Embers (80 page)

But still she dallied, there in the clear May night.  "Senator--"

"We've been through our first vocal trance together; call me Lee."

"Senator," she persisted, ignoring the bantering request.  "You didn't have to tell me all that you did tonight.  I know that."  She braced herself and threw out the next observation:  "I guess I'm wondering why you did." 

"Why?"  He sounded less puzzled than incredulous.  "Is that the only word you know?  'Why'?"

She'd never heard his how-dare-you tone before.  Not that she wasn't familiar with it; most of the people she investigated eventually hauled it out and batted her over the head with it.  But somehow she wanted Arthur Lee Alden III to be different.  Somehow she was wrong.

"What I mean is, you can't have told any but your most trusted friends and associates about your -- your vision, or I would've read about it somewhere.  Why did you tell me, of all people?"  Simple question; she thought it deserved a simple answer.

He just stared at her, so she answered the question for him.  "It's not just because tonight is off the record.  I think it's becausee you were hoping to make me so sympathetic to your plight, so moved by it, that I'd back off investigating this side of your character.  After all, I'm a woman; that's what women do -- sympathize.  You took a big risk, Senator.  You'd never have tried this with a man."

"Geez, you're paranoid," he said at last.

"Nosir. 
Not
paranoid," she countered, throwing an index finger up in the air.  "I just want to know why you told me."

"Fine," he said angrily, his hand on the door of his BMW.  "You want to know why?"  He threw the door open.  "I'll tell you why."  He got in and slammed the door.  He rolled down the window.  "I don't know why.  That's why."

He turned the key, the engine jumped to life, and he roared off, leaving Emily alone with the strength of her convictions.  Her chin was set, her breathing coming hard and fast.  She'd just reduced a United States Senator to gibberish; it should've been a moment of triumph.

But it wasn't, and all the way home she tried to fathom why.  Eventually it all came down to this:  she thought more of him for having the courage to face her laughter than she thought of herself for having the courage to laugh at him.

It wasn't fair.  Lee Alden had it all, including a good-old-boy understanding with the press not to expose his fanciful side.  Even Stan Cooper left him alone.  And yet not all politicians were immune to scrutiny.  She thought of Gary Hart; she thought of
John
Tower
.  Somewhere someone had stood up and said, "Enough is enough."  So why was there this reluctance to go after Lee Alden?  Was it because when you did go up against him, you felt rotten about it?  The way she was feeling now?

Too bad, kiddo,
she told herself with grim determination. 
Learn to live with it.

By the time she squeezed her car into the lone space left on her street, Emily was bleary-eyed with exhaustion.  It was well after midnight, but that wasn't the reason she was having to force one foot up the stairs past the other.  She'd just spent a most unconventional evening, and she considered herself a very conventional girl.  This kind of thing was more of a strain on her system than it was for Shirley MacLaine.

She was weak with longing for her bed by the time she slipped her key into the dead bolt of her door.  Muddled and impatient for sleep as she was, after she turned the key to the left and right she wasn't sure whether she'd even locked the door before dashing out that morning.  Most likely not; it wouldn't have been the first time.  She threw a switch on the living room wall.  As always, her little condo looked perfectly happy to be what it was:  a little condo.  Everything was neat and tidy, because everything had no choice.

Emily ran the place like a ship, which is why she noticed, even half-asleep, that one of the silver candlesticks on a small writing table was knocked over.  Automatically she stood it back up; she must've hit it when she dumped her book-bag on the table that morning.  She pulled open a louvered door to a tiny hall closet to hang her jacket inside, and wrinkled her nose.  Tobacco.  She stuck her face in the sleeve of her jacket, but now the smell eluded her.  The Harvard professor, she remembered.  A pipe smoker.  The two were practically synonymous.

Still, somewhere in the deepest part of her brain she was toting up the irregularities as she found them.  She had long ago decided that messy people lacked a certain gene, which is what enabled them to live long and happy lives.  Neat people, on the other hand, were always noticing things and worrying about them, just as she was doing now. 

When Emily went into her bathroom, she suddenly got a lot more worried.

She was reaching for her nightgown behind the bathroom door when she saw that the jewelry box she kept on the top of a small bureau -- the little inlaid wooden jewelry box her brother had sent her from
Korea
-- had been thrown open and its three drawers pulled out and left that way.  Short of fleeing an earthquake, Emily was incapable of having left that kind of mess behind.  Shocked, she went through the box quickly and inventoried the few things she kept there.  Coins, earrings, broken watches, her mother's wedding rings, an old charm bracelet-- all present.  Frightened and relieved and very much awake, she thought:  They took one look and decided it wasn't worth it.

Mere bravado.  Exactly four seconds after that thought, Emily had another:  that they -- or he -- didn't actually finish the burglary.  She ran back to her living room.  The VCR was still there.  The TV.  The stereo. 
Oh, God.  Oh, no
.  If they hadn't finished, where were they now?  Had they been scared off by a neighbor in the hall?  Were they trying to find a closer parking place for their van? 
Oh, God
.  They weren't in the kitchen.  The kitchen opened out into the living room.  She could see the kitchen.  They weren't in the kitchen. 

She looked across to the bedroom, the dark, unlit bedroom.  The bedroom with no wall switch, where the nearest light was a lamp on a dresser located exactly six and a half steps to the left of the door.  The bedroom where to date the only phone was plugged into the only jack.  She cursed the lamp, the phone, the darkness.  She would not go in there.

She would go to a neighbor instead -- Mr. Olafson, who had to get up at 5:30 for the commute to
New Hampshire
-- and bang on his door, and beg him to come to her apartment to find the burglar for her.  He would ask if her door had been open.  She would not be sure.  He would ask what they took.  She would say, "Nothing."  He would ask why he, Mr. Olafson, was standing in the hall instead of lying in his bed. 

No, she could not go to Mr. Olafson.

If this were a boarding house we'd have a pay phone at the end of the hall and I could call the police,
she realized, furious with the management.  But
would
she call the police?

Mace!  I have mace!
  Her brother the policeman had
given it to her, a big, unwield
y can that she kept next to the Raid under the bathroom sink.  She crept back into the bathroom, her heart hammering wildly and erratically in her breast, and took out the can of mace.  She had practiced it a thousand times, grabbing the can so that the button fired away from her.  But she grabbed it backwards anyway, and dropped it in her panic, and picked it up again, backwards again, and finally got it right side out, and marched out of the bathroom with it at arm's length, just in case she hadn't got it right after all.

She stood in the lighted living room at the threshold to the bedroom, clutching her mace, her eyes failing completely to adjust to the darkness within.  She took one step inside, then another.  The air flowing from the bedroom was ocean-cold and damp; it wrapped itself around her like a
Nantucket
fog.  A new and utterly horrifying sensation took hold of her.  Inside her bedroom there was no burglar lying in wait.  There wasn't even someone so comforting as a Boston Strangler.  There was something else.  Something more.  Something worse.  Her heart became absolutely still in her breast.  She took one step back. 

The lamp was six and a half feet to the left, but she saw -- she was certain she saw -- a shadow move in the emerging dimness to the right.  She aimed recklessly and fired; the wet hiss of mace managed to go somewhere other than her face.  She saw someone leap away, heard his startled oath.  Petrified, she fired again, this time sweeping the area.  Again the figure leapt away, unaffected by it.

"Jesus, woman!  Put that thing away!"

She knew the voice.  Oh God, she knew the voice.

"Kimberly," she whispered, frozen in terror.

"Kimberly, my ass!  I'm Fergus.  Fergus O'Malley."

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Emily's Ghost