Hell to Pay

by Wendy Corsi Staub

She looks over her shoulder every so often, as is her habit. But Jeremy never does, either because it wouldn’t occur to him that he’s being followed, or because he’s too absorbed by his mission to pay attention to what’s around him.

  Back at the apartment, while devouring the hot ham, egg, and Swiss sandwiches she’d picked up at the deli, she’d plugged both “Parkview” and “Park View” into her computer’s search engine. It came up with far too many hits to sort through—apartment buildings, hotels, hospitals, restaurants, stores . . .

  She still has no idea which one Jeremy is visiting, but she’s definitely about to find out.

  He emerges from the park on Fifth Avenue at East Seventy-second Street.

  Ah, familiar territory. The Upper East Side. Now what?

  He turns left and walks up several blocks, then makes a right and walks two and a half blocks east.

  There, he disappears into a building.

  She catches up a few seconds later and looks at the placard beside the revolving door.

  What the . . . ?

  Parkview is a private psychiatric hospital.

  After a mostly sleepless night mulling over his conversation with his sister and waiting for the phone to ring, Ryan managed to get himself to work. At least, he’s here in the sense that he’s physically sitting at his desk.

  But really, he’s not here. His thoughts are, as the cliché goes, a million miles away, with Phoenix—who at this point might as well be a million miles away.

  Ryan’s been leaving messages and sending texts since yesterday afternoon.

  Why isn’t she picking up her phone or texting him back?

  And why can’t he stop thinking about what Lucy said? Not about Phoenix—but about Ryan himself, when he told her he feels as though something is missing in his life.

  Maybe it’s some part of yourself that you lost a long time ago, and you need to find it again.

  Maybe Lucy is right. Maybe it is about him. Maybe he does need to find himself again. He always thought that having the things that other people—normal people—his age have—like an education, a job, a relationship—would make him feel normal again, too.

  He has all those things now, yet he’s still incomplete, and more insecure than ever.

  Especially when it comes to Phoenix.

  Why is she with a guy like me?

  Ryan Walsh is no fool. He can tell himself all he wants that she’s attracted to his kind heart, or his sensitive soul, or that she’s just new in town—a breath of fresh air compared to the women here who don’t give him the time of day—but in the end, he doesn’t really believe it.

  Especially now that she hasn’t called him back.

  Traci, one of his coworkers, sticks her dark head around the corner of his cubicle. “Hey, Ryan, here’s that file.”

  “What file?”

  “The one you asked me about yesterday, when you were looking for background about that Medicare fraud case. Take a look at it and let me know if it helps.”

  “Right . . . I will.” He takes the manila folder from her and waits for her to go.

  Why isn’t she going?

  Where is Phoenix, dammit?

  Why is she with me?

  Why? Why? Why?

  “Is everything okay?” Traci is asking.

  “Yeah. Fine.”

  She looks like she wants to say something, then shrugs and walks away.

  The moment she disappears, Ryan tosses the folder aside and goes back to his computer screen.

  He’s been trolling the local media and police blotters on the Internet, making sure there weren’t any incidents overnight that might have involved Phoenix. He could find nothing about an unidentified accident or crime victim that might fit her description—although he’d stumbled across one unsettling piece that gave him pause.

  There was a double homicide in a midtown hotel last night, and the name of one of the victims—the maid—hasn’t been released yet, pending notification of her next of kin.

  Phoenix isn’t a hotel maid, Ryan reminds himself. She’s a corporate accountant.

  That’s what she told him, anyway.

  What if she lied?

  Why would she lie?

  There’s that word again—why.

  But what if she did?

  What if she’s really a hotel maid, and right now she’s lying in the city morgue? He might never even know, because he’s not her next of kin.

  Who is her next of kin?

  She’s an only child and her parents are dead. She has a roommate, an ex-boyfriend, and, presumably, coworkers and friends . . .

  But Ryan has never met any of them.

  Why not?

  What does he really know about her past, other than that she’s from Arizona and her last name is Williams—which happens to be the third most common name in the United States, according to her.

  Not a whole lot to go on.

  He gives the computer mouse a hard shove and it skitters across his desk, colliding with the pencil cup that goes over with a clatter.

  Dammit. Ryan leans his head back and closes his eyes.

  She waits just outside the glass revolving door, pretending to wrestle with her umbrella as she keeps an eye on Jeremy as he speaks to the uniformed guard at the security desk, then signs in on a clipboard.

  She waits until the elevator doors are closing behind him, then blows into the small lobby.

  “Wow—it’s nasty out there this morning!” she proclaims as the guard, a ruddy-faced older man with a shock of white hair, looks up from the newspaper he was just about to open again.

  “Sure is.” He knits his thick gray brows, staring at her kind of funny.

  He can’t possibly think she’s up to something. She just walked in the door.

  You’re just paranoid, she tells herself, sneaking a peek at the elevator bank. The one Jeremy boarded as the sole occupant has just stopped on the fourth floor.

  “I hate winter, don’t you?” she asks the guard, as casually as she can.

  “Nah. I like it. Good whiskey weather, as my granddad used to say.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, any weather is good whiskey weather if it’s good whiskey.” She grins at him and then, satisfied she’s won him over, flinches. “Oh no!” she says and bends her head, rubbing her eye.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “My contact lens . . . I just dropped it.” She blinks rapidly and pats her fingertips around on the desk between them. “I hope it didn’t bounce onto the floor . . .”

  The guard looks down just long enough for her to take a good look at the clipboard in front of him.

  “Oh! Here it is!” She pretends to pick up something from the desk and turns slightly away from him, making a show of popping her “contact” back into her eye. “There. Good thing it wasn’t on the floor. I never would’ve found it.”

  “Glad you did.”

  “Me too. Anyway, I’m here to see Darryl Gaus. He’s in 402.”

  “Darryl Gaus, Darryl Gaus.” He scans through a directory on the computer screen. “Sorry. I’m new here. Still getting to know everyone. Yup. 402.”

  Across the lobby, elevator doors open and out steps an attractive woman in a dress coat, hose, and heeled pumps. “See you later, Fitzy,” she tells the guard as she strides past.

  “Later, Dr. Westfall.” Fitzy watches her admiringly until she exits the building, then gets back to the business at hand, sliding the clipboard across the counter along with a pen. “Just sign in here and take this visitor’s pass up to the nurses at the station on four.”

  She writes a name—not her own, and not any of her recent aliases—along with the time and the random patient’s name she’d spotted toward the top of the page, listed with Thursday’s patients who’d received late day visitors.

  As
she writes, she scans Jeremy’s entry just above her own. She can make out the room number, 421, but the patient’s name, like his own signature, is all but illegible.

  “All set,” she says cheerfully to the guard. “Have a great day, and thanks!”

  “You’re very welcome.” Fitzy hands over a visitor’s pass, then tips his hat to her as she sails onto the elevator and presses the button for the fourth floor.

  “Don’t tell me it’s TGIF already?” Wendy Nevid comments, spotting Jeremy as he approaches the nurses’ station.

  “Sure is. Got any fun weekend plans?”

  “That depends on how you define fun,” the nurse, a petite, blue-eyed blonde, tells him. “I have to finish my Hanukkah shopping, and Ethan has karate and swimming lessons and Julia has volleyball, and they’re invited to three birthday parties between them, so Mark and I will be running from one kid thing to another.”

  “Sounds fun to me.”

  Wendy shakes her head, but Jeremy means it. What he wouldn’t give to be in her shoes a few years from now, with a couple of healthy, busy kids.

  “How about you?” Wendy asks.

  “My wife and I just moved into a new place and we’ve still got some unpacking to do, so that’s my big weekend plan.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Upper West Side.”

  “How do you like living in Manhattan?”

  “So far, so good. Makes it easier to get to work, that’s for sure. And to get here, too. Maybe I’ll be able to come by more often.” The hospital is a fairly short walk across Central Park. In better weather, it will be a nice stroll. Today, he didn’t enjoy it in the least.

  “It means a lot to her that you’re here every Friday morning.”

  “I missed last week. And the week before.” And the week of his grandmother’s funeral, too, back in November.

  “Really?” Wendy shrugs, and he wonders if she really didn’t notice that he wasn’t here. Or is she just trying to make him feel less guilty?

  “Well, things come up,” she says. “You come when you can, and when you do, she’s glad to see you.”

  He nods, but he’s not so sure, most of the time, that she even knows he’s there with her.

  He comes anyway, because he wants to see her. Because he has to see her. Because if it weren’t for her, he wouldn’t be here.

  Here, as in alive.

  And if it weren’t for me, she wouldn’t be here, he can’t help thinking. Here, as in here: at Parkview.

  It’s taken him years to realize that he isn’t directly responsible for the tragic series of events that destroyed her life and so many others that touched it. He knows that he’s a victim, too. But no one can erase the fact that a lot of people might have been much better off if he’d never been born.

  Might have been better off?

  Would. Would have been better off.

  He thinks of Miguel and his pregnant girlfriend, Carmen, as he has many times since last night, then pushes them from his head. They have nothing to do with this. With him.

  “How has she been this week?” he asks Wendy.

  “Just fine. She rolled herself down the hall to bingo last night and won a stuffed animal. She was thrilled.”

  Thrilled about winning a toy while playing bingo in a wheelchair.

  Not just any toy. A stuffed animal.

  Wendy Nevid might not grasp the irony, but Jeremy does. It was a stuffed animal—containing a hidden memory stick full of damaging evidence—that triggered Garvey’s deadly rampage fifteen years ago.

  He forces a smile. “That’s . . . great. That she won bingo, I mean. That she was so happy . . .”

  “Simple things matter a lot in this world, Jeremy.”

  She’s not talking about the world in general, he knows—because in the real world, who gives a crap about bingo? She’s talking about the world of Parkview.

  Wendy touches his arm, her pretty face sympathetic. “I know it’s not easy for you to see her like this, but—”

  “I’m sure it’s not easy for anyone who visits this place.” Please don’t feel sorry for me. I don’t want to start feeling sorry for myself. Or angry . . .

  “No. But our patients are in good hands. I hope you know that.”

  “I do.” This time, his smile is genuine. “Have a great weekend, Wendy.”

  “You too.” She gives a little wave and he heads down the hall.

  Standing with her back against the wall, right around the corner from the nurses’ station, she absorbs what she just overheard.

  At first, she thought Jeremy and the nurse were talking about Elsa Cavalon, or possibly Renny. Maybe one of them finally went off the deep end, a delayed response to all they had been through years ago . . .

  But then, analyzing what Jeremy had said—that he’d missed last week, and the week before—she realizes it can’t be Elsa.

  She, as of a few days ago, had been perfectly fine, living in Connecticut with her husband, Brett. And Renny is in college at NYU, downtown.

  She knows. She’s been keeping tabs on them—along with everyone else in Jeremy’s world.

  The nurse was clearly talking about someone who’s been here for a long time. Long enough for Jeremy to have established a regular visiting routine. Long enough for him and the nurse to be all first-name chummy and—

  “Excuse me!”

  Jolted by a voice right beside her—the same voice that was just chatting with Jeremy—she turns to see a pretty blonde clad in pastel scrubs. Ah, Nurse Wendy.

  “Can I help you?” she asks—not exactly unpleasantly, but not in nearly as friendly a tone as she used with Jeremy.

  “I—I think I’m lost. I’m here to visit my uncle.”

  “Who’s your uncle?”

  “Darryl Gaus.”

  Immediately, Wendy’s blue eyes take on a wary expression. “Darryl Gaus is your . . . uncle?”

  Hearing the slight hesitation and incredulous emphasis on the last word, she realizes she’s just made a terrible mistake.

  Darryl. It’s an unusual name for a woman, but not unheard of.

  Wendy bounces back quickly, but there’s no denying that she’s suspicious. “Hang on a sec, I’ll check the room number for you.” She disappears around the corner—undoubtedly to call security.

  There’s no time to wait for the elevator. She rushes toward the adjacent stairwell instead, praying there’s no alarm on the door.

  Luck is with her.

  She hurtles herself down four flights and emerges in the lobby.

  Fitzy, the guard, looks up in surprise from his New York Post with its Death on the 27th Floor headline. “Hey, what’s going on? Are you okay?”

  She blows past him and out the door, and she doesn’t stop running until she reaches the subway station several blocks away.

  Fishing a MetroCard from her pocket, she scurries down the stairs and through the turnstile. Panting, she pushes her way along the subway platform, crowded with rush hour commuters.

  The train pulls in almost immediately.

  Safely on board, wedged into the car with dozens of oblivious strangers, she sighs with relief.

  That was a close call.

  Now that it’s over, she turns her attention to a far greater concern: Who in the world is Jeremy Cavalon visiting in a mental hospital?

  With his bearded chin resting in his hand, Omar Meade stares at the last few seconds of the grainy video, taking it in without comment.

  “Talk about bizarre,” Lisha Brandewyne murmurs, seated beside him in the small back office.

  They’re accompanied by a couple of uniformed cops, a security guard, and the nervous Nellie hotel manager Stanley Reiner, who looks like he’s going to faint at any given moment—though he has yet to even see the gory crime scene upstairs. He won’t, if Meade has any say
in the matter.

  After watching the snippet of video through to the end, Meade commands, “Play it again.”

  “Play it again, Sam,” chirps Brandewyne, and Meade shoots her a look that of course she doesn’t catch.

  The security guard obediently presses a button and Meade pushes Brandewyne and her stupid, inappropriate quip out of his head.

  Onscreen, a long shot of the hallway on the twenty-seventh floor.

  Elevator doors open.

  Out steps a heavyset woman in a hooded trench coat. Her head is bent, her face hidden from view.

  She walks swiftly down the hall and disappears through a door at the end.

  “No cameras in the stairwells?” Lisha asks unnecessarily, and the security guard shakes his head, pressing another button as Reiner wrings his hands.

  A new scene—the maid emerging from suite 2713 and rolling her cart down to the next one, 2715.

  She unlocks the suite and reaches inside to fold the security latch out onto the jamb, using it to prop open the door to the hall.

  Moments later the door to the stairwell opens and the figure in the trench coat emerges. Hood still up, head still bent, she walks purposefully down the hall to 2715. She opens the door, pushes the maid’s cart inside, slips in after it, and closes the door.

  A new scene: Richard Jollston stepping off the elevator, strolling to his room, swaying a little. He’d been drinking in the bar—they’ve established that. Three whiskeys, and he was obviously feeling no pain.

  Yet.

  In silence, they watch him disappear into his suite, never again to be seen alive.

  “Okay, one more scene . . .” The security guard pushes another button and the onscreen image advances.

  Now—and this freaking sends chills down Omar’s spine—the door to the room opens and a figure slips out into the hallway. Still hooded—but this time, not by a trench coat. Now she’s wearing some kind of long, flowing cloak.

  “She looks like a damned monk,” Lisha mutters, shaking her head.

  Exactly.

  Omar rubs his beard thoughtfully. “Play it again.”

  “Play it again, S—” Brandewyne breaks off, this time catching his glare.

  “Hi, you’ve reached Phoenix. Leave a message and I’ll be sure to get right back to you.”