And I always give him a pass, because that’s how I roll.
Yes, because she knows that Mack acts out of self-preservation: always holding back at least a little piece of himself.
It’s just that lately, her nerves are so frazzled, it’s all she can do not to demand more from him, whether or not he’s capable of giving it. She’s always prided herself on being able to take care of herself and her children and any obstacle fate throws in their path, but this . . .
This nightmare has left her longing, just this once, for someone else to step in and take care of things for her. She wants someone to make it go away, even though she’s well aware that nobody can do that. Not even Mack.
This morning, they watched the live televised press conference held by the local police, who have formed a task force to work on the case.
“We’re following every possible lead,” Captain Cleary said into the microphone, “and we encourage anyone who has any information that might help us to call the special hotline we’ve set up.”
With his take-charge attitude—not to mention his manly good looks—he exuded such confidence that Allison almost fooled herself into thinking the case would be solved in no time.
That lasted about five minutes. Then the press conference ended and it was back to wondering and worrying and trying to stay calm for the kids’ sake.
“Here.” Randi puts a full martini glass into Allison’s hand and clinks her own gently against it. “L’chaim.”
“L’chaim. What does that mean?” she asks, having first heard the Hebrew toast last year, at Lexi’s Bat Mitzvah.
“It means ‘to life.’ Fitting, don’t you think?”
Allison nods, sips, and swallows. The drink is pure alcohol. It burns all the way down her throat and lands in her empty stomach. She hasn’t eaten all day, really, and . . .
I don’t drink like this.
“I know you’re more of a white wine girl,” Randi comments, seeing the look on her face, “but I thought you needed something stronger right now.”
Allison nods, and they both take another silent sip from their glasses. This time, expecting the burn, she welcomes it and the promise of numbness in its wake. She does her best to banish the mental image of her mother, wild-eyed, incoherent, out of control . . .
I could never be like that. One drink isn’t going to do that to me.
“Are you hungry?” Randi asks, and Allison shakes her head.
She’s never hungry anymore. In a matter of days, she’s lost the final few pounds she wanted to lose, and then some.
But she’d better go easy on the alcohol with nothing in her stomach to soak it up. Just another sip or two, and she’ll set the glass aside.
A buzzer rings on their third sip, and Randi furrows her salon-sculpted eyebrows. “Ben?” she calls. “Is there someone out at the gate?”
“Sounds that way,” he returns dryly from the next room, where he and Mack are settled in front of the television with beers.
Randi rolls her eyes. “Would you mind answering the intercom?”
Allison pictures Ben rolling his eyes, too, as he calls back, “Sure, no problem.”
“You’re not expecting anyone?” she asks Randi, who shakes her head.
“No, and I don’t like it when the gate bell rings—or even the phone—when the kids aren’t home.”
Both Lexi and Josh are spending the night at friends’ homes. Knowing how Allison worries about leaving J.J. with a sitter, Randi had arranged sleepovers for her children so that Greta would only have Hudson, Maddy, and J.J. to watch while they were all out at the wake.
The girls, of course, were disappointed that Lexi wouldn’t be here, but not for long. For all her German reserve, Greta manages to be playful, tirelessly engaging the girls even when it comes to Candy Land tournaments that go on for hours.
“Sometimes I just think the worst, you know?” Randi cocks her head, listening as Ben answers the intercom.
“I know.” Allison sips her drink again, not wanting to point out that the worst can—and does—happen.
But not to us. Please, God. Not to us.
In the other room, Ben’s voice and a staticky voice are conversing over the intercom.
“Who do you think that is?” Randi whispers, as if Allison might have some idea.
Allison shrugs, not caring, as long as it’s not an emergency of any sort—and it doesn’t sound like one.
“I’ll be right back. I’m going to go see.”
Randi leaves Allison to sit sipping her drink, thinking about Phyllis’s family, and her own. Thinking about what it would be like for her children, and for Mack, if something were to happen to her. Thinking about what it would be like for her if something were to—
No. I can’t bear to think of it. I can’t.
In the hall, male and female voices mingle with Ben and Randi’s, and she hears footsteps approaching.
The Webers appear in the kitchen doorway, accompanied by an attractive, vaguely familiar-looking couple.
The pale-haired man is dressed in the suburban weekend uniform: chinos, loafers, button-down, and jacket. The brunette woman, in a black coat and dress and holding a Saran-wrapped platter, could be coming from a funeral or going to a party. Her hair is pulled straight back from her face in a long ponytail, a style that would be unbecoming on a less attractive woman . . .
Like me, Allison reminds herself, thinking of all the slap-dash ponytail days when J.J. was in the height of his hair-pulling phase. But the style serves to accentuate the woman’s high cheekbones and large dark eyes.
Ben calls for Mack to come into the kitchen as Randi takes the couple’s coats and turns to Allison.
“You remember Nathan and Zoe Jennings.”
She doesn’t. Should she? Is it the booze?
Crossing to them, feeling a little unsteady on her feet, she forces a smile. Her drink sloshes a bit over the rim of her glass onto her right hand as she goes to transfer it to her left, realizing the man is extending his own hand in greeting.
She quickly wipes on the side of her own black dress—as well cut as Zoe Jennings’s, she’s certain, yet somehow not flattering her own figure nearly as much—and shakes both her hand and her husband’s.
“We were so sorry to hear about your friend,” Zoe tells her.
“Thank you.” Allison sets down her glass on the nearest surface, trying to place the couple.
“Zoe made some brownies. She thought the kids might want a treat,” Nathan says. “But don’t worry, they’re the healthy kind.”
“I use organic oat flour and pureed spinach. No nuts,” Zoe adds. “My kids don’t like them, and I figure your girls probably don’t, either.”
Allison’s first thought is that she’s right—the girls don’t like nuts, but they don’t like spinach in their brownies, either.
Her next thought is that Zoe somehow knows that she has daughters, that she lost a friend—and, obviously, knows Mack, because when he appears in the doorway, Zoe makes a beeline over to hug him.
“I was so looking forward to getting together tonight,” she tells him.
She was?
“When I called Ben and Randi to invite them to join us, too,” she goes on, “Randi told me what had happened. We’d heard about it, of course, but we had no idea she was your neighbor. Randi said you were staying here until . . . well, until everything blows over.”
“We tried to call earlier and see if it was okay to stop by, but we couldn’t get ahold of you,” Nathan puts in.
“We just came from the wake.” Randi puts the platter of brownies on the table and peels back the plastic wrap.
“Was it awful?”
No, it was absolutely delightful, Allison finds herself wanting to say to this Zoe person who apparently made Saturday night plans with Mack and puts spinach in brownies and has now taken off her coat to show off a killer body. No cleavage—the dress is conservatively cut—but it’s slinky enough to reveal that she’s either had a bo
ob job, or is wearing the world’s most invisible bra.
Allison can’t help but check to see if Mack is looking at Zoe’s figure, but he’s not. He catches her eye and his mouth quirks a little, not a smile, not a frown, but an expression she can easily decipher after all their years together.
Sorry about these people, he’s saying. I know you’re not in the mood to socialize with strangers.
He’s right about that.
Suddenly, she longs to be home, despite everything. Home with her husband and children, where they belong. Home where she’ll feel more like herself and Mack will act more like himself and everything will be back to normal . . .
Except, how can it ever be normal now?
“I’m sorry we had to meet under these circumstances,” Nathan is saying, and Allison realizes he’s talking to her.
“Oh . . . I . . . so am I.”
“We’d still love to have you guys over,” Zoe tells her, “after the dust settles.”
After the dust settles—an awkward thing to say after a funeral, but the irony seems to escape Zoe, making Allison like her even less.
Again, she looks at Mack.
Reading her mind, he says, “I forgot to tell you, Al— right before everything happened, I ran into Nate on the train and he and Zoe had invited us over for Saturday night—tonight.”
“That’s . . . nice.” But who the hell are these people?
“You’ll have to be sure and take that rain check,” Zoe says, “and I promise that when you do come, we won’t just talk about old times.”
“You’re the one who already dug out all those old pictures to show Mack and Ben,” her husband reminds her.
“I’m sure Allison and Randi want to see them, too.”
“Are they incriminating?” Randi asks Zoe, and Allison notes that her martini glass is almost empty. “Because I always like to see incriminating pictures from Ben’s past . . . as long as they were taken before he met me.”
“Well, I’m sure Nate has a few of those. The guys used to go to all the big media parties.”
“So did you,” Mack tells Zoe, with a grin.
For a brief, irrational instant, Allison resents it.
How, she wonders, can he be suddenly smiling after all that’s gone on the last few days? And at a total stranger—if only to Allison—who’s returning it with such ease; an outsider who came barging in at the least opportune moment, when Allison was ready to be alone with her friends and her husband and her thoughts and her good, stiff drink.
Oh please. It’s not about you, she reminds herself, picking up her glass and relishing another burning sip. Don’t be petty.
Still, she can’t help but feel wistful over Mack’s sudden jovial demeanor, given the darkness of his mood these last few days. Never one to share emotions—ha, understatement of the year—he seems to have retreated emotionally more than ever lately, whenever they’re together.
Which hasn’t been often. To Allison’s dismay, he went into the office on Wednesday morning for a few hours to attend his meeting, and back again on Thursday, after taking the first part of the day off to handle the alarm installation. Yesterday, he put in a full day at work.
“I have to go,” he told her when she protested, and reminded her that she and the kids are completely safe at Ben and Randi’s. The house is like a fortress. It isn’t even just the house; the property is surrounded by an electronic security fence and an access-control iron gate.
“I’d feel safer with you here,” she told Mack.
“Okay, but it’s not like you really are any safer, and it’s not like going to work is optional. Especially with everything that’s going on right now.”
He was talking about what was going on at the office, she knew—as if that could possibly hold a candle to the hell that had broken loose in their lives.
“You get personal days, though, Mack. Maybe—”
“I used them up in September when I stayed home to paint the sunroom, remember?”
“What about a bereavement day? You can take one for Phyllis’s funeral on Monday morning—”
“I only get those if an immediate family member dies,” he replied, and the words made her shudder inside.
“Someone did die. This is serious, and—”
“Allison, for the love of God! Stop! Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I want to go to work?”
Taken aback by his explosion, she just looked at him.
“I’m up to my eyeballs in problems right now and heads are already rolling! I can’t just take off right now because a neighbor passed away!”
“She didn’t pass away—she was murdered!”
“Do you think that makes any difference at all to my boss? My job is on the line here!”
So are our lives, she wanted to remind him—but when she noticed the irate look in his eye, she was afraid to. Suddenly, she was afraid of him.
Looking back on that conversation—as she has done many times since—she’s convinced herself that she overreacted. She used to have a corporate job herself; she knows the kind of pressure he’s facing. At least, she used to know.
Mack is just doing what he has to do: going to work, earning a living. She doesn’t need to make it harder for him; she’s always prided herself on being self-sufficient, perfectly capable of taking care of herself and the kids—and on not being one of those wives who spends her husband’s money without a care. She’s not like that. She knows how hard he works.
So why did you have to give him such a hard time? It isn’t like you.
No, and Mack wasn’t behaving like himself, either.
The pressure is getting to both of them.
With Allison’s self-loathing over her resentment of his obligation to his job has come a hefty dose of guilt—it’s not like you’re sharing the breadwinner burden—and, more than anything else, terror.
She jumps at every little noise, perpetually looking out the windows and over her shoulder, expecting to see . . .
Him.
The hooded figure who attacked her in her bedroom that night ten years ago.
The Nightwatcher.
God help her, God help them all; it wasn’t Jerry Thompson, who is safely dead and buried.
It was someone else, and he’ll be back, and how can Mack just be standing here right now in the Webers’ kitchen holding a beer and smiling like an idiot at this woman who won’t shut up?
“I never went to the magazine parties where the guys all met the Penthouse Pet of the Year,” Zoe is saying, ostensibly to Randi and Allison, though she’s looking at their husbands, “and I wasn’t even invited the time Hugh Hefner flew everyone out to the Playboy Mansion for—”
“Whoa, easy now, Zoe,” Ben cuts in with a laugh. “Randi doesn’t want to hear about that, do you, babe?”
“Trust me, I don’t, and Allison doesn’t, either, do you, Al?”
“No, thanks,” she says with absolute conviction.
Now she remembers—Zoe. She’s the woman Mack used to work with, the one who got married and moved up here not long ago. Allison didn’t recognize her with her hair pulled back. Mack was talking to her the night of the Webers’ party, the night . . .
The night I noticed that my nightgown was missing.
She closes her eyes and swallows hard, remembering the last time she saw it—bloodstained, on Phyllis Lewis’s lifeless body.
The others continue talking and laughing around her as though nothing terrible has happened, and Allison loses herself, once again, in the nightmare.
“ . . . just the way you look . . . tonight.” Rocky finishes singing and leans over to kiss his wife’s forehead. “Yeah, yeah, I know . . . I’m no Sinatra, but I’d say that wasn’t half bad, huh, Ange?”
Encouraged by the ripple of movement beneath her closed eyelids, his heart lifts another notch, buoyed by a gust of hope.
It’s been happening more and more frequently today—this visible twitching of her eyes and her mouth and her fingers. Ye
sterday, too, according to Carm, but Rocky wasn’t here much, busy with the case up in Westchester.
The news that Phyllis Lewis had been raped really threw things off for him, and instantly led to a couple of conclusions. Most importantly, he’s almost positive—much to his relief—that he hadn’t arrested the wrong guy in the Nightwatcher case after all.
Given the departure in signature, it looks more like they’re dealing with a copycat killer—and clearly, it isn’t a female, which lets Allison Taylor MacKenna off the hook. As for her husband . . . James MacKenna was there with her that day ten years ago. Not married to Allison at the time; he was just a neighbor, as was Kristina Haines.
Rocky clearly remembers interviewing him back then, and quickly dismissing him as a suspect. He was as all-American Mr. Nice Guy as they come: former altar boy and Big Brother volunteer, with a respectable family background and solid career, not an overdue library book or parking ticket to his name. Beyond that, the guy’s wife had been among the thousands of New Yorkers missing in the twin towers; his alibi the night of Kristina’s murder was that he’d been desperately searching hospitals and victim centers for her.
As Rocky recalls, Carrie MacKenna was one of the first names to emerge on the official lists of those who had been confirmed dead.
Later, the New York Times printed the “Portraits of Grief” series that captured each of the victims—not in formal obituaries, but essays about their personal lives, about who they had been, rather than what they had done. He remembers reading the one about Carrie, and noting that her husband mentioned that they’d been trying to start a family, battling infertility . . .
At the time, Rocky’s oldest son, Tony, and his wife, Laura, were enduring the same grueling, expensive treatments. He remembers feeling sorry for James MacKenna, who had gone through so much already in his efforts to become a father, and in the end found himself alone and bereft.
What are the odds that the guy might emerge a decade later as a cold-blooded copycat killer?
Not nearly as high as the odds that Jerry Thompson talked in prison.
Rocky and Murph are planning to head over to Sullivan Correctional to see what they can find out. Thompson could very well have shared the details of his crimes with a since-released inmate—one who decided to duplicate the crimes for kicks, and add rape to the signature. With luck, they’ll be able to pinpoint a suspect and match him to the semen collected at the scene.
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