Burning Time

54

In the early hours of the morning, Jason pulled himself out of the taxi and headed for his front door. As he rang the bell for the doorman, he was seized again with the same wild, unreasonable hope that had been nudging at the corners of his mind all the way across the country, the hope that his instincts had been wrong all along. Emma was not really threatened. She had just moved into another life without him. The letters were just an excuse for him to develop an elaborate fantasy of a madman’s retribution for his wife’s transformation from teen angel to movie-star whore. In this scenario he was the one who was threatened by it, and the hurt and anger were his alone. Nothing else was acceptable. He desperately wanted to be the crazy one, so caught up in the fantasy of retribution that he went all the way to San Diego to find himself an imaginary serial killer.

Francis wasn’t at the door. Jason had to ring twice. Maybe Emma had come home, and he would be proven a fool. Rumpled and exhausted, with dark circles under his eyes, he thought about that as he waited for Francis to appear.

Not many people actually did what they dreamed of doing. Even Charles had suggested more than once that there was a big difference between writing letters and acting on the rage and hatred expressed in them.

Francis shuffled across the lobby and started at the sight of him. “Oh, Dr. Frank, Dr. Frank. Thank God you’re back. The police were here,” the doorman cried as he swung the heavy door open.

“I know,” Jason said.

“What do they think happened to Mrs. Frank?” he demanded. “They just didn’t give me no choice. They forced their way in. What did they expect to find anyway?”

“It’s all right.” Mechanically, Jason went through the motions of calming him down. He was a stoic and a doctor. Staying in control when people around him were bouncing off walls was what he did. He had managed his raging panic on the plane and continued to do so now without thinking.

“It set me off for the whole night, I’ll tell you.” The man followed him to the elevator. “I didn’t leave them alone for a minute. Stayed with them the whole time,” he insisted.

“Thank you.” Jason got on the elevator, hardly knowing what he was saying. The acid had begun eating away at his insides again. Emma had not magically returned. He refused to let himself think about Troland Grebs.

Upstairs, he went through the apartment carefully. He saw the towels, still damp in the bathroom, and her purse on the bed. Nothing of hers seemed to be missing. Not a coat, not a dress, not a credit card, not a hairbrush or a toothbrush or a lipstick. There was no way in the world that she would voluntarily go anywhere without those essential items.

He went into the kitchen. There was the lettuce in a bowl in the sink. The treadmill in the laundry room was still on Pause. In the bedroom he turned on the answering machine and fiddled with it. Detective Woo had been right. Several messages had been counted by the machine, but not recorded. Only blank tape played back. This had happened with the machine before, but it had righted itself before Emma had gotten around to getting it fixed.

Just like the police, Jason saw an interruption in life in the apartment. But he did not want to jump to any conclusions about it. There could be more than one explanation for Emma’s disappearance. She could have gone out to the store for something and had an accident. Only a month ago an old woman crossing Riverside Drive had been struck by a van when the driver ran a red light. More recently a taxi jumped the curb and smashed into the window of the video store on Broadway. The driver had been distracted by a homeless man waving a stick at him. And other things happened, too. Bicycle messengers, silently racing the wrong way on one-way streets, knocked people over all the time.

Emma might have been sideswiped by a bus, or a car, and was in the hospital. There were a thousand unexpected, freaky things that happened to people every day in New York City.

Jason took his jacket off and went back into the kitchen. He made himself a cup of strong coffee and started calling hospital emergency rooms and morgues. No Emma Chapman or unidentified woman who fit her description had been admitted anywhere that night.

When he could think of nothing else to do, he went into his office and played back the messages from his own answering machine.