Lullaby and Goodnight

by Staub, Wendy Corsi

  Well, maybe he’ll just show up, to surprise her. He used to do that years ago. Pop up where she least expected it. Sometimes he’d bring her flowers, or a little gift . . .

  Or a big gift, she thinks, looking down at her diamond engagement ring.

  Unlike her, J.D. came from money. Not big money, but enough to afford the apartment in what was, just a decade ago, a nice part of Queens, as well as a weekend house on Long Island.

  When he left, she got to keep the ring, the apartment, and the house. Not that she cared. She just wanted him.

  And now I’ll have him back, she thinks with a smile. I’ll finally be able to give him the one gift he always wanted from me, the one his money couldn’t buy.

  She can just imagine the look on his face when he sees her holding a baby.

  Their baby.

  A live, pink, happy, hungry baby.

  She pushes aside the memory of the stiff little boys she clung to on the darkest days of her life, willing them to come alive again, to come back to her.

  Sometimes, when she’s telling nosy Nancy about them, she can almost convince herself that her prayers were answered, that she has two strong, grown boys of her own.

  Gianni and Paolo.

  John and Paul.

  Her babies.

  The woman behind her in the bed lets lose an agonizing shriek.

  Helen flinches at the grating sound, wishing she would just shut up.

  She looks out the window again, checking to see if J.D.’s truck is turning down the lane yet. Wouldn’t that be a sight for sore eyes.

  She hasn’t seen that old red truck in years. Who knows if he even has it these days?

  Maybe she doesn’t let him drive a truck. Maybe it doesn’t fit into their lifestyle in that upscale town in Nassau County, on the island’s north shore—a stone’s throw and a world away from both the Queens apartment and the farmhouse where J.D. and Helen were supposed to live happily ever after.

  Jealousy bubbles within her like a cauldron, spilling over into venomous hatred.

  What she probably should have done, years ago, was get rid of the woman who stole J.D. away from her, the woman who could give him what she couldn’t.

  But then, that would have been murder, plain and simple.

  Helen isn’t a cold-blooded killer.

  Yes, she’s disposed of a handful of donors, as well as a few unfortunates who got in the way. But that’s all part of the work. God will forgive her for that. Of course he will. Look at all the good she’s done, punishing the wicked, unselfishly saving the worthy from her own barren fate.

  Unselfishly, Helen?

  All right, maybe she always secretly believed that if she blessed enough infertile couples with children, she would be rewarded.

  She closes her eyes, and her mother’s face appears before her. Mama, alive again, dressed in her solemn Sunday black, all fired up from the latest sermon.

  Mama drilled into her little girl’s head that it was every God-fearing person’s duty to see that sinners were punished. She said that was why God had taken Daddy away from them, that horrible day he was electrocuted in the bathtub—because he had been adulterous, and adultery was a sin, one of the worst imaginable.

  Only later, when she overheard Mama praying for forgiveness, did Helen realize that Mama must have punished Daddy on God’s behalf. Hadn’t she always said that a God-fearing person was obliged to do just that, wherever she saw fit?

  Mama said that even children were sinners. Throughout all those years of enduring whatever punishment Mama handed out for Helen’s sins, real and imagined, the little girl prayed for redemption. She read her Bible and she dutifully prayed to the saints, just as Mama taught her to do. She prayed frequently to Matilda of Saxony, patron saint of the falsely accused, and to Perigrinus, patron saint of open sores, to heal the angry red welts and burns her mother was forced to inflict.

  As a teenager, after the tables turned and she was at last obliged to punish her mother for her sins, Helen prayed to Mark the Evangelist, patron saint of impenitence, and Frances Xavier Cabrini, patron saint of orphans.

  When God sent J.D. into her path, she knew she had been rewarded for her piety; knew in her heart that they would be blessed with the children they longed for.

  She prayed to Rita of Cascia, the patron saint of infertility, all those years that she was trying to have a child.

  She told J.D. they had to be patient, that it would happen for them. And it did. Twice, God and Saint Rita blessed her with pregnancy.

  When their sons died, she begged her husband not to give up on their family, on her.

  He left anyway.

  She always knew in her heart that if she kept praying, if she kept up her God-fearing obligations, then he would bless her with a family. That J.D. would come back to her, and they’d have another chance at the happiness that slipped so tragically from their grasp. . . .

  “Rita,” the woman in the bed calls plaintively. “Please, Rita . . .”

  Helen pointedly ignores her, anger flaring once again to obliterate her sorrow.

  She was the mistake. Peyton Somerset. The biggest mistake of all.

  I should have stuck with strangers, she tells herself again. That was always the plan. After what happened with the first one, that girl Heather whose mother went crazy looking for her, I knew I shouldn’t mess with Lombardo’s patients.

  For ten years, she kept the business discreet, far removed from her daily life, tempting as it was to choosing donors and recipients from among those she knew through her work.

  The humble recipients were relatively easy to locate, thanks to her scattered volunteer work with several gynecological free clinics in the metropolitan area. She found a few of the donors that way as well: women who weren’t likely to be the subject of a high-profile search, if they were missed at all. Hookers, homeless women, throwaway street kids who’d been raped.

  Then Nancy, damn her, came up with the brilliant idea of a Pregnant and Single support group, with Rita as reluctant moderator.

  What else was she supposed to do? She couldn’t say no. Nor could she resist the donors who were all but rolled to her doorstep on a doomed gurney.

  Allison was the first, so damned ripe to be taken down a few notches. She actually laughed about having used a sperm donor; actually dared to mock her mother, who tried to warn her that she was a sinner.

  Helen initially did her best to overlook Allison’s brazen attitude, but she just couldn’t seem to get past it. Allison deserved to be her next donor and that humble Nueves couple from New Jersey would be the perfect recipients of her baby.

  And so it began . . . the beginning of the end.

  Once she gave in to that first bold impulse, she could have been tempted to choose all the women in that group as donors. But of course, she knew better. She didn’t want anybody to grow suspicious. She figured one was plenty . . .

  Until she saw Peyton Somerset strutting confidently around the office like she was entitled to whatever she wanted.

  Look at her now.

  Sweating, squirming, screaming like a sick, wounded animal.

  I even tried to warn her. I told her not to trust anybody.

  But she trusted me. She was so obedient, climbing into the car. She lapped up those pills so willingly, never asking me what they were for.

  Surprisingly, it’s almost a shame now to see the confidence beaten right out of her.

  Helen quite honestly expected her to put up more of a fight.

  But then, the sedative was powerful. So powerful she slept throughout the journey to Long Island and the wheelchair ride into the house.

  As much as she hated to use medication that will cross the placenta prior to delivery, she had no choice. And in the end it was a much appreciated blessing. There was no need to carry on the charade, pretending to be outrunning a predator in a yellow cab. All she had to do was drive, and plan.

  “Oh . . .” Peyton moans, eyes closed, perhaps both in severe discomfort a
nd exhaustion.

  The sedative probably still hasn’t worn off entirely; nor have the effects of the drug Helen used to induce labor, hurrying along what Mother Nature herself already triggered.

  In the grips of perhaps the most intense labor experience Helen has ever generated, Peyton Somerset is truly suffering.

  Well, in the end, everybody gets what they deserve, Helen thinks smugly. She’s finally going to get what’s coming to her . . .

  And so will I.

  “Getting . . . worse,” Peyton pants in desperation, as another brutal contraction takes hold almost before the last has faded.

  Rita, staring through a lifted slat in the blinds, merely nods. She’s been going back and forth to the window for what seems like hours now, as if she’s waiting for somebody.

  Perhaps it has been hours.

  The light that filters in through the gap seems grayer than before. This grueling day might be drawing to an end at last.

  But what about the night? Peyton wonders in despair. How many more hours can she endure this torment?

  “Help . . . me,” she begs Rita again. “Please.”

  Finally, the woman turns away from the window. With a gleam in her eye, she reaches for the latex gloves she tossed aside earlier.

  “No!” Peyton cries out, realizing what she’s about to do. “Please, no. Not again.”

  Rita marches to the foot of the bed. “I need to see how far you’ve progressed, sugar pie. Come on, open up.”

  “Noooo . . . God, no . . .” Peyton screams as the savage fingers probe into her like knives.

  “Ten centimeters,” Rita announces triumphantly when she can bear it no more. “Time to start pushing and have this baby.”

  The baby.

  The word is like a healing balm that cuts through the anguish.

  Yes. The baby.

  I’m having my baby.

  That’s why I’m here.

  Outside, in the distance, gravel crunches with the sudden approach of a car.

  Rita goes absolutely still.

  Then she breaks into a grotesque grin and triumphantly yells, “He’s here! I knew he’d come.”

  He’s here.

  Relief courses through Peyton despite the overwhelming urge to bear down and push.

  Clenching her teeth, fighting off the incredible pressure, she grunts, “Is it Dr. Lombardo?”

  “Dr. Lombardo?” Rita furrows her eyebrows in amusement, revealing a smudge of dried blood on her forehead.

  The blood.

  The blood is so strange . . .

  Rita makes a move to return to the window, but Peyton grabs on to her arm with sudden, superhuman strength, pulling her back to the bed.

  “Let go of me.”

  “Tell me who it is!” Peyton gasps, trembling uncontrollably. “Who’s here? Dr. Lombardo?”

  “Of course not. Why would he come all the way out here?”

  “To . . . deliver . . . my baby.” She’s breathing hard, straining against the flames of tension in her lower back and pelvis.

  “I guess I’d better break it to you, Peyton. It isn’t your baby.”

  She’s crazy, Peyton realizes. She’s talking nonsense.

  Somewhere beyond the room, there’s a knocking sound, then the creak and slam of a door being opened and shut.

  “Of course . . . it’s . . . my . . . baby,” she manages to say despite the explosive ache that’s threatening to tear her apart.

  “I’m afraid not, Peyton. I’m going to be the mommy. And here’s the daddy now,” Rita exclaims happily as footsteps approach and a voice calls her name.

  “Rita!”

  The voice is familiar, Peyton realizes in the midst of her own frantic hysteria.

  A voice that reaches through the fog of pain like a lethal hand she can no longer escape.

  Tom Reilly’s voice.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Sitting anxiously in the passenger seat, watching the scattered trees and tiny yards of eastern Queens give way to an increasingly urban landscape, Jody can’t help feeling as if she and her partner are driving in the wrong direction.

  They should be going to Peyton Somerset, the woman she’s never met in her life, the woman for whom she suddenly feels responsible.

  She’s missing, and her life is in grave danger. Jody can feel it.

  But their supervisory officer ordered them back to the precinct, assuring them that the address of the farmhouse, obtained from Nancy’s files, has been forwarded to the Long Island police with urgent orders for a search and rescue.

  Jody wonders if they’re going to make it there on time, wonders if the isolated farmhouse is really where Rita took Peyton. It’s certainly a possibility. Her Queens apartment and Peyton’s Manhattan one are being searched even now. If anything relevant has turned up, somebody surely would have called Langella and Basir in the car.

  “I still don’t get it,” Sam mutters, swerving out of the slow-moving center lane into the left as they approach the Triborough Bridge ramp. “How the hell did Rita, or Helen, or whatever her name is, get away with this? Didn’t she think she’d eventually get caught?”

  “She’s sick,” Jody reminds him. As if that offers any insight at all into the character of a murderess who had everybody fooled all these years.

  Through snatches of information she and Sam have gleaned in the last hour via phone calls and radioed updates, Jody has been piecing together the bizarre details of this case. The big picture has revealed implications of a scheme more chillingly elaborate than Jody could ever have imagined.

  It was pure gut instinct that told her to look further into Linden Cordell’s death.

  And it’s gut instinct that tells her time might be running out, right this moment, for Peyton Somerset.

  “I know the woman’s sick,” Sam is saying, “but what the hell is her motive? What does she get out of any of this?”

  Jody shrugs.

  As Nancy put it before Langella and Basir turned her over into protective custody, Helen Zaterino must see herself as a noble Robin Hood figure of sorts. She steals the babies of women she considers undeserving, and hands them over to poor, infertile couples despondent enough to go along with a peculiar nine-month charade.

  “You know, desperation does strange things to people,” Sam comments, and Jody knows his thoughts are meandering down the same path as hers.

  Jody thinks of her children; tries and fails to imagine life without them.

  She can almost understand how a couple might be driven to such an extreme.

  Almost.

  After all, in exchange for their covert efforts, the otherwise helpless couples are presented with healthy infants and nobody, supposedly, will ever be the wiser.

  It’s an airtight, diabolically clever plan, really. The babies are ostensibly born at home with only a spouse and a registered midwife in attendance. Women give birth in that scenario every day all over the metropolitan area. Nobody bats an eye when the midwife fills out the paperwork for the birth certificate that will be perfectly legitimate. Nobody would dream of questioning whether an apparently pregnant woman has actually given birth.

  The radio crackles suddenly and Jody picks up the receiver, speaking briefly with the supervisor.

  “Did they find her?” Sam asks the moment she hangs up.

  “Not yet,” she tells him, knowing he’s talking about Peyton Somerset. “But they do think Allison Garcia’s daughter may have turned up. She was living with a couple in New Jersey who said they got her from a Rose Calabrone from an adoption agency that of course doesn’t really exist. On Mother’s Day.”

  “Unbelievable. The family must be thrilled.”

  “I imagine they see it as a mixed blessing,” Jody points out, realizing that the baby’s appearance doesn’t bode well for the mother’s safe return.

  Please let the police get to Peyton on time, she thinks, feeling helpless. There was nothing she and Sam could do from where they were when they found out the address. The
house is a good two hours away from Queens, almost at the tip of eastern Long Island.

  “Do you think the Cordells were supposed to get this baby?” Sam asks after a moment, gazing intently out the windshield at the crawling bridge traffic.

  “Probably. I wonder what happened to Derry.”

  “Nothing good, that’s for sure.”

  Jody nods, wondering if a replacement stepped in to fill her maternity clothes. She looks out over the cityscape across the water, speculating.

  Is there a childless couple waiting out there, even now, for the blessed event to come to fruition?

  Anxious to get to the station for another update, she glances at the clock at the dashboard, then asks Sam, “Can you drive any faster?”

  “Not if you want to go home to your kids tonight.”

  Jody swallows hard.

  Yes. Yes, she wants more than anything to go home to her kids tonight.

  Of course he came. Well, what did you expect?

  You knew he’d be here. He wouldn’t miss this for the world.

  “J.D.! We’re in here,” she calls, as Peyton heaves her upper body forward, still gripping her arm, using the leverage to lift her massive weight from the mattress.

  J.D.’s footsteps have stopped and the door behind her opens.

  Helen is about to shake Peyton off and hurtle herself into his arms . . .

  Then she realizes that her patient’s bare legs are spread, knees bent . . . and the baby is crowning.

  “Hurry, J.D.!” she calls without turning around, her giddiness transformed into bold purpose as instinct and experience take over.

  The most important thing now is to see that their child arrives safely into the world . . . and immediately see Peyton Somerset out of it.

  Then we can be together at last, she promises herself. All three of us. Forever.

  She looks down at the baby’s dark, blood-slicked scalp preparing for the miracle she’s witnessed time and time again.

  But this is the most miraculous birth of all.

  Any moment now, the slippery body of a newborn will slide into its mother’s waiting hands.