Horoscope: The Astrology Murders

by Georgia Frontiere

  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.

  One

  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.

  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 irratio
nal. 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, wh
en 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.”