Hell to Pay

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  No, you won’t.

  Ryan hangs up, resisting the urge to stand up and pace. There’s nowhere to go in this tiny cubicle, and he doesn’t want to leave it in case she tries to reach him on his direct office line instead of on his cell.

  But he doubts that’s going to be the case. No, he’s becoming more and more convinced that something catastrophic has happened. Either to her—or to him.

  If nothing terrible happened to her that would prevent her from getting in touch, then she’s not getting in touch because she doesn’t want to. Because she’s finished with him.

  That would be catastrophic—and not entirely unexpected. The more he’s thought about the way she keeps him at arm’s length, the more he’s come to realize that not only does she probably not feel the same way about him that he does about her . . .

  But maybe he doesn’t even feel the way he thought he did about her.

  How can you love someone you don’t trust?

  And when you get right down to it, how, in this world, can you trust anyone?

  Look at what happened to Ryan’s parents. To his grandparents on his father’s side. And to countless other marriages.

  Shattered lives, broken homes, cheating spouses . . .

  This is crazy. What made Ryan think he had a shot at happily-ever-after when even people who have everything going for them can’t guarantee success?

  You’d be better off alone.

  And it’s a good thing, because that’s where you’ve always been, and it looks like that’s where you’re going to be from here on in, and that, my friend, will give you plenty of time to find yourself.

  Jeremy finds the door to room 421 ajar, as usual. Taped to it is a paper Christmas stocking, her name written on it in silver glitter glue.

  Not her real name, of course, but the alias Jeremy used for her when he registered her here a few years ago, after the final blow to her psyche. The assumed name was a last-ditch effort to protect what little was left of her privacy and dignity. He didn’t think it would work, but it very well may have.

  Only a handful of people here at the hospital even know the true identity of the frail woman in room 421.

  The rest of the world seems to have bought the story Jeremy planted in the press with the help of her longtime friend Heather Cottington: that Marin Hartwell Quinn had gone into seclusion somewhere in Europe, hoping to put her heartbreaking past behind her.

  Chapter Six

  Lucy is on her office phone troubleshooting a PC with an employee when she feels a buzzing vibration in her purse beneath the desk.

  She quickly reaches down, pulls out the phone, and checks the caller ID.

  “I’m sorry, I need to put you on hold for a moment,” she tells the woman on her office line, and presses the hold button before the inevitable protest.

  She answers her cell with a brisk “Hello?”

  “Mrs. Cavalon?”

  “Yes. Who is this, please?” she asks Carl Soto, not quite sure why she’s pretending she doesn’t know—maybe so that he won’t think she’s been waiting breathlessly for his return call.

  Truthfully, she hasn’t. It’s been a busy morning so far, and the few times she’s been able to take a breather and focus on something other than work, her former landlord hasn’t even come to mind. Jeremy has. She tried calling his cell a little while ago, but it was turned off, as it usually is when he’s at the hospital visiting Marin. She left him a message to call her when he leaves Parkview.

  That crampy feeling she had this morning is also in the back of her mind. She hasn’t felt anything further, though, so she’s going to take that as a good sign.

  “This is Carl Soto, Mrs. Cavalon,” the landlord is saying over the phone. “I wanted you to know that I do have your security deposit, and I’ll be happy to put it into the mail if you want to give me your new address.”

  “Thanks. It’s 2109 Broadway—”

  “Or—I just thought of something,” Carl Soto cuts in so promptly that she realizes he didn’t just think of it at all. “I can drop off the check in person tomorrow.”

  In person? That’s a bizarre offer, coming from a man Lucy’s seen perhaps twice in all the time he’s been their landlord.

  “I have to be in the city anyway. That way you don’t have to wait for it to come in the mail next week.”

  “That’s really not—”

  “I’d like to do that, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Cavalon. There’s actually something I wanted to talk to you about.”

  She frowns, glancing at the red hold light on her desk phone, conscious of the waiting client. “Is it about the apartment? Because we made sure that we left it clean.”

  “No, no, you did. Spotless. I appreciate that. And it is about the apartment, but I—”

  “It’s okay,” she quickly cuts in as the other line on her desk phone lights up with a call. “You can stop by tomorrow anytime. We’ll be home.”

  “Good. I’ll see you at around eleven.”

  She hangs up and tosses her cell back into her purse, then quickly presses the button for line two. “Lucy Cavalon.”

  “Hi, Lucy, I think one of the computers on our network down here has a virus . . .”

  “All right, hang on just a second, I’m on the other line.”

  As she juggles phone calls, her thoughts drift back to Carl Soto. She isn’t particularly anxious to see the man in person after what he did—but they do need the money, the sooner the better . . .

  Plus, he’s definitely piqued her curiosity.

  What could he possibly say to them about the apartment at this late date, other than to apologize for kicking them out?

  If that’s all he wants, they can certainly live without it.

  But Lucy has a feeling there might be more to it than that.

  Occasionally Jeremy finds Marin still in bed when he arrives; but when he doesn’t, he finds her precisely where she is today: sitting in her wheelchair, facing the room’s lone window. It overlooks an alley between the hospital and the office building next door. Not long ago, she was in a smaller room across the hall, facing a different alley.

  Despite the hospital’s bucolic name—Parkview—Jeremy’s noticed that most of the patient rooms and visitor areas look out on concrete walls of other buildings.

  But he suspects the view matters very little—to her, anyway. Though she gravitates to this spot, facing the glass, she never really seems to be seeing what’s out there.

  Hell, half the time, when she looks at him, she doesn’t seem to know who he is.

  No. It’s even more complicated than that. Looking into her vacant blue eyes, he often thinks she has no idea who she is, either.

  On the deep windowsill before her sits a marble notebook that serves as the journal patients are encouraged to keep. Spiral-bound notebooks aren’t allowed here. When Jeremy mentioned that to Lucy the first time they visited together, she didn’t understand why.

  “You could hurt yourself with the wire,” Jeremy told her, and saw the sad comprehension filter into her green eyes.

  She knew, of course, about the final tragedy that had pushed Marin Hartwell Quinn over the edge and sent her to a mental health facility in a psychotic state. It happened shortly after two milestone incidents in Jeremy’s life took place within a few months of each other: his own wedding, and Garvey Quinn’s death. Yes, just when he thought he might be able to put the past behind him and make a fresh start at last, all hell broke loose again.

  As a result of that final blow, Marin may very well be here at Parkview for the rest of her life. Given a choice, it’s not what she ever would have wanted. Her own father had been diagnosed with early-onset dementia and lived out his days in a facility near Boston—talking to people who weren’t there, Marin once told Jeremy, and ignoring people who were.

  “It’s heartbreaking to see him
like that,” she said sadly, “stuck in that place, not even knowing where he is most of the time.”

  And now, it’s her turn.

  “Do you know if this kind of thing runs in the family?” Jeremy asked Wendy a while back.

  “That’s something you need to discuss with the doctor.”

  Probably. But he can’t bring himself to do it. Maybe he’s afraid of what he might find out.

  As Jeremy crosses the room toward her, he notes the framed photograph on the sill beside the marble notebook—which for all he knows is probably blank.

  There’s no glass covering the picture. Glass, of course, can be broken into shards that can slit wrists.

  In the photograph are Caroline and Annie, Marin’s two daughters—Jeremy’s sisters.

  He doesn’t like to look at it, and he isn’t sure it’s a healthy thing that she carries it around the room with her, holding it in her lap, or setting it on the nearest surface.

  He has no doubt that when she played bingo last night, the photo was propped alongside her card and chips. It will be on her nightstand tonight when she goes to bed—that’s where it is every night, as though the two girls are guardian angels watching over her.

  That was Lucy’s take on it, anyway.

  Jeremy’s just glad she didn’t say it in front of Marin, who would have started wailing hysterically about how it should be the other way around. Sometimes when she gets going like that, they have to stick her with a needle to calm her down. Jeremy witnessed it once—his frail, frantic mother being strong-armed and tranquilized by a couple of nurses—for her own good, he knows—and he never wants to see it again.

  His mother.

  Technically, that’s what Marin is—his birth mother. Twice, she mourned his loss: when she gave him up as a newborn, and when she found out he’d been kidnapped and left for dead by his own father.

  He doesn’t doubt that she loves him—or rather, loved him, when she was capable of it.

  But Elsa Cavalon is the mother he remembers for the three precious years of his childhood before he was abducted. She’s the one who tucked him into bed and bandaged his knees and believed in him when the whole world was against him.

  She’s the mother who tried desperately to find him, hiring a private detective, Mike Fantoni, when the police got nowhere.

  She’s the mother who sat in the front pew when Jeremy and Lucy were married, the one who will rock their child in her arms—the one their child will call Grandma.

  She’s the one—the only one—Jeremy calls Mom.

  It’s different with Marin. By the time Jeremy found his way back to her, she’d been ravaged; she was so fragile he sensed that she was on the verge of a breakdown long before it actually happened. They bonded, yet not as mother and son in the sense that she would look after him, as a parent would; as Elsa and Brett have since the day he came back into their lives.

  No, it’s more that he looks out for Marin, makes sure she’s taken care of, makes sure—with the aid of her longtime friend, Heather—that Marin is “sighted” overseas from time to time—just often enough to keep anyone from looking for her closer to home.

  “Marin?”

  She doesn’t respond. Maybe he spoke too softly, not wanting to risk anyone overhearing her name. Or—he notes her slumped posture—maybe she’s asleep.

  Stepping around the front of the wheelchair, he sees that her eyes are open, staring dully out the window.

  Once the epitome of graceful beauty, Marin Hartwell Quinn bears little resemblance to her oft-photographed former self. Her straggly blond hair is streaked with gray, her skin like faded, crumpled tissue paper from a forgotten drawer.

  “Marin?”

  She blinks, looks up at him without recognition.

  “It’s me. Jeremy.”

  “I know.” Almost dazed, she nods and reaches out with a thin, blue-veined hand that looks as though it belongs to a much older woman. Resting it on the sleeve of his jacket, she asks, “Have you seen her?”

  He sighs inwardly.

  He’d been hoping, somehow, that today, she wouldn’t ask.

  He should have known better. She always asks. And his answer is always the same.

  “No. I haven’t seen her.”

  Still wondering about the patient Jeremy was visiting at Parkview, she rides the subway home: first the Number Six train downtown, then the shuttle across Forty-second Street to Times Square, and finally an uptown Number Two express.

  Every train car is crowded with rush hour commuters, but not a single person makes eye contact with her, or even glances her way.

  That’s the beauty of New York City. You can get lost here.

  And found, too.

  Yes—found, the way she found Lucy and Jeremy after she got out of prison.

  But not right away.

  Chaplain Gideon told her to leave Massachusetts immediately after she escaped, so she took an Amtrak train to Washington, D.C., and changed there for another train that took her all the way south to Miami.

  It had been winter in the Northeast, but the Florida weather was beautiful—warm and sunny, with a salty breeze that reminded her of her childhood, and Daddy.

  Miami is a transient place—particularly at that time of year. She quickly found an off-the-books job waiting tables and rented a room not far from the beach. They fed her well at the restaurant where she worked. She ate conch fritters and key lime pie. She let her prison-shorn hair grow long. The sun bleached it and made her skin weathered and ruddy, but she liked it that way. She liked to be outside after all those years in prison. Winter turned to spring, summer, and finally fall, and Chaplain Gideon told her it was time to return to the Northeast.

  She located Jeremy and Lucy without a problem—that’s the beauty of the Internet.

  It wasn’t immediately obvious to her that Lucy was pregnant, though. Not until the day she trailed her after work to a maternity store on Lexington Avenue.

  Standing out there in the cold, watching Lucy through the plate-glass window as she browsed the racks of clothes . . .

  Lucy Cavalon was pregnant. Through her, the bloodline would endure.

  Enraged, she realized that Jeremy’s wife had stolen the life she herself could have—should have—had.

  But then Chaplain Gideon explained to her what was going on, and he quoted from the book of Revelation.

  Behold, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to everyone according to what he has done . . .

  Suddenly, it all made sense.

  Lucy was with child, just as the Virgin Mary had been—but this baby would not belong to her and Jeremy any more than Mary and Joseph’s baby belonged to them.

  Interviewing the widow of a murder victim is one of Meade’s least favorite parts of this job. It’s hard enough to sit in a room with a shell-shocked stranger who’s just suffered an unimaginable loss; torturous to gather as much information as possible while weeding out details that seem important to the widow but are often irrelevant to the case.

  Richard Jollston’s wife, Sondra, arrived in Manhattan just twenty minutes ago, predictably distraught. Now, seated in a private interview room at the precinct, she wants to tell Meade and Brandewyne about the new house she and her dead husband just bought—how it has a pool and professional landscaping and is right down the street from one of the Red Sox players.

  Meade—a die-hard fan of the rival New York Yankees—isn’t interested in that, unless the Red Sox are behind Jollston’s murder, which he highly doubts.

  But he lets Sondra talk and sob and wail, “Why, why, why?” because that’s the humane thing to do.

  And because it gives him a chance to study Sondra’s demeanor and make sure her grief is genuine. He’s already aware that the Jollstons’ marriage was troubled; that they had recently reconciled. But only, as he and Brandewyne privat
ely noted, after Richard stumbled into fame and fortune.

  “This guy was like a modern-day Chicken Little,” Brandewyne said—though, mercifully, not in front of Sondra Jollston, who had yet to arrive at that point.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Meade told her.

  “Of course it makes sense. Chicken Little went around saying the sky was falling, and no one believed him until all of a sudden—”

  “But ‘modern-day’ implies that Chicken Little was real,” Meade cut in, “and he wasn’t.”

  “Where do you get that?”

  “You think he’s real?”

  “No! I mean, that is not what ‘modern-day’ implies.”

  It was stupid, arguing about an imaginary character from a children’s fable, and he knew it, but he couldn’t help himself. Brandewyne pushed his buttons.

  At the moment, though, watching her hand a box of tissues to the weeping widow and pat her arm, Meade has to admit that she’s got just the right female touch here.

  “Did your husband have any enemies, Mrs. Jollston?” she asks after a minute or two.

  Sniffling, Sondra shakes her head.

  “Any weird encounters with readers?” Meade puts in. “Bizarre fan mail? Anything like that?”

  Again, she shakes her head. “Not unless you consider religious freaks weird or bizarre.”

  Meade and Brandewyne look at each other, and he knows she, too, is thinking about the footage of Jollston’s presumed killer.

  “What do you mean, Mrs. Jollston?” he asks.

  “Just—I don’t know, there are a lot of people out there who think that the earthquake—that earthquake, because it was so strong, and not in a place where anyone but R-Richard would expect it—” Her voice breaks on her husband’s name, and she goes off again on a trail of tears.

  Meade lets her cry, but only for a moment. “What do people think about the earthquake, Mrs. Jollston?”

  She wipes her eyes, blows her nose, shakes her head. “That it meant the end of the world is almost here. Richard got a few letters from people quoting the Bible and talking about Judgment Day and the Second Coming—that sort of thing.”