Your Heart Belongs to Me

desk.
    Having gone directly to the shelves on entering the room, he had not noticed the familiar book on the desk. A copy of Samantha’s novel lay facedown.
    Staring at Sam’s jacket photo, Ryan settled in the office chair. He hesitated to inspect the book.
    When finally he picked it up, he turned to the half-title page, then to the full-title. He was relieved to find no inscription from the author, no signature.
    Paging through, he discovered notations in the margins, petty criticisms, some of them vulgar enough to sicken him. He read only a few before closing the book in disgust.
    Understandably, Spencer Barghest would have been interested enough in the novel to buy a copy. He’d been in a relationship with Sam’s mother for at least six years. And he had in some way assisted her twin sister, Teresa, out of this world, which was either a noble act of compassion or cold-blooded murder, depending on your point of view.
    The point of view that mattered most was Teresa’s, but given the shortage of reliable mediums these days, the authorities were not likely to obtain a deposition from her.
    Putting the book aside, Ryan turned next to the first ring binder. Sixteen months earlier, none of these faces in this album had meant anything to him. He was curious to see if that would be the case again or if he might have overlooked something the first time.
    Perhaps his personal journey over the past year had sharpened his sensitivity to suffering, because these faces affected him more profoundly than before. They remained death portraits, but on this second viewing, he was more poignantly aware that they were people, even in death each of their faces alive with character.
    If he had missed anything important the first time through the binder, he missed it again—and did not have the courage to review it a third time.
    The second album was the one from which he had extracted the photo of Teresa that had obsessed him. He had sat here, mesmerized by the reflections in her eyes—until Cathy Sienna had stepped in from the hall to say the house was giving her the creeps.
    Ryan had agreed and, assuming that the discovery of Teresa’s death portrait was the lodestone that had drawn him here, he had closed the ring binder and returned it to the shelf.
    Now he found the third plastic sleeve still empty. Perhaps Barghest had not discovered that Teresa’s photo was missing.
    Twelve sleeves farther into the album, he came across someone he knew. He closed his eyes in disbelief.
    If it belonged in this sick collection at all, surely this face should be in the third ring binder, the new one, among the portraits of the people to whom Barghest had evidently ministered since Ryan’s previous visit. Impossible that it belonged with the faces of those who had been unfortunate enough to come under his care years ago.
    Heart knocking harder than it had when Lily’s sister had cut him in the parking lot, Ryan opened his eyes and found that he had not mistakenly identified the woman in the photograph.
    I’m here. I’m watchin’ over you. You’ll be just fine.
    The smooth dark skin.
    Don’t hold your breath, honey.
    The emerald-green eyes.
    You hear him, don’t you, child?
    Twelve sleeves after Teresa, who had been dead six years, was Ismay Clemm, one of the two cardiology nurses who had assisted Dr. Gupta with the myocardial biopsy.
     

 
    FORTY-FIVE

    T he rising wind choked and wheezed in the eaves, as if words were caught in its throat, and in frustration thrashed the branches of the melaleucas beyond the study window.
    Sixteen months ago, sitting in this room, Ryan had been certain he stood at the threshold of a discovery that would strip bare the lurid details of the conspiracy against him. Now the same conviction gripped him.
    The first time around, upon finding Teresa’s photo, he thought he had before him the essential piece of the puzzle. Already half obsessed with the perfection of Samantha’s face, he was at once riveted by its perfect duplicate. Seeing the six-year-old death portrait mere hours after having risen from the bed of a lover whose countenance, as she slept, matched the dead face detail for detail, Ryan had been struck by an intense awareness of the eternal presence of death in life that at first disoriented him and then led him to focus on Teresa as the hub from which all the recent weirdness had radiated.
    Teresa Reach, however, could neither complete the puzzle nor even contribute to its solution. She