herself as she hung up. Please, please let something come of it.
She made coffee, carried a mug of it into her office, and opened her laptop. No matter how distracted she felt, she knew she had to generate more ideas for her presentation. She emailed both the Web designer she had recruited and the person she had in mind for day-to-day PR, asking them for a few ideas by tomorrow. She’d originally given them a deadline of two weeks from now, thinking she wouldn’t need their input for her initial presentation to Levin and Sherman. But she was desperate now.
Later she sent one fax to both Amy and Will. She’d drawn a little picture of herself and Smokey looking draggy from the heat. When she first started writing the kids, earlier in the summer, she’d been struck by how dull her life was. Now she would give anything to have all that dullness back.
As she slid into bed that night she thought she might fall asleep instantly from sheer mental exhaustion, but it was clear after thirty minutes of thrashing in the sheets that sleep wasn’t going to arrive. She tossed and turned a little while longer and then finally dragged herself out of bed, leaving Smokey still draped over a pillow. In her white cotton nightgown, she paced the long hall of her apartment like a ghost. The apartment was deadly quiet, except for the drip of a faucet somewhere—in Will’s bathroom, she guessed.
At one point during her lonely, restless prowl, she stopped in the foyer and studied the silver-framed photos on the hall table. There were shots not only of her kids but of friends, too—sitting on the porch in Roxbury, celebrating a birthday, laughing together in Riverside Park. If only she could turn to one of those people now, she thought. But since her split with Jack, she’d let her friendships drift, out of embarrassment, or, in the case of people like Steve’s sister, Sonia, because their coupled-up lives now seemed out of sync with hers.
Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, she registered movement on the ground to her right. She jerked her head in that direction, thinking it was Smokey, but there was no sign of him. As her eyes swept around the foyer, she realized with a jolt what she’d seen. On the parquet floor by the door, the narrow strip of light from the outside corridor had just been broken. There was a shadow in the middle now. Someone was standing on the other side of her door.
It was after two a.m. Who could possibly be there? she wondered anxiously. She stood frozen in place, staring at the slightly ragged strip of shadow. And then the doorbell rang.
15
THE SOUND MADE her reel backward. Who would come to her apartment at this hour? And why hadn’t the doorman rung up first?
“Who’s there?” she called out from where she stood.
The doorbell rang again. This time longer, more insistent.
“Who is it?” she called, louder now. After a few seconds she forced herself toward the door and squinted into the peephole. There was no one in view.
Tiptoeing backward, she saw that the shadow was gone now. She put her ear to the door, straining to hear. She thought she could hear the faint sound of footsteps moving away. She waited for the deep purr of the elevator but it never came.
She stabbed at the intercom button. While she waited for a response, she pressed her ear against the door one more time. Silence.
“May I help you?” a sluggish male voice answered.
“This is Lake Warren in 12B. Someone just rang my bell. Did you send someone up here?”
A pause followed, as if he had to think about it.
“No—no, I didn’t. No one has gone up for a while.”
“Well, who do you think it could have been?”
“What did the person look like?”
“I didn’t see,” she said in frustration. “When I looked through the peephole, no one was there.”
“Some people went up a while ago to a party on eleven. Maybe someone got off on the wrong floor. Do you want me to come up?”
“No, that’s okay.”
She wondered if it was like he said, someone just ringing the wrong bell. Or had the doorman fallen asleep at the front desk, allowing a stranger to slip by in the night? Had it been Keaton’s killer standing on the other side of her door? Someone from the clinic, or a person paid to stalk her? Whoever it was, maybe they’d started