LITMIR.BIZ

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rolled over on her stomach. Boy, talk about miscalculations.

      Two

      The effect of seeing her picture in the paper caused Jennifer to decide she’d better go a little farther afield than a Las Vegas suburb, so she got on a bus. She wasn’t sure where it was bound, so she just rode for a half hour through a stretch of desert and got off in the first little town she came to. She walked for about twenty minutes and, after passing several decent places, found a motel that had clearly seen better days. It was a seedy-looking place between a junkyard and a railroad track; there were only twelve rooms. Nick Noble would never find it. And if he did find it, he would never expect Jennifer to be there.

      She looked at the phone book in room number eight and saw that she was in Boulder City. Good enough, she thought. She’d never even heard of the place. Surely she wouldn’t draw much attention here. She could have stayed at one of the casinos off the Strip; the bus had passed several of them, but they were large and their parking lots crowded. Too many people around, increasing the odds of being recognized as the missing girl in the newspaper.

      She looked at the map the phone book provided. Boulder City, a small town a mere twenty-five miles from Las Vegas, on the edge of Lake Mead on the way to Hoover Dam. This was the last place Nick would expect to find the classy, bejeweled Jennifer Chaise.

      She stood in front of the mirror for a while, not recognizing the woman who stared back at her. Wardrobe by army surplus—very unlike the wardrobe she had left behind. Her face, washed clean of makeup, left her looking very plain and pale. Her expensive artificial tan was fast disappearing. The shock of finding herself on the run likely contributed to her wan look. She flushed the colored contact lenses down the toilet and her eyes went from that sexy lavender to an ordinary brown. Her vision, fortunately, was perfect. She clipped her long acrylic nails and felt briefly crippled.

      She had attempted to dye her waist-length golden hair to brown, but had ended up with a rather sickly gray—absolute proof that she’d tried to color it with drugstore supplies. Scissors in hand, she meant to rectify the situation, but a tear gathered in her eye. She’d pampered that sexy mane for how many years? Nick adored her hair; he loved to crunch it up in his fists and bury his face in it. Well, that would never happen again. “And if it does happen,” she said aloud, “it would probably be just one last crunch before he crushes my skull.” But the hand with the scissors trembled. “Oh, suck it up,” she told the reflection. “We’ll save a fortune. And it’s only temporary—until we figure out what to do and where to go.” She stared into her own eyes and, realizing she was talking to a mirror image, said, “Oh, my God, it’s hereditary. We have our mother’s wackiness.”

      And then she lopped it off, close to the scalp. She continued this drastic amputation, tears running down her cheeks, until all she was left with was a short, spiky cap of really strange-colored hair. It looked as if someone had colored her hair badly—and then cut it badly. How different could she be? And what could she do to become invisible and utterly unrecognizable?

      She thought about it for a moment and then she shaved her head. After brief consideration, the eyebrows that she’d spent a fortune having professionally colored and waxed into a curvaceous arch also went. If she remembered correctly, her original brows were black, bushy, shapeless and met over the bridge of her nose.

      Then, despite her determination to be stronger than her circumstances, she cried in a bed with a lumpy mattress and a thin sheet. What had she been thinking, getting involved with a man like Nick? With any of the rich older men she’d attracted? It had only served to isolate her from the world. Had she really thought she was so smart, so immune to having her heart broken? This was proof positive that you didn’t have to be in love to have your heart broken. She was in a crappy motel in a tiny desert town outside Las Vegas with nothing. With no one. Even worse, now she was in actual peril. Talk about a plan gone awry.

      The month was March and she awoke the following morning to chilly air and leaden skies, and the sound of rain. The heater in the room didn’t work and everything seemed inevitable.

      The morning sky was just painting the dark clouds gray when she couldn’t take the cold, dank hotel room another second. She bundled up in a khaki-green windbreaker, her scarf wrapped around her neck and her baseball cap covering her bald head. All her worldly goods were tucked into a canvas backpack. The motel office was still closed; no one there to get the heater going in her room. So she set out to see if there was more to this place than a junkyard and train tracks.

      A few blocks away the road forked—the highway went left and she went right. Another few blocks revealed a small town, a street lined with cafés and shops not yet open. She counted three restaurants, all apparently of the no-tablecloth variety. It was an old street with worn sidewalks, but some trendy shops and eateries were peppered amid the older ones, perhaps recent additions to snag the visitors to Hoover Dam, and travelers en route to the Grand Canyon as they passed by the town. The manager of Starbucks was just unlocking the door. A clock in the window of a gift shop read six-thirty. There was a small corner market that looked no bigger than a convenience store, but it displayed a large variety of fresh fruits and vegetables in the window, and a sign that boasted a sale on ground sirloin.

      A big white hotel with signs that advertised Underground Dancing and a Dam Museum stood down the street. Across the parking lot was a small brick building painted pink—a dance studio.

      She took a left, getting off the main street, and a few blocks later found a park, library, theater and an old residential neighborhood full of tiny, multicolored houses nestled amid tall, full trees. They looked like playhouses, street after street of them. There were obviously no neighborhood-association rules about conformity in this part of the world, as interspersed with well-maintained houses and manicured lawns were battered-looking homes inside cyclone fences that surrounded dirt and weeds. The houses, however, were almost all the same shape. Except one at the end of the street, a square two-story, with a huge peace sign painted on a tall tree stump and flowered sheets covering the windows. It looked like a throwback from the sixties.

      Around the corner she saw the post office and wondered if this was the center of town. It didn’t even resemble anything close to a desert here in Boulder City; the foliage was thick, and most of the trees had retained their leaves through winter while others showed the promise of new buds on bare branches. Shrubs were dense; grass was green.

      She passed a yarn shop, a used-book store and a health-food store. A sign stuck out farther down the street that read Nails. A couple of young women jogged around the park, and farther down the street an elderly man walked his dog. She turned onto a side street, and right between a dry cleaner and dog-grooming salon was a diner with the lights on and a sign in the window that read Open. Above the door in fading red paint was the name of the place—the Tin Can.

      This place hadn’t seen a renovation in a long time yet was clean and well kept. Since there was a Starbucks on the main street, she supposed this diner was seeing less action than it used to—there was only one customer. With the stools at the counter, booths covered in Naugahyde lining the wall and Formica tabletops, it had the look of a fifties greasy spoon. But a nice, warm one. It reminded her of a place she used to go with her grandpa when she was small.

      The bell jingled as she entered. “’Morning,” a man called from behind the counter.

      She took a stool right in the middle of the completely vacant counter. The man in the booth at the back of the diner had a newspaper spread out in front of him.

      “’Morning,” she returned. “Coffee?”

      He had a cup in front of her in seconds. “Cold and wet out there, ain’t it.”

      “Freezing,” she said, pulling her jacket tighter.

      “It should be a lot warmer by now. There’re buds on the trees and the grass is greening up. Spring’s ’bout here. I’ll let you warm up a little, then we’ll talk about some breakfast,” he said. She looked up at him. He squinted at what he could see of her face under the bill of her hat. For a moment she was confused, and then she remembered she had no eyebrows. With a self-conscious

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