Valentine (39 page)

Cass, he thought. For you, Cass. This silence is for you.

Then the music reached him. It had continued throughout, he supposed, though he hadn’t been aware of it; bizarre underscoring for the scene on the dock. He nearly laughed aloud: the devil was dead, his sister had been avenged, the world had been made right again—and all to the tune of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.”

And with the music came the rest. The startled cries from the house behind him. The slamming of the screen door and the approach of running footsteps. The sudden, almost electric shock as his sanity at last returned to him. And the other voice, the one that came up from somewhere deep inside him and rushed out through his lips.

“
No!
”

He ran. He threw himself forward, down the length of the dock, shouting the word again. “
No!
” Cass was gone, and nothing would bring her back, not even his love. “
No!
” Sharon Williams and Belinda
Rosenberg Kessler, whom he had never known, had never met, but who had others who loved them as he loved Cass. “
No!
” Now this woman, Jillian Talbot, was in the lake ahead of him, a pregnant woman with a mother, and friends who loved her, and a life; a vital, purposeful life. “
No!
”

With that final cry he ran, and then he leaped, and he dived into the black, freezing water.

The numbness spread through him instantly as the cold assaulted his senses, but he barely noticed it. He stroked mightily with his arms and legs, forcing himself down deeper, deeper into the blackness. Some force, some power almost beyond him had taken control of his body. He stroked again, thinking,
No!
This woman will not die.

His outstretched hand made contact, grasping something soft and fleshy: the exposed brain of Victor Dimorta. With a shock of revulsion, he yanked his hand away and reached lower, to the shoulders. He shoved with all his strength, and the bleeding corpse fell aside, floating languorously off into the darkness. David reached down with his right hand, and it sank into mud. He felt blindly around the bottom of the lake until his hands at last discovered her. He pulled her up by the hair, tucked his arm under her chin, and pushed off with his legs from the lake floor. They shot swiftly up and broke the surface.

As he drew in an enormous gulp of air, he looked furiously around him, trying to orient himself, but he couldn’t see anything in the snowy darkness. She was not moving, not breathing; she was dead weight against him. Just as he was beginning to panic, he heard the most wonderful sound he’d ever heard: the deafening splash as something large arrived in the water nearby. Massive, powerful arms reached out for him. Between them, he and Mike Feldman dragged her some twenty feet to the dock. David grasped the nearest piling and clung to it as the big man raised her body up, and other arms reached down for her.

Then Mike grabbed him and pushed him over to the ladder. He muttered something to Mike about the body in the lake, and he pointed over to where he had surfaced with Jill. Then he pulled himself up the rungs and fell forward, landing facedown on the dock. He heard shouting around him, and running footsteps, and the splashing underneath him as Mike climbed the ladder. He wasn’t sure how long he lay there: he seemed to have lost all sense of time passing. The soft snow continued to fall on him as gentle hands reached out to cover him with a blanket. Gradually, he became aware of the other sounds: a hundred sirens, filling the night.

The shrill wail of the sirens faded and died, followed almost immediately by the sounds of other
feet arriving and pounding swiftly down the length of the dock. He pushed down with his hands and brought himself up to his knees in time to see several figures in bright orange drop to the dock around the still form of Jillian Talbot.

He heard muffled pounding and sharp voices barking instructions, but he couldn’t see through the clutch of orange jackets. The gentle hands reached down to pull the blanket more securely around him, and he looked up into the kindly, concerned, beautiful face of Gwen Feldman.

“My God!” she whispered. “What on earth happened, Richard?”

He stared at her, thinking, Richard? Who’s Richard—? Then he remembered. It was the only name these people knew him by. Richard, his lover, was dead.

His teeth were chattering so violently that for a moment he could not speak. He looked over at the orange jackets, then his gaze traveled down the length of the dock to where two more people in white uniforms were approaching, carrying a stretcher between them. Beyond them, on the porch of the main house and on the sloping hill above the dock, the other partygoers stood staring, an enormous, freeze-frame tableau accompanied by the incongruous music that continued, unheeded, from the gramophone in the empty room behind them.

“What happened, Richard?” Gwen said again.

He looked back at her and shrugged.

“Valentine,” he whispered.

She stared. “Valentine? What are you talking about?”

He shook his head, unable to summon the will to explain. Then he looked over at the crowd on the dock a few feet away. Jillian Talbot was on the stretcher now, and several EMS people lifted her up and rushed away down the dock. One of them was holding a clear plastic mask over her nose and mouth. Just as they began to move, he saw what he had been waiting, hoping, praying to see.

Her eyes were open, and she was breathing.

Gwen and her husband helped him to his feet. As he began to move, a group of blue-uniformed men came past the stretcher toward him. He assumed they were there to arrest him. They stopped before him, and the one who was obviously in charge stepped forward. He was a large, beefy man in his fifties, with steel-gray hair and mustache. His eyes took in the sight of David in the blanket, shivering, and the man and woman who flanked him. Mike said something to him and pointed out at the water behind them. The man nodded grimly and turned to his subordinates.

“Wilson and Lopez, get these people into the house. The rest of you, come with me.” Looking back
over his shoulder, he called to a blue-clad figure on the shore. “Get that rowboat over here, the big one.”

“If it doesn’t float, we’re going to need divers,” one of the others said. He reached for his radio and began to talk into it.

David thought he meant the rowboat. What did that mean, he wondered, “if it doesn’t float”? Why wouldn’t the rowboat—

Then he realized what the cop meant.
It.
The body. Victor Dimorta: Valentine. They’ll have to fish him out, what’s left of him. He’d forgotten all about him. . . .

He drew the blanket tighter around his shivering body, and with the two officers followed Gwen and Mike down the dock. The little group passed a lone officer, a woman, kneeling beside the fallen Beretta, guarding it. He looked up toward the parking lot in time to see the paramedics load the stretcher into an ambulance. As it shrieked away, lights flashing, he moved his lips in silent prayer for Jillian Talbot. He continued to pray for her as they moved through the crowd of party guests and into the main house.

There was no music now. For the first time tonight, the ancient gramophone was silent. Mike went immediately to the hearth to rebuild the fire, and Gwen brought him a glass of brandy. Flanked by the two officers, David sat on a couch close to the roaring flames and waited to tell the story.

She stood on the little strip of beach beside the dock, gazing out over the lake, waiting. The thin blouse over her bathing suit was enough to ward off the slight, early morning chill of the surrounding forest. Even so, she hugged her arms to her as she remembered.

Gwen and Mike, now making breakfast for the guests in the house behind her, had told her she could stay there as long as she liked, and she was grateful for the isolation of the writing colony. The police had finished their business months ago, but the press was unrelenting. The story itself had been bad enough, but the appearance of the fluffy
New York
cover story two days after the initial nationwide headlines had further amplified the problem. Gwen had finally disconnected the single telephone in the compound, wondering aloud how so many reporters from all over America had managed to get the unlisted number. Now there was a new unlisted number,
and they’d see how long
that
lasted. She smiled at the thought of Gwen: she had good friends.

Tara and Doug. He’d finally arrived to. make up for the canceled date—shortly before Valentine’s Day, wouldn’t you know. Nearly four months ago. Doug had canceled their date because of Jill, because the sight of her had brought back painful memories. Cold feet. But subsequent events had proved to him—to all of them—how tenuous life is, and how precious. So Doug called Tara. He didn’t have to explain to her that he would no longer mourn his murdered wife.

Besides, there were other people to mourn.

Barney Fleck. The tears began as she thought of him. Mrs. Fleck and Verna Poole had descended on Mill City, Pennsylvania, with grim determination. And it had indeed been grim. They and the sheriff and his deputy had turned the Dimorta house up-side-down. They had found traces of blood in an upstairs closet, in front of the paintings. She’d seen photo reproductions of a couple of the paintings in the newspapers: horrible, sick pictures of women in various stages of dismemberment. Okay, not women—
one
woman. Herself. In keeping with the fantasy, he’d signed them “Nate Levin.” They were probably the last things Barney saw before he died.

The sharp-eyed young deputy had noticed the freshly turned earth in the back garden, and that’s
how they found him. Barney was given a full police funeral in Brooklyn. She’d stood off to the side, wincing at her own fresh pain, watching Jane Fleck and Verna Poole and his family and friends. As the commissioner presented Jane with the American flag and the gunshots resounded through the cemetery, she prayed for Barney. And for Dr. Philbin. And for all the others, including her own unborn child.

It had been a boy, they informed her when she demanded to know. She had miscarried, they said, a direct result of the blow to her stomach and the sustained lack of oxygen in the freezing lake that had nearly killed her. Nate—Victor Dimorta—had claimed one final victim. His son.

Nate—
no!
She couldn’t,
wouldn’t
think of him that way. His name had been Victor Dimorta. Valentine. He had murdered seven people. Eight, including the baby. They had left behind families and friends who could only mourn them: more victims. The only people who were happy about him were the Japanese businessmen who had snapped up the final collection of paintings from Henry Jason’s gallery for an undisclosed sum.
Life
, she thought: his final painting. She shook her head at the horrible irony of it.

As she waited, she thought about it all; the whole, strange story. The stupid practical joke perpetrated by three careless young women—okay,
four
careless young women—that had, in an odd way, started the
whole thing. But no, it had truly begun eighteen years before that, the day Victor Dimorta was bom.

Mary Daley had come out to visit her last weekend, with Tara and Doug. She announced that she was finally going to write a book, with Jill’s permission: the biography of Victor Dimorta.

Yes, Jill had said, write it. If everyone could learn the whole story, maybe it would help. There were other Victor Dimortas in the world—and other Jill Talbots. Yes, she’d repeated, write the story.

She winced as she thought about that: writing. She’d been here at the writing colony for nearly four months now, recuperating and hiding from the world. But she would leave soon. She would go back to New York, to a new apartment. She was selling the apartment on Barrow Street as she had sold the one on Central Park West, and for the same reason. It was time to begin again. And it was time to write again. She would not use the idea she’d been forming, the thriller set in the art world, with all the borrowed facts from Nate.

Victor Dimorta, she told herself again. His name was Victor Dimorta.

It was going to take a long time, but she would do it. She would survive this, and she would be stronger for it. And it would begin right now, this morning. That’s why she was here now, waiting.

As if on cue, David MacFarland arrived on the
beach beside her. He had a T-shirt on over his bathing suit, and he looked surprisingly animated for someone out on bail. She’d paid it, as she was paying for his defense attorneys. The arraignment was next week, but the lawyers assured them that there was a good case for dropping charges, all things considered. David didn’t care: he was willing to spend time in prison. He would do even that, he’d said, for Cass.

He came quietly down to stand next to her, leaning over to kiss her on the cheek.

“Good morning,” he said as he pulled his shirt off over his head. “Ready for your first lesson?”

She smiled and dropped her blouse on the bank beside his shirt. “Yes, David, I’m ready.”

He regarded her closely. “You’re not afraid?”

“No, I’m not afraid.” She looked out over the gray lake. Because she felt it, because she meant it, she added, “I’m not afraid of anything.”

Smiling again and reaching for his hand, Jillian Talbot walked forward into the water.

THE END

Any New York resident will gladly tell you that although Jill Talbot’s building actually exists, it is only six stories high, in accordance with the regulations for Greenwich Village, which is a New York City landmark. The building facing hers, on the north side of Barrow Street, is only four stories high, which would make spying on her difficult (even if she
does
live on the roof!). There is no Mill City, Pennsylvania, no Hartley College, no Peconic Writing Colony, and no ski resort such as I have described in Boulder, Colorado.