No Place Like Home

by Mary Higgins Clark

  “I wonder if the plan to get Liza back into her old home was hatched after Robin went to work at the Grove Agency and the house came on the market,” Jeff mused. “Buy the house as a gift. Move her into it. Vandalize it to rattle her. Expose her as Little Lizzie. Count on a psychological breakdown so he could get control of the estate. But then something went wrong. That last evening when Georgette stayed in the office, she must have found something that linked Robin to Alex. Henry told us that Georgette had gone through both their desks. Maybe Georgette found a picture of Alex and Robin together, or a note from him to her. Georgette made a call to Robin at ten o’clock Tuesday night. Unless Robin comes clean, we’ll probably never know the reason for it.”

  “My guess is that Robin was the one waiting for Georgette in the house on Holland Road,” Mort volunteered. “Between them, if she and Alex knew they had to get rid of Georgette, that may have been when they decided to try to point the finger at Celia by leaving her picture in Georgette’s shoulder bag. And don’t forget, if Robin put a picture in that bag, she then might have taken something out of the bag that Georgette had found in her desk. Then, when Charley Hatch’s jeans and sneakers and carvings were confiscated by Sergeant Earley, he became too much of a danger to them. So their plot to get control of Liza and Jack’s money caused them to commit two homicides. And if Celia ends up going to prison for these murders, that’s a perfect ending.”

  “This may not be the first time Nolan has been involved in a homicide,” Jeff told Shelley. “As you know, we had a number of our guys digging up information about his pre-law school days. He was a suspect in the death of a wealthy young woman he had dated in college. They never proved anything, but she had dropped him for someone else. He apparently went crazy and stalked her for over a year. She had to get a restraining order against him. I only learned that this afternoon.”

  Jeff’s expression became grave. “First thing tomorrow morning, I’m going to drive to Mendham and tell Liza what we know. After that, I’ll order around-the-clock protection for her and Jack. If Nolan weren’t in Chicago, I’d have a 24/7 guard on them now. My guess is that Nolan and his girlfriend have to be getting very, very nervous at this point.”

  The phone rang. Anne, who was still at her desk with Dru Perry keeping her company, answered after the first ring, listened to the terse message, and turned on the intercom. “Jeff, there’s a Detective Ryan on the phone from Chicago. He says that they’ve lost Alex Nolan. He slipped out of the dinner meeting he was attending more than three hours ago, and he hasn’t shown up at the Ritz-Carlton.”

  Jeff and Mort jumped up. “Three hours!” Jeff exclaimed. “He could have flown back here by now!”

  80

  I had heard the garage door close. The car’s engine was running. The fumes were making me drowsier, but I knew I had to fight it. Now that he was with me, Jack was falling asleep again. I tried to move him. I had to get into the front seat. I had to turn off the engine. If we stayed here, we were going to die. I had to move. But my limbs wouldn’t function. What was it that Alex had forced me to drink?

  I could not move. I was slumped against the cushion, half-lying, half-sitting. The sound of the car’s engine was deafening. It was racing. Something must be wedged against the gas pedal. Soon we would be unconscious. Soon my little boy would die.

  No. No. Please, no.

  “Jack, Jack.” My voice was a hushed, broken whisper, but it went directly into his ear, and he stirred. “Jack, Mommy is sick. Jack, help me.”

  He moved again, turning his head restlessly. Then he settled again under my neck.

  “Jack, Jack, wake up, wake up.”

  I was starting to fall asleep again. I had to fight it. I bit my lip so hard that I could taste blood, but the pain helped keep me from losing consciousness. “Jack, help Mommy,” I pleaded.

  He lifted his head. I sensed that he was looking at me.

  “Jack, climb . . . into front seat. Take . . . car key . . . out.”

  He was moving. He sat up and slid off my lap. “It’s dark, Mommy,” he said.

  “Climb . . . in . . . front seat,” I whispered. “Climb . . . ” I could feel myself sinking slowly into unconsciousness. The words I was trying to say were disappearing from my mind . . . .

  Jack’s foot grazed my face. He was climbing over the seat.

  “The key, Jack . . . ”

  From far off, I heard him say, “I can’t get it out.”

  “Turn it, Jack. Turn it . . . then . . . pull . . . it . . . out.”

  Suddenly there was silence, total silence in the garage. Followed by Jack’s sleepy but proud cry, “Mommy, I did it. I have the key.”

  I knew the fumes could still kill us. We had to get out. Jack would never be able to open the heavy garage door by himself.

  He was leaning over the front seat, looking down at me. “Mommy, are you sick?”

  The garage door opener, I thought—it’s clipped onto the visor over the driver’s seat. I often let Jack be the one to press it. “Jack, open . . . garage . . . door,” I begged. “You know how.”

  I think I slipped away for a minute. The rumbling sound of the garage door slowly rising woke me up for a moment, and it was with a vast sense of deliverance and relief that I finally stopped fighting and lost consciousness.

  I woke up in an ambulance. The first face I saw was Jeffrey MacKingsley’s. The first words he said were the ones I wanted to hear: “Don’t worry, Jack is fine.” The second words seemed filled with promise. “Liza, I told you everything was going to be all right.”

  EPILOGUE

  We have lived in the house for two years now. After much thought, I decided to stay there. For me it was no longer the house in which I had killed my mother, but the home in which I had tried to save her life. I have used my skills as an interior designer to complete my father’s vision for it. It is truly beautiful, and each day we are building happy memories to add to the ones of my early childhood.

  Ted Cartwright accepted a plea bargain. He got thirty years for murdering Zach Willet, fifteen years for killing my father, and twelve years for causing the death of my mother, the sentences to be served concurrently. Part of his agreement was that he would confess that he came to the house that night intending to kill my mother.

  He had lived in the house while he was married to my mother, and he knew that there was one basement window that for some inexplicable reason had never been wired into the security system. That was the way he got in.

  He admitted that he had planned to strangle my mother as she slept, and if I had awakened while he was there, he would have killed me, too.

  Knowing that the impending divorce would make him a suspect in her death, he had placed a call from our basement phone to his home and waited an hour before starting upstairs on his murderous journey. He had planned to tell the police that my mother had asked him to come to our house the next day to discuss a reconciliation.

  But that planned explanation for the phone call had to be changed when I awoke and the confrontation and shooting occurred. Instead, on the witness stand at my trial, he testified that my mother had called him late that evening and pleaded with him to come to the house while I was asleep.

  Once he was in the house, Ted got the new code out of my mother’s address book and disarmed the security system. He unlocked the kitchen door, again planning to make it seem that my mother’s carelessness had allowed an intruder to sneak in. At my trial, his story was that my mother had disarmed it and unlocked the door because she was expecting him.

  Ted also indicated that the other “moving man” was Sonny Ingers, a construction worker on his town-house project. His identification of Ingers was corroborated by Rap Corrigan’s description of Ingers’s strawberry birthmark and partially missing index finger. Since there was insufficient evidence linking Ingers to Zach’s murder, he pled guilty to the burglary of Zach’s apartment and got three years in prison.

  When Ted’s plea was entered in open court, and he
related all of these details to the judge, I think that a lot of people in the community were ashamed that they had fallen for his story, and had condemned a little girl.

  Henry Paley emerged from the investigation without any criminal charges. The prosecutor’s office concluded that Henry’s conspiracy with Ted Cartwright was limited to trying to convince Georgette Grove to sell the Route 24 property. None of the evidence indicated that he knew about or was involved in any plan to harm anyone.

  It will be many, many years, if ever, before either Robin Carpenter or Alex Nolan will be released from prison. They are both serving life sentences for the murders of Georgette Grove and Charley Hatch, and for the attempted murders of Jack and me.

  Robin admitted that she had been the one who shot both Georgette and her half brother Charley Hatch. She had taken from Georgette’s shoulder bag the picture of Alex and Robin that Georgette had found in Robin’s desk. She had placed my picture in Georgette’s shoulder bag and my mother’s picture in Charley Hatch’s pocket.

  So many people stopped by our house during those first weeks after Jack and I were nearly killed. They brought food and flowers and friendship. Some of them told me how their grandmothers and mine were schoolmates. I love it here. My roots are here. I’ve opened an interior design shop in Mendham, but I’ve had to limit my clients. Life is very busy. Jack is in the first grade and plays on every team he can find.

  In the weeks and months following Alex’s arrest, my relief over Ted’s confession was overshadowed by my sadness at Alex’s betrayal. It was Jeff who helped me to understand that the Alex I thought I knew had never existed.

  I’m not exactly sure of the moment when I realized I was falling in love with Jeff. I think he knew before I did that we were meant to be together.

  That’s another reason why I am so busy. My husband, Jeffrey MacKingsley, is getting ready to run for governor.

  Simon & Schuster

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  WHERE ARE YOU NOW?

  Mary Higgins Clark

  Please turn the page for a preview of

  Where Are You Now? . . . .

  1

  It is exactly midnight, which means Mother’s Day has just begun. I stayed overnight with my mother in the apartment on Sutton Place where I grew up. She is down the hall in her room, and together we are keeping the vigil. The same vigil we’ve kept every year since my brother, Charles MacKenzie Jr., “Mack,” walked out of the apartment he shared with two other Columbia University seniors ten years ago, and has never been seen since then. But every year at some point on Mother’s Day, he calls to assure Mom he is fine. “Don’t worry about me,” he tells her. “One of these days I’ll turn the key in the lock and be home.” Then he hangs up.

  We never know when in those twenty-four hours that call will come. Last year Mack called at a few minutes after midnight, and our vigil ended almost as soon as it began. Two years ago he waited until the very last second to phone, and Mom was frantic that this slim contact with him was over.

  Mack has to have known that my father was killed in the Twin Towers tragedy. I was sure that no matter what he was doing, that terrible day would have compelled him to come home. But it did not. Then on the next Mother’s Day, during his annual call, he started crying and gasped, “I’m sorry about Dad. I’m really sorry,” and broke the connection.

  I was sixteen when Mack disappeared. His kid sister, Carolyn, following in his footsteps—like him, I attended Columbia, then unlike him I went on to Duke Law School. Mack had been accepted there before he disappeared. After I passed the bar last year, I clerked for a criminal court judge in the courthouse on Centre Street in lower Manhattan. Judge Huot has just retired, so at the moment I’m unemployed. I plan to apply for a job as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, but not quite yet.

  First, I must find a way to track my brother down. What happened to him? Why did he disappear? There was no sign of foul play. Mack’s credit cards weren’t used. His car was in the garage near his apartment. No one of his description ever ended up in the morgue, although in the beginning, my mother and father were sometimes asked to view the body of some unidentified young man who had been fished out of the river or killed in an accident.

  When we were growing up, Mack was my best friend, my confidant, my pal. Half my girlfriends had a crush on him. He was the perfect son, the perfect brother, handsome, kind, funny, an excellent student. How do I feel about him now? I don’t know anymore. I remember how much I loved him, but that love has almost totally turned to anger and resentment. I wish I could even doubt that he’s alive and that someone is playing a cruel trick, but there is no doubt in my mind about that. Years ago we recorded one of his phone calls and had the pattern of his voice compared to his voice from home movies. It was identical.

  All of this means that Mom and I dangle slowly in the wind and, before Dad died in that burning inferno, it was that way for him too. In all these years, I have never gone into a restaurant or theatre without my eyes automatically scanning to see if just maybe, by chance, I will run into him. Someone with a similar profile and sandy brown hair will demand a second look, and, sometimes, close scrutiny. I remember more than once almost knocking people over to get close to someone who turned out to be a perfect stranger.

  All this was going through my mind as I set the volume of the phone on the loudest setting, got into bed, and tried to go to sleep. I guess I did fall into an uneasy doze because the jarring ring of the phone made me bolt up. I saw from the lighted dial on the clock that it was five minutes of three. With one hand I snapped on the bedside light and with the other grabbed the receiver. Mom had already picked up, and I heard her voice, breathless and nervous. “Hello, Mack.”

  “Hello, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day. I love you.”

  His voice was resonant and confident. He sounds as though he doesn’t have a care in the world, I thought bitterly.

  As usual, the sound of his voice shattered Mom. She began to cry. “Mack, I love you. I need to see you,” she begged. “I don’t care what trouble you may be in, what problems you have to solve, I’ll help you. Mack, for God’s sake, it’s been ten years. Don’t do this to me any longer. Please . . . please . . . ”

  He never stayed on the phone for as long as a minute. I’m sure he knew that we would try to trace the call, but now that that technology is available, he always calls from one of these cell phones with a prepaid time card.

  I had been planning what I would say to him and rushed now to make him hear me out before he hung up. “Mack, I’m going to find you,” I said. “The cops tried and failed. So did the private detectives. But I won’t fail. I swear I won’t.” My voice had been quiet and firm, as I had planned, but then the sound of my mother crying sent me over the edge. “I’m going to track you down, you lowlife,” I shrieked, “and you’d better have an awfully good reason for torturing us like this.”

  I heard a click and knew that he had disconnected. I could have bitten my tongue off to take back the name I had called him, but of course it was too late.

  Knowing what I was facing, that Mom would be furious at me for the way I had screamed at Mack, I put on a robe and went down the hall to the suite she and Dad had shared.

  Sutton Place is an upscale Manhattan neighborhood of town houses and apartment buildings overlooking the East River. My father bought this apartment after putting himself through Fordham Law School at night and working his way up to becoming a partner in a corporate law firm. Our privileged childhood was the result of his brains and the hard-work ethic that was instilled in him by his widowed Scotch-Irish mother. He never allowed a nickel of the money my mother inherited to affect our lives.

  I tapped on the door and pushed it open. She was standing at the panoramic window that overlooked the East River. She did not turn, even though she knew I was there. It was a clear night, and to the left I could see the lights of the Queensboro Bridge. Even in this predawn hour, there was a steady stream of cars going back and forth acro
ss it. The fanciful thought crossed my mind that maybe Mack was in one of those cars and, having made his annual call, was now on this way to a distant destination.

  Mack had always loved travel; it was in his veins. My mother’s father, Liam O’Connell, was born in Dublin, educated at Trinity College, and came to the United States, smart, well-educated, and broke. Within five years he was buying potato fields in Long Island that eventually became the Hamptons, property in Palm Beach County, property on Third Avenue when it was still a dirty, dark street in the shadow of the elevated train track that hovered over it. That was when he sent for, and married, the English girl he had met at Trinity.

  My mother, Olivia, is a genuine English beauty, tall, still slender as a reed at sixty-two, with silver hair, blue-gray eyes, and classic features. In appearance, Mack was practically her clone.

  I inherited my father’s reddish brown hair, hazel eyes, and stubborn jaw. When my mother wore heels, she was a shade taller than Dad, and, like him, I’m just average height. I found myself yearning for him as I walked across the room and put my arm around my mother.

  She spun around, and I could feel the anger radiating from her. “Carolyn, how could you talk to Mack like that?” she snapped, her arms wrapped tightly across her chest. “Can’t you understand that there must be some terrible problem that is keeping him from us? Can’t you understand that he must be feeling frightened and helpless and that this call is a cry for understanding?”

  Before my father died, they often used to have emotional conversations like this. Mom, always protective of Mack, my father getting to the point where he was ready to wash his hands of it all and stop worrying. “For the love of God, Liv,” he would snap at Mom, “he sounds all right. Maybe he’s involved with some woman and doesn’t want to bring her around. Maybe he’s trying to be an actor. He wanted to be one when he was a kid. Maybe I was too tough on him, making him have summer jobs. Who knows?”