Your Heart Belongs to Me

Dr. Gupta seemed unnaturally calm, every movement efficient, every gesture economical. His resting pulse was probably a measured fifty beats per minute. Ryan envied the physician’s serenity and his health.

“Please be at the hospital admissions desk at six o’clock tomorrow morning,” the cardiologist said. “Do not eat or drink anything after midnight.”

Ryan said, “I don’t like sedation, the loss of control.”

“You’ll be given a mild sedative to relax you, but you’ll remain awake to follow instructions during the procedure.”

“The risks … ”

“Are as I explained. But none of my biopsies has ever involved … complications.”

Ryan was surprised to hear himself say, “I trust your skill, Dr. Gupta, but I’m still afraid.”

In business, Ryan had never expressed uncertainty, let alone fear. He allowed no one to see any weakness in him.

“From the day we’re born, Ryan, we should all be afraid, but not of dying.”

In the plush backseat of the Mercedes S600, on the way home, Ryan realized that he did not understand the cardiologist’s last comment.

From the day we’re born, Ryan, we should all be afraid, but notof dying.

In the office, in the moment, the words had seemed wise and appropriate. But Ryan’s fear and his desire to quell it had led him to hear that statement as a reassurance, when in fact it was not.

Now the physician’s words seemed mysterious, even cryptic, and disturbing.

Behind the wheel of the sedan, Lee Ting glanced repeatedly at the rearview mirror. Ryan pretended not to notice his houseman’s concern.

Lee could not know which of the many physicians Ryan had visited in Dr. Gupta’s building, and he remained too discreet to ask. Yet he was an acutely perceptive man who sensed his employer’s solemnity.

In the west, the phoenix palms and the rooftops were gilded with sunlight. The attenuated shadows of those trees and buildings, of lampposts and pedestrians, reached eastward, as if the entire coast yearned for nightfall.

On those rare occasions when Lee previously served as chauffeur, he had driven sedately, as if he were decades older than his years and part of some royal procession. This time, he exceeded speed limits with the rest of the traffic and crossed intersections on the yellow light.

He seemed to know that his employer needed the comfort of home, refuge.

SEVEN (#udf5c8c93-8926-536c-8eee-32450ad6ade1)

En route from Dr. Gupta’s office, Ryan called Kay Ting and placed an order for dinner that would require her to go to his favorite restaurant to get takeout.

Later, using the elevator, the Tings brought a dining-service cart to the third-floor sitting room that was part of the master suite. They put up the leaves to expand the cart into a table and smoothed out the white tablecloth.

Presented for Ryan’s pleasure were three dishes of homemade ice cream—dark chocolate, black cherry, and limoncello—each nestled in a larger bowl of cracked ice. There were also servings of flourless chocolate cake, a lemon tart, a peanut-butter tart, strawberries in sour cream with a pot of brown sugar, a selection of exotic cookies, and bottles of root beer in an ice bucket.

Because Ryan allowed himself dessert only once or twice a week, the Tings were curious about this uncharacteristic indulgence.

He pretended to be celebrating the conclusion of a particularly rewarding business deal, but he knew they did not believe him. The arrayed sweets suggested the last meal of a condemned man who, though thirty-four, had never finished growing up.

Eating alone, sitting at the wheeled table, Ryan sampled a series of old movies on the big-screen plasma TV. He sought comedies, but none of them struck him as funny.

Calories no longer mattered, or cholesterol, and at first this indulgence without guilt was so novel that he enjoyed himself. Soon, however, the adolescent smorgasbord grew cloying, too rich.

To thumb his nose at Death, he ate more than he wanted. The root beer began to seem like syrup.

He wheeled the cart out of the master suite, left it in the hall, and used the intercom to tell Kay that he had finished.

Earlier, the Tings turned down the bed and plumped the pillows.

When Ryan put on pajamas and slipped between the sheets, insomnia tormented him. If fear of death had not kept him awake, the tides of sugar in his blood would have made him restless.

Barefoot, hoping to walk off his anxiety, he went roaming through the house.

Beyond the large windows lay the luminous panorama of Orange County’s many cities on the vast flats below. The ambient glow was sufficient to allow him to navigate the house without switching on a lamp.

Shortly before midnight, lights in a back hall led him to the large butler’s pantry, where china and glassware were stored in mahogany cabinets. He heard voices in the adjacent kitchen.

Although additional members of the household staff were at work during the day, the Tings were the only live-ins. Yet Ryan could not at once identify the speakers as Lee and Kay, because they conversed quietly, almost whispering.

Usually, the Tings would be in bed at this hour. Their workday began at eight o’clock in the morning.

Although throughout his life Ryan had not once been troubled by superstition, he was now overcome by a sense of the uncanny. He felt suddenly that his house hid secrets, that within these rooms were realms unknown, and that for his well-being, he must learn all that was being concealed from him.

Putting his left ear to the crack between the jamb and the swinging door, he strained to hear what was being said.

The spacious kitchen had been designed to function for caterers when large parties required the preparation of elaborate buffets. The low voices softly reverberated off the extensive granite countertops and off the many stainless-steel appliances.

Risking discovery, he eased the door open an inch. The voices did not become recognizable, nor did the murmurs and whispers resolve from sibilant sounds into words.

Ryan did, however, additionally hear the quiet clink and ping of dishes, which seemed curious. Lee and Kay would have washed the dinnerware hours ago, and if they had wanted a late snack, they would have prepared it in the kitchenette that was part of their private suite.

He heard also a peculiar grinding noise, soft and rhythmic. This was not an everyday sound, but vaguely familiar and—for reasons he could not define—sinister.

Gradually his eavesdropping began to seem foolish. The only thing sinister in his house was his imagination, which had been dizzied and led into dark byways by the specter of his mortality.

Nevertheless, when he thought to press the swinging door inward and learn the identity of those in the kitchen, fear swelled in him. His heart abruptly clopped as hard as hooves on stone, and so fast that all Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse might have been approaching.

He eased the door shut, backed away from it.

With his right hand over his heart and his left hand against a cabinet to steady himself, he waited for another seizure to sweep his legs out from under him and leave him helpless on the floor.

The butler’s pantry went dark around him.

Ryan might have thought he’d gone blind, except for the lights in the hallway, beyond the open door by which he had entered.

Past the closed swinging door, lights had been extinguished in the kitchen. A wall switch in that room also controlled the pantry.

Now the hallway fell into darkness.

The windowless pantry could not have been blacker if it had been a padded silk-lined clamshell of mortuary bronze.