Maeve saved the best of them, but tossed quite a few. What she wouldn’t give to have them back, all of her baby’s precious crayon drawings. How could she have thrown them away so blindly? Did she think Erin was immortal?
“Damn it,” she whispers, wiping at the tears that are beginning to trickle.
There’s no sign of the sled.
She turns away from her daughter’s belongings, unprepared to keep searching. She’s had enough for today.
But she can’t go upstairs yet.
She can hear the distant rumbling hum of Sissy’s vacuum in the kitchen on the floor above. If only she would just hurry up and finish and get out.
Maeve isn’t leaving the basement until she has her house to herself again. The last thing she wants is the cleaning lady’s sympathy, or worse yet, her prayers.
Prayers are a reminder of the man who killed Erin; of the God who let her die.
Maeve wipes her streaming eyes and nose on the sleeve of her black cashmere cardigan and is instantly reminded of the black cashmere pullover she bought for Jen Carmody just a few weeks ago. She remembers the tension at the dining room table that night. Tension between Kathleen and her father, between Kathleen and Matt, between their daughter and hers.
I can’t stand Jen.
Erin’s words. She and Jen had had a falling out, but Erin refused to tell Maeve why.
Now she’ll never know what came between the girls—unless Jen chooses to tell Kathleen. Highly unlikely.
Nor will Maeve ever know what Erin was doing at the Gattinskis that night with Jen.
You weren’t supposed to be there, Maeve tells her daughter in silent despair. It’s become a familiar refrain. You lied to me. Why did you always have to lie to me?
Yet would it have made any difference if she had known where Erin was going that night when she left? Would Maeve have foreseen danger in a night spent babysitting a few blocks from home?
Of course not.
Reaching into the pocket of her sweater for her cigarettes and lighter, Maeve searches for a place to sit down. She settles for an old webbed lawn chair, reaching up to remove it from the nails in the rafters where it’s been hanging for years.
As she pulls it down something crawls across her hand.
Crying out, she drops the cigarettes, lighter, and chair, also knocking over an old straw broom that was propped against the wall.
The vacuum cleaner is abruptly silenced above, and Sissy’s footsteps approach the basement door. “Mrs. Hudson? Are you all right down there?”
“I’m fine.” Shuddering, she watches an oversized centipede disappear beneath the chair on the floor.
“I thought I heard you scream.”
“I’m fine,” she calls, irritated. “Just finish cleaning, please, Sissy.”
After a moment, the vacuum starts up again.
Maeve warily retrieves her cigarettes and lighter from the concrete floor, leaving the chair and broom where they fell. Settling onto the bottom step, she lights up and inhales a soothing stream of menthol.
There.
Better.
She takes another drag and finds herself facing a stack of high school yearbooks on a nearby shelf. So that’s where they went. She hasn’t seen them in ages.
For a long time, she stares at books, fighting the urge to reach for one.
At last, temptation gets the best of her.
Doesn’t it always? she thinks grimly, lit cigarette clenched between her lips as she opens the yearbook from her senior year at Saint Brigid’s.
She flips past the pages filled with various versions of oversized and backhanded high school girl handwriting punctuated with smiley faces, balloon letters, coded initials whose meanings Maeve has long since forgotten, signatures she’d be hard pressed to match with faces after all these years.
She gazes at her senior portrait, marveling at how much her own daughter was beginning to resemble her, sobbing out loud when she remembers that Erin will never sit for a senior portrait of her own.
She stubs out the cigarette on the basement floor and turns the pages slowly backward until she reaches Kathleen’s face, frozen in time.
Well, she looks nothing like her daughter, Maeve notes with a bizarre twinge of satisfaction. Jen must resemble her deadbeat father. What was his name?
Quent.
Or Quinn.
Quinn something.
Maeve shakes her head, wondering how Kathleen could find herself in so much trouble and still miraculously land on her feet. To think that she was once destitute, out on the streets, carrying a druggie musician’s baby.
To think that now she has it all.
Resentment stirs within Maeve.
Kathleen still has her daughter. God chose to save her daughter. Not Maeve’s daughter.
Kathleen still has her husband.
Her loyal, loving husband.
Or is he?
Was it Maeve’s imagination, or did she catch Matt staring at her the night of Jen’s birthday dinner?
She remembers thinking at the time that she might have seen him stealing a glimpse, remembers wondering if his good night kiss on the cheek was more flirtatious than perfunctory.
She also remembers trying—and failing—to catch his eye afterward, then reasoning with herself that no man in his right mind would blatantly do so with his wife hovering at his elbow.
As she and Erin drove home silently that night in the darkened car, Maeve vowed to try and catch Matt alone, just to see if . . .
Well, if there was anything to her intuition. To see if Kathleen’s perfect husband was as human as anybody else when it came to temptation. As human as Maeve was.
She remembers vowing to find out the answer.
Then her daughter was murdered, and life as Maeve knew it disappeared into haze of hot tears and insomnia, whiskey and cigarette smoke.
Now she’s alone.
Kathleen isn’t alone.
Now she has nothing.
Kathleen . . .
Kathleen has everything.
And slowly, Maeve’s resentment boils over into rage.
Footsteps sound at the top of the stairs.
“Mrs. Hudson? Are you still down there?”
For a moment, she’s tempted not to answer. Can’t the dumb girl just leave her alone?
Then the footsteps start down the stairs, and Maeve sighs. “What do you want, Sissy?”
The girl pauses, her white sneakered feet all that is visible of her body on the top of the cellar steps. “I’m leaving now. Do you want me to lock the doors when I go?”
“Why would you? I’m here.”
“I know, but I thought maybe you’d want the doors locked.”
“Why?”
There’s a pause. “I don’t know.”
“You’re thinking the neighborhood might not be safe anymore, aren’t you, Sissy?”
Maeve watches the girl’s feet twitch anxiously, one sneaker crossing briefly over the other and then back again. “I don’t . . . that’s not why I—”
“You’re thinking that if somebody could slaughter my daughter in cold blood, somebody could walk through my front door and do the same thing to me. Aren’t you, Sissy?”
“No, Mrs. Hudson, I didn’t mean—”
“Trust me, that might be the best thing for everyone.”
No reply.
Sissy shifts her weight.
“Get out of here, Sissy,” Maeve says wearily. “Just go. And don’t lock the doors on your way out. I’ll take my chances.”
“Are you sure you don’t need anything else?”
What could she possibly need that Sissy could possibly provide?
Feeling utterly helpless, overwhelmed by pain, Maeve closes her eyes.
Help.
Ha. The kind of help she needs is beyond reach.
Matt Carmody’s words echo in her head.
If you need anything, I’ll be glad to help you, Maeve . . .
Then again . . .
&n
bsp; Maybe there is something she needs. Something Sissy can’t provide . . .
Something Matt Carmody can.
Maeve glances at her watch. He’d be at work right now. And she has the number. Kathleen proudly gave her one of his business cards back when they first moved here. Maeve slipped it into her wallet and never took it out.
“Mrs. Hudson?”
She glances up impatiently to see that Sissy is still hovering on the stairway above, shifting her weight from foot to foot.
“What?” Maeve asks sharply. “I thought I told you to go.”
“You did . . . It’s just, umm . . .”
Oh. Her pay.
Her thoughts focused on the phone call she’s about to make to Matt Carmody, Maeve sighs and heads for the stairs.
Why can’t I remember?
Jen punches her pillow in frustration, then winces at the pain that shoots down the splintered bones in her fragile arm.
Why does it matter, anyway?
It shouldn’t. She’ll probably be better off if she never has to relive what happened that night.
After all, it’s over.
The man who tried to kill her is dead.
And I’m the one who killed him.
You’d think something like that—taking another person’s life—would be etched in her mind as permanently as Jen’s name is etched in the metal plates on the trophies that line the shelf overhead.
The trophies.
She stares at the shelf as though she’s seeing it for the first time.
With tremendous effort, she hoists herself upright and reaches for the nearest one. It’s heavier than she anticipates—almost too heavy for her to lift now, even with her good arm.
She stares at the gleaming figure of a girl kicking a soccer ball, stares at her name improbably engraved on the brass plate. Jen Carmody.
The trophy—and yes, even the breezy name—seem to belong to somebody else now. A carefree, confident, sturdy stranger . . . not this person whose spirit is as broken as her body, stranded on this island in a sea of pain.
Stranded in solitude she once craved, and now fears.
Why?
Why am I so afraid?
It’s over. I’m safe. He’s dead.
But the reassuring words she keeps repeating to herself—the same words her mother and the doctors have been telling her for weeks now—don’t seem to penetrate.
Maybe it’s because of all the medication she’s been on—medication that’s supposed to ease the ache of her healing wounds and the mending bones of her right leg and left arm. The bitter white pills she obediently swallows every few hours seem to dull her thought processes more than the pain.
Or maybe it’s not the medication at all.
Daddy isn’t my father.
My brothers aren’t my brothers.
My real father is dead.
Jen closes her eyes, trying to block it all out.
Think of something else.
Think of apples.
Apple peels.
Nothing.
Come on, Jen.
Think of what happened that night.
But she can’t. She can’t retrieve whatever it is that keeps flitting in to tease her, then darting just out of reach.
No, the one thing Jen instinctively needs to remember is lost in a haze of images she’d rather forget.
SIXTEEN
Stella’s heels sound hollow on the hardwood floors as she walks one last time through the empty rooms of the first floor.
The living room is bathed in shadows now, the winter afternoon waning quickly. Stella reaches for a wall switch and flips it.
Nothing.
Oh. Right. The lamps are packed; there are no overhead lights or wall sconces in here.
Stella eyes the empty hooks on the barren white walls where framed art once hung. She wonders whether she should pull them out, or leave them for the new owners to deal with.
Leave them, she decides, reaching back to rub her aching shoulders. All I want to do now is get the heck out of—
“Tired?”
She jumps, spins around to see Kurt standing in the doorway.
“You scared me!” Last she knew, he was down in the basement, packing the last of his tools.
He chuckles. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”
She’s reminded of that last day, when she did the same thing to Sissy as she cleaned the upstairs bathroom.
But Sissy was already jumpy that afternoon, having heard somebody creeping around the house earlier.
Was it Kurt?
Or the killer?
Again, Stella wonders how on earth an elderly man—a priest, no less—could possibly have committed such a heinous crime.
“Listen,” Kurt says, glancing at his watch. “I have to get going. I need to be someplace in a few minutes.”
“Meeting your girlfriend?” Stella hears herself ask tartly.
His tone and expression are as bland as an unseasoned potato. “Not until later.”
She nods, wondering what kind of man wouldn’t squirm under his wife’s gaze after admitting a rendezvous with his girlfriend.
The kind of man who’s hollow inside, she concludes. The kind of man who has no feelings; no concern for anybody but himself.
A psychopath.
That’s what you call a person like that. Stella hasn’t forgotten all those deviant psychology courses she took back in college.
No, you didn’t forget what a psychopath was . . . you just forgot to make sure you weren’t marrying one.
A snort escapes her.
Kurt’s eyes narrow.
“What’s so funny?”
Stella shrugs.
“No, really.” He takes a step closer, coming into the shadowy living room with her. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you laughing at me?” The bland expression is gone; his eyes are ablaze with anger.
“Why? Did you say something funny?”
“You seem to think so.”
“No, I don’t. I’m not laughing.” And she isn’t. Not now. Now she’s . . . well, she’s frightened. Of him. It’s ridiculous, but she is.
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
She shouldn’t be afraid of him. She lived with him for years, shared his bed, bore his children. There was a time when she would have gone to the ends of earth if he asked, a time when she would have died for him.
But that was so very long ago . . .
Or was it?
The night of Erin’s murder, she lied to the police to protect Kurt. She was certain they’d be suspicious if she told them about his affair, and just as certain of his innocence.
In the murder, at least.
But there was once a time when she managed to convince herself that he wasn’t cheating on her, wasn’t there?
She was in denial about that.
What if she was in denial about the murder?
She stares at her husband. Her soon-to-be-ex-husband.
Suddenly, it’s as though she’s looking at a complete stranger.
The stuffed pork chops Kathleen baked for supper are drying out in the oven, and still there’s no sign of Matt.
Darkness seemed to descend more swiftly than usual today, casting the house in shadow not long after she and the boys trudged home through the snow from the bus stop. Her feeling of claustrophobia intensified, Kathleen turned on almost every lamp in the house and flipped every outdoor switch as well. Somehow, the artificial light seemed to help dispel her restlessness along with the gloom. So did the fire she lit in the den, and the Christmas videos and DVDs she pulled out to keep the boys occupied.
Now, with the rousing piano music from A Charlie Brown Christmas playing reassuringly in the background, Kathleen peers anxiously through the living room window.
The front yard and the street are blanketed in snow, and it’s still swirling, sparkling like glitter in the glow from the floodlights and lamppost.<
br />
Across the street, Kathleen sees one of her neighbors, undaunted by darkness or the weather, standing on a ladder stapling holiday lights beneath the gutter above his wreath-bedecked front door. A few houses down, a colorful Christmas tree twinkles already in a picture window.
“Christmastime . . . is here . . .”the Peanuts characters chorus in the next room.
Yes, it is. It seems like only moments have passed since Kathleen was contentedly sending the kids off on the bus on the first day of school, warm September sunshine on her shoulders. Now the holidays are upon them, and her world has spun out of control.
Kathleen is surrounded by the familiar trappings of her favorite season, but nothing is as it should be.
And where the hell is Matt? she wonders, searching the street for an arc of headlights turning off Cuttington Road. Nothing but darkness, falling snow, and the rapidly disappearing tracks of a plow that went by more than an hour ago.
Why hasn’t Matt called since this morning?
At first, she was relieved to have a reprieve from the frequently ringing phone and the tiresome questions about Jen’s condition. But as the afternoon wore on, she found herself regretting the way she’d spoken to him earlier, wishing she’d told him to just come on home before the weather got too nasty. She even tried calling him back a few times, but only got his voice mail.
That wasn’t unusual. Matt is frequently away from his desk. But he always calls her back as soon as he gets her message. Always.
“Mommy?”
She looks up to see Riley standing behind her, the spitting image of his daddy, bright blue eyes and dark hair.
Suddenly, she feels a pang of longing for Matt, for the way things used to be between them. How can they ever go back to that now?
We can’t, she realizes, and grief sweeps over her. We’ll never be the same. He’ll never trust me again.
Jen will never trust me again, either. And she doesn’t even know the whole story. If she ever finds out . . .
“Mommy?” Riley says again. “I’m hungry. Can I have a snack?”
“We’re going to eat soon, sweetie. The second Daddy gets home.”
“Well, when is he coming?”
“Any time now.” She glances again out the window. Still no headlights.
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