The Snow Garden (54 page)

     At the double doors, she was stunned by what she saw. A giant metal stick figure had toppled, catching the basin of a utility sink on its descent, pulling pipes free from the wall and sending jets of water across the floor. Tool racks had been torn free and a barrage of sculpting tools bobbed toward her on the weakening currents flecked with melting wax. Water and wax don’t mix, he’d said, and when she saw the smoldery cavities of the giant wax blocks, she realized what he’d meant. She bent down and grabbed the sharpest thing she could find, a pathetically small putty knife. Level with the overturned armature, she glimpsed the spools of bent and torn chicken wire dangling from the figure’s arms. If Randall had been attached to it, he was gone now.

     She spun around, the knife in front of her, but no one charged her.

     Had Michael chosen to escape as well?

     The apartment seemed empty and silent except for the whistle of wind through the shattered glass and the incessant gurgle of water fighting its way out. Obvious signs to get the hell out now. She backed up to the elevator doors, reaching behind her to stab the button. Then her eyes landed on the terrace. Spotlights on the sculptures chased away any shadows. She whirled, slammed one fist against the elevator doors, stabbed the button with several more punches of her trembling fingers, and turned again.

     Jesse’s face stared back at her.

     His waxed mask had been striated by flying wood, revealing purple lips and closed eyes, the lids pale blue. Wax had been torn free, revealing several curled fingers. His dead form was elevated on a stone platform, his arms extended in what looked like a waxen embrace of the wind whipping across the terrace.

     In her chest, she felt the beginning of a scream. Choked by panic and deprived of the breath it needed to get past her throat. She let out only an asthmatic wheeze. She pounded against the elevator doors. With a chime, they parted.

     Michael took one step forward from the elevator and drove his fist into her stomach with enough force to send her skidding across the floor. She reared her head up off the wet marble. Fiery pain radiated out from her belly. Then she saw the syringe he held clamped in his fist.

     “Come see!” He wrapped her soaked hair around one fist and tugged. She slid with him, legs kicking in protest, howling sounds that fought to be screams. Just beyond her feet, the elevator doors glided shut with a soft thud. Even as her hands clawed at the fist entangled in her hair, her fingers went sticky with blood, numbness tingling at her fingertips.

     “Fast acting, isn’t it? Unfortunately, its longevity leaves something to be desired. Randall’s little fuck buddy out here woke up before the wax even dried. Not pleasant!”

     When her head slammed into the deck door, the impact resonated through her skull without pain and she fought to keep her eyes open.

     Michael squatted down gingerly next to her, slid one bulky arm under her back, and lifted her. Her vision went askew and the shattered, swaying chandelier was suddenly replaced by the sight of wind-driven clouds. Wind hit her, but no chill ran through her body.

     Michael lowered her onto her knees to the snow. When her head fell forward, he righted it with a pull of her hair, and she looked up to see Jesse.

     “Lend me some of your insight, Kathryn!” Michael whispered into her ear. “Just what is it about those perfectly formed pecs and that rounded bubble butt that is capable of reducing so many poor fools to their basest desires? I put my very own hands on those body parts, even enhanced them a little bit as you can see, and I still don’t have the slightest clue.”

     Jesse’s face tilted down at her placidly through her smarting tears. More wax had been torn free from his chest, and she was barely able to focus on the portion of rotted skin that revealed a glistening rib.

     “You see, it’s somewhat important that I find out. Because I like to familiarize myself with just why it is that those I’ve given so much to feel the need to betray me! This happens to be the second time I’ve handed over everything I’ve had to someone I’ve loved, only to find out they were going to
steal
it! Take what I gave them and run off with it.”

     A faint echo blurred the edges of his words and her head rolled forward. He kept his grip, but where he ripped at her hair, she felt only slight tugs that sent diffuse tickles through her scalp.

     “Arrogant little fuck. Can you imagine his surprise when I told him I was Randall’s father? He laughed. He laughed and he told me Randall didn’t have
anyone
.
I knew what he meant. Anyone but
him
.
If only he hadn’t been packing, I might have never been so brave!”

     He dropped her. Wet snow clogged her nose. He rolled her over onto her back. Her eyes wanted to fall closed, but she managed to focus on him as he crouched over her, one hand cupping the back of her head. She tried to scream, but could only curl her mouth. Life had gone from her limbs. She didn’t realize Michael was stroking her bangs from her forehead until his fingers passed over her right eye.

     “Do you really think I killed Pamela Milford for a scarf? Or does that trite summation make it easier to ignore how badly Eric betrayed me? You know, he wrote me a letter afterward. Do you want to know what he told me? It was so poetic.”

     Her lips drifted shut.

     “Of course he didn’t have the courage to just ask me to forget him. He had to rely on some sloppy metaphor. The snow garden. That’s what he called it. A place for people incapable of moving forward, incapable of letting go of their pain. He said it was the snow-blanketed lawn you get stuck in when you decide not to use the sidewalk. And once you’re there, such memories freeze you, keeping you from the present and the future. How’s that for poetry?”

     His laugh sounded distant.

    
“
This
is my snow garden! I
make
something of my memories.”

     Blackness fell over the terrace.

     For a brief, panicked second, Kathryn thought she had lost consciousness. Then, next to her, she saw the snow crunch under Michael’s shoes as he leaped to his feet.

Downtown Manhattan turned Michael into a silhouette as he stepped through the deck door, drawing Kathryn’s pistol from his pocket. With his other hand, he slid the deck door shut behind him and threw the lock. Behind him, Kathryn lay prone across the snow.

     Michael walked around in the disorienting darkness, his feet splashing several steps across the floor, making sweeps with the pistol. Finally, he caught sight of Randall watching him, standing in shadow at the top of the spiral staircase, next to the fuse box he now controlled. Randall tightened his grip on the chandelier’s rotary crank, but Michael stood still.

     “Is she dead?” Randall called, his voice echoing on the vaulted ceiling. He didn’t want to hear, but knowing the truth, if Michael told it, would make this even easier. It would be fueled less by self-preservation than the hot fire of revenge.

     “Come down here and see for yourself.”

     Closer, you fuck, he thought. Three steps closer, “Jesse was running away,” he shouted down the stairs. “And me, I don’t really exist. Not on paper, at least. But what about her?”

     Michael kept still, the gun aimed at Randall’s shadow. “Do we really have to do this in the dark?”

     “Answer me and I’ll turn the fucking lights back on!” Randall roared.

     There was a flash of muzzle flare. Randall threw himself against the wall, slamming the fuse box shut with his back. The bullet hit the spiral staircase with a hollow ring. His hand still held the crank, and he peeled himself off the wall just in time to see Michael charging across the dining room toward the stairs.

     He yanked the crank forward with all his strength, tensed his arm, and drove it through its rotation. The chandelier twisted, bobbed, and then plummeted silently. Ceramic met marble in a bone-rattling crash. Michael’s arms flew out in front of him. A shattered tentacle pinned his legs to the floor.

     The resounding crash was followed by a silence punctuated by whistling wind.

     “Michael?”

     He was answered by throaty laughter. And a muzzle flare that lit the rafter and whistled into his chest.

     He hit the wall and then carpet.

     “I’m still here, Randall!” Michael howled.

     Randall brought one hand to the second heartbeat of throbbing blood in his chest. He pulled himself to his feet by the rail. The pain was too unreal to care about.

     “I’ll be right down!” he shouted. “Just let me turn the lights on first.”

     Randall flipped open the box and threw every fuse with the side of his palm.

     Spotlights shot to life on the terrace.

     Electricity hummed and then spat as it fought its way down to the chandelier, erupting in sparks from the tattered wire.

     Blue strobes lit Michael’s body—his chest reared up off the floor, fell, and jerked again. One arm shot out from under his body, the other jerked and splashed against the marble. Strands of lightbulbs flickered inside the shattered ceramic cavities.

     Randall watched. Michael’s body gave up before the chandelier did, and after several more minutes of surging, misdirected power, the penthouse returned to darkness.

Sirens wailed in the street below.

     Randall sat cross-legged in the snow, holding Kathryn’s head to his bleeding chest. Light flakes filled the distance between him and Jesse’s blue-veined face peering out from his tomb of wax. Kathryn gave a pained groan, managing to gather a fistful of his crimson-stained T-shirt. He released the back of her neck and her face tilted toward his.

     “Kathryn?”

     Her lips parted, puffed, but nothing came out other than breath. He lifted one hand from under her to smooth the damp hair from her face, and lowered his mouth to hers.

     “You knew me, Kathryn,” he whispered.

     When their lips met, hers gave beneath the press of his, and the tip of her tongue slipped briefly inside his mouth. He held his mouth to hers for several seconds, wondering if it was the loss of blood that made his head spin and his vision blur. Slowly, he withdrew. It took him awhile to find the strength to let go of her, and when he did he took care to lay her on her back.

     At the edge of the terrace sat an empty stone platform exactly like the one on which Jesse had been mounted.

     Randall stepped up onto it and stared down at the view Michael had selected for him. Twenty-five stories below, fire trucks formed a parade down Second Avenue, police cars emerging from the side streets to fill the gaps between them. Tim Mathis’ Jeep Cherokee was stuck in the middle of the fray. For a brief, dizzying moment, Randall pondered staying, but then the wound in his chest came back to life, pulling him out of his daze and forcing him down off the platform where he would have met his death if Kathryn hadn’t come.

     Back inside, he risked one last glance over his back and saw the dance of blue and red lights crawling up the walls of the surrounding buildings, and Kathryn, sleeping in the snow with Jesse standing over her, his arms extended as if at any moment he might leap down from his perch to rescue her.

EPILOGUE

May 2005

“KATHRYN?”

     Her eyes opened and shot to the clock on the nightstand, then to the sun beating against the window shade. Around its edges, slivers of light fell across the cardboard boxes alongside the bed. She groaned in protest and rolled over, her breasts pressing against the soft sweep of his chest. In response, his fingers did a cakewalk down her spine, igniting gooseflesh as they went.

     “Coffee,” he whispered into her ear. “And then you’ve got lunch in an hour,”

     Giving up on sleep, she lifted her head, staring up into his blue eyes, still hooded with sleep, laughing, she saw his peaked blond shock of pillow hair. She smoothed the Mohawk with one hand. He leaned over, lips grazing her cheek, nibbling a bit before he withdrew. “I don’t want to make you late for your date.”

     “It’s not a date.”

     “Who is it then?”

     “Old friend.”

     “How old?” he asked, trying not to sound curious. Trying to maintain his respect for the spaces in her life she silently designated as blank. She folded her arms around his back, pressing her head against his chest, trying in vain to pull his weight onto hers. He gently slid free from her embrace and she shut her eyes against the pillow, listening to him get up, lightening the bed. His bare feet padded across the carpet, knee colliding with box. He cursed and she laughed.

     When she rolled onto her back, he was at the door to a walk-in closet, pulling on a T-shirt. “Black or with something?” he asked. “I know you need it. You and April set a new world record last night.”

“     With tears or vodka tonics?”

     “Both.” He turned around and raised his eyebrows to ask what she wanted.

     Short and stocky, with his round, boyish face and soft features, Ken Farlan was the kind of man she never thought she would end up living with. But they had been together for the last two years of her college career. A New England boarding-school boy who’d ridden the silver chute of money and connections into Atherton, he gave frat boys a good name, and he had enough innocence not to know what he did to her when he wore nothing but a T-shirt.

     Tim returned his attention to the closet. “That’s what the Commencement Ball’s for, I guess. Crying and vodka.”

     “What else was I supposed to do?” Kathryn said. “You and your Neanderthal friends were too busy staging a Macarena revival.”

     “It’s called the chicken dance, but I’ll forgive you.”

     “Don’t you always.”

     Ken rounded the bed and bent down to kiss her on the cheek. She reached up to stroke his back, but before she could pull him down to the bed, he planted his palms firmly on the mattress on either side of her chest. “You and April were off in your own world. I didn’t want to interrupt.” He kissed her forehead. “I didn’t mean to neglect you.”