Shadowkiller

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “Sue . . . which Sue did you say you were?” she asked, eyes narrowed.

  “Sue Calvert.” The name that rolled readily off her tongue didn’t ring a bell. No surprise there.

  Was Sue one of the girls Chelsea had made fun of back in the day? Had she somehow tracked her down, figured out who she was now? Or . . . was she just making that up about school?

  Was she someone’s jealous ex-wife? Or . . . wife?

  Chelsea was pretty sure Mack hadn’t been married, but there were plenty of other men in her recent past—including Andrew—whom she wasn’t so sure about.

  Unpleasantly unnerved, Chelsea said, “I have to get going,” and without another word, turned on her heel and walked off down the block.

  Good riddance, Sue . . . or whoever you are.

  But she had the distinct feeling that she was being followed. Just before she reached the corner, she looked back.

  She didn’t see Sue. That was a good sign. She breathed easier, all the way to the subway.

  But as she wedged herself into a jam-packed train minutes later, she could have sworn she glimpsed Sue’s face in the crowd on the platform as they made their way into the next car. And again, in the Fourteenth Street station when she changed trains.

  Maybe she was just paranoid.

  Maybe not.

  Whatever. Even if, by chance, she was someone Chelsea had wronged in the past—perhaps by sleeping with her husband . . .

  So what? What’s she going to do about it? Kill me?

  “It’s called Google,” Luis told Allison, standing behind her as she sat at her desk with her fingers poised on the computer keyboard.

  “Google?” she echoed. “That sounds like a kid’s toy.”

  “Well, it’s not. It’s a search engine, and it’ll come back with information on anything you type in. Go ahead. Go to www.google.com . . .”

  She did, and as they sat waiting for the screen to load, she said, “I’m telling you, you’re wrong. This is crazy.”

  “And I’m telling you you’re wrong. But I guess we’ll find out now, won’t we.”

  She rolled her eyes and looked pointedly at her watch. “I really have to get going home. It’s getting late.”

  “You can go, as soon as we resolve this.”

  This, of course, being yet another friendly little squabble with Luis. It had all started when she heard him singing, falsetto, along with the radio in his cubicle. He always turned it up at the end of the workday, after the bosses were gone.

  The search engine screen popped up, and Luis commanded, “Type in the song title.”

  She did.

  “Wait . . . before you hit enter, type in the word ‘lyrics.’ ”

  “ ‘Every Breath You Take’ . . . lyrics,” she read aloud. “Now what?”

  “Hit enter.” He leaned closer, resting his chin on his shoulder, to see the results as they came up.

  Allison raised an eyebrow when she saw all the hits, and clicked on the top one. Moments later, she was saying triumphantly, “See? Sting is saying, ‘My poor heart aches,’ not ‘I’m a pool hall ace’! I told you so!”

  “Well, he should learn to enunciate if he’s going to be a singer,” Luis grumbled. “It sounds exactly like ‘pool hall ace.’ ”

  “But that doesn’t make sense.”

  “This is the guy who wrote ‘De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da,’ Allison.” Luis shook his head. “I’ve got to get going. I’m late for a date.”

  “Where? At a pool hall, Ace?”

  “Funny. You’re funny.”

  Alone again in her cubicle, Allison reached for the mouse to shut down the computer.

  Luis was right about one thing: this Google search engine was pretty good. It worked fast, and it was accurate.

  “You can use it to find anything,” he’d told her.

  Anything . . . and anyone?

  Allison used the mouse to click back to the search box, then hesitated, staring at the blinking cursor.

  After a moment, she typed in her father’s name.

  Hit enter.

  Somehow, she couldn’t seem to make her fingers move to the key.

  Go ahead. Just to see what will come up.

  What if nothing did?

  What if something did?

  What, exactly, did she want to know about him? That he was living happily ever after without her? That he wasn’t living at all?

  After her mother died, her brother, Brett, said he was going to try to find their father. Allison told him that if he did, she didn’t want to know about it. She never wanted to hear his name again.

  She stared at it on the screen for another long moment. Then she reached for the mouse and, with a single, decisive click, closed out of the search engine.

  After all these weeks—months—of fruitless searching, Carrie savored the sweet taste of triumph at last.

  Standing in the shadow outside the glow of a streetlamp on a narrow side street off West Broadway, she gazed up at the four-story brick building. Five minutes ago, she had unlocked the door and disappeared inside.

  Now I know where she works and lives.

  Finding out had been almost too easy. After calling in sick to Cantor Fitzgerald this morning, Carrie had disguised herself in a long, dark wig, put on the old winter coat she hadn’t gotten around to donating to charity, and taken the subway down to West Thirty-sixth Street. She’d been hoping to waltz right into the building that housed the designer’s showroom, but a security guard was posted in the tiny lobby.

  Ralph. That was his name. Friendly guy, though in a leering kind of way. Under other circumstances, that might have made Carrie feel uncomfortable—not just because his dark mustache, sideburns, and retro glasses reminded her of her father—but she used his smarmy interest to her advantage.

  Ralph was happy to help her, for a price.

  Fifty bucks richer, he agreed to signal Carrie when Chelsea appeared in the lobby at the end of the day.

  That, he did. But clumsily.

  From her perch on the sidewalk outside the building, she saw him motioning at two blond women. But which of them was Chelsea Kamm?

  For a moment, she was so enraged at Ralph that she almost allowed the women to slip past her. But she could deal with him later, she realized, and forced herself to focus on identifying Chelsea.

  As luck would have it, Carrie approached the wrong woman first, which left her feeling rattled when she approached the right woman—even more so when Chelsea’s standoffishness hindered the conversation’s flow.

  She’s a bitch, Carrie decided, when Chelsea turned and walked away. I hate her. She didn’t deserve Mack—and she deserved . . .

  Well, time would tell what she deserved.

  At least now, Carrie knew where she lived. Not because Chelsea had played nice and told her, but because Carrie had followed her downtown on the subway. Once, she thought Chelsea might have spotted her, and she quickly ducked behind a conveniently located, grossly overweight man until the coast was clear again.

  Now, as she stood gazing up at the building, knowing she was in there someplace, Carrie couldn’t help but smile.

  You did it!

  You found her!

  She closed her eyes, picturing the look of surprised recognition—and horror—she would see on the blonde’s face if they met again, under decidedly less pleasant circumstances . . .

  No.

  Wait a minute.

  Carrie’s eyes snapped open again.

  This is Chelsea, she told herself. Remember? Chelsea lives here. Not Allison.

  You found Chelsea.

  It was still a victory. Yes, a temporary one—but somehow, it made it easier to swallow that she had yet to find Allison.

  I will, though. I’ll savor the thrill of the chase, but sooner or later I’ll find her.

  In the meantime, Chelsea would be good practice.

  So, she thought as she reached into her pocket, pulling out a slip of paper, will you.

  On it were the wo
rds “Call me,” followed by a phone number and a name: Ralph.

  Chapter Seven

  There weren’t many perks to being a lobby security guard in a commercial building in the garment district.

  Ralph didn’t get hefty Christmas tips from well-heeled tenants, like his friend Carlos, who was a doorman at a fancy co-op building on the Upper East Side. And, unlike Carlos, he didn’t get to see movie stars coming and going at all hours of the day—and night, with people who weren’t their equally famous spouses, yet another opportunity for Carlos to pocket a nice tip: hush money, he called it.

  “If you want,” Carlos had offered not long ago, “I’ll see if I can get you a job in one of the buildings up here.”

  “That’s okay. I’m happy where I am.”

  “How is that possible?”

  Ralph just shrugged. He didn’t like change of any kind. That was why, at thirty-one, he still lived with his widowed mother; that was why he hadn’t yet proposed to Juliana, his girlfriend of five years. Well, mostly why.

  Ralph couldn’t wait to tell Carlos his latest news: that he had finally gotten a nice little chunk of change a few days ago, for two seconds’ worth of work. And now, it looked like he was about to receive an unexpected added bonus.

  “Yeah, sure,” he told the woman who’d just called his cell phone out of the blue. “I remember you. Sue, right?”

  “That’s right. You said to call, so . . . I’m calling.”

  He’d been surprised, yesterday, when she asked for his number after he agreed to help her out. She hadn’t struck him as the type of woman who might do that.

  It just went to show that you never know.

  Maybe he was going to get laid this week after all. With Juliana visiting family down in Puerto Rico through the nineteenth, he hadn’t been counting on that.

  “I thought maybe we could meet for a drink or something,” Sue said.

  “Sure. Name the time and place.”

  She did—so readily that he couldn’t help but smile.

  Sorry, honey, he told Juliana silently. But I told you not to leave for so long. When the cat’s away, the mouse will play.

  “Allison? Ready to go?”

  She jumped and turned to see Luis standing behind her in his Armani overcoat, his black leather messenger bag—which she liked to call his man purse—slung over his shoulder.

  “What? What time is it?”

  “Time to go.” Taking in her blank expression, he added, “It’s Tuesday night. Parsons. Accessory class. Helloo-oo? You’re a million miles away, aren’t you?”

  More like fifteen hundred.

  Nebraska.

  Was it time to plug it into the new search engine Luis had shown her yesterday, along with her father’s name?

  All day, she’d been tempted—but too busy to do anything about it. Finally, as her colleagues had begun to power down their computers, turn off their cubicle desk lights, and trickle toward the elevator banks, she had opened Google.

  For the last fifteen minutes she’d been sitting here, staring at the blinking cursor.

  “I just have to finish one last thing for Loriana,” she told Luis. “Give me five minutes, okay?”

  He sighed. “You have two. I don’t want to be late. I’ll be in the lobby flirting with Henry,” he added, referring to the amiable Rastafarian who manned the security desk.

  Left alone once again with the search engine, Allison told herself it was now or never.

  Not never . . . there’s always tomorrow.

  That was what she’d told herself yesterday. And after a largely sleepless night, tomorrow became today, and she promised herself she’d get it over with.

  Now she had two minutes to find out whether her father was dead or alive.

  She began typing.

  Allen . . . Taylor . . . Centerfield, Nebraska.

  After a long moment, she hit enter and waited.

  Mack stubbed out his cigarette with his heel on the sidewalk outside his childhood home. He’d never smoked in front of his parents, and he wasn’t about to start now.

  Opening the front door, he heard barking dogs and the familiar theme music from his mother’s favorite television game show. Was it that late already? He checked his watch and saw that it was past seven. He’d been planning to leave the office early enough to get to Hoboken for dinner, but it was too late for that; his parents always finished eating before Jeopardy! started.

  “Who’s that? Lynn?” his mother called as he stepped into the front hall.

  “It’s me, Mom.” Mack locked the door behind him and pocketed his keys, then stooped to greet Champ and Bruiser, former strays he’d rescued when he was a soft-hearted teenager and they were puppies. Wagging their tails and offering their heads to be patted, both mutts were aging and somewhat frail—par for the household, Mack thought grimly.

  “Mack?” Mom sounded pleasantly surprised. “What are you doing here?”

  “I thought I’d stop in on my way home to say hi.” As he tossed his overcoat over the newel post at the foot of the stairs, he saw that the lower steps were cluttered with household items: a ShopRite bag that contained toilet paper rolls and tissue boxes, a stack of folded sheets, another of towels, a third of books and magazines.

  “What’s all that stuff on the stairs?” he asked, crossing through the archway into the living room, with its comfortable furniture and his mother’s prized Irish lace curtains.

  “It all needs to go up,” his mother said, curled up beneath a quilt on the far end of the couch. Ordinarily, she’d already have been on her feet, hurrying over to hug her only son. And ordinarily, anything that had to go upstairs would have been brought upstairs immediately. Maggie MacKenna was a real hustler-bustler—as her husband liked to call her—when it came to housekeeping. When it came to everything.

  But those days were over. Beneath the turban-style scarf wrapped around her bald head, her pale face was etched in exhaustion. And wedged into a corner of the room, where Mom kept her treadmill at an angle facing the TV—primed for her daily hour of exercise and Oprah—was a hospital bed.

  The hospice team had delivered it early on, perhaps underestimating their patient’s stamina—or perhaps just wanting to spare the family the difficult task of ordering it on the day it became apparent that Maggie could no longer get up and around the house.

  None of the MacKennas had verbally acknowledged this grim harbinger of what lay ahead. The bed was just there, all made up and ready.

  Ready . . .

  Mack couldn’t even look at it. He wasn’t ready. He would never be ready for this.

  “I came downstairs for dinner and almost tripped and killed myself,” his father reported from his recliner, turning down the volume on Jeopardy! as Champ and Bruiser settled themselves again on the rug.

  “I can’t run up and down the stairs all day, Brian.”

  “Nobody wants you to, Maggie. I told you to let me know whenever something needs to go up and I’ll carry it. Whenever you need help with anything. That’s what I’m here for.”

  Mack’s mother rolled her lashless eyes and said to the ceiling, “I’m going to make him come running every five minutes? I don’t think so.”

  “She doesn’t like to ask for help,” Mack’s father told him. “That’s her problem.”

  “And you do?” Mom was indignant. “He lost his wallet for two days last week and do you think he’d tell me so that I could find it for him?”

  “You don’t need to be running around the house looking, Maggie.”

  “I would have just told you to look in the glove compartment. That’s where it’s been the last three times you lost it. And that’s where it was this time.”

  Mack sighed inwardly. The glove compartment—that reminded him that his father shouldn’t be driving anymore. He and Lynn had agreed they’d have to do something about that.

  Just last week, Lynn noticed his car’s fender was dented and streaked with bright yellow paint and called Mack saying, “I t
hink Dad might have hit a school bus, but he says he doesn’t remember hitting anything at all.”

  A few days later, running errands for his parents, Mack figured out that it had probably been a yellow concrete post in the parking lot of the neighborhood CVS—but it could have been a school bus. Or a schoolchild.

  He and Lynn needed to tell him he wasn’t capable of driving anymore—their big, strong capable father. Brian MacKenna still looked the part—a sturdy-postured, broad-shouldered six-foot-one with a pile of dark hair on his head—but Alzheimer’s was ravaging his brain the way cancer was ravaging Maggie’s body.

  Tonight, Brian was lucid. But last time Mack was here, his father thought he was one of the hospice workers. It wasn’t until an hour into the visit that the light dawned in his blue eyes and he made it a point to work his son’s name into every sentence, just to show that he wasn’t clueless . . . until, eventually, he forgot again.

  “I’ll carry the stuff upstairs,” Mack told his parents. “And I’ll take out the garbage, too, before I go.”

  Brian shook his head. “You can’t let it sit out at the curb for two days. The animals will tear it apart.”

  “Dad, this is Tuesday night. Tomorrow’s Wednesday. Garbage day.”

  “See, Brian? I keep telling you that.” Mom sighed, and told Mack, “He’s all confused.”

  “I know, Mom. It’s okay. Where are you going, Dad?” he asked, seeing that his father was getting up.

  “I can take out my own garbage.”

  “But Mack is here. And Jeopardy! is on.”

  “So what? I don’t know any of the answers anyway.” His father tossed the television remote at Mack on his way out of the room.

  Moments later, the back door slammed shut.

  Mack looked at his mother, who shrugged, refusing to say what was on both their minds.

  Instead, she asked him about work, and about the weather—she hadn’t been outside in days now—and she showed him the picture frame his little niece had made for her out of Popsicle sticks and yarn.

  “Do you know Lynn made the same exact frame for me when she was that age?” his mother marveled. “I still have it.”