WATCHERS by Dean R. Koontz

paws on her, and sniffed her face and hair, whining happily and wagging his

tail.

She hated the new look. When they had turned her to the mirror, she’d seen a

pathetic old maid trying to pass for a pretty, vivacious young thing. The styled

hair was simply not her. It only emphasized that she was basically a plain, drab

woman. She would never be sexy, charming, with-it, or any of the other things

that the new hairstyle tried to say she was. It was rather like fastening a

brightly colored feather duster to the back end of a turkey and attempting to

pass it off as a peacock.

Because she did not want to hurt Travis’s feelings, she pretended to like what

had been done to her. But that night she washed her hair and brushed it dry,

pulling on it until all the so-called style had been tugged from it. Because of

the feathering, it did not hang as straight and lank as it had previously, but

she did the best with it that she could.

The next day, when Travis picked her up for lunch, he was clearly startled to

find that she had reverted to her previous look. However, he said nothing about

it, asked no questions. She was so embarrassed and afraid of having hurt his

feelings that, for the first couple of hours, she was not able to meet his eyes

for more than a second or two at a time.

In spite of her repeated and increasingly vigorous demurrals, Travis insisted On

taking her shopping for a new dress, a bright and summery frock that she could

wear to dinner at Talk of the Town, a dressy restaurant on West Gutierrez, where

he said you could sometimes see some of the movie stars

who lived in the area, members of a film colony second only to that in Beverly

Hills—Bel Air. They went to an expensive store, where she tried on a score of

dresses, modeling each for Travis’s reaction, blushing and mortified. The

saleswoman seemed genuinely approving of the way everything looked on Nora, and

she kept telling Nora that her figure was perfect, but Nora couldn’t shake the

feeling that the woman was laughing at her.

The dress Travis liked best was from the Diane Freis collection. Nora couldn’t

deny that it was lovely: predominantly red and gold, though with an almost

riotous background of other colors somehow more right in combination than they

should have been (which apparently was a trait of Freis’s designs). It was

exceedingly feminine. On a beautiful woman it would have been a knockout. But it

just was not her. Dark colors, shapeless cuts, simple fabrics, no ornamentation

whatsoever—that was her style. She tried to tell him what was best for her,

explained that she could never wear such a dress as this, but he said, “You look

gorgeous in it, really, you look gorgeous.”

She let him buy it. Dear God, she really did. She knew it was a big mistake, was

wrong, and that she would never wear it. As the dress was being wrapped, Nora

wondered why she had acquiesced, and she realized that, in spite of being

mortified, she was flattered to have a man buying clothes for her, to have a man

take an interest in her appearance. She never dreamed such a thing would happen

to her, and she was overwhelmed.

She couldn’t stop blushing. Her heart pounded. She felt dizzy, but it was a good

dizziness.

Then, as they were leaving the store, she learned that he had paid five hundred

dollars for the dress. Five hundred dollars! She had intended to hang it in the

closet and look at it a lot, use it as a starting point for pleasant daydreams,

which was all fine and dandy if it had cost fifty dollars, but for five hundred

she would have to wear it even if it made her feel ridiculous, even if she did

look like a poseur, a scrubwoman pretending to be a princess.

The following evening, during the two hours before Travis was to pick her up and

escort her to Talk of the Town, she put the dress on and took it off a half

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