It’s his mother’s fault.
And finally, she’s been punished.
So have Kristina and Marianne. Next, it will be Allison’s turn.
Should I cut off her finger, too, when the time comes?
How will she react? Will she faint? Struggle? Try to scream?
Jamie can’t wait to find out.
Yet as the afternoon dragged on, even the anticipation of Allison’s murder has worn thin.
I really thought it was going to happen today. I wanted it to happen today. I so wanted to see blood, feel blood, touch blood . . . today.
Today . . .
Even now, Jamie’s hands ache to grab hold of that knife handle again; they’ve been aching so badly that Jamie couldn’t bear to leave the knife behind at the apartment.
No, it’s right here, in Jamie’s pocket, just like the old days.
There’s something deliciously empowering about walking down the street knowing the knife is at the ready, just in case . . .
No. I’m not going to use it.
I could, though, if I felt like it. That’s what counts.
But Jamie won’t be taking any chances. Not today. Not with the police actively investigating Kristina’s murder, and undoubtedly aware—thanks to Allison—that Jerry was in the vicinity that night.
It wouldn’t be easy for them to track down Jerry, though. He gets paid off the books, strictly in cash; there’s no record of his address in the office files—Jamie checked—and Dale Reiss probably doesn’t even know where he lives.
But what if he does?
Or what if his nosy wife, Emily, the good-deed-doer, has Jerry’s address written down somewhere for some reason, like to send a Christmas card or something?
For all Jamie knows, the cops are on their way to the apartment right now. And if they get inside, they’re going to find a lot more than they bargained on.
Dammit.
This is all Allison Taylor’s fault.
She has to be punished. The sooner, the better.
But first . . . Jerry needs cake. It’s the only way to keep him quiet and content.
Mo’s bodega is open, of course. Today there’s an enormous American flag hanging in the window.
Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising, given the sudden burst of patriotism all over the city, but something about it seems . . . off. Jamie isn’t sure why. Maybe the flag is just too big, or too prominently displayed, covering all the sale signs taped to the glass. Just too . . . deliberate.
Inside, Mo is behind the counter, as always. Today, though, he’s not lost in a newspaper. He’s keeping a wary eye on a young man who’s standing over by the refrigerated soda compartment.
Potential shoplifter? Probably.
He’s just a kid, really—sixteen, maybe seventeen. Short and skinny. He’s wearing low, baggy jeans and a backward Mets cap. Leaning against the open door to the compartment, he’s obviously taking his sweet old time looking through the soda cans.
Jamie brushes past him and checks the end cap where the bakery goods are kept. The shelf is bare. Dammit!
Ah, that’s right—Jamie bought the last box of chocolate cake yesterday, and restocking is obviously an issue with all that’s gone on. Still . . .
Jamie’s hand twitches, wanting to touch the knife . . . just to make sure it’s still there, of course. Not to . . . do anything. Because of course, there’s nothing to do. Running out of cake—that’s not a reason to—
“Excuse me,” Mo calls.
Startled, Jamie looks over, and is relieved to see that he’s talking to the kid.
“Keep door closed until you figure out what you want! If you let warm air in, fridge doesn’t work!”
“Shut up, freakin’ towel head,” the kid mutters.
Mo didn’t hear him.
Jamie did.
The cake shelf is still bare, and the kid is still standing staring at the soda cans, and the store is suddenly feeling hot and close despite the draft from the propped-open door to the street and the propped-open door to the fridge.
“Excuse me, excuse me,” Mo calls again. “You need to close door!”
“Yeah? What are you going to do if I don’t? Blow me up?”
Mo scowls, but ignores him, turning away. He opens a newspaper, jerking the page so hard the paper tears.
Jamie looks from him to the young punk, and back again.
Poor Mo. He doesn’t deserve this . . . this . . . misplaced hatred.
He looks up as Jamie walks toward the door. “Can I help you?”
“No, thanks,” Jamie tells him.
But I can help you.
Chapter Eleven
Thursday evening, Allison takes a deep breath and knocks on the door to Mack’s apartment.
He’s inside—she knows that, because she heard him come in about ten minutes ago.
She’d been waiting for hours for his return from the grim task of delivering his wife’s DNA to the midtown Armory, where a registry has been set up for those missing after the attack.
Earlier, Allison watched live televised news footage of the mob scene there. The cameras unabashedly zeroed in on distraught family members pushing their way past satellite trucks and reporters, curious bystanders, religious groups keeping vigil . . .
She looked for Mack, but she didn’t see him.
She wishes he hadn’t turned down her offer to go with him, or even instead of him. But he was adamant that it was something he needed to do alone.
After he left, she walked to Union Square and found an open supermarket. The shelves and cold compartments were picked over, and one of the clerks, an NYU kid working part-time, said the delivery trucks hadn’t been able to get into the city since Monday.
“We’re hoping they’ll get here tomorrow,” he said, “so if you live in the neighborhood, you might want to wait.”
“I don’t,” Allison told him. “I’d better get stuff now, while I can.”
“Where do you live?”
“Hudson Street, off Canal.”
“And you’re staying there?”
“I’m not in the evacuation zone.”
“But still. There’s asbestos in the air down there.”
Allison didn’t know what to say to that.
There’s probably asbestos in the air up here, too.
Or, Do you think I’d be breathing asbestos if I had anywhere else to go?
She didn’t say anything. Not then, and not as the kid told her his politics, which basically translated into the United States being filled with crass capitalists and warmongers who asked for it and got what they deserved.
Allison lugged home heavy bags filled with chicken and vegetables and milk and bread, all of which could be fresher. But at least none of it was past the expiration date.
Back at her apartment, safely locked inside, she made soup.
It wasn’t something she’d ever attempted to do before—unless you counted mixing a can of Progresso lentil soup with a cup of cooked ditalini.
But it suddenly seemed like a good idea to learn how to cook, a good idea to do something for Mack, a good idea to keep her hands and her thoughts occupied.
Busy, busy, busy . . .
Stay busy, and you won’t think about the scary stuff.
After browsing through an Internet recipe database, Allison put the chicken in a pot with carrots, onions, celery, and salt and filled it with cold water. Eventually, it smelled like chicken soup, and it looked like chicken soup, so . . . it must be chicken soup, right?
Pleased with herself, she deboned the chicken, added noodles to the broth, poured it into a jar, and waited for Mack to come home.
Now that he’s here—now that she’s knocked—she suddenly wonders if she’s overstepping her boundaries. Remembering all those people she saw on the
news, gawking at the victims’ families, she wonders if he’ll think she’s just another curious ghoul.
But she’s not. She’s . . . a friend. A friend he’s known just a few days, but perhaps the only friend who’s here, in person, right now when he so clearly needs someone.
Or does he?
How do you know what he needs?
Maybe she’s the one with needs. Maybe she needs to help him more than he needs—or wants—to be helped. Maybe she’s sick of being alone, or . . .
No. She’s not afraid to be alone.
It’s more the opposite, actually. She’s afraid not to be alone. When you let people in, you’re vulnerable. When you don’t, you have nothing to lose.
Mack’s door opens, and it’s too late for second thoughts.
He stands there, looking even worse for wear than he did earlier. Looking like he needs a friend, or soup, or sleep, or . . . something.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she says. “I just wanted to bring you this.”
He looks down at the jar she offers, then up at her face.
“It’s chicken soup,” she hurriedly goes on. “I don’t know if you have any food in the house, or if you’ve eaten, or if you’re hungry, but . . .”
Shut up, Allison. You’re rambling.
She stops talking and looks at him, wishing she knew him well enough to know what he might be thinking behind that opaque gaze.
“Thank you,” he says, and takes the jar. “Do you want to come in?”
“I don’t want to bother you.”
“It’s okay. I was just . . .” He rakes a hand through his hair. “Oh, hell, I don’t even know what I was doing. Come in.”
Walking into the apartment, she experiences a flicker of misgiving, remembering what happened to Kristina.
But then, she no longer has any doubts about Mack, does she? He’s ensnared in his own tragedy; he doesn’t deserve a shred of suspicion.
The apartment looks exactly the same as it did when she was here yesterday, right down to the red coat still hanging over the back of a chair where Carrie presumably left it.
Seeing her glancing at it, Mack says, “I should probably hang that up, shouldn’t I? Or . . . figure out what to do with it?”
What is she supposed to say to that?
She watches him pick it up and stare at it for a moment. Then he puts it back on the chair. “I’ll do something with this later. God knows what. What do you do?”
She shrugs helplessly.
When her mother died, the church ladies came and bundled up all her clothes and sent them to charity. That’s what you do, they said. Give them to someone who needed them.
I needed them, Allison remembers thinking, one day when she was sitting on the floor in her mother’s empty closet and crying. It wasn’t that her mother had anything she would have worn—not in public, anyway. But she could have slept wrapped in one of her mother’s shapeless sweaters, smelling her mother’s scent in the yarn embrace.
No one ever gave her the chance. She was seventeen. Everything was handled for her.
Mack is a grown man. He can do this himself, in his own way, whenever he’s ready.
“Have a seat,” he says, gesturing vaguely toward the living room furniture.
She sits on the couch and tries to think of something to say.
He puts the soup on the kitchen counter and comes into the living room, looking out the window and then perching on the arm of the couch. But only for a moment, and then he is up again, restless.
“Do you want something to eat or drink?” he asks.
“No, I’m fine, but why don’t you sit down and eat some soup? It’s still hot.”
“I will. Just not right now. I’m not really hungry.”
“Are you sure? Have you eaten today?”
“I . . . I don’t even know. I can’t remember. I know that sounds crazy, but . . .” He shakes his head. “Everything is crazy, you know?”
“I know.”
If she knew him better, she would make him sit down at the dining room table and she would pour the soup into a bowl and hand him a spoon.
But it’s not her place to do that. It’s probably not even her place to be here.
“I brought her hairbrush down there, to the Armory, and her toothbrush,” he says abruptly.
“I . . . I’m sorry.”
“I had to take a number and wait on a folding chair for them to call it. There were so many people there . . . some didn’t talk at all, some were crying, hysterical. I was number 1448. I keep looking for meaning in that, you know? But there isn’t any. In the number, or . . . any of it.”
Oh God. This is tragic.
He goes on, staring into space, almost as if he needs to recap it for himself more than for her, “They were calling ten numbers at a time. When they called mine, they took us downstairs. They read off the names of people who were injured at the hospitals.” He shrugs, not bothering to state the obvious: Carrie’s name was not among them.
“Then I had to fill out a twelve-page report. I had to write down anything that might help them . . . you know, identify her body. They wanted to know if we have kids, you know, for DNA—or if she has parents, or siblings . . .”
“She doesn’t?”
“No. Just me. I mean, we were trying to have kids, but . . .”
“I’m so sorry,” Allison repeats, struggling not to blink and let the pooling tears escape her eyes. He isn’t crying. How can she start?
“It wasn’t so bad, really. I mean, in a way it was horrible, but in another way . . . I was doing something. Something for her. You know?”
She thinks about the day the church lady bought her the Ralph Lauren dress, about how her mother would have loved to have seen her in it.
This is nothing like that, but . . .
Grief.
Yes. She knows grief.
“I know what you mean,” she tells him, surreptitiously wiping her cheek. A tear is rolling down it. Dammit.
“You do? Did you lose . . . someone?”
“Not, you know, on Tuesday. A long time ago, though. When I was a kid. My mom.”
“I lost mine, too—just last year, not when I was a kid. That had to be hard for you.”
“Yeah.”
“The thing I keep thinking about—with my mom—is that she didn’t like Carrie.”
Startled by that admission, Allison notices that the mask has lifted. Now she can read the raw, honest emotion in his expression.
“A lot of people didn’t like her,” he tells her. “And in the end, I was one of them.”
Allison stares, shocked. Maybe she heard him wrong. She must have heard him wrong.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “what was that?”
He sighs heavily. “Things weren’t working between Carrie and me. And I don’t know what to do with that now. I feel sick when I think about how I was feeling, what I said, what I did . . .”
Whatever she was expecting when she came over here, this isn’t it.
“I hurt her. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I feel like I have to tell someone.”
Looking at him, seeing the glazed, faraway expression in his eyes, she’s suddenly uneasy.
What does he mean, he hurt her?
“I keep thinking,” he goes on, more to himself than to her, “if I could go back and relive Tuesday morning, would I do it the same way? You know, if I knew what was going to happen.”
She nods. As if she knows.
She doesn’t know, though. She doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
She thinks about Kristina, and she wonders. About Mack. Again.
“The thing that sucks,” he says, “is that I know I did what I had to do. Anything else would have been—”
Interrupted by the buzzing of the
wall intercom by the door, he looks over at it.
Startled, Allison follows his gaze. “Are you expecting someone?”
“No.”
Mack hesitates, then walks slowly over to the intercom.
Her thoughts racing back to Kristina, Allison remembers that there was no sign of a break-in at her apartment. Either her killer got in with a key or through an unlocked window, or she let him in the door.
Mack nods and presses the intercom button. “Who is it?”
Allison’s heart sinks at the reply.
“NYPD. We need to talk to you, Mr. MacKenna.”
From the window of her sister’s spare bedroom in Jersey City, Emily Reiss has a perfect view of lower Manhattan. She knows the vantage was a major selling point when Jacky bought the east-facing condo on a high floor.
Now, some might consider it a drawback to see the sun rise every morning over the permanently altered—and still smoking—skyline.
Emily certainly does.
She closes the blinds and turns away, wondering how long she and Dale are going to have to stay exiled in New Jersey. Jacky says she doesn’t mind, and she probably doesn’t—she’s a neurologist and isn’t around much. But her live-in boyfriend, Frank—a writer who works from home—doesn’t seem particularly pleased to have given up the room he uses as an office.
“We really need to think about moving into a vacant apartment in one of your buildings,” Emily tells Dale, who’s lying on the futon.
Either he’s so engrossed in the Times that he doesn’t hear it, or—more likely—he doesn’t want to hear it.
“Dale?”
He looks at her over the top of the paper. “Let’s just see how things go with our own building first.”
“You keep saying that, but how do you think things are going to go?” Their idyllic little corner of the world, adjacent to the Trade Center, is now a crime scene, layered in toxic dust and littered with broken airplanes, broken buildings, broken bodies.
They weren’t home when the planes hit, thank goodness, and they haven’t even been allowed back to collect their property. That’s the least of Emily’s worries.
She never wants to go back there. Ever.
“There are empty apartments in all of your buildings, Dale,” she points out. “Pick one—I don’t care which one—and let’s move in.”
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