Dean Koontz - Your Heart Belongs To Me

Studying the photos of the three dead women, brooding about their living sisters, Ryan suspected that this pattern of twins, though seemingly the key to the plot, rose more from subtext and that the more intently he focused on it, the farther he traveled from the revelation he sought.

The yellow wind made pendulums of the traffic lights suspended over intersections, tore dead fronds off tall palm trees, harried tumbleweed out of vacant lots and along busy streets, buffeted the car, hissed at the windows, and in general made such an exhibition of its power that a pagan might have cast basketfuls of flower petals into it as an offering, to solicit exemption from the miseries of the coming storm.

Returning the photographs to the envelope, he said, “George, Cathy, I’m flying out to Denver from here. I don’t know that I’ll really need anyone with me, but there’s a longshot that I may have a security issue. I’d feel a lot more comfortable with someone who had a license to carry.”

“We’re both cool to carry in Colorado,” Zane said, “and Cathy has all the gun training that I have. Fact is, she may be the better shot.”

“I’ll lay twenty to one on that,” she said.

Ryan asked, “Are you up for Colorado, Cathy?”

“I only brought one change of clothes in my overnight bag.”

“That’s all you’ll need. We’ll be going back to California tomorrow.”

In truth, it didn’t seem likely that Ismena Moon, a fifty-eight-year-old woman described as a sweetheart, would prove to be a threat to Ryan’s physical safety.

He wanted someone with him more for company than protection. He had been something of a loner the past year, and solitude had taken its toll.

Denver in particular seemed to be a dangerous place for him to be alone. On his previous visit, he had arrived confused, as he would be arriving this time, and he had departed confounded, in a condition close to despair.

Besides, since he had first seen Cathy this afternoon in Spencer Barghest’s garage, Ryan had felt there was a question he wanted to ask her. Needed to ask her. A question of considerable importance. He just didn’t know what it might be. He sensed the question half-formed in the back of his mind. Perhaps it would fully coalesce in Denver.

Forty minutes out of Las Vegas, high over Utah, above the weather and bound for Colorado, Ryan excused himself and went to the lavatory.

He dropped to his knees and threw up in the toilet. He had developed a nervous stomach awaiting takeoff, and it had grown worse in flight.

At the sink, he rinsed out his mouth twice and washed his hands. He was struck by the paleness of his fingers, as white as bone.

When he looked at his face in the mirror, he found that it was paler than his hands, his lips without color.

Reluctantly he met his eyes and for some reason thought of Alvin Clemm and the convenient stepladder, the convenient concrete, the silk scarf and the convenient heart attack.

His legs grew weak, and he sat on the toilet. His hands were shaking. He clasped them, hoping one would steady the other.

He didn’t know when he had gotten up to wash his hands again. He found himself at the sink, scrubbing.

He was sitting on the toilet again when he heard a rapping, which quickened his heart until he realized this really was a hand upon a door.

“Are you all right?” asked Cathy Sienna.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

“You’re okay?”

“A little airsickness,” he explained.

“Do you need anything?”

“Just a minute. Give me a minute.”

She went away.

Airsickness wasn’t the correct diagnosis. He was sick with fear about what he would find on the ground, in Denver, in the house of Ismena Moon, which had once been the house of Ismay.

Leaving stars behind, and moon, they descended through deep clouds, a white boil at the portholes, and then Denver appeared below, sparkling in the clear night air.

In flight, Ryan had phoned Ismena, telling her only that her late sister had done a kindness for him that he’d never forgotten and, as he was in Denver, he would like to stop by and find out more about Ismay. After Ismena welcomed their visit, Ryan had arranged for a Cadillac Escalade, which awaited them at the airport.

The January night was so bleak that his cold hands felt warm by comparison. His breath plumed from him, curls of vapor lingering for brief moments before deliquescing into the still air.

His stomach was settled, but not his nerves, and after they put their two small pieces of luggage in the back of the Escalade, he asked Cathy Sienna to drive. In the passenger seat, he read Ismena’s address from a notepad on which he had written it, and Cathy keyed it into the navigator.

She drove well, handling the big SUV as if she had put fifty thousand miles on it before this. Ryan suspected that she was good not merely with a gun and a car but also with just about any machine or tool, good with things because she preferred them to people.

The very act of driving brought a slight unconscious smile to her. Although she usually guarded her expressions closely, her face was not a mask at this moment, but relaxed as Ryan had not before seen it.

“Do I need to know who this woman is, why we’re here?” she asked.

He told her only about Ismay Clemm’s kindness to him during the myocardial biopsy-and then that he had this day learned the nurse had died twenty-one months before he met her.

Of the reactions he expected from Cathy, she exhibited none. The faint smile remained, and she kept her eyes on the road, as if he had said nothing more surprising than that, judging by the lowering sky, snow would soon fall.

“Twenty-one months. What do you make of that?” she asked.

“Ismena and Ismay are identical twins.”

“So you-what?-think it was Ismena at the biopsy?”

“Maybe. Probably.”

“But she was using Ismay’s name? Why would she?”

“That’s one thing I want to find out.”

“I guess you would.”

He waited for her to say something more. She drove in silence, and only spoke to say “Yes, ma’am,” each time the computerized voice of the navigation system gave her an instruction.

For her line of work, Cathy had been trained to listen carefully to what a client needed to tell her about his problems and to have no curiosity about any portion of his story that he failed to disclose. But her ability to feign disinterest in this case seemed almost superhuman.

As the navigator announced a final turn to the left coming in three hundred yards, Ryan recognized the park with the aspen trees and the church beside it.

“Pull over,” he said. “I know this place. If her house is just around the corner, we can walk from here.”

Their jackets were not heavy enough for the weather, but the air remained still, with no wind-chill factor. Hands in their pockets, they walked first into the park.

The aspens had shed their leaves for winter. The smooth bare limbs described pale geometries against the night sky.

A recent snow, not yet despoiled by children’s boots, mantled the grass, and the brick walkways wound like channels of dark water through the whiteness.

“I was here once,” he told Cathy, “sixteen months ago.”

She walked with him and waited.

“That time, I had the most powerful experience of deja vu. The air was as still then as now, but the aspens were whispering, as they always do when they’re leafed out. And I thought how much I’d always loved that sound-and then realized I’d never heard it before.”

A lamppost spilled light upon an iron bench. Icicles depended from the front skirt of the bench, and ice glazed the bricks directly under them.