“Come on, what gives? I’ve got a hearing in fifteen minutes.”
“The headline says, ‘Ape Killer Makes Manhattan Jungle.’”
“Yeah
so?”
“I need to talk to you about this ‘ape killer.’ I know who it is!” Then, unable to say more, she slammed down the phone. What had happened to her? She stood and came around the desk as her office door opened. Joan was holding a bright red file.
“It’s for your eleven o’clock with Meyer,” she said, handing the thick file to Jennifer.
“Call this number for me, please,” Jennifer said as she strode from the office. “Eileen Gorman. See if she can have lunch with me today in the city. Tell her it’s very important. And call Evan Konechy and tell her I have to cancel.”
Joan followed Jennifer out of the suite of offices and stood with her in front of the bank of elevators. “Jennifer, are you sure you’re all right?” She peered over her glasses at her boss.
Jennifer stared at her reflection in the polished bronze doors of the elevators. In the contours of the metal, she looked gross and deformed, and she turned away from the image.
“I’m not sure,” she whispered. And then the doors opened and she stepped into an empty elevator. Turning, she pressed the button for the conference room floor, then glanced at Joan, who was still watching her, her face knit with concern.
“You can tell me,” Joan offered.
Jennifer managed to fake a smile. “I wish to God I could,” she whispered to herself as the doors slid smoothly closed, locking her briefly in the safety of the descending car.
CHAPTER EIGHT
JENNIFER COULD NOT EAT lunch. Instead, she sat across from Eileen Gorman and listened to the woman talk. Jennifer had wanted to see Eileen as soon as possible, once she realized that everything about her had started to go wrong after she met Eileen in Washington. She and Kathy Dart had exchanged a strange look, and then she had run thirteen miles. All of it, she guessed, was somehow connected to Eileen Gorman.
She had also wanted to tell Eileen what she had done, how she had killed the man who attacked her, but now she couldn’t tell her high school friend. In her heart, Jennifer still believed that she wasn’t capable of doing such a horrendous act.
So she spent lunch listening to Eileen tell her about the New Age philosophy, channeling, psychic auras, all of the metaphysical beliefs that Eileen followed. Something told Jennifer that she had to learn more about this new form of spiritualism if she was going to find out what was wrong with her body.
“I didn’t believe in meditation or est, or anything having to do with pyramids and quartz crystals, either,” Eileen went on, “not at first, certainly. But then I began to notice how my life—what was happening in my life—had a pattern. I started to read, to investigate everything, you know, the unexplained. And that is what finally led me to the teachings of Kathy Dart and Habasha.”
Jennifer waited for her to go on, to explain what she meant.
“I just decided I had been reincarnated.” Eileen shrugged. “I mean, reincarnation was the only thing that made sense about my life. Anyone’s life.” She waved her hand in the air. “None of our lives make any sense, unless there is some reason.”
“There is a reason,” said Jennifer. “Some people call it heaven and hell. Others call it evolution.” She could not yet accept what Eileen was telling her, but could she dismiss Eileen’s reasoning, either?
“Look, I don’t have your law degree,” Eileen said, leaning forward, “and I didn’t graduate from the University of Chicago like you did. I really haven’t studied at all, not since high school. But I’ve learned a lot on my own just from reading the New Age material. It’s incredible, really, once you see the connections, the links between lives. The plan of what we are doing here on earth.”
Jennifer raised her eyebrows.
“Listen, there’s something about me I never told you. You know I married that lifeguard, Tim Murphy. Well, we had a baby. A little premie. A girl. We called her Adara, and she lived just a week.”
“Eileen, I didn’t know.”
“Of course not. You were away at college.” Eileen continued, “It was a forceps delivery, and the poor little thing had these deep gashes on her forehead.”
“Oh, no,” Jennifer whispered.
“No, that didn’t kill her. She was just too young. Her lungs hadn’t developed. Perhaps today with all the advancements in medicine
but she didn’t live. And because of that, plus a lot of other things, naturally, Timmy and I just drifted apart. I mean, we really had nothing in common except Jones Beach.”
“I went a little wild after we split up,” she said with a grimace. “I got kind of heavy into drugs and playing around. Some mornings I woke up and didn’t know where I was, who I was with. It was that awful. I was trying to kill myself, I guess.” Eileen shrugged. “And I would have if I hadn’t met Todd. He was just getting over this terrible divorce, and we sort of found each other—saved each other.”
“Here he was, this big, successful New York City insurance executive, with this great house in Old Westbury. I mean, I couldn’t believe how lucky I was. And he loved me, too. I actually knelt down one night by the side of my bed and said my prayers, as if I was a little kid again, and thanked God for sending Todd into my life. But it wasn’t God who had given me Todd. I was simply fulfilling my karma.”
“Anyway, we were married on the fourteenth of September, and our son, Michael, was born the same day, two years later. It was exactly five years before that day that I had lost my little Adara.”
“Michael had a perfectly fine delivery, no forceps. Yet when I saw him, when the doctor laid him on my chest, he had two marks on each side of his forehead, just like Adara. And I knew. I knew.”
“Eileen, please.”
Eileen nodded. “Yes, I’m certain of it, Jennifer. Michael and Adara are the same soul. That’s not so strange, either. There’s a psychiatrist in Boston, Dr. Susan Zawalich, who has been collecting information on just such occurrences.”
“And I read about one case. It happened in Ireland. Two boys, eleven and six, were killed in an IRA bombing. Right after that, their mother got pregnant, but this time with twins. Two girls were born, and they had marks on their bodies that were exactly like the marks their older, dead brothers had had. The same kinds of marks, in the same places, the same color eyes, the same expressions, everything.”
“Eileen, you’re letting your imagination run away with you.”
“You mean my guilt?” Eileen suggested.
“Well, maybe,” Jennifer answered, caught short by Eileen’s self-awareness.
“I thought about that—that I might just be projecting onto Michael what Adara had looked like. So I did some checking. I went back into the drawer where we kept all her papers, all the hospital papers, and found that little first footprint they do of all newborns. I took Adara’s and I got Michael’s, and I gave them to a friend of Todd’s who is deputy sheriff over in Garden City, and asked him to compare the prints.” She paused dramatically. “They’re the same, Jennifer. My two children have identical footprints. They are the same soul.”
Jennifer looked away. She didn’t believe it, but perhaps Eileen needed to believe something like that. It would give her a way to justify what had happened to her firstborn.
“The unexplained, Jennifer, is just that. It is beyond our so-called rational thinking. We were brought up, taught, to have rational explanations for all actions. Well, the truth is that there are some phenomena that just don’t allow themselves to be easily explained. There is always a reason, but it is sometimes beyond our comprehension. And some people, like Kathy Dart and other channelers, they have a gift—a gift from God. There’s nothing satanic about any of this. Their gift is to show us that there’s a logic in the randomness of events, but it’s the logic of a superior power.”