Hell to Pay

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  He might very well have been. Elsa is strikingly beautiful even in middle age—nearly as beautiful as Sylvie herself. But her marriage to Brett Cavalon, having weathered many a storm, is stronger than ever.

  “Actually, they’re mother and daughter,” Renny promptly informed the waiter, “not sisters.”

  “Is that so? Well, I sure can see the family resemblance in all three of you.”

  As soon as he walked away, Renny rolled her eyes and sipped the pinot noir she’d glibly ordered as a newly minted twenty-one-year-old. “He’s so full of crap.”

  Sylvie scolded, “Renny! Such language at the table!”

  “Oh, it could have been worse, Maman.” Elsa grinned. “She could have said he’s full of—”

  “Elsa!”

  Her daughter laughed, and Sylvie shook her head. Americans.

  “I didn’t mean he was full of crap because he thought you were sisters, Mémé,” Renny told Sylvie, who couldn’t help but be as pleased by her granddaughter’s French term of endearment as she was displeased by the repetition of the offending word. “But he’s all ‘I see the family resemblance.’ Meanwhile, I’m adopted.”

  “Well I’m not,” Elsa pointed out, “and you actually look more like me, Renny, than I look like Maman.”

  C’est vrai, Sylvie thought. While they were adopted years apart from the foster care system, and don’t share blood with their mother or each other, Elsa’s grown children do resemble her and each other. Both Renny and Jeremy have dark eyes and dark hair. Renny’s complexion is on the olive side compared to Elsa’s fair skin, and Jeremy’s eyes are darker than his mother and sister’s, so dark they’re almost black.

  Ah, such a shame that Sylvie’s blue eyes—which Frank Sinatra himself once told her were bluer than his own—will die with her.

  But not, God willing, for a long, long time. She’s feeling good, despite getting around with a cane these days: a handcrafted walking stick, imported from the century-old Fayet in France.

  And yes, her cardiologist is always telling her to go easier on the butter and cream, but Sylvie has no intention of obliging. She’s svelte as ever, despite butter and cream, wine and chocolate—all the pleasures of life, which she’ll continue to enjoy to its fullest, merci beaucoup.

  “Mon Dieu,” laments the great Piaf over the bathroom speaker, and begs God to let her lover stay with her a little bit longer.

  Such a sad song. Sylvie thinks of Jean Paul as she turns away from the fogged-over mirror. Such a painful loss.

  And yet, life goes on. She has much to look forward to. Thanksgiving in a couple of days. Christmas next month, and she’s spending it with friends on the Côte d’Azur.

  And when she returns to New York, if all goes well, she’ll be a great-grandmother at last. Jeremy and his wife, Lucy, are expecting.

  “The kids have been through so much,” Elsa said at lunch the other day. “Will you offer a novena that nothing goes wrong again, Maman?”

  “But of course.”

  Lucy’s two lost pregnancies—the first, a late-term stillbirth—were a lot to bear. God willing, there won’t be a third. Sylvie, who attends daily Mass at Holy Trinity, is a strong believer in the power of prayer, as is her granddaughter-in-law.

  Sylvie is impressed by Lucy’s unshaken conviction that she will be blessed with a child.

  After all she’s been through—the tragedy that marked her childhood, and the heartbreaking miscarriages—she’s been remarkably resilient.

  A woman like Lucy can survive anything. Sylvie just hopes she won’t be tested again in the months ahead.

  Poking a fingertip through the frothy layer of bubbles into the steaming tub, she decides the water temperature is just right. She turns off the tap, fits a shower cap snuggly over her fresh coiffure, and uses the sleeve of her robe to wipe a small window into the mirror.

  Checking her reflection to ensure that her hair is neatly tucked beneath the shower cap, she glimpses a flutter of movement reflected in the filmy glass. Frowning, she wipes a wider swath.

  Reflected in the mirror, a robed, hooded figure stands behind her.

  The sight is so shockingly out of place that Sylvie blinks, certain it’s a trick of the light.

  Slowly, she turns.

  She isn’t alone.

  The cloaked intruder swoops upon her, hands outstretched—ominously wearing rubber gloves, Sylvie realizes in horror.

  “Mon Dieu!” Edith Piaf sings, reaching the crescendo as the gloved hands push Sylvie down, down, into the full bathtub. She thrashes and gasps, sucking hot water into her lungs.

  I can’t breathe . . . I can’t breathe . . .

  Panicked, she struggles futilely to free herself from the strong hands that hold her face submerged.

  Drowning . . . I’m drowning . . . Mon Dieu . . . Mon Dieu . . .

  Climbing the stairway to her second floor apartment, Lucy Walsh Cavalon—who not so long ago regularly ran the New York Marathon—is pretty sure she’s about to collapse from sheer exhaustion.

  “Stay strong, Lucy—stay strong!” her father used to shout from the sidelines when she was on the middle school track team.

  Stay strong, she’s been telling herself for the last twenty minutes. Stay strong.

  But her fatigue isn’t due to running—or even walking, really, despite the five blocks she briskly covered from her office to Grand Central and three more blocks from the train station home.

  No, what did her in was standing on her feet in the aisle of an overheated train for the duration of the forty-minute commute from midtown Manhattan to Westchester County.

  It’s a Wednesday—matinee day on Broadway, when the Metro North trains are crowded with the usual commuters plus chatty suburbanites clutching theater Playbills. Lucy can always find a seat anyway, if she leaves the office with enough time to spare.

  Being super-organized, that’s something she manages to do most nights without any problem.

  But this was one of those frustrating days when nothing was within her realm of control: the phone kept ringing and e-mail kept popping up and she was running late. The train, extra-jammed with matinee-goers, was standing room only. And no one, not even the retirees who can usually be counted on for more gentlemanly behavior than their thirty- and fortysomething counterparts, offered to give up a seat for Lucy.

  You’d think someone would have noticed that I was pregnant and on the verge of keeling over.

  Then again, if anyone knows better than to count on the kindness of strangers, it’s Lucy. You have to take care of yourself out there, because nobody else will.

  The thing is, I’m not just trying to take care of myself. I have a baby to protect now. Again.

  Please, God, let this baby be born. Please . . .

  She crosses herself and says a quick prayer.

  Ever since a pregnancy test confirmed the new life she’s carrying, she’s felt terrifyingly fragile—not that she’d confess that to anyone, even her husband. Jeremy is worried enough for both of them. She reassures him every chance she gets.

  Yet it’s unsettling for a woman who’s always prided herself on being in control of her own fate to accept that that really isn’t the case.

  “God is in control,” Father Les, her parish priest in Westchester, counseled her after her last miscarriage. “We can’t question why bad things happen. We can only accept that they do, and trust in God’s plan for us.”

  She’s been trying to do that. She really has. Trying to grasp that motherhood might not be a part of God’s plan for her.

  But it might be. Please, let it be.

  She was reluctant to even tell anyone about the pregnancy this time. Her mother, her brother and sister, her in-laws, her best friend—none of them knew until the first trimester was safely past.

  Safe? There’s no such thing as safe. Not until y
ou’re holding a healthy newborn in your arms.

  The first time she was pregnant, Lucy carried all the way into her sixth month before she started bleeding.

  Blood . . . all that blood.

  She shudders, forcing the memory from her thoughts, having trained herself long ago to fixate on future dreams, not past nightmares. She’s safely past the six-month mark now.

  It doesn’t mean nothing can go wrong. It just means the baby is getting stronger and stronger. Some babies born at this premature stage survive.

  Aching and yawning, she trudges up the last few steps, wishing she could just crawl into bed and not set the alarm.

  Maybe she really should, as her husband keeps urging, consider taking an early leave from her job as a network administrator. Between the stressful commute, and the regular pressures of corporate America, and dealing with the daily chaos in Manhattan—which will be more crowded than ever with the holiday season upon them . . .

  “But what if they decide I’m on the mommy track and get rid of me altogether? We count on my salary,” she points out whenever Jeremy starts down that road.

  “We can get by on mine.”

  Not really. He’s a youth counselor at a group home in the Bronx. Overworked, underpaid.

  “Or we can borrow money from my parents if we need to,” he suggests.

  Maybe, but Lucy’s in-laws aren’t exactly rolling in dough. While the Cavalons won a sizable damages settlement years ago, what isn’t being held in trust for Renny was lost in a series of bad investments, or used for living expenses back when Brett was forced into early retirement from his nautical engineering job.

  “Let’s just see how it goes,” Lucy keeps telling Jeremy. “Plenty of women work through pregnancy with no problem. And it’s not like I’m slaving away in a factory or something. All I do is sit at a desk . . .”

  . . . for eight hours a day troubleshooting with frustrated employees whose computer systems aren’t working the way they’re supposed to . . .

  Still, she’s really good at what she does, makes decent money with good medical benefits, her job is stable, and she generally works a regular forty-hour week. Things could be a lot worse.

  I just have to stick it out until maternity leave.

  Please, God, let me get to that point this time.

  Statistically, the odds are stacked against her carrying a baby to term after multiple miscarriages. Still, at twenty-nine, she’s relatively young. Her obstetrician told her to be hopeful—and extra-careful.

  Thank goodness for the long Thanksgiving weekend coming up next week. Her old, hyper-industrious, nonpregnant self would have seized the opportunity to take a trip, or get things done around the house. But aside from eating turkey at her mother’s house a few miles away, all she plans on doing from Wednesday night until the following Monday morning is sleeping. She’s pretty sure Jeremy won’t mind. It’ll give him a break from constantly telling her to sit down and take a break.

  An envelope is taped to their apartment door at the top of the stairs. Plucking it off as she stomps the slush from her boots, Lucy sees that it’s addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Jeremy Cavalon in handwriting she doesn’t recognize.

  Odd.

  The building, a duplex, is kept locked. No one should be able to get in here other than the first floor neighbors, or—

  Carl Soto?

  Having torn open the envelope and spotted the landlord’s signature, Lucy quickly skims the typewritten page. Her eyes widen in dismay.

  This can’t be right . . . can it?

  Rereading, she sees that it is, indeed, an eviction notice giving her and Jeremy just thirty days to vacate the apartment. That’s it. No further explanation.

  So much for sleeping, Lucy thinks grimly, resting a hand on her rounded stomach.

  When it’s over, Sylvie Durand’s limp body, now stripped of the white bathrobe, lies facedown in the bathtub, partially obscured by a foamy drift of perfumed bubbles. The wineglass sits undisturbed, the candles remain aglow, and Edith Piaf croons a new song.

  “Thy will be done.” With a satisfied nod, still wearing the surgical gloves, she swiftly takes off her hooded cloak, soaked in the struggle. After hanging it on a hook beside Sylvie’s dripping robe, she picks up the thick white bath towel Sylvie had lain out on the heated towel bar.

  The label is familiar—Le Jacquard Français.

  Long ago—before she’d been condemned to using thin, scratchy prison-issue towels—she herself had lived in a grand home whose marble bathrooms were stocked with fine European linens.

  Now that home—and everything in it—belongs to someone else.

  Not, however, to the Cavalons. It was sold before they won a sizable portion of her family’s assets in the damages settlement.

  Back when that happened, her attorney, Andrew Stafford, relayed the news gingerly, as though he thought she might explode in anger or grief at the news that Jeremy Cavalon and his adoptive family had been awarded what should rightfully have belonged to her.

  She didn’t explode. She clenched her handcuffed fists so hard her nails drew blood from her palms. But of course, Andrew couldn’t see her hands. He could only see her face, and she was an expert at masking her emotions. She remained as stoic as she had the day Andrew told her that Jeremy had married Lucy Walsh.

  Yes, Jeremy and Lucy were still out there in the world, living their lives, while she was caged like an animal.

  Every time she allowed herself to think of them, helpless rage would well up inside her. She knew then—as she knows now—that there is nothing to do about it but wait for Judgment Day, when Jeremy and Lucy—and the others, too—will get what they deserve. Yes, justice at the hands of the Almighty upon his return to earth.

  The earthquake heralded the beginning of the end, the imminent arrival of the Messiah. Now Judgment Day is almost upon them, and she—as a prophet, and a true believer—will be rewarded at last.

  She surveys Sylvie Durand’s waterlogged corpse. Having made good and sure to slam the woman’s head hard against the edge of the tub, she’s not worried about anyone suspecting foul play.

  An elderly woman, living alone, slips getting into the bathtub, bangs her head, is knocked unconscious, and drowns. A terrible accident, the medical examiner will conclude. But the kind that happens every day.

  Pooled water on the floor and spatters on the walls and mirror are the only signs of a struggle. She easily obliterates them with the thick, absorbent towel. After draping it over the hook with the other soggy things, she opens a linen closet.

  The shelves are stacked with neatly folded white towels identical to the soggy one. That’s how it is in wealthy households like Sylvie’s—and her own, long ago: everything belongs to a luxurious linen set, no mix-and-match.

  With her gloved fingers, she lifts a towel from the top of the nearest pile and drapes it over the heated towel bar. Then she rolls the wet things into a tight bundle and tucks it beneath her arm.

  Better to risk taking the bathrobe and towel than to arouse suspicion should someone show up here unexpectedly and discover the wet evidence. Surely the Cavalons will be too caught up in grief and shock to notice anything is missing.

  After taking one last look around the bathroom, she slips out and closes the door behind her.

  Chapter Two

  “Wow—how many more boxes are there?” Lucy asks, holding the door open for Jeremy as he lugs two more heavy-looking cartons into the apartment.

  “Trust me, you don’t want to know.”

  He’s right. She doesn’t. It’ll only make her feel even more guilty.

  She watches him heave the boxes onto the polished herringbone wood floor beside stacks of others. “I wish I could help you.”

  “Don’t even think about it.” He brushes a hand over the raindrops beaded on his close-cropped dark hair. “You know what Dr. C
ourmier said.”

  He’s talking about her new OB-GYN, who specializes in high-risk pregnancies. Her former doctor referred her after the second miscarriage.

  “Dr. Courmier has said a lot of things,” she points out to Jeremy.

  “Including ‘no heavy lifting till the baby comes.’ ”

  Yes. She knows.

  She knows what could happen if she disobeys; knows only too well what might very well happen anyway.

  Yet Lucy has never been the kind of person who sits by watching as someone else takes care of things. She can’t help but feel guilty that Jeremy’s literally had to shoulder the weight of this forced move from Westchester down to his late grandmother’s apartment on the Upper West Side—in a miserable December downpour, no less.

  She wishes they could have afforded to hire movers, but their finances are pretty dire this month, especially with the holidays looming next week.

  Luckily, her Christmas shopping is done—and has been for months now, one of the perks that come with being hyperorganized. She buys things on sale, wraps them, labels them, and puts them away until the holidays.

  If that weren’t the case, she and Jeremy probably wouldn’t be exchanging gifts with each other or anyone else this year, given their bank account balance.

  She really hopes they’ll be able to save some money, living here for a while. It would be nice to catch up on the bills before the baby comes.

  Seeing Jeremy start toward the door again, she says, “Why don’t you at least wait until my brother gets out of work? He said he’d come over and help.”

  “Nah, that’s okay.”

  “His office is right off Columbus Circle.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “It’s only two subway stops away, and—”

  “I know where he works!” he snaps, and Lucy clamps her mouth shut.

  Sometimes, especially when he’s tired, Jeremy lashes out unreasonably.