O’Connell deposited fifty cents and dialed Ashley’s number.
The telephone rang five times before he heard her sleep-groggy voice.
“Hello?”
He paused, just to give her a second or two to fully awaken.
“Hello?” she asked a second time. “Who is it?”
He remembered a cheap, white portable phone by the side of her bed. No caller ID, not that it would make a difference.
“You know who it is,” he said softly.
She did not reply.
“I told you. I love you, Ashley. We are meant for each other. No one can come between us.”
“Michael, stop calling me. I want you to leave me alone.”
“I don’t need to call you. I’m always with you.”
Then he hung up the phone, before she had a chance to. The best sort of threat, he thought, wasn’t stated, but imagined.
It was almost dawn when he finally made it back to his apartment.
Perhaps a half dozen of his neighbor’s cats were milling about in the hallway, mewling and making other annoying sounds. One of them hissed when he approached. The old lady who lived across from him owned somewhere more than twelve cats, perhaps as many as twenty, called them all by a variety of names, and set out food dishes for the occasional stray that happened by. Owned, he thought, was a relative term. They seemed to come and go pretty much as they pleased. She’d even put an extra litter box in a corner of the hallway to accommodate their needs, which gave the corridor a thick, unpleasant smell. The cats knew Michael O’Connell and he knew the cats, and he didn’t get along with any of them any better than he did with their owner. He considered them strays, a step above vermin. They made him sneeze, and his eyes water, and were forever watching him with feline wariness whenever he entered the building. He didn’t like it when anyone or anything paid any attention to his comings and goings.
O’Connell aimed a kick at a calico who strayed within his reach, but missed. Getting sluggish, he told himself. The result of a long but exciting night. The calico and companions skittered away as he unlocked his apartment door. He looked down and saw that one, a black-and-white with an orange streak, lingered momentarily near the food dish. It must be new or else stupid not to take its cue from the others, who kept their distance from him. The old woman wouldn’t be up for an hour, maybe longer, and he knew her hearing was getting pretty shaky. He glanced down the hallway for a moment. None of the other tenants seemed to be stirring. He could never understand why no one else complained about the cats, and he hated them for it. There was an old couple, from Costa Rica, who spoke poor English. A Puerto Rican man who, O’Connell guessed, supplemented his machinist’s job with an occasional B and E occupied one of the other apartments. Upstairs were a pair of graduate students, who occasionally filled the hallway with the pungent smell of marijuana, and a gray-haired, sallow-faced salesman who preferred to spend his extra hours weepy and immersed in a bottle. Other than complaining about the cats to the superintendent-an older man with fingernails encrusted with years of dirt, who spoke in an accent that was indecipherable, and who clearly hated to be bothered with repairs-O’Connell had little to do with any of them. He wondered if any of the other tenants even knew his name. It was all just a quiet, dingy, unimpressive, cold place, either an end for some or a transition for others, and it had an impermanence that he liked. He looked down, as he opened his door, and wondered whether the old woman actually kept track of her cats. He doubted that she had an accurate count.
Or that she would miss one.
He rapidly bent down and seized the black-and-white roughly around the midsection. The cat squealed once, clawing at him in surprise.
He looked down at the sudden red scratch on the back of his hand. The thin line of blood was going to make what he had in mind much easier.
Ashley Freeman lay back in her bed.
“I am in trouble,” she whispered out loud.
She remained that way, barely moving until the sunlight moved steadily through her window, past the frilly, opaque shades that gave the room a little-girl feel. She watched as a shaft of daylight moved slowly along the wall across from her bed. Some of her own works were hung there, some charcoal drawings done in a life-figure class, one of a man’s torso that she liked, another of a woman’s back that curved sensuously across the white page. There was also a self-portrait that she’d done, which was unusual in that she had only drawn half of her face in detail and left the remainder in obscurity, as if it were shadowed.
“This can’t be happening,” she said, again out loud, but this time a little louder.
Of course, she noted inwardly, she didn’t know what this was. Not yet.
I called her later that day. I didn’t bother with pleasantries or small talk, but just launched into my first question: “Exactly where did Michael O’Connell’s obsession come from?”
She sighed. “That’s something you need to discover for yourself. But don’t you remember the electricity of being young and coming unexpectedly across that singular moment of passion? The one-night stand, the chance encounter. Have you gotten so old that you can’t remember when things were all possibility?”
“All right. Yes,” I said, perhaps a little too hastily.
“There was only one problem. All those moments are more or less benign, or, at the very most, simply embarrassing. Red-faced mistakes, or moments you keep to yourself and never mention to another soul. But that wasn’t the case this time. Ashley, in a moment of weakness, slipped once, and then, abruptly, found herself enmeshed in a briar patch. Except a briar patch isn’t necessarily lethal, and Michael O’Connell was.”
I paused, then said, “I found Will Goodwin. Except his name wasn’t Goodwin.”
She hesitated, a small catch in the words that slowly came over the phone line. “Good. You probably learned something important. At the very least, your understanding of Michael O’Connell’s, ah, potential should have grown through your meeting. But that’s not where it all began, and it’s probably not where it all ends, either. I don’t know. That’s for you to figure out.”
“Okay, but-”
“I have to go. But you understand, in a way, you’re at the same point Scott Freeman was, before things started to get…well, I’m not sure what the right word is. Tense? Difficult? He knew some things, but not very much. Mostly what he had was an absence of information. He believed that Ashley might be at risk, but he didn’t know how, or exactly where or when, or any of the things that we first ask ourselves when we perceive a threat. All Scott Freeman had were several disturbing items to wonder about. He knew it wasn’t the start and he knew it wasn’t the finish. He was like a scientist, thrown into the middle of an equation, trying to guess which way to go in order to find an answer.”
She paused, and for the first time I felt a bit of the same chill.
“I have to go,” she said. “We’ll speak again.”
“But-”
“Indecision. It’s a simple word. But it leads to evil things, does it not? Of course, so can being foolishly decisive. That’s more or less the dilemma, isn’t it? To act. Or not to act. Always an intriguing question, don’t you think?”
5
When Hope came through the front door of her house, she instinctively clapped her hands twice. She could already hear the sound of her dog’s paws as he rushed from the living room, where he spent much of his time staring out the front picture window, waiting for her to return home. The sounds were utterly familiar to her: first the thud, as he leapt down from the sofa that he wasn’t allowed on when there was an actual human around to tell him no, then the scrabbling noise that his toenails made against the hardwood floor, as he slipped and pushed the Oriental rug out of position, and finally the urgent bounding, as he headed to the vestibule. She knew enough to put down any papers or groceries in anticipation of the greeting.