Shadowkiller

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Carrie takes the card from her and glances at it as Molly sips from the straw.

  Along with the name of the ship and the embedded code that will be scanned for reboarding, the card bears the passenger’s name, Molly Temple, her disembark date—tomorrow—and her lifeboat assembly station.

  “Great, I just need your cabin number,” Carrie tells her easily, then holds her breath, praying the generous rum in the first drink—and the first couple of sips Molly’s taken from this one—impaired her better judgment.

  Yep:

  “It’s 10533,” Molly tells her, thus confirming—as Carrie had already suspected—that she’s staying in one of the ship’s new studio rooms—tiny inside cabins that accommodate just one passenger. No frills. No roommates.

  No problem, mon, as they like to say here in the islands that are soon to become mere specks on the horizon in the Carousel’s wake.

  “Oooh, I love your bracelet.” Molly has caught sight of the unusual silver and blue bangle on Carrie’s wrist, a constant source of compliments. “Is that topaz?”

  “Larimar. It’s a Caribbean gemstone.”

  “It’s beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. Where did you get it?”

  “Punta Cana.”

  She’d visited only once, recklessly daring to leave this island on a clandestine private yacht trip with Jimmy at the height of their affair. The vendor who sold her the bracelet had assured her that it was real larimar, not the plastic imitations that are rampant in tourist traps. He used a lighter to prove it, holding a flame to the stone to show her how durable it was.

  “The real thing won’t melt,” he told Carrie, “or burn. The real thing, you can’t destroy.”

  She liked that.

  She bought it.

  She wears it every day.

  If Jimmy ever noticed, he probably thinks that’s because it’s a treasured memento of their time together. It isn’t. For Carrie, it’s a reminder that some things in this ever-precarious world can’t be destroyed.

  “I’d love to bring a bracelet like that back for my mom,” Molly tells Carrie. “She just lost my dad a few months ago, and I’ve been looking for a souvenir for her. Where is Punta Cana? Is that one of the shops down the road?”

  The woman’s stupidity makes it even easier for Carrie to silently rationalize what’s going to happen to her as she says aloud, “No, it’s a different island. It’s a city in the Dominican Republic. That’s the only place you can find larimar in the whole world.”

  “I’ve never been there.”

  “I’m sure you’ll go someday.” The lies spill so easily off Carrie’s tongue. They always have.

  “I hope so,” Molly tells her. “Oh well. Maybe I can find something for my mom in the jewelry store on the Carousel. Anyway, thanks for the drink.”

  “You’re welcome. Enjoy.” Smiling, Carrie hands back the ship ID card—for now.

  Glenhaven Park, New York

  Five o’clock on a Thursday, and Allison MacKenna finally—finally!—finds the opportunity to sit down on the couch with the novel she was supposed to have finished reading for her May book club meeting tonight.

  She started it over a week ago and has been trying to get back to it since Monday morning when her daughters left for school and her youngest went down for his nap. But one interruption after another derailed her plans for that day, and the three subsequent days.

  That’s okay. They were just ordinary household events—a forgotten lunch box, a broken dishwasher, unexpected drop-in company, a high-maintenance playdate . . .

  Allison can handle those kinds of disruptions. She actually welcomes anything that reminds her that life is back to normal; that nothing earth-shattering or life-threatening is going to pop up and rob her of the things she treasures most in this world: her husband and children, a quiet suburban life as a stay-at-home mom.

  In this moment, Hudson and Madison are happily occupied with a “top secret” project involving felt and glue sticks at the kitchen table. J.J. is industriously stacking blocks in his ExerSaucer across the room. And Allison has just three hours until the book discussion at her friend Sheila’s house.

  She’s loved to read since she was a little girl, and ordinarily, she likes to savor the pages, not rush through them. But this dense book just isn’t her cup of tea, and it’s not the sort of thing you can casually put down and pick up right where you left off.

  Those would be more my speed these days, she thinks, eyeing a stack of the girls’ library books on the coffee table. My brain is mush. Maybe I can suggest Shel Silverstein or Dr. Seuss when it’s my turn to pick the next book.

  Wondering how many pages she has left to go, she flips to the back of the novel—a trade paperback with a matte cover whose illustrations are heavy on the nature imagery and conspicuously missing human beings, as all the book club selections seem to be.

  The epilogue—all these books have epilogues, too—concludes on page 283.

  She sighs and starts reading. Rather, tries to start reading.

  In the kitchen, the girls’ voices have gone from pleasant chatter to bickering.

  “Maddy, please keep your eyes on your own work,” Allison hears Hudson telling her younger sister in her best imitation of her kindergarten teacher’s voice.

  “I just wanted to see where I’m s’posed to glue the flower.”

  “You can glue it anywhere! Be creative!”

  “I am being creative!”

  A moment later: “Noooo! Don’t copy me! That’s exactly where I have mine!”

  “It’s on top of the stem, Huddy! That’s where flowers go!”

  Listening to them, Allison sighs. Even if all hell doesn’t break loose around here in the next fifteen minutes—and she wouldn’t bet against that—she’ll be lucky if she manages to get through a couple of chapters, let alone almost two hundred pages.

  Oh well. She can always fake it, or show up late. The group usually spends the first half hour on the book, but meetings generally stray after that into a pinot grigio–fueled bus-stop-gossip free-for-all.

  Having been the topic of said gossip herself last November, Allison had been tempted to drop her membership in the book club altogether. Oh hell, she’d been tempted to pick up and move the whole family out of suburban Westchester County, make a fresh start.

  “Where do you propose we go?” her husband asked the first time she mentioned it, on the morning they were heading back home after their ordeal. “Back to the city?”

  “No! Not the city. Not with all this . . . stuff.” No way would they ever be able to fit the contents of their thirty-five-hundred-square-foot house and garage into a Manhattan apartment.

  Besides, now isn’t the time to sell the house, even though it’s fully paid for, thanks to the life insurance policy and 9/11 victim relief funds Mack collected after Carrie’s death. They bought the house for just over a million dollars at the peak of real estate prices, and it’ll be a while before the market bounces back.

  Anyway, she doesn’t want to live in the city anymore. Not with kids. Nor does she want to return to her Midwestern hometown, as her husband assumed when she first tried to explain her yearning for an easier life, something less intense.

  “Where were you thinking we should go? Centerfield?” Mack asked. “Because I have to say, Nebraska to midtown would be a hell of a commute for me.”

  “Mack, you know how I feel about Nebraska. I moved away from there the second I was old enough, for good reasons—and they haven’t changed.”

  “Then where?”

  “I don’t know. Someplace else. Where nobody knows us, and nobody knows what happened.”

  “We can’t just drop out of sight, Allie. That’s not fair to the kids. We owe it to them to go home and live our lives, get back to normal. We didn’t do anything wrong. We’re not going to slink around acting like we did.”

  He was right, of course. And right again when he added, “After all, no one knows better than we do how t
o pick up the pieces and get on with life.”

  Ten years earlier, on September 11, Mack—who was Allison’s across-the-hall neighbor at the time—had lost his first wife. Carrie was working on the 104th floor when a plane struck the north tower at the World Trade Center in Manhattan. In the days that followed the attacks, he and Allison regularly crossed paths with each other—and with the Nightwatcher, an opportunistic serial killer who murdered a fellow tenant in their building, along with three other New Yorkers.

  Traumatized by the terror attack and confused by the murders, mentally impaired handyman Jerry Thompson confessed to the crimes. It was Allison’s testimony that sent him to prison, where he’d finally taken his own life last September.

  Or had he?

  NYPD detectives on the case believed that another inmate might have been behind Jerry’s so-called suicide. The truth about his death will probably never be known.

  On the heels of his suicide, what appeared to be a copycat killer resurfaced on a vengeful mission to frame Mack in a new rash of murders, hell-bent on destroying Allison’s family to settle the score. When the ordeal was finally over, the killer lay dead—courtesy of an illegal gun Mack had borrowed from a friend.

  But he’d acted in self-defense, and in the end, wasn’t charged.

  Thank God. Thank God.

  Allison can’t imagine what her life would be like now had her children not been rescued and her husband not been exonerated.

  She won’t imagine it.

  Even with the nightmare behind them, it wasn’t easy for the MacKennas to return to this house where their privacy had been so chillingly violated: the family’s every move captured by a twisted voyeur’s hidden cameras and microphones.

  Gradually, though, they’ve been able to rebuild their lives. To keep the press at bay they changed their home phone number to an unlisted one, canceled their cell phone accounts and got new ones, and planted thicker hedges to protect their house from prying eyes on the street. They threw themselves back into work and school routines, nurturing friendships that have proven surprisingly, blessedly resilient.

  Not that life is perfect now, by any means.

  But then, it never really was. That was an illusion, one to which Allison fiercely clung, wanting her children to experience the childhood she never had; the mother she never had.

  In the end, she learned the hard way that it doesn’t really matter whether you do everything right, the way she attempted to, or everything wrong, the way her own mother had. No matter how hard you try to insulate your family—and yourself—the big, bad world has a way of intruding. Fate, as her father used to say, is the great equalizer.

  Or is it time that’s the great equalizer?

  Speaking of time . . .

  I have three hours to finish this book, so why am I sitting here staring at the page without reading it, thinking about the past?

  Allison pushes the troubling memories from her mind and forces herself to read.

  One page, another page . . .

  God, I hate this book.

  “Maddy! Don’t glue that sunshine there!”

  “You said to be creative! You said not to copy you!”

  “But the sun has to be in the sky, not on the grass! You can’t give Mommy a card that has the sun in the grass!”

  Allison can’t help but smile. So the girls are making cards for her—no wonder they kicked her out of the kitchen.

  Mother’s Day is coming up on Sunday. It wasn’t one of Allison’s favorite holidays back when she was a daughter, and it isn’t now that she’s a mother—though of course, she’s grateful to be blessed with three beautiful, healthy children.

  But the problem with Mother’s Day, as with most holidays, is that it brings back memories. Memories of her difficult childhood, raised by a forlorn woman whose own conservative parents had turned their backs on her when she got pregnant and whose husband—Allison’s father—did the same thing years later, but for other reasons. God only knew what they were.

  And God only knows who he really was. I’ll never know, and I shouldn’t care.

  “Memories are good for nothin’,” Mom used to say, and no wonder. “It’s better to just forget about all the things you can’t change.”

  Allison was nine when her father took off. Her mother, Brenda, hung in there until she was seventeen, when the final overdose in an ominous string of them put her out of her misery at last.

  Hell, yes, it would be better to forget those things—forget a lot of things that can’t be changed—but that doesn’t mean it’s always possible.

  All you can do is try. And of course, you just keep going forward, making the best of every day. You weather the inevitable storms, and you take the sunshine wherever you can get it—even if it’s lying in the grass.

  Across the room, J.J. topples a two-block tower and explodes in gleeful babble.

  Watching him, Allison realizes that while he hasn’t grown disinterested in the activity just yet, he’s probably about to.

  That’s okay. Playing with a toddler is right up her alley at this point. The book is a lost cause. She sets it aside and goes over to the ExerSaucer.

  “What’s up, little man?”

  “Mom-mom-mom-mom . . .”

  Ah, music to her ears.

  Her son had been a difficult baby—and an even more difficult toddler. But now that he’s past eighteen months, he seems to have gotten a bit more manageable. Either that, or she’s simply used to his energy. After two docile little girls, it wasn’t easy to adapt to a demanding little boy, especially with all the drama that unfolded here last fall.

  She scoops him up and hugs him close, breathing the powdery-diaper and baby shampoo scent of him.

  “Mom-mom-mom-mom . . .”

  “Are you talking to me? Hmm?” Relishing his drool-spilling, three-toothed grin, Allison sighs contentedly.

  Yes. Life is good.

  Again.

  And this time, it’s going to stay that way.

  When at last Carrie exits the small apartment above Jimmy’s Big Iguana, for the first time ever, she leaves the door behind her unlocked.

  The island is relatively safe, and it’s not as though she’s ever had possessions that are worth stealing.

  Even you don’t want them, she reminds herself as she heads down the fourteen steep, rickety steps leading into an overgrown little yard. But she’s always kept her secrets locked away in that apartment: the only tangible evidence of who she once was and where she came from.

  Now, they’re in the straw bag over her shoulder—Molly’s straw bag. The few things worth bringing along into the next phase of her life: her laptop, cash, a couple more packets of the powder that had come in so handy at the bar, and an envelope filled with old photos and documents, including her original birth certificate, and the key to a safe deposit box back in the States.

  Oh, and of course, she also has her ticket home, in the form of Molly’s ship ID, passport, and wallet.

  That she would eventually find her way back to America via cruise ship, posing as a lookalike passenger, was never in question. After all, it’s not as though she can just hop a plane back to the U.S. using her own passport—the real one, not the Carrie Robinson MacKenna identity she was using when she disappeared on that September morning over ten years ago.

  No, and she can’t use Carrie Robinson MacKenna’s passport, either. Carrie is dead, after all. Or so the whole world believes. She herself saw the name on list after published list of World Trade Center victims; she read a touching tribute to her life in the New York Times.

  There was no obituary. She’d watched for one, wondering how Mack might handle it, given what he knew—which was next to nothing—about where she’d been born, and to whom. Even the memorial in the Times was sketchy, based upon what her husband knew about her life in New York.

  Funny—faking her own death had never been part of her agenda. It had occurred to her, of course, but she’d thought it would be impossible to pull of
f.

  On the day that fate proved her wrong, she’d already realized their marriage was a big mistake; had already been planning to walk out of Mack’s life without a backward glance.

  Mack unwittingly gave the plan a premature jump-start when he told her, the morning of September 11, that he wanted a divorce. She feigned tears, as if all her dreams had just been shattered when the reality was that the marriage, for her, had ultimately been little more than a smokescreen.

  She hadn’t intended it to be that way. When she met Mack, she had, admittedly, gotten lost in the promise of something more than she’d bargained for, the promise of a family. A real family. She almost dared to believe that it was possible to have that; to actually become the person she was pretending to be.

  But of course, she came to her senses and grasped that it wasn’t meant to happen.

  She hardened her heart long before he told her it was over. On the morning that he did, she dried her fake tears, got dressed for work and left the apartment on Hudson Street. She hopped on the subway and arrived at the office just before seven-thirty, same as always. She’d been working at Cantor Fitzgerald for almost two years by then, making great money.

  All good things must come to an end, she clearly remembers thinking on that last day, as she made her way to her desk in front of a north-facing window with an incredible view of the uptown skyline against a cloudless blue sky.

  Had she been looking out that window a little over an hour later, she’d have seen American Airlines Flight 11 gunning straight for her. By then, though, she was long gone.

  Instead of grabbing a cup of coffee and getting down to business as usual before the bond market opened for the day, she had unlocked her desk drawer and removed the packet that had been waiting for months. How many times, before that morning, had she congratulated herself on cleverly hiding the incriminating evidence of her past at the office, where she could get to it on short notice—but where Mack would never stumble across it? How many times, after that morning, had she marveled at the close call she’d had because of her final detour to her desk in the World Trade Center?