Audrey Rose Read online

  She turned off the lamp and crawled into bed beside him. Raising her nightgown to her waist, she gently snuggled up to him, fitting her body into the curvature of his warm nakedness.

  Like everything else in their marriage, their sex life was perfect. Nothing between them was taken for granted. Both were experimenters, and every session brought with it something new and liberating. Bill bought books on the subject to widen their knowledge. “Bioloop,” “biocurve,” “mutual concentration,” “intimacy spiral” were expressions they knew and used.

  Janice smiled as she remembered the Orissan posture book that Bill had brought home one evening. It contained drawings of more than one hundred intimate positions practiced by sixteenth-century Arabians. Over the course of several weeks they tried a number of them, the more possible ones, which were mainly unrewarding. They were forced to give this up when Bill hurt his back trying the number seventeen, or cartwheel, position.

  Her smile deepened with the memory of the joy, the fun, the perfect sweetness of their life together, high in the center of Manhattan, in the dreamy duplex they owned.

  How perfect their life had been. How safe and protected. No frights, no miseries, no sudden shocks. Except for that spate of crazy nightmares that had come to plague Ivy when she was a toddler and that lasted almost a year, not sickness, or want, or fear, or desire for others had come to challenge the perfect order of their lives.

  Until today, Janice thought, with an aching stab of regret. Until today—in front of the school.

  Janice was certain, and had been certain since three ten that afternoon, that life as they knew it was coming to an end. That even now, as she lay beside the warm, breathing form of the man she loved, forces were gathering to shatter their dream. She didn’t know how it would come about, or why. Only that it would happen.

  That afternoon, in a flash of instant prescience, Janice had seen their doom reflected in the eyes of a perfect stranger.

  2

  Ivy awoke with a slight fever. It was just above normal, yet Janice thought it best to keep her home from school. With the weekend upon them, it would afford her three days’ rest. She would call Dr. Kaplan only if the fever got worse. Janice rationalized the decision to her full satisfaction and felt a sense of relief at having made it. Or was it a sense of reprieve?

  Whatever, three days had been granted her before the next confrontation with the man.

  The morning was cold and sunny as Bill stepped through the big glass doors of the old building and started walking to the corner of Sixty-seventh Street and Central Park West. The weather was perfect for walking, and Bill would make it to the office in good time since he didn’t have to take Ivy to school this morning.

  He might even forgo the fast route down Central Park West and cut through the park directly at the Tavern on the Green. It took seven minutes longer; but the park was beautiful this time of the year, and Bill always enjoyed plodding across the soft golden carpet of crisp autumn leaves.

  By the time the traffic signal had changed his decision was made. Bill crossed over to the Sixty-seventh Street park entrance and headed toward the famous old green and white clapboard restaurant.

  As he entered the park gate, he casually glanced toward Ivy’s school, six blocks down the traffic-clogged boulevard. He wondered what Sideburns would think when he and Ivy didn’t show up this morning.

  Bill plowed through a thick crunch of dried leaves which the wind had gathered together at the curb and proceeded on a southeasterly course through the park. The lanes at this point were wide and festooned with overhanging trees. The morning was still, and leaves drifted down gently around him under their own weight.

  Bill had first become aware of the man on September 12, just four weeks and four days before. He hadn’t really spotted him until the fourteenth, two days later, but the moment he realized he was being followed, his mind did some fast backtracking and eventually placed the first encounter at a specific moment in time.

  It was on the Sixty-fifth Street cross-transverse bus. Bill had just finished an all-afternoon conference with a media representative from the Doggie-Dog TidBits account. They had conducted their business in the client’s suite in the Hotel Pierre. As Bill left for home, it started to drizzle. He managed to make the four blocks up Fifth Avenue before the deluge began and happily found a bus parked there and taking on passengers.

  As the loaded bus took off with its damp, surly cargo, Bill found himself wedged tightly in a mass of strangers, their breaths commingling intimately, their bodies swaying and jerking together in rhythm to the bus’ staccato progress through the transverse.

  The face closest to his was a woman’s—middle-aged, care-worn, drained of joy or hope, with a pair of eyes that gazed vacuously into his, registering nothing. He couldn’t see the person behind him, but knew it was another woman, as he could feel the soft, pliable form of her breasts snuggling into his back every time the bus came to a short stop.

  The third face, only partially seen in profile, belonged to a man about Bill’s age. What fascinated Bill here was the single perfect sideburn on the right side of his face. It was fascinating because of its perfection. Each hair was separate and distinct and seemed to have been trimmed by a draftsman. The thick crop of the man’s sideburn was matched by his mustache, which was equally perfect. Still, there was something very wrong about them both. Bill puzzled over this halfway across the park before finally coming up with the answer. They were phonies. The guy’s cheeks were nearly hairless; he could never have grown bushes like those on his own. Bill smiled with satisfaction at having solved the mystery when suddenly he realized that the man was looking at him. Bill quickly looked away and began studying an ad over the bus driver’s seat.

  By the time Bill got off the bus at the corner of Sixty-sixth and Central Park West, the rain was falling heavily. Tiny glistening explosions of water battered the wide street as Bill jogged the short block to Des Artistes. The man with the sideburns was totally forgotten.

  Two days later Bill met him again. In the elevator of the building where Bill worked. He was standing in the rear of the car behind a group of people as Bill entered. He didn’t look at Bill, and Bill pretended not to notice him. It could have been a coincidence, but Bill didn’t think so.

  Later in the day, to confirm his suspicions, Bill ran a tape in the big computer that Simmons Advertising used for its demographic breakdowns. He fed the machine all the data he could think of: population density, area of encounters, time elapsed, distance between two encounters, and even fed it their sexes, probable ages, and an estimate of their physical fitness. The machine came back with a probability of one in ten million that two such encounters could occur within two days.

  Still, Bill was willing to grant the outside possibility that it might have been a coincidence.

  Twice, yes. Three times, no.

  One of Bill’s accounts was a mutual fund with offices down on Wall Street. He and Don Goetz had spent an entire Monday morning presenting their spring ad campaign to the board of directors. The wrangling by the board would continue through the day, so Don and Bill escaped to a nearby restaurant for an early lunch.

  They had finished their sandwiches and were sipping their second cups of coffee when Bill’s eyes caught the familiar sight of Sideburns floating in the rear of a mob of waiting customers near the doorway. The man was barely visible since people’s bodies were blocking all but a fragment of his head. Yet Bill was certain he was the same person.

  After they paid their checks, Bill pushed through the waiting mob clotting the doorway, keeping his eyes peeled for the man with the sideburns. But in the time it had taken him to pay his check and put on his coat, the man had vanished. Bill glanced back into the restaurant to see if he had been seated. He was nowhere in sight.

  Bill was worried. He was obviously being followed. By whom? A cop? The FBI? And for what reason?

  That evening, balmy with Indian summer, Bill strolled slowly up the path that flanked the small lake in Central Park. Swans and geese swam in gentle, patient circles in search of stray crumbs of popcorn or peanuts. Bill walked to an empty bench and sat down.

  His was a logical, orderly mind. If he was being followed and if it was the FBI, then there had to be a reason. Sitting in the shadow of the Plaza Hotel which loomed impressively above the lake, Bill probed his memory for anything he might have done in college, any organization or club he might have joined, any donations he might have made, any lectures he might have attended that could possibly give the FBI a reason for being interested in him. He reviewed each episode of his youth, each small area of his school years, minutely scoured each miserable day of his one-year hitch in the Army, and still, he could come up with nothing. He was clean. Of that he was sure.

  The man was obviously wearing a disguise. The mustache, the sideburns, the whole thing was amateurish. Maybe he wasn’t a professional at all? Maybe he was just some nut. God knows, the city was filled with them. You met them on buses, in subways, in broad daylight, walking down Fifth Avenue, screaming, yelling, cursing, no cops around, and nobody daring to stop them. Yes, the city was infested with psychotics. And if you were smart, you never let them catch your eye.

  Bill remembered what happened to Mark Stern. A promising career was cut short because of a nut. Mark and his wife had parked their car on a side street near Lincoln Center. They were members of the Metropolitan Opera Association and had lifetime seats in the Founders’ Circle. After the opera they’d gone to where their car was parked and found this person pissing against the fender. Mark got angry and pushed him away from the car, so the man started pissing on Mark and his wife. Mark hit him in front of witnesses and knocked him down. The man suffered a small concussion but was out of Bellevue in two weeks. He
got a lawyer and swore out an assault and battery complaint against Mark. The trial was by jury. Mark was found guilty. He did sixteen months in jail, lost his job, a vice-presidency with Gelding & Hannary, and the last that Bill heard, his wife was divorcing him.

  Bill couldn’t figure out why he was smiling. What happened to Mark was tragic, and yet he couldn’t help wondering who wound up with the lifetime subscription to the Met.

  He sighed and rose from the bench. Sideburns just had to be some nut.

  The next day Bill was forced to reassess that opinion.

  He and Don had spent the morning trying to land another agency’s client—a client they had once represented but who had been snatched away from the Simmons agency some years before. Don felt encouraged by the reception they got, but Bill, a trifle older and wiser in the ways of the street, got a different message.

  “They let us leave,” Bill explained to Don as they rode back to the office in a cab.

  “Well, they want to think about it,” protested Don. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “If they have to think about it, we’ve lost them,” Bill said with a note of finality.

  Bill liked Don Goetz; he was bright, aggressive, loyal, and eager to learn. Bill had taken him as an assistant right out of Princeton three years before. He never regretted the decision.

  Approaching his desk, the first thing Bill saw was the interoffice envelope. He glanced briefly at his phone messages before opening it. The envelope contained an eight-by-ten glossy photo of himself—an updated portrait he’d sat for last year at Bachrach’s. It accompanied his bio, which was kept in a file case in Personnel. A handwritten note from Ted Nathan, personnel director of Simmons, was attached: “Forgot to include this with your bio. Sorry. Ted.”

  Bill shook his head foggily and tossed it aside.

  He took care of several of the more important calls on his message sheet before dialing Ted’s interoffice number.

  “What’s the mug shot for, Ted?” Bill asked when Ted came on the other end.

  “What do you mean?” Ted said. “We always send them along with the bios.”

  “What bio?”

  “The one you asked for.”

  “Hold on, old friend. Let’s start at the beginning. You say I asked you for a bio on myself?”

  “Yes, that’s right.” Ted Nathan’s voice showed a slight nervous strain as he enunciated his words with care.

  “All right, Ted,” Bill said gently. “When did I ask for it?”

  “This morning. A little after nine. I had just gotten in when you called. You wanted it on the double, for your presentation. Don’t you remember, Bill?”

  “Sure, Ted, sure. Slipped my mind for a sec. Thanks, pal.” And then: “Oh, say—by the, way—you didn’t tote it up yourself, did you?”

  “Course I did. Nobody else is here at that time.”

  Cleared of any wrongdoing. Ted Nathan’s tone became pointedly self-righteous. “I put it on your secretary’s desk like you told me to.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Bill said genially. “Thanks, Ted.”

  Bill hung up the phone lightly. He sat back in his Eames tubular recliner and focused his eyes on the big Motherwell print that dominated the wall opposite him. His eyes burrowed into the soothing brown and black juxtapositions, drawn into the hypnotic spell of the artist’s vision.

  Sitting silently, immobile, Bill Templeton had real things to think about.

  Somebody wanted to know all about him. Obviously. Somebody who had done his homework. Who knew that Bill’s secretary didn’t arrive at the office till nine thirty. Who knew that Ted Nathan always arrived shortly after nine. Who knew that on this particular morning Bill would go directly to his appointment and not come into the office at all. Who knew how to imitate Bill’s voice well enough to fool a man whom Bill had known for more than nine years. Somebody with the training and resourcefulness to plan a break-in and accomplish his mission without getting caught. A person of talent and dedication—and daring.

  One week later Sideburns showed up at school.

  It was on the first Monday in October. There was a real threat of snow in the air. Bill, as usual, was taking Ivy to school on his way to work.

  Their gloved hands clasped tightly together, they would jog down the length of a block, then, coming to a corner, swing suddenly about so that their backs would receive the frigid impact of the crosstown winds, whipping up the narrow side streets. It was a game they played and loved playing together each year at this time.

  When they finally reached the school building, they both were out of breath and laughing in total delight at each other. Bill’s eyes watered with the cold, and he could hardly see Ivy as she stood on her toes, kissed his cheek, then turned and scampered up the steps and through the big doors. As Bill turned to leave, he almost collided with a group of mothers, stationed at the base of the steps waving good-bye to their children.

  Grunting an apology, he started to move past them when, suddenly, he stopped. Sideburns was standing directly in his path, staring at him. The look in the man’s eyes gripped Bill tightly and seemed to push for a confrontation.

  “My name is Bill Templeton,” Bill said, and took a step forward. “I think you want to know me.”

  The man remained transfixed, gravely looking at Bill for a long moment, before quietly speaking.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not certain. I’ll let you know soon.”

  And without another word, he turned abruptly and hurried off down the windswept boulevard toward Columbus Circle.

  Bill could only watch after him, staggered, replaying the words over and over in his baffled brain.

  “I don’t know. I’m not certain. I’ll let you know soon.”

  A week went by.

  Each morning Sideburns faithfully kept his rendezvous in front of the school. Bill would find him standing in his customary spot next to the steps, watching them approach from the distance. He’d watch them kiss good-bye, then turn and hurry off toward Columbus Circle the moment Ivy entered the building.

  When, for two weeks, the pattern didn’t change, Bill decided to go to the police.

  The desk sergeant was paunchy, dyspeptic, and pushing retirement age. He listened to Bill’s story in a bored, detached manner, then sent him upstairs to “Detectives” to see Detective Fallon.

  Bill sat opposite a young, ruggedly handsome man in plain clothes and repeated his story to him. The room was large, painted a dreary green, and filled with an odd assortment of tables and chairs. The table where Bill and Detective Fallon were seated was deeply scored by years of use and mischief.

  Detective Fallon listened attentively but without surprise or emotion. He made a few notes, flashed a quick look at Bill when he mentioned the man’s disguise, but allowed him to finish before asking, “Did this person in any way batter you?”

  “Batter me?”

  “Did he come into purposeful bodily contact with you? Did he push you? Or hit you?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  Fallon’s face softened somewhat. “Unless there’s evidence of a battery, there’s very little the police can do in a case like this.”

  “Isn’t it enough he’s been following me, spying on me?”

  “What evidence do you have that he’s spying on you?”

  “I told you, he got into my office. He secured my biodata sheet by impersonating me.” Bill’s voice steadily rose in indignation. “Isn’t that enough evidence?”

  “How can you prove that he did it? I mean, do you have real concrete evidence that he was the person who entered your office and did this?”

  “Well, no, but.…” The energy in Bill’s voice gradually flattened.

  Fallon watched him a moment, almost regretfully.

  “Officially, there’s nothing I can do for you, Mr. Templeton, but tell me again, what time do you take your daughter to school?”

  “The schoolbell rings at eight thirty.”

  “Okay. I’m on the nine-to-five this week. I’ll stop by on my way in tomorrow and have a look at this guy for myself.” And with a small, tight smile, he added, “Unofficially, of course.”