* * *
“What happened?” Kathleen said with alarm when she answered Emily’s knock at her front door. Emily knew she must look shaken. Kathleen didn’t look much better.
“I don’t know. I swear to god, Kathleen, I felt as if I was being followed. From the subway. I know it sounds farfetched …”
Kathleen brought her inside and locked the door.
Emily looked around. “Oh my god, what happened here?”
The place was ransacked. Papers were strewn around, drawers still open, furniture askew.
“The police searched it,” Kathleen replied. “They thought I might have booked the date for Sharon the night she was killed. The date with the killer.”
“Get out of here. That’s ridiculous.” Emily pushed a love seat back to its old place, perpendicular to the sofa. She unfolded an area rug, struggling to pull it to its spot in the center of the floor in front of the couch.
“You don’t have to do that. I’m going to hire someone to come in and help me.”
“Don’t be silly.” Emily began picking up books from the floor to reshelve. “Could it have been the police, following me? Would they think I’m involved in some weird way too?”
“I don’t think so. You work at City Hall, for god’s sake.” Kathleen put a hand on her arm as Emily bent to pick up a second pile of books. Emily straightened up to look back at her. “Who did you tell about seeing Sharon?” Kathleen asked.
Emily frowned. “Everyone at work knows. And all my friends.” Seeing the look in Kathleen’s eyes, Emily put up her palm. “The friends I talk to, not Facebook and Instagram friends.”
Kathleen raised her eyebrows, saying dryly, “That’s something, at least.”
“I didn’t think it was a big deal to tell my friends. I mean, I don’t know anyone who would know anyone that could be involved. Should we call the detectives about someone maybe following me?”
“We don’t have anything to tell them. It could have been nothing. And I don’t think they’re on our side, at least not mine or Sharon’s.”
CHAPTER
31
Before
AT THE APPOINTED time, Jackson approached a brownstone in Greenwich Village. He had spent hours drafting an email to the man in a decades-old New York Times wedding announcement that his distant cousin had sent him. Jackson’s spitting image had stared back at him. Same eyes, same jaw, same chin. His doppelgänger. And the man was not only rich, he was important. The patriarch of twenty-eight heirs to a family fortune of over fifty billion dollars.
Within a day, Jackson had received a response to his email: a call from a lawyer. “My client will meet you at 436 West Tenth Street. Tomorrow.”
The lawyer hadn’t said directly that the groom in the photo was Jackson’s father, but Jackson had fought not to hyperventilate.
“The matter requires discretion. You’re a young man. Can you handle that? Keep it quiet?”
“Of course I can,” Jackson said, trying not to take offense.
During the call, Jackson had kept his voice calm, asking no questions. He’d seen a viral video once of a guy who misread a lotto ticket. The dude had a damn fit of joy about it for a full minute, screaming and rolling on the floor, thinking he’d won a million dollars, before he realized he’d misread the number. Jackson had no intention of humiliating himself like that. But still, after he hung up, he’d literally jumped for joy. Everything he’d dreamed of was coming true. Pay-fucking-dirt.
A door at street level led to a garden apartment. It was unlocked, as promised. Jackson walked in and looked around; no one there yet. There was no clutter like in the homes of his family in Beacon and upstate, which were filled with decades of junk. He didn’t think anyone lived here, at least not full-time. He sat on a couch and put his feet on the coffee table, trying to get comfortable.
Jackson had dressed nicely, new Old Navy jeans and a clean indigo-blue T-shirt. He had found his father. He hoped there would be a night out on the town for the two of them. Fancy places Jackson’s parents couldn’t afford or even imagine. It was almost too much to believe that, after nineteen years of feeling like he’d been parachuted into a family where he didn’t belong, he’d solved the Rubik’s Cube that was his life.
The man who was meeting him was a hotshot, obviously skilled at meeting people surreptitiously at places like this—including women, Jackson guessed. Jackson figured the dude had given him up for adoption when he got a woman pregnant. It wasn’t excusable, but based on Jackson’s research, his dad had already had other kids to worry about back then. The shit would have hit the fan if the wife found out about him. Jackson posed the question to himself: what would he have done if he were in his father’s shoes? He smirked, thinking of it. Give the kid up, no doubt. He totally got it. The past was past. Now was what counted.
A knock sounded at the front door, the way doctors warned you they were coming into an examining room. A man entered the room, and Jackson stood. The man’s eyes took Jackson in as Jackson did the same, both noting each other’s resemblance as if looking into a funhouse mirror.
Jackson’s father put out his hand to shake. Jackson felt the smooth, soft skin, so unlike that of the men Jackson knew. He felt a deep discomfort, not knowing what to do with his body after they shook. He wanted to hug the stranger, but his father’s grip made clear that their hands would be the only contact.
“Well, it’s good to meet you, son,” his father said.
“It’s good to meet you too.”
“Was your trip okay?”
“Yeah. Yes”—he corrected his working-class speech—“it was fine.”
“I wanted you to be raised without any knowledge of me, but I see that hasn’t worked out.”
“I understand, sir. But it was unnatural.”
“Naturally,” his father replied with a wry smile.
“Leaving me with strangers who were nothing like me … I couldn’t help but wonder. Not that they told me. They denied everything.” Jackson surprised himself by protecting his parents from unknown consequences. He felt uncertain, not knowing the rules of engagement with this man.
“You do understand that I have a wife and family who don’t know about you? There are many other considerations at stake.”
“I could meet my brother and sister.” Jackson’s tone took on a disconcerting whine. The way his father was speaking, Jackson could see the rejection coming like a tsunami against a gray sky. “You are my father.”
“Not legally, no. And there’s no basis for you having that issue tested and proved. You’re an adult and the legal child of your parents, the Mattinglys. There will be no paternity test, just your suppositions.”
“I wasn’t stolen, then.”
The man chuckled, his expression darkening. “Of course not. People don’t steal from me.”
Was that a warning? As if Jackson, his own son, was some sort of gold digger?
Jackson found himself pacing, feeling reduced by the look in the dude’s eyes. His deeply buried feeling that he was an alien being, an abomination belonging nowhere, nearly bubbled to the surface, stomped down only by his razor-sharp rage. “What the fuck? You don’t even want to know me? You’d deny your own blood?”
“I have already denied you. For nineteen years.”
Jackson recognized the meanness in the man’s facial expression. Jackson had used that same disdainful expression himself with the weak: nerds, girls, stray dogs. He’d never seen that look in anyone before, the depth and poison to it. Directed at him. Jackson seethed. This motherfucker has no idea who he’s fucking with.
His father went on. “You understand you have no legal claim to my money or estate. You are the legal son of the Mattinglys, and our connection, assuming a connection, is an illusion. All my money will go to my wife and children. You may not understand the legal basis, but I have a will, and you can’t make a successful claim. I have no obligation to you whatsoever.”
Jackson’s eyes burned. “You fucker.”
“I gave you a life where you would be properly cared for.” The man must have seen the killer look in Jackson’s eyes, because he talked more softly, ingratiatingly. Jackson knew it was bullshit. “I’d like to claim you, but I can’t. What I will do for you, though, is help you. Once. Now.”
All righty then, here comes the con job. Jackson listened.
“Do you know what Bitcoin is?”
“Of course.”
His father opened a small leather portfolio he’d brought with him, pulled documents out, and placed them on the coffee table. “I’m going to give you the account number for a Bitcoin wallet with two hundred thousand dollars in it. Please spend it slowly. This is a one-time deal. I have a document for you to sign. It’s called a nondisclosure agreement.”
“I know what they are,” Jackson said bitterly. “Everybody knows what they are.”
“If you talk about me or your theory about our relationship, or contact anyone else in my family, you will owe ten million dollars in penalties for each violation. If you don’t have that much money, my attorneys will make sure you lose everything I’ve paid you, anything you’ve bought, and will even garnish your wages if you so much as utter a word about me. So spend the Bitcoin wisely. I don’t want to hear anything more about your paternity theories, or anything from you, again, at all, ever. This is the last time we’ll speak.”
The man pulled out a pen and turned the agreement toward Jackson for him to sign.
Jackson sat on the edge of the couch and pulled it toward himself. “What about my mother? I want to meet my mother.”
“She has no interest in you, and if you met her, you’d have no interest in her. There’s no more to be said on that point.”
“I’d like to be the judge of that.”
The man looked hard at Jackson. There was a glint in his eyes. He was enjoying himself. “Impossible.”
Jackson took the pen, assessing the man who, unbeknownst to him, had landed firmly in enemy territory. Payback would be a bitch. Jackson didn’t know how, but he would get his father back. If needed, he’d use every penny of the guy’s own money to do that, to destroy him—it would be worth it. The thought of retribution was the only thing that soothed the burning in his gut and throat. He looked up after signing the agreement that would give him more money than he’d ever seen, feeling no joy in it.
He stared at his father’s eyes, identical to his own, not only in their blue color but in their ruthlessness. “You’re just like me, aren’t you?”
His father offered a bare flicker of acknowledgment, turned, and left.
PART III
CHAPTER
32
ALONE IN HER kitchen after a quiet Sunday with Skye at the playground, Emily eyed a neon video game tournament on a propped-up iPad. She hardly played anymore but still enjoyed watching a good game of Fortnite. A pearl-white fish fillet sizzled in a frying pan on an old-fashioned four-burner stove. The olive oil crackled, the scent of browning garlic cloves giving her hunger pangs. She wore a pair of drawstring shorts and a frayed, faded tank top.
A pasta pot gave off warm steam in contretemps to the cooling air coming from a window AC unit. Emily picked at a bowl of loose spinach she’d rinsed, chewing a leaf as she dumped the rest in the frying pan, planning to keep it on the flame only long enough to soften it. Thankfully, Skye still ate spinach. Skye’s “terrible twos” had brought along daily rejections of foods she used to eat. Skye had opinions now. Endless opinions.
Smoke.
The instant Emily thought it, the smoke alarm over the kitchen doorway blared, painfully loud.
“Damn.” She looked at the frying pan, annoyed that the smoke detector was going off for such a miniscule amount of smoke. But it wasn’t the fish.
She breathed acrid air now: wood, plaster … metal burning?
Her chest constricting, Emily heard fire rushing up the stairs like a train outside her apartment.
Skye. Where’s Skye?
Her daughter’s paper and crayons lay on the kitchen table. She’d said she was going to the living room to get pencils.
Time seemed to crawl. Between alarm wails, Emily heard crashing and popping outside her apartment. She thought she heard a scream through the walls, but it was hard to tell over the alarm.
Emily ran. “Skye!”
In the living room, she grabbed her daughter, who’d come running, crying, startled by the alarm. Skye clutched her neck.
Stay calm, Emily told herself. You’ve rehearsed this in your mind.
In the first few years after her father’s death, Emily had often found herself imagining him waking up in his burning hotel room and escaping. Staying low, under the toxic cloud, running for his life. Emily did that now, running through the living room with Skye tight in her arms.
Gray smoke roiled at the ceiling, moving into Emily’s apartment. The smoke was thicker in the living room than the kitchen, but the apartment door and fire escape were both that way. Smoke flowed through the frame of the front door and under it. No need to feel the door for heat. A sound, nearly an explosion, crashed beyond the door. Emily yelped and jumped at the sound. The staircase had collapsed.
Skye began shrieking.
“Mommy’s here, it’s okay,” Emily told her. Skye’s fingers clawed into her neck.
Emily could hear a distant yelling from the street, the booming bass voice of a man below, warning people: “Fire, fire, fire.”
Her heart rippling with fear, Emily ran toward the window. She could feel the smoke scratching her throat with each breath. Skye began coughing. Emily felt a terror for her baby beyond anything she’d ever experienced.
She reached the gated window at the far end of the living room. The apartment lights went out. Blackness. Blindness.
Her eyes adjusted. She could see shadow. The lights from neighboring buildings provided wavering illumination through the window. Skye was coughing, crying, Emily’s neck wet with her tears.
Black smoke outside the window streamed upward beyond the glass. There was an orange glow outside, coming from below. The front door was burning, impassable. They might not be able to escape through the window, not if the smoke and fire were coming from somewhere below, out there. The living room was getting hotter. Emily imagined the apartment below as a furnace heating her floor. Her apartment was a death trap. The window was her only choice.
Emily held tight to Skye, balanced on a hip. She reached with one hand inside the window gate’s metal casing and grappled with the latch, crouching as much as she could below the lowering smoke. She and Skye were coughing, sweating, the room stifling, pressured with heat.
Skye’s crying was a steady drumbeat as Emily tugged manically on the gate. “Goddammit, open!”
It creaked and, finally, opened, thank god.
She pulled upward at the window. Nothing. It didn’t budge. Jesus. She felt for the window lock above the bottom window frame. It was highlighted by a strobe light of smoke that obliterated the streetlight with each breeze. She flipped the latch.
Emily’s back bunched with tension before she tried the window again, afraid new oxygen flowing into her apartment might feed the flames beyond the apartment door. The fire could explode toward them when she opened the window. Ready to launch herself and Skye out, Emily pulled upward on the window with all the strength of her free hand. A gust of fresh air rushed in.
She climbed quickly onto the metal fire escape, feeling steam coming off her body. She took a breath of air just as flames shot upward from the apartment below. Inches from her feet. She screamed to the people gathered below, “Help us, please!”
A gust of wind blew the flames and smoke away from Emily’s feet. Skye had gone quiet, dead weight, maybe unconscious. Emily looked down. Skye’s eyes were open. She could feel Skye’s breath on her neck. She was like a trapped animal hoping for invisibility.
People were shouting from the street. The same booming male voice she’d heard before shouted, “Go up, go up!”
>
The fire was burning the building from the bottom up. Emily scampered up the metal stairs, her heart galloping. Kathleen would be on the fourth floor, two flights up.
Emily peered through the glass of Kathleen’s darkened window just as a frightened face emerged from the darkness on the other side of the glass. Startled, Emily’s head jolted back. Kathleen was grappling with the window lock as Emily had just done. Smoke streamed out when Kathleen opened it a few inches with obvious exertion.
“Hurry, hurry,” Emily said, sticking her fingers in the open crack.
Together, Emily and Kathleen yanked the heavy window up, pushing it fully open.
Hugging the ceiling within Kathleen’s apartment, a ball of fire sped their way, toward the outdoor oxygen. Kathleen threw herself out the window. Holding Skye tight, Emily launched herself sideways, out of Kathleen’s way. Emily’s bones crashed into the hardness of the fire escape, but she cushioned Skye’s fall. Kathleen fell to the metal slats too.
“You all right? Come on. Come on!” Emily yelled. “We’ve got to go up!”
Kathleen scrambled to her feet. She steadied herself and ran up the metal stairs behind Emily and Skye. They’d run a dozen steps upward before the fire exploded from Kathleen’s window. Sparks flew at them, pricking Emily’s skin. Skye whimpered when sparks hit her.
When they reached the next landing, Emily took in the sight above, horrified: the roof was on fire too. Flames towered upward from there, a huge torch.
They had nowhere to go. Emily’s terrified eyes met Kathleen’s. They were trapped between the flames above and the flames below.
Over the roar of the fire, Emily could hear the crowd yelling and screaming below, fearing for them. She heard a woman’s despairing cry: “La niña!” It had to be one of their neighbors, realizing that Skye was trapped with them.
Men were running, dragging mattresses and full garbage bags to the sidewalk below the fire escape. Emily knew what those men saw: death. Were the men hoping to catch her baby? Could she be expected to drop her baby to them? A groan rose from Emily’s belly.
Gone by Morning Page 14
