Horoscope: The Astrology Murders (34 page)

Kelly finished trimming the fat off a piece of lamb that she was going to broil for her dinner. She was about to chop the broccoli she’d washed when the phone rang. She was so used to reacting to the sound with apprehension that she felt her body tense up, and she had to remind herself that it was over and she could relax. He wasn’t calling anymore; he was dead.

Picking up the phone and hearing her son saying, “Hi, Mom,” she laughed, and once she started, she found it hard to stop.

“What’s so funny?” Jeff asked her.

“Myself,” Kelly said. “I just …” She took a deep breath to calm herself down. “I just scare myself sometimes over nothing. How are you, darling?”

“I’m okay. What were you scared of?”

Kelly could hear the distress in her son’s voice. “I told you, honey,” she assured him, “it’s nothing. I’m fine. Just fine.”

“Okay,” he said, sounding better. “I just want to make sure you are.”

“You don’t have to take care of me,” Kelly told him. “I’m a grown-up. I can take care of myself. You have enough to do taking care of yourself.”

Jeff laughed. “That’s true,” he said, “especially taking five courses this semester.”

Kelly smiled; she loved knowing how hardworking and responsible an adult her son was becoming.

“Love you, Mom,” he said.

“Love you, too, honey.”

“Only a few more weeks until Thanksgiving and Julie and I come home.”

“Can’t wait,” Kelly told him.

Hanging up the phone, she felt that things were finally back to normal. Then she looked into the hall outside the kitchen, saw the front door, and felt her body tense up again. She was still afraid to leave her house. And that meant that even though her life was no longer in danger, things might never really be normal again.

S
ARAH SAT NEXT
to her mother’s bed, filling in her parents on the events of the last few days and their victorious outcome.

“He told Kelly on the phone he was going to get even with her because she made a woman leave him,” she said. “But it turned out he didn’t have a wife or girlfriend, so Kelly never consulted with a woman who was thinking of leaving him. He must’ve just said that so she wouldn’t be able to figure out who he was.”

Sarah was about to tell her parents what Emma had recounted to her about Kelly realizing who the man was from reworking his chart when she noticed that her mother was staring at her. Not staring with fascination or relief or confusion but with alarm. Sarah wondered if something had happened to her mother related to the stroke; then she saw that Rose’s lips were parting and she was trying to speak, but no sound was coming out of her mouth.

“What is it, Mom?” Sarah asked.

Sam pulled his chair over to his wife’s bed, too. “What is it, doll?”

Rose closed her lips and tried again; this time a word came out. “Helen,” she said.

“Helen?” Sarah asked.

With great effort, Rose nodded.

Sam turned to his daughter. “She must mean Helen Heath.”
He faced his wife again. “Helen Heath?”

For a moment, Rose just stared at him, her lips moving noiselessly. Then she said, “Yes.”

K
ELLY STOOD IN THE
greenhouse with her crutches, picking herbs to go with the lamb she was making for dinner. It had been a long day, and so much had happened that she was still in the process of absorbing it all. The moon shone through the greenhouse roof, illuminating the plants with a white glow, making the night seem magical. She gathered a handful of sage and rosemary, left the greenhouse, and walked up the slate steps. As she opened the rear door to the kitchen, she heard the phone ring, and for the first time in days didn’t feel frightened. She locked the door and walked with her crutches to the phone, wondering if Jeff was calling back or if it was Julie or Michelle and Mark.

The phone was still ringing when she picked up the receiver. She was about to say hello when she heard a man’s whispered voice, the same voice that she’d heard before.

“So you don’t have a monitor on your phone anymore,” he whispered.

At the sound of his voice, Kelly stopped breathing and felt herself growing faint. Only the crutches were holding her up. “I thought you were—”

“It doesn’t matter what you thought I was,” he whispered, venom in every word. “What matters is that I know what you did. You told her to leave. You didn’t care about me. You didn’t care about what my life would become.”

Kelly’s mind was whirling in confusion. She didn’t know how he could still be alive, and she didn’t know what he was accusing her of, but whatever it was, she knew he was wrong. She struggled against blacking out as she cried, “That’s not true. I—”

He continued as if she weren’t speaking. “Just like now I don’t care about your life,” he said.

She couldn’t listen to him anymore; she just couldn’t, not if she wanted to keep her sanity. She slammed the phone down and looked around the kitchen at the familiar things that she lived with every day and tried to remind herself that she was safe. She told herself she would call Detective Stevens.

The sharp crack of shattering glass broke the silence like a gunshot. She turned and saw a man letting himself into the kitchen through the garden door. His hand was reaching through the broken pane of glass to unlock the door. She stared at him, transfixed and frozen.

“Guess I don’t need this anymore,” he said, opening the door and slipping his iPhone into his pocket.

He was in his early twenties, tall and thin, with a tangle of blond hair, and he was wearing coveralls stained with paint. She’d seen him that morning and the day before when he was painting her house.

She continued staring at him, barely breathing. It was hard for her to speak, but she did. “I know you …”

“No, you don’t know me,” he said. “You just know I painted your house. You don’t even know my name, do you?”

As he looked at Kelly, his light brown eyes were as cold as his whispered voice had been on the phone. She could see how much he hated her. And he was right; she didn’t know his name.

“Peter,” he said. “Peter Heath. Does the name
Heath
ring a bell?”

Still staring at him, Kelly wished she could give him the right answer; she knew that her life depended on it; but she couldn’t. His name meant nothing to her.

King ran into the kitchen, carrying his new bone. He looked at Kelly and Peter. Kelly waited anxiously as the dog looked from her to the man who had invaded her house. She expected King to pick up her fear and to attack Peter, but the dog, the bone in his teeth, walked over to Peter, wagging his tail.

Peter petted King’s nose and spoke to him calmly in a manner that King would interpret as affectionate. “So you like my little present,” he said.

The dog nuzzled against Peter.

“Let’s play a game,” Peter said. He gently pried the bone from King’s mouth and tossed it into the front hall. King immediately ran after the bone. When the dog was in the hall, Peter closed the door, leaving King on the other side of it and him and Kelly alone in the kitchen.

“You gave him the bone,” Kelly said, meeting his gaze.

Peter smiled. “I figured it would make this easier.” He reached into his pocket and took out a wood scraper with a blade as sharp as a knife and held it up for Kelly.

“I could’ve killed him,” he said, “but I’ve always liked dogs. And besides, I was saving this for you. It’s got a beautiful blade, don’t you think?” He glanced admiringly at the thin, pointed blade. “Look at the power of it, Kelly.”

She felt her helplessness as she stood there on her crutches, gazing into eyes that despised her and that wanted to see her dead. The knife she’d been using to cut the lamb and vegetables for her dinner was on the other counter, out of her reach; all she had to fight him with was what she knew about people.

“Don’t let it control you, Peter,” she said. “You’re bigger than
that blade. You have the power to put it aside.”

“Don’t try to mind fuck me!” he shouted at her, his face reddening with rage.

Kelly heard King jumping up and scratching the other side of the kitchen door. She turned toward the door, hoping to find that he’d been able to open it, but Peter had closed the door tightly and King’s attempts did nothing but produce futile noise.

“Poor King,” Peter said to her with mock sympathy. “He can’t protect you.”

He looked as if he was going to say something else, but before he did, the phone started to ring.

“Don’t answer that!” he shouted.

As the phone continued ringing, he came closer to Kelly with the razor-sharp wood scraper. On the fourth ring, the answering machine picked up, and Kelly heard her recorded voice answering as it had so many thousands of times before. “This is Kelly York. Sorry I can’t get to the phone. Please leave a message.”

There was a brief pause and then a beep before Sarah’s voice came through the answering machine.

“Hi, Kelly. It’s Sarah. It’s probably not important anymore, but I thought you should know. Peter Heath’s father, Joe, he’s a drinker, and he used to be Ed’s partner in Ace Painting. Joe’s wife, Helen, came to you for her chart just before she left him. It must’ve been twenty years ago. I know the FBI says it’s the man they shot who was calling you, but I thought you should know about Helen leaving Joe after she saw you, since the man on the phone kept blaming you for making a woman leave him. I’m sure it doesn’t matter. See you tomorrow.”

Kelly heard a
click
as Sarah ended the phone call. Then she heard the tape with her greeting rewind. All the while she silently repeated to herself the name
Helen Heath
. Desperately,
she searched her memories to find the woman who matched the name, going back twenty years to when she’d been twenty-one years old and her grandmother had been alive. She and Jack had been living in Kings Point, and she’d been pregnant with Jeff. She hadn’t started doing charts professionally then; she’d done only one or two of them because her grandmother had asked her to.

She remembered doing the first chart … Then she remembered Helen Heath.

She looked at Peter and saw that his face had turned white, but his eyes were filled with no less rage and his hand still held the blade steadily as he pointed it at her chest from two feet away.

“I remember your mother,” she said quietly. “My grand mother asked me to do a chart for Sarah’s mother, Rose. Rose was my grandmother’s nurse. Your mother was Rose’s friend. Rose asked me to do her chart.”

Peter said nothing; he just looked at her, and she could see that beneath his rage was a deep hurt, a hurt that she knew could be just as deadly as the anger it had turned into. But she felt that if she could make him hear her … if only she could make him hear her …

“I never told your mother to leave,” she said. “And she wouldn’t have left, even if I had. She loved you too much to leave. I remember her talking about you. It touched me how much she loved you.”

“Liar!” he screamed. “You made her leave!”

“Peter, please listen to me—” she begged.

He advanced on her with the blade. “I didn’t even know what happened till my father got so sick I had to give up my job in California to fucking come home and take care of him! That’s when he told me that she saw you, and that the next day she walked out! That’s why I asked Ed if I could take over for my
father on his painting crew, so if your house needed painting, I could get in here. And it did need painting, didn’t it? And then you had your ‘accident’ on the stairs.”

He looked at her, not with satisfaction about the success of his plans, but with anger so great that it consumed him. It made his body rigid with hate, and Kelly knew that if she could not stop him, it would lead him to end her life.

“I told you, Peter, I—”

He stopped her again. “You made him suffer, and I wanted him to see you suffer. And we did. Both of us. That’s why I put the surveillance equipment in here, so we could both see you suffer!”

“Your father made your mother suffer,” Kelly said, trembling. “I remember, because she cried the whole time she was talking to me. She—”

“Shut up!” he screamed.

“Your mother was scared of him,” she continued, “but she wanted to stay because of you. She wanted to know what she should do to get him to stop drinking, so he wouldn’t beat her. She asked me to do his chart for her, and I did. And I tried to—”

Before Kelly knew it, Peter grabbed her, knocking one of her crutches to the floor as he pulled her around and held the blade to her throat. “My whole life would be different if it wasn’t for you and your fucking astrology!” he shouted.

She could feel the blade’s edge against the skin of her neck. All at once something came to her, not something she remembered from her talk with Helen Heath, but something that she
felt
. “You tried to protect her from him, didn’t you? You were only four or five. There was nothing you could do—”

“I said shut up!” This time his voice wavered.

Terrified, she forced herself to continue. “Then he turned his
anger on you.”

“Because you made him!” he shouted. “Because you made her leave! It all happened because of you.”

She heard him start to cry, and she could feel that although he was still holding the blade to her neck, his hand was shaking and the blade was no longer pressing against her throat. A surge of adrenaline shot through her, and she reached up, took hold of the wood scraper, and pulled it down and away from her with all her strength. It came loose from his hand and fell to the kitchen floor. Instantly, she swooped down and picked it up, and as he bent down to take it from her, a primal violence rose within her. She picked up the crutch that had fallen to the floor and started beating him over the head with it until he slumped to the floor, unconscious, his head bleeding.

With the blade in her hand, she moved on her crutches as rapidly as she could to the kitchen door where King was scratching and howling. She opened the door and hurried down the hall toward the front door, unlocked both locks, opened the door, and faced the street. Standing on the threshold, looking out onto 85th Street, she was breathing hard and her body was drenched with sweat. She gripped the doorjamb, scared to leave and scared to stay.