Death by Diamonds

Author:Annette Blair [Blair, Annette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101188507
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Published: 2010-05-16T18:30:00+00:00

Twenty-six

Black is the color most often chosen to cloak the pious and those devoted to spiritual sacrifice. The flip side of black suggests a darker nature . . . calling up references to mystery, magic, and inevitably, a little bit of sin.

—AMY HOLMAN EDELMAN, THE LITTLE BLACK DRESS

My dear friend was dead, sealed in a horrendously expensive bronze coffin, according to Kyle, that should be sitting on the empty pedestal at the head of the room.

Behind the pedestal hung a life-sized picture of Dominique, at her most glamorous, the one in which she’d posed for the cover of Vogue wearing Christian Dior.

On the wall beside it hung a picture nearly as glamorous, but so full of life, you expected Dom to step right out of it and hug you. I felt both honored and humbled to be in that candid with her and her son at the skating rink at Rockefeller Center, taken more than a year ago.

“I shouldn’t be in that picture,” I told Kyle. “You should have picked one with just you and your mom.”

“Give it up, Mad. She thought of you as a friend and daughter. I started calling you Aunt Mad because I was jealous as a kid, but I saw the error of my ways the minute I asked for your help after she passed, and you came, no questions asked.”

“I’m honored. Sincerely.”

“Yesterday at the train station, I saw in you what Mom saw from the beginning,” Kyle said. “A kindred spirit, a kind soul. Family. From now on, can I just call you Sis?”

Okay, I thought, he must be sedated. “Of course.” “What will you call me?” Eve asked him in a whisper to tease the sadness from his expression.

“Nothing that I can repeat in polite company,” he said, nuzzling her ear and pulling her close against his side. She had become his weapon against despair. Hardly the stuff of a lasting relationship, but I figured Eve knew that.

Without Nick, I felt lost, and beside Kyle and Eve, a fifth wheel. Ian, Kyle’s ex-dad, must have seen my discomfort and decided to take me in hand, because he stepped up to take my arm.

Attached to him, I felt like I needed a hazmat chemical wash. Ugh. I extricated myself from the man who hurt my friend and made a beeline for Werner. “I don’t belong here in the inner circle,” I said.

He cleared his throat and turned me toward the skating rink picture. “She really was your friend,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t get it the other morning.”

“What are you really doing here? I mean, thank you, but aren’t you afraid that Mystick Falls will fall apart without you?”

“Nah, I had some vacation time coming, and I was just looking for a good excuse when somebody got interested in Nick’s house.”

“You were worried about me.”

“Life gets interesting around you, Mad, and dangerous. Very dangerous.”

I may have been ticked, but when he took my arm as Pierce Pierpont approached, turning the unlikable man in another direction, I was relieved to belong to someone.

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