Horoscope: The Astrology Murders (13 page)

Kelly stood up, too. “Thank you again.”

“Sorry it happened,” he told her sympathetically. “Just remember, it could’ve been a lot worse.”

Kelly nodded; she knew he was right.

She saw him out, ignoring as best she could the soot-stained walls on her way to the front hall, where two firemen stood on the stoop, working on the front door. She waited until they had rehung the patched-up door on its hinges and closed it. Then she went back upstairs to her study. Earlier in the night she had felt scared; now she just felt numb.

Emma walked home from where the bus had let her off on 86th and Columbus. She and Donald had enjoyed the movie and gone out for a snack afterward. He’d wanted to see her home, but she liked being on her own. She’d been on her own since she’d come to New York, and even though she and Donald had been going out together for the past four years, she liked maintaining her independence. Apparently, this must have been fine with him, she reflected, since he’d never proposed changing their living arrangements. She didn’t know what she would do if he suggested it, but with Kelly’s recent fear of leaving the house, she was glad that up till now it hadn’t come up.

As she approached the brownstone, the arthritis in her hip started to hurt a little. She wasn’t surprised: cold, wet weather
always made her hip hurt. She was just about to walk down the steps from the sidewalk to the door to her apartment when, by habit, she glanced up to see which lights were on in Kelly’s part of the house. She was surprised to see that although the lights were out on the first floor, behind the bars on the first-floor windows Kelly’s office windows were open. She looked up and saw that the windows were open on the darkened second floor as well and on the third floor, where the lights were on in Kelly’s study.

Why would all those windows be open on such a cold night? She was suddenly afraid. And as her gaze moved to the front door and she noticed that it was now patched with plywood, she became even more afraid.

Moving as quickly as she could, she went down the steps and unlocked the door to her apartment. Even before she entered, she smelled smoke. She turned on the lights, but her apartment looked just as she’d left it—white walls, comfortable gray furniture, a tiny Pullman kitchen. She hurried through the apartment and up the stairs that led to the first floor of the brownstone. Out of breath and anxious, she opened the door to the first-floor hall outside the kitchen, and in the light from her apartment, saw the blackened walls as she smelled the stale smell of the vanished smoke.

“Kelly!” she screamed.

Without waiting for a response, she got into the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor. It felt to her as if this time it was taking hours, not minutes, to get there, but eventually the door opened and she rushed out into the third-floor hall.

“Kelly!”

Kelly was in her bathrobe, at the desk in her upstairs study, with her ephemeris and her chart, the chart on which she’d written the word
danger
right after she’d gotten the phone call. She
was focused on the ephemeris when she heard Emma’s voice and rose to her feet.

“In here, Emma—” She was already at the door when Emma came in and threw her arms around her.

“Thank God!” Emma said, hugging her tightly.

Kelly put her arms around Emma. “I’m okay. Really, I’m okay. You don’t have to worry. I should’ve left you a note. I’m sorry. I just forgot.”

Emma held her for a long time. Then she let go and looked at Kelly assessingly. “You didn’t stay inside the house during the fire, did you?”

“No. I went into the garden. But it wasn’t a fire. It was—”

Emma felt her face grow hot. “I don’t care what it was! You should’ve been outside on the street, well away from it! It’s not right, Kelly. You have to do something about being afraid to leave home!” Looking at Kelly, who had been so strong for so long and now seemed so fragile, she felt heartsick. “You didn’t used to be like this,” she said tenderly. “Don’t you want to be able to go out again?”

Emma looked into Kelly’s eyes as she used to when Kelly was a little girl, to make sure that Kelly was going to tell her the truth. Kelly met her gaze, pained to see the anguish that she had brought to this woman whom she knew loved her as much as she would if Kelly were her own child.

“I will do something about it,” Kelly told her.

“And when will that be?”

“That’s what I was working out when you came in. But it won’t be forever. I promise, Emma. I really do.”

Emma continued looking into Kelly’s eyes. When she was sure she saw in them that Kelly had not given up, she nodded and hugged her again.

In Emma’s maternal embrace, Kelly was acutely aware that she’d given Emma her word. But although she’d meant what she said, she had no idea how she would accomplish it.

T
HE MOON WAS FINALLY
full tonight. Of course, he’d expected it to be. And he expected to have luck; the aspects favored him. They favored him for his vocation, and they favored him tonight. And as always, he had planned everything. Everything.

But when he got to her street, he saw a man walking a dog, and his insides liquefied as they used to when he was a child and his mother caught him doing what she didn’t like and punished him with her needles. Despite the paroxysm in his gut, he forced himself to keep driving, knowing that if he made a U-turn, the man would be more likely to notice him. He continued driving until he got out of her neighborhood and then he drove for half an hour in a state of nerves. When he drove back to her block, the streets were empty, and he was full of rage again. He parked on the street around the corner from hers. It was three forty-five a.m.

She lived in a colonial-style house in the middle of the block. She hadn’t left any lights on outside, but as he approached, the full moon enabled him to see the path he would take from her driveway to her front door. Fifteen-foot bushes lined the far side of the driveway, separating it from the house next door, so he walked next to the bushes until he reached the garage; then he cut over to the front door.

When he got to the door, he stretched the surgical gloves
onto his hands and took a key out of his jeans pocket. Slipping it into the top lock, he was not surprised when it fit perfectly and turned with no effort. The second key he’d brought with him slipped into the bottom lock and opened it easily. He congratulated himself on how well he’d worked everything out. This pleasure only sharpened his anger.

A moment later and he was in the house. No lights left on inside, either. But the full moon, shining through the windows, allowed him to see all that he needed to: the staircase he silently mounted in his black running shoes, the upstairs hall he quietly walked across, the doors of the bedrooms where she might have been sleeping, and the bedroom where he soon found her. The sound of her turning over in bed gave her away even before he reached her door.

He hadn’t stopped to look around much downstairs, but now that he was in the curtainless bedroom, he surveyed the furnishings. It had once been expensive and elegant, but now it was shabby: a Native American blanket thrown over worn upholstery, flat patches in the light blue rug, a tear in the lampshade on the night table lamp. Soon, none of it would matter to her.

He looked at the woman on the bed, sleeping soundly in a white nightgown that looked as if it was silk. She was in her late forties and still very beautiful. Her fine blond hair fell on the pillow, framing her face. She had once been an actress, and she had high cheekbones. With her eyes closed, her long lashes fell on her white skin.

Soon he was on her bed, straddling her, opening his zipper and pulling on his condom. She stirred in her sleep but didn’t wake up.

“You’ve got company, Sheryl,” he whispered.

The blond woman opened her eyes, looked up at this man in
a black ski mask, felt him pinning her down on the bed between his legs, and saw that he was stiff and ready to rape her. She screamed.

He stretched the leather cord across her neck. “You scream again and you’re dead!”

Her frightened eyes stared up at him, and he thought she was going to just surrender, but she screamed again and started flailing her arms, legs, and head so wildly that he became disoriented and lost his grip on the leather cord. Taking advantage of the opportunity, she raised her head and tried to bite his arm, but her teeth didn’t penetrate his thick black sweater. Furious, he punched her in the jaw, and as her head fell back against her pillow, he pressed the cord down on her neck hard enough to make her gag on her fear.

“You wanted love, Sheryl? This is love!” he told her.

Frozen in terror, she watched as he lowered himself on top of her, and then she felt him enter her. After that, she didn’t know what happened.

K
ELLY SAT AT HER
desk in the upstairs study, examining her chart. Although the smoke was long gone, its acrid smell remained, even on the third floor. She’d closed the windows in the study because it was too cold; now she glanced at them, wondering if she should reopen them to air out the room. The smell of smoke made her think of death, and she didn’t need to think about death any more than she was already thinking about it. She’d begun looking at her chart, focusing on her moon in Capricorn, which could make her inclined to melancholy reflection. But since early September, when she’d started to be afraid of leaving the house, she hadn’t just been melancholy; she’d been afraid. And she realized now that it hadn’t just been a vague sense of fear; when she’d stood frozen at the threshold of the front door, unable to run after King, she’d been afraid of dying. The prospect of going out onto the street was like a death sentence to her.

Now her home had been marked by the smoke that had backed up from the fireplace. As she’d walked from the garden through the kitchen into the hall and up the staircase to the third floor, she’d been stunned by the black stains on the walls of the first two floors; the smoke had traveled like a dark manifestation of her fear and left its imprint everywhere. She’d been afraid of Chris Palmer and, right or wrong, had made him leave her house,
and then she’d lit the fire and—

She was startled from her thoughts by the ringing of the phone. She looked at the clock; it was 4:35 in the morning. Her heart was beating fast, and she could feel the blood pulsating through her arteries and veins. She knew who it was.

The phone rang again. She looked at the two phones on the desk, her business phone and her personal phone. She wasn’t sure which one was ringing. She picked up the receiver of her business phone. That was the line he had called on last time. When she brought the receiver to her ear, she heard a dial tone.

The ringing continued; it was her personal phone. She replaced the receiver on her business phone and picked up her personal line.

Silence.

For a while she didn’t say anything. Then she quietly said, “Hello.”

“You think you know everything, don’t you?”

It was the same man, the same whispered voice taut with hatred.

“Who is this?” Her voice rose in fear.

“That’s one thing you don’t know, isn’t it?”

“Please tell me! Is it you, Chris?”

“You don’t know, do you? There’s another thing you don’t know. You don’t know what I’m going to do to you.”

All night Kelly had been so cold; now she was sweating. “Why are you calling me like this? Why do you hate me?”

“I hate you because you made her leave me. You made her go and never come back.”

“No, I didn’t! I wouldn’t—I …”

She heard him hang up. Her hand trembled as she placed the receiver back on the phone. Then she picked it up again and
called the 20th Precinct. When an officer answered, she gave him her name, told him the man who had called her before had called again and that this time he’d said he was going to do something to her. The officer asked her to come to the station to file a report. Unable to tell him the truth about what bound her to her home, she told him that she couldn’t leave the house because it had been flooded with smoke, the fire department had just left, and there was a lot of damage. Her voice shaking, she asked if he could please send someone to her and she gave the address. She was told that an officer would be there, but that it would probably be in the morning.

As Kelly hung up the phone, she reconciled herself to the fact that she would be up for the rest of the night.

A
T EIGHT A.M
. K
ELLY
called Sarah to tell her about what had happened with the fireplace and to ask her to cancel the day’s appointments and ask her father, who had taken care of all the contracting work on Kelly’s house until his retirement, to recommend workmen he knew personally to do the cleanup, painting, and repairs. By ten thirty, carpenters were replacing the front door, the electrician was taking down the old smoke alarms, the paint crew had washed down the walls and were already painting, and the upholstery and carpet cleaners were on their way.

Still, standing in the front hall, looking at all that needed to be done, surrounded by workmen, drop cloths, ladders, and paint buckets, and hearing the sounds of hammers and saws, Sarah was impatient. She felt the tension in her fingers and hands; as a violinist, that was the last place she wanted to feel it. She wished she could just close her eyes and open them again to find that the house was back to normal. But it was never that way; not with learning a piece on the violin, and not with knowing how she would look at the world and at life now that she knew Kevin was getting married. Maybe it was good that she had all this work to do; it would take her mind off him.