The Killing Room (7 page)

After that, their relationship proceeded quickly. David was being evicted from his apartment; he told Carolyn that the owner was selling the place, so she let him move in with her. Along with David came his instruments: he was a musician who played the guitar and the sax and the drums. Many a night Carolyn was unable to sleep because David was out in the kitchen practicing his music. But she’d stumble groggily to work with a grin on her face the next morning, pausing to kiss the forehead of her sleeping lover before she left. David didn’t have a regular job. He’d take the ferry out to Staten Island and play gigs there on the weekend. He never had much money. If only he could finish enough songs to cut his own album, he was certain he could hit it big—and Carolyn was certain, too. She thought she had never heard a more beautiful singer. No one could play the sax like David. But he needed money to buy new mixing equipment, so she put him on her credit cards and authorized him to withdraw money from her account. It only made sense: they were going to get married, after all. This was what committed couples did for each other. This was how they lived.

One night, Carolyn sat transfixed at a music club, her chin in her hands, her eyes trained on the man she loved. David singing for the beer-drinking crowd, pouring his heart into his words. A couple of guys she didn’t know sat down next to her. They watched David as intently as she did. Finally Carolyn heard one of them say, “Such stirring words about love and devotion from a guy who killed his girlfriend.”

She spun on them. “What the hell are you talking about?”

The man beside her crooked a grin at her. “Come on, everyone knows he killed Lisa Freeman.”

“Watch it,” Carolyn snarled, “or we’ll hit you with a defamation suit.”

“Oh,” the other man said, smiling himself now. “I take it you’re the latest squeeze. Well, honey, I’d keep looking over my shoulder if I were you.”

The nightmares began after that. Lisa Freeman would be standing in her closet, staring at Carolyn when she opened the door. Or she’d be drowned in the bathtub. After each horrifying dream, Carolyn would awake with a start—and discover David was awake, looking over at her, his eyes seeming to glow in the dark. “You’ve been talking in your sleep,” he told her one morning. He wouldn’t reveal what she had been saying.

She tried to push the idea out of her head. David couldn’t be a murderer; it was just idle, cruel gossip. But more and more she began to notice a darker side to the man she lived with. He could be so heartfelt and emotional when he sang his songs, but he was easily roused to anger, once upsetting the entire table when a waitress brought him the wrong order. Another time he’d snapped at a cabdriver who’d taken the wrong route, threatening to break the guy’s neck. Carolyn had been horrified, and fearful the cabbie would call the police. That night she couldn’t sleep. She just lay there beside David, listening to him breathe, unsure if he was asleep or awake. The scar on his face was no longer erotic. It now seemed like evidence of some terrible encounter. The last scratch of a dying woman. Carolyn no longer believed his stories of a boating accident.

Then one night David didn’t come home from a gig. Carolyn called his cell phone; it just went to voice mail. She phoned the club where he was supposed to play, and they said he had left hours ago. Checking his closet, Carolyn noticed several shirts and pairs of pants were gone. His drums were still in the apartment, but he had his guitar and his sax with him. Carolyn pulled open the top drawer in his bureau and realized he had taken his passport. She knew then that he wasn’t coming back. She was heartbroken, but after the way she’d been feeling the last few weeks, a part of her was also relieved.

Relief turned to horror the next morning, when she received a notice from her bank that her entire account had been withdrawn and closed out. Her entire savings plus her portfolio of investments. Hundreds of thousands of dollars—gone! Immediately she phoned her credit card companies. Every one of her cards had been maxed out. Her debt nearly equaled the money she had lost. Carolyn stumbled into the bathroom and got sick.

Suddenly she knew without a doubt that David had killed Lisa Freeman. Her suspicions were confirmed when she got a call two weeks later. David’s old landlord, renovating the apartment he’d lived in, made a gruesome discovery. A hole had been cut into one of the walls, then expertly plastered over and repainted, but not before something had been placed inside. The landlord had found an industrial-strength plastic bag in the wall. Unzipping it, he was assaulted by a terrible, toxic odor. He called police, who discovered inside the decomposed body of Lisa Freeman. A warrant for David’s arrest for murder was immediately issued.

Of course, David was long gone. He had disappeared without a trace. Carolyn—who knew how to track people down—had been absolutely stymied. He must have changed his name, probably even left the country. With his passport he’d gone over the border to Canada or Mexico, and who knew where he headed from there? Carolyn told police he might be traveling with a guitar or a saxophone, but he could have stashed them somewhere. Returning to her apartment, Carolyn had all her locks changed and double bolts installed. She cried then for the first time, really let loose with heaving sobs. How had she not seen? How had she fallen for his sweet talk? She was too good, too shrewd for that. But for a year she had slept beside a murderer. Drying her tears, she began the slow process of digging herself out of debt and getting her life back.

So Mr. Young’s offer of a million dollars was like a gift from heaven. She didn’t need a
million
, of course, but after living with such financial stress for the last six months, the idea of never again having to worry about money was a blissful fantasy. Making everything worse was that Andrea’s health had taken a turn for the worse. She’d developed diabetes and a rare skin condition that meant more treatments and more medication. Her disability payments from the government covered some of it, but not everything, and the fees at her home had increased. Carolyn had been seriously thinking of returning to the FBI, even in a lower post since she knew her old job had been filled. Theoretically, working on her own might promise greater rewards, but it also could never afford the kind of security she so desperately craved now. But then one day, out of the blue, Howard Young had walked into her office and offered her a million dollars.

That was, if she could do what he wanted.

Carolyn pushed thoughts of David out of her mind and returned her focus to the matter at hand. She had to figure out how this had all begun. Then perhaps she could understand what was going on down in that basement room. But everyone who might possibly tell her what she needed to know was dead. Except Howard Young, and he was holding back for now, for his own curious reasons. But there was one other person….

Carolyn looked again at the list she had made of those who had spent the night in that room over the years. The names all had several things in common. They were all Youngs, first of all, and had been selected by lottery. But of the eight names, there was one that differed from the rest. Only one was a woman.

And that was not her only distinction.

She was also the only one who hadn’t died.

Though from what the old man had told her, Carolyn didn’t think “alive” was a suitable way to describe poor Jeanette Young.

She would need to speak with Jeanette. That much was clear. As best she could, Carolyn needed to discover just what had happened to her in that room.

Philip Young sat by his swimming pool sipping a Beefeater martini with his requisite three olives. It was a warm day. Indian summer. He watched as Carlos, his Salvadoran gardener, trimmed the topiary that surrounded the pool. The sun was hot on Philip’s cheeks, so he adjusted the wide-brimmed hat he wore. He’d just had laser resurfacing on his face to blast away the wrinkles and the age spots. He didn’t want a sunburn to ruin all that work.

He had a good life, and his life pleased him. Philip watched now as his daughter Chelsea welcomed a couple of girlfriends to sit on the other side of the pool. Such young nubile beauties. One of the girls was dark, the other blond. Philip forgot their names. But he certainly didn’t forget how good they looked in their bikinis, which was why he’d encouraged Chelsea to invite them over today. He took another sip of his martini and lowered his sunglasses over his eyes so they wouldn’t catch him watching.

“Daddy!” Chelsea was calling from the other side of the pool. “Would it be all right if we took the Bentley into town later?”

“What’s wrong with your Beemer?” Philip asked.

“We’re going shopping,” Chelsea said, “and there’s not going to be room for Trisha and Joni and me and all our packages.” She giggled.

Trisha and Joni. Those were their names. The two girls waved at Philip as they stretched out on chaises, exposing their long smooth legs.

“Oh, all right, Chels,” Philip said. “I don’t plan on going anywhere today. I’m staying right here and soaking up this last little bit of summer. Won’t be long until fall is here….”

Even as he said the words, Philip knew what the fall season entailed. His mood darkened. The family reunion. He leaned back and closed his eyes. The goddamn family reunion. Every ten fucking years.

He’d lost his father to that room fifty years ago, when Philip was still just a teenager. Then, ten years later, his sister Jeanette had faced something even worse than death in that terrible place. From that moment on, Philip had vowed that he would never again let that room take anything else from him.

He looked over at Chelsea. She was throwing her head back in laughter with her friends, her strawberry blond hair reflecting the sun. How beautiful she was, how full of life. She was just twenty-three. Young enough to have her whole life ahead of her, but finally old enough to be told about the room. Philip didn’t relish that duty. But this year, for the first time, both Chelsea and her twin brother Ryan would be required to take part in the lottery. Philip shuddered.

Required they might be—but he would not let anything happen to his children.

“Refill your glass, Mr. Young?”

His eyes flicked up behind his sunglasses to the face of his pretty young assistant. He’d hired Melissa to help him now that he was working mostly from home. The brokerage that bore his name could function quite well without him needing to trek into the city every morning from his home in Cos Cob the way he had most of his career. He was past sixty-five now; he was entitled to leisure.

That didn’t mean he didn’t work or that he wasn’t on top of the market. He could just do it poolside from now on, with a lovely young assistant to help him. “Yes, thank you,” he said to Melissa, handing her his empty martini glass.

When he’d hired her, Philip had explained to Melissa that the job would be more than just making telephone calls and filing papers. “I need an all-around personal assistant,” he had explained. That meant refreshing his drinks when she noticed he was low. And it meant other things, too—but only when Chelsea or other members of the family were not around.

Philip watched Melissa walk across the lawn to the outside bar. She certainly filled out her tight white jeans well. Chelsea had rolled her eyes when she saw Philip’s new assistant—“Trailer trash from Bridgeport, Daddy,” she had called her, and Philip supposed she was right—but his son Ryan had given him the thumbs-up. The reaction of his wife Vanessa, however, was considerably more muted.

“Tell me, Philip,” she had said, “does the girl know
anything
about the stock market? Or finances in general?”

“All she needs to know is how to make telephone calls and hit print on the computer,” Philip had replied.

And she knows how to do those things well,
Philip thought.
Other things she does even better.
A small grin crept across his face.

“Darling,” he called over to Chelsea. “When are you and the girls going shopping?”

“Maybe in an hour or so,” Chelsea called back.

Melissa was handing him his drink. “Ah, thank you, my dear,” Philip said. “And how long are you planning to stay today?”

“However long you need me, Mr. Young,” Melissa told him, her big brown eyes flashing at him from under her long lashes.

He smiled up at her. “After Chelsea leaves, there’s some work I’d like to get done in my office,” he said.

“Of course,” Melissa said, giving him a broad smile.

Philip settled back into his chair, taking a sip of the martini. Yes, his life pleased him. There was no way he would let anything interfere with his life.

Not even a family curse could stand up against Philip Young.

He was one of the most powerful men on Wall Street. He had spent decades building up his firm. With the money his father left him he had invested wisely and shrewdly and sometimes unscrupulously. He was a very rich man.

But not nearly as rich as he would be one day when Uncle Howard finally died.

Philip planned on bulldozing that house and its accursed room the moment the old man finally kicked off. In the meantime, he kept encouraging Chelsea and Ryan to go up to Maine and visit with their uncle. Butter him up. Get on his good side. Philip worried that the old codger was going to leave the bulk of his billions to that good-for-nothing Douglas. The kid was always winking at Uncle Howard, joshing with him, making him laugh. “Get in there and work your charm on the old coot,” Philip had urged his kids. “Don’t let that worthless gypsy walk off with everything.”

It occurred to Philip as he sat there sipping his gin that this would be the first year Douglas would partake in the lottery as well. He stared across the pool at Chelsea and her friends. Every previous Douglas Young—from the kid’s great-grandfather down to his father—had been selected by the lottery to spend the night in that room. And every previous Douglas Young had died in there.

Why shouldn’t it be the same for Douglas Desmond Young IV?

A flicker of something passed through Philip’s heart. Conscience? No, it couldn’t be conscience. He’d long ago surrendered that. One had to if one was going to conquer Wall Street. Maybe it was grief. Philip wasn’t so hardened that he didn’t regret the deaths of his kinfolk. He’d loved his older brother Martin, of course. They’d been playmates and confidants as children. And growing up, his cousin Douglas Young III had been his hero, the upstanding, courageous public defender who thought of others before thinking of himself.

But Philip came to realize that he’d rather be alive than upstanding. That being deceitful was better than being dead.

Alone among his generation, he had survived. Every one of his siblings—including Jeanette—had fallen victim to that room. Every one of his first cousins, too, had all been cut down in their youth. One by one, they had been selected to enter the room or they had run off, like his foolish brother Ernie, only to be slaughtered for their mutiny. Philip was the only male Young in nearly a hundred years—except for Uncle Howard, of course—who had made it past the age of sixty.

And he fully intended to ensure that such remained the case. And that Ryan and Chelsea, too, lived to ripe old ages.

Ripe,
wealthy
old ages.

“Mr. Young?”

He lifted an eye. Melissa was standing beside him.

“Mrs. Young is on the telephone. She’s decided to stay in the city to have dinner with Gloria Vanderbilt. She wants to know if you have any objection.”

Philip crooked a little smile at Melissa. “No objection from me,” he said. Melissa returned his smile. She placed the phone to her ear and spoke into it. “Mrs. Young? He says to stay and have a wonderful evening.”

Philip laughed. Oh, yes, he enjoyed his life.

So what if he’d had to resort to extraordinary means to do so? He remembered the terror he’d felt as a young man, watching Aunt Margaret prepare all their names and place them in that box. His life—reduced to a slip of paper! He was just eighteen at the time of his first lottery. His whole future might have ended that night. He had felt the sweat bead on his forehead as Uncle Howard took the box from Aunt Margaret. Just hours earlier the old man had told him the secret of that room. At first Philip had scoffed, but he had seen the look in his father’s eyes. His father believed it, so it must be true. Sheer panic had gripped Philip then. He wanted to bolt. But his brother Martin, four years older, was brave, even stoic. Philip had never possessed the steel of his brother. Martin could dive from the cliffs into the water below, but Philip had never had the guts. But he couldn’t indulge in such terror now. It would forever mark him as a coward. So he trooped into the parlor following Martin and his father, fully expecting it would be his name that would be drawn, his life that would end that night.

When his father’s name had been drawn, Philip’s first reaction was relief. He didn’t like admitting that to himself, but it was true. He loved his father, but better his father than him. When his father was found dead the next morning, Philip wailed like a banshee over his body. But a little voice inside him was also saying, “Thank God it isn’t me.”

Ten years later it was his sister Jeanette’s turn. His baby sister. He saw the fear in her eyes. Martin, of course, volunteered to go in her place. Philip was silent. Only after Uncle Howard had insisted that the lottery forbade anyone from taking the place of the one chosen did Philip speak up, offering great protests that his sister should have to face such a fate, that if only it were possible he would be glad to go in her place.

He took another sip of his drink. There were parts of his past he did not like remembering. But how could he avoid them, with another family reunion looming? With the possibility that Chelsea and Ryan might have to face that room?

Aunt Margaret died two years before the lottery of 1980. She passed away peacefully in her sleep, something for which the entire family envied her. Aunt Margaret had been part of the lottery since the beginning, and each time she had escaped being chosen.

Was it significant that she had prepared the names each time, and burned them afterward in the fireplace?

Philip began to wonder if Aunt Margaret had contrived to keep herself out of that room. Of course, there were always the same number of slips of paper as there were candidates for the lottery. Aunt Margaret wrote all their names out, then folded the papers in half. But what if, Philip had wondered, she had written someone’s name
twice
and left out her own? Whether she had or not, no one would ever know.

In 1980, Philip volunteered to take over for Aunt Margaret in writing down the names.

That year there were six of them in the lottery. Philip and Martin. Their cousin Douglas and his two children, Douglas and Therese. And of course, Uncle Howard himself. Philip wrote everyone’s name but his own. Then he wrote Douglas Senior’s name again. When he handed the box to Uncle Howard, he was giddy—ecstatic—that his plan had worked. Douglas was chosen to enter the room.

Was there guilt? Maybe a flash, when he saw Therese call out, “Daddy! I love you!” But then it was gone. The instinct for survival was a far more potent emotion than guilt. By then, Philip was a hotshot on Wall Street. He was set to marry Vanessa McMaster, heiress to the textile fortune and one of the most chased-after socialites in New York. He had feared they’d never be able to have a family, but now he had found the answer. So long as he kept preparing the names, he could keep himself—and any children he would have—out of that room.

He smiled to himself. And Uncle Howard can only leave his billions to those who are left alive.

The next lottery, there was some regret. Tradition meant something in the Young family, particularly in matters of the lottery, so no one questioned Philip once again preparing the names. He toyed briefly with the idea of leaving out Martin’s name this time. But then he’d have to leave out Martin’s two children, Paula and Dean, brought into the lottery for the first time that year. And that would cut down the number of available names to the extreme: every name would have to be either that of Uncle Howard or their cousin Douglas, the sole surviving member of that branch of the family. So Philip did what he’d done ten years previously. He left only himself out, and wrote Douglas twice. Hell, the world didn’t need another bleeding-heart public defender.

But this time, Martin was chosen. His brother. The fellow who had taught him to ride a bike and to play football. The one who, after their father died, had stepped in and been adviser and supporter as Philip made his way in the world. It had been Martin who’d given him money in the very beginning to make his first investments in the stock market. And now Martin was going to die.

Who’s to say his name wouldn’t have been chosen even if Philip’s name had been in there? That’s how Philip rationalized it. How he still rationalized it.

Ten years later, it was easier. This time the lottery got the public defender. They found him in the morning with a plastic bag over his head. This time, Philip had felt no grief at all, not even a flash, not even when Douglas’s teenaged son, also named Douglas, had broken down in tears at the news. By now it was clear that he had found the escape hatch from the family curse. His children need never worry. That was all that mattered.

He watched now as Chelsea and her friends stood from their chaises, chattering among themselves, talking on their cell phones, getting ready for their shopping spree. He knew his son Ryan was at the brokerage, working even on a weekend, making millions for himself. If a member of the Young family had to die every decade as a result of some old curse, then it was far, far better that it be someone from a branch that didn’t matter as much, that couldn’t claim the power and success that Philip’s family did.