Hell to Pay

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “I don’t know, then. I guess I’ll try my luck at the Soundview Station. There has to be a train through eventually.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

  Jeremy shrugs. Never in his life has he wanted so badly to be at home.

  “All right,” Cliff says. “Get home safe.”

  “You too. Want to walk with me to the subway?”

  “No, thanks. I think I’ll head over to Garrett’s anyway and wait it out.”

  Wondering what makes a man choose a pub filled with strangers over home and his family, Jeremy wishes Cliff a merry Christmas and pulls on his coat.

  “There was something unusual,” Wendy Nevid tells the detectives, seated at a table with them in the break room.

  They’ve been asking mostly routine questions until this one—about whether anything unusual has occurred here at Parkview in the last couple of days.

  Now, as she nods vigorously, Detective Meade leans toward her with interest. “What happened?”

  “Friday morning,” Wendy says, “someone tried to get onto the floor. She said she was here to visit one of the patients, but she was lying.”

  “She?” Meade and Brandewyne exchange a glance. “What did she look like?”

  Wendy thinks back. “She was heavy, medium height, with dark hair.”

  “Wait a minute.” Meade pulls something out of his pocket.

  A photograph. No—a mug shot. He slides it across the table to Wendy. “Is this her?”

  Wendy looks at it. “Yes. That’s her. Who is she?”

  But then, all at once, before Meade even tells her, she knows. Knows why that woman looked so familiar, and knows where she’s seen her before: in a framed photograph in room 421.

  She’s much younger in it, and pretty, and slender, but still . . .

  “She’s Marin Quinn’s daughter.”

  C-U-Soon. Love, R

  C-U-Soon. Love, P

  After sending the return text message, she puts her phone aside and glances up at the computer screen. There, she watches Ryan do the same, courtesy of the hidden camera concealed in Lucy Cavalon’s living room a few floors above.

  She’d been dreading these last twenty-four hours, holed up in her tiny apartment, just waiting until it’s time. But actually, it’s proven quite entertaining to watch the two of them, Lucy and Ryan, lounging around without a clue that this is their last day on earth.

  If they knew, would they be doing anything differently?

  Would they be calling their parents, or praying, or trying to escape?

  Is that why Lucy is having those cramps she keeps talking about? Because she’s anxious?

  She even called the doctor, who seemed to reassure her.

  She hasn’t said much about it to her brother, but concern is blatant on her face.

  What if something’s wrong with the baby?

  “The baby will be fine,” Chaplain Gideon croons. “Just a few more hours. Patience.”

  Patience!

  It’s always about patience. Always.

  But not for much longer.

  She paces, nervous with anticipation—like a child on Christmas Eve, she thinks, much to her own amusement. Only she’s not waiting for Santa.

  Just a few more hours, and it will be time for her to show up at the apartment door upstairs. They’ll let her in. Of course they will.

  Once she’s in, Lucy will recognize her. But by then it will be too late. By then, the end will have begun.

  Just as Daddy said it would.

  Again, she pulls out the packet of letters—the ones Garvey Quinn wrote her from prison. They’ve given her the fortitude, these last few days, to resist temptation. The end is in sight now. Her reunion with her father is in sight. Tonight . . .

  She pulls the topmost letter from the stack, carefully unfolds the yellowed pages, and begins to read what Daddy wrote to her years ago.

  Dear Caroline . . .

  Seeing the obvious concern on the petite blond nurse’s face, Meade offers her a reassuring smile. “You’ve been really helpful, Ms. Nevid.”

  She nods, still clearly shaken by that photograph.

  “We’re going to station a uniformed officer in the lobby and another one up here on the floor, just like we talked about. In fact”—he looks over his shoulder toward the hall outside the break room, where Brandewyne is on the phone, making the necessary arrangements—“someone should be here shortly, and we won’t leave until that happens, I promise.”

  “You really think Caroline Quinn would want to hurt her own mother?”

  “She’s a sick woman. We don’t know what she might try to do, or where she’ll surface next. In fact, that’s what I wanted to ask you about. Mrs. Quinn has a son—”

  “Jeremy.”

  “You know him?”

  “He visits her every Friday.”

  “Was he here this Friday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we haven’t been able to get in touch with him and his wife.” Or their landlord, who, it turns out, was struck by an express train on Saturday afternoon and was killed.

  The platform was crowded, and no one saw exactly what happened in the moments before Carl Soto fell, jumped, or was pushed onto the track. It’s not clear which of those scenarios took place.

  They might never find out. Though the MTA has, in the years since 9/11, installed surveillance cameras over a good portion of the subway system, that particular section of that particular station wasn’t covered.

  “Do you know,” Meade asks Wendy Nevid, “if the Cavalons went away for the holidays?”

  “Not that I know of. They had just moved, and—”

  “They moved?”

  The nurse nods. “A week or two ago, I think.”

  “You mean they’re not living in White Plains now?”

  “No, they moved to the city.”

  “Do you know where?” Meade’s thoughts are racing. No wonder.

  “Upper West Side.”

  Upper West Side . . .

  It’s where Carl Soto was hit by that subway train—and that’s looking less and less like a coincidence—or an accident.

  “Do you know where on the Upper West Side?”

  Wendy shakes her head. “I’m afraid I don’t. I should have asked.”

  “It’s okay. We’ll find them.”

  “Why? Do you think they might be in danger, too?”

  Yes, Meade thinks grimly. I think that anyone who’s ever crossed Caroline Quinn’s path might be in danger.

  Aloud, he says only, “Do you think we can speak with Mrs. Quinn now? We’ll go easy, I promise,” he adds, seeing the worried look on the nurse’s face.

  “It’s just that she’s very fragile.”

  “I understand.”

  “What is it that you’re hoping to find out?”

  “Anything that might shed some light on where her daughter is, or where she might turn up next.”

  “But she doesn’t even know what happened to Caroline in the first place.”

  Meade’s eyes widen.

  “It’s not that she wasn’t told,” the nurse goes on, “just that she couldn’t really accept it.”

  “That Caroline died in the earthquake?”

  “No, long before that. She couldn’t accept that Caroline went to prison for killing her own sister.”

  Ryan hands Lucy a cup of tea. “Careful—don’t spill it. It’s hot.”

  “Thanks, Ry. It’s decaf, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He just looks at her.

  “Okay, I’m being a nagging sister. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. That’s just you.”

  She sticks out her tongue at him, then picks up the remote and aims it at the tele
vision screen, frozen on an image of a despondent George Bailey standing on a snowy bridge in Bedford Falls. Thumb poised to press the play button, Lucy asks Ryan, “Aren’t you going to sit down?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to make you something to eat?”

  She shakes her head. “Jeremy should be coming soon.”

  He called from his office phone a few minutes ago to say that he was leaving, and that his cell phone actually had died.

  “I hate to say it, but it might take him a while to get here,” Ryan tells his sister. “Maybe you should at least sip some soup or something.”

  “ ‘Sip some soup’? I’m not sick, Ry, and you’re not Florence Nightingale.”

  He manages a smile, glad to hear her sounding like her old self, but he can see the worry in her eyes.

  He’s worried, too. So worried that just now, when he was in the kitchen, he even texted Phoenix about what’s going on.

  Maybe she’s never had a baby but at least she’s a woman, and Ryan figures some female advice might be helpful. He’s utterly clueless when it comes to this stuff, and Lucy adamantly refuses to let him call their mother in Florida.

  “All she’d do is worry, and it would ruin her Christmas,” Lucy told him.

  “But at least you can ask her if this is normal.”

  “I already asked my doctor. She said that it probably is.”

  Ryan knows that, but still . . .

  My sister is having some cramps or something, he texted Phoenix while he was in the kitchen, waiting for the teakettle to whistle. Do you think it could be early labor pains?

  She must have been busy at work. The response took a few minutes to come back: When is she due?

  He quickly replied: Not until February.

  Only a few seconds this time for the response: IDK.

  IDK—I don’t know. So much for female advice.

  A moment later, she sent another message: Try not to worry.

  Try not to worry? Easy to say if you’ve never met Lucy and aren’t here to see the way she’s just lying around brooding. That’s completely unlike his sister.

  Ryan just wishes Jeremy would hurry up and get here.

  Or Phoenix, who told him that even if she has to walk through the storm to spend Christmas Eve with him, she’ll do it.

  It’s such an about-face from the way she was acting last week that he can’t help but wonder if something might be wrong with her. First hot, then cold, hot, cold—it can’t be normal behavior.

  Ryan isn’t familiar with the symptoms of, say, bipolar disorder, or depression, but he’s pretty sure drastic mood swings are among them. Maybe . . .

  Maybe he’ll talk to her about it. After the holidays, though.

  Right now, we all just have to get through Christmas Eve.

  The dark thought takes him by surprise. The holidays are meant to be joyful, not something to be endured.

  But he can’t help it.

  Trapped in a strange apartment with Lucy in this condition, and the city paralyzed by snow . . .

  But really, it’s just more of the same, isn’t it? It’s like he was telling Lucy last week.

  There’s some big, heavy dark thing hanging over my head . . . I feel like something’s going to go wrong. Like it’s got to.

  Every restaurant between the Bruckner home and the Soundview Avenue subway station was closed when Jeremy passed. So much for the city that never sleeps, he thinks, trudging up the steps to the elevated train. They’re drifted over with snow, not the most promising sign for the impending commute home to Manhattan.

  Reaching the platform, he finds it snow-swept and deserted.

  Apparently the rest of the world—the whole world, judging by the eerie stillness—is already safely at home for the holidays. That, or in the corner pub drinking shots with Cliff.

  A cold west wind blows tufts of snow into Jeremy’s face. He bends his head and turns his back. After a momentary reprieve, the wind seems to circle around and come at him from the other direction, as if to prove that there’s no escape.

  There never is.

  He looks up the tracks to the north, hoping to spot the headlight of an oncoming train, but all is dark and desolate.

  Cliff was right about the dearth of cabs tonight. Maybe Jeremy should brave the weather and walk the couple of miles over to the Grand Concourse, where he can pick up the underground subway line back to Manhattan. The B is a local. It stops at the Museum of Natural History on Central Park West. From there, it would be a short walk home.

  A short walk through a raging blizzard, after a long walk through a raging blizzard.

  Jeremy thinks about Lucy waiting for him, and wonders when or how he’s ever going to get there.

  He thinks of his parents, cozy at home in Connecticut with his sister Renny.

  My sister . . .

  Jeremy thinks about his other sister, the one who died just days after Garvey Quinn’s fatal heart attack in prison.

  Annie’s short life was so difficult and her death—if she grasped what was happening to her—was brutal.

  But maybe she didn’t realize it. Maybe she just swallowed that drug-laced cocoa that Caroline gave her, and went to sleep.

  Or maybe she was high before she even drank it, too high to realize that she was about to die.

  Jeremy hopes that was the case, and according to the coroner’s report, it seems likely. Annie had other drugs in her system that morning: marijuana, cocaine, booze.

  The usual.

  Sleeping pills—that was unusual. Finding those in Annie’s system—coupled with the fact that there was no suicide note—raised a red flag.

  For Jeremy, anyway.

  The police thought it was reasonable that she might have killed herself in the wake of her father’s death.

  Jeremy knew that wasn’t the case. From the moment he got the terrible call that Annie was dead, he knew she hadn’t killed herself, despite Garvey’s death and despite her addiction. He suspected—no, he knew—that Caroline must have done it.

  Both girls had dutifully come home to be with their widowed mother.

  Jeremy was there, too. He witnessed Caroline’s cruel treatment of Annie, saw the hatred and contempt in her eyes whenever she looked at her.

  After Annie’s death, he told Marin that Caroline could have been capable of killing her. He told the police, too.

  Marin hadn’t believed him.

  Even before Annie died, Marin had descended into her own little world, numbing the pain with drugs the way Annie did. Losing her child sent her into a grief-stricken abyss from which she would never emerge.

  But the police believed Jeremy. Enough to open an investigation.

  Caroline was questioned. Arrogant, delusional, she didn’t think to call a lawyer. Not until she was charged with murder after her fingerprints were found on the prescription bottle on Marin’s nightstand.

  Circumstantial evidence, Andrew Stafford later argued. Maybe Caroline had picked up her mother’s prescriptions from the pharmacy.

  She hadn’t.

  And she had said just enough to the police before her lawyer arrived to ultimately incriminate herself.

  Convicted, sentenced to prison.

  Bridgebury, as fate would have it.

  The prison wasn’t far from the Montgomery home in Nottingshire, where Jeremy had saved Caroline’s life years ago. Saved her life, and taken La La Montgomery’s. She’d died of massive head injuries.

  Hers was the second life Jeremy had taken, but it was in self-defense. He was saving his sister, never dreaming that in doing so, he condemned his other sister, Annie.

  When he learned last year that Caroline had died in the prison collapse, he felt nothing but relief. She—like Garvey Quinn, and like Papa—deserved what she got.

  It was Lucy who said it
best, quoting from the Bible: “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.”

  At the time, those words brought Jeremy comfort.

  Now, however, they haunt him.

  The police want to talk to him. Not about Miguel.

  Time is running out, just as he always knew it would.

  Leading the two detectives into room 421, Wendy sees that Marin is in her wheelchair beside the window, watching the curtain of falling snow.

  “Someone is here to see you, sweetie,” Wendy says gently.

  Marin’s head swivels and her blue eyes are wide as she looks from Wendy to the detectives and then, expectantly, around the room.

  “Where is she?”

  Wendy’s heart sinks. “No, it’s not—”

  “Where is she?”

  “No, sweetie, it’s these nice people who came to see you—their names are Omar and Lisha.” Wendy rests her hands on Marin’s shoulders and clears her throat, looking at the detectives, sending them a silent message to say whatever it is that they need to say and then leave Marin Quinn in peace.

  Detective Brandewyne clears her throat. “Mrs. Qu—”

  “No!” Wendy says sharply, shaking her head to indicate that they don’t call her that here.

  Quickly grasping the situation, his dark eyes laced with sympathy, Meade speaks up. “I’m sorry, ma’am, we just wanted to come by and . . . wish you a Merry Christmas. That’s all.”

  For a long time, Marin says nothing, just staring at his face. Then she shakes her head a little, as if coming out of a trance. “Have you seen her?”

  “Seen who?”

  “My daughter . . . Where is she? It’s Christmas, and I thought she’d come.”

  Watching the tears roll down Marin Quinn’s pale cheeks, Wendy aches for her.

  “Where is she?” she asks again, clutching the detective’s sleeve.

  Meade shoots Wendy a questioning look; she nods at him.

  He clears his throat and then he speaks the truth—as much of the truth as Marin Quinn can handle.

  “I don’t know where she is. I’m sorry.”

  Standing in front of the open refrigerator in her apartment, Caroline tilts her head back and chugs eggnog straight from the carton, savoring the rich creaminess as it coats her throat and slides into her full stomach.