Free Puppet by Joy Fielding Page A

morning, and told her that she might not be in the office Monday.
    “Any particular reason I can give people?” Kelly asked, her voice alarmingly perky despite the early-morning hour.
    “No.”
    “Will you be back Tuesday?”
    “I’m not sure.”
    A pause. Amanda could almost hear the wheels in Kelly’s head spinning, knew she was desperate to ask if this sudden change in plans had anything to do with the phone calls from Ben Myers.
    “I’ll call you as soon as I know my plans,” Amanda said before hanging up. Then she threw a pair of black pants and a black turtleneck sweater into an overnight bag, along with her makeup bag and several changes of underwear, phoned Ben and told him she’d be arriving in Toronto at around five o’clock that afternoon, and took a cab to the airport, where she ate a slice of pepperoni pizza and gulped down a large Coke for breakfast, picked up her boarding pass, passed unchallenged through security, and fell into a mercifully dreamless sleep in the departure lounge while waiting to board her plane.
    Luckily—or unluckily, she thinks now—someone saw her sleeping and shook her awake in time to make her flight. She bounded onto the plane just as the doors were about to close, squeezing her overnight bag into the already full overhead compartment before similarly squeezing herself into the middle seat in the second-to-last row of the plane. She was reminding herself aboutbeggars not being choosers when the pilot announced they were experiencing a slight mechanical problem, and there would be a ten-minute delay. Ten minutes stretched into twenty, then thirty, and eventually fifty, as Amanda grew increasingly hot and restive inside her black wool coat. And now they were finally making their way down the runway, whatever problem they’d been having apparently solved.
    “And away we go,” Amanda whispers as the plane lifts into the air. She grips the armrests, tries hard not to panic. It’s been eight years since her last plane trip. Even her honeymoon with Sean involved boats, not planes. A Caribbean cruise, she recalls wistfully, remembering that she and Ben never had a honeymoon at all.
    She shakes the image of Ben from her head. She’ll be seeing him soon enough. “Book me a room at the scene of the crime,” she instructed him over the phone this morning. “I’ll call you as soon as I’m settled in.”
    The girl in the window seat beside Amanda cracks her gum loudly several times in rapid succession, so that it sounds as if someone were firing a small pistol. What kind of gun had her mother used to murder this mysterious stranger? Amanda wonders, feeling her body grow clammy underneath her heavy coat.
    An old image appears, the unexpected memory taking root and growing, like a weed, before Amanda has the chance to pull it out. She sees herself as a child, going through the closet in her mother’s bedroom, looking for a pair of fancy shoes, something with high heels and pointy toes, preferably in silver or gold, something suitable for playing a fairy princess, but finding only a succession of sensible low-heeled shoes in black and brownlined along the floor. And then looking up, seeing a shoe box on the high shelf above where her mother’s clothes were hanging, and thinking this must be where she keeps her special shoes, the ones a fairy princess would wear. She ran to the kitchen, retrieved the small stepladder that leaned against the side of the counter, returned with it to her mother’s bedroom, and climbed to its third and final step, stretching her arms toward the shoe box, her fingertips repeatedly grazing its side, unable to make full contact, until finally she succeeded in dislodging it. The box fell to the floor, narrowly missing her head, and bouncing awkwardly along the carpet, the lid opening, disgorging its contents at her feet.
    A gun, Amanda remembers now with a gasp, as she must have gasped then. Small and black, and surprisingly heavy.
    She watches the