Horoscope: The Astrology Murders (3 page)

Looking at her children, she felt a profound sense of longing.
Julie was at UCLA now, close to Jeff at USC, but three thousand miles from Kelly. She missed them so deeply that at times she felt bereft, as if she would never see them again. She knew it was nonsense, of course. She had encouraged them to go; she wanted them to have their own lives. She wanted them to be free of burdens, most of all any sense that she was a burden. She would never tell them how she felt, because she knew it was irrational. Gazing at their photos, she realized that not only did she miss them, she also missed the sense of freedom she had felt at the time when the photographs were taken.

Despite missing them, she was aware that she was a very fortunate person, and she was grateful for it. She felt grateful for her home and grateful that she worked at home. In fact, she didn’t know what she would do if she had to work somewhere else.

Emma was at the kitchen stove when she heard Kelly’s footsteps and King’s loud tromping on the staircase. She was sixty-eight, generous, and oversized in every way: large boned, ample bodied, with a heart almost as big as her broad chest. She had come to New York from Ireland when she was nineteen to work as a housekeeper for Kelly’s grandmother, who had been confined to a wheelchair. Growing up, Emma had helped take care of her eleven younger siblings, and by the time she was nineteen, taking care of people was second nature to her, as it still was. As she often did lately, Emma felt relieved knowing that Kelly was out of bed, ready to start her day. Things might not be as they should be, but at least in some ways Kelly was going about her routine.

Kelly walked into the kitchen, accompanied by King and Meow. She’d pinned her hair back with two barrettes and was
wearing the green blouse she’d found in a thrift shop, her long black skirt, and an enameled necklace from India. Emma thought she looked lovely.

“Good morning,” Kelly said on the way to the cabinet over the sink to get her coffee cup.

Emma looked at King and Meow. “I see you brought the army.” She addressed them directly now: “Don’t fret, you two. I’ve got breakfast all prepared.”

While Kelly poured herself a cup of coffee, Emma took the pets’ bowls of food from the counter and placed them on the floor. King and Meow immediately began eating, slurping their food and chewing it noisily.

“Look at them!” Emma complained good-naturedly. “They eat like animals!”

“They can’t help it,” Kelly said, spooning the oatmeal Emma had made into a bowl. “They’re Tauruses. You know how much Tauruses love their food.”

“I know how much
these
Tauruses love their food. You may think they’re a dog and a cat, but they’re both pigs!”

Kelly laughed, poured milk into her oatmeal and brought it with her coffee to the oak table that dominated the kitchen. She had just begun to eat when her assistant, Sarah, appeared in the doorway with a fretting look on her pretty face.

“You’ve got only fifteen minutes,” Sarah said, her eyes on the wall clock, its hands indicating that it was 8:45. “Your first client is coming at nine, and after that you’ve got a full day.” Without waiting for a response, she started back toward her office.

“Good morning!” Kelly called after her.

“Good morning to you, too!” Sarah called from the hallway. “Hurry up!”

“Looks like I’m going to have to eat fast, too,” Kelly said to
Emma. “And I’m not even a Taurus.”

“Just make sure you don’t eat too fast,” Emma admonished her. “You’ve got to take better care of yourself, Kelly.”

Kelly shook her head and said dismissively, “Oh, Emma!”

She hated that Emma had begun to worry and that she’d given her a reason to worry. She hoped that soon everything would be normal again, and in the meantime, she wanted to pretend that it already was and for Emma to pretend it was, too. She could tell by the look in Emma’s gentle gray eyes that she knew this, and that, for the moment, at least, she was willing to go along with Kelly’s wishes.

But Kelly couldn’t pretend to herself that things were normal now. Even in the moments during the day when she felt all right, she knew the only reason she did was that she was home. Her home was the only place she felt safe. One morning she’d woken up and had been about to go out to walk King, as she’d done most mornings since she’d gotten him. But that morning she’d stood in the front doorway, terrified to step over the threshold into the outside world. She’d felt that if she went out, something horrible would happen to her. She’d stood there, sweating, trembling, her heart beating hard, certain that if she went out, she would die. That had been weeks ago, and ever since then, she’d lived with the fear that the only way to stay alive was not to go out beyond the confines of her house and walled-in garden.

As an astrologer, she knew that Pluto was conjuncting—almost on top of—her Mars in the tenth house, the house of reputation and status, a difficult aspect that heightened her anxiety about public exposure, but this didn’t fully explain the abrupt onset of the new fear she had developed. Why had she suddenly become anxious about leaving the house, something she had always enjoyed doing?

Besides the astrological influence, she deeply felt there was a psychological component to it, too. As a psychologist, she knew there was a term for her condition—she had a panic disorder: agoraphobia. She didn’t know what part of her psyche had brought this on, and, although she recognized that Pluto conjuncting her Mars was increasing the emotional sensitivity that was always part of her makeup as a Pisces, no matter how much she talked to herself and told herself that her fear of leaving the house made no rational sense, it did no good. She felt as if she’d lost control of herself, and until she could understand the psychological component of what was causing her fear, all she could do was to keep hoping that one morning her agoraphobia would go away just as one morning it had appeared.

Sarah sat in her office and addressed an envelope to a client Kelly had seen the week before, a woman who had come to Kelly wanting to know if she should move to Chicago to live near her daughter. But Sarah wasn’t thinking about the client or even the numbers and letters in the address she was copying from the form the client had filled out. She was thinking about Janáček’s String Quartet no. 1, the piece she was practicing for a concert, thinking about the rehearsal schedule and wondering about whether she’d need to get one of the strings on her violin replaced. She was thinking about her mother in the convalescent home in Sheepshead Bay and wondering how she was feeling today. She was thinking about Kevin Stockman and what it would be like to see him again after the three months he’d been away, singing with opera companies in other parts of the world.

She was thinking about Kelly, whom she’d known since Kelly was eleven and she was six. Even when they were children,
Kelly had never treated Sarah condescendingly because she was younger, just as now she never pulled rank because she was Sarah’s boss. Though employer and employee, they were equals, which is what made it possible for Sarah to work for Kelly while she pursued her musical career and what made her care for Kelly so much.

Sarah loved that Kelly appreciated her intensity, her tendency to be precise and organized; indeed, Kelly understood these qualities and loved Sarah for them. Kelly also understood and loved the compassion and emotion that were sometimes hidden beneath Sarah’s well-ordered exterior. Sarah was a Virgo, with Virgo rising and a moon in Cancer, and Sarah knew that for Kelly, this meant Sarah was exactly as she was supposed to be.

Sarah’s office was just off the entry hall, to the left of the front door when clients came in. It led directly into Kelly’s office, which was at the front of the brownstone and had a street-level view of the same trees Kelly saw from her bedroom. Originally, both offices had formed a front parlor.

Many years ago, Kelly’s grandmother Irene had converted the parlor into a library and a den so that when she was downstairs and wanted to look through her books or to watch television, she wouldn’t have to go upstairs. Besides Emma, Irene had also had a nurse, Sarah’s mother, Rose. But during her whole long life Irene had been independent by nature, and even though she’d had an elevator installed at the rear of the house, once she had gone down to the first floor for breakfast, she had preferred to remain there rather than cause Rose or Emma to follow her from floor to floor as she pursued various activities.

As Rose’s daughter, Sarah had visited the brownstone often when she’d been a child, and she liked working there now for Kelly, but she knew that one day she would be leaving, when her
violin began demanding more of her time. She looked forward to that, and she knew Kelly did, too. They both hoped it would happen soon, as a result of Sarah’s upcoming concert. That was another thing Sarah was thinking about. She hoped that by the time she was ready to leave her job, Kelly would be all right again. She didn’t know what was wrong; she just knew that Kelly wasn’t as spontaneous as she usually was, that something was worrying her that she didn’t want to talk about, and that she seemed never to want to go out of the house.

The phone rang. She answered it as Kelly entered.

“Dr. Kelly Elizabeth York’s office,” Sarah said. “Oh, hello, Mr. Winokur …”

She looked up at Kelly, ready to hand her the phone, but Kelly indicated that Sarah should handle it and continued into her own office. “She’s in the middle of something at the moment,” Sarah said into the receiver. She listened for a while and then said, “Hold on a second. I’ll ask her.”

Sarah put the receiver on her desk and stuck her head into Kelly’s office. Kelly was already at her desk. “He wants to remind you about the fund-raising dinner at the beginning of next month. He said you haven’t RSVP’d yet.”

“Tell him I’ll send a check, but I’m sorry, I can’t go. Julie might be coming home.”

“I thought she wasn’t coming until Thanksgiving—”

“No. She changed her mind.” Kelly couldn’t quite look at Sarah when she said this, so instead she concentrated on taking the pencils from the top drawer and putting them in an old pewter mug on her desk. She didn’t like to lie, especially to the people closest to her, but she was just too ashamed to tell the truth.

Sarah saw that Kelly was avoiding her eyes. She thought of saying something to her, but Kelly continued busying herself
with arranging the pencils in the mug, so she returned to her office and picked up the receiver.

“She’s very sorry, Mr. Winokur, but her daughter will be coming home from school. She’ll send a contribution…. Yes, of course I’ll tell her, but I don’t think she’ll be able to.”

As Sarah was hanging up the phone, a nervous-looking man with light red hair stood on the steps of the brownstone and rang the bell. The day was warm and he was wearing a white business shirt and khaki pants. He carried the rolled-up copy of
Luminary World
magazine that he’d read on the subway on his way uptown. He rang the bell again, but before he even took his finger off it, a small, trim woman with fair skin, hazel eyes, and black hair down to her shoulders opened the door.

He looked her over and said, “You’re not Kelly York.”

“No, I’m her assistant, Sarah Stein.”

“I’m Lewis Farrell. I’m here to see Dr. York.”

Sarah moved out of the doorway so he could come in. “She’s expecting you.”

Sarah led him through her office into Kelly’s and then left, closing the door behind her.

Kelly rose from her chair and shook her new client’s hand. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Farrell.”

“Nice to meet you, too.”

He looked around Kelly’s office. A painting of the signs of the zodiac in vivid colors hung on the wall to his right; on the opposite wall were three filing cabinets. On top of the one nearest him was Kelly’s book:
Aspects for the New Millennium
by Kelly Elizabeth York, PhD. He glanced at her shyly. He’d seen her on a television interview show and he’d seen her photograph in
Luminary World
magazine, next to her column, but in person she was taller than he’d thought and the intelligence of her dark blue
eyes made him feel intimidated.

Finally, he spoke. “I read your column every week.”