For a moment light and shadow alternated like flashes of a strobe. And then silence pooled. Too much silence. It was as though a magician had waved a wand and made the white rabbit disappear. There was no white dress. No white arms. No white legs. No Nita.

“Nita,” Leigh whispered. “Where are you?”

A knot twisted inside her stomach. She closed her eyes, fighting back nausea. I will not vomit, she told herself.

When the spasm passed, she opened her eyes. Through the open French window moonlight spilled down onto the terrace in a wash of white stillness. Relief took her. There was no one there.

I was imagining it.

She moved into the living room.

I need a drink.

She turned on a light. The room was done in soft grays and deep greens—peaceful colors. Three dozen red roses with a note from her director had been placed in a tall crystal vase near the bar. She had the impression that the scene was being projected onto a 360-degree wraparound screen.

At that moment a wave of Nita’s perfume floated past her.

She didn’t move. She stayed exactly where she was, sniffing, listening.

“Nita?”

The silence and that faint trail of sweetness drew her toward the open French window. Her body had to fight a path through a wall of medication. Everything seemed twisted around, wrong. She stepped onto the terrace.

It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the moonlight.

Potted plants and dainty tables and chairs came into focus. She caught the trail of perfume again, and it drew her across the terrace to the low wall.

She stood there, looking out. She saw things with eerie, drugged precision. The town-house facades across the garden all glowed with the dead light of the moon.

A breeze ruffled the little boxwood bushes that the gardener had spaced along the low section of the wall. She saw that several of the branches had been freshly snapped off.

She moved a toppled chair aside. She stood a long moment staring over the waist-high wall. She slowly swung her gaze down to the garden five stories below. It was like staring down into a pool from a high diving board. The trees and the parallel dark rows of green hedge all seemed to be rippling on dark water.

A body lay directly below, splayed out across the flagstone path. White dress. White arms. White legs.

Leigh doubled forward. Disbelief physically took her. A sickening whoosh of bile and booze and half-digested diet Pepsi flooded her mouth. She could feel vomit rushing up and out of her.

Some instinctive residual sense of decorum told her to get to the john. She turned and shoved a garden chair out of the way and ran stumbling and puking back toward the living room.

A young man stood half crouched against the wall. She collided with him and stared with a hand over her mouth.

He sprang up to his full height, well over six feet, and there was something about his panicky eyes that made her think she might have to fight him.

“I didn’t mean to,” he whimpered.

“No, I know you didn’t.” Leigh kept her voice soft, nonconfrontational. She edged past him toward the open French window.

He made no move to stop her.

She darted into the living room and in the same movement swung the French window shut behind her. Her heart was banging in her chest. She fumbled her hand around the key and twisted it, and then she ran to the phone and snatched up the receiver and punched 911.

SIX WEEKS BEFORE THE TRIAL the woman who was prosecuting the case phoned Leigh and said the defense had unearthed new evidence. “Could you be in my office tomorrow morning at ten?”

Leigh wore her black-on-black Chanel. In the limo, riding to the meeting, she took twenty milligrams of prescribed Valium and twenty of unprescribed Dexedrine that her husband had left on his side of the bathroom cabinet.

At ten after ten, on the fourth floor of the State Supreme Court Building, the prosecutor introduced her to a small, stocky gray-haired woman wearing a plain black cotton dress. “Miss Baker, I’d like you to meet Xenia Delancey—the mother of the accused.”

Leigh did not take the hand that Xenia Delancey offered.

“Miss Baker,” Xenia Delancey said, “I’m a mother too.”

“We have nothing to say to each other,” Leigh said.

“On the contrary.” The defense attorney placed a small leather-bound book on the conference table. He invited Leigh to read it.

The book, Leigh discovered, was a diary. She opened it. Most of the pages were blank. Where there was writing she recognized it as Nita’s. The forty or so hand-written pages covered the last forty days of her daughter’s life. Days of drugs and sex and recklessness.

“This is a forgery,” Leigh said. “Nita never did these things.”

“Miss Baker, I understand that you loved your daughter.” The prosecutor spoke with an unashamed Queens Irish accent. Words sounded tough in her mouth. “I understand that the diary comes as a shock to you. But I’ve prosecuted six date-kill cases, and I can tell you from trial experience, young girls are sexual beings and they often do confide their sexual activities to a secret diary.”

“Maybe, but this diary is a fake.”

“The jury will have to decide that,” the defense lawyer said.

“They’re putting this forgery into evidence?” Leigh said. “They’re allowed to do that?”

“Yes, they’re allowed to do that.” The prosecutor drew in a long breath and let it out in a deeply troubled sigh. “But Mrs. Delancey has an offer to make.”

“You tell the state to accept a lesser plea,” Xenia Delancey said. “I’ll tell my boy’s lawyer not to use this diary.”

“What kind of lesser plea?” Leigh said.

“Negligent manslaughter,” the defense attorney said.

“At best,” the prosecutor said, “the state can make a case for involuntary manslaughter.”

“It was murder.” Leigh heard herself speak before she’d even realized what she was going to say. It was a flat statement of fact, with no emotion in it whatsoever. “I saw him push her.”

The prosecutor whirled. Her glasses flew off her nose, and her blond hair spun out like a tossed skirt. After a moment she picked her glasses up from the floor and put them back on.

The muscles in the defense attorney’s jaw worked slowly. “Miss Baker didn’t depose that she saw her daughter killed.”

“I’m deposing it now,” Leigh said.

“In other words,” the defense attorney said, “you’ve been suppressing evidence for the better part of a year?”

“I was willing to forgive the man my daughter loved—because I believed he hadn’t intended to kill her.” Leigh could feel the defense attorney’s gaze on her, dubious, puzzled, probing for truth and for falsity. “But that diary, that forgery, is an act of pure malicious calculation. I have no intention of forgiving now.”

“She’s lying,” Xenia Delancey said.

“Mr. Lawrence,” the prosecutor said, “would you and Mrs. Delancey be good enough to wait in the hallway for a moment?”

The defense attorney grumbled and stood and motioned Xenia Delancey to come with him.

Leigh and the prosecutor sat alone at the cigarette-scarred conference table. The prosecutor’s glance nailed Leigh through half-tinted lenses. “What did you see exactly?”

I wish I’d had time to prepare this, Leigh thought. And then she remembered what Stella Adler used to say in acting class: Who has time for sense memory? Improvise!

For the next two minutes Leigh improvised.

“You realize,” the prosecutor said, “if you change your testimony, the defense will accuse you of lying. They’ll attack you, not just on the stand but in the media.”

“I realize that.”

“The attacks will be personal, they’ll be savage, they’ll reflect on your character, your habits, your morals, your marriages, your movies, your lovers, and, above all, on your use of medications, mood changers, and liquor.”