So where's all this damn guilt coming from?
"Oh, God ... this hurts," she said, interrupting her own reverie. She remembered that Hank had once had a sinus infection that had leveled him for two or three days—and Hank had been as big, as strong, and as stoic as they came.
Yeah, but this one's lasted all week, a voice kept prodding.
It was the headache, she decided, that was making her feel such deep remorse; before it, she hadn't felt nearly enough sympathy for Linda Byrne. All that was different now.
She tried to siphon off some of the pain with a low, prolonged sound deep in her throat. It was neither moan nor whimper, but a kind of pleading pant—as if she were begging for mercy. After a moment, the sound came out again.
But this time it wasn't coming from her.
Instantly Helen held her breath, listening. There it was again: a soft pant, with something like a shiver underlying it. Someone crying? But no one else was in the house.
She sat up on the denim-covered sofa, trying to track the source of the sound. It seemed to evolve into another, sharper noise—as if someone were trying to jiggle a locked door.
Helen turned off the light, tiptoed to the big bay window, and peeked through the lace curtain on the side window nearest the front stone steps. The night was inky black: a streetlight had gone out the day before, leaving the house in a big black hole. She thought of flipping on the porch light, but it was obvious that no one was jimmying the lock of her front door. Unsure now whether she'd dreamed the whole thing, Helen lay back down on the sofa. And listened.
Again the panting ... again the jiggling.
She sat back up. Someone was in the house. God in heaven. Someone was in the house.
"Helen? Dear? Are you home?"
Ah. "In here, Aunt Mary," Helen said, relieved. Of course someone was in the house. When you give your key to a kindly old aunt who lives in the apartment in the back bumpout, you can reasonably expect the aunt, sooner or later, to be in the house.
With soup. Into the room walked Helen's seventy-three-year-old relation, a gentle, gray-haired bundle of quirks and good intentions. "How're you feeling, dear?" the old woman asked, sitting next to Helen and patting her hand with her own veiny, wrinkled one. "I brought you something to clear your sinuses. It's on the stove, on low. You want me to bring you a bowl, dear?"
The soup fumes—aroma seemed too kind a word—were turning the corner just about then. "Gee, Aunt Mary, I don't know ... ," Helen said feebly. "What's in it?"
"This and that. Sauerkraut ... pigs' feet ... I fiddled with the recipe your Uncle Tadeusz taught me."
Tadeusz Grzybylek, a member of Salem's spirited Polish community, had wooed Helen's spinster aunt late in her life. No kids, but plenty of amazing food, had come out of the union.
Helen smiled wanly. "Only a taste. It doesn't have the blood of anything in it, does it?"
Her aunt gave her a little laughing pinch and said, "No, no, you're thinking of czarnina—duck soup. You just lie there, dear. I'll be right back."
With a mixture of affection and dread, Helen watched the elderly woman scurry out of the room for a bowl of her brew. Aunt Mary had given up a life of her own to raise Helen after Helen's mother—Aunt Mary's sister—had died; Helen owed her everything. Now that Uncle Tadeusz was gone, it gave Helen great pleasure to give her aunt the back apartment and let her have the run of the house.
Nonetheless, she could do without the soup.
Helen sighed. It came out in a shudder, and that reminded her of the deeply distressing sound of panting that she thought she'd heard. The jiggling—okay, that was because Aunt Mary's cataracts made the back-door keyhole hard for her to find. But the sound of panting—that, Helen couldn't explain.
Ironically, the panting could just as easily have been of someone in the throes of passion as someone in the throes of distress. Helen ought to know. In bed with Hank, she used to make the sound regularly. And yet. . . no. This sound had been too full of pain. Something deep inside Helen had responded the way a mother would ....
Becky! Had something happened to Becky? Helen jumped up, terrified that she'd had some kind of premonition. At that instant the phone rang.
It was Becky, calling to ask whether her mother was interested in a set of Liz Claiborne sweats at seventy-five off.
"Thanks, no, I'm all set," said Helen, buckling with relief onto the sofa. "And, Becky? Please drive carefully. You know how intense you get when you're yakking with your pals."
"Yes, Mother," Becky said in an exaggerated way.
Obviously her girlfriends were near the phone: Helen heard giggling. Becky said good-bye and Helen, reassured, was left waiting for her medicine.
Aunt Mary came bearing a galleried brass tray on which a bowl of kapusniak sat like a queen's coronet. Helen made herself sit up straight to receive the tray across her lap, then took the round-shaped spoon, part of the old set her aunt had foisted on her when she moved in, and skimmed a bit of clear liquid into it. "Here goes nothing," she said with a game smile.
Aunt Mary sat perched on the edge of one of the corduroy chairs and shook her head. "You look so pale. I don't know ... maybe you need more protein. Say what you will about czarnina, it's high in that, at least. It would put some color in those cheeks."
"Don't even think about it," said Helen, shuddering. The one time her aunt had made a batch of czarnina, a neighbor had called the police.
"She was overreacting," said Aunt Mary, reading Helen's mind.
Helen grimaced. "Well, what do you expect when you throw a quart of blood in a vat of water? It doesn't smell like anything normal."
Aunt Mary gave a little tuck to her single long gray braid and said with great dignity, "I'm glad your uncle Tadeusz isn't here to hear you say that about Polish cuisine. He'd be very hurt."
And so, obviously, was Aunt Mary. Her pale brown eyes were glazed over in tears and her rather small, once pretty mouth was trembling in distress.
"I'm sorry," Helen said at once, closing her eyes. "It's this stupid, stupid headache. I wish it would go away."
"Maybe that's what I should do," her aunt said, pushing herself up from the chair with a sigh. She gave the bowl of soup an appraising look, then shifted her gaze to her suffering niece. "Eat it," she said, and then she left.
Helen, feeling honor-bound, finished the serving and then lay back down, closed her eyes, and dreamed of ducks being hunted, their quacks dissolving into panting sounds as hunters with bloodied hands wrung their necks.
She woke with a start at the sound of the front door opening.
"Mom!" yelled Becky up the stairs. "It's me! How're you feeling?"
Helen sat up, groggy and tentative. "I'm down here, Becky. And I'm feeling. . . better," she said, surprised and pleased that the headache had retreated, if ever so slightly.
Becky came in—mercifully free of shopping bags—and Helen smiled a greeting. "I guess that last decongestant kicked in," she explained. "What time is it?"
"Eight-thirty. So what's going on?" asked Becky, flopping tiredly into one of the corduroy chairs. Obviously she expected her mother to answer "Nothin' much."
But the death of Linda Byrne was uppermost in Helen's mind. She related the call that Russell had taken, then said, "I feel unbelievably bad about it."
"Yeah.. . I can see. I'm surprised you didn't notice something in the obituaries," Becky added. "You always read them."
"Ah, but not this week," Helen realized. "It's been so crazy, I've hardly had time to scan the headlines."
She went to the butler's pantry and fished out the week's copies of the Evening News from the iron recycle rack, then dumped them in a pile on the claw-footed, round oak table in the center of the kitchen. She pulled the chain on the stained-glass lamp above the table, throwing light that was more quaint than bright across the walls and high ceiling of the carefully restored room.
Becky came in with the big brass tray and left it on one of the marble counters—Helen's one indul
gence when they redid the kitchen—and pulled out a carved-back oak chair.
"Why do you want to look her up, anyway?" Becky asked, dropping her chin onto the cupped palms of her hands. "Isn't that a little ghoulish?"
"When you're older, you'll understand," Helen said, flipping through Monday's obituaries without success. She picked up Tuesday's paper and went straight to the deaths, then sucked in her breath. "Here it is. It's true, then," she added rather stupidly.
She read the headline aloud—" 'Linda Byrne, thirty-two; former art teacher' "—and then scanned the rest. "Born in Geneva ... graduated from Wellesley with a degree in art; taught at Boston College before she was married ... member of a couple of art societies ... survived by her husband ... one child ... a mother and two brothers in Geneva ... a couple of nieces and nephews. Huh. It's not much to go on."
"What do you mean, 'to go on'?"
"Hmm?" Helen looked up in a daze. "Did I say that?"
"Mom. Get a grip," said Becky, laughing. She slid the paper over to her side of the table and studied the obituary. "Y'know, I think I've seen this name Nathaniel Byrne somewhere," she added, tapping her multi-ringed fingers on the page.
"The husband? Can't say I have," Helen decided.
"Yeah ... wait ... somewhere in the house ... I know!" Becky dashed out of the kitchen, went flying up the stairs, stomped across Helen's tiny but efficient home office overhead, and came roaring down again.
"Ta-dah! 'Nathaniel Byrne, Mutual Fund Manager of the Year,'" Becky said, holding up an investment magazine that Helen subscribed to but never had time to read.
"If he's the same Nathaniel Byrne," said Helen. She took the magazine and studied the cover of the magazine. "And anyway, since when are you interested in mutual funds?"
"Who cares about those? He's what caught my eye when I dumped the mail on your desk. It was like, when you walk into a supermarket and you see Brad Pitt's picture on the cover of People? It was like that. You can't help but look."
She was right. The Fund Manager of the Year was a dark-haired, steely eyed, square-chinned, unsmiling male who wasn't the least bit shy about looking straight into the camera and daring it to expose his inner self. His brows were thick and straight, his hair, attractively unruly. He was wearing a heavy wool shirt, khakis, and work boots and was sitting on a massive tree stump in an autumn setting, with his thighs pulled up to his chest and his arms slung loosely across the knees. A gold band adorned his left ring finger and, if Helen wasn't mistaken, that was a Rolex on his left wrist. He was the kind of man that women described as intense rather than hunky.
Near the tree stump was a woodpile with an ax leaning against it. Helen took in the man, took in the setting, and shook her head. "Wrong guy. The Byrne I heard about is a workaholic who ignores his family, flies his own plane, and is never at home. He wouldn't have the time or inclination to chop wood. Besides, look at his boots. They're brand-new."
"Mom, you are so naive," Becky said, rolling her eyes. "The ax and shoes are just props. If he's Fund Manager of the Year, obviously he can afford to get his wood split and stacked. Look him up, look him up," she urged. "See if they say he's from Salem."
Helen did as she was told. The cover article was long, and it finished up, as all such pieces do, with a few scraps of biographical information. "For goodness' sake," Helen said. "You're right. It says he lives on a 'prestigious street in Salem.'"
"Oh, like he's gonna live on a slummy one? What else? Let me read it."
"When I'm done," said Helen, pulling the cover away from her daughter's pesty, hovering grip. She read aloud:
"Byrne and his wife, Linda Bellingame Byrne, to whom he's been married for eight years, have one three-year-old daughter and another child on the way. Mrs. Byrne, an art historian who lectures occasionally in the area, abandoned a professorship at Boston College when her husband began putting in eighty-hour weeks after his promotion to manager of the Columbus Fund. in the five years since then, they have taken no vacations.
"'Nathaniel Byrne has made a lot of money for a lot of investors,' Mrs. Byrne told us. 'After the new baby's born, I'm hoping that they let the poor man have a week or two off now and then,' she said with a teasing smile at her husband.
"So she was pregnant," Helen mused. "How sad." She added, "It's funny that the article lets her have the last word."
Becky, meanwhile, was impressed. "This is so cool. You know this guy, Mom!"
"Number one, I don't know him," Helen reminded her daughter. "And number two, there's nothing cool about it. The timing of this is tragic."
With the ruthless indifference of youth, Becky shrugged and said, "It sounds like Linda Byrne wouldn't've been all that impressed by an article about him anyway."
"Rebecca! A little less cynicism, please."
Brought up short by her mother's sharpness, Becky defended herself. "I only said what you just told me, Mom. Why are you taking this so seriously?"
"I don't know," said Helen, staring at the man on the cover.
What she did know was that her headache had retreated even further. She lifted her hand to the back of her head, just to make sure her head was still there. Yep. And hardly any pain.
Well, for Pete's sake, she thought with a bemused smile. Was it the soup, the pill—or the sight of his face?
Chapter 3
Helen went to bed immediately after Russ came home (twelve minutes late, which fell within an acceptable range of defiance). She'd read the entire article about Nathaniel Byrne, twice; but except for a few principles for making sound investments—and the revelation that Linda Byrne had been pregnant—the story had left Helen none the wiser about either Nathaniel Byrne or his wife.
In the meantime, one thought, and one thought only, rolled back and forth through her head: I wonder what she died of?
Obviously not the headache. The headache must have been a symptom. But of what? Linda Byrne had not sounded like someone near death, that's all there was to it. On the other hand, she'd sounded in a desperate hurry. So maybe she knew.
And yet Peaches hadn't sent off any such signals. But then, Peaches would be discreet, of course. As for Linda Byrne's husband ... it's true, he'd been home early that day, which was odd for an eighty-hour-a-week man. Had he known that his young wife was dying? Would he have let a stranger come to the house if he had?
I wonder what she died of?
Half-asleep, half-ruminating, Helen burrowed more deeply into the down pillows that she liked to pile high on her four-poster bed and pulled the blue plaid comforter more tightly around her shoulders. She always kept the room cool for sleeping—a throwback to Hank's preference—but tonight she'd cracked the window way too wide. A damp breeze was blowing briskly from the northeast, foretelling another raw day.
In fact, the room felt extraordinarily clammy and cold. Far from being fresh and bracing, the air seemed dank, almost fishy, as if she were walking along a beach in the off-season rather than tucked in a cozy warm bed. She shivered under the covers, oddly repelled by the odor. Her house was not so close to the water that she could smell low tide; but low tide, with its washed-up seaweed and occasional dead fish, is what this smelled like. She wanted to close the window, but her limbs seemed paralyzed with fatigue, her very thoughts frostbitten around the edges. I wonder what she...?
A brain tumor?
Helen resolved to find out exactly how Linda Byrne died, and that made it easier, somehow, to fall asleep. But the respite didn't last long. Late in the night, when she was deep in sleep, she was roused by a high-pitched call that sounded like, "A fire, fire!"
Helen shot up in bed, heart pounding, adrenaline surging. What in God's name was that? A screech, a bark, a cry? Before she had time to figure it out, she heard it again, only farther away: a not-quite-human, not-quite-animal sound. Whatever it was, it wasn't someone yelling fire.
Eyes leaden with sleep, she listened for a moment, then fell back on her elbows, waiting. After a little while she heard it again, from yet another
direction. Something with wings, she decided at last. Raccoons, even cats, weren't fast enough to cover that much ground. Another owl? Salem seemed suddenly overrun with them.
Snuggling back under the covers, still too cold to make a sprint for the window, Helen tried to calm her nerves. But images and thoughts, all of them disturbing, kept pounding away at her determination to drop off into blissful, headache-free sleep.
Nathaniel Byrne. She remembered vividly the sound of his voice as he yelled down to Peaches to get upstairs— the voice, hoarse and urgent, that seemed such an odd fit with the cooly confident financier posed on the stump. Helen remembered the voice so well that, for the first time, she realized that it had held more shock than surprise, more anger than grief. It was not the voice of a man expecting his wife to die at any moment of some terminal disease.
Nathaniel Byrne. Helen's heart went out even more to little Katherine.
****
By morning Helen's headache was back, worse than ever. It didn't seem possible. It took all the strength she possessed to get out of bed and on with the day. She was making coffee and halfheartedly arguing with her son over whether or not he could go to a performance by a really vicious rock group when they were interrupted by the arrival of Helen's aunt.
The elderly woman took one look at her niece and clucked in distress. "It didn't work?" she asked, apparently incredulous.
"For a while it did," Helen said, managing a limp smile. She pulled her terry-cloth robe a little more tightly around her and padded over to the fridge for cream. "But then I guess the potion wore off."
"You'll have to get your head x-rayed then," Aunt Mary decided without any more ado. "It could be a brain tumor."
"Ma, can I go or not?" asked Russ, annoyed by the interruption. "Mickey hasta know to buy tickets."
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