Aphrodite

Aphrodite - Russell Andrews


Acknowledgments

As always, the list is a long one: To Bill Goldman, for the obit, the readings, the guidance, and, as usual, everything else; Hilary Hale, for being a great and supportive editor; Jamie Raab, Sara Ann Freed, Beth DeGuzman, and Larry Kirshbaum for their enthusiasm, support, and savvy; the Zigmeister for putting me in touch, yet again, with the right people; John Boris, for his insight into the pharmaceutical/financial world; Bill Borbidge, for his amazing knowledge of explosives; Ron Malfi, for his inside info; Alicia Goldsmith, Susanna Green, Dina Dillon, and Sonom Wangmo for all things to do with yoga, Buddhism, massages, and fun; Janis, for everything.



PROLOGUE

Washington, D.C.

February 23

She knew there were no monsters.
And yet, when the lights were out, she also knew that there were.
It’s why she screamed when she heard the footsteps. There was a quick flurry, someone running—no, darting, that’s the way it sounded, definitely darting—and then there was a crash, glass being shattered, a piece of pipe, perhaps, swung against the ugly overhanging fluorescent light. Everything turned shadowy; the whole room was suddenly fifty percent darker than it had been. Then, almost before she could register what was happening, there were more footsteps, on the other side of the garage—how did he get over there so fast? It didn’t seem possible—and another crash, another light smashed, and then it was dark. Not just darker this time, but completely dark. She couldn’t see her hand right in front of her face.
It was absolutely quiet, too. Black and silent.
And suddenly there it was.
The feeling.
Even under normal circumstances, when things were calm, when she was tucked safely in bed, under the down-filled covers with the lights out, Maura Greer was overwhelmed by the dark. Even in her own room there was nothing she could do to stop her imagination from running wild. To stop her heart from beating madly and her throat from drying up and that thing inside her head from saying: Be afraid. Something bad is coming. Something really is there, inside the blackness. …
And now something really was there.
Footsteps again.
She could hear someone breathing.
She thought she was going to faint. Her whole body was shaking and, despite the freezing temperature and dankness of the garage, hot, clammy sweat was starting to drip down the back of her neck.
Maura had lived with this fear for so long. Maybe her whole life. As a child she needed a night-light. When she went away to college, got her very first apartment, she used to leave the light on in the hallway outside her bedroom. She told her roommate it was so she could find the bathroom when she woke up in the middle of the night, but that wasn’t true at all. It was because the darkness terrified her. Filled her with numbing, paralyzing dread.
That’s what she was feeling now. She was stuck in the underground garage of her apartment building with some madman who had shattered all the lights and was, she was positive, going to stalk her and catch her and rape her. So the dread was deep in the pit of her stomach. A physical sensation. A pain. As if she’d been injected with a drug that was quickly taking effect, moving upward from her feet, through her legs, clenching her stomach, wrapping around her throat, choking her. It’s not fair, she thought. Not today. Not now. Not when, in less than an hour, her whole life was about to change. And it was going to change. She knew it. Today he was going to tell her he loved her. He was going to tell her they could be together. Finally. And she was going to comfort him and assure him that everything would be all right, and make him understand he’d made the right decision, and …
More footsteps!
To her left. He was all the way to her left, maybe thirty feet away. There was a door there, leading up to her apartment building; it was the way she’d come in. But there was another way out. An easier way. The driveway. That was maybe fifty or sixty feet to her right. The metal door, the one that rolled slowly down from the tracks on the ceiling and guarded the ramp the cars came up, was shut. It shouldn’t have been—it was supposed to stay open until 7 p.m. She didn’t have the clicker that opened it, either. She would have, normally, but she hadn’t brought her purse. He didn’t like her to carry any ID when they met. He didn’t want them to be seen together in public, and they always took extra-careful precautions, but he didn’t want her to have any identifying papers in case anything happened, so she just took to leaving her purse and her wallet at home when she saw him. She could picture her bag sitting on the kitchen counter. And in it was the goddamn clicker. She’d thought about taking it, decided it wasn’t important, she wouldn’t need it, not before seven. So she left it. Her ticket to freedom sitting on the god-damn kitchen counter. …
But there was still another way out, she realized. Another door that led out to the front of the building. All she had to do was beat him to that door by the driveway and she could make it up to the street. There’d be people there. Someone to help her. There’d be light.
But she didn’t know if she could make it. She wasn’t dressed for running.
She had wanted today to be so perfect. She wore his favorite blouse, a flowery Donna Karan, very flimsy and practically see-through. She had tried on two different pairs of pants in her apartment, then decided that pants weren’t right, she really wanted to go sexy, so she wound up with a short black skirt. Straight, no pleats, linen. It came down to the middle of her thighs, and she knew he really liked her thighs; even in public he could barely keep his hands from brushing up against them at dinner, sometimes being as daring as he could be, squeezing them under the table and lingering.
The bra had been easy. It came from the Bra Store, in Manhattan, on Madison in the East Sixties, practically her favorite place on earth. Today’s choice was very daring. It was flesh colored and revealed a lot of cleavage. Under the Donna Karan it would look, at first glance, as if she was naked, and she knew he’d really, really like that. Leaving her apartment, she’d thought about how he’d look at her in mock disapproval, shake his head, and say something like “That should be illegal.” She’d look concerned and maybe say, “Do you want me to go home and change?” And, of course, he’d grab her then, because he couldn’t help himself, and she’d let him hold her, touch her, for a long time, and she’d kiss him, once or twice, slowly lick the inside of his upper lip, he loved that so much, and when he groaned with pleasure, she’d say, “Did you do it? Did you tell her?” And this time she knew the answer would be yes. Because this time she really had something for him. She had some real information. She would show him once and for all that she was not just a piece of fluff or merely the object of his lust. She had a brain. A good brain. And she was important to him. Useful.
Because this time she could give him what he wanted, something besides the sex.
He’d given her a name.
Aphrodite.
And now she knew what it meant.
She could, even in the darkness of the garage, picture his eyes, the way they’d shine when she told him what she’d discovered. And she imagined his voice when she finally heard the words she’d been dying to hear for so many months now.
Yes, I told her. Yes, we can be together.
Yes. I love you.
Yes …
It was going to be exactly how she’d dreamed about it. That’s why she’d had to get the shoes just right, too, of course. He liked spike heels, all men did. God, men were fools sometimes. It was still the middle of the afternoon and she didn’t want to look like a hooker, but what the hell, she’d decided to go for it. She wouldn’t wear them when he took her to the White House—and he was going to take her to the White House, he’d all but promised—but today wasn’t for meeting presidents and senators. Today was supposed to be for something altogether different, so she went for the Jimmy Choo eggshell-colored heels. Why not? They showed her ankles off so perfectly and that was the best part of her body, she knew. She might be ten pounds on the plump side—okay, fifteen—but her ankles were perfect. So that was what she was wearing with her tight skirt, and that was why she was not dressed for running.
Her ankles just might get her killed, she thought. …
Where was Hector? Why hadn’t that occurred to her before? He was always in the garage during the day. He complained about it all the time. Sunny outside but I’m underground all day long, that’s what he constantly said to her. He’d leer at her a little bit, especially when she looked like she did today. He’d leer and complain about being inside and underground breathing in car fumes. Where was he now?
She screamed out his name.
Hectorrrrrrrrrrr!
No answer. Was Hector the one doing this? It seemed inconceivable. But still, the way he looked at her sometimes. Had she ever told him she was afraid of the dark? She might have. Everyone said she was too gabby. She might have told him and now here he was, wanting her and knowing she’d be terrified.
There was another noise, a ssssstttt. A match being lit. Then a tiny speck of light. She saw something. A man. Not Hector. Nothing like Hector. A tall man. Tall and thin with short-cropped white-blond hair. Handsome and pale.
Then the match went out and the light was gone. And so was he.
Back in the dark.
That’s when she realized that if she couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see her. So, as terrified as she was, her brain began to work: It told her to crouch down and kick off those eggshell high heels and move quietly, quietly but steadily, toward the door by the driveway. …
She wondered if they’d realize she was late checking into the hotel. She had told them she’d be there by five. They knew her there by now, at the Marriott in Virginia. The desk clerk no longer bothered to take her credit card imprint when she checked in; he’d just wave her away and say they’d take care of it on her way out. Then she’d pay cash. Her story was that she was from out of town, coming in repeatedly on business. She said she lived in East End Harbor, on Long Island, in New York, and that wasn’t really a lie. More like a fib. She also told him she was a lobbyist for the Nature Conservancy, and that was a lie. She didn’t know why she’d said it, maybe because that’s what she wished she were. That’s what she would be, one of these days. But the clerk certainly remembered their conversations because when he saw her he always called her Ms. Greer, he always asked how her lobbying was going, and then he’d hand her the key to her room, always the same room, 1722. He knew not to bother to call a bellhop; she had made it clear that she preferred to carry her small overnight bag herself. The only question he ever asked was, “Early or late checkout?” and after she told him she’d smile to show she was very satisfied with the service, then head straight for the bank of elevators that went to the seventeenth floor. All she’d have to do after that was wait for the love of her life to arrive. She always arrived on time, she was never late. So maybe they’d realize that something was wrong; maybe they’d come looking for her.
Another ssssstttt. Another flash of light. He was far from her now, the blond man. He was guarding that door all the way to the left, and she’d moved maybe fifteen feet closer to the driveway. She could make it. He was looking around, he didn’t see her, but she could see he was wearing a khaki suit with an open-necked blue shirt, and now she thought: I can do it. I can make it. He’s not even looking in my direction and, okay, I see the clearing, I see the door. As soon as the match goes out, just run like hell. I can make it. …
The match went out and she took off.
She banged her knee into the corner of a car—the darkness was dis-orienting, but that didn’t really slow her down. She was hauling ass and there was no way he was going to get her. She didn’t even hear footsteps; he wasn’t even trying. He knew it was impossible, knew that he’d lost, and she reached the door, grabbed for the doorknob and started to turn it, started to yank the door open and yes, there was the crack of sunlight, she had made it. …
And that’s when she felt the hand on her arm.
She looked up and there he was. The light from the crack in the door showed the short blond hair, the khaki suit, and the blue shirt. But it wasn’t possible. She’d seen him, knew he was all the way on the other side of the garage. She hadn’t heard him running. He couldn’t have beaten her to the door. It was not humanly possible. …
She felt a pain in her wrist now, realized he was twisting it, pulling her away from the door. She heard it shut with a click and a quiet whoosh. She started to scream—maybe someone on the other side would hear her—but his hand was over her mouth and she couldn’t scream. She couldn’t move and she couldn’t make a sound and she couldn’t even see him anymore. She couldn’t see anything. She was back in the dark.
There was a strange and overwhelming pressure on her throat now and she was having trouble breathing. She felt her head twisting and it hurt, it really hurt, and then she heard a little snap and started to fall to the concrete floor. She was vaguely aware that the man was holding her up, that he was dragging her to the back of a car. She felt herself being lifted up, realized that the trunk of the car was open, and she started to squirm.
And then she felt another tug at her neck and heard another crack and then she didn’t feel anything.
Maura did not hear the trunk of the blond man’s car close on top of her. She did not know that the Donna Karan blouse she was wearing now had a long tear under her right armpit or that the Jimmy Choo spike-heeled shoes were streaked with grease and carelessly tossed inches away from her bare feet. She did not see or feel the body of Hector, the garage attendant, which was already stuffed in the trunk next to her.
As the blond man’s car slowly pulled out of the parking space and moved toward the exit ramp, Maura felt like she was floating, like she was drifting off into space, weightless. She was surrounded by blackness, blacker than she’d ever imagined. She tried to make herself come back, tried to stop herself from fading into the dark, but she couldn’t. And as she floated farther and farther away, she thought: It’s not fair. It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair. He has to tell me he loves me. He has to take me to meet all the famous and powerful people. And he has to know about Aphrodite.
I have to tell him about Aphrodite.
And then the terrible feeling that had been with Maura Greer her entire life disappeared. There were no more shadows. No more terrifying shapes. And no more fear.
There was only a new and different kind of darkness.
London, England

March 2

The lecture hall was packed.
The turnout was more than a little surprising to Joseph Fennerman because over the past twenty-four hours a steady stream of cold, hard rain and a numbing winter dampness had re-arisen, and the combination seemed to permeate not just every English person’s clothes or even skin, but life.
Fennerman was delighted with the event. For one thing, the size of the crowd guaranteed that his lecture fee would remain at the exceedingly high level he now commanded for an appearance. For another, he was autographing the hardcover edition of his latest book, The Morality of Numbers, already a best-seller on the other side of the Atlantic, and judging from the buzz in the room he’d sell every copy on hand. Finally, prior to taking the stage he had been approached by a rather awestruck grad student, a somewhat bony brunette wearing a man’s rose-colored collared shirt, a short black skirt, and black leggings. She was not particularly attractive but, after a remarkably easy ten-minute conversation, she not only seemed charmed by his awkward demeanor, facial tics and all, she also agreed to meet him after the lecture to continue their discourse over a late supper at his favorite London restaurant, Rule’s. Fennerman was astonished by his successful pickup, and he was so eager to meet up with her he did something that went totally against his normal behavior pattern: He rushed through his material, knowingly omitting several salient and key points, trying to get to the end of his speech as quickly as possible. When the moderator opened up the floor for questions, forty-eight-year-old Dr. Fennerman, for the very first time in his distinguished career, was wishing that his audience would stop making him the center of their world and let him get off the damn stage.
“Of course, we are just beginning to explore the complicated questions of limits,” he heard himself saying in response to a rather smug, long-winded comment from someone wearing a corduroy jacket and a beard sitting in the third row. “By limits, I am referring to our own population, to the extension of human life into prolonged senescence, as well as limits to our own consumption and exploitation, of both resources and our very nature. The question of limits is probably our most difficult one to grapple with because biologically we are designed to increase at will and acquire whatever is available. The matter is complicated further because any kind of thorough historical perspective shows that people will exploit anything they can as completely as their technology and force permit.”
Another question. This one from a singularly unattractive woman near the back. He barely let her finish her sentence before he roared into his answer.
“You must understand the difference between what is visible—and thus easy to ascertain and comprehend—and what is underneath the surface, which is, in almost all cases, far more defining than something that can be touched and seen. When it comes to the question of human existence, understanding that difference is essential. All of us carry a unique genetic profile in our cells. That profile includes expressed genes, those things easily recognizable, such as eye and hair color, size of various features, et cetera, and that is called a phenotype. But we also have genes that are not expressed, recessive if you will, that make up an individual’s genotype. If I can use a mundane but clear example: Think of a birthday present, nicely wrapped and handed to you. The wrapped package is a phenotype. You can tell something about what is inside by the size and the weight and possibly the sound. But you can’t tell exactly what it is—you can’t define it—until you open it. The contents—in many ways, the essence—are the genotype.
“What I hope you take away from our conversation this evening is the complexity of the ethical dangers inherent in tampering with either phenotype or genotype. Does it really matter to the moral structure of the universe if we use transgender engineering to produce perfect-looking strawberries? No, of course not. But does it matter if, because of our interference, we create something that looks beautiful but has no taste? That is no longer functional or serves the purpose for which it was originally created by nature? That’s what each of us must decide.
“Thank you and good night.”
Joseph Fennerman practically raced off the stage, sat at a small desk off to the side where he impatiently signed books for half an hour, then threw his coat and muffler across his shoulders and, waving away his well-wishers and admirers, rushed outside to his stretch limousine that was waiting in front of the University of London’s urban campus. He tapped on the dark, tinted window to alert the driver to his presence and jumped into the back, a good six feet away from the front seat, rubbing his hands together to brush off the cold and the rain. The driver didn’t bother to turn around.
“I’m waiting for a young woman,” Fennerman said, smothering his nervousness with an awkward cough. “She’ll be here momentarily.” He tried but was unable to make out a fragment of the man’s face in the rearview mirror. He remembered from the initial pickup that he was handsome and young, with smooth, pale features and well-groomed blond hair. Not the sort of face that would be surprised or anxious at the thought of his having dinner with a too-skinny woman.
“She was already here, Dr. Fennerman,” the driver said. “She said she’ll meet us a couple of blocks away, at the corner of Melton and Euston Square.”
“Why?” Fennerman asked. The little twitch in his left eye was suddenly back and doing its work. It occurred to him that the driver had an American accent. Not a very refined one, either. Broad and harsh. He hadn’t noticed that earlier. “Why didn’t she just stay here?”
“It’s where she parked her car. I guess she had to get something out of it. I told her I could drive her, but she didn’t want to wait.”
Fennerman grunted and nodded, said, “Fine, fine,” and kept rubbing his hands together as the driver took him two blocks away. When the long black car pulled up to the curb at Euston Square, the back door opened. Looking up in anticipation, Fennerman was more than a little annoyed when a man slid in next to him.
“You’ve got the wrong car,” Fennerman told him with an exasperated sigh. When the man didn’t move, he added an impatient “You’ve made a mistake.”
“I don’t think so,” the man said. Then, turning to the driver, he said, also in a jarringly harsh American accent, “Have I made a mistake?”
Fennerman, facing the front seat, demanded to know what was going on.
“Just taking on another passenger,” the driver told him. “It won’t be for long.”
“This is unacceptable,” Fennerman said. “In my hotel room I have the name of the event organizer who booked your car service and I will definitely make a complaint. Now take me back to the lecture hall.”
“You flying to Washington tomorrow?” the man in the backseat now asked.
“How do you know that?”
“I’m a psychic.” The man held his hand over his eyes as if envisioning the future. “Three o’clock meeting at the Hubert H. Humphrey Building. Two hundred Independence Avenue. Southwest. You want the room number?”
“Take me to the lecture hall,” Fennerman told the driver again. “Take me back immediately and let me off.”
“Meeting your young lady?” the man next to him said.
“Yes.” It took Fennerman only a moment to make an unpleasant and frightening connection. It was what he did for a living: make connections between thoughts. “How do you know about her?”
“Move forward. There’s something up there I want you to see.”
Fennerman hesitated, then slid toward the driver and jutted out his chin until it almost touched the glass shield that separated the front seat from the back. Slumped all the way forward in the seat, unmoving, her head resting limply between her knees, sat the woman he had talked to at the lecture hall. He also saw the large, ugly wound running from her spine around to her ribs and the pool of blood that was still accumulating under her body.
“Oh my God,” he said, his eyes blinking furiously and uncontrollably. He looked at the driver’s face in the rearview mirror now, then turned to stare at the face of the man sitting beside him. “What’s happening?”
“I read one of your books. The one about actions and consequences,” the man said. “You should have realized. You made that appointment; now there are consequences.”
“What consequences?” Fennerman asked, his voice hoarse and his throat dry.
“We’re gonna have to f*ck with your genotype,” the man said and moved so quickly that Fennerman barely saw what happened. All he knew was that there was a sharp stinging at his throat and the black leather car seat was suddenly splattered with red. Fennerman felt himself choking, heard a loud and harsh gurgling noise, like a clogged drain trying to disperse its contents or a neglected fountain struggling to increase its water pressure.
Dr. Joseph Fennerman, physiologist, scientific ethicist, and internationally esteemed observer of the complexity of human life, was dead before he could even realize that his throat had been cut. The man whose reputation was made by connecting abstract theories to form precise and practical applications did not even have time to make the connection that the unpleasant noise he was listening to, the last thing he would ever hear, was the sound of himself drowning in his own blood.
Long Island, New York

June 14

Up until nine-fifteen this morning, Susanna Morgan had loved everything about her life. She adored her work, she was crazy about where she lived, and since the two things were so intertwined on a day-to-day basis, she felt safe in assuming it was the combination that made her so content.
Some might say too content. Two of her best friends recently broke it to her that being around her was a little bit like going into diabetic shock. They told her if she didn’t cut down on her sugary disposition, they’d have to come over and slap some sense into her. This conversation came after she’d explained to them why she didn’t mind staying at the office until ten o’clock at night sometimes and why she wouldn’t think of asking for overtime. It was after she said “I’d pay them to let me work” that the whole slapping issue came up.
She’d come to New York from Dayton, Ohio, to be a writer, and while she was toiling away at her first and sure-to-be-epic novel, she decided she’d do what she’d done in Dayton, which was work at the local paper. So she had gone to the New York Times and waited for them to be impressed by her perkiness and her extremely literate application form. After several months of waiting, she decided they had indeed been impressed but they were not going to be hiring her, so she started looking elsewhere. In a couple of months she’d been turned down by both New York tabloids, several small papers in New Jersey, and an Upper West Side giveaway. In the meantime, she went to a temp agency, and they sent her from ad agency to publishing company to, while they lasted, dot-com start-ups. At one of the ad agencies, she met a guy whom she dated for a while. In their third week of dating, he took her for a weekend to the Hamptons house he shared with six other people, and within an hour of driving and strolling around she fell in love with that part of Long Island. She and the guy broke up at the end of the summer, but she couldn’t get Long Island out of her mind. She decided it was the perfect place to write her novel, so she gave up her city sublet and rented a small two-bedroom apartment, half of an adorable Victorian house, right on Main Street in the center of the town of East End Harbor, which was a bit more blue-collar and not quite as chic as the Hamptons but was only a few minutes away. And what do you know: Her first week there she went to a yoga class, just two doors down from her new digs, and not only was the yoga instructor the woman who rented the other apartment in Susanna’s house, but one of the people in the class was the man who owned and ran the local newspaper. Two days after that she began working at the East End Journal. A dream come true.
She started out at the low end of the totem pole and did a little bit of everything at the paper: editing, writing, rewriting, reporting, making coffee. It was a staff of only five. Four years later, she was still writing the same novel but she was no longer at the bottom of the pole: She practically was the East End Journal. She’d added a food page and now traveled all over Queens and Long Island looking for quirky ethnic-restaurant stories, interviewed all the top chefs who were gradually opening upscale eateries in the area, and from time to time even tossed in some recipes of her own because she was not a bad cook herself, thank you very much. She reviewed the local summer-stock theater, which wasn’t very good, but she did get to have a drink with Alec Baldwin to discuss the local writing talent. At the drink she happened to mention that she was working on a novel and that it would make a terrific movie if she ever actually finished the damn thing, and he told her he’d love to look at it—if she ever did finish it. Susanna also wrote about local gardens and covered the twice-yearly house tours of the town’s old homes and, as of three months ago, she was even writing the obituaries. She didn’t tell this to many people, but the obits were actually her favorite things to work on. She didn’t mind that she was writing about dead people and talking to bereaved relatives several times a week. She loved digging into the family histories and hearing about the community roots that went back years and years. There was a wonderful graveyard in East End Harbor—some of the tombs went back to the early 1700s—and she had even begun to think about doing a book based on all the history she’d uncovered from talking to so many grief-stricken people.
Yes, everything was absolutely lovely.
Then, two days ago, it all began to unravel. She didn’t understand how life could get so screwed up in a mere forty-eight hours.
Wednesday afternoon she’d been in the office working on a piece about an athlete, the only local football player who’d left East End High and gone on to play in the NFL. He used to play for the Green Bay Packers in the mid-1980s and once ran an interception back 102 yards for a touchdown. But after he retired from football he got into crack, was arrested for armed robbery, and spent several years in a homeless shelter. Earlier that morning he’d jumped off the roof of a building in Dallas, Texas, leaving behind a note that said A hundred and two yards my ass. Except that “two” was spelled too and “my” was spelled mi. She was trying to decide whether to mention that the player had gone through four years at a Texas college when she looked up and saw Harlan Corning, the owner of the Journal, standing over her desk. He looked like he’d been standing there for several seconds. And he looked uncomfortable, she thought. He looked as if someone had died.
“I got a call,” he told her. His voice was softer than usual and soothing in that way people spoke when they thought they had to be gentle. “Bill Miller died.”
Susanna didn’t swear very often, but the first thing that came out of her mouth was “Oh, damn,” and she turned her head down toward her desk because she felt her eyes welling with tears and she didn’t particularly want to cry in front of Harlan.
She composed herself, nodded, accepting the news she’d heard, and instead of crying, said, in as clear a tone as she could muster, what she thought a good journalist should say: “I’d like to write the obit.”
Which she did.
Susanna did not have to do a lot of research for her obituary on Bill Miller. Over the past two years, she had gotten to know him extremely well.
Since working nearly twenty-four hours a day clearly wasn’t enough to keep her busy, twice a week Susanna did volunteer work at the East End Retirement Home. The Home was a series of small apartments, near a bay of the Long Island Sound, around which the town was originally built. The apartments had been built as a condominium project but, in the mid-seventies, the developer had gone broke. Before the 1980s boom struck, another developer, a local this time, bought the half-finished buildings on the cheap and turned them into an assisted-living complex, mostly so his grandmother would have a nice place to live out the last years of her life. Susanna, who spent her afternoons there talking to the inhabitants, reading to them, mostly just showing them that someone cared, soon got very personally involved. She got to know many of them intimately. She loved hearing their stories about the old days—it all fit in with her growing interest in the town’s history—and she never tired of their fascinating, often odd perspectives on the world. She had always liked old people. Her attitude was, I’m going to be one of them some-day—might as well find out what I’m going to be like.
Her absolute favorite was William Miller, who had been living there for quite some time, as long as anyone could remember, and who was friendly and garrulous and had extraordinary energy. Susanna often would start out reading to Bill only to have him take the book out of her hands, explain to her about the need for dramatic inflection, and end up reading to her. She would try to entertain him with stories about her most recent date or something crazy that happened at work, but he would usually interrupt with far more compelling reminiscences about a woman he’d dated when he was a teenager or anecdotes about a lunatic boss from fifty years ago, and Susanna would find herself sitting, sipping iced tea, and listening to his yarns, their roles once again reversed. Bill Miller had been an actor, and he was a marvelous storyteller. He entertained her with Hollywood tales and stories of his days on Broadway. Since she was not a showbiz-type person, it all was new and fascinating to her. Soon she knew his credits by heart, and was a little in awe of the fact that Bill, when he was young, had actually been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. It was for a movie called The Queen of Sheba. Susanna had tried to rent a tape of it once—she wasn’t ready for a DVD player, she had just figured out how to work her VCR—but the kid at the local video store said they mostly kept new stuff on hand. One of these days when she went back into the city, she figured she’d get a copy. In the meantime, she’d been content to listen to Bill yak away, particularly when he spoke about Cowboy Bill, the character he’d played on TV in the early fifties. It was a series for kids, and Susanna’s mother got extremely excited when she heard that her daughter had met the real Cowboy.
“I used to watch that as a little girl,” she gushed. “I can still see it, on the black-and-white TV my parents used to have in the living room. It was the only ‘boy’ show I liked, mostly because Cowboy Bill was so handsome. My God,” she said, finally coming up for air, “how old is he? He must be a hundred.”
“Eighty-two.”
“You’re kidding. That’s amazing. I remember him as being so old. Of course,” her mom laughed, “I was seven, so anyone older than sixteen was an old man to me.”
Bill had been very pleased when Susanna told him about her mother’s reaction. That night, he’d asked her to dine with him, which she did. They ate in the Home’s common room, in front of the TV. After that, they’d even had dinner outside the Home a couple of times. She tried taking him to Sunset, her favorite seafood dive, thinking he’d love it, but leaving the apartment complex seemed to disorient him. When he talked, he got his dates all mixed up, forgot a lot of details of his career, and mingled dubious fact with obvious fiction. So after two unsuccessful attempts they went back to their twice-a-week afternoon chats in the comfortable if somewhat musty complex.
As Susanna wrote Bill Miller’s obit for the East End Journal, she found herself tearing up. She was sad for Bill, yes, but she was even sadder for herself, she realized. She was going to miss him. His stories. The way he used to poke fun at her. His advice about men and her career. She liked Cowboy Bill Miller and she was sorry he was gone, so she decided she’d write the best obituary she’d ever written. She’d give him a proper send-off. A tribute.
So that’s what she’d done. Or what she thought she’d done.
The obit had come out in that morning’s paper, and she picked it up to read for perhaps the twentieth time in the past half hour.
COWBOY BILL DEAD AT 82
William Miller, best known for the three years he spent riding the TV range as the poor man’s Roy Rogers and folksy star of Cowboy Bill, was found dead in his room at the East End Retirement Home this past Wednesday. Miller, one of East End Harbor’s most beloved and colorful citizens, began his career as a serious actor, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor when he was just a teenager, in the 1938 costume drama The Queen of Sheba. He was too rebellious to fit into the Hollywood studio system, however, and his film career stalled. By 1953 he found himself starring as Cowboy Bill in the television series of the same name. Cashing in on the popularity of Western shows starring Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, Cowboy Bill lasted three seasons and is fondly remembered by many baby boomers.
Mr. Miller’s credits are spotty after that. He appeared in one low-budget horror film, The Vampire’s Bite, in 1966. In 1968, he appeared in a lead part in the acclaimed off-Broadway revival of Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy. His final stage appearance was in 1971 in another Odets revival, Waiting for Lefty.
Mr. Miller’s wife, Jessica Talbot, an actress, died in 1972. He is survived by his great-nephew, Edward Marion, of Wilton, Connecticut.
—Susanna Morgan

When she first saw it, she had been a little disappointed with the way the piece had come out. There was a space problem and Harlan had cut a lot of the personal touches she had labored so hard over. She felt as if she hadn’t done what she promised herself she’d do: make the town proud of Bill Miller and make Bill proud of her. But after the conversation she had with Harlan first thing that morning—all about the conversation he’d had with some nut who was incensed about the obit—her disappointment was fading. It was being replaced by confusion. And a strong feeling of embarrassment.
As soon as she strolled into the office that Friday, Harlan had come over to her desk. He said that he’d gotten an irate phone call. In fact, irate didn’t even begin to describe it. Some guy in Middleview, a mid-Island town about an hour closer to the city, had erupted on the telephone. The guy’s name—“Get this one,” Harlan had said—was Wally Crabbe and he was a movie fanatic. So fanatical, in fact, that he’d flown into a rage because all the information in the Bill Miller obit was wrong. While Harlan held the receiver away from his ear, Crabbe had ticked off the long list of errors that he’d spotted. Susanna’s boss held up a yellow legal pad, almost apologetically. He tore off the top page, which was covered with his scribbling, and handed it to her. “This is everything Mr. Crabbe said was wrong with your story,” he said softly. “Actually, it’s not everything. He was still going on when I told him I had to get off the phone. When I hung up, he was screaming at me that he wanted a free subscription to the paper to make up for our incompetence. Why is it that people want something for free if they think it’s not good enough to pay for?”
He grinned, to show her that his question was meant to prove that he didn’t take this all that seriously, but she didn’t return the grin or give an answer, so Harlan told her, still in that uncomfortably gentle tone, to get to the bottom of things. If her facts were wrong, he said, they’d have to print a retraction in next week’s paper. Susanna knew the way the town worked, and she colored a deep red at the idea of admitting in print that Bill had lied about himself. If she had indeed screwed up, she had not immortalized her friend Bill in town lore; she had permanently humiliated him.
She herself had been surprised at one thing when she was researching the story. She had called over to the Home to confirm certain facts, and found one she didn’t know: Bill had had a nephew. A great-nephew to be exact. She was certain Bill had told her, several times, that he had no living relatives. But Fred, who managed the Home, had told her about the nephew—great-nephew—who visited Bill every three months, like clockwork, stayed no more than five or ten minutes, and always paid for the next three months of Bill’s stay. Fred said that he had called the nephew right after he’d found Bill slumped in an easy chair in his room, to give him the sad news. The man had said he’d take care of all funeral arrangements and, in fact, that very night Fred called Susanna at home to say that Bill’s body had been picked up by ambulance and taken away. The nephew—great-nephew—made it clear that the funeral was going to be small and very private.
Everything else in the obit she’d gotten from Bill when he was alive. She’d taken it all on faith because she’d heard it so many times, and she realized now that even if one were a cynic—which she most definitely was not—repetition was a subtle form of brainwashing when it came to the truth. If you heard something often enough, especially from someone you trusted, it became true. Whether it was or not.
She told herself that Bill Miller was not a liar. She told herself that there had to be a misunderstanding. She told herself that what she’d put in the obit had been correct.
Only deep down she didn’t believe it, so she decided to find out for herself.
If there was a mistake, it was her mistake, not the paper’s, so she didn’t want to do this work on the Journal’s time. That’s why, at lunchtime, three hours after Harlan told her that she’d screwed up, Susanna walked over to the East End Harbor Public Library.
After conferring with the librarian, Adrienne, a surprisingly snip-pish and impatient woman, Susanna took a seat in front of the computer that was in the lobby to the right of the checkout desk. She pulled out the sheet of yellow legal paper that Harlan had handed her, looked down the list of errors that angry Wally Crabbe had called in. She went on-line, wound up going to the Askjeeves.com Web site, and typed in the question: How do I find out who was nominated for the 1938 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor?
It didn’t take long. Within seconds she had her answer. She had to admit that she hadn’t heard of any of the nominees. No, wait, Basil Rathbone—he was English, wasn’t he? He played someone famous. Oh yes, Sherlock Holmes, she was pretty sure that was it. And Walter Brennan—he was in some show on Nick at Night; he played a farmer or something like that. And she also had to admit that William Miller wasn’t among them. She tried looking at the nominees for 1939, then 1940, and then going back earlier, year by year, until 1930. She decided to stop searching then. Bill might have gotten the year wrong, at his age, but she doubted he’d miss the entire decade.
She wondered how much further she should pursue this. Decided—out of duty and curiosity—she had to keep going. After several false starts, she got to the site for IMDB.com—Internet movie data-base—and looked up the career of William Miller. It took her over an hour of staring at the screen and reading and scrutinizing photos and double-checking, then triple-checking, on other movie Web sites before she began to accept what she was seeing.
By the time she was done, she had a splitting headache and a steady wave of nausea flowing in the pit of her stomach. She practically fled the library, gasping in warm, fresh air once she made it to the sidewalk outside. Leaning up against a lamppost for support, she flicked open her cell phone, called Harlan’s number at the Journal, told him she wasn’t feeling well, wouldn’t be coming in for the rest of the afternoon. He told her to go to the doctor, started to ask if there was anything he could do, but she just clicked the phone off and hugged the lamppost until she had the strength to walk.
When she got home, Susanna paced nervously around her living room, picking at her cuticles and tapping the fingers of her right hand against the knuckles of her left. Finally, she looked at the notes she’d jotted down from the conversation with Fred, the manager of the Home, saw the phone number she was looking for, picked up the phone and dialed it. After the fourth ring, she heard a man’s voice on the answering machine, giving a bland outgoing message. After the tone, she took a deep breath—it was suddenly hard to talk—and then she said, “Hi … uh…Edward Marion? This is Susanna Morgan. I was a friend of your uncle’s …uh … great-uncle’s … and, um …well, I wrote his obit for our local paper and I’m very confused about a few things. …I need to …well …know a few more things about Bill. …I know this doesn’t make any sense and I’m probably wrong …I’ve got to be wrong … but I really do need to talk to you.” She left her phone number on the tape and then said, “Please call me.” Then she hung up, took three aspirins, and, even though it was three o’clock in the afternoon, got into bed and pulled the covers up over her head.
Edward Marion called back around six o’clock that evening. Susanna was still in bed, although she hadn’t slept a wink, and the sudden noise of the phone made her shudder. When she answered it, her voice sounded thick to her, as if she’d been sedated.
“Ms. Morgan?”
“Yes.”
#8220;This is Ed Marion. Bill Miller’s nephew.”
“Great-nephew.”
“What?”
“You’re his great-nephew.”
“Yes. That’s right.”
There was an awkward pause. Now that she had to convey her news to another person, now that she had to say it out loud, Susanna didn’t know how to begin.
“Listen,” she said. “I’m very sorry about your loss.”
“Thank you.”
“I was pretty close to Bill, I used to—”
“I know. He talked about you all the time.”
“I wrote his obituary for our local paper and I used a lot of information that your uncle had told me, you know, over the years.”
“Great-uncle.”
“What?”
“He was my great-uncle.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Ms. Morgan, I’m afraid Bill was a bit of a …how should I say this … fantasist.”
“You mean he made things up?”
“I mean I think he probably believed them when he said them. And the more he said them, the more he believed them, if you know what I mean. I’m sorry if he told you things that weren’t true. I hope it wasn’t anything important. Or embarrassing.”
“The thing is, Mr. Marion …”
“Call me Ed. Please.”
“The thing is, Ed …Somebody called, some movie nut, and he was pretty angry—we don’t get too many angry calls at the Journal— and he said that things I’d put in the obit weren’t true. So I did some research.”
“You did?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of research?”
“I went on the Internet and checked out the things Bill told me about his career.”
“You researched my uncle?”
“Yes. And it turns out, this guy, this movie nut, he was right. Well, not about everything. Some of the things Bill told me were true. Only they weren’t really true. This is going to sound kind of crazy. …”
“Ms. Morgan, may I make a suggestion?”
“Sure.”
“Let me meet you for lunch tomorrow. I was going to call you anyway because my uncle left you something in his will.”
“He did?”
“Yes. He was very fond of you. I’ve been wanting to meet you, so this is a good excuse. I can discuss the will with you—I think you’ll be very pleased with what I’ve got to say—and you can tell me whatever it is you need to tell me.”
“Well, yes, it might be better to do this in person. But, listen, I have to tell you, this is pretty disturbing.”
“I can’t imagine anything too disturbing about my uncle. He was such a sweet old guy. But let’s talk about it at lunch.”
“It’s an awfully long drive for you, isn’t it?”
“Three hours. And I don’t mind. From what I’ve heard about you, it’ll be well worth it.”
She told him where to go, that she’d meet him at Sunset restaurant at twelve-thirty. He said he was looking forward to it. She didn’t say anything.
She’d have more than enough to say over lunch, she decided.
Susanna didn’t fall asleep until one o’clock in the morning, which was incredibly late for her, two hours past her normal bedtime. And then she woke up one hour later. Two-oh-five to be exact, according to her new Bose clock radio.
At first she thought she’d awakened because she was hungry. She was so shaken by the experiences of the day she hadn’t been able to eat dinner. She had heated up some soup, toyed with it with her spoon, then poured it right down the drain. She’d tried reading, couldn’t concentrate. Tried watching TV, couldn’t even do that. At nine-thirty she gave up and got into bed, tossing and turning until one. Now she was awake again, her stomach growling.
And then she realized that she wasn’t awake because she was hungry.
She was awake because there was a noise at her front door.
A noise like someone fiddling with a lock.
And then there was a noise like someone turning a doorknob. And opening a door.
And coming inside.
There was somebody in her house.
All of a sudden, Susanna was having trouble swallowing. She felt her throat constricting at the same time a rush of bile shot up from her stomach, choking her. She closed her eyes and ordered herself to be calm. Willed herself to keep her eyes closed an extra second until her throat relaxed. She took a deep breath, it helped to clear her head, but right in the middle of that was when she heard the creak of a floorboard in her living room and Susanna jumped out of bed, flailing at the covers, stumbling for just a moment as her foot was still wrapped in the sheet, and she lunged for the door to her bedroom, threw her shoulder against it, and slammed it shut and locked it.
She stood still, one hand on the door, in total silence except for her own heavy, rhythmic breathing. After a few seconds, she began to feel silly. Maybe she’d been dreaming. Maybe everything that had happened that day was just ganging up on her to make her edgy and paranoid and—
And there was a scratching noise on the other side of the door.
There was no mistaking this one.
He was picking the lock.
She was in her nightgown and bare feet and she was pretty much frozen with terror, and her heart was pounding so loud she thought she might actually be having a heart attack and six inches away someone was picking the lock to her bedroom door.
Was about to come in and do God knows what.
The air-conditioning was on full blast, but she was sweating through her nightgown. Beads of salty water dripped down her forehead, into her eyes, stinging them into a series of erratic blinks. Susanna looked around the room, searching for something, anything that could help her, but there wasn’t a damn thing. No cell phone even. She’d left it in the living room, where she kept the cradle for the charger. She thought about racing to the regular phone, it was just by the bed, but something told her she wouldn’t have time to call, something told her it was a matter of seconds now. …
She took her hand off the door and turned, told herself not to look back, no matter what, and sprinted toward her bedroom window, the window that led to the back of her building, to the back of Main Street.
The window that, because she lived in the middle of the town’s one-street-long business district, had a fire escape right outside.
She threw the window open, forgetting it was locked, wrenching her back because she’d yanked so hard, then she fumbled with the latch—Stay calm, stay calm, don’t panic—and then it was open and she jumped through, made it onto the landing just as her bedroom door burst open. She didn’t want to look but she had to—it was instinct— and she saw a blond man barrel in, look up, and then charge the window. Instead of going down, she went up; it was easier to elude his grasp that way. Even so, he managed to grab hold of her foot. It sent a terrible shock through her entire body. The physical contact terrified her way beyond any level she had ever experienced. It made everything all too real and too close. And it brought her imagination into play, turning danger into something she hadn’t let herself think of: pain. She was phobic about pain. The thought of what might be done to her made her freeze for a moment, paralyzed her. She felt herself go limp but then her anger took over. No panic, she told herself again. You cannot panic! She felt the man’s grip tighten and her hysteria disappeared, replaced by fury. So she kicked as hard as she could, shook her leg and kicked again, and his fingers let go and she scurried up the fire escape, climbing away from him as fast as she could.
She got to the flat roof and even before she hoisted herself over the top, she knew she’d won. She’d been up here many times. She kept a beach chair here, used to come up and sunbathe and read on weekends when the beaches were too crowded. She knew this roof and knew that all she had to do was hop over to the next building, maybe a one-foot jump, no big deal, and there was another fire escape there, at the back. All she had to do was get there and climb down and then it was over. He couldn’t possibly get there as fast as she could. Couldn’t even know which direction she’d go.
It was easy now.
She was safe.
So before she pulled herself onto the roof she looked down. Saw that he wasn’t even trying to follow her. He was just looking up at her. She stared straight into his eyes, studied his face so she could remember to tell the police exactly what he looked like, was startled because he was smiling. Looking up at her and smiling.
She swung her legs up onto the tarred rooftop. Started running over to the next building. But she got only a few steps before she stopped cold. It was impossible.
What she saw was physically impossible!
He was there. The blond man. He was on the roof, smiling at her. The same smile she’d just seen.
But it couldn’t be. He couldn’t be here! He couldn’t. …
She was going to scream. That was her only chance. She could scream and hope that someone would hear her. Hear her and help her.
But she didn’t scream.
The blond man moved too quickly and the thing she feared more than anything, the pain, was too great. When the blond man spoke, it was quietly, as if he was being respectful of the early-morning silence. “I need to know a few things,” he said.
So she nodded. She wanted him to understand that she’d be happy to tell him anything she could. He said, “Aphrodite,” and she looked confused, even through the pain, so he said, “What do you know about Aphrodite and who did you tell?” She said she didn’t understand what he was talking about, it was more of a whimper really. He asked her three times and after the third time she couldn’t even answer, she could just moan very, very quietly and shake her head, and he was convinced she was telling him the truth. Then he said, “I need a name,” and she knew the answer to that one, so she told him, she was so happy to tell him, and then he took a small step away from her.
“Is it over?” she asked, barely able to get the words out. “Do you need anything else from me?”
“It’s almost over,” the blond man told her. “There’s just one more thing.”
There were details to be attended to inside Susanna’s bedroom. First her body was carried down the fire escape, put inside, and arranged on the floor, by her bed. Then her nightstand was tipped over, the contents of the one drawer allowed to spill and spread on the floor, the clock radio tumbling and breaking. The sheet and summer quilt were wrapped around Susanna’s feet and legs. From the kitchen, a drinking glass half-full of water was brought in, then thrown down. The glass shattered, the water spilled. Soon it was safe to assume that anyone finding the body would come to the reasonable conclusion that Susanna Morgan had gotten out of bed in the middle of the night, tripped, fallen, and broken her neck.
Outside, Main Street was absolutely empty. It took less than a minute to reach the car, which was parked in the alley behind Susanna’s apartment. It took less than four minutes for the car to pass the sign that read EAST END HARBOR, TOWN LIMITS.
It had been a totally professional hit. There was no hint that a crime, much less a murder, had even taken place in the town of East End Harbor.
Nothing had been overlooked.
Except for one thing.
That thing was still up on the roof of Susanna Morgan’s building. And it wasn’t exactly a thing. It was a person.
It was a woman who had been sitting quietly, as still as could be, cross-legged, in the corner of the flat roof, as she often did in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep. She had been sitting peacefully, breathing in, breathing out, appreciating the misty night and the hazy half-moon. She had been thinking about life in general and her life in particular, and what direction it might be taking in the next few months. Up until the blond man had appeared on the roof, she was thinking that her life could move in just about any direction she decided to move it in. After the man had climbed down the fire escape, after she’d looked down to see the car drive away, after she’d seen her friend Susanna murdered, she had a terrible, sickening feeling that that decision had just been taken out of her hands.