Horoscope: The Astrology Murders (19 page)

Kelly is nine years old. She is sitting on the ottoman next to her grandmother, who is in her wheelchair. The living room walls are light blue and the bulky, brown velvet-upholstered sofa and chairs are the same ones her grandmother had when Kelly’s mother was a child. Grandma Irene is showing Kelly a chart with a circle divided into sections and with odd-looking symbols and writing. The chart is on old paper. The reason Kelly knows the paper is old is because it’s discolored, the way the pages are in some of her grandmother’s old books
.

“Do you know who did this chart for me?” her grandmother asks
.

Kelly looks at her grandmother and shakes her head, no
.

“Evangeline Adams, dear. She was the most famous astrologer in all of America, and when I was very young I was lucky enough to have her do my chart!”

“That’s wonderful, Grandma!” Kelly says, impressed
.

“When I was your age,” her grandmother tells her, “being an astrologer wasn’t a legal profession. Even Evangeline Adams was arrested for fortune-telling. When she came before the judge, he told her he was going to give her a test. He wrote down the birth date and time and place of a real person, and he asked her to tell him about what that person’s life was like now
.

“Evangeline Adams took the information, looked in her ephemeris, and said to the judge, ‘I can’t tell you what his life is like now because the person is dead.’” Her grandmother pauses dramatically. She sees
that she has Kelly’s expectant attention and then continues. “The judge was stunned. The birth date and time belonged to his son, who had died many years before!” Grandma sits up in her wheelchair and announces, “Not only did the judge free Evangeline Adams to practice astrology, but he told her she had ‘raised astrology to the dignity of an exact science.’”

Kelly is more than entertained by what her grandmother has just told her about Evangeline Adams; it speaks to her in a way that makes her feel better than she has in months; it gives her the first hope she has felt since she learned that her parents had died when a train had gotten derailed and crashed between New York and New Haven, where they had been professors at Yale. She reaches for her grandmother’s ephemeris on the coffee table. She doesn’t know exactly what an ephemeris is, but she knows her grandmother is always looking up dates and times in it in order to find out something about astrology
.

“Will you show me how to use your ephemeris, Grandma?” Kelly asks her
.

“Of course I will, dear.” Her grandmother takes the ephemeris and places it onto her lap. “That way you’ll be able to help guide yourself and other people, too.”

Kelly smiles. “I’d like that. That way, I would always know what to do, and I’ll never make a mistake.”

She opened her eyes with a start, at first not realizing that she’d been dreaming. The word
mistake
had woken her up. It reminded her of something she had forgotten when she’d spoken to Detective Stevens and that she realized could be important. She felt Meow against her leg, and saw that she was still asleep. She glanced down at King, asleep in his bed on the floor, and then she glanced at the clock on her night table. It was just after two a.m. Her eyes went to the telephone; it was silent. She turned to the window and saw the top of the moon above the
treetops. It was a quiet, peaceful night, and yet the word
mistake
had awakened her from her sleep as if it had been a gunshot. She felt anything but peaceful.

She got out of bed, put on her slippers and bathrobe, and headed for her daughter’s room. After Sarah had left, the last vestiges of her positive frame of mind had collapsed. She and Emma had shared a quick dinner, and after that she’d spent the night looking through another three months of files. She’d discovered only one other woman who had consulted her about leaving a relationship. So up until now the search had revealed four clients whose names she would give to Detective Stevens because their husbands or boyfriends might have made the calls. But because of what Sarah had told her, she would also give him Kevin’s name. And because of what her dream had prompted her to remember, she had another name to give Stevens, too.

And there was Chris Palmer. One of her clients who had consulted her about relationship problems had had a boyfriend who had been a Pisces. Chris Palmer had said he was a Pisces. Maybe the woman’s boyfriend had been Chris Palmer and she’d left him after her appointment with Kelly, and Chris Palmer blamed her for his girlfriend’s breaking up with him. Maybe she was right to have been afraid of him.

It made her sad, all of it; it wasn’t her nature to think about people this way, to probe their lives and their own sadness, looking for reasons they might be filled with hatred. She preferred always to see the potential for light.

She walked into Julie’s room, opened the closet, and looked up at the shelf over the clothes rack, wondering if she’d find what she was looking for. She wasn’t the type of mother who searched through her daughter’s things, and this was the first time she’d been in Julie’s closet since Julie had left for school. But she knew,
because Julie had not hidden it from her, that Julie kept a shoe box full of letters on the top shelf. The question was, was it still there, or had she taken it with her to college?

At first, Kelly thought the box wasn’t there. Then she found it between two piles of sweaters. She took the box down from the shelf and brought it over to Julie’s bed. She sat down and removed the lid. She knew what she was looking for because Julie had shown her that particular letter. As she started looking through the letters her daughter had saved, in her head she kept hearing the word
mistake
.

She recognized the handwriting. She’d seen it on Valentine’s Day cards, Christmas cards, and birthday cards that Julie had put on the mantel while she was in high school. The letter was dated June 15 of that year. Her eyes focused on the words that he had written in his strong, bold printing:
You’re making a big mistake breaking up with me
. Below it, he had blamed Kelly.

S
TEVENS HAD CALLED
Chris Palmer’s number a few times during the day but had never reached him. He didn’t know if Palmer just happened to be out or if he was deliberately not answering the phone because, despite Stevens’s calling Wendy Storr under the pretext of a potential assignment for Palmer, Storr had told Palmer that a man had called to question her about him. Now Stevens sat in his car at the curb outside Palmer’s loft on Prince Street.

Each floor of the four-story building was a loft, and since Stevens had found Palmer listed in the directory as #4, he figured that Palmer’s loft was on the top floor. Stevens had first stopped by there at nine o’clock, and the fourth-floor windows had been dark; it was one fifteen a.m. now and they were still dark. He was just about to start his car and go home when he saw Palmer walking arm in arm with an attractive young woman with a mass of black hair and a dress just long enough to keep her from being arrested for indecent exposure. Their wobbly gait and raucous laughter told him they were drunk.

He got out of his car and approached Palmer and the young woman just as Palmer was unlocking the door to his building. He stuck his badge under Palmer’s nose and identified himself. “Detective Stevens. I’d like to talk to you.”

Palmer looked up at Stevens with alcohol-glazed eyes that
seemed to sober up in the moment it took for him to register the detective’s presence. “I think you’re making a mistake, Detective. I haven’t witnessed a crime or accident or anything.”

Stevens stared down at him; he was half a head taller than Palmer and weighed eighty or a hundred pounds more than him. “I’m not making a mistake, Mr. Palmer,” he said evenly.

Palmer turned to the young woman, said he’d be right back, and led Stevens out of the doorway so that she wouldn’t hear their conversation. “What’s this about?” he asked.

“Kelly York.”

Palmer’s forehead furrowed with confusion. “What about her? Did something happen to her?”

“No. Do you wish something did?”

Palmer laughed dismissively. “Of course not. I just don’t understand why you’re asking me about her.”

“I’m asking you about her because you seemed angry when you left her house this morning.”

Palmer’s dark brown eyes glanced at the sidewalk for a moment as if he were going back to that morning in his mind; then he looked up at the detective again. “This has to do with what happened to her house because of that smoke, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t have to tell you what it has to do with,” Stevens said. “Why were you so angry at her?”

Palmer shrugged. “I was interested in her, and she gave me the cold shoulder.”

Stevens looked at the young woman waiting apprehensively in the doorway. “You seem to have gotten over it pretty fast.”

“I didn’t realize it was a crime to go out on a date,” Palmer said.

Despite Palmer’s effort at casual sarcasm, Stevens noticed the tension in his hands and shoulders; he was nervous. Stevens
wondered if it was just because he was being questioned by a police detective or because Palmer had been threatening Kelly York.

“How do you know I was angry at Kelly when I left her house today?” Palmer asked almost belligerently. “Did she tell you that?”

Stevens was about to respond that it was none of Palmer’s business how he knew when he felt his cell phone vibrating in his jacket pocket. Taking the phone from his pocket, he said, “Excuse me,” and walked away from Palmer, keeping his eyes on him as he brought the phone to his ear.

“Stevens here.”

On the other end of the phone Stevens heard what he didn’t want to hear.

“It’s Griffin, Detective Stevens. I’m monitoring Kelly York’s phone. The caller is on the phone with her right now.”

Stevens turned away from Palmer. “Where’s he calling from?”

“Chelsea Piers.”

“Shit,” Stevens said. “Patch it through.” He was already running to his car.

“Hey, can I go now?” Palmer called after him.

“Yeah, you can,” Stevens shouted back over his shoulder. He brought the phone to his ear again so he could listen to the call.

Kelly shuddered as she stood at her desk in her third-floor study, speaking to the voice on the other end of the phone. “Please, stop calling me,” she begged.

“Why should I? You didn’t care what happened to me,” the voice whispered back.

“Was it you who blocked up my chimney? Did you make my house fill up with smoke?”

“Oh, your house filled up with smoke. What a shame,” he
whispered. “But it didn’t kill you, did it?”

She was still holding the letter she’d found in the shoe box from Julie’s closet. As she listened on the phone, her eyes drifted to the first few words of the letter:

As Stevens sped uptown on 10th Avenue toward Chelsea Piers, he was listening to Kelly’s conversation with the caller, which he’d had patched into his radio phone. The volume was up all the way and he could hear bits of it despite his siren.

“Billy, is that you?” Kelly was asking.

Stevens wondered who Billy was; Kelly had never mentioned him. He was already doing eighty and making good time because there were so few cars on the road at that time of night, but he pushed down the gas pedal and went up to ninety. He wanted to get to the location where the caller was making the call while the call was still in progress.

He could hear that the caller was saying something, but he had trouble hearing him because of the siren, so he turned it off and just used the flashing red light to warn the two other cars on 10th Avenue that he was about to overtake them.

“It doesn’t matter who I am,” the caller was whispering. “What matters is what I’m going to do to you.”

“Whatever I did, I’m sorry,” Kelly said.

Stevens could tell she was terrified from the way her voice
was shaking.