Most Likely to Die

by Lisa Jackson

  She had never been entirely comfortable in crowds, and this was extreme. So many people, some passing so close they were practically touching her, some with terrible body odor, others speaking in various languages. There were crying babies and panhandlers shaking cups of change and someone, somewhere, was playing Van Morrison’s “Moon-dance” on a clarinet.

  Maybe that wasn’t her upstairs, Aurora tried to convince herself, yet again.

  But that didn’t work for more than a hopeful second or two.

  It was her. Definitely.

  She was wearing some kind of bizarre disguise. Her body was much heavier, and she had on a blond wig.

  But her face was unmistakable.

  And the look in her eyes…

  God, that was scary.

  Never before had Aurora seen her look that way. Darkly serious, almost…

  Sinister.

  That was why she kept trying to convince herself that it had been somebody else, standing there, watching.

  Because it didn’t make sense for a friend to be looking at Aurora that way—much less be here in New York City at all, in fact.

  Aurora stared blindly into the train tracks, wondering what she should do about what she had seen.

  I’ll call Eddie the second I get back to my room and run it by him, she decided.

  She always shared troubling developments with him first. Shared everything with him, really. Bad, good, exciting, scary.

  Suddenly, she was fiercely homesick for her husband. For her house. For Portland.

  Especially when she spotted movement amid the litter strewn over the rails just below the platform and realized it was a rat.

  A real live rat.

  Oh, God. This was too much. Aurora wanted nothing more than to go home.

  Nothing was reassuringly familiar here, not with Tina so uncharacteristically wan, with Lindsay no longer at her side—and with her, up there in the station, looking eerily like a stranger.

  Except a stranger wouldn’t have returned Aurora’s gaze so intently.

  She shivered at the thought of that strange stare.

  No, there was nothing familiar about New York on this night at all; she felt as though she had been dropped into an exotic foreign land—a war zone or something, because she had a vague, inexplicable sense of impending peril.

  That’s just because you’re alone in a big city. Thirty-eight years old and you feel like you desperately need to hold somebody’s hand.

  It was kind of pathetic, really.

  I really am a bumpkin. That’s all it is. A bumpkin, and a baby.

  Below, on the track, the rat scurried away abruptly and she felt, then heard, a distant rumble. It scared her for a moment—was it an earthquake? A terrorist attack?

  Oh my God. Eddie…I’m so scared, Eddie.

  Her heart pounded as the rumble grew steadily louder.

  Dear God in heaven, Blessed Mother, please, please help me.

  She looked up to see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

  The train.

  Oh.

  That was all it was.

  The subway train was roaring into the station.

  Aurora instinctively stepped back from the edge of the platform as it approached—rather, she tried to.

  Somebody was right behind her, of course—it was crowded. She felt herself being jostled. The person behind her was pressing up against her. Hard.

  No.

  Not pressing.

  Pushing.

  Panic worked its way into her throat as she realized she was too close to the edge.

  She was losing her balance, and the train was coming, and she was falling, dear God, please, no, she was falling, and—

  The last thing that went through Aurora Zephyr’s mind was that she wasn’t going to live to be a grandmother after all.

  Chapter 21

  Saturday morning, Lindsay went to the gym first thing for her usual one-hour spinning class. Whenever she was stressed, she could count on finding relief there, mindlessly riding the stationary bike over imaginary mountain roads in the dark, music blasting.

  But the exercise didn’t relieve her physical tension today, and it wasn’t mindless.

  She kept seeing Wyatt’s face, and Leo’s.

  Rather, seeing Leo’s as a younger version of Wyatt’s. In Lindsay’s mind’s eye, her son had morphed into the Wyatt she had known back in Oregon, tall and lean with a shock of black hair, flashing black eyes, and a smile like a sunburst.

  The grown-up Wyatt still had that same smile, the same dark hair and eyes. But he was more muscular now; she had been able to see the masculine changes in his body even beneath the sleeves of his suit coat.

  She hated that she still, even now, days later, found herself fantasizing about his biceps, pecs, and abs—about seeing him shirtless, or in nothing at all.

  Let’s face it, she told herself as she stepped from the steamy shower in the gym’s locker room and reached for a towel, you’re hopelessly overdue for some physical…release. And not the kind you get in a spinning class.

  It had been months since she and Isaac broke up; there had been no one since him. A few dates here and there, nobody she wanted to see more than once.

  But it wasn’t just about Lindsay needing some kind of physical release.

  It was about her needing Wyatt himself.

  Why? Because he had been her first? Did you always long to repeat that experience, right down to the man with whom you had shared it?

  Or was it something more?

  Who are you kidding? she asked herself, wrapping the towel around her waist and padding back into the main locker room. Of course it was something more.

  And it wasn’t just physical.

  But none of that mattered—or was supposed to, anyway. As relationships went, she and Wyatt Goddard barely shared a past, and certainly not a future.

  “Hey, Lindsay, how’ve you been?”

  She looked up to see Amy, a casual friend from spinning class.

  “Great,” she lied, “how about you?”

  As she made small talk with Amy and got into her clothes, she couldn’t help but compare this slightly stilted conversation to the effortless one she’d had with Aurora last night.

  They had picked up right where they’d left off, finding so many things to talk about that she was reluctant when the evening came to an end and she had to say good-bye.

  The last thing she’d told Aurora, before she sent her off on the subway, was that she would plan on going to the reunion in July.

  “Oh, Lindsay, really? That would be great. Everyone would absolutely love to see you.”

  “I’d absolutely love to see them, too.”

  She and Aurora had shared a big hug, one that left Lindsay overcome with unexpected emotion. She found herself with tears in her eyes and, embarrassed, hurried away quickly. She didn’t want Aurora to go home and tell everyone that she was a sentimental wreck.

  That, however, was exactly what she was. Last night, and today.

  But today wasn’t about her old girlfriends or stepping into a familiar, nostalgic past.

  It was about stepping into a role she had both willingly and reluctantly abandoned—and a decision she had both regretted and celebrated.

  No wonder she was tense.

  “Did you hear that we’re supposed to get a big storm later?” Amy asked conversationally as, fully dressed, they both slung their duffel bags over their shoulders and headed for the door. “I’m so bummed. I was supposed to go boating on the Hudson this afternoon with this guy I’ve been seeing.”

  “Well, hopefully it won’t happen and you’ll have smooth sailing.”

  “I doubt it. It’s supposed to be really bad, wind, rain, maybe even hail.”

  Lindsay found that hard to believe as she stepped out into the surprisingly hot May sunshine and walked the three blocks back to her apartment.

  The first thing she did was book her plane reservations back to Portland for the reun
ion, and a room at the new Marriott not far from the school. She arranged to be there a week early, thinking she might be able to help the committee with some last-minute details. Event planning, after all, was what she did.

  At least, that was her official excuse for arranging to spend so much time in her hometown. Really, she was anxious to indulge this wave of nostalgia.

  All right, that was set.

  Now what? She had a few hours still to kill before Wyatt’s car arrived.

  It was too early to start getting ready yet, so she wandered around the apartment, watering plants, throwing away newspapers and junk mail, emptying the dishwasher.

  She realized she was famished. She opened the fridge and reached past the carton of eggs for a container of yogurt.

  Then it occurred to her that she could actually cook something. That would occupy her for a while.

  In class this week, they had progressed from chopping and dicing to making simple omelets.

  Lindsay didn’t have on hand many ingredients they had used, but she did have onions and tomatoes.

  She washed and placed them on the counter, pulled out a cutting board, and hunted through her drawer for a suitable knife.

  If you’re going to take this cooking stuff seriously, you’re really going to need to be better equipped, she told herself, at last locating a knife that looked closest to the one she’d used in class.

  She began dicing the onion, trying to remember to use the technique she’d learned, but it wasn’t easy with this knife. The blade was much duller.

  Not entirely dull, though. She found that out the hard way when it sliced into her forefinger.

  “Ow!” She grabbed a dish towel and wrapped it to stanch the blood that poured from the painful wound, but it took a while. Every time she lifted the towel to check her finger, she saw that it was still bleeding profusely.

  Finally, the flow subsided, and she winced as she cleaned the cut in the bathroom. She wondered if she might need stitches…but it was a Saturday. She’d have to go to the emergency room, and that, she knew from the notorious experiences of others, could take hours.

  Which would mean postponing today’s meeting.

  No. No way.

  Better to let the wound heal and hope for the best.

  Her finger bandaged, she returned to the kitchen, where she tossed partially chopped onion into the garbage and put away the eggs, tomatoes, and butter.

  Then she opened a container of yogurt, flopped on the couch, and turned on the television.

  It was tuned to the twenty-four-hour local news channel—pretty much the only thing she ever watched when she did bother to turn on the TV at night.

  Whoa, Amy was right. Severe thunderstorms were expected late in the day.

  Lindsay hoped it wasn’t an omen that this afternoon wouldn’t be smooth sailing for her meeting with Wyatt and Leo.

  Come on…Do you really expect it to go off without a hitch?

  There were too many emotions involved all around. Leo might be her own flesh and blood, but he was a stranger.

  Wyatt might as well be a stranger, too.

  She sighed, spooned some yogurt into her mouth glumly, and stared at the television. Above the news anchor’s left shoulder, an ominous graphic showed the black outline of a human figure and a train, with a red splotch between the two.

  “A tragic accident last night—”

  She’d had more than her fill of bloody injuries for one morning. She reached for the remote, deciding to find something a little more uplifting to watch before she got ready to go to Wyatt’s.

  Maybe there was an old sitcom or a cooking show or something. Anything to take her mind off the day ahead.

  “—beneath the streets of Manhattan as an unidentified woman was struck and killed by a—”

  Lindsay aimed the remote and curtailed the anchor’s grim report, then channel-surfed until she came across a Steve Martin movie that was a few years old. She’d seen it and knew it had a happy ending.

  Good. At least something would today.

  She surveyed the array of items spread before her on the hotel desk.

  A wallet filled with old pictures, some of family, but others of her friends. A small bottle of Aurora’s favorite perfume. A date book filled with notes pertaining to the upcoming reunion. Vanilla-flavored lip balm—not lipstick—the kind she had used back in high school. A brush that held strands of curly black hair.

  She couldn’t wait to get it all back to Aurora’s locker beneath St. Elizabeth’s; what a wonderful and unexpected treasure trove to add to the collection.

  There had been considerable cash in the wallet, which would come in handy today. She had, as usual, found someone who was willing to accommodate her request and keep his mouth shut about it. But he wanted a hell of a lot of money for his compliance.

  So much money that she thought it would almost be easier to just steal a damned town car—or hire one and ask the driver to take her to a remote spot, then catch him off guard and get him out of the way.

  Easier, perhaps, but far riskier.

  She stashed Aurora’s cash in her purse. She had more than enough to pay the driver for the use of his car. She just hated to keep spending it this way. Life would be easier when she was back home, back in her element, not having to rely on strange people in a strange city.

  Using a pair of nail scissors, she carefully snipped Aurora’s Oregon driver’s license, credit cards, and plastic hotel key into tiny pieces. She tucked those into a small plastic bag and put that in her purse, too. She would have to remember to toss it into a garbage can on the street when she left the hotel.

  Those identifying items were the reason she’d grabbed Aurora’s purse from her shoulder as she fell. The longer it took to identify her, the more time she would buy for all that needed to be accomplished.

  Shoving Aurora in front of an oncoming train wasn’t nearly as satisfying as it had been hacking into Haylie’s body, but it achieved a far more important goal.

  Aurora had seen her, recognized her. She had to be stopped before she told someone—and the perfect opportunity had presented itself, which was a sign from God that this was meant to be.

  The platform had been so jammed that it took a few seconds for anyone to realize someone had fallen in front of the train.

  By the time she heard the inevitable commotion, she was halfway up the stairs. From there, it was easy to get out, lost in the crowd. She heard sirens wailing in the distance and saw uniformed transit authorities rushing for the track, but by that time, she was halfway to the street.

  This morning on the news, she had seen coverage of the incident.

  In a city like New York, it was eclipsed by other stories: the masked rapist who had been terrorizing women on the East Side, the mayor’s latest ribbon-cutting ceremony in Harlem, even the weather forecast.

  Little airtime was devoted to the report about an unidentified woman who had fallen from a crowded subway platform at the Times Square station. Witnesses said it had been crowded down there, as always; Times Square was, after all, “the crossroads of the world,” as the reporter pointed out.

  Nobody seemed to have seen anything suspicious; it was assumed that the poor woman, whoever she was, had simply lost her balance.

  Perfect. Everything was just humming along, nobody piecing anything together yet. That would buy her some time.

  She wondered how long it would take before Aurora’s daughter, who must have reported her mother missing by now, heard about the subway accident. How long before the police connected the missing tourist with the dead woman?

  With any luck, it would be at least another day or two.

  Just long enough to let me do what I have to do and get back home to Portland.

  Of course, her work was cut out for her there as well.

  Hopefully, there wouldn’t be further complications.

  Wearily—she hadn’t slept well last night—she reached for the sunglasses she had picked up in Central Park the
other day.

  She put them on and studied her reflection in the mirror above the desk.

  They were meant for a man; they masked most of her face.

  Perfect, she thought again.

  Looking out the fourth-story master bedroom window above Queens Boulevard, Leo reminded himself that he still had twenty minutes before the car was supposed to arrive.

  He couldn’t help it, though; he was anxious to get moving.

  He had been ready for over an hour, pacing the small apartment wearing his best suit—his only suit, purchased when he was a pallbearer for his grandmother’s funeral last year. The pants were too short now; about an inch of black sock was visible above his scuffed dress shoes. He had tried to polish those with little success; he had donned them to go to Saint Luke’s School every day of his senior year, then again for Grandma’s funeral—they were all but worn out. Tight, too, at a size twelve and a half.

  Were your feet supposed to keep growing as you headed into your twenties?

  He wondered if his father had big feet. His real father.

  He’d be able to ask him today.

  Come on, move, he thought, glancing at the hands of the clock on the bedside table. They seemed to be glued down.

  It was an old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock he had won at a street fair a few years ago. It used to be beside his own bed, but he gave it to his mother for the master bedroom when his father—his adoptive father—moved out and took the digital one.

  He found himself wishing that his father knew what he was doing today…and glad his mother did not.

  She had taken his brother, Mario, into the city to visit Aunt Rose and Uncle Paul. She wanted Leo to go, too, but he told her he had to work.

  He felt guilty about that—and even guiltier knowing she wouldn’t check up on him. Uncle Joe, who owned the pizzeria, was her ex-husband’s brother. She didn’t talk to that side of the family anymore.

  But she didn’t stop Leo from working there. He needed the job, the money. And anyway, Uncle Joe was good to him. Better to him than his father had been.

  He paced across the bedroom, then back again, coming to a halt before the window air-conditioning unit. He probably should turn it on, actually. It was pretty hot out today. Ma would appreciate coming home later to a nice, cool bedroom.