Ellery gave the woman’s hand a perfunctory shake and then stepped backward again, shoving her hands in the pockets of her coat, lest she show off her own scars. “What is it we have in common?”
Ellery asked the question of Dr. Sunny, but it was Myra who answered. “I read about you in the paper,” Myra said, looking up at her. “I read what happened with Francis Coben.”
“Yeah?” Ellery glanced at the door, wondering if it was too soon to make her good-byes and escape back to the solitude of her apartment.
“You were the one who lived,” Myra continued. “So was I.”
Ellery swiveled her head around and regarded the woman with new eyes. “What did you say?”
“Myra received a lot of unwanted media attention as a result of what happened to her,” Dr. Sunny explained as she took up her briefcase to leave. “I know the scrutiny is new for you, but she lived with it for years. Perhaps she has some advice.”
Myra gave a harrumphing sort of sigh, as if denying her own supposed wisdom, and for the first time, Ellery felt something like grudging respect. “You’re probably too young to remember,” Myra said. “Heck, look at you—maybe you weren’t even born back then. It was the mid-1980s, and Boston was on fire. Seemed like every day, the papers would carry a new story about a building that went up in flames overnight. No rhyme nor reason that anyone could see—warehouses, a couple of churches, abandoned or empty houses. There was a major investigation but they couldn’t seem to find the guy. Then one night I went back to our furniture store after closing. My husband was sick, hanging his head over the toilet half the day, but taxes were due and we needed some papers. I took Bobby, our son, and went to fetch them. I—I only put him down for a minute. You know how wriggly toddlers are, especially the boys. I turned my back to get the papers from the cabinet, and the next thing I knew, the place was on fire and Bobby was gone.” She drew a shuddering breath and placed one hand to her chest. “I tried to look for him. I called his name, over and over, but there was so much smoke and the place got so hot, real quick. I couldn’t find the way out. I only survived because a passing firefighter saw the smoke and busted through the nearest window. He tried to get to Bobby, too, but it was no use.”
Ellery tried to imagine it, the dense smoke and searing flames. How terrified the woman must have been when she couldn’t find her son. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, dear. So am I.” They lapsed into silence for a moment. Ellery had no idea how to navigate a conversation that included the death of a toddler. Thankfully, Myra seemed to have had practice. “It was a huge story because of Bobby’s death, my dramatic rescue, and because they caught the guy that night.”
“They got him?”
“He was standing there watching the place burn. Apparently they do that,” she said, her voice quavering. “The firebugs. They want to watch their handiwork. The police said he still reeked of gasoline when they arrested him. The reporters hounded us for comments—camped right outside our house, like cats waiting for the mice to come out of the hole. I bet you know what that’s like.” She glanced up at Ellery for confirmation, and Ellery noticed for the first time how bright the blue was in her eyes, like they were the eyes of a much younger woman, full of light. It was, Ellery mused later, like the fire was still inside her.
“I do know what they’re like,” Ellery said of the reporters. “‘The story will go on with or without you,’ they say. ‘Make sure you tell your side.’”
“Exactly.” Myra pointed a finger at her. “I didn’t want to tell my story. My story was about my dead little boy. Who would want to talk about that?”
Ellery shook her head. “I’m sorry you went through that. I hope they eventually left you alone.”
Myra gave a sad smile. “Oh, sure. They move on to the next big thing. There was a TV movie in the 1990s, and every ten years they do some sort of retrospective. But mostly, folks stopped talking about it once Luis Carnevale was locked up. That’s why I still come here to the group.” At Ellery’s inquiring look, she explained. “Now, this is the only place I can talk about it. Otherwise, I’m a sad old lady dwelling on the past, and no one likes a sad old lady. Here, I can talk about my Bobby, and it’s like … it’s like he comes alive again, if only for a little while.”
Ellery, who had a young brother gone too soon, one who lived now only in her memory, understood this all too well. The dead could only speak if you spoke for them.
“They say time heals all wounds,” Myra said after a beat. Then she leaned closer to Ellery and dropped her voice low. “But we both know that’s a lie, don’t we?”
Ellery didn’t quite know what to say to that. She straightened back up and cleared her throat. “Is he still alive—the man who did it?” Francis Coben was sitting on death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, writing her letters he could never send.
“Oh, yes. He’s coming up for parole again soon—and they tell me he might make it this time. It’s been so long that no one remembers anymore how it was, the year the city burned. They aren’t afraid of him anymore.”
Her voice drifted off at the end, and Ellery could tell Myra didn’t share this reformed opinion of the arsonist. “You never know,” Ellery said, hoping to be reassuring. “There would be press again if they released him—that alone might keep him behind bars.”
“I’ve no doubt there’d be stories,” Myra said grimly. “Bad ones. They’d start up again when he set his first fire.” The old man returned, presumably Myra’s husband come to take her home, but he didn’t actually enter the room, just stood there frowning from the doorway. Again, Ellery felt as if she and the rest of the group were lepers, contagious somehow. She couldn’t wait to get out of there. “I hope you’ll come to the next meeting,” Myra said, as if reading her thoughts, and Ellery tore her gaze from the door. Myra gave her a twisted smile. “It’s nice to get fresh blood into the group.”
“Maybe.” Ellery felt sorry for the woman, but she didn’t want to be like her, showing up at these support group meetings a quarter century after the fact. How utterly depressing. Dr. Sunny might want to rethink the wisdom of pawning Myra off as some sort of life lesson for other people, given that she didn’t appear to be a success story. Still, Ellery had one question she wanted to ask, just in case she never saw the woman again. “What will you do if he gets out? Carnevale?” This was Ellery’s big fear: as long as Coben was still breathing air, there was a chance he might get free somehow. If that happened, he would know exactly where to look for her, because now, thanks to last summer, everyone did.
Myra halted with her hands on the wheels. Her chin quivered. “I guess I’d have to find a way to bear it, the same as everybody else.”
* * *
Ellery left the hospital preoccupied from her talk with Myra. The slush had refrozen as the sun went down, making the path hard and slippery. As she walked toward the T station, she caught a flash of movement on her right—the impression of a person more than anything else—and she whirled on the figure, prepared for battle. She stopped short when she saw it was the girl from the group, Wendy. Her shaved head was covered in a black hoodie and she held up her hands in a gesture of peace. “Whoa,” she said, skidding to stop about five feet from Ellery. “It’s just me.”
“You scared me.”
“Sorry. I was waiting for you.”
Ellery didn’t know this girl from a hole in the wall. “Waiting for me?”
“Yeah. I saw on TV what happened to you last summer—what you did.”
Oh, Ellery thought. That.
Wendy licked her chapped lips and took a tentative step closer. “I just needed to ask you … can you sleep at night, you know, now that you shot him? Is that what it takes?”
Oh hell. Ellery scrubbed her face with both hands. I ought to move to Mexico or Denmark or something. “I’m currently unemployed and being forced to do court-mandated therapy,” she told the woman darkly. “Make of that what you will.”
Wendy’s eyes became wider, her g
aze unfocused. “I lost my job, too,” she whispered. “I can’t even sleep. I thought—I thought maybe you could tell me what to do next. How to go on.”
Ellery thought longingly of her apartment across town, but she dropped her hands with a sigh and nodded down the street. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll buy you a slice of pizza.”
Soon she and Wendy were seated in a tiny pizza joint at a table for two right up against the store window, the kind of place that ran so cold in the winter that you didn’t bother to take off your coat while you ate. Ellery welcomed the extra layers of winter clothes because it kept away the prying eyes, and she expected from the enormous hoodie Wendy wore that her new companion felt the same way. She and Wendy had each ordered a slice of cheese and an ice-packed cup of Coke, but Wendy didn’t touch her food. “He came in through my bedroom window,” she said without preamble, and suddenly Ellery wasn’t hungry anymore, either. “I was stupid. I left it cracked. It was early spring but we had a weird heat wave going on. My apartment got roasted. It was so stuffy that I opened the window to get some air. I lived on the second floor of a house, in a nice neighborhood. There was a balcony outside the windows but it was high up and I never thought … I didn’t think anyone would get up there. But I was sleeping, and all of a sudden, I just woke up. Like there was no transition. I was asleep and then wide awake. Maybe somehow I knew he was there?”
She seemed uncertain, searching herself for the details, and Ellery didn’t have the heart to tell her the particulars didn’t matter. The story was always the same.
“It happened so fast,” Wendy continued. “I didn’t have time to look around or turn on a light because then he was on me. He had a knife and he put it against my throat, right here. He said, ‘If you scream, I will kill you. No mercy.’”
No mercy. The same phrase as the woman’s tattoo. A strange choice on Wendy’s part, Ellery thought, to wear his words on her body.
“He didn’t kill me,” Wendy continued bitterly. “But he may as well have. Before, I had a job and a boyfriend and my own apartment. Now I’m alone, on disability, and living with my sister and her kids. I’m too afraid to be alone. They didn’t catch him so he’s still out there someplace. Not enough evidence, the detective says to me. All I could tell them was that he was big and strong, like a linebacker. He wore a ski mask and I didn’t see his face. I went through hell at that hospital to get the rape kit, only turns out, it has nothing in it. He didn’t leave semen, no hair, no DNA. It’s like he was a fucking ghost.”
“I’m sorry.” Ellery couldn’t fathom how she would get through a day if Coben were out on the streets.
“I thought,” Wendy said, hesitating. “I thought since it happened to you, too, kind of, and since you were a cop, that maybe you could help.”
“Oh,” Ellery replied, realization dawning as she leaned back in her seat. “I’m not—I’m not working right now. I’m on leave.”
“So maybe you have free time?” Wendy asked hopefully. “The detective on the case has given up. He can’t do anything until he gets another lead. That means another woman gets raped, right? That’s what he’s waiting for.”
Ellery couldn’t deny it. “It’s not my case,” she said gently. “I don’t have access.”
“Please. I’ll tell you everything I know. I’ll call up my doctor and Detective Manganelli and tell them I want you to have access to my records if that will help. I just…” She put her hands to her head. “I just want him caught so that I can get my life back. I thought maybe you would understand that.”
Ellery barely heard her. Her mind was already whirring. “Did you say Detective Manganelli? Joseph Manganelli? Works in Somerville?”
Wendy’s expression gave the barest hint of brightening. “You know him?”
“A little bit. He taught part of one of my training courses five years ago.” Ellery had pestered him with extra questions outside of class, and Manganelli was always obliging with his time. “Listen,” she told Wendy, “I’m sympathetic to your position, believe me, but if you’ve followed my story, you know that most cops are doing their best to get away from me right now.”
“You had the guts to shoot that guy. They’re just jealous because you’re in the papers and stuff.”
No, Ellery thought, that’s definitely not it. She could just imagine what would happen to her if the brass caught her mucking around in someone else’s case. If Dr. Sunny got wind of what she was doing, she’d tattle to the brass, and Ellery’s career would be over for good. Forget about any second chances. “I’d like to help you. I really would. But…”
Wendy’s lower lip trembled and she bit it back. “The stories on the news, they made it seem like you were different. They made it seem like you knew what it was like. If you’re not going to help me, who will?”
The plaintive question reminded Ellery of her plea last summer, when she’d called up Reed Markham at the FBI and tried to cash in on a fourteen-year-old favor. Reed could’ve told her to get lost, that he had his own problems to deal with, but instead he’d risked his career to come up to Massachusetts to help her. “I suppose I could call Detective Manganelli, just to see where the case is,” Ellery found herself saying. “But I can’t promise anything.”
Wendy straightened in her seat. “That would be amazing, thank you. Anything at all you can do to help.”
Ellery drank a long swallow of Coke and crunched the remaining ice cubes between her back teeth. If Wendy had seen the stories on the news, then she must have known the truth: the last time Ellery had tried to help, two more people ended up dead.
* * *
Back at her apartment, Ellery crouched down to greet her basset hound, Speed Bump. He wriggled up against her and stamped his paws in enthusiasm, like she’d been gone to outer Siberia for six months. “Yes, yes, I missed you, too. Let’s get your dinner, okay?” She fed the dog and turned on the stereo for added company, opting for something mellow from The Cure. She ate her own dinner—microwaved mac and cheese—standing at the kitchen counter, since she’d left the pizza slice she’d had with Wendy virtually untouched. She glanced around at her empty, shadowed loft, with its sparse furnishings and huge windows. Normally she loved the tall ceilings and hardwood floors, the sense of isolation that came from living far above the city, but tonight she kept glimpsing her reflection in the black windows and thinking someone else was looking in on her. Impulsively, she picked up the phone and dialed a familiar number, a series of digits that still felt like “home,” even though she hadn’t set foot there in more than a decade.
“Mom,” she said when the other voice came on the other line. “It’s me.”
“Ellie! It’s been ages since you called.” She could picture her mother in the same threadbare green chair, the TV news on mute, an open beer in her hand.
“I know,” she said, suddenly shamed. “I’ve been so busy…”
There was a short silence as her mother processed this lie. They both knew Ellery had no job at the moment. “How are you doing? Are you eating?”
Ellery looked at the cardboard container sitting in her trash, the one coated in a particularly nuclear shade of orange cheese. “Yes, I’m eating.”
“Good, good. I worry about that. When you were little we had to work so hard to get food into you, and then you’d just pop outside and run it off again.”
Ellery stroked her flat stomach and leaned against the wall, still watching the windows. “I promise I’m eating fine.”
“Good. A man likes a woman with a little meat on her bones, you know?”
“Yes, Mom. I know.”
“Yes, you know? You have someone special?” The hopeful tone in her mother’s voice made Ellery wince, and she remembered anew why she didn’t phone her mother more often. They always spent the entire call disappointing each other.
“No, there’s no one special.”
“Oh, that’s such a shame. Soon, I’m sure. You just have to put yourself out there. Smile and you’ll make friends. Y
ou know who is getting married? Timothy Adler. Remember him? He was Daniel’s best friend in grade school—that little red-haired boy? I met him in the grocery the other day with his fiancée, and I wouldn’t have even recognized him, he’s got so tall. But he said I look exactly the same.”
“I remember Timothy.”
“I can’t believe he’s old enough to be getting married. Seems like yesterday he and Danny were swinging from the trees in the park.”
“That was twenty years ago, Mama. Timmy’s all grown up now.”
“Yes.” Her mother sounded wistful. “Of course he is.”
Timmy would be thirty-two now, Ellery knew, although it seemed impossible because Daniel had died before his seventeenth birthday. She felt alien sometimes as her own birthdays mounted, as she turned ages that her big brother never knew.
“Christmas is coming soon,” her mother announced. “You know what I’d like more than anything.”
Yes, Ellery knew, because it was the same wish her mother had for every birthday, every Christmas, since Ellery had left home a dozen years ago. “I’m not going back there, Mom. Not ever. You’re more than welcome to come out here for Christmas. It’s—it’s real pretty. They have a tree on the common and we’ve had snow already and everything. I can pay for your ticket.”
“Fly? I don’t think so. You won’t catch me hurtling through the sky in some bucket of bolts that’s probably driven by a liquored-up pilot.”
Ellery repressed a sigh as she sagged against the counter. “The train then.”
“Did you see the news last week? A derailment outside of Philadelphia killed three people.”
Caroline Hathaway saw danger everywhere but the city streets outside her apartment. Meanwhile, Ellery spent the remainder of her growing-up years looking out on the park where she’d been abducted. “Mom?” She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got to take the dog out.”
No Mercy--A Mystery Page 2
