Are you ready to face the truth yet? (Only part of it is in the computer, Anne. The rest is in your mind.) You’ve known it since my release from the hospital. Remember that afternoon, Anne? There was an excitement you’d never felt before, wasn’t there? It was electricity, Anne, the kind that filled the theater when Nijinsky leaped. That’s the single great sorrow of my life, you know. I never sat in an audience when Nijinsky danced. But at least I know he wasn’t mad.
Anyway, it’s been fun, but now it’s time for the final dance. And I’ve already chosen my partner.
She read the note and reread it, her mind struggling to comprehend the words her eyes were seeing.
What did it mean?
Nijinsky? What did a dancer who’d been dead for nearly fifty years have to do with anything?
“Do you have any idea where Glen might have gone?” she heard Mark Blakemoor saying. His voice was gentle, and when she managed to tear her eyes away from the note to look up at him, she saw no trace of the satisfaction of vindication in his expression.
All she saw was sympathy.
“No,” she breathed. “His car’s out in front, so …” Her words died on her lips. She’d been about to say he must have gone for a walk, but it was pouring outside. Even if he’d gone out before the rain started, wouldn’t he be back by now?
Suddenly a line from the note popped up in her mind:
It’s time for the final dance. And I’ve already chosen my partner.
Then she remembered a line from the previous note:
I can come into your house any time, you know. Any time at all.
Images tumbled through her mind: the basement, cleaned up for the first time in years.
The motor home that had mysteriously appeared on the street, and remained there, just a couple of houses away.
The motor home that was now gone!
Now the pieces started falling together. Whoever had written the notes had been out there for days, watching them, watching her! “I know where he’s been,” she whispered, turning away from the window, her face drained of color. “Oh, God, Mark, he’s been right outside for days. There was a motor home—” Still talking, telling Blakemoor how annoyed she’d been when the big van had appeared down the block, she found her leather carryall and began rummaging through it, searching for her notebook.
Her fingers finally closing on it, she pulled it out, ripped out the page on which she’d scrawled the R.V.’s license number, and handed it to Mark. “He was here, Mark!” she said. “My God, he’s taken Glen!” She picked up the note again. “This is wrong. Mark, I know how it looks, and I know what you think, but it’s wrong. Glen didn’t write this note! Someone else did, and now he’s got Glen!” But Mark Blakemoor wasn’t listening; he was already on his cellular phone, putting a trace on the motor home’s license plate. While he talked, Anne read the note one more time, and slowly her numbed mind began to work again.
The more she studied the note, the more her certainty grew that Glen hadn’t written it. One word kept leaping out at her, taunting her. Finally she went to her computer, called up her file manager, and typed the single word into the search utility.
NUJINSKY.
She pressed the return button and waited. A few seconds later a short list of files appeared, all of them transcriptions of interviews she’d had over the years with one man.
Richard Kraven.
She double-clicked on the first file on the list and a second later the transcript appeared on the monitor, the word “Nijinsky” brightly highlighted.
She skipped to the next one, and the next one, her fascination, and her terror, growing as she read.
The truth of Richard Kraven began to emerge.
It was a truth he’d hinted at from the very beginning, offering her a single piece of the puzzle here, another one there. But the pieces had been so small, the hints so oblique, that she’d never recognized them for what they were.
The dance.
Metaphysics.
Electricity.
Life, death, insanity.
And Nijinsky.
Richard Kraven had told her about Vaslav Nijinsky himself. It was right there in one of the earliest interviews:
A.J.: Why the ballet, Mr. Kraven?
R.K.: My interest in ballet doesn’t have to do with the dance, per se, Ms. Jeffers. It’s the dancers that fascinate me.
A.J.: The dancers?
R.K.: Do you know what it takes to be a ballet dancer? Perfection. Perfection in physical discipline, and perfection in mental discipline. That is what’s fascinating. The drive toward perfection.
A.J.: But is it really possible to achieve perfection?
R.K.: There was one. Vaslav Nijinsky. Are you familiar with the name?
A.J.: He died insane, didn’t he?
R.K.: So they say, but I’m not at all sure I agree. What he did do was leap higher than anyone else, before or since. But he didn’t just leap, Ms. Jeffers. At the zenith of his leaps, he hovered above the stage.
A.J.: I’m not sure I’m following you.
R.K.: Oh, at the time they said he only appeared to hover, but according to Nijinsky himself, he truly did suspend himself above the stage. He said he learned to separate himself from his body, and when he danced, he felt as if he were in the flies above the stage, manipulating his own body as if it were a marionette on strings.
A.J.: And you believe such a thing is possible?
R.K.: Not just possible, Ms. Jeffers. I believe he did it. You see, the reason he stopped dancing was that he began to feel that he might find himself stranded outside of his own body. He said that toward the end of his career he would find the spirit of a stranger inhabiting his body when he came back, and he began to feel the time would come when the invading spirit was stronger than his own and he would not be able to repossess his own body. It is why he stopped dancing, and why he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. But what if he wasn’t schizophrenic, Ms. Jeffers? What if he wasn’t schizophrenic at all? What would it mean?
The interview had ended there. Anne had made a note to check out the story of Vaslav Nijinsky. At the time, though, it had seemed irrelevant, and she had focused on what she’d then considered more important things.
Now, she realized, there were no more important things. Not if Vaslav Nijinsky — and Richard Kraven — were right.
Her eyes went back to the note one more time, fixing on the last line:
… I’ve already chosen my partner.
If Kraven had been right, it wasn’t Glen he’d chosen today, couldn’t possibly be Glen, because he already had Glen.
Who, then?
Who might he have chosen? A terrible thought came to her, and she snatched up the phone, dialing Rayette Hoover’s number. On the fourth ring, Rayette herself picked up the phone, and Anne, her voice catching in her throat, asked to speak to her daughter. When she hung up the phone a moment later, her face was ashen, her hands trembling. But before she could say anything, Mark Blakemoor spoke as he slid his phone into the pocket of his jacket. “The R.V.’s a rental, Anne,” he said quietly. “And Glen rented it a few days ago.”
Anne nodded mutely. “But it’s not Glen,” she said, her voice choked with a sob. “It’s really him, Mark. He’s taken Heather! Oh, God, he’s taken Heather, and he’s going to kill her.”
