She keeps hearing his voice, remembering how halting it was the few times she heard him speak. She keeps seeing that vacant stare of his—not evil-vacant, the way people have described other serial killers’ eyes, but more like . . .
The lights are on but nobody’s home.
That’s what Allison thought the first time she ever crossed paths with Jerry the handyman.
Dim-witted doesn’t equal guileless, she reminds herself.
Still, having grown up fending for herself, she learned early on how to read other people, instinctively grasping whom she could trust and who might be dangerous.
Not dangerous, necessarily, in a physical sense, but dangerous to her emotional well-being. It would have been harsh enough to grow up in an impoverished single-parent household in a gossip-fueled, intolerant small town. But with a deadbeat father who walked out one day and never looked back, and a mother whose drug habit was common knowledge . . .
Yes, Allison learned exactly whom she could trust back in her hometown: not a soul.
Later, in college and in Manhattan, she did eventually forge relationships with friends and with a few men she dated. But her instincts about new people always proved to be dead-on.
How could she have been so wrong about Jerry?
How could she not have known?
Somehow, she should have picked up on something about him.
But you didn’t, okay? Why is this nagging you ten years later, especially now?
You have to let it die with him. You have to.
Sitting here on the couch in her cozy lamp-lit living room, she’s read everything she could find on the Internet about his suicide. She’s hoping that if her lingering questions are answered, she’ll be able to put it to rest once and for all.
She learned that he’d done it with poison. He’d swallowed cleaning fluid.
It’s not clear how he managed to get his hands on it. One of the guards was quoted—anonymously, of course—as saying that inmates who work on janitorial duty have been known to smuggle chemicals into their cells.
But Jerry worked in the prison library. According to the guard, he wouldn’t have had access to cleaning fluid.
So what does that mean? That he convinced someone to get it for him? God only knows what he had to do in return.
So what? He was an animal. He deserved whatever he got, and then some.
Another guard reported that it wasn’t an easy death, or a pretty one.
Yeah, well, neither was Kristina Haines’s.
Allison closes out of the last screen, leans her head back, and exhales slowly through her nostrils.
Okay.
Now she knows.
Now are you satisfied?
She listens for an answer, but all she hears is a dog barking someplace outside and the ticking of the clock in the next room. It’s an antique. Mack’s sister, Lynn, gave it to them when they bought the house.
“It used to be our grandmother’s,” she told Allison, “and then it was in our house when we were growing up. I took it when Mack and I were packing up the house to sell it. I took just about everything, because he was afraid to.”
“What do you mean?”
Lynn shrugged. “Carrie didn’t want old things around. I guess since she didn’t have a past, she didn’t want to be reminded that Mack did.”
“Everyone has a past” was Allison’s reply, and she was relieved when Lynn changed the subject.
She’s never been comfortable discussing Carrie with anyone but Mack himself. She knows that Ben and Randi didn’t like Carrie, and that Lynn merely tolerated her to keep the peace. But she doesn’t intend to be one of those second wives who badmouth the first, especially since the marriage ended in death and not divorce.
What does it matter now, anyway? Carrie is gone.
So is Jerry Thompson.
It’s time you let this rest, Allison tells herself, stretching.
On that note . . .
It’s time you went to bed.
She closes the laptop, puts it on the coffee table, and immediately thinks better of it. J.J. will be on the move first thing in the morning.
Carrying the laptop over to the built-in shelves beside the fireplace, she wonders if Mack is still awake upstairs. She’d half expected him to resurface—or at least, expected to hear creaking floorboards overhead.
Is it possible he’s asleep?
Please, please, please let him be asleep.
He was in such a foul mood tonight. She knows he’s overtired, but sometimes she feels like she’s dealing with a fourth child—one who can be even more unreasonable than the others at the end of a long day.
She usually opts to give Mack a pass when he’s so obviously exhausted. Considering all that’s gone on this week, he deserved one tonight. But it took every ounce of patience she possessed not to snap right back at him earlier, when they were talking in the sunroom.
Oh well. If he really does get a good night’s sleep, tomorrow will undoubtedly be a better day.
Allison tucks the laptop away on a high shelf, then turns off the table lamp. She feels her way back across the pitch-black room, thinking she should have remembered to turn on a light over by the doorway, or near the foot of the stairs.
She’s rarely the last one up at night. Mack is usually down here when she goes to bed, unless he’s away on a business trip. Though lately, there are times when he’s still at work, and she leaves the lights on and a foil-covered plate in the oven.
Tonight, the dark, quiet house isn’t feeling like quite the safe haven it should be.
Reaching the front hall, Allison spots a human shadow looming just inside the door. A tide of panic sweeps her back to a Manhattan bedroom ten years ago, and a hooded figure is lunging at her with a knife . . .
She cries out and jumps back—then realizes that it’s not a human shadow at all; it’s the coat tree draped with jackets.
Pressing a hand against her pounding heart, she looks up the stairs, expecting someone to come rushing to her aid, having heard her scream.
Not the girls—they’re deep sleepers. But Mack must have heard her . . . unless he, too, is sleeping that soundly.
Or what if . . . ?
The thought is so dreadful she can’t bear to let it in.
Taking the stairs two at a time, she tries to shut out another memory trying to shove its way into her mind.
She was the one who found her mother dead on the bathroom floor in the middle of the night, having overdosed on sleeping pills.
No . . .
No, please . . .
Reaching the master bedroom, she bursts through the door. “Mack?”
No voice reassuringly responds, no one stirs in the darkened room.
She flips on the light and sees her husband huddled in the bed.
“Mack!” She moves toward him.
Still nothing.
Please, no . . .
She leans over, seeing her mother’s lifeless form in her mind’s eye, hearing her own shallow breathing as terror takes over . . .
And then, something else.
Not Mack’s voice . . . but his snoring.
Soft, rhythmic snoring.
For the second time in perhaps a minute, Allison goes limp with relief.
He’s alive. Thank God. Thank God.
Of course he is!
What the heck were you thinking? He’s just asleep!
And there’s no one lurking in the hallway downstairs.
And the man who tried to kill you ten years ago is dead. Okay? Can you relax now? Do you finally understand that you have nothing to worry about?
A smile plays at Allison’s lips as she hurriedly strips off her clothes, pulls on a nightgown, and goes through her bathroom routine.
Yes. Tomorrow is definitely going to be a brighter day, she thinks as she climbs into bed beside her peacefully slumbering husband.
Robbie Masters’s mother is always warning him that hanging around stoned outside the gas station
mini-mart in Monticello will get him into trouble, but that shows how much she knows.
Talk about being in the right place at the right time.
A little while ago, when the car pulled up alongside him and the driver beckoned him over, he figured it was someone who’d taken a wrong exit off the highway and needed directions. That, or someone was looking to score some weed and wanted access to Robbie’s dealer.
Boy, was he wrong.
Robbie is careful not to jostle the insulated blue bag as he carries it toward the guardhouse at the main entrance. Having grown up a mere twenty-minute drive away from Fallsburg, this is the closest he’s ever come to the massive correctional facility—and he hopes it’s the closest he ever has to get.
He may be a high school dropout, and he’s had some minor run-ins with the cops, but he’s never going to get into the kind of trouble that will land him in a place like this, no matter what his mother thinks. No way, Jose.
“I need to drop this off for one of the corrections officers,” he tells the guard, who looks warily at him through the window.
“What is it?”
Robbie shrugs and holds out the bag. “It’s his lunch. He forgot it. His wife asked me to leave it for him. His name’s Chuck Nowak. See? His initials are right here on the bag.”
“You can’t just—”
“Please, sir,” Robbie cuts in, because the person who’s paying him to do this told him to be polite, “it’s just a sandwich and a bag of chips and an apple . . . See for yourself. It’s not going to blow up or anything.”
“But who—”
“Look, you can give it to him or not. No skin off my nose. I’ve got to get going.” Robbie sets the bag on the ledge beneath the guard’s window, turns around, and strides quickly to his waiting car.
His heart is racing. He half expects the guard to come running after him, or the bag to blow up, even, despite what he said.
Yeah, it’s a sandwich, chips, an apple, a drink. He made sure of that before he agreed to drive the damned thing up here. Still . . . you never know.
No one in his right mind pays a total stranger two hundred bucks to deliver a bag lunch—with explicit instructions for Robbie to keep his hood up and tied so tightly that his face is barely visible.
For that matter, no one in his right mind goes around wearing a woman’s clothing, a wig, and makeup.
But again, that’s no skin off Robbie’s nose. If Chuck Nowak the prison guard wants to pass off a freaking drag queen as his wife, that’s fine with Robbie. It’s all fine with Robbie, just as long as he gets paid.
He tears back down to the main road and drives a couple of miles to the secluded spot where he agreed to meet the so-called Mrs. Nowak.
The car is parked there, headlights off.
Robbie turns off his own headlights, but not the engine. Take the money and run—that’s the plan. He doesn’t feel like hanging around in the woods with a cross-dressing freak for one second longer than necessary.
He strides over to the driver’s side of the other car, expecting the door to open.
It doesn’t.
Maybe the freak fell asleep waiting.
Robbie reaches the car and raps on the window. “Hey,” he calls—then realizes that the driver’s seat is empty.
Maybe he . . . she . . . it got out to take a leak.
Maybe the whole thing is some kind of joke.
Maybe—
A twig snaps behind him.
Robbie whirls around to see the freak standing there.
But he never sees the blade that slices through the air and into his jugular vein, and he never hears the words, “Sorry, kid,” whispered into the darkness before the stranger drags him deep into the woods where he’ll never be found.
Frowning, Chuck hangs up—again—on Cora’s cell phone voice mail. The first time, five minutes ago, he left a message.
“Babe, what’s up with this lunch you left me? This is your bag. I had mine. Call me.”
The second time, maybe three minutes ago, his message was terse: “Cora. Call me when you get this.”
Between those two calls, and the one he just made, he called the home number, too. It went right into voice mail.
Is that because she drove out here to Fallsburg? If she had, she wouldn’t be back home yet.
But Paul down at the guardhouse assured him that it wasn’t Cora who dropped off the lunch bag. It was some kid who said she’d sent him.
None of this makes sense.
Chuck’s heart races as he again regards the blue insulated bag that bears his initials—and Cora’s. Sitting beside it on the break room table is the identical bag he’d grabbed when he left the house.
His hand shakes as he reaches inside to remove the contents. He and Paul went through the bag down at the guardhouse, too, just making sure it really does contain food.
Now, Chuck lays it all out on the table.
First, a bottle of Poland Spring sparkling water with lemon essence—there were three left in the six-pack in the fridge back home when he packed his lunch earlier. He took one. This, presumably, is one of the two that remained.
The next two items are also duplicated in the lunch he packed himself: a green Granny Smith apple—one a day keeps the doctor away; the fridge is full of them—and a snack bag of Snyder’s pretzels, which he buys in bulk at BJ’s; there were at least a dozen bags left in the cupboard.
Then there’s the hero sandwich.
His own sandwich is peanut butter and jelly made on Wonder bread, but this—this doesn’t sit well with him.
No, not at all.
He puts the sandwich on the table and dials Cora’s phone again with a forefinger shaking so badly he can barely guide it to the numbers.
This time, it rings only once before a brisk “Hello?”
“Cora!” he blurts, even though he knows in the split second he says it—even in the split second he heard the voice—that it isn’t her.
“Who?”
He jerks the phone away from his ear, looks at the screen, and sees that he dialed a wrong number. With a curse, he disconnects the call. Painstakingly, he redials.
This time, the line rings several times, and it’s Cora’s recorded outgoing message that greets him when it bounces into voice mail.
“Please, Cora,” he says hoarsely, “please call me right away. I’m . . . worried about you.”
Yes. He’s always worried about her, but . . .
This is different. This isn’t just casual concern.
Something is wrong.
Some instinct, some sixth sense, had told him that back at the house earlier, when he felt as though he was being watched, and now . . .
He ends the call and looks again at the lunch spread out on the table; at the food; the sandwich in particular.
It looks store-bought, well-wrapped in cellophane, with what looks like meat and cheese, lettuce, tomato, and onion layered thickly between the top and bottom halves of the roll.
Yes, it must be store-bought, because none of those ingredients were in the house when Chuck left just a few hours ago, and he can’t see Cora going out to buy meat and cheese. She’s a vegetarian. She’ll look the other way when Chuck eats meat, but she sure as hell doesn’t encourage it.
Heart pounding, he reaches out and unwraps it.
He lifts the top of the roll.
At a glance, he thinks he’s looking at some kind of mottled slice of meat oozing with ketchup.
Then he sees it.
CN2.
Surrounded by a heart.
He sees it, and he knows.
It isn’t meat. It’s skin, human flesh . . .
It isn’t ketchup. It’s blood . . .
It’s Cora, and the toxic horror washing through Chuck Nowak’s system bubbles from his lips in an unearthly howl.
PART II
To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
/> That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d.
William Shakespeare
Chapter Five
Saturday, October 1, 2011
“And then we have to go buy some new colored pencils so that I can— Daddy!” In the midst of outlining her plans for the day, Hudson breaks off with a happy exclamation. “You’re up!”
Allison turns away from the cup of coffee she was about to stir and sees Mack standing in the doorway, wearing plaid boxer shorts and an old gray T-shirt.
He takes in the Saturday morning scene—Allison in her bathrobe standing at the counter, his nightgown-clad daughters with bowls of cereal at the table, J.J. in his high chair happily finger painting with goo that was once a handful of dry cereal.
Then he smiles. “Morning, guys. What’d I miss?”
Allison opens her mouth, but Hudson jumps in before she can speak.
“You missed that we’re putting on a show! I’m going to be the star and the director, and Maddy is going to be the actress, and J.J. is playing a sheep and maybe a baby. And we’re making posters to put up all over town so people will come. Right, Mommy?”
“Right,” Allison agrees, having long ago realized that when Hudson embarks on a creative project, it’s best to go along with her in the brainstorming stage and rein her in later, when—if—logistics actually come into play.
Maddy—who learned the same thing—just smiles at her father as he bends to kiss her on the head.
“How’s the Cap’n Crunch?” he asks the girls.
Maddy informs him that it’s yummy, while Hudson says wistfully, “I wish we could have it every single morning.”
She shoots a pointed look at Allison, who shrugs.
“Sugary cereal isn’t good for you. That’s why you only get it on Saturdays.”
If she had her way, they wouldn’t even keep it in the house—though if Mack had his, they’d all eat it every morning.
The once-a-week Cap’n Crunch rule is one of countless parenting compromises they’ve made over the years, many about food.
Mack has such a sweet tooth that he can’t even eat an apple without cutting it up and dredging the slices in a cinnamon-sugar mixture. He’s agreed not to do that in front of the girls, though, after unsuccessfully trying to convince Allison that fruit is fruit.
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