“Astrology is my professional specialty. But I also love cooking.”
“If you love cooking, why do you have a cook?”
“Emma used to cook for my grandmother. This was my grandmother’s house. She raised me after my parents died. When she passed away, she left the brownstone to me. Emma lived downstairs. I didn’t want her to have to look for another home or another job.”
“That was generous of you.”
“Emma’s been generous to me, too. I was twenty-five when my grandmother died. I was a single mother with two children and starting graduate school in psychology. Emma took care of my children when I was at school. She cooked and she helped clean. For years I couldn’t pay her what she deserved. It took everything I had to keep the house, feed us, and pay for school.”
Chris glanced over his shoulder, into the hallway. “Where are your children?”
“Actually, they’re not children anymore. They’re in college.”
His eyes returned to Kelly. “I won’t say you look too young to have children that age because you’ll say that line’s been around since Adam left the Garden of Eden.”
She laughed. “Not this time I won’t.”
“Good. Because it’s true.”
The way he looked at her, she believed him. She also believed that if she let herself, before the end of the evening they’d be in bed, making love.
Smiling, he got to his feet. “Why don’t I help you clear the table?”
“You don’t have to—”
“I know. I want to.”
She watched as he rolled up the sleeves of his black sweater and started gathering the dessert dishes. Suddenly, a chill pierced through her body with the sharpness of an ice pick. Ingrained into the skin under the dark hairs on his forearm was the tattoo of a skull.
He must have seen that she was staring at it because he said: “A remnant of my Goth days. When I was young and grim and obsessed with death.”
He headed toward the kitchen with the dishes, but she didn’t go with him. She just stood there, thinking about the black, blue, and red skull, with black holes where the eyes and nose should be and its mouth grinning with the rictus of death. For the first time that night she realized that she was alone in her house—the one place she felt safe—with a man she did not know. What did it matter that she’d liked the way he looked? Or that he’d been so charming and clever when he’d photographed her? Or that he worked for Luminary World magazine and that Wendy had assigned him to take her pictures? Had she called Wendy to ask about him? No. She’d called no one. Chris Palmer was a stranger.
All evening he’d asked her questions and she’d told him about herself. The first thing he’d told her about himself all night was that he had a sweet tooth. Now he’d told her that the skull on his arm was a relic from years ago. But she had no idea if he was telling the truth. Maybe it wasn’t left over from the past; maybe it was very much a part of his current life. Maybe the black, blue, and red skull, five inches long and the width of his muscular forearm, meant that Chris Palmer was violent and sadistic. Maybe King had sensed this about him and that was why he’d kept howling at him. Maybe Chris Palmer was the man who had—
She didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t need to. She didn’t care if he was any of the things that she feared or if she was needlessly frightening herself. She wasn’t going to take a chance; she wanted him out of her house.
All night he’d been as pleasant and flirtatious with her as he’d been that afternoon. Obviously, he wanted her to like him; he wanted her to let him into her life. The best way to get him to leave, she reasoned, was to act as if he’d succeeded. That meant she had to continue to seem as interested in him and as relaxed as she’d been during dinner.
As she walked toward the kitchen, she forced a smile onto her face and steeled herself not to allow her fear to show. She found him at the sink, washing a dinner plate. Despite herself, she couldn’t take her eyes off the skull on his exposed forearm.
She stood next to him and touched his arm with her fingertips. “That’s sweet of you, Chris. But please, leave the dishes for me.”
He ran the soapy sponge over the plate. “It’s the least I can do to pay for my supper. When I’m finished, we can sit and talk in front of a nice fire.”
She kept the smile on her face and tried to sound as pleasant as he did. “That sounds great for next time. But it’s late.”
“It’s not that late,” he said, not turning to look at her. “You just don’t know what time it is.”
You’re the one who doesn’t know what time it is. Those were the words with which the man had menaced her on the phone. Now Chris Palmer had used almost the same words. Her smile disintegrated as fear knotted her stomach.
He looked at her. “What’s the matter? I just said if you think it’s late, you don’t know what time it is. It’s only ten.” He looked at the clock. “See?”
She glanced at the clock. He was right; it was ten. But how did she know that all he’d been referring to was the time? That he hadn’t been deliberately echoing the words she’d been threatened with in the whispered phone call? How did she know that her fear about him wasn’t the truth—that he was the man who had made the call?
She told herself again that it didn’t matter if she was right to be afraid of him or not; someone had made the call and Chris Palmer was a stranger and she didn’t want him in her house. And if he really was dangerous and wanted to insinuate himself into her life, her greatest chance of getting him to go right now was to let him think that she wanted to see him again.
She put on her smile. “I just meant I had a long day. And I get moody when I’m tired. No use putting you through that. I’ve got to go to sleep.”
He smiled, too. “Party pooper.” He turned off the faucet, then turned to face her. They were standing very close; she could feel his breath on her face. “I hope we can get together again soon.”
It took all of her will to remain so close to him. “I’d like that, too.”
“I hope you mean it.”
She made herself lean forward and kiss him on the lips. “Of course I mean it.”
“Good.”
He returned her kiss, not forcefully, just enough to part her lips and touch her tongue with his. She didn’t flinch. In a moment, he stepped back, smiled at her again, and told her that he’d call her tomorrow.
It wasn’t until she’d stood at the inner edge of her front doorway and watched him descend the steps and walk toward Central Park West that she began to shudder. She closed the front door and locked both locks. She was shivering as she ran up the stairs to get King. If Chris Palmer came back, she wanted the Siberian husky to be with her.
The moment she opened the door to the third floor hallway, King ran to greet her, howling a brief hello and licking her hands as Meow circled her feet. Kelly let the animals precede her onto the stairs before closing the door to the third floor behind her and joining them on the staircase. Although the furnace had been on since dinner, she was still shivering, and she decided that she’d light a fire in the fireplace and stay down in the living room reading. She knew it would be impossible for her to fall asleep.
She pulled the living room drapes closed, kneeled down in front of the fireplace, took three pieces of wood from the pile on the flat stone hearth, and arranged them on the andirons. Then she took a long match out of the matchbox, turned on the gas jet, and lit the gas under the wood. As the flames rose into the wood, she took the coffee cups and saucers from the table and brought them into the kitchen.
Perpetually hungry, Meow and King were waiting in front of their bowls for a snack. She put dry food into their bowls and went over to the sink to finish washing the dishes. She had a dishwasher, but although Emma used it, Kelly never did. She preferred doing the dishes by hand, especially now that Jeff and Julie were away and she used fewer dishes. She liked the feel of the hot water on her hands and the process of starting off with a dirty plate and making it clean.
As she washed the dinner dishes, she thought about Chris Palmer and wondered if she’d been right to be afraid of him or if she’d made a fool of herself and only imagined that she had anything to fear from him, let alone that he had been the man whose whispered voice had terrified her.
Meow had gone to her spot on top of the refrigerator and King was lying at her feet when she started to smell a dry, bitter smell, like something burning. She turned around, half expecting to see that she’d inadvertently left something cooking on the stove that had burned down to the pot, and instead saw black smoke coming into the kitchen. She ran into the hallway and saw that the smoke was coming from the living room. That instant, the smoke alarms began to scream, bleating like dying animals on speed. Her heart beating fast, the skin hot all over her body, she looked toward the front door and knew that no matter what, she couldn’t run out into the street. King stood next to her, voicing his dismay; Meow was in the kitchen doorway, mewing.
As the smoke continued pouring in from the living room, Kelly ran back into the kitchen and opened the glass door and ushered the animals out into the garden. Once they’d gotten outside, she closed the door and, coughing, ran into the smoke-filled hall again toward the front of the house. Her eyes stinging, she made her way through Sarah’s office and into her own, grabbed her cell phone from her desk, and ran out into the hall, closing the doors behind her. By the time she got to the kitchen again, she was coughing and could barely see. She reached the garden door and started choking so convulsively she couldn’t breathe. She leaned against the door, wheezing, choking, her eyes tearing. Finally, she was able to turn the doorknob, open the door, and, holding on to the knob, stumble out onto the slate steps to the garden. She closed the door behind her and, between fits of choking, slowly began to breathe the cold air; then she went to the nearer of the two stone benches in the garden and sat down. King was at her feet. Meow was cringing in front of the greenhouse. She dialed 911 on her cell phone. Still coughing, she told the operator that she needed the fire department.
Sirens braying, a fire engine turned the corner onto 85th Street from Columbus Avenue, sped up the block, and stopped in the middle of the street in front of the brownstone. Walt Metzger, the first officer, a fifteen-year veteran of the FDNY, jumped out of the front passenger seat and fastened his fire mask as he ran up the steps, leading the three other firemen who were putting on their masks. Metzger rang the bell, knocked loudly on the door, and then tried to open the door, but it didn’t budge.
“She said she’d be in the yard. She probably can’t hear us,” he told the other men.
He didn’t wait long, just a few seconds, before he inserted the hydraulic wedge he’d carried with him and started the process of forcing the door open. Seeing bars on the first-floor windows, he glanced up to the unbarred windows above and called over his shoulder to the rookie who prided himself on his skill with the ladder, “Ferguson, see if you can get in through one of those windows up there!”
While Ferguson went back to the engine and raised the ladder, Metzger kept working on the front door until he got it open and smoke streamed out of the house onto him and the other two firemen. They raced into the black haze and split up to search the brownstone for the fire. The woman who’d called in said she’d made a fire in the fireplace, but she neglected to say where the fireplace was located. They figured that was the most likely source of the fire.
As Metzger headed through the smoke-filled hall, he called on his portable radio to the battalion chief, the two trucks, and the ambulance that he knew were on their way from more distant locations. “Lots of smoke, but so far I don’t see anything burning!”
The two firemen who charged into Sarah’s and Kelly’s offices at the front of the brownstone quickly found that neither room was the source of the smoke, and they closed the doors to prevent further smoke damage. Just as they were running up the staircase to the second floor, they heard Metzger yell from the living room, “The chimney’s stopped up! I got it under control!”
When they joined him in the smoky room, they found that Metzger had already doused the logs in the fireplace with his fire extinguisher and turned off the gas jet. Now he was opening the door to the garden where the woman who’d made the call was sitting on a stone bench with a red cat in her lap and a big white dog at her feet.
“Get those damned smoke alarms turned off,” he told them. “Then open the windows and get the blowers. I’ll go see how she’s doing.”
Removing his smoke mask, he walked down into the garden, followed by a billow of smoke from the house. As he neared the bench, he noticed the woman looked dazed.
“Are you okay?” he asked gently.
Kelly turned to him and told him that she was. Then she started to cough.
“Sorry, but we’ve got to leave the door open. Let the smoke clear out.”
“I understand.” Stifling another cough, she covered her mouth with her hand and watched the smoke float out of the house and up into the sky.
“I got an ambulance coming. The medics can see about that cough.”
She answered adamantly: “It’s nothing. I got out of the house right away. As soon as the smoke started.”
“Well, the medics’ll be here in a minute or two if you decide you need them.”
She ignored his suggestion. “Did sparks jump from the fireplace and start the fire?”
“There was no fire. Your chimney was stopped up. Sent the smoke right back into the living room and everywhere else.”
Kelly looked at him, puzzled. “How did it get stopped up?”
“Maybe the flue was closed.”
She shook her head. “I’ve never closed the flue. I always leave it open. Could it have blown shut?”
“Depends. I’ll find out and tell you. That’s part of my job.” He looked at her. She was a beautiful woman, but she looked so drained that he felt sorry for her. It was a shock, and a frightening one, to go through what had happened to her. “Why don’t you go to a neighbor’s or to a coffee shop and wait till we get the smoke out? You can even wait in the engine if you want.”
“I appreciate it, but I’ll just wait here.”
“Okay. If that’s what you want.” He waited a moment to see if she’d change her mind, but she didn’t. She just sat on the bench, petting the cat, looking at the ivy on the garden wall. “I’ll come for you when I’ve looked at the chimney,” he told her.
She looked up at him, the whites of her blue eyes bloodshot from the smoke. “Thank you.”
“I know the place is a mess,” he said to her. “But at least it’s not burned down.”
“No, it’s not burned down. I’m grateful for that.”
She watched him go back into the house as the smoke continued to spill out and disappear into the night.
Nineteen
TWO HOURS LATER, THE brownstone was sufficiently aired out for Kelly to come back inside. The first- and second-floor walls and furnishings were stained with black where the smoke had left its imprint, but because the door to the third floor had been closed, her bedroom, bathroom, and upstairs study had suffered no damage. The smell of smoke pervaded these rooms, too, but not as badly as it did the rest of the house, and everything in them was unharmed.
Kelly was sitting on the sofa in her upstairs study, Meow clinging to her leg, King on the floor in front of her, while Metzger sat in the chair opposite her, reporting to her what he’d found.
“The chimney was clogged with debris. That’s why the smoke backed up like that.”
Kelly looked at him a moment before she asked, “What kind of debris?”
“Just plastic bags, newspapers, leaves—the kind of stuff the wind carries. Happens every fall to somebody when they make their first fire in the fireplace and they don’t have a screen across the top to keep the debris out.”
Kelly looked at him but didn’t say anything.
Her silence made him continue.
“It was a cold night. Was it your first fire in the fire
place in a while?”
“Yes. I haven’t made one since last March or April.”
Metzger was satisfied. “Okay, then. That’s it.” He got up from the chair. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to get the place cleaned and painted and all and get the chimney cleaned out. New smoke alarms. And a new front door. But we’ll make sure this one’s closed safe for the night.”
Kelly stood up, too. “Thank you again.”
“Sorry it happened,” he told her sympathetically. “Just remember, it could’ve been a lot worse.”
Kelly nodded; she knew he was right.
She saw him out, ignoring as best she could the soot-stained walls on her way to the front hall, where two firemen stood on the stoop, working on the front door. She waited until they had rehung the patched-up door on its hinges and closed it. Then she went back upstairs to her study. Earlier in the night she had felt scared; now she just felt numb.
Emma walked home from where the bus had let her off on 86th and Columbus. She and Donald had enjoyed the movie and gone out for a snack afterward. He’d wanted to see her home, but she liked being on her own. She’d been on her own since she’d come to New York, and even though she and Donald had been going out together for the past four years, she liked maintaining her independence. Apparently, this must have been fine with him, she reflected, since he’d never proposed changing their living arrangements. She didn’t know what she would do if he suggested it, but with Kelly’s recent fear of leaving the house, she was glad that up till now it hadn’t come up.
As she approached the brownstone, the arthritis in her hip started to hurt a little. She wasn’t surprised: cold, wet weather always made her hip hurt. She was just about to walk down the steps from the sidewalk to the door to her apartment when, by habit, she glanced up to see which lights were on in Kelly’s part of the house. She was surprised to see that although the lights were out on the first floor, behind the bars on the first-floor windows Kelly’s office windows were open. She looked up and saw that the windows were open on the darkened second floor as well and on the third floor, where the lights were on in Kelly’s study.
Horoscope: The Astrology Murders Page 9