Now that the time is near, her mind is beginning to cloud with uncertainty about what lies ahead.
What will it be like—the new world?
Will there be earthly pleasures? If there aren’t, will she miss them?
One thing is certain—it would be impossible to miss anything in the next world as deeply as she’s missed her father in this one.
At least when Daddy was alive, he was still a part of her life. She was able to visit him in Hazelton. As soon as she graduated from college, she rented an apartment located just a few miles from the prison gates, so that she could see her father whenever there were visiting hours.
During that precious time together, they talked about Chaplain Gideon, the man who had come to him in prison to teach him about salvation.
Salvation meant that Daddy and Caroline would be together again, forever.
It seemed too good to be true, but when Caroline started reading the Bible, as Daddy told her to do, she saw for herself. It was true, right there in black and white.
In the letters he sent between visits, Daddy steered her to the relevant passages and reminded her, as he had from the time when she was a little girl, that she was special.
The day she learned that her father had died in prison—that was the end of her world. This world.
But tonight . . .
Tonight, the dead will rise up.
Tonight, she’ll be reunited with her father.
She closes her eyes and quotes one of his favorite passages, from Luke 21:22.
For these be the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled.
When she opens her eyes, Chaplain Gideon is there. “It’s time, Caroline.”
Chapter Thirteen
Startled by a loud knock at the apartment door, Ryan jumps to his feet. “That must be Phoenix. It’s about time!”
He and Lucy have been sitting here for hours, watching It’s a Wonderful Life over and over, just like they did when they were kids. Watching, waiting, worrying, wondering . . .
Why is it taking so long for Jeremy to get home?
And Phoenix—she’d texted long ago to say she was on her way. Where is she?
“It can’t be her,” Lucy tells Ryan as he starts for the door. “Security would have to buzz from the lobby to tell us she’s here. It must be Jeremy.”
“But why would he knock?”
“I don’t know, maybe he lost his keys or something. Or maybe it’s one of the neighbors.”
“I thought you don’t know any of them.”
“I don’t, but one of them left us cookies and—just go see who it is, Ryan,” she says impatiently.
“All right, all right.”
Ryan goes into the circular foyer, looks through the peephole, and grins.
“It’s Phoenix!” he announces triumphantly, unlocking the door and throwing it open. “Thank God you made it. How is it out there?”
She steps inside, bundled from head to toe in a long, hooded coat. No—not a coat, Ryan realizes as she steps over the threshold. A cloak. What the . . . ?
She pulls the door closed, turns the lock and the deadbolt, and then slides the chain. It’s all accomplished in one swift, furtive movement, such an odd thing to do that Ryan instinctively takes a step back from the door.
“Phoenix? What are you—”
He breaks off suddenly, realizing something.
She’s bone-dry. How can that be? She just walked forty blocks in a storm, and yet she’s dry.
Bewildered, he looks at her face.
Seeing the icy gleam in her eyes, he takes another step back as dread steals over him.
“What are you doing?”
She laughs—a guttural, humorless sound.
His mind races back to the day he looked for her on the Internet—her name, her face, anything at all about her—and couldn’t find it.
“Who are you?”
“You mean you still haven’t figured it out?” She shrugs. “I guess that’s because you and I never met, years ago. But I’ll bet your sister will know me. Let’s go try her, shall we?”
“Get out,” Ryan tells her fiercely, and starts to reach for the door.
She stops him, her hand jerking out from the folds of the robe.
Ryan stares in horror at the knife in her hand . . .
A knife that’s encrusted with dried blood.
“How long is this going to take?” Brandewyne paces in front of Meade’s desk, sucking on a candy cane.
She can’t smoke here inside the precinct, and it’s so nasty outside that even she isn’t willing to brave the weather long enough to smoke an entire cigarette. Instead, she’s gone through almost the entire package of candy canes someone left by the coffeepot.
“We’re waiting for a federal agency to come up with restricted information on Christmas Eve, in the middle of a blizzard,” Meade reminds her. “It’ll be a miracle if we get our hands on the Cavalons’ new address before New Year’s.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
He shrugs.
“There must be another way.”
“There isn’t, unless the phone company beats the post office to the punch and provides us with those unlisted numbers.”
Aside from cutting through the red tape necessary to get restricted information from the postal service, their only other option is to contact other family members who might know where to find Jeremy and Lucy Cavalon.
But Meade’s repeated calls to the Walsh house in Glenhaven Park went unanswered, and Elsa and Brett Cavalon’s Connecticut town is currently in a blackout zone, hard hit by the storm.
“That’s the problem with cordless phones,” Brandewyne muses, and Meade realizes that her thoughts have traveled along the same path as his.
It used to happen all the time, with Tarrant. Meade would be sitting there mulling an angle on a case, and Tarrant would voice it aloud.
“When the power goes out,” Brandewyne goes on, “so do communications. That’s why everyone should have a good old-fashioned landline.”
“Do you?”
“Absolutely. Do you?”
He nods and notices that her tongue is unnaturally pink. And that she’s whittled the candy cane tip so that it resembles an ice pick’s deadly point.
They go back to waiting in silence.
She bites off the ice pick tip. Crunching it, she asks, “What would you be doing tonight if you weren’t here, Omar?”
“Same thing I do every night. Eating. Sleeping.”
“What about Christmas?”
“You mean tomorrow? Before I come here, I’m picking up my son and going down to Staten Island to see my mother.”
But thanks to Brandewyne, his mother’s gift is going to be late this year. He’s planning to return the vacuum and get something a little more special for the only woman in his life.
“What are you doing for Christmas?” he asks Brandewyne—the only other woman in his life, he realizes.
“No plans. Maybe I’ll see an early movie.”
He nods. He, too, has spent many a lonely holiday in a darkened theater.
For an awkward moment, he wonders if Brandewyne is expecting him to invite her to come with him to Staten Island. But that would be weird, wouldn’t it? Hell, yes. It’s not like she’s his girlfriend. It’s not like she could ever be his girlfriend.
No . . . but she’s your partner, and maybe she could turn into a friend . . .
No, thanks. Meade doesn’t need any more friends.
More friends?
Thanks to Johnny and April, Meade has been keeping people at arm’s length for years now. Everyone except Tarrant, because they worked together every day and there was no avoiding him.
Kind of like Brandewyne.
The phone rings,
and he seizes it gratefully. “Yeah.”
“Detective Meade? This is Ivette Lynde with the United States Postal Service. We have that forwarding information you requested.”
Lucy sits up expectantly and runs a hand over her head to smooth her hair, trying to remember the last time she brushed it.
Under ordinary circumstances, she’d have made herself presentable and her home as welcoming as possible before meeting her brother’s girlfriend for the first time. But these are extraordinary circumstances, to say the least, so here she is in sweats and slippers. She kept thinking she might change her clothes and pull herself together, but when she found out a little while ago that Christmas Eve services at Holy Trinity have been canceled, she decided not to bother.
Meanwhile, the living room is cluttered with books, papers, snack wrappers, empty cups . . .
Earlier, when she’d suggested to Ryan that he straighten the place up a little, he’d brushed a litter of potato chip crumbs onto the carpet and made a haphazard attempt at stacking the magazines he’d discarded onto the floor beside his chair.
Lucy had to bite her tongue to keep from going into bossy big-sister mode, much as she longed to order Ryan to get the magazines off the floor, and vacuum the rug, and take the dirty dishes to the kitchen . . .
There are just some things she can’t control, and people she shouldn’t try to control. If being in this situation has taught her anything, it’s that she needs to lighten up, that she can’t do everything herself.
Hearing a thumping crash in the other room, she calls out, “Ry?”
No reply.
“Ry! What’s going on?”
Still no reply.
Oh no. Did he knock over one of Sylvie’s prized pieces of art?
Frowning, Lucy starts to hoist herself up, calling, “Ryan?”
All at once, a cloaked figure swoops into the doorway.
Stunned, Lucy tries—and fails—to make sense of what she’s seeing.
“Hi, Lucy. Remember me?”
That face—that face inside the hood—it’s the same face Lucy thought she saw on Sunday morning at church.
No, she did see her.
She was there, and now she’s here, and . . .
And in her hand is a knife dripping with fresh red blood.
As the nearly empty B train approaches the station at Eighty-first Street and Central Park West, Jeremy stands and holds the pole with one hand as he raises the already damp collar of his coat with the other.
Time to go back out into the cold.
That’s the last thing he wants to do after his earlier ordeal.
It had taken him well over three hours to trudge two miles across the Bronx, from the Soundview Avenue elevated station to the underground 167th Street station on the Grand Concourse. He was relieved when he made it, glad to descend from the howling blizzard into the warm, dry underground tunnel—dingy tiles, scurrying rodents, and all.
The ride downtown might have lulled him to sleep, if he weren’t chilled to the bone, wet and uncomfortable. Good thing.
The doors slide open and Jeremy steps out onto the platform, the lone passenger to disembark here.
The B train disappears into the southbound tunnel, its clattering wheels giving way to the sound of a smooth clarinet playing “Silent Night.”
Jeremy can see the subway musician sitting cross-legged on the floor at the far end of the platform, at the foot of the exit stairs.
As he heads in that direction, he reaches into his pocket, feeling for some loose change. His fingers encounter a wad of tissue and in that moment, touching the carefully wrapped angel ornament as the mellow musical notes wash over him, he experiences a sudden aura of peace.
It’s Christmas Eve, and he’s almost home, and Lucy is there, pregnant with his child.
Right now, that’s all that matters.
The musician, a wizened man in a porkpie hat, looks up as he approaches.
Jeremy reaches into his other pocket and finds his wallet. Opening it, he takes out the lone bill inside—a twenty he got from the ATM yesterday at lunch hour. The twenty he wasn’t going to spend unless it was absolutely necessary.
It is, he decides. It is necessary.
The musician sees the bill, and his eyes smile at Jeremy, but he doesn’t miss a note.
Jeremy stoops to place the money into his open, empty case.
As he starts up the steps, the man stops playing just for a moment. Just long enough to call, “God bless you.”
Jeremy smiles. He already has.
Meade lightly taps the brakes to come to a stop well in advance of another red light. Sixth Avenue. So close and yet so far.
It’s taking forever to drive across the city. It isn’t because of the traffic, though. Not in the traditional sense. Cars are everywhere they shouldn’t be—buried in no-parking zones, front-ended in snowbanks, sliding through intersections directly in front of the patrol car.
“You know, it’s a good thing this isn’t a matter of life and death,” Brandewyne comments from the passenger’s seat.
“It might be,” he tells her grimly, staring through the windshield at the blowing snow. “If Caroline Quinn has figured out where Lucy and Jeremy are, and if she’s decided she wants to get to them . . .”
“But that building, the Ansonia, has good security. It would be hard for her to get past the lobby.”
“She managed to do it at Parkview Hospital.”
“True. Let’s just hope she learned her lesson that time.”
“I doubt it. She didn’t learn her lesson when she went to prison for murder. I have a feeling that the only thing that’s going to stop her is . . .”
Meade doesn’t bother to say the word.
She knows what it is.
Death.
Somewhere, someone is screaming.
Lucy.
Lying on the floor in the foyer, Ryan struggles to call out to her, to tell her that he’s here, that he’s coming to help.
But he can’t speak, and he can’t help, because he can’t move. There’s an agonizing pain in his side.
She stabbed me.
Phoenix stabbed me with that knife and then she went into the living room and now she’s stabbing Lucy.
“Please, nooooo, no!” Lucy is shrieking, sobbing, and no one is coming to help. No one but Ryan can hear, because the damned apartment is soundproof. Lucy told him that a long, long time ago.
The night he came to tell her he felt like something bad was going to happen.
Phoenix . . . dear God.
Why are you doing this?
Who are you?
Lucy is screaming and he’s in agony and he closes his eyes to block it all out . . .
And then, mercifully, it all fades away.
At last, Meade pulls the police sedan beneath the portico of the Ansonia.
Before he and Brandewyne can even step out of the car, a doorman appears beside it.
“See? I told you. Great security,” Brandewyne murmurs.
“What can I do for you?” the doorman asks as they flash their badges.
“We’re looking for a couple who live in this building. The Cavalons. Do you know them?”
He shakes his head. “Talk to Bobby at the desk. He’ll know them. He knows everyone. You can leave the car right here. It’s okay.”
“Thanks,” says Meade, who was already planning to do just that.
Technically, it isn’t an emergency, and yet . . .
Something tells him that it might be.
And like Brandewyne’s, his gut instinct is rarely wrong.
Once again, Jeremy finds himself enveloped in a swirling wall of white. To the east, across Central Park West, the park is a beautiful, frozen wasteland. To the west, shrouded in falling snow, are tall buildings with wi
ndows that glow like festive twinkle lights.
Jeremy heads down West Eighty-first Street, past the Museum of Natural History.
All he can think about is getting home to Lucy.
The elegant Ansonia lobby is deserted, other than a security guard sitting at a desk beside the elevator bank.
Meade and Brandewyne show their badges; he introduces himself as Bobby and asks how he can help them.
“We’re looking for Jeremy and Lucy Cavalon. They moved in about a week ago.”
“Sylvie Durand’s grandson and his wife.” Bobby nods. “Yeah, that was such a shame, what happened to her.”
Narrowing his eyes, Meade echoes Bobby’s last four words as a question.
“She drowned. Right up there in her apartment. Slipped, fell, drowned. A couple of days went by before anyone found her.”
Meade and Brandewyne exchange a glance.
Another sudden death in the Cavalon circle. And Meade’s infallible gut instinct tells him that Sylvie Durand didn’t fall into her bathtub any more than Carl Soto fell onto the subway tracks.
“We need to speak to the Cavalons right away,” he tells Bobby. “Do you know if they’re home?”
“I don’t know, but let’s buzz the apartment and find out.”
A couple of days went by before anyone found her . . .
Meade sincerely hopes that the Cavalons are safe and sound in their apartment.
Because if they aren’t, it might take a couple of days to secure a warrant to get in there—and by then, it will be too late.
It’s a boy, of course.
Just as Caroline had known it would be. A boy with her father’s blood, and her own—Quinn blood—pumping through his veins.
Clasping the warm, wet bundle against her racing heart, wrapped in the folds of her cloak, she rides the elevator down to the ground floor, below the lobby.
The laundry room is there, along with storage rooms and exits to the parking garage and an alleyway behind the building. The area is deserted, as she’d known it would be.
It had gone well. Better than expected. Jeremy wasn’t there to get in the way. Only Ryan, and he’d gone down easily with one jab of the knife.
He was lying dead in a pool of blood when she’d walked past him just now on her way out the door. At least, she was pretty sure he was dead. She thought of stopping to make sure, but it’s almost midnight, and the baby is so tiny and fragile, she’s afraid he might not make it. When she first cut him from Lucy’s womb, he was so still she thought he had already died.
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