You Kill Me Read online

  Praise for Hide Your Eyes

  “Crack up along with Alison Gaylin’s protagonist in this bold take on the thriller. This is not your standard deadly serious crawl past slimy alleyways—nope, it’s a headlong rush into the muck and panic, in cute boots. Hide Your Eyes is a smart, snappy piece of deviltry. Welcome to a fresh new talent.”

  —New York Times bestselling author

  Perri O’Shaughnessy

  “Something completely different.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Sharp debut suspense…a consistently entertaining evocation of Manhattan’s strange and artsy underside, narrated by a heroine with a beautifully judged blend of warmth and wit, independence and edge.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A delightful combination of wit, romance, and captivating suspense…. Quirky and original, this novel has levity as well as suspense…. The romance between Sam and Krull added depth to the intricate mystery.”

  —Romantic Times

  Other Books by Alison Gaylin

  Hide Your Eyes

  YOU

  KILL ME

  Alison Gaylin

  A SIGNET BOOK

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, December 2005

  Copyright © Alison Sloane Gaylin, 2005

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-101-65770-6

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  To Mike.

  And to Marissa, our firefighter/princess.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Very special thanks go out to Detective Joe Muldoon, NYPD Retired, for answering every single question I had. Everything I got right is to his credit; everything wrong has nothing to do with him.

  My gratitude also to Abigail Thomas, Jo Treggiari, The Golden Notebook, The Woodstock Wool Company…and all the usual suspects from the scene of the previous crime, especially and always Ellen Edwards.

  Thanks as well to Debra Bard Javerbaum for brilliant Web design, Beverly Sloane and Sheldon and Marilyn Gaylin for invaluable moral support and babysitting, to my daughter Marissa Anne Gaylin for saying and doing so many wonderful, printable things. And to my husband, Mike Gaylin, whose incredible patience and ability to pick up all sorts of slack kept the title of this book from becoming prophetic.

  If you stop acting like a victim, he’ll stop treating you like one.

  —Sydney Stark-Leiffer, PMS: Postmarital Survival

  Table of Contents

  Prologue: Now and Forever

  1: Too Safe

  2: All About Me

  3: Reverie

  4: A Winner’s Tale

  5: Bloody Valentine

  6: Marlamania

  7: Ready to Listen

  8: ’Til Death

  9: Six Charlie

  10: Monsters and Superheroes

  11: The Gentleman Caller

  12: The Quiet Invisible

  13: Pillow Talk

  Epilogue: What Scares Me Now

  Hide Your Eyes

  PROLOGUE

  Now and Forever

  About two months after the September 11 attacks, when the city still smelled like burning plastic and people shuffled down the sidewalks, faces blank and sad as flattened pennies, Detective John Krull and I decided to rent a car and drive out into the country.

  The idea was to go to New Hope, Pennsylvania, where my former off-off-Broadway box-office colleague, Argent Devereaux, was performing in a production of Cats. Argent had quit her job at our theater, the Space, and moved to New Hope more than a year earlier, after winning the role of Grizabella.

  Since Argent’s departure, I’d killed a murderer, moved in with a cop, said good-bye to one class, hello to another at Sunny Side Preschool, where I teach the nine-to-twelve class. At the Space, where I work afternoons, we’d seen three plays open and flop. (Actually, the one-man show about Stalin’s dog had been pretty clever.) Then the planes had flown into the World Trade Center, and the theater went dark indefinitely. We all lost our paychecks while the artistic director tried to figure out what type of show she could possibly put on a stage when people were still breathing in ashes.

  No one wanted to let go of their kids either, so the Sunny Side was temporarily closed, giving me a lot of free time to fill. I spent most of it uptown, sitting in the lobby of the Plaza, pretending I was visiting from somewhere far away.

  Several cops from Krull’s precinct had died, as well as a much-loved detective from the bomb squad, which is housed in the same building. Krull started working twelve-to fifteen-hour days, spent mostly at the wreckage. Then he’d come home, attempt sleep for a few hours and head out again. We hardly spoke during that time, other than to say good-bye. But every time he left the apartment, he hugged me so tight it hurt.

  By the time things started to calm down, Krull’s partner Art Boyle had come out of a four-month retirement, and his other partner, Amanda Patton, had put her baby son in day care and returned to work full-time.

  Krull was perhaps the only cop I knew who had refused therapy of any sort—not even one grief-counseling session. And, try as I might to convince him otherwise, I learned that this man—who had taken a bullet in the neck for me, who had urged me to tell him everything that frightened me—was someone who did not “want to fucking talk about things.”

  Yet through it all, this smash-hit production of Cats in New Hope, Pennsylvania, ke
pt playing to packed houses six nights plus one matinee performance a week, with Argent Devereaux in the starring role. No wonder that show’s slogan was “Now and Forever.”

  Anyway, the prospect of seeing something that hadn’t changed in a year was so appealing to Krull and me that we paid a ridiculous amount of money to rent a car one Saturday, booked a night at a New Hope hotel called Honeymoon Sweets and headed out on the open highway.

  I don’t remember much about the show itself, other than someone shouting, “Yes!” as Argent first made her entrance, wedged into a shredded unitard, glittery whiskers scrawled across her face.

  As for the rest of the trip, I know Krull and I walked through a park and talked about how the bare trees reminded us of skeletons. I know we shared a split of sweet, headachy champagne from the minibar and had sex on a bed shaped like a giant heart. But I can’t feel any of it, can’t taste it or even see it anymore. It’s a dim memory in the literal sense of the phrase—a recollection with its batteries running out.

  There is one exception, though—an event from the ride home that keeps getting sharper in my mind—and it’s the main reason why I’m telling the story in the first place.

  Krull was driving, and we’d just turned onto a two-lane highway. There was a straight, empty stretch of road ahead of us, and we were listening to Black Sabbath on the radio when an SUV swung up behind our rental car, passed us and hit a squirrel.

  It was the first time I’d ever seen roadkill happen, and what surprised me, when we passed the little body, was the tiny amount of blood and the way the head, legs and tail jolted up and down, like it was trying to signal us. “He’s still alive,” I said.

  Krull said, “Some things keep moving a long time after they’re dead.”

  The way he said it made me think he wasn’t talking about squirrels at all. But when I looked at him, staring out the window with that jaw of his clenched, as if it might hurt to say anything more, I knew a follow-up question wasn’t in the cards. We were headed back to a burning city, after all. We’d left New Hope behind.

  It’s November 2002. That weekend trip was a year ago, and I’ve since lost the feeling of anything being “now and forever.” Yes, Argent is still the Betty Buckley of New Hope. And I, Samantha Leiffer, am still teaching four-year-olds how to write their names and selling tickets to often-embarrassing theatrical productions. But it’s amazing how much everything else has changed—and I’m not talking about the fact that people now walk by that great, smoldering pit in Battery Park talking on their cell phones, making dinner plans without even turning to look at it.

  What I’m talking about is my own life. I’m talking about what scares me now.

  On my mother’s Web site, this quote is currently posted: “Everyone creates her own reality.” I really hate that quote. But I must say, it’s true of Sydney. She created hers twenty-five years ago, when my dad moved out. Instead of leaving me with my grandmother, checking into a motel and gorging herself on rocky road ice cream and single-malt scotch (which is what I would have done), Sydney left me with my grandmother, checked into a motel and wrote a runaway best seller: PMS: Postmarital Survival.

  Since then, she’s tweaked her created reality with three short-lived marriages, a syndicated newspaper column, two honorary degrees from respected universities, a heavily photographed series of dates with a much-younger tennis champ…the list is endless. Her life never stays exactly the same for more than one season.

  But with the help of regular nips, tucks and injections and a long-suffering hairdresser named Vito Paradise, Sydney makes sure her exterior, by contrast, remains as unchanged as possible. It’s something the fans can latch onto. The face that never ages. The face of what they think they can get out of life.

  This potent combination has made my mother more famous by the year. And now the press calls her what she’s wanted to be called since her pre-PMS days: Sydney Stark-Leiffer, self-help guru.

  Until this past January, Sydney was a self-help expert, sometimes a maven. But then she came out with her breakthrough book, The Art of Caring, in which she coined a new catchphrase—sympathy vulture. (I still don’t know what it means.) Before long, she was doing weekly segments on Oprah, people like Jennifer Aniston started mentioning her name and poof…a guru was born.

  I, on the other hand, did not create my own reality. Not any more than that squirrel in New Hope created the speeding SUV. To say I’ve gone through changes would be inaccurate. The truth is, changes have gone through me.

  There was a time when I thought love was the one thing that could truly change you. Look at what it had done to my box-office coworkers. Shell Clarion, an insult factory in skintight pleather who would have gladly killed kittens for a part on All My Children, became a completely different person after moving in with aspiring screenwriter/yoga teacher En Henry. Sure, she was still annoying. But now she was annoyingly domestic. She stopped stuffing snapshots of her bikini-clad self into agents’ and managers’ comp-ticket envelopes. And, where she used to spew venomous comments on practically anyone within her airspace, she now channeled the negative energy into nagging En for an engagement ring and baking very bad muffins.

  My best friend, Yale St. Germaine—who tended to end his most serious relationships after a day or two—had gone miraculously monogamous the moment he set eyes on his now-longtime boyfriend, Peter Steele. And Hermyn—a performance artist whose vow of silence had lasted three whole years—took back her voice and her old name of Amy Rosensweig, quit her job at the Space and moved from the East Village to Scarsdale…all after marrying Sal Merstein, dentist of her dreams. Last I’d heard, she’d become a stand-up comic and was working bachelorette parties throughout the tristate area.

  Look at what love had done to me. I used to hate cops. But then I met Detective John Krull, and I didn’t even think twice about moving into his apartment in Stuyvesant Town—a Lower East Side complex crawling with law enforcement professionals. Within weeks, Krull and I were playing poker with cops and their spouses on a regular basis. We went to their apartments for home-cooked meals, invited them over for delivered Chinese food (neither one of us could cook), took them to hideous shows at the Space and out for much-needed drinks afterward. Sometimes, we even babysat their kids.

  And for the first time, love made me feel more comfortable with another person than I did alone. Krull and I went to bed every night with our arms wrapped around each other and his enormous cat, Jake, sprawled across our stomachs, breathing in and out in unison without even trying.

  Even after September 11—when the regular poker games stopped and Krull got quieter, sometimes leaving our bed to stare, just stare, out the living room window—love was still there, like the body fat camels live off of when they’re stuck in the desert for weeks. It made me think, We’ll get through this.

  But that was before I discovered the truth: There is an emotion more powerful than love. An emotion that looks like love, but isn’t. This emotion…I’m not sure what to call it, but it can change your life in ways that make love seem like a twenty-dollar withdrawal from an ATM machine.

  Because no matter how strong you think it is, no matter how much it turns your life around or domesticates you or gives you back your voice, no matter how much it makes you see the world from an angle you never knew existed, love—real love—can never kill you.

  1

  Too Safe

  “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” said the voice behind me. The voice was deep, with some sort of European accent—French? Belgian? Swiss? A tasteful trace of an accent, like a carefully chosen accessory. Like a black leather, three-button jacket bought brand-new at Barneys because it looked “so vintage,” but costing more than I make in a year. He was probably wearing the coat too, despite it being ninety degrees outside.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, without turning to look at either him or his inevitable coat.

  I was sitting in a Starbucks at Tenth and Sixth at seven o’clock in the morning on Se
ptember 2, 2002. It was the first day of school, and I was making name tags for my class, wondering how we’d all get along. I loved imagining faces to go with the names, trying to pick out the shy ones, the precocious ones, the troublemakers. After writing each name in red felt-tipped pen on a rectangle of yellow construction paper, I’d close my eyes, repeat the name in my head and attempt to visualize the student. Deep down, I suppose I enjoyed believing I was psychic. Like my superstitions, it gave me a sense of control.

  Yes, I still had my superstitions. I’d had them so long they were like birthmarks, and I barely noticed them anymore. But my mother did. She wanted them removed.

  A year and a half earlier, I’d stabbed a serial killer to death with a butcher knife after nearly getting murdered myself. And then, just as the residual nightmares were starting to fade, September 11 happened. I’d spent that whole day trying to track down Krull, until he wandered into our apartment at three in the morning, his dark hair gray from building ash, murmuring, “We’re fucked, honey. We’re all fucked.”

  Sydney couldn’t understand how I could go through all that and still think it made a difference whether or not I walked under a ladder. She said I suffered from a disorder with a clinical term: magical thinking. But I didn’t care. My mother lived three thousand miles away and could not physically stop me from stepping over cracks in the sidewalk. And besides, magical thinking didn’t sound like a disorder. It sounded like a compliment.

  Visualizing this new group of kids from the sound of their names was proving harder than usual, though. There was a Charlotte, an Ida, two Harrys, an Abraham…. When I closed my eyes, all I could see were friends of my grandmother.

  “But I’m sure I know you. Look at me, please.”