Horoscope: The Astrology Murders

by Georgia Frontiere

  The cop who’d been monitoring the call came in over the radio: “Sorry he cut off before you got there.”

  “Yeah,” Stevens said. “Me, too.”

  “He used a prepaid cell phone. It’s probably in the Hudson by now.”

  “Shit,” Stevens said for the third time that night.

  Thirty-Two

  KELLY WAS IN THE living room sitting on the sofa with King curled up next to her when she heard a knock on the door. Detective Stevens had called to tell her he knew she’d received another phone call and that he was on his way. After that, she’d gotten dressed and had come downstairs to wait for him.

  As she got up from the sofa and hurried into the hallway, King came with her, running between her legs as he always did. She had to gently push him out of the way so she could get to the door. She felt relieved when she looked through the peephole and saw Stevens. She unlocked both locks and opened the door for him. The moment he walked into the house and she’d closed the door so King wouldn’t get out, she turned to him and asked, “Do you know who he is?”

  Stevens shook his head. “No. He used a phone he bought at a convenience store. A throwaway.”

  She felt herself plunge again into despondency. “Then you’re never going to know who he is until it’s too late! Until he does something to me!”

  All of a sudden she was crying. She hadn’t wanted to cry in front of Stevens, but she couldn’t stop herself.

  He looked at her steadily. “That’s not true. I’ll find him.”

  She tried to dry her eyes, but she kept crying. “I shouldn’t act like this—”

  “That’s okay,” Stevens said.

  Despite his reassuring words, Kelly got her crying under control and dried her eyes again. Then she asked him if he’d like a cup of tea and led him toward the kitchen.

  “Have you started looking through your files?” he asked as he followed her and King.

  “So far I’ve found four women who consulted with me about possibly leaving their relationships,” she said, turning on the kitchen light. “I wrote down their names, phone numbers, and addresses. Two of them gave me their boyfriends’ names, and two just gave me their birth date and time.” She handed him the information she’d taken from her files. “Any of these women could’ve broken off their relationship, and the men might have blamed me.”

  Kelly watched as Stevens looked at the sheet of paper she gave him. She wished she could leave him with just that, but she knew she couldn’t. After a moment, she said: “I’ve been thinking, Detective. There are two other men it might be …”

  She stopped speaking, and he could see how painful this was for her. “Just tell me, Dr. York.”

  Kelly took a deep breath before she continued. “One of them was a boy my daughter, Julie, dated in high school. Billy Whitmore. She broke up with him the middle of her senior year. I remember her showing me this.” She took the letter she’d found from the pocket of her pants and gave it to Stevens. “I never told her to break up with him, but he blamed me. He said I was an astrologer and I should’ve known it was a mistake. But he’s only eighteen. Do you really think it could be him?”

  Stevens was already reading the letter. So that was who Billy was; he’d heard Kelly ask the man on the phone if he was Billy.

  “Age has nothing to do with it,” he said. He finished reading the letter and put it in his pocket along with the other piece of paper she had given him. “You said two men. Who’s the other one?”

  “Kevin Stockman.”

  “Who’s Kevin Stockman?” he asked.

  She still felt hesitant. “I don’t know … I could be wrong …”

  “If you’re wrong, it doesn’t matter,” Stevens told her. “If you’re right, it could matter a lot.”

  “Kevin is my assistant Sarah’s old boyfriend. I’ve always liked him.”

  “Like age, that has nothing to do with it. Tell me why you think it might be him.”

  “Because of what happened in their relationship,” Kelly explained. “Kevin is an opera singer. He and Sarah met at Juilliard, and they dated while he lived in New York. Then he started getting jobs in Europe, and he proposed to her. He wanted her to travel with him, but it would’ve meant giving up her career as a violinist. Today she told me how angry he was when she wouldn’t marry him. He knew she’d consulted with me. I never said she should turn him down, just that whatever decision she made, she would have to find a way to fulfill her own need for creativity. But he might not know that …”

  Her blue eyes looked at Stevens with urgency for him to understand how unfair this was, that someone would hate her for something that she’d never even said. “What we talked about this morning is true, Detective Stevens. It doesn’t matter what I really said. It only matters what whoever is calling me thinks I said.”

  Stevens’s eyes met hers; he wished there were something he could say to comfort her, but nothing came to mind. “Where is Kevin Stockman now?” he asked.

  “He’s in New York, singing at the Met. He told Sarah he’s found another woman, and they’re going to get married, but …”

  Kelly stopped. She knew that if she continued, she would start crying all over again. She looked away from Stevens and took control of the emotions that were threatening to unmoor her and take her over.

  “Why don’t you go stay with friends for a while or go to a hotel?” he suggested.

  That was it, the trick question, a question that would not be a trick for anyone but her to answer. She didn’t answer him.

  “What is it?” Stevens asked.

  She looked at him and unleashed her frustration and bewilderment. “Everything,” she said. “Everything! My whole life! I can’t stay with anyone or go to a hotel because I can’t leave my house. I have agoraphobia. I’m afraid to leave. And now I’m afraid to stay. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore!”

  If he saw urgency in her eyes before, now he saw desperation.

  “I always believed that I knew a lot. I knew psychology and astrology, and between them I could make good decisions and help other people make good decisions and that everything would be better because of what I knew. I married my ex-husband knowing from his chart that he had a predilection for other women, but I thought I could bring out the best side of him instead. When that didn’t work, I comforted myself by telling myself I saw the potential for it from the start, and if I thought I could overcome it, that was my choice. But this! This—someone threatening my life—I didn’t see it!”

  She looked at him and for a time said nothing.

  “I told you that Mars is squaring my Pluto at the same time as Pluto is conjuncting my Mars,” she said after a while. “And that means danger. But what kind of danger? I’m not going to get run over by a car because I can’t leave my house! I never thought somebody would want to come here and kill me! It makes me feel as though I don’t know anything anymore, that astrology is worthless … or that I’m worthless as an astrologer and as a psychologist.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said, “because it’s not true.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because your column helped my wife, Diane.”

  “How?”

  “Two years ago, we were trying to have a baby, and she was about to give up. She’d had two miscarriages, and she felt so bad about herself, she started pulling away from me. I don’t know what you wrote, but it was something about obstacles for Aries being more temporary than they seemed and having the faith to stay committed to what you want. She opened up to me, told me how guilty she felt for miscarrying, and I told her I love her no matter what. Two months later she got pregnant.”

  He took out his wallet and removed a photograph that he held out to Kelly. “That’s Anthony,” he said. “He was fourteen months old last week.”

  Kelly took the photo of the small boy with a lot of brown hair, an open smile, full cheeks, and shining brown eyes not unlike his father’s. She was still crying, but not for herself anym
ore; it made her cry to see such a beautiful child.

  “My marriage means everything to me,” Stevens told her. “I don’t know what would’ve happened if Diane hadn’t read your column.”

  Kelly looked up at him. “I thought you didn’t believe in astrology.”

  “I don’t know if I believe in it. But I believe you do help people. And I’m going to get this guy. Whoever he is. You got my word on it.”

  Kelly could tell these weren’t just words to Stevens; he meant them with the full force of his being. “Thank you, Detective Stevens,” she said. “And thank you for showing me your lovely son.” As she handed the photograph back to him, she was no longer crying.

  “I feel like you’ve given me the most important things in my life,” Stevens said to her. “My wife and my son. That’s why when I saw the report, I wanted to work this case. I want to do something for you. Why don’t you put up that tea now, and I’ll go over the information you wrote down about those clients to see if I’ve got any questions.”

  He watched Kelly go to the stove for the teakettle and take the kettle to the sink to fill with water. He could tell she was feeling a little better. He hoped that one of the men she’d told him about tonight would turn out to be the caller.

  Thirty-Three

  HE’D MADE GOOD TIME driving to Tarrytown. And he’d made good time getting to the house, a rambling suburban ranch with mock weathered shingles and a shingled roof. He’d had no trouble getting in, of course; all he’d had to do was use the keys he’d made to open the locks and then cut the chain with a wire cutter. If she’d had an alarm, he could’ve taken care of that, too; he would’ve gotten her to tell the code to him the same way he’d gotten her to tell him everything else. Or she might have even written it down and kept it in her purse; he’d seen that before. And if she’d had a dog, he would’ve taken care of the dog as well. He had his ways.

  But it had been easy. All of it. And Cassie herself was the easiest of all of them. When she felt his knees pressing against her body and looked up and saw his ski-masked face, she cried out, but just a little, and then she gave up. And then she gave in. And now she was no more.

  Gripping the instrument in his surgical-gloved hand, he inserted the point into her thigh and began to carve what looked like the Roman numeral II, the symbol for Gemini.

  He was still hard. It always excited him to see how well his plans worked. He hoped that this time when the police found what he’d done, they’d tell the newspapers and television about how he’d marked her body with her zodiac sign. It was disappointing that until now they’d only said that the women he’d so carefully chosen had been raped and strangled. Leaving out his astrological expertise somehow made his accomplishments less personal, but it didn’t render them less satisfying.

  Thirty-Four

  KELLY FELT THE HOT spray of the shower run over her body. It made her feel almost as if she were starting all over again with the new day. She found herself thinking about what Detective Stevens had told her the night before about how much her column had meant to his wife and to him. It felt good to know she’d helped them, that what she’d written, based on the disposition of the planets, about Diane’s problem being temporary and the necessity of staying committed to what she wanted, had not only proven true but had been what Diane had needed to hear.

  She turned off the water, got out of the shower, and started to dry herself with her white terry-cloth towel. Besides thinking about his wife, she’d also been thinking about the women whose names she’d given the detective because they’d consulted with her about troubled relationships. As she’d reviewed their files and read her notes about them, she’d begun to picture some of them in her mind. She hadn’t had enough time to go over their charts or the charts of their husbands or boyfriends, and now she wondered what their charts would tell her. She decided that she would look at them and see. In the meantime, Detective Stevens was going to find out what he could learn about the men, so no time was being wasted.

  She hung the towel on the rack. As she reached for her bathrobe, she was surprised to see King padding into the bathroom carrying a bone in his mouth. She generally didn’t give him bones, and neither did Emma or Sarah.

  “Where did you get that?” she asked him. “Did someone throw it into the garden?”

  King looked up at her with his light blue eyes and gave her a soft howl, as if to say he hoped she would stop asking questions and just let him keep it. She pried the bone out of his mouth and looked it over. It was a leather bone, the kind sold in pet stores. It was in very good shape; in fact, it looked new. She bent down and smiled as she gave it back to King. “Looks like you got yourself a bone,” she told him.

  Sarah was downstairs straightening her office. She’d been ready to take Kelly’s advice and stay home, but when she’d woken up that morning, she realized that she wanted to go to work. The night before she had practiced her part in Janáček’s String Quartet no. 1 for three hours, and playing the magnificent music had made her realize that, despite missing Kevin, she was still able to enjoy music and hopeful about the opportunities that the upcoming concert would create for her quartet. Part of what made her feel this sense of hope was the support Kelly gave her to pursue her career as a violinist, and it made her want to come to the brownstone to support Kelly.

  All the workmen had left the house except the two painters who ran Ace Painting, Ed Murrin, who’d come today for the first time, and Peter, who’d painted and run the crew in Ed’s absence. Emerging from her office, Sarah saw Ed on the stairway, using a small paintbrush on the molding. She could see from the awkward way that he held his neck and head as he painted that he had arthritis. The last time Ed had painted her house was four years ago, when Joe Heath, Peter’s father, was still working as Ed’s partner. Sarah didn’t remember Ed seeming old then, although he was in his 60s. There were times Sarah felt her father shouldn’t have retired from his contracting business, but seeing Ed in pain made her feel that maybe her father had been right to stop while he was still feeling well. And, of course, the fact that he had retired meant that he now had the time to devote to taking care of her mother.

  Ed hadn’t made it to the house the day before because the job he’d been on had taken all day, but Sarah had been impressed to see that he was already there and busy painting in the morning when she’d arrived. It was clear from the meticulous way he painted that he was a master in his trade, and the look of pride Sarah saw on his face as he stood back to inspect his work told her that if he was still painting because he needed the income, he also still found satisfaction in it.

  “How’s it going?” she asked him, walking to the foot of the stairs.

  He turned and straightened up his stooped frame as best he could. “Fine. Just fine.”

  “Would you like some water?”

  He shook his head. “Just want you to know, tell your father thanks for the recommendation. We appreciate the work.”

  Sarah smiled. “Well, I appreciate your work.”

  “How’s your mother?” Ed asked her.

  “She’s doing all right. I think she’ll be okay.”

  Ed smiled. “I’m glad.”

  Peter, on a ladder at the end of the hallway, painting the ceiling, spoke to Sarah as he wiped a blob of white paint off the front of his uncombed mane of blond hair. “We’ll be out of here as soon as we finish these touch-ups. Unless you see anything else …”

  Sarah stepped away from the staircase and surveyed the neatly painted hall. “Looks good,” she said. “When you’re done, come to my office and I’ll write you a check.”

  Walking back to her office, she was certain she’d made the right decision to come to work that day. It gave her a sense of accomplishment to see how much had been done to restore the house in a mere twenty-four hours and that she was the one who had set the renewal process in motion; it made her feel that she would get over Kevin and that she was already starting a new and positive chapter in her life.

&nb
sp; It had taken Kelly longer to dress than usual. She’d found herself thinking about her grandmother and memories she had of growing up in her grandmother’s care. Kelly had been the only child in her class at Rudolf Steiner who had been raised by a woman in her seventies and eighties, yet her grandma Irene had been as creative, interesting, and open-minded as any of the other children’s far younger parents. And she had been the only one who had taught the child she was raising about astrology; more important, through astrology, and through her own optimistic spirit, she had taught Kelly that life was a cycle and that death, which had claimed Kelly’s parents—her grandmother’s daughter and son-in-law—in a train accident, was part of that cycle. Her grandmother had explained that just as the cycle of each day included dawn and night and everything in between, so the cycle of each life included birth and death and everything in between.

  Kelly had been grieving over the loss of her parents; for days she had stayed in bed, coming out for meals only at her grandmother’s and Emma’s insistence. Gradually, she had begun spending time with her grandmother, whom she had always deeply loved, in the living room or the downstairs library, which was now Kelly’s office, or in her grandmother’s garden. All the while, her grandmother had talked to her. Slowly her words had begun to take root in Kelly’s consciousness, and Kelly had begun to believe that life wasn’t necessarily all bleak because something terrible had happened, to believe that one day she could find her spirit reborn, perhaps even find her grandmother’s optimism in herself.

  She knew how very much her grandmother had loved her mother and father, and yet her grandmother was able to mourn them and, at the same time, to love life enough to take care of her and to encourage her to find delight in life again. In a very real way, Kelly felt that her grandmother had saved her life, and later she had made it possible for Kelly to survive her divorce, go back to school, and raise Jeff and Julie. Despite being in a wheelchair and unable to stand on her own, her grandmother had had the strength to teach Kelly to stand on her own, not just once, but twice.