Carolyn. He was sure that someday she would go for good. She’ll be furious if she ever finds out what I’m doing, he told himself as his fingers restlessly moved toward the phone on his desk. He had the number of the station. She’ll never know, he assured himself. All I’ll do is ask for a tape of today’s Ask Dr. Susan program. I’ll say it’s my mother’s favorite show, and she missed it today because she had a dentist appointment.
If Barbara the receptionist was right, and it was Carolyn who had called in to that show, she had talked about being involved with some man while she was on a cruise.
He flashed back to two years ago, when after that terrible incident Carolyn had impulsively booked passage on a Mumbai to Portugal segment of a world cruise. She had told him at the time that when she returned she intended to file for divorce. She said that she still cared about him but that she couldn’t stand his jealousy and constant questions about where she had been all day and who she had seen.
I called just before the ship docked in Athens, Justin remembered. I told her I was willing to go into therapy, to do anything I could, if she would just come home and work with me in keeping the marriage together. And I was right to worry, he thought. Clearly, the minute she was away from me she met somebody.
But maybe Barbara was wrong, he thought. Maybe it wasn’t Carolyn who called in. After all, she had met Carolyn only a few times. Then again, Carolyn’s voice was distinctive—well modulated, with a hint of an English accent, thanks to childhood summers spent in England.
He shook his head. “I have to know,” he whispered.
He dialed the radio station, and after several minutes of listening to seemingly endless instructions—“press one for schedules; press two for information; press three for directory; press four . . . press five . . . hold for operator”—he was finally put through to the office of Jed Geany, the producer of Ask Dr. Susan.
He knew he sounded less than genuine when he gave the flimsy excuse that his mother had missed the program and that he wanted a tape for her. Then, when asked if he wanted a tape for the whole program, he botched his story by blurting out, “Oh, just the listener call-ins,” and then tried to correct himself by hurriedly adding, “I mean that’s Mother’s favorite part, but please make a tape of the whole program.”
To make matters worse, Jed Geany himself got on the phone to say they were glad to oblige, because it was good to hear that a listener was that involved. Then he asked for the name and address.
Feeling guilty and wretched, Justin Wells gave his name and the office address.
He had barely hung up when he received a call from Lenox Hill Hospital, informing him that his wife had been gravely injured in an automobile accident.
11
When Susan stopped by Nedda’s office at six o’clock, she found her about to lock up her desk for the night. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” she announced dryly. “How about a glass of vino?”
“Sounds like a great idea. I’ll get it.” Susan went down the corridor to the closet-sized kitchen and opened the refrigerator. A bottle of pinot grigio was cooling there. As she examined the label, a memory flashed through her mind.
She had been five years old, trailing behind her parents in the liquor store. Her father selected a bottle of wine from the shelf.
“Is this one okay, honey?” he had asked as he handed it to her mother.
Her mother had read the label and laughed indulgently. “Charley, you’re getting there. Excellent choice.”
Mom is right, Susan thought, remembering her mother’s outburst on Saturday. She taught Dad all the basic social graces, from how to dress to which fork to use at a dinner party. She encouraged him to leave Grandpa’s deli and strike out on his own. She gave him the self-confidence to succeed, then he took hers away.
Sighing, she opened the bottle, poured wine into two glasses, shook a few pretzels onto a plate, and returned to Nedda’s office. “Cocktail hour,” she announced. “Close your eyes and pretend you’re at Le Cirque.”
Nedda looked at her steadily. “You’re the psychologist, but if I can offer a nonprofessional opinion, you look pretty down.”
Susan nodded. “I guess I am. The visits with my parents this weekend still bother me, and then today was pretty bumpy.” She filled Nedda in on the angry phone call from Douglas Layton, as well as on the call on the program from the woman who identified herself as Karen. And then she told her of Jane Clausen’s surprise visit. “She left the ring with me. She said I should keep it just in case ‘Karen’ ever does show up. I also get the feeling Jane Clausen isn’t well.”
“Do you think there’s a chance you’ll hear from Karen again?”
Susan shook her head. “I simply don’t know.”
“I’m surprised that Doug Layton phoned you this morning. When I spoke to him, he didn’t seem at all upset about the program.”
“Well, he changed his mind,” Susan said. “He came to my office with Mrs. Clausen, but he didn’t stay. He said he had an appointment he couldn’t break.”
“If I were he, I’d have broken the appointment,” Nedda said dryly. “I happen to know that last year Jane made him a trustee of the Clausen Family Trust. Wonder what was so important that he would leave her alone here, especially knowing that Jane might have been about to meet someone who could possibly have described the man responsible for her daughter’s disappearance, perhaps even her murder?”
12
Donald Richards’s sprawling apartment on Central Park West was both his home and office. The rooms he used to see patients were accessible by a separate entrance from the corridor. The five rooms he reserved for himself had the distinctly masculine flavor of a home that had not known a woman’s touch for a very long time. It had been four years since his wife, Kathy, a top model, died while on a photo shoot in the Catskills.
He had not been there when it happened, and he certainly could not have done anything about it, still he had never stopped blaming himself. Most certainly he had never gotten over it.
The canoe in which Kathy had been posing overturned. The boat with the photographer and his assistants was twenty feet away. The heavy turn-of-the-century gown she had been wearing pulled her under before anyone could reach her.
Divers never recovered her body. “Even in summer, that lake is so deep that it’s icy on the bottom,” he was told.
Two years ago, hoping that it would bring some sense of closure, he had packed away the last few pictures of her he still had in the bedroom.
But of course it made no difference, and finally he acknowledged to himself that there was still a sense of unfinished business. Both he and Kathy’s parents needed to have her remains buried in the cemetery with her family—her grandparents, and the brother she had never known.
He dreamed of her frequently. Sometimes he saw her lying trapped under one of the rocky ledges in the frigid water, forever the Sleeping Beauty. At other times the dream changed. Her face dissolved and others replaced it. And they all whispered, “It was your fault.”
There was no reference to Kathy or what had happened to her on the book jacket for Vanishing Women. Under his picture, the brief bio reported that Dr. Donald Richards was a lifelong resident of Manhattan, had received his bachelor’s degree from Yale, his M.D. and doctorate in clinical psychology from Harvard, and a master’s degree in criminology from NYU.
Following the Ask Dr. Susan program, he went directly home. Rena, his Jamaican-born housekeeper, had lunch waiting when he got in. She had worked for him since shortly after Kathy’s death, having come to him through her sister, who was his mother’s live-in housekeeper in Tuxedo Park.
Don was sure that whenever Rena visited Tuxedo Park, his mother pumped her for information about his personal life. She had made it very clear to him that she thought he should be getting out more.
As he ate his lunch, Don thought about Karen, the woman who had phoned during the broadcast. Susan Chandler had obviously resented his suggestion that he
would like to discuss with her anything the woman might disclose, assuming, of course, she kept the appointment. He smiled, remembering how Susan’s hazel eyes had darkened, the resistance in them unmistakable.
Susan Chandler was an interesting and very attractive woman. I’ll call and invite her to dinner, he decided. Chances are she will be more open to talking about the case in an intimate atmosphere.
It was an intriguing situation. Regina Clausen had disappeared three years ago. The woman who called herself Karen had talked about being involved in a shipboard romance only two years ago. Clearly Susan Chandler would make the inevitable connection that if only one man was involved with both those women, he might still be targeting victims.
Susan is stirring up a hornet’s nest for herself, Donald Richards mused. He wondered what to do about it.
13
In the plane on her way back to California, Dee Chandler Harriman sipped a Perrier, slipped off her sandals, and leaned back, causing her honey blond hair to spill around her shoulders. Long used to admiring glances, she deliberately avoided meeting the gaze of the man across the aisle who had twice attempted to start a conversation.
Her plain gold wedding band and a narrow gold choker were the only jewelry she wore. Her pin-striped designer suit was stark in its simplicity. There was no one seated next to her in the second row, for which she was grateful.
She had reached New York Friday afternoon, stayed at the apartment her Belle Aire Modeling Agency maintained in the Essex House, and quietly met with two young models she was hoping to sign up. The meetings had gone well, and the day had been a success.
Too bad she couldn’t say the same about Saturday, when she had gone to visit her mother. The sight of her mother’s continuing pain over her father’s defection had reduced her to sympathetic tears.
I shouldn’t have been so nasty to Susan, she reflected. She’s the one who was there with Mother, and who took the brunt of the separation and divorce.
But at least she’s educated, Dee thought. Here I am at thirty-seven, thankful to have a high school diploma. But then, from the time I was seventeen, the only thing I knew was modeling—there was no time for anything else. They should have insisted I go to college. The two smart moves I made in my life were to marry Jack and to invest my savings in the agency.
Uncomfortably she remembered how she had railed at Susan, telling her that she didn’t understand what it was like to lose a husband.
I’m sorry I missed her at Dad’s party yesterday, Dee thought, but I’m glad I called her this morning. I meant it when I said that Alex Wright is terrific.
A smile played on Dee’s lips as she thought of the good-looking man with the warm, intelligent eyes—attractive, appealing, a sense of humor, an air of breeding. He had asked if Susan was involved with anyone.
At his request she had given him Susan’s office number. She couldn’t refuse that, but she decided against offering her home phone.
Dee shook her head at the flight attendant’s offer to refill her Perrier. The empty feeling that had begun with the visit to her mother, and that had grown with the sight of her father and his second wife toasting each other, threatened to deepen.
She missed being married. She wanted to live in New York again. It was there that Susan had introduced her to Jack; he had been a commercial photographer. Shortly after they were married, they moved to Los Angeles.
They had five years together; then, two years ago, he’d insisted on skiing that weekend.
Dee felt tears sting her eyes. I’m sick of being lonely, she thought angrily. Hastily she reached for her voluminous shoulder bag, fished inside it and found what she was looking for: a brochure describing a two-week cruise through the Panama Canal.
Why not? she asked herself. I haven’t taken a real vacation in two years. Her travel agent had told her that a good cabin was still available for the next slated cruise. Yesterday her father had urged her to go. “First class. On me, honey,” he had promised.
The ship was sailing from Costa Rica in a week. I’m going to be on it, Dee decided.
14
Pamela Hastings did not mind an occasional evening alone. Her husband, George, was on a business trip to California; her daughter, Amanda, was away at college, a freshman this year at Wellesley. It had been less than a month since Amanda’s classes had begun, and as much as Pamela missed her, she acknowledged a guilty pleasure in the soothing silence of the apartment, the quiet of the telephone, the unnatural state of neatness in Amanda’s room.
Last week had been a busy one at Columbia, what with staff meetings and student conferences, in addition to her normal teaching schedule. She always looked forward to Friday evening, a much anticipated and appreciated oasis, and the get-together at Carolyn’s with the “gang of four,” as they used to call themselves in the old days, had been fun but had left her with an emotional hangover.
The urgent sense of evil that she had experienced when she held that turquoise ring still frightened her. She hadn’t spoken to Carolyn since that evening, but as Pamela turned the key in the lock of her apartment on Madison and Sixty-seventh Street, she made a mental note to call her friend and tell her to get rid of the ring.
She glanced at her watch. It was ten of five. She went straight to the bedroom, exchanged her conservative dark blue suit for comfortable slacks and one of her husband’s shirts, fixed a scotch, and settled down to watch the news. This was going to be a peaceful evening, just hers alone.
At five after five, she stared at the image of the cordoned-off section of Park Avenue and Eighty-first Street where there was a massive traffic jam, and crowds of spectators were observing a blood-spattered van with a smashed-in grill.
In stunned disbelief she listened as the off-camera commentator said, “This was the scene at Park and Eighty-first, where a short time ago, apparently due to the pedestrian crush, forty-year-old Carolyn Wells fell into the path of a speeding van.
“She has been rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital, with multiple head and internal injuries. Our reporter at the scene spoke with several of the eyewitnesses to the accident.”
As Pamela jumped to her feet, she heard the smattering of comments: “that poor woman . . .”; “terrible that people are allowed to drive like that . . .”; “they’ve got to do something about the traffic in the city.” Then an elderly woman shouted, “You’re all blind. She was pushed!”
Pamela stared as the reporter rushed a microphone to that woman. “Would you give us your name, ma’am?”
“Hilda Johnson. I was standing near her. She had an envelope under her arm. Some guy grabbed it. Then he pushed her.”
“That’s crazy; she fell,” another bystander yelled.
The announcer came on again. “You have just heard the testimony of one eyewitness, Hilda Johnson, who claimed she saw a man push Carolyn Wells in front of the van just as he yanked what appeared to be an envelope from under her arm. While Ms. Johnson’s report varies from the observations of all others at the scene, the police say they will take her statement into consideration. If her story holds up, it would mean that what seems to be a tragic accident is in fact a potential homicide.”
Pamela ran for her coat. Fifteen minutes later, she was sitting beside Justin Wells in the waiting room outside the intensive care unit of Lenox Hill Hospital.
“She’s in surgery,” Justin said, his tone flat and emotionless.
Pamela slipped her hand into his.
Three hours later a doctor came in to speak to them. “Your wife is in a coma,” he told Justin. “It’s simply too soon to tell if she’s going to make it. But when she was in the emergency room, she seemed to be calling for someone. It sounded like ‘Win.’ Who would that be?”
Pamela felt Justin’s hand grip hers violently as in an anguished voice he haltingly whispered, “I don’t know, I don’t know.”
15
Eighty-year-old Hilda Johnson liked to tell people that she had lived on East Eightieth Street all her life and could
remember when the smell of Jacob Ruppert’s brewery on Seventy-ninth Street had permeated the air with the pungent aroma of yeast and malts.
“Our neighbors there thought they were moving up in the world when they left Manhattan and relocated their families in the South Bronx,” she would reminisce with a rumbling laugh. “Oh well, everything changes. The South Bronx was country then, and this place all tenements. Now this area is toney and the South Bronx is a disaster. But that’s life.”
It was a story her friends and the people she met in the park heard time and again, but that never deterred Hilda. Small, bony, with thinning white hair and alert blue eyes, she liked to talk.
On brisk days, Hilda enjoyed walking to Central Park and sitting on a sunlit bench. A people-watcher, she was remarkably observant and did not hesitate to comment on anything she felt needed correction.
She had been known to sharply reprimand a gossiping nanny whose charge was wandering from the playground. She regularly lectured children who dropped candy wrappers on the grass. And on frequent occasions she stopped a policeman to point out men who she thought were up to no good, as they hung around the playground, or wandered aimlessly along the paths.
With weary patience the police always listened politely, noting Hilda’s warnings and accusations and promising to keep an eye on her suspects.
Her keen powers of observation certainly had served her well that Monday. A little after four o’clock, on her way home from the park, while standing in the crush of pedestrians waiting for the light to change, she happened to be to the right of and just slightly behind a smartly dressed woman with a manila envelope under her arm. Hilda’s attention was attracted by the sudden movement of a man who reached for the envelope with one hand, and with the other, shoved the woman forward into the path of a van. Hilda had started to shout a warning, but there was no time. At least she had gotten a good look at the man’s face before he had disappeared through the crowd.