Charlotte was working on the top of the egg with her usual precision and care, colors never straying over the lines. Emily was working on the egg with her usual flair – bright colors, bold lines, abstract images.
Abby sipped her tea, watched with amusement and no small measure of puzzlement. The girls were leaving out the middle. It was the second year running for this. To Abby’s bewilderment, they’d made the same sort of drawings the previous Easter (and, now that she thought about it, the previous Halloween too, leaving out the center third of all their pumpkin drawings).
When they were done, Abby took the two drawings and taped them together. The edges didn’t line up, but probably would have if there had been a center to the drawing.
Why was there always a missing third to everything the girls did? Abby wondered. Three chairs at the tea table in their room, three Peppermint Patties at the store the day before. Abby tacked the big egg on the refrigerator. The two girls stood, admiring their work.
“It’s very pretty,” Abby said. “Daddy is really going to like it.”
The girls beamed.
Abby pointed to the odd shapes. At the top and bottom of the egg were a pair of strange looking little creatures. “What are these?”
“That’s a duck and a bunny,” Charlotte said, pointing to the figure at the top.
“That’s a bunny and a duck,” said Emily, pointing to the other.
On the top of the egg, the duck seemed to be inside the rabbit, and inside the rabbit looked to be another egg. On the bottom, it was the exact reverse.
To Abby it looked like the drawing she had seen in the Russian folk tale book at which the girls were looking in the library. Right down to the needle inside the egg.
Kids were like sponges, Abby thought. They absorb everything with which they come in contact.
She kissed the girls on top of their heads. “Okay, my little duck and bunny,” she said. “Let’s brush up.”
The girls giggled, then took off for the stairs and the upstairs bathroom.
Abby glanced again at the drawing. An egg inside a duck inside a rabbit. Inside them all, a needle.
With the girls tucked in, Abby checked the messages on her cellphone. Nothing from Michael. She knew that he would call if he was going to be any later than midnight. He was out with Tommy, and she knew he wouldn’t drink too much – he never did on the night before a case started – but if it all ran late he would call, and probably crash at Tommy’s place in Littleneck.
She left a few lights on and headed upstairs.
Abby had discovered Pilates in her second year at Columbia. With all the stresses of second year she had found that she was sleeping two hours a night, eating once a day – many times while cycling across campus – and drinking a bottle of sauvignon blanc just to get sleepy enough to crash for two hours and wake up with a hangover so she could pop a fistful of Advil and start all over again. She had found a yoga center near the campus that practiced Satyananda yoga, but for some reason it did not stick. She was an A-type personality, and yoga seemed a little too passive for her. She found a speed-cycling class in the West Village, and for a while that worked.
But the problems of getting there – two trains at least – stressed her out to the point where the class was only neutralizing the excess stress.
Then she discovered Pilates. The emphasis on strengthening ligaments and joints, increasing flexibility, and lengthening muscles, combining with the quality, not quantity of workout, seemed like a perfect fit.
Now it was a natural part of her day.
She slipped on the earphones, and began warming up. She stretched for a few minutes, and would soon move on to her pelvic tilts and abdominal exercises.
At first she had needed almost complete silence to practice, but when you have toddlers in the house, near silence, any silence at all, was a distant memory. In the past two years she could work out with a 747 landing in the living room. This was good news and bad news. Good news because she could grab twenty minutes when she needed it. Bad news because she, at times, seemed to block out the rest of the world. She could still hear what was going on around her, of course, but sometimes it mercifully drifted away.
Midway through her routine, she thought she heard a noise. A loud noise. In fact, she’d felt it. It was as if someone had dropped something large and heavy inside the house. She pulled out the earbuds.
Silence.
She left the bedroom, walked down the hall, looked in on the girls. Both were sleeping soundly. Emily with the covers twisted in a knot. Charlotte lying with the covers pulled up primly to her chin, like a children’s bedding ad in a JC Penney’s catalog.
Abby listened to her house. Other than the ticking of the grandfather clock in the foyer, the house was silent.
Had Michael come home?
“Michael?” she called out in a loud whisper. Loud enough for her husband to hear – unless he had gone down to the basement – but not loud enough to wake the girls.
Silence.
Abby moved slowly to the top of the stairs. Another glance into the girls’ room. Still asleep. The Care Bears nightlight cast the room in a warm ginger glow. The house was so quiet she could now hear them breathing in tandem.
Abby half-closed the bedroom door, then gently padded down to the landing. The light was on in the kitchen, as was the light in the mud room, the small space near the back door in which they kept their boots, umbrellas, raincoats, slickers, and rain hats. In summer they usually kept that light on all night. In winter, when the snow was known to drift halfway up the back door, they kept it off.
She had imagined it. It was probably a passing car, one of the rolling boom boxes with the trunk-sized bass speakers that seemed to be passing by with more frequency of late. She hoped it wasn’t becoming a trend. They’d moved to Eden Falls precisely because it was quiet, and the thought that -
A light snapped off. Abby spun around.
The mud room was now dark.
Abby’s heart skipped a beat. She backed up one step. In a loud whisper: “Michael!”
No response. A few moments later, in the kitchen, another light snapped off.
Abby looked down the steps. She saw the alarm panel on the wall near the front door, the digital panel that armed the three doors and sixteen windows in the house. The single green light in the lower right-hand corner was aglow, meaning, of course, that the system was unarmed. If it were Michael, he would have come in through the garage door, through the kitchen, into the foyer, and armed the panel. This was his routine.
In the past year there had been two break-ins in their neighborhood. Because the houses on this block were relatively isolated, hidden by trees, there were no witnesses. Neither time were the burglars caught, nor any of the stolen items recovered. There had been no violence in either case – the owners had been out of town – but there was always a first time for everything. The burglaries were one of the reasons they had gotten an alarm system installed in the first place.
In the eight months since they had first subscribed to the security service, Michael had never failed to arm it the moment he arrived home. Not once.
If there was someone in the house – and there was no doubt in Abby’s mind that there was – it was not her husband. No one else had a key.
She listened intently, searching the silence for a noise; the creak of a floorboard, the scrape of a chair, the intake or exhale of a breath.
Nothing. Just the click of the clock. Just the sound of her own heartbeat pulsing in her ears.
Abby gently leaned over the railing and glanced at the dim light spilling into the living room from the kitchen. Her cellphone was charging on the small roll-top desk, right next to the cordless phone.
Shit.
The rest of the room – the dining room and living room beyond – was consumed by darkness, a darkness that drew shapes and spirits in every corner. She knew every inch of her house, but at the moment it looked like a foreign land, an ominous, threatening la
ndscape.
There was no phone upstairs. She and Michael either had their cellphones with them, or when the cordless wasn’t charging, kept it on the nightstand.
Abby returned to the master bedroom, pulled over the short step stool, climbed on it. On the top shelf of her closet was an aluminum case. She pulled it down, spun the combination, all the while glancing toward the hallway, looking for shadows, listening for footfalls. She opened the box. Against the egg-crate foam lining was a Browning. 25 semi-automatic pistol. Abby checked that the safety was on.
When she was ten, her father had taken her out to her uncle Rob’s farm in Ashtabula, Ohio. There he had taught her to shoot. They hunted quail in summer, rabbits in fall. Although never a great shot, the first time she bagged a quail she felt a rush of exhilaration. Of course, when Morton, their beautiful Golden, brought the bird back, Abby cried for two straight days. After that, it was target practice, and at this she excelled. She found that shooting a target, even the silhouette of a man, was easier than shooting small game. Although she liked a good steak as much as the next person, the notion of killing a living thing was anathema to her.
But this was different. This was her family.
She slipped the pistol into her pocket, stepped down the hall. She entered the girls’ room, snapped off the nightlight. She checked the windows. Everything was locked tight. Before pulling the drapes, she peeked out the window. From this vantage, at the front right side of the house, she could not see the driveway, nor the area in front of the garage. If Michael had returned, she would not have been able to see his car anyway. The yard, the street, the block was quiet, dark, serene.
Abby exited the room, closed the door, descended the stairs. Before she could turn around, she heard a noise, the unmistakable sound of someone walking across the kitchen floor. There were two boards, right next to the island, they had been meaning to shim for more than a year. Abby looked at the wedge of light spilling from the room.
There. A shadow.
Abby glanced back up the stairs. Should she try to bundle the girls up and get out of the house, or risk crossing the foyer to get to the phone and the police?
She thought about trying one last time to call her husband’s name, but if it wasn’t him, she would have to confront the intruder. She slipped across the foyer, and remembered. There was a panic button on the alarm panel. Press it, hit a three-number code, and the Eden Falls police would be alerted. All silently.
When she was just a foot away she heard the footsteps crossing the kitchen. The shadow on the floor grew larger, less sharply defined. Whoever was in the kitchen was coming right toward her.
She hit the panic button, drew the weapon, and put her back to the wall. The shadow grew even larger as it filled the doorway.
She smelled something in the air, something she knew.
Cologne. A familiar cologne.
She flipped on the light. The intruder screamed.
“Walk this waaaaay, talk this waa-aa-aay!”
It was Michael. He was signing Aerosmith. He was listening to one of the girls’ iPods and he hadn’t heard her calling his name. He hadn’t heard a thing.
“Hey babe!” He leaned against the counter, pulled off his headphones. His eyes focused on the. 25. “Man,” he said, smiling. “Am I that late?”
Abby shook. Her eyes filled with tears of relief. She let herself slide down the wall to the floor.
The girls were fine, she was fine, Michael was fine. Everything was just peachy.
“So, I guess a blow job is pretty much out of the question,” Michael added.
Abby wanted to shoot her husband anyway.
ELEVEN
Aleks watched. from his vantage, in the darkness behind the house, he could see through the dining-room window, into what he imagined was the living room. Shadows danced on the walls.
He turned, and once again scanned the yard. His eyes played over the shapes. A pair of three-wheel bicycles, a swing set.
The sight filled him with a longing he had long ago relegated to that part of his heart he reserved for weakness. He tried to imagine how Anna and Marya looked when they were infants, as toddlers, taking their first, tentative steps around this yard.
He slipped to the other side of the property, assessed the structure. It was a two-story colonial, well tended, but not landscaped beyond the prestige of the neighborhood. A single pin oak graced the side yard, a tree that would one day begin to finger its massive roots into the cellar, if it had not already.
When he and Kolya had arrived there had been three lights on in the back of the house – one on the first floor, two on the second. He waited, observed. He had learned stillness in his many years in the forest, observing birds of prey eyeing their quarry. He could remain in one position for hours if needed.
He climbed the tree next to the south side of the house, and slipped onto the upstairs porch. He stepped up to the window. At first he thought the room was dark, or that heavy drapes had been pulled, but as his eyes adjusted he saw there was a dim light coming from the room.
A light snapped on in the window to the right of the bedroom. It appeared to be a bathroom. Frosted glass prevented him from seeing in. He turned back to the bedroom window.
Nothing inside the room stirred.
Within seconds, Aleks had the window raised. He slipped silently into the house. Except for the sound of the television below, the house was quiet.
He stood at the foot of the beds. The two little girls slept in the darkened room, in the hands of angels. They had not awakened, were unaware of his presence. The room was filled with plush animals – ducks, rabbits, teddy bears, turtles. On one wall was a long low table, a pair of bright plastic chairs. Above it was a large corkboard, collaged with a menagerie of Sesame Street characters.
In the dim light Aleks could only see their small forms beneath the covers.
Suddenly – noise behind him. Metal brushing metal.
The door opened. In a blur Aleks had the Barhydt out of its sheath, open, at the ready.
In front of him, in silhouette, a small figure.
Aleks flipped on the overhead light, and saw it was a woman. She was waif-like, in her late forties, south-east Asian. Aleks looked at the beds. He backed across the small room, slipped the covers down. The twins were Asian, too.
The girls were not his tutred.
He looked into the woman’s eyes. There he saw pain, as well as fear and something that looked like understanding. She did not move. Aleks closed his knife, sheathed it. He put a finger to his lips. The woman nodded.
“This is not Anna and Marya,” Aleks said softly. “I have made a mistake. If I have frightened you, you have my deepest apologies. You are in no danger.”
Moments later he was out the window, down the tree, across the street, and into the waiting car.
Aleks now knew where he had to go. He knew where his daughters lived.
A town called Eden Falls.
TWELVE
Two hours later Aleks stood near the bank of the East River, in the shadow of the massive United Nations Building. A chill had fallen over the city, a wind that whispered that spring had not fully arrived.
He took out one of the disposable cellphones, tapped the number written on the cocktail napkin. After two rings, the woman answered. They chatted for a minute or two, dancing the dance. Finally, Aleks asked. Moments later, after what might have passed for coquettishness in the woman’s experience, she gave Aleks her address. He committed it to memory, signed off. He then snapped the phone in half, threw both pieces into the river.
As he walked toward the avenue, and a cab stand, he felt the heft of the Barhydt on his hip.
Jilliane Murphy was the woman’s name. She said she would make tapas, and open a good bottle of Barolo. She said that from the moment they met on the plane, she had known he would call.
It had been a mistake to let her see the marble eggs on the plane. This Aleks knew. What he did not know was whether or not, when she
moved the papers from the seat next to his, she had seen the name Viktor Harkov, or the address of People’s Legal Services. The lawyer’s murder was bound to be all over the news very soon.
As Aleks slipped into a cab on First Avenue, a Yankees cap pulled low on his head, he gave the driver an address eight blocks from Jilliane Murphy’s apartment.
He lay back his head thinking about the next day. His heart began to race. He was going to meet his daughters, a moment about which he had dreamed for four years.
But that was tomorrow.
Tonight he was really looking forward to the Barolo.
THIRTEEN
Whiskey dreams were the worst. in this version Michael was in his underwear, in public – so far, the standard horror show – but this dream was not about being in such a state in a junior-high classroom, locker combination unknown, surrounded by cheerleaders. It was not even the nightmare he used to have where he was in court, sans suit, standing in front of a jury populated with octogenarian garden club ladies. No such luck.
This dream had him running down the street in Astoria, chasing a scantily clad Gina Torres. Behind him was Abby who, for some reason, was carrying an AK-47.
He opened his eyes.
Gina Torres?
His heart suddenly leapt into his throat. He hadn’t. He wouldn’t. He didn’t. Did he?
Pulse racing, he bolted upright, felt around the bed. Empty. He glanced around the room. His own bedroom. He had overslept, but that was the good news.
Thank you, Jesus. Put it on my tab.
Gina Torres. He had seen her at the bar. That much he remembered. And he remembered how good she looked, although that was a given. And that he’d kissed her.
No. She kissed me, your honor.
He hadn’t gotten drunk, but when had he gotten home? It was late, he knew that. It was all starting to come back to him. Especially the part where Abby had -
A gun?
He ambled into the bathroom, saw the note taped on the mirror, written in a quick script Abby saved for when she was royally pissed off.
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