Final Breath

Red Lion, or Marriott. She felt lonely and homesick. She missed Joe. Down the hallway, her son was sleeping--with his night-light on.

She heard another pop in the distance. People were still setting off firecrackers.

With a sigh, Sydney threw back the covers and then switched on her light. She padded down the hall to use the bathroom. This was one of those nights when the extra presence in the apartment scared her. Sitting on the toilet, she warily glanced over toward the tub. The closed shower curtain fluttered a little. She told herself that it had moved when she'd shut the bathroom door earlier. There was nothing on the other side of that plastic, map-of-the-world curtain. She was alone in here.

Staring down at the tiled floor, Sydney thought about Leah and Jared. A grisly image crept into her head of two corpses lying there on the tiles, a pool of blood beneath them.

'A neighbor found both bodies in the bathroom,' her friend in the newsroom had said.

Sydney closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. What had happened to poor Leah and Jared was just too bizarre, sad, and senseless. It still hadn't quite sunk in that they were dead--and how they'd died. It baffled her.

She flushed the toilet, washed her hands, and retreated to her bedroom. Crawling back into bed, she switched off the light.

Sydney lay there in the dark for a few moments. Then instinctively she knew she wasn't alone. Even with the windows open and a breeze wafting in from the lake, the bedroom suddenly felt warm. She could hear breathing. The room seemed to get darker. This was how it always happened. Yet Sydney didn't think she'd ever get used to it.

She clutched the bedsheets up to her neck. A shadow passed over her. Something brushed against the side of her face--by her ear. It felt like a kiss. For a brief moment, she thought of Joe and wished he were there. Then maybe she wouldn't be so scared.

But it wasn't Joe.

It was only a ghost.

The picture quality was poor, and the sound fuzzy. On the TV screen, Amanda Beck, the perky brunette actress best known for her popular late-eighties sitcom Get Out of Here!, was taking a dramatic turn in this old Lifetime Movie. She didn't look very perky--or pretty--as she lay unconscious in a hospital bed, hooked up to a respirator. A tube tugged down one corner of her mouth, a nasty bruise marred her forehead, and her hair looked greasy. The respirator made a constant whoosh-whoosh-whoosh sound. The eleven-year-old boy she'd saved from the fire before the last commercial now maneuvered himself in his wheelchair to her bedside. It was night, and no one else occupied the hospital room with them. With dogged determination and all the strength he could muster, the poor, pathetic, bandaged boy pulled himself out of the wheelchair just long enough to kiss her cheek and whisper in her ear. 'Thank you for saving my life. Sydney Jordan, you're my hero.'

'That scene with the boy late at night in the hospital never happened,' Sydney told TV Guide when the TV movie first aired in 1994. The maudlin segment wasn't in her autobiography either. They'd invented it for the film.

Another commercial came on. The clock on his DVD/VCR player read: 3:45 A.M. He could hear a series of pops outside. People were still lighting off firecrackers. He poured a shot of Courvoisier, sat back in his chair, and watched the rest of Making Miracles: The Sydney Jordan Story.

It was on a medium-quality videotape he'd bought on eBay. Intermittent static nearly ruined the final scene with Sydney's color commentary of the Olympic Games in Lillehammer. The music swelled while they showed all the people whose lives Sydney had touched in the hospital now watching her on TV, including young Aidan Cosgrove. It was a real tearjerker.

But he was dry-eyed.

He had to finish packing for his trip tomorrow afternoon. But instead he watched once again some Movers & Shakers segments he'd recorded over the past several months. For closure, he viewed the Jared and Leah piece one more time. A set of silver candlesticks from their dining room now sat on the same shelf as his TV. And a fancy sterling-silver plate on display in their living room was serving as a coaster for his glass of Courvoisier. He'd also taken forty-seven dollars out of Jared's wallet and another sixty-two dollars from Leah's purse--along with their credit cards. He'd already cut up the credit cards. He didn't really need the money. He just needed the scene at Leah and Jared's place to look like a robbery gone bad. Still, the silver items and the cash were a sweet little bonus.

Glancing over at his open suitcase on the living room floor, he decided to get back to his packing. He ignored the TV for a few minutes. The segment now showing he'd watched so many times recently, he knew it word for word and shot for shot. Sydney was interviewing Ned Haggerty, a rail-riding transient, who had seen a Burlington Northern yardman trip and fall on the tracks. Ned had emerged from his makeshift temporary home in a boxcar to save the unconscious yardman from being sliced in two by an oncoming freight train. Ned was quite a colorful character, but after the umpteenth viewing, his pontificating on what was wrong with people and the current administration no longer amused.

Throwing an extra T-shirt and pair of socks into the suitcase, he shoved a pair of work shoes into a plastic bag, and placed it on top of the clothes. He already had the new work uniform in there. He wouldn't need his skeleton keys or his burglar tools this time. There would be no break-ins.

He had two jobs on this trip. If he carried them out as planned, he wouldn't need his rain slicker and shower cap. It was ironic, too, because he anticipated both kills would be extremely messy.

There would be a great deal of blood, but not a drop of it would touch him.

It would be on Sydney Jordan's head.

If anyone had noticed a stranger coming or going last night, it would have been Sally Considine, the fifty- something divorcee in Apartment 8. Despite the fact that the chateau-style town houses looked alike and often had the same kind of flowers in the window boxes, Tudor Court's occupants usually kept to themselves. Sydney knew Sally Considine well enough to chat politely in passing, and Sally had twice praised her Movers & Shakers reruns when they'd aired recently. She'd also asked Sydney if she knew how to get tickets for Oprah.

This was the first time Sydney had rung Sally's doorbell. She knew Sally was home. Her windows were open, and she could hear the radio going.

It was a hot morning, the mid-eighties. Sydney wore khaki shorts and a pink blouse. She'd tried to look halfway presentable for her neighbor. She'd been on TV long enough to know that one bad hair day out among the public could start a chain reaction of gossip about what an utter slob she was. It had been particularly hard trying to look pretty this morning. She hadn't gotten much sleep at all last night.

The phone had started ringing at 6:35 this morning. The network--along with a few news services--had wanted a quote from her about the deaths of Leah and Jared.

She'd had three cups of coffee while checking the Internet this morning. There had been several articles on Leah and Jared, but no new developments except for the rather lame quote she'd given them two hours before:

'It's all so senseless and tragic,' said On the Edge correspondent Sydney Jordan, whose Movers & Shakers profile on McGinty and Dvorak brought them national attention. 'They were a very sweet, selfless couple, genuine heroes. Jared and Leah should have had many happy years together ahead of them. It's very sad indeed.'

The Portland police still didn't have any leads.

Sydney kept thinking about that strange e-mail she'd received a few days before. 'You can't save them,' it had said. She wondered if the person was talking about Leah and Jared, or had it been just some crank, screwing around with her head?

She clicked RECENTLY DELETED EMAIL in her mail file. It took her a few moments to find it among the seven days' worth of deleted messages. There was no subject header, but Sydney recognized the sender's address. She remembered duet had been in the e-mail moniker: [email protected].

She clicked RESTORE, and stared at that cryptic message again. Sydney hesitated before clicking the REPLY icon. Did she really want to respond to the nutcase who had written this message and addressed her as