Horoscope: The Astrology Murders (22 page)

“I am, but only if they’re drunken orgies. What about you?”

Kelly did her best to keep up her end of the joking. “Oh, I’m going to my fair share.”

“How many drunken orgies have you been to this week?”

“Five or six,” she said. “I’ve lost count.”

All at once, even before she finished talking, the vulnerability and helplessness she’d been feeling returned. She hoped it hadn’t come through in her voice, but her son’s next words told her that it had.

“How are you really, Mom?” he asked. “You don’t sound too good.”

She forced the smile back on her face, determined that it
would make her sound as well as she was going to tell him she was. “I’m fine, Jeff. Absolutely fine. I called to say hello, that’s all.”

“If anything was wrong, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

He sounded very earnest now, as he had when he was a child and had wanted to talk to her about something serious, like whether or not there was a God and, if there was, was there a heaven and a hell.

“Of course I’d tell you,” she said, just as seriously as when she’d told him that she did believe in God and that she didn’t believe in heaven or hell except those that people created for themselves here on earth through their good or bad actions.

“I’d want you to tell me. I’m not a kid anymore. You can rely on me.”

“I know I can, Jeff.” She was feeling more and more emotional. She wondered how much longer she could keep it together if they continued their conversation. “You better leave for breakfast so you can be on time for class. “I don’t want you to be late.”

He laughed. “You’re right. It’s not like the days when you could write a note to the teacher for me, is it?”

“I’m very proud of you, Jeff,” she said, not caring if it seemed to come out of nowhere; it was how she felt, and she needed to tell him.

“I’m proud of you, too, Mom,” he told her; then he added: “I’ll call you later.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I know I don’t have to. I want to.”

Then he was gone, and suddenly she could feel the three thousand miles between them, the same three thousand miles that separated her from Julie. Suddenly she missed them so deeply that the pain she felt throbbing in her ankle seemed to have risen to her heart. She hung up the phone and looked around his room
again, wishing desperately that Thanksgiving were tomorrow instead of a month away.

A
FTER TAKING
M
ICHELLE UP
to Jeff’s room to see Kelly, Sarah came downstairs again. She was about to go into her office to start going through the next three months of files to search for women who’d come to see Kelly with relationship problems, but she realized it was lunchtime and that she was hungry. She walked into the kitchen and saw Emma at the counter, making a salad.

“How’s Kelly’s ankle?” Emma asked, continuing her preparations.

“I don’t know. We’ll have to wait to see what Michelle says.” Sarah took a cup and saucer out of the cabinet and poured herself a fresh cup of coffee. “What are you making for lunch?”

“Chicken and a salad,” Emma said. She turned to Sarah, her face showing the worry that had been with her all morning. “Kelly’s always telling me Mars or one of those other planets is conjuncting another planet or squaring it or whatever and what I’m supposed to watch out for. Before all this, I only half believed it. But now …” She didn’t finish her thought right away. When she spoke again, there were tears in her sweet gray eyes. “I’m scared for her, Sarah. She seems so strong, but underneath she’s always been delicate, ever since she was a child. I’m worried about what’s going to happen to her …”

Sarah put her coffee down, came over to Emma, and put her
arms around her. As she hugged her, Emma was crying. “You don’t have to worry about Kelly,” she told her. “Kelly’s a survivor.”

Emma, still crying, looked at her with wet eyes. “But what if it’s the planets? What if whatever is happening with them means this is just the beginning of her bad luck?”

“You can’t think that way, Emma,” Sarah said sternly. “Remember what Kelly says in her column. The planets can present you with a challenge, but they don’t determine your fate.”

“What determines your fate?” Emma asked, her voice quavering.

“Your choices,” Sarah said. “And Kelly makes good choices. She’s not going to let this challenge overcome her. She’s going to meet it. You’ll see.”

Emma nodded, crying less now. She was starting to feel better.

Sarah was relieved to see this. She didn’t want Emma to worry. But despite her positive words to Emma, Sarah, too, was worried. She knew the pressure Kelly had already been under before falling down the stairs, and she worried that the accident would further undermine her belief in herself.

Kelly sat on the edge of the bed as Michelle held her right foot and inspected her ankle, which was puffed up well beyond its normal size.

“It’s very swollen,” Michelle said. “But it’s not crooked. That’s a good sign. No bones sticking out. Did you hear a cracking noise when you fell or just a pop?”

Kelly thought about it for a moment. “I didn’t hear anything. I was too busy falling.”

“See if you can move the joint,” Michelle said, the ankle still in her hand. “Take it easy, but just try.”

Kelly tried to move her ankle joint. She felt a knifelike pain that made her wince, but her ankle joint moved and allowed her to turn her foot slightly to the right.

“Good,” Michelle said. She gently released Kelly’s ankle. “Now lower your foot to the floor.”

Kelly slowly brought her right foot to the floor alongside her left foot.

“Let me help you up. I want to see if you can put any weight on it at all.”

“It really hurt when I tried to stand on it before,” Kelly said.

“I understand that,” Michelle said, all doctor now. “But I want you to try again.”

Taking Michelle’s hand, Kelly rose from the bed with all her weight on her left foot. Once she was standing, she lowered her right foot onto the carpeted floor and slowly redistributed some of her weight onto that foot. “I can, a little.”

“I’d say it’s a bad sprain,” Michelle said, “but it’s probably not broken. The only way to be sure is if you come in for an X-ray.”

Kelly looked into her best friend’s eyes. She’d told Michelle so many secrets in the years they’d known each other, but this was different; this was the first time she had a secret that made her feel humiliated. “I can’t,” she said after a while. “I can’t leave my house. I suppose you must’ve suspected by now. I just can’t.”

“How long have you been afraid to leave?” Michelle asked. Neither her face nor voice showed any sign of judgment.

Kelly had thought about this often, and she gave Michelle the most accurate answer that she’d come up with for herself. “I’m not sure exactly. Around the time Julie left for school. I don’t know if it was the same day or the day after or the day after that. But ever since the morning it first happened, every time I try to leave, I get panicky. I start sweating. My heart beats fast. I breathe
so hard I feel like I’m going to die. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I just get so frightened. This is the only place I feel safe. Or at least I did …”

Michelle’s dark eyes became somber. “Has that man called you again?”

“Yes,” Kelly said, “but the police are investigating it. The detective said that he’s going to find him. They’re monitoring my phones and they’re beginning to look at suspects—”

“You’ve got to learn to go out of your house again, Kelly. You’ve got to find the key.” As she said this, Michelle’s voice was no longer even and professional; it was insistent.

Kelly laughed grimly. “That’s what I keep saying to myself. The ‘key.’ KEY. My initials. Kelly Elizabeth York. People come to me to give them the key to their lives, and I can’t help myself.”

“But you have to,” Michelle told her. “You can’t just be trapped in here, afraid in your own home and afraid to go out.”

“I don’t want to be afraid, Michelle,” Kelly said. “I really don’t.”

“Then it’s up to you. Either you have to get help, or you have to help yourself.” Michelle was looking at her urgently now. “Whatever is making you feel like this, you really do have the key. You just have to find out what it is and use it.”

Kelly continued to meet her friend’s eyes, but she didn’t answer right away. When she did, she said emphatically: “I will.”

Michelle smiled. “I know you, Kelly,” she said. “If you tell me you will, you will. I just wanted to hear you say it. When we’ve made a pledge to each other, we’ve never let each other down.”

Kelly smiled, too. “No, we never have. And I’m not going to start now. I’m going to find the key. I will. I’m going to find the key.”

FBI
AGENT
M
ARY
A
NN
Winslow was filling in her junior colleague, Eric Broadbent, on the serial killer case she’d just been handed as they walked toward the elevator in the agency’s headquarters on East 57th Street. Winslow walked at her usual fast pace, and Broadbent had to quicken his steps to keep up with her. She talked as quickly as she walked, and he had to make sure he caught every word because he knew she expected that he’d remember everything. Whenever he forgot something she told him, she’d get icy and condescending, and he hated being treated that way. He wished he had a kinder, gentler boss, but the powers that be had assigned him to Winslow, so that’s the way it was. At least she was good at her job.

“Four victims raped and strangled,” she was saying. “All with the same MO. Two in New Jersey suburbs—New Kent and West Orange. Two in New York, about an hour or so outside the city. Long Beach and Tarrytown. Those two were just found this morning. Long Beach had been dead for five days. Tarrytown was killed last night. There are peculiarities to the MO the cops didn’t release to the media.”

Broadbent nodded; he’d gotten it all. The thing about Winslow that was most disconcerting to him was how attractive she was: five foot five, with auburn hair, blue eyes, a pretty face, and a great figure. Sometimes it was difficult to listen to her because
he found himself just staring at her. He brought himself down to reality again. “Do we know anything about the killer?” he asked.

“The New Kent cops are calling him the
Astrologer
,” Winslow said. She reached into her briefcase and handed him the file. “You can read about why in the car. We’ve got a lead we’ve got to follow up right now.”

“In Tarrytown?” Broadbent asked.

“No, about thirty blocks from here, on the Upper West Side.”

They reached the elevator, and Winslow pressed the button. The door opened seconds later, and she stepped inside. Broadbent, carrying the file, followed her in. He wanted to ask her more, but she’d closed herself off and was absorbed in her own thoughts. That was how she got, and he knew better than to annoy her. They rode down to the garage in silence.

K
ELLY, HER ANKLE WRAPPED
in the bandage Michelle had put on it, sat at her desk in her upstairs study, looking over the new files she’d asked Sarah to bring her from her office. So far she’d reviewed six files belonging to female clients, and none of the women had consulted her about leaving a relationship. She opened the seventh file folder and was about to read her notes when one of the phones on her desk rang. It was her private phone. She felt a moment of nervousness but then remembered her son had said he’d call her back, and she picked up the receiver before the end of the second ring.

“Jeffrey,” she said brightly. “I almost forgot you were going to call.”

“It’s not Jeffrey,” the voice on the other end whispered into her ear.

Kelly felt her hand holding the receiver starting to sweat. She wanted to hang up, but she knew she couldn’t; the longer she kept him on the line, the more possibility there was for Detective Stevens to trace the call. She forced herself to keep holding on to the receiver and listening.

“You’ve been a bad girl,” the voice continued, “but you’ve been punished, haven’t you? It’s not going to be so easy for you to get around anymore. Not that getting around outside the house was easy for you before.”

Kelly felt her body tense. How could he know? Her mind told her it must have just been a lucky guess.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You know what I mean. You’re frightened to go out.”

She felt her mouth growing dry; she couldn’t bring herself to say anything.

“You think you’re the only one who knows things, Kelly. You say you know things from the stars. But I just
know
them, like I was right there.”

Kelly suddenly looked around her study, half expecting to see him; that he, whoever he was, had mysteriously materialized in the room as he had mysteriously materialized in her life. But she was the only one there.

“You’ll never find the key to me,” he said. “But I’ve already found the key to you!”

That was it. The last words she could make herself listen to from him. She slammed down the phone. But even that didn’t stop her from feeling scared and enraged and violated. What he’d said wasn’t a lucky guess. Somehow he knew these things about her; in fact, he seemed to know everything about her. As if he really were in the room with her.