Dearly Beloved

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “Oh, Sweet Jesus, no!” His strangled cry pierces the noise of the storm. “Oh, God, not Sandy. No . . . please, not Sandy!”

  Her brother? The one who called . . .

  In numb horror, Jennie looks from the grief-crazed man on the dock back at the tumbling blur of arms and legs on the wildly pitching boat deck.

  Then she sees a flash of the gun in Stephen’s hand.

  She opens her mouth to warn Keegan when, with a sudden, swift movement, he knocks the weapon out of Stephen’s grasp, sending it skittering across the icy boat deck.

  Sobbing in desperation, Jennie strains to pull herself toward the spot where it lies near the railing as the two men scuffle in the opposite direction. She’s about to close her fingers over the barrel when a hand moves in and grabs it away.

  Stunned, Jennie looks up to see Jasper Hammel standing over her, clutching the gun against his chest and looking dazed.

  Water streams from his hair and over his body, and there’s blood trickling from his temple. The bullet Stephen fired only grazed it, Jennie realizes, knocking him overboard and he must have pulled himself back on board the boat somehow without Stephen’s realizing it.

  “You bastard!” The voice belongs to Keegan, yet it sounds far off and muffled.

  Jennie jerks her head around to see that only Keegan’s lower legs are visible as Stephen dangles the rest of him backward over the rail of the boat, holding onto his ankles.

  “Are you ready to die, Mr. Hero?” Stephen shouts, wearing a deranged grin.

  “No!” Jennie screams, looking desperately toward the man on the dock to do something, to help Keegan somehow.

  But he’s gone—running across the snow-covered lawn toward the house, shaking his head blindly as if to shut out the sight of Sandy’s body.

  Jennie turns her head back to look at the two men by the rail just as a shot rings out.

  She hears a blood-chilling shriek, not realizing for a moment that it’s coming from her.

  It becomes a high-pitched wail as she squeezes her eyes shut to block out the horror, knowing that when she opens them, Keegan will be gone, just as Harry was . . .

  But then she hears his voice saying, “Drop the gun.”

  Astounded, Jennie opens her eyes and sees Keegan scrambling back up over the rail and onto the deck . . . where Stephen lies writhing from a bullet wound in his side.

  Relief courses through her and she gasps his name on a nearly hysterical half-sob, half-laugh.

  “Drop the gun,” Keegan repeats.

  Jennie turns to see that Jasper Hammel is still holding the pistol straight in front of him in both hands, arms rigid trembling all over.

  “What are you doing, Arnie?” Stephen gasps, clutching his side and looking up at Hammel in bewilderment. “What are you doing? Don’t do anything foolish, Arnie. It’s me, Stephen . . .”

  “I know it’s you.” Hammel’s voice is a bitter sob. “You lying bastard. You lying . . . You never planned to bring me with you when you left. You . . . I loved you. . . . I was the only one who stood by you. And you . . . you tried to kill me.”

  “No, Arnie . . .”

  Stephen starts to say something more, but Hammel closes his eyes tightly and fires again, this time hitting Stephen square in the throat. His words die instantly in a gurgle of blood.

  “Drop it,” Keegan says again, taking a step closer to Hammel.

  For a brief, terrifying instant, Jennie believes that Jasper Hammel is going to fire again, this time at Keegan. But then, with a shudder, he drops the weapon at his feet and opens his eyes.

  At the sight of Stephen’s bloody body, he sobs. “Oh, look at you. . . . Look at what I’ve done to you. . . . I loved you, you lying bastard.”

  Keegan moves forward and grabs him, pulling his arms behind his back. Hammel doesn’t resist, but, as if in a stupor, allows his wrists and ankles to be tied with two lengths of rope Keegan finds in the compartment where the life jackets are stored.

  Only when Jasper Hammel is restrained and lying on his stomach on the deck, weeping bitterly about Stephen, does Keegan turn to Jennie.

  “Are you all right?” he asks gently, bending over her and touching her cheek.

  “My leg hurts, but . . . I’m going to be fine,” she assures him, meeting his gaze. “Now that you’re here.”

  “Oh, Jennie . . .” He gathers her into his arms. “Thank God you’re all right. Don’t you even think of leaving me, not ever again.”

  “I won’t,” she promises. “I’ll never leave you again, Keegan.”

  Epilogue

  The sun shines brightly on New Year’s Day, glistening on the drifts of snow that blanketed Boston overnight.

  “Be careful now, Jen,” Laura, wearing her black-velvet matron-of-honor dress, warns as her sister’s white-satin pumps hover over the sidewalk in front of the church. “It’s probably icy.”

  “I’m all right.” Jennie gathers the voluminous ivory skirt of her antique wedding gown over her arm and steps down from the horse-drawn carriage.

  Laura is right behind her, carrying her bouquet and Jennie’s.

  They’re not roses—Jennie had told her sister she’d carry anything but roses.

  She has no idea how Laura got her hands on lilacs in January, but her sister had come through for her.

  “Are you ready?” Shawn is waiting on the sidewalk, handsome in a dark suit and tie.

  Jennie nods at her brother-in-law. He’d been so happy when she’d asked him to give her away. “I’d be honored,” he’d said and Laura had positively beamed at his side.

  It is hard to believe that six months have passed since their June wedding—that it has been almost a year since Jennie’s ordeal on Tide Island.

  But she pushes the thought of that out of her mind. This is the happiest day of her life. There’s no room today to let unpleasant memories haunt her. . . . There never will be again.

  Jennie takes Shawn’s arm and they walk toward the church with Laura right behind them, fussing with the back of her sister’s antique-lace veil.

  The church is hushed and filled with waiting friends and family.

  Jennie stops at the edge of the satin runner and takes a deep breath.

  “Nervous?” Shawn whispers.

  She smiles serenely and shakes her head.

  The organist begins playing Pachelbel’s “Canon in D.”

  It’s time.

  Laura leans toward her sister and plants a kiss on her cheek. “I love you, Jennie.”

  “I love you, too,” she says, and watches as her sister starts down the aisle, each step a saucy little sashay typical of Laura.

  Then it’s Jennie’s turn. She and Shawn step onto the white-satin runner, and she looks up. The congregation has stood, blocking her view of the groom.

  It’s all right. . . . I’ll see him soon enough, she thinks, and begins to move forward.

  Familiar faces beam at her from the pews.

  Midway toward the front, she sees Danny and Cheryl Cavelli. In Danny’s arms is their three-month-old baby girl, Sandra. Cheryl had been pregnant on that icy February day on Tide Island. She had been keeping it a secret, planning to tell her husband on Valentine’s Day.

  Jennie nods slightly at them as she passes and is rewarded with two slightly wistful, but happy smiles—and one drooly one from the baby.

  Then she’s nearing the altar . . .

  And there he is, waiting for her, tall and dashing in his charcoal morning coat and striped ascot.

  Keegan, the man she’s going to spend the rest of her life with.

  He steps forward as she arrives in front of him, taking her arm from Shawn, looking down at her face with teary eyes so full of love that a lump rises in Jennie’s throat.

  Together, they take the final few steps to stand in front of the priest.

  Looking down on the bride and groom with a benevolent smile, he begins. “Dearly beloved . . .”

  Keep reading for excerpts from

  Wendy
Corsi Staub’s chilling new trilogy

  NIGHTWATCHER

  September 2012

  SLEEPWALKER

  October 2012

  and

  SHADOWKILLER

  February 2013

  From HarperCollinsPublishers

  An Excerpt from

  NIGHTWATCHER

  Chapter 1

  September 10, 2001

  New York City

  7:19 P.M.

  Allison Taylor has lived in Manhattan for three years now.

  That’s long enough to know that the odds are stacked against finding a taxi at the rainy tail end of rush hour—especially here, a stone’s throw from the Bryant Park tents in the midst of Fashion Week.

  Yet she perches beneath a soggy umbrella on the curb at the corner of Forty-second and Fifth, searching the sea of oncoming yellow cabs, hoping to find an on-duty/unoccupied dome light.

  Unlikely, yes.

  But impossible? The word is overused, in her opinion. If she weren’t the kind of woman who stubbornly challenges anything others might deem impossible, then she wouldn’t be here in New York in the first place.

  How many people back in her tiny Midwestern hometown told her it would be impossible for a girl like her to merely survive the big, cruel city, let alone succeed in the glamorous, cutthroat fashion publishing industry?

  A girl like her . . .

  Impoverished, from a broken home with a suicidal drug addict for a mother. A girl who never had a chance—but took one anyway.

  And just look at me now.

  After putting herself through the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and working her way from an unpaid post-college internship at Condé Nast on up through the editorial ranks at 7th Avenue magazine, Allison finally loves her life—cab shortages, rainy days, and all.

  Sometimes, she allows herself to fantasize about going back to Centerfield to show them all how wrong they were. The neighbors, the teachers, the pursed-lipped church ladies, the mean girls at school and their meaner mothers—everyone who ever looked at her with scorn or even pity; everyone who ever whispered behind her back.

  They didn’t understand about Mom—about how much she loved Allison, how hard she tried, when she wasn’t high, to be a good mother. Only the one girl Allison considered a true friend, her next-door neighbor Tammy Connolly, seemed to understand. She, too, had a single mom for whom the townspeople had disdain. Tammy’s mother was a brassy blonde whose skirts were too short, whose perfume was too strong, whose voice was too loud.

  Tammy had her own cross to bear, as the church ladies would say. Everyone did. Mom was Allison’s—hers alone—and she dealt with it pretty much single-handedly until the day it ceased to exist.

  But going back to Centerfield—even to have the last laugh—would mean facing memories. And who needs those?

  “Memories are good for nothin’,” Mom used to say, after Allison’s father left them. “It’s better to just forget about all the things you can’t change.”

  True—but Mom couldn’t seem to change what was happening to them in the present—or what the future might hold.

  “Weakness is my weakness,” Brenda once told a drug counselor. Allison overheard, and those pathetic words made her furious, even then.

  Now Mom, too, is in the past.

  Yes. Always better to forget.

  Anyway, even if Allison wanted to revisit Centerfield, the town is truly the middle of nowhere: a good thirty miles from the nearest dive motel and at least three or four times as far from any semi-decent hotel.

  Sometimes, though, she pictures herself doing it: flying to Omaha, renting a car, driving out across miles of nothing to . . .

  More nothing.

  Her one friend, Tammy, moved away long before Mom died seven years ago, and, of course, Dad had left years before that, when she was nine.

  Allison remembers the morning she woke up and went running to the kitchen to tell her mother that she’d dreamed she had a sister. She was certain it meant that her mom was going to have another baby.

  But that couldn’t have been farther from the truth. In the kitchen, she found the note her father had left.

  Can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry. Good-bye.

  God only knows where he wound up. Allison’s only sibling, her half brother, Brett, wanted to find him for her sake after Mom died.

  “Well, if you do, I don’t want to hear about it. I never want to hear his name again,” she said when her brother brought it up at the funeral.

  It was the same thing her mother had told her after her father left. Mom considered Allison’s deadbeat dad good for nothin’—just like memories. True as that might have been, Allison couldn’t stand the way the townspeople whispered about her father running off.

  The best thing about living in New York is the live-and-let-live attitude. Everyone is free to do his or her own thing; no one judges or even pays much attention to anyone else. For Allison, after eighteen years of small-town living and a couple more in college housing, anonymity is a beautiful thing. Certainly well worth every moment of urban inconvenience.

  She surveys the traffic-clogged avenue through a veil of drenching rain, thinking she should probably just take the subway down to the Marc Jacobs show at the Pier. It’s cheaper, arguably faster, and more reliable than finding a cab.

  But she’s wearing a brand-new pair of Gallianos, and her feet—after four straight days of runway shows and parties—are killing her. No, she doesn’t feel up to walking to Grand Central and then through the tunnels at Union Square to transfer to the crosstown line, much less negotiating all those station stairs on both ends.

  Not that she much likes standing here in the deluge, vainly waiting for a cab, but . . .

  Lesser of the evils, right?

  Maybe not. She jumps back as a passing panel truck sends a wave of gray-brown gutter water over the curb.

  “Dammit!” Allison looks down at her soaked shoes—and then up again, just in time to see a yellow cab pulling over for the trench-coated, briefcase-carrying man who just strode past her, taxi-hailing arm in the air.

  “Hey!” she calls, and he glances back over his shoulder. “I’ve been standing here for twenty minutes!”

  More like five, but that’s beside the point. She was here first. That’s her cab.

  Okay, in the grand scheme of Manhattan life, maybe that’s not quite how it works.

  Maybe it’s more . . . if you snooze, you lose.

  And I snoozed.

  Still . . .

  She’s in a fighting mood. The Jacobs show is huge. Everyone who’s anyone in the industry will be there. This is her first year as—well, maybe not a Somebody, but no longer a Nobody.

  There’s a seat for her alongside the runway—well, maybe not right alongside it, but somewhere—and she has to get to the Pier. Now.

  She fully expects the businessman to ignore her. But his eyes flick up and down, taking in her long, blond-streaked hair, long legs, and short pink skirt. Yeah—he’s totally checking her out.

  She’s used to that reaction from men on the street.

  Men anywhere, really. Even back home in Centerfield, when she was scarcely more than a kid—and still a brunette—Allison attracted her share of male attention, most of it unwanted.

  But as a grown woman in the big city, she’s learned to use it to her advantage on certain occasions.

  Oh hell . . . the truth is, she made the most of it even back in Nebraska. But she doesn’t let herself think about that.

  Memories are good for nothin’, Allison. Don’t you ever forget it.

  No, Mom. I won’t. I’ll never forget it.

  “Where are you headed?” The man reaches back to open the car door, his gaze still fixed on her.

  “Pier 54. It’s on the river at—”

  “I know where it is. Go ahead. Get in.”

  She hesitates only a split second before hurrying over to the cab, quickly folding her umbrella, and slipping past the man—a total stranger,
she reminds herself—into the backseat.

  A stranger. So? The city is full of strangers. That’s why she moved here, leaving behind a town populated by know-it-all busybodies.

  Anyway, it’s not the middle of the night, and the driver is here, and what’s going to happen?

  You’re going to make it to the Marc Jacobs show, something you’ve been waiting for all summer.

  After the show there’s an after-party to launch Jacobs’s new signature fragrance. It’s the hottest ticket in town tonight, and Allison Taylor is invited.

  No way is she going to miss this—or arrive looking like a drowned rat.

  She puts her dripping umbrella on the floor as the stranger climbs in after her and closes the door.

  “I’m going to Brooklyn—take the Williamsburg Bridge,” he tells the driver, “but first she needs to get off at Thirteenth and West.”

  “Wait—that’s way out of your way,” Allison protests.

  “It’s okay. You’re obviously in a hurry.”

  “No, I know, but . . .” Jacobs is notorious for starting late. She can wait for another cab.

  “It’s fine.”

  “Never mind,” she says, unsettled by this stranger’s willingness to accommodate her. What, she wonders uneasily, does he expect in return? “Listen, I’ll just—”

  “No, I mean it. It’s fine.” He motions at the cabbie, who shrugs, starts the meter, and inches them out into the downtown traffic.

  Alrighty then. Allison faces forward, crossing her arms across her midsection.

  She tried to let this guy off the hook. It’s going to take him forever to get to Brooklyn with a West Side detour, but . . .

  That’s his problem.

  And mine is solved.

  Allison leans back, inhaling the fruity cardboard air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror and the faint cigarette scent wafting from her backseat companion. Unlike some reformed smokers, she doesn’t mind it. In fact, she finds the tobacco smell pleasantly nostalgic, sending her back to college bars and rainy, lazy, coffee-drinking afternoons in Pittsburgh.