Beyond Midnight (6 page)

Becky came in with the big brass tray and left it on one of the marble counters—Helen
'
s one indulgence when they redid the kitchen—and pulled out a carved-back oak chair.

"
Why do you want to look her up, anyway?
"
Becky asked, dropping her chin onto the cupped palms of her hands.
"
Isn
'
t that a little ghoulish?
"

"
When you
'
re older, you
'
ll understand,
"
Helen said, flipping through Monday
'
s obituaries without success. She picked up Tuesday
'
s paper and went straight to the deaths, then sucked in her breath.
"
Here it is. It
'
s true, then,
"
she added rather stupidly.

She read the headline aloud—
" 'Linda Byrne, thirty-
two; former art teacher
' "
—and then scanned the rest.
"
Born in Geneva
...
graduated from Wellesley with a degree in art; taught at Boston College before she was married
...
member of a couple of art societies
...
survived by her husband
...
one child
...
a mother and two brothers in Geneva
...
a couple of nieces and nephews.
Huh.
It
'
s not much to go on.
"

"
What do you mean,
'
to go on
'
?
"

"
Hmm?
"
Helen looked up in a daze.
"
Did I say that?
"

"
Mom. Get a grip,
"
said Becky, laughing. She slid the paper over to her side of the table and studied the obituary.
"
Y
'
know, I think I
'
ve seen this name Nathaniel Byrne somewhere,
"
she added, tapping her
m
ulti
-
ringed fingers on the page.

"
The husband? Can
'
t say I have,
"
Helen decided.

"
Yeah
...
wait
...
somewhere in the house
...
I know!
"
Becky dashed out of the kitchen, went flying up the stairs, stomped across Helen
'
s tiny but efficient home office overhead, and came roaring down again.

"
Ta-dah!
'
Nathaniel Byrne, Mutual Fund Manager of the Year,
'"
Becky said, holding up an investment magazine that Helen subscribed to but never had time to read.

"
If he
'
s the same Nathaniel Byrne,
"
said Helen. She took the magazine and studied the cover of the magazine.
"
And anyway, since when are you interested in mutual funds?
"

"
Who cares about those?
He
'
s
what caught my eye when I dumped the mail on your desk. It was like, when you walk into a supermarket and you see
Brad Pitt's
picture on the cover of
People?
 
It was like that. You can
'
t help but look.
"

She was right. The Fund Manager of the Year was a dark-haired, steely eyed, square-chinned, unsmiling male who wasn
'
t the least bit shy about looking straight into the camera and daring it to expose his inner self. His brows were thick and straight, his hair, attractively unruly. He was wearing a heavy wool shirt, khakis, and work boots and was sitting on a massive tree stump in an autumn setting, with his thighs pulled up to his chest and his arms slung loosely across the knees. A gold band adorned his left ring finger and, if Helen wasn
'
t mistaken, that was a Rolex on his left wrist. He was the kind of man that women described as intense rather than hunky.

Near the tree stump was a woodpile with an ax leaning against it. Helen took in the man, took in the setting, and shook her head.
"
Wrong guy. The Byrne I heard about is a workaholic who ignores his family, flies his own plane, and is never at home. He wouldn
'
t have the time or inclination to chop wood. Besides, look at his boots. They
'
re brand-new.
"

"
Mom, you are so naive,
"
Becky said, rolling her eyes.
"
The ax and shoes are just props. If he
'
s Fund Manager of the Year, obviously he can afford to get his wood split and stacked. Look him up, look him up,
"
she urged.
"
See if they say he
'
s from
Salem
.
"

Helen did as she was told. The cover article was long, and it finished up, as all such pieces do, with a few scraps of biographical information.
"
For goodness
'
sake,
"
Helen said.
"
You
'
re right. It says he lives on a
'
prestigious street in
Salem
.
'"

"
Oh, like he
'
s gonna live on a slummy one? What else? Let me read it.
"

"
When I
'
m done,
"
said Helen, pulling the cover away from her daughter
'
s pesty, hovering grip. She read aloud:

"
Byrne and his wife, Linda Bellingame Byrne, to whom he's been married for eight years, have one three-year-old daughter and another child on the way. Mrs. Byrne, an art historian who lectures occasionally in the area, abandoned a professorship at
Boston
College
when her husband began putting in eighty-hour weeks after his promotion to manager of the
Columbus
Fund. in the five years since then, they have taken no vacations.

"'
Nathaniel Byrne has made a lot of money for a lot of investors,
'
Mrs. Byrne told us.
'
After the new baby
'
s born, I
'
m hoping that they let the poor man have a week or two off now and then,
'
she said with a teasing smile at her husband.

"
So she was pregnant,
"
Helen mused.
"
How sad.
"
She added,
"
It
'
s funny that the article lets her have the last word.
"

Becky, meanwhile, was impressed.
"
This is so cool. You know this guy, Mom!
"

"
Number one, I don
'
t know him,
"
Helen reminded her daughter.
"
And number two, there
'
s nothing cool about it. The timing of this is tragic.
"

With the ruthless indifference of youth, Becky shrugged and said,
"
It sounds like Linda Byrne wouldn
'
t
'
ve been all that impressed by an article about him anyway.
"

"
Rebecca! A little less cynicism, please.
"

Brought up short by her mother
'
s sharpness, Becky defended herself.
"
I only said what you just told me, Mom. Why are you taking this so seriously?
"

"
I don
'
t know,
"
said Helen, staring at the man on the cover.

What she did know was that her headache had retreated even further. She lifted her hand to the back of her head, just to make sure her head was still there. Yep. And hardly any pain.

Well, for Pete
'
s sake,
she thought with a bemused smile. Was it the soup, the pill—or the sight of his face?

Helen
went to bed immediately after Russ came home (twelve minutes late, which fell within an acceptable range of defiance). She
'
d read the entire article about Nathaniel Byrne, twice; but except for a few principles for making sound investments—and the revelation that Linda Byrne had been pregnant—the story had left Helen none the wiser about either Nathaniel Byrne or his wife.

In the meantime, one thought, and one thought only, rolled back and forth through her head:
I wonder what she died of?

Obviously not the headache. The headache must have been a symptom. But of what? Linda Byrne had not sounded like someone near death, that
'
s all there was to it. On the other hand, she
'
d sounded in a desperate hurry. So maybe she knew.

And yet Peaches hadn
'
t sent off any such signals. But then, Peaches would be discreet, of course. As for Linda Byrne
'
s husband
...
it
'
s true, he
'
d been home early that day, which was odd for an eighty-hour-a-week man. Had he known that his young wife was dying? Would he have let a stranger come to the house if he had?

I wonder what she died of?

Half-asleep, half-ruminating, Helen burrowed more deeply into the down pillows that she liked to pile high on her four-poster bed and pulled the blue plaid comforter more tightly around her shoulders. She always kept the room cool for sleeping—a throwback to Hank
'
s preference—but tonight she
'
d cracked the window way too wide. A damp breeze was blowing briskly from the northeast, forete
ll
ing another raw day.

In fact, the room felt extraordinarily clammy and cold. Far from being fresh and bracing, the air seemed dank, almost fishy, as if she were walking along a beach in the off-season rather than tucked in a cozy warm bed. She shivered under the covers, oddly repelled by the odor. Her house was not so close to the water that she could smell low tide; but low tide, with its washed-up seaweed and occasional dead fish, is what this smelled like. She wanted t
o close the window, but her limb
s seemed paralyzed with fatigue, her very thoughts frostbitten around the edges.
I wonder what she...?

A brain tumor?

Helen resolved to find out exactly how Linda Byrne died, and that made it easier, somehow, to fall asleep. But the respite didn
'
t last long. Late in the night, when she was deep in sleep, she was roused by a high-pitched call that sounded like,
"
A fire, fire!
"

Helen shot up in bed, heart pounding, adrenaline surging. What in God
'
s name was
that?
A screech, a bark, a cry? Before she had time to figure it out, she heard it again, only farther away: a not-quite-human, not-quite-animal sound. Whatever it was, it wasn
'
t someone ye
ll
ing fire.

Eyes leaden with sleep, she listened for a moment, then fell back on her elbows, waiting. After a little while she heard it again, from yet another direction.
Something with wings,
she decided at last. Raccoons, even cats, weren
'
t fast
enough to cover that much ground. Another owl?
Salem
seemed suddenly overrun with them.

Snuggling back under the covers, still too cold to make a sprint for the window, Helen tried to calm her nerves. But images and thoughts, all of them disturbing, kept pounding away at her determination to drop off into blissful, headache-free sleep.

Nathaniel Byrne. She remembered vividly the sound of his voice as he yelled down to Peaches to get upstairs— the voice, hoarse and urgent, that seemed such an odd fit with the cooly confident financier posed on the stump. Helen remembered the voice so well that, for the first time, she realized that it had held more shock than surprise, more anger than grief. It was not the voice of a man expecting his wife to die at any moment of some terminal disease.