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PROLOGUE
San Francisco
Now
No! No! No!
Forcing her way through a gathering crowd that had been barricaded across the sloped street, Remmi shielded her eyes with one hand and stared upward through the thickening fog to the ledge of the Montmort Tower Hotel. “Oh, God.” Squinting through the fog to somewhere near the twentieth floor, she saw a woman balanced precariously on a ledge, her back to an open hotel room window, sheer curtains billowing behind her.
It couldn’t be.
It just couldn’t!
Not when Remmi was so close . . . so damned close. Please, no!
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, she’s gonna jump!” a tall man said under his breath. He wore a heavy jacket and stocking cap, and a one-year-old in a hooded snowsuit was strapped to his chest. He quickly sketched the sign of the cross over his chest and the baby. Red-faced from the cold, the child began to whimper, but his father barely seemed to notice.
Sirens wailed as fire trucks and police cruisers collected near the base of the stalwart San Francisco hotel, an Art Deco edifice of concrete and marble that had withstood earthquakes and fires, riots and time, rock stars and politicians. It pulsed with the fierce, eerie lights of emergency vehicles. People were talking and milling around, jamming the roped-off area of the steep San Francisco street.
High on the ledge, a woman with short, platinum hair, the hem of her pink dress dancing around her knees, wobbled on her matching heels, swaying enough to make some of the onlookers gasp, while others screamed.
Don’t do it!
Heart in her throat, her pulse a surf in her ears, Remmi pushed her way through the throng held at bay by police officers and yellow tape strung hastily over A-frame barricades. Twilight was descending, the lights of the city winking through the thickening mist, the streets shiny and wet, the bay nearly invisible at the bottom of the steep hillside. Most of the crowd, heads tilted back, stared, gape-mouthed, hands to their chests, up to the thin ledge where the woman balanced so precariously.
“This is horrible. Horrible!” a woman in a stocking cap and padded jacket whispered. She was transfixed, as they all were, but couldn’t turn away. Her gloved hand was clamped over that of a boy with ragged brown hair and freckles, a baseball cap crammed onto his head.
“Let me through.” Remmi shouldered her way closer to the police line. “Come on.”
The gloved woman observed, “She looks like Marilyn Monroe.”
“Marilyn who?” her son, all of about twelve, asked, earbuds visible beneath his baseball cap, acne vying with fuzz on his jaw as he stared upward to where the would-be jumper stood.
“A–a beauty queen . . . actress from the fifties.”
“So really old.”
“No, no . . . she’s dead.” Gaze aloft, the woman shook her head. “Died a long time ago. Overdose of sleeping pills. Or . . . or something.” Her forehead crumpled as she thought.
“Then it’s not her.”
“I know.”
“Just someone who looks like her.” The kid’s eyes were focused on the ledge high overhead. “Is she really going to do it? Will she land in that fountain?”
His mother was shaking her head. “I hope not. I hope she doesn’t . . . Dear God.” She, too, made a hasty sign of the cross over her chest.
“Impersonator?” a man in a long overcoat who had overheard the exchange asked.
“I–I guess.” The woman again.
“There’ve been a lot of them,” the man said with a snort, as if the woman’s life was of no importance. Callous jerk.
“The outfit. Pure Marilyn.” The woman in the stocking hat was nodding, her head bobbing slowly, graying curls springing from beneath the knit cap. “But one impersonator . . . in particular. Kind of famous. What was her name?” She snapped the fingers of her free hand, the sound muted through her glove. “It was . . . it was, oh, I almost had it . . . But gosh, I can’t remember. Doesn’t matter.”
Didi. Her name is Didi Storm, Remmi thought, her heart frozen in her chest. And it does matter! What’s
wrong with you people? Acting as if a woman contemplating suicide is just an interesting sideshow!
Overcoat pulled a face of disbelief. “An impersonator of a dead woman . . . long dead, by the way. She’s gonna take a swan dive off the Montmort? Doesn’t make sense.”
“Does suicide ever make sense?” Knit cap snapped, her lips pursing a little.
“Sorry. I was just sayin’—”
On the ledge above, the slim woman swayed, and the crowd gasped. Firemen were gathered at the base of the hotel, and someone in a uniform—a sergeant, Remmi thought—was addressing the throng: “Stand back. Give us a little room here.”
Water beading on his Giants cap, the kid observed, “Man. It looks like she’s really going to do it.”
“Oh . . . oh, no. Come on, let’s go. I can’t watch this.” The mother hustled her son through the gathering throng of horrified lookie-loos, and the boy, reluctantly, his gaze glued to the would-be leaper, was dragged past nearby observers holding cell phones over their heads in sick efforts to capture the horrible moment. Mother and son disappeared, melting into the ever-growing throng.
