Midnight Voices

enjoyed, and was good at, and over the years he had managed to shape it into his idea of near perfection: he invested only on his own behalf, and on the behalf of a few people he enjoyed as friends as well as clients. He never invested his clients’ money in securities he would not have in his own portfolio, and he believed in putting his money where his faith was. Thus, both his funds and his clients’ were invested as conservatively as the decor of his office, which was done entirely in old mahogany, old leather, and old prints.

Things that stood the test of time.

But this morning Anthony Fleming ignored the Wall Street Journal that was placed exactly in the center of his desk, and pushed the half-dozen specialized investment newsletters to one side.

When he turned his computer on, he barely glanced at the condition of his stock portfolio before bringing up a search engine and typing in two words:

Caroline Evans.

He hit the return key, then sat back to see what, if anything, he could find out about the woman he’d met in the park on Saturday.

This was the worst part of Andrea Costanza’s job — having to check up on the children in foster care. She knew it had to be done, knew there were places where the children simply weren’t safe. The problem was that you never knew what you were looking at. Last year she had taken a child away from a couple up in Harlem, certain that the family was already far overextended. The father had just lost his job, and what with their own two children to take care of, along with two nieces and a nephew, Andrea had judged that the foster child — an eight-year-old girl with a history of abuse and a learning disability — was just too much for them. The woman, in particular, had begged her to leave the child with them, but Andrea had stood firm, having already found a far better home — a couple on the Upper West Side who could not only give the child far more individual attention, but a room of her own as well.

A room the foster father had apparently begun invading on the very first night the girl was there, as soon as his wife went to sleep. By the time Andrea got around to the first evaluation visit two months later, the little girl had retreated into a nearly catatonic silence, which it had taken a pediatrician only five minutes to diagnose.

When Andrea asked the woman why she hadn’t taken the child to a doctor earlier, the woman had said her husband — a child psychologist — had told her nothing was seriously wrong, that the little girl had to be given time to adjust to her new surroundings. The little girl had been admitted to Bellevue Hospital — where she was to this day — and Andrea had nearly left her job with Child Services. It took her supervisor a week to convince her that anybody else would have made the same mistake, and that she shouldn’t—couldn’t— blame herself. “These things happen,” he’d said. “We wish they didn’t, but you can never be sure. You can only do your best. And if you leave, I’ll just have one less person to keep an eye on the kids. They won’t let me replace you — it’s called budget reductions by attrition.” So in the end she’d stayed, and every weekend she’d gone to see the little girl in Bellevue, knowing the child wasn’t even aware of her presence, but praying that her visits might somehow atone for the horror that had befallen the child. But each week it seemed as if the job got harder, and on this morning she was headed to a place she didn’t like at all.

Stupid, she told herself as she approached the building at 10 °Central Park West. Everybody else in the city loves this building, and there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a great old New York apartment house. Which was, Andrea knew, most of the problem. She just didn’t like ‘great old New York apartment houses,’ not with their clanging steam radiators, and leaky plumbing and antique electrical systems. Andrea had grown up in a nice tract house on Long Island, brand new when she was a year old, and no matter what anyone said about the glories of living in Manhattan, her secret desire was to get married and go right back out to Long Island, where she belonged. But so far that hadn’t happened, and she was starting to suspect that probably it wasn’t going to. The statistics for her age group were against her; in all likelihood she’d wind up one of those pathetic old maids living with three cats in a one-room apartment on her pension from the city. But in the meantime, she’d help as many of the kids as possible. Sighing, she pulled open the door, stepped into the vestibule, and pressed the bell that would summon Rodney, the doorman. A moment later the door opened, and Rodney tilted his head a fraction of an inch.

“The Albions are expecting you.”

Andrea returned his nod, and headed for the elevator — a cage that reminded her of a movie she’d once seen, in which Katharine Hepburn had descended in just such a machine, her voice drifting down long before she herself became visible. As the ancient elevator ground slowly toward the seventh floor, Andrea prepared herself to face the Albions.

She didn’t like them any more than she liked the building.

And she had no more reason to dislike them than she had to dislike the building.

Alicia — a woman who seemed to be in her early forties — was waiting at the door. The first time Andrea had met her, she’d felt a faint stirring of memory, as if she’d seen Mrs. Albion somewhere, but couldn’t quite place her. But a few nights later she’d been channel surfing through an empty Saturday evening when she’d come across a rerun of an old family sitcom from the late Fifties or early Sixties. She’d been about to move on to the next channel when she had a feeling of deja vu strong enough to make her pause. The deja vu passed almost immediately, but even in its wake there was an eerie familiarity about the show, as if she’d seen it only a day or so before. And then it came to her: Though the actress playing the mother bore no physical resemblance to Alicia Albion, their styles were almost identical. The actress’s carefully plucked eyebrows, her makeup and hairdo — even her clothes — looked exactly like Alicia’s. At first Andrea had been certain she was imagining it, but on her next visit to assess Rebecca Mayhew’s adjustment to living with the Albions, she knew she hadn’t been mistaken at all. Alicia Albion might have just stepped out of the old sitcom.

Nor was it just Alicia that seemed to have gotten stuck in the past. Everything about the apartment seemed dated — the furniture, the wallpaper — everything — looked old.

Not antique.

Just old.

But Rebecca seemed happy, and even though Andrea felt vaguely uncomfortable in the apartment — okay, downright creepy, if she was honest with herself — she hadn’t been able to find fault with anything about the relationship between Alicia and Max and the girl they’d taken into their home. In fact, when she’d called this morning, it had only been to set up a routine visit sometime next month. But when she’d been told that Rebecca wasn’t going to school today, she’d decided to come over, just to make sure that it really was nothing more than a minor virus that had kept the little girl home.

Alicia Albion looked worried when she opened the door for Andrea Costanza. Worried, and tired.

“I’m afraid I’m being much worse about this than Rebecca is,” she said fretfully, the fingers of one hand nervously rubbing those of the other, which looked a little swollen. “My arthritis,” she went on as she saw Andrea looking at her hands. “Most of the time it doesn’t bother me, but sometimes… ” Her voice trailed away, and she shrugged the whole matter off as if it weren’t even worth talking about. “She wanted to go to school, but we kept her home. She’s still in bed, and I’m making her some soup.”

For the first time, Andrea noticed the aroma wafting from the kitchen. It was a strange scent, almost bitter, smelling nothing like the wonderful chicken soup her mother used to make, which had imbued the whole house with the aroma of herbs and spices. Alicia Albion’s soup smelled almost medicinal, and the only image it brought to Andrea’s mind was of a bowl of lukewarm grayish broth that was offered to her when she’d been in the hospital having her appendix out at the age of ten. Even now the thought of that soup made her stomach knot in rebellion. “May I go in and see her?” she asked, avoiding any comment on the strange odor emanating from the kitchen.

“Oh, please do,” Alicia said. “She likes you so much.”

As Alicia disappeared into the kitchen, Andrea made her way down the hall into the big corner bedroom that was Rebecca’s. Rebecca herself was propped up against a bank of pillows, and though she looked a little pale, her eyes lit up when she saw Andrea. “You did come!” she said.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Andrea countered. “When I heard you were sick, wild dogs wouldn’t have kept me away.”

“I’m not really sick,” Rebecca assured her. “I felt much worse on Saturday, and I’m going back to school tomorrow.”

“You are if Dr. Humphries says you are,” Alicia pronounced, coming into the room with a steaming bowl of