Horoscope: The Astrology Murders (4 page)

She smiled warmly. “Thank you.” She let her blue eyes rest on him. They were nice eyes, accepting eyes, and they made him feel calmer.

“I have a question for you—”

“Good,” she said. “But first, please write down the time, date, and place of your birth. That’s the information I’ll need. And write down your address and e-mail address, too.”

“Sure,” he responded.

She handed a legal pad and pencil to him across the desk.

He placed his rolled-up copy of
Luminary World
on the desktop. She noticed that it was opened to her column. Across the top of the page was the name of the column, “The Stars,” and her byline, Kelly Elizabeth York, PhD, Intuitive Astrologer. Below that was the airbrushed photo of her that she hated.

She observed him as he wrote on the sheet of yellow paper. He was in his late twenties; judging from his manner, he was self-conscious and earnest. She watched as he erased the word
February
and wrote it over, this time more neatly. She wondered if he was obsessive-compulsive or just overly careful. When he finished writing, he gave her back the pad and pencil. He glanced at her only momentarily and then gazed again at the painting of the zodiac signs.

She read the information he’d written aloud. “Born 10:30 a.m., February 4, 1986, Greensboro, North Carolina.” She looked up at him, but he was still gazing at the painting. “You’re sure of the time and place? It makes a difference in determining the positions of the planets in your chart.”

He looked at her now and nodded. “Yes, I’m sure.”

“So you’re an Aquarius …”

“Yes.”

She noticed that he was clasping his hands tightly on his lap, like a child who wanted to make sure the adults around him knew that he was well behaved.

“Please, Lewis. Relax. There’s nothing to be anxious about.”

He looked down at his lap, unclasped his hands, and laughed at himself. It was the first spontaneous moment he’d had since coming into her office. Kelly felt it was a hopeful sign, the fact that he could laugh at himself. And he was looking at her directly now, another hopeful sign that he was capable, with some guidance and support, at least, of enjoying himself.

She breathed a deep sigh. “That’s better.”

He laughed again. “Yeah, it is. I’ve never had a chart done before. I guess I just don’t know what to expect, and I’m a little uptight.”

“Today I’m just gathering information. Then I’ll do your natal chart and send it to you with a written explanation. I’ll also tell you what the transits indicate for you for the next twelve months.” She saw the blank look in his eyes and continued. “Transits are the way the movement of the planets at a given time will affect you, because of the placement of the planets in your chart. It’s why astrologers say that a particular time is propitious for a certain activity and not for another.” She smiled warmly at him again. “You said you had a question—”

“It has to do with my girlfriend. We’ve been dating for two years. I’m thinking about asking her to move in with me.”

“I’ll need her date, time, and place of birth, too. Do you know it?”

“I saw it on her birth certificate when she applied for her passport. She was born in Forest Hills on December 26, 1989, at three p.m.”

“In Queens?” Kelly asked as she took notes.

“Yes. Her parents still live there.”

“She’s a Capricorn, but of course you know that. I’ll have to check her rising sign, her moon, and her other planets, especially where her Venus is located, and compare them with yours. I’m sure you care for each other a lot or you wouldn’t be considering living together.”

She watched to see how he’d react to this and saw his face break into a smile; just thinking about her seemed to make him happy. “We do … At least I do. I’m not sure how Laura feels. She’s very quiet.”

“That’s not unusual with Capricorns,” she said reassuringly. “They’re not always big on talking about their feelings.”

He nodded again.

“It seems to me you may not really be wondering whether you want Laura to move in with you. You may just be anxious about asking her because you don’t know how she’ll answer you. And you’re anxious that even if she says yes, it may not work out.”

Now it was Lewis Farrell’s turn to sigh deeply. “That about sums it up.”

“I’m not going to tell you that you should ask her or that you shouldn’t. I’ll tell you what your charts tell me about your personality, character, and needs, and Laura’s. I’ll tell you about the areas where you’re most compatible and the areas that will be challenging. And I’ll tell you approaches for resolving those challenges. If that’s all right with you, I’ll do your charts. If not, we’ll just say goodbye and wish each other well.”

Her dark blue eyes were still on him. They didn’t display the least suggestion of judgment or impatience. He wondered why he had found her intimidating.

“I’d like you to do the charts,” he said.

“Fine. I’d like that, too.”

She stood up and shook his hand again before showing him into the waiting room, where Sarah would have him write a check for $550 for the two charts she would be preparing.

Alone in her office, she wrote down her impressions of him on the same sheet on which he’d written the information she’d asked for. She had a feeling that she could help him. While she was studying psychology, she’d read that the psychoanalyst C. G. Jung, one of Freud’s disciples, had used astrology as well as psychology to help his patients. Jung had said that astrology contained all that the ancient world had learned about human psychology and behavior. She’d already learned astrology from her grandmother, and she believed that Jung was right; there was wisdom in astrology just as there was in contemporary psychology.

A true astrologer didn’t focus only on identifying the influence of the planets’ positions at a given time on the different parts of a person’s life—love and work, to use Freud’s famous words—or on looking at future potentialities in those areas; a true astrologer used the positions of the planets and moon at the time of a person’s birth as a tool to analyze personality and character, to learn about that person’s potential talents, strengths, and weaknesses. As Jung had put it, “We are born at a given moment in a given place, and like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season in which we are born.”

Astrology and psychology were both means of helping people. And that was what Kelly loved doing; helping people gave her life purpose, and she needed purpose, especially now. Reflecting on this, she asked herself for the millionth time why Kelly Elizabeth York—KEY—whom so many people considered the key to solving their problems, couldn’t solve her own.

I
T WAS JUST BEFORE
six o’clock and the end of Kelly’s workday. She’d seen five clients after Lewis Farrell and had repeated the same process with all of them. It wasn’t quite sunset yet, but the sky was already darkening. She felt a little tired, but in a good way, a productive way. She was taking notes on her last client, a woman of fifty who was thinking about embarking on a new career, when Sarah knocked and came into her office. Kelly looked up.

“I’ve got an extra ticket to the opera tonight, and I’d like you to come. They’re doing
Faust
. My father was supposed to go, but he’s visiting my mother, and he wants to stay with her for the whole evening.”

“How is she?” Kelly asked.

“Her doctor says she’s doing well. She’s gotten back more movement in her left arm. But she’s still not able to talk yet.”

“Please tell your father to send her my love.”

“I will. How about going to
Faust
with me? Kevin’s singing the title role.”

“I wish I could, but—” she looked at the pages with her clients’ information spread out on her desk—”I’ve got too much work to do.”

“You’ve been at it all day. Why not just take the night off?”

Kelly picked up her pen again. “I can’t. I don’t want to fall
behind. Congratulate Kevin for me.”

The way Kelly said this, Sarah knew the subject was closed. She watched, concerned, as Kelly began to write again on the sheet of yellow paper in front of her. Sarah sighed, went back to her office, and put on her coat. Emma was standing at the rear of the hallway, outside the kitchen, drying her hands on her apron when Sarah emerged from her office.

“She’s not going,” Sarah told her.

“But she loves opera! And not even to see Kevin?”

“She didn’t even consider it.”

Emma’s face was as despondent as Sarah’s voice had been when she delivered the news. For a moment they just looked at each other; then Sarah shrugged sadly and left for the night.

In her office, Kelly sat at her desk, miserable. She was ashamed of lying, of pretending it was her work that kept her from going to the opera and from visiting Sarah’s mother, Rose. She’d known Rose most of her life, and she loved her—Rose had been as important a part of her growing up as Emma had been—yet in the weeks since Rose had had a stroke, all Kelly had been able to do was to write her a letter telling her how much she loved her and wanted her to get well and to send flowers with Sarah when Sarah visited her. Kelly was sure Sarah knew, just as Emma knew, that it was something other than the demands of her schedule that was making her act as she did, but so far they hadn’t forced her to talk about the problem.

She looked at herself in the mirror on the wall opposite her desk. The satisfaction she’d felt from her work moments before had vanished. She looked as miserable as she felt.

H
E’D NEVER BEEN TO
New Kent but he’d driven through it several times on his way to somewhere else. Tonight it was his destination. He parked in the upscale neighborhood where she lived, a block from her house, under a large evergreen that all but hid his car. Not that he was worried about anyone remembering what kind of car it was anyway; it was a fawn-beige Toyota, like millions of others you saw on the road. There was no reason to look at it twice.

He’d lucked out again. The streetlamps on the block she lived on were spaced far apart, and there were so many trees blocking their light that they didn’t do much good anyway. The moon, blocked by the trees, too, was just a glimmering, ineffectual presence on the street. He was wearing his black clothes again, and he felt like he blended into the night.

He walked up the driveway to her house. Unlike the last woman he had visited, she had left the porch light on. He didn’t wait until he got to the porch to put on the surgical gloves. He slipped them on and took the keys from his pocket—two of them this time—before he left the shadowed driveway. When he got to the front door, he felt exposed. He knew that someone passing by might see him there under the porch light. But he forced himself not to look over his shoulder as he unlocked the door. He just did it quickly, and did it as if he belonged there. He did,
after all, didn’t he? It was part of his job, his vocation, his destiny.

Once inside, he put on the ski mask and stared through the eye slits into the darkness until he could see the staircase that he knew would be there. It wasn’t until he was on the first step that he realized the stairs were uncarpeted. He ascended slowly, carefully, mentally reducing his body mass so that he was just the phantom, weightless essence of himself, making sure she could not hear him on the stairs.

He reached the second floor and stepped onto a rug. For a while, he just stood there and waited. When his eyes got used to seeing in the small amount of light that came through a window at the end of the hall, he saw that the door across from him was open. He walked slowly to the wall on the left side of the doorway and listened. Nothing. No breathing. No turning in her sleep. Just silence. It reminded him of how his mother had slept. At least that was how she slept when she wasn’t having nightmares. When she had nightmares, she would scream in her sleep, and then she would get up, she would come into his room, and scream at him, and that’s when she would punish him.

With a surge of anger, he made his way toward another open doorway down the hall. Again all he heard was silence. His eyes focused on a third doorway at the end of the hall. Even before he reached it, he could hear her breathing in her sleep inside the room.

Her bedroom floor was covered with a thick white carpet. He knew it was white because of the tiny night-light she’d plugged into the wall just inside the doorway. He walked over to the bed, savoring each soundless step as it brought him closer to her. Taking out his leather cord, he saw her naked shoulders and realized that she was nude under the cover.

He peeled back the blanket and straddled her. A moment
later, he was undoing his pants and pulling on the condom. Suddenly, she was awake, and he saw the terror in her face as she stared up at him. She picked up her head, and her long brown hair spilled onto the pillow.

“No, please!” Her voice came out as a hoarse cry.

He stretched the cord across her throat. “Say one more word and I’ll kill you.”

She grabbed his arm and tried to push him away with a strength that momentarily surprised him, but it only made him more excited. He applied more pressure on the cord across her throat until she was so scared she stopped fighting.

He was hard as he lowered himself down on top of her.

“The transits aren’t too good for you right now. I guess that’s not a surprise, though, is it?”

K
ELLY HAD BARELY EATEN
anything for dinner. She’d spent the evening doing charts for clients and had become so engrossed that she hadn’t even thought about food. When she’d finally remembered that she hadn’t eaten anything since lunch, she’d gone into the kitchen and picked at leftovers from the refrigerator. Emma had been out all evening with Donald, whom she still referred to as her “friend,” although it was clear to Kelly and Sarah and anyone else who might have met Donald and Emma together that he was her boyfriend. Kelly was glad that Emma had someone, and she was glad that Emma hadn’t been home to see how little she’d eaten and worry even more about her.

It had been almost twelve-thirty when she’d finally stopped working and gone to bed. First she’d taken a bath, to relax her body and try to relax her mind. The hot water had begun to make her feel sleepy, and as she’d put on her nightgown, she knew it wouldn’t be long before she fell asleep. She’d gotten under the covers and had immediately felt Meow jump onto the bed and nestle in the crook of her leg. King, already in his dog bed, had looked up at her to make sure she was all right before he’d closed his eyes. She had listened to Meow’s steady purring and seamlessly drifted into asleep.