Final Breath Read online

  He used his real estate connections and did a little digging around about Tudor Court's Apartment 9. He didn't uncover anything about the suicide, but he learned that in the last twenty-plus years, that apartment had had the highest turnover rate of all ten units in Tudor Court--and the longest vacancy stretches.

  "Some rich doctor from Denver had it as his second home for several years," Kyle told her while barbecuing on his patio one warm night in mid-May. Eli was in the TV room, out of earshot. Sydney didn't want him to know someone had died in their prospective new home. "The Denver doctor wasn't actually there much," Kyle explained, flipping the hamburgers on his gas grill. "But the place is bad news. The guy I talked to on the QT at Tudor Court's property management company said the last renter endured it for only four months. And--get this--the renters before her, some incense-burning Birkenstock couple, they even hired a certified shaman to do a house blessing and exorcise whatever's in there. But I guess it didn't take, because Mr. and Mrs. Birkenstock got the hell out a few weeks before their six-month lease was up."

  "So you're saying this place is haunted?" Sydney asked, setting place mats, napkins, and utensils around the umbrella-covered glass-top table near the grill.

  "I'm just telling you what the property management guy told me, Syd."

  She shrugged. "Well, maybe we can hire that short, little lady with the funny voice from Poltergeist. We'll have her throw some tennis balls in a closet, or whatever they did to fix their ghost problem. Listen, Kyle, I really like this place. Plus we can move in right away. If the place is truly haunted, I could always--"

  "Pack up again and go back to Joe?" he said, finishing for her.

  She frowned, and set down the utensils. They clattered against the glass tabletop. "I wasn't going to say that."

  "Yeah, but you were thinking it," Kyle replied soberly. "Let's face it, you're miserable, Syd. All this time, you've been hoping for some excuse to make up with Joe. And hell, maybe you'd have one--if the son of a bitch ever bothered to call you. I really don't think he gives a damn. He probably wouldn't even be talking to his own son if Eli didn't call him every day. That's another thing. I used to think Joe was such a great dad. I can't believe he didn't put up more of a fight to keep Eli with him."

  "You don't know the whole story," Sydney muttered.

  "I know he hit you. That's enough for me. That makes him an asshole in my book."

  "Can we switch the subject, please?" she said, gazing down at the tabletop.

  Kyle was silent for a moment. He flipped the burgers again. "So nothing I've told you about this freaky Blair Witch apartment in Tudor Court has changed your mind," he said, finally. "You're still moving in anyway, aren't you, Syd?"

  She sighed. "I signed the lease this afternoon."

  Sydney didn't know what to expect their first few days and nights in the apartment. She wondered if she'd hear strange voices--faraway moaning, laughing, or crying. Maybe the walls would start bleeding or something. Perhaps the lights would flicker for no reason.

  If some kind of spirit resided there, it allowed her and Eli to move in their stuff without making its presence known. None of the new pieces from Macy's, Ikea, or Georgetown Furniture Liquidators suddenly toppled over in the night. Doors didn't open or shut by themselves. There was no unexplainable tapping from inside the walls.

  The only disturbances were from outside--the occasional late-night drunken swimmers, screaming and laughing on the beach. Sydney would crawl out of bed and glance out her window. Often the clandestine swimmers were naked or in their underwear though it was too far away for her to really see anything. No cheap thrills. Still, it made her heart ache for Joe when one night, she spied a young, amorous couple skinny-dipping in the moonlight.

  She also understood why Eli--who shared pretty much the same view of the beach she had--suddenly wanted binoculars for his birthday.

  They had been in the apartment a little over a week and had unpacked the last of the boxes when it happened. Sydney had just switched off her bedside light to go to sleep one Tuesday night. Down the hallway, Eli had already gone to bed. His door had been closed--and the light off--for at least an hour.

  "Mom?" His voice was muffled.

  She sat up, uncertain whether or not he was talking in his sleep.

  "Mom, is that you? Mom?" he repeated, louder and more panicked than before. Then there was a loud crash.

  Sydney switched on the light and jumped out of bed.

  "Oh, God, Mom!" he yelled. Dressed in his T-shirt and undershorts, Eli threw open his bedroom door. He almost tripped bolting out of there. "Were you just in my room, Mom?" he asked, catching his balance--and his breath. He braced himself against the corridor wall. "Were you just in there?"

  Bewildered, Sydney shook her head.

  "Someone came in there--like thirty seconds ago--"

  "Honey, it was probably just a dream--"

  "I wasn't asleep!" he insisted. "Somebody's in the house! He came in my room and sat down on the end of my bed. I felt it, Mom! He brushed against my foot. I felt the weight on my bed..."

  They searched the apartment, both upstairs and downstairs, including the closets. There was no sign of a break-in.

  Eli kept insisting that he'd been awake. He'd heard her using the bathroom about ten minutes before this person came in his room. He'd thought it had been her at first. He hadn't seen anything, because it had been too dark, but he'd felt someone hovering. Then the person had sat down on the end of his bed. In his panic, Eli had knocked over the Homer Simpson lamp on his night table while trying to turn on the light.

  Homer had survived the fall, but the bulb had gotten smashed. Eli slipped into his jeans and shoes and helped her clean up the glass. It took him another hour to settle down for bed again. But after that night, he wanted the hallway light on and kept his bedroom door open. The last time Eli had needed a light on so he could go to sleep, he'd been eight years old.

  Sydney didn't tell him the place had a vague history of weird occurrences. She didn't have to. He figured it out on his own a week later, after a second, similar late-night episode in his bedroom. He claimed he also heard voices this time--a soft, undecipherable muttering and a woman crying. Eli bought himself a night-light. Sydney thought about doing the same thing. She had her own night visitor. She didn't hear voices, but otherwise it was just as Eli had described it--an inexplicable sensation that someone was hovering over her as she lay in bed. It had happened enough times that Sydney tried to discern a pattern in the erratic visits. Was it a certain day of the week--or a particular time of night? Not really. Was the bedroom window open or closed that last time she'd been spooked out? She couldn't be sure. She became very superstitious, a slave to certain illogical bedtime rituals to ward off whatever was haunting her and Eli--until another unnerving night visit proved those rituals meaningless.

  She went online and researched how to deal with a ghost. Apparently in some haunted houses, a happy cohabitation of the living and the spirit residents was quite possible. The Web sites recommended acknowledging the ghost, talking to it, and asking it to leave--even shouting at it if necessary.

  "Okay, dude, I'm going to bed now," Eli had taken to announcing some nights--right after brushing his teeth. "I gotta have my sleep. You need to leave me the hell alone for the next eight hours." From her study downstairs, Sydney would hear him some nights going through his bedtime monologue. They tried to make jokes and shrug it off as a minor annoyance--just one of those things that came with living there.

  But it was still unnerving.

  The bathroom seemed to be the center of this paranormal activity. Sydney had a framed Georgia O'Keefe print on the bathroom wall. For no logical reason, it fell to the floor on three different occasions--the glass shattering twice. She finally put the print away and left the wall blank. Twice, water started gushing out of the bathtub faucet on its own--both times late at night. She'd had to crawl out of bed and switch off the valve under the sink. Eli called the occurrences
water raids.

  Sydney suspected her son might have exaggerated some of his own brushes with the supernatural, and maybe--out of boredom or resentment toward her--he'd been triggering the water raids himself.

  But one night last week, Sydney had felt that otherworldly presence while in the bathroom. Washing her face, she half-expected to catch a glimpse of something in the medicine chest mirror--a dark figure lurking behind her or a strange light. By the time she'd dried off her face and switched off the bathroom light, Sydney had managed to give herself a thorough case of the creeps. She was just down the hall, about to step into her bedroom, when she heard the water start in the tub. A chill raced through her. That made three times. She waited in the corridor and listened. The gushing only lasted a few moments, and then there was a steady drip. She crept back to the bathroom, and switched on the light. "Oh, God," she whispered. One of the towel racks was bare; the two bath towels that had been draped over it were strewn across the floor.

  The door to Eli's room had remained shut the entire time.

  Sydney often thought the woman who killed herself in this apartment years and years ago must have done it in this bathroom.

  Drying off her face, Sydney glanced down at the old, chipped powder blue and white tiled floor and wondered if the body had been discovered here, curled up by the toilet. She knew when people overdosed they sometimes died on or near the toilet. Or perhaps the woman had cut her wrists in the sink or in the bathtub.

  Was that why their night visitor kept coming back to this bathroom?

  A sudden, loud pounding on the door startled her.

  "Mom?"

  "What? What is it, honey?" she called back, a hand over her heart.

  "The phone light's blinking," Eli said. "You got a message. I checked caller ID. I thought it might be Dad, but it looks like someone in New York."

  "You have one new message," the computerized recording told her ten minutes later. Sydney had taken the cordless phone out of the kitchen and now sat at her office desk. Nearly all the wall space was taken up by shelves and cabinets full of books, files, and equipment. But there was a small space beneath her window that had framed family photos--and Joe was in some of them. There wasn't one of just him alone.

  Eli had the TV on in the living room. Sydney could hear him channel surfing with the remote control. She'd already checked the caller ID. Eli had been right; the call had been from New York. Someone from the network had phoned--probably about an assignment. She was supposed to be on a summer vacation, but that had never stopped them before.

  "Friday, July Fourth, ten-twelve P.M.," the recording continued. Then there was a beep tone. "Hi, Sydney, this is Judy Cavalliri in the news office. Sorry to call so late. I have some pretty awful news. I thought you should know, since we recently reran the story you did about that Portland couple, Leah Dvorak and Jared McGinty. It just came over the AP. They were killed tonight, shot in their apartment. It looks like a burglary gone from bad to worse. A bunch of their stuff was missing. A neighbor found both bodies in the bathroom. There's a chance we'll show part of your Movers & Shakers piece tomorrow on the network news. They might want a comment from you, too. Anyway, Sydney, I thought I'd give you a heads-up. I'm terribly sorry. They seemed like such a nice couple."

  Dazed, Sydney listened to the beep, then she slowly put down the phone.

  She'd gotten to know Leah and Jared pretty well when she did the story on them last Christmas. She and Leah had sent Christmas cards to each other and there had been a few e-mails back and forth in January, but they hadn't had any further correspondence. That was typical of her work. She became close to nearly all of her Movers & Shakers subjects while working on their segments. Then a week later, she was already involved in her next story and her next subject. She was in and out of these people's lives so quickly. Way too often, she didn't hear about any of them again--not until something awful happened.

  She just couldn't believe Leah and Jared were dead.

  Slumped in her desk chair, Sydney remembered something. She told herself there was no connection, and yet she still thought about that cryptic e-mail from a few days ago.

  "You can't save them," it had read.

  CHAPTER SIX

  "Hang on, Eli! Hang on!" she called to him.

  Four stories above her, Eli clung to the storm drain on Kyle's roof. Screaming, he helplessly dangled in the air. Kyle's town house was on fire. Flames shot out the windows of the top floor, licking at Eli's feet.

  "I'll catch you!" she called to her son. "I'll break your fall!"

  Eli's clothes started to catch on fire. His screams turned to agonizing shrieks. He let go of the gutter, and his body plummeted down toward her.

  Sydney suddenly sat up in bed.

  Her heart was racing. She started to reach for the light on her nightstand, but hesitated. Sometimes it was easier just to sit there in the dark and face her fear. She knew she was alone right now, no ghostly visitor. If she turned on the lights, then switched them off later, she'd just have to get used to the dark again.

  Sydney settled back down and rested her head on the pillow. She glanced at the digital clock at her bedside: 2:11. She heard some firecrackers popping in the distance. The Fourth of July celebration was still going on for some people.

  She rubbed her eyes. That dream had everything screwed around, of course. It wasn't Eli who had fallen from a burning building. It had been another boy.

  The incident had been a pivotal chapter in her bestselling autobiography from fourteen years ago. But the paperback original had been out of print for years. Not many people remembered it or the hokey TV movie based on the book. The people who only knew her as the pretty correspondent for On the Edge, the ones who asked if her slight limp was from a recent injury, those people didn't know Sydney was once an awkward, homely girl whose legs worked beautifully. In fact, they worked wonders.

  Ever since she was seven--with her Dorothy Hamill wedge-style haircut--Sydney had dreamed of skating in the Olympics someday. From the Jordan's home in Seattle's Queen Anne district, her mother drove Sydney to the Highland Ice Arena in Shoreline three times a week so she could practice. If Sydney did enough household chores, her mother rewarded her with an extra trip to the ice arena. Once she was old enough, Sydney took the bus there: a seventy-minute trek both ways with a transfer--six days a week.

  She had a long, awkward puberty: bad skin, frizzy hair, and braces. In family photos, Kyle was always the cute one, damn him. She was shy, and hopeless around guys. But on the ice, she felt beautiful and confident--for a while at least.

  Sydney's high school physical education teacher recommended a private coach for figure skating, and Mr. Jordan hired her. Donna Loftus coached several girls who competed nationally. Two of her former pupils had ended up on the U.S. Olympic teams--in 1984 and 1988. She was a thin, homely woman with rank body odor that reminded Sydney of bad vegetable soup. Sydney never saw her crack a smile. She practiced and practiced until her ankles were ready to snap. She felt lucky to be working with such an accomplished coach, but nothing she did seemed to please Ms. Loftus. Sydney finally asked her what she was doing wrong. Was it her spirals? Her landings?

  Leaning against a post at the rink's sideline, Ms. Loftus folded her arms and heaved a sigh. "I don't think you're right for figure skating," she frowned. "I probably shouldn't have taken this job. You've got a lot of talent, and you're not afraid of hard work. You're very graceful on the ice, but your looks are awkward. I don't mean to be cruel, but most people expect figure skaters to be pretty."

  Sydney was devastated. But she didn't give up. She was going to dazzle Ms. Loftus if it killed her. But before she had a chance to prove herself to her, Ms. Loftus quit. She told Mr. Jordan, "Sydney just doesn't have the right look for a figure skater. There's no nice way to put it. She's rather plain and awkward."

  Sydney's father was furious. "That woman--who looks and smells like the backside of a horse--she said you weren't pretty enough?" He immediately h
ired another coach, and Sydney worked even harder--just to prove Dog-Face Donna wrong.

  Her Olympic dream took over and dominated the whole family. Sydney's mother found temp work to help pay for Sydney's trainers. When he wasn't working overtime, her father worked closely with her trainers on weekends. They entered Sydney in local and statewide competitions. The family scheduled their lives around her practice sessions and those competitions.

  "You wanted to skate like Dorothy Hamill, and I wanted to skip down the yellow brick road like Dorothy Gale," Kyle once pointed out. "I mean, how many eleven-year-old boys save up their allowance to buy their own copy of Judy at Carnegie Hall? But Mom and Dad didn't even notice that I was different. They were too busy planning for your big Olympic moment. God, sometimes I thought I'd barf if I had to sit through one more dinner-table conversation exclusively devoted to the subject of you and your double axels."

  By the time Sydney was nineteen, people compared her to her idols, Dorothy Hamill and Peggy Fleming. She'd also turned into an attractive young woman, and not just on the ice. The braces came off, her complexion cleared up, and she had developed a toned, taut body. No one would ever call her awkward-looking again. She moved up from junior to senior level and shined in the U.S. Nationals. She didn't make the Olympic team for the 1992 games in Albertville, but she came in at thirteenth place and was written up in several newspapers and magazines.

  She graduated from the University of Minnesota, where she'd majored in broadcasting. Sydney's respect for good reporters came through whenever she was interviewed or profiled, and those reporters loved her. They predicted she'd come home from the 1994 Lillehammer Games with a medal.

  There was a lot of pressure on her. The dreams of that driven homely little kid with the Dorothy Hamill haircut had touched so many people--the reporters, her trainers, and her family. She started receiving fan letters and e-mail from total strangers. All these people had gotten caught up in her dream, too, and she didn't want to disappoint them. Sydney trained harder and harder. She kept thinking about how much her family had sacrificed and what she'd given up, too.