The Perfect Face Read online

  “We… we don’t have a hotel,” the girl said.

  Maddie noticed that the girl’s forest green eyes had gold flecks in them. Probably the prettiest eyes she’d ever seen. Mesmerizing. What people must have felt when they looked at a young Elizabeth Taylor.

  “You don’t?” she asked. “Where are you staying? Or are you catching a flight out today?”

  God help them if they were. Given the shape the mother was in, it didn’t seem likely they were getting back on a ferry any time soon.

  “N-no…” the girl said, looking hesitant. “Not, umm…”

  On the ground, the mother groaned again.

  “Listen,” Maddie said, projecting to the mother. “I’m staying at a studio right up the street. Can you walk? You can lay down there until you feel better.”

  “Mom?” the girl asked, hopefully.

  The mother somehow managed to push herself half up from the dock, and slowly wobbled her head. Maddie stood, and motioned for the girl to do the same.

  “I’m Maddie. What’s your name?”

  “It’s, well…” The girl dangled a long finger in her mouth. Had the rough seas affected her so badly that she’d forgotten her own name? Or was she reluctant to share it with a stranger, even a female stranger?

  “Doris,” the mother said from the ground. “She’s Doris. I’m—”

  The rest cut off as a strangled retching erupted from the woman’s mouth as she vomited on the dock.

  “Let’s help your mother, Doris,” Maddie said.

  Chapter Three

  Maddie and the girl—could her name really be Doris?—walked to the chora, the center of the island, veined with a cobbled labyrinth of alleyways flanked by white-washed, blue-trimmed shops and restaurants, and draped with vibrant pink bougainvillea.

  Nothing could be more beautiful than a Greek island, Maddie mused. No wonder it was the land that (mythologically) produced Aphrodite and Helen of Troy. And she was ecstatic to be away from the congealed humidity of Manhattan, where she lived. She’d smartly followed her friend Athena’s suggestion that Maddie take a break from her demoralizing work situation and come to Greece for her summer vacation. The temperature must be in the 90s Fahrenheit, but it didn’t feel that hot thanks to a strong, steady breeze off the water. Besides, a beach was never more than a short walk away. If you started to sweat, you simply headed for the shoreline.

  After leaving the dock, Maddie and the girl had managed to stumble the mother along the few blocks to the rental, called Sideratos, where the woman promptly collapsed on Maddie’s bed and crimped into the fetal position.

  Maddie couldn’t believe the woman was still so affected by the turbulent ferry ride back from a small abandoned island that was one of the world’s most intact ancient archaeological sites. Along with a couple dozen others, Maddie had spent three hours gazing in awe at the ruins of Greco-Roman houses adorned with colorful mosaics, theaters, churches, temples, art, and ancient but sophisticated aqueduct and plumbing systems. Attention consumed, she hadn’t noticed the girl and her mother.

  Perhaps the mother—who eventually moaned out that her name was Stella—had some travel bug.

  She felt bad for the daughter, who apparently hadn’t eaten since the morning, several times braying, “Mom, I’m staaaaarving.” Maddie offered to take her out to get food, and to go to a pharmacy and try to get medicine to calm Stella’s stomach. Granted, it was a bit uncomfortable to offer to take charge of a random young minor but sometimes you had to shove aside feelings of discomfort when help was needed. Besides, they were all female. The odds of one of them being a serial killer were virtually nil.

  Virtually.

  First, she and the girl walked to a food stall inside the chora and ordered tiropita and spanakopita with the intent of eating while walking to their next destination—a pharmacy. But it was closed. Now Maddie remembered from past trips to Europe that retail hours could be inconvenient—often closed all afternoon, then open until late into the night.

  The girl had no money—she and her mother had stored their belongings back at the ferry terminal and the mom had been too sick to go get them—so Maddie paid for her food.

  Then they sat on a bench overlooking the crystal-blue Aegean and dug into their sumptuously greasy meals. Beaches were ubiquitous but not uniform. There were red sand beaches, white “sugar” sand beaches, pebbled beaches, and lava beaches, covered with black pebbles from millions of years of lava cooling and being pummeled into bite-sized pieces. Maddie and the girl currently stared out over a shore layered with multicolored pebbles.

  “How old are you, Doris?” she asked the girl.

  “Twelve.”

  “Oh! You’re so tall. I thought you were a little older.”

  Now it definitely seemed odd to be sitting here with a random child—for despite the long legs and Katherine Hepburn cheekbones, Doris was indeed a child. But these were the Greek islands. Children of all ages ran around unattended. It wasn’t the United States, with its kidnapping hysteria and parental micromanaging.

  Even in Athens, where Maddie had stayed for two days before flying to a nearby larger island, then taking a ferry to Kyrie, she’d seen kids, looking as young as seven or eight, free-roaming all over the city.

  It seemed okay to sit here with a random child, unlike at home, where Maddie would have been crawling with vague guilt, keeping one eye out for cops or Chris Hansen.

  The girl steadily munched away on her food. She wasn’t very talkative.

  “Are you and your mother on vacation?” Maddie probed.

  “Sort of,” the girl said, resting her food on her lap, staring out to the gloriously sparkling sea. Hard to believe an hour ago it had almost devoured their ferry. “We’re going to visit my uncle. He lives on another island.”

  “Lucky him. Which island?”

  The girl shrugged. “I forgot the name of it.”

  “Does he live there year-round?”

  “Yeah.” She paused, took another bite of food and chewed, staring out at the electric-blue Aegean. “He’s really rich.”

  “Even nicer.”

  But Maddie’s tone was flat. She knew about rich men. She’d been covering them for five years for Wealthy magazine. One of these rich men, she felt certain, had been responsible for disrupting her career and was indirectly the reason she was even on Kyrie. Her friend Athena was on the island, restoring her great-grandparents’ house. And Maddie’s job was not going well. She figured she’d better use her vacation time before she was fired.

  But surely the girl’s uncle wasn’t the kind of rich man Wealthy magazine wrote about? Not billionaire rich. The public perception that there were billionaires on every corner was far from reality—there were only a handful of true billionaires in the world.

  The girl didn’t give the impression she was familiar with that kind of private plane, private island, politicians-in-your-pockets, celebrities-in-your-bed kind of rich. She seemed too unpolished and down-to-earth. And if that kind of money was in the family, Doris and her mother probably would have taken a private yacht to the historical island, not that sad little ferry boat that put them through that harrowing sea trip. The uncle was likely an expat who’d retired to the much cheaper islands and was doing fine with monthly withdrawals from his retirement fund.

  “So, you’re on your way there?” Maddie prodded, unable to shake the reporter’s habit of asking lots of questions. “That’s why you don’t have a hotel?”

  The girl nodded. “He’s supposed to get us in his boat later tonight.”

  Boat.

  Hm. Maybe the uncle did have a yacht. That’s what rich people called them. Boats. Maddie thought about asking the uncle’s name—maybe she knew of him—but decided she’d grilled the girl enough. “Hopefully the sea has calmed down by then,” she said.

  “Mom and I got here last night, and we thought it would be fun to go on a day trip while we waited for him. But now she can’t move, so who knows what will happen.”

  “Your uncle might have to wait until she’s better. You guys can get a hotel tonight.”

  “Yeah,” she sighed. “I guess.”

  Maddie didn’t hang around young people. She had no nieces or nephews. At 32, she had no children. A pregnancy at 30 had led to an engagement with her long-term boyfriend, but at ten weeks, the pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage. The miscarriage had resulted in thousands of dollars in medical bills thanks to crappy insurance and what seemed like dozens of appointments with her gynecologist to continually check her hormone levels, and then a dilation and curettage when the fetus didn’t pass on its own.

  Her boyfriend, Jesse, whom she’d known since she moved to the city in her mid-20s, had agreed to split the bills, then haggled over every dime. The miscarriage had been painful not only emotionally but physically, and she was in no mood for quibbling over medical bills, especially when Jesse made ten times the money she did.

  She’d always known he was cheap—it was his worst quality—but this was an abhorrently insensitive side to him she’d never imagined. So, she’d broken up with him, and he immediately moved on to one of his coworkers—possibly the source of his insensitivity. Perhaps he’d already had something going on with her.

  Only one of Maddie’s friends had a child—but the child was a toddler. The typical behavior of a 12-year-old was simply out of her range of familiarity. Doris’ lack of enthusiasm for her uncle’s island was likely a preteen thing. Maddie vaguely remembered, at that age, being unimpressed with everything, too.

  “Doris is an interesting name,” she continued, driven to keep trying to connect with the girl. “Kind of old-fashioned. Those old-timey names are really making a comeback.”

  The girl stuck her tongue out. “Stupid name. You can call me
Ruby. But don’t call me that in front of Mom.”

  “Is that, uh, the name you’d rather have?” Maddie asked, at the same time wondering, Why not call you that in front of your mother?

  “Doris is a—never mind.” The girl brushed some crumbs off her cut-offs, then wrapped the longest clump of strings on the frayed hem around two fingers. “Just call me Doris. It’s my real name. My nickname is Ruby but Mom wants people to call me by my real name.”

  “Oh.” Pause. “Okay.” Kind of an odd decision for a mother to make for a girl who was old enough to decide for herself what she wants to be called.

  “You want to hear a name story?” she went on. “Maddie is short for Madison, which my mother named me because she loves the movie Splash.” At the girl’s utterly blank expression, Maddie plowed on: “You’re probably too young to know that movie but it was popular in the eighties.”

  Another dead-blank look.

  “I guess I’m lucky she didn’t name me Daryl after the actress who played Madison,” she continued, expecting another blank canvas. Instead, the girl said, “Daryl. I like that name.”

  Leaving some remnants of food for a few stray cats who sat nearby, staring regally and hungrily, the pair tossed their greasy paper wrappings into the nearest trash can and went to see if they could find an open pharmacy. They couldn’t. Not knowing if Stella would be able to stomach any food, Maddie bought her a sports drink at an outdoor stall.

  Then she and Doris wound their way back through the narrow maze of the chora. There were other strolling tourists, but not too many. Kyrie wasn’t easily accessible by Athens or Thessaloniki, requiring either a plane ride and another hours-long ferry ride, or an overnight ferry trip. Plus, it was July. Most tourists, the majority of them coming from Britain, wouldn’t arrive until August.

  “Have you visited your uncle on the island before?” Maddie asked the girl, more to break the silence.

  “Not really.”

  Is that a yes or no? Maddie wondered, having the sudden urge to ask the girl if she’d even met her uncle before.

  “Well, I hope you have a good time.”

  The girl said nothing, staring down at her open-toed flat sandals as the pair made their way back to the studio apartment.

  Maddie now had the distinct impression that the girl, for whatever reason, did not wish to move on to her uncle’s island. Perhaps there was some family dynamic happening that was distressing for her. But maybe she had a naturally sullen or insular personality.

  Still, there was an urge to check in, to look out for her, though Maddie had no idea how to do it without overstepping boundaries. But given that she’d likely never see the girl or her mother again, she figured there was no harm in being more nosy.

  “Is that a place you want to go?” she asked, uncertain how to articulate the vaguely dark intuition creeping up on her. “I mean… you seem kind of…” The words evaporated in the air. She was stuck in that discomfiting space between wanting to get involved and wanting to be respectful. To, essentially, mind her own business. “I guess I want to make sure you’re okay.”

  The girl stopped and stared at her, genuinely puzzled. “Okay? What do you mean?”

  Now Maddie felt overreaching and pushy. She’d lived in a city too long. Worked in journalism too long. Not everything was a plot or conspiracy. Sometimes preteens were moody. She certainly had been at that age.

  “About going to see your uncle.” Each word felt like she was digging herself deeper into an awkward hole. “Like maybe you…” She trailed off, pretending the turquoise and silver jewelry laid out in the window of a little shop they passed had drawn her eye.

  “I’m just nervous,” Doris said, pulling out her hairband and rapidly redoing her ponytail. Her hair was so long and thick, it must be like a carpet on her back in this heat. But other than during the tortuous ferry ride, the girl always seemed poised and graceful. “See, he’s going to pay for a private school. I kind of have to impress him. So he knows he’s not wasting his money.”

  “Gotcha.”

  So much for the theory that the uncle was an eking-it-out retiree. He obviously had a plump bank account if he was going to pick up the tab for private school.

  Maddie couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off but decided to drop it. She’d been a journalist for many years and poking around in other people’s business was her job, but she was on vacation. And she should be worrying about her own life, not that of a random preteen who was traveling with her mother and for all appearances seemed perfectly fine.

  Chapter Four

  Back at the rental apartment, Stella was sitting up on the bed, looking much better, though still a bit peaked. Maddie handed her the drink, and Stella took a succession of careful but eager sips.

  “Thanks so much,” she sighed, closing her eyes. “I can’t believe how sick that ride made me.”

  “I tried to get you some medicine but the pharmacies are closed right now. I’m sure they’ll be open in a couple hours.”

  Stella looked at her watch. “Oh, we have to be gone by then. It’s fine, I’ll pick up something later. We need to get back to the ferry terminal and get our belongings.” She looked up at Doris/Ruby. “You okay, hon?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You eat?”

  “Yeah, Maddie bought me some Greek food.”

  “Oh God,” Stella groaned, putting her hand to her head. “I’m so sorry. I can’t pay you back. I’ve got nothing on me.”

  Maddie wondered why Stella didn’t suggest walking to the ferry terminal together so Stella could retrieve her wallet but Maddie’s ex-boyfriend’s stinginess was still lodged in her mind as an abhorrent quality, so she said, “Really, it’s no problem. My pleasure. The food here is so inexpensive anyway.”

  “Thank you,” Stella said, attempting to smile.

  Maddie wondered how the pair were going to make it to the uncle’s boat—the mother still appeared as if she could barely move. Then the bottle of water Maddie had consumed during lunch started to weigh on her bladder. She’d always had a weak bladder, but after her short pregnancy, it seemed to have gotten a lot weaker, though she didn’t know why that would be the case. But a bottle of water would take ten minutes, tops, to work its way out of her system.

  “Do you think you’re okay now?” Maddie asked. “You could probably get a room here for the night. It’s a nice place, only seventy euros a night. Not too many people here yet.”

  “Oh no,” Stella said, setting the sports drink on the bedside table, and shakily rising. “We should get going. We’ve got to get our things, then meet my cousin down at the dock. Though it makes me sick again thinking about getting back on that water.”

  “I get it,” Maddie said, though her mind was reeling off in several directions. Hadn’t Doris said they were meeting her uncle? She glanced at the girl, and unless it was her imagination, the girl’s normally placidly blank expression betrayed an undercurrent of panic. She was staring intensely at her mother, hazel eyes wide.

  The thought zipped through Maddie’s mind: They’re lying.

  The intuition that had been honed over years of reporting—the one that told Maddie when something was off-kilter—was jangling insistently. The pair were on their way somewhere alright, but it had nothing to do with an uncle or cousin.

  Stella approached, hand outstretched. Maddie shook it, the pangs in her bladder sharpening.

  “Thank you so much for everything,” Stella said. “I don’t know what I would have done without you. Probably still be lying on that dock.”

  “Hey, listen,” Maddie said. “Why don’t I walk you guys to the terminal? Make sure you’re alright.”

  “Oh no. We’ve inconvenienced you enough. We really should get going.”

  “To your cousin?” Maddie blurted. “I’d thought Doris said her uncle.”

  Stella’s face seemed to freeze for a second, and Maddie caught that same look of momentary panic in the mother’s eyes that had appeared in the daughter’s. But then her expression smoothly transitioned back to equanimity. “He’s my cousin. But Doris has always called him uncle.”