Horoscope: The Astrology Murders (18 page)

“Whoever’s calling her doesn’t just have her office phone number. He has her private phone number, too. So it’s someone who knows her well enough to access her private number.”

“That was her grandmother’s old number. Kelly kept it after her grandmother died. I don’t know how many people have had access to it over the years.”

Stevens took this in. “Thanks, Mr. York.” He buttoned his jacket and prepared to go out again into the rain. “By the way, how did she become interested in astrology?”

Jack York smiled. “That’s something else Kelly got from her grandmother. Her grandmother was an amateur astrologer. She taught Kelly.”

“She seems to owe her grandmother a lot.”

York nodded in agreement. “Her grandmother was a lovely woman. I liked her. She was very disappointed in me.” He went inside himself again for a moment; then he added, “I was very disappointed in myself.”

Stevens picked up his wet umbrella from the floor where he’d
dropped it. “Thanks again. If I have any more questions, I’ll be in touch.”

“You know where to find me,” York said to him. He stepped out from behind his desk and shook Stevens’s hand. “I’m sorry I got off on the wrong foot, Detective. I want you to know, I’ll do anything I can to help you get this guy. Kelly doesn’t deserve to have this happen to her. She’s a good woman.”

As Stevens left the office and headed toward the elevator, he mentally crossed Jack York off his suspect list. However great a salesman York was for Gemma Pharmaceuticals, Stevens believed that York was exactly who he seemed to be: an ex-husband who regretted that his philandering had hurt his ex-wife.

Stevens knew that if he wanted to, he could’ve called it quits for the day, but that wasn’t his personality. With York crossed off, he had the urge to question Chris Palmer.

S
ITTING AT THE DESK
in her office, Kelly opened the last of the files that she and Sarah had taken from her filing cabinet. The first thing inside the folder was the sheet of lined yellow paper on which the client had written her name—Carol Wallen—birth date, time, and place—November 24, 1980, 9:15 a.m., Brookline, Massachusetts—and on which Kelly had written the issue about which the client was consulting her and her impressions of the client from their meeting. Carol had consulted Kelly about whether she should stay in her job as an investment analyst at a brokerage firm or look for a new job or even a new career. Kelly’s impression from the time they spent together was that she was strong, direct, and open. Kelly closed the folder; there was no point in reading any further about Carol Wallen; Carol had not come to see her about leaving a relationship.

Kelly turned and looked out the windows. It was no longer raining, but water was still dripping from the trees and the tires of passing cars made a squishing sound on the wet street. She considered taking another batch of folders from the cabinet, but it was almost five p.m., and she decided she needed a break and a cup of coffee. She got up and went to the door to Sarah’s office, expecting to see Sarah, but when she opened it, the office was empty and Sarah’s coat was gone from the rack in the corner. On Sarah’s desk was a neat stack of the files she was supposed to have
reviewed. It was unlike Sarah to leave without saying goodbye, but perhaps she hadn’t left yet; perhaps she’d just taken King out for a walk and would soon be back.

Kelly walked into the hallway and was surprised to find that the painters had already finished with it. The walls were once again butter yellow and the molding a shiny white. The hall was brighter looking, in fact, than it had been since she’d had the house painted four years ago. She’d meant to have it repainted for the past year, but it was one of those things that she’d kept postponing for lack of time and lack of commitment to put up with the inconvenience. Now she’d had to do it, and despite the reason, she found she was glad that it had been done. She walked into the living room and turned on the light to see that the painters had completed repainting there, too. The other crews Sarah had called in had also done their jobs. The Persian carpet had been taken out to be cleaned and the slipcovers had been removed from the sofa and chairs for cleaning as well. The hardwood floors, the dining table and chairs, and the tiles on the fireplace had been scrubbed clean of smoke.

Kelly was pleased to see that the house was, indeed, returning to normal and that despite everything that had happened, she was, as Sarah had predicted that morning, beginning to feel better. But it wasn’t just the house being put back together quickly that had improved her spirits; it was the feeling she’d gotten as she’d read her clients’ files. So far, she’d found only three women who matched the criterion Detective Stevens had given her: those thinking about ending a relationship. Most of the men and women who’d seen her since July had come with career questions, as Carol Wallen had, or questions about their parents or siblings or their health. Many had come to her about romance, but generally it was because they wanted a relationship and didn’t
have one, not because they had a relationship that wasn’t working. Two women who had consulted with her before had gotten engaged and wanted her to tell them what the best dates were for their weddings.

She had seen more than two hundred clients since July, and looking through their files reminded Kelly how much she enjoyed her work and how much her clients appreciated what she did. Often they would call her about how helpful she had been, and when they did, she noted their calls on the sheet of yellow legal paper in their folders. She’d had the pleasure of seeing many such notes today as she’d searched her files. People thanked her for her insight into their patterns of behavior, for her encouraging them to enter new professional fields or her supporting them in remaining patient, based on what their charts told her about them and on what she intuitively observed in meeting with them.

She remembered that Sarah had referred to the man who had called her as a coward and that Emma had said he was full of hot air, and she wondered if maybe the fireplace’s backing up had been an accident just as the fire investigator had said and if really the caller was just what Sarah had labeled him: “a creep with a telephone.” Kelly’s mind began to spin possibilities. Maybe because she was afraid to leave the house, she’d made his threats more real than they were, that all he would ever do was call, or even better, he would never call again. Maybe Detective Stevens was just being polite that morning in his decision to monitor her phones. Maybe despite the skull tattoo on Chris Palmer’s arm and his suggestion about starting a fire in the fireplace, Chris Palmer was just a handsome man who’d been interested in her until she’d all but thrown him out of her house today. If that was so, it was something she’d just have to live with.

She couldn’t dismiss the danger that she saw in her chart, but
it was possible she’d been right when she’d thought that the anger that was posing the danger was really her own anger at herself for being unable to go out into the world as she used to. Maybe everything that had happened was making her look at herself and carry through on her promise to understand why she’d suddenly become so scared of leaving the brownstone; maybe it was leading her to be able to free herself. Leaving the living room, she was starting to feel it was possible that she would get control of her life again.

She walked into the kitchen and saw two painters on ladders, rolling yellow glossy paint onto the ceiling. One was the lanky, blond young man who seemed to be in charge of the paint crew, and the other was a graying man with Eastern European features who was concentrating so hard as he painted that his brow was creased from temple to temple.

“Thanks for working late,” she said to the young man. “I appreciate you doing so much so fast.”

He looked down at her from the ladder and smiled. “That’s why we’re called Ace Painting. We’re good at what we do.”

She took a cup and saucer out of the cabinet. “Do either of you want some coffee?”

“No, thanks,” the young man said. “How about you, Alton?”

The other man responded with a heavily accented “No, thank you.”

Kelly poured herself a cup of coffee and was about to leave the kitchen when she looked out the glass door and saw Sarah, in her coat, sitting on one of the stone benches in the garden. Sarah’s head was in her hands, as if she were feeling sick. Kelly put her coffee on the counter and hurried into the garden. Even before she reached Sarah, she could hear that she was sobbing. Kelly ran to her and gently put her hand on her shoulder.

“What is it, Sarah? Tell me. Please, tell me. Is it your mother?”

For a long time, Sarah didn’t look at her; she just shook her head and kept crying. Then she lifted her head from her hands and, still crying, looked up at Kelly. “It’s Kevin. He’s marrying someone else.”

Kelly knew what Kevin meant to Sarah and, hearing this news, her own heart ached with Sarah’s. “I’m so sorry. So sorry.”

“I never thought this would happen. Sometimes I was scared he would meet someone else, but I never really thought …” Sarah was crying so hard again that she couldn’t speak.

Kelly knelt beside her. “I know. I know.”

Still crying, Sarah took a handkerchief from her coat pocket and started to dry her eyes and her cheeks. “Every time he came into town to sing, we would go out,” she said between sobs. “And we would sleep together. I know it’s silly now, but I thought it would always be like that. I guess I thought that one day when we’re old, we’d finally get married.”

Kelly was afraid to ask her what she needed to ask her, but she knew there was no way of avoiding it. She looked up at Sarah. “Are you sorry you asked me to do your charts and talk to you about them?”

With hazel eyes filled with tears, Sarah shook her head. “No.” She repeated the word more adamantly. “No.” She knew Kelly would blame herself, which was precisely why she hadn’t wanted to tell Kelly about Kevin right now, not on top of everything Kelly was dealing with. But she didn’t blame Kelly, and she didn’t want Kelly to blame herself, either. “I was ambivalent or I wouldn’t have asked you. And what you told me only reinforced what I already knew about myself. It would’ve been terrible for me to marry Kevin and give up a music career myself. I love the violin as much as I love him. I couldn’t spend my life going from
opera company to opera company so he could keep building his career while I would just … just be a wife who used to play the violin.”

Kelly knew that what Sarah said about herself was true, but she also knew it didn’t make Kevin’s engagement to another woman any less painful. “I wish it had happened differently, Sarah. I wish it with all my heart. Everything I saw in your chart and Kevin’s said it might have turned out just the way you thought it would, with the two of you together. None of this was fated. But that’s how it is. It’s not the planets that determine our lives; it’s the choices each of us makes. And no matter how much we know about our planets and the planets of the people we love, we can’t make choices for the people we love. We can only make choices for ourselves.”

Sarah nodded again. She was still crying, but not as wrenchingly as she had been. Soon she dried her eyes again with her handkerchief. “A year ago, before he left for Germany, he was so angry when I told him I wouldn’t marry him. Even though I told him I loved him, it hurt him deeply. I didn’t realize he had so much anger in him.”

Kelly suddenly felt cold. It wasn’t just the cold dampness of the garden in the waning hours of daylight after the rain; it was the realization that Kevin was a man who could possibly blame her for making a woman leave him. She hadn’t made Sarah leave him, but he could certainly think that she had; he could blame Sarah’s decision on her because she hadn’t encouraged Sarah to accept his proposal.

“What are you thinking, Kelly?” Sarah asked her.

Kelly stood up. She didn’t want Sarah to see her eyes, because she didn’t want her to see that she was lying. “Nothing. I was just feeling sad.” In the gray-blue twilight, she looked at the rain that
clung to the ivy on the garden walls and to the panels of glass on the greenhouse. “It’s late,” she said to Sarah. “Please go home and take care of yourself. I had no idea the strain you were under today. I wish you’d told me.”

Sarah rose from the bench. “I didn’t want to burden you. Not accepting Kevin’s proposal was my choice. You never told me what to do.”

Kelly took Sarah’s hand and clasped it. She wished she could be sure that Kevin understood that as well as Sarah did. “Thank you.”

As they headed back toward the kitchen, the optimism that Kelly had felt minutes before was gone. The realization that Kevin might hate her made the threatening calls all too real again. She reminded herself that that didn’t negate the possibility that all they were were calls—that they would never amount to more than that. And it didn’t negate the possibility that she would never receive another one. Maybe Kevin’s engagement to another woman would gradually lessen his anger at her. Maybe today he was already feeling less angry.

Kelly opened the door for Sarah and let her go into the kitchen first. The two painters were still painting the ceiling. Kelly entered behind Sarah. She squeezed her hand again. “Please rest tonight and take care of yourself. I don’t want you coming in tomorrow.”

Sarah looked into Kelly’s eyes, which were filled with concern. “I want to come in. I want to keep busy, and we don’t have a rehearsal till tomorrow night.”

“See how you feel,” Kelly told her. “You might want to just stay home and practice.”

Sarah nodded. “Okay, I’ll see how I feel.”

H
E SAT AT THE
worktable, watching the computer screen and drinking a long, slow slug of beer. On the screen, he saw Kelly and Sarah walking through the kitchen toward the doorway to the hall. They looked like they were upset. He also saw the legs of the two painters standing on the ladders, but he couldn’t see their faces. He didn’t care; the only face he really wanted to see was Kelly York’s. It made him feel warm and tingly that she looked so upset. He’d hated her for so long. It was a pleasure to see her so upset. And he knew that however upset she was, it was only the beginning.