Horoscope: The Astrology Murders Read Free Page A

looked around her room. It was filled with things she liked, things she’d inherited from her grandmother and parents and things that she’d collected herself. Old things mostly and things from faraway places. A tall, graceful, yellow and violet art nouveau vase; a squat blue, green, and white rosewood pot; a one-hundred-year-old wooden mask from the Himalayas; a lavender piano shawl embroidered with pastel-colored flowers; a 1920s wicker child’s chair that she used as a plant stand. All of them were as familiar and comfortable to her as her bed, and she loved being surrounded by them.
    Kelly felt the sudden pressure of her red cat, Meow, pushing against her leg, stretching in her sleep. She glanced down next to her bed at King, her white Siberian husky, awake in his dog bed,waiting for her to get up. His bright blue eyes met her dark blue eyes, and he gave her a good morning howl. Often he and the cat got up in the middle of the night and went downstairs; King would scratch on the inside door to her housekeeper Emma’s garden apartment on the basement level of the brownstone; and Emma, good soul, would wake up and let them stay with her. But today, King and Meow had remained with Kelly. She smiled, glad to have them close to her; it made her feel secure, a feeling that she cherished more and more because recently she had experienced it less and less.
    She turned to the clock on her night table. It was 8:25.
    “You must be famished,” she said to King.
    He howled again, as if to agree.
    Kelly got out of bed, pushed her blond, curly hair out of her eyes, and walked to the windows. Opening the curtains, she looked out at the treetops on West 85th Street. It was the third week in October, and, despite ten days of Indian summer, the leaves were changing color. She’d had a view of the same trees for most of her life, ever since she was nine years old and had moved into the brownstone to live with her grandmother following her parents’ accident. The only time she’d lived anywhere else was for the two years she’d been at Northwestern and the three years she’d been married to Jack and they’d lived in Kings Point. When she and Jack had separated, her grandmother had asked if Kelly wanted to move back into the brownstone on 85th with her children, Jeffrey, who had been one and a half, and Julie, who had been four months old. Kelly had been grateful for the offer, as grateful as she’d been as a child when her grandmother had taken her in after her parents’ death. The brownstone had become her refuge after she’d lost her parents, it had become her refuge again when she’d left Jack, and it was her refuge now.
    Turning away from the window, she focused on the carved table that held her family photographs: a snapshot of her grandmother, Irene, her white hair in a not-very-neat bun, her open, friendly face virtually unlined; her parents’ wedding photo: her mother slim and beautiful in her wedding gown, her hair short and cut like a French movie star from the 1950s, her father in a tuxedo, looking more severe than Kelly remembered him, his hair brushed back flat, his usually playful eyes hidden behind wire-rimmed glasses; a photo of herself at eight, tall for her age and looking very much as she did today. In the photo, she was smiling a big, toothy smile, the smile of a child whose parents were loving and alive and seemed as if they would live forever.
    Her eyes settled on her photos of her own children. They were both tall like her and her ex-husband, and they had inherited Jack’s black hair and strong features. Kelly had taken the photo of Julie in June, right after Julie’s high school graduation. Julie, in her cap and gown, was grinning proudly. Her black hair, usually as unruly as Kelly’s, was pinned up neatly under her cap, and her brown eyes shone with excitement about her future. Jack had been there that day, too, and taken his own photos of Julie. That was how it was; she and Jack saw and