John Lutz - Serial

After the pizza slice and a second glass of wine, Nora left the restaurant and walked the remaining block and a half to her apartment. She felt better now. Unafraid. The wine could do that, push lingering uneasiness away from the active part of her mind. Useful stuff, wine. She might have a glass or two tonight before bedtime.

When she reached her apartment building, she trudged up the worn stone steps with a cautious look left and right.

Nothing suspicious, she decided.

Besides me.

She reminded herself that she’d decided not to let fear do its inevitable damage. She would keep that commitment.

Nora was actually humming as she worked the three locks on her apartment door. They were all sturdy locks. Two of them set automatically when the door was closed. One of them was a dead bolt. She would feel safe on the other side of those locks.

She carefully locked herself in, then went to the kitchen and, after deciding against actually drinking another glass of wine, downed a glass of water. Walking the streets of Manhattan had made her thirsty, even after the wine she’d had at Perfect Pizza. Maybe it was the saltiness of the pizza. Whatever. She wondered how people who lived on the streets could stay hydrated.

How awful it must be to live that way. And it could happen to anyone. That possibility was why Nora worked so hard at her trade. She, like so many living in the city, felt always close to becoming one of the pathetic people she saw every day, panhandling on the sidewalks. Maybe that was why New Yorkers seemed always distracted and in a hurry; visible all around them were the consequences of living without a net.

The spare bedroom in Nora Noon’s apartment was for storage. It was stuffed with clothing of her design, cloth creations draped on hangers affixed to shoulder-high steel racks that were on wheels. There was room for an aisle down the middle of the room, but sometimes Nora had to shift the overloaded rolling racks from one side to the other to reach the garment she wanted.

Tonight what she wanted was a dress that had been bothering her for days. It was this afternoon that she’d decided a higher waistline might be exactly what the design needed. Nora could alter the waist and try the dress on herself in front of the triple mirror at her studio. That was one of the advantages of Nora N. designs being for ordinary-sized women.

It was bright in the room with the overhead fixture blazing, and the air was still and stuffy. Some of the material she touched was warm from the sunbeams lancing in at the edges of the drawn shades. There was a faint odor of mothballs. Too faint, Nora decided. Most of her garments had a high wool content. Moths were the enemy.

She pushed aside two of the swaying, overloaded racks and saw the dress she wanted. Dark green with black piping. Maybe that had been a mistake, too, choosing a dark color for the piping.

She reached for the dress’s hanger, and a hand appeared from between the garments on the nearest rack and reached for her.

The sounds of her struggle were muffled among the overstuffed racks of clothing. Every time she tried to escape her assailant’s grip, her arms and legs would become entangled in material. She soon became swathed in the stuff. The karate lessons were useless. So were her screams, with her mouth jammed with what she knew was fifty percent cashmere.

Nora regained consciousness in her own bed. It was still futile to try to move her arms and legs. She was on her back, with her wrists bound to the headboard. Her legs were spread wide, her ankles tied to the bottom corners of the steel bed frame beneath the mattress. The rope was knotted so tightly that her hands and feet were numb. She attempted to say something but couldn’t utter more than a moan. Her tongue probed and found a rough surface. Her mouth was still crammed with material, but it was smoother.

She raised her head to look around her. That was when she realized she was nude and became really afraid.

Fighting off panic, she let her head loll back. There was no pillow so she was staring up at the headboard and the surface of the wall behind it.

Moving her head had caused a tremendous pain in the back of her neck. She remembered a hand clutching her there, squeezing. A man’s grip. No woman could encompass her neck so and squeeze so hard.

She let her eyes roll to the right and her gaze fell on an unfamiliar object on the nightstand by the bed. A curling iron. It wasn’t hers, though. This one had a white handle and a white cord that ran from the nightstand and disappeared. She knew the cord would be run to the socket just below where the lamp was plugged in. The metal brace was flipped downward so the main shaft of the curling iron was suspended an inch above the surface of the nightstand. A tiny red light glittered on the white handle. It indicated that the curling iron was turned on.

Nora sensed or heard a movement to her left, alongside the headboard and back where she couldn’t see who or what it was. She strained to see but couldn’t; the pain at the base of her neck prevented her from turning her head far enough.

Her body gave an involuntary jerk. Fingertips gently caressed her perspiring cheeks and then the vulnerable area beneath her chin. They brushed a strand of hair back off her forehead.

“It’s possible that your hair is going to curl,” a man’s voice said softly. “But the curling iron will never touch it.”

Michelle Roper was quite beautiful, which made her one of Nora Noon’s favorite clients. Michelle had dark hair and eyes, high cheekbones, and a trim and graceful figure. Though not a tall woman, she carried herself with a kind of regal bearing. Surely in her ancestry were kings and queens. With Michelle roaming around New York, wearing Nora N. creations to all the fashionable clubs, Nora had her own walking advertisement.

“I was supposed to meet with Nora at nine,” Michelle was telling the super of Nora’s building. “It’s already nine-thirty.”

“She might still show up,” the super said. He was a middle-aged guy wearing a green work shirt over a bulging stomach. He didn’t seem too interested in Michelle’s story, though he did seem to have an eye for Michelle.

“There’s no showing up involved,” Michelle explained. “She sleeps here. We were going to meet at her apartment so I could look at some swatches, then go have breakfast together. She doesn’t answer her phone, and her message machine is off. That’s not like Nora. Maybe you can raise her. You’re the super-”

“Leonard,” the super said.

“What?”

“My name is Leonard.” He gave her a broken-toothed smile.

“Michelle.”

“Much as I’d like to help you, Michelle,” Leonard said, “I got no right to enter a tenant’s apartment because she don’t answer her phone. You try her cell?”

“Yes. She doesn’t answer that one, either.” Michelle decided to use what influence she obviously had with Leonard. She put on a concerned look. “This is going to sound funny, Leonard, but I’m half Cherokee, and I have a certain sense about such things. An instinct. I just know something is wrong in that apartment.” The Cherokee part was true, but that was all.

“Cherokee Native American? No kidding?” He stared closely at her. “Once you know, it’s easy to see it.” He gave her a shy smile. “It looks good on you.”

“Nora and I are friends, Leonard. I’d know if she simply wasn’t home. She doesn’t answer at her workshop, either, and I’ve been in touch with several people she knows and they haven’t seen her since yesterday.” Michelle touched his arm and he almost melted. “If Nora was having some kind of medical problem in there, Leonard, you wouldn’t want to be responsible for her not getting help in time, would you?”