Blood Red

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  It was then that she confessed the real reason she’d wanted to leave Westchester.

  “I was worried about my marriage,” she told Noreen, who at that point would never have dreamed that she should have been worried about her own.

  “Why? Did something happen? Did Jake have an affair?”

  “It wasn’t Jake.”

  “You had an affair?”

  “Almost, but I stopped it.”

  Here we go again, she thought. Just when she thought Rowan had her act together and was going to be okay.

  “With whom?” she asked her sister.

  “Wow, even when you’re completely scandalized, you use perfect grammar,” Rowan commented, shaking her head. “Do you remember my neighbor Rick? You met him and his wife, Vanessa, that time you and Kevin came over for Mick’s first birthday.”

  Noreen couldn’t have picked Rick out of a crowd, but she remembered the party. It was a sprawling backyard affair complete with a rented bouncy house and a cotton candy machine. Hordes of bouncing, sticky, screaming kids on a sugar high.

  She remembered Rick’s wife, too. She was attractive, with dark hair and porcelain skin, but a little uptight. She seemed uncomfortable with the other women at the party, most of whom were in full-­blown stay-­at-­home-­mom mode. Noreen found herself relating to her, but it was Kevin who spent a lot of time on the deck talking to her while Noreen shielded their children’s fragile skulls from the baseball bat her sister kept handing to frenzied toddlers to use on the piñata.

  She opted not to pick a fight with Kevin about it on the way home. When it came to their marriage, she chose to let a lot of things go over the years.

  And now you’re second-­guessing them all.

  At least she isn’t the only one whose marriage is less than perfect. Then again, her sister had gone to great lengths to save hers, moving upstate just to get away from temptation.

  “That’s a little drastic,” Noreen commented at the time. “Couldn’t you just have avoided him?”

  “No. I didn’t trust myself to do that. Sometimes I can be . . . you know.”

  Yeah. She knew. Self-­control had never been Rowan’s forte.

  Not about to relinquish her long-­held role as her sister’s moral compass, Noreen felt obligated to scold the weakness and near indiscretion. They never discussed it again.

  “Did you tell anyone about it?” Rowan asks her now.

  Noreen stops straightening the magazines. “You made me swear I wouldn’t, remember?”

  “I do remember. That’s why I’m asking. Did you tell anyone?”

  She hesitates, not wanting to admit the truth.

  Back then, she told Kevin everything.

  She wished she hadn’t told him about that, though. He asked more questions than she cared to—­or even could—­answer, including some that made her squirm. She even wondered whether deep down, her husband had a crush on her sister. Maybe he was drawn to the proverbial bad girl now that he’d dutifully married the good one.

  At the time, Noreen couldn’t relate to wanting to walk on the wild side, though she can now. Not that she’d ever admit it to her sister, much less to her soon-­to-­be-­ex-­husband. Let Kevin take the blame for their failed marriage. She’s perfectly content to play the role of the wronged and heartbroken wife. No one ever has to know that isn’t quite the case.

  Yes. You take your comfort where you can. Some nights, you find it in cozy socks and good wine; other nights, though not lately, between the sheets in an unfamiliar bed, in someone’s muscular arms.

  Kevin would be stunned if he knew he wasn’t the only one who’d ever strayed. But he’ll never know or even suspect. If he goes through with the divorce, she’ll make good and sure that he’s the only villain.

  Noreen may not have gotten much better at honoring certain vows over the past decade or so, but she’s definitely mastered the art of keeping a secret.

  Her own, anyway.

  Rush hour on the subway is always crowded, and today is no exception.

  It might have been tolerable if Rick could have boarded the downtown express at his midtown stop and stepped off in Union Square five minutes later, but something has gone seriously awry. For the past half hour, he’s been stuck underground on a stalled train, standing shoulder to shoulder, chest to back, back to chest—­or perhaps breast; it’s hard to tell—­with a throng of strangers who are silently, and sullenly, resigned to their fate. The lone exception: a deceptively normal-­looking businessman with frenetic eyes who’s loudly informed everyone, repeatedly, that there’s no cell phone ser­vice in this spot.

  That means Rick has no way of letting Bob know he’ll be late for their dinner. Hopefully, Bob’ll figure it out. Or maybe he’ll assume Rick isn’t going to show up at all.

  Maybe I shouldn’t, even if I ever get off this train.

  Then again, he and Bob don’t have to rehash Vanessa, or—­God forbid—­Rowan, or the kids, or anything else remotely personal or unpleasant. They can just talk about sports or old times or Bob’s travels. Something safe.

  The speaker clicks on to broadcast a garbled announcement from the conductor: something about police activity on the track ahead.

  “What did they say?” someone asks from somewhere behind him.

  “MTA code for someone jumping in front of the train” is the reply. “This happened the other day, too, and that’s exactly what they said. Police activity.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s the holiday season. Suicide rates are up.”

  “It’s the most . . . wonderful time . . . of the year,” a new voice sings.

  “What, just because some idiot loser is miserable, we all gotta suffer now?” yet another passenger chimes in. “You gonna kill yourself, you gotta be considerate of others. You know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Hell, yeah. Do it at home. Gun to the head, noose to the neck . . . No fuss, no muss. Well, maybe a little muss.”

  The jokes roll on, because this is a city of extremes. When hordes of New Yorkers find themselves captive in a stressful situation, group interaction tends to go one of two ways: dark humor or explosive anger.

  Rick is steeped in the latter by the time the train starts moving again—­backward. Downtown express ser­vice has been disrupted for the foreseeable future. Dispatched at the previous station, he opts not to wait on the platform to catch the next downtown local with the crushing crowd.

  As he makes his way up several flights of steps to the sidewalk, where another gloomy, wet December dusk has fallen, his pocket vibrates.

  Ah, cellular coverage has resumed. Pulling out his phone, he sees that he missed three calls while he was stuck underground. Predictably, one is from Bob.

  The others are far more important.

  Rowan was late getting home after spending fifteen minutes in the car talking to her sister. Mick was already upstairs when she got there.

  Now she’s back behind the wheel with him in the passenger seat, wearing his busboy uniform and a jacket she insisted he put on because it’s chilly out. He grudgingly agreed.

  “You begged me to buy you that coat,” she reminds him as she drives toward Marrana’s. “And it cost a fortune. Now you never want to wear it.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Rather than argue, she changes the subject. “Did you eat?”

  “Yeah, I had cereal. I couldn’t find anything else.”

  “I’m sorry. I meant to get groceries over the weekend, but . . . you know. There was a lot going on.”

  “I know,” he agrees, although of course he can’t possibly know what’s been going on: that his mother is neglecting to feed her family because she’s been caught up in this . . . this ugly . . . thing.

  “I’ll stop at the store right now, and when you come home later, I’ll make you anything you—­”

  “
Mom, it’s okay. I ate.”

  “Cereal isn’t dinner.”

  “I’ll get something at the restaurant later. It’s fine. Really.”

  No. Clearly, it isn’t fine. Mick has resumed staring out the window on his side of the car. Something is bothering him. She wants to ask what it is, but is afraid to.

  What if he’s figured out what she’s been up to?

  Oh, come on. Since when do kids his age waste two seconds brooding about anything that doesn’t directly impact themselves?

  Having raised two and a half teenagers, she’s fairly certain that whatever is on Mick’s mind has nothing to do with her. More likely it’s something involving school, or basketball. Or a girl.

  When she pulls up in front of Marrana’s, he yanks down the visor and looks into the mirror. From the corner of her eye, she can see him finger combing his hair.

  Definitely a girl.

  He snaps the visor back up and pulls off the jacket, tossing it into the backseat before reaching for the door.

  “Wait, Mick—­it’s cold outside.”

  “So? I’m not going to be outside.”

  “So . . . what, you’re going to tunnel underground to get over to the door?” she asks dryly, and is rewarded with a brief smile, a flash of the easygoing boy he used to be.

  “I’ll be fine, Mom. You have to stop worrying about everything.” Again, he reaches for the door.

  “Wait.” She touches his arm, reluctant to let him go just yet. “Anything special you want me to pick up at the store for you?”

  “Nah. See you later.”

  With that, he’s gone.

  Watching him disappear into the restaurant, she basks in a moment of maternal normalcy as precious as the marital normalcy she’d appreciated on date night at Marrana’s with Jake. If only she could go back to the time when her kids’ tribulations were all that kept her up at night.

  Whenever one of them decided the world was coming to an end, she felt the same way. Fretting along with her kids about breakups and SAT scores was nothing compared to realizing that someone might want to destroy her happily-­ever-­after.

  She looks at the dashboard clock. She has plenty of time to go to the supermarket. Jake has a late meeting and won’t be home for at least another hour, maybe two. She can make a nice dinner for a change. Not that she’s hungry, despite the fact that she hasn’t eaten since breakfast, and that consisted of a few bites of an apple.

  Ah, stress: the most effective appetite killer there is. At this rate, her New Year’s resolution will be to gain enough weight to fit back into her jeans.

  She pulls away from the curb, winding back through the streets and around the traffic circle toward the Mundy’s Strip Mall on Colonial Highway. It was built shortly after she and Jake moved back to town, on the site of the old Caldor discount department store where her mother used to buy all their back-­to-­school clothes. The boys and Rowan never minded much, but even as a little girl, Noreen longed for the designer brands they couldn’t afford.

  Noreen.

  “I think you’re blowing this whole thing out of proportion,” she said when Rowan told her about the burnt cookies. “It had to be Rick who sent them. Of course he’d deny it.”

  “But why would he do it?”

  “Who knows? Because the sky is blue? Because his wife died and he’s lonely?”

  “Ex-­wife. And she died on the same day that—­”

  “I know, but the odds of that happening aren’t really all that astronomical. Maybe he took it as some kind of sign that you and he were meant to be together.”

  “I doubt that. And I wish I knew how she died.”

  “Does it matter? The fact that she died was added stress for him. ­People get crazy enough when they go through a divorce. Believe me—­I’ve seen it all.”

  “So you think it was Rick.”

  “Of course it was Rick. Who else could it have been?”

  Well, it wasn’t Vanessa, and it wasn’t Noreen. And it wasn’t Kevin, even though he knows what happened.

  She shouldn’t have been surprised when her sister admitted she’d shared the secret with her husband immediately after Rowan told her. After all, she herself has shared plenty of secrets with Jake.

  Other ­people’s secrets, anyway.

  Her trustworthy, honorable brother-­in-­law is no more likely to taunt her or sneak around sending anonymous packages than her sister is. If Kevin is the only person Noreen told—­and she swears that he was, and that no one could possibly have overheard the conversation—­then Rick himself is guilty, or he lied about having kept what happened to himself.

  “Can you just make sure Kevin never mentioned it to anyone else?” she asked Noreen before they hung up.

  Noreen promised that she would, though she reminded Rowan that Kevin works long hours and she sometimes goes for days without seeing him.

  Rowan refrained from warning Noreen that that’s how she got herself into trouble back when she and Jake were living in Westchester. Her sister isn’t a young stay-­at-­home mom pining away for her husband or fantasizing about the stay-­at-­home dad next door. Even twenty years ago, she would never have fallen into that trap.

  Doing the right thing has always come so naturally to Noreen.

  It must be nice, she thinks, sliding into the left-­hand turning lane at the intersection in front of the large shopping complex.

  “You need to tell Jake,” Noreen advised. “Then your problem will be solved. This Rick guy will have nothing over you.”

  “You’re kidding, right? If I tell Jake . . .”

  “What? He’ll leave?”

  She hesitated. “I don’t know.”

  “Jake isn’t going to walk out on you because you kissed the neighbor fourteen years ago.”

  Noreen is probably right, she concluded. About that, and everything else.

  Rick must have sent the package of cookies. Without a spurned wife in the picture, he’s the only person who would possibly have the motive to go to such lengths.

  As she inches the minivan forward, her sister’s words continue to ring in her head.

  “You’re lucky, Ro. Rejected men are capable of pulling a lot worse than this.”

  “But how is he rejected? I mean, maybe he was years ago, but . . . it just doesn’t add up.”

  “He’s nostalgic. It comes with age. He probably thinks of you as the one who got away.”

  “So he sent me a box of burnt cookies, because God knows that’s the surefire way to a woman’s heart.”

  “Maybe it seemed like a grand romantic gesture when he thought of it.”

  “When I told him about it, he seemed as shocked as I was.”

  “Of course he did. Because he’d probably come to his senses in the meantime and realized he’d look like an idiot admitting it. So he lied. He’s a good liar. A lot of men are.”

  Not just men.

  Some women are expert liars, too.

  If someone asked Jake whether it was within the realm of possibility that his wife had spent part of Saturday having lunch with another man instead of at the outlet mall, what would he say?

  He’d say that was impossible.

  Because I went out of my way to make sure he wouldn’t doubt me. I bought all those presents so that I could come home loaded down with bags.

  But I did it because I love him. Because I’d rather die than hurt him.

  At last, Rowan makes her left turn into the parking lot, snaking her way along behind a string of cars as if she’s on autopilot, trying to convince herself that Noreen’s theory makes perfect sense.

  “Look, this guy started to stalk you and then he changed his mind and he lied about it,” her sister told her. “Stuff like this happens all the time. It’s tame in the grand scheme of things, believe me.”

  Rowan
believes her. Noreen should know.

  So should I.

  Of course Rick sent the cookies. Of course he regrets it now. And of course he wouldn’t pick up the phone this afternoon when Rowan called to confront him about it.

  Well, good. That means the tables have turned.

  All she said when she left her message in Rick’s voice mail was “Call me. I need to talk to you.”

  Too bad she hadn’t called her sister first. If she had, she probably wouldn’t have bothered calling Rick at all.

  Oh well. If he was embarrassed enough to avoid her call, he’s sure as hell not going to return it.

  As she pulls into a parking space near Price Chopper, she can almost see her way out of this mess. With any luck, it’ll just fade away.

  For the first time in a week, she’s going to focus on what matters most: taking care of her family.

  According to the forensics team, Sullivan Leary’s latest Jane Doe wasn’t your run-­of-­the-­mill stabbing victim.

  She was slashed to death. Her wounds were long and deep, had clean edges and neatly severed vascular structures, and lacked tissue bridges. They were consistent with a straight-­edged razor, the kind you might find in a barbershop or your grandfather’s medicine cabinet.

  Not only that, but judging by the streaks of the victim’s own blood found on her scalp—­which was free of slash wounds—­the killer appeared to have used the same razor to shave her head post-­mortem.

  The same was true of Heather Pazanno, who had lived just outside Erie, Pennsylvania. She went out one night last March to pick up a prescription for her sick mother and never came home. Her car was left in the parking lot. The store security cameras had captured a hooded figure on crutches trailing her out of the store, but the footage was grainy and the outdoor range didn’t extend far enough beyond the front entrance to see what had happened next.

  Having spent the last few hours painstakingly combing the online databases, Sully and Stockton have discovered two more slashing murders that bear similar details. One was in Rhode Island over the summer; another in Virginia back in January. Like Heather Pazanno and the West Side Jane Doe, both of the other victims were relatively young and attractive, and shared a striking physical characteristic: long red hair.