Woman In The Mirror: Prologue

[ladymirth]

This is the REVISED version of the prologue which I posted herein some time ago. Since then, I've acquired some lovely and insightful beta readers who know how to negotiate with commas better than I. 

Woman In The Mirror

prologue

 

The room was suffused in the darkness of night, broken only by the slivers of moonlight, which filtered in between the drawn blinds.

 

The red light on the phone flared to life suddenly, a lone red eye blinking in the blackness.

 

One, two, three discreet, yet insistent rings. Then the voicemail picked up.

 

“Hi, you’ve reached the office of Carmen Martinez. I’m not available right now, so leave a message,”

 

A soft swear word. A slight hesitancy.

 

The caller spoke in a light tone. “Carmen, it’s me. I have to talk to you about those flowers you ordered for Ash’s party. Turns out she’s deathly allergic to carnations. Call me.”

 

A pause.

 

“Call me now”.

 

Click.

 

In the otherworldly stillness of the room, a person listening to the message may have fancied that that last syllable was full of something akin to…menace.

 

However, the only occupant of the room was unlikely to hear anything ever again as her body lay cooling, a barely distinguishable form at the foot of the telephone stand.

 

*  *  *

 

“Aunty Ash, why isn’t Mommy here yet?” Six-year-old Lara Kent looked up at her with big dark eyes. Marta’s head also jerked in her direction.

 

Asha Westlake would very much have liked to know the answer to that question herself. Lois was supposed to have met her with the costumes for the girls’ nativity play while Ash picked up the Kent twins and her own daughter, Amber, from the daycare center an hour ago. And Lois was never late. Especially not to her little girls’ very first elementary school play.

 

She had tried Lois' cellphone, and when it became apparent she wasn't going to pick up, she had left messages at the Planet, the Kent house and with her assistants. Clark had dropped off the costumes before heading out to track down his wife half an hour ago, leaving Ash in charge of three exasperatingly fussy and uncomfortably astute prepubescent girls.

 

Asha kept telling the girls that their mother was stuck in traffic and was trying to get here as soon as possible. The lie sounded thin even to her. The kids were smart enough to know that Lois would have called and apologized to them. Lois simply wasn’t the type of mother to relay her excuses through other adults.

 

“Aunty Ash, is she in trouble?” piped up Marta. She was dressed in her angel costume, unlike Lara who had insisted on being a donkey. Usually she was the more timid of the two, content to let her more outgoing sister ask the tough questions. “Is that why Daddy’s not here either?”

 

“Why would you think she’s in trouble, sweetie?” Ash was genuinely curious. Lois hadn’t been the reckless reporter, constantly tumbling in and out of the clutches of high-flying criminals, for many years now.

 

“Aunty Lois says that whenever she gets in trouble with bad men, Uncle Clark has to come and save them before she can hurt them too bad,” said Amber, as seriously as her halo of tinfoil would allow her to.

 

Despite her rising unease, Ash had to suppress the urge to burst out laughing. Lois was really an arrogant prat sometimes. Not that she could tell Lois’ daughters and goddaughter that.

 

“Umm, I’m sure that’s it, chickabids,” she said with a straight face. “Now it’s almost time for the curtain. Lara honey, no.. Don’t start braying at the angels until you get on stage…No, you can’t kick Tommy Jenkins even if you are supposed to be a donkey, you’ll have to get in character some other way…Marta don’t fidget, you’re a beautiful angel…Stand proudly…Amby, stop pulling on your wing! It’s going to break off again..,”

 

“But it keeps sagging down and hitting me on the shin!” cried the harassed angel.

 

“Aunty Ash, the play can’t start without Mommy and Daddy here! They’ll miss it!" Lara cried in distress.

 

“No, they won’t honey,” said Ash soothingly. “C’mere.” Discreetly parting the curtains, she pointed out her husband sitting near the front row to the little girl. “See Uncle Gary? He’s bought his camcorder, and he’s taping the whole thing. Even if your Mommy and Daddy get here a bit late, we’ll make sure they won’t miss a thing!”

 

Gary grinned and waved at Lara from his seat. Lara waved back half-heartedly.

 

“Okay…I guess,” she said. Most youngsters wouldn’t have compromised so readily, but Lara and her siblings had grown up knowing that the price of having a “special” Daddy was that he would sometimes have to run out on important occasions, no matter how much he wanted to be there. They knew he’d always try his best not to miss them though and how sorry he was when he did. And he always made it up to them. Somehow.

 

It was, however, a new experience for them to have both their parents absent.

 

A throat was cleared raspingly behind them. The children’s drama teacher, Mrs. Pince, whom Ash had privately named The Gorgon, was looking down at them in disapproval. A heavy-set woman in her fifties, with the face of an aged bull dog in spectacles, Mrs. Pince held the student body of the Truesdale Elementary school in an iron fist of terror. Even feisty Lara quailed under her glare. For that matter, so did Ash. Almost.

 

“Mrs. Westlake, if you would be so kind as to keep from peeping through the stage curtains?” she said, in sardonic, clipped tones that made it clear to Ash that in the opinion of the drama teacher, Mrs. Westlake was not much more than an overgrown juvenile delinquent herself. “We are having hard enough a time preventing the children from doing so.”

 

Before Ash could formulate a reply, Mrs. Pince had cupped her hands around her mouth and started to bellow.

 

“Attention everyone!” she bellowed. Ash winced and backed away. “Five minutes to curtain! I want everyone off the stage! Parents, please take your seats in the audience!”

 

A babble of high-pitched voices erupted in excitement. Ash extricated herself quickly, with a liberal round of last minute good wishes and air kissing, as the children were herded backstage by the teachers. She had almost made it off the stage when…

 

“Aunty Ash,” said a small voice. Ash was surprised to see Marta had followed her.

 

“Marta, honey, you gotta run. They’ll be calling you…”

“Aunty Ash, I think Mommy’s in trouble,” Marta broke through insistently. 

“Nonsense, baby, what trouble could she have got into? I’m sure she’s…”

“MARTA KENT! GET INSIDE THIS INSTANT!” Mrs. Pince’s stentorian shout made them both flinch. 

“But Aunty Ash…”

“Honey, you gotta go!”

“But the man…”

“Marta Kent!” Mrs. Pince started to advance upon them. 

“I’ll see you, hon. Good luck!”

“But a man called this morning…” 

“What man?” 

“Mrs. Westlake!” 

“And she got all white and upset…”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Westlake, she’s got to come now.” Mrs. Pince enclosed Marta’s small wrist in a grip of iron and began dragging her away.

Marta made one last effort and cried back to her desperately. 

“He called her about the flowers!”

 

Ash froze. 

 

The curtain bell rang out. 

 

* * *

The black Grand jeep Cherokee pulled into the deserted car park of Exeter Towers.  There was only one other car in the immediate vicinity, a luxurious silver sports car. It was not parked on a parking space but had halted right in the middle of the road, projecting an aura of arrogant patience. The greenish fluorescent light which shone at the far end of the car park cast an oily sheen over the two sleek vehicles.

 

The jeep circled the car once before pulling to a stop. They looked like two well-muscled mechanical predators, an almost palpable tension emanating from them.

 

The door of the car opened and a man in a black trench coat got out. He leaned against his car and crossed his arms, adopting a pose of casual arrogance. His dark glasses obscured his eyes but a spectator might assume that had they been visible, the expression in them would have been one of boredom.

 

A woman alighted from the jeep. Dressed in a stylish white coat with long black hair framing her face, she exuded a sense of immaculate elegance like a perfume. She had made no attempt to conceal her eyes, but their dark depths was so devoid of expression that a spectator would have been able to draw no assumptions of her mental state at all.

 

“And in a full Men In Black ensemble, no less,” commented the woman, as naturally as though the remark was part of a conversation between them, muted to the world until that precise moment. “I hope you haven’t dragged me here to tell me more fairy tales. I’m nearly missing my daughters’ school nativity play as it is.”

 

“You came alone,” said the man, as though she hadn’t spoken. “I didn’t expect that. I thought you’d outgrown your propensity for foolish stunts, Lois.”

 

“Would I have been safer from your thugs if I had come with a cavalry?” returned Lois, a touch of sarcasm in her voice. “What makes you so sure I haven’t, by the way?”

 

“I’m not, which is one of the reasons why you aren’t dead yet,” returned the man.

 

“Like I said, more fairy tales,” Lois scoffed. “If you’d wanted me dead, Archer, I’d have been fodder for the earthworms for the past week. Since I’m not dead, I’d have to surmise that you don’t want me dead. Which means you are in fact, on my side. Being at anyone’s mercy is not a situation that’s arisen for me for the past ten years, and I’m not going to let it happen again.

And now time’s running out, and so if you’re going to play at all, you’ll play on my turf, on my terms. Drop the Al Capone act, and tell me what I want to know. Who knows about Madame?”

 

“Y’know, I can’t believe you didn’t even tell that tagalong husband of yours,” continued Archer, again ignoring her. A faint smirk crossed his face. “He’s looking for you, you know. They all are.”

 

Lois looked at him for a moment. Then she wordlessly spun on her heel and walked back toward her jeep.

 

“The information you want is encrypted on this disc,” Archer’s voice stopped her. She turned back to face him.

He held up a small black disc between his fingers.

 

“How do I know it’s not a dud?” she asked suspiciously, taking it.

“You’ll have to trust me” the smirk on Archer’s face widened, irritatingly.

“Not as far as I can throw you,” Lois scoffed.

“I thought you said I was on your side? Like you said, I didn’t kill you did I?”

“For now. I know you’ll try when the time is right.” Lois didn’t betray a trace of fear.

 

“And the time isn’t right now?”

 

In answer, Lois simply walked back to her jeep and got in.

 

Archer watched as the jeep swerved out of the parking lot. He looked over the railing onto the street below. It was a beautiful night, with a tang of frost in the air. The city lights sparkled in the distance, mirrored upon the calm bay like a tapestry of scattered stars. He watched the jeep speeding along the highway over Hob’s Bay.

 

Suddenly, a deafening explosion sounded as the jeep disintegrated into a furious ball of flame. Flaming wreckage was thrown high into the air, coloring the black, still water of Hob’s Bay fiery orange before they fell into its depths. Screeching tires and the sickening crunch of metal on metal were heard as other drivers frantically swerved to avoid being hit by the flying debris. Screams pierced through the air.

 

“You’re wrong, Lois,” whispered Archer, as he calmly surveyed the carnage below. “The time is now.”

 

The black-clad figure watching over the railing of the third floor of the Exeter parking lot disappeared.

 

He didn’t see the small figure in the bloodstained white coat lying unconscious and undiscovered, near the sidewalk of the highway, several feet away from the explosion. 

 

* * *

 End prologue