Valentine (29 page)

This evening, he got lucky. He recognized Cass MacFarland’s voice immediately. She spoke to her brother, confirming an already-made plan for tomorrow. David was getting his car out of the garage on the corner at one o’clock, and the two men were driving to New Jersey to stay with her for a couple of days. How’s the cabin? David asked. Cozy, she said. Take the Holland Tunnel; it’s faster.

The next day, he checked out of the hotel, threw the tape recorder away, and went to Hertz Rent-a-Car. Then he parked near the garage on the corner near David’s home and waited. At precisely one o’clock the two men appeared and went into the garage, emerging a few minutes later in a green Volvo.

He followed them through the tunnel and along miles and miles of the New Jersey Turnpike. They
drove for nearly two hours. Just when he was beginning to think that New Jersey couldn’t possibly continue much longer, the car ahead went onto an exit ramp.

The smaller, secondary highway led to a tiny town surrounded mostly by hills and forest. David turned right at the main intersection in the center of the village, and took off down a small road. Victor waited a while at the intersection: from now on, tailing them was going to be tricky.

He followed. The road went through the woods, and there were lots of curves. He caught a glimpse of the other car once, on a long stretch, far ahead of him. Then it turned on a curve and disappeared in the trees. He sped up a little.

After a few miles, he realized that the car was no longer in front of him. He stopped, turned around, and drove slowly back the way he’d come, scanning the few turnoffs, all of which had mailboxes. Long driveways, apparently: there were no houses visible from the road. The third turnoff on the left had a bright, shiny new mailbox, and the name neatly painted on it was
C. MACFARLAND.

He ordered apple pie from the waitress, smiling. Smiling at the memory of his own ingenuity in tracing his third victim. Smiling at the glorious memory
of his Valentine’s Day liaison with her six months later.

Cass MacFarland was a pleasant surprise. In college, she had always been with the other girls, one part of the four-headed monster that was the Elements. Now, fifteen years later, she was a quiet, dignified, serious woman. She never spoke with her parents, she would tell him shortly into their brief relationship, and she’d lost contact with all her former friends. She’d been married for six years to a man she’d grown up with, a college instructor who’d eventually run away with one of his students. The only person she kept in constant touch with was her brother, whom she obviously adored. Her dark red hair and her easy smile had made this third task a pleasant one.

But first, he’d had to make initial contact. And the way he did that was clever, as clever as anything Valentine had ever done. He knew—and who would know better?—that people who isolated themselves from society were particularly susceptible to kindness.

There was a little restaurant in the town where she went by herself for dinner every Saturday night. He’d moved to New York by now, but he came out to this remote part of New Jersey every now and then in the following months, to keep an eye on her.
He watched her alone in her cabin, and he noted the careful dress and makeup she affected on her Saturday-night trips into town.

He would watch through the window as she sat, always alone and always at the same table, chatting with the waitress and the busboy. Once or twice the proprietor, a portly, middle-aged man, joined her for dessert and coffee. Before leaving the restaurant, she would go up to the bar near the front for an after-dinner drink, and she would laugh and joke for half an hour with the bartender. Then, with smiling farewells for all of them, she would go out to her car and drive slowly back to her house in the woods.

He watched this routine every Saturday for six weeks. Other than that, she rarely left the house, except to go to the supermarket or the drugstore, and she would always linger there, talking with the checkout girls or the pharmacist. Once, he followed her to the town’s tiny movie theater. She bought her ticket for the film, a romantic love story that had been highly praised, according to the posters outside. Then he watched through the glass front doors as she had a long conversation with the girl who sold the popcorn.

Cass MacFarland was lonely.

Meeting her in the restaurant was easy. One Saturday night, four weeks before Valentine’s Day, he sat at the next table in the nearly empty dining room
and struck up a conversation. By dessert, she’d invited him to join her.

I’m a writer, trying to write a novel, he said, but the city is too noisy. Friends said to try way out here on weekends. Amazing! she cried: I’m a writer, too! No kidding! he said. I’m staying at the little hotel down the street on weekends. Would you like to have dinner next Saturday night . . .?

He’d added the new embellishments with Cass: the anonymous cards and flowers. He’d spent the three weeks before Valentine’s Day—when he wasn’t dating her—watching her in the cabin from the nearby forest. (After he’d smothered her, in retrospect he found that he derived more pleasure from watching her than from eventually killing her. He would remember this with Jillian.)

Cass was writing a novel, and she’d used her divorce settlement and part of her trust fund to buy this isolated cabin. The rest she’d given to her brother, she told him, to take care of his lover, who was dying. She had deliberately removed herself from the world to make a serious attempt at a book. She’d been attempting to write novels ever since her college days, but she had yet to complete one. Six years of trying to make a go of the relationship with the philanderer had put her further off course. Now, at thirty-six, she felt it was time to accomplish what she’d always set out to do. She’d smiled when she
said this, adding that it was time for her to meet her true destiny.

Yes, he agreed. It was.

When the cards and the flowers appeared, she immediately figured it out. She told him about Victor Dimorta, the creepy freshman who had assaulted her and her girlfriends. She never once mentioned the prank that had gotten him to the room that night. She tried to contact her friends at old addresses, which is how she learned from Sharon’s mother that Sharon had vanished two years ago. She never traced Belinda, and she never mentioned Jillian Talbot, giving him the odd impression that she did not consider Jillian to have been part of the practical joke. Even so, she was worried enough to buy a gun to protect herself, and she actually showed it to him.

Don’t worry, he assured her.
I’ll
be here with you on Valentine’s Day.

And he was.

Every time he thought about the burning cabin in the woods, he became sexually aroused. He’d read about it in the papers back in New York. The photos of the ruined cabin. The devastated brother. The search for a tall, dark-haired man thought to have been dating her in the last three weeks of her life. He’d used the name he’d first given to Sharon Williams with Cass and at the hotel, and that was the
name the hotel proprietor gave the police. The man who never was, he mused, smiling.

It was so brilliant, he reflected. Sharon Williams had been buried. Belinda Rosenberg had fallen to her death from a great height. Cass MacFarland had been immolated.

Earth.

Wind.

Fire.

And now, in the diner, he thought, it’s your turn, Jillian Talbot. Water, the fourth element. You can run, but you can’t hide. Not from me. Not from Valentine. I know how to find you.

But first, that detective. Barney Fleck, the big guy on West Twenty-fifth Street. He went to the police the other day, and they searched the building across from her. Yes, the detective . . .

He hummed his favorite time to himself as he stood up and went over to the cashier. “My Funny Valentine.” He caught a glimpse of his own image reflected on the mirror-paneled wall behind the girl at the cash register. Yes, he told himself again, that analyst had to go. Reconstructive surgery could only do so much. Jillian had been the least self-absorbed of the four Elements: sometimes, he thought she had been the only one of them who’d really
looked
at Victor Dimorta. If her memory were jogged, she’d see
right through the minor alterations. She’d look at him and remember, and that must not happen. Not yet.

He smiled at the cashier and went back to the table to leave a large tip, happy with the world. He was thinking about her again.

She was going to be his masterpiece. He would do this one perfectly. And in his mind he spoke to her.

Are you frightened, Jillian? Are you afraid of Valentine? Have you ever felt such fear, such terror, in your whole stupid, privileged, lucky life?

My dear Jillian, the terror has just begun.

She woke to the sound of birds. The small, soft chirping noises slowly coaxed her from sleep, and it was several moments before she realized where she was. When she did, she stood up, yawned and stretched, and went over to the door of the little log cabin. Outside, the air was crisp and cold, and there was a swirling blanket of thick white mist hanging among the evergreen trees and above the still, gray water of the lake.

Jill took a long, deep breath: fresh, clean air, tinged with salt from Long Island Sound, which lay some four hundred yards in front of her, beyond the massive sand dimes on the other side of the retreat. The twelve cabins were nestled in the forest around the main house, the biggest structure nearest the lake, where Gwen and Mike lived. Her cabin, number 12, was the farthest one from the lake, back among the trees. It was the most isolated, and the most quiet.

The main room was long, with doors at either end. A barracks: that was the word. In her mind’s eye, she saw the rows of bunk beds against the two longer walls, accommodating perhaps seven little boys or girls and one counselor. At present, there was just the one big, comfortable four-poster, an overstuffed armchair, a braided area rug, and a desk and chair against the wall under the window that, if opened, would face the lake. On one wall hung a large, old-fashioned pendulum clock that chimed the hours. Gwen’s touches, of course. The windows were cabin-style, top-hinged wood things that had to be swung out and propped up with sticks to remain open. Now, in February, they were closed and latched. The bathroom in one comer was a recent innovation: the camp had utilized now-vanished latrines and shower houses, not to mention a mess hall with industrialsized kitchen that had also been torn down. She smiled, trying to imagine Mike and Seth, the ancient handyman who apparently came with the place, installing fixtures and septic tanks. They must have been busy for months.

The water in the tiny shower stall in the tiny bathroom was freezing—and that was from the tap labeled
HOT.
She washed quickly, shivering, wondering what could possibly emanate from the cold one. Well, she reasoned, it had to travel a long way from the central cistern, wherever that was. She dried her
hair with her brand-new blow-dryer, put on new jeans and a new sweater and a new down coat, and headed down the hill through the trees along a well-worn path.

She passed several other log bunkhouses, now refashioned as guest cottages, and crossed the large clearing at the center of the complex that still housed a baseball diamond. Near home base stood the lone, de-nuded flagpole that had been saluted twice every day by a hundred little patriots in morning and evening rituals involving bugles. The trees pressed in around the clearing on three sides; she smiled as she walked by, imagining the number of lost, rotting baseballs that, even now, probably adorned the forest floor. The fourth edge of the clearing was lakefront, with the main building and the dock. The little paved road from the highway half a mile away came in from the forest near the shore, and there were parking spaces there. She could hear voices inside the big house as she approached it, and the enticing aroma of frying bacon wafted out to greet her. She smiled at that: this was her fourth day here, and so far there hadn’t been a single incidence of morning sickness. She had apparently left that behind her, in the city. Along with so much else . . .

She stopped on the porch and looked out at the view. The lake was perhaps a hundred feet away. It was a medium-sized body of water, she supposed,
but in the eyes of a city girl it was enormous. The thick, green forest ringed it all the way around, and here and there by the water were other small clearings with other buildings, six or seven lakeside summer homes for affluent New Yorkers, all of them now deserted. The farthest houses, on the other side, were so remote as to be barely visible. The dock directly in front of her was a solid-looking old wooden structure jutting twenty-five feet out into the water, with a diving board and a ladder at the end. The little strip of gray, muddy beach beside the dock was crowded with three rowboats and two canoes—another legacy from the summer camp. The morning sun peered down through the mist, highlighting the water. She sighed: beautiful.

The downstairs area of the large, two-story stone-and-redwood main house was mostly one big room, with a spacious kitchen at the back. The large space was an all-purpose gathering place; half hotel lobby, half dining room. Couches and easy chairs were gathered around an enormous coffee table, and there was a rocking chair in one corner, the mate of the three on the front porch next to the suspended porch swing. The dining area at the back of the room, close to the kitchen, housed the biggest mahogany dinner table she’d ever seen. It currently seated twelve, but Gwen had told her there were extra leaves to accommodate a grand total of eighteen, should the need
arise. One side wall was of fitted flagstone, with an impressive fireplace that was constantly working in these winter months. Along the other side wall was the little wooden staircase leading to Gwen and Mike’s apartment. This had obviously once been the home of the camp’s proprietors.