Shadowkiller

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  No. She’d have had to act in the two seconds it took her assailant to close and lock the door behind them; it was already too late for that.

  “Stand up straight,” the voice commanded. “Turn around.”

  Chelsea did as she was told and came face-to-face with her attacker at last.

  The woman wore baggy clothes that included a hooded jacket pulled tight around her head, leaving only a small circle of face visible. It was dark in here; Chelsea could barely see a tuft of dark hair, a protruding white nose, and eyes that were narrowed into slits of fury.

  “You don’t even know why I’m here, do you?”

  About to answer, Chelsea spotted the small flashlight she was holding. Was that what had been prodding into her back?

  Before she could react, the woman revealed a big knife in her other hand. “Don’t try anything. Believe me, I’ll use this.”

  And that, Chelsea realized, would be a different kind of attack than the one she had envisioned.

  With a gun, you took aim and pulled the trigger. With a knife, you had to get close enough to use it.

  If I don’t give her an opportunity to do that, she thought wildly, I can get away.

  She’d still be taking a chance—a huge one. After a long evening in these shoes, she could barely walk, let alone run.

  But, fixated on that sharp blade, she now realized this wasn’t just a random mugging. Muggers carried guns, or switchblades, maybe. Not chef knives with long, tapered blades.

  If she tried to escape, she might die. If she didn’t try, she most certainly would.

  “Do you, Chelsea?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Do you even know why I’m here!” The woman was no longer whispering, and there was something familiar about her voice.

  “No, I don’t.” Chelsea looked more closely at the circle of face, trying to see if it was recognizable.

  “Because of him.”

  “Because of who? Andrew?” And then it dawned on her.

  That day, maybe a few weeks ago . . . or was it this week? It must have been this past week, because she’d just met Andrew last weekend. Yes, she was leaving her office building with Tiffany, and a stranger had come up to her, claiming to be an old school friend.

  This was that woman.

  “Who’s Andrew? What are you talking about?”

  “What are you talking about?” Chelsea shot back, momentarily as furious with herself as she was with the woman, remembering something wasn’t quite right that day. And then later, on the subway, she’d felt like she was being followed, even though she’d glimpsed the woman’s face.

  “I’m talking about what you did to Mack!”

  Mack . . .

  Mack . . . ? The guy she’d dated recently?

  This was about him?

  “I didn’t do anything to Mack. I don’t—”

  “Shut up!”

  Clamping her mouth shut, Chelsea took a step back.

  “I’m his girl! Do you understand? Me! Not you!”

  “That’s fine. Seriously. I’m not—”

  “Just because he lives with you instead of with me now doesn’t mean—”

  “Wait, what?” It was Chelsea’s turn to interrupt—maybe not the best idea, but she couldn’t help herself; this lunatic had it all wrong. “Mack doesn’t live with me! I live alone!”

  “Don’t you dare lie to me! Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I don’t know what’s been going on?”

  “It’s not a lie! It’s the truth! Go ahead, look around. None of his things are here. He doesn’t live here. I haven’t even seen him in weeks!”

  “You’re lying! How do you think I found out you even exist? I followed him here, and I saw you with him. I saw you, and you had Papoose! Papoose was mine!”

  What was she talking about? Chelsea felt panic beginning to take hold; felt her body beginning to quake and a cold, clammy sweat oozing from her skin.

  “You didn’t even know about me until now, did you? He didn’t even bother to tell you, did he? Did he?”

  She was screaming now. Praying someone would overhear and call the police, Chelsea took another step backward.

  The woman moved closer and her eyes were no longer angry little slits; they were wide and wild and full of accusation that made no sense at all.

  She’s crazy, Chelsea realized. She’s truly crazy, and she has a knife, and . . .

  And she’s not here to rob me. She’s here to kill me.

  Summoning every ounce of calm her body would allow, she said, “Look, you can have him. I mean it. He’s all yours.”

  “He is not! He’s all yours. I hate you, Allison!”

  Allison?

  Dear God, no wonder there’s no logic to what she’s saying. She doesn’t even know who I am.

  Wait a minute. She did know. She’d called Chelsea by her own name just a minute ago. Now she was calling her Allison, as if something had snapped inside her and she’d lost her grip on reality.

  “Listen to me, you obviously have me mixed up with someone else!” Chelsea was desperate to get through to her, to bring her back from the brink of violence. “My name isn’t—”

  “Shut your mouth!”

  Chelsea tried again to back away, but her heel hit the wall behind her. She was literally cornered, and if she didn’t convince this delusional stranger that her name wasn’t Allison and she wasn’t living with Mack . . .

  The edge of the knife settled against Chelsea’s throat.

  If I don’t convince her, then I’m going to die. Right now.

  “All those times he told me he was working, he was really with you. All the times I needed him and he couldn’t be there for me, it was because of you.”

  Chelsea turned her head and felt the blade press into her straining neck, felt her skin splitting, felt blood running over her collarbone.

  Her first thought was that she was never going to get the stains out of her white silk dress.

  Her next, as she fell to the floor amid her attacker’s rants and vicious knife thrusts, was that this terrible fury was meant for someone else.

  For Allison, whoever . . . wherever . . . she was.

  The ringing phone should have jarred her from a sound sleep at this hour, but Allison was already—rather, still—wide awake, watching the first gray light inch across her bedroom walls.

  She reached for the phone, knowing whose voice she would hear when she answered it.

  “Allison? It’s Brett. I’m sorry to call so early.”

  “What time is it?”

  “A little after five here, but it’s already six where you are, so I figured you might be up.”

  On a Saturday morning? He truly did inhabit an entirely different world.

  Then again, she was awake, if not technically up.

  She’d been lying here for hours now thinking about the past, and about her future.

  Last night, giddy with margaritas and first date fantasizing, she’d imagined falling in love with Justin. She’d thought that getting married and starting a family of her own was all she really wanted out of life, all she needed.

  But when she got into bed, darkness swallowed the afterglow, and the familiar empty feeling took hold again. How could she have thought that loving someone else, even being loved by someone else, could erase the damage that had been done when first one parent, then the other, abandoned her?

  Anxious for her brother to get to the point so that she could hang up and attempt to move on, she asked, “What’s going on, Brett?”

  “It’s about your father.”

  Not “Dad,” or “our father.” Nope, clearly, as far as Brett was concerned, Allen Taylor was all Allison’s, and probably had been for over twenty-three years now, ever since he’d been so insensitively vocal about wishing for a son of his own.

  “What about him?” she asked, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and thrusting her feet into her slippers before she realized what she’d done.

  It was as
if her subconscious mind were preparing her to flee.

  But you can’t run away from a conversation, Allison.

  “You caught me off guard when you called me the other night, and I . . . I guess I wasn’t as truthful when I answered your questions as I could have been.”

  And you can’t run away from the truth.

  “So you did find him?” she asked Brett flatly.

  “No! You know I wouldn’t lie about something like that.”

  “Well, you said you weren’t truthful, so that means you lied about something.”

  “No, it just means I didn’t tell you the whole truth, and that was only because I didn’t want to hurt you any more than he already did.”

  “You mean Allen Taylor?” She couldn’t even bring herself to call him her father.

  “That’s the thing, Allison. He’s not Allen Taylor.”

  “What do you mean?” She clenched the phone hard against her ear, her hand trembling.

  “I mean that couldn’t have been his real name. When I searched for him, I went looking for records that should have been available if he was telling the truth, and they weren’t there. He always said he was born on Pearl Harbor day, remember?”

  A faint memory made its way back to her: A day that would live in infamy, Allison—that was my birthday. All the doctors and nurses at the hospital were so worked up about the attack in Hawaii that they were barely paying attention to my poor mama.

  “I remember,” she told her brother. “Pearl Harbor day. That’s right.”

  In her head, she could still hear her father’s voice. My mama—your grandma, may she rest in peace—said that if I’d been a girl, I’d have been named Pearl. But I was a boy, so she named me Al, after the Allies.

  Your name was Allies, Daddy?

  No, it was Allen, sweetie pie.

  But it wasn’t.

  In the grand scheme of what her father had done, perhaps the fact that he’d lied about his name shouldn’t have been surprising. Yet she felt as though she’d had the wind knocked out of her.

  “He said he was born in Council Bluffs,” Brett went on. “Remember?”

  Yes. That was directly across the Missouri River from Omaha, where her mother had grown up. She remembered him teasing Mom about how he hadn’t just been born on the wrong side of the tracks, he’d been born on the wrong side of the river and the state line.

  You coulda wound up with one of those fancy insurance fellows in Omaha, Brenda. Instead, you got stuck with an Iowa farmer.

  But of course, he wasn’t really a farmer. His parents had been, but it wasn’t a life he wanted for himself. “I’m not one for putting down roots,” he’d say. “I like to get up and go.”

  Yeah. No kidding.

  “When I went to look for him after Mom died,” Brett said, “the first thing I did was check birth records. There was no documentation of an Allen Taylor having been born on December 7, 1941, in Council Bluffs or in any of the surrounding towns.”

  “Did you check Omaha, too?”

  “I checked everywhere.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t really Allen. Maybe it was Alan, with two As and one L, or—”

  “I tried that, Allison. Just like you did. Remember what you said about looking for an Alex, or Alvin . . . ? I did the same exact thing. Not with the Internet, because there was no Internet back when I was looking, but I searched everyplace I could think of for anything that might even come close. There was nothing.”

  “So what does that mean?” she asked, though of course she knew. But she needed him to say it.

  “It means he didn’t want us to know his real name, or where he was born, or when.”

  “Or all of the above,” she said slowly as the news worked its way into her brain like a sliver painfully jabbing the tender skin beneath a fingernail.

  “Do you think Mom knew?” she asked Brett.

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Something else dawned on her. “Do you think—were they even married?”

  “Who knows?”

  “But you were around then. You must remember.”

  “I do, a little bit. I remember Mom telling me that Al was going to be my new dad, and I remember her getting all dressed up in a white dress—not a wedding gown, just a dress. They left me with Mrs. Franklin, the fat old lady who lived next door to us on Third Street, while they went off to get married.”

  “When was that?”

  “It must have been in the early seventies because I was about four or five years old. And it was winter, or early spring, because I remember that it was snowing. I overheard Mrs. Franklin talking to a friend of hers on the phone about the weather, how the roads were getting bad and she was worried about them making it home in one piece. I remember picturing them not in one piece—you know how kids’ minds work. And I was afraid they’d never come back and I’d have to live with Mrs. Franklin. But they finally showed up, and they were—you know. Newlyweds. Laughing, happy. They smelled like booze. Al picked me up and swung me around the room and told me to call him Dad.”

  Brett fell silent.

  Allison digested the cozy little family tableau he’d just painted. “So they were married.”

  “That’s what they told me and Mrs. Franklin.”

  “But you think—”

  “I don’t know what to think. Look, if they really went and got legally married that day, then it couldn’t have been more than a hundred miles or so from Centerfield. They left me off with Mrs. Franklin after lunch—I remember, because I didn’t want to eat lunch there, because she was always cooking something that stunk to high heaven. Fish, Brussels sprouts, cabbage . . .”

  He paused, and she could picture him wrinkling his nose the way he did when they were kids—well, when she was a kid and he was almost grown up. He never did like vegetables, and that was fine with Mom, because she didn’t, either. Back when everything was still relatively normal—when Brett was still living at home, before Allison’s father left, before the drug habit took hold—Mom would occasionally attempt to cook dinner. Pasta with jar sauce, hamburgers, and frozen French fries. That was the extent of her “home cooking,” but she was proud of it.

  Allison was not. She still had friends back then. A few, anyway. They would tell her how lucky she was to have a mother who didn’t force string beans or beets on her.

  Lucky. Sure.

  The only other girl who “got it”—aside from Winona, Allison’s imaginary friend—was Tammy Connolly, who seemed like a godsend when she moved to town, renting the house next door to Allison.

  Tammy didn’t have a picture-perfect family, either. Her father wasn’t around. Allison couldn’t remember whether he’d died or there’d been a divorce. But she clearly remembered Tammy’s brassy mother, a waitress at the local Cracker Barrel by day and God-only-knew-what by night. She was the kind of woman the church ladies called a tramp behind her back, while bringing casseroles to her front door to welcome her to town.

  The church ladies’ daughters didn’t believe in that behind-your-back stuff. They ridiculed Allison to her face when her life fell apart.

  Tammy just felt sorry for her. Allison didn’t want the pity, either. She was torn between regret and relief when Tammy’s family moved away abruptly not long after Allison’s father took off. If only she, too, could have left Centerfield behind.

  “We’ll keep in touch,” Tammy promised on that last day, when she showed up at the door to tell Allison she was leaving. “You can come visit.”

  For Allison, those words beckoned like an inflatable escape route on a burning plane.

  Of course it never happened. She never saw or heard from Tammy again.

  But I did leave Centerfield as soon as I got the chance, and I promised myself that just like Tammy, I’d never look back, and what the hell am I doing now?

  “Anyhow,” Brett said, “when they came back to Mrs. Franklin’s that night, the ten o’clock news had just started—I definitely remember that, because I was watching it
and worrying that there might be a report about a car accident. So it took them—what, about eight or nine hours?—to drive out on icy roads to wherever they were going, get married, have champagne and dinner at a decent restaurant—I remember Mom told me she ate lobster tail.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “What?”

  “Lobster?”

  “We have fancy seafood here in Nebraska, Miss Big Apple.”

  “I didn’t mean—” Yes, you did. “Never mind.”

  “I’m glad Mom got to have it on her wedding night,” Brett said.

  “Me too.” She ached at the thought of their mother, eating lobster in a pretty white dress on her wintry wedding night, toasting a bright, shiny future, believing the worst was over, hard times behind her at last . . .

  Oh Mom. You were fooling yourself.

  Or was he fooling you?

  Did Brenda see her new husband as her knight in shining armor?

  How could she not? She was a high school dropout, disowned by her family, a single mother on welfare . . .

  She must have wondered what Allen Taylor—whoever he was—could possibly see in her.

  What did he see in her?

  “I used to be beautiful, you know,” Allison’s mother liked to tell her. “All the boys said so. You look just like me. You’re beautiful, too, you know.”

  Allison would nod as if she agreed, but her mother had the haggard, emaciated facial characteristics of a junkie, and she couldn’t see a resemblance. Wouldn’t see it.

  Not back then. Maybe now, given the perspective of adulthood—but of course, she could glimpse her mother only in her mind’s eye. There were no snapshots of a happy, healthy, youthful Brenda. Mom had presumably left the photographic remnants of her childhood behind at her own parents’ home, and if there had been photos later in her life, she’d destroyed them along with everything else.

  Maybe it was better that way. Better not to see what once was—and fantasize about what could have been . . .

  “The way I’ve always figured, they probably went about two hundred miles round-trip in that time frame in that weather,” Brett said, and she forced her attention back to the conversation. “There’s no record of an Allen and Brenda Taylor getting married anywhere in a hundred-mile radius of Centerfield at that time of year in the early seventies. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but . . .”