Beyond Midnight (19 page)

"
Only in the sense that t
heir bedrooms are across the hal
l from one another,
"
Helen quipped.
"
No. I shouldn
'
t say that. They
'
re close, I think. I
'
ve seen each of them defend the other fiercely, but they do it behind one another
'
s backs, you know?
"

"
Actually,
"
he admitted,
"
I don
'
t know. I was an only child. You?
"

"
I had a brother, but he was raised with my father in
L.A.
He died twelve years ago.
"

It was odd, to be standing in front of her office sharing family history with a stranger. Even Janet didn
'
t know she
'
d had a brother. What exactly was going on here?

She glanced at her watch again, then said,
"
You know, I have some books in my office on toddlers. It sounds silly to have to read up on how to handle
'
em—parents are convinced they should know this stuff instinctively—but really, you
'
d find the books a great help.
"

"
Madame, I would be forever in your debt,
"
Byrne said, bowing low. It was an ironic, grandiose gesture and, considering that it turned several mothers
'
heads, an annoying one. She would
'
ve preferred a simple thank you.

Helen led Byrne into her office and quickly pulled down several books on the toddler years and swung around to hand them to him. But she did it so hurriedly that the top book slid off the others and dropped to the floor. They both stooped down to retrieve it, nearly knocking their heads together in the process. It was an awkward, but hardly extraordinary, little incident. Helen was not prepared for the look of pain on his face when they stood up again.

"
Enchantra?
"
he asked.

"
Ench—?
No, no,
"
she said.
"
I don
'
t use that.
"

The pain turned to puzzlement.
"
Funny. My wife always
wore it. I thought I knew the scent. I was sure I caught a whiff just now.
"

"
No. I wear plain old Chanel No. Five,
"
Helen said faintly.
"
Here
'
s your book,
"
she added, all but kicking him out of her office.
"
Enjoy the reading.
"

"
Yeah
...
well
...
thanks again,
"
he said with a distracted frown.
"
I
'
ll return these as quick as I can.
"

Byrne left then, but Helen stayed behind for a few minutes, because her heart was pounding far too wildly for her to think about hitting the road.

She
'
d thrown out her bottle of
Enchantra
days ago.

It
must
'
ve clung to this dress,
Helen told herself.
When it spilled out of the bottle last week.

It was a reasonable theory until she remembered that she
'
d picked up the dress from the cleaners the day before and had left it hanging on the downstairs peg-rack overnight.

The scent wasn
'
t on the dress; it wasn
'
t on her underwear. The smell of
Enchantra
wasn
'
t from Helen. Period.

From whom, then?

She pushed the question violently away. It landed in the same creepy, crawly corner as the others for which she had no answers.

Who was doing the tapping?

Who had screamed at the doctor? (It couldn
'
t have been her.)

Who had railed at her family?

Who had given her the vicious, unbearable headache that had battered her for weeks?

Who?

Helen didn
'
t know. She decided she didn
'
t want to know, as she drove the historic one-way streets from the preschool to her house. More accurately, she didn
'
t want to believe that someone—or thing—was behind the series of unexplained events that had come and gone over the last two months. It was much more rational to believe that those events were random and ordinary and most of all, unconnected.

Yes. Unconnected. A series of coincidences. What did they have in common, really? Nothing. What did the smell of the sea have to do with the smell of perfume? What did the knockings have to do with the headaches? Nothing, nothing, nothing!

No, that wasn
'
t true. There was one thing. An
d damn it, it was a big thing: t
hey
'
d started on the day that Linda Byrne died.

For Nathaniel Byrne to have smelled
Enchantra—
for
his wife to have used
Enchantra—went
beyond coincidence. But what was the connection, then? Did the spirit world communicate with people who shared their brand of perfume? What about lipstick, in that case? And shampoo? It was absurd.

Helen believed—as her husband had not—in an afterlife. What kind of afterlife, she wasn
'
t sure. But she believed that men and women and children and their love for one another were too wonderful for it all to end at death. And so she expected—truly expected—to be reunited somehow, somewhere, in some form, with those she loved in the course of her life. And it would be
nice
if Hank would cooperate.

But this! This didn
'
t fit in with her theory at all. She didn
'
t know Linda Byrne—if that
'
s who was behind all this—from Hillary Clinton. A single phone conversation wasn
'
t enough to form a basis for haunting, not according to Helen
'
s system, anyway. What possible connection could they have to one another?

Katie.
It must have to do with Katie. Linda Byrne had been so fierce, so dedicated a mother that her spirit was
hanging around to make sure that Katie was well taken care of. It made a crazy kind of sense. It would explain the extraordinary concern Helen had been showing for Katie
'
s welfare. Maybe all mothers were connected on some mystical plane. In that case, Linda Byrne had come to the right place. Her little girl would be in good hands at The Open Door.

"
You can rest easy, Mrs. Byrne,
"
Helen whispered rather whimsically to the air around her.
"
Truly.
"

Somehow, in her naiveté, Helen thought the reassurance would be enough.

As she pulled up in front of her house Helen saw her son hunched on the bottom step, waiting for her. His denim jacket was no match for the sharp sea breeze that was blowing in off the ocean. She thought about running in for something warmer for him to wear, but what would be the point? He wouldn
'
t put it on, anyway.

She swung the car door open while Russ, an expert by now with crutches, deftly tossed them into the back and slid into the seat alongside her.
"
Sorry I
'
m late,
"
she said to him.
"
I got held up at school.
"

Russ shrugged.
"
It won
'
t be my fault if Dr. Welby
'
s pissed.
"

"
Cool it, would you?
"
she said tiredly.

He was still angry over the grounding she
'
d imposed after the accident: one full month, with no hope of parole. It was the stiffest punishment he
'
d ever got, and the sad thing was, Helen was sure she
'
d be upping the ante in the future. She glanced at her son, his chin set in stony silence, his hands slapping his thighs to an imaginary beat.

She wanted to say things like,
"
It
'
s for your own good,
"
and
"
You
'
ll thank me when you
'
re older
"
; but, again, what would be the point? They
'
d h
ashed all through that on the d
ay after the accident when she
'
d thrown every parental cliché she could think of at him and had got only sullen nods in response.

One thing was depressingly true: he
'
d already had his first ride in a stolen car. The sixteen-year-old driver, who
'
d suffered broken ribs and internal injuries, had taken his cousin
'
s car without permission and now the cousin was pressing charges. The police had gone easy on Russ and the other two passengers (who all thought the driver had permission) but there was nothing they could do about the angry cousin
'
s legal vendetta.

Russ had been scandalized at the thought that a man would turn on his own relation and had muttered darkly about friends being the only blood you could count on. That sounded ominously like gang talk to Helen, but when she grilled her son further she was satisfied that he was talking through his Pearl Jam hat.

In the meantime, the grounding was in force. And after Russ got rid of his crutches—which he surely would do today—it was going to be a lot harder to make it stick. God, he was exhausting to raise.

If only he
'
d stayed on the basketball team. Or kept up with his keyboard lessons. Or agreed to work on the school paper. He had the talent to do any and all of those things well, but he was scorning them as too demanding or too wussy. So here he was, smart and bored. It was a scary combination.

They had to wait forty-five minutes for the doctor, but fortunately for both of them there was a dog-eared copy of
Sports Illustrated
in the reception room. Russ scooped it up and hid behind its pages the whole time, leaving his mother to scan an even more battered copy of
Good Housekeeping,
its pages stripped of recipes, its Christmas ideas too late to use for the past holiday, too early to remember for the next one.

When their turn came, Russ was pronounced fit to roam and was allowed to leave on his own two feet.

It was anybody
'
s guess where he
'
d go from there.

****

The next evening Russell decided to drag out his electronic keyboard, which made Helen as happy as if he
'
d made the honor roll. He was doing something at home. Today, the keyboard, tomorrow, who knows? Maybe even his homework.

Tortured notes and fractured chords competed with the moody Beethoven sonatas that Helen played in the kitchen as she busied herself with a little homework of her own. She was determined to find out all she could about Nathaniel Byrne
'
s wife, the devoted mother who wore
Enchantra
and who died so premature a death.

Helen had saved Linda Byrne
'
s obituary. It was in front of her on the kitchen table, along with a copy of the funeral announcement that had come out two days later, and an old volume of
Who
'
s Who in the Art World
that she
'
d borrowed from a friend. She also had copies of the original engagement and wedding announcements from the
Evening News.
And that, unfortunately, was it.

Helen picked up the copy of the grainy engagement photo. Unquestionably, Linda Byrne had been a beautiful woman. Her face was a perfect oval, with wide-set eyes under thinnish arched brows that gave her face a delicacy only blondes seem to possess. It was hard to tell the shape of her nose from the frontal photograph, but there was no doubt about her smile: Her teeth were wide, her lips full. Everything about her was perfect; everything about her radiated confidence. You
'
d expect a woman like that to run a Fortune 500 company, and possibly to own it.