Tell-All

splashing on the stone floor as Miss Kathie hurries to pour wine into the two dusty champagne glasses I hold. Here, in the depths of stone beneath the cathedral where she was so recently wed, Miss Kathie takes a glass and lifts it, toasting a new urn which rests on the stone shelf beside the urns engraved Oliver “Red” Drake, Esq., Loverboy, Lothario . All of her long-dead loved ones.
    The new urn of shining, polished silver sits engraved with the name Terrence Terry , and includes a smudged lipstick kiss identical to the old kisses dried to the magenta of ancient blood, almost black on the urns now rusted and tarnished with age.
    Miss Kathie lifts her glass in a toast to this newest silverurn, saying,
“Bonne nuit
, Terrence.” She sips the champagne, adding, “That’s Spanish for bon voyage.”
    Around us a few flickering candles light the dusty, cold crypt, shimmering amid the clutter of empty wine bottles. Dirty champagne glasses hold dead spiders, each spider curled like a bony fist. Abandoned ashtrays hold stubbed cigarettes smudged with a long history of lipstick shades, the cigarettes yellowed, the lipstick faded from red to pink. Ashes and dust. The mirror of Miss Kathie’s real face, scratched and scarred with her past, lies facedown among the souvenirs and sacrifices of everything she’s left behind. The pill bottles half-full of Tuinal and Dexamyl. Nembutal, Seconal and Demerol .
    Tossing back her champagne and pouring herself another glass, Miss Kathie says, “I think we ought to record this occasion, don’t you?”
    She means for me to prop the mirror in its upright position while she stands on the lipstick X marked on the floor. Miss Kathie holds out her left hand to me, her fingers spread so I can remove her Harry Winston diamond solitaire. When her face aligns with the mirror, her eyes perfectly bracketed by the crow’s-feet, her lips centered between the scratched hollows and sagging cheeks, only when she’s exactly superimposed on the record of her past … do I take the diamond and begin to draw.
    On the opening night of
Unconditional Surrender
, she says Terry had paid her a visit backstage, in her dressing room before the first curtain. In the chaos of telegrams and flowers, it’s likely Terry purloined the Jordan almonds . He’d stopped to convey his best wishes and inadvertently made off with the poisoned candy, saving her life. Poor Terrence. The accidental martyr.
    As Miss Kathie speculates, I plow the diamond along the soft surface of the mirror, gouging her new wrinkles and worry lines into our cumulative written record.
    Since then, Miss Kathie says she’s ransacked Webster’s luggage. We can’t risk overlooking any new murder schemes. She’s discovered yet another final chapter, a seventh draft of the Love Slave finale. “It would seem that I’m to be shot by an intruder next,” she says, “when I interrupt him in the process of burgling my home.”
    But at last she’s managed a counterattack: she’s mailed this newest final chapter to her lawyer, sealed within a manila envelope, with the instructions that he should open it and read the contents should she meet a sudden, suspicious death. After that she informed the Webster of her actions. Of course he vehemently denied any plot; he protested and railed that he’d never written such a book. He insisted that he’d only ever loved her and had no intention to cause her harm. “But that’s exactly,” Miss Kathie says, “what I’d expected him to say, the evil cad.”
    Now, in the event Miss Kathie falls under an omnibus, bathes with an electric radio, feeds herself to grizzly bears, tumbles from a tall building, sheathes an assassin’s sharp dagger with her heart or ingests cyanide—then Webster Carlton Westward III will never get to publish his terrible “lie-ography.” Her lawyers will expose his ongoing plot. Instead of hitting any best-seller list, the Webster will go sit in the electric chair.
    All the while, I drag the diamond’s point to draw Miss Kathie’s new gray hairs onto the mirror. I tap the glass to mark any new liver spots.
    “I should be safe,” Miss Kathie says, “from any homicidal burglars.”
    Under pressure, the mirror bends and distorts, stretching and warping my Miss Kathie’s reflection. The glass feels that fragile, crisscrossed with so many flaws and scars.
    Miss Kathie lifts her glass in a champagne toast to her reflected self, saying, “As Webb’s ultimate punishment, I