Shadowkiller

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Most females would know enough to use just a first initial, and so Carrie methodically called every “Taylor, A” in the book. When that didn’t pan out, she called designers’ showrooms or offices and asked for Allison Taylor, only to be informed that no one by that name worked there.

  She wasn’t sure what she’d have done if a receptionist had said, “I’ll put you through.”

  Would she hang up?

  No—she needed to actually hear her voice. Then, after Allison picked up, she would simply claim that she’d dialed a wrong number, or, if she wasn’t ready yet to sever the connection, she could just make up some reason she was calling, something that would keep the voice talking . . .

  Not, of course, about anything meaningful. There would be time enough for that down the road.

  What if Allison recognized her voice, though?

  It wasn’t likely, but—

  Caught up in her reverie, she walked squarely into someone.

  “Oh! Sorry!” a male voice exclaimed.

  She looked up to see a businessman standing there looking apologetic, as though it had been his fault. It hadn’t—Carrie wasn’t watching where she was going—but if he wanted to take the blame, why stop him?

  She took a step back and studied him more closely. He was tall, with nice green eyes and dark, barber-buzzed hair. He carried a leather briefcase-like bag over his shoulder and a trench coat over his arm, and wore a charcoal pinstripe, well-cut suit with a white shirt and green tie that matched his eyes.

  Yes, she noticed his eyes. Noticed that they were deep green with flecks of bluish-black. Noticed his dark lashes and the manly straight slashes of brow, with a furrow of concern between.

  There was something about him that captured her interest in a way that no one had in a very long time. The men she’d met at work were mostly brokers: brash and busy, men who worked hard and played harder, married or not. She wasn’t interested in anyone like that.

  She wasn’t interested in anyone, period.

  Well, anyone other than Allison Taylor.

  “That was a major head-on collision,” the guy said. “Are you okay?”

  She noticed that both his hands were on her upper arms—and that she liked it.

  That was unusual, because she wasn’t big on being touched. Especially by strangers.

  He was just trying to steady her, but it was almost as if he were holding her. It had been a long time since anyone had done that.

  “I’m okay,” she said, but it wasn’t true. She didn’t like liking the sensation of being held by him. And she didn’t like not liking it when he took his hands off her arms.

  There was something about him—about the way he’d held her steady—that made her feel safe, for the first time since . . .

  Well, in years.

  Daddy.

  “Here,” he said, sort of pulling her over to a vacant bench just a few feet away, “sit down for a second. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I am. I’m okay.” She sat and was disappointed when he let go of her again and took a step back.

  “So what’s so fascinating?” he asked, and she was confused—and embarrassed, wondering if he somehow knew what she’d been thinking.

  Then he pointed at the midtown skyline beyond the network of winter branches. “You were staring up there. Like you were looking at something interesting.”

  “I was just . . . um, noticing how pretty the buildings are at night, when the sun goes down and the lights go on.”

  “You’re visiting, then? From out of town?”

  “What makes you say that?” She was disappointed. Irked, even. Was it the accent? She’d worked so hard to lose it before she ever left the Midwest.

  “If you lived here,” the guy said, “you wouldn’t be taking the time to notice how the buildings look at night, or any other time. Most people just rush along looking down, not up, or around.”

  “Actually, I do live here.”

  “Really?” He looked almost—pleased? Pleased to have been wrong?

  She tried to remember whether she’d ever been pleased about being wrong.

  Nope. Especially when the things she’d been wrong about in her life were often people she’d trusted. Like Daddy. Being wrong about him was the worst thing that ever happened to her.

  But she didn’t want to think about that right now. She wanted to think about the fact that this stranger was still standing here talking to her instead of pushing past her; that he was actually glad—for some reason—that she lived here after all.

  And she was glad that she was wearing her nicest suit, a slimming black one, and that she’d taken the time to brush her hair and put on lipstick before leaving the office, which she rarely bothered to do.

  Spring fever? Was that really what was wrong with her?

  You’d better get over it, fast. You can’t afford to forget why you’re here: to find Allison, and . . .

  And figure out what to say—what to do—when you’ve found her.

  “Are you coming from work?” the guy was asking. “On your way home?”

  “Yes. How about you?”

  “Coming from work, but I live in New Jersey and right now, I’m headed downtown. I’m meeting some buddies for drinks at McSorley’s.”

  “That’s nice,” she murmured, wondering if her end of the conversation sounded as stiff as it felt on her tongue. She’d never been good at small talk with strangers. With anyone.

  “Eh,” he said, and shrugged.

  “You don’t like McSorley’s? Or your friends?”

  “I like them both, but not tonight.”

  She noticed something else about his eyes: there was a note of sadness in them. She wondered what was wrong. The question seemed much too forward, so instead, she asked, “Then why are you going?”

  “Good question. I really don’t want to.”

  “Why do something you don’t want to do?”

  “Don’t you ever do anything you don’t want to do?”

  “No. Not if I can help it. Can you help it?”

  “Yeah—I guess I can.”

  Carrie shrugged. “Then don’t go.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “It is that simple.”

  He just looked at her for a minute. Then he sat beside her and reached into his pocket.

  She watched as he took out a pack of cigarettes, placed one between his lips, and offered the pack to her.

  Daddy had been a smoker. Personally, she could take or leave it.

  Tonight, she took it.

  After lighting her cigarette and then his own, he took a drag, exhaled, and said, “You’re right. I just changed my mind.”

  She inhaled smoke deeply into her lungs, exhaled, waited.

  “You know what I’m going to do instead of meeting my friends?”

  “What?”

  Could there possibly be . . .

  Was there any way he was going to ask her to go have a drink with him or something?

  Are you kidding? There’s no way in hell. You know that.

  But once the crazy thought flashed into her head, she couldn’t help but hold her tobacco-saturated breath until he answered.

  “I’m going to go home and see my mother. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  She exhaled, secretly disappointed—but not surprised at having been right, as usual.

  “Do you live with her?”

  “No. But near enough. My parents are in Hoboken. I’m in Jersey City.”

  She nodded and stood up. Now she was anxious to get going, away from him and this unsettling connection that had come out of nowhere on a night when nothing was as it should have been.

  He stood, too, and pointed at the skyline to the north. “How far uptown are you walking?”

  She wasn’t sure yet. Maybe she’d just jump on the subway at Union Square. Maybe she’d had enough warm fresh air. Enough . . .

  She looked down at the cigarette in her hand, tempted to toss it down and grind it o
ut with her heel.

  “Because I’m heading back up to the Port Authority,” he continued, checking his watch, “to catch a bus home to Jersey. It’s a quarter to six. I can make the six-thirty bus, no problem. So maybe I’ll walk with you, as far as you’re going.”

  And maybe she hadn’t had enough warm fresh air after all. Or smoke.

  She bit back a smile, took another slow drag. “That’s fine. I’m catching the subway at Times Square, so I thought I’d walk all the way up Fifth and then go across Forty-second Street.”

  “Works for me.”

  Together, they started walking north, toward the solid old stone arch, an homage to Paris’s Arc de Triomphe and the gateway to Fifth Avenue and the part of the city she loved best, where everything fell neatly into place and made sense.

  As they walked, puffing companionably, he asked what her name was. For a fleeting, wild moment, she was tempted to give him her real name.

  But of course, she couldn’t.

  “Carrie Robinson,” she said.

  “Carrie. Nice to meet you.” He stuck out his hand, and shook hers as they walked. His brief clasp was warm, as she’d known it would be. Safe.

  “I’m James,” he said, “but everyone calls me Mack.”

  She almost gasped. Surely she’d heard him wrong. “Did you say Matt?”

  “No, Mack. It’s short for my last name, MacKenna.”

  Mack.

  His name was Mack.

  It was a sign, Carrie thought. A sign that he was meant to be a part of her life.

  “Did you go vote yet, babycakes?”

  Allison Taylor looked up to see her friend Luis standing in the doorway—if you could call it a doorway—of her cubicle.

  He was a production editor at 7th Avenue magazine, where she’d been working for about six months now, having been hired away from her postcollege internship at Condé Nast.

  The glamour factor was higher there, but here, she was actually getting paid. Her duties were pretty much the same: basic entry-level stuff—though sometimes, not even. Her supervisor, Loriana, kept her hopping with ridiculous nonsense, such as fetching cups full of tepid water—Loriana’s preferred afternoon “snack,” ever since she read somewhere that tepid water burns more calories than hot or cold water.

  Having adapted a your-wish-is-my-command corporate philosophy, Allison figured she could put up with just about anything for the promise of working her way up the ladder and one day—hopefully soon—seeing her own name on the magazine’s masthead.

  “Why are you calling me babycakes?” she asked Luis.

  “Because you asked me to stop calling you toots.”

  “Okay, well, stop calling me babycakes, too, okay?”

  “Only if you promise me you’ve voted. Or that you’re going to vote.”

  “I can’t. I’m not registered here yet.”

  She hadn’t been registered back in Pittsburgh, either—or in Centerfield, for that matter, though she’d celebrated her eighteenth birthday shortly before she moved away.

  If you could call packing your bags and paying one last visit to your mother’s lonely grave “celebrating.”

  Anyway, she’d known all along that both Centerfield and Pittsburgh were temporary; that she was destined to settle here in New York City.

  “What? You’re not registered to vote?!” Luis feigned horror, slapping his hands to his cheeks and staring at her with his mouth agape.

  “I just haven’t gotten around to it. I will.”

  “You’d better. We can’t take any chances on another four years with Dubb’ya.”

  “What makes you think I wouldn’t vote Republican?”

  His eyebrows shot even higher. “Would you?”

  “If I liked what the candidate had to say,” she told him, mostly to get a rise out of him. “I have strong Republican roots, you know.”

  Her maternal grandfather, Thurston Downing, had been a staunch conservative who’d held some kind of high-profile public office in Nebraska long before she’d been born. She didn’t know the details; nor had she ever bothered to look them up—though now, sometimes, she thought about using the World Wide Web to see if she could find out more about her mother’s parents.

  She’d never met them, had no idea whether they were alive or dead, or if they even knew she existed. Probably not.

  Whenever her curiosity got the better of her and she thought seriously about searching for them—or her father—she stopped herself.

  If her grandparents hadn’t disowned their only child, Mom might still be here.

  And if her father had never walked out on his wife and child, Mom might still be here.

  So, no. She wasn’t interested in finding anyone, even if it was just a matter of hitting a few keys on the computer. No, thank you.

  “You’re a Republican?” Luis was asking.

  She forced away thoughts of the past and laughed at the look on his face. “What?”

  “You said—”

  “I was just busting your chops. And don’t worry . . . babycakes. I’ll register between now and November.”

  “I’ll hold you to it. So are you ready to go?”

  They were taking an accessory design class together on Tuesday evenings, down at the Parsons School of Design.

  Allison looked at her watch. It was ten of six. “We don’t have to leave for at least another half hour.”

  “I know, but since it’s so nice out, I was thinking we could walk down to class tonight instead of taking the subway.”

  “Walk? From Thirty-seventh Street to Thirteenth Street? In these?” She lifted her foot to show him the four-inch Louboutins she was wearing.

  “Definitely not in those. What size are you?”

  “Nine.” She cleared her throat. “And a half.”

  He eyed her foot and raised a dubious eyebrow.

  “All right,” she conceded. “More like a ten. Why?”

  “Be right back.” He disappeared for less than a minute and reemerged wearing a smug expression and holding a pair of black flats. “Try these.”

  She took them, looked them over, read the label. “Really?”

  “What do you want, Chanel? They’re free.”

  “Do you have Chanel?”

  “In a ten? And a flat?” He rolled his eyes. “Sorry, Sasquatch. Wedge those giant dogs of yours into these shoes and let’s go.”

  She grinned, already unbuckling the ankle straps on her Louboutins.

  Five minutes later, they were strolling south on Fifth Avenue.

  Carrie was so caught up in what Mack was saying that, for the first time since she’d arrived in New York City, she’d forgotten all about Allison Taylor.

  Mack.

  His name was Mack.

  She still couldn’t believe it. If only she could tell him what the name meant to her. But of course, she couldn’t. So she focused on listening to him talk, wondering what it would be like to connect—really connect—with him.

  Granted, her experience in that area was pretty limited. She was almost thirty and reasonably attractive; she’d gone on a handful of dates over the past decade or so.

  Never anything serious, of course, because she’d learned the hard way that you can’t trust even the person you love more than anything in this world; the person who claims to love you in just the same way. She would never, ever let anyone get close to her. Never again.

  Not even if someone ever came along who seemed to want to get close to her.

  This guy—Mack, with the easy smile and quick laugh that belied the hint of sadness in his eyes—hadn’t indicated that he was interested in anything more than company for his walk up Fifth Avenue. If he were, she didn’t know what she’d do. A date with someone to whom she was this physically attracted might be dangerous.

  But for the moment, it was nice to have someone to talk to about something other than the weather and the stock market.

  The protesters in the park had spurred a conversation about politics that then
meandered to travel, and on to food, and movies. The discussion turned to books when they reached the famous stone lions in front of the public library. As they made a left onto Forty-second Street, Mack asked Carrie what she was reading now.

  “Harry Potter,” she said after a moment’s hesitation, selecting a title she’d seen open on countless strangers’ laps on the subway lately.

  “Isn’t that a kids’ book?”

  Was it?

  She had no idea. She shrugged, said, “I like it,” and prayed he wouldn’t ask her anything specific about the story.

  What he asked, though, was even harder: “Do you have kids?”

  “No,” she said, so sharply that he glanced over at her.

  “Not big on kids, huh?”

  “What? Why do you say that?”

  “Just . . . never mind. It was stupid.”

  Yes. It was stupid, she thought, enraged.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t like kids, it was . . .

  But that was none of his business.

  Even which books she liked to read was none of his business, which was why she’d lied. She wasn’t about to tell him about the stack of titles on her nightstand. Definitely not after the way he’d reacted to Harry Potter.

  “What are you reading?” she asked Mack, as much to defuse her own anger as to break the awkward silence.

  “If I said Harry Potter, would you believe me?”

  “No.”

  “You’d be right.”

  Yes. I’m always right.

  He reached into his briefcase and held out a book.

  She slowed her pace to see the title, reading it aloud. “Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying.”

  “Just a little light reading.” He tucked it back into his bag.

  She didn’t know what to say. Whatever she’d been expecting—this wasn’t it. Now she understood the sadness in his eyes, although not entirely.

  Who was dying? Someone close to him?

  Was he dying?

  That would be horribly unfair.

  The thought was immediate, and struck her as bizarre.

  Unfair to whom? To him?

  Yes, of course.

  But maybe also . . . to me? Because I actually like him?

  “I’m actually not reading it yet,” he told her. “I just bought it at lunchtime. It was recommended to me by the hospice nurse who’s going to be taking care of my mom.”