t the edge of Leigh's consciousness, an odd humming sound blended with a hammering in her skull, the ringing of telephones, and the sensation of being paralyzed. Nausea rolled in her stomach, rising to her throat, and she swallowed hard, forcing her eyelids open, automatically searching for something to focus on to steady her reeling senses.

Her eyelids seemed to work, but what Leigh saw in front of her open eyes had no meaning to her. Her entire field of vision was obstructed by two similar hues of cream; one of them seemed to be flat and horizontal, the other vertical and wavy.

She blinked repeatedly, trying to refocus, and in the process she became aware of the different textures of the two shades. The horizontal cream color against her cheek was rough… carpet. The vertical, wavy cream color was… fabric… like… the dust ruffle on her bed? She was evidently lying on the floor beside her bed with her hands behind her back. She tried to move her hands, but they seemed to be bound at the wrists, and her legs seemed to be stuck together at the ankles.

Lifting her head with an effort, Leigh turned her face in the opposite direction, and the sight she beheld made her senses swim. Jane Sebring was sitting at the dressing table, wearing the red dress Leigh had worn to her opening-night party. The actress was humming and putting on Leigh's lipstick, but it was smeared grotesquely around her mouth and partially over her cheeks. Strewn across the floor near her feet were the slashed remains of several of Leigh's other dresses.

Lying on the table, near her left elbow, was a gun.

Sebring glanced down and saw Leigh's face reflected in the wide, lighted mirror above the dressing table. "You're awake!" she exclaimed. "You're awake. My audience is awake…"

Leigh snapped her eyes shut.

"No, no, no, don't pretend you're sleeping… "

Leigh kept her eyes closed, and heard the upholstered stool at the dressing table squeak a little as Sebring whirled it around and stood up. "Wake up, you bitch!" she snarled close to Leigh's ear; then she grabbed a fistful of Leigh's hair and nearly jerked it out by the roots. "That's much better," she exclaimed, her garish red mouth parted into a smile in front of Leigh's terrified eyes. In her other hand Sebring was holding a pair of long, sharp scissors.

"Let me help you sit on the bed. I don't like my audiences to fall asleep," she said, jerking hard on Leigh's hair to "help" Leigh slide awkwardly onto the bed. In the process, Sebring's scissors cut a searing path across Leigh's upper arm, but Leigh scarcely felt it. Fear, the greatest natural anesthetic, was pumping wildly through her veins. Her feet were bound with one of her silk scarves; the binding at her wrists seemed to be another scarf, but very tight.

"Your blood matches my dress," Sebring said, looking at the blood oozing from Leigh's cut. She rubbed her fingers on Leigh's wound and smeared some of Leigh's blood onto her own arm.

Every nerve ending in Leigh's body was screaming in terror, but her mind was snapping into focus, searching wildly for explanations and solutions. Somehow, she had to stall until Joe or Hilda or someone came looking for her. Trying to keep her voice steady, she said, "What are you doing, Jane?"

"I'm getting ready to go to the theater, of course," Sebring said, studying Leigh's face. "You look pale. You need lipstick." She sauntered over to the dressing table, picked up a lipstick tube, and carried it over to Leigh. Leigh jerked her face away, and Sebring didn't seem to mind. With the barrel of the lipstick clenched in her fist, she rammed it at the side of Leigh's face, rubbing it hard while she promised between her teeth, "Before too long, I am going to cut you into little pieces. I'm just marking my starting place."

She stepped back and surveyed her work; then she sauntered back to the dressing table and sat down. Holding the scissors in her right hand, she studied Leigh intently in the mirror; then she lifted up a fistful of her long red hair and chopped it off at shoulder length—like Leigh's. "Logan loved me," she informed Leigh. "We found that mountain cabin together one day. He wanted to leave you, but that bitch shrink talked him out of it." Tipping her head to one side, then the other, she studied the effect of her garish, one-sided hairstyle while she asked Leigh conversationally, "Would you like to know what your husband was doing just before he died?"

Her question sent a shudder through Leigh's entire body. Swallowing a surge of bile, she forced the word out. "Yes."

"He was making love to me on your sleeping bag in front of the fireplace. I surprised him at the cabin with a bottle of wine, and we drank it together and made love. And then—" She picked up the scissors and made another vicious assault on her hair. "—that spineless' bastard told me he was finished with me for good. He told me I had to leave because she was coming to the cabin."

"Who was coming?" Leigh asked in a shaking whisper.

Sebring put down the scissors and opened a small compact with eye shadow. Dabbing a small brush on the eye shadow, she leaned a little closer to the mirror and put a slash of jade green across one eyelid. "Sheila Winters," she said as if Leigh should have been able to figure that out. "And after telling me that, he thought he could just drive me up to the road in his car and send me off in mine." Laughing softly, she put another slash of green on her other eyelid. "You should have seen his face when I pulled his gun out from under my seat and pointed it at him."

Leigh's body shifted as she began working frantically at the tight knot on the scarf binding her hands together. "How—how did you know it was there?"

"He showed it to me once," she said, putting the eye shadow down and studying the other colors she'd scattered on the table. "He didn't think I'd know how to use it. If he'd really been a big fan of my films, like he said he was, he'd have seen me using guns in them. He was such a liar," she hissed furiously.

The knot in the scarf wouldn't budge, and Leigh was losing control of her terror. When she'd first seen the gun on the dressing table, she hadn't completely believed Jane Sebring was capable of using it… hadn't wanted to believe it, but now she knew better. She darted a glance over her shoulder to the doorway on her right. Soon, Joe or Hilda would come looking for her, but if either one of them walked more than two steps into the bedroom, Sebring would see them in the dressing table mirror.

"Are you hoping to be rescued?" Sebring purred, watching her in the mirror.

Leigh snapped her gaze forward.

"No one will come," she said with another grotesque smile. "They're dead. Your fat maid is dead, and so is your driver."

Tears sprang to Leigh's eyes, and she blinked hard, her fingernails shoving against the knot at her wrists.

"So is your friend Sheila."

"Sheila is dead?" Leigh repeated hoarsely, trying to keep Sebring talking.

"Logan and she were blackmailing her patients," Sebring confided with absolute certainty.

"Logan told you that?"

"No, Sheila did, just before I shot her. People will tell you anything you want to know when you're pointing a gun at them," she sneered. "Though she did say she hadn't been having an affair with Logan, but she was lying, trying to save her own skin."

"How d-do you know she was lying?"

Sebring heard the heightened terror in Leigh's voice, and she smiled as she leaned forward to add some blue eye shadow above the green. "Are you getting scared now? You should be scared, you know. I'm going to kill you, too. And then," she added with a smile as she picked up the scissors and hacked another inch off the right side of her hair, "I'm going to go to the theater and take your place."

"How do you know Sheila was lying—about having an affair with Logan?" Leigh persisted desperately.

"Because," she enunciated silkily, "Logan admitted they were having one. And then," she finished, "I blew his brains out!"