Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub

Nightwatcher (39 page)

BOOK: Nightwatcher

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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.

On September 11, the attack on the World Trade Center turned her life upside down, but what happened the next day almost destroyed it.

Kristina Haines, the young woman who lived upstairs from her, was brutally murdered by Jerry Thompson, the building’s handyman.

Allison was the sole witness who could place him at the scene of the crime. By the time he was apprehended, he had killed two more people—and Allison had narrowly escaped becoming another of his victims.

Whenever she remembers that incident, how a figure lurched at her from the shadows of her own bedroom . . .

You don’t just put something like that behind you.

And so, on this night of bitter memories, Jerry Thompson is part of the reason she’s having trouble sleeping.

It was ten years ago tonight that he crept into Kristina’s open bedroom window.

Ten years ago that he stabbed her to death in her own bed, callously robbing the burning, devastated city of one more innocent life.

He’s been in prison ever since.

Allison’s testimony at his trial was the final nail in the coffin—that was how the prosecuting attorney put it, a phrase that was oft-quoted in the press.

“I just hope it wasn’t my own,” she recalls telling Mack afterward.

“Your own what?” he asked, and she knew he was feigning confusion.

“Coffin.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

But it
wasn’t
ridiculous.

She remembers feeling Jerry’s eyes on her as she told the court that he had been at the murder scene that night. Describing how she’d seen him coming out of a stairwell and slipping into the alleyway, she wondered what would happen if the defense won the case and Jerry somehow wound up back out on the street.

Would he come after her?

Would he do to her what he had done to the others?

Sometimes—like tonight—Allison still thinks about that.

It isn’t likely. He’s serving a life sentence. But still . . .

Things happen. Parole hearings. Prison breaks.

What if . . . ?

No. Stop thinking that way. Close your eyes and go to sleep. The kids will be up early, as usual.

She closes her eyes, but she can’t stop imagining what it would be like to open them and find Jerry Thompson standing over her with a knife, like her friend Kristina did.

About the Author

USA Today
and
New York Times
bestseller W
ENDY
C
ORSI
S
TAUB
is the award-winning author of more than seventy novels. She lives in the New York City suburbs with her husband of twenty years and their two children. Learn more about Wendy at www.wendycorsistaub.com.

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Praise for the work of

WENDY CORSI STAUB

Finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award

“Solid gold suspense!”

Lee Child

“Wendy Corsi Staub is a master storyteller!”

New York Times
bestselling author Brenda Novak

“Each twist and turn is methodical, meant to build anxiety as she cleverly yanks the rug out from underneath.”

Suspense
Magazine

“Once Staub’s brilliant characterizations and top-notch narrative skills grab hold, they don’t let go.”

Publishers Weekly
(★Starred Review★)