He said, "If I can get away, I'd like to come to the funeral."
"No! I mean, that might not be such a good idea. I'd feel better if I knew you were here working on her case."
Rob had figured she'd say something like that. Kara seemed intent on keeping him at arm's length. So what else was new?
"I'll walk you to the Amtrak platform."
"That's okay. I can make it." She started to get out of the car, then stopped. "And thank you, Rob. When they unzipped the bag at the morgue, you turned away. I appreciate that."
He was baffled.
"Why?"
"It gave me an inch more of privacy than I would have had otherwise. That was very considerate. I'm glad to see that you haven't become like everyone else in this city."
And then she closed the door and walked away toward the station doors.
Considerate, hell! he thought. He hadn't been able to look at Kelly again because she looked so much like Kara. And he hadn't been able to bring himself to watch Kara view her sister's battered corpse, couldn't watch her pain, her naked grief. So he'd turned away. That was all.
He lit a cigarette and watched the station doors for a while after she had gone inside. Kara had changed. She'd always been a strong person, with lots of drive and intensity, but the intervening years seemed to have brought everything into sharp focus for her. There was fire in her voice, and a steely determination in her eyes. Although legally she'd been an adult when they'd had their affair, she'd still been a girl inside. She was a woman now, inside and out.
And somehow he knew it would not be another ten years before he saw her again. He found himself looking forward to that.
Punished me again.
Still recovering from it. At least he didn't find the letters. Doesn't know about my scribblings. Be furious if he did. They tell too much about him, about our whole mad relationship. He'd punish me again, worse than ever.
But I can't stop writing. Only this bit of pencil and these scraps of paper allow me to retain the most tenuous grip on the last remnant of my sanity. My only link to reality, whatever that means. My reality—one continuous nightmare interspersed with all too brief periods of wakefulness. Have to keep a record of these awake times, to reassure myself they exist. That I exist! They are worth any punishment.
Oh, the punishment. He metes it out so casually these days. Simply for belittling him because he lost the blonde. Laughed at him because she escaped him. Resented my taunts, so the swine punished me.
But no matter. I survived. And in that poor nurse's death I've found hope. Proves he's not omnipotent. Not quite the Ubermensch he believes himself to be—that I believed him to be.
She escaped him.
Perhaps there's still hope for me.
February 7
5:32 P.M.
"YOU COMING DOWN SOON, MOM?"
Kara turned at the sound of Jill's voice. In the dim twilight leaching through the bedroom window she saw her daughter standing uncertainly in the doorway. Jill was still dressed in the dark green plaid dress and white tights she had worn to the funeral. Her dark brown hair had somehow held onto the French braid Kara had worked it into this morning.
"In a few minutes, Jill. I just want to sit here a while longer."
Jill walked over to where Kara sat by the window and put a hand on her arm.
"Are you okay, Mom?"
Kara put an arm around Jill's thin little shoulders and hugged her close. Someday I'll be okay, she thought, but not yet. Not for a long time.
"I'm fine," she told Jill. "Just sad."
It was over. Finally. Kelly had been laid to rest in a tearful ceremony late this morning. Six nurses had come all the way from Manhattan to say good-bye. Kara had been touched by that. They had accompanied the family back to the house and were downstairs now with her mother, Bert, Aunt Ellen, and a few neighbors who remembered Kelly.
Kara knew she should be downstairs playing hostess, but she couldn't manage that right now. She didn't want anybody else here in her house tonight. Except Jill. And maybe Mom.
Kara wanted them all to go home now and leave her alone with her grief. She wanted to hold onto that grief, use it to keep Kelly alive, use it to retrieve the memories of the past they had shared so intimately.
Go away! All of you!
She'd heard it was good to share your grief; that was what wakes and funerals were for—not for the dead, but for the living. To Kara, it was morbid, all of it.
"Aunt Kelly's with God, right?"
For the hundredth time, Kara reassured her little girl that her Aunt was indeed up in heaven with God.
"And she's happy, right?"
So important to Jill that her Aunt was happy. It seemed to make Kelly's death easier for Jill to accept. But it didn't work for Kara.
"Very happy. She's up in Heaven's ICU taking care of all those scorched souls they ship in from Purgatory every day. She's happy and very, very busy."
On the last word, Kara felt her voice start to crack. She hugged Jill more tightly against her.
If I start crying now, I'll never stop.
She got control and pushed Jill to arm's length, glad she hadn't turned on the lights.
"You go downstairs and play hostess with the mostess for a little while, then I'll come down and take over, okay?"
Jill brightened. She loved to be put in charge.
"Okay!"
They hugged again. Kara could never get enough hugs from Jill, or give her enough. She loved her like life itself, and strove every day to give her child two parents' worth of affection.
"Love you, bug," she said.
Jill kissed Kara on the cheek and ran downstairs.
Kara leaned back in her rocker and rocked, much as she had in this same chair, in this same room, when she'd been nursing Jill. That had given her such warm, pleasant feeling. Now she looked out at the bleak, frozen landscape and thought how well it matched her present mood.
The farm. Her farm. Forty acres with a house and a barn. True, the barn was falling apart and there was no livestock. Kara had no desire to be a farmer, but she was growing something: Christmas trees. That was for tax purposes, mainly. An accountant had told her that her tax rate for the property would go down if a certain percentage of the acreage was planted. Scotch pines were a perfect solution. Once she'd planted the seedlings, they needed no care beside an occasional spraying which she did herself. And someday she'd be able to sell them as Christmas trees.
She rocked and listened: Through the floor she could hear her mother moving about downstairs, clanking the pots, still so much at home in the kitchen that had been hers for thirty years but now belonged to Kara. Mom looked like she'd aged ten years since Christmas. She wasn't saying much; especially noticeable was the lack of bickering with her sister, Aunt Ellen. Hanging between Mom and Ellen no doubt was the memory that it had been Ellen who first had urged the twins to come to New York and live there as she did. Bert's voice floated up occasionally. Kara's usually jovial stepfather had been subdued this trip, muttering only an occasional phrase. He seemed to take Kelly's death as hard as a man who had lost his own flesh and blood. Kara loved him for that. And piping above it all was Jill's voice, high-pitched, incessant. Good old Jill. No such thing as a pregnant pause when she was around.
How Jill had loved Kelly, and Kelly, Jill. The two of them, separated by more than twenty years, would whisper and share secrets like two sisters, just as Kara and Kelly had when they were kids.
So many memories. What relationship, what life-sharing could be more intimate than that of identical twins? Kelly and Kara Wade had dressed alike, braided their long blond hair alike, had even played the traditional tricks of pretending to be the other.
She smiled as she remembered the time at the local county fair when they had driven one of the Little Miss Lancaster judges to distraction by taking turns showing up wherever he went. They shared the award that year.
They had grown apart during these last years of separation, of livin
g in different states, but on the occasions they got together, it was as if they had never been apart.
Kara had always assumed she'd know instantly if something awful happened to Kelly. Wasn't there supposed to be a psychic link between identical twins? But Tuesday she had gone to bed early and had spent the night in a sound sleep. Kelly had plummeted through more than a hundred feet of cold air, screaming all the way, had had the life smashed out of her on the filthy pavement below without causing the slightest ripple in Kara's slumber.
It didn't seem right.
But then, nothing about this whole thing seemed right.
Kara picked up the list of Kelly's personal effects that were being kept for evidence. She hadn't— couldn't—let Mom see this. The vial with half an ounce of cocaine was the hardest to accept, but the clothing described wasn't much easier.
… one garter belt, black… two full length stockings, black… one pair silk panties, black, slit-crotch style… one bra, black, open cup style…
Kara forced her bunched jaw muscles to relax. This could not be her sister they were talking about here. Slit-crotch panties? Bras cut so the nipples poked through? Kelly would never wear these things. She would have fallen on the floor laughing if anyone asked her to wear this garbage.
This is not my sister!
It was Kelly they had buried today, but who had Kelly become? Who had made her this way?
Kara had to know. She knew she would not rest easy until she found out.
And who had pushed Kelly through that window?
Kara hoped that, whoever they were, they were sweating and worrying about being caught. And when Rob did catch them she hoped they got sent up for a long, long stretch during which they'd be buggered by every ferocious hood on Riker's Island.
She hoped they were spending every moment of every day in sweaty, shaky, skin-crawling, heart-pounding panic.
▼
"Phil? It's me—Ed."
"Are you crazy calling me here now? Julie and Kim will be back from church any minute!"
Ed Bannion cringed at the heat of his brother's anger. He could almost see Phil's clenched teeth, the splayed fingers of his raised hand.
"I gotta talk to someone, Phil. I'm going crazy!"
"Have you been drinking?"
"I've had a few."
"It's not even six o'clock, for Christ sake! What are you going to be like in a couple of hours?"
"Asleep, if I'm lucky."
"What the hell's that supposed to mean?"
Ed looked around his five-room Upper West Side apartment. It was empty, as usual, but never had felt so alone. He had hundreds of acquaintances, people he hung out with at night and on weekends, women he dated and occasionally slept with, men he had lunch with, played squash with. He couldn't turn to any one of them. He almost wished he'd stayed active in the Church. At least then he might be able to talk to a priest.
But there was no one for him now except Phil. And Phil didn't want to talk about it.
He sat at the kitchen table. Newspapers from Wednesday, the Times, Post, News, Newsday, USA Today, early and late editions, all arrayed before him. A beautiful blonde, clad only in garter belt and stockings, crashing through a window in the Plaza Hotel to end up dead on the street below—the tabloids had eaten it up, and even the Times had given the story considerable space. The tv news shows had reviewed the victim's life but reported that the police could come up with no answers. The victim's family refused to comment, and her tearful co-workers at St. Vincent's in Greenwich Village had nothing to say except how shocked they were.
And that was it. By Thursday she wasn't even mentioned. Twenty-four hours after her dramatic death, the papers and tv news both had forgotten about Kelly Wade.
But the police hadn't—Ed was sure of that.
And neither had Ed Bannion.
"I can't sleep, Phil. Every time I close my eyes I see her going through that window. I hear her—"
"Knock it off, will you? I never knew you were such a goddam wimp!"
Images flashed before Ed's eyes—the two of them, panicked, shaking, stumbling half-dressed out into the hallway, adjusting their clothing in the stairwell, hurrying down a random number of flights and then waiting for the elevator on another floor, taking it down to the lobby and then strolling out as casually as they could amid the uproar over the "jumper" who had landed on the pavement only moments before.
It would have been funny, a scene out of a Hollywood comedy, something to laugh about later… if only it hadn't ended so horribly.
"Doesn't it bother you at all?"
Phil's voice softened. "Yeah, it bothers me. It was a hell of a thing. But we're not to blame, Ed. We didn't do anything to that Ingrid—"
"Kelly. The papers say her real name was Kelly Wade."
"Whatever. The fact remains that she went out that window on her own. Nothing we did in that room had anything to do with her taking that leap."
"I know, but—"
"But nothing!" The anger was back in Phil's voice. "What really bothers me is that I might get hauled in for questioning and have my marriage and career and reputation ruined because my brother can't stop whining about a whore with a snootful of coke who threw herself out a window!"
"You didn't see her face, Phil."
"Of course, I did!"
"Not right before she went out the window. It was—"
"Gotta go, Ed. Julie and Kim are back. Just hang in there and keep your shit together and don't do anything stupid, okay? I'll call you tomorrow."
"Phil—?"
The line was dead.
Ed hung up and reached for the vodka bottle. He poured some more over the ice in his glass. Absolut Citron. He'd never been more than a beer or wine drinker but he'd heard that the best way to get drunk without getting sick was with vodka. The slight lemony flavor of this one made it easier to swallow.
He sipped, grimacing as it went down.
But not that much easier.
He walked through the great room of his spacious condo, past the entertainment center with the stereo and giant screen tv, past the leather furniture groups. He didn't want to hear anything or watch anything, and he couldn't sit still. He stood at the picture window and looked down on Sheridan Square. How he'd reveled in owning this chic, expensive pied a terre in the Coronado, the corner of Broadway and 70th, in the heart of yuppidom. Tonight it left him cold.
"You didn't see her face, Phil," he said aloud as he watched the traffic below. "You didn't see her face."
If only he could forget how she'd looked as her head swung back and forth, staring in turn at him and his brother in those silent seconds before she ran blindly for the window; if only he could get her last expression out of his mind, maybe then he could sleep. He had only seen her face for a few seconds then, but it had differed so from the woman who had accosted them down in the bar. The face that had hovered over him for that instant had been shocked, repulsed, anguished, tortured… lost. But worst of all, utterly hopeless.
Why? Why, damn it!
The question clung to him like a whining child, following him from room to room. And it led to other questions.
Who was this woman who had called herself Ingrid but was really named Kelly who had turned in a matter of seconds from a male fantasy sex kitten to a frightened doe? Who or what had made her that way? Why had she jumped?
And most importantly: Was Ed in any way responsible?
He wouldn't sleep until he knew.
Which was why he had spent most of the past four days trying to track down Kelly Wade, R.N. He had called in sick on Wednesday—and truly he had been sick the whole day after the incident—and had extended his illness through the rest of the week, spending his time calling the increasingly short-tempered Phil and trying to learn more about the dead woman. He had used a number of ruses, calling the personnel office at her hospital in various guises, trying to learn more about her. All he had managed to glean from them was that she had lived in the East Sixties and tha
t the funeral was scheduled for Saturday in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The police had been even less helpful.
He had found a Wade K in the Manhattan directory, listed at 335 East 63rd. He had called the number at least forty times now and there was still no answer. That had to be her place.
When he got the chance, he was going to go over there and take a look around. Nothing overt, nothing conspicuous, just get the lay of the land and see if maybe he could learn something about her.