Shadowkiller

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “I don’t care!”

  “Stop that. Stop acting like a two-year-old. You know better.”

  She did, of course. She was seven. Old enough to know that Daddy had to leave tonight, and that he’d be away for a long time. Weeks, probably.

  “No!” she shouted. She couldn’t help it. “I want to swing!”

  “You’ve had enough swinging.”

  “But I want to swing up over the moon! I want the dish to run away with the spoon!”

  She waited for a response from him. He liked rhymes. They always made him laugh.

  But he was silent. Suddenly, his hands felt ice cold. And she could no longer feel his heart beating.

  She turned her head, slowly, to look at him.

  “Daddy? Daddy . . . ?”

  A scream erupted from her throat.

  He was grinning at her, his rotting teeth protruding from the withered mouth of a hideous corpse with vacant eye sockets.

  And that was when she finally remembered.

  “Nooooo!” Carrie screamed, sitting up in bed. “Noooo!”

  She pressed a hand against her wildly racing heart, looking around.

  Her bedroom was dark. Too dark. Where was the dream catcher?

  She could barely make out the slats of the blinds across the window—but they were up and down, vertical slats, not horizontal. And a strange light filtered through the cracks. Far too bright for prairie starlight . . .

  It’s city light, she realized, even as she heard the sirens outside, on a street too far below her window, and remembered the rest.

  Her name was Carrie now. She wasn’t in her purple and white bedroom. She was all grown up, in New York City.

  That was just a dream. The same old nightmare, back to haunt her.

  Tears rolled down her face, and she hugged herself, rocking back and forth, back and forth, comforting the lost little girl who still lived somewhere deep inside of her—the little girl whose daddy had died so long ago.

  Chapter Four

  New York City

  March 7, 2000

  On an ordinary Tuesday evening, Carrie wouldn’t set foot outdoors until the tail end of her commute to the opposite tip of Manhattan.

  There was a subway station located directly beneath the World Trade Center concourse, and it had come in handy during the wintry weather these past few months. She could leave her desk at Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the north tower and, without being exposed to the elements, emerge from the subway right around the corner from her Washington Heights apartment building.

  That commute had become so choreographed that she could probably do it blindfolded. Every night, faced with a row of concourse escalators, all of them descending toward the bowels of the building, she chose to ride the second to the right. At the bottom, entering the subway, she always put her token into the same turnstile—the one on the far left—and positioned herself in front of the same pillar on the platform, precisely where the doors to the fourth car on the next uptown train would open. That would allow her, when she reached her stop, to exit the train directly at the foot of the stairs to the street.

  Elevator, escalator, subway, stairs.

  Elevator, escalator, subway, stairs.

  It’s all about the rhythm. Get into the rhythm of it . . .

  Elevator, escalator, subway, stairs.

  She liked knowing exactly where to go and what to do. There was a certain comfort to order; to ordinary—most of the time.

  Tonight, she was feeling uncharacteristically restless; tired of knowing exactly what was going to happen next. Tired of the commute, of the job itself, of going home alone to that drab little apartment.

  Little? That was an understatement. Every night and every morning, she had to crawl in and out of her double bed across the foot, because the edges of the mattress on either side were right up against the walls. Usually, that didn’t bother her. She could afford the rent, and she was exactly where she wanted to be: in Manhattan.

  Tonight, though, she was in no hurry to get back home. And so, after riding the elevator down to the lobby, she faltered.

  What the heck are you doing? she wondered as, instead of taking the escalators on down to the concourse and the C train, she impulsively exited to the street.

  I’m listening to my gut. That’s what I’m doing.

  Was it a case of spring fever? If so, she must have caught it from her coworkers, in much the same way that being surrounded by an office full of coughing, sneezing people would inevitably lead to a tickle in your own nose and throat by the end of the day.

  Today’s workplace chatter had been all about the unseasonably warm weather. According to the calendar, springtime was still a couple of weeks away. But the city had been bathed in warm sunshine all afternoon, and while at this time of year the concrete didn’t hold the heat, the evening chill was nowhere near as biting as it should be.

  Carrie found the open space between the two towers alive with twilight activity. Despite the pleasant weather, no one lingered on the low benches surrounding the spherical bronze sculpture at the plaza’s center. Businessmen and women in suits and trench coats scurried past, following their own well-worn paths of least resistance from office to train, bus, or ferry. At the end of a long day, all anyone wanted in this city—at least here in the financial district—was to get home, the sooner, the better.

  Not me. Not tonight.

  Carrie knew she couldn’t walk all the way up to Washington Heights—not wearing pumps, pantyhose, and a skirt—but she was going to stroll for as long as she felt like it.

  After being confined to a skyscraper’s artificial ventilation for nine hours straight, she found the fresh night air almost intoxicating. The few blocks she’d expected to walk turned into miles.

  As she moved north, Broadway, all business at the lower end of Manhattan, transformed into a neighborhood where people lived and dined and shopped. She passed storefront pizzerias, trendy boutiques, and—when she reached the Village—NYU’s massive academic buildings.

  Backpack-toting college students milled about smoking cigarettes between swigs from Starbucks cups; fancy women window-shopped; hand-holding lovers strolled and mooned; nannies pushed their charges in baby carriages; office workers scurried around all of them.

  Sometime in the past twenty-four hours, enterprising downtown restaurateurs must have hastily dragged chairs and tables from winter storage to transform sidewalks along the network of side streets into outdoor cafés that ordinarily wouldn’t materialize for another couple of months. People lingered at small, votive-lit tables drinking wine, gazing at the pedestrian parade.

  Although Carrie had never walked up this stretch of Broadway before—all the way from the financial district through Tribeca and SoHo—the terrain felt familiar. That was because she’d prudently learned the lay of the land long before she even moved to Manhattan four months ago, having been taught, as a child, to take a methodical approach to new ventures.

  “If you do your homework in advance of any situation,” Daddy told her, “you’ll always be able to fit in, no matter where you go or what you do. No one will ever guess that it’s your first time for anything.”

  Like everything else he’d ever said, those words resonated—particularly years later, when she was able to grasp their bitter irony.

  And so, she’d spent a good portion of last autumn in Midwestern libraries, poring over street maps, tour guides, photo collections. She learned New York City’s key landmarks and thoroughfares, and how they all fit together. She practiced the mathematical formula one could use to figure out the nearest numbered cross street for any address on any avenue in the city. Brilliant.

  As Daddy so aptly, and frequently, said, “Order is a great person’s need and their true well-being.”

  Only later, much later, did she realize that he was quoting the Swiss writer Henri-Frédéric Amiel—and that Daddy wasn’t exactly prone to giving credit where credit was due.

  That wasn’t h
is worst fault, though. Far from it.

  “Excuse me, ma’am?” Someone tapped her shoulder as she stood waiting for the light to change at Third Street in the heart of Greenwich Village.

  She turned to see a middle-aged couple. Tourists—she could tell by the pastel jackets—and undoubtedly from the Midwest: the flat A that drew “ma’am” into two syllables was unmistakable.

  “Can you please tell us where Houston Street is?” The woman pronounced it like the city in Texas.

  “You mean Houston?” Carrie couldn’t help asking, emphasis on the proper pronunciation: How—rhymes with “now”—ston. Not H-you—rhymes with “new”—ston.

  “Houston, How-ston—whatever you call it. Do you know where it is?”

  Carrie resisted the urge to inform this impudent stranger that one shouldn’t just go around calling things whatever one felt like calling them. Some people simply had no sense of right vs. wrong, of order vs. chaos.

  Suppressing a sigh, she pointed back over her shoulder, to the south. “It’s down there. Go past Bond Street—you’ll see it on the left but you don’t have to cross it if you stay on this side of the street, because it only runs east of Broadway—and then go across Bleecker, and it’s the next intersection after that.”

  “After Bleecker?” the man asked. “Are you sure?”

  Carrie just looked at him. Granted, he didn’t know her; didn’t know how her mind worked, or that she never made mistakes when it came to directions—or anything else. Never. But still . . .

  “I’m sure,” she said crisply, and turned away.

  Behind her, the woman called, “Thank you.” “Thank” was also two syllables. Thay-ank.

  The light changed and Carrie resumed walking north, inexplicably unsettled at having heard that familiar accent again. It made her think of what she’d left behind, and of the reason she was here instead of there.

  But it wasn’t healthy to look back, especially with a past as dysfunctional as hers. She tried, instead, to focus on being flattered that those tourists had recognized her as a local, despite the fact that she’d been here only a few months herself.

  She had Daddy to thank for that. She’d certainly done her New York City homework. Long before she ever actually set foot on Fifth Avenue, for example, she could recite not just the cross street, but the address of every notable skyscraper and flagship store that lined it, from Trump Tower at 725 to the Flatiron Building at 175; Saks at 611 to Lord & Taylor at 424 . . .

  Oh, how she admired the way the glorious boulevard neatly bisected the city! Oh, how brilliant that numbered addresses on perpendicular streets increased accordingly east and west, with a mathematical formula available for locating those addresses as well . . .

  She appreciated, too, that the venerable avenue disappeared altogether below Fourteenth Street, as if, after having been swallowed into the bohemian wilds of Washington Square Park, it couldn’t bear to reemerge in the meandering chaos of the Village.

  Of course, Carrie—being Carrie—couldn’t blame it. She herself much preferred the symmetry north of Fourteenth Street to the randomly intersecting streets below.

  Up on Forty-second Street, for instance, the main branch of the public library, with its stone lions standing sentry, was marvelously centered at the intersection with Fifth Avenue, bookended by Times Square two blocks to the west and Grand Central Terminal two blocks to the east.

  Down here in the Village, by contrast, there were anomalies galore. Not only did West Fourth Street defy the simple rule that traffic on one-way even-numbed streets ran east—so simple to remember because of the E: even, east—but West Fourth Street somehow made its way north of itself to intersect with Eleventh Street, Twelfth, Thirteenth . . .

  Madness. Sheer madness. Numbered streets were meant to keep a parallel distance from each other. They might intersect with numbered avenues, of course—but not other numbered streets.

  Oh, and it wasn’t just downtown that all bets were off. There was senseless chaos underground as well.

  Carrie had spent a full week studying the subway map, determined to learn every stop along the confusing network of color-coded lines that branched to distant boroughs—something she’d since discovered even native New Yorkers didn’t bother to do.

  When she arrived in the city, she found that no one even referred to the three subway lines by their official names—the IRT, IND, BMT. And that half the time, the express train ran local. Or vice versa. Or there was station construction, a disabled train, flooded track, congestion ahead—any number of reasons that she couldn’t use the damned subway to get where she needed to go, even though she knew exactly how to do it.

  But of course, she didn’t regret having spent so much time learning the system; learning everything she could about her new hometown. All that information was bound to come in handy sooner or later, and even if it didn’t . . .

  It’s much better to be ambitious enough to learn things you might never use than to be too lazy to learn things you might need.

  That wasn’t something Daddy had ever told her; nor was it a quote from a famous writer. It was all hers.

  At least something was all hers.

  At the next corner, she made a left and headed down the block that would lead her directly to Washington Square Park.

  “Planning a trip?” a smiling librarian asked her one day back in Omaha, shelving travel books near the table where Carrie was sitting.

  She nodded, forcing a smile.

  “We have a new computer for our patrons to use. I’d be happy to show you how to use the World Wide Web for your research. There are all sorts of things you can look up if you—”

  “No, thank you,” Carrie cut in curtly, and turned away from the librarian’s expression of surprised dismay.

  She never returned to that branch. She didn’t need anyone looking over her shoulder, asking questions about where she was going, or why.

  All that research, conducted the old-fashioned way, paid off. She rarely got lost once she got to Manhattan, and hands-on experience quickly provided some additional navigational skills. For example, whenever she emerged from a subway station onto an unfamiliar midtown street, all she had to do was find the twin towers on the skyline. They acted as a reverse-compass point: if she was facing the towers, she was facing south.

  She liked looking at them—from far away, from close up, from inside out. She liked their symmetry, their unbroken lines and perfect right angles, their no-frills construction and gridlike facades. They didn’t seem to belong downtown. They should have been midtown buildings.

  Should have been . . .

  So damned many should-have-beens.

  But you’d drive yourself crazy dwelling on them. Carrie preferred to think about the many things that had gone right.

  Like the fact that just a few weeks after her arrival, she found herself working as a secretarial temp in one of the twin towers, having landed a short-term assignment at the global financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald. The assignment was extended by a week, and then another, and she’d been offered a permanent position in February.

  Now she, Carrie Robinson, was actually employed in one of the most famous buildings in the entire world. She belonged there. Heady stuff: almost—but not quite—heady enough to eclipse the real reason she was in New York.

  Lots of other positive things had happened since she got the job, leading up to the extraordinary weather tonight, which—she didn’t even realize at the time—was about to send even better things her way.

  The last time she ventured into Washington Square Park, she found it a frozen wasteland; tonight, it was a churning sea of pedestrians, skateboarders, Rollerbladers, joggers, musicians. Kids frolicked on the playground; dogs romped on the dog run; chin-stroking chess players pondered moves at the chess tables; withered elderly people in wheelchairs reminisced together as their nursemaids chatted with each other.

  Carrie hadn’t yet experienced a New York City spring, but she was, of course, familiar
with the seasonal climate statistics. As she strolled along the paths inhaling the warm evening air, she reminded herself that it could very well snow again soon, and for another whole month, maybe even two. Yet it seemed jarring, in this warm weather, to see that the grass was dull and patchy and that the tree branches, like the flowerbeds, were bare, not even a hint yet of buds.

  Around the big fountain, she spotted hordes of chanting protesters and remembered that today was Super Tuesday—the presidential primary election. Here in New York, Gore was expected to capture the Democratic vote, and on the Republican front, McCain might give Bush a run for his money. But Carrie didn’t care much about politics. There were plenty of other things to worry about.

  Like Allison Taylor.

  Carrie had learned, last summer, that Allison had graduated from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and moved to New York, presumably to find a job in the fashion industry.

  Where are you now, Allison?

  Casting her eyes up at the midtown west skyline, Carrie listened for her instincts.

  Was it her gut telling her that Allison was probably out there—up there—somewhere? Or was it just common sense? Most of the showrooms were in the West Thirties, in the garment district.

  Carrie had spent hours wandering that neighborhood when she first got into town, scanning the face of every attractive young female who passed. She’d never spotted Allison, though so many of those women seemed to look like her: tall, blond, pretty. But because they all wore large sunglasses, even on stormy days in the dead of winter, Carrie might have missed her.

  Meanwhile, she was working her way through the city’s massive telephone directories, going through the residential listings for every borough. There were pages upon pages of Taylors. None had the first name Allison—though there was an Alison, one L. Carrie called it, and the line had been disconnected. She wasn’t really disappointed. She doubted that a young woman in this day and age would be naïve enough to put her first name in the phone book, which would undoubtedly invite a host of calls from anonymous heavy breathers.