Horoscope: The Astrology Murders (2 page)

We had heard sections of the book read aloud over the phone or at dinner in the last couple of years before our mother died. We didn’t know what there was of the novel until we went through her papers. What we found was the almost completed novel along with several outlines for other adventures for Kelly and many notes about Kelly and the other characters that our mother created as part of Kelly’s life.

We reached out to Mark Bruce Rosin, who not only is a friend of the family’s (including our mother) but is an accomplished writer and editor. We asked Mark to work on the manuscript as an editor and, in some ways, a collaborator. He read our mother’s draft and notes and saw that the book was essentially there; all it needed was a fresh pair of eyes and an expert editor to bring it into shape. He did a tremendous job of doing just that while honoring the book and characters our mom created.

So, here is our mom’s book,
Horoscope: The Astrology Murders
. We hope that the other Kelly Elizabeth York stories will be told in the future too.

Lucia Rodriguez   

Chip Rosenbloom

We would like to thank the following people who were both personally inspiring to and caring of our mother during the writing of this book and her wonderful life: her six grandchildren—William, Stuart, Andrew, Lauren, Alexander, and Olivia; Kathleen Rosenbloom, her daughter-in-law; Lupe Rodriguez, her son-in-law; Earle Weatherwax, her adored companion of nineteen years; Ken Irwin, her brother; her ten nieces and nephews; John Shaw, her dear friend and confidant; Tom Guthrie, her close friend; Mike Moyneur; Lance Ferguson, her personal astrologer; Margie Baldwin, our spectacular cousin; Father Sal Polizzi, Marshall Klein, and Paul Mason, her dear friends; and Mark Bruce Rosin, who made this book possible through his dedication, experience, and talent. We would also like to thank Jane Rosenman and Dr. Leana F. Melat, Jungian psychotherapist and student of astrology, for their valuable support.

H
E COULD JUST SEE
the moon through the fog. It was a weak, round glow. If you didn’t know better, you might’ve thought it was full, but of course he did know better. It was only seven-eighths full.

He’d also known to expect Long Beach to be foggy. After all, it was a beach town, and a light fog had just begun to settle in on the night he’d driven there to get a look at the house and plan for tonight.

Tonight’s fog was heavier. As he walked, he could see only a few feet in any direction. Looking down, he could make out the asphalt driveway under his feet. Looking straight ahead, he couldn’t see any sign of the house, but he knew it was there, fifteen or twenty yards up the driveway. Most people preferred staying in on a night like this, but a night like this made his job easier. That’s how he’d thought about it at first, as a job, a job he loved, a job he was born for. Then he’d realized that it wasn’t just his job; it was his vocation. He had been called to it; it was his destiny.

Earlier tonight, at home, in the special room he had made, he had dressed himself in black: black jeans, black sweater, black jacket, black running shoes. Black was his favorite color. Wearing black was like hiding. It was like being in a black hole—you could just disappear in it and stay lost forever.

He heard the waves hitting the beach, and he knew he was nearing the house. He kept walking, and sure enough, through the fog, he began to see the outline of the house in the moonlight. Soon he arrived at the steps leading up to the porch. The house was dark, just as he knew it would be. It was 3:10 a.m. He knew she’d be asleep. She’d said she could sleep twelve hours at a go, and she had trouble waking up.

He reached into his back pocket, took out a pair of surgical gloves, and put them on. When he’d pulled them snugly over his hands, he tried the door in case she hadn’t locked it. It didn’t budge. No worries; he’d worked it all out ahead of time. He was a born planner.

He took the key from the front pocket of his jeans and slipped it into the lock. It went in easily, just as it was supposed to. He let himself in, noiselessly closing the door. He was enmeshed in darkness now, as if he’d disappeared into a real black hole. He took his black ski mask from his jacket and put it over his head. It was new, and it didn’t have as much give as it would have later, after he’d used it more. He could feel it constraining his hair and his face, but it had slits for his eyes so he could see and for his nose and mouth so he could breathe.

For a while he just stood there, feeling his excitement as his eyes became used to the darkness. He saw that a sliver of moonlight was entering the house through the narrow space between the top of the door and the doorframe. Through the soles of his running shoes he could feel the plush carpet beneath his feet. No wooden floors to creak under his weight as he walked. Another sign that tonight’s work would go well.

In front of him was a small living room, barely visible in the darkness; to his left, an even smaller room—a den or a study—almost as dark; to his right, an ink-black hallway that he thought
must lead to the bedrooms. He took his first silent steps on the carpet into the hallway.

Almost immediately, he could hear her breathing in her sleep. He followed the sounds of her inhalations and exhalations. They were rhythmic and regular; soon they would cease altogether.

But not quite yet. There was more to his job than just that.

He stopped at the open door of her bedroom and looked inside. The drapes were open, and the moonlit fog came right up to her bare windows, casting the room in a silver light. He could see her torso as she slept, one of her arms dangling over the side of the mattress. She was still breathing deeply, unaware that he was in her house, unaware that he could be. That was part of what made him so excited: the element of surprise. The other part was the element of justice.

He passed a closet, a small closet, the kind they used to build in houses like this. The door was closed, but he didn’t need to see inside to know what it was like in there: dark and close. If you sat on the floor of a closed closet like that, under the clothes, some of them hanging down and touching you, surrounding you, you would feel scared and you would think that you couldn’t breathe. But gradually, you would realize that you were breathing, because otherwise you would be dead. You would still be scared, but after a while, a long while, you would begin to feel safe. Safe and private because you were alone.

He found himself thinking about the needles. His mother’s needles. Then he thought about his mother. He pushed the thoughts away, burying them in the out-of-the-way corner of his mind where he stored all the things he didn’t want to think about. The black corner was even better than a closed closet; it was like a black hole.

He looked again at the sleeping woman and walked toward
her bed. He could see her pale, pretty face, her short black hair. She was twenty-nine years old. Twenty-nine years old, three months, and four days. She had not had a long life.

He slipped his hand into his jacket and found the leather cord. The surgical gloves were so thin that as he stretched the cord tightly between both hands, he could feel the slightly rough texture of the leather. Whoever invented surgical gloves deserved some sort of prize, he thought. They were like an extra layer of skin, but better, because they would leave no prints.

He climbed onto the bed, turned her on her back, and straddled her sleeping body, kneeling with a bent leg on either side of her. Holding the cord in his left hand, he opened the button on his jeans and pulled down his zipper with his right. He wasn’t wearing any underwear. He never did. It made him excited to feel his stiffness pushing against his pants, aching to get out. Or should he say to get in?

Aroused to the point of pain, he slipped on a condom and looked down at her. She was still asleep.

“You’re making this too easy,” he said.

Reaching down between his legs, he pulled up her nightgown and gathered it around her abdomen.

Her eyes opened. Seeing him above her, feeling the press of his knees against her body, holding her there, she gasped.

He stretched the leather cord between both hands again and lowered it onto her neck, applying just enough pressure to let her know how easy it would be for him to kill her with it.

Staring up at him, her eyes bulged with fear.

“The more scared you are, the hotter I get,” he said.

Her mouth opened, but she was too frightened to scream.

Still pressing the cord across her throat, he lowered himself on top of her.

“The astrological aspects are good for this. They really are. At least mine are.”

She felt him working his way inside her and started to cry. Unable to look at him, she closed her eyes. She never opened them again.

When he was through, he thought about how simple it had been. All the planning he’d put into it was worth it. For a moment he regretted that he’d decided on her first, because her house was so isolated. That had its advantages, of course, which was why he’d picked her, but now he realized it would take a while before someone found out what he’d done, and he wasn’t sure he was happy about that. He consoled himself by thinking that someone would find her eventually. As invisible as he was that night, soon, through her, he would be very visible.

A
SAFE PLACE? MARRIAGE
is not. At least not for me, Kelly thought. I don’t even know why I would wake up thinking about it.

But maybe it wasn’t really marriage her dreaming mind had been thinking about, she reflected; maybe it was feeling safe. She felt cozy in her bed. Yet warm and comfortable as she felt ensconced under her duvet, maybe her dreaming mind, like her waking mind, was preoccupied with the fact that suddenly everything about her life had changed, and feeling safe was something she could no longer take for granted.

She looked around her room. It was filled with things she liked, things she’d inherited from her grandmother and parents and things that she’d collected herself. Old things mostly and things from faraway places. A tall, graceful, yellow and violet art nouveau vase; a squat blue, green, and white rosewood pot; a one-hundred-year-old wooden mask from the Himalayas; a lavender piano shawl embroidered with pastel-colored flowers; a 1920s wicker child’s chair that she used as a plant stand. All of them were as familiar and comfortable to her as her bed, and she loved being surrounded by them.

Kelly felt the sudden pressure of her red cat, Meow, pushing against her leg, stretching in her sleep. She glanced down next to her bed at King, her white Siberian husky, awake in his dog bed,
waiting for her to get up. His bright blue eyes met her dark blue eyes, and he gave her a good morning howl. Often he and the cat got up in the middle of the night and went downstairs; King would scratch on the inside door to her housekeeper Emma’s garden apartment on the basement level of the brownstone; and Emma, good soul, would wake up and let them stay with her. But today, King and Meow had remained with Kelly. She smiled, glad to have them close to her; it made her feel secure, a feeling that she cherished more and more because recently she had experienced it less and less.

She turned to the clock on her night table. It was 8:25.

“You must be famished,” she said to King.

He howled again, as if to agree.

Kelly got out of bed, pushed her blond, curly hair out of her eyes, and walked to the windows. Opening the curtains, she looked out at the treetops on West 85th Street. It was the third week in October, and, despite ten days of Indian summer, the leaves were changing color. She’d had a view of the same trees for most of her life, ever since she was nine years old and had moved into the brownstone to live with her grandmother following her parents’ accident. The only time she’d lived anywhere else was for the two years she’d been at Northwestern and the three years she’d been married to Jack and they’d lived in Kings Point. When she and Jack had separated, her grandmother had asked if Kelly wanted to move back into the brownstone on 85th with her children, Jeffrey, who had been one and a half, and Julie, who had been four months old. Kelly had been grateful for the offer, as grateful as she’d been as a child when her grandmother had taken her in after her parents’ death. The brownstone had become her refuge after she’d lost her parents, it had become her refuge again when she’d left Jack, and it was her refuge now.

Turning away from the window, she focused on the carved table that held her family photographs: a snapshot of her grandmother, Irene, her white hair in a not-very-neat bun, her open, friendly face virtually unlined; her parents’ wedding photo: her mother slim and beautiful in her wedding gown, her hair short and cut like a French movie star from the 1950s, her father in a tuxedo, looking more severe than Kelly remembered him, his hair brushed back flat, his usually playful eyes hidden behind wire-rimmed glasses; a photo of herself at eight, tall for her age and looking very much as she did today. In the photo, she was smiling a big, toothy smile, the smile of a child whose parents were loving and alive and seemed as if they would live forever.

Her eyes settled on her photos of her own children. They were both tall like her and her ex-husband, and they had inherited Jack’s black hair and strong features. Kelly had taken the photo of Julie in June, right after Julie’s high school graduation. Julie, in her cap and gown, was grinning proudly. Her black hair, usually as unruly as Kelly’s, was pinned up neatly under her cap, and her brown eyes shone with excitement about her future. Jack had been there that day, too, and taken his own photos of Julie. That was how it was; she and Jack saw and communicated with each other when they had to, but they were very separate, even when they were in the same place.

Jeff’s photo was taken last spring, during his freshman year at USC. Kelly had gone to Los Angeles to visit him, and Jeff’s roommate had snapped a picture of her with Jeff. Jeff’s arm was around her, and he and Kelly were both laughing. Every time his roommate had gotten ready to snap a picture, Kelly had sneezed, and when she finally managed to stop, she and Jeff couldn’t stop laughing.