On, Off

midair until her body was perpendicular, then swung her legs inward to cradle the rail behind her bent knees. A huge lunge, and she stood on the balcony above her own.

One down, one to go. Teeth chattering, her body felt like ice beneath the heat her gymnastics generated; without pausing to rest she mounted that rail and reached for the bottom of the balustrade on Carmine’s level. Do it, Desdemona, do it before you can’t! Up again, safe again on the balcony two floors above her own.

Now all she had to do was travel on the same level from one balcony to the next – easier said than done, as a ten-foot gap lay between the end of one and the beginning of the next. She chose to bridge the gap by balancing her feet on the rail and springing with all her might at the next balustrade. How many such? Twelve. And her feet were turning numb, her hands inside the woolly gloves minus all sensation. But it could be done – had to be done, given what was waiting for her downstairs if she tarried. How could she be sure he wasn’t at least as agile as she?

Finally it was done; she stood on Carmine’s balcony, began pounding on the sliding door to his bedroom, at this end.

“Carmine, Carmine, let me in!” she screamed.

The door was yanked open; he stood wearing only boxer shorts, took in her presence in a millisecond, pulled her inside.

The next moment he had stripped the quilted down cover off his bed and was draping it around her.

“He’s in my apartment,” she managed to say.

“Stay here and concentrate on getting warm,” he said, cranked the thermostat up and vanished even as he pulled on his trousers.

“Look at this,” he said to Abe and Corey twenty minutes later at Desdemona’s door, gaping open.

The hard steel dead bolt had been cut through; a small pile of iron filings lay on the floor where it had sat in closed position.

“Jesus!” Abe breathed.

“We have a whole new trade to learn,” Carmine said grimly. “If this proves anything, it proves that our ideas of security suck. To keep him out, we’d have had to overlap the metal on the outside of the door, but we didn’t. Oh, he’s gone – gone the minute he found Desdemona gone, I reckon. Flitted out like a ghost.”

“How the hell did she get past him?” Corey asked.

“Went onto her balcony, vaulted two floors up, then came along the intervening apartment balconies between here and where I am. I heard her banging on my balcony door.”

“Then she’s a mess in this weather – metal rails, the wind.”

“Not her!” Carmine said, a hint of pride in his voice. “She put on gloves and she was wearing bedsocks.”

“One hell of a woman,” said Abe reverently.

“I have to get back to her. Set the wheels in motion, guys. Search the place from penthouse to basements. But he’s gone.”

Finding Desdemona still under his quilt, he unwrapped her. “Feeling better?”

“As if I’ve wrenched my arms out of their sockets, but – oh, Carmine, I got away! He was there, wasn’t he? It wasn’t just my imagination?”

“He was there, all right, though long gone. Cut through the dead bolt with something like a diamond-tipped fretsaw – thin, fine, cut through anything if used by an expert. Therefore we now know he’s an expert. Didn’t try to do it too fast and break his saw. The bastard! He spat on our security.” Carmine knelt to pull off her soaked bedsocks, examine the skin of her feet. “You survived at this end. Now let’s have a look at your hands.” They too had survived. “You’re some woman, Desdemona.”

Thoroughly warmed, she began to glow. “That’s a compliment I’ll treasure, Carmine.” Then she shivered. “Oh, but I was so terrified! All I saw was his shadow as he opened the front door, but I knew he’d come to kill me. Only why? Why me?”

“Maybe to get at me. To get at the cops. To prove that if and when he decides to act, nothing will stop him. Trouble is that we’re used to ordinary criminals, men who wouldn’t have the brains or the patience to try a stunt like sawing through a two-inch dead bolt. Diamond teeth or not, it must have taken him several hours.”

Suddenly he reached for her, pulled her hard against him in an almost frantic hold. “Desdemona, Desdemona, I nearly lost you! You had to save yourself while I snored! Oh, Jesus, woman, I’d have died had I lost you!”

“You are not going to lose me, Carmine,” she said on a sigh, nuzzling her head into his shoulder, her lips busy on his neck. “I was terrified, yes, but I never thought for one moment of going anywhere else than to you. With you, I knew I’d be safe.”

“I love you.”

“I love you back again. But I’d feel ever safer if you took me to bed,” said Desdemona, emerging from his neck. “There are some bits of me that haven’t thawed in years.”

Part Four February & March 1966

Chapter 22

Monday, February 14th, 1966

Mid-February saw the commencement of a thaw. It began to rain remorselessly on a Friday and didn’t stop until well into Sunday night. All the low-lying parts of Connecticut were under freezing water trying vainly to get away. The Finch house was cut off from Route 133 in exactly the manner Maurice Finch had described to Carmine; Ruth Kyneton’s streamlet had risen so high that she had to pin out her washing in gumboots; and Dr. Charles Ponsonby came into the Hug complaining bitterly about a flooded wine cellar.

Thwarted by the intensity of the deluge and tormented by stiffening leg muscles, on Monday at dawn Addison Forbes decided to take a short run around the East Holloman area, then down to the water’s edge at his jetty. There he had built a boat shed to house his little fifteen-footer, though few were the times that his frame of mind prompted him to launch it for a leisurely sail on Holloman Harbor. For the last three years leisure was a sin to Addison Forbes, if not a crime.

A squad car was parked suspiciously near Forbes’s rather precipitous driveway, its occupants giving him an admiring wave as he leaped past, intent on concluding his run. Sweat rolled off him as he plunged down the bushy slope from the road; three days of downpour had melted the frozen snow, hence the flooding all over the state, and the ground under Forbes’s running shoes was saturated, slippery. Years ago he had planted a row of forsythia at the bottom of the incline – how wonderful it always was when that harbinger of spring burst into yellow blossom!

But in February the forsythia hedge was rigid brown sticks, so when Forbes noticed a jarring patch of lilac on the ground beneath it, he stopped. A split second later he saw the arms and legs emerging from the lilac patch, and his treacherous heart suddenly surged in his ears like a tidal race. He clutched at his chest, opened his parched mouth to yell, could not. Oh, dear Lord, the shock! He was going to have another coronary, this had to trigger another coronary! Hanging on to the back of an old park bench Robin had put there for “dreaming on,” he inched around it until he could sit and wait for the pain to clamp down, old and ineradicable instinct causing him to flex his left hand constantly as he waited for the pain to shoot down the arm and into it. Eyes dilated, mouth agape, Addison Forbes sat and waited. I am going to die, I am going to die…

Ten minutes later the pain hadn’t arrived, and he could no longer hear his heart. Its pulse had slowed precisely as it did after all his runs, and he felt no different than he did after all his runs. A huge jerk shot him to his feet, and that didn’t cause pain either; he turned his gaze to the lilac patch with its arms and legs, then took the slope up to the house in long, rhythmic steps, joy welling inside him.