You Look Beautiful Tonight: A Thriller
L. R. Jones
Chapter One
Life asked Death, Why do people hate me and love you? Death responded with, Because you’re a beautiful lie and I’m a painful truth.
—Unknown
Blood seeps through the cream-colored carpet, fading into the thick fibers, a river of life runneth over and under until death do us part. The same carpet that now absorbs one life and yet hugs my feet and cushions my body. Seconds tick by, eternal seconds, a clock ticking somewhere—loud, heavy, eternal. I try to draw in air, but I can’t catch my breath. My throat is raw, my chest tight.
Run, I tell myself.
Run, before it’s too late to run.
I rotate and immediately hit a hard surface—a piece of furniture, I think—banging my leg, pain radiating from my kneecap and down my shin. The room is spinning. The smell of death permeates the air, a scent no one can understand without experiencing it, living it while another person dies inside the horrific stench of it. Death has an energy, too, as contrary as that may sound, almost as if you can feel the grim reaper doing his work with a heavy pull that suffocates you in its existence.
I don’t even know what is happening right now, how I got here, how this became a moment in my uneventful, unremarkable life. I blink the room—an office, a familiar office that once felt safe—into view and round the desk in my path. My heart is thundering in my ears, my breathing now raspy and loud as I make my way across the room and yank the door open. Freedom calls to me, and I stumble into the hallway before me, leaving the door open, sucking in fresh air. Looking left and then right toward the emergency door, I hear it promising safety and an escape from death and all the blood. So much blood.
I run in that direction, pain radiating in my head that I don’t understand, but I push through it, my legs burning with the speed at which I travel, until I reach that blessed door, my hand closing on the long silver handle. The urge to look back behind me is strong, but I resist. Run. Run now. Run hard and fast. Shoving open the door, I burst into the corridor, and the hard steel slams shut behind me. I take one more step and halt with the realization that the smell of blood and death has followed me.
I look down and lift my hands to find the stains on my skin, gasping with the realization that I’m holding a long, silver letter opener stained with the same shades of red. Memories illuminate the darkness that is my shock. Oh my God. I can’t run away from the killer.
I am the killer.
I drop the weapon—and it is a weapon—and a scream rips from my lungs, permeating the air as death had done—then I crumple to the ground and collapse.
Chapter Two
The past, two weeks ago . . .
When I was seven, my strict mathematician mother, who maintains a rigid schedule, picked me up from school an hour late. I’d stood there on a scorching Tennessee day, sticky and hot, gripping the straps to my My Little Pony book bag, and watching the other kids depart and head off to their blissful homelife. No one asked if I was okay. No one seemed to even notice me at all. I’d been certain my mother had been killed in a car accident or, at the very least, was lying on the side of the road, bloodied and dying. I’d been hunting for someone, anyone, to help me, when finally our gray Suburban pulled up to the curb. My mother hadn’t even gotten out of the car. She’d popped the door open and yelled, “Hurry, Mia,” as if I were the one running late. “We have to go to the store to grab ketchup for the meat loaf.”
I’d done as she’d ordered, happy to be in the car, happy to still have a family, but as an adult, I have another take. I’d been traumatized, certain she was dead, and all she had said to me was we needed ketchup to make the meat loaf I didn’t even like. Inside the store, I’d already forgotten the trauma of being alone and lost—kids are resilient like that—and I was considering how I might milk my mother’s mistake quite literally.
I’d picked up a can of strawberry Nesquik to ask if we could buy it, and my mother was missing. Gone. Nowhere to be found. Panic had risen hard and fast, and frantically I’d hunted for her, walking past strangers, never making eye contact—my mother always warned me never to talk to strangers. At some point, I’d crawled under a bakery table with Memorial Day streamers sheltering me from danger. I’d been certain my mother would come by, screaming for me, at any minute. She hadn’t. I’d waited there at least another hour before it was not my mother but my father who found me, and pulled me from under the table. Apparently, he’d emerged from the basement, where he’d been working on some new project, when he smelled the Wednesday meat loaf, and asked about me. My mother had freaked out, and my father had lost his mind with worry, and they’d fought. The result was that my father, and really the only hero in my life, had come to my rescue.
My mother had stayed home and finished the meat loaf.
That day I’d been invisible to everyone but my father, including my mother.
That about sums up my life and this very moment right now.
I’m sitting at the bar of the Tex-Mex restaurant, waiting on my friend Jess to return from the bathroom and trying to garner the bartender’s attention to order two Diet Cokes and guacamole. Three times he’s walked by me and ignored my various grabs for attention—the hand lift, the hand lift with a verbal “excuse me,” and finally the shove of my dark-rimmed glasses higher up my nose to show seriousness before the hand lift with a verbal “excuse me.” Three times. Three strikes. It’s not even as if the bar is busy, but I remind myself he’s preparing drinks for tables as well.
Jess joins me in a whiff of Chanel No. 5—the only perfume worthy of her to wear—sliding onto the stool next to me, her long blonde hair freshly sprayed and her lips newly glossed. “I thought you were ordering drinks and the appetizer?” She hangs her Louis Vuitton bag onto the back of her seat.
“I tried. The bartender ignored me.”
“Oh good Lord, Mia, I hate that you still let yourself be overlooked.” She waves at the bartender and immediately has his unbridled attention.
I grimace at his response and her comment. It’s not like I let anything happen—it just did—but I bite my tongue. It’s an argument I don’t feel like having today.
The bartender steps in front of Jess. “What can I get you?”
“Two Diet Cokes and a guacamole, please,” she says, glancing at her watch and crinkling her nose. “Can we dare to rush you? I have a meeting in forty-five minutes.”
“I’ll make sure to hurry things along for you,” he assures her.
He’s a tall, dark, good-looking, and baby-faced twentysomething, the kind of unestablished, inexperienced guy Jess wouldn’t have even considered when we were still in our twenties, certainly not now that we’re in our thirties. Nevertheless, his brown eyes glint with interest. He’s enamored with her, but then everyone is enamored with Jess.