Shadowkiller

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Agent Fink, the woman who joined them at the end of the dirt road where they parked the SUV, motions for Mack to be quiet.

  Ignoring her, he asks DiCaprio, “Did they find something?”

  “ . . . and latitude 44.369. Okay, got it.” DiCaprio finishes writing on the small pad in his hand and looks up to meet Mack’s questioning gaze. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know . . . what?”

  “The flyover pilot thought he saw something.”

  It’s getting harder to breathe now.

  Tremors wrack Allison’s body; every muscle is clenched with intense pain.

  Lying in the bottom of the hole on top of Winona’s corpse, she drifts in and out of consciousness, waking every time to the same tunnel of light—grateful every time to see that it’s still just sunlight at the top of the hole.

  She may be dying, but she isn’t dead yet.

  And the sun . . .

  It’s there. That’s what counts, right? That’s what she told herself months ago, when Maddy made that Mother’s Day card for her.

  You weather the inevitable storms, and you take the sunshine wherever you can get it—even if it’s lying in the grass.

  It seems so long ago, but it was just weeks, really. A few days, only, since they were back home. And just hours since she last saw them all.

  Mack . . .

  Hudson . . .

  Maddy . . .

  J.J. . . .

  Home. I want to go home.

  She thinks of her brother. Brett. She was so close to seeing him again, so close to apologizing for the distance she’d put between them, so close to forgiving him for what he’d said to her all those years ago, when she tried to find her father.

  He’s not Allen Taylor . . . that couldn’t have been his real name.

  He didn’t want us to know his real name, or where he was born, or when.

  All this time, Allison realizes now, some part of her had resented Brett for that. Some part of her had wanted to believe that it was a lie; that her father was who she always thought he was, despite what he’d done, despite the way he’d left.

  Now she knows Brett was telling the truth—but she knows something else.

  Her father hadn’t left her by choice. His love had been real. Maybe he was capable of terrible things—maybe he’d done terrible things to Winona, and to Mom, and to Allison herself—but he hadn’t walked out on her in the middle of the night without looking back.

  For some reason, despite the horror of it all, everything that had happened—that makes a difference.

  Why do people lie?

  To protect themselves, or someone else . . .

  And because they have something to hide. Something dark, or damaging, or ugly.

  Another life.

  Another wife.

  Another daughter.

  Now her broken body cradles Allison’s as she struggles to draw another breath. Just one more.

  Please.

  I don’t want to die.

  I don’t want to leave them.

  Please . . .

  What will they do without me? My girls . . . they need me.

  But they’ll go on, of course. Just as Allison did when she lost her own mother.

  Your daughters are survivors, Mrs. MacKenna, Dr. Rogel’s voice echoes in her head.

  Then she hears another voice.

  Faint, but real.

  The sound of Mack’s voice, calling her name.

  “Allison!”

  She fights for another breath, fights to find her voice.

  She’s so weak . . .

  But you can do it.

  It comes back to her now: the other thing Dr. Rogel said that day, about the girls.

  They’re blessed with extraordinary strength—as is their mother.

  Yes. You’re strong.

  Your strength is strength, remember?

  Mustering every bit of it, she drags air into her lungs, finds her voice at last. “Mack!”

  She hears a shout.

  Running footsteps.

  Then, incredibly, she sees her husband’s face, haloed in golden sunlight.

  Epilogue

  Nebraska

  July 12, 2012

  “Happy birthday to you . . . Happy birthday, to you . . . Happy birthday, dear . . .”

  The chorus of voices, singing in unison until now, diverge.

  Some sang “Allison,” some sang “Mommy,” some sang “Aunt Allison,” and one—J.J., on her lap—just babbles.

  It’s all music to her ears.

  “ . . . Happy birthday to you!”

  Smiling, she leans forward to blow out the thirty-six candles on the triple-layer chocolate cake her sister-in-law made for her.

  “But Mommy’s only turning thirty-five, Aunt Cindy,” eagle-eyed Hudson protested as they lit the candles.

  “I know, but we always put one candle for every year, and an extra one for good luck.”

  “I’ll take all the extra luck I can get,” Allison told her.

  “I think you’re the luckiest person I’ve ever known,” her brother said, sitting next to her at the big redwood picnic table he’d built with his own hands. “But you better watch out, because tomorrow is Friday the thirteenth.”

  Thinking of Randi and the big party she’s throwing tomorrow, Allison grinned. Her friend has called her every day for the past week and a half, just making sure she’s okay.

  “She must really love you,” Cindy-Lou said after the latest call.

  Allison smiled. “She really does.”

  A lot of people do.

  “Make a wish, Mommy.”

  She closes her eyes, makes a wish, and blows out the candles in one big breath.

  “What was the wish?” Maddy asks, as everyone claps.

  “She can’t tell you,” Hudson says, “or it won’t come true.”

  “Guess what? It already did,” Allison informs her daughters.

  Gazing at the people gathered around the table, with Mack’s arm resting on her shoulders, she really does feel like the luckiest person in the world.

  True to the promise she made to herself years ago, when she was in her early twenties and thinking about what she wanted out of life, she’s never taken her husband and daughters and son for granted. Back then, she swore that if she were ever fortunate enough to have a family, I’ll be there for them, and I’ll hold on tight, no matter what, because nothing in this world is more precious.

  What she failed to realize at the time was that all family ties are precious.

  But she figured it out the moment her big brother Brett walked into her hospital room in Sioux Falls, where she’d been taken to recuperate from her injuries and the poisonous spider bite.

  The hefty blond man in the doorway didn’t look anything like the boy who once ran along behind her bike, and let go.

  But he was her big brother. She knew it the moment she saw the relief in his eyes. He cared about her. And so did the pleasantly plump woman who came up behind him, holding a vaseful of bright yellow blooms she’d cut from her garden.

  Sunflowers. They couldn’t have been more fitting.

  There are more in a red tin milk pitcher sitting on the blue and white checked tablecloth, along with the remains of a decadent, deep-fried dinner doused in creamy country gravy.

  The table is perched not on a deck or a fancy flagstone or brick patio, like the outdoor dining furniture tends to be back home, but on the wide stretch of lawn behind the big white farmhouse. The warm air is sweetly scented with freshly mown grass, fireflies are flitting about, cicadas have taken up a steady chatter in the fields, and a pale slice of waning moon has appeared in the wide open purple-blue sky.

  “Samantha,” Cindy-Lou says, “will you please run into the kitchen and get the ice cream I made to go along with the cake?”

  “I’ll help!” Hudson is on her feet immediately.

  “Me too!” Maddy follows suit, and the girls trail their pretty teenage cousin into the ho
use. They’ve been doing that from the moment they met her, and good-natured Samantha seems amused by it.

  The screen door squeaks and bangs, a homey sound that made Allison jump every time she heard it for the first few days. She’s used to it now. She likes it.

  “You made homemade ice cream, Mom?” Jeff, a quiet boy with his father’s gentle disposition, lights up.

  “Remember, we have company, so you can’t eat it all yourself like last time,” Brett tells his son, and Jeff reddens.

  Allison smiles, bouncing J.J. on her lap and imagining a time when he’ll tower over her the way Jeff does over Cindy-Lou.

  She feels Mack’s arm tighten around her shoulders and she looks up to see him smiling. He might be thinking the same thing. Or he might still be marveling at how very lucky Allison is.

  It’s been more than a week now since the ordeal she survived at the hands of Winona, the half sister she’d never known existed—the wife Mack had thought was dead. With the help of Rocky Manzillo back East, they had pieced together the tragic details of her life, and the path she’d followed into Mack’s life—and Allison’s.

  Strangely, despite all the evidence that her father was a selfish scoundrel living a double life, Allison feels more capable of forgiving him now than she ever did before.

  “It’s because you have closure,” Brett told her when she mentioned it one day, as they went walking over his property at sunset. “You were such a daddy’s girl when you were a kid. He took good care of you when he was around. I know why it broke your heart when he left.”

  Daddy really hadn’t left Allison, though. Not by choice.

  But he had left Winona. Had the emotional pain she’d endured turned her into a monster? Or was she just wired differently than most people—capable, as she was, of unthinkable, rage-driven acts?

  It’s going to take some getting used to—this new version of an already troubled family history.

  But Allison is willing to work on accepting what is, and letting go of what can never be. She’s ready to lay the ghosts to rest and start looking ahead from now on.

  Tomorrow morning, she and Mack and the kids will bid farewell to this peaceful farm where they’ve spent more than a week of vacation that was, if not entirely restful, then at least healing.

  Allison is sorry to say good-bye, but they’ve already made plans to visit again next summer. Anyway, it’s time to set out for home.

  To think she was feeling unfulfilled, just weeks ago, with her life there. Questioning her choices, bored and restless, what-if-ing her days away.

  The screen door squeaks opens again and bangs shut.

  I’m going to miss that sound.

  “Mommy! Aunt Cindy-Lou made ice cream!” Hudson announces.

  “And cones, too!” Maddy puts in.

  “You are really quite something, Aunt Cindy-Lou,” Allison tells her sister-in-law.

  “Can we make ice cream when we go back home?” Hudson asks.

  “And cones?”

  “Sure,” Allison tells her girls.

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  Mack looks at her. “Better not make promises you can’t keep.”

  “I never do.”

  From where she sits, looking at the summer days ahead, she can’t think of anything better than licking homemade ice cream cones in the bright sunshine with her children.

  Mack leans closer to her as Cindy-Lou and Samantha dish up dessert for everyone. “Are you ready to go home, Allie?”

  “Definitely.”

  “We’ve got a long road ahead of us.”

  “Not as long as the one we took to get here.”

  Resting her cheek on her husband’s shoulder, Allison smiles contentedly, watching the fireflies dance like stars across the night sky.

  And now a sneak peek at

  THE GOOD SISTER,

  the first in Wendy Corsi Staub’s

  chilling new series

  Coming in 2013

  from HarperCollins Publishers

  That it had all been a lie shouldn’t come as any surprise, really.

  And yet, the truth—a terrible, indisputable truth that unfolds line by blue ballpoint line, filling the pages of the black marble notebook—is somehow astonishing.

  How did you never suspect it back then?

  Or, at least, in the years since?

  Looking back at the childhood decade spent in this house—an ornate, faded Second Empire Victorian mansion in one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city—it’s so easy to see how it might have happened this way.

  How it did happen this way.

  There is no mistaking the evidence. No mistaking the distinct handwriting: a cramped, backhand scrawl so drastically different from the loopy, oversized penmanship so typical of other girls that age.

  Different . . .

  Of course it was different.

  She was different from the other girls; tragically, dangerously different.

  I remember so well.

  I remember her, remember so many things about her: both how she lived and how she—

  Footsteps approach, tapping up the wooden stairway to this cupola perched high above the third story mansard roofline, topped by wrought-iron cresting that prongs the sky like a king’s squared-off crown.

  “Hellooo-oo. Are you still up there?” calls Sandra Lutz, the Realtor.

  “Yes.” Where else would I be? Do you think I jumped out the window while you were gone?

  Sandra had excused herself ten minutes ago, finally answering her cell phone. It had buzzed incessantly with incoming calls and texts as their footsteps echoed in one empty room after another on this final walk-through before the listing goes up tomorrow.

  The entire contents of the house are now in storage—with the exception of the rocking chair where Mother had passed away and gone undiscovered for weeks.

  “I don’t think that chair is something you’d want to keep,” Sandra said in one of their many long-distance telephone conversations when the storage arrangements were being made.

  Of course not. The corpse would have been crawling with maggots and oozing bodily fluids, staining the brocade upholstery and permeating it with the terrible stench of death.

  Presumably, someone—surely not the lovely Sandra—tossed the desecrated rocking chair into a Dumpster, while everything else was transported to the storage facility somewhere in the suburbs.

  As for Mother herself . . .

  I’d just as soon have had someone toss her into a Dumpster, too.

  But of course, the proper thing to do was arrange, also long distance, for a cremation.

  “We have a number of packages,” the mortician said over the phone, “depending on how you want to set up visitation hours and—”

  “No visitation. I live almost five hundred miles away, and I can’t get up there just yet, and . . . there’s no one else.”

  Pause. “There are no other family and friends here in the Buffalo area who might want to—?”

  “No one else.”

  “All right, then.” He went over the details, mentioning that there would be an additional seventy-five-dollar charge for shipment of the ashes.

  “Can you just hold on to—” It? Her? What was the proper terminology, aside from the profane terms so often used to refer to Mother—though never to her face—back when she was alive?

  “The remains?” the undertaker supplied delicately.

  “Yes . . . can you hold on to the remains until I can be there in person?”

  “When would that be?”

  “Sometime this summer. I’m selling the house, so I’ll be coming up there to make the final arrangements for that.”

  The undertaker dutifully provided instructions on how to go about retrieving what was left of the dearly departed when the time came.

  The time is now here, but of course there will be no trip to the mortuary. Mother’s ashes can sit on a dusty shelf there for all eternity.

  As for the
contents of this old house . . .

  “I’m sure you won’t want to go through it all just yet,” Sandra Lutz said earlier, handing over the rental agreement and a set of keys to the storage unit. “Not when the loss is so fresh. But empty houses are much more appealing to buyers, and this way, at least, we can get the home on the market.”

  Yes. The sooner this old place is sold, the better. As for the padlocked compartment filled with a lifetime of family furniture and mementos . . .

  Good riddance to all of it.

  Well . . . not quite all.

  Right before she answered her phone, Sandra had taken the Ziploc bag from her leather Dooney & Bourke purse.

  “These are some odds and ends I found after the moving company and cleaning service had finished in here. I didn’t want to just throw anything away, so . . . here you go.”

  The bag contained just a few small items. A stray key that had been hanging on a nail just inside the basement door, most likely fitting the lock on a long-gone trunk or tool chest. A dusty Mass card from a forgotten cousin’s funeral, found tucked behind a cast-iron radiator in the front parlor. A tarnished, bent silver fork that had been wedged in the space behind the silverware drawer.

  And then there was . . .

  This.

  The notebook, with a string of black rosary beads wrapped around it twice, as if to seal it closed.

  According to Sandra Lutz, the notebook, unlike the other contents of the bag, hadn’t been accidentally overlooked. It was deliberately hidden in one of the old home’s many concealed nooks.

  “I stumbled across it last night when I stopped by to double-check the square footage of the master bedroom,” she reported. “I noticed that there was a discrepancy between the measurements I took a few weeks ago and the old listing from the last time the house sold, back in the late seventies.”

  “What kind of discrepancy?”

  “The room was two feet longer back then. Sure enough, that’s exactly the depth of the secret compartment I found behind a false wall by the bay window. I was wondering whether you even knew it was there, because—”

  “The house is full of secret compartments. My father said that it was probably used to hide slaves on the Underground Railroad.”

  “That’s the rumor about a lot of houses in this neighborhood because we’re just a stone’s throw from the Canadian border, and there was Underground Railroad activity in western New York. But I don’t think this would have been an actual safe house.”