Free Horoscope: The Astrology Murders by Georgia Frontiere

keeping her in her home, more a prisoner there than her grandmother in her wheelchair had been. She wished she didn’t feel so ashamed of her condition, but she did, and even knowing that hiding it only contributed to her loneliness, she felt unable to do anything else. She couldn’t talk about it with Emma or Sarah; now she’d avoided the opportunity to talk about it with Michelle and Mark.
    She walked up to the second floor. When she reached the landing, she stopped and looked toward Jeff’s and Julie’s bedrooms. Their doors were open, but the rooms inside were dark, emphasizing her children’s absence. The time they had all lived in the brownstone together had gone by so quickly. While it was happening, it seemed as if they would be children forever, but now they had embarked on their own lives and, except for school vacations, they might never live in the house with her again. She was still their mother, of course, but their relationship would change. It had already changed. They loved her, and she loved them, but they didn’t need her on a daily basis as they once had. They were becoming independent. She was pleased about that; it was part of what every parent wanted for her children. But she hadn’t realized until Julie had left for college how dependent she had become on at least one of them being there and needing her.
    She went into Julie’s bedroom and flipped the light switchbeside the door. The room was all Julie. Julie had picked out the peach paint for the walls, the oak bedroom set that she had spotted in an antique store in upstate New York the summer that she turned fourteen, and the white lace curtains. Her dresser held the trophies she’d won on Dalton’s swimming team. Kelly’s eyes went to the teddy bear that had fallen off the bed onto the blue and peach hook rug. She picked it up and placed it where it belonged, sitting against the pillows on the bed. Kelly had given the chubby brown bear to Julie after her first frightening trip to the dentist to have a cavity filled. Julie had hugged the bear, and it had made her stop crying.
    Kelly left Julie’s room and walked toward Jeff’s. His bedroom was at the front of the brownstone, with windows looking out onto 85th Street, and the street lamp threw a large swath of light across the room. This had been Kelly’s bedroom when she was a child, and when she’d moved back to the brownstone after her divorce, it had become her bedroom again. Jeff and Julie had been babies, and they’d shared the room that eventually became Julie’s. The bedroom Kelly had now, one floor above, had been her grandmother’s, and Kelly hadn’t moved into it until a year after her grandmother had died. Jeff’s windows looked out on the same trees that Kelly saw from her bedroom, but instead of just seeing the treetops, Jeff saw the trees’ strong trunks and their graceful leaf-covered branches, which would soon be bare. Kelly remembered seeing the same view so many nights and days and mornings when she was younger.
    She stood at the window and thought about the seasons, the seasons of the year and the seasons of life. This was her work as an astrologer—to see clearly the relationships between the seasons as expressed in the movements of the planets and the lives that were affected by these inevitable movements. She lookedat Jeff’s varsity football letter that he’d pinned to his bulletin board and the other souvenirs he’d collected: a trophy he’d won for being the football team’s most outstanding player, an award that had made his father especially proud; a ceramic ashtray he’d made in eighth grade; a picture of the view from his window that he’d drawn with a pen and India ink; photos from his high school prom. Now he and Julie were in a new season of their lives.
    She walked out of Jeff’s room to the staircase and up to the door that led to the third-floor landing. Even before she reached it, she heard King running up the stairs to join her. As