Shadowkiller

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  When it’s her turn, she hands Molly’s ID card to the waiting officer and holds her breath. He takes a cursory glance at the photo, then at her, swipes it through the slot on the reentry kiosk, and nods her through. Suppressing a sigh of relief, she puts the straw bag onto the conveyor belt to be X-rayed and dutifully holds up her hands for the mandatory squirt of antibacterial spray.

  After rubbing her palms together to ward off germs that could sicken an entire ship full of passengers, she retrieves her bag from the X-ray machine and can’t help but marvel that the Carousel’s security force has thought of everything.

  Almost everything.

  I’m the one who’s thought of everything.

  Calliope music plays merrily on the speakers as Carrie makes a left toward the midship elevator banks and stairwell, having memorized the deck plans that are conveniently mapped out on the cruise line’s Web site. No one would ever guess she hasn’t been navigating the ship’s passageways and levels every day of this weeklong cruise.

  She waits a few minutes for the elevator, but ducks her head and opts for the stairs the moment she’s joined by a boisterous crowd of fellow passengers who reek of coconut oil and booze. For all she knows, she mixed drinks for them this afternoon.

  She climbs six flights and emerges, winded, in an empty but brightly lit corridor on Deck 10. She makes a left; oops; backtracks, makes a right. Moments later, she’s unlocking the door marked 10533. Before crossing the threshold, she hangs the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the knob.

  The inside cabin is tiny, as she had expected it to be, and she leaves the light off, taking refuge in the darkness at last. Without a porthole, she won’t have a cabin view of the island home she’s leaving behind forever, but that’s okay. Maybe she’ll venture out to one of the decks as they set sail. Not for sentimental reasons, but because the timer inside the box she left in the storage room is set for five-fifteen. She’ll be able to watch Jimmy’s Big Iguana—and everyone in it—go up in an explosion of flames and smoke.

  Flames and smoke . . . just like the scene she left behind on another island over ten years ago, where the landscape was concrete and steel, not fronds and foliage.

  There shouldn’t be too many casualties here, relatively speaking. With the exception of a few stragglers, the passengers should all be back on board by the time the bomb goes off at the Big Iguana. The Disney ship is always the last to leave, at five-thirty, but that isn’t a bar crowd anyway.

  Of course the investigation will reveal the explosive device planted in the bar’s storage room. But with all Jimmy’s enemies, it won’t be a stretch, by any means, for the authorities to conclude that someone might have reason to blow up the place. Certainly someone other than one of the victims, who will include a handful of locals, a couple of employees, and of course, poor Jane the bartender, who will have been killed in her apartment upstairs.

  As for Molly Temple: Carrie wonders who’s waiting back at home for her in . . . where, Ohio? Yes, according to the driver’s license in her wallet, and last Friday’s paycheck stub for an accounting firm in Cleveland. Also among her things: a room reservation for three nights at the Miami Marriott, and a plane ticket to fly home on Monday morning.

  Well, whoever is waiting for her back in Ohio will just have to wonder why she never caught her flight. The ship’s records will show that she disembarked on Friday morning, checked into her hotel—and then vanished into thin air.

  As for Carrie . . .

  All she has to do, once she’s back in the States, is rent a car and drive away.

  She can be in New York before the weekend is over . . . if that’s what she wants.

  Or she can take it slowly, savor the journey.

  That’s the beauty of it. She has all the time in the world to catch up with her past. At least this time, she knows right where to find Allison.

  That wasn’t such an easy task twelve years ago. All she knew back then, when she arrived in New York City, was that Allison Taylor was somewhere in Manhattan, the proverbial needle in a haystack in those days before it was possible to locate just about anyone in a matter of seconds via the Internet.

  I found her, though, eventually.

  Found her, and moved in right across the hall from her. She never suspected a thing . . .

  Nor did Mack.

  He honestly thought they were moving to Hudson Street because Carrie’s commute to the World Trade Center would be shorter if they lived downtown. He also believed the apartment’s previous tenant, an elderly woman named Mrs. Ogden, had died in an accidental fall—as did Mrs. Ogden’s family, and the landlord who listed her newly vacated apartment as available for rent on June first.

  And when Carrie and Mack introduced themselves to their pretty blond neighbor across the hall, it never occurred to Mack—or, apparently, to Allison—that Carrie wasn’t meeting her for the first time.

  That was how it went, throughout that long, hot city summer when they lived across the hall from each other. Whenever Carrie ran into Allison in the hallway or down by the mailboxes, they’d exchange polite greetings and go on their way.

  Every time that happened, Carrie was left shaken. She’d gone to such great lengths to engineer the whole thing—now what?

  What was she supposed to do next? What did she want out of all that? She thought she knew . . . until she found herself face-to-face with Allison. It infuriated her that there wasn’t a flicker of recognition in those blue eyes, but . . .

  But by then, you were too distracted by Mack to let it bother you as much as it might have. By then, you were foolishly thinking you could escape the hand you’d been dealt, and live a normal life.

  Now, though, that time has dulled those foolish hopes and dreams—and the sting of having been forgotten by Allison—it’s all more amusing than anything. To think that she’d been right under Allison’s nose all that time . . .

  To think that, after Carrie’s “death,” Allison—of all people, of all people!—went and married the grieving widower . . .

  Unbelievable. Daddy used to tell me that I could be a writer when I grew up because I was so good at making up stories, but I couldn’t come up with this stuff if I tried.

  That final twist—Allison marrying Mack—was, like September 11, just another cosmic coincidence; a sign that the stars have aligned so that she—

  Her thought curtailed by a sudden blast of noise, Carrie thinks, for a moment, that it’s the bomb going off back at the Big Iguana.

  But it can’t be. A glance at Molly’s glow-in-the-dark Timex, now strapped around her own wrist, tells her that it’s not time yet. It’s only five o’clock—on the dot.

  The noise, she realizes, was one she’s heard nightly, repeatedly, from shore; a noise that sounds drastically different when it’s coming from somewhere overhead: it’s the ship’s giant horn blasting the news that they’re setting sail.

  Carrie smiles.

  It worked. It really worked.

  She’s going home.

  PART II

  Night-dreams trace on Memory’s wall,

  Shadows of the thoughts of day;

  And thy fortunes as they fall,

  the bias of the will betray.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Chapter Three

  Kingsbury County, South Dakota

  July 11, 1977

  “Higher, Daddy! Push me higher!”

  “Any higher, and you’re going to go right up to the moon!”

  “I want to! I want to go over the moon, like the cow in the nursery rhyme!”

  “You’re getting too old for nursery rhymes,” he told her.

  “I am not!”

  “Sure you are. No more ‘Hey, Diddle-Diddle’ for you!”

  “Yes! I like ‘Hey, Diddle-Diddle’! And I like ‘Jack Be Nimble,’ and I like ‘Little Boy Blue,’ and—oh! I know! I want to go over the moon so that I can see the man inside it, like in the song.”

  “Which song?”

  “Your favorite so
ng, about Little Boy Blue and the kitty cat and the daddy!”

  “What? Oh—you mean ‘Cat’s in the Cradle’?” He laughed. She couldn’t see him, but she could hear him, and she could picture that broad grin on his handsome face, flashing teeth beneath his mustache, and the way he’d throw his dark head back, laughing as though he didn’t have a care in the world.

  “Hey, there, Diddle-Diddle.” He caught the back of the swing in his hands when she came sailing back toward him. “Guess what? You can’t go over the moon.”

  She giggled. “My name isn’t Diddle-Diddle!”

  “No? I thought it was!” He wrapped his arms around her from behind and tickled her, making her giggle harder.

  Then he stopped. Still holding her fast against him, so that she could feel his mustache against her cheek and feel his heart beating against her back, he said firmly into her ear, “It’s time to go home. It’s late. Mom’s going to wonder where you are, and I have to get on the road, remember?”

  “Not tonight, Daddy. Please. Can’t you stay tonight?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “Da-addy!” she whined.

  “Diddle-Di-iddle!” he whined right back. “I told you that before. Don’t you remember?”

  Remember . . . what was she supposed to remember?

  There was something . . . a memory swooped close enough to touch and then swung up and away, and she couldn’t catch it. She couldn’t . . .

  Or maybe you don’t want to.

  “Come on. If we go now, I can tuck you in and read you a quick story before I go. But no Mother Goose.”

  That was fine with her. All the nursery rhymes in that book were much too short.

  “How about Tikki Tikki Tembo?” she asked.

  “Nope—that’s not a quick story!”

  That was the point. But it was just as well he didn’t want to read it to her again. The last time he read it, the book had given her nightmares about falling down a well—the one on their own property, which Daddy had once proudly told her had been hand-dug a hundred years ago by an early settler somewhere back in his family tree.

  There were tens of thousands of those old wells dotting the prairie, dug by homesteaders on their claims a hundred years ago, he told her.

  Theirs was covered by a heavy wooden lid. One day, as Daddy was taking a break from working outside to roll her around in the wheelbarrow, she asked him if they could look inside the well.

  “Why?”

  “I want to see what it looks like.”

  “There’s not much to see. I filled in most of it years ago,” he told her. “It’s the law. But it’s still pretty deep, so you stay away from it.”

  “How deep?”

  “Six, maybe eight feet. See?” He held a flashlight and she leaned forward in the wheelbarrow and peered over the edge, breathing the dank smell of earth. There were worms, she remembered, and then a big shiny black spider crawled toward the opening, and she screamed and made him close it back up again.

  “That was a black widow,” he told her. “They’re poisonous. You don’t want to get bit by one of those.”

  “What would happen? Would I die?”

  “You might. At the very least, you’d have terrible pain, starting about a half hour after the bite, and your muscles would begin cramping as the venom enters the bloodstream and attacks the nervous system. After a few hours, if you didn’t get help, your blood pressure would go up and you’d have trouble breathing, probably convulsions—”

  “Daddy, stop! I don’t want to hear any more!” Why did he always have to give her such complicated responses to basic questions?

  “Why not? I’m teaching you about black widows. They’re fascinating.”

  “I’m afraid of them.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about them at all if you don’t go near the well. They’re nocturnal creatures. They like it down there in the damp dark hollow. Make sure you stay away.”

  “Don’t worry. I will.”

  In the nightmare, she was walking along on a summer afternoon through the high grass in the open field way out behind the house. The cover must have been left off the well, and she was swallowed up and trapped there, alone in the dark with the big spider, lots of spiders . . .

  Her mother must have told her father that she’d been waking up screaming in the night, because the next time she saw him, he had a present for her.

  “What is it?” she asked, trying to mask her disappointment. She’d been hinting that she wanted a new set of furniture for her Barbie house, and instead she got . . .

  Some kind of contraption made out of sticks, feathers, and a network of strings that looked like a spider’s web?

  “It’s a dream catcher,” Daddy told her. “I bought it at the reservation.”

  The reservation, she knew, was where the Native Americans lived. Sometimes, Daddy stopped there on the way home from a trip to get gas and cigarettes, and once in a while he’d bring her something from the store there. Usually, he just liked to give her books as presents, because he wanted her to be smart, but when he went to the reservation he came back with other things. A leather coin purse. A beaded bracelet. A dark-braided little doll in a pouch, whose name, she mistakenly thought he said, was Papoose. She thought it was nice that Daddy had bothered to give the doll a name.

  Later, she found out that “papoose” was a Native American word for “child.” By that time, the name had stuck. She carried Papoose with her everywhere for a long time, until one day, she disappeared, along with lots of other toys.

  She searched frantically, and when Daddy came back from his trip she asked him if he’d seen Papoose. His response was simply that she was too old for dolls.

  That was untrue.

  “I’ll never be too old for dolls,” she told him. “Never.”

  “Yes, you will. Someday, you’ll be all grown up. And grown-ups don’t play with dolls.”

  “Then I’m not going to grow up. I’m going to stay this way forever.”

  “That’s a stupid thing for a smart girl to say,” Daddy said, and she cringed. She hated it when he said that.

  “What do I do with this?” she asked, trying not to show her disappointment when he gave her the dream catcher.

  “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Daddy climbed up on a chair and hung it in the window of her purple and white bedroom. “There. Only good dreams can get through that web. Nothing scary.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  He’d been right about that. Every night before she fell asleep, she looked at it hanging there in the glow of her nightlight, and she told it to catch all the nightmares about falling down a dark well.

  So far, it had.

  But that didn’t mean she was ready to leave the swing set and go home to bed—with or without reading Tikki Tikki Tembo. She wasn’t ready to say good-bye to Daddy again just yet.

  She flailed her legs, pumping futilely in the air. “I want to swing a little longer. Just a couple more pushes? Please?”

  Sometimes, he gave in when she begged for something.

  Not usually, though.

  She had a feeling he wouldn’t tonight. He was in a hurry to get going. She could sense his impatience; had noticed him looking at his watch during dinner: hamburgers, fries, and milk shakes served by a carhop at Eddie’s, their favorite drive-in restaurant out on the highway. People kept saying the old place was going to close any day now, but she hoped it wouldn’t. She liked to go to Eddie’s because it was where Daddy used to take her mother on dates when they were boyfriend and girlfriend.

  That was a long time ago, in the sixties, long before she was ever born.

  Sometimes, when she went to Eddie’s with Daddy, she saw teenagers there together—boys and girls, kissing in the car while they waited for their food to be brought to the window. She imagined her parents doing that when they were young, and it made her happy inside, and sad, too. Because now that they were husband and wife, they did
n’t ever kiss each other. Sometimes, they didn’t even talk to each other—and when they did, it wasn’t in a nice way. She couldn’t even remember a time when her parents didn’t fight a lot.

  Remember . . . what is it? What am I supposed to remember?

  After dinner tonight, Daddy used the pay phone outside Eddie’s. Then he said he had to get going right away, but she convinced him to stop here at the playground behind a school down the road from Eddie’s. She showed him how she could get all the way across the monkey bars. Well, she tried, and fell, twice.

  “I can do it!” she told him. “Really! I can! I did it while you were gone this week. Watch me! One more try . . .” She fell.

  “Don’t give up. You have to keep working at it. It’s all about the rhythm. Get into the rhythm of it.”

  She tried again. Fell again.

  “You have to try harder. I told you, if you put in the effort, you’ll be able to do it. You can do anything. Hard work makes things happen. If you would just—”

  “Come on, Daddy!” she cut in, sensing he was about to embark on one of his lectures. “Race you to the slide!”

  They both went down the slide a few times, and then he made her try the monkey bars again. And again. And again.

  Fighting back tears of frustration, she turned to the swing set. “Push me, Daddy! Push me!”

  Up, up, up she sailed, over and over again. Up toward the silvery pale crescent moon in the purple-blue night sky, clearly visible above the tall silo across the road from the school.

  Up, up, up . . .

  Down, down, down . . .

  Now, she was stuck, legs dangling helplessly.

  Behind her, holding her close in his warm embrace, Daddy said, “Come on. I mean it. We have to go.”

  She kicked her legs furiously. “Not yet!”

  “Stop that. I said five minutes, and it’s been ten. You promised to listen when I said it was time to go, remember?”

  Remember . . .

  What am I supposed to remember? There’s something . . .

  “Let’s go. Now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have to work. You know that.”