Dead Before Dark

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Doctor Rubin, his oncologist, offered him a sedative, as always, to calm the unpleasant panic sensations most people—even those who are not particularly claustrophobic—experience inside the MRI machine.

  Frank turned down the offer, as always.

  He turned it down even though he’s been fiercely claustrophobic since childhood, when a neighbor girl locked him in the basement while she was babysitting so that she could make out with her boyfriend.

  He’s going to work as soon as he gets out of here, and he can’t afford to be any more clouded than he already has been on the job.

  Particularly since no one at work—or, really, outside of his oncologist’s medical circles—is aware that cancer is spreading lesions like lethal black confetti through Frank Santiago’s organs.

  “How long do I have?” he asked Dr. Rubin back on January 2, when he got the news that the new year would most likely be his last.

  Not that Dr. Rubin would commit to that.

  “There’s no way of knowing at this stage, Frank. If you’re asking whether you should get your affairs in order, the answer is yes.”

  Frank’s affairs are always in order. The phrasing, however, sent a stab of panic to his gut.

  “If you’re asking whether we will continue treatment, the answer is yes again. When we halt treatment, we’ll discuss your options at length.”

  When, not if.

  Options—as if he has any, other than whether to die at home or in some sterile hospital bed.

  Even there, he figures he has no options. Who’s going to take care of him at home?

  Not his two grown kids, who have families of their own and live in Texas and Florida.

  Not Ellen, though she still lives less than a mile away. He’s pretty sure her possessive second husband wouldn’t appreciate her playing Clara Barton to her dying first.

  Friends and neighbors have come and gone over the years—some closer than others, almost like family when they were there. But when they’re gone, they’re gone. Frank’s not one to live in the past or keep in touch much.

  When the time comes, then, he supposes, he’ll just take a cab—or will it be an ambulance?—to the hospital and check in and wait to die.

  Now there’s something to look forward to.

  First, of course, he’ll have to tell his kids. And the people at work.

  Something else to look forward to.

  Dammit to hell. How can this be happening to him?

  He’s already made up his mind to keep things status quo for as long as possible. Keep living in his own house, keep going about his usual business, keep working. Even if the condition they call chemo brain is impairing his better judgement.

  “Can you hear me, Mr. Santiago?”

  The damned technician again, this time filling his entire head with her false cheerfulness, her voice coming in over the earphones she placed on him.

  “Loud and clear.”

  “Ready?”

  Ready to be sealed into a space so confining that you literally can barely lift a finger, and your own hot, moist breath boomerangs back at your face?

  Ready to be assailed by noise, not just her voice but the lame music they pipe in and the harsh metallic chugging and whirring of the machine as it surveys the cancer-pocked landscape of your organs?

  Ready to find out whether you get to die in the near, as opposed to nearer, future?

  “Ready,” Frank Santiago says grimly, and the process begins.

  “Who are you?”

  They say it in unison, both Neal and the gray-haired stranger at Lucinda’s door.

  Instinctively, Neal’s hand brushes against his gun, concealed beneath his coat.

  “I’m Bradley Carmichael—I’m a friend of Lucinda’s.”

  Neal relaxes just a bit. So this is the famous Bradley. He’s a handsome man, probably about Neal’s age, with a muscular build and perfect white teeth.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m a friend of Lucinda’s, too. What is that you’re holding?” Neal eyes the brown paper-wrapped package in his hand.

  “I don’t know. I found it propped against the door just now. Is she here?”

  “No, she’s not.”

  Bradley frowns. “Are you sure? Because she’s expecting me.”

  Neal raises an eyebrow at that. Lucinda didn’t mention anything about expecting company. But then, she was awfully agitated about the flowers earlier, and about Chicago just now when he talked to her.

  Maybe she forgot.

  Or maybe this guy is up to something.

  Either way, Neal isn’t taking any chances.

  When Bradley says, “I’ll just come in and wait for her,” Neal steps into his path.

  “Why don’t I call Lucinda,” he suggests, keeping one hand over his weapon as the other reaches for his cell phone, “and check with her?”

  Bradley shrugs. “Good idea. Tell her that I just took the train down from New York to see her so she’d better get her butt home.”

  Neal dials Lucinda’s phone and is relieved when she picks up on the first ring. “Cin. I’m still at your place.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Your friend Bradley is here.”

  She gasps. “Bradley! Oh, no, I forgot!”

  “So you were expecting him?” Neal relaxes another notch.

  “Yes. It totally slipped my mind. Tell him I’m really sorry, and I’ll have to catch him next time.”

  “She says she’s sorry, and she’ll catch you next time,” Neal tells Bradley, who frowns.

  “Where is she? Where are you, Lucinda? Here, can I talk to her?”

  Neal reluctantly hands over the phone, hoping Lucinda knows better than to give anything away. She might trust Bradley, but right now, Neal doesn’t trust anyone.

  “No, it’s okay. I understand. Yes. But I can just wait here at your apartment for you to come back,” Bradley offers into the phone. “What?…No, your friend let me in, but I have your keys…. Oh. I didn’t know you changed them. Okay, well, then I guess I don’t have your keys anymore. Still, I can stick around…. No?…All right. All right, fine…. Whatever. Whenever. Okay. Good-bye.”

  “Wait. Don’t hang up.” Neal reaches for the phone.

  “Too late. Sorry.” Bradley thrusts it at him.

  “I’ll take that package,” Neal tells him, and Bradley hands it over as well.

  “Good-bye,” Neal calls after him as he heads down the stairs.

  He hears a grumbled response from below before the door to the street opens and slams shut.

  “Temperamental actors.” Neal shakes his head.

  Then he looks down at the package in his hand.

  Lucinda’s name is scrawled on the plain brown wrapping—in what looks like red lipstick.

  When Randy spots her sitting at the airport gate, she looks…like someone else.

  This, he realizes, is Main Line Lucinda Sloan. How easy it is to forget where she came from when she’s wearing jeans and drinking Pepsi from a can, waves of unfettered hair streaming over her shoulders and down her back.

  Today, it’s tamed in a sedate chignon. Even from here, he can see that she’s got makeup on. And she’s wrapped in what looks like a woolen blanket—a dress coat, he realizes, as he draws closer.

  He slows his pace, watching her, wondering why—no matter how she looks or where he sees her—she always makes him feel this way.

  What way? How does she make you feel?

  Randy’s been asking himself a lot of questions lately—and they always seem to involve Lucinda.

  He never has any answers.

  But, looking at her across the bustling concourse, he’s certain of one thing.

  She had nothing to do with Carla’s death.

  He doesn’t give a damn what the evidence says, or what people think.

  He’d bet his life on Lucinda Sloan’s innocence.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please remain seated with your seatbelts fastened
while we’re taxiing toward the gate. If you have a cell phone where you can easily get to it, you’re free now to make a call.”

  Lucinda immediately reaches into her pocket. She finds her BlackBerry, along with a packet of chocolate-covered peanut butter eggs she stashed there this morning.

  Nibbling one, she checks her phone and finds an urgent text message from Neal.

  CALL ME AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

  She licks the chocolate from her thumb and dials, glancing over the seat back to find Randy. They couldn’t get seats together; he’s sitting several rows behind her.

  Seeing her, he shoots her a questioning look. She holds up her phone, mouthing, “Neal.”

  He answers on the first ring. “Lucinda, where are you?”

  “On the ground in Chicago. We just landed.” She speaks in a low voice, conscious that the male passenger next to her has folded his newspaper and put it away. “What’s up?”

  “There was a package on your doorstep earlier. Not from a delivery service or anything—just a box wrapped in brown paper with your name on it.”

  He pauses.

  “Your friend Bradley picked it up.”

  “And…?”

  “And we’ve brought him in for questioning.”

  Her heart skips a beat. “Why? You don’t think—”

  “All I know is that he was there, and he handled the package—it’s in the Crime Lab now—and we need to rule out that he’s the one who put it there.”

  “It’s in the Crime Lab? Why?”

  “Your name was written in red lipstick on the box, Cin.”

  “What was in it?”

  “Just a blue tissue stained with a red lipstick kiss.”

  As promised, Jason Czarniak meets Cam at the door of the machine shop in an industrial stretch of a suburban town called Lackawanna.

  The double-chinned man with the graying blond mustache, thick aviator glasses, and Buffalo Sabres cap looks nothing like the good-looking athlete in his yearbook photo taken almost forty years ago.

  But the name stitched on an oval patch on his blue mechanic’s uniform reads Jason, and when she called him earlier, after tracking him down with Janet O’Leary’s help, he told her that he had, indeed, been Sandra Wubner’s high school sweetheart.

  If he thought it was an odd question, he didn’t let on over the phone. He agreed to talk to her and asked that she meet him here at the machine shop when his shift ended.

  She’s dangerously close to missing her flight home, but she’s trying not to think about that right now.

  A phone call to Mike on her way over here confirmed that poor little Grace is still miserable.

  “She probably wants to nurse,” Cam told him, plagued with guilt. “Are you holding her close to your chest the way I do when you feed her?”

  “Yeah, I am. But my chest is missing a key component,” he said dryly.

  “I’m serious, Mike! I’m worried about her.”

  “Don’t be. She’ll get through the day on a bottle. Just do what you have to do in Buffalo.”

  What she has to do in Buffalo is ask Jason Czarniak about his long-dead girlfriend. Hardly a pleasant task.

  “We can talk in here.” He leads the way to a break or waiting room that consists of a couple of chairs with plastic seats and two vending machines, one of which bears a handwritten OUT OF ORDER sign. The scent of stale cigarette smoke and motor oil permeates the air.

  Cam finds this place is more depressing, somehow, than the cancer hospital was. At Roswell, she felt a sense of real hope amidst the despair—of human beings caring for each other.

  Janet O’Leary was a big part of that perception. She told Cam a little about her work, saying, “My job is to accept patients for whoever they are, and to help them to use their faith to accept the losses that come with living with, or dying from, their diagnosis.”

  Cam couldn’t help but think of her father, and the losses he never learned to accept.

  If she does learn the truth about Ava’s death, it won’t change anything for Ike. It’s too late now. He’s not all there most of the time, and when he is…What comfort will there be in learning that his firstborn was murdered?

  From Roswell, Cam very nearly drove straight to the airport and headed home, thinking maybe she should just forget about it.

  But she couldn’t bring herself to do that.

  Because while the truth can’t help her father now, maybe it can bring her—if not comfort—then closure.

  “Have a seat. Want a can of pop?” Jason asks her, gesturing at the vending machine that works. On his grease-stained left hand is a gold wedding band.

  “No, thank you.” Cam imagines him getting over Sandra all those years ago, moving on, marrying someone else. She wonders if he’s ever still haunted by what happened.

  Probably.

  You don’t just get over something like that.

  “I’m going to get one. Hang on a second.” He feeds in a dollar bill, and then another. The second one spits out of the slot again with a whirring sound.

  Jason attempts to get it in several more times, cursing under his breath when the machine won’t take it and fishing in his pockets for another single.

  “Here you go.” Cam hands him one from her purse—which, she can’t help but think, retails for more than he must make here in a week.

  “Oh…thanks.” He offers her the crumpled dollar the machine wouldn’t take.

  She shakes her head. “It’s okay.”

  “No, take it. Unless you’re planning to use it in some stupid machine,” he adds with a grin.

  She smiles back and accepts the dollar, deciding she likes him. Watching him take the Pepsi from the machine, she wonders how he dealt with his loss all those years ago. According to Janet, he and Sandy had gone steady all the way through high school and into her freshman year at Buff State. Jason, she said, went to work right out of high school.

  “So you knew Sandy?” he asks, after taking a swig of Pepsi and settling in the chair opposite hers.

  “No, I actually didn’t.”

  “Oh. I thought that’s why you were here.” He looks confused.

  “I’m here because I’m looking into her death.”

  Jason raises a dubious blond eyebrow. “Are you a cop?”

  “No.”

  “Reporter?”

  “No! I’m just someone who…who also lost someone very dear to me, right around the same time. My sister. They said it was a suicide, too, but…I’m not so sure.”

  “Yeah? Because I wasn’t so sure, either. Back then. With Sandy.”

  Her heart pounds. “You weren’t? Why not?”

  “No one knew this,” he leans forward conspiratorially, “but we were gonna get married.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. Sandy was real excited about it. After she got through college—she was gonna be a teacher—we were planning to settle down and get a house and have a bunch of kids. That was the plan. When she died, I was saving up to buy her a pre.”

  “A pre?”

  “Pre-engagement ring.”

  Lost in his bittersweet memories, Jason falls silent.

  “You said you didn’t think, at the time, that Sandy killed herself, Jason.”

  “Nope.”

  “Then you thought someone else killed her?”

  “I didn’t know what to think. When that little kid she was watching that night said she saw me there, I got scared, you know? Because I wasn’t there, and I thought they thought I was. They checked out my alibi—thank God I had one; I was at a Sabres game that night with my dad and a couple of his friends. So then they figured the little kid must have been wrong about someone’s being there.”

  “Did you think she was wrong?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So you thought someone else might have been there with Sandra? Some other guy? Or…man?”

  “You mean, did I think she was cheating on me?” He looks defensive. “Nope. No way. Not her. We were in l
ove. We were going to get married.”

  Maybe it really would have happened, Cam thinks—maybe he’d have married the beautiful college girl who wanted to become a teacher.

  Or maybe they would have become more entrenched in their separate worlds over time, grown apart, broken up.

  Maybe, when Sandra Wubner died, she was already moving on.

  Maybe there really was someone else.

  Maybe she, like Ava, had gotten involved at college with something that she shouldn’t have.

  “If she wasn’t cheating on you, but you’re not sure she took her own life, who did you think was with her at the Toscanos’ house that night?” she asks Jason. “Who did you think killed her?”

  “I don’t know. A stranger, maybe? Stuff like that happens. Look, to be honest with you, it didn’t matter to me back then, because she was gone. And the last thing I wanted the cops to do was start in on me again.”

  “Why worry, if you were innocent?”

  He shrugs. “Innocent people get arrested all the time.”

  Yes, Cam thinks. And sometimes, guilty ones go free.

  Lucinda and Randy step out of a cab on a side street off West Division and look around at the dusk-cloaked buildings.

  “Over there. That must be it.”

  Lucinda follows Randy’s gaze to a narrow three-story brick facade, fronted by several squad cars, a news van, and a telltale strip of yellow crime scene tape.

  Looking up at the building’s brightly lit second story windows, Lucinda experiences a sudden flash of violence.

  Just a snatch of a scream, a fleeting glimpse of spattering blood, a howl of…laughter?

  Laughter.

  Yes, and the jarring sound makes her skin crawl.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Lucinda blinks and looks up to see Randy watching her.

  “Nothing, just…that’s the place. Definitely.” With a shudder, she shakes her head to banish the echoing laughter.

  “Did you see something?”

  “Not really. Just…blood. But I heard something.”

  “What?”

  “Someone laughing.” She shudders.

  Randy looks concerned. “Do you want to…I don’t know, wait here while I go speak to them?” He points to a heavy-set man in a trench coat smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk in front of the building, talking to a uniformed officer who appears to be barely out of his teens.