Sweet Revenge

Hollywood. I don’t honestly know whether the mental illness fed the alcoholism or if the alcoholism fed the illness. I know only that she fought both for as long as she could, but when we got to California, the scripts weren’t there with the parts she’d been used to playing, and she couldn’t handle the failure. She had bad advice which she swallowed like a starving woman. Her agent was slime.”
    Her voice tightened there, stretched but didn’t waver. There was enough of a change, however subtle, to make him narrow his eyes and focus on hers. “What did he do? To you?”
    Her head jerked up at that. For an instant her eyes were clear as glass. Just as quickly, the shutter lowered.
    “How old were you?” he asked very carefully while his fingers bit into the metal of his fork.
    “Fourteen. It wasn’t as bad as you think. Mama came in before he could—while I was fighting him. I’d never seen her like that. She was incredible, like the cliché about the tigress defending her cub.” Because it made her uncomfortable, she set the matter, and the memory, aside. “What matters is that he dragged her down, used her, exploited her, and she was too battered from those years in Jaquir to pull herself back up.”
    He let it pass, only because when you needed to win trust, you could only push so much so fast. “You didn’t stay in California?”
    “We came back to New York right after the incident with her agent. She seemed better, really better. She was talking about trying theater work again. Stage. She was thrilled, talking about all the offers she was getting. There weren’t any, or no important ones, but I didn’t know it then, because I believed, wanted to believe, everything was all right. Then one day, just after I turned sixteen, I came home from school to find her sitting in the dark. She didn’t answer me when I spoke to her. I shook her and shouted. Nothing. I can’t tell you what that was like—it was as if she were dead inside.”
    He said nothing, just linked his fingers with hers. Adrianne stared down at their joined hands. Such a simple thing, she thought, one of the most basic forms of human contact. She’d never known it could be so comforting.
    “I had to put her into a sanitarium. That was the first time. A month there, and there was no money left. But she pulled out of it for a while. I quit school and got a job. She never knew.”
    She should have been in school, leading cheers and dating skinny young boys. “Wasn’t there anyone, any family you could have gone to?”
    “Her parents were dead. She’d been raised by her grandparents, and they both died while I was a baby. There’d been a little insurance money, but that had been sent to Jaquir and it remained there.” She brushed that off as if it hardly mattered. “I didn’t mind working, in fact I enjoyed it a great deal more than school. But the little I could earn wasn’t enough for the rent and food, much less medicine and nursing care. So I began to steal. I was good at it.”
    “Didn’t she wonder where the money came from?”
    “No. Those last years she was in a dream half the time. She often thought she was still making films.” A smile began to form. She watched a gull swoop down over the sound and wheel, screaming, out to sea. “Eventually, I told Celeste; she went wild. She would have paid for everything, but I couldn’t let her. My mother was my responsibility. In any case, I never stole from anyone who didn’t deserve it.”
    “How do you figure?”
    “I’ve always been selective about my targets. I’ve always stolen from the very rich.”
    “That’s always wise,” Philip said ironically.
    “And very close-fisted. Take Lady Caroline.”
    “Yes, the diamond.” Tilting his chair back, Philip took out a cigarette. “Twenty-two carats, nearly flawless. I’ve always envied you that one.”
    “It was a fabulous job.” She braced her elbows on the table, resting her chin on her open hands. “She kept it in a vault, top-notch security. Heat sensors. Motion detectors. Infrared. It took me six months to plan it out.”
    “How did you?”
    “I was invited for the weekend. That way I didn’t have to worry about the outside security. I used magnets and a minicomputer. They had sensor beams on the first floor, but it was simple enough to crawl under them. The vault itself was a time lock, but I fooled the computer into thinking it was six hours later. I’d rigged a device out of an alarm clock