"I'm surprised his neighbors haven't had the police on him."
"That's what I think all these drapes and wall hangings are for. They're like baffles. They keep the sound from bouncing off the walls as well as vibrating through. He's fixed himself a miniature concert hall here."
Kara looked through the titles of some of the albums.
"He must have every opera by every diva whoever warbled a note."
"You like opera?" Rob said, coming over to her side.
"Can't stand it." But as she stood there with her hand on the record rack, she thought she heard an operatic voice wailing faintly in the back of her mind. She shook her head and it was gone. She moved to his classical section.
"He's got composers I've never even heard of," she said.
"No ZZ Top?"
"Not a one."
"Guess there's no accounting for taste." He put a hand on her arm. "Let's go. I've got to get back."
"I want to look around some more," Kara said. "It's safe, don't you think?"
"Nobody here but us. You really want to stay?"
"I want to check out his study, see if he's got any papers that will give me a clue as to what he was all about—and why he left it all to me."
"You sure you want to know?"
"I think so."
Kara didn't say so, but she was still half-convinced that Gates had somehow used her body. She wanted to find a way to contact the person who had sent her that warning note. She wouldn't rest easy until she knew for sure.
Rob had her follow him down to the front door.
"Make sure you keep it locked while you're here, and turn on the alarm when you leave."
"Yes sir!"
"Now—when can we get together tonight? We've got a lot of talking to do, and some decisions to make."
She'd known this was coming.
"How about after dinner? Meet me at Ellen's and we can go someplace."
"Ellen knows?"
Kara nodded. "Ellen, my mother, and Bert. They're the only ones. And Kelly, of course."
Rob's eyes were intense as they bored into hers.
"Of course. Everyone but me. And Jill. We've got to figure out when to tell her."
"Yes. I know."
Kara wasn't looking forward to tonight's discussion.
Rob hovered outside until she had locked the door behind him, then waved good-bye and hurried off.
As she turned away from the door, Kara felt her arms and legs give way, as if someone had severed all their nervous connections. As she went down, a voice spoke in her mind.
"At last! I thought he'd never leave!"
February 26
12:17 A.M.
Rob was cruising Manhattan.
I'm a father! Jill's my daughter!
The two thoughts kept echoing in tandem off the inner walls of his skull. They'd kept him awake, kept him wired. Which was why he was up and out and doing something he never did: driving around the city.
He cruised the avenues, using Harlem or the Park as his uptown boundaries, and Canal Street downtown. Traffic was light. He drove at a leisurely pace, staying in the center lanes to let the cabs and everyone else in a hurry slip by on either side. The street lights glimmered on his windshield and off the passing cars, the neon from the various store fronts refracted through the steam rising from the street vents. The city had its own brand of beauty. He felt enough at peace with himself tonight to enjoy it. He smiled. Stopping to smell the roses, Manhattan style.
He wished he could have got together with Kara tonight but she had called around 4:30 or so to tell him that she wasn't feeling well. She seemed to have picked up an intestinal virus or something and was going to spend the rest of the afternoon and evening in bed.
Probably the best idea. She hadn't sounded well at all. Rob had been tempted to drop by Ellen's and hang around with Jill anyway but had canceled the idea. He was afraid he might start crying again.
Christ, hadn't that been a scene this afternoon! He didn't know where it had come from but all of a sudden he'd been bawling like a wimp. And in front of Kara, too. Embarrassing as all hell, although it hadn't seemed to bother her in the least.
Anyway, his throat tended to get tight every time he thought of Jill, so maybe it was better if he hung loose on his own tonight.
He was tooling up Sixth into Chelsea when impulse pulled him left onto Twenty-first. He was glad he no longer had to camp out here every night. He came to a complete stop in front of Gates' house.
The lights were on.
That wasn't so strange, really. If Kara hadn't been feeling well, she probably hurried back to Ellen's without bothering to turn them off.
He wondered if she'd locked the door.
Rob double-parked and ran up the steps. He tried the door. Rattled it. Good. She'd locked it behind her. But through the glass he spotted the green light glowing on the alarm panel. She'd forgotten that. He rattled the door again, then walked back to his car. He'd have to remind her about the alarm. It would be a sin to let vandals get hold of that library, or that fabulous stereo rig.
He put the car in gear and started rolling again, thinking about instant fatherhood.
▼
Kara wanted to scream but had no voice, wanted to run, crawl, claw a path away from here but had no limbs, none at least that would obey her. And what good would blind flight do? The horror was within her, all around her, it permeated her flesh, it encapsulated her like a steel bubble.
Horror, gut-wrenching panic, rage—they'd been her world since this afternoon. And they were with her even now, but they were under control. She could almost say she was calmer now—as calm as a madwoman in a straitjacket. She had to hold on. That was all she could do. She could feel her sanity jittering on its already frayed tether, blindly straining to pull free and flee into the waiting darkness.
After the horrors of the past ten hours it was a wonder that she retained any control at all.
She knew a few things. She knew it was night, and knew she was in the dining room. She could smell and hear, she could taste her dry mouth but could not move her tongue or lips, could see but was incapable of moving her eyes. She'd been a prisoner within her own body since this afternoon.
This afternoon…
Now that her body was in one of its quiet periods, the insane events of the afternoon and evening rushed back in a flood…
At first she had simply lain there on the floor inside the door. The voice didn't speak again. Eventually she became convinced that she had suffered a massive stroke; some sort of brain aneurysm had ruptured.
But then she started to move.
First the fingers of the right hand, then the left, moving independently of her volition, without her permission, rippling up and down like a pianist playing rapid scales. Then the arms bent, the knees straightened. She sat up. Kara had a sense of the muscles moving but she was exerting no effort, she felt no strain.
The terror was building inside her. Her body was like a runaway machine. A moment ago she had been pleading with her limbs to move, now she was trying to stop them. Her body turned over onto its hands and knees and began crawling down the hall. Where am I going?
Her body crawled into the big dining room. It headed straight for the couch and pulled itself up onto the cushions. She was panting but had no feeling of breathlessness.
And then the voice spoke again.
"There! That's better! A cushion is much preferable to a hard floor any day, don't you think, Kara?"
She tried to scream but still she had no voice.
"Don't be afraid, Kara. You're in no danger."
Panic swirled around her again. She felt as if she were sealed inside a tight cubicle of foot-thick glass, banging frantically, desperately on the walls with no one to hear her but this disembodied voice.