Janey tossed and turned most of the night, dipping in and out of dreams.
One stuck with her. The smell of the clay permeated her nostrils. She was back in high school, in the art studio. Beau spent most of his time there. He ditched other classes to sit in the studio’s back room and draw. In the dream Janey was wearing her white dress from the debutante ball, but it was too tight. Much too tight. It felt like the dress was suffocating her. She walked into the art room and found Beau sitting on one of the high stools. It was seventeen-year-old Beau. He looked up at her and smiled sweetly. “Come see what I’ve made, love.” She walked toward him. The room was hot, boiling hot. He reached out to touch her dress, making a dark brown stain with his hands, which she now saw were covered in wet sticky clay. He wasn’t drawing. He was sculpting. He was sculpting little figures, little women. “They’re you, Janey. I made you,” he said. She couldn’t speak. She opened her mouth, but no words came. All she could do was watch as he slid the small figures into an oven to bake them. As she stared at him, seventeen-year-old Beau became twenty-year-old Beau and then thirty-year-old Beau and then Beau today. The Beau from the breakfast table who told her she was fat and made her feel unworthy of everything she’d accomplished. She walked over to the oven, her dress getting tighter every second, finally splitting along the seams of her waist. Inside the kiln the clay Janeys dried and cracked and crumbled to dust.
· · ·
Janey woke the next morning to a man in a white lab coat standing over Suzy’s bed, connecting a needle and a tube to the crook of her roommate’s arm.
“Shit, Suzy! Are you okay?” Janey sat straight up, pulling the white sheet to her chin. “Suzy?”
Suzy rolled her head toward her.
“I’m great, honey. Morning IV treatment. Super vitamin B booster, liquid magnesium, vitamins C, D, K, and some other letters I don’t remember. Three fat burners and L-carnitine to help use stored fat and build lean muscle.” She looked up at the doctor, nurse, or lab technician. “Sweetheart, do you do Botox too? I could use a little update this morning.”
Janey slowly eased herself out of bed to pad to the bathroom, careful to give the doctor a wide berth.
“You want one, honey?” Suzy called after her.
“Nah, I’m good. Maybe tomorrow. I’m taking a shower.”
Mobile IV treatments and clay. How the hell had she wound up here?
The whole crew of ladies was bright-eyed and perky at breakfast.
“You missed a wild time last night, Janey.” Maizee giggled.
“We danced till dawn,” Miranda said, high-fiving the blond mommies who sat on her left and right. “These local boys have rhythm. Let me tell you. And the mescal they have here. Ohmigod. It’s like the best. No hangover. All natural. Super organic.”
Janey was surprised. There was no food at the retreat, but there was a late-night disco and artisanal liquor.
Suzy giggled. “And then we went skinny-dipping! Whooooo-ooooo-oooo!” Suzy had paired a cowgirl hat with her grey Melissa Odabash resort wear this morning.
“Sorry I missed it. I’ll try to stay up tonight.” Janey had no interest in partying hard while she was here, or really partying hard at all. She couldn’t even remember the last time she took a shot. She looked at Stella across the table and raised her eyebrows. Stella just smiled and concentrated on her chia pudding.
The chia seeds were strange little things, and eating them felt like swallowing baby food that tickled as it went down your throat. Janey wondered how everyone was so alert and perky, and then she remembered the man in the white coat at Suzy’s bedside. Holy shit. They’d all been given hangover treatments this morning. No one looked the least bit worse for wear. It was true. Money could buy you almost anything, including a hangover-free life if you didn’t mind an IV drip in the morning.
“I got a great night’s sleep and explored the beach,” Janey offered. “It’s incredible here. Sand for miles. I didn’t see another human being.”
“Let’s go paddle-boarding this afternoon,” Stella piped up. “Anyone’s welcome to join. We have Workout in the morning and free time before evening Pilates. Boarding is so good for your core, and it will be blissful to be out on the waves.”
“Did you sign up for a massage yet? Or a colonic? We have a guy who does the most profound colonics,” Maizee asked. “The massage slots are going quick, and you have to sign up for one with Scott. He does something very, very special at the end.” All of the other women at the table giggled.
Janey shook her head. She could use a massage. Every muscle in her body felt as though it had been rolled in shattered glass. “I didn’t. How do I sign up?”
“Oh darling, just tell me what time is good for you and I’ll arrange it. I arrange everything around here.” Maizee sighed. “But you absolutely want Scott. He has magical fingers.” There were the sniggers again.
“What does he do?”
“He just makes you feel really, really good,” Suzy said. “I had him yesterday afternoon. My husband hasn’t made me feel like that in years.”
She’d somehow stumbled into an outlandish middle-aged sorority party complete with shots, late-night parties, and happy endings. God help her if she made it the rest of the week.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Ivy hadn’t expected the retreat to be in the middle of the damn jungle. She’d assumed it would be in the tourist zone and there’d be a nice (cheap) Hilton or Radisson nearby, but the Vanderses owned miles of jungle and beach, and the closest place she could find to stay, even though SoarBarre was willing to pay whatever it cost, was a run-down guesthouse behind a mechanic’s shop—a one-bedroom shack adjacent to a chicken coop.
The only upside was the owner’s brother, Carlo, worked as a cook for the Vanderses, and he promised to sneak her onto the property that evening. She’d wanted to go over earlier, to make the most of her time here on the ground, but Carlo had discouraged it.
“Oh, you want to go there at night, miss. That’s when things get wild.”
Wild? At an exercise retreat? “Well, I really am supposed to film the workouts.”
Carlo shook his head. “If you want to get dirt on these ladies you go at night. Besides, I don’t work till eight.”
She took his word for it and spent the day on her own, jogging along the beach and swimming in the gentle water.
She’d taken her entry into espionage seriously, and two weeks of Google searches and tracking down former friends (and quite a few enemies) of Sara Strong helped her build a whole dossier on The Workout star, and, frankly, it wasn’t pretty. Ivy had even tracked down the woman’s stepmom at the Jersey Shore.