The Key to Midnight (14 page)

“Is it safe for you to leave here alone?” Mariko asked.

He picked up the suitcase that contained the Chelgrin file, having left the other bag in Wayne’s room. “They think they’ve scared me off. For a while they’ll be lying low, just watching.”

Outside the hospital, the night was cold, but the snow flurries had long ago stopped. Backlighted by the moon, fast-moving trains of clouds tracked west to east.

Alex took a taxicab to the hotel, packed his bags, and checked out of his suite. From the hospital to the hotel, then from the hotel to the Moonglow Lounge, he was followed by two men in a white Honda.

By seven-thirty at Joanna’s place, he had unpacked. The spare bedroom was cozy, with a low, slanted ceiling and a pair of dormer windows.

Shortly before Dr. Mifuni left, Joanna went into the kitchen to check on dinner, and the physician took advantage of her absence to draw Alex aside and speak with him. “Once or twice a night, you should look in on her to be certain she’s only sleeping.”

“You don’t think she’d try it again?”

“No, no,” Mifuni said. “There’s virtually no chance. What she did last night was strictly impulsive, and she’s not really impulsive by nature. Nevertheless ...”

“I’ll watch over her,” Alex said softly.

“Good,” Mifuni said. “I’ve known her since she came to Kyoto. A singer who performs more evenings than not is bound to have throat problems once in a while. But she’s more than a patient. She’s a friend too.”

“Right now she needs all the friends she can get.”

“But she’s an amazingly resilient woman. She’s got that going for her. Last night’s experience appears to have left only minor psychological scars. And physically, she doesn’t seem marked at all. Untouched. It almost seems a month has passed, not just one day.”

Joanna returned from the kitchen to say good-bye to the doctor, and indeed she did look splendid. Even in faded jeans and a midnight-blue sweater worn to a smooth shine at the elbows and frayed at the cuffs, she was a vision, the golden girl once more.

“Arigato, Isha-san. ”

“Do
itashimashita.
”

“Konbanwa.
”

“Konbanwa.
”

Suddenly, as Alex watched Joanna and Mifuni bowing to each other at the apartment door, he was caught in a powerful wave of desire that swept him into a strange state of mind. He seemed to be looking back and down at himself, somewhere between a condition of heightened consciousness and an out-of-body experience. He saw the familiar Alex Hunter, the carefully crafted persona that he put on view to the world—the quiet, self-assured, self-contained, determined, no-nonsense businessman-but he was also aware of an aspect of himself that had never before been visible to him. Within the cool and analytical detective was an insecure, lonely, desperately seeking, hungry creature driven by emotional need. Regarding this heretofore hidden aspect of himself, he understood that the power to see deeper into himself came from his desire for Joanna, from his need to share a life with her.

For the first time in his experience, Alex was overwhelmed by a desire that couldn’t be satisfied solely through hard work and the application of his intellect. He was filled with a longing for something more abstract and spiritual than the drive for success, money, and status that had always motivated him. Joanna. He wanted Joanna. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to hold her, make love to her, be as close to her as one human being could ever get to another. But he required far more than mere physical intimacy. He sought from her a number of things that he couldn’t entirely understand: a kind of peace that he could not describe; satisfactions he had never known; feelings for which he had no words. After a lifetime shaped by his unwavering denial of love’s existence, he wanted love from Joanna Rand.

Old convictions and reliable psychic crutches were not easily cast aside. He couldn’t yet accept the reality of love, but a part of him desperately wanted to believe.

The prospect of belief, however, scared the hell out of him.

Joanna wanted the dinner to be perfect. She needed to prove to herself, as much as to Alex, that she was coping again, that life was going on, that the event of the past night was an aberration.

She served at the low table in her Japanese-style dining room, using royal-blue placemats, several shades of gray dinnerware, and dark red napkins. Six fresh white carnations were spread in a fan on one end of the table.

The food was hearty but not heavy. Igaguri: thorny shrimp balls filled with sweet chestnuts. Sumashi wan: clear soup with soybean curd and shrimp.
Tatsuta
age: sliced beef garnished with red peppers and radish. Yuan
zuke:
grilled fish in a soy-and-sake marinade. Umani: chicken and vegetables simmered in a richly seasoned broth. And of course they also had steamed rice—a staple of the Japanese menu—and they accompanied everything with cups of hot tea.

The dinner was a success, and Joanna felt better than she had in months. In a curious way, the suicide attempt was beneficial. Having sunk to the depths of ultimate despair, having reached even a brief moment during which she’d had no reason to go on living, she could now face anything that might come. Even by acting halfheartedly on her death wish, she seemed to have been purged of it.

For the first time, she felt that she would be able to overcome the periodic paranoia and the strange claustrophobia that had destroyed so many opportunities for happiness in the past.

Immediately after they had eaten, Joanna had a chance to test her newfound strength. She and Alex moved into the living room, sat together on the sofa, and began to look through the Chelgrin file, which filled the large suitcase—and which, according to Alex, held the true story of the first two decades of her life. There were thick stacks of field investigators’ reports in the gray-and-green folders of the Bonner-Hunter Security Corporation, Alex’s company, scores of transcriptions of interviews with potential witnesses as well as with friends and relatives of Lisa Chelgrin, plus copies of the Jamaican police records and other official documents. The sight of all that evidence had a negative effect on Joanna, and for the first time all day, she felt threatened. The familiar strains of paranoia were a distant, ominous music in her mind-but growing louder.

More than anything else in the suitcase, the photographs disturbed her. Here was Lisa Chelgrin in blue jeans and a T-shirt, standing in front of a Cadillac convertible, smiling and waving at the camera. Here was Lisa Chelgrin in a bikini, posed at the foot of an enormous palm tree. Several close-ups, in all of which she was smiling. A dozen photos in all. All were snapshots except for the professional portrait taken for the high-school yearbook when she had been a senior. The settings in which Lisa posed and the people with whom she was photographed meant nothing whatsoever to Joanna. Nevertheless, the young girl herself—blond, with a full but lithe hgure—was as familiar as the image in any mirror. As Joanna stared in disbelief at the face of the missing woman, a chill crept along her spine.

Finally she got up and retrieved half a dozen photographs of her own from a box in the bedroom closet. These shots had been taken the first year she’d lived in Japan, when she’d been working in Yokohama. She spread them on the coffee table, next to the old photos from the Chelgrin file. As she studied the resemblance between Lisa’s face and her own as she had looked more than a decade ago, a dynamic but formless fear stirred in her.

“It’s a remarkable likeness, isn’t it?” Alex asked.

“Identical,” she said weakly.

“You can see why I was convinced almost from the moment I saw you in the Moonglow.”

Suddenly the air seemed too thick to breathe comfortably. The room was warm. Hot. She stood, intending to open a window to get a breath of fresh air, but she sat down again at once, too dizzy to remain on her feet. The walls moved in and out like living membranes, and the ceiling was descending, coming down, slowly but relentlessly down. Although she knew the shrinkage of the room was occurring only in her imagination, she was nevertheless terrified of being crushed to death.

“Joanna?”

She closed her eyes.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

She was overcome by an irrational urge to tell him to pack up his pictures and his reports, and get out. His presence now seemed to be a terrible intrusion into her life, an unconscionable intimacy, and a flutter of nausea went through her at the thought that he might touch her. He’s dangerous, she thought.

“Joanna?”

Restraining herself from lashing out at him, she said in a whisper: “The walls are closing in again.”

“Walls?” Alex looked around, perplexed.

To her, the room appeared to be only a third of its former size.

The air was so hot and dry that it scorched her lungs, parched her lips.

“And the ceiling,” she said. “Coming lower.”

She broke into a sweat. Dissolving in the heat. Melting. As if made of wax. Unable to breathe. The heat was going to kill her.

“Is that really what you see?” he asked. “Walls closing in?”

“Y-yes.”

She stared at the walls, trying to make them roll back, willing the room to return to its former proportions. She was determined not to let fear get the better of her this time.

“You’re hallucinating,” Alex said.

“I know. Because of you. Because of feeling... too close to you. This is always what happens. I’ve never told anyone... not even Mariko. I’ve never told anyone about the spells of paranoia either. Sometimes I think the whole world’s against me, out to get me. Seems like nothing’s real, all just a clever stage setting. When I start thinking like that, I want to run off and hide where no one can find me, hurt me.” She was speaking rapidly, in part because she was afraid that she would lose the courage she needed to reveal these things, and in part because she hoped that talking would distract her from the advancing walls and the steadily lowering ceiling. “I’ve never told anyone about it because I’ve been afraid people will think I’m crazy. But I’m not nuts. If I were crazy, I’d accept paranoia as a perfectly normal state of mind. I wouldn’t even realize I was
having
spells of paranoia.”

The hallucinations grew worse. Although she was sitting, the ceiling appeared to be no more than ten or twelve inches above her head. The walls were only a few feet away on every side, rolling closer on well-oiled tracks. The atmosphere was being compressed within this space, molecules jamming against molecules, until the air ceased to be a gas and became a liquid, first as dense as water, then syrup. When she breathed, she was convinced against all reason that her throat and lungs were filling with fluid. She heard herself whimpering, and she despised her weakness, but she couldn’t silence herself.

Alex took her hand. “None of it’s real. You can turn it off if you try.”

The air became so thick that she choked on it. She bent forward, coughed, gagged.

Alex tried to guide her through the seizure. “You’ve been brainwashed, Joanna. That’s got to be it. The answer. Somehow. All the memories of your true past have been eradicated, replaced with totally false recollections.”

She understood, but that understanding didn’t stop the ceiling from descending farther.

“After they did that to you,” Alex said, holding fast to her hand as she tried to pull away from him, “they must have implanted a couple of posthypnotic suggestions that have twisted your life ever since. One of those suggestions is affecting you right this minute. Every time you meet someone who’s interested in your past, anyone who might uncover the deception, then you suffer attacks of paranoia and claustrophobia
because the people who brainwashed you told you this would happen.”

To Joanna’s ear, at least, his voice boomed and echoed within the shrinking room. He was loud, demanding, as fearsome as the relentless advance of the viselike walls.

“And each time you reject the person with whom you’ve become close,” he continued, “the claustrophobia goes away, the paranoid fear declines—
because they told you it would.
That’s a damn effective method for keeping inquisitive people out of your life. You’re programmed to be a loner, Joanna.
Programmed.”

He was so plausible, so earnest—but he was not a friend. He was one of
Them.
He was one of the people who had been trying to kill her, part of the conspiracy. He couldn’t be trusted. He was the worst of them all, a conniving and despicable—

As if reading her mind, he said, “No, Joanna. I’m with you. I’m here for you. I’m the best friend and the best hope you have.”

She jerked reflexively as the ceiling shuddered and dropped closer to her, and she wrenched her hand out of his. She slid down on the couch.

The air had been compressed to such a degree that she could feel it against her skin. Insistent. Heavy. Metallic. All around her. Like a suit of armor. A suit of armor that was constantly growing tighter, smaller, more confining. Inside that defensive garment, she was drenched with perspiration. Her flesh was bruised by the steel embrace of her armor, and the bones ached in every torturously compressed joint.

“Fight it,” Alex said.

“The walls, the walls,” she keened, because the room began to close around her more quickly. No previous attack of claustrophobia had been as fierce as this one. She gasped. Her lungs were clogged. She tasted blood and realized that she had bitten her tongue. The room was rapidly shrinking to the size of a coffin, and she foresaw the conditions of the grave so clearly that she could actually
feel
the cold, damp embrace of eternity.

“Close your eyes,” Alex said urgently.

“No!” That would be intolerable. If she closed her eyes, she would be surrendering to the grave. She would never be able to open her eyes again. The darkness would seize her and drag her down, the cold and the dampness, the silence, down into the bottomless black maw of forever. “Oh, my
God,”
she groaned miserably.