Too Pretty to Die Read online

  Too Pretty to Die

  A Debutante Dropout Mystery

  Susan McBride

  “I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty

  being only skin-deep.

  That’s deep enough. What do you want,

  an adorable pancreas?”

  Jean Kerr

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  She used to be so pretty.

  Chapter 1

  “Aw, c’mon, Andy. Don’t be a chicken. Everybody’s doing it.

  Chapter 2

  If I’d been smart, I would’ve hightailed it out of…

  Chapter 3

  It wasn’t the sun that woke me, nor an alarm…

  Chapter 4

  Miranda DuBois had committed suicide?

  Chapter 5

  I shuffled out of Miranda’s duplex just as the medical…

  Chapter 6

  I hugged Sandy Beck and told her good-bye before crossing…

  Chapter 7

  The receptionist looked very much like a walking advertisement for…

  Chapter 8

  I had rarely been so glad to get home in…

  Chapter 9

  Usually, approaching Mother’s house meant a quiet drive down Beverly,…

  Chapter 10

  Malone shot a Do you need me? look from across…

  Chapter 11

  “Remember when I told you I was working on a…

  Chapter 12

  “We have to tell the police,” I said as soon…

  Chapter 13

  Needless to say, it felt a bit creepy, touching things…

  Chapter 14

  Malone offered to take me out for a quiet dinner…

  Chapter 15

  It wasn’t hard getting out of the condo without raising…

  Chapter 16

  The woman gazing back at me from the silvered glass…

  Chapter 17

  The club’s French name, Bébé Gâté, flashed across the second-story…

  Chapter 18

  “You!” I hissed at him, while droplets of pale gold…

  Chapter 19

  No one stopped me as I entered.

  Chapter 20

  A ringing phone nudged its way into my consciousness, playing…

  Chapter 21

  I sat in the passenger seat of Milton’s Porsche Boxer,…

  Epilogue

  It had been a week since Miranda DuBois died.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Susan McBride

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Dear Miranda DuBois:

  Due to your current unfortunate circumstances, your membership in the Caviar Club has been revoked. We wish you luck in your recuperation. Should your situation improve, please reapply, and we will give your application our prompt attention.

  Sincerely,

  The Caviar Club

  She used to be so pretty.

  Perfect, some would say.

  Her eyes had always been so blue and wide, her smile so bright; her skin without a blemish. She’d never gone through an awkward stage, having blossomed from beautiful baby and skipping through puberty without a hitch; ending up the fully spun butterfly everyone knew she’d become.

  She was the one who Daddy had called “my own little Grace Kelly,” showing her off at the country club when she was a toddler in rompers and saddle shoes. Even in grade school, the boys from St. Mark’s had tripped over themselves to be near her when they’d mixed with the Hockaday girls at dances. Her mailbox had always overflowed with love notes on Valentine’s Day, many from names she didn’t even recognize.

  She’d grown accustomed to being adored, and thrived on it. She figured her looks were her gift, and there was nothing wrong with that. Some savants played piano like Mozart or painted like Chagall. Miranda knew that her talent was in keeping up her appearance. And it had been so easy for her, really.

  Sure, she’d had to deal with Venus envy. Girls hated her for no other reason than that she was prettier. But there would always be people who wanted what they couldn’t have, wouldn’t there? If people didn’t like her, it had more to do with them than her, or so her mother had always suggested.

  Such was life, and Miranda had fast learned how to shrug off the jealous whispers. She’d been blessed where it mattered most when the eyes of Texas were upon you: her shiny chassis.

  And she’d never, ever taken it for granted.

  If she’d been pug-ugly, she wouldn’t have been a Pi Phi at UT-Austin, and she certainly wouldn’t have been a Symphony Deb (okay, maybe she could have, since her daddy had practically paid for the entire string section with his annual donations).

  She’d surely never have won Miss Dallas or first runner-up at the national pageant.

  Homely girls didn’t wear sashes, and they damned sure didn’t get tiaras unless they bought them at Oriental Trading.

  When she’d graduated from UT, she’d gotten a gig right off the bat doing on-air consumer reports at KXAS-Channel 5 in Big D, before the news director had claimed she was being underutilized and moved her to the anchor desk. And, really, it had everything to do with all the viewer e-mails about her Southern charm, the breezy way she read the teleprompter, and her movie-star looks, and not a whit to do with the fact that she was sleeping with her married boss—call her naïve, but she’d believed him when he said that he loved her and planned to leave his boring wife.

  My God, but it had been so easy when she was beautiful, when all she had to do was smile and the world fell on its knees to please her.

  She used to pray to God every night, thanking Him profusely for blessing her with good features. Her mother had raised her to think of others, too; so she’d prayed as well for the ungainly, the gawky, the brace-faced, and pimply, because, Lord knew, they could always use the help.

  Now her prayers had changed.

  They’d become more like an SOS.

  Thirty-one years old, and she’d been ruined for life.

  She was a freak, a loser, a big, fat (okay, skinny) nothing.

  Through moist eyes, she read the letter from the Caviar Club one last time before she crumpled it into a ratty ball and tossed it across the room. It bounced off the open screen of her laptop and dropped to the carpet.

  So that’s how it ended?

  With an impersonal note?

  After all the lip service when they’d embraced her about how special she was, how extraordinary on the inside and out?

  Tears slid down her cheeks, and she brushed them off, angry and disappointed at once.

  Screw them all! she thought.

  Even him. No, especially him.

  She’d barely heard a peep from the man she’d been seeing, not since Dr. Sonja had turned her into a pariah. Then, wham, he’d sent a text message earlier in the afternoon saying, need time 2 think. give me space, ok?

  Space?

  Wasn’t that the precursor of the infamous “can’t we just be friends” brush-off, dating back to junior high?

  What had happened to all the gushy messages before Dr. Sonja turned her into a freak? Had his professed adoration been a lie? And how had he found out? She hadn’t told him, not personally. So how had he learned?

  Someone must’ve spread the word, and Miranda was fairly certain she knew who was responsible, despite how hard she’d tried to keep her disfigurement under wraps, wearing dark glasses and a scarf around her hair every time she ventured out, telling fibs, avoiding everyone as best she could.

  Pretty soon it wouldn’t matter what disguise she donned or how many excuses she made up. The world would know wha
t she’d become: the Park Cities’ version of the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  She’d forever be known as the Ugly Chick with Botched Botox, or how about, Your Friendly Neighborhood Sideshow Freak?

  She’d no longer be Dallas’s “Most Beloved On-Air Personality,” that was for darn tootin’.

  Because she wouldn’t be on-the-air anymore; no one would want her.

  It didn’t matter that her co-anchor, the smarmy Dick Uttley, looked like he was 101. He had a million tiny creases from a fifty year nicotine habit and the broken capillaries of a lifelong drinker. But did he ever get e-mails about his hairstyle or the color of his lipstick? Did anyone care that he’d cheated on his wife about a hundred times with every intern at the station?

  Noooooo.

  If Dick had been the one scarred by a permanent eye twitch and an Elvis sneer, the viewers likely wouldn’t have even noticed.

  But they expected Miranda DuBois to be perfect. They demanded that she look gorgeous from the tip of her pedicured toes to the roots of her shiny blond hair.

  The only trouble was, she would never be perfect again.

  Her breaths became rushed, and she felt dizzy, on the verge of hyperventilating.

  Oh, God, she couldn’t breathe!

  She gulped down the last of her gin and tonic, struggling up from her Barcelona chair only long enough to pour another—minus the tonic this time.

  “Just try a little around your eyes, Randa, and let’s do your laugh lines. Then you’ll look as perfect as you did when you were twenty,” Dr. Sonja had cajoled her, and who wouldn’t have listened? Sonja Madhavi was cosmetic dermatologist to all the pretty people in Dallas. Everyone and her pedigreed pup had Dr. Sonja show up for glycolic peel parties and Botox bashes.

  So she had done it, too, like a sheep.

  The one truly bad thing about being born with pretty genes was seeing that first wrinkle and glimpsing the future.

  She’d been afraid of growing older, knowing how women who aged disappeared from TV news like old soldiers who’d faded away. She’d decided, what the heck? Enough of her friends had gone under the needle and raved about it. No one ever talked about the “what ifs,” as in, “What if Dr. Sonja hit a nerve or injected a bad batch of botulism?”

  What a fool she’d been!

  Now she was a walking example of those “adverse reactions” that Dr. Sonja had so quickly glossed over. Who ever paid attention to the warning labels until it was too late? What woman truly cared that the FDA hadn’t put its stamp of approval on a product if it was featured in Vogue and lauded by doctors in France and Italy?

  Those French were always ahead of everyone else in matters of beauty. They were willing to take risks, throw caution to the wind. It wasn’t fair. Why should they have dibs on everything?

  But she should’ve read the fine print. She should’ve erred on the side of caution instead of being so fast to jump on Dr. Sonja’s better-than-Botox bandwagon; should’ve wised up to the fact that Dr. Sonja had never seemed to like her.

  If she had, things would be different.

  As it was, she would never be the same.

  It had been three weeks since her injections, and she’d had to call in sick at work, claiming “female troubles,” which prevented any of the producers from asking probing questions. They had the weekends-only anchorwoman sitting in temporarily “while Miranda DuBois takes a much needed vacation,” or so they told viewers.

  But what she had was a case of botched wrinkle filler: a serious tic in her left eye that wouldn’t stop, and a droop in the corner of her mouth, so she appeared the drooling idiot. She’d been to Dr. Sonja’s for a follow-up, begging her to fix things, but Dr. Sonja had blamed her, said she must be overly sensitive, and told her to wait it out.

  Wait out ugly?

  Good God!

  What if that took forever?

  She had on-air news to read, celebrity charity events to chair, commercials and public service announcements to tape, not to mention countless promotional gigs for the station.

  But Dr. Sonja didn’t care. She’d stopped returning her phone calls, was intentionally avoiding her, despite Miranda threatening to report her to the BBB and the AMA if she didn’t do some kind of quick fix. And she would do it, too.

  She had never felt so abandoned.

  Oh, Lord, she would die alone, wouldn’t she?

  Forget the tiaras and sashes! She’d be lucky if any single, attractive, heterosexual male would pay attention to her ever again.

  The one man she’d believed loved her—who used to ring her cell spontaneously to whisper dirty little come-ons, who’d made a million excuses at work and at home so he could squeeze in a half hour at her place in the mornings or at night—had vanished off the radar after her face was ruined.

  She knew she could make his life a living hell if she wanted to; hurt him as much as he was hurting her. And she might—she could—but she wasn’t sure he was worth it. He had never really been hers.

  It was the sign of things to come, wasn’t it?

  She could already see the future, and it was as ugly as she was: being forced to move out of her pretty duplex on Preston near the country club and into the guest house of her mother’s Highland Park manse, undatable and unable to pay rent when she got permanently canned, because what TV station in its right mind wanted an anchorwoman whose features frightened small children?

  Talk about a double whammy.

  She was unattractive and pathetic.

  Maybe she should just choke down the bottle of Xanax in her medicine cabinet, chase it with the gin, and be done with it, so she wouldn’t have to live with the sight of her mangled self another day.

  Only, Miranda DuBois had never chickened out on life before. She’d always found a way to land on top, no matter what it took. What she wanted wasn’t her name on a marble slab in Sparkman Hillcrest Memorial Park.

  Why should she be the one to chuck it all?

  Would that make things right?

  Miranda drained her drink and slapped down the empty glass on the table beside her, wiping at her mouth with a silk sleeve.

  What she wanted was payback.

  If anyone knew about revenge, it was a pageant girl. She hadn’t suffered through butt tape and sequins all those years for nothing.

  She would make that quack suffer, just as she was suffering.

  Hell, she’d get all the insensitive jerks who’d given her the cold shoulder. And she had plenty of ammo to do it.

  Her quest would start tonight with the good doctor.

  Sonja Madhavi wouldn’t know what hit her.

  Chapter 1

  “Aw, c’mon, Andy. Don’t be a chicken. Everybody’s doing it.

  What’s the big deal?” I’m not exactly sure why Janet had followed me into the opulent powder room in Delaney Armstrong’s enormous Bordeaux Avenue manse, except to torment me, as she was supposed to be mingling with the loitering ladies swarming the living room: upper crust women in their twenties and thirties, sipping Chablis and waiting for a turn with über-dermo Dr. Sonja Madhavi, there to inject the beauty-obsessed with her latest age-defying cocktails. My only consolation was that Dr. Sonja hadn’t brought her fat vacuum to liposuction any thighs or bellies. That would’ve had me running straight out the front door and not just to the can.

  If I strained my ears, I could discern the hum of yammering voices alongside the bass of “Hot Stuff” by Donna Summers, being that disco was the night’s background music. No one had asked, but if they had, I’d have kept disco dead and buried.

  I was no Saturday Night Fever diva, but a rock chick to the core.

  Yet another reason why I’d rather have been just about anywhere else at the moment and felt extra grateful for my temporary refuge in the loo.

  I’d endured enough Abba and eyeballed enough shallow women wearing Gucci, Fendi, and Prada to satisfy my quota for the year, and I certainly had no intention of experiencing Dr. Sonja’s party favors, since that would mean subject
ing myself to a syringe full of God knows what. I’d heard tell that she made up some of her “beauty remedies” on the stovetop in her kitchen. Kind of like an upscale meth lab for the chic.

  The idea gave me shivers, but it obviously didn’t do much to scare off the long list of Dr. Sonja’s clientele. Even the Morning News had dubbed the exotic-looking doc who wore miniskirts and platform heels “Big D’s Own Fountain of Youth.”

  Like a bad case of the flu, Dr. Sonja’s “Pretty Parties” had spread across the city, infecting every wrinkle-fearing, couture-wearing woman in Dallas’s in-crowd from age fifteen to 115.

  It was worse than the Tupperware plague of the 1980s.

  Plastic wasn’t my thing, not the kind you stored leftovers in or the type that meant reshaping body parts with knives or needles.

  Call me crazy—and plenty of folks around Big D did—but hardcore superficiality gave me the heebie-jeebies, not surprising considering that I, Andrea Blevins Kendricks, would forever be known as the “debutante dropout” after bailing on my own cotillion, and deemed fatally etiquette impaired by the city’s blue bloods, despite being reared by the High Priestess of High Society and Matron of Good Manners, my Chanel-wearing mother Cissy Blevins Kendricks.