King ran into the kitchen, carrying his new bone. He looked at Kelly and Peter. Kelly waited anxiously as the dog looked from her to the man who had invaded her house. She expected King to pick up her fear and to attack Peter, but the dog, the bone in his teeth, walked over to Peter, wagging his tail.
Peter petted King’s nose and spoke to him calmly in a manner that King would interpret as affectionate. “So you like my little present,” he said.
The dog nuzzled against Peter.
“Let’s play a game,” Peter said. He gently pried the bone from King’s mouth and tossed it into the front hall. King immediately ran after the bone. When the dog was in the hall, Peter closed the door, leaving King on the other side of it and him and Kelly alone in the kitchen.
“You gave him the bone,” Kelly said, meeting his gaze.
Peter smiled. “I figured it would make this easier.” He reached into his pocket and took out a wood scraper with a blade as sharp as a knife and held it up for Kelly.
“I could’ve killed him,” he said, “but I’ve always liked dogs. And besides, I was saving this for you. It’s got a beautiful blade, don’t you think?” He glanced admiringly at the thin, pointed blade. “Look at the power of it, Kelly.”
She felt her helplessness as she stood there on her crutches, gazing into eyes that despised her and that wanted to see her dead. The knife she’d been using to cut the lamb and vegetables for her dinner was on the other counter, out of her reach; all she had to fight him with was what she knew about people.
“Don’t let it control you, Peter,” she said. “You’re bigger than that blade. You have the power to put it aside.”
“Don’t try to mind fuck me!” he shouted at her, his face reddening with rage.
Kelly heard King jumping up and scratching the other side of the kitchen door. She turned toward the door, hoping to find that he’d been able to open it, but Peter had closed the door tightly and King’s attempts did nothing but produce futile noise.
“Poor King,” Peter said to her with mock sympathy. “He can’t protect you.”
He looked as if he was going to say something else, but before he did, the phone started to ring.
“Don’t answer that!” he shouted.
As the phone continued ringing, he came closer to Kelly with the razor-sharp wood scraper. On the fourth ring, the answering machine picked up, and Kelly heard her recorded voice answering as it had so many thousands of times before. “This is Kelly York. Sorry I can’t get to the phone. Please leave a message.”
There was a brief pause and then a beep before Sarah’s voice came through the answering machine.
“Hi, Kelly. It’s Sarah. It’s probably not important anymore, but I thought you should know. Peter Heath’s father, Joe, he’s a drinker, and he used to be Ed’s partner in Ace Painting. Joe’s wife, Helen, came to you for her chart just before she left him. It must’ve been twenty years ago. I know the FBI says it’s the man they shot who was calling you, but I thought you should know about Helen leaving Joe after she saw you, since the man on the phone kept blaming you for making a woman leave him. I’m sure it doesn’t matter. See you tomorrow.”
Kelly heard a click as Sarah ended the phone call. Then she heard the tape with her greeting rewind. All the while she silently repeated to herself the name Helen Heath. Desperately, she searched her memories to find the woman who matched the name, going back twenty years to when she’d been twenty-one years old and her grandmother had been alive. She and Jack had been living in Kings Point, and she’d been pregnant with Jeff. She hadn’t started doing charts professionally then; she’d done only one or two of them because her grandmother had asked her to.
She remembered doing the first chart … Then she remembered Helen Heath.
She looked at Peter and saw that his face had turned white, but his eyes were filled with no less rage and his hand still held the blade steadily as he pointed it at her chest from two feet away.
“I remember your mother,” she said quietly. “My grand mother asked me to do a chart for Sarah’s mother, Rose. Rose was my grandmother’s nurse. Your mother was Rose’s friend. Rose asked me to do her chart.”
Peter said nothing; he just looked at her, and she could see that beneath his rage was a deep hurt, a hurt that she knew could be just as deadly as the anger it had turned into. But she felt that if she could make him hear her … if only she could make him hear her …
“I never told your mother to leave,” she said. “And she wouldn’t have left, even if I had. She loved you too much to leave. I remember her talking about you. It touched me how much she loved you.”
“Liar!” he screamed. “You made her leave!”
“Peter, please listen to me—” she begged.
He advanced on her with the blade. “I didn’t even know what happened till my father got so sick I had to give up my job in California to fucking come home and take care of him! That’s when he told me that she saw you, and that the next day she walked out! That’s why I asked Ed if I could take over for my father on his painting crew, so if your house needed painting, I could get in here. And it did need painting, didn’t it? And then you had your ‘accident’ on the stairs.”
He looked at her, not with satisfaction about the success of his plans, but with anger so great that it consumed him. It made his body rigid with hate, and Kelly knew that if she could not stop him, it would lead him to end her life.
“I told you, Peter, I—”
He stopped her again. “You made him suffer, and I wanted him to see you suffer. And we did. Both of us. That’s why I put the surveillance equipment in here, so we could both see you suffer!”
“Your father made your mother suffer,” Kelly said, trembling. “I remember, because she cried the whole time she was talking to me. She—”
“Shut up!” he screamed.
“Your mother was scared of him,” she continued, “but she wanted to stay because of you. She wanted to know what she should do to get him to stop drinking, so he wouldn’t beat her. She asked me to do his chart for her, and I did. And I tried to—”
Before Kelly knew it, Peter grabbed her, knocking one of her crutches to the floor as he pulled her around and held the blade to her throat. “My whole life would be different if it wasn’t for you and your fucking astrology!” he shouted.
She could feel the blade’s edge against the skin of her neck. All at once something came to her, not something she remembered from her talk with Helen Heath, but something that she felt. “You tried to protect her from him, didn’t you? You were only four or five. There was nothing you could do—”
“I said shut up!” This time his voice wavered.
Terrified, she forced herself to continue. “Then he turned his anger on you.”
“Because you made him!” he shouted. “Because you made her leave! It all happened because of you.”
She heard him start to cry, and she could feel that although he was still holding the blade to her neck, his hand was shaking and the blade was no longer pressing against her throat. A surge of adrenaline shot through her, and she reached up, took hold of the wood scraper, and pulled it down and away from her with all her strength. It came loose from his hand and fell to the kitchen floor. Instantly, she swooped down and picked it up, and as he bent down to take it from her, a primal violence rose within her. She picked up the crutch that had fallen to the floor and started beating him over the head with it until he slumped to the floor, unconscious, his head bleeding.
With the blade in her hand, she moved on her crutches as rapidly as she could to the kitchen door where King was scratching and howling. She opened the door and hurried down the hall toward the front door, unlocked both locks, opened the door, and faced the street. Standing on the threshold, looking out onto 85th Street, she was breathing hard and her body was drenched with sweat. She gripped the doorjamb, scared to leave and scared to stay.
She heard a sound behind her and turned to see Peter coming out of t
he kitchen, getting his bearings. In his hand was the large knife that she’d used to prepare her dinner.
King had been with Kelly; now he ran toward Peter as Peter started unsteadily down the hall toward the front door.
“Get out of here, you fucking dog!” Peter shouted at him as King ran through his legs. He pushed King out of the way and continued toward Kelly.
Kelly turned toward the street again. Her heart was beating so fast she felt it would burst. Death was only a few steps behind her, but looking out on the street it felt like death was in front of her, too, that she would literally die if she went outside onto the tree-lined street that she had known all her life.
In that instant, she knew only one thing: She wanted to live, not only for herself, but for her children. Closing her eyes, she let go of the doorjamb, crossed the threshold onto the stoop, and, opening her eyes, descended the steps on her crutches, ignoring the pain in her ankle. Reaching the sidewalk, she realized that she was still alive, and she kept going.
Knife in hand, Peter ran onto the stoop. Enraged by what Kelly had done to him, he was determined to kill her even if it meant stabbing her in the street in front of anybody who might be walking by. He was so intent on catching up to her that he didn’t notice King until the dog ran between his legs, and Peter felt himself stumbling over the husky’s strong, muscular body and falling onto the cement steps.
Kelly was across the street before she allowed herself to glance back over her shoulder. She was startled to see Peter Heath sprawled headfirst down the steps of the brownstone. He wasn’t moving. King was sniffing him.
She stood where she was and started to catch her breath, full of wonder that she had escaped death by daring to do something that had seemed impossible to her for so long. She was outside the brownstone; she was like everybody else who could leave their houses. It was what people did; it was what she had done her whole life until the day after Julie had left for college.
But that wasn’t exactly true, was it?
She hadn’t done it for her whole life; there was another time that she’d been afraid to leave the brownstone. It was a long time ago, when her grandmother was alive. It was when she’d first come to live with her grandmother after her parents died.
For several months she’d been afraid to leave her grandmother’s side. That had meant that the only place she’d go besides the three floors of the house was the garden, where her grandmother would come with her. Her parents had left so suddenly that she’d been terrified of being abandoned again by the only family she had left.
Little by little her grandmother had taught her about astrology and had increased her trust in the world, and eventually she had gone out of the house again. But late this past summer, with Jeff already away at school, Julie’s leaving for college, too, had triggered her fear of abandonment all over again. That was why she’d been afraid to leave the brownstone. But she was no longer afraid.
She’d known that Pluto’s conjuncting her Mars and Mars’s squaring her Pluto would bring up the past, secrets, things that had been hidden. She had been right: the reason she’d been agoraphobic had been hidden in her past all along. And so was the reason that Peter Heath had wanted to kill her. She had found the key.
She heard the shrill sound of brakes and turned to see that a black car had sped to the curb in the middle of the street. A man well over six feet tall jumped out of the car, and she recognized that it was Detective Stevens.
“Are you okay?” he asked, running up to her.
“Yes.” She looked at Peter Heath again. He was still not moving.
Stevens took out his gun and ran up to Peter’s body. Kneeling down, he could see that Peter had fallen onto a knife and that the cement beneath where the knife had entered his chest was covered with blood. He also saw that Peter was still breathing, and as he listened, he heard him faintly crying. He kept his gun on Peter, took out his cell phone, and made a call.
“Get me an ambulance,” he said into his phone.
Slowly, Kelly walked on her crutches toward her house. She stood on the sidewalk and looked up at Stevens.
“How did you know?” she asked Stevens.
“I can’t explain,” he told her. “I just kept thinking, what if Winslow was wrong? What if it wasn’t the same man?”
Kelly looked at Peter Heath’s body on the steps and heard his whimpering. “He kept saying I made his mother leave his father,” she said to Stevens. “I don’t believe his mother left. I don’t believe she could. I believe his father would’ve killed her if she tried. I was very young, and I remember how frightened I was for her. I think you should look for her body.”
Joe Heath’s hands shook as he stood in the basement of his house, watching two men from the police department digging a hole in the earth beneath the cement he’d poured twenty years before. Behind him was the worktable where he’d sat drinking his beer and watching Kelly York, thanks to the cameras and microphones his son had planted in her house. His hands weren’t shaking because he was afraid. He was afraid, but his hands always shook when he hadn’t had a drink for a while, and he’d had to stand there with two detectives for an hour, at least, without a beer or anything stronger to give him courage while the other policemen had jackhammered through the cement and then used crowbars to lift the broken chunks off to the side so they could shovel into the dirt.
He knew the policemen were getting close. He brought a hand to his face and felt it shaking as he touched his cheek, trying to comfort himself, telling himself that it didn’t matter anyway. His eyes stayed on the cop who was digging nearest him. The cop had already dug out three shovelfuls of dirt. Now he was digging a fourth shovelful. The cop threw the fourth shovelful of earth onto the cement and was about to dig into the ground again when he stopped and stared down into the hole. Joe Heath saw what the cop saw: the bones of a rib cage. He started sobbing, his whole body shaking; he knew it did matter. He had killed his wife, and for all these years, he had hidden it from everybody, including his son; there was no hiding it anymore.
Detective Stevens looked at the bloated old man with the dull eyes and red, blotchy face, body and soul ruined by alcohol. As Stevens watched the detective from the Bensonhurst division put the cuffs on Joe Heath, he thought of Heath’s son in the hospital and wondered if Peter would survive the wound in his abdomen that he’d gotten from falling on the knife. Then Stevens thought about Kelly; he had to call her to tell her that she’d been right again. Helen Heath had never left her husband; she’d been there all the time. Hidden. A dark secret of the past.
Epilogue
IT WAS THE SATURDAY after Thanksgiving, and Kelly was at Merkin Hall for Sarah’s concert. She loved being there to hear Sarah play, and she loved wearing the red dress she’d bought for the occasion. The dress symbolized her sense of freedom: freedom to come and go from her house as she chose, freedom to enjoy her life. She liked being able to go to an event that she cared about and wear a special dress just for the hell of it. She liked being able to enjoy the way the dress looked on her, the way the vivid red contrasted with her blond hair and her dark blue eyes and the way its cut accentuated her height and her trim figure. She was no longer afraid to be herself.
She loved that Jeff and Julie were there with her to hear Sarah. They sat on either side of Kelly, holding her hands. Looking at them, she recognized once again that they were handsome, vital young adults, even though they were and always would be her children.
Emma was there, too, sitting between Jeff and Sarah’s parents, Rose and Sam. Rose had been home for three weeks and was able to get around with a cane; she was rehabilitating more quickly than the doctors had first predicted. Kelly saw the pride in Rose’s and Sam’s eyes as they waited for the curtain to rise on their daughter’s quartet. The aisle seat next to Sam was empty, and Sam had placed his coat on it. Every now and then he’d glance over his shoulder as if he was expecting someone.
Kelly leaned over Jeff and Emma. “Who’s the seat for?” she
asked Sam.
“Our future son-in-law,” Sam told her. He smiled at Kelly mysteriously, and she noticed that Rose was smiling, too.
The house lights began to dim, and Kelly turned her attention to the front of the concert hall. A moment later she felt Jeff moving beside her and, looking in his direction, saw Kevin taking the empty seat next to his future parents-in-law. Kevin met her eyes and smiled warmly, and then all of them sat back in their seats and focused on the stage.
Under the brilliant stage lights, Sarah’s quartet started walking onto the stage. Sarah was first to enter. She looked radiant in her long black dress, carrying her violin, her back straight, her black hair shining like onyx. She walked to her chair and gracefully sat down. As the other members of the group took their seats, Kelly reflected that, since the time of danger was over now, it was the time for second chances and adventure. That’s what she’d seen in the stars, and it was already happening around her. Kevin had broken up with his fiancée, Sarah had given him another chance, and they were starting over; maybe it was time for Kelly to call Chris Palmer and apologize to him and hope that he would give her another chance, too. And if he wouldn’t, then, for the first time in a long time, she knew that she was open to meeting someone.
Sarah applied her bow to her violin and, with the other members of her group, played the haunting first notes of Janáček’s String Quartet no. 1. As the rich melancholy music filled the hall, Kelly lost herself in its beauty.
About the Author
GEORGIA FRONTIERE WAS AN author, a businesswoman, a performer, and a philanthropist—a woman who lived life to the fullest.
Frontiere was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to Lucia Pamela Irwin, Miss St. Louis of 1926, KMOX radio’s “gal about town,” and the leader of America’s first all-girl orchestra, and Reginald Irwin, an insurance salesman and businessman.
Frontiere had early aspirations to work as an opera singer, eventually travelling to Milan to train with the Milan Opera. By the age of ten, she was performing along with her mother and brother in the singing group the Pamela Trio. The group traveled the state and entertained at ballrooms and state fairs. A few years later, the family moved to Fresno, California, where Frontiere performed at dinner theatres alongside her mother in a duo, the Pamela Sisters.
Horoscope: The Astrology Murders Page 25