Shadowkiller

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “Tell me what?”

  “You might want to sit down.”

  “I am. I’m sitting.” Mack closes his eyes and he’s back at his desk in New York on a sunny Tuesday morning in September, and the phone is ringing, and the world is burning.

  Mack gulps, his blood running as cold as the sweat on his forehead. “Please don’t tell me . . . she’s not . . .”

  “It’s not about your wife,” Manzillo says quickly, adding cryptically, “not Allison, anyway.”

  “What—”

  “This is going to come as a shock. I wish I could tell you in person instead of over the phone, but—”

  “What? What the hell is it?”

  “Your wife—your first wife—is alive. Carrie. She’s alive.”

  Driving through the night, heading north on the lonely highway toward South Dakota, Carrie casts another sideways glance at Allison.

  Sound asleep in the passenger’s seat, she hasn’t stirred in a while now. Good. The fuel tank is running low, and as long as Allison is out cold, she can stop to fill it.

  Carrie had been worried when Allison only took a few sips of the Pepsi, but the sedative she’d slipped into it is powerful stuff. Good thing she brought it along when she left the island. Illegal but readily available on Saint Antony, the powder is probably much harder to come by in the States.

  Oh well. After this, Carrie won’t have any use for it anymore. After this, she’s going to turn over a new leaf. She’ll hitchhike out to the Pacific Northwest, where summers are cool and cloudy.

  Maybe that’s what she should have done twelve years ago, instead of heading for New York, chasing after Allison.

  But she couldn’t even think straight back then. Her life was a mess. Her parents were dead, and she was all alone in the world, living in Minneapolis, earning a living by selling the only thing she had: her body.

  What did it matter? It wasn’t like she was a virgin, saving herself for marriage to some mythical Prince Charming. And it wasn’t like she could get pregnant—though she didn’t know that for sure at the time.

  She suspected, of course. You didn’t go through a self-induced late-term coat hanger abortion without butchering your reproductive organs.

  Only years later, when she was married to Mack and trying to start a family, was the ugly truth confirmed by her obstetrician. The infection that had set in after she terminated the pregnancy had scarred her fallopian tubes, making it difficult—if not impossible—for her to conceive. Assuring her that her husband wouldn’t have to know what had caused the infection, he referred Carrie to Dr. Hammond, an infertility specialist at the Riverview Clinic. Dr. Hammond told her there was hope, and for a while there, she clung to it, stubbornly . . . foolishly.

  But she wasn’t meant to be a mother.

  Nor was she meant to be a wife, or . . .

  Or a big sister.

  But that’s why you went to New York to find her, isn’t it?

  Because you got lonely, right? Because you realized that Allison was the last link to Daddy; the only other person in the world who has Daddy’s blood running through her veins . . .

  She thinks back to the day she realized that her father had another daughter.

  It was around Thanksgiving, a week or so after Carrie’s mother had accused her of being pregnant with her own father’s child. A week after she’d hacked her mother to death with a kitchen knife and dumped her body into the well.

  When she heard a vehicle splashing up from the highway, she thought it was going to be the police. She had long since scrubbed every drop of blood away, and sealed the well up good and tight, and she hadn’t seen another living soul since it had happened. Still, she worried that somehow, someone had found out what she had done.

  But it wasn’t the police on that rainy November day.

  It was her father.

  Beside herself with excitement and relief, she let him into the house.

  “Where’s your mother?” he asked, draping his damp jacket over a kitchen chair the way he always did, and looking around. She followed his gaze, making sure she hadn’t missed any bloodstains. Nope, all clean.

  “I have no idea.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She left, Daddy.”

  “How many times have I told you—you should call me Dad now. Daddy is for little girls. And how could she have left? The car is parked right outside.”

  She thought quickly. “Someone picked her up.”

  That upset him. She could see it in his eyes. He was suspicious. Jealous, maybe. Wondering if her mother had another man.

  “Who was it? Who picked her up?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see. All I know is that she left, and she hasn’t come back.”

  He asked a lot of other questions, and a terrible thought occurred to her. What if he decided to call the police?

  She couldn’t let that happen.

  “We had a fight before Mom left,” she said belatedly. “Maybe she took off because she was mad at me.”

  Yes. That made sense. But then, just as she was trying to find the right words to tell him about the baby she was carrying, he abruptly said he had to leave.

  “But—what about me?”

  “What about you?”

  “You have to take me with you.”

  “I can’t do that. I have to work.”

  “But . . . I can’t stay here by myself.”

  “Sure you can. You’re almost seventeen, Winona. You’re not a little girl anymore. You stay here, and I’m sure your mother will show up in a day or two. And if she doesn’t, well, I’ll be back next weekend.”

  Next weekend?

  Something snapped inside her.

  Her father went into the bathroom, the way he always did before he left. The moment the door closed behind him, she went into the pocket of his jacket and found his wallet.

  She had no idea how much an abortion cost, but she knew it had to be a lot. Looking for cash, she found something else instead: his driver’s license.

  No—not his license.

  A license, from Nebraska, with his picture on it. But it bore the name Allen Taylor, and an address on Third Street in a town called Centerfield.

  Shaken, she heard him coming out of the bathroom. She shoved the license back into his wallet, and the wallet back into his pocket.

  He came out and picked up the jacket.

  “Please . . . please don’t leave me.”

  “Are you crying? You’re too old for tears, Winona. Pull yourself together.”

  “I can’t . . . I’m afraid . . . Daddy, please.”

  Again, he told her to stop calling him that. Again, she begged him not to leave. Back and forth they went, until he said, in disgust, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry. Good-bye.”

  She waited until the sound of his truck faded into the distance. Then she opened a drawer and she took out the knife she’d used to kill her mother. She put it into her pocket and she got into the car and she started heading south, in the opposite direction on the very road she’s driving on right now.

  What was she thinking as she drove? What was she planning?

  She doesn’t remember anything about that drive, other than the fact that the weather was miserable that day. The road was slippery, and she didn’t even have her license yet; had never even driven on a highway. Yet somehow, she drove all the way into Nebraska, stopping twice to ask for directions until darkness fell and she found herself in Centerfield.

  It was a tiny town, just a cluster of gabled houses and squared-off nineteenth-century storefronts rising off the plain. The highway became Main Street, crossing First Street, Second Street . . . Third Street.

  From the intersection, she could see her father’s truck parked halfway down the block, in front of a small gray house. She drove another block, rounded the corner, and left the car on Fourth Street, parked in the lot behind an elementary school that was deserted for the night.

  The pavement was shiny in the
yellow glow from a single light pole, pooled with icy rain that was still falling. She slipped through the muddy schoolyard, and she saw the back of the gray house. Lights were on. Looking through a window, she saw her father. He was sitting on a bed in a little girl’s bedroom . . .

  Dazed, she saw that it was purple and white, just like her own room back at home. There was a painted shelf filled with books, the same books she’d once had in her own room, and a hanger draped with a fancy dress that looked just like her own long-ago favorite dress, the one her father said he’d accidentally tossed into the Goodwill bag, and on the bed was a doll . . .

  Papoose.

  Carrie stared, wide-eyed, at her own doll, the one that had disappeared years earlier. In that instant, she understood that her father had taken it, and the dress, too, and he had given them to someone else. To the girl who sat beside him on the bed, a girl with long dark hair and blue eyes and a nice smile, a girl who was listening as he read to her from a book on his lap.

  Allison.

  Heedless of the freezing rain, Carrie stood watching for a long time, until she saw her father put the book back on the shelf and tuck the girl into the purple and white bed. He turned out the light and left the room. She snuck over to another window, and watched him as he sat on the couch and talked to a woman who was drinking a glass filled with whiskey; a woman who looked so much like the girl that anyone could see they were mother and daughter.

  How, Carrie wondered, did her father fit into this picture?

  Of course, she already knew, deep down.

  “Always listen to your gut,” Daddy used to tell her. “If you tune in to your intuition, you’ll find that you know much more than you think you do.”

  She snuck into the house after all the lights were turned off. After her father had climbed into bed with a woman who wasn’t her mother—although, what did it matter? Her mother was dead. She had killed her, and now she was pregnant and all alone and her father was here with another family.

  What am I going to do? she wondered, prowling through the house, looking through papers until she found a folder filled with documents that proclaimed the truth she sought.

  A man named Allen Taylor lived here with his wife, Brenda; and their daughter, Allison, had been born just over nine years ago, during the summer of 1977.

  Allen Taylor. That was what her father was calling himself, or maybe that was who he really had been all along.

  She found her way to the girl’s bedroom and she stood for a long time, watching her sleep.

  How many times have I told you—you should call me Dad now. Daddy is for little girls.

  Now it all made sense. This little girl wasn’t too old to call him Daddy. She wasn’t too old for dolls, or picture books.

  Tears rolled down Carrie’s cheeks. She sniffled and reached over to pluck a tissue from the box on the painted white nightstand.

  The child stirred and opened her eyes sleepily.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m your sister,” she whispered. “My name is Winona.”

  “Okay.” Allison’s eyes fluttered closed again.

  She left the room, made her way back down the hall, heading for the back door, feeling her way through the dark. Her legs were wobbly and she felt sick, light-headed. She tripped, bumping into a chair.

  “What’s that?” her father’s voice called from the next room. “Allison?”

  She didn’t answer, just stood there for a moment shaking in fury.

  Then, hearing footsteps, she slipped out the door, into the rainy night.

  She was halfway across the muddy backyard when she heard his voice.

  “Winona?” He sounded so incredulous that she stopped short. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Trembling, she waited for him to catch up to her. Then she whirled to face him. “What am I doing here? What the hell are you doing here, Daddy?”

  She doesn’t remember what he said—or tried to say—before she stabbed him the first time. Doesn’t remember dragging him through the dark yard to the deserted parking lot and dumping him into the trunk of the car . . .

  What she does remember is that he was moaning as she closed it, and she realized he was alive.

  Just as she was about to drive away, she realized something else.

  The rain would wash away the blood in the yard, but that woman—Brenda, his wife—was bound to report him missing. What if the police managed to track him to South Dakota? What if they found her? What if they wanted to know where her mother was? What if . . .

  She hurried back to the house. There, she wrote a quick, terse note, doing her best to imitate her father’s jagged handwriting.

  Can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry. Good-bye.

  Those were his own words, after all.

  She left the note in the kitchen and then she drove all the way home, numb, trying to make it under cover of darkness.

  The first streaks of light were just appearing on the flat eastern horizon when she pried the cover off the well. The stench hit her: her mother’s body, decaying in the depths.

  She hoisted her father out of the trunk and into the rusted old wheelbarrow, the one he used to use to work in the yard; the one he let her climb into so that he could give her a ride.

  “Your turn, Daddy,” she said, and pushed it over to the yawning hole in the ground. Just as she heaved the weight forward, he opened his eyes and looked up at her.

  “Winona,” he said. “I—”

  Too late. She gave the wooden handles a mighty shove, and he toppled into the well.

  She would never know what he was about to say. That bothered her later.

  Was it I told you to stop calling me Daddy?

  Was it I’m sorry?

  Or I love you?

  It doesn’t matter, really, does it?

  It certainly didn’t matter that night, as Carrie took a coat hanger out of the closet, went into the bathroom with it; it didn’t matter as, with her pelvis cramping painfully, she scrubbed bloodstains from the floor for the second time in a week—this time, her own.

  And it doesn’t matter tonight, as Carrie covers the same stretch of highway she did on that cold November night in 1986.

  All that matters now is that Allison is finally going to see her father again after all these years . . . right up close and personal.

  What’s left of him, anyway, Carrie thinks as she makes the final turn on the road toward home.

  “Well? How did he take it?” Vic asks, as Rocky hangs up the telephone.

  “How would you take it if your wife just came back from the dead?”

  “Don’t even say that.”

  “Sorry.” Rocky leans his head back momentarily against the chair’s faux leather padding, grasping a certain note of irony here. His own wife, Ange, had been all but dead, and now . . .

  Ange’s survival was a blessing.

  This is not.

  The woman James MacKenna had known—and married—as Carrie Robinson MacKenna is up to no good. Rocky suspected it before he called Mack with the news that she’s alive; now he’s certain of it.

  “Allison MacKenna is missing,” Rocky says flatly, and Vic curses under his breath.

  “She got to her before we could.”

  “Looks that way.”

  Rocky quickly explains the situation to Vic.

  “Are you going to let Randi Weber know?”

  “I’d better.” He scrolls through the redial numbers on the phone, looking for the Glenhaven Park exchange he’d dialed earlier. Randi had given him both Mack’s and Allison’s phone numbers as soon as Rocky told her they might be in danger.

  It’s hard to believe that was just a matter of minutes ago.

  At that point, Rocky had considered that this woman, Carrie—whose real name, or at least the name under which she’d been arrested, was Winona Carroll—might eventually pose some kind of vague threat to the MacKennas. Never in a million years did it occur to him that she’d follow them all the w
ay to Nebraska.

  But then, she was no stranger to that part of the country.

  Like Allison MacKenna, Winona Carroll had grown up on the rural Great Plains. She was raised in east-central South Dakota, an only child who had been homeschooled, according to the records Vic had quickly unearthed.

  Winona was an old Sioux name, and she had a bit of Native American blood in her veins, courtesy of her father. Born in Iowa on December 7, 1941—Pearl Harbor day—he’d been given an unusual first name that had also come from the Sioux: Macawi. But—incredibly—he was known as Mac.

  “Her father was Mac,” Vic pointed out, “and she married a Mack? That’s a hell of a coincidence.”

  “There are no coincidences. Maybe she had some kind of Daddy complex, and that’s why she married a guy who had the same name,” Rocky suggested. “Where’s the father now?”

  “Good question.”

  As Rocky made his phone calls trying to track down the MacKennas, Vic had been looking for Winona Carroll’s parents.

  There’s no trace of them after 1987—the same year their daughter was arrested for solicitation—one more “hell of a coincidence,” as Vic put it.

  Mac Carroll was a long-haul trucker who apparently lived—when he wasn’t on the road, which was probably much of the time—on a section of land inherited from his own parents, and now listed as abandoned. A self-employed independent contractor, he filed tax returns until twenty-five years ago, and regularly paid his property taxes, too.

  Winona’s mother, Robin, was a decade younger than her husband and had been raised in Iowa foster homes in the fifties and sixties. She’d married right out of high school—not uncommon in that era or that part of the country—and Winona was born seven months later.

  The Carrolls appear to have largely kept to themselves: no memberships in local organizations, no church affiliation, no volunteer work . . .

  Perhaps no one to miss them when they vanished, Rocky thinks grimly as he tells Vic what MacKenna just told him—that Carrie claimed to have grown up in the witness protection program.

  “And he bought that?”

  Rocky shrugs. “When you love someone, your tendency is to believe what they tell you.”