Midnight Voices by John Saul

wherever she looked, and everything she saw looked old and faded.
    But it can be fixed, she told herself. All of it can be fixed. In the kitchen, she put the cup in the sink, then rummaged through her big needlepoint bag in search of the receipt for the vase she’d purchased yesterday. Finding it, she picked up the telephone and dialed the number of Antiques By Claire. Two minutes later, her message delivered, she hung up the phone.
    Yes, she decided. Everything can be fixed, and I shall fix everything.

    “Would it really be too much trouble for you to give me a hand with this?” Caroline asked. The cab had pulled up in front of 100 Central Park West nearly two minutes ago, but the cabbie had made no move to help her heft the huge Oriental vase from the backseat onto the curb. Instead he sat stoically behind the wheel, staring straight ahead through the windshield, his radio blaring and acting as if she simply didn’t exist. “Or would you like me to call the TLC as well as stiff you on the tip?” The threat to call the Taxi & Limousine Commission finally got his attention, and even though it no longer really mattered, since he’d pretended to be deaf when she’d asked him to turn it down twenty minutes ago, he now shut the radio off and got out of the cab. A moment later the vase was out of the cab and sitting on the lowest of the three steps that bridged the drainage moat separating the sidewalk from the huge front doors of The Rockwell. Wordlessly, Caroline paid the driver, added a tip that was exactly ten percent, then changed her mind.
He probably has as many problems as I do,
she decided and added two more dollars she really couldn’t afford to the bills she handed him. The cab driver accepted the money as wordlessly as he’d helped her transfer the vase from the cab to the sidewalk and pulled away into traffic as the afternoon foot traffic swirled and eddied around her.
    The ornate façade of The Rockwell loomed above her, and as she gazed up at its towers and cupolas and bowed windows and terraces, she couldn’t help but wonder what could have been in the mind of its designer. One of the first apartment buildings to be constructed on the avenue bordering Central Park’s western edge, it had stood alone in its earliest years, surrounded first by farm land, but very quickly by the expanding grid of the city’s streets. No one had ever quite been able to describe its architecture, but Caroline thought the man who had dubbed it “The Grand Old Bastard of Central Park West” hadn’t been far off the mark. There were elements of practically everything in it, at least everything that predated the twentieth century. The highest towers and parapets tended toward the gothic, though there was a gold-leafed minaret soaring above the corner of 70th Street that looked as if it might have been transferred directly from St. Basil’s in Moscow. Beneath the turrets, parapets, and minaret was a jumble of elements, some of them vaguely Norman, others Elizabethan, along with a few touches of the faintly Mediterranean where there were terraces overlooking the park. The whole impression was of some kind of fairy tale fantasy that had somehow been plunked down in the middle of the greatest city in the world, where, despite its overall hideousness, it had settled in to become one of the most rarefied addresses in New York, as well as a source of stories children used to scare themselves half to death.
    Now here she was, standing in front of the immense double doors, their heavily etched, beveled, and leaded glass panes framed in oak so weathered it was as gray as the cement of the sidewalk. As Caroline eyed them, wondering just how heavy they might be—and if she could hold one of them open long enough to heave the vase inside, someone behind her spoke.
    “Oh, Lord, I think I smell a plot.”
    Turning, she saw a familiar-looking man eyeing her, his head cocked to one side, an amused smile playing around the corners of his