The Ex

by John Lutz

  By the time she was dressed, she could hear Michael crying beneath the din of the clanging alarm bell.

  He became quiet immediately when she picked him up. He rested his head on her shoulder, maybe going back to sleep despite the clamor. This wasn’t his first fire alarm; he’d attained a veteran’s nonchalance.

  Michael was getting heavy fast, but she decided against the stroller. If he became too burdensome, she could always put him down and he could walk.

  In the corridor she saw a knot of neighbors waiting by the elevator. Elderly Mrs. Grace from down the hall. A middle-aged married couple, Irv and Rachel Teller, who lived in 2G. The young blond man Molly thought was an actor grinned at them as he walked past still buttoning his shirt. He swung open the door to the landing and Molly heard his rapid footfalls on the stairs.

  Molly sniffed the air and glanced toward the ceiling. Still no scent or sight of smoke. It would have surprised her if there had been. These repeated false alarms were becoming wearisome. She remembered David speculating that the faulty wiring causing the alarms could itself start a fire. He’d been joking, perhaps, but maybe it was possible. She decided to write a letter to the management company and add her voice to the tenants’ numerous complaints about the malfunctioning alarm system.

  “Take the stairs,” a thirtyish, heavyset woman, whose name Molly had never learned, said to her roommate, a tiny, thin blond woman about forty. “You know we’re supposed to take the stairs and not the elevator in case of fire.”

  “There is no fire,” Irv Teller told them in disgust. “It’s the faulty wiring again. They keep promising to fix it but they don’t. It’s the second false alarm this month.”

  Both women stared at him as if he hadn’t spoken, then followed the young actor down the stairs.

  “So where’s your husband, Molly?” Rachel Teller asked.

  Molly shifted Michael’s weight against her. “Working late tonight.”

  “Uh-hum,” Rachel said.

  “Too bad,” Irv said sarcastically. “He’ll miss all the excitement.”

  A few more tenants arrived simultaneous with the opening of the elevator doors. Obviously they wouldn’t all fit in the elevator, so several of them made for the stairs. Molly, the Tellers, and three men and a woman Molly knew only to say hello to, rode the elevator down to the lobby.

  When they went outside, Molly saw many of the other tenants standing in three or four tight groups across the street, staring glumly at the building. No one seemed to be seriously considering the possibility of a real fire.

  Molly crossed the street and joined them, glad to put Michael down. Still sleepy, he stood leaning with his head pressed to her thigh.

  The tenants were talking casually among themselves, about the weather, baseball, the sad quality of summer movie releases, about everything but the notion that the apartment building might be on fire. The night was warm, and Molly hadn’t taken time to towel completely dry from her bath. Her clothes were sticking to her uncomfortably, and residue soap from the bubbles was starting to make her itch.

  The alarm suddenly cut off, leaving the night in silence except for the usual neighborhood noises of traffic and occasional voices and laughter.

  But nothing else changed. A police car cruised past, and one of the uniformed cops glanced with disinterest at the tenants, but the car didn’t stop. The alarm wasn’t the sort that summoned the fire department automatically, and apparently no one had phoned. Even people in the surrounding buildings knew by now that most likely there wasn’t a fire.

  The tenants’ attitude became one of irritation tempered by resignation. They were New Yorkers and conditioned to standing and waiting.

  After a few minutes, one of the downstairs tenants who hadn’t left the building appeared at the front door and yelled across the street to them that it was another false alarm and they could return to their apartments.

  Several people groaned, as if disappointed that their homes and possessions weren’t actually threatened by flames. They’d been fooled again. Slowly they crossed the street and began reentering the building.

  Molly lifted Michael and joined them.

  Michael went back to bed without an argument, and almost immediately he was on his way to falling asleep. Something was going right this evening.

  Molly returned to the bathroom and lowered a hand into the bathtub to test the temperature of the water beneath the bubbles. It was still warm, and there were plenty of bubbles left.

  She worked her damp body out of her clothes, dropped them back into the hamper, and lowered herself again into the tub. Trying to recapture her previous level of relaxation, she sank deeper and rested the back of her head against the cool porcelain. Enough bubbles had disappeared so that she could see patches of water now, but no washcloth. She fished around for it but didn’t feel it.

  Then she noticed its dark form floating just beneath the surface near her right thigh.

  She reached for it, lifted it dripping from the water, and stared in horror.

  It wasn’t the washcloth.

  It was the limp, dead body of Muffin.

  Molly recovered from her shock enough to drop the dead cat and scramble screeching out of the tub. It was all one frantic motion and she felt the cat’s claws scrape her stomach. She splashed water everywhere. Her bare feet slipped on the wet tile and she fell to the floor, bumping her knee on the toilet bowl.

  Her leg throbbing with pain, she staggered from the bathroom, not looking back, her feet sliding and her toes curled to find traction by digging into the grouted spaces between the floor tiles. Bubbles had splashed up in her face and soap stung her right eye and blurred her vision.

  By the time she’d reached the phone in the living room, she’d stopped screaming but her breath was rasping and her entire body was broken out in goose bumps and trembling. She’d never felt so horror-stricken and so vulnerable.

  So naked.

  Curled on the floor with the phone, it took her three fumbling tries before she punched out the number of the direct line to David’s office.

  46

  They stood in the lobby of the Wharman Hotel near Columbus Circle. It was a small, mostly residential hotel, with wood paneling, a modest registration desk, and a single elevator with an old-fashioned brass arrow-and-numeral floor indicator above its door. Rates were reasonable because the Wharman hadn’t the amenities of the larger hotels, no restaurants, bars, shops, or ballrooms.

  The desk clerk was in his early twenties and sharply dressed in a blue suit, white shirt with red tie. He had neatly trimmed dark hair and a smooth complexion and looked more like a leader in the Young Republicans than a hotel employee. If there was a bellman, he was nowhere in sight.

  Clutching Michael’s hand, Molly stood off to the side near a chair and table and watched David check them in. At her feet on the waxed parquet floor were Michael’s folded stroller, a suitcase, and a large dufffle bag.

  She found herself studying David’s face. He was obviously under more strain than he usually allowed her to see. Like her, he was trying hard to hold everything together and keep his world from disintegrating.

  The young desk clerk turned away from him to swipe his Visa card, and David quickly wiped a hand over his face, massaging his Adam’s apple between thumb and forefinger as if his throat was constricted. His expression became placid and he glanced toward her and smiled to let her know he was thinking of her; he was hiding behind his facade again.

  When he’d gotten the room key, he came over to her and lifted the duffle bag and suitcase. Without a word, she picked up the stroller and they went with Michael to the elevator.

  David set down the suitcase and pressed the button with the Up arrow. After a pause, the brass arrow on the floor indicator trembled as if stuck on 12, then began moving spasmodically toward lower numbers.

  “Did we remember to pack my electric razor?” David asked.

  She knew he was trying to restore normalcy, to get her mind off what had ha
ppened to Muffin. The horror in the bathtub. Who had done it and why.

  “I’m not sure,” Molly said, not looking at him.

  The arrow stopped at 4, then within a few seconds began lurching downward again.

  “No matter. It isn’t far. I can go back and get it, along with anything else we forgot.”

  “No!” she said vehemently. “You will not go back inside that apartment tonight. None of us will!”

  The elevator arrived and they waited for a man cradling a bouquet of roses to make his exit, then they stepped in and David set the luggage at his feet and pressed the button for the fifth floor.

  “Okay, Mol,” he said reassuringly when the elevator door had closed. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll go into work late again tomorrow. We can go to the apartment together in the morning after dropping Michael off at Small Business.”

  “Julia,” Michael said, at the mention of Small Business.

  “All right,” Molly said. “We’ll do what has to be done there, then we’ll get out. We don’t live there anymore.”

  He leaned close and kissed her cheek. “Another thing we can do tomorrow is sign the lease for the new apartment.”

  The elevator door slid open, David stooped and picked up the suitcase and duffle bag, and they walked down a wide, gray-carpeted hall illuminated by indirect lighting set in carved wooden sconces on the pale green walls.

  They stopped before the door to room 512.

  David unlocked then swung the door open. He reached inside and flicked a wall switch.

  After standing aside to let Molly and Michael enter, he followed with the luggage.

  The room was small but high-ceilinged, well appointed with a dresser, desk, and a TV with a VCR on it on a wooden stand near the foot of the bed. Molly noticed right away there was no scent of tobacco smoke; David must have anticipated her wishes and asked for a nonsmokers’ room. There was a large closet with sliding doors, one of which was a full-length mirror. What she could see of the bathroom was all gray tile and modern, with gleaming chromed plumbing and frosted-glass shower doors. Nothing like the apartment’s old bathroom where Muffin-

  She veered her mind away from vivid and disturbing images, concentrating instead on the room. It was cool and quiet, with light beige walls that were almost white. Here and there hung restful framed prints. Two of the prints were very stylized fox-hunting scenes, erect, red-coated riders on horses leaping over hedges to race over a green expanse of field bordered by trees. It was a bright, sunny day in the prints and everyone other than the fox was having a fine time. The room’s carpeting was a dark green that matched the green in the fox-hunting scenes as well as the long green drapes and green, padded headboard. There was a small roll-away bed in a corner for Michael. The wall switch had turned on a tall brass floor lamp with a cream-colored shade that cast a soft light over everything.

  “Just another hotel room,” David said, hoisting the suitcase onto the bed to unpack, “but it looks comfortable.”

  To Molly it looked like much more than that.

  It looked like sanctuary.

  47

  Molly knew Deirdre had probably left for work, but she still felt a sense of foreboding, a tingle of fear, as she crossed West Eighty-fifth Street with David to enter their apartment.

  They’d overslept that morning. David had left the Wharman while Molly was getting herself and Michael dressed, and returned with some orange juice and a cinnamon roll from a nearby bakery for Michael’s breakfast. After delivering Michael to Small Business in a cab, Molly and David had a leisurely breakfast on Amsterdam. The truth was, after what had happened to Muffin, and all that had gone on before, neither of them was anxious to return to the apartment.

  But here they were, Molly nervously glancing up at their windows as they crossed the street, David staring straight ahead and setting a slow pace.

  The building seemed to engulf her as they entered the foyer, but she said nothing as they walked to the elevator.

  In the second-floor corridor, her heart was racing as David fit his key in the door to their apartment. Even the harsh grating of the key in the lock was now an unfamiliar sound. Full of their possessions though it might be, this place was no longer home.

  David opened the door and entered first.

  Molly saw him stop and stand still. She heard him mutter, “Good Christ!”

  She went in and stood beside him. What she saw seemed to strike her in the stomach. It took her breath away and made her physically ill.

  Then angry. Boiling angry.

  The apartment had been viciously vandalized. Molly’s desk drawers had been removed and the contents dumped on the floor. The desk itself was upside down. One end of the sofa, the end where Molly usually sat, had been slashed and the batting yanked from it to protrude in obscene bulges of cotton and horsehair from the gaping material.

  David walked around slowly, staring in disbelief. “God! Look at this!” He used the toe of his shoe to nudge one of the desk drawers that had been hurled to the floor and lay upside down and broken. “What kind of sick, vicious animal would do something like this?”

  “I’m not surprised,” Molly said, barely containing her fury. “It was Deirdre.”

  David stopped and stared at her. “I don’t know-”

  “Don’t, David! Goddamn you, don’t tell me this wasn’t Deirdre!”

  She was glad he chose not to answer as they walked through the rest of the apartment.

  “Notice?” Molly asked.

  David nodded. “It’s only your things.”

  It became increasingly clear that only objects connected with Molly had been vandalized. Her pillow was slashed. Her clothes had been pulled from the closet and ripped. Brush and comb and cosmetic bottles had been thrown to the floor. The T-shirt she usually slept in was draped from a drawer pull in tatters. Bright red lipstick was smeared wildly on her dresser mirror, as indecipherable as if it were scrawled in a foreign language.

  Molly went to examine something glittering on the floor.

  Shattered glass. A framed wedding photograph of her and David, which had been wrapped in paper on the back of a closet shelf, was broken from its frame and lay in the middle of the glinting fragments of glass. The image of a younger David, grinning in his tuxedo, was untouched. The smiling woman on his arm, Molly, had been shredded with a sharp blade.

  Molly looked at him. “Who’s crazy now, David?”

  “Mol. I never said-”

  “Never mind,” she interrupted. “We both know what you thought.”

  In a way she was glad Deirdre had done this. Deirdre’s duplicity, the danger that she posed, were out in the open now; no one could say they were merely in Molly’s mind. What had been done to the apartment was an explosion of malice and violence that proved Molly was the sane one. Deirdre was mad.

  “I’m sorry, Mol…” David was saying remorsefully.

  Molly ignored him as they returned to the ravaged living room.

  “I’m going to call the police,” he said, and walked to the overturned desk. Near it on the floor lay the phone-equipped answering machine. He replaced the receiver, then gripped the machine and stood up. He paused.

  Molly could see the glowing green digital numeral on the machine.

  “There’s a message,” David said.

  He propped the machine against his hip and pressed the Play button.

  Beep.

  Molly immediately recognized Deirdre’s voice:

  “Hi, David and Molly.” She sounded jarringly normal and cheerful in the middle of such chaos. “This is you-know-who. I hope you like the way I redecorated your apartment. I guess you’ll be busy for a while admiring it, making little personal changes. That’s okay. Idle hands are the devil’s playthings. And don’t be concerned about Michael. I’ve already picked him up at Small Business, so you two can enjoy the rest of the day without worry.”

  Molly and David stood motionless for a few moments.

  Then the full impact of what
Deirdre had said hit Molly in a violent rush.

  She was across the room in three strides and grabbed the phone from David.

  “It’s a bluff, Mol,” he said. “We dropped Michael off at Small Business not much more than an hour ago.”

  But Molly was already punching out Small Business’s number on the key pad. “Damn her! I’ll kill her if she’s taken Michael!”

  David gently but firmly worked the receiver from her clutching fingers. She glared at him.

  “You’re in a rage, Mol. Let me talk. Let me see what Julia has to say.”

  She knew he was right. If Julia had let Michael leave the school, she didn’t know what she might say or do.

  She surrendered the phone to him then backed a step away and watched him hold the receiver to his ear and listen to the ringing phone at the other end of the connection.

  Molly waited, fighting back her temper and fear for Michael. She could faintly hear the Small Business phone ringing, seeping from the receiver’s earpiece.

  “Yes, please,” David said abruptly, tightening his grip on the phone. “I’d like to talk to Julia…” He stared inquisitively at Molly.

  “Corera,” she said, assuming he couldn’t remember Julia’s last name.

  “Corera, please. I need to talk to her. Yes, I know, but it’s very important.”

  He stood waiting, not looking at Molly, for more than a minute.

  Then he grew rigid and stood straighter as the receiver returned to life.

  “Julia. This is David Jones. That’s right, Michael’s father. Remember, his mother and I dropped him off at the school a little over an hour ago? We need to know if he’s still there.”

  Molly saw his expression darken and her heart almost stopped.

  After several seconds, he said, “I don’t know. No, there is none. We don’t know. Yes, thanks, Julia…”

  He slammed down the receiver.

  “What did she say?” Molly asked.

  “Julia said Aunt Deirdre came to the school half an hour ago with a note from you saying there was a family emergency. She said they knew Deirdre at the school. She’d been there several times before to see Michael. Trusted her because Michael knew her and seemed fond of her.”