Now, as she reaches for the phone, Peyton prays she isn’t walking into an unwelcome confrontation with Tom—or another hangup. Rita told her there have been a few this week, most likely coming from pay telephones whose numbers don’t appear on caller ID.
“Peyton, turn on the news,” a female voice exclaims in response to her tentative “hello.” “Channel seven. Now!”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Julie. Hurry!”
It takes her a moment to locate the remote control amidst the stacks of cards on the rumpled bed.
“Do you see this?” Julie’s voice rises in panic. “Oh God . . .”
“What is it, Julie?” Peyton aims the remote at the television, presses Power, and changes the channel.
Then, yes, she sees it.
And she realizes, in one sickening flash of recognition, that her life is in grave danger.
After a vigorous morning at preschool, the droopy-eyed triplets have been lulled into placidity by a Blue’s Clues video, peanut butter and jelly triangles, and milk-filled sippy cups.
With any luck, Anne Marie thinks, they’ll stretch out on the couches after they eat and fall asleep for a while. That will give her a chance to read this morning’s newspaper, still untouched on the kitchen table, and to return several phone calls from mothers of overtly social preschoolers requesting play dates with one or another of the vivacious Egerton boys.
It’s hard to remember now that there was ever a time when the trio lay in adjoining isolettes in the neonatal intensive care ward, their monitors bleating whenever one of them drifted too close to oblivion.
The nightmarish vigil lasted for weeks, with Anne Marie and Jarrett seeing each other only in passing, taking turns keeping watch over their delicate children who had been born too soon.
That was the turning point in their marriage, she realizes, looking back.
They had made it unscathed through courtship and commitment, then through the trials of infertility when she attempted to conceive as her age closed in on forty.
She didn’t dare tell Jarrett that she knew she could carry a child, that she had already been pregnant and given birth, already been a parent.
Her gynecologist knew about her past pregnancy, of course, but he believed the lie she told him—that she had been pregnant as a teenager and given up the baby for adoption. She asked him not to tell her husband and he was legally bound to oblige.
He gave her a list of esteemed fertility specialists.
Among them she spotted a chillingly familiar name: Dr. William Lombardo. He had evolved from the straightforward obstetrician-gynecologist he’d been just a few years earlier, when he was Heather’s doctor at the Staten Island branch of his practice.
He’d never had a chance to deliver Anne Marie’s grandchild; now he would not have a chance to treat Anne Marie herself. She chose a stranger, a specialist in Connecticut who eventually assisted her in conceiving the triplets and becoming a mother again.
God bless him, she thinks as she removes a mug of this morning’s reheated coffee from the microwave and sinks into a kitchen chair.
She wonders wearily, as she does every afternoon around this time, where the first half of the day went.
She thought she’d have more time to herself now that the boys are in school. But by the time she drops them off at nine and runs a few errands, it’s already eleven and time to head back for a pre-pickup parking spot.
It’s been a hectic few weeks, settling into the new fall routine. Too hectic to have done much soul-searching.
Not that Kelly Clements isn’t in the back of her mind every moment of every day.
She just isn’t sure where to put her yet.
While supportive, and forgiving of the lies his wife told him, Jarrett is reluctant to go to the police.
Anne Marie knows he must be worried about appearances, as always.
Of course he claims he merely wants to protect the boys from the upheaval of a long-term, potentially high-profile investigation.
“My daughter was abducted and murdered,” Anne Marie has been forced to remind him more than once, as loath to say the terrible words aloud as she is to let the resolution languish indefinitely. “My granddaughter is living with strangers who are passing themselves off as her parents.”
“They are her parents, legally,” Jarrett has reminded her, more than once.
Yes. The birth certificate. So far, nobody in Jarrett’s furtive team of attorneys and investigators has found any reason to question it. They’ve reportedly even found a witness who will attest that Mrs. Clements was visibly pregnant and delivered Kelly herself.
“It’s all a con,” Anne Marie screamed at Jarrett when he told her that.
“Maybe it is,” he agreed with maddening calm.
At least he didn’t reiterate, yet again, that there isn’t a shred of evidence other than Anne Marie’s fierce, purely instinctive conviction that Kelly Clements is Heather’s baby.
She’s determined to prove it through DNA testing.
But until they reach that milestone, Anne Marie is forced to inhabit this oddly bustling limbo as if nothing has changed.
She swallows some coffee and reaches for the newspaper, deciding to relax for a few more minutes before getting out the calendar to schedule play dates.
She leafs through the front section with its grim global headlines, then takes the last few sips of her coffee while skimming the local section for anything that might capture her interest before she tosses the paper into the recycling bin.
The name jumps out at her in bold black and white for the second time in her life, as though summoned to the page by her thoughts of mere minutes before.
Dr. William Lombardo.
If Rita hadn’t stopped impulsively at the newsstand to pick up a couple of magazines for Peyton, she might not have found out for hours.
By then it could have been too late.
But she happens to glance down at the Daily News as she’s paying for People and Glamour, and there it is, utterly unexpected, a pair of familiar faces staring out from beneath a sensational tabloid headline.
Oh no. Oh God.
She doesn’t even wait for the man to give her the change for the twenty she’s just handed him, but takes off running down the avenue, through the pouring rain, magazines in one hand and plastic drugstore bag in the other.
Is she being followed?
She checks over her shoulder at every intersection she must wait to cross, half expecting to see somebody dogging her zigzag pattern toward Peyton’s apartment.
But she makes it safely to the door.
She’s hurriedly pushing her key into the lock when she hears pounding footsteps splashing down the street.
She looks up to see Tom Reilly racing through the downpour in her direction, waving his arms at her.
In a panic, she manages to get the door unlocked, slips through, and slams it behind her just as he reaches the steps.
“Rita, wait, no!” he shouts.
Ignoring him, she rushes down the stairs with a fervent prayer that she’ll find her patient intact. She can hear Tom pounding on the door upstairs, to no avail. He must know the building, inhabited by professionals, is deserted at this time of a weekday morning, same as always.
“Peyton?” Rita calls, bursting into the apartment. “We have to get you out of here, sugar pie.”
She finds her in the bedroom, staring at the television, tears streaming down her face.
She already knows.
“You hear about this crazy shit?” Sam Basir throws a morning tabloid paper onto Jody’s desk.
She doesn’t bother to glance at it. “What, the hostage beheading in Iraq? Yeah, it’s—”
“No, that was the front page of the Post. This is the Daily News. Take a look.”
The attractive face that stares back from the cover is unfamiliar, as is the name in the caption.
It’s the headline that gets her.
In the month since t
hey obtained a search warrant and ascertained that Derry Cordell was not indeed capable of being pregnant, Jody has managed to push the subway pushing homicide to the back burner.
Yes, she’s still convinced the missing wife murdered Linden Cordell. No, she doesn’t understand why she was pretending to be pregnant. Perhaps she even fooled her husband into believing it, or maybe he knew the truth. Maybe that was why he didn’t share the news with anyone.
In the end, Jody came away with the realization that the enigmatic Derry Cordell managed to disappear, perhaps never to be found, not even if Langella had the means and the time and the leads to try.
But she didn’t. She left her card with the doctor, the receptionist, and Nancy, the nurse, asking them to get in touch if anyone thought of anything that might help.
She didn’t expect to hear from them.
And that was that.
Until now.
She flips through the paper to the cover story, skims it, and looks up at Sam. “Think it’s related to Derry Cordell’s disappearance?”
“What do you think?”
“I think we’d better move on it,” she says, already on her feet and heading toward the door.
“We have to call the police, Rita,” Peyton says urgently, still holding the phone from the call she hastily ended from Julie.
Her heart is pounding as the midwife tugs a pair of sneakers over her bare feet, her stomach roiling with the baby’s squirms and twitches, as though it’s been stirred into action by a sudden injection of fear-induced adrenaline. Peyton rests a hand on what she believes is the baby’s elbow protruding beside her navel, as if she can somehow calm her child despite her own teeming apprehension.
“We will call the police, from my cell after we get out of here.” Rita ties one lace and then the other, hands flying, voice quaking. “Any second now, Tom is going to find a way into this building.”
Tom.
This feels like her worst nightmare come to life, but it’s real. Peyton can hear his frantic pounding and angry shouts from the street even from here.
“We’ll go out the back of the building to the garden and through to the next block where I parked my car.”
“Car? I thought you took the subway.”
“I do, most days. “ Rita is pulling Peyton to her feet even as she says, “J.D. usually drives to work but today I have the car, thank God. Let’s go.”
Thank God, Peyton echoes silently, feeling dizzy as she allows herself to be led through the door, down the shadowy basement corridor, to the back exit opening onto the courtyard.
She hasn’t taken more than a few steps at a time in a month. Now, heaven help her, she might have to run for her life.
“Rita,” she says, stopping to grab on to the cool, painted concrete wall for balance. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“You have to, sugar pie,” the midwife says grimly, giving her hand a squeeze. “Come on, I’ll be with you every step of the way.”
“But . . .” She doubles over as a pelvic cramp slices through her.
“Contraction?” Rita’s voice is laced with concern.
“I think so.”
Overhead, Peyton vaguely realizes, the pounding and shouting have given way to momentary, ominous silence.
“I’m going to give you something to hold it off as soon as we get to the car,” Rita promises, wielding the medical bag she wisely remembered to grab on their way out. “And I’d better take you straight to the hospital.”
Mary rarely watches television during the day.
Now that the dog days of August have given way to golden September, she spends most afternoons wheeling Dawn through the nearby park in the secondhand baby carriage Javier bought.
But she awakened this morning to the rumble of thunder and an overcast sky that soon spilled sheets of rain.
It’s just as well. She spent the morning catching up on all there is to do around the house. Her daughter looked on, gurgling happily from her high chair in the kitchen and her swing in the living room.
Now Dawn is dozing in her cradle, the house is back in order, and the sky appears to be clearing. Wondering about the forecast, Mary turns on the noon news and settles on the couch with a bowl of canned soup to watch it. If the weather is supposed to be nice later, she might put the baby into her carriage and walk down to the park.
Channel seven’s meteorologist has appeared twice already in teaser segments before the broadcast breaks away to commercials. Every time the newsroom and anchors reappear, Mary expects the weather report, but they keep turning to other stories.
Grim accounts of carjackings and rapes, robberies at gunpoint, and now a violent suicide.
Mary shakes her head as the victim’s picture appears: a lovely African-American woman, a young mother with a new baby. The mother hurtled herself from the balcony of her high-rise apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, leaving her newborn daughter safely asleep in her cradle, and no sign of a note.
“Police are investigating Wanda Jones’s death and have not confirmed sources who say that there may be a link between this woman and the disappearance of a close friend back in May. That woman, Allison Garcia, was almost nine months pregnant when she vanished from her home on Mother’s Day.”
Mother’s Day?
Mary’s breath catches in her throat. Frowning, she sets the soup bowl on the coffee table and picks up the remote, raising the volume.
“While Jones’s death is officially being called a suicide, and there is no evidence of foul play, police have learned that both she and Garcia were members of a local support group for unwed mothers. Anyone with any information regarding Allison Garcia’s disappearance is asked to call this number.”
The anchorwoman’s face is replaced by a graphic screen: an eight hundred number printed below a photograph.
The moment she sees the ebullient-looking young woman with a halo of black ringlets, Mary knows.
She knows.
The facts slam into her like a series of metal gates, clanking one after another into place with numbing finality.
Dawn was born on Mother’s Day.
Dawn’s face is a miniature version of the missing Allison Garcia’s.
And Rose Calabrone lied.
“Hey, Langella,” a desk sergeant calls as Jody and Sam head for the door. “I got an urgent call for you.”
“Who is it?” Not that it matters, she realizes, not even slowing her pace. “I can’t take it now, Jimmy. Not unless it’s life-and-death.”
He shrugs. “It’s somebody from a Dr. Lombardo’s office. You decide.”
Life-and-death?
Her decision made in an instant, Jody does an about-face and hurries toward the phone, trailed by Sam.
Lying in a fetal position on the backseat of Rita’s car, Peyton fights off another painful contraction. She hugs her stomach, fearful for her child, and asks, “How long until that pill starts to work, Rita?”
“Any second now,” the woman promises, careening around another corner.
“Are we almost to the hospital?”
“Almost,” Rita replies . . . and then curses.
“What is it?”
“I think we’re being followed by somebody in a cab. Hold on, Peyton. I’m going to try to lose him.”
“Tom?” she asks dully, her body taut with pain and her head suddenly swimming.
“I think so.”
The car jerks and jolts. The brakes slam on, followed by the gas pedal.
“I’m sorry, sugar pie,” Rita calls as they bump and sway around another corner.
Too woozy to reply, Peyton closes her eyes and prays.
“Who was it?” Basir asks anxiously, as Langella hangs up the phone.
“Lombardo’s nurse. Nancy. Remember her?”
“The gossip. Yeah. Why’s she calling now?”
“She said she might have more information about the Cordell case.” Jody is already retracing her steps toward the door, with Sam right behind her. “
She wants us to meet her.”
“Yeah? Where? At the office?”
“No, she said the place is a zoo. Reporters are camped out all over the place.”
“So where are we meeting her?”
“Calvary Cemetary in Queens.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Let’s go.”
“How do you know she isn’t some loony tune pulling one over on us?”
“I don’t,” Jody tells him grimly. “But we’re going anyway.”
Once again, it all comes down to carelessness.
Killing Wanda was a stupid, impulsive move, albeit a necessary one, because she had somehow figured it out.
She was never supposed to figure it out, and she was never supposed to die.
Only the donors were supposed to die.
Wanda wasn’t a suitable donor. She wasn’t married, but her baby was going to have a father. She didn’t engineer her pregnancy with anonymous sperm and a test tube. The father has his faults, but he’s raised two other children, and he’s clearly going to be there for this one.
Wanda didn’t have to die.
But she got suspicious, and she got scared. She instinctively went into hiding when she found herself in labor, as though she’d sensed the danger lurking nearby. She must have delivered at some suburban hospital, where she felt safe . . . not that it matters now.
She never even knew for certain whether her suspicions were founded. Not until that final confrontation in her twenty-eighth-floor apartment with its lovely terrace.
Until yesterday she probably thought she was well protected, hidden away in her elegant tower like a princess, behind triple dead bolts with an obedient doorman to protect her.
Just as Peyton Somerset finally believed she was safe in her elegant fortress with loyal Rita to protect her.
But, in a misguided attempt to warn Peyton of her suspicions, Wanda crossed the wrong path. All those fancy precautions of hers meant nothing in the end. It was laughably easy to slip past the doorman and up to the twenty-eighth floor. It wasn’t even all that difficult to cajole Wanda into unlocking the door.
Lullaby and Goodnight Page 29