Hell to Pay

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “If that’s not gonna happen,” he says, “do you by any chance want a free bagless vacuum instead?”

  Brandewyne grins and slaps the steering wheel. Her teeth are still yellow with coffee and nicotine, but for some reason, it bothers Meade a little less.

  J—I went to Mass at H.T.—Love, L

  Jeremy plucks the yellow Post-it note from the mirror above the bathroom sink and stares at his reflection.

  You look like shit.

  He’d better pull himself together, though, because Cliff just called to say that the cops want to interview them both, along with several boys who were close to Miguel, and other members of the staff.

  “I’ll get there as soon as I can,” he promised Cliff.

  “With a lawyer?”

  “Nah—I realized that’s not necessary.”

  “Didn’t think so. In fact, the more I think about it, if you’re lawyered up, it might make them think you have something to hide.”

  “Well, I don’t, and I won’t.”

  Now, as Jeremy runs the water for a shower, he assures himself that there’s nothing to worry about. This isn’t about him. He owes it to Miguel to help the police find out who murdered him.

  All he has to do today is go up there, answer some routine questions just like everyone else.

  He has to go buy his wife a Christmas gift, and a tree, too. They’re going to celebrate this holiday the way they always have.

  Jeremy isn’t sure when he came to that conclusion.

  Was it just now, when he looked at himself in the mirror and decided he doesn’t want to be this miserable person?

  Or maybe it was last night, when he was watching Lucy sleep, lying on her side facing him, her forearm resting on her rounded stomach.

  No matter what happened in the past, he’s spent the last fifteen years doing the right thing—and he’s going to keep on doing it.

  Maybe I ain’t never had a father, but I’ll figure out how to be one. A good one.

  With Miguel’s words ringing in his ears, Jeremy steps into the bathtub and lets the hot water wash away yesterday’s grime.

  Holy Trinity Church, a beautiful old cathedral in the heart of the Upper West Side, is standing room only on this last Sunday morning of Advent.

  Wedged into the end of a pew halfway down the aisle, surrounded by the familiar rituals of Sunday Mass—organ music, incense, prayer—Lucy is still waiting to be swept by the usual feeling of comfort and healing.

  She does her best to keep her attention focused on the priest and the beautifully decorated altar. There are dozens of white poinsettias and flickering white votives, and three tall evergreens are strung with simple white lights.

  Off to one side is a life-sized crèche.

  Lucy can’t help but fixate on it—on the empty manger positioned at the forefront, between the Mary and Joseph statues.

  Lots of churches set it up this way, she knows, so that the baby Jesus figurine can be carried in on the Christmas Eve procession and symbolically placed on the bed of straw.

  Lucy always thought it was a beautiful tradition.

  But today, a strange feeling of foreboding came over her the moment she saw the empty manger, and she’s grown increasingly uneasy.

  Relieved when the Mass comes to an end, she exits the pew and faces the altar to cross herself.

  Turning her back on the unsettling Nativity scene, she joins the parishioners making their way toward the rear of the church. The organist is cheerfully playing “Joy to the World,” one of Lucy’s favorite carols, but even that doesn’t help to dispel the nagging sense of uneasiness.

  Reaching the back of the church, she turns to dip her hand into the font of holy water. As she does, she glimpses a familiar face in the crowd funneling toward the door.

  Lucy stops short, stunned.

  It can’t be.

  Someone bumps into her, hard, from behind.

  “Pardon me, I’m so sorry,” an elderly man says.

  Lucy just looks at him and then turns, dazed, back toward the face in the crowd.

  It’s gone, of course.

  Because it was never there.

  Because it couldn’t have been there.

  Because she’s dead.

  “Are you joining us for bingo today?”

  Marin looks up to see a nurse’s aide standing behind her. Lost in thought as she stared out the window, she didn’t even hear anyone come into the room.

  “Bingo . . . no, not today.”

  “Are you sure? You won big the other day, remember?” The aide points to the stuffed monkey propped on Marin’s bedside table. Beside it, a towering red bloom has sprung from the ceramic flowerpot Wendy Nevid gave her a while back.

  “It’s an amaryllis,” she said, as Marin inspected the stub of a stalk poking up out of the dirt. “Watch it grow, and it’ll be blooming by Christmas, I promise.”

  It’s blooming. It must be Christmas.

  “No bingo today,” Marin tells the aide, “but thank you for asking, Jackie.”

  She smiles. “You remember my name.”

  Marin nods. She remembers a lot of things. Today is one of those days when her mind is feeling sharp.

  She wishes Jeremy would come visit. There are so many questions she wants to ask him.

  She picks up her marble notebook and rifles through the pages, filled with her own handwriting.

  When she’s feeling lucid, she writes things down—things she doesn’t want to forget.

  But it doesn’t do her much good. When she’s having a bad day, she never thinks to look inside the notebook.

  She opens to a random page and starts reading.

  When Jeremy showed up after all those years, I worried about how Caroline would adjust to her long-lost brother . . .

  Yes, Marin well recalls those troubled days . . . and the bizarre circumstances under which Jeremy had come into Caroline’s life.

  Driven by a misguided effort to get to know the sister who had no idea he even existed, Jeremy hadn’t revealed his true identity to Caroline when they met. Marin can’t really blame him for that—like Caroline, Jeremy was oblivious to La La Montgomery’s vicious manipulation of their relationship. Both Marin’s children were unwitting pawns in La La’s vengeful game.

  In the end, it was Jeremy who saved Caroline at La La’s hands.

  But he couldn’t save Annie.

  No one, not even Marin, could save her tenderhearted younger daughter.

  Through all those years, Annie quietly shouldered the unfair burdens she’d been handed: her father’s emotional abandonment, his unspeakable crimes and the resulting public scandal, her sister’s resentment, her brother’s reappearance—and, worst of all, her mother’s reliance on prescription medication to cope with everything.

  I failed her.

  Marin stares down at the page, where fresh teardrops have fallen on words that are as difficult to read now as they were to write months ago:

  If only I had realized how Annie was struggling.

  But Marin never knew.

  She was too swept up in the tragic maelstrom and the vicious cycle of chemical dependency to see what was right there before her: a child in crisis. A child who went from self-medicating with food to self-medicating with drugs.

  A few days after learning that her father had died in prison, Annie swallowed a handful of sleeping pills stolen from Marin’s bedside table. Then she got into bed, clutching her teddy bear, snuggled beneath her quilt, just as she had every night of her life.

  The next morning, she didn’t wake up.

  “Chaplain Gideon.”

  Car keys in hand, about to head toward the parking lot adjacent to the brick church, the lanky old man turns instead toward the sound of Meade’s voice.

  “I’m Detective Meade, and this is
Detective Brandewyne. We’re with the NYPD.”

  Chaplain Gideon glances at the badges in their hands, pale gray eyes wide in his withered face. “Is there something I can help you with, Detectives?”

  “There is,” Meade tells him. “We’d like to talk to you.”

  “I’m on my way to meet friends for brunch. They’re already at the restaurant, waiting for me.”

  “We’ll try not to take up too much of your time.”

  “It’s supposed to start snowing soon.”

  Meade follows the old man’s gaze to the overcast sky. He can definitely smell snow in the frigid air. The storm is coming from the southwest, forecast to hit Trenton before it makes its way up to New York City later tonight.

  “Would you come with us, please, Chaplain?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “You do,” Meade admits, his breath puffing white in the air. “But we really need to talk to you.”

  The chaplain tilts his head, studying Meade, then Brandewyne.

  “We’re investigating a double homicide,” she tells him, and he seems to consider that before making up his mind abruptly.

  “All right. Let’s go.”

  She’s sure Lucy spotted her in church, just before she slipped out the door.

  There’s no question about it; no mistaking the look of shocked recognition on Lucy’s face.

  Huddled in the last booth of a diner around the corner from the church, she’s broken one of the first rules she learned in prison: Never sit with your back to the door. But in this case, it’s okay. Her seat faces a mirrored wall that reflects the entire place. In it, she can keep an eye on the room behind her, just in case.

  Not that she can imagine, in her wildest dreams, that Lucy possibly managed to follow her here without being spotted. Still, she keeps her guard up, because you just never know.

  “Hi there, what’ll it be?” The waitress, bored, nearing the end of her shift, doesn’t bother to make eye contact.

  Having grown accustomed to maintaining invisibility in the heart of a crowded city, she orders scrambled eggs, white toast, bacon, hash browns, orange juice, black coffee—nothing requiring additional questions or conversation.

  The waitress disappears.

  Her thoughts turn back to what happened in church just now.

  She should have resisted the temptation to show up at Mass, having known Lucy was going to be there. Thanks to the camera she’d planted in the bathroom—one that shows Lucy miserably hunched over the toilet bowl every morning, sick as a dog—she’d seen the note on the mirror. It was easy, so easy, to zoom in on the Post-it and read Lucy’s large, legible script.

  J—

  I went to Mass at H.T.

  —Love, L

  The thought of Lucy in Holy Trinity—sitting in a pew facing the altar, with no idea what lies in store for her there—was too tantalizing to ignore.

  She dressed quickly and walked over, arriving just before Mass started. Sitting several rows behind Lucy, she wondered if maybe Lucy did have some kind of awareness after all. If not an inkling about what was going to happen on Christmas Eve, then perhaps just a hunch that she wasn’t completely among strangers in that church.

  She kept turning to look over her shoulder, as if she were searching for a familiar face.

  From a distance, mine wouldn’t have been.

  But close up—looking into my eyes for just that split second by the door—she knew it was me.

  What is she going to do about it?

  As long as I don’t take another risk—not the slightest risk—everything is going to be all right.

  There’s only one way to avoid risk: by spending the next forty-eight hours alone in the apartment, emerging only on Christmas Eve, when it’s time.

  But what about tomorrow?

  She was planning to return to Parkview, to see if Marin really is there.

  If she doesn’t go, she might never know.

  But if she does go . . . there’s no telling how she might react.

  Is she willing to take a chance?

  “Snowing out there yet?” the lobby security guard asks as Lucy hurries toward the elevator.

  “Not yet.”

  “Looks like it’s going to be a white Christmas, though.”

  Lucy smiles and nods and is relieved to step onto an empty elevator.

  Is she going to tell Jeremy what she saw at church?

  Rather, what she imagined she’d seen?

  That’s about as logical an explanation as Lucy can come up with. Other than . . .

  No, she doesn’t believe in ghosts.

  There was a time when she might have—or at least, when she wanted to. After Daddy died, she kept hoping his spirit might appear to her. She and Robyn even spent a couple of sleepovers trying to contact him with a Ouija board, succeeding only in scaring themselves so that they had to sleep with the lights on.

  The elevator reaches her floor and the doors slide open. Lucy pushes through the doors leading from the elevator bank to the quiet, carpeted corridors.

  Unlike yesterday, when the Ansonia’s halls were relatively teeming with activity, Lucy doesn’t encounter another soul—living or dead—before she turns off onto the short hallway that leads to their door.

  But it’s not all that difficult to imagine an old building like this being haunted.

  If she did believe in ghosts—now, as a levelheaded adult—would it mean that this particular spirit has a message for her from the great beyond?

  If so, nothing good, that’s for sure. Lucy had felt the bad energy from the moment she walked into Holy Trinity and saw that empty manger.

  Maybe that’s why I imagined seeing her. Maybe she was in the back of my mind. Because if she isn’t—wasn’t—the queen of bad energy, well, she’s—she was—pretty close.

  Unlocking the door, she wonders again if she should tell Jeremy what happened.

  Maybe she’ll mention it in a joking kind of way—like, “You’ll never believe my latest crazy pregnancy symptom . . .”

  No . . . she won’t take that approach. There’s nothing the least bit amusing about her.

  Stepping over the threshold, she calls Jeremy’s name.

  No answer.

  Thinking he’s still asleep, she makes her way into the bedroom. The bed is made—Jeremy-style, anyway, meaning he pulled the comforter up to cover the sheets and blanket and picked up the stray pillows that had fallen onto the floor. Maybe he’s in the den on his computer again. She quickly smooths the sheets, blanket, and comforter, rearranges the pillows Lucy-style.

  “Jeremy?” she calls, going out into the hall, the kitchen, through the apartment room by room. “Jeremy?”

  Where is he?

  Ordinarily, she wouldn’t be thrown, but seeing that face in church . . .

  “Jeremy!”

  Backtracking to the bedroom, and finally into the master bathroom, she sees that her yellow Post-it note is still on the mirror.

  Then she realizes that isn’t the one she left.

  It’s a note from Jeremy.

  Relieved, she plucks it off the mirror.

  L—Cliff called and I had to go into work for a few hours.

  Love, J

  A few hours should be enough time for Lucy to figure out what the heck happened—or didn’t happen—back there at Holy Trinity.

  The greasy spoon off Broad Street in Trenton is overheated and overcrowded with locals wearing their Sunday best, lingering over their after-church breakfasts.

  Meade and Brandewyne managed to snag a small, semi-private table where they can talk to Chaplain Gideon in relative privacy.

  “I take it this isn’t where you were planning to meet your friends?” Brandewyne asks, watching him examine the spoon he’s about to use to stir his coffee. He makes a f
ace and sets it aside.

  “No. We go to Denny’s.”

  Brandewyne arches a brow. “Now that’s a step up.”

  It definitely is, at least from this place, Meade thinks, noticing some dried crud on his own spoon.

  But they’re not here for the fine cuisine or atmosphere, or even for a hot cup of coffee—good thing, because the sludge the waitress poured into his cup is lukewarm at best.

  They’re here to see if Chaplain Gideon can shed any light on the Jollston murder. So far, they’ve told him just the basic details of the crime. Not a hint of recognition on his face about any of it.

  They’ve also established that he has a very good alibi for the night of the murders. He was leading a prayer group at the church here in Trenton. Plenty of people will be able to vouch for him, and Meade fully intends to speak with them.

  “Tell us about Garvey Quinn,” he says abruptly.

  The old man doesn’t look particularly thrown by the name.

  “I wondered if this might have something to do with him.” He nibbles the crust of a piece of toast that was probably dry before it was dropped into the toaster.

  “Why is that?” Meade asks.

  “Because you’re NYPD. That’s where he was from. New York City.”

  “A lot of inmates at Hazelton are, though, aren’t they?”

  “Yes. But I didn’t get too close to many of them. Not like Garvey. We prayed together all the time. He repented for his sins. He was saved, you know, before he died.”

  “Too bad no one saved all those people he murdered,” Brandewyne mutters—loudly enough to be overheard by Meade.

  Not, apparently, by Chaplain Gideon, though. He goes on without missing a beat

  “Garvey was very passionate about his faith, and he wanted to share his beliefs with everyone he met. That turned off some of the other inmates, but not all of them. He was frighteningly charismatic.”

  “Frighteningly?”

  “He had a dark side. And he displayed serious delusional behavior toward the end. All that time in prison—I think it just got to be too much for him.”

  “Poor guy.”

  Meade shoots Brandewyne a warning look, and asks Gideon, “Delusional, how? What happened?”