Nightwatcher

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “I hate him.” The look in her eyes—it was lethal. It scared the hell out of him.

  She’d been wanting to do that, Sam realized, for a long time. She’d been wanting to hurt Jerry. Or maybe just hurt someone, anyone—just for the hell of it.

  He knew, because he recognized the look. He’d seen it in his father’s eyes, and he’d seen it in the mirror. The same dark urge had festered inside him for as long as he could remember. But he fought it, because he didn’t want to be like his father.

  Hearing sirens, he abruptly turned his back on Jamie and started running again. He never looked back.

  Maybe he knew she was following him. Maybe he didn’t.

  Whenever he remembers that night, he’s never really sure.

  What he does know is that later—much later, maybe the next night—he walked out of a bar, and there she was. Waiting for him. She got in his face, telling him that she needed him, that she wanted to come with him, that she wanted him to take care of her—on and on like that.

  She looked and sounded like her mother. In his inebriated confusion, he thought she was her mother.

  She just wouldn’t let up. Kept talking to him, making accusations and demands, louder and more shrill until he couldn’t take it anymore.

  He had a blade in his pocket for protection, as always. He’d never used it, though. Never used anything but his fists. Not until that night.

  The next thing he knew, she was dead at his feet with her throat slit, those cold eyes of hers seemingly fixed on his face.

  She wasn’t Lenore.

  She was Jamie. His own daughter.

  He’d killed her—killed a part of himself, really—and the strange thing was, his first thought was that it had felt good. For so long, he’d been wondering what it felt like to take a life. Now he knew.

  And he wanted to do it again.

  He left her there, on the street.

  He started running, and he didn’t look back. He ran away from his dead daughter, and his injured son. He ran away from New York. Hitchhiked out through Jersey, through Pennsylvania. On the Ohio turnpike, a lady trucker picked him up. They drove for a while, until the trucker said something that pissed him off, and he swore he could hear Jamie’s voice in his head, telling him to do something about it.

  He tried, when they pulled over at the next truck stop. He pulled a knife on the trucker, tried to use it. Bad idea. Turned out she was a black belt. He regained consciousness to find himself back in police custody.

  They never connected him to Lenore, or Jamie, or Jerry . . .

  But they sure as hell connected him to his rap sheet.

  It was back to prison for him, for years.

  And through all those years, Jamie talked to him inside his head.

  He gradually came to understand that when he killed her, her spirit left her body and entered his own. Her being melded with his. She was a part of him now, and he was a part of her. Eventually, he let go of Sam and became Jamie.

  He didn’t tell anyone about that, though. They would never understand. They would have thought he was crazy, just like his old man. Like father, like son. He probably would have been sent to the psych ward.

  All he wanted was to get the hell out of prison; to go find the rest of his family, and make things right.

  Finally, this summer, he was free. Free to leave. Free to embrace Jamie on the outside, just as he had within. He had always thought she looked like her mother, but when he put on a woman’s clothes, and the right wig, and looked into the mirror . . . he saw Jamie. It was like she was alive again. A part of him.

  She told him what to do about Lenore. She deserved to be punished, Jamie said, for the way she had treated him.

  It felt good, so good, to kill Lenore. When it was over, he waited for Jerry to come home. Jamie wanted him to kill Jerry, too.

  But when Jerry walked in the door, another voice started speaking inside his head, drowning out Jamie’s. It was his own voice.

  He’s your son. Look at him. Don’t do to him what your father wanted to do to you!

  “Who are you?” Jerry asked, frightened, bewildered. He was childlike—but there was no hint of the scrappy kid he’d once been.

  He’d been robbed of that. Robbed of so many things.

  “I’m . . . your sister. Jamie.” The words escaped him before he could think them through, but when he saw Jerry’s face light up, he knew it was for the best.

  “I thought you were dead!”

  “Well, I’m not. I went away, but now I’m back, and I’m going to take care of you.”

  And that’s what I did. It’s what I tried to do, until it all went wrong.

  Having arrived at a northbound subway entrance, he decides that it’s time to stop walking.

  He turns to look back over his shoulder.

  From this vantage, he can’t see the gaping hole in the skyline, or the smoke rising from the ruins a few miles south. From here, he can see only intact buildings, glittering against the starry night sky.

  Time to get out of here; time to go far, far away again.

  At least for a while.

  But don’t worry, he tells New York City . . . and Jerry . . . and Allison.

  I’ll be back. You can count on that.

  “Allison. Allison . . .”

  She opens her eyes to see Mack. “What . . . ? Where . . . ?”

  Dazed, she looks around and sees that she’s in her own living room. Faint light falls through the window; it’s dawn.

  Emily Reiss is dozing on the couch beside her, and Mack’s sister, Lynn, is in the corner of the room, having a hushed telephone conversation. There’s no sign of Officer Green, but she can hear the crackle of a police radio in the next room.

  “Allison, there’s good news,” Mack tells her. “Detective Manzillo just called. They got him.”

  “Got who?”

  “Jerry. The handyman. He did it. He’s under arrest. It’s over.”

  “Jerry?” she echoes, stunned. “But . . . are you sure?”

  “He confessed.”

  “Are you sure?” she asks again, because it can’t be right.

  “Positive.”

  Wow. So she was wrong.

  She had been so sure Jerry was harmless . . .

  Guess I’m not a very good judge of character after all.

  “Are you okay?” Mack asks.

  “Yes,” she says. “Are you?”

  He nods.

  She reaches out and squeezes his hand. He squeezes it back.

  “Thanks,” he says. “Again. For helping me.”

  “You’re welcome. I’m usually around. Whatever you need. Right across the hall.”

  He smiles—faintly, but it’s a start. “That’s good to know.”

  Keep reading for

  an excerpt from

  SLEEPWALKER,

  the chilling follow-up to

  NIGHTWATCHER

  Coming October 2012

  from Wendy Corsi Staub

  Sunday, September 11, 2011

  Glenhaven Park

  Westchester County, New York

  Her husband has suffered from insomnia all his life, but tonight, Allison MacKenna is the one who can’t sleep.

  Lying on her side of the king-sized bed in their master bedroom, she listens to the quiet rhythm of her own breathing, the summery chatter of crickets and night birds beyond the window screen, and the faint hum of the television in the living room downstairs.

  Mack is down there, stretched out on the couch. When she stuck her head in about an hour ago to tell him she was going to bed, he was watching Animal House on cable.

  “What happened to the Jets game?” she asked.

  “They were down fourteen at the half so I turned the channel. Want to watch the movie? It’s
just starting.”

  “Seen it,” she said dryly. As in, Who hasn’t?

  “Yeah? Is it any good?” he returned, just as dryly.

  “As a former fraternity boy, you’ll love it, I’m sure.” She hesitated, wondering if she should tell him.

  Might as well: “And you might want to revisit that Jets game.”

  “Really? Why’s that?”

  “They’re in the middle of a historic comeback. I just read about it online. You should watch.”

  “I’m not in the mood. The Giants are my team, not the Jets.”

  Determined to make light of it, she said, “Um, excuse me, aren’t you the man who asked my OB-GYN to preschedule a C-section last winter because you were worried I might go into labor while the Jets were playing?”

  “That was for the AFC Championship!”

  She just shook her head and bent to kiss him in the spot where his dark hair, cut almost buzz-short, has begun the inevitable retreat from his forehead.

  When she met Mack, he was in his mid-thirties and looked a decade younger, her own age. Now he owns his forty-four years, with a sprinkling of gray at his temples and wrinkles that frond the corners of his green eyes. His is the rare Irish complexion that tans, rather than burns, thanks to a rumored splash of Mediterranean blood somewhere in his genetic pool. But this summer, his skin has been white as January, and the pallor adds to the overall aura of world-weariness.

  Tonight, neither of them was willing to discuss why Mack, a die-hard sports fan, preferred an old movie he’d seen a hundred times to an exciting football game on opening day of the NFL season—which also happens to coincide with the milestone tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

  The networks and most of the cable channels have provided a barrage of special programming all weekend. You couldn’t escape it, not even with football.

  Allison had seen her husband abruptly switch off the Giants game this afternoon right before the kickoff, as the National Anthem played and an enormous flag was unfurled on the field by people who had lost loved ones ten years ago today.

  It’s been a long day. It might be a long night, too.

  She opens her eyes abruptly, hearing a car slowing on the street out front. Reflected headlights arc across the ceiling of the master bedroom, filtering in through the sheer curtains. Moments later, the engine turns off, car doors slam, faint voices and laughter float up to the screened windows: the neighbors returning from their weekend house in Vermont.

  Every Friday without fail, the Lewises drive away from the four-thousand-square-foot Colonial next door that has a home gym over the three-car garage, saltwater swimming pool, and sunken patio with a massive outdoor stone fireplace, hot tub, and wet bar. Allison, who takes in their mail and feeds Marnie, the world’s most lovable black cat, while they’re gone, is well aware that the inside of their house is as spectacular as the outside.

  She always assumed that their country home must be pretty grand for them to leave all that behind every weekend, particularly since Bob Lewis spends a few nights every week away on business travel as it is.

  But then a few months ago, when she and Phyllis were having a neighborly chat, Phyllis mentioned that it’s an old lakeside home that’s been in Bob’s family for a hundred years.

  Allison pictured a rambling waterfront mansion. “It sounds beautiful.”

  “Well, I don’t know about beautiful,” Phyllis told her with a laugh. “It’s just a farmhouse, with claw-foot bathtubs instead of showers, holes in the screens, bats in the attic . . .”

  “Really?”

  “Really. And it’s in the middle of nowhere. That’s why we love it. It’s completely relaxing. Living around here—it’s more and more like a pressure cooker. Sometimes you just need to get away from it all. You know?”

  Yeah. Allison knows.

  Every Fourth of July, the MacKennas spend a week at the Jersey Shore, staying with Mack’s divorced sister Lynn and her three kids at their Salt Breeze Pointe beach house.

  This year, Mack drove down with the family for the holiday weekend. Early Tuesday morning, he hastily packed his bag to go—no, to flee—back to the city, claiming something had come up at the office.

  Not necessarily a far-fetched excuse.

  Last January, the same week Allison had given birth to their third child (on a Wednesday, and not by scheduled C-section), Mack was promoted to vice president of television advertising sales. Now he works longer hours than ever before. Even when he’s physically present with Allison and the kids, he’s often attached—reluctantly, even grudgingly, but nevertheless inseparably—to his BlackBerry.

  “I can’t believe I’ve become one of those men,” he told her once in bed, belatedly contrite after he’d rolled over—and off her—to intercept a buzzing message.

  She knew which men he was talking about. And she, in turn, seems to have become one of those women: the well-off suburban housewives whose husbands ride commuter trains in shirtsleeves and ties at dawn and dusk, caught up in city business, squeezing in fleeting family time on weekends and holidays and vacations . . .

  If then.

  So, no, his having to rush back to the city at dawn on July 5 wasn’t necessarily a far-fetched excuse. But it was, Allison was certain—given the circumstances—an excuse.

  After a whirlwind courtship, his sister Lynn had recently remarried Daryl, a widower with three daughters. Like dozens of other people in Middleton, the town where he and Lynn live, Daryl had lost his spouse on September 11.

  “He and Mack have so much in common,” Lynn had told Allison the first morning they all arrived at the beach house. “I’m so glad they’ll finally get to spend some time together. I was hoping they’d have gotten to know each other better by now, but Mack has been so busy lately . . .”

  He was busy. Too busy, apparently, to stick around the beach house with a man who understood what it was like to have lost his wife in the twin towers.

  There were other things, though, that Daryl couldn’t possibly understand. Things Mack didn’t want to talk about, ever—not even with Allison.

  At his insistence, she and the kids stayed at the beach with Lynn and Daryl and their newly blended family while Mack went home to work. She tried to make the best of it, but it wasn’t the same.

  She wondered then—and continues to wonder now—if anything ever will be the same again.

  Earlier, before heading up the stairs, Allison had rested a hand on Mack’s shoulder. “Don’t stay up too late, okay?”

  “I’m off tomorrow, remember?”

  Yes. She remembered. He’d dropped the news of his impromptu mini stay-cation when he came home from work late Friday night.

  “Guess what? I’m taking some vacation days.”

  She lit up. “Really? When?”

  “Now.”

  “Now?”

  “This coming week. Monday, Tuesday, maybe Wednesday, too.”

  “Maybe you should wait,” she suggested, “so that we can actually plan something. Our anniversary’s coming up next month. You can take time off then instead, and we can get away for a few days. Phyllis is always talking about how beautiful Vermont is at that time of—”

  “Things will be too busy at the office by then,” he cut in. “It’s quiet now, and I want to get the sunroom painted while the weather is still nice enough to keep the windows open. I checked and it’s finally going to be dry and sunny for a few days.”

  That was true, she knew—she, too, had checked the forecast. Last week had been a washout, and she was hoping to get the kids outside a bit in the days ahead.

  But Mack’s true motive, she suspects, is a bit more complicated than perfect painting weather.

  Just as grieving families and images of burning skyscrapers are the last thing Mack wanted to see on TV today, the streets of Manhattan are the last place he wants
to be tomorrow, invaded as they are by a barrage of curiosity seekers, survivors, reporters, and camera crews, makeshift memorials and the ubiquitous protesters—not to mention all that extra security due to the latest terror threat.

  Allison doesn’t blame her husband for avoiding reminders. For him, September 11 wasn’t just a horrific day of historic infamy; it marked a devastating personal loss. Nearly three thousand New Yorkers died in the attacks.

  Mack’s first wife was among them.

  When it happened, he and Carrie were Allison’s across-the-hall neighbors. Their paths occasionally crossed hers in the elevator or laundry room or on the front stoop of the Hudson Street building, but she rarely gave them a second thought until tragedy struck.

  In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, when she found out Carrie was missing at the World Trade Center, Allison reached out to Mack. Their friendship didn’t blossom into romance for over a year, and yet . . .

  The guilt is always there.

  Especially on this milestone night.

  Allison tosses and turns in bed, wrestling the reminder that her own happily-ever-after was born in tragedy; that she wouldn’t be where she is now if Carrie hadn’t talked Mack into moving from Washington Heights to Hudson Street, so much closer to her job as an executive assistant at Cantor Fitzgerald; if Carrie hadn’t been killed ten years ago today.

  Yes, in the most literal sense, she wouldn’t be where she is now—the money Mack received from various relief funds and insurance policies after Carrie’s death paid for this house, as well as college investment funds for their children.

  Yes, there are daily stresses, but it’s a good life she’s living. Too good to be true, she sometimes thinks even now: three healthy children, a comfortable suburban home, a BMW and a Lexus SUV in the driveway, the luxury of being a stay-at-home mom . . .

  The knowledge that Carrie wasn’t able to conceive the child Mack longed for is just one more reason for Allison to feel sorry for her—for what she lost, and Allison gained.

  But it’s not as though I don’t deserve happiness. I’m thirty-four years old. And my life was certainly no picnic before Mack came along.

  Her father walked out on her childhood when she was nine and never looked back; her mother died of an overdose before she graduated high school. She put herself through the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, moved alone to New York with a degree in fashion, and worked her ass off to establish her career at 7th Avenue magazine.