Tell Me No Secrets by Joy Fielding Page A

able to rent its top floor. If only it had an elevator, she wished, though normally she thought nothing of the three flights of stairs. Tonight, however, her legs felt tired, as if she’d spent the last few hours jogging.
    She hadn’t jogged since her divorce. She and Don had regularly run the distance between the North Avenue and Oak Street beaches when they’d lived on Lake Shore Drive. But the jogging had been at Don’s insistence, and she’d given it up as soon as she’d moved out, along with three balanced meals a day and eight hours’ sleep a night. It seemed she’d given up everything that was good for her. Including Don, she thought now, deciding that tonight was one of those nights that it would have been nice not to have to come home to an empty apartment.
    Jess parked her old red Mustang behind the new metallic gray Lexus of the woman who lived across the street and ran through the light drizzle—was it actually snow?—to the front door. She unlocked the door and stepped into the small foyer, switching on the light and relocking the door behind her. To her right was the closed door of the ground-floor apartment. Directly ahead were three flights of dark red-carpeted stairs. Her hand tracing an invisible line along the side of the white wall, she began her ascent, hearing music emanating from the second-floor apartment as she passed by.
    She rarely saw the other tenants. Both were young urban professionals like herself, one a twice-divorced architect with the city planning commission, the other a gay systems analyst. Whatever that was. Systems analyst was one of those jobs she would never understand, no matter how often and in how much detail it was explained to her.
    The systems analyst was a jazz fan, and the plaintive wail of a saxophone accompanied her to her door. The hall light, which was on an automatic timer, turned off as she stretched her key toward the lock. Once inside, the saxophone’s mournful sounds gave way to the happier song of her canary. “Hello, Fred,” she called, closing the door and walking directly to the bird’s cage, bringing her lips close to the slender bars. Like visiting a friend in prison, she thought. Behind her, the radio, which she left on all day along with most of the lights, was playing an old Tom Jones tune. “Why, why, why, Delilah …?” she sang along as she headed for the kitchen.
    “Sorry I’m so late, Freddy. But trust me, you’re lucky you stayed home.” Jess opened the freezer and pulled out a box of Pepperidge Farm vanilla cake, cutting herself a wide slice, then returning the box to the freezer, the cake already half-eaten by the time she shut the freezer door. “My brother-in-law was in top form, and I got sucked in again,” Jess stated, returning to the living room. “My father is in love, and I can’t seem to be happy for him. It looks like it’s actually starting to snow out there and I seem to be taking it as a personal affront. I think I’m having a nervous breakdown.” She swallowed the rest of the cake. “What do you think, Fred? Think your mistress is going crazy?”
    The canary flitted back and forth between his perches, ignoring her.
    “Exactly right,” Jess said, approaching her large front window and staring down onto Orchard Street from behind antique lace curtains.
    A white Chrysler was parked on the street directly across from her house. Jess gasped, instantly retreating from the window and pressing her back against the wall. Another white Chrysler. Had it been there when she arrived?
    “Stop being silly,” she said over the loud pounding of her heart, the canary bursting into a fresh round of song. “There must be a million white Chryslers in this city.” Just because in the course of a single day, one had almost run her down, another had almost plowed into her car, and a third was now parked outside her apartment, that didn’t necessarily add up to more than coincidence. Sure, and it never snowed before Halloween,