LITMIR.BIZ

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across the beige-colored carpet toward her bedroom, still carrying her bag.

      “Where are you going?”

      “To take a shower.”

      “I thought we were going out for Italian.”

      “We are. I want to get cleaned up first.”

      “Good, then I can catch the beginning of the Red Sox game.”

      His secret admirer suspicions apparently forgotten, Alec heads for her living room and the portable TV that is perched almost as an afterthought on an end table.

      Before Alec came along, it was barely used. When she wasn’t working around the clock on her medical residency in pediatrics, Cassie was content to spend her meager free time riding her beloved horse, Marshmallow, boarded at a nearby barn.

      Or, of course, catching up on much-needed sleep.

      Alec, who will be bringing his 42-inch plasma screen television when he moves into her condo after their November wedding, is a televised-sports fanatic. Most of the time, that’s fine with Cassie. He’s a successful podiatrist who has a lot more time on his hands than she does. Television keeps him busy while she’s finishing her last year of residency at the hospital in Danbury.

      Almost one more year to go on that…and less than three months now until they walk down the aisle. If Cassie had her way, the nuptials would wait until next fall. But Alec is anxious to wed—an unusual quality in most men she’s encountered.

      He sounds too good to be true—for God’s sake, don’t let him get away, Tildy advised last spring after he proposed, when Cassie confessed her ambiguity about getting married so soon.

      Tildy.

      Cassie has to call her right away.

      In the white-carpeted master bedroom, she closes the door behind her, and, after a moment’s hesitation, presses the knob button to lock it. Not that she expects Alec to barge in; he respects her privacy.

      The bedroom is shadowy. She left the blinds drawn this morning in her haste to get to the hospital for early rounds. She debates opening them now to let in some late-day sun, but decides against it. It’ll be dark outside in an hour or so—and they’re leaving the house anyway.

      She does turn on a lamp, but oddly the splash of light does little to warm the room.

      As Cassie hangs her tote bag on the white iron bedpost, she glances from the sunny yellow and white patchwork quilt to her framed art posters to the antique bookcase brimming with well-worn childhood favorites.

      Why does she feel so skittish in her own room, among familiar belongings?

      Because I’m scared, that’s why.

      Finding that card in the mail—like she needed a reminder that today is September 7th—has put all sorts of crazy thoughts into her head.

      Now, as she takes the cordless phone from its cradle on the nightstand, she finds herself looking over her shoulder, almost as if…

      As if someone might be here with her, watching her?

      Yeah, right. She’s alone in the bedroom, and Alec is way on the opposite end of the condo.

      You’re not thinking about Alec, are you? You’re thinking about some nameless, faceless stranger.

      Someone who knows…

      What nobody can possibly know.

      Unless one of the others told.

      But we swore each other to secrecy.

      Cassie refuses to consider that any one of her friends—her sisters—could possibly have broken that solemn vow made a decade ago tonight.

      Yes, just as she refuses, absolutely refuses, to check under the bed and behind the slats in the louvered closet door.

      Frightened little girls do things like that. Especially frightened little girls whose big brothers warn them incessantly about the lurking bogeyman.

      But Cassie’s a grown woman now—a doctor, for God’s sake.

      Shaking her head at her folly, she takes the phone into the bathroom and closes that door, too. Then, just to be safe, she turns on the shower. The sound of the water will drown out her voice, should her fiancé decide to eavesdrop.

      Which he won’t. Alec will be safely ensconced in front of the Red Sox game for however long she takes to get ready for dinner.

      She presses the familiar series of touch-tone numbers. The phone rings once on the other end, and again. And then again.

      Come on, pick up, Tildy…Where are you?

      The machine picks up with a lengthy greeting. Not surprising. Tildy always did like to hear herself talk.

      Waiting for the outgoing message to give way to a beep, Cassie gazes into the mirror above the sink. She looks the same as she always does at the end of a workday: a touch of makeup to accentuate her fine bone structure and mocha complexion, her hair in neat cornrows that hang well below her shoulders, her only jewelry a pair of simple gold post earrings, and, of course, her diamond engagement ring.

      Her mahogany eyes are different tonight, though.

      I look like I’ve just seen the bogeyman, she notes, staring at herself as the fog from the shower rolls in from the edges of the mirror.

      Or maybe, I’ve just heard from him.

      “Hey, it’s Cassie…Listen, you need to call me, please, as soon as you get this message. I have to talk to you…”

      Matilda Harrington quickly presses a button on the answering machine.

      “Message…deleted…” a computerized voice informs her.

      Tildy turns and walks briskly from the den, an alcove on one end of the living room, toward the back of the town house.

      Her eyes shift briefly, as always, to the gilt-framed oil painting in the hall.

      The only formal Harrington family portrait that was ever done—or ever will be. The canvas is illuminated from the arc of gallery lighting positioned directly above. It casts the four faces—father, mother, daughter, son—in a soft, almost ethereal glow.

      Tildy has a vague memory of sitting for the portrait at her family’s Beacon Hill mansion, where Daddy still lives.

      She remembers how little baby Jonathan kept spitting up as usual, and her mother had to repeatedly hand him to the nanny to be cleaned up.

      And how she got to sit on her father’s knee for hours, and how the artist commented that she was such a good little girl, never fidgeting or complaining.

      Tildy’s mother said something like, “Oh, Daddy’s Little Girl would be content to just sit there on his lap forever.”

      She sounded somewhat wistful about that, Tildy remembers. For a long time afterward, she thought that must have been because Mother regretted that Daddy was usually much too busy with his real estate empire to spend much time with his family.

      But later—much later, years after the plane crash that killed Mother and Jonathan—Daddy mentioned that her mother was often jealous.

      “She always thought you loved me more than you loved her, Matilda.”

      That’s because I did, Tildy thought matter-of-factly, and without guilt.

      Distraught as she was to lose her mother and baby brother so suddenly and violently, she remembers how relieved she was that it wasn’t Jason Harrington who died that awful night.

      Daddy was her favorite, the one she always worried about; the one who traveled all over the world on business, usually on his private jet.

      Ironic, then, that it was Mother and Jonathan who were killed, along with Daddy’s pilot, when the jet went down in a snowstorm near Baltimore. That night, Tildy

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