Hell to Pay

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  She climbs the steps, heaves open one of the doors, and slips into the vestibule. It smells of incense and wet coats, but evening Mass ended almost an hour ago, and the place is deserted, as she had known it would be.

  Sometimes, she comes here when it’s crowded with people. She sits among them, and she listens to them pray, and she wonders how they can be so oblivious.

  “So many people are,” Chaplain Gideon tells her. “So many people don’t see what’s right there in front of their noses.”

  But she sees. She knows.

  She just has to stay focused on the task ahead, and her own salvation.

  She can’t get sidetracked by other things. Not even . . .

  Parkview. Marin.

  All day, she’s been wondering about that.

  She did some checking on the Internet. Found references to Garvey Quinn’s widow having been spotted, over the past few years, in Italy, in France, in Spain . . .

  There are photos, too.

  Purportedly.

  In all of them, the woman identified as Marin is clearly trying to be incognito in hats and enormous sunglasses. It definitely looks like her. But it also looks like thousands of other beautiful, wealthy women who rub shoulders with the beautiful people in Europe.

  Quite an elaborate ruse, if that’s what it is. If Marin is, indeed, occupying room 421 at Parkview Psychiatric Hospital.

  I’m going to find out. As soon as it’s safe to go back there. I’ll give it a day or two. Monday. I’ll go on Monday.

  But for now, tonight, she has other things on her mind.

  In the dimly lit sanctuary, she steals up the aisle, past a tiered display of flickering candles and rows of wooden pews, all the way to the front of the church.

  She kneels in the front pew, but she isn’t here to pray.

  She’s here to remind herself of the plan—just in case she’s tempted, in the days ahead, to get sidetracked again.

  There, on the altar, is the familiar Nativity set composed of familiar life-sized figurines. All the pieces are there: Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and angels, lambs and camels . . .

  All but one.

  The straw-filled manger is empty.

  According to church tradition, on Christmas Eve at midnight, the baby will be placed there.

  The baby. The Messiah.

  But this time, the child will be real—and the priest won’t be the one delivering him to the manger.

  I will.

  Holding her mug of hot tea, Wendy sticks her head into the living room, where her husband, Mark, is watching a basketball game.

  “What’s up?” he asks, still focused on the screen.

  “I’m going to check e-mail and then go to bed early.”

  He glances over at her, takes one look at her face, and picks up the remote to mute the TV. “Bad day, Wen?”

  She shrugs. “Better than others. Worse than some.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  She tells him, quickly, about the woman who’d tried to gain access to the patient floor. When Wendy had returned with a security officer, the woman had disappeared. Fitzy, the new lobby guard, said she’d run past him and out onto the street.

  “I don’t know why it’s been bothering me all day,” Wendy tells Mark now. “There was just something about her . . .”

  “What?”

  “I keep picturing her face, and . . . I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong.”

  “You?” Mark asks dryly. “Since when?”

  She grants him a little smile. “First time for everything.”

  “What are you wrong about, Wen?”

  “It’s just . . . you know what? I don’t think I’m wrong.”

  “Surprise, surprise.”

  “Seriously, there was something familiar about her. That woman. I could swear I’ve seen her someplace.”

  “Maybe she’s been at the hospital before. Maybe she was visiting a patient, or maybe she worked there or something. Maybe she got fired and she was coming back to shoot up the place,” he says, aiming a finger pistol.

  “No—I mean, it wasn’t recent, when I saw her. I’m positive of that. It was a long time ago. And that’s the weird thing.”

  “What is?”

  “Fitzy said the exact same thing—that she looks vaguely familiar. But he’s only been working at the hospital for a couple of weeks.”

  “Jeremy?” Lucy calls, feeling around for a switch on the wall as she steps into the circular foyer. “Jeremy!”

  Maybe he isn’t home yet. The apartment feels very still, and the overhead chandelier she just turned on seems to be the only light.

  Jeremy should be here by now, though.

  “Jeremy!”

  No reply.

  She locks the deadbolt behind her, but not the chain. Clearly, her husband isn’t home yet. Maybe he stopped off on the way to get something to eat.

  She kicks off her shoes and pads down the hall, turning on lights as she goes. In the bedroom, she digs her cell phone out of her bag, drops the bag onto the floor, and calls Jeremy.

  The call goes into voice mail after several rings. Suddenly a little uneasy, she leaves a message. “Hey, it’s me. Where are you? I thought you’d be home by now. Call me.”

  After hanging up, she stands there for a minute, holding the phone. Maybe they’re doing track work on the subway and he got stuck somewhere. Or maybe he stopped to grab a burger in a loud restaurant where he couldn’t hear his phone ringing.

  Frowning, she decides she might as well text him, too.

  Where r u?

  She hits send, then sets her phone on the nightstand and heads toward the bathroom.

  Scrubbing her hands at the sink, she glances at the tub. It occurs to her that it would feel good to run a hot bath before bed.

  Why don’t you?

  She’s never been a bath person, lacking the patience to sit around soaking when she could be getting things done. But tonight, she’s weary from a long week.

  Besides, when she mentioned the slightly crampy feeling to Robyn over dinner, Robyn said it sounded like Patrice was right and it was Braxton Hicks contractions.

  “That, or you might be overdoing it, Lu, on your feet and running around too much,” she said.

  Lucy wanted to protest that that wasn’t the case, but when she thought about it, she realized it hadn’t exactly been a relaxing week.

  “Look, I know you hate to sit still,” Robyn said, “but you really need to take it easy, no matter how hard it is.”

  “Do you think I should call the doctor and tell her about the cramps?”

  “You said it was just this morning? At home and then again after you got to work?” At Lucy’s nod, Robyn shook her head. “I think you need to go home, take a bath, and get into bed. Sleep in until noon tomorrow.”

  “Noon? Yeah, right,” Lucy said, but the way she’s feeling right now, it doesn’t really seem like a stretch.

  She reaches out abruptly and turns on the hot water tap. Then, just as abruptly, she turns it off.

  Sylvie drowned in this tub a month ago. How could Lucy possibly think it would be a good place to soak away her troubles?

  Remembering Jeremy’s vibrant grandmother, Lucy feels her eyes well up with tears.

  Sniffling, she wipes them away, half crying, half laughing at what an emotional wreck she’s become lately.

  She’s going to be a real basket case by the time the baby is born.

  Shaking her head, she changes into her pajamas and returns to the bedroom, where she spots a light blinking on her cell phone, indicating that she has a message.

  She picks it up. There’s a text from Jeremy. Good.

  Stopped 4 food. Don’t wait up. Luv U. J.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t,” Lucy whispers aloud. Yawning deeply,
she quickly texts back a four-letter reply—OK, U2—before climbing into bed, too exhausted to go back out and turn off all the lights—too exhausted to even think.

  All she wants to do is sleep. Maybe even till noon.

  “Hi, honey . . . how are you feeling tonight?”

  Marin opens her eyes to see one of the night nurses standing beside her wheelchair.

  How are you feeling?

  Why do people persist in asking that stupid question every day of her life?

  How do they think she’s feeling?

  How would they feel in her shoes?

  Slippers, she amends, glancing down at her feet, propped on the chair’s footrests.

  Once, she lived in designer high heels, the fashion-plate wife of a promising politician destined for the governor’s mansion. She woke up every morning in a showplace apartment, surrounded by a loving husband and three beautiful children . . .

  No, two. Two children. Two daughters.

  Her firstborn, Jeremy, had never been part of the picture-perfect family she and Garvey paraded along the campaign trail. He was their dark secret, born before they were married and given up at birth.

  But I never stopped longing for him . . . never stopped looking for him . . .

  Only after Garvey was gone—the picture-perfect illusion shattered—did Jeremy come back into her life.

  Even then, Marin was fool enough to believe they could somehow live happily ever after, she and her three children, together at last.

  But it wasn’t meant to be. Such a cruel twist of fate that a woman who had only ever wanted to be a loving mother to all her children was robbed of every single one of them.

  Only Jeremy came back to her.

  Now, he’s all she has.

  Her girls . . . Annie—Annie’s gone. Dear God, Annie’s gone.

  As always, the realization—the memory of that awful morning—brings a fresh wave of grief.

  And Caroline . . .

  Why doesn’t she come to see me?

  Where is she?

  A swell of panic rises up along with the grief—the instant, terrible kind of panic a mother feels when her toddler disappears for a few seconds on the playground, or a teenager is submerged beneath a wave at the beach. The kind of panic that gives way to blessed relief when the child resurfaces safe and sound.

  But Caroline has yet to turn up.

  And so, when anyone—like this stupid, smiling nurse—asks Marin how she’s feeling, she ignores the question.

  She ignores just about everything now, wasting away the endless days in this quiet institution where she’s been living for what, a year now?

  Maybe two.

  Five?

  She doesn’t know. She doesn’t care. She only wants to be left alone—and for the most part, she is.

  Sometimes, though, she gets visitors: Jeremy, usually. Once in a while, Heather will come, or even Lauren Walsh and Elsa Cavalon—usually together, two-thirds of a tragic team of female survivors that once included Marin as well.

  She no longer thinks of herself as a survivor.

  This existence . . . this isn’t surviving.

  This is merely waiting.

  Waiting for the nightmare—her life—to be over at last.

  Every light in the place is on when Jeremy walks through the door, and for a moment, he wants to walk right back out again, thinking Lucy is still up. Even though he told her to go to bed. Even though she said she would.

  Drained, exhausted, he just doesn’t want to see her right now. Doesn’t want to let her see him. She’ll start asking questions that he doesn’t want to answer—about where he was, and what he was doing, and why . . .

  But the apartment feels absolutely still as he stands there in the foyer. Maybe he was wrong.

  No, she’s not awake, because if she were, she’d have heard him come in, and she’d be calling out to him. She always does—so happy to see him whenever he comes home. So sweet. Lucy. The mother of his child.

  Lucy, who doesn’t know what kind of man she really married.

  Jeremy walks through the apartment as quietly as he can, turning off lights as he goes. When he reaches the bedroom, he sees her there, in bed, sound asleep. Her lips are slightly parted and she’s lying on her side, her arms cradling her stomach beneath the comforter as though she’s protecting her child even in slumber.

  For a long time, Jeremy stands looking at her. Loving her so much it hurts. Knowing she loves him in return—but only because she doesn’t know the whole truth about him.

  If she did—

  But she won’t.

  Jeremy turns away, and turns out the light.

  Sitting at his kitchen table in Queens, fork in hand, Meade picks at the cold fried rice in the cardboard container before him. The grains are hard and the preternaturally red pork slivers chewy, and it might be better if he heated it up, but he doubts it. It’s got to be three days old, at least. Maybe four.

  When did he last order Chinese?

  Oh, crap. Last weekend. Saturday night, when his son Dante was here with him for weekend visitation and his mother—Meade’s ex-wife, April—was out on the town with Meade’s ex–best friend, Johnny.

  Disgusted—and not just by the stale food—he stands and crosses the entire length of the kitchen in two steps. He jabs his foot on the pedal to open the garbage can, dumps the container inside, and lets the lid bang closed. It echoes through the apartment, but that doesn’t matter.

  There’s no one trying to sleep in the bedroom, shouting at him to keep it down in here. Back when there was, he’d grimace at the sound of April’s voice and fantasize about what it would be like to have his own place.

  Now he knows; has known for a few years.

  It’s hard to come home to an angry wife, but even harder to come home to an empty place.

  Yawning, aching with exhaustion, he pours himself a scotch and takes it to his easy chair in the living room. Sinking into it, leaning back, and raising the footrest, he thinks about Richard Jollston, about how scotch and blood were the last thing he ever tasted.

  Maybe it beats the hell out of cold, stale Chinese food.

  The last thing Meade ate before that was . . . what?

  He thinks back over the day. Right. Street cart hot dogs, a few minutes before Alden called to tell him about the fingerprint. And then he and Brandewyne went back into the hotel and discovered there had been a new development: one of the maintenance guys who’d been working yesterday—his name was Tony—had come forward to say he’d been bribed yesterday afternoon by a woman who wanted to know which room Jollston was staying in.

  That established that she didn’t know the guy—or at least, that she hadn’t been invited to his room.

  Apparently, she said she was a fan of the author. Meade wouldn’t buy it, but Tony did. Pretty unbelievable, since it’s usually movie stars and rock stars who attract groupies trying to bribe hotel staff—not paunchy middle-aged literary newcomers.

  But it’s Christmas, and Tony’s kids still believe in Santa Claus, and that’s what he was thinking about when the woman offered him a handful of cash that would go pretty damned far at Toys “R” Us.

  Poor guy was terrified he was going to go to jail, or get deported—yet he came forward as soon as he heard about the double murder.

  “I know I need to do right thing,” he told Meade in broken English.

  Too bad there aren’t more crime witnesses like Tony.

  Then again, the dollar signs in Tony’s eyes seemed to have temporarily obscured his vision, because he couldn’t tell them a whole lot about the mystery woman that they didn’t already know from the videotape. She was heavyset with red hair, wearing dark glasses—not unusual, even on a rainy day, in a celebrity-frequented hotel.

  Meade’s phone rings, startling him. He glances at the clo
ck on the DVR as he reaches to answer it. This is going to be—if not bad news, then, at least, news. You don’t call someone after midnight to shoot the shit.

  “Meade. You up?”

  “I’m up,” he tells Alden. “What’s going on?”

  “You know that print?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “We got a match.”

  “Yeah?” Meade sets down his drink and reaches for a pen and paper.

  “Yeah. There’s just one thing . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “The person it belongs to?”

  “Yeah?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “When did she die? What happened?” He imagines a bloody showdown between the suspect and the police somewhere in Manhattan and wonders how the hell all this could have gone down since he left the precinct less than an hour ago.

  “She’s been dead. For a long time, Meade. Way before last night.”

  “What? I thought you said it was a fresh print.”

  “It was.”

  “Then how—” Meade is already on his feet, looking for his keys, his wallet, his badge. “Never mind. I’m on my way down there.”

  Chapter Nine

  On Saturday morning, Lucy awakens early, heart pounding from a nightmare.

  Jeremy snores beside her as she lies in bed staring at the ceiling, remembering . . . She was here in the apartment, at night, alone—but not really alone, because as the action went on, it shifted and she was playing hide-and-seek. Her opponent wasn’t just hiding, though—he was invisible. Lucy could hear footsteps, and breathing, and she felt his presence—knew he was standing right in front of her at one point. But she couldn’t see him.

  Creepy.

  She rolls over and closes her eyes, trying to fall back to sleep, but it’s no use. Once she’s up, she’s up; she’s always been that way.

  With a sigh, she sits up—not too fast, though, because that tends to make her feel sicker. Right now, the nausea is there, but not raging. Yet. And she’s not the least bit crampy, either. Good.

  Checking the clock, she sees that although it’s not noon, it’s not that early after all—well past eight. She’d have been out of bed long ago if this were a weekday—or an ordinary weekend morning if she weren’t pregnant.