Kiss Her Goodbye (40 page)

Nobody knew the baby had been left at the church.

Nobody . . .

Except whoever left her there in the first place.

Again, Kathleen thinks about the pink bootee.

About the person who cared enough to knit the delicate pink blanket and bootees.

Whoever it was might not be the person who wants her dead. . .

But what if they want her back?

Kathleen shudders, so distracted by the frightening thoughts running through her mind that she nearly passes the turnoff to Cuttington Road and Orchard Hollow.

 

 

“Oh my God. You killed Maeve?”

But it isn't a question. Jen
knows.

Another thought occurs to her then; she blurts it aloud. “You killed him, too, didn't you?”

“Robby?” Sissy gives a self-satisfied nod. “Yup. Him, too.”

“Robby?” Jen gasps in horror.

“Let me guess . . .” Sissy peers into her face. “You weren't talking about Robby?”

“No, I . . .” Jen swallows hard, thinking of poor Robby. “I meant Quint.”

“Who?”

“Quint Matteson. They said he OD'd. Did you—”

“No.” Sissy laughs. “Sorry, I had nothing to do with that. Whoever he is.” With exaggerated patience, she adds, “He's not your father, Margaret. Your father is John.
Our
father is John. Remember?”

Mute with fear, Jen stares at the woman claiming to be her sister. Stares at the scar in her eyebrow.

Following her gaze, Sissy runs her fingertips almost lovingly along her brow. “My mother always called it the mark of the devil. She was a religious fanatic, you know? She thought it meant my father was cursed, and when I came along I guess she thought I was, too. And then he brought you home. You were all dressed in pink that day. Pink bootees, and a blanket . . . oh, that reminds me. Did you get the birthday gift I left for you?”

The pink bootee. Oh, God.

“Yes,” Jen whispers.

“It fell off your foot that day when they took you away. I saw my mother pick it up off the floor and throw it into the garbage. But I took it out. It was my souvenir.” Sissy laughs.

“You know, my mother flipped out when she first saw you, Margaret. She said you were the spawn of the devil. She said he had to get rid of you. He said he didn't want to. But I did.”

Sissy retrieves something from the folds of her coat.

“Remember this?” she asks, holding it up.

Jen stares at the white pillow with pink embroidery.

“Remember it?” Sissy demands again.

Jen shakes her head, manages to find her voice. “No. No, I don't . . .”

“He bought it for you. He bought lots of things for you. Little pink ruffly dresses, and a stuffed lamb, and an Ashton-Drake doll. I always wanted one, but he said they were too expensive. And then he bought one for you. And he said I was too old to play with it.”

“I don't like dolls. I never liked dolls,” Jen whispers.

Lost in her memories, Sissy ignores her. “After you left, I thought he'd give me the doll, but he didn't. He threw it away. I guess he didn't want me to have it because of what I did.”

“What . . . what did you do?”

This time, the sound of Jen's voice seems to snap Sissy back to the present.

“I was naughty. Really, really naughty,” she says, leaning closer and whispering conspiratorially, “Want to know what I did?”

Jen nods, praying harder than she's ever prayed in her life.

“You really want me to tell you?”

“Yes.”

“How about if I just show you instead?”

With that, Sissy raises the pillow and brings it down over Jen's face.

 

 

“Susie wanted to hurt the baby?” Lucy echoes in disbelief, staring at John.

“She tried. Deirdre found her . . . she was trying to smother Margaret in her crib.”

Lucy buries her face in her hands, shaking her head. Her baby. Her poor baby.

“Deirdre did CPR. She saved her, Lucy. And she made me promise not to tell. We both knew that if we told anybody, Susie's life would be ruined.”

“She tried to kill a helpless baby, John!”

“I know, but you have to understand . . .” He takes hold of Lucy's upper arms, holding her, as though he won't let go until he makes her see. “Susie was my baby, too. She was my baby first. And she was fine before Margaret came along. Deirdre and I knew that she'd be fine if things could just go back to the way they were.”

“So you left a helpless baby on the steps of the church? Why didn't you come to me?”

“You couldn't keep her.”

“If I knew what had happened, I'd have found a way to—”

“I couldn't tell you what happened, Lucy. Deirdre and I swore we'd never tell a soul about Susie. And we never did. I never did. Not even . . .”

“What?” she presses, when he trails off, his expression haunted. “What is it?”

He takes a deep breath, his hands painfully tightening on her arms, almost as though he's clinging to a lifeline.

“Deirdre never forgave Susie. Neither did I, but she . . . it was different with Deirdre. She always thought Susie had the devil in her, from the moment she was born. The more time went by, the more tense things were between them. And then one day . . .”

“What? One day, what?” Lucy demands when he falls silent once again.

“Deirdre fell down the stairs. I was out when it happened. Susie was, too. At least, that's what she said.”

“You didn't believe her.”

“I did at the time. But I started to wonder. And then . . . then, a few months ago, I found the pictures.”

“What pictures?”

He reaches into his pocket, takes out a stack of photographs and hands them to her silently.

Lucy gasps.

Flipping through them, she stares in disbelief at a series of snapshots of Jen Carmody, shot through a telephoto lens.

“Susie sent me the letter. My God, John. You knew, and you didn't—”

“I couldn't. Lucy, she's still my daughter. She's my baby.”

“So is Margaret,” she bites out.

“I know that.” He nods in weary resignation. “That's why I'm here. I wanted to warn her parents before I went to the police. But it looks like nobody's home.”

“Then let's go right to the police,” Lucy says simply.

He nods, opens his mouth. Before he can speak, the air is filled with the faint sound of approaching sirens.

Jen writhes on the bed, panic taking hold as she realizes that her time is running out.

Her lungs burn with the futile strain for air as Sissy presses the pillow over her face in a ruthless death grip.

In another few seconds, it will be over.

She'll never have the chance to tell them how much she loves them.

That she knows how much they love her.

Images fly through her mind.

Is this what happens when you die? You see your life flashing before you like a movie montage?

Mom coming back to kiss her goodbye.

Dad coaching soccer—

Soccer.

Jen releases her hold on her captor's viselike arm.

Feeling her way blindly, she reaches for the trophy.

The one she pulled from the shelf earlier.

The one that should still be on the bed.

Even as her fingers close over the cold metal, she remembers how heavy the trophy was. Heavy enough to kill somebody . . . but too heavy for her to lift.

Now, with her oxygen rapidly depleting, she'll need a miracle to turn it into a weapon. She can't breathe, she can't see, she can't move.

Mom.

Dad.

Curran.

Riley.

With a miraculous surge of adrenaline-driven strength and a fierce will to live, Jen swings the trophy upward with all her might.

 

 

Kathleen sees the red lights of the police cars in front of the house from Cuttington Road. She pulls as close as she can, then abandons her car, pulls the keys from the ignition, and takes off running toward her home.

A knot of people are on the front lawn and steps: several uniformed officers, an unfamiliar couple, and Detective Brodowiaz.

“What happened?” Kathleen asks breathlessly, reaching his side. “Is Jen okay?”

“We've knocked and rung the bell. There's been no answer, but we can't find any evidence of a break in.”

“She can't answer the door; she can't get out of bed.” Frantic, Kathleen fumbles trying to jam the right key into the lock, getting it in and then turning it the wrong way in her haste to get it open.

“Relax, Mrs. Carmody.” Detective Brodowiaz lays a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Nobody broke in while you were gone. Chances are your daughter is safe upstairs.”

“Whoever it was might have a key,” Kathleen flings at him. “Whoever it was has been in the house before.”

She throws the door open at last and races into the house, screaming her daughter's name.

“Mom?”

“Jen!” Kathleen shrieks, taking the stairs three at a time.

Thank you, God.

Thank you, Mommy.

Bursting into her daughter's bedroom, the first thing Kathleen sees is the blood-soaked bed.

“Jen! No!”

But it isn't Jen's blood.

Her daughter
is
alive. Alive but covered in blood that belongs to a lifeless figure draped across the bed.

The skull is cracked; the brown hair is matted with red clots. But the face, eyes open and staring at a grotesque angle, is intact.

Intact, and hauntingly familiar.

Stunned, Kathleen realizes why she recognized the voice on the phone.

“Oh, God,” she breathes in disbelief.

It doesn't make sense. Nothing makes sense. Why?

“Oh, God. Sissy . . .”

“Mommy,” Jen sobs.

Footsteps pound on the stairs, in the hall, all around them.

“Mommy, I'm so sorry.”

Police officers swarm the room, guns drawn.

In the eye of the storm, Kathleen sinks onto the bed and gathers her baby into her arms, holding her close, rocking her. “It's all right, Jen. It's going to be all right. I'm here. Mommy's here.”

She strokes Jen's hair, her hands sticky with blood.

Blood.

A long time ago—a lifetime ago, it seems—she told Jen about blood . . .

And about love.

“Mommy,” Jen sobs. “Mommy. She hurt Maeve. Somebody has to go over there.”

Maeve.

Matt.

“Mommy, she tried to—”

“Shhh . . . It's over, sweetheart. That's all that matters now. We're going to be okay.”

“There's so much blood . . .”

Blood.

Yes.

Love,
Kathleen told Jen a long time ago,
is thicker than blood.

Cradling their daughter in her arms, Kathleen whispers, “We really are going to be okay.”

 

Something wet and white lands on Kathleen's hand as she climbs out of the car. She looks down at it, then up at the milky sky in disbelief.

It's snowing.

Snowing on the second Sunday in May.

Kathleen shakes her head, smiling as she buttons her jacket and pulls up the collar against the cold.

“Mom, is that . . . ?”

“Yes,” she tells her daughter, who has climbed out of the passenger's seat and come to stand behind her, shivering.

“First a blizzard on Easter, and now this. I can't believe it.”

“I can.” Laughing, Kathleen reaches out to tug at the zipper pull of her daughter's open ski jacket, raising it to her chin. “Welcome to Buffalo. I can remember one year when it snowed on Memorial Day.”

“That's not funny.”

“Maybe not, but it's true.”

“I think we should move to Florida,” Jen grumbles, as Kathleen opens the backseat to remove the long, shiny white boxes there. “It feels like it's been winter forever. I can't stand it.”

It does, Kathleen thinks, her smile fading. It does feel like it's been winter forever. Endless months of police investigation, complicated when the decomposing body of April Lukoviak was discovered. Endless therapy sessions and fervent prayers as Kathleen—as all of the Carmodys—came to terms with the past.

It hasn't been easy. At first, it was downright traumatic, especially for Jen, who was forced to accept the shock that neither Matt nor Kathleen are her birth parents.

There were times, especially in the beginning, when she would rant and scream at Kathleen, and at Matt. She called them strangers, she called them liars, she called them far worse. Then one day, at last, when Jen was home with a terrible cold and Kathleen was straining homemade chicken soup at the sink, she came into the kitchen and she simply asked why.

“Why did you do it?”

Kathleen took a deep breath, knowing they had reached a turning point. Here, at last, was a question. A question instead of an accusation, a curse, a threat.

A question that, thank God, she could answer honestly and with all her heart.

“Because when I picked you up from the church steps and I looked down into your face, I knew that you needed me as badly as I needed you,” Kathleen told her daughter. “Somewhere inside I knew it was wrong, but I didn't care. When I saw you, at first glance I thought you were my daughter. And then, when I realized that you weren't . . . well, somehow, you still were. Does that make any sense at all?”

“No,” Jen said, but she was crying. And laughing.

And so was Kathleen.

And the tears and the laughter, like the chicken soup, helped with the healing.

So her daughter has learned to forgive.

And so, in the long, bleak months since December, has Kathleen.

Most importantly, she's forgiven herself.

She's also forgiven John for not coming forward sooner about Susie.

And she's forgiven Lucy, now living in a shelter for battered women, for not fighting to keep her baby girl so long ago.

They both want to play a role in Jen's life when—and if—she's ready to see them. At first, she claimed she never would be, but lately, she's been hinting that she might change her mind. That maybe she's forgiven them, too.

“It's freezing out here,” Jen announces, dragging Kathleen's thoughts back to the present. “I wish it would stop snowing.”

“So do I.”

Like her daughter, Kathleen is more than ready for a new season. Ready to put the brutal winter behind them, once and for all.

She hands Jen one of the boxes, takes the other in her own arms, and locks the car.

“Come on,” she says, leading the way down the path. “This won't take long.”

Saint Brigid's Cemetery is busier than usual today, despite the weather. Kathleen can see small knots of people, many dressed in their Sunday best, gathered at quite a few graves. There are urns and wreaths of feminine-hued flowers at others.

Their first stop is a large granite stone shaped like a cross.

There, Kathleen begins to open her box, but Jen stops her.

“I want to do it,” she tells her mother.

Swallowing over a lump in her throat, Kathleen watches her daughter remove a dozen red roses from the green tissue inside the florist's box and lay them at Father Joseph's grave beside the stone marked with her name, and his mother's. Genevieve.

They kneel together and pray silently.

“Thank you,” Jen whispers at the end, echoing Kathleen's heartfelt sentiment for the man who honored Mollie Gallagher's memory by bringing roses to her grave all these years . . . and then saved her granddaughter's life.

Lucy told her that he never mentioned having known Kathleen in the past, nor did he mention that she had named her daughter after his mother. He had to wonder what had happened to the first Genevieve—the baby he blessed on All Saint's Day fourteen years ago. He made the sign of the cross on her forehead; he knew there was no scar on her eyebrow then.

He must have wondered what happened to Kathleen's baby; he must have wondered how and why she was switched for Lucy's baby. He must have wondered, must have doubted, must have had his suspicions, and yet, when he understood that there was danger he watched over Genevieve Carmody.

He wasn't a vicious monster stalking Jen; he was her guardian angel.

From the moment Kathleen uncovered the truth about Father Joseph's role in the tragedy, she wondered how she ever could have doubted him.

It was the fear. The fear, and the grief, and the guilt. They can do terrible things to a person if their burden is carried around for very long. They can arouse suspicion and mistrust of even those who are closest or most deserving of trust.

Like Father Joseph.

Or. . .

Or Matt.

But that's different,
Kathleen reminds herself.
You never thought Matt would hurt Jen. You knew he loved her.

But it all makes sense now that she knows why he acted so oddly, why he wouldn't return her calls that snowy day in December.

He was afraid that if he did, he would be compelled to tell her about the call he'd received from her best friend.

That Maeve had called to proposition her husband on that last day of her life is no longer surprising to Kathleen.

Fear and grief can do terrible things to a person.

That Matt turned her down and chose not to tell Kathleen was never surprising in the first place. He wanted to protect his wife from her best friend's betrayal.

That's Matt. Protective. Loyal. Loving.

Too good to be true.
How many times has she thought that about him over the years?

But it
is
true. She has everything she always wanted.

Almost everything.

“Let's go,” she says, touching Jen's sleeve.

They get to their feet. Walking in somber silence, her daughter at her side, Kathleen carries the second box to the far corner of the cemetery. They come to a stop beneath the oak tree, whose spreading branches are pale green with tender new leaves.

Kathleen removes the dozen roses from the box in her arms and sets them at the base of the tombstone.

Mollie Gallagher.

She had the last two words etched into the stone just before the holidays, after she visited the stone monument company just outside the cemetery gates, next door to the florist shop.

You really were,
she silently tells her mother, touching the recent engraving she considers her last Christmas present to Mollie Gallagher.
You've protected her—and my secret—all these years.

But in the end, the sins of her past weren't meant to stay buried—and neither were the remains of her infant daughter.

The makeshift grave was exhumed not long after the police investigation began. The baby's remains were examined, then released to Kathleen, who was mercifully cleared of any potential charges.

Genevieve Gallagher Carmody was laid to rest in a tiny white coffin in a plot beside her grandmother's grave, beneath a carved marble angel that lists only her name and the dates of her birth and death.

Tears sting Kathleen's eyes as she takes the final red rose from her box and props it against her firstborn's tombstone.

“Are you okay, Mom?” Jen's arms encircle her in warmth.

Kathleen nods, wiping the tears with her sleeve.

For a long time, they stand staring down at the tiny angel.

Then Kathleen takes a deep breath. “We should go,” she says. “Daddy and the boys are probably back from their secret shopping mission by now, and they were going to go get Grandpa so he can come out for dinner with us.”

“Before we go, I have to run over to Mrs. Gattinski's to drop off the Mother's Day presents the girls made for her. We did clay handprints. I promised I'd have them wrapped and ready this afternoon.”

When Stella Gattinski and her daughters moved into the apartment at nearby Orchard Arms, Kathleen doubted Jen would be willing to do much babysitting there.

It took her a while, but, ultimately, she opted to take back her old weekly job. Stella, in the throes of a messy divorce, frequently expresses her gratitude when she and Kathleen take their regular early morning walks around the neighborhood.

Stella likes to say, “I don't know what I'd do without Jen.”

Kathleen doesn't know, either . . . but she's well aware that she came perilously close to finding out.

“Are you ready, Mom?” Jen asks quietly, giving Kathleen's arm a gentle pat.

“I'm ready.”

She touches the marble angel one last time, then bends to press her lips against the cold granite of Mollie Gallagher's gravestone.

“Happy Mother's Day, Mom,” she whispers softly. “I love you.”

At her side, her daughter—who greeted Kathleen first thing this morning with those very same heartfelt, precious words—puts a reassuring arm around her shoulder.

“Hey! The snow's stopped,” Jen tells her, looking up in wonder.

Kathleen follows her gaze. Overhead, a gleam of golden sunshine and a patch of bright blue sky are poking through the dense ceiling of gray.

“I guess you got your wish,” she tells Jen with a smile.

“We both did.”

Truer words, Kathleen decides, have never been spoken.

Arm in arm, mother and daughter head toward home.