Gone by Morning

by Michele Weinstat Miller

  “Dude, split ’em,” Emily said. She could lose her mind over chocolate. She knew her mother had probably been thinking of her as much as Alex and Skye when she added chocolate chips to half the batch. “For Skye,” Emily added, although she wasn’t fooling anyone.

  “Adam Lanza wasn’t even stable enough to go to school, and his mother still let him have guns,” Alex said. “It’s hard to feel sorry for her.”

  “But”—Carl pointed his fork for emphasis—“I’ve never heard of a killer setting a timer to kill his par—” He stopped himself, noticing that Skye might be hearing too much.

  Emily looked at Skye, who was totally focused on digging for a chocolate chip.

  “Anyway, that was devious stuff, if Mattingly did it,” Carl went on. “It gave the parents a chance to know they created a monster, that he was dead, and that their lives were basically destroyed. If a killer hated his parents, that would be a powerful ‘eff you’ before they died.”

  Carl seemed lit up from inside, relishing the crime puzzle. “It couldn’t have been vigilantes because they would have needed to have a bomb handy, place it in the house, and beat the police there once they found out about Mattingly. It could be coconspirators covering up something. But my money’s on Jackson Mattingly and a timer.”

  Emily met her mother’s eyes for a moment, seeing the pain that so often lurked there lately. Lauren was worried about Carl losing the law enforcement career he loved. She had told Emily how anxious he was to get back to work, which was no surprise. Emily had all her fingers crossed about that too.

  After breakfast, Emily got up and Alex joined her, making quick work of the cleanup so Lauren could enjoy her coffee. Lauren took Skye onto her lap and wiped the girl’s hands with a wet washcloth.

  Emily adored Carl, and she had since her mother started dating him ten years earlier. Still, she worried about her mother doing too much—maintaining her own law practice and looking after him. Carl was distressed by his medical condition and how it was impacting both his career and family, since Lauren had to go with him to all his appointments. She wanted to be there, she’d told Emily, to keep Carl from hearing only what he wanted to, going into denial about negative news, minimizing his symptoms when he talked to the doctor, or even hiding something from her to spare her.

  Emily only hoped her mother wasn’t repeating an old pattern of taking care of everyone and not herself. Lauren’s parents had been addicts, so she’d basically become the parent in her house when she was still a kid. When Emily’s grandfather had tried to get clean, Lauren had gone with him to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, serving as armor to help him resist doing drugs. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been able to keep her father clean, and he’d died of an overdose when she was only fifteen.

  Meanwhile, Lauren’s mother, Emily’s grandmother, had been useless, a crack addict. When Lauren’s father died, it had been Lauren, not her mother, who cleared the drugs and illegal gun out of the house before the police arrived. Lauren had eventually ended up homeless on the streets, without so much as a word from her mother.

  Lauren had told Emily that she’d seen her grandmother once when Emily was Skye’s age and her grandmother approached them on the street. Emily didn’t remember it. Lauren hadn’t seen her mother in nearly twenty-five years.

  Alex dried his hands at the sink and turned to Rusty. “So, dog, you got any skills?”

  “Rusty.” Emily signaled toward the kitchen light switch.

  Tail wagging furiously, Rusty ran to the wall. He stood on his hind legs, leaned his front paws against the wall, hopped to steady himself, and nosed the light switch. He left all of them in shadow, laughing, Skye clapping with delight.

  CHAPTER

  11

  AT SIXTY-EIGHTH STREET, between Broadway and Amsterdam, Kathleen pulled into a circular driveway with a round garden at its center. Sharon lived in a white-brick condo building in the Lincoln Center neighborhood. It took up an entire square block and stood catty-corner to the Sony multiplex theater. Coming to Sharon’s home was a last resort; Kathleen had exhausted all other options. Barging in at a working woman’s home base was generally frowned upon, but Kathleen believed she was innocuous enough—a privilege of age—to avoid attracting unwanted attention. If she were wearing hot pants and thigh-high boots, it would be another story.

  The doorman came out and bent toward Kathleen’s passenger-side window. “May I help you?”

  “Yes, my cousin, Sharon Williams, lives here. She called me a few days ago and said she was coming to visit me. I haven’t heard anything from her since, and she’s not picking up the phone.”

  His eyes narrowed in thought. “I haven’t seen her for a few days either.”

  “Could I go up and check on her? I’m her only family.”

  “I’ll call upstairs and see whether she answers. If not, I need to talk to my supervisor. Give me a minute.”

  “I’ll park and be right back.”

  Kathleen pulled her car out of the driveway and made a quick turn down a ramp that led to a parking lot under the building.

  When she returned on foot up the steep garage drive and walked around to the entrance, the doorman greeted her, key in hand. “I’m on break. I’ll take you up. She didn’t answer, but I’m sure she’s okay … although you got me worried too. She’s a nice lady, Sharon. Always has a kind word in the morning. She would usually leave her mail key with me if she were going away.”

  He held the glass door open, and Kathleen entered a large, carpeted lobby. A long reception desk like a hotel’s stretched along one side of the lobby. An array of couches and chairs clustered on the other side under a chandelier.

  “When did you see her last?” Kathleen asked.

  “It’s been a few days. I usually see her jogging at about ten thirty in the morning. She runs in Central Park. Maybe she’s sleeping off a cold.” He talked like he was trying to reassure himself, but he was making Kathleen more nervous.

  They took one of three carpeted elevators with etched-mirror walls. Outside apartment 19C, Kathleen sniffed the air, grateful not to smell the sickly scent of a dead body. She hadn’t expected to find a body, but she’d seen too much in her life to be surprised by the worst-case scenario. She became more edgy as the doorman rang the bell. He waited. Rang again. Knocked. He inserted the key, opening it a foot.

  “Ms. Williams? Sharon? Are you here? This is Dunbar. Here to check on you.”

  An elevator opened behind them. Kathleen looked back to see two figures walking from the elevator.

  They flashed badges.

  Kathleen took in a husky male cop, over six feet tall with a football-player build. His partner was a woman. Latina. Short. Pretty, like an actress playing a cop on Law and Order, except for a roll of fat at her belt. Both rested their hands on their holsters as if evaluating the threat level of a uniformed doorman and an elderly woman—although Kathleen didn’t think of herself as elderly.

  “NYPD, Detective Banks,” the husky male cop said. “What are you doing here?”

  Dunbar held up his key. “The tenant hasn’t been seen for a while, and her cousin was concerned about her. We came up to check on her.”

  “Cousin? Are you her next of kin?” Banks asked Kathleen gruffly.

  His words fell on Kathleen like dead weight. “By affinity, not blood.”

  Dunbar gave Kathleen a look. She’d lied to him, and now he could be in a mess.

  “Sharon has no one. I’ve been family to her for nearly twenty years,” Kathleen continued. “I called in a missing-persons report but didn’t hear anything back.”

  “I’m Detective Luna.” The Latina officer handed Kathleen a card. “I’m sorry to tell you that she’s dead.”

  Air blew out of Kathleen’s lips as if she’d been drop-kicked in the solar plexus. Dunbar exclaimed beside her.

  Kathleen couldn’t breathe. She’d known in her gut that something bad had happened. But no, no, no … she didn’t want it to be true.

  She didn
’t cry, though she might have if she’d been alone. Instead, her face went hard. This hallway was not a safe space. She shifted mentally into the woman who had once played life as if she were always under threat of attack. She’d washed with too many bars of prison-issued lye soap to feel safe with cops.

  “How?” Kathleen asked.

  “Her body was found near the Gateway Recreation Area in Queens. A place they call North Beach, although it’s mostly reeds out there,” Detective Banks said, studying her as he spoke. “It’s a dumping ground for dead hookers.”

  “Excuse me?” Kathleen asked, furious at the cop’s tone.

  He recited without expression, as if he were a bad actor cold-reading a script, “A serial killer’s been dumping women out there for decades. We’ve seen her criminal record.” He looked at Dunbar, whose eyes had reddened. “We’ll take your statement.”

  Luna turned to Kathleen and spoke sharply. “You’ll need to come to the precinct to talk to us.”

  PART II

  CHAPTER

  12

  Before

  BEFORE HE’D BLOWN himself up along with forty-three other people, Jackson Mattingly had been a handsome boy. At first glance, people gravitated to him. None of them knew him, not really, although some recognized intuitively that danger lurked beneath his skin. Women with honed survival instincts could see in the depths of his blue eyes a future domestic abuser, poised to pounce. Boys and young men had sometimes sensed a bully lurking there, someone who would dynamite the neighbor’s wandering cat if he felt the hankering, someone who felt no compunction about taking you down a notch if you were fat, skinny, or thin-skinned. They didn’t see it consciously, but healthy people gave him wide berth.

  He liked it like that. Most of all, he didn’t want anyone to get close enough to truly scope him out. He didn’t want them to see how any kind word he spoke morphed into calculation and how rage boiled beneath his calm surface. He was a natural for the high school football team, so he wasn’t viewed as an outcast like the Columbine shooters. But he wasn’t like other people. At all. That was his secret.

  A year before Jackson Mattingly’s simmering rage morphed into a road map, he walked along Main Street in Beacon, alone as usual. Twilight cast purple shadows over the stores that lined the street, mostly tiny art galleries, plus a bake shop. The best berry pies he couldn’t afford. It was his last year of high school, and he didn’t have any plans he intended to follow. But one thing that had made him deeply angry, as he peered at his reflection rather than the artwork in a gallery window, was his eyes—or more accurately, their eyes.

  His parents’. Jason and Elyse Mattingly’s. Brown eyes. Both of them.

  It had never occurred to him that this was a problem. Not until he’d learned about genetics in high school and realized his parents were probably not his parents. He’d asked the question in class, trying to make it sound casual, about whether brown-eyed parents ever had blue-eyed kids. The teacher, a young dude with a denim shirt and jeans, had looked at him curiously, maybe wondering himself how an Adonis like Jackson could have come from parents like his. His dumpy parents—clearly graduates of the slow-reading class—regularly showed up for parent-teacher conferences, a mortifying exercise during which the teachers always said Jackson was smart but never, ever said he was a pleasure to have in their class. He’d never done anything much to get the teachers mad—at least nothing they were sure he’d done. Jackson attributed their discomfort mostly to his energy, which overwhelmed weak people, namely 99.9% of the population.

  The teacher explained that if both parents had the recessive gene for blue eyes, it could be passed down, skip a generation, and create a blue-eyed kid, even if the parents had brown eyes. It wasn’t the norm, but it happened.

  Jackson had given some thought to that. He rarely saw his grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins. He and his parents had taken the four-hour car ride for the first time when he was five. Poor white trash, both sides of the family. They had weak chins, sallow skin, and lank hair, none above six feet tall like him. None a good athlete. Not an intelligent conversation from a one of them, other than a skinny cousin who’d become damn near a chemist from cooking methamphetamine in a shed behind his house. No wonder Jackson’s parents had moved far away from that flock of losers. And none of them had blue eyes. That was some fucking recessive gene, hidden away for generations, just to come calling on tall, athletic, blue-eyed Jackson. Total bullshit. He knew the real deal.

  He’d confronted his parents. But they’d refused to talk about it. He couldn’t figure out their reaction. His mother wept and his father stormed around the house. Most of all, they seemed scared, which ate at Jackson and made his need to know even stronger. He didn’t mind all that much about being adopted. It would answer a lot of questions about why he didn’t fit in with the family. But the fear on their faces and refusal to acknowledge his questions drove him crazy. Anger swirled with his pumped-up teenage testosterone, fondling his eerie intelligence, which he was now sure he hadn’t gotten from them.

  He hadn’t thought about it before, but genetics might also answer why he shared no interests with his parents, and why they were so nice to everyone while all he thought about was blowing shit apart. He’d been fascinated with explosions, fire, the force of a tsunami, every kind of mass disaster, for as long as he could remember. Violence filled and soothed a grating emptiness inside him. Violence made him feel something other than the fury that blistered his insides unless he did something to calm it.

  Luckily, he was a guy who knew how to keep a secret. He wasn’t a sharer, needy for people to recognize his accomplishments. He wasn’t a joiner either, didn’t need a group that required sharing secrets as the price of entry. No one person knew more than a small slice of his behavior, and no one knew his thoughts. From his earliest memory, every feeling other than anger that he’d ever shared with anyone had been a lie. He pretended to be happy, or loving, or excited, even as a child, and even then, only when it helped him get something he wanted. Most importantly, he hid the homicidal rage that spoke to him every moment of his life. And he hid his lurking fear, barely known even to himself, that it meant there was something wrong inside him.

  Jackson turned a corner several blocks before he reached home. The houses here were 1960s ranches surrounded by squares of lawn. Several houses were dark. One belonged to his hip science teacher and his pregnant wife. They’d gone to visit her family during summer break. It took Jackson little effort to quietly break in with a gloved fist though a back window. Once inside, he walked the dark house to the bedroom, smelling the remnants of their last meal, the room deodorizer, the empty kitty litter that still left an ammonia mist. It was a pity they’d taken the cat with them. He pulled out dresser drawers until he found the wife’s panties.

  * * *

  When Jackson returned home, his anger quelled by his little detour, his parents were in the living room. Worn recliners and a couch were arranged around a flat-screen TV. Jackson joined them, eating a plate of flank steak and potatoes on a tray table. They all watched a show about the one-year anniversary of a high school shooting. They didn’t watch it together, exactly. They were all in one room, each of them on an electronic device, looking up periodically at the television screen as the announcers went through the blow-by-blow of the school massacre. Jackson caught the undercurrent of elation among the round table of guests reminiscing about their big-news payday a year ago.

  Jackson’s dad clucked when the announcer talked about the shooter aiming under desks at kids hiding there. “I don’t know about this world.”

  “Terrible, terrible,” his mother clucked back, her upper arms jiggling when she put her fingers over her mouth with a horrified gesture.

  Jackson became more attentive when the TV flashed on the pockmarked face of the loser kid who’d done it. The boy had a dumpy, half-witted mother who reminded Jackson of his own mother. The kid’s father was a dentist—far better than Jackson’s own dad’s line of work
as a prison guard. Thirty years doing that and his dad had never even gotten a promotion. The announcer was saying that the kid’s mass shooting had ruined the father’s dental practice and that the mother couldn’t leave the house without people following and shouting at her. Jackson laughed gleefully at the thought of it.

  His parents looked over at him, startled, with worry in their eyes. It was a look he’d seen many times before. He lit a cigarette and flicked ashes onto his half-eaten steak, taking a long look back at them. His parents had gotten more than they bargained for when they found Jackson’s baby basket on their doorstep, or however the fuck that whole arrangement had gone down.

  He decided. He needed to find out the truth about that. It was clear that his real parents were special people, unlike the homely dimwits who’d raised him. His real parents were the missing link that would make sense of his life. He needed to reunite with his makers like a magnet drawn to metal.

  CHAPTER

  13

  AFTER BRUNCH AT Lauren’s and a much-needed nap for all, Emily took Skye and Rusty to meet a group of Emily’s friends for dinner. Although most of her friends lived downtown, they were happy to come to the palm-lined outdoor restaurants of Dyckman Street. The food was good and less expensive than downtown. Plus, they doted on Skye and wanted to meet Rusty.

  After dinner, Emily waited for a traffic light a few blocks from home. Skye slept in her stroller now. Happily, that meant Emily would be able to transfer her to her crib without the drawn-out routines of bedtime. Emily checked her phone. She’d missed a call from Kathleen. It was the first time Kathleen had called since Emily gave her the number.

  Rusty growled. She looked down, startled. He was staring at a man with a bucket and fishing pole who stood nearby, waiting for the light. People fished in the Hudson nowadays, which was supposedly clean if it hadn’t rained a lot.