"What's the matter, babe?" Phil said.
"Oh, no!" she moaned. There was no passion in the sound, only revulsion and unplumbed misery. "Oh, God, no!"
Ed turned cold inside. Something was terribly wrong here. What—?
She turned to run and immediately slammed into the wall. She bounced off it and blindly dashed toward Ed, accelerating as she passed him.
"Christ, no! The window!" Ed said and tried to grab her leg.
But she was moving too fast. He missed her and could only watch helplessly as she rammed into the lower pane of the big double-hung window. For an instant it looked as if she might bounce off that, too, but then came a sharp crash like a shot, like an explosion, and suddenly the glass was coming apart all around her and she was still moving outward, taking a million bright dagger shards with her. And then she was gone, a keening wail trailing behind her.
Ed remained kneeling on the carpet, frozen in shock, shivering in the cold wind pouring through the shattered window, thinking this couldn't be real, this couldn't be happening, listening to the terrified wail that continued long after she was gone from view, much longer than it should have. And then he realized that the sound was coming from him.
February 5
9:52 A.M.
Kara felt the old tension come alive as the city hove into view. She had been able to hold it at bay during the express ride through central New Jersey, but after pulling out of the Amtrak station in Metropark and hearing the conductor call out New York as the next stop, she'd felt it stir. Now, with the spires of the Manhattan skyline poking at the morning clouds across the river, it came writhing to life.
Ten years ago she had walked out on the city, leaving behind the two most important people in the world.
Manhattan. The City That Never Sleeps. The City of Opportunity. She and her twin sister Kelly had arrived there fresh out of their respective secretarial and nursing schools, two ingenues, a pair of Pennsylvania hicks leaving home to take their bite out of the Big Apple.
Everything went swimmingly at first. They stayed at their Aunt Ellen's place while hunting for jobs. Kelly found a nursing position almost immediately—it was the late shift, but it was a job. Kara looked over the prospects and decided she'd do better starting out as a temporary, figuring that way she'd be exposed to a variety of companies and could see how they operated.
When she found a good one that would pay enough to cover a few college courses, she'd hire on as a permanent. For Kara didn't intend to stay a secretary forever. She had plans. She wanted to write, wanted to work her way into advertising and copywriting.
So Kara started off as a Kelly Girl. She didn't like the "Girl" part but she went along. She preferred to think of herself as a secretarial gun for hire. There was no such thing as word processing then. The IBM Selectric was her weapon of choice and she wielded it with deadly efficiency. The Kelly people paid her well and kept her busy.
Who knew where she might be working now if she'd stayed on in the city? Perhaps she'd be a big name at Saatchi & Saatchi. Or maybe she'd have started her own temporary office help service. She had seen no limit to her potential in the Big Apple.
Until the Central Park incident.
That was when Kara learned that Big Apple bit back and she'd run for home.
Ten years later now, and she was on her way back to identify her sister's body. Alone. Mom was rushing back from Florida and so there was no one else to make this trip but Kara.
Kelly dead! She still couldn't believe it! And the way she had died! Naked, smashed on the sidewalk in front of the Plaza! How could someone have done that to her?
Kara's mind balked at the very question.
Since the call from New York yesterday afternoon, Kara's life had been a bad dream. Kelly, she'd learned, had been dead for more than half a day before the police had got around to calling her.
And it had been Rob of all people who'd made the call.
They hadn't spoken in ten years, yet she had recognized his voice immediately. And she had known that it was something bad, something about Kelly. Why else would Rob call from New York after all this time?
Rob Harris. She had left him high and dry. When she first met him he'd been attending the police academy. She still remembered how cute he'd looked in his hated recruit grays. When she left him he was in regular blues, and she'd been convinced the city was going to kill him.
She wondered if he'd forgiven her yet.
And now she had to see him again. At the morgue. Over poor Kelly's shattered body.
God, how was she going to do this?
▼
Kara shivered in the cold as she stood in the morning crowd outside Penn Station. The city hadn't changed much. The Penn Station-Madison Square Garden area looked older and dirtier. She noticed that the old Statler Hilton was now called the Vista. She felt the pedestrians crowd against her as they stacked up on the sidewalk, waiting for the Seventh Avenue traffic light to change. She clutched her pocketbook tightly against her. These people frightened her.
The Central Park incident came back to her in a rush.
It had been a sunny Sunday in June. She and Kelly were strolling along the Park side of Fifth Avenue on their way back from an exhibit at the Metropolitan, enjoying the day, enjoying the admiring stares from all the guys, killing time until they met the men in their lives later in the day. Kelly stopped to get a pretzel and a coke from a pushcart. While she was waiting on line, Kara wandered onto a path to listen to an old black fellow playing Delta blues on a portable electric guitar.
Without warning, she felt herself jerked off her feet, stumbling backwards as something hard and sharp tightened across her throat, digging into the soft flesh there. She fell, and it dug deeper as she was dragged backwards. She tried to scream but her air had been cut off. She heard other screams and blurred glimpses of staring, horrified faces. Yet nobody moved to help her.
And then with a snap, the pressure was gone as suddenly as it had come.
Gasping, choking, Kara rolled over in the dirty and saw the receding back of a man as he dashed down the path, saw people darting out of his way. Her hand went to her throat. Her gold necklace, the heavy chain her father had given her a year before he died, was gone. People tried to help her to her feet but she batted their hands away. She wanted to scream at them, ask them why no one had lent a hand when she needed it most, but her voice seemed paralyzed.
"Y' shouldn't wear gold necklaces near the Park, hon," said a middle-aged woman in a housedress. "Y' should know that."
Kara wanted to strangle her, but then Kelly ran up and Kara fell into her sister's arms and began to sob with reaction.
Nowadays she didn't cry so easily.
That was when the Big Apple began to rot for Kara. It never was the same after that. She found herself constantly looking over her shoulder. She became afraid to go out alone. And she never went near Central Park again.
Six months after the necklace-snatching she was on the train, outbound from Manhattan, never to return.
Until now.
She looked east along Thirty-Fourth. Bellevue Hospital Center was that way, on First Avenue and Thirtieth. The morgue was in its cellar.
She shut her eyes.
Why am I here? I don't want to be here. I don't have to be here.
Which was true. Her presence here today would not speed Kelly's body back to Pennsylvania by a single minute. But she had to do this, had to make this trip. For Kelly. Kara had left her sister here, and now the least she could do was see her home.