Nighttime Is My Time: A Novel (5 page)

Smiling, she moved from one man to the other, closely examining their tags, then kissing each one of them on the cheek. "Mark Fleischman, Gordon Amory, Robby Brent, Jack Emerson. And, of course, Carter, whom I used to know as Howie and who hasn't kissed me yet. You all look marvelous. You see, there's the difference. I was at my peak at sixteen, and after that it was all downhill. You four and Howie, I mean Carter, were just starting up the hill in those days."

Then she spotted Jean and rushed to embrace her.

It was the icebreaker they needed. Mark Fleischman could see the notable relaxation as polite expressions became amused smiles and the better wines they'd put aside for the honorees began to be sipped.

Laura's still a knockout, he thought. Thirty-eight or -nine like the rest of us, but could pass for thirty. The cocktail suit she was wearing was clearly pricey, very pricey. The television series she'd been on had been cancelled a couple of years ago. He wondered how much work she'd had since then. He knew she'd had a messy divorce, with claims and counterclaims; he'd read about it on Page Six of the
New York Post
. He smiled to himself as she kissed Gordie a second time. "You used to have a crush on me," she teased him.

Then it was his turn. "Mark Fleischman," she said breathlessly. "I swear you were jealous when I was dating Barry Diamond. Am I right?"

He smiled. "Yes, you're right, Laura. But that was a long time ago."

"I know, but I haven't forgotten." Her smile was radiant.

He had once read that the Duchess of Windsor had the capacity to make every man she spoke to feel like the only man in the room. He watched as she turned to another familiar face.

"I haven't forgotten either, Laura," he said quietly. "Never for one
minute
have I forgotten."

10

It amused him to note that at the cocktail party Laura was, as usual, the center of attention, even though she was the least deserving of all the honorees. On the television series that had been the one feather in her cap, she had played a shallow blonde who only cared about the person she saw reflected in the mirror. The ultimate in typecasting, he thought.

There was no denying that she still looked damn good, but she was enjoying that final bloom before the change begins to take place. Already there were fine lines around her eyes and mouth. He remembered that her mother had that same papery skin, the kind that ages fast and hard. If Laura lived another ten years, even plastic surgery could only do so much for her.

But of course, she wasn't going to live another ten years.

Sometimes, even for months at a time, The Owl retreated to a secret spot deep inside him. During those times he was almost able to believe that all the things The Owl had done had been a dream. Other times, though, like now, he could feel it living inside him. He could see The Owl's head, its dark eyes surrounded by pools of yellow. He could feel how its talons grasp the limb of a tree. He could feel the touch of its soft velvety plumage, causing him to shiver inwardly. He could feel the rush of air beneath its wings as it swooped down on its prey.

Seeing Laura had brought The Owl rushing from its perch. Why had he waited so long to come to her? The Owl demanded to know, but he was afraid to answer. Was it, he wondered, because when Laura and Jean were finally destroyed, The Owl's power over life and death would vanish with them? Laura should have been dead twenty years ago. But that mistake had liberated him.

That mistake, that accident of fate, had transformed him from the stuttering crybaby—"I ammm th-th-the oooooowwwwwlllll and I liwvwe in aaaa…"—into The Owl, the predator, powerful and unflinching.

Someone was studying his ID, a guy with glasses and thinning hair, dressed in a reasonably expensive dark gray suit. Then the man smiled and held out his hand. "Joel Nieman," he said.

Joel Nieman. Oh, sure, he had been Romeo in the senior play. He was the one Alison had written about in her column: "To everyone's surprise, Romeo, a.k.a. Joel Nieman, managed to remember most of his lines."

"Did you give up on acting?" The Owl asked, smiling back.

Nieman looked surprised. "You have a good memory. I thought the stage could do without me," he said.

"I remember the review Alison wrote about you."

Nieman laughed. "So do I. I was going to tell her she did me a favor. I took up accounting, and it was a better way to go. Terrible shame about her, isn't it?"

"Terrible," The Owl agreed.

"I read that initially there was some question of a possible homicide investigation, but the police now pretty much believe that she passed out as she hit the water."

"Then I think the police are stupid."

Joel Nieman's expression became curious. "You think Alison was
murdered
?"

The Owl realized suddenly that perhaps he looked and sounded too vehement. "From what I read, she made a lot of enemies along the way," he said carefully. "But who knows? The police are probably right. That's why they always say that no one should go swimming alone."

"Romeo, my Romeo," a voice squealed.

Marcy Rogers, who had been Juliet in the school play, was tapping Nieman's shoulder. He spun around.

Marcy still wore her chestnut hair in a mass of tangled curls, but now it was highlighted with random streaks of gold. She struck a theatrical pose. "And all the world shall be in love with night."

"I can't believe it. It's Juliet!" Joel Nieman exclaimed, beaming.

Marcy glanced at The Owl. "Oh, hi." She turned back to Nieman. "You've got to meet my real life Romeo. He's over at the bar."

Dismissal. Just the way he'd always experienced it at Stonecroft. Marcy hadn't even bothered to look at his ID. She simply wasn't interested in him.

The Owl looked around. Jean Sheridan and Laura Wilcox were standing next to each other on the buffet line. He studied Jean's profile. Unlike Laura, she was the kind of woman who got better looking as she aged. She looked decidedly different, although her features certainly hadn't changed. What had changed was her poise, her voice, the way she held herself. Oh, sure, her hair and clothes made a difference, but the change in her was more interior than outward. Growing up, she had to have been embarrassed by the way her parents carried on. A couple of times the cops had been exasperated enough to cuff them.

The Owl walked over to the buffet line and picked up a plate. He realized that he was beginning to understand his ambivalence toward

Jean. During the years at Stonecroft, a couple of times, such as when he didn't make the football team, she'd gone out of her way to be nice to him. In fact, in the spring of senior year he'd actually considered asking her for a date. He had been sure she wasn't going out with anyone. Sometimes, on warm Saturday nights, he would hide behind a tree in lovers' lane and wait for the cars to drive there after the movies. He never saw Jean in one of them.

Positive thoughts aside, it was too late to change course now. Only a couple of hours ago, seeing her come into the hotel, he'd finally made up his mind to kill her, too. At this moment he understood why he had made that irrevocable decision. His mother used to say "still waters run deep." Jeannie may have acted nice to him a couple of times, but she was probably just like Laura underneath, snickering about the poor dope who had wet his pants and cried and stuttered.

He helped himself to salad. And so what if she hadn't been in lovers' lane with one of the jerks in their class, he reflected. Instead, Miss "Butter-Wouldn't-Melt-in-Her-Mouth" Jeannie had been romancing a West Point cadet—he knew all about that.

Fury lashed through him, alerting him that soon he would have to release The Owl.

He skipped the pasta, selected poached salmon and green beans with ham, and looked around. Laura and Jean had just settled at the honoree table. Jean caught his eye and waved him over. Lily looks just like you, he thought. The resemblance is really striking.

The thought sharpened his hunger.

11

At two o'clock, Jean gave up the attempt to sleep, turned on the light, and opened a book. But after reading for an hour and realizing that she had not absorbed one word, she restlessly put the book down and turned off the light again. Every muscle in her body felt wired and taut, and she had the beginning of a headache. She knew that the effort to socialize all evening, despite the constant gnawing worry that Lily might be in danger, had exhausted her. She realized that she was counting the hours until ten o'clock when she would visit Alice Sommers and tell her about Lily.

The same thoughts kept racing through her mind. In all these years I've never mentioned her to a soul. The adoption was private. Dr. Connors is dead, and his records were destroyed. Who could have found out about her? Is it possible that her adoptive parents know my name and have kept track of me? Maybe they told someone else, and that person is the one contacting me now. But
why
?

The window facing the back of the hotel was open, and the room was getting cold. After a moment's debate Jean sighed and pushed back the covers. If I have any hope of getting some sleep, I'd better close it, she thought. She got out of bed and padded across the room. Shivering as she cranked in the open panel, she happened to glance down. A car without its lights on was pulling into the self-parking area of the hotel parking lot. Curious, she watched as the figure of a man stepped out and began walking quickly toward the back entrance of the hotel.

His coat collar was up, but when he opened the door to the lobby, his face was clearly visible. Turning away from the window, Jean thought, I wonder what in the name of God one of our distinguished dinner partners found to do until this hour of the night.

12

The call came into police headquarters in Goshen at 3:00 A.M. Helen Whelan of Surrey Meadows was missing. A single woman in her early forties, she had last been seen by a neighbor. Whelan had been walking her German shepherd, Brutus, at or about midnight. At 3:00 a.m. a couple living a few blocks away at the edge of the county park were awakened by the howling and barking of a dog. They investigated and found a German shepherd trying to struggle to its feet. It had been savagely beaten on the head and back with a heavy instrument. A woman's size seven shoe was found on the road nearby.

***

At 4:00 a.m., Sam Deegan had been called in and assigned to the team of detectives investigating the disappearance. He stopped first to talk to Dr. Siegel, the veterinarian who had treated the wounded animal. "My guess is that he was knocked out for a couple of hours by the blows to his head," Siegel told Deegan. "They came from something about the size and weight of a tire iron."

Sam could visualize the scenario. Helen Whelan had let her dog off the leash for a run in the park. Someone seeing her standing alone in the road had tried to drag her into a car. The German shepherd had rushed to protect her and had been beaten senseless.

He drove to the street where the animal had been found and began ringing doorbells. At the fourth house an elderly man claimed he heard a dog barking frantically at about 12:30 a.m.

Helen Whelan was, or had been, a popular physical education teacher at Surrey Meadows High. Sam learned from several fellow teachers that her habit of walking her dog late at night was well known. "She was never nervous about it. She'd tell us that Brutus would be dead before he'd let anyone hurt her," the principal of her school said sadly.

"She was right," Sam told him. "The vet had to put Brutus down."

By ten o'clock that morning he could see that this case was not going to be an easy one to solve. According to her distraught sister who lived in nearby Newburgh, Helen had no enemies. She had been seeing a fellow teacher for several years, but he was on a sabbatical in Spain this semester.

Missing or dead? Sam was sure that anyone who had so savagely injured a dog would have no mercy on a woman. The difficult investigation would begin, and he would commence his share of it in Helen's neighborhood and at her school. There was always the chance that one of the weirdo teenagers the schools were spitting out today held a grudge against her. From her picture he could tell that she was a very attractive woman. Maybe some neighbor had fallen in love and been rejected.

He only hoped it wouldn't turn out to be one of those random crimes, committed by a stranger on a stranger, whose only fault was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That kind of crime was the hardest to investigate, and often went unsolved, something he hated.

That train of thought inevitably brought him to Karen Sommers.

But her death wasn't hard to
solve
, Sam thought; it was only hard to
prove
.

Karen's killer was Cyrus Lindstrom, the boyfriend she dumped twenty years ago—of that he was sure. But as of next week, when I turn in my papers, I'll be off that case, Sam reminded himself.

And I'll be off yours, too, he thought, as with compassionate eyes he studied a recent picture of blue-eyed, auburn-haired Helen Whelan, who was now officially listed as "missing, presumed dead."

13

Laura had been tempted to sleep in and save her energy for the pre-game luncheon at West Point, but when she awoke on Saturday morning, she changed her mind. Her goal of romancing Gordie Amory had achieved only middling success at the dinner after the cocktail party. The honorees had sat together, and Jack Emerson had joined them. At first Gordie was quiet, but eventually he had warmed up some and even paid her a compliment. "I think every guy in our class had a crush on you at some point, Laura," he said.