Charon's Crossing

"I love you, Kathryn," he whispered.

The stink grew more powerful.

"I love you, and I will be in your heart forever, as you will be in mine."

The air was thick with the smell of the gas now. Soon, it would reach the candle flame.

Matthew felt his eyes blur with sudden dampness.

"Good-bye, Kathryn," he said softly, "good-bye, my love."

* * *

Kathryn was halfway to the airport when she heard Matthew's voice.

"Good-bye, Kathryn. Good-bye, my love."

Her skin turned icy with fear. "No," she whispered, and then she screamed. "Matthew, no!"

She jammed on the brakes and the car skidded wildly across the road but even before its engine sputtered and died, the sky behind her exploded into a million shooting stars.

Chapter 20

After her divorce, years before, Beverly Russell had been left penniless and with a teenaged daughter to rear.

"So, what else is new?" she'd said with a wry smile, to anyone who cluck-clucked over what her friends delicately called her "situation."

Trevor Russell had never made enough money to matter nor held on to what little he'd had. And, towards the end of the marriage, he'd spent more time tramping the mountains, veldt, tundra and beaches of the world's more exotic places than he had staying at home.

Beverly had tried her hand at selling cosmetics, used cars and encyclopedias—"Not all at the same time," she'd say with a smile when she talked about that period in her life—but nothing had clicked. Then, at a friend's urging, she'd decided to try turning what had always been a hobby into an occupation.

Beverly called it creating jewelry out of found objects.

Kathryn called it making necklaces, bracelets and earrings out of junk.

To the surprise of them both, more people saw it Beverly's way than Kathryn's, including the owners of a world-renowned shop with branches in Manhattan, Paris, London, Madrid and Palm Beach. Just about the time Kathryn had finished college, Beverly was transformed from flea-market craftperson to sought-after designer.

Ever since then, as she often said with a cat-ate-the-canary smile, life had been very, very pleasant.

She lived on Central Park in a vast, high-ceilinged apartment with a breathtaking view. Kathryn had never much liked the place. Despite its size, the apartment seemed cramped, thanks to Beverly's propensity for ballooning velvet drapes, silk shawls, eclectic furnishings, and table-top collections of whatever struck her fancy, from French snuffboxes to Chinese jade. The building itself was one of those New York landmarks, all turrets and stone gargoyles. Kathryn's tastes ran more to the spare elegance of the newer glass skyscrapers that loomed in the Fifties.

At least, it had.

Strange, how her tastes had changed.

Sitting in the living room of Beverly's apartment on a late spring afternoon, she found herself admiring what she'd once thought of as clutter. Not very long ago, she'd have found the antique silk shawl flung across the baby grand in the corner pretentious, the Duncan Phyfe table crowded with tiny porcelain dogs unattractive, the Empire sofa facing the pair of Mies van der Rohe chairs just plain out of place.

She didn't, not anymore. Instead, she took pleasure in the richly furnished rooms, even in the turrets and the gargoyles of the building itself. She saw now that these things had their own beauty and were soothing not just to the eye but to the soul.

Kathryn sighed, put down the copy of Vanity Fair she'd been pretending to read, and walked out onto the little balcony that overlooked the park. It was probably all those weeks of living in the ruined splendor that was Charon's Crossing that had changed her attitude towards what she'd once thought of as out-of-date clutter.

Not that she thought about Charon's Crossing very much anymore.

She had, at first. For weeks after the explosion and fire that had reduced the mansion to rubble, she really hadn't been able to think about much of anything else. It was as if the explosion, and the subsequent fire, had burned themselves into her brain.

She saw the flames shooting into the black sky over and over again, heard herself screaming Matthew's name.

The nights had been the worst. Asleep, she'd had no control over the images; they'd swooped down on her like visions out of Hell. It was always the same. She saw the house, and her car driving away from it. She saw Matthew, going to the cellar.