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would
throw that up too.
    “Liz?” Kevin’s voice
spoke into her ear.
    “For Christ’s sake,
Kevin, you’ve known her for seven goddamn years! You’re telling me
you won’t have anything to say to her?” Liz breezed back to her
office and started flipping through her Rolodex. “Use that
melon-sized head for something and think. What does Susan like?
What used to cheer her up back in college?”
    “What used to cheer
her up?” Kevin murmured. “In college?”
    “There you go! I can
practically hear the gears moving around in that mammoth skull of
yours already. Now leave me alone, mommy’s got work to do!” Liz
hung up on Kevin, her eyes honed on the business card she’d plucked
from her Rolodex.
    Denton Crane: Private Investigator.
    Liz remembered that
Denton had been crude and lecherous, hitting on her with a dogged
perversity that only made her want to slap the hell out of him. Who
better to find Mark than one of his own kind?
     
     

Chapter 3
     
     
     
    Standing in that
crowded vestibule again, Susan’s dress felt so heavy, but that
goddamn cocktail napkin was heavier by far. How many times had she
been there? This moment always seemed to take forever, as if she’d
stood there for hours before her life had dissolved around her and
evaporated.
    Things finally moved
forward to her crying in Liz’s arms, but only for a moment, before
everything crashed around her, shattering like crystal on concrete.
The scene shuffled, flipping swiftly through disjointed moments,
some from childhood, like when she’d fallen out of the neighbor’s
tree house and broken her leg.
    The next moment she
was standing in the library at Dartmouth, and Liz was chewing gum
and checking her makeup, bitching about the B she’d gotten on her
Art History paper. “I even blew the little bastard too!”
    There was a flash of
Kevin smiling at her for the first time. She could still remember
how she had pitied him, and yet couldn’t bear to send him away,
like a cute, though geeky, puppy.
    She was dancing like
a fool in her dorm room with Kevin--couldn’t remember the song,
just how happy it made her.
    And then there was
Mark, handsome and sexy as all hell, his dark brown eyes like
melted chocolate as he asked her out for the first time. She
couldn’t remember how they had met that day, only that he both
irritated and turned her on.
    She flickered through
the romantic things, through the sex, stopping and holding on for
dear life to a panel of memory where she remembered how his body
fit against hers, and how she always lost herself in his scent.
This she grabbed hold of with all her strength, until it faded away
in her desperate embrace.
    She was back in that
dress, in the vestibule, and that goddamn napkin was burning a hole
in her hand again.
    And that was when
something outside the dream started to bleed through. The song. The
song she couldn’t remember, the one she’d been dancing so happily
with Kevin to. It was playing, the final chords of it.
    Susan’s eyes shot
open just as the last of it faded into nothingness.
    The room was
unfamiliar and dark, the shades drawn, the only light coming from
the door at her back. The song started again--Sheryl Crow’s All I Wanna
Do . When Susan moved, her body
was stiff with entropy, her head cloudy, as was her vision. She
stumbled as she stood, the room turning slowly around her. She
grabbed the nightstand and closed her eyes, willing everything to
stop moving.
    When, blessedly, the
room did stop turning, Susan moved toward the open door, toward the
music. But the urge to pee hit her so hard she turned tail and
bolted for the bathroom, groaning with anguished satisfaction as
she voided the contents of her bladder for almost a full
minute.
    Standing back up, she
groaned again at the stiffness in her legs and back. Susan caught
sight of herself in the bathroom mirror and gasped. Hair was
frizzed out and tangled on one side, the other side matted down
almost perfectly flat. But the