Shadowkiller

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Carrie files it away for future reference.

  At last, Imogene allows the flight attendant to take her bag and settles into her aisle seat with a loud moan to ensure that everyone around her knows that she’s in extreme physical pain.

  Five minutes later, the captain comes on the loudspeaker and apologetically announces that they’ve lost their slot for takeoff and will be delayed for at least forty-five minutes, bringing a collective groan from the passengers.

  Carrie sticks the magazine back into the seatback pocket and gazes out the window, eyes narrowed, fists clenched.

  This is all Imogene Peters’s fault, she thinks, when—an hour later—the plane finally creeps out to take its place in the endless lineup of planes waiting to take off. Someone should teach that woman a lesson. Someone should . . .

  Maybe someone will, Carrie tells herself, but it’s not going to be you. No matter how much you want to see that she gets what she has coming to her . . .

  You can’t.

  It’s all about self-control.

  Self-control—she’s had to dig deep to find that ever since she took up residence a few weeks ago in the house next door to the MacKennas. Spying on Allison in the yard with her children, it was all she could do not to push through the shrubbery and confront her on the spot.

  But it wasn’t time for that yet. It was going to happen back in Nebraska.

  In the meantime, all Carrie could do was watch.

  A couple of times, Allison glanced idly in the direction of the Lewises’ deserted house. Once—early this morning, when Carrie snuck out for one last look at the MacKennas before they drove away—Allison even seemed to look right at the spot where she was standing.

  Carrie swiftly and silently stepped back, grateful for the cover of trees and shrubs . . .

  So different from the landscape where they were headed. On the wide-open plains, she knew only too well, there would be no place to hide.

  That was okay. When the time was right, she would be all too willing to step out of the shadows at last.

  The pilot’s voice comes on the intercom again. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re next for takeoff. Flight attendants, please be seated.”

  With a great rumbling rattle, the plane hurtles down the runway. Carrie smiles as it lifts off the ground, and presses her forehead against the window.

  Her online research paid off. The aircraft banks sharply as it begins its steep climb, allowing her to glimpse Manhattan’s skyline off to the left.

  She thinks of the passengers on the doomed flights that crashed into the twin towers on September 11. This was one of the last things they ever saw on this earth—albeit with the World Trade Center still intact on the lower tip of the island.

  As the historic events unfolded on that fateful day, Carrie had been in full-on carpe diem mode, making the most of the opportune situation for her own benefit. Only when she was safely out of the country did she allow herself to reflect. For her, hindsight brought mostly relief—and self-serving glee.

  Now, catching her first glimpse of the island without its familiar anchor, a new structure rising where the twin towers once stood, she’s caught off guard by a stirring of emotion deep inside her.

  Regret. That’s what it is.

  She remembers what it was like to belong there, in an office high above the bustling city streets. She remembers her choreographed commute through a network of corridors and elevators and tunnels that no longer exist. She remembers the night she deviated from that daily routine and met a man named Mack because she listened to her gut as Daddy had taught her. She remembers the dream catcher, and believing in dreams, and a sense of loss trickles in like contaminated groundwater seeping through fissures in a stone foundation.

  Things could have turned out differently if she hadn’t given up and let go.

  Things could have turned out differently if Allison hadn’t stepped in to take what should have belonged to Carrie.

  Regret gives way to rage, just as it has in the past.

  I was so mad . . .

  Rage, undiluted, leads to loss of self-control.

  The plane has begun to level off as they head west. Far below, she knows, the MacKenna family is moving in the same direction.

  In a few days, their path and Carrie’s will converge at last. She and Allison will come face-to-face again—right back where it all began.

  Of course, Allison might not even recognize her. Just as before, in New York.

  But don’t worry, Carrie tells her silently. This time, I’ll be sure to tell you exactly who I am.

  In the meantime, she needs to do something about the turbulent emotions that are now bubbling inside her. If she doesn’t find a way to let off some steam, she’s going to explode.

  She sneaks a sideways glance at Imogene Peters just as a two-bell signal dings through the cabin, followed by the click of an intercom.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the flight attendant says, “we have now reached a cruising altitude and it is safe to use approved portable electronic devices. Wifi service is available.”

  Internet on an airplane? Incredible. Carrie reaches under the seat in front of her and takes out her laptop. She opens it and angles the screen toward the window, just in case Imogene is as nosy as she is obnoxious.

  A few moments later, Carrie is online looking at a Minnesota road map.

  She’d already plotted her course from the airport across the state to her first stop, in South Dakota. But that doesn’t mean a detour can’t be arranged. The MacKennas won’t even be in Nebraska until Tuesday.

  There will be plenty of time to visit Mankato.

  Plenty of time to expel this brewing rage from her system.

  “Can we go sightseeing after dinner?” Hudson skips a little as they cross the hotel parking lot, her Child’s First Atlas in hand.

  “Sightseeing?”

  Allison and Mack echo their daughter’s ludicrous question in perfect unison, exchanging a weary, but amused, glance.

  It’s been a long day—one that started five hundred miles ago, at four A.M.—and Allison suspects it might be an even longer night. J.J. dozed all morning in the car, woke infuriated to find himself strapped in a car seat, and fussed against the restraints for the next several hours until he exhausted himself into unconsciousness again. Allison was so relieved not to have to ride backward in the front seat, trying to entertain him so that Mack did the driving, that she let him sleep through most of the afternoon.

  She actually had to wake him when they reached the hotel just off the interstate in Ohio. As his glassy-eyed parents and sisters dragged themselves out of the car, J.J. was refreshed, wanting to play. At this point, his schedule is so thrown off that she’s certain they’re looking at a restless night—all five of them crammed into a small hotel room.

  Allison and Mack would have been content to go straight to bed after they checked in, but the girls got a second wind and are hungry. Allison is hoping she can muster enough energy to make it through a meal without her head falling into her salad bowl.

  But sightseeing?

  “Sweetie, we can’t,” she tells Hudson as she straps a loudly protesting J.J. back into his car seat.

  “The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is around here someplace. I want to see it, and the zoo, too. There’s a lot to do here.”

  “I know, but it’s really much too late for that.”

  “It’s still sunny out!”

  “I know,” Allison says again, summoning every ounce of patience, “but look at the time.”

  Hudson, who never goes anywhere without her watch, glances at her wrist, and her green eyes widen.

  “What time is it?” Madison wants to know, buckling her seat belt.

  “Almost nine o’clock,” her sister tells her, and it’s Maddy’s turn to look surprised.

  “We’re so far west that the sun doesn’t set until after nine at this time of year,” Mack explains, climbing into the front seat beside Allison. “Any idea where we’re g
oing to eat?”

  “There were a bunch of restaurants back by the exit where we got off the road.”

  “Did you notice which ones? I’m already sick of fast food.”

  “So am I.”

  The girls, naturally, are not. Much to their delight, they’d eaten breakfast at McDonald’s and lunch at Arby’s, something they get to do maybe once or twice a year back home in the land of healthy snacks and organic everything.

  Allison pulls out her iPhone and taps on a search engine app. “I’ll see what’s around here.”

  “There’s a children’s museum around here,” Hudson tells her, consulting her atlas.

  “I meant restaurants.”

  “I know! I mean for after dinner, Mommy.”

  “After dinner we’re all going to bed,” Mack informs her.

  “But I wanted to go sightseeing!”

  “Stop whining, Hudson!”

  “Don’t snap at her, Mack!” Allison immediately regrets contradicting him in front of the kids, something they both try never to do. But her nerves are fraying fast—and so are everyone else’s.

  To his credit, Mack apologizes. “I know you’re just excited to be here, right, Huddy?”

  She nods vigorously.

  “We’ll have to make sure we come back another time.”

  “Promise, Daddy?”

  “Promise.”

  “You mean we’ll come back to Cleveland?” Hudson sounds like an attorney repeating a witness’s testimony for the court record.

  “Sure.” He looks at Allison. “Right, Mommy?”

  “Sure, Daddy.” She rolls her eyes. “Why not? Another fourteen-hour drive to Cleveland will be a breeze.”

  “Hudson told me it wasn’t supposed to take fourteen hours,” Madison speaks up, and her sister nods vigorously.

  “My atlas said it was s’posed to be less than nine.”

  “That’s not allowing for stops,” Allison points out. They’d made quite a few—several for the bathroom, a couple for more coffee to keep the drivers alert, and of course, breaks for breakfast and lunch.

  “It’s not allowing for holiday weekend traffic, either,” Mack puts in, braking and flipping on the left signal and waiting to make what looks like an impossible turn onto the highway.

  Traffic, traffic, and more traffic—even here.

  They thought they’d seen the worst of it this morning near the junction with Interstate 81, which branched off south toward Hershey. But they hit another massive crunch near the outlet malls of Grove City. Then they were stuck for over two hours behind a pileup involving a jackknifed tractor-trailer just north of Youngstown.

  So much for her theory that the Midwest would be uncrowded. It isn’t here in suburban Cleveland, anyway. Probably farther west.

  Mack finally makes a right turn, then a U-turn at the next light—an illegal one, but Allison bites her tongue. She gazes out the window as reminders of her old life fly past. A field of corn, a parking lot carnival, grocery and retail store chains you don’t see in the Northeast: Kroger’s, Von Maur, Cracker Barrel . . .

  “Crackers! I love crackers!” Hudson shouts, seeing the sign. “Can we go there?”

  Allison’s mind tumbles back to her own childhood. Her friend Tammy Connolly’s mom was a waitress at the local Cracker Barrel restaurant. Once in a while, Allison and Tammy visited her there, and she would buy them old-fashioned candy buttons from the country store at the front of the restaurant.

  “Might as well. What do you think, Allie?”

  “Hmm?” She gives Mack a blank look.

  “Cracker Barrel. Should we eat there?”

  She nods, toying with the iPhone in her hand, wondering what ever happened to Tammy.

  “Too bad it’s on the left-hand side of the road.” Shaking his head, Mack brakes and puts on the turn signal in the face of an endless stream of oncoming traffic.

  Maybe I should look up Tammy, Allison thinks. She wouldn’t want to actually see her, of course—they’d have nothing in common after all these years. She’s just curious, now that the memories are trickling in, about where life has taken her old friend.

  Before she can change her mind, she types “Tammy Connolly, Nebraska,” into the phone’s open search engine.

  The query comes back with thousands of results, as she’d expected. But the top one seems to fit. There’s a Tamara Connolly Pratt, age thirty-five, living in Ashland, a small town between Omaha and Lincoln.

  Of course, they’ll be driving right past there tomorrow and have a reservation to spend the night nearby, at the famous Cornhusker Hotel in Lincoln.

  Tamara Pratt has a Facebook page. Allison, who does not, is blocked from viewing her photo or any information about her.

  She changes her search engine query to “Tamara Connolly Pratt, Ashland, Nebraska,” and is routed to several other sites. One lists an e-mail address.

  “Mommy!”

  Allison blinks, realizes Mack is pulling into a parking space at the restaurant, and Madison is waiting for her reply to a question she didn’t hear.

  “What, Maddy?”

  “I said, do they have anything besides crackers here?”

  “Oh . . . sure they do. They have chicken and French fries and all kinds of things you like.”

  “Do they have spaghetti?” she asks, as her little brother grabs a fistful of her long blond hair.

  “I don’t think so, but—”

  “Ouch!” Poor Madison, always so patient, is trying to disentangle her hair from J.J.’s fingers.

  “J.J., no!” Allison says sharply.

  “Mommy, I really feel like spaghetti.” Madison sounds as though she’s going to burst into tears.

  “You know what they definitely have?” Allison says quickly. “They have candy. All kinds of candy.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I used to go to Cracker Barrel when I was a little girl. My friend Tammy’s mom worked there.”

  “Here?” Hudson asks, with interest, as they climb out of the car.

  “No, it’s a chain. There was one in my hometown.”

  Predictably, Allison’s firstborn is full of questions about that. “Does her mom still work there? Does she get free candy? Can we go see her in your hometown?”

  “She’s not there anymore. She moved away and we lost touch, but . . . I just found out she’s still in Nebraska.”

  As she leans into the backseat to get J.J., Allison sees Mack glance at her in surprise.

  “I looked her up,” she tells him simply, and puts her son into her husband’s outstretched hands.

  “I thought you didn’t want to do that.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “Are we going to go see Tammy when we get to Nebraska, Mommy?” Hudson persists.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Here, hold my hand. You too, Maddy. This parking lot is crazy. I bet there’s going to be a long wait for a table even at this hour.”

  As they make their way toward the entrance, with its trademark rows of wooden rocking chairs—most filled with customers waiting for tables—Allison’s thoughts drift back to Tammy, her daughter’s question echoing in her ears.

  Why not?

  LaJuanda’s Cuban heritage is rooted in this part of the world, but she’s been to the Caribbean only twice in her life. The first time was on her Jamaican honeymoon, when she and Rene toasted their marriage and promised each other they’d return annually. The next—and last—visit was the following year on her anniversary.

  “I feel like we belong here,” she told her husband as they sat holding hands on the beach in Negril, watching a bright pink sun sink into the turquoise sea. “There’s something about this place that speaks to me.”

  “That’s because it’s in your blood.”

  “I’m Cuban, not Jamaican.”

  “Cuba is only a hundred miles away from here. I think your subconscious is sensing that you’re close to home.”

  “Home i
s Miami. That’s the only place I’ve ever lived.”

  “Yes, but you’re Caribbean at heart,” Rene pointed out. “You’re free-spirited and resilient and full of passion and you live in the moment.”

  That was entirely true back then. Still is, on some levels. But life got in the way of her plans to reconnect with her island roots and spend every anniversary barefoot on those sugary sands. Rene decided to go to law school, she made detective, he passed the bar, they wound up with a mortgage and a couple of kids . . .

  Now here she is, all alone on a tropical island very much like the one where they’d honeymooned twenty years ago. Rene is back in Coral Gables with the kids, attempting to hold down the fort at home in the midst of trying a grueling case.

  “When will you be back?” their oldest son, Ricky, asked when he dropped her off at the airport this afternoon.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe even tonight.”

  “Tonight?”

  Of course not tonight. Even if the island proved to be a dead end, there were no flights back to Miami until tomorrow afternoon.

  But with Rene absorbed in his trial, LaJuanda doesn’t want her teenagers tempted to take advantage of her absence with a free-for-all. Let them think she might show up at any minute.

  “It all depends on how long it takes for me to find out what I need to know,” she told her son, and kissed him good-bye.

  Thunderstorms were moving into Miami as they took off, and most of the flight over open water was turbulent.

  LaJuanda barely noticed. She was absorbed in rereading everything she’d learned about what had happened on Saint Antony after the Carousel, with Molly Temple on board, dropped anchor.

  Namely: the explosion that very evening at Jimmy’s Big Iguana, a bar not far from the harbor. Eight people were killed, including Jimmy Bolt, the owner. According to published accounts, the local police had confirmed foul play but had no suspects. It seemed that for every local who adored the famously charismatic Jimmy, there was another who despised him—perhaps enough to want him dead.

  Apparently, one of his enemies had planted a bomb in a storage room off the bar’s kitchen. Had it gone off just an hour earlier, a police officer was quoted as saying, there might have been dozens, perhaps hundreds, of casualties. Jimmy’s Big Iguana was popular with cruise ship passengers.