Shadowkiller

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “You too, Mommy.”

  Knowing that a last-minute client emergency could have curtailed the whole trip, Allison didn’t breathe easily until Mack pulled into the driveway close to midnight, having stayed at the office to tie up loose ends.

  “Good to go?” she asked him.

  “Unless something somehow goes wrong between now and tomorrow morning.”

  “What are the odds of that?”

  “In this business,” he told her, “I learned never to say never.”

  She went to bed wondering if maybe some part of her had been hoping that a crisis would arise at the office and keep them from leaving.

  But the rest of the night passed uneventfully.

  Now it’s four-thirty A.M., three sleeping kids are strapped into the backseat, and it’s actually going to happen. They’re actually going to Nebraska.

  “Come on, Al,” Mack says around a yawn, jangling the car keys. “We’ve got to get on the road if we’re going to beat the holiday weekend traffic over the bridge.”

  It’s the same route they follow every year on the way to the Jersey Shore. But this year, once they’ve crossed the Hudson River, they’ll continue heading west, not south.

  Allison takes one last look around.

  The next time I walk into this room, it’ll be over.

  She’ll have gone to Nebraska, faced down the past, and survived. Then she’ll be able to get on with normal life again, focusing on going forward, not back.

  She turns off the bedside lamp, plunging the room into predawn darkness, and follows Mack down the shadowy stairs.

  “Oh—wait, did you get the girls’ tote bags? They were by the door.”

  “I got them. What the heck was in them? Rocks?”

  “Books. Hudson wants to read the Little House series since we’re heading out to the prairie, so I brought that—”

  “The whole series?”

  “What’s wrong with that? They were mine when I was a little girl, just like some of the books in Maddy’s bag.”

  “Allie, it’s really sweet that you saved your favorite books for your own little girls and lugged them all the way here from Nebraska—but do we really need to lug them all the way back again?”

  “Yes,” she says simply, not bothering to explain to him that salvaging all those well-worn books from her childhood bedroom years ago had nothing to do with preserving them for future daughters. Nor was it because her father had bought them for her and read them to her.

  She did it for herself, because she thought she might need them someday. Growing up, she’d learned that when the real world became hard to bear, she could always pull a book off the shelf and lose herself in a make-believe one. It was a relief to step into a fictional character’s shoes and deal with someone else’s problems instead of her own, knowing that things would work out in the end.

  Outside, it feels like the middle of the night. The streetlights are still on, crickets are chirping, and the newspaper trucks have yet to toss plastic bags containing the New York Times or Wall Street Journal onto driveways up and down the street.

  Standing beside Mack as he locks the front door, Allison remembers something. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going?” he asks as she hurries down the steps.

  “To check the backyard.” It’s been raining the past couple of days, and she never found a chance to get outside and make sure the sandbox was covered, the little plastic pool was drained, and everything was put away.

  She called Randi last night to give her Brett’s name, address, and phone number, so that someone on this end would know where they were headed. Randi promised to drive by and check on the house every couple of days while they’re away, but Allison doesn’t want her picking up grungy plastic toys from the lawn.

  Dewy grass brushes her toes, bare in flat summer sandals, as she makes her way around the side of the house. Through the trees and shrubs that border the edge of the property, she can see the large house looming next door.

  A year ago, it was full of life. Phyllis and Bob Lewis were living there. Their two children were home from college for the summer, using the saltwater pool and the sunken patio with its outdoor stone fireplace and wet bar, hosting loud parties most weekends when Phyllis and Bob retreated to their Vermont cottage.

  To think Allison and Mack used to complain—if only to each other—about the noise. Now she’d take wee-hour laughter, music, and slamming car doors any day over the eerie silence that’s fallen over the vacant house.

  Desperate to get away from the horror of what happened here, Phyllis’s grieving husband accepted a year-long overseas assignment in February. Their son had graduated from college in May and taken a job on the West Coast, and their daughter, Bob told Allison in a recent phone call, didn’t have the heart to return to an empty house for the summer.

  “I’m going to see if I can rent it out until I get back,” he told her. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all, Bob. Let me know what I can do to help.”

  “Thank you. I will,” he said in a hollow voice, and she knew that he, too, was remembering the last time he’d needed her help. As keeper of the Lewises’ spare set of keys, Allison was the one who discovered the grisly murder scene after a worried Bob called from a European business trip and asked her to go check on his wife.

  Every time she looks at the house, she remembers that night. Remembers Phyllis’s bloodied corpse in the master bedroom and remembers, with a shudder, that she’d actually suspected, at one point, that Mack might have had something to do with it.

  She’s glad the house hasn’t been rented yet. She doesn’t want to see it come to life again, occupied by strangers. That would feel just as wrong as the “For Rent” sign does, and—

  Frowning, Allison stares into the dense foliage that separates her own yard from the Lewises’.

  There, amid the branches, she could have sworn she just saw a human shadow . . .

  Just like that night a few weeks ago.

  She blinks, and it’s gone.

  Unnerved, she gives the backyard a cursory glance, making sure there are no stray toys on the lawn. As she hurries back around front, she takes a long last look at the property line.

  Nothing. It must have been her imagination again, playing tricks on her as it had a few weeks ago. It makes sense. She’s anxious about leaving, not to mention deliriously tired.

  Mack certainly is. He yawns deeply as they head to the car.

  “Did you sleep at all?” Allison asks him.

  “I must have. Last thing I remember, the clock said three forty-five.”

  The alarm, she knows too well, had gone off at four.

  “You only got fifteen minutes. I got almost four hours. I’ll drive the first leg.”

  Predictably, Mack argues with that.

  But Allison is behind the wheel when they pull out of the driveway a minute later, her husband sleeping as soundly as the three kids by the time she merges onto the Saw Mill River Parkway, heading southbound toward the George Washington Bridge.

  Traffic is already starting to build. The Fourth of July falls on Wednesday this year, and a lot of people are taking the whole week off, or at least a five-day weekend.

  That’s the thing about living where they do. When you’re competing for space with the millions of others who occupy the metropolitan area, even the simplest endeavor demands a serious head start and considerable advance planning.

  It’s going to be nice, Allison tells herself, approaching the bridge at last, to have some breathing room for a change. Out on the wide open plains of Nebraska, she recalls, it’s possible to drive for miles without seeing another car. At least, that used to be the case. She wonders if it still is.

  Noticing that the sun is coming up out to the east, behind the city, she reminds herself that in just a few days, she’ll see it rise over a grassy horizon for the first time in years.

  She told the girls all about that just the other day—abou
t how you can see all the way across a great, flat expanse to where the earth meets the sky.

  “You’ve never seen anything like it around here,” she told her daughters.

  “That’s how it is down the shore,” Hudson reminded her. “Only there, it’s water meeting the sky. Does Nebraska look like that? But green instead of blue?”

  “Not exactly. The ocean only stretches in one direction. You can stand in the middle of a field in Nebraska, and it spreads out all around you, so that there’s nothing but grass and sky no matter which way you turn. And when the sun sets at night, it looks like it’s lying right on the grassy edge of the earth.”

  “That sounds like the card I made you for Mother’s Day!” Maddy exclaimed. “See, Hudson? I told you it was okay to put the sun on the grass.”

  “There’s no edge to the earth,” Hudson replied, to both of them. “It’s round.”

  “But it looks flat in Nebraska,” Allison told her. “All the way to the sky, there’s nothing. Not a house, not a tree, not a person.”

  “It sounds peaceful.”

  A wide-eyed Madison disagreed with her sister. “I think it sounds scary. What if you needed help? Or what if you needed to hide?”

  “You wouldn’t need help, and you wouldn’t need to hide,” Hudson told her before Allison could respond, “because Mommy said there’s not a person around. So there wouldn’t be any reason to hide.”

  Those words—and the haunted look on Madison’s face—sent a pang of sorrow through Allison. Her poor girls had been through so much at the hands of a depraved human being. Thank goodness they weren’t going back to the shore anytime soon. Thank goodness they were headed far, far away.

  Now, Manhattan’s skyline falls into the rearview mirror as they head west. Dawn is breaking, its rainbow sherbet palette tinting the glittering steel and glass facade of the new Freedom Tower rising above the scarred ground that once held the burning ruins of the World Trade Center.

  For a fleeting, foolish moment, Allison considers waking Mack to show him the spectacular sight. She quickly thinks better of it, not just because he’s exhausted.

  Even now, over a decade later, still riddled with guilt over what happened to his first wife, he balks at reminders of that fateful day.

  Even so, he recently mentioned that last year around the tenth anniversary, he’d actually considered looking into Carrie’s past. He’d thought it might be time to uncover her true identity: who she’d been before her family vanished into the witness protection program. He never got around to doing it, and when he mentioned it to Allison, she was glad.

  She still remembered what her brother had said to her years ago, when she briefly toyed with the idea of searching for the father who had walked out on her.

  “Why would you want to go dredging that up again after all these years? Why can’t you leave well enough alone?”

  She’d have said the same thing to Mack, had he told her he was going to delve into Carrie’s roots.

  That situation was entirely different from her own.

  Carrie was dead. Mack wasn’t looking for her. He was looking for truth; perhaps, even after all these years, for closure.

  Can Allison blame him?

  Isn’t that what I’m doing right now? she wonders as she drives west through New Jersey.

  Nothing but highway stretches behind her now in the rearview mirror, but again she thinks of the Freedom Tower.

  She visited the site only once, when there was nothing to see other than steel girders, blue scaffolding, and a large sign that read “Never Forget.”

  Built to symbolize rebirth and strength, the soaring structure now casts its long shadow over the gaping footprint where the twin towers once stood, and the bronze memorial etched with the names of the victims who died on that spot.

  Carrie Robinson MacKenna, of course, is among them.

  “Do you want to go see it?” Allison had asked Mack last fall, when the memorial opened and the victims’ families were invited to be among the first to visit.

  His reply was the same as it had been a few years earlier, when he was invited to join other bereaved spouses at ground zero on the 9/11 anniversary to ceremoniously read from the long list of victims’ names: a flat, predictable no.

  Allison hadn’t pressed the issue then, and she didn’t now.

  What if her father’s name were etched in stone somewhere? Would she be drawn to the spot, or fiercely determined to avoid it?

  It’s different, she reminds herself again, focusing on the road ahead.

  Carrie Robinson wasn’t the name Mack’s first wife had been born with. And Allen Taylor . . .

  For years, Allison has refused to allow herself to think about what her brother had once told her: that her father had, most likely, been living under an assumed name.

  Now, the thought barges into her mind again.

  She can’t seem to push it back out.

  Why live a lie?

  What was he hiding?

  Maybe it wasn’t a dark secret, as she had assumed. Maybe it was a noble one. Maybe there was some redeeming aspect to the situation; some self-sacrificing reason that he’d left his family. Maybe her father had been a hero after all. Or a victim.

  Was he, like Carrie Robinson, in the witness protection program?

  Ha. What were the odds of that?

  Only a fool believes in coincidences, Detective Rocky Manzillo told Allison last fall, after the Nightwatcher case was resolved.

  Yes. And only a fool would believe that a man who’d turned his back on his own child could have been anything but a miserable scoundrel.

  She isn’t going back to Nebraska in search of answers. She’s going to visit her only living relatives. Period.

  The only relatives who matter, anyway.

  The man she had known as Allen Taylor might not be dead and buried, but he might as well be.

  “Excuse me, ma’am?”

  Carrie looks up from the airline magazine she’s been pretending to read as the other passengers board the plane. She can’t focus on it, but she doesn’t want to make eye contact with anyone.

  Now, however, she’s forced to, looking up to see a gray-haired woman standing in the aisle.

  “Would you mind switching seats with me, ma’am? I’m in this row, too, but I’m on the aisle and I’d rather have the window.” She lets go of the handle of her rolling carry-on suitcase to gesture at Carrie’s seat with a wrinkled, blue-veined hand.

  “Sorry,” Carrie mutters, shaking her head. “I can’t.”

  “Ma’am, please . . .” The woman shifts her weight, and her smile grows forced. “I have back and leg problems, so I need to lean against the window whenever I fly, but my travel agent made a mistake and got me an aisle seat.”

  Travel agent? In this day and age?

  Even Carrie, who hadn’t flown in well over a decade, had figured out how to book her flight online.

  Naturally, she had carefully studied the airline’s online seat map before selecting hers. She had learned the back of the plane boarded first and that the overhead bins filled very quickly in this era of checked baggage fees. Checking her luggage—and risking the chance that it could go astray and ultimately fall into the wrong hands—was out of the question.

  She settled on a window seat in the rear of the plane with an as-yet unfilled middle seat beside it, hoping it would stay vacant. She chose one on the left-hand side because she wanted the best view of Manhattan upon takeoff.

  Of course, there were still no guarantees she’d be able to glimpse the skyline from the air even if the weather turned out to be perfectly clear—which it is this afternoon—but she conducted considerable online research into flight patterns to give herself the best chance. And there’s no way in hell that she’s about to give it up for this clueless stranger who didn’t even board twenty minutes ago when their row was called.

  “We all have our problems,” she says curtly. “Please don’t expect me to make yours into mine.”
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br />   The woman’s jaw drops.

  Carrie turns away, going back to pretending to read her magazine.

  She hears the woman asking a harried flight attendant to find her a window seat.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, they’re all full.”

  “I have a medical condition. I can’t sit on the aisle.”

  “What is the condition?”

  “My back, and my hip—I’ll be crippled with pain by the time we land if I can’t lean against the window, and”—she lowers her voice to a stage whisper—“that woman sitting there in my row was very rude when I asked her to change with me.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. I’ll see what I can do after takeoff, but for now I just need you to take your assigned seat because we can’t close the cabin doors until you do.”

  “But my back—”

  “Ma’am, please, if you don’t take your seat right now, we’ll lose our takeoff slot, and this is a very busy airport. You’ll be inconveniencing an entire plane full of passengers.”

  “What about my inconvenience? What about my health and well-being?”

  “Ma’am, please. Stow your bag and be seated.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Carrie watches the flight attendant retreat to the galley as the woman huffily opens the overhead bin above their row. Of course it’s full, as is the one across the aisle. And the two behind them, and in front of them . . .

  “Stewardess! I can’t find a place for my bag.”

  What did you expect? Carrie wonders, and clenches her jaw.

  “I’m going to have to check it. I’ll take it up front and—”

  “I can’t check it. I can’t afford it, for one thing—”

  “There’s no charge for gate-checking items that won’t fit.”

  “But my prescriptions are in there, and my other glasses, and—”

  “Ma’am, please take those items out if you need them, but you’ll need to do it quickly because we really do have to close the cabin door.”

  With what seems like deliberate sluggishness, the woman begins removing items from her bag and placing them on the middle seat. Seething, Carrie sneaks a peek at one of the orange prescription bottles.

  It’s from a pharmacy in Mankato. The woman’s name is clearly typed on the label: Imogene Peters.