Lullaby and Goodnight

by Staub, Wendy Corsi

  “What is it?” She makes a face.

  “Special herbal tea.”

  She shakes her head, pushes it away when the cup is raised again.

  “Drink it, Peyton,” Rita orders. “Unless you don’t mind the contractions?”

  Another twinge of agony has already begun to take hold, as if cued by Rita’s words.

  Peyton seizes the cup from her hand and gulps the hot liquid, not caring that it burns her throat all the way down.

  No pain, she tells herself, oblivious of her last, rapidly dwindling moments of naïveté, can compare to the torment of labor.

  “Good,” Rita tells her, taking back the empty cup with a smile. “That should kick in any second now.”

  In the midst of a full-blown contraction now, Peyton cries out, reaching desperately for something, anything to grab on to.

  Her flailing arm encounters a wooden bedpost.

  She clings to it.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, it occurs to her that hospital beds have metal rails, not wooden bedposts.

  Frightened, she turns toward her friend for reassurance . . . and spots the odd trickle of blood that has emerged beneath the fringe of Rita’s overgrown bangs.

  At last Detectives Antares and Jacobs have returned to the interrogation room, accompanied by a shaken-looking man they introduce as Gil Blaney. His female friend, on the verge of giving birth and becoming a single mother, is missing from her apartment.

  “Mrs. Egerton,” Jacobs asks, “do you know a woman named Rita Calabrone?”

  “Rita Calabrone?” She frowns, shaking her head.

  “She may also use the aliases Rose Calabrone, and . . .” He consults his notes before adding, “Rose Cascia. Although she may not have used that one in years.”

  “Rita . . . Cascia?”

  “You know her?”

  “She’s a saint.”

  “She’s no saint, Mrs. Egerton,” the detective says grimly. “She’s a suspect in—”

  “No, I mean Rita of Cascia is an actual Catholic saint.”

  “That’s right, she is!” Gil Blaney exclaims, as Anne Marie’s thoughts pivot back to parochial school, to the time she had to write a report about the origin of her name.

  That was when she found out Grace had named her after Anne, the patron saint of pregnant women. But Margarita Taylor claimed that she was named after the patron saint of pregnant women. Anne Marie argued with her until the teacher, Sister Mary, stepped in.

  She explained that both girls were right. Saint Anne was the patron saint of pregnant women. Saint Rita of Cascia, whose real name was Margarita, was the patron saint of pregnant and infertile women.

  Anne Marie remembers being jealous, thinking her own boring essay paled compared to mean old Rita Taylor’s interesting report about the enigmatic saint, who became a nun after tragically losing her sons and husband.

  “What do you know about this Saint Rita?” the detective asks now, obviously intrigued.

  He glances from Anne Marie to Gil, who shrugs and admits, “I don’t remember much. Just the name. What about you?”

  Anne Marie frowns, trying to remember, pulse racing and skin crawling at the possibility that a stranger boldly invoking a saint’s name might have something to do with her daughter’s death.

  “Tell them what you know.” Jarrett touches her trembling hand. “It’s okay.”

  “She, um, lived in the fifteenth century and . . . there were supernatural legends associated with her. . . .”

  “Like . . . ?” somebody asks when she trails off, lost in her memories.

  She settles on the starkest image, the one that frightened her as a child and stayed with her all these years.

  “She was a recipient of stigmata.”

  Realizing nobody but Gil comprehends that, Anne Marie quickly manages to explain, “That’s a word for inexplicable bleeding on the site of Christ’s wounds.”

  Blaney concurs. “It’s been documented by the church to have happened for centuries to especially pious people.”

  The detectives exchange a dubious glance.

  “Saint Rita always had a mysterious, bleeding gash in her forehead that corresponded with the crown of thorns,” Anne Marie tells them. “Oh, and the bees! There were—”

  She breaks off, realizing something else, to ask, “You said she was going by Rita Calabrone?”

  “And Rose Calabrone.”

  Rose.

  Yet another shock jolts through Anne Marie. “Neither of those can possibly be her legitimate name.”

  “How do you know that?”

  She explains as quickly as she can the two most relevant miracles associated with Saint Rita.

  The first miracle: when she was born, a strange swarm of snow-white bees appeared above her cradle and buzzed around the infant, inexplicably without harming her. The bees, which are unable to sting, reputedly continue to appear every year on the Feast Day of Saint Rita in the convent where she died.

  The second miracle: as she was dying on a harsh January day, Rita asked a visitor for a blooming rose from her family’s estate. There was no hope of finding one, but the visitor was compelled to look. On a seemingly dead bush, against a stark winter landscape, one perfect rose was found in bloom.

  “So you think that’s why this woman is using the name Rose?” the detective asks Ann Marie, and she nods.

  “What about the bees?” Jarrett asks. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  Anne Marie, whose grandmother Grace frequently lapsed into her native tongue, informs them all, “The word calabrone means ‘bumblebee’ in Italian.”

  “So you think this woman is some kind of deluded religious fanatic?” the detective asks.

  Anne Marie reaches into her bag, pulls out the red leather Bible, and slides it across the table with an icy hand. “I know she is.”

  “Your head,” Peyton manages to tell Rita, her mouth clenched in pain. “It’s . . . bleeding.”

  Rita reaches up to touch the trickle of red above her brow. An unsettling look comes over her face, yet she says nothing.

  Another monstrous contraction attacks without warning.

  “It . . . still hurts,” Peyton moans, thrashing in the bed.

  Her friend nods, merely watching, an oddly detached expression in her eyes.

  There’s something different about her, Peyton realizes, through the haze of pain.

  When at last the intense cramping has briefly subsided, she manages to ask, “Where are we?”

  “My house. Out on Long Island.”

  Bewildered, Peyton reaches for Rita’s hand, mere inches from the bed but just beyond her grasp. Rita looks down but makes no move to touch her.

  “Why?” Peyton asks, dread washing over her like a bone-chilling wave that comes out of nowhere. “Why are we here?”

  No reply.

  “What about—” She winces. Oh God. Here it comes again.

  “What about the hospital?” she asks in a rush, while she can still speak.

  “We couldn’t go to the hospital.” Rita is looking down into her eyes, watching her suffering, doing nothing to stop it.

  A long, excruciating minute passes before Peyton can ask, “Why not . . . the hospital?”

  “It wasn’t safe.”

  Peyton is distracted by an ominous tightening in her stomach. Too soon. They’re coming so close together.

  What about the tea? Why isn’t it helping?

  As soon as there’s another fleeting window between contractions, she begs Rita to give her something to ease the hurt.

  “I can’t do that.”

  “More tea . . . please . . . not working . . .”

  “Oh, the tea.” Rita laughs. The sound is eerily humorless. “It’s working, all right. It’s doing what it’s supposed to do. And so did the nice little pills I gave you in the car.”

  I must have heard her wrong, Peyton thinks wildly, because that doesn’t make sense. If anything, the pain is getting worse.

>   Rita is looking down at her, and her features seem contorted, her face a grotesque, leering mask that bears little resemblance to her trusted friend.

  Spinning away from the woman in the bed, Rita paces across the room again.

  If only the phone would ring.

  Funny how you can go from loathing that sound to longing for it.

  It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours since Wanda Jones called Peyton’s apartment for the very last time.

  When Rita saw that the number was blocked on caller ID, she realized that it must be the same caller who kept hanging up whenever she answered.

  Well, this time she wouldn’t answer.

  Peyton was sound asleep in the bedroom with the television blasting, and the volume on the answering machine was low enough that she’d never hear.

  Rita screened the call, and Wanda, foolish Wanda, left a detailed message.

  She told Peyton that she thought Rita might not be what she seemed. That she had snooped into her background and found out her real name, and her addresses—both of them. She left the information on the answering machine for Peyton and asked her to accompany Wanda to the police with it. She said Eric had forbidden her to get the authorities involved because he was afraid their affair would be exposed.

  Rita wonders how he feels today, with his dead girlfriend’s picture and rumors about her married lover splashed all over the tabloids.

  You’re not feeling so terrific about that yourself, Rita can’t help thinking. You should have realized the media would put two and two together even if the police didn’t think to link Wanda to Allison.

  Which, eventually, they would.

  But she wasn’t thinking clearly when she shoved Wanda to her death. She only knew that she had to get her out of the way quickly, before she got to Peyton.

  She stopped to cuddle Wanda’s infant daughter before she left, and she imagined what it would be like to hold her own baby.

  That was when she realized she couldn’t afford to wait for Peyton to go into labor on her own.

  It was time to stop preventing it and start inducing it.

  Peyton never even noticed that her breakfast coffee was laced with a little extra kick this morning.

  “And how did you find out Rita Calabrone wasn’t who she claimed to be?” Jody asks Nancy as she and Sam hurriedly escort her back to the parking lot, intent on turning her over to the precinct handling the Lombardo investigation.

  “I went to her apartment this morning when I found out about Wanda. I’d never gone there before, because it was out here in Queens, and I live in Jersey.”

  “And never the twain shall meet,” Sam says dryly. “Right?”

  “Exactly. You know how it is.”

  “Absolutely. I live in the Bronx and I can’t tell you the last time I visited Langella here in Brooklyn.”

  Jody rolls her eyes. “So getting back to your situation, Nancy . . . you never had any occasion to visit Rita’s apartment even though you were good friends?”

  “No, we always just got together at the office or somewhere in Manhattan. And, frankly, Rita never invited me.”

  “Obviously she had reason not to,” Sam points out and asks, as if he finds the whole scenario hard to believe, “You were never suspicious of her?”

  “Why would I be? I’ve known her for years. She was wonderful at her job. The patients raved about her bedside manner.”

  A chill slithers down Jody’s spine at that. She wonders how many laboring women entrusted themselves and their babies into the care of a woman who might very well be a serial killer.

  “And anyway, some people like to keep to themselves,” Nancy goes on. “I just figured she was one of them. And it wasn’t like she didn’t say anything about her personal life. She talked a lot about her sons, and her husband, and their charming little house in Queens, and their farmhouse way out on Long Island.” She snorts, shaking her head. “She doesn’t even live in a house. It’s an apartment building and it’s seen better days. At first I thought I had the wrong address when I saw it. I was thinking maybe I should have called her first.”

  “Why didn’t you?” Jody asks.

  “Because I was scared. Of Dr. Lombardo,” Nancy says reluctantly. “I didn’t know where he was, and I just wanted to get out of my apartment, just in case . . .”

  “He was brought in for questioning this morning,” Sam informs her, referring to the information they received right before they left the precinct.

  “Did they arrest him?”

  “I doubt it,” Jody tells her. “Why did you think he had something to do with this?”

  “I don’t know . . . maybe I didn’t, really. But he was the only person I could imagine . . . I mean, I never thought Rita could be involved. Never in a million years.”

  I’m hallucinating, Peyton realizes. That has to be it.

  That woman across the room isn’t Rita. She’s probably some nurse and I’m thinking she’s Rita because Rita makes me feel safe and I need her.

  The pain is bearing down on her again, roaring at her like a freight train. Helpless to get out of its path, she has no choice but to let it crush her.

  Somehow, she survives it.

  I’m not in a house, I’m in the hospital, she reassures herself when the train has roared past and she can think clearly again. It just looks like a house because I want it to be a house because I want this to be over.

  Here it comes again.

  Dear God, please, have mercy.

  “Please, just tell me . . . how much longer?” she begs the stranger who isn’t Rita, as she returns to stand over the bed.

  “Oh, it could be hours. Trust me, though. You don’t want to wish it away.”

  Again, the chilling cackle fills Peyton with dread as potent as the relentless siege on her body.

  Trust me, though . . .

  Trust me . . .

  What was it Rita said to her the night she called from the hospital and told her about Gil?

  She can’t think straight for the blinding ache that contorts her once more.

  Only when it’s begun to ebb does she remember Rita’s words . . . and finds herself gripped by a terror as acute as the next contraction already sweeping in to claim her.

  You never know, Peyton. The person you think is your closest friend might be an enemy.

  “So you absolutely trusted your friend Rita,” Jody says, just to be sure she has Nancy’s story straight.

  “Yes. Absolutely. And when I heard the news about Wanda this morning, I needed to see her. I just had to get out of the city, and find a safe place to hide. So I looked up her address and I went out to Queens.”

  “You had her address, then?”

  “Yes, both her addresses, here and on Long Island, are in the files at the office. But I bet the farmhouse is a fake, too. Or it’s probably really run-down like the apartment building was. I should have known. I mean, the neighborhood didn’t look anything like she described it.”

  “How did she describe it?”

  “Oh, you know . . . trees and parks and families. It was more like gangs and drugs and garbage. I was looking around, trying to figure out where her cute little house was, when this woman came out of the building. She asked if she could help me and I told her I was looking for Rita. She said she knew everyone in the building and she had no idea who I was talking about until I showed her a picture.”

  “You had a picture of Rita with you?” Jody asks incredulously. She doesn’t even carry pictures of her own children.

  Nancy looks embarrassed. “It was from a few years ago. One of those photo booth places. I . . . I guess I don’t have many friends, and I thought she was one.”

  Once again, Jody can’t help feeling sorry for the woman. She comes across almost as an overly eager, insecure adolescent, trying too hard to fit in and make friends.

  Typically unmoved, Sam nudges, “So what happened when you showed the picture?”

  “The neighbor said, ‘Oh, that’s Helen Zate
rino.’ And that’s when I found out Rita isn’t Rita after all. And that she lives alone, and she’s been here forever. Her husband left her because he wanted children and she couldn’t carry them to term.”

  Sam emits a low whistle, shaking his head and muttering, “Harsh.”

  Jody asks, “So Gianni and Paolo were their sons?”

  “Yes. I guess losing them destroyed the marriage. It had to have destroyed Rita—I mean, Helen—too.” Nancy shakes her head. “It’s sad, in a way. Poor thing. Do you think she really believed they were alive?”

  “Who knows what she’s thinking?” Jody shrugs, thinking of all the criminally insane killers she’s encountered through the years. “It’s hard to tell.”

  They’ve reached the detectives’ car, and Sam climbs in, saying he’s going to radio the latest to the precinct.

  Left alone with Nancy, Jody tells her somberly, “I’m glad you called us. You did the right thing.”

  The woman offers a tremulous nod. “I was afraid you might think I was crazy unless I showed you the graves. If you’d heard the way she talked about her sons . . . how proud she was of them . . .” She shudders.

  “Do you have any idea where her husband is?”

  “No, but I bet that neighbor might know. She’s been living there forever, she said. I bet it was a decent neighborhood years ago.”

  “We’ll need to talk to her. Did you get her name?”

  “Alice something. Detective Langella, do you think . . . Rita did something to Mrs. Cordell?”

  “I don’t want to speculate, Nancy. Let’s just take this one step at a time.”

  Sam pokes his head out of the car. “Nancy, do you know a patient named Peyton Somerset?”

  The color drains from the woman’s face. “Oh God. Rita was taking care of her. Is she . . . ?”

  “She’s missing,” Sam says, “Come on, get in.”

  Everything will be okay as soon as J.D. calls, Helen promises herself.

  Or maybe he won’t call.

  He hasn’t called in . . .

  When was the last time?

  It’s been a while.

  She probably doesn’t let him call. That’s why he hasn’t returned Helen’s messages in so long. Of course he wants to. Of course. But he can’t.