CHAPTER ONE

Sally Arnstein squeezed the arms of the chair until her knuckles turned white. The Mozart meditation music wasn't having its desired effect. In fact it was annoying. And when a chrome instrument attached to an electric umbilical cord suddenly appeared in front of her face, her eyebrows reached for the top of her forehead.

Okay, Sally. Just relax now. Dr. Zarcata, in a facemask and blue surgical jacket, hovered over her. You're creating more wrinkles than even I can handle.

Is this going to hurt, doctor?

No, no, no. I told you before, all you'll feel is the slightest pressure, like a rubber band snapping against your skin. Just close your eyes and think about the most beautiful place you've ever been. This will be over before you know it.

Sally closed her eyes. Where was the most beautiful place she'd ever been? Her honeymoon, when she and Ned watched the sunset from the pier at Key West? The trip to the Grenadines?no, since that's where she'd caught Ned sharing more than his oxygen mask with his scuba instructor, who coincidentally was also named Ned. The trip to Antarctica where she'd gone when their divorce was final because she wanted a place to match her mood of icy desolation? They were all beautiful places. But none of them popped up on the mental screen she was trying to access. The sunset, the crescent beach, the penguinsthey were all crowded out by a single, persistent image.

The conference room at ZING magazine.

You're doing fine, Sally. Dr. Zarcata's soothing voice washed over her. What you feel are low frequency impulses which are gently revitalizing your skin. Relax those fingers, dear.

She opened her hands, but they almost immediately clamped back on the chair arms with the same vice-like grip she experienced with every takeoff and landing. Maybe that's why she'd taken only three memorable trips, one of which had been on a cruise ship, and had no other beautiful images to draw on. Airplane seats, dental chairs, and now thisthey were all white-knuckle experiences.

She tried accessing her mental screen again, but it was back to the conference room. There was the lozenge-shaped fruitwood table covered with art work, photographs, copy and cappuccinothe detritus of the hundreds of meetings she had attended in the twelve years since the first edition of ZING magazine came off the presses, heralding itself as ZING . . . for women with a zest for life. The tag line was hers, an inspiration that got her immediate recognition and supercharged her career. For twelve years it appeared on the cover of every monthly edition as a reminder that Sally Arnstein had put the zest into ZING.

Come to think of it, the conference room at ZING was the most

Beautiful, beautiful, Dr. Zarcata said. You've got great bone structure, Sally. Classic lines. It's just that your exterior surfaces have started to slip on your superstructure. But we've got it in hand. You'll be as tight as a tom tom.

As tight as a tom tom? If any of her writers had used such a hackneyed simile she'd have dropped them in a nanosecond. Well, he was a cosmetic surgeon. And a damn good one if you judged by the fee he was charging for a procedure he described as cosmetic maintenance. Just think of it as a tune up,another tired simile he'd said in their office conference. Well, she had heard you could spend a thousand dollars tuning up some cars, so why not a face? And he'd come well recommended. Fran Utley, her articles editor, best friend and only real confident, had used Dr. Zarcata to iron a few of her emerging wrinkles.

All of which I got working for you, she'd told Sally. You ought to try it, Sal. You're starting to get permanent frown lines. In a few more years you'll need a contour map to find your lips.

At first Sally had said no way. She'd looked in the mirror. Her face wasn't that bad for a divorced forty-something single mom with a teenage daughter on the pill and a killer job in mid-town Manhattan. She wasn't about to subject herself to anything that even sounded like an invasive surgical procedure, whether you called it ironing, planing, pealing, or facial rejuvenation. I'll practice smiling, is what she'd told Fran.

Good, good, Dr. Zarcata said. Keep thinking those happy thoughts.

But that was before last year, the year from hell. The year in which ZINGs circulationwhich had initially zoomed past Allure, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, New Woman and Voguehad dropped so low they were offering subscribers three months free if they renewed early at rates that wouldn't come close to paying for the cost of publication. They could afford to lose money on subscribersthey just couldn't afford to lose the subscribers. Their rates to advertisers, whose fees provided the profits that kept them afloat, were based on the number of readers they could guarantee. They had pulled every trick in the bookincluding sending magazines to expired subscribers just to keep the numbers up. And then, just as their juggling and slight-of-hand seemed to be paying off, they got hit with a paper strike. As the cost of newsprint rose into the stratosphere, their profit picture went from black, to gray, to pink, to screaming scarlet at the end of the year.

That's when Pug had called her at home. He was, he said, going to pull the plug, and he wanted to talk to her alone. This is just between us, Sally. Can I count on your discretion?

Of course he could count on her discretion.

Charles Pug Abbot, III, ZINGs publisher, had started the magazine with twenty million dollars he inherited when his textile-rich father had gone to be with the great weaver in the sky. And Pug, who didn't know a warp from a woof, had put up the whole enchilada. A ballsy move in a business where half of all the new magazines never make it past their first anniversary, and only two in ten survive the first four years. Pulling the plug could only mean one thing.