FROM THE KITCHEN WINDOW above the sink Natalie could look out through the scrawny naked branches of the trees in the sloping backyard and see the towers of Manhattan across the water. Low, soft gray clouds scudded across the skyline, and there was fog rising off the water, mist spitting against the window. Manhattan seemed more a mirage than the core of the city: it came and went and the fog seemed almost palpable.
The coffee was finished perking and she poured herself a mug and sipped it carefully, listening to the weather report on the radio, remembering the sound of the cat in the night, the closing of the door. She’d finally drifted off; upon waking the night’s fears had receded like misshapen giants straggling back to the black openings of their caves. It was odd how vulnerable one became when the darkness closed in and how carefree even the grayest daylight could make one feel. All she’d heard were some house noises that went on day and night—the kind you only heard in the stillness, the darkness, when your senses were sharpened.
A major winter storm, bigger than the one of the preceding weekend, was on its way, and the weatherman said he expected flurries to begin by noon, turning to full blizzard conditions by mid-afternoon. She was glad to be where she was. The house would be magical with a heavy snowfall outside, like something from a fairy tale.
She poured another cup of coffee and sat on a high stool by the kitchen telephone. She had wakened thinking of MacPherson, wanting to hear his voice, wondering what had happened at her apartment during the night—but for some obscure reasons of self-discipline she had forced herself to wait until she was coffee fortified to call MacPherson’s office. It turned out he had come to work directly from her place and he sounded tired, edgy when she was put through. She had almost decided to confront him on the D’Allessandro issue, but no, this wasn’t the time.
“No, nothing, he didn’t show.” She heard him blow his nose. “I tore my pants getting into your backyard, I couldn’t sleep at all, and somewhere along the line I’ve picked up a cold.” He sneezed as if to prove his point.
“How’s Officer Farraday?”
“Slept like a log. Woman hasn’t got a nerve in her body.”
“So what happens now?”
“She left the house and went to your office. She’ll come home again tonight. We’ll wait. I know he’s watching, waiting, wondering what to do. Maybe tonight will be the night. How is it out there, Natalie? Snowing yet?”
“Misting. Cozy. I’m fine.”
“Well, just relax, sit tight. I can’t think of anyone who could use a vacation better than you. This’ll be over soon.” He was beginning to sound like the needle was stuck, but, she supposed, when you didn’t have anything to report, you just didn’t. In any case, he didn’t sound angry with her, which was something.
She called Julie at her office and told her what was going on. “Well,” Julie said, “I won’t have you staying out there all by yourself. I’m coming out tonight. Period. End of report.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Natalie said, a small hope at the back of her mind. “There’s a huge storm coming. It wouldn’t be worth the effort. You’d just have to go back in the morning—”
“Not if we’re snowed in.” Julie cackled triumphantly. “The perfect excuse. I’ll be there tonight, one way or another. We can sit around and listen to the house creak and the disappearing cats meow and tell ghost stories—it’ll be like Girl Scout camp all over again!”
She wouldn’t take no for an answer and Natalie hung up looking forward to her arrival. Somehow, storm or not, Julie would get through.
The first big flakes of snow had begun to blow across the drifts still remaining from the weekend when Natalie got into her sheepskin coat and headed out the door. She was standing on the front porch, feeling the tingling in her cheeks caused by the brisk, wet wind, when she heard the telephone ring behind her. The locks on the outside doors hadn’t worked for years, Aunt Margaret was fond of reminding people from Manhattan, and she’d never had a burglary. The result at the moment was that Natalie was able to dash back inside and get to the phone before the caller hung up. She was thrown for a moment: it was an unfamiliar voice. Then it dawned on her that the call was intended for Aunt Margaret.
“Well, where in the world is Margaret?” It was a woman of a certain age. “And who are you? Is this Margaret’s house?”
Natalie identified herself. “And Aunt Margaret’s gone to Atlantic City with friends.” She laughed. “I hope they took along plenty of money—they may get snowed in at the casinos—”
“Oh, no, we didn’t go to Atlantic City. We got a much better deal on rooms for the first week in January and what difference did it make to us? Bunch of old biddies out on a tear? December, January, who cares? So we didn’t go.”
“Well, Margaret isn’t here. I came last night and there’s not a soul around. Not even the cats. Maybe she decided to go anyway, on her own?”
“Maggie? Oh, I don’t think so. She’s the life of the party but she does need the party. She’s not one to go off by herself. I wonder … could she have gone into the city? Well,” her voice broke out of the momentary questioning reverie, “she’s a big girl, isn’t she? She can do what she likes. But the cats, I wonder what she did with the cats.”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” Natalie said. “She’s bound to call someone, you or some other friend, or she’ll just come home. I’m sure it’s perfectly simple.” Something about Aunt Margaret’s disappearance was making her nervous: it was the state of mind she was in, obviously, and had nothing to do with Aunt Margaret and the cats.
“I suppose you’re right,” the woman said. “When she gets back, have her call Fanny and explain what she’s been up to.”
Natalie said she would and jotted down a note on the pad by the telephone. She went back outside and noticed that the flakes of snow were already bigger and blowing harder across the front of the house. She couldn’t resist the high iron gates of the cemetery, the way the blowing snow shrouded the monuments as if they were an army crouching against the elements, waiting for nightfall to attack. She leaned into the wind, hands deep in her pockets and chin buried against her chest, barely looking outward, enjoying the simple awareness of where she was. The solitude, the desolate wind, the insistent scraping of the snow on her face like a cat’s tongue. She wound around the driveways, seeing the dead, broken flowers in pots, the sheen of ice on the odd monument, the rims of snow growing along the edges of the marble. Someone had scattered breadcrumbs and little dun-colored birds tiptoed daintily along the crust, lunching.
The wind increased as she worked her way up toward the crest of the long slope. To her left she could see Margaret’s house, the light she’d left on in the parlor shining through the snow like a safety beacon. Out of breath, she stopped at the top and realized that Manhattan had disappeared in the storm. The towers, the bulk of lower. Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge—all gone as if by Merlin’s wand. Nothing but the increasing gray fury of the storm over the water, where nothing stood in its way.
Damn D’Allessandro and his insinuations! She kicked at the snow, acknowledging her frustration and loneliness. MacPherson had seemed such a nice man, an interesting and interested man, an increasingly rare bird. Hopes … she’d obviously felt a flaring hope that Saturday, a hope she hadn’t been quite willing to admit.
A man for Natalie …
She felt the wind streaking the tears across her face.
She left the cemetery in a thoughtful frame of mind, not upset, but reflective, almost unaware of the weather. She walked for a long time until she found herself in the middle of a shopping area, small drugstores and clothing shops, a market, a couple of restaurants with lights glowing behind windows in fake brick facades. She stopped, looked back the way she’d come and saw a long street blurring in the snow, running straight as a string up a hill and then turning, disappearing. Looking at her watch, she realized she’d been walking for the better part of an hour. The exercise had kept her warm and she was famished.
The restaurants lunch crowd had thinned to almost nothing and the effort at a nightclub atmosphere struck her as somewhat pathetic, yet oddly endearing in the dim gray light of early afternoon. The hostess gave her a booth with a view of the street through cedar slats and hanging plants, enough hanging plants to remind her of the restaurants in Malibu where what you saw beyond the windows was the Pacific. She ordered a Bushmills on ice and later there was a club sandwich with chips. It was like a little town in Illinois somewhere, like the villages she’d driven through as a college student at Northwestern. New York seemed inconceivably far away. She felt as if the land mass reached hundreds of miles in all directions and there was nothing anywhere to frighten her.
Christmas decorations clung to the ceiling and a tree stood by the cashier’s desk. She hadn’t seen such old-fashioned bubble lights since she was a child. Her father had come home with boxes of bubble lights shaped like little candles one long-ago Christmas, and they had struck a six- or seven-year-old Natalie as wondrous quite beyond description. Miraculous. Now here they were again and she hadn’t seen any since she was a girl. She drank her coffee and realized she’d better go to the bathroom before setting off on her walk home. It was a long walk.
The afternoon turned imperceptibly to twilight and then to darkness as she walked through the curious mixture of fog and snow. Instead of blowing steadily, the snow was now accumulating and the temperature was dropping toward freezing, then below. The footing was increasingly treacherous but still she seemed almost unaware of the process of walking, of her surroundings as she moved past the dark shapes of houses with lights in the windows and the smell of the woodsmoke curling from chimneys. Through the windows she was vaguely cognizant of Christmas-tree lights, the shapes of people moving. Cars sliding carefully into driveways, the slamming of the door muffled by the thickly falling snow. One front lawn featured a team of reindeer pulling Santa’s sled, all in plastic, like a store display.
God, she thought, please let all this be over before Christmas. It was a child’s prayer: Please grant me my wish, O Lord, and I’ll never be a bad girl again. …
Memory doesn’t work rationally, doesn’t follow nice logical pathways through the maze of the mind and lead inexorably to the truth, the remembered truth. Instead it is constantly making quantum leaps that seem on the surface to make no sense but are instead simply mistakes. Memory, in short, is cleverer and more impatient and a good deal more inspired than those who are merely its keepers.
Which accounts for the fact that it was a snowman that set Natalie to thinking.
He stood somewhat forlornly in a vacant lot next to a small gray house. He wore a plastic bowler hat in an unhappy green shade that surely dated from some Saint Patrick’s Day celebration better forgotten. His nose was a candy cane, which struck her as rather a nice touch. His eyes were indeed made of something that looked like coal, and his grin was a curved line of small stones. An ancient plaid scarf had been wrapped around his neck and the fringe fluttered in the wind. Another row of stones stretched down his chest like buttons on a coat.
She stood smiling at him, surprised at the effort that his creation had required. She had certainly never made such a snowman and doubted that she’d ever seen one like it outside the pages of a book. Or a Christmas card …
He seemed almost to deserve a salutation of some kind. Then she saw his shoes! He even had shoes. Two black shoes protruding from the largest of the three boulders of snow, angled slightly as first to remind her of Charlie Chaplin.
But there was something else about the shoes, some snickering blade of memory fighting to emerge, struggling to tell her something, yapping at her even as she walked the last fifteen minutes to the great house where the light she’d left on still burned, making it seem a center of warm family life on a snowy winter night.
She ran a hot tub and sank in gratefully, breathing the steam and feeling the heat soak in, driving the chill from her bones. Those shoes … why did they make her think of the anonymous flowers that had come for her? Shoes. Flowers. She closed her eyes, trying to push aside the clouds of memory, all the events that had crowded in on her so distractingly. The shoes. There was something funny, not quite right. …
She laughed at the thought of the deliveryman who’d brought the flowers. Same guy both times. Ingratiating, New Yorky kind of character, helpful, proud of having delivered flowers to none other than Mrs. Robert Redford. She remembered standing in the kitchen, dripping wet, a towel around her head, while he got on the stool to reach the vase on top of the cupboard … and suddenly memory snapped and crackled.
She saw his black shoes—a stain was it? No, a scratch, a long scratch across the toe of one of his black shoes. Plain black shoes and the scratch had laid back the leather, leaving a pale incision across the toe. … The shoes hadn’t been polished since the scratch had occurred, otherwise she’d never have seen it—
She sat up in the tub. She felt her stomach turn in on itself. She struggled to her feet and splashed out of the tub, grabbed a towel and began to dry herself furiously. All the signs of terror, the frantic fluttering in her chest, hands shaking …
The cop who’d come to her apartment to check on MacPherson. D’Allessandro. She never had seen his shield while he was doing all the shtick about how important seeing the shield was. She’d been amused at what a perfect television cop he was … and while she’d listened to the creak of his leather coat and heard his patter she’d cataloged his outfit. Right down to his shoes.
And across the toe of one of his black shoes there had been a pale scar.
The same scar.
But how was that possible?
She struggled into her jeans and sweater and ran down the stairs, out of breath, almost falling on the loose carpet runner.
It was possible only if it was the same pair of shoes.
She had trouble dialing the number, her fingers wouldn’t work.
The same pair of shoes …
And Barry Hughes wasn’t only a murderer.
He was an actor.