Nine Lives(20)

Matthew had been slumped forward, his hands on his knees, even though he was no longer breathing deeply. He straightened up and did a couple of lunges, to stretch out some more. He’d already decided to do the big loop today and that meant two and a half more miles. More time to think of Michelle Robinson. But before he began to run again, he heard the snap of a twig behind him, then he was thrown forward onto the path by the enormous force of a .44-caliber bullet punching a hole dead center between his shoulder blades, severing the spinal cord so that he was effectively brain-dead by the time he landed on the soft forest floor.





SEVEN





1





SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 8:04 A.M.


At the exact moment that a bullet ended the life of Matthew Beaumont, Alison Horne, who had gotten up very early on that Saturday in September, finished a glass of alkaline water and was laying out her yoga mat.

She was trying to relax, but her mind was racing. Had been racing since she’d woken up two hours earlier. This was a periodic problem, a sudden and overwhelming panic that the life she was leading was utterly without meaning or purpose. She’d felt that way before, on and off, all through her twenties and her thirties, but now time was a factor. She was going to be forty-one years old in December, and that thought filled her with a cold dread, a tightening in her stomach. She’d moved to New York nineteen years ago after graduating with a fine arts degree from Mather College in Connecticut, and had immediately gotten a string of jobs that seemed promising but led nowhere. She’d been a nanny for a wealthy couple who lived on the Upper East Side, a yoga instructor, and a portrait photographer specializing in actors’ headshots. She’d also worked unpaid as an intern at a photography gallery in the Village, and she’d been taking her own photographs for as long as she could remember, shots of her friends mostly, and street shots of New York. Looking at some of those photographs now filled her with an almost sorrowful feeling of failure. They were like lesser copies of better photographs by better photographers. Some were okay, but none of them stood out. They were reminders that she wasn’t special. And they were also reminders of her freewheeling twenties, and how they were never coming back. Most of the friends she’d photographed had left the city either to start families or to follow promising careers. And she was still here.

A year earlier, with the free time afforded her by her relationship with Jonathan Grant, Alison had taken up collage, utilizing some of her own pictures, combining them with printouts of text messages and emails, and rearranging them on canvases, painting over them with oil sticks.

Jonathan said he liked them, and even offered to try to get her a gallery show, but lately when she looked at the dozen pieces she’d produced, it was like looking at a foreign script. They were unreadable to her. She had no idea if they were any good, or if they were terrible. She’d put them at the back of her walk-in closet.

On good days she told herself that she was living a happy, comfortable life, that she was one of the lucky ones. She had a spacious one-bedroom in Manhattan with no financial worries. She had time to create art, read, work out, see friends. Her only responsibility was to Jonathan, who paid her bills in exchange for weekly sex (sometimes not even that) and an occasional dinner out at a top-end restaurant.

She’d been Jonathan’s paid mistress for one year now. (Sometimes she told herself that she was his girlfriend, but she knew that wasn’t really what she was.) He’d approached her when she’d been working as a hostess at a subterranean steak house in midtown Manhattan. It had been a particularly bad time for her, both financially and emotionally. She’d split with her boyfriend of five years, a mutual separation, but then he’d immediately taken up with a younger woman at his law firm, and within one year they’d married, bought a house in New Jersey, and were starting a family. She’d also just lost the best job she’d had in the city, as a photo editor for a start-up literary magazine that was being backed by a dot-com entrepreneur named Bruce Lamb. Apparently, the magazine had lost so much money in its first two years that it was no longer useful even as a tax write-off. Her friend Lucy had gotten her the job as a hostess at the Lodge. She wore tiny skirts and halter tops, but it was an easy job, and the tip sharing included the hostesses, which meant she was making far more per week than she had in the entire time she’d been in New York.

Jonathan Grant was a semi-regular at the Lodge, coming in by himself around nine and sitting at the bar. He wore nice suits, and reminded Alison of an actor her mother used to like called James Mason, with his deep voice and rigid posture. He always ordered the bar steak, a petit filet mignon with crabmeat and béarnaise sauce. On slow nights she’d chat with him, often about the wine he was drinking. One evening he stayed at the bar until late, then asked Alison if she wanted to go to a place he knew two blocks over, a Spanish tapas restaurant that had the best glasses of wine in the city. She must have hesitated when he’d asked her because he’d immediately put his hands up, and said, “Please say no, and don’t feel bad about it. I just love talking wine with you and it would be nice to do it when you were actually tasting the wine yourself.”

“I’ll let you know how I feel at closing,” she said, and went back to her station. She wanted to go with him. He might be as old as her father, but he also seemed harmless, and he was attractive. Still, as soon as he’d asked her the question a strange chill had rippled over her skin, almost like a premonition. She’d had those her whole life, little flickers of knowing. Like the time she’d been talking with her grandmother on the phone, and she’d gotten so cold that she had to run for a sweater after they’d hung up. The next time she laid eyes on her grandmother was when she was in an open casket, looking as though someone had replaced her body with a terrible nonbreathing approximation. Her cold spells weren’t always about death, though. When she’d first met Mrs. Talbot, their new neighbor in Greenwich when Alison was thirteen years old, she’d actually begun to shiver. Within a year, her father had left the family in order to move with Marianne Talbot to a brownstone in Philadelphia. He’d always been a distant, unhappy father, but after abandoning his family, he’d become almost a stranger. Alison hadn’t spoken with him in a decade.