Midnight Voices

by John Saul

  “Who cares? It’s true—at Cipriani’s, we’re both charity cases. So what do you say? You sure sound like you could use a good lunch, and by ‘good’ I mean ‘expensive.’ Get away from your problems and let your hair down for a couple of hours.”

  Caroline hesitated, but not for long; suddenly the idea of sitting in the sumptuous room with her three best friends was irresistible. “I’ll be there,” she promised. “Hey, I’m taking the kids to the park this morning. Want to meet us there?”

  “God, how I wish I could,” Andrea sighed. “But I’ve got three kids in shelters that need foster homes, and four families to do background checks on before I can even think about matching the kids to the families.”

  “Why do I suspect the city isn’t paying you to work on weekends?” Caroline asked.

  Andrea uttered a darkly hollow chuckle. “Because you’re a reasonably intelligent human being. But the kids still need homes, so hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work I go. And if I don’t get to it, I’m not going to get done until dinner. See you Tuesday.”

  As she hung up the phone and turned back to Laurie and Ryan, Caroline felt a little better, cheered by the prospect of seeing her old friends again on Tuesday. Unless, of course, the lunch turned into nothing more than a bitter taste of what life would be like if Brad hadn’t gone running in the park that night.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Let’s walk down a few blocks,” Caroline said. They were at the corner of 77th and Central Park West, and even though the light had changed and the north-south traffic had come to a halt, Caroline stayed on the curb, clutching her children as if they were toddlers instead of near-adolescents. As she stared across the street to the spot where Brad had entered the park on the night he’d been killed, she told herself she was being stupid, that there was nothing threatening about the spot at all. Everyone who’d ever been mugged in the park had entered it somewhere; what was she going to do, avoid the park completely for the rest of her life? Keep herself and Laurie and Ryan penned inside the apartment because she was afraid to go outside?

  “You don’t have to go with me, Mom,” Ryan said, trying to tug loose from her grip. “I know where I’m going. Why don’t you and Laurie just go to the zoo?”

  Because I don’t want the same thing to happen to you that happened to your father, Caroline thought, but managed to let her voice betray not even a hint of the thought. Instead she smiled brightly. Too brightly? “Embarrassed to be seen with your old mother?” she asked, and saw by the flush of Ryan’s face that she’d hit the nail squarely on the head.

  “All the other guys’ll be with their dads,” Ryan blurted out, and his flush immediately deepened. Then he swiped at his eyes with his sleeve, in a not-quite-successful attempt to conceal their dampness.

  “Hey, it’s okay.” Caroline squatted down so her eyes were level with her son’s. Suddenly he looked far younger than his ten years, and the pain in his eyes tore at her heart. “I know it’s not easy,” she said, resisting an urge to wrap her arms around him. “But we’ll get through this. I promise we will.”

  Ryan’s jaw trembled, but then he bit his lip and drew slightly away from her. “I’m okay,” he muttered.

  But it was so obvious that he wasn’t okay that for a moment—just a moment—Caroline considered letting him go on to the playground by himself. After all, it was one of the ball fields down at the south end of the park that they were going to, not the ones farther up.

  The exact opposite direction from the way Brad had gone that night.

  But then she scanned the park, already filling up with people brought out by the perfect spring morning. Was it possible the man who’d killed Brad was here? They’d never caught him, never even had a clue. And the detective in charge of the case—a big, bluff, sad-eyed Sergeant named Frank Oberholzer up at the 20th Precinct on West 82nd—had explained that they probably wouldn’t catch the killer. “The thing is, it doesn’t look like your husband was a specific target. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. So we don’t have much to go on unless we get a bunch more just like it. Same M.O., same area, same time of day. Then we got a pattern, and we got something to look for. But if it was just some junkie looking for quick cash, there won’t be a pattern—he’ll hit someone else, but it won’t necessarily be a jogger, or even in the park. Hell, he might already be sitting out on Rikers for something else, but unless he talks, there’s no way we’re going to find out what he did.”

  “And he could just as easily still be in the park, looking for someone else,” Caroline had countered. Oberholzer at least had had the decency to tell her the truth.

  “He could be. But if he is, and if he does the same thing again, then we’ve got a shot at him. With your husband, there were no witnesses. Next time he might not be so lucky, or his victim might not die.”

  Which meant that he might be right here, right now.

  Watching her?

  Could he know who she was?

  Of course not! She was being ridiculous. The man hadn’t even known Brad—hadn’t known his name, or anything about him. But that wasn’t true—he’d taken Brad’s wallet, so he’d known a lot about him if he’d taken the time to go through the wallet instead of just grabbing the money and credit cards. Brad’s driver’s license had been in the wallet, so he’d had their address. And pictures. There’d been pictures of her, and of the kids. At least the pictures of the kids were old ones: Ryan hadn’t been more than four, and Laurie six or seven. But Laurie, at least, would still be recognizable, and so would Caroline herself.

  Once again she scanned the people moving through the park, and felt an almost irresistible urge to grab the kids’ hands and take them back to the safety of the apartment.

  Paranoid!

  She was getting paranoid like Brad, and it had to stop before she turned into one of those terrified women who never let their children out of their sight for fear that something would happen to them. Caroline knew the fear was irrational; she’d read the statistics herself and knew that children were just as safe on the streets now as they’d ever been. Despite the hysteria of the media, there weren’t monsters lurking everywhere, waiting to victimize every child that came down the sidewalk. Those things happened, certainly, but they weren’t nearly as commonplace as Caroline had once believed. But on the other hand, she wasn’t ready to let Ryan go off by himself in the park. Not yet. In fact, she wasn’t ready to go into the park herself quite yet. At least not here. “Let’s just go down a few blocks, okay?” she said.

  She saw Laurie and Ryan lean forward just enough to glance at each other, and was almost certain they were rolling their eyes, disgusted that she was treating them like four-year-olds. Forcing herself to relax her grip on their hands, she crossed 77th and started south.

  Then, at the corner of 70th, it was Ryan who suddenly stopped, his hand tightening on hers. Caroline looked down at him questioningly.

  “Can we cross the street?” he asked.

  She glanced ahead, searching for whatever had made him stop. Had he seen something? Or someone?

  Or had someone been looking at him?

  Her heart skipped a beat, but as she scanned the smattering of people on the sidewalk ahead—there weren’t more than half a dozen of them—nothing looked amiss at all. Just a few people going about their business. Then she heard Laurie giggle. “Is there something going on that I don’t know about?”

  Laurie’s eyes twinkled. “He thinks witches and vampires live in the building across the street,” she said.

  “I do not!” Ryan flared, but his face turned beet red, belying his words.

  Caroline glanced up at the building across the street, and suddenly understood.

  The Rockwell.

  It was a big old pile of a building, combining enough different styles of architecture that most people referred to it as “The Grand Old Bastard of Central Park West.” One of the oldest buildings in the area, it was also showing its age, for the stone blocks from which it had been
constructed had never been cleaned—at least not in Caroline’s memory—and the entire façade of the building was blackened with the accumulated grime of decades, if not centuries. As she gazed up at it, she was suddenly reminded of a house two blocks down the street in the town in New Hampshire where she’d grown up. It had been big—though nowhere near as big as the Rockwell, given that it had been designed for a single family—but it had been constructed out of the same kind of stone that covered the Rockwell, and that had been just as badly stained. The family that had built it had dwindled down to one old lady who lived alone in the huge stone mansion, and the grounds had gone the way of the house itself, so the whole property was an overgrown tangle of weeds dominated by the forbidding-looking house. It had been an article of faith among Caroline and her friends that the old woman was a witch, and that any child who wandered too close to the house would never be seen again.

  Apparently the legend of the witch in the old house on the corner had transplanted itself to the city, and as she gazed at the old apartment house, she could certainly see how the legend could have gotten attached to the building. She could almost hear herself and her friends whispering the tales to the younger kids in the neighborhood. “Now I wonder who could have told Ryan that?” she asked, her eyes fixing on Laurie.

  Now it was Laurie who blushed. “They’re only stories,” Laurie said, looking at her brother with undisguised contempt. “It’s not like anyone believes them.”

  “They are not!” Ryan flared. “Jeff Wheeler says—”

  “Jeff Wheeler’s a jerk,” Laurie offered.

  “He is not! He’s—”

  “How about we just go to the park?” Caroline interrupted before the spat could escalate any further. Mercifully, there was enough of a break in traffic to let them dart across to the park side of the street, and she headed toward the foot-path a block further down that led to the Tavern on the Green. “As soon as we get in, you can go on ahead, okay? Just don’t get too far ahead—your old mother still worries about you.”

  “I’m not a baby,” Ryan replied, but even as he spoke, Caroline saw his eyes flick nervously toward the building across the street.

  “I know you’re not,” Caroline replied as they came to the mouth of the path. “I know you’re growing up, and I know you can take care of yourself. But I still worry about you, and I want to be able to keep an eye on you. So just don’t get too far ahead of us. And when we get to the field, Laurie and I’ll sit on a bench by ourselves, and try to pretend we don’t even know you. How’s that?” Ryan seemed to think it over, and apparently decided it was the best deal he was going to get. Nodding, he started away, but Caroline called after him. “Hey! If you hit a home run, is it okay if we cheer?”

  Ryan turned and waved, finally grinning, then moved ahead, scurrying along the path toward the baseball diamonds. For a moment Caroline was afraid she was going to lose sight of him, but then he glanced back once again, apparently decided he’d put enough distance between himself and his mother, and slowed his pace enough so she’d be able to keep up without having to look like she was chasing him.

  But even as Ryan slowed his pace, Caroline speeded up her own, unwilling to lose sight of her son even for a few seconds.

  The view from Irene Delamond’s window had never failed to please her; indeed, to her mind, the expanse of Central Park spread out beneath her made her feel as if she were living in the far reaches of some charmingly bucolic county rather than in the throbbing heart of one of the busiest cities in the world. That, of course, was what made the apartment she shared with her sister Lavinia so perfect. It was high enough up so she could easily see into the park; indeed, during the winter months she could actually glimpse the buildings lining Fifth Avenue on the far side through the skeletal branches of the trees. But its location on the third floor was still low enough that for three seasons only the new skyscrapers over on Second and Third were visible, and if she ignored those (and Irene was quite capable of ignoring anything she chose) she could imagine that the city wasn’t surrounding her at all, but lay far beyond the forest outside her window. Of course, to perfect the illusion, Irene had to refrain from looking down into the street directly beneath her, but that was simple—the rooms were large, and it was merely a matter of staying back from the glass a sufficient distance to allow nothing to intrude upon her vista of nearly unbroken parkland.

  And at night, one simply closed one’s drapes.

  This morning, though, was so perfect that the sunlight had drawn Irene to the glass like a moth to a bare light bulb, and even though the window hadn’t been opened in years, she was almost tempted to try to lift the heavy casement and let the morning air in.

  Almost, but not quite.

  As far as Irene was concerned, fresh air was fine in its place, but its place was definitely outside the confines of the Rockwell. Still, this morning it might actually be pleasant to undo the latch and raise the window, except she knew perfectly well that the latch wouldn’t undo, nor would the window raise; not without removing the layers of paint from the last three redecorations the apartment had been through. Three, at any rate, that Irene and Lavinia admitted to remembering. There had been a couple of more remodels, but they had been done in fashions that had proved to be nothing more than fads, and Irene had as easily shut them out of her mind as she shut the city out of her vision. But this morning she found herself not only gazing out at the park, but at the street below.

  A few minutes ago she had seen a little family going into the park: a woman, with her son and daughter. The moment Irene had first spotted them she had begun playing her little game of trying to figure out where they might be going and what they might be doing. She had watched them as they’d made their way down the sidewalk across the street, watched as the little boy kept glancing over at the building. She’d kept watching as they turned onto the path leading into the park and started down toward the Tavern on the Green. But surely they weren’t going to the restaurant this early? Was it even open? But they hadn’t been dressed for a restaurant. The boy was wearing jeans and a baseball jersey.

  A baseball jersey! Of course! They were going to the baseball diamonds down near the playground.

  And now here came Anthony Fleming.

  He was dressed almost perfectly, as always: gray flannel trousers, a pale blue shirt, and a navy-blue blazer with just the slightest hint of a bright red handkerchief peeping out of its pocket. It was the fact that he was wearing no necktie that forced Irene to qualify the perfection of his dress. Of course, Anthony was very stylish, which Irene appreciated, but there were certain styles that she really wished would pass.

  One of them was open-throated shirts on men. On a few men, she supposed they could actually be attractive. But all too many males of the species accomplished little more than displaying a thick patch of decidedly unattractive chest hair tangled around vulgar gold chains. That was something Irene could definitely do without. Not that she had any objection to flesh itself—it was the hair she disliked. There had been times in her life—and she hoped there would still be times yet to come—when she had certainly indulged in the physical pleasures of life. But aesthetics were important, which was one of the reasons Irene admired Anthony Fleming. Even from where she stood, she could tell that there was no unsightly hair protruding from his shirt. Anthony, even in his grief, knew how to dress.

  But while his grief may not have been evident in his clothes, certainly Irene could see a heaviness in his step, a seeming tiredness in his whole being. But it had been months now since the loss of Lenore, and even though she knew some of the neighbors might not approve, to Irene the proper thing was obvious. Anthony Fleming was a man, and if there was one thing Irene had come to understand over the long decades of her life, it was that men could not do without women. The reverse, of course, was not true at all; most women—and Irene certainly counted herself among them—could do very well without a man. Not that she had anything against them, per se. It was simply that it h
ad been her experience that for the most part, men simply weren’t worth the effort. They expected a great deal of support, both physical and emotional, and seemed to think that a few moments a week of sexual gratification should suffice to keep a woman happy. Irene knew that not to be true, and had long ago decided that affairs were one thing; as long as a man performed to her standards, and pleased her more than he did not, then a relationship could be perfectly comfortable. But marriage was another story entirely. From her observations—and she had had ample opportunity to observe—women nearly always got the short end of the marital stick. They made a home, did the cooking (or at least hired the chef, then tried to keep him from stealing more than his fair share), organized the social life, and did their best to remain attractive long after the man’s hair had fallen out while his stomach had grown. But men seemed utterly unable to do without the attentions of a good woman, and Anthony Fleming seemed to be no exception. So, since Irene had neither the interest nor the intention of filling the void in her neighbor’s life herself, the least she could do was set about finding someone who could.

  As if sensing her eyes on him, Anthony looked up, spotted her, and waved.

  Then, as he stepped through the front door of the Rockwell, she left the window, went to the phone, and dialed the number of the doorman’s booth. “Tell Mr. Fleming not to go up,” she instructed. “I shall be down in a few moments.”

  She looked in on her sister, who was still asleep, then put on a light poplin coat in her favorite shade of purple. Picking a walking stick from the umbrella stand by the front door, she left her apartment, not bothering even to lock the door, let alone bolt it. In all the considerable number of years she’d lived in the Rockwell, she’d never had reason to lock her door, and saw no reason to begin now. The elevator, sent up from the lobby by Rodney, clanked to a stop just as she arrived at its gate, and she slid the accordion gate open, stepped inside, re-closed the gate, and reached for the button that would send her to the lobby. But then she suddenly changed her mind, and went up four floors instead. She left the door of the cage open, and walked down the hall to Max and Alicia Albion’s door. Alicia answered almost instantly, and the worry in her eyes was enough to tell Irene what she’d come to find out. “Rebecca’s no better?” she asked. Rebecca Mayhew was the foster child Max and Alicia had taken in four years ago, a tiny waif of a child who had looked far less than her eight years. “It’s just that she’s never been fed properly,” Alicia had assured Irene when the older woman had asked if there was something wrong with the child. Irene hadn’t quite believed her, since Alicia’s response to any problem invariably involved food. But in Rebecca’s case, it appeared Alicia was right, for as time went by, the girl had managed to grow and fill out, without ballooning the way Alicia and Max had. But over the last few weeks the child had begun looking tired, and not only Irene, but some of the other neighbors started to worry about her. “I was hoping maybe she’d be feeling good enough to go to the park with me.”