Kiss Her Goodbye

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “No,” Jen said, but she was crying. And laughing.

  And so was Kathleen.

  And the tears and the laughter, like the chicken soup, helped with the healing.

  So her daughter has learned to forgive.

  And so, in the long, bleak months since December, has Kathleen.

  Most importantly, she’s forgiven herself.

  She’s also forgiven John for not coming forward sooner about Susie.

  And she’s forgiven Lucy, now living in a shelter for battered women, for not fighting to keep her baby girl so long ago.

  They both want to play a role in Jen’s life when—and if—she’s ready to see them. At first, she claimed she never would be, but lately, she’s been hinting that she might change her mind. That maybe she’s forgiven them, too.

  “It’s freezing out here,” Jen announces, dragging Kathleen’s thoughts back to the present. “I wish it would stop snowing.”

  “So do I.”

  Like her daughter, Kathleen is more than ready for a new season. Ready to put the brutal winter behind them, once and for all.

  She hands Jen one of the boxes, takes the other in her own arms, and locks the car.

  “Come on,” she says, leading the way down the path. “This won’t take long.”

  Saint Brigid’s Cemetery is busier than usual today, despite the weather. Kathleen can see small knots of people, many dressed in their Sunday best, gathered at quite a few graves. There are urns and wreaths of feminine-hued flowers at others.

  Their first stop is a large granite stone shaped like a cross.

  There, Kathleen begins to open her box, but Jen stops her.

  “I want to do it,” she tells her mother.

  Swallowing over a lump in her throat, Kathleen watches her daughter remove a dozen red roses from the green tissue inside the florist’s box and lay them at Father Joseph’s grave beside the stone marked with her name, and his mother’s. Genevieve.

  They kneel together and pray silently.

  “Thank you,” Jen whispers at the end, echoing Kathleen’s heartfelt sentiment for the man who honored Mollie Gallagher’s memory by bringing roses to her grave all these years . . . and then saved her granddaughter’s life.

  Lucy told her that he never mentioned having known Kathleen in the past, nor did he mention that she had named her daughter after his mother. He had to wonder what had happened to the first Genevieve—the baby he blessed on All Saint’s Day fourteen years ago. He made the sign of the cross on her forehead; he knew there was no scar on her eyebrow then.

  He must have wondered what happened to Kathleen’s baby; he must have wondered how and why she was switched for Lucy’s baby. He must have wondered, must have doubted, must have had his suspicions, and yet, when he understood that there was danger he watched over Genevieve Carmody.

  He wasn’t a vicious monster stalking Jen; he was her guardian angel.

  From the moment Kathleen uncovered the truth about Father Joseph’s role in the tragedy, she wondered how she ever could have doubted him.

  It was the fear. The fear, and the grief, and the guilt. They can do terrible things to a person if their burden is carried around for very long. They can arouse suspicion and mistrust of even those who are closest or most deserving of trust.

  Like Father Joseph.

  Or. . .

  Or Matt.

  But that’s different, Kathleen reminds herself. You never thought Matt would hurt Jen. You knew he loved her.

  You just weren’t so sure he loved you.

  But it all makes sense now that she knows why he acted so oddly, why he wouldn’t return her calls that snowy day in December.

  He was afraid that if he did, he would be compelled to tell her about the call he’d received from her best friend.

  That Maeve had called to proposition her husband on that last day of her life is no longer surprising to Kathleen.

  Fear and grief can do terrible things to a person.

  That Matt turned her down and chose not to tell Kathleen was never surprising in the first place. He wanted to protect his wife from her best friend’s betrayal.

  That’s Matt. Protective. Loyal. Loving.

  Too good to be true. How many times has she thought that about him over the years?

  But it is true. She has everything she always wanted.

  Almost everything.

  “Let’s go,” she says, touching Jen’s sleeve.

  They get to their feet. Walking in somber silence, her daughter at her side, Kathleen carries the second box to the far corner of the cemetery. They come to a stop beneath the oak tree, whose spreading branches are pale green with tender new leaves.

  Kathleen removes the dozen roses from the box in her arms and sets them at the base of the tombstone.

  Mollie Gallagher.

  Mollie Gallagher.

  Loving Wife, Devoted Mother, Protective Grandmother.

  She had the last two words etched into the stone just before the holidays, after she visited the stone monument company just outside the cemetery gates, next door to the florist shop.

  Protective Grandmother.

  You really were, she silently tells her mother, touching the recent engraving she considers her last Christmas present to Mollie Gallagher. You’ve protected her—and my secret—all these years.

  But in the end, the sins of her past weren’t meant to stay buried—and neither were the remains of her infant daughter.

  The makeshift grave was exhumed not long after the police investigation began. The baby’s remains were examined, then released to Kathleen, who was mercifully cleared of any potential charges.

  Genevieve Gallagher Carmody was laid to rest in a tiny white coffin in a plot beside her grandmother’s grave, beneath a carved marble angel that lists only her name and the dates of her birth and death.

  Tears sting Kathleen’s eyes as she takes the final red rose from her box and props it against her firstborn’s tombstone.

  “Are you okay, Mom?” Jen’s arms encircle her in warmth.

  Kathleen nods, wiping the tears with her sleeve.

  For a long time, they stand staring down at the tiny angel.

  Then Kathleen takes a deep breath. “We should go,” she says. “Daddy and the boys are probably back from their secret shopping mission by now, and they were going to go get Grandpa so he can come out for dinner with us.”

  “Before we go, I have to run over to Mrs. Gattinski’s to drop off the Mother’s Day presents the girls made for her. We did clay handprints. I promised I’d have them wrapped and ready this afternoon.”

  When Stella Gattinski and her daughters moved into the apartment at nearby Orchard Arms, Kathleen doubted Jen would be willing to do much babysitting there.

  It took her a while, but, ultimately, she opted to take back her old weekly job. Stella, in the throes of a messy divorce, frequently expresses her gratitude when she and Kathleen take their regular early morning walks around the neighborhood.

  Stella likes to say, “I don’t know what I’d do without Jen.”

  Kathleen doesn’t know, either . . . but she’s well aware that she came perilously close to finding out.

  “Are you ready, Mom?” Jen asks quietly, giving Kathleen’s arm a gentle pat.

  “I’m ready.”

  She touches the marble angel one last time, then bends to press her lips against the cold granite of Mollie Gallagher’s gravestone.

  “Happy Mother’s Day, Mom,” she whispers softly. “I love you.”

  At her side, her daughter—who greeted Kathleen first thing this morning with those very same heartfelt, precious words—puts a reassuring arm around her shoulder.

  “Hey! The snow’s stopped,” Jen tells her, looking up in wonder.

  Kathleen follows her gaze. Overhead, a gleam of golden sunshine and a patch of bright blue sky are poking through the dense ceiling of gray.

  “I guess you got your wish,” she tells Jen with a smile.

 
“We both did.”

  Truer words, Kathleen decides, have never been spoken.

  Arm in arm, mother and daughter head toward home.

  A SEASIDE RETREAT . . .

  It’s summer on the Jersey Shore. Children play on the

  beach. Husbands are off working in the city. And the surf

  echoes in the night. Here, in this perfect place, a serial

  killer has no worries in the world—except choosing the

  next victim . . .

  HAS JUST BECOME . . .

  Cam Hastings has come to Long Beach Island with her

  teenage daughter and the hope that maybe she can save her

  failed marriage. Cam has never stopped loving her husband

  Mike nor has she been able to outrun her flaws and

  demons—a vanished mother, a lost sister, and the ugly

  visions she has of missing children . . .

  A KILLER’S FAVORITE PLAYGROUND . . .

  Now, Cam is about to step over the edge. For once, she will

  act on one of her visions—and then face the consequences.

  For a killer has just struck again. And for Cam, and the

  people she loves most, fear has come home for good . . .

  And now for an exciting sneak peek of

  Wendy Corsi Staub’s

  DYING BREATH,

  coming next month wherever paperbacks are sold!

  PROLOGUE

  New York City

  January

  It always begins with the dizziness.

  In her office high above East Forty-Sixth Street, Camden Hastings is editing yet another inane fashion article, “Not Your Grandmother’s Belts and Brooches,” when the words begin to swim on the page.

  Lightheaded, she looks up warily. The desk lamp is glaring; the small room distorted and tilting at an impossible angle.

  Oh, no.

  She braces herself.

  Here it comes.

  It’s been awhile—a month, maybe more—since the last episode.

  Sometimes after that much time has passed, she actually allows herself to relax a little. She’ll lower her guard, wanting to believe she’s free and clear; that she’ll never have to deal with the unsettling visions again.

  But they always come back.

  Cam’s fingers involuntarily release her pencil. It rolls off the desk onto the floor. Ignoring it, she rolls her chair back slightly, just enough to rest her elbows on her lap and lower her face into her hands to stop the spinning sensation.

  She can hear her heart beating, hear her own rhythmic respiration . . . then someone else’s.

  Inhale . . .

  Exhale . . .

  Inhale . . .

  Cam’s head is filled with the sound of erratic, shallow breathing, in some kind of bizarre syncopation with her own.

  “Please, you have to let me go.”

  The thin, uneven pitch of the voice is typical of male adolescence, but she can’t see the speaker yet. Can’t see anything at all; her eyes are tightly closed against her palms and her mental screen remains dark.

  “Why are you doing this? Who are you?” she hears the boy ask brokenly.

  He’s so afraid, she senses, so terribly afraid, it’s all he can do to just stay conscious, keep breathing . . .

  Inhale . . .

  Exhale . . .

  Cam’s own lungs seem to constrict with the effort.

  But that’s crazy. You can breathe. You know he’s only in your head, like the others.

  All of them—all the characters she alone can see and hear—are figments of an exceptionally vivid imagination Cam’s English teachers liked to call “a gift,” back when she was in school.

  Ha. A gift?

  Hardly.

  But then, her teachers didn’t know about the strange visions she’s endured for as long as she can remember. If they knew, they might have understood that a vivid imagination can be—more than anything else—a curse.

  They’d have suggested a shrink for her, instead of creative writing courses. Because that’s what you do when you hallucinate on a regular basis, right? You see a psychiatrist.

  That’s what her sister Ava did at college, well over twenty years ago.

  But no one in Cam’s world ever realized that she had stumbled across the truth about beautiful, brunette Ava. About her mental illness. For all she knows, Pop never even knew about Ava’s troubles in the first place.

  In any case, no one in her life has ever suspected that Cam is aware she might have more in common with her older sister than an uncanny physical resemblance. She might also have the genetic potential to go stark raving mad, just as Ava so obviously did over twenty years ago.

  Why else would a person—perched twelve stories in the air—take a head-first dive to the ground?

  You don’t kill yourself just because your mother abandoned you when you were a teenager, or because your college course load is overwhelming . . . do you?

  Okay, some people might. But Cam found her sister’s diary years ago. She’s suspected, ever since, what was going on with her. She’s come to believe the voices in Ava’s head told her to jump.

  Funny, though—the voices in Cam’s aren’t anything like that.

  For one thing, they’re invariably laced with fear. Terror, even. They never speak directly to Cam; they’re always addressing someone else, some shadowy person who intends to hurt them.

  And most of the time, those voices belong to mere children.

  Cam knows that because she can usually conjure their faces if she focuses hard enough.

  Funny . . . even though she’s the one who dreams up these tortured characters in the first place, she can never quite anticipate what they’re going to look like, or whether she’ll even get to see them at all.

  For instance, this boy today, the frightened boy with the cracking voice, sounds like he’s going to be small and pale.

  But when he begins to take shape in Cam’s mind’s eye, he’s older than she expected. Dark-skinned, too—Hispanic, maybe, or Native American. He has a mop of curly dark hair and big brown eyes.

  He’s huddled in a confined space—she can see carpet, and metal, and a small recessed light, as if . . .

  Yes, it’s a car trunk. It’s open. Broad daylight. Dappled, fluid shade spills in, as if trees are gently stirring overhead.

  Then a human shadow looms over the boy; someone is standing there, looking down at him.

  Cam’s heart races, her throat gags on the boy’s panic.

  Calm down, she tells herself—and him. Even though he’s not real. Even though he exists only in her head.

  Is he wearing some sort of uniform? Boy Scouts, maybe? Khaki shirt, badges, and pins. A kerchief is tied around his neck. On his sleeve, a couple of sewn-on numbers, but Cam can’t make them out.

  Which doesn’t make sense because she’s the one who made him up—so she should know which numbers he’s wearing, shouldn’t she? She should know his name, and his age, and, dammit, she should be able to make him stop sounding so helpless.

  But no. He’s crying now. Crying and cowering in the car trunk, his elbows bent on either side of his face, his hands clutching the back of his head.

  Cam can’t bear to see him like that, can’t bear to listen to the unnatural, keening sound.

  Stop, she commands her over-imaginative, gifted brain, lifting her head and shaking it back and forth. Stop doing this to me.

  Mercifully, the boy’s voice gradually grows fainter. The image begins to fade.

  Cam breathes deeply to calm herself.

  There. That’s better.

  She sits up in her chair.

  Sips some tepid tea from the mug on her desk.

  Slowly, her breathing returns to normal.

  That was a bad one.

  They usually are. Bad like a nightmare that grips you when you’re having it . . .

  And end when you wake up.

  But lately, the hallucinations stay with her. She doesn’t
forget them the way you would a nightmare. They seem more real than ever before. Why?

  Who knows? It’s hard enough for Cam to believe she’s capable of creating such emotional drama out of thin air—let alone comprehend how and why she does it.

  Lord knows she’s got enough to worry about without her mind being cluttered by imaginary people in trouble.

  Her promotion from associate editor to editor is on hold until the next fiscal year begins. Mike’s been laid off for almost a month. They’re running out of money.

  That’s real stress.

  That’s what she should be worrying about.

  Not daydreaming, or hallucinating, or whatever one would call the unsettling visions that pop up in her head.

  Maybe I should go see someone about them, she thinks—same as always, whenever she comes out of one of these episodes.

  Then—no. No way, she tells herself—same, too, as always.

  She can’t go see a shrink. They can’t afford it, and anyway, what would Mike do if he realized he were married to a crazy person?

  Probably the same thing Pop did, all those years ago:

  Make himself scarce.

  I can’t lose Mike. I need him. I love him.

  She can barely remember her parents’ married era. Not that Ike and Brenda Neary had ever divorced—though they often spoke the word.

  Spoke? Ha. Screamed it.

  Back then, they still lived in Camden, a New Jersey suburb of Philadelphia and Mom’s hometown, for which she named her second daughter. Obsessed with glamorous old Hollywood and lingering girlhood dreams of becoming an actress, Brenda had named her firstborn after her favorite movie star, Ava Gardner.

  The irony: the real Ava Gardner lived a long, gilded life. A different brand of irony: once-thriving Camden, New Jersey has steadily deteriorated into poverty, urban blight, and staggering crime rates, notoriously dubbed the “most dangerous city in America.”

  Cam dimly recalls her mother’s face, her voice, her tears. Not much more than that, though. On rare occasions her father was around; there were arguments and accusations—usually ending with her mother hysterical and Pop slamming the door behind him as he left.