Jill dropped the glass in her hand and dashed for the stairs. The screaming was coming from the bathroom at the end of the hail. She pushed open the door and saw a little girl—maybe eight or nine years old—standing in the doorway. She was frozen in place by fear, staring at something horrible at the far end of the bathroom.
Natalie Streck was standing in front of the sink, both faucets gushing water into an overflowing basin, water splashing to the tile floor. Both of Natalie’s hands were in the sink, her hands wrapped like claws around the cheap radio, the one from her bedroom. The radio that she said had spoken incessantly to her dead husband. It was as if she was trying to drown the thing.
A power cord led from an electrical outlet into the sink. Natalie’s body was trembling, her hair on end, a crackle and fizzle at the corners of her mouth, her eyes wide. Natalie was dead, electrocuted by the radio that she said had killed her husband.
Almost in a trance, Jillian took a step closer to the horrible sight. The little girl continued to scream. But Jillian heard her name loud and clear over the shrieking of the child.
“Jillian! Look out!” Spencer grabbed her and pulled her back from the pool of electrified water in the middle of the bathroom floor. She had almost stepped in it and joined her friend in a horrible death. It had been so close and she had not even realized it.
Natalie still stood, her dead eyes staring into the mirror. The little girl continued to scream. Jillian gaped at the scene. It would be a long time before she forgot those eyes and the sound of that scream.
8
Jillian Armacost had had her doubts about Spencer leaving NASA and the two of them leaving Florida, particularly for a destination like New York City. But with the deaths of Alex and Natalie Streck, each grotesque in its own, unique way, she knew she could not stay there any longer. The place was haunted for her now, and perhaps a radical change of place and style of living might be enough to banish the bad memories and the hellish images.
And yet New York was quite a stretch. There were two fundamental problems to deal with. First off, the city itself—the noise, the confusion, the polyglot population—was disconcerting at first, but Jillian was sure that she could adapt to it.
With the other problem she wasn’t so sure. Suddenly and without warning, she found that she was rich. The aerospace corporation that had hired Spencer was paying him in a year what NASA paid in a decade. In addition to the salary, the company provided a vast duplex company apartment in the heart of the Upper East Side, along with a company car—a Jaguar—that came with a private parking space that cost as much as the rent for a two bedroom apartment back in Florida. Jillian just wasn’t used to being able to afford anything she happened to see and the effects were quite disconcerting.
Oddly enough, and to Jillian’ s immense surprise, Spencer took to the New York way of living without the slightest hesitation. Without a second thought all of his old clothes went to Goodwill and he spent a couple of days outfitting himself at Bergdoff’s, Paul Stuart, and Barney’s. Jillian had to ad-mit that her husband looked pretty sharp and well turned out in his new clothes, but somehow he did not quite look like Spencer—that is, Jillian‘s Spencer.
In addition to all this, Jillian was not quite used to the social life that went along with corporate life. It seemed as if they went out at least five nights out of seven, but always during the week, never on Saturdays or Sundays—rich New Yorkers appeared to vanish on weekends— which was quite a bit more socializing than Jillian was used to.
The nature of the entertainment was different, too. Until the move to New York, Spencer and Jillian had socialized in bars not unlike the one where their tragic farewell party had been held— back-country taverns where the drink of choice was long-necked beers, where people only had scotch on their birthdays.
Now they went out to dinner almost every night. New Yorkers of a certain type made a fetish out of first-class restaurants and if you didn’t know someone on the inside of the most chic restaurants in the city, you might have to wait up to a month for a reservation. Jillian had to admit the restaurants were fabulous, beautifully designed, with exquisite food faultlessly served. One thing puzzled her about these palatial places—she wondered how they could charge such extortionate prices for such minute portions. But since they moved to New York, price had ceased to be a consideration. The company credit card paid for all—Spencer’s expense account was virtually without limit. And, Jillian noticed, he seemed to enjoy using it.
Dinner was almost always preceded by a cocktail party. Sometimes they were held in fabulous apartments with million-dollar views of Central Park, sometimes they were held in places not normally open for parties like the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or at the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art. But wherever they might be held they always had one thing in common. When Spencer announced that they had to go to yet another cocktail party and Jillian groaned and moaned about it he could always silence her with a single reason. So far, it had never failed.
“We have to go,” he said. “It’s business.” That night, “business” took them to a party in the gargantuan lobby of a building on Wall Street that had been built as the old U.S. Customs House for the Port of New York. But these days Fifty-five Wall Street housed a bank—a bank very interested in doing business with the company that featured Spencer’s name so prominently on its stationery.
For once Jillian did not object to going out to a cocktail party—Spencer had told her that there was a rumor that the big boss, the head of the company might attend this particular function. She had heard so much about the mysterious Jackson McLaren that she was very anxious to meet him—even if it meant another night out on the social scene.
Fifty-five Wall Street had been built by the same firm of architects that designed Grand Central Station and some of the pharoanic scale of that building lingered in this one. The lobby was vast, a space so huge and beautiful it was almost daunting. The ceiling seemed so high above the pavement it appeared to have been lost in the night sky. Fifty-five Wall, the high cathedral of high finance, was built to prove that money was the greatest power known to man.
The power of the room and the people in it had the usual effect on Jillian. She felt absolutely insignificant. She stood with a glass of champagne in her hand watching men and women in faultless dinner jackets move through the crowd bearing trays of canapes almost too beautiful to be eaten.
Jillian surveyed the crowd. She was becoming familiar with the New York types. There were the old men, men in their seventies and eighties, men so rich they were worth more than some small countries. They had been so rich for so long that they automatically commanded a certain kind of respect. Accordingly, they were treated like heads of state. These men were usually attended by women of the same age, perhaps a year or two younger, but never more. These were first wives who had married these men fifty or more years before, members of a generation who believed that a marriage vow was something that was not to be taken lightly—particularly the “for richer or poorer” part.
Beneath these wealthy old lions were the men in their fifties and sixties, men who still had careers as CEOs and CFOs or in brokerage firms and banks. These men almost all had one thing in common—they had started out in their banks or brokerages back in the late fifties and early sixties, grateful to have a job with a nice firm and hoping to have something approaching a lengthy and comfortable career. They married their high school, college, or hometown sweethearts and bought little houses in the suburbs on Long Island, in Westchester, and in New Jersey. They never missed the 5: 23 train home because back in those simpler days there was nothing to be gained working late, tracking something as bizarre as a foreign stock market or the track record of a company manufacturing something in another country-like Japanese cars, for example.