Woman in the Window (23 page)

Her mind turned not to what was going on in New York, at her apartment, where the policewoman and MacPherson waited for the killer, but back, willy-nilly, to her parents, to happy times she had treasured because of their scarcity. She remembered sitting much like this at a lodge one winter, the fire crackling, her parents at ease with each other. Rare, wonderful, an image of what she had wanted her marriage to be. She shook her head, watching the flames lick at the old bricks. A girl’s dreams …

The telephone rang and for a moment she couldn’t quite remember where she was. She groggily found it on a special little table with feet like claws. It was Lew.

“Hey, you didn’t call me,” he said. “Are you all safe and sound?”

“Safer than you can imagine. It’s like being in another century, Lew. I made a fire and some tea and eggs and fell asleep in a rocking chair. It’s great.”

“Dammit, I wish I’d insisted on coming out with you. Just for the night. I’m going to be thinking about you out there—I could still drive out, Natalie. I’d like to—

“No, really, Lew. I’m fine. I’m going right to bed and I’ve got a Robert Benchley I saw in a bookcase picked out for reading myself to sleep—it really is a time machine. I’m fine. Don’t worry.”

He grudgingly accepted defeat. “But be sure to keep a radio or the TV on, for company. And leave some lights on. I don’t want you getting scared out there all by yourself. The house sounds like something out of Mary Roberts Rinehart—”

“It is, it is, and I love it. And there’s a huge graveyard next door! Can you believe it?”

“Christ, I wish you hadn’t told me.” He paused for a moment. “Well, I guess I’ll let you go to bed. And, Nat, be safe out there. You’re very special.”

“Good night, Lewis,” she said softly and slowly replaced the receiver.

She was putting the kitchen in order, rinsing off her dishes and putting the milk back into the refrigerator, when a stray thought crossed her mind.

The cats.

Where were the cats?

Tony had specifically said something to her about his aunt’s cats. But she hadn’t seen a cat since she’d gotten there. Still, there in a corner of the kitchen, on the floor, was a large saucer of milk and beside it a bowl of cat food.

Well, Aunt Margaret must have decided to drop them off with a friend. What else, after all?

She took a long hot bath in a bathroom roughly the size of her own kitchen. She was reading the Benchley when she heard something. At first she thought it was the wind whining outside. But it persisted, the same sound again and again.

Slowly it seemed to clarify itself in her mind.

A cat meowing.

But far away. A faint sound. Coming again and again.

She lay in the steaming water, motionless, listening. Was it a cat? One that had been left behind? But then the wind would whine and obliterate the meowing and when it was still again she couldn’t hear the cat. …

“Christ,” she said aloud, splashing noisily as she stood up and grabbed a towel. “He’s on his own tonight,” she muttered. Poking through the house in the middle of the night waiting to be scared half to death by a cat jumping from the darkness was way too much like a movie.
Forget it, Natalie.
Bag it, as Julie would have said.

She crawled into the old four-poster, snuggling down under a heavy comforter with the window opened a couple of inches to the night. The inevitable noises an old house made on a windy night kept her half-awake for an hour but she finally drifted off, thinking somewhat defeatedly about Dan MacPherson. …

She wasn’t sure what time it was when she opened her eyes and lay listening again.

She had heard a door closing, clicking into place.

Her heart was racing.

What was she afraid of?

But surely she had heard among the creaks and groans of the house … the closing of a door.

Or had it been a dream?

F
ROM THE KITCHEN WINDOW
above the sink Natalie could look out through the scrawny naked branches of the trees in the sloping backyard and see the towers of Manhattan across the water. Low, soft gray clouds scudded across the skyline, and there was fog rising off the water, mist spitting against the window. Manhattan seemed more a mirage than the core of the city: it came and went and the fog seemed almost palpable.

The coffee was finished perking and she poured herself a mug and sipped it carefully, listening to the weather report on the radio, remembering the sound of the cat in the night, the closing of the door. She’d finally drifted off; upon waking the night’s fears had receded like misshapen giants straggling back to the black openings of their caves. It was odd how vulnerable one became when the darkness closed in and how carefree even the grayest daylight could make one feel. All she’d heard were some house noises that went on day and night—the kind you only heard in the stillness, the darkness, when your senses were sharpened.

A major winter storm, bigger than the one of the preceding weekend, was on its way, and the weatherman said he expected flurries to begin by noon, turning to full blizzard conditions by mid-afternoon. She was glad to be where she was. The house would be magical with a heavy snowfall outside, like something from a fairy tale.

She poured another cup of coffee and sat on a high stool by the kitchen telephone. She had wakened thinking of MacPherson, wanting to hear his voice, wondering what had happened at her apartment during the night—but for some obscure reasons of self-discipline she had forced herself to wait until she was coffee fortified to call MacPherson’s office. It turned out he had come to work directly from her place and he sounded tired, edgy when she was put through. She had almost decided to confront him on the D’Allessandro issue, but no, this wasn’t the time.

“No, nothing, he didn’t show.” She heard him blow his nose. “I tore my pants getting into your backyard, I couldn’t sleep at all, and somewhere along the line I’ve picked up a cold.” He sneezed as if to prove his point.

“How’s Officer Farraday?”

“Slept like a log. Woman hasn’t got a nerve in her body.”

“So what happens now?”

“She left the house and went to your office. She’ll come home again tonight. We’ll wait. I know he’s watching, waiting, wondering what to do. Maybe tonight will be the night. How is it out there, Natalie? Snowing yet?”

“Misting. Cozy. I’m fine.”

“Well, just relax, sit tight. I can’t think of anyone who could use a vacation better than you. This’ll be over soon.” He was beginning to sound like the needle was stuck, but, she supposed, when you didn’t have anything to report, you just didn’t. In any case, he didn’t sound angry with her, which was something.

She called Julie at her office and told her what was going on. “Well,” Julie said, “I won’t have you staying out there all by yourself. I’m coming out tonight. Period. End of report.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Natalie said, a small hope at the back of her mind. “There’s a huge storm coming. It wouldn’t be worth the effort. You’d just have to go back in the morning—”

“Not if we’re snowed in.” Julie cackled triumphantly. “The perfect excuse. I’ll be there tonight, one way or another. We can sit around and listen to the house creak and the disappearing cats meow and tell ghost stories—it’ll be like Girl Scout camp all over again!”

She wouldn’t take no for an answer and Natalie hung up looking forward to her arrival. Somehow, storm or not, Julie would get through.

The first big flakes of snow had begun to blow across the drifts still remaining from the weekend when Natalie got into her sheepskin coat and headed out the door. She was standing on the front porch, feeling the tingling in her cheeks caused by the brisk, wet wind, when she heard the telephone ring behind her. The locks on the outside doors hadn’t worked for years, Aunt Margaret was fond of reminding people from Manhattan, and she’d never had a burglary. The result at the moment was that Natalie was able to dash back inside and get to the phone before the caller hung up. She was thrown for a moment: it was an unfamiliar voice. Then it dawned on her that the call was intended for Aunt Margaret.

“Well, where in the world is Margaret?” It was a woman of a certain age. “And who are you? Is this Margaret’s house?”

Natalie identified herself. “And Aunt Margaret’s gone to Atlantic City with friends.” She laughed. “I hope they took along plenty of money—they may get snowed in at the casinos—”

“Oh, no, we didn’t go to Atlantic City. We got a much better deal on rooms for the first week in January and what difference did it make to us? Bunch of old biddies out on a tear? December, January, who cares? So we didn’t go.”

“Well, Margaret isn’t here. I came last night and there’s not a soul around. Not even the cats. Maybe she decided to go anyway, on her own?”

“Maggie? Oh, I don’t think so. She’s the life of the party but she does need the party. She’s not one to go off by herself. I wonder … could she have gone into the city? Well,” her voice broke out of the momentary questioning reverie, “she’s a big girl, isn’t she? She can do what she likes. But the cats, I wonder what she did with the cats.”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Natalie said. “She’s bound to call someone, you or some other friend, or she’ll just come home. I’m sure it’s perfectly simple.” Something about Aunt Margaret’s disappearance was making her nervous: it was the state of mind she was in, obviously, and had nothing to do with Aunt Margaret and the cats.

“I suppose you’re right,” the woman said. “When she gets back, have her call Fanny and explain what she’s been up to.”

Natalie said she would and jotted down a note on the pad by the telephone. She went back outside and noticed that the flakes of snow were already bigger and blowing harder across the front of the house. She couldn’t resist the high iron gates of the cemetery, the way the blowing snow shrouded the monuments as if they were an army crouching against the elements, waiting for nightfall to attack. She leaned into the wind, hands deep in her pockets and chin buried against her chest, barely looking outward, enjoying the simple awareness of where she was. The solitude, the desolate wind, the insistent scraping of the snow on her face like a cat’s tongue. She wound around the driveways, seeing the dead, broken flowers in pots, the sheen of ice on the odd monument, the rims of snow growing along the edges of the marble. Someone had scattered breadcrumbs and little dun-colored birds tiptoed daintily along the crust, lunching.

The wind increased as she worked her way up toward the crest of the long slope. To her left she could see Margaret’s house, the light she’d left on in the parlor shining through the snow like a safety beacon. Out of breath, she stopped at the top and realized that Manhattan had disappeared in the storm. The towers, the bulk of lower. Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge—all gone as if by Merlin’s wand. Nothing but the increasing gray fury of the storm over the water, where nothing stood in its way.

Damn D’Allessandro and his insinuations! She kicked at the snow, acknowledging her frustration and loneliness. MacPherson had seemed such a nice man, an interesting and interested man, an increasingly rare bird. Hopes … she’d obviously felt a flaring hope that Saturday, a hope she hadn’t been quite willing to admit.

A man for Natalie …

She felt the wind streaking the tears across her face.

She left the cemetery in a thoughtful frame of mind, not upset, but reflective, almost unaware of the weather. She walked for a long time until she found herself in the middle of a shopping area, small drugstores and clothing shops, a market, a couple of restaurants with lights glowing behind windows in fake brick facades. She stopped, looked back the way she’d come and saw a long street blurring in the snow, running straight as a string up a hill and then turning, disappearing. Looking at her watch, she realized she’d been walking for the better part of an hour. The exercise had kept her warm and she was famished.

The restaurants lunch crowd had thinned to almost nothing and the effort at a nightclub atmosphere struck her as somewhat pathetic, yet oddly endearing in the dim gray light of early afternoon. The hostess gave her a booth with a view of the street through cedar slats and hanging plants, enough hanging plants to remind her of the restaurants in Malibu where what you saw beyond the windows was the Pacific. She ordered a Bushmills on ice and later there was a club sandwich with chips. It was like a little town in Illinois somewhere, like the villages she’d driven through as a college student at Northwestern. New York seemed inconceivably far away. She felt as if the land mass reached hundreds of miles in all directions and there was nothing anywhere to frighten her.

Christmas decorations clung to the ceiling and a tree stood by the cashier’s desk. She hadn’t seen such old-fashioned bubble lights since she was a child. Her father had come home with boxes of bubble lights shaped like little candles one long-ago Christmas, and they had struck a six- or seven-year-old Natalie as wondrous quite beyond description. Miraculous. Now here they were again and she hadn’t seen any since she was a girl. She drank her coffee and realized she’d better go to the bathroom before setting off on her walk home. It was a long walk.

The afternoon turned imperceptibly to twilight and then to darkness as she walked through the curious mixture of fog and snow. Instead of blowing steadily, the snow was now accumulating and the temperature was dropping toward freezing, then below. The footing was increasingly treacherous but still she seemed almost unaware of the process of walking, of her surroundings as she moved past the dark shapes of houses with lights in the windows and the smell of the woodsmoke curling from chimneys. Through the windows she was vaguely cognizant of Christmas-tree lights, the shapes of people moving. Cars sliding carefully into driveways, the slamming of the door muffled by the thickly falling snow. One front lawn featured a team of reindeer pulling Santa’s sled, all in plastic, like a store display.

God,
she thought,
please let all this be over before Christmas.
It was a child’s prayer:
Please grant me my wish, O Lord, and I’ll never be a bad girl again. …