Horoscope: The Astrology Murders

by Georgia Frontiere

  Why would all those windows be open on such a cold night? She was suddenly afraid. And as her gaze moved to the front door and she noticed that it was now patched with plywood, she became even more afraid.

  Moving as quickly as she could, she went down the steps and unlocked the door to her apartment. Even before she entered, she smelled smoke. She turned on the lights, but her apartment looked just as she’d left it—white walls, comfortable gray furniture, a tiny Pullman kitchen. She hurried through the apartment and up the stairs that led to the first floor of the brownstone. Out of breath and anxious, she opened the door to the first-floor hall outside the kitchen, and in the light from her apartment, saw the blackened walls as she smelled the stale smell of the vanished smoke.

  “Kelly!” she screamed.

  Without waiting for a response, she got into the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor. It felt to her as if this time it was taking hours, not minutes, to get there, but eventually the door opened and she rushed out into the third-floor hall.

  “Kelly!”

  Kelly was in her bathrobe, at the desk in her upstairs study, with her ephemeris and her chart, the chart on which she’d written the word danger right after she’d gotten the phone call. She was focused on the ephemeris when she heard Emma’s voice and rose to her feet.

  “In here, Emma—” She was already at the door when Emma came in and threw her arms around her.

  “Thank God!” Emma said, hugging her tightly.

  Kelly put her arms around Emma. “I’m okay. Really, I’m okay. You don’t have to worry. I should’ve left you a note. I’m sorry. I just forgot.”

  Emma held her for a long time. Then she let go and looked at Kelly assessingly. “You didn’t stay inside the house during the fire, did you?”

  “No. I went into the garden. But it wasn’t a fire. It was—”

  Emma felt her face grow hot. “I don’t care what it was! You should’ve been outside on the street, well away from it! It’s not right, Kelly. You have to do something about being afraid to leave home!” Looking at Kelly, who had been so strong for so long and now seemed so fragile, she felt heartsick. “You didn’t used to be like this,” she said tenderly. “Don’t you want to be able to go out again?”

  Emma looked into Kelly’s eyes as she used to when Kelly was a little girl, to make sure that Kelly was going to tell her the truth. Kelly met her gaze, pained to see the anguish that she had brought to this woman whom she knew loved her as much as she would if Kelly were her own child.

  “I will do something about it,” Kelly told her.

  “And when will that be?”

  “That’s what I was working out when you came in. But it won’t be forever. I promise, Emma. I really do.”

  Emma continued looking into Kelly’s eyes. When she was sure she saw in them that Kelly had not given up, she nodded and hugged her again.

  In Emma’s maternal embrace, Kelly was acutely aware that she’d given Emma her word. But although she’d meant what she said, she had no idea how she would accomplish it.

  Twenty

  THE MOON WAS FINALLY full tonight. Of course, he’d expected it to be. And he expected to have luck; the aspects favored him. They favored him for his vocation, and they favored him tonight. And as always, he had planned everything. Everything.

  But when he got to her street, he saw a man walking a dog, and his insides liquefied as they used to when he was a child and his mother caught him doing what she didn’t like and punished him with her needles. Despite the paroxysm in his gut, he forced himself to keep driving, knowing that if he made a U-turn, the man would be more likely to notice him. He continued driving until he got out of her neighborhood and then he drove for half an hour in a state of nerves. When he drove back to her block, the streets were empty, and he was full of rage again. He parked on the street around the corner from hers. It was three forty-five a.m.

  She lived in a colonial-style house in the middle of the block. She hadn’t left any lights on outside, but as he approached, the full moon enabled him to see the path he would take from her driveway to her front door. Fifteen-foot bushes lined the far side of the driveway, separating it from the house next door, so he walked next to the bushes until he reached the garage; then he cut over to the front door.

  When he got to the door, he stretched the surgical gloves onto his hands and took a key out of his jeans pocket. Slipping it into the top lock, he was not surprised when it fit perfectly and turned with no effort. The second key he’d brought with him slipped into the bottom lock and opened it easily. He congratulated himself on how well he’d worked everything out. This pleasure only sharpened his anger.

  A moment later and he was in the house. No lights left on inside, either. But the full moon, shining through the windows, allowed him to see all that he needed to: the staircase he silently mounted in his black running shoes, the upstairs hall he quietly walked across, the doors of the bedrooms where she might have been sleeping, and the bedroom where he soon found her. The sound of her turning over in bed gave her away even before he reached her door.

  He hadn’t stopped to look around much downstairs, but now that he was in the curtainless bedroom, he surveyed the furnishings. It had once been expensive and elegant, but now it was shabby: a Native American blanket thrown over worn upholstery, flat patches in the light blue rug, a tear in the lampshade on the night table lamp. Soon, none of it would matter to her.

  He looked at the woman on the bed, sleeping soundly in a white nightgown that looked as if it was silk. She was in her late forties and still very beautiful. Her fine blond hair fell on the pillow, framing her face. She had once been an actress, and she had high cheekbones. With her eyes closed, her long lashes fell on her white skin.

  Soon he was on her bed, straddling her, opening his zipper and pulling on his condom. She stirred in her sleep but didn’t wake up.

  “You’ve got company, Sheryl,” he whispered.

  The blond woman opened her eyes, looked up at this man in a black ski mask, felt him pinning her down on the bed between his legs, and saw that he was stiff and ready to rape her. She screamed.

  He stretched the leather cord across her neck. “You scream again and you’re dead!”

  Her frightened eyes stared up at him, and he thought she was going to just surrender, but she screamed again and started flailing her arms, legs, and head so wildly that he became disoriented and lost his grip on the leather cord. Taking advantage of the opportunity, she raised her head and tried to bite his arm, but her teeth didn’t penetrate his thick black sweater. Furious, he punched her in the jaw, and as her head fell back against her pillow, he pressed the cord down on her neck hard enough to make her gag on her fear.

  “You wanted love, Sheryl? This is love!” he told her.

  Frozen in terror, she watched as he lowered himself on top of her, and then she felt him enter her. After that, she didn’t know what happened.

  Twenty-One

  KELLY SAT AT HER desk in the upstairs study, examining her chart. Although the smoke was long gone, its acrid smell remained, even on the third floor. She’d closed the windows in the study because it was too cold; now she glanced at them, wondering if she should reopen them to air out the room. The smell of smoke made her think of death, and she didn’t need to think about death any more than she was already thinking about it. She’d begun looking at her chart, focusing on her moon in Capricorn, which could make her inclined to melancholy reflection. But since early September, when she’d started to be afraid of leaving the house, she hadn’t just been melancholy; she’d been afraid. And she realized now that it hadn’t just been a vague sense of fear; when she’d stood frozen at the threshold of the front door, unable to run after King, she’d been afraid of dying. The prospect of going out onto the street was like a death sentence to her.

  Now her home had been marked by the smoke that had backed up from the fireplace. As she’d walked from the garden through the kitchen into the hall
and up the staircase to the third floor, she’d been stunned by the black stains on the walls of the first two floors; the smoke had traveled like a dark manifestation of her fear and left its imprint everywhere. She’d been afraid of Chris Palmer and, right or wrong, had made him leave her house, and then she’d lit the fire and—

  She was startled from her thoughts by the ringing of the phone. She looked at the clock; it was 4:35 in the morning. Her heart was beating fast, and she could feel the blood pulsating through her arteries and veins. She knew who it was.

  The phone rang again. She looked at the two phones on the desk, her business phone and her personal phone. She wasn’t sure which one was ringing. She picked up the receiver of her business phone. That was the line he had called on last time. When she brought the receiver to her ear, she heard a dial tone.

  The ringing continued; it was her personal phone. She replaced the receiver on her business phone and picked up her personal line.

  Silence.

  For a while she didn’t say anything. Then she quietly said, “Hello.”

  “You think you know everything, don’t you?”

  It was the same man, the same whispered voice taut with hatred.

  “Who is this?” Her voice rose in fear.

  “That’s one thing you don’t know, isn’t it?”

  “Please tell me! Is it you, Chris?”

  “You don’t know, do you? There’s another thing you don’t know. You don’t know what I’m going to do to you.”

  All night Kelly had been so cold; now she was sweating. “Why are you calling me like this? Why do you hate me?”

  “I hate you because you made her leave me. You made her go and never come back.”

  “No, I didn’t! I wouldn’t—I …”

  She heard him hang up. Her hand trembled as she placed the receiver back on the phone. Then she picked it up again and called the 20th Precinct. When an officer answered, she gave him her name, told him the man who had called her before had called again and that this time he’d said he was going to do something to her. The officer asked her to come to the station to file a report. Unable to tell him the truth about what bound her to her home, she told him that she couldn’t leave the house because it had been flooded with smoke, the fire department had just left, and there was a lot of damage. Her voice shaking, she asked if he could please send someone to her and she gave the address. She was told that an officer would be there, but that it would probably be in the morning.

  As Kelly hung up the phone, she reconciled herself to the fact that she would be up for the rest of the night.

  Twenty-Two

  AT EIGHT A.M. KELLY called Sarah to tell her about what had happened with the fireplace and to ask her to cancel the day’s appointments and ask her father, who had taken care of all the contracting work on Kelly’s house until his retirement, to recommend workmen he knew personally to do the cleanup, painting, and repairs. By ten thirty, carpenters were replacing the front door, the electrician was taking down the old smoke alarms, the paint crew had washed down the walls and were already painting, and the upholstery and carpet cleaners were on their way.

  Still, standing in the front hall, looking at all that needed to be done, surrounded by workmen, drop cloths, ladders, and paint buckets, and hearing the sounds of hammers and saws, Sarah was impatient. She felt the tension in her fingers and hands; as a violinist, that was the last place she wanted to feel it. She wished she could just close her eyes and open them again to find that the house was back to normal. But it was never that way; not with learning a piece on the violin, and not with knowing how she would look at the world and at life now that she knew Kevin was getting married. Maybe it was good that she had all this work to do; it would take her mind off him.

  Since Kelly wanted the walls painted the same butter yellow as they had been with the same eggshell white for the molding, Sarah had been able to order the paint when she’d called the painters and begged them to come right away, and she’d authorized Ed Murrin and Peter Heath at Ace Painting to hire extra men so the painting would go quickly. But seeing the walls still mottled with smoke residue even after washing, she wondered how fast that could be.

  She looked up at Peter, who stood on a ladder as he painted the wall outside her office with a roller. He’d arrived forty-five minutes after she’d called, ready and eager to work. He’d brought along Ace’s whole painting crew and several of its part-timers, and they’d started right away, while his partner, Ed, finished another job in Queens by himself.

  “How long are we talking about, Peter?” Sarah asked.

  Peter was tall and gangly and, with his bushy blond hair, Sarah thought he looked like an overgrown child. He rolled on the yellow paint in a smooth, straight line as he answered her: “We’ve got eight men, so it’s possible we can finish tonight. It’s only the two floors. If not tonight, definitely by noon tomorrow.”

  Sarah felt the tension in her hands begin to relax. She thanked him and approached the ladder that held the electrician, a two-hundred-fifty-pound man wearing an unflattering red toupee who looked precariously balanced on the next-to-the-top rung as he installed a new smoke alarm. “How are you doing, Ivan?”

  Without looking down, he replied, “Don’t worry, Miss Stein. I’m not going to fall. I’ve been doing this a long time.”

  Embarrassed that she’d been so transparent, Sarah felt her face heat up. “I know. I just meant—”

  “You meant I should probably lose some weight, right?”

  Sarah was still blushing. “I guess so.”

  The older man laughed. “My wife tells me the same thing. So do my kids. So join the crowd. Like I said, don’t worry.”

  “Okay, I won’t,” she responded.

  Recognizing that if she stayed in the hall and continued exercising her nerves, she would do more harm than good, Sarah headed toward her office. She’d already canceled the day’s appointments; now she had to cancel the appointments for the remainder of the week. Entering her office, she was relieved again to see that Kelly’s having closed the office door so soon after the smoke had started had kept Sarah’s office walls almost free of smoke. They looked like all they needed was touching up. And the walls in Kelly’s office would only need touching up, too. That is, unless the touch-ups contrasted too starkly with the old paint; as a contractor’s daughter, she knew that if that happened, the office walls would need to be painted just like the other walls.

  She sat at her desk and looked at the closed door to Kelly’s office. Kelly was inside, talking with a police detective. Sarah assumed he was talking with her about the chimney backing up, but she wondered why the police would be involved with something that Kelly had told her the fire investigator had said was an accident.

  She knew that if she moved her chair close to Kelly’s office door, she could hear what they were saying. But no matter how curious and concerned she felt, she believed in privacy too much to ever do that. Instead, she turned on the classical radio station and opened her calendar to the appointments scheduled for the next day so she could start making calls. Pavarotti was singing “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot. She found herself thinking of Kevin; he’d sung the haunting aria for her last year when he’d been preparing to perform it in Turandot for an opera company in Germany. Regardless of the amount of work she had to occupy her, she felt heartsick. As she lifted the receiver to make a call, she wondered if she would ever feel another way.

  Detective Mike Stevens sat in one of the chairs Kelly usually used for clients. The chair was a little too small for Stevens, who was six foot five, but he made the best of it. He crossed his long legs and sat back as if there were actually room for his big frame. At forty-five years old, that’s how Stevens was; he tended to make the best of inconsequential things. Things of consequence were another matter. With his investigations, he tended to be relentless. He also tended to read people well. Sitting across the desk from Kelly, he could see that she was not a woman who would call the police fo
r attention; she was a woman who would rather not call the police at all. And that made him take the threatening phone call she had reported all the more seriously.

  “You said he told you that you made her leave him. Why would he say that?” he asked her.

  Kelly had spent the six hours that had passed between the phone call and the detective’s arrival pondering that very question herself. “Maybe his wife or girlfriend came to see me, and he thinks I told her to end the relationship. But I don’t do that.” She kept her eyes on his to make sure he understood what she was telling him. “The reason I call myself an intuitive astrologer is that besides being an astrologer, I’m a trained psychologist. The psychoanalyst C. G. Jung used astrology when he saw patients. I do the same thing in reverse. When I interpret people’s charts, I use my background in psychology to add to what their charts tell me about the disposition of their planets. I never tell someone to leave a relationship. I help the person to understand himself or herself and the other person and the kinds of adjustments that he or she would have to make if they stay together. Then it’s up to the person.”

  “But like you said, he may think you told her to go. That’s why he might say that to you.” Stevens unbuttoned his brown sports jacket and tried to make himself more comfortable in the chair. “Do you remember any woman in the last six months who came to you wondering if she should break it off with a husband or a boyfriend?”

  “I remember at least two. I’ll check my records for their names and see if there were others.”

  “Might as well go back a year. It may have taken this guy time to work up the steam to call you after she left.”

  “I will,” Kelly told him.

  Stevens noticed that she was no longer looking at him; her dark blue eyes were looking at nothing in particular; she was preoccupied with something she was thinking about.