* 7

Next to the fireplace was a narrow flight of carpeted stairs leading up to two bedrooms and a small study. The banister and rail posts harkened back to the days of the artists and were fancifully carved; the newel post featured the bulbous head of a Viking chieftain.
Janice’s eyes lovingly moved across the treasured corners of her world and, as always, finally came to rest on the pièce de résistance – the one item that had plunged them recklessly ahead on the perilous course of buying the apartment; the ceiling.
Deeply panelled in variety of rare woods, varnished to a high lustre, the ceiling was a magnificent work of art. Two large paintings, wrought by the brush of a true master, had been set into the woodwork, dividing the ceiling into two parts. Janice discovered, after research, that the paintings were in the tradition of Fragonard, featuring woodland nymphs cavorting licentiously in cool, shaded glades. It was a stunning, breathtaking sight that literally startled new guests, and Bill and Janice loved playing it down, pretending to accept the ceiling as a matter of course, sometimes even expressing slight irritation at its gaudy vulgarity.
But alone, they would lie together on the hearth rug, holding hands and gazing spellbound at their ceiling museum, themselves stunned at the fantastic luck of having found and acquired such a treasure so soon after their marriage. They had rushed into buying the apartment just as they had rushed into marriage, impatient to get started on their lives together.
Devoted opera fans, Janice and Bill first met at a matinee of La Traviata in San Francisco. Both were in school at the time, Janice completing her senior year at Architectural University in Berkeley and Bill doing graduate work at San Francisco State. Each was pot lucking for a single that blustery Saturday afternoon,

6 *

enough room for two or three bedrooms upstairs.
With all the changes and departures from the artists’ original concepts, the one thing no tenant could ever alter was the inherent charm and grandeur of the building. Like the superb restaurant off the main lobby, the original atmosphere remained intact.

Janice’s first act upon entering the apartment was to double lock and bolt the door. After pouring Ivy’s Coke and sending her upstairs to do her homework, she poured herself a straight scotch. The man at the school had really rattled her. This was a new sensation for Janice. She realized that life was filled with pockets of danger, but thus far she had been spared.
She carried her scotch into the living room and sat in her favourite chair – an overstuffed antique rocker that had belonged to her grandmother. As she sipped the drink, her mind reformed the face, the expression in the man’s eyes as he stood looking down at Ivy. There was nothing sexual in his look, or depraved; it was more a look that spoke of great loss – sad, hopeless, desperate. That was it, desperate.
Janice shivered visibly and took a large swallow of scotch. She could feel the spreading, soothing, warming sensation of the alcohol throughout her body as she rose and walked to the window. Her eyes ferreted among the antlike figures scurrying about on the sidewalks far below. Might he be down there? Watching? Waiting? She would tell Bill about it as soon as he came home.
Sipping the last of her scotch, Janice turned from the window and gazed at the long length of the living room in the soft, waning light of the autumn afternoon. The thirty-eight-foot expanse of dark-stained pegged floor led the eye to a huge stuccoed walk-in fireplace, a practical, wood-burning, marshmallow-toasting fireplace that warmed their souls on cold winter evenings.

* 5

What if she had given in to Ivy’s persistent requests and had allowed her to walk home alone like Bettina Carew and some of the others in her class?
“Why’ve we stopped, Mommy?”
Janice took a deep breath to regain control of herself, smiled wanly, and together, they crossed the street and entered the old building, Des Artistes.
The Fortress, Bill called it.

Built at the turn of the century at the whim of a group of painters and sculptors who purchased the land, hired an architectural firm, approved of the plans, and arranged for the mortgage, each level of the twenty-story building contained six master apartments of various sizes, featuring huge, high-ceilinged studios with galleries facing large floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a diversified selection of city views. A number of these windows admitted the northern light, a must for the painters. The décor of the apartment was lavish, imaginative, and fulfilled the esthetical and emotional needs of their owners. Some studios took on a baroque character, displaying vaulted ceilings replete with inset pediments and slavering gargoyles. Others went a more frivolous rococo route, featuring painted ceilings with rich, gilded mouldings. A few apartments followed a sombre Tudor pattern and were intricately panelled in darkly stained veneers.
A magnificent restaurant in the lobby of the building amply satisfied the artists’ appetites and even delivered exquisitely prepared dinners to each apartment via a network of dumbwaiters scattered throughout the building. During the Depression, Des Artistes was sold to a cooperative association, and the new people who purchased apartments began to remodel them. The space in midair was valuable to them and was quickly subdivided, providing a large living room downstairs and

4 *

The school bell rang.
The parade of children tumbling through the doors was, each day, a bittersweet experience for Janice. It made her realize how quickly time sped by, how eventually the child of yesterday would become the adolescent of tomorrow.
Petite, lithe, innocently beautiful, ten-year-old Ivy Templeton possessed the delicacy of a porcelain doll. Like a doll, she too was fragile, with a small face and tiny nose and mouth. Her long shiny hair, was blonde, a biological gift from her mother.
Janice never ceased to marvel over the beauty of her daughter and never ceased to wonder about the genetic miracle that had formed her.
“Can I get a Coke?”
“I’ve got Cokes in the refrigerator,” Janice said, pulling Ivy’s plaid coat tighter around her neck.
Hand in hand, they started their walk up Central Park West when Janice stopped, remembering the man. Glancing over her shoulder to see which child’s hand might be linked to his, she froze. The man was standing immediately behind them, close enough to feel the plumes of his breath, and in his eyes a manic glint of desperate need – of inexpressible longing – directed exclusively at Ivy. At Ivy!
“Excuse me,” Janice gasped inanely and in shock, her heart pounding as she clutched Ivy’s arm and hurried up Central Park West toward Des Artistes, five blocks away, without once looking back to see if the man was following them.
“Who was he, Mommy?”
“I don’t know,” Janice panted.
The thought of what might have happened had she not been there to meet Ivy brought Janice to a sudden stop at the corner of their street.

PART ONE

1

He was there again, standing among the glut of waiting mothers who arrived each day at ten to three and milled about in their separate worlds, waiting for their children to be released from school.
Until today he was merely a presence to Janice Templeton, just another parent standing in the cold, outside the Ethical Culture School, waiting for his sprite to emerge. Today, however, Janice found herself noticing him - a lone male in a sea of females- and wondering why it was always he who showed up, and not his wife.
He was standing now with his back half turned to her, gazing expectantly up at the big doors of the school building. Somewhere in his early forties, Janice guessed, and not at all bad-looking. He wore a thick moustache and carefully trimmed sideburns and had the lean, hard body of an athlete.
She wondered who his child might be and made a mental note to find out.

Pittsburgh Post Gazette, September 4, 1964 (Page 6)

TWO-VEHICLE
CRASH KILLS 2,
INJURES 2

Harrisburg, PA (UP) - A wo-
man and her young daughter
were killed and 2 persons were
alightly injured after their cars
collided with each other on the
Penna. Turnpike during a sud-
den hail storm.
Police have withheld the
identities of the dead woman
and child pending notification
of relatives.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Daniel A. Lipsig provided thought and counsel. Dr. Donald Schwartz graciously gave of time, information, and guidance. Dr. Jay L. Dickerson, Professor Irwin R. Blacker, Father Joseph Casper, Ivy Jones, Jeanne Farrens, and Willard M. Reisz contributed instruction and encouragement. William Targ, my editor, make it all possible.