The Webers’ telephone starts to ring on the other end of the line.
Randi answers immediately. “Did you get ahold of Allison? Because I just tried, and she didn’t pick up. I was about to call Mack—”
“Don’t. Allison is missing.”
“Oh God. Oh no. What happened?”
He tells her—and this time, he includes what he learned about Mack’s first wife.
“I never liked her,” Randi says, “not from day one. Ben didn’t, either. I knew right away that what she’d said about the witness protection program was bullshit. She wasn’t even Mack’s type. But when he met her he’d just broken up with someone and he was trying to date women who were the opposite of her.”
“And what was she like?”
“Shallow gold digger. Her name was Chelsea. I didn’t like her either, but—”
“Chelsea?”
“Right.”
“Do you remember her last name, by any chance?”
“No. Maybe Ben does. He just left to drive our daughter someplace, but when he gets back I can—”
“Was it Kamm?”
“Kamm. Yes. I think that was it. Why?”
Because I just found the motive in the Leprechaun case.
Rocky shakes his head grimly, remembering what had been done to the lovely blond Chelsea Kamm.
Chapter Sixteen
“Oh, Al-lison!” The voice is singsong. “Time to wake uh-up!”
She’s trying, but her eyelids are like boulders, and the voice is coming from so far away, down a dark tunnel . . .
“Allison!”
It’s not Mack talking to her.
It’s not a man’s voice.
It’s a female . . .
The girls?
No. They call her Mommy.
Mommy . . .
Her children . . .
Mack . . .
“Allison!”
She forces her eyes to open, and a flash of bright light instantly closes them again.
“You’re awake! I saw you! Open your eyes. Here, I’ll turn off the flashlight. I was just making sure you weren’t dead. Yet.”
The voice laughs.
Terror takes hold in Allison’s gut, the kind of terror she’s known before in her life; terror that can paralyze you if you let it take over.
Don’t let it take over.
The only way out of this is to stay focused.
“Allison!”
She opens her eyes again. This time, to darkness. As her vision adjusts she can see a figure standing over her, silhouetted against a starlit sky.
“He was awake when I did this, and I wanted to make sure you were, too. Like father, like daughter.”
“What . . . who . . . ?”
“Daddy! Our father! Did you forget again?”
“Forget?”
The shadow sighs and says, with exaggerated patience, “I’m Winona, your sister. We had the same father. And the same husband. Both named Mack. We’re just alike, see? Like the song.” She clears her throat and sings off key, something about a pair of matching bookends being different as night and day.
“I’m night,” she tells Allison. “That’s what Mack told me once, years ago, when we were dating.”
Mack . . . she was dating Mack. Yes, because she’s Carrie.
Carrie is alive.
“Mack said I was night and he was day, and that was a good thing. He said we balanced each other out. Just like me and you. I’m night, and you’re day.”
Allison feels herself being jerked violently. She’s moving. But she isn’t in the car. She’s outside, in the open air, being bumped over the ground. The movement jars her head and her cheek hits a hard surface. She’s in some kind of metal cart, or a wheelbarrow.
The voice, Carrie’s voice, continues its bizarre soliloquy.
“I like the way it all fits together, don’t you? I like it when things fall neatly into place. I’m night, and you’re day. I’ve never been a day person, Allison. I’ve always liked the night so much better. The dark—it hides things, you know? Messy things that are just out there in the daylight. How about you? Do you like the dark? I really hope so.”
Another harsh laugh.
The bumping continues.
“Are you ready? We’re almost there. No, never mind, don’t tell me. I don’t care if you’re ready. I don’t want to hear anything from you. I’ll do all the talking. I know just what to say, too, when we get there. The perfect last words for you to hear.”
Last words. Oh no. Oh please . . .
“They’re not original—the words. I know you’ve heard them before. Or at least, you’ve read them.”
She’s going to kill me. I’m going to die. I’m never going to see Mack again, or my girls, or my baby, J.J. . . .
“You really thought he left you, didn’t you? You thought he just took off one night and didn’t come back.”
Dragging her frantic thoughts away from her own family, Allison comprehends that she’s talking . . .
About my father. About . . .
Our father?
“That must have been painful for you, Allison. In fact, I know it was. Because that’s what he did to me. He left, and he didn’t come back. Well—not for a long time. That’s probably what would have happened to you, too, if he’d stayed alive. He probably would have started spending more and more time on the road, and he would have told you to stop calling him Daddy and he would have taken your doll and your dress and your books away and given them to some new little girl, some little sister you didn’t even know you had.”
She’s huffing and puffing now as she talks.
“But I didn’t give him the chance to do that again. You should thank me. I took Daddy away from you before he left you himself. It’s easier that way. Trust me. Okay, here we are.”
The movement has stopped.
“Here they are, Allison. Are you listening? Here are the last words.” Carrie—Winona—whoever she is—takes a deep breath. Then she says, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry. Good-bye.”
The cart is tilting beneath Allison. She’s falling forward. She reaches wildly, trying to grab on to something, but there’s nothing, and she’s falling through the air, falling into endless darkness, blacker than the night sky.
Mack stares bleakly out the window of his hotel room at the few lights that are still on at this hour in the unfamiliar city.
Allison is out there somewhere.
They’re looking for her.
Not just here in Lincoln, Detective Manzillo told her when he called again a few minutes ago, but in Centerfield, too, and in South Dakota. That’s where Carrie grew up, he said.
She wasn’t in the witness protection program. That was a lie.
The whole thing was a lie. Her life—her death.
“Daddy?”
He turns to see Hudson standing behind him in her summer pajamas. She gestures at the wristwatch she wears everywhere, even to bed. “It’s two-fourteen A.M.”
“Is it?” he asks dully.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m just . . . looking out the window.”
“Where’s Mommy?”
Good question, Hudson. You always ask good questions.
But this time, I don’t have an answer for you.
Carrie slams the trunk of the car, locking the wheelbarrow inside, angry with herself.
It’s done—but she made a mistake.
She doesn’t make mistakes.
Yes, Allison is as good as dead and buried, deep down in the well, with the black widow spiders and the bones of their father and Winona’s mother.
But now Carrie has to trek all the way back out there—a good mile from where the car is parked along the highway.
She reaches into the backseat, grabs the shovel she’d forgotten, and sets out to hoist the cover back over the well, and bury it forever.
LaJuanda hangs up the phone and looks at Rocky Manzillo and Vic Shattuck, seated across from her at the Formica-toppe
d table in the small kitchen.
“They’re going to order the DNA testing on those remains,” she tells them. “It’s going to take some time, and we already know what we’re going to find out, but . . .”
“At least it’ll bring some closure to Molly’s family,” Rocky says. “That’s important.”
She nods and reaches for the still-steaming coffee he’d poured for her after she arrived at his Bronx doorstep, courtesy of a yellow cab from JFK, half an hour ago.
Her flight hadn’t beaten the thunderstorms to New York after all, thanks to air traffic. When she finally landed and called Rocky, she was stunned to hear what had transpired as she circled for several hours high over New York City. The air was turbulent at times, and for the first time in her life, LaJuanda was afraid on an airplane.
She couldn’t help thinking of all the people who had been on the planes flown into the World Trade Center.
How dare she? LaJuanda kept thinking. How dare Carrie take such a tragedy and use it to cover her tracks? What kind of person does that?
By the time LaJuanda was on the ground, she was convinced the woman was pure evil.
Then she called Rocky, and found out she was absolutely right about that.
Now, she shakes her head at him and Vic. “I just pray that Allison’s family has a happier ending than just ‘closure.’ ”
“So do I.” Rocky looks at his watch, and LaJuanda knows what he’s thinking. Vic, too.
They’ve all worked in law enforcement. They know the missing persons statistics only too well.
With every minute that ticks by, the odds of finding Allison alive are diminishing.
The pain in Allison’s ribs and legs is excruciating, yet she forces herself to stay on her feet, to keep trying to claw her way out of the hole. When she’s standing on her tiptoes, her fingertips just graze the ground around the edge of it. Not enough to get any kind of hold on it and pull herself up.
But the moment she allows herself to sink into the depths of the hole is the moment she faces her own death, and she’s not about to do that.
Mack . . .
Hudson . . .
Maddy . . .
J.J. . . .
Her family needs her. And she’s going to find her way back to them, one way or another. She’s going home.
Home.
What she wouldn’t give to be back in their house in Glenhaven Park right this very moment, back in the Happy House she’d been so tempted to leave behind after what had happened last fall.
That made about as much sense as . . .
As wanting to leave Nebraska behind forever?
She’d wasted all those years, over half a lifetime, trying to avoid coming back here, because she thought it meant coming back to the ugly past.
She was wrong.
The ugly past can follow you wherever you go if you let it.
I’m Winona, your sister. We had the same father.
I took Daddy away from you before he left you himself.
I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry. Good-bye.
Those were the words from the note her father left that day. But he didn’t write it. She understands that now. Winona did. She wrote the note.
And her father—he didn’t leave.
When Allison landed in the hole, she felt around in the dirt for something to stand on. Her fingers found . . .
Bones.
Even in the dark, she knew they were bones.
And she knew whose they were.
Oh, Daddy . . .
Hearing movement above her—footsteps—Allison goes absolutely still. Her instinct is to cry out for help, but she quells it. If it’s her again—Winona—it’s better to play dead.
The beam of a flashlight bounces across the top of the hole. Allison sees a fat, shiny black spider just inches from her outstretched left hand resting against the dirt wall. It’s crawling toward her fingers. She fights the urge to flinch.
A shadow falls across the hole.
She sees the tip of Winona’s shoe, right at the end.
She feels the spider crawling on her skin in the instant before she moves her hand. As she lunges upward to grab the shoe, a stinging pain pierces her ring finger.
Her hands, both of them, close around Winona’s foot. She pulls as hard as she can, and she hears Winona scream.
“Are you sure?” Vic asks, pacing with the phone.
Sitting beside LaJuanda at the kitchen table, Rocky exchanges a glance with her.
“Okay, keep me posted,” Vic says, and hangs up.
“What’s going on?” Rocky asks.
“A woman fitting Carrie’s description stopped for gas a few hours ago just off Interstate 29 in Elk Point, South Dakota. The security camera footage shows a female companion slumped in the front seat. It looked like she was asleep.”
“I hope to God that’s the case.” LaJuanda crosses herself.
“If it’s Allison, then she was taken across state lines. The FBI is involved now.”
“I’ll call Mack and tell him.” Rocky reaches for his own phone.
“He already knows. He’s on his way to South Dakota.”
“Noooooooo!”
She’s falling.
Falling into the well.
Just like in the frightening visions that used to wake her up in the night all those years ago, when she was a little girl.
Winona’s last thought, before she slams into the shadows and her spinal cord snaps, is that Daddy was wrong.
The dream catcher couldn’t keep away the nightmares after all.
“How are you doing, Mr. MacKenna? Hanging in there?”
Mack shifts his gaze from the barren flatland and the milky morning sky beyond the window of the SUV to the dark-suited man behind the wheel.
His name is Agent DiCaprio.
“Like the actor,” he told Mack when he introduced himself, adding, “but no relation.”
“What?”
“To the actor. Leonardo DiCaprio. You know . . .”
Yeah, Mack knew. He and Allison had seen one of his movies, Gangs of New York, on their first date.
“I love everything Leonardo DiCaprio does,” she sighed when it was over, and Mack found himself wishing she felt the same way about him. What would it be like, he wondered, to have Allison fall head over heels for him?
Soon enough, he knew.
And now . . .
Now that the FBI is involved in the search for his wife, Mack should probably feel better, but the news only made him grasp—as if he hadn’t already—just how dire the circumstances are.
He thinks of their children, his and Allison’s, probably waking up now back at the hotel. The agents who showed up at his door assured him that they’d be in good hands. Still, the decision was agonizing for Mack: stay with his kids, or go look for his wife?
“Mr. MacKenna?”
Mack blinks. “Sorry. Yes. I’m hanging in there. And you can call me Mack.”
“Okay. Mack.”
“How much further?”
They’re headed to the land once owned by Carrie’s father, Macawi Carroll.
He, too, was called Mac.
He wasn’t in the mob, as Mack always suspected. He was a truck driver.
Just like Allison’s father.
So many coincidences . . .
Too many.
“Just a few more miles,” Agent DiCaprio tells him.
Mack nods and goes back to staring out the window.
A faint buzzing sound reaches Allison’s ears.
Opening her eyes, she sees a bright light at the end of the long tunnel.
I’m dying, she thinks. Just like they did.
Winona’s body is cold now, slumped beneath Allison, providing a layer of protection above the bones.
For a long time, she tried to stay on her feet. But the pain in her legs and her rib cage was gradually eclipsed by an agonizing sting in her left hand where the spider had bitten her. It got so bad that she finally did what she�
��d sworn she wouldn’t do: she allowed herself to sink to the ground.
The last thing she remembers is feeling for Winona’s pulse with her right hand, and finding none.
Now . . .
I’m dying.
The buzzing grows louder, and she blinks.
The bright light, she realizes, is the sun; the tunnel is the hole.
Daylight lies beyond it. As she gazes at it with longing, something crosses the patch of blue sky overhead.
An airplane, a small one, flying low.
That’s Mack, looking for me.
It’s a crazy thought. Mack wouldn’t have the first idea where to find her.
Yet, he would try. If he knew she was lost, he would do whatever he could to find her.
“Mack,” she whispers. “I’m here.”
She manages to get to her feet, stretching, reaching up toward the light. It illuminates her left hand and she sees that it’s bright red and horribly swollen, as though her wedding ring is trying to burn its way through her skin.
The plane is passing her by, and Allison is buried alive in this hole, with no way to let anyone know that she’s here. They’ll never see her.
“Help!” she cries hoarsely. “Help! Help! I’m down here!”
But of course, they’ll never hear her, either. The plane is too far away, the roar of its engines drowning her weak, small voice.
If only Winona’s flashlight had fallen into the hole with her, so that Allison could signal—
Wait a minute.
She lowers her right hand and reaches into her pocket.
No. It isn’t there. It must have fallen—
No. She remembers now: she picked it up with her left hand after she dropped it on the floor of the car near the brake; probably put it into her left pocket.
Now her left hand is useless. Twisting, she strains to reach her right hand deep enough into the left pocket. Her fingertips graze something round and hard.
Trembling, triumphant, Allison pulls out the compact her girls had given her for Mother’s Day.
She fumbles with it, one-handed. It snaps open at last and she thrusts it up, high over her head, tilting the mirror into the sunlight that lies just beyond her fingertips.
Back and forth, back and forth . . .
“Yeah, I hear you,” Agent DiCaprio says into his mouthpiece. “Give me the coordinates.”
“What is it? What’s going on?”
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