“Sure.” David nods politely.
In truth, he doesn’t want the coffee his hostess insisted on brewing, nor does he want to see pictures. But it seems to be almost therapeutic for Olivia’s mother to share her memories of her daughter.
Again, David wonders if his own grief for Angela might be tempered if he hadn’t isolated himself in his lonely, sorrowful little world.
Joanne moves purposefully for the first time since David arrived, standing and crossing swiftly to the shelf beside the fireplace. She plucks a thick photo album from the end of a long row of them and carries it over to David.
“The first few pages show what she looked like before the surgery,” she says, as he opens the album. He murmurs appropriate comments as he peruses the photographs of a plain-looking young woman whose eyes, when they aren’t obscured by dark glasses, betray her blindness in a vacant upward stare.
“This is her right after the bandages came off,” Ralph says, having come to flank David’s chair with his wife. He turns on a floor lamp behind the chair, illuminating the page.
“She looks happy.” David scrutinizes the young woman’s smiling face, telling himself that those are Angela’s eyes twinkling up at him.
But they aren’t. Not really. Olivia McGlinchie looks nothing like his late wife. Perhaps it would have been different to gaze into her eyes in person, but now, as he stares at the photo, David feels no connection to Angela; nothing other than sorrow for this poor girl’s tragic death.
He flips through the pages as her parents describe various scenes: Olivia learning to drive, Olivia tossing a Frisbee at the Jersey Shore with Buddy, Olivia on the top of the Empire State Building with binoculars . . .
“This one was taken on her last birthday,” Joanne says, pointing to the last photo in the album, a group snapshot. “One of her newer friends sent it to us in a Christmas card a few months ago. She said she had forgotten she even took the picture and came across it when she had an old roll of film developed. She thought we might like to have it.”
The photo shows a collection of young men and women posing around Olivia, with a birthday cake in the foreground, covered in lit candles.
His hand poised to close the album, David says, “How nice. They must have thrown her a part—”
He stops short.
Shakes his head.
It can’t be . . .
His heart pounding, he holds the album up to the light.
Panting, his veins still pumping with adrenaline and fury, he gives Luke Pfleuger’s battered, bloody corpse one last kick before leaving it on the ground at the foot of the lattice.
He turns to stride away, then curses under his breath.
The car, he realizes, is still in the driveway, motor still running, headlights on.
Certain it’s only a matter of moments before somebody in the house realizes it’s there, he contemplates slipping into the driver’s seat and moving it. If only he had on a pair of gloves . . . But his hands are bare, and he can’t risk leaving fingerprints on the steering wheel. The car will have to stay there. But he can at least turn it off, so that it’ll take a little longer before Rose or her sister-in-law spots it.
He can hardly believe they didn’t hear the scuffle, or Luke’s strangled, gurgling gasps as the life drained out of him.
He untucks his shirt from his jeans and leans in the open car door. After wrapping his shirttail around his fingers, he grasps the key and turns it.
The motor’s hum ceases.
He glances up through the windshield.
Pfleuger’s body, the throat slit from ear to ear, is illuminated in the headlights’s glow, the spotlight act in a macabre theater.
His only regret is that he couldn’t use the monogrammed letter opener he stole from David Brookman’s study to do it. It served him well with Olivia, and again this afternoon. But he left it behind, carelessly tossed into a thatch of pachysandra not far from Isabel’s body, where the crime scene detectives will be sure to find it and assume her assailant accidentally dropped it as he fled. It will be all the evidence they need to arrest David Brookman as a suspect.
Brilliant. It saved him having to lug her body all the way to David Brookman’s cabin.
Brilliant, too, that he thought to arm himself with a kitchen knife before venturing over here this evening. It was just a hunch—he never dreamed he’d need to use it. Luck is certainly with him tonight. He takes that as a sign that accelerating his plan was the right thing to do.
Wincing, he uses his fabric-wrapped hand to turn off the lights. His palm is sore where the splinter went in, and his knuckles are bleeding.
He thinks he’d better get the hell out of here before somebody sees him. He doesn’t want to risk getting caught. Not now, when completion is so close at hand.
After stepping out of the car, he turns to look at the house one last time. The light is still on in the bathroom window upstairs.
“Sweet dreams, Angela. I’ll see you tomorrow,” he whispers softly, before scurrying off into the night.
“Christine? I’m home,” Ben’s voice calls from downstairs.
Crouched on the bathroom floor in front of the toilet, she doesn’t answer him.
“Christine?”
She waits, half-expecting to hear his footsteps coming up the steps, but instead they retreat to the back of the first floor. He knows she’s here—her car is in the driveway. Yet he didn’t even bother to come up and make sure she’s all right.
She hears the pipes groan as water begins to run in the downstairs bathroom.
Ben is washing up at the sink, she knows. It’s the first thing he does every night when he walks in the door, saying he has to get the city grime and newsprint off his hands.
Another wave of nausea grips her and she stares miserably into the vomit-filled toilet bowl. It’s like the chemo all over again, she thinks bleakly, wondering what the hell is wrong with her.
It couldn’t be all that crap you gorged on earlier, could it?
The thought of potato chips and Twinkies is enough to gag her, but she really didn’t eat that much. Not enough to make her this sick.
If she didn’t have her period, she might be able to convince herself that her body clock is screwed up and this is a bout of morning sickness, but it would be wishful thinking, of course. She no longer believes she’ll ever get pregnant. They’ve been trying for months, to no avail.
Plop . . . plop . . . plop . . .
Damn that dripping tub faucet. She still hasn’t called a plumber, and God knows she can’t ask Rose Larrabee about the one she uses now.
“Christine?” Ben’s footsteps are on the stairs at last.
Good. Let him find her here in all her misery. Let him feel sorry that he took his time coming home tonight, that he didn’t come right up here to check on her first thing.
Yeah, right. Ben, she knows, is immune to guilt.
She coughs loudly, forcing a dry heave, wishing she could make herself retch right about now to show him exactly how miserable she is. But the urge seems to have passed, her empty stomach left merely queasy in the wake of the storm.
Ben knocks at the bathroom door. “Christine? You in there?”
“Yes.” Her voice is wan.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m sick.”
He opens the door and looks in. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know . . . I think I have that flu you had or something.”
Ben takes a step backward. “Don’t give it back to me. I can’t afford to get sick at this time of year. I’d better sleep downstairs on the couch tonight.”
She tries to tell herself that he’s really not a selfish bastard. That she should know better than to expect tea and sympathy from him. That he’s overworked and overtired, and he never was the nurturing type in the first place.
“Do you, uh, need anything?” he asks belatedly, as though he just realized he should at least pretend that he cares about her.
“J
ust to be left alone.”
“Do you think you’re going to be long?” Ben is still hovering in the doorway. “Because I want to take a shower before bed.”
“Trust me, when I’m done vomiting, you’ll be the first to know,” she snaps, reaching out with her foot to kick the door closed in his face as she gags again, this time for real.
This time, when Leslie calls home, Peter answers the phone on the first ring.
“There you are!” Relieved, she smiles and nods at Rose, who has looked up expectantly from the field trip permission slip she’s filling out for Jenna to take back to school in the morning.
“I had to run out and pick up a few things,” he says, sounding a little breathless.
“Really? Like what?”
“Just some stuff . . . you know, from the drugstore.”
“Guy stuff?”
“Yeah. Listen, what’s up? Where are you? I thought you’d be home by now.”
“Didn’t you get my message?”
“No, I just walked back in the door.”
“Oh. Well, I wanted to tell you I’m staying here with Rose tonight.”
“You are?” He sounds disappointed. “If I had known that, I would’ve just gone home tonight instead of tomorrow.”
“You’re going home tomorrow night?”
“I have to. I haven’t even gotten my mail in days, Les.”
“But then I won’t see you till Thursday.”
“So come home tonight. I’m here now. And I’ve got a surprise for you.”
“You do?”
“Yup. Just come home.”
“I’d love to, but . . .” She glances across the room at Rose, curled up on the couch leafing through her magazine. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll tell you later. So . . . have a good night, Peter. Can I still get that surprise when I see you?”
“Definitely.”
“Love you.”
“You, too,” he says. He never actually uses the word love, she realizes. Just echoes you too whenever she says it.
She hangs up the phone and sets it on the table beside her chair, frowning.
“What’s wrong?” Rose asks.
“Did Sam ever say ‘I love you’?”
“All the time. Why?”
“Peter doesn’t.”
“Ever?”
“No.” She sighs, filled with doubt about Peter, their wedding, their future. “Sometimes I wonder . . .”
“What?”
She wants to tell Rose how lucky she was to have had Sam. For as long as they were together, there was never any doubt that he loved her.
But Rose already knows that.
And anyway, Peter isn’t Sam, Leslie reminds herself for the second time today. You can’t compare. It isn’t fair.
Plus, Peter just said he has a surprise for you. He sounded so mysterious. Maybe it’s—
“Leslie?” Rose prods, breaking into her thoughts. “Sometimes you wonder what?”
“Oh . . . never mind.” She checks her watch. “Hey, what time did you say your boss was coming over?”
“I have no idea. It’s getting late, isn’t it? Maybe he for—”
“Why don’t you call the store to remind him?”
“It’s already closed.”
“Do you have his home number?”
“No, and even if I did, I wouldn’t use it. I guess if he doesn’t show up, I’ll have to get the check tomorrow.” Rose reaches for the remote control. “Come on, let’s find some sappy girl movie to watch on TV to take our minds off our troubles. Too bad I don’t have a bag of chips in the cupboard. I could really go for—”
“Chips! Oh, Rose, I almost forgot. Your neighbor, Christine.”
Rose glances at her, startled. “Christine? What about her?”
“I saw her today. She was taking groceries out of her car—she dropped a bag of chips, which is what made me think of her. So anyway, I asked her if she’d seen the puppy—she hasn’t. But she said to tell you again how sorry she was for yesterday.”
“She did?”
Leslie nods. “I felt kind of sorry for her. She seemed so . . . I don’t know. There’s just something about her that struck me as sort of pathetic. What’s up with her marriage?”
“I never see her husband. He commutes, and he’s always at—”
The phone rings suddenly, startling both of them. “Want me to get it?” Leslie asks, reaching for it on the table beside her chair.
“Would you?”
“Sure. Maybe it’s your boss.” She lifts the cordless receiver and presses Talk. “Hello?”
Silence.
Then a man says, “Uh, who is this?”
“Who is this?” she shoots back, though she recognizes the voice.
Scott Hitchcock.
“Uh, I was looking for Rose—”
‘This is Leslie. Hang on a second.” She raises an eyebrow at Rose as she passes her the phone. “It’s Hitch.”
“Hitch?” Rose looks surprised. Pleasantly so.
Leslie watches her carry the phone into the other room.
I knew it, she thinks, shaking her head, looking up at a framed photo on the mantel. I just knew it. He’s trying to take your place, Sam. And I hate to say it, but . . . I have a feeling she’s going to let him.
“Who . . . do you know who this is?” David asks the McGlinchies when he manages to find his voice. He points at the smiling young man standing beside their daughter in the photo.
“No, I don’t . . . do you, Joanne?”
She shakes her head, telling both her husband and David, “These are friends Olivia made that last summer, after she regained her sight. She met most of them in the city, I think.”
“Do you mind if I take the photo out of the album so that I can take a closer look?” David is already slipping it, with trembling fingers, from its protective plastic pocket.
“What’s the matter?” Ralph asks. “Are you all right?”
“I just . . .” David stares at the photo, incredulous. “I know I’ve seen that face before, and . . .”
And something is very, very wrong here.
Because the young man standing next to Olivia McGlinchie—the man whose baseball cap, scruffy beard and shaggy hair almost, but not quite, obscure his face—is the same person David saw coming out of the restaurant with Angela on St. Mark’s Place on that warm spring night.
“So what’s up, Hitch?” Rose asks, carrying the cordless phone into the kitchen, unwilling to sit there and talk to him with Leslie in earshot, just in case . . .
In case what? In case he’s calling to pick up where he left off yesterday, in the kitchen?
“I just called to see how your day went,” he says, and she realizes he sounds a little anxious. “I hope it was better than yesterday.”
She gives a brittle laugh. “Well, the kids didn’t disappear today, if that’s what you mean. But Cupid did.”
“Cupid . . .”
“Their puppy,” she says, absently sponging the counter she already wiped down earlier. “He’s missing.”
“What happened? Did he run away?”
“He must have. I’m thinking Leo must have opened the door to check for snow—he’s dying to use the sled you got him for Christmas—and the puppy probably got out.”
“He’ll probably find his way back. But the kids must be upset.”
“They’re devastated. Leslie’s staying here tonight, and it took her forever to get them into bed. She must have read a dozen bedtime stories and sung a hundred nursery rhymes before they finally calmed down.”
“Hopefully she didn’t sing ‘Where oh where has my little dog gone,’ ” Hitch says dryly.
Caught off guard by his dark humor, she forces a laugh. “I doubt that.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to joke about the puppy. I just—”
“It’s okay,” Rose assures him, tossing the sponge back into the sink. “Trust me, we can use some jokes around here
these days. Actually, we can use a lot of things. Jokes . . . money . . . snow . . .”
“Well, you might be in luck there,” Hitch says. “I heard there’s going to be a big storm tomorrow night. So the kids might get to use those sleds after all.”
“My fingers are crossed,” she says around a yawn.
“I’ll cross mine, too,” Hitch says. “You’re tired, Rose. I’ll let you go. And I’ve got an early day tomorrow. I’m driving into the Bronx to the plumbing supplier. Maybe I’ll stop by on my way back.”
“Do that. Good night, Hitch.”
“Sweet dreams, Rose.”
“May I see the photo for a second?” Joanne asks, and David hands it to her wordlessly, his mind racing. He doesn’t know what any of this means, but as far as he’s concerned, two coincidences linking Olivia McGlinchie to his world are two too many.
Joanne flips the photo over, then holds it up to the light. “That’s what I thought. Olivia’s friend wrote the names of the people in it on the back. That means this person’s name would be . . . let’s see, he’s the one, two, three, fourth person from the left, so his name is Clarence.”
Clarence?
Clarence . . .
“Is there a last name?” David asks.
Joanne shakes her head. “She only wrote first names.”
“Do you know him?” Ralph is watching David carefully.
David looks from Ralph to his wife, noting their expectant expressions.
If I tell them what I suspect, it will only upset them, he realizes. Because I’m not even sure what I suspect. I only know that something odd is going on here.
Odd . . . and maybe dangerous.
“No,” he tells Olivia’s parents, rising abruptly and handing over the photo album. “I don’t know him. I just . . . I thought I did. You know, I have to be going now.”
Joanne protests, “But the coffee is ready, and—”
“I’m sorry. I just remembered something that I have to do right away.”
Hopefully, it isn’t too late.
Chapter Eleven
Rose awakens slowly, her senses gradually coming to life as she stretches her arms high above her head.
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