Your Heart Belongs to Me

the corner, we can walk from here.”
    Their jackets were not heavy enough for the weather, but the air remained still, with no wind-chill factor. Hands in their pockets, they walked first into the park.
    The aspens had shed their leaves for winter. The smooth bare limbs described pale geometries against the night sky.
    A recent snow, not yet despoiled by children’s boots, mantled the grass, and the brick walkways wound like channels of dark water through the whiteness.
    “I was here once,” he told Cathy, “sixteen months ago.”
    She walked with him and waited.
    “That time, I had the most powerful experience of deja vu. The air was as still then as now, but the aspens were whispering, as they always do when they’re leafed out. And I thought how much I’d always loved that sound—and then realized I’d never heard it before.”
    A lamppost spilled light upon an iron bench. Icicles depended from the front skirt of the bench, and ice glazed the bricks directly under them.
    “Sitting on this bench, I became convinced I’d sat here many times in the past, in all seasons and kinds of weather. And I felt the most powerful nostalgic sense of…of love for this place. Strange, don’t you think?”
    Again surprising him, she said, “Not really.”
    Ryan looked at her. Aware of his stare, she did not return it.
    “Are you experiencing any of that now?” she asked, gazing up into the aspen architecture.
    Shivering, Ryan surveyed the park. “No. It’s just a place this time.”
    They walked to the front steps of St. Gemma’s Church, where a bronze lamp in the shape of a bell brightened the oak doors.
    “I knew what the church would look like before I went inside. And when I went in…I felt I’d returned to a much-loved place.”
    “Should we pay a visit?”
    Although he knew he could not have been located and followed to Colorado so quickly, Ryan imagined that if he went into the church, he would find waiting for him the woman with the lilies and the knife, this time without the lilies.
    “No,” he said. “It won’t feel special now. It’ll be like the park—just a place.”
    His ear lobes began to sting with cold, his eyes watered, and the icy air had a faint ammonia scent that burned in his nostrils.
    On the opposite side of the church from the aspen grove lay an expansive cemetery. No fence encircled it, and lampposts flanked a central walk.
    “I didn’t see this before,” he said. “I didn’t come this far. When I left the church, I was so…spooked, I guess, I just wanted to get back to the hotel. I thought I’d been poisoned.”
    This statement seemed to strike Cathy Sienna as more peculiar than anything else that he had revealed. As they walked past the cemetery toward the corner, she was first silent, but then said, “Poisoned?”
    “Poisoned or drugged with hallucinogenics. It’s a long story.”
    “No matter how long it is, seems to me poisoned-and-drugged is a bigger leap than some other explanation.”
    “What other explanation?”
    She shrugged. “Whatever other explanation you didn’t want to consider.”
    Her answer disturbed Ryan, and suddenly so did the graveyard.
    “I’ll bet she’s buried here,” he said.
    “You mean Ismay Clemm?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You want to look for her?”
    Grimacing at the gravestones in the snow, Ryan said, “No. Not in the dark.”
    On the first block of the next cross street, houses stood on only one side, facing the cemetery.
    The sixth house, a Victorian place with elaborate cornices and window-surround moldings, belonged to Ismena Moon. The porch light welcomed them.
    Lace curtains on the mullioned windows and a brass door knocker in the form of a wreathed cherub holding a diadem in both hands suggested the interior style.
    A slim handsome woman in her mid-sixties answered the door. She had white hair, a light café-au-lait complexion, and large clear brown eyes. Her sensible black dress shoes with block heels, blue rayon dress with high round neckline and narrow white collar, white cuffs, and gathered sleeves suggested she had recently returned from vespers or another service.
    “Good evening, ma’am. I’m Ryan Perry, and this is my associate, Cathy Sienna. We have an appointment to see Ismena Moon.”
    “That would be me,” the woman said. “So pleased to meet you. Come in, come in, you’re dressed to catch pneumonia in this weather.”
    Ismena and Ismay were not identical twins, or twins of any