Shadowkiller

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “What happened to the Jets game?” she asked.

  “They were down fourteen at the half so I turned the channel. Want to watch the movie? It’s just starting.”

  “Seen it,” she said dryly. As in, Who hasn’t?

  “Yeah? Is it any good?” he returned, just as dryly.

  “As a former fraternity boy, you’ll love it, I’m sure.” She hesitated, wondering if she should tell him.

  Might as well: “And you might want to revisit that Jets game.”

  “Really? Why’s that?”

  “They’re in the middle of a historic comeback. I just read about it online. You should watch.”

  “I’m not in the mood. The Giants are my team, not the Jets.”

  Determined to make light of it, she said, “Um, excuse me, aren’t you the man who asked my OB-GYN to preschedule a C-section last winter because you were worried I might go into labor while the Jets were playing?”

  “That was for the AFC Championship!”

  She just shook her head and bent to kiss him in the spot where his dark hair, cut almost buzz-short, has begun the inevitable retreat from his forehead.

  When she met Mack, he was in his mid-thirties and looked a decade younger, her own age. Now he owns his forty-four years, with a sprinkling of gray at his temples and wrinkles that frond the corners of his green eyes. His is the rare Irish complexion that tans, rather than burns, thanks to a rumored splash of Mediterranean blood somewhere in his genetic pool. But this summer, his skin has been white as January, and the pallor adds to the overall aura of world-weariness.

  Tonight, neither of them was willing to discuss why Mack, a die-hard sports fan, preferred an old movie he’d seen a hundred times to an exciting football game on opening day of the NFL season—which also happens to coincide with the milestone tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

  The networks and most of the cable channels have provided a barrage of special programming all weekend. You couldn’t escape it, not even with football.

  Allison had seen her husband abruptly switch off the Giants game this afternoon right before the kickoff, as the National Anthem played and an enormous flag was unfurled on the field by people who had lost loved ones ten years ago today.

  It’s been a long day. It might be a long night, too.

  She opens her eyes abruptly, hearing a car slowing on the street out front. Reflected headlights arc across the ceiling of the master bedroom, filtering in through the sheer curtains. Moments later, the engine turns off, car doors slam, faint voices and laughter float up to the screened windows: the neighbors returning from their weekend house in Vermont.

  Every Friday, the Lewises drive away from the four-thousand-square-foot Colonial next door that has a home gym over the three-car garage, saltwater swimming pool, and sunken patio with a massive outdoor stone fireplace, hot tub, and wet bar. Allison, who takes in their mail and feeds Marnie, the world’s most lovable black cat, while they’re gone, is well aware that the inside of their house is as spectacular as the outside.

  She always assumed that their country home must be pretty grand for them to leave all that behind every weekend, particularly since Bob Lewis spends a few nights every week away on business travel as it is.

  But then a few months ago, when she and Phyllis were having a neighborly chat, Phyllis mentioned that it’s an old lakeside home that’s been in Bob’s family for a hundred years.

  Allison pictured a rambling waterfront mansion. “It sounds beautiful.”

  “Well, I don’t know about beautiful,” Phyllis told her with a laugh. “It’s just a farmhouse, with claw-foot bathtubs instead of showers, holes in the screens, bats in the attic . . .”

  “Really?”

  “Really. And it’s in the middle of nowhere. That’s why we love it. It’s completely relaxing. Living around here—it’s more and more like a pressure cooker. Sometimes you just need to get away from it all. You know?”

  Yeah. Allison knows.

  Every Fourth of July, the MacKennas spend a week at the Jersey Shore, staying with Mack’s divorced sister, Lynn, and her three kids at their Salt Breeze Pointe beach house.

  This year, Mack drove down with the family for the holiday weekend. Early Tuesday morning, he hastily packed his bag to go—no, to flee—back to the city, claiming something had come up at the office.

  Not necessarily a far-fetched excuse.

  Last January, the same week Allison had given birth to their third child (on a Wednesday, and not by scheduled C-section), Mack was promoted to vice president of television advertising sales. Now he works longer hours than ever before. Even when he’s physically present with Allison and the kids, he’s often attached—reluctantly, even grudgingly, but nevertheless inseparably—to his BlackBerry.

  “I can’t believe I’ve become one of those men,” he told her once in bed, belatedly contrite after he’d rolled over—and off her—to intercept a buzzing message.

  She knew which men he was talking about. And she, in turn, seems to have become one of those women: the well-off suburban housewives whose husbands ride commuter trains in shirtsleeves and ties at dawn and dusk, caught up in city business, squeezing in fleeting family time on weekends and holidays and vacations . . .

  If then.

  So, no, his having to rush back to the city at dawn on July 5 wasn’t necessarily a far-fetched excuse. But it was, Allison was certain—given the circumstances—an excuse.

  After a whirlwind courtship, his sister, Lynn, had recently remarried Daryl, a widower with three daughters. Like dozens of other people in Middleton, the town where he and Lynn live, Daryl had lost his spouse on September 11.

  “He and Mack have so much in common,” Lynn had told Allison the first morning they all arrived at the beach house. “I’m so glad they’ll finally get to spend some time together. I was hoping they’d have gotten to know each other better by now, but Mack has been so busy lately . . .”

  He was busy. Too busy, apparently, to stick around the beach house with a man who understood what it was like to have lost his wife in the twin towers.

  There were other things, though, that Daryl couldn’t possibly understand. Things Mack didn’t want to talk about, ever—not even with Allison.

  At his insistence, she and the kids stayed at the beach with Lynn and Daryl and their newly blended family while Mack went home to work. She tried to make the best of it, but it wasn’t the same.

  She wondered then—and continues to wonder now—if anything ever will be the same again.

  Earlier, before heading up the stairs, Allison had rested a hand on Mack’s shoulder. “Don’t stay up too late, okay?”

  “I’m off tomorrow, remember?”

  Yes. She remembered. He’d dropped the news of his impromptu mini stay-cation when he came home from work late Friday night.

  “Guess what? I’m taking some vacation days.”

  She lit up. “Really? When?”

  “Now.”

  “Now?”

  “This coming week. Monday, Tuesday, maybe Wednesday, too.”

  “Maybe you should wait,” she suggested, “so that we can actually plan something. Our anniversary’s coming up next month. You can take time off then instead, and we can get away for a few days. Phyllis is always talking about how beautiful Vermont is at that time of—”

  “Things will be too busy at the office by then,” he cut in. “It’s quiet now, and I want to get the sunroom painted while the weather is still nice enough to keep the windows open. I checked and it’s finally going to be dry and sunny for a few days.”

  That was true, she knew—she, too, had checked the forecast. Last week had been a washout, and she was hoping to get the kids outside a bit in the days ahead.

  But Mack’s true motive, she suspects, is a bit more complicated than perfect painting weather.

  Just as grieving families and images of burning skyscrapers are the last thing Mack wanted to see on TV today, the streets of Manhattan are t
he last place he wants to be tomorrow, invaded as they are by a barrage of curiosity seekers, survivors, reporters and camera crews, makeshift memorials and the ubiquitous protesters—not to mention all that extra security due to the latest terror threat.

  Allison doesn’t blame her husband for avoiding reminders. For him, September 11 wasn’t just a horrific day of historic infamy; it marked a devastating personal loss. Nearly three thousand New Yorkers died in the attack.

  Mack’s first wife was among them.

  When it happened, he and Carrie were Allison’s across-the-hall neighbors. Their paths occasionally crossed hers in the elevator or laundry room or on the front stoop of the Hudson Street building, but she rarely gave them a second thought until tragedy struck.

  In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, when she found out Carrie was missing at the World Trade Center, Allison reached out to Mack. Their friendship didn’t blossom into romance for over a year, and yet . . .

  The guilt is always there.

  Especially on this milestone night.

  Allison tosses and turns in bed, wrestling the reminder that her own happily-ever-after was born in tragedy; that she wouldn’t be where she is now if Carrie hadn’t talked Mack into moving from Washington Heights to Hudson Street, so much closer to her job as an executive assistant at Cantor Fitzgerald; if Carrie hadn’t been killed ten years ago today.

  In the most literal sense, she wouldn’t be where she is now—the money Mack received from various relief funds and insurance policies after Carrie’s death paid for this house, as well as college investment funds for their children.

  Yes, there are daily stresses, but it’s a good life Allison is living. Too good to be true, she sometimes thinks even now: three healthy children, a comfortable suburban home, a BMW and a Lexus SUV in the driveway, the luxury of being a stay-at-home-mom . . .

  The knowledge that Carrie wasn’t able to conceive the child Mack longed for is just one more reason for Allison to feel sorry for her—for what she lost, and Allison gained.

  But it’s not as though I don’t deserve happiness. I’m thirty-four years old. And my life was certainly no picnic before Mack came along.

  Her father walked out on her childhood when she was nine and never looked back; her mother died of an overdose before she graduated high school. She put herself through the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, moved alone to New York with a degree in fashion, and worked her ass off to establish her career at 7th Avenue magazine.

  On September 11, the attack on the World Trade Center turned her life upside down, but what happened the next day almost destroyed it.

  Kristina Haines, the young woman who lived upstairs from her, was brutally murdered by Jerry Thompson, the building’s handyman.

  Allison was the sole witness who could place him at the scene of the crime. By the time he was apprehended, he had killed three more people—and Allison had narrowly escaped becoming another of his victims.

  Whenever she remembers that incident, how a figure lurched at her from the shadows of her own bedroom . . .

  You don’t just put something like that behind you.

  And so, on this night of bitter memories, Jerry Thompson is part of the reason she’s having trouble sleeping.

  It was ten years ago tonight that he crept into Kristina’s open bedroom window.

  Ten years ago that he stabbed her to death in her own bed, callously robbing the burning, devastated city of one more innocent life.

  He’s been in prison ever since.

  Allison’s testimony at his trial was the final nail in the coffin—that was how the prosecuting attorney put it, a phrase that was oft-quoted in the press.

  “I just hope it wasn’t my own,” she recalls telling Mack afterward.

  “Your own what?” he asked, and she knew he was feigning confusion.

  “Coffin.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  But it wasn’t ridiculous.

  She remembers feeling Jerry’s eyes on her as she told the court that he had been at the murder scene that night. Describing how she’d seen him coming out of a stairwell and slipping into the alleyway, she wondered what would happen if the defense won the case and Jerry somehow wound up back out on the street.

  Would he come after her?

  Would he do to her what he had done to the others?

  Sometimes—like tonight—Allison still thinks about that.

  It isn’t likely. He’s serving a life sentence. But still . . .

  Things happen. Parole hearings. Prison breaks.

  What if . . . ?

  No. Stop thinking that way. Close your eyes and go to sleep. The kids will be up early, as usual.

  She closes her eyes, but she can’t stop imagining what it would be like to open them and find Jerry Thompson standing over her with a knife, like her friend Kristina did.

  Sullivan Correctional Facility

  Fallsburg, New York

  One hour of television.

  That’s it. That’s all Jerry is allowed per day, and he has to share it with a roomful of other inmates, so he never gets to choose what he wants to watch. Not that he even knows what that might be, because it’s been ten years since he held a remote control.

  Back then—when he was living in the Hell’s Kitchen apartment that was a palace compared to his prison cell—he liked the show Cops. He always sang along with the catchy opening song, Bad boys, bad boys . . . whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

  It was so exciting to watch the cops turn on the sirens and chase down the bad guys and arrest them. Then one night, they came—in real life, the cops did—and they arrested Jerry because Mama was dead in the bedroom and they thought he was a bad boy. They thought he had killed her, and two other ladies, too.

  “Admit it, Jerry!” they kept saying. “Admit it! Tell us what happened!” They said it over and over again, for hours and hours, until he started crying. Finally, when he just couldn’t take it anymore, he did exactly what they were telling him to do: he admitted it. He said that he had killed his mother and Kristina Haines and Marianne Apostolos, and then he signed the papers they gave him.

  He did that because you have to do what the police tell you to do, and also because maybe he really had killed the women. Maybe he just didn’t remember.

  He doesn’t remember a lot of things, because his brain hasn’t been right for years, not since the accident.

  Well, it wasn’t really an accident.

  Someone doesn’t accidentally bash a person’s head in with a cast-iron skillet. But that’s what Mama always called it, an accident, and that’s what Jerry always thought it was, because the truth about his injury was, of course, just one more thing he didn’t remember.

  Ten years ago, right before he was arrested, he finally found out what had really happened to him on that long-ago day when his head was bashed in.

  His twin sister, Jamie, had attacked him.

  Once he knew the terrible truth, he tried to forget it, because it was too horrible. For years, he couldn’t even remember anything about that night. Now, bits and pieces come back to him, though most of the time, when his mind tries to think about it, he can push it away.

  Sometimes, though, usually late at night, when he’s lying awake in his cell, the terrible truth sneaks back into his head, and he can’t get rid of it.

  It’s the same with Doobie Jones, the big, mean inmate who lives in the cell next to Jerry’s. He talks to Jerry in the night sometimes, and Jerry can never seem to shut out his voice. Even when he pulls the thin prison pillow over his head and presses it against his ears, Doobie’s voice still seems to be there, on the inside, saying all kinds of things Jerry doesn’t want to hear.

  Sometimes, Jerry wonders if Doobie is even real.

  Jamie wasn’t.

  That’s what the cops told him, and so did his lawyer, and the nice doctor who came to talk to Jerry a lot back when he was first arrested.

  Everyone said that Jamie had died years ago, and
now only lived in Jerry’s head.

  It was hard to believe, because Jamie seemed so real, walking and talking, and bringing Jerry cake . . .

  “That was you, Jerry. You said and did those things,” the cops said on the awful day when Jerry found Mama dead in the bedroom, and Jamie ran away just before the police came to the apartment . . .

  That was what he thought had happened, anyway. But when he told the policemen that the bloody dress and the bloody knife belonged to Jamie, they didn’t believe him.

  “Jamie only exists up here.” Detective Manzillo tapped his head. “Do you understand, Jerry?”

  He didn’t at the time.

  Even now, when he thinks about it, he’s not quite sure he understands how someone who only lives in your imagination can go around killing people.

  Maybe that, too, is because Jerry’s brain is damaged.

  Anyway, it’s not his fault that he is the way he is.

  You can’t help it.

  That’s what Jerry’s lawyer told him, and that’s what she told the judge, too, and the jury, and everyone else in the courtroom during the trial. She said Jerry shouldn’t worry, even though he had admitted to killing people and signed the papers, too.

  “You were not responsible for your actions, Jerry,” his lawyer would say, and she would pat Jerry’s hand with fingers that were cold and bony, the fingernails bitten all the way down so that they bled on the notebook paper she was always scribbling on.

  “You’re going to be found not guilty by reason of insanity,” she said. “You’re not going to go to prison. Don’t worry.”

  “I won’t,” Jerry said, and he didn’t.

  But then came the day when the judge asked the lady in charge of the jury—the tall, skinny lady with the mean-looking face—“Have you reached your verdict?”

  The lady said, “We have, Your Honor.”

  The verdict was guilty.

  The courtroom exploded with noise. Some people were cheering, others crying. Jerry’s lawyer put her forehead down on the table for a long time.

  Jerry was confused. “What happened? What does that mean? Is it over? Can I go home now?”