The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)

clicked the second one off the screen. ‘Ecuador.’ Click. ‘And then . . . um . . . Laos.’ Her face was flushed as she stared at Misty. ‘Malcolm is in Laos.’
    Misty grinned, and Jane felt her own smile widening. The muscles of her face felt a little creaky after the drama of the last twenty-four hours, but there was no mistaking it: she was coming back to herself. ‘Not South America any more,’ Misty pointed out helpfully, and Jane practically giggled; Lynne may actually have been on Malcolm’s trail, but then he had jumped clear to the other side of the globe. He was still safe, as far as she knew, and now she might even be able to get in touch with him.
In an emergency,
she told herself steadily,
or when I have good news.
    ‘And I’ve got one last piece of good news,’ Misty told her seriously, and Jane’s attention snapped to her tanned face. ‘Jane, Anne’s still in London.’
    Jane recoiled physically. ‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’ she asked, genuinely stung. If it was, it seemed uncharacteristically unkind.
    ‘You know where she is, you twit,’ Misty clarified, rolling her eyes. ‘You didn’t brawl with André and scare her away, or tell her the truth and freak her out. She’s exactly where you left her, and no one knows you know but
you.’
    Jane frowned. ‘But I can’t get anywhere near her.’
    ‘You don’t need to,’ Misty nearly exploded. ‘You think Lynne can’t afford a ticket to Heathrow?’
    ‘She’d give me anything for that information,’ Jane realized slowly. Fragments of thoughts began to coalesce in her mind: the deal she had been thinking of striking with Lynne back before everything had gone to hell. ‘Okay. Now I need to run some ideas by you.’
    It’s not perfect,
she warned herself, but she could feel the telltale energy returning to her limbs. She felt hopeful, almost giddy, and she knew what it meant. Jane was, once again, on the verge of a daring, dangerous, and brilliant plan.

Thirty-three
    J ANE HURRIED ALONG one of the paved paths that curved downtown through Central Park. She felt almost foolish, thanks to the stares she kept getting from other park-goers; upon reflection, the trench-coat-and-giant-sunglasses uniform that she had taken out of retirement for this occasion seemed to be attracting more attention than it was deflecting.
Apparently, it’s more conspicuous in the park on a nice day than around the Port Authority in March.
    But it was too late to change, and she enjoyed the safe, cocooned feeling the outfit gave her. She needed every ounce of advantage she could get, anyway: she was on a particularly nerve-racking errand. Just the thought made her want to pull the collar of her coat a little more tightly closed, but she reminded herself sternly that, for the first time in a while, she was walking into an unpleasant confrontation while holding all the cards.
    It was harder to hold on to that thought when she came around a bend and found Lynne, tall and stern and immaculately groomed as ever, standing in a small clearing under a chestnut tree. Waiting. Jane gulped down the lump in her throat and stepped off the path, feeling her red-painted Louboutin stilettos sink into the grass. Lynne’s eyes raked slowly from Jane’s vertiginous platform heels to the top edge of her oversize sunglasses, and Jane suspected that her mother-in-law once again disapproved of her wardrobe.
Mine . . . Ella’s . . . until I start wearing nothing but Chanel, that’ll never change,
she thought ruefully, and was gratified to see Lynne’s eyebrows pull together at her obviously unexpected smile.
    She respects confidence,
Jane reminded herself, fixing the smile in place as if with glue. In Book and Bell the day before, this had all seemed fairly straightforward, but now, face-to-face with the woman who had ruined her life in an impressively thorough way, it was harder than she had expected to remember that she had the upper hand.
    Lynne spoke first. ‘I believe you said you have some information for me,’ she snipped impatiently, and Jane felt stronger by the moment as she registered the tension in the other woman’s voice. ‘I assume it has something to do with my son.’
    ‘It doesn’t,’ Jane croaked, and cleared her throat hurriedly. ‘It’s about your daughter.’
    Lynne’s face was so immobile that it looked entirely different. ‘Jane Boyle? You mean my daughter-in-law. Although, of course, I love her like my own,’ she finished with a