She stood there, holding the receiver, absorbing what had just taken place before slowly setting it back in its cradle. She saw that King had come into the room and was looking up at her with his electric-blue eyes, as if wondering why she had gotten up so suddenly from her nice, warm bed. She rubbed his nose, reassuring him that she was okay even though she felt queasy and shaky. He seemed to sense this, and when she sat down at the desk, he lay at her feet, his strong, furry body pressed against her bare legs, to show her that he was there to protect her from whatever was frightening her.
She opened the middle drawer of the desk and took out the chart she’d done for herself. Like all the charts she did, it showed a circle divided into the twelve houses, each house corresponding to a sign of the zodiac and revealing the astrological influences on a particular area of a person’s life, which depended on the timing of that individual’s birth. It also delineated which planets, if any, are in each house, revealing additional details about the influences on that person. The chart was a circle because it has no beginning and no end.
Kelly stared at her chart. To someone unfamiliar with astrology, it would appear to be a drawing of a wheel with a rim around it and twelve spokes. In the middle was what seemed to be the wheel’s hub, containing more lines and symbols. It looked ancient, mystical, and even scientific, but the uninitiated would not understand what it meant.
To Kelly, of course, every line, symbol, and number had meaning, and in the chart she’d drawn using her birth date and time, she saw a picture of herself and every aspect of her life—material, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual—from her physical being to her personality, her values, her family, her friends, her romantic life, her career, her public self and her private self, what she allowed others to see and what she kept hidden. Her chart told her story: who she was and the challenges she faced in the present, who she had been and what had happened to her in the past, and who she could be and what could happen to her in the future.
The lines that looked like spokes were the dividing lines between the twelve houses; the symbols represented the astrological signs and the planets; the numbers were the degrees of the planets’ exact locations, determined by date and time of birth. They showed how the planets interact with each other and revealed the blessings and challenges that are likely to appear in an individual’s life.
Kelly ran her finger around the circle of the houses of her chart. The houses followed the seasons, starting with Aries, spring; progressing through Taurus and Gemini to Cancer, summer; moving through Leo and Virgo to Libra, fall; continuing through Scorpio and Sagittarius to Capricorn, winter; and progressing through Aquarius and Pisces to spring again. Kelly’s chart showed the positions of her natal planets in these houses. It showed that her sun sign, Pisces, was in the twelfth house, the house of hidden matters; that her ascendant was Aries, making Mars the ruler of her chart; and that her moon was in Capricorn. It was, as she’d said to herself many times in the last weeks, the current planetary aspect of transiting Pluto conjuncting her Mars that made this a time when she felt so emotionally sensitive to her fear.
But what about the phone call? Pluto conjuncting her Mars seemed to have attracted an external threatening force. She needed to find out if there were other astrological aspects that had contributed to this.
Knowing that the aspects that were about to occur were affecting her experience even before they happened, she picked up a pencil and began to check her aspects for the coming weeks.
Her eyes focused on the planet that ruled her chart, Mars—named after the Roman god of war—a planet of energy that can be used for either good or ill. She felt her stomach tighten as she saw that Mars was about to square her natal Pluto. This alignment of these planets meant that she could be in imminent danger; it would require her to be extremely cautious for the next three weeks. It was compounded, of course, by what she already knew—that Pluto was conjuncting her Mars in the tenth house, which for her was ruled by Capricorn, heightening her anxiety about public exposure.
Seeing that transiting Mars was about to square her Pluto, she felt her body start to shake. She knew that when these two aspects coincide, there could be a life-or-death event. She had to be very careful of dark places, of secrets, hidden matters, anger, and angry people from the past. But no matter how careful she was, she knew that she might have to confront darkness, an energy so black that it could challenge everything positive she believed in.
Below the circle containing the twelve houses in her chart, she wrote Mars squaring Pluto and Pluto conjuncting Mars.
Mars, she knew, represented the body. Her body.
She was facing bodily harm.
Under what she had already written, she wrote the word danger.
Five
EMMA LOOKED AT THE clock. It was 9:20 a.m. King was lying on the floor beside his empty bowl and Meow was curled up on top of the refrigerator. They had scratched on her door at 4:00 a.m. and spent the rest of the night in her apartment before she’d woken up for good at 8:00 and fed them. She’d been expecting Kelly to come down for breakfast any minute, but Kelly had yet to appear.
Sarah walked into the kitchen and looked at the empty table. “Where’s Kelly?”
“Still upstairs. She must’ve stayed up late working.” Emma didn’t have to say she disapproved; it was in her voice and on her face.
Sarah refilled her coffee mug. “Her first client is at nine thirty. I’d better go up and—”
The sound of Kelly descending the stairs stopped her mid-sentence. Moments later Kelly came into the room. Despite the makeup she’d put under her eyes to cover the dark circles, it was clear to Sarah and Emma that she was tired and had spent a sleepless night.
Kelly noticed their evaluating stares and the uncomfortable silence and decided to make a joke of it. “Gossiping about me?”
“We were just surprised you slept in again,” Sarah said lightly.
“Are you feeling all right?” Emma asked.
Kelly took her cup over to the coffeepot. “Never better.”
Her hands were unsteady as she poured the coffee, and she hoped that Sarah and Emma didn’t notice. All she could think about was the phone call.
“I’ve been planning what to serve the Dennisons for dinner,” Emma said. “I thought I’d make wild salmon, rice, and asparagus.”
“Fine,” Kelly responded. She opened the refrigerator to take out the milk for her coffee and was just about to reach for the milk carton when suddenly she felt a heavy weight drop onto her shoulders and knifepoint pricks in the skin on her upper back. Her body jerked back as she gasped, and the cup and saucer dropped from her hand, splashing hot coffee onto her dress before they crashed to the floor, where they shattered amid a puddle of brown liquid. Meow, as frightened as Kelly, jumped from her shoulder to the floor and landed with a thud. Kelly realized what had happened, but it brought little relief from her anxiety. She stared at the shards of china, afraid to look up and let Sarah and Emma see her fear.
“Are you okay, Kelly?” Sarah asked.
Kelly went to the closet and took out the dustpan. “I’m fine,” she snapped. “Meow scared me, that’s all.” She knelt on the floor and began picking up the wet, broken pieces of china and putting them in the dustpan.
Emma hurried over to her. “Let me do that—”
Kelly continued picking up the shards. “I’m not a child, Emma.”
She kept her head down, her eyes focused on what she was doing. She still didn’t want Emma and Sarah to see how upset she was. She’d decided not to tell them about the phone call; what was the point of frightening them on top of the concern she knew they already felt for her?
But as she gathered the fragments of china in the dustpan, she made another decision: she would call the police.
Kelly closed the door to her office before placing the call. In case Sarah heard her on the phone, she’d told her that she had to call an old client who had an emergency. Now that she was alone, she sat at
her desk, called information, and quietly asked for the number of the nearest police station. Her hands were no longer shaking, but inside she felt as if her whole body was trembling.
She dialed the number of the 20th Precinct and immediately found herself talking to a man with a strongly confident voice who identified himself as Officer Nelson and asked how he could help her. Kelly hadn’t considered until now exactly what she was going to say.
“This is Dr. Kelly York. I received a threatening phone call,” she said, lowering her voice so that Sarah wouldn’t hear what she was saying. “It was from a man.”
“What time did he call?”
“Four fifteen a.m. I looked at the clock, so I know.”
“You say he threatened you. How did he threaten you?”
“He … he didn’t make a specific threat. He just—he knew my name, and he wouldn’t tell me who he was or why he was calling. When I asked him, he just hung up.”
“Do you have any ideas about who he is?”
Kelly shook her head and then realized that the officer couldn’t see what she was doing. “No. I have no idea.”
“Anyone you’ve been fighting with about anything? Someone with a grudge against you?”
Kelly had been asking herself the same questions since the call; she’d asked them as she’d lain awake in her bed while the sky had still been dark, and she had still been asking them as she’d watched the sun come up in the moments before she’d finally fallen asleep again.
“No,” she said. “There’s no one.”
She heard an intermittent scratching sound on the other end of the phone and she realized that Officer Nelson must be taking notes. Finally, he said, “I’ve got it all down, Dr. York, but there’s nothing we can do right now. Call us if he calls again. If he keeps calling, we’ll get the phone company to monitor your line, and we’ll find out who he is and tell him to stop.”
Kelly didn’t answer right away. She didn’t want to get off the phone yet. Talking with this policeman, she felt safe; she didn’t know how she’d feel when she hung up.
“Dr. York?”
“I’m sorry, Officer. I was just thinking. But I understand what you said. I’ll call back if he calls again.”
She figured he must have known she was scared when instead of just saying goodbye, he said, “Don’t worry, Dr. York. You’ll probably never hear from him again.”
She tried to sound as confident as he did. “Thanks.”
She waited for him to hang up before she did. She felt no better and no more reassured than she had before she’d placed the call. Through the bars her grandmother had installed on the first-floor windows so many years before, she looked out at the trees and realized how sunny the day was. But even that didn’t improve her mood. She couldn’t forget the vitriolic whisper of the man who had called her; she couldn’t forget the words that he’d said to her; and she couldn’t forget what her chart had told her. She felt the man would call again.
She forced herself to get out of her chair and go over to the door between her office and Sarah’s. She took a moment to gather herself before opening it. When she did, she saw that Sarah was at her desk and a sophisticated middle-aged woman in a black suit was sitting on one of the chairs against the far wall. “Forgive me for keeping you waiting, Ms. Weston,” she said, doing her best to smile. “Please, come in, and we’ll get right to work.”
Six
THAT NIGHT, KELLY LAY under the cover, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep. Meow was at the foot of the bed, and Kelly could hear her snoring as she slept with her head on Kelly’s ankle. She glanced down at King sleeping soundly in his bed on the floor. She looked at the clock. Its illuminated digits told her that it was 2:15. She looked at the silent phone beside it. Except for the subtle sounds of Meow’s snoring and King’s breathing, the whole house was silent.
She knew that if she just continued lying there, thinking about everything that was troubling her, she would be awake all night, and at some point she would see her room growing lighter with daybreak and be all the more depressed knowing that she hadn’t slept. Rather than staying in bed and ruminating, she got up, put on her bathrobe and slippers, and went into her upstairs study to work on her column. It was due in the morning, and normally she would’ve started writing it before now, but after looking up the aspects for her own chart, she’d been avoiding it. She found it difficult to concentrate on writing her column when her own aspects were so difficult.
Doing her best to emerge from her somber thoughts, she sat at her library table in front of her laptop computer. At the top of the file on her screen, she typed the words that would appear on this week’s column: “The Stars: Week of October 26th.” The sun sign for the week, of course, was Scorpio, as it had been since October 23. In her previous column, she had written about the sun entering Scorpio and the opportunities this offered for deeper reflection. Now she would elaborate on this in the context of the aspects for the new week.
She picked up her ephemeris, the almanac she used to see the positions of the planets as they moved through the heavens throughout the years, and opened it to October 26. She already knew that in the coming week Mars would enter Capricorn, where it would eventually conjunct Pluto—an aspect that would affect everyone and that she had been concerned about.
As always, she would begin her column by telling her readers the exact time that a significant planetary movement would take place. She was glad to see that on October 26, Venus was traveling with the sun, an aspect that she could write about favorably.
Once she’d gotten the time from the ephemeris, she typed:
On October 26th, at 7:08 p.m. eastern standard time, Mars enters Capricorn and moves toward conjuncting Pluto. On that date, Venus is traveling with the sun in Scorpio, bringing out love and the feeling that the world and other people are beautiful.
This is in contrast to the influence of the planet Mars entering Capricorn, which is potentially very challenging. Mars powerfully affects our drives and desires; channeled properly, Mars energy can help us to be productive and constructive; channeled improperly, Mars energy can lead to destructiveness.
She consulted her ephemeris again and saw that Mars would conjunct Pluto on November 10. Aware that by the end of the coming week some of her readers would start feeling this influence, she stared at the screen as she thought about what she wanted to write next; it was a problematic aspect, and she wanted to write about it as positively and constructively as possible.
Finally, she began to type:
Mars will conjunct Pluto in two weeks. As this conjunction approaches, it is a time to be cautious, even wary, to strengthen yourself. It is a time to prepare to confront challenges, external events, which is why caution is so important.
Reading over what she had written, she realized once again that Mars conjuncting Pluto would add to the danger she had already seen in her own chart. She reviewed again what she’d written for her readers and thought about how she could write about these aspects in a way that was accurate but encouraging. After a few moments, she started typing:
This conjunction creates change. It can lead to a powerful transformation—as long as you are vigilant.
She stopped again and asked herself exactly how she could be vigilant about the man who had called her when she didn’t know who he was or what he wanted from her. Of course she would do all she could to be vigilant about him. She wondered if maybe his phone call had really been a one-time occurrence, a vicious prank, if maybe the danger from anger that her chart indicated she would have to be careful about didn’t have to do with the caller but with her own anger at being trapped in her home because she was afraid to leave it. Maybe the best way to apply her own advice was to become even more vigilant about her thoughts, to learn precisely what it was that had suddenly made her so scared of the world beyond the threshold of her house that the brownstone was the only place she felt safe.
Or at least this was the only place she had felt safe. Until the p
hone call. She looked toward her business phone and wondered if the man would call again.
Seven
IT WAS A TUDOR-STYLE house on a picturesque block in one of New Kent, New Jersey’s best neighborhoods. The houses were all four-, five-, and six-bedroom homes that had been built seventy or eighty years ago, and the massive trees were older than that. The police had gotten a call at one thirty p.m. from the woman’s maid, who had just found the body. She’d let herself in to clean and had started downstairs. As soon as she’d gotten upstairs, she knew something was wrong. When she got to the master bedroom, she found out what it was.
Forty-five minutes later, George Rayburn, the medical examiner, was looking at the pallid white body sprawled naked on the bed, her brown hair draped over the side. He remarked to himself that in life the woman had been beautiful. He examined the deep red line gouged across her throat and thought she must have been strangled with something like a rope. Not a rope, though, or at least not a conventional one, because a rope would have shown the marks of its weave and this didn’t seem to have a weave.
Rayburn had just turned sixty-two. He’d been ME for the New Kent PD for twenty-four years, and in that capacity he’d examined a lot of dead bodies. It was not something that he particularly liked to do, but he was good at it, and he did like when his work helped catch a murderer. “She’s been dead ten to twelve hours. I’m not quite sure what she was strangled with,” he said. “But I’ll find out.”
Frank Giordano, the detective in charge of the investigation, stood next to the older man, watching him. The top of the woman’s left thigh and the sheet under her were covered with blood, but before determining the source of the bleeding, Rayburn was carefully examining the inside of her thighs and her genitals.
“Signs of forced penetration,” he told Giordano. “She was raped before she was killed.”
On the second-floor landing outside the bedroom, Sergeant Lanie Warner was doing her best to comfort the crying cleaning woman, but the woman seemed inconsolable. Tom Hernandez, Giordano’s partner, walked past them into the bedroom. He hated to see women crying; he felt so bad for them that it threw him off his game.
Horoscope: The Astrology Murders Page 4