No Place Like Home (47 page)

I could not move. I was slumped against the cushion, half-lying, half-sitting. The sound of the car's engine was deafening. It was racing. Something must be wedged against the gas pedal. Soon we would be unconscious. Soon my little boy would die.

No. No. Please, no.

“Jack, Jack.” My voice was a hushed, broken whisper, but it went directly into his ear, and he stirred. “Jack, Mommy is sick. Jack, help me.”

He moved again, turning his head restlessly. Then he settled again under my neck.

“Jack, Jack, wake up, wake up.”

I was starting to fall asleep again. I had to fight it. I bit my lip so hard that I could taste blood, but the pain helped keep me from losing consciousness. “Jack, help Mommy,” I pleaded.

He lifted his head. I sensed that he was looking at me.

“Jack, climb . . . into front seat. Take . . . car key . . . out.”

He was moving. He sat up and slid off my lap. “It's dark, Mommy,” he said.

“Climb . . . in . . . front seat,” I whispered. “Climb . . . ” I could feel myself sinking slowly into unconsciousness. The words I was trying to say were disappearing from my mind . . . .

Jack's foot grazed my face. He was climbing over the seat.

“The key, Jack . . . ”

From far off, I heard him say, “I can't get it out.”

“Turn it, Jack. Turn it . . . then . . . pull . . . it . . . out.”

Suddenly there was silence, total silence in the garage. Followed by Jack's sleepy but proud cry, “Mommy, I
did
it. I have the key.”

I knew the fumes could still kill us. We had to get out. Jack would never be able to open the heavy garage door by himself.

He was leaning over the front seat, looking down at me. “Mommy, are you sick?”

The garage door opener, I thought—it's clipped onto the visor over the driver's seat. I often let Jack
be the one to press it. “Jack, open . . . garage . . . door,” I begged. “You know how.”

I think I slipped away for a minute. The rumbling sound of the garage door slowly rising woke me up for a moment, and it was with a vast sense of deliverance and relief that I finally stopped fighting and lost consciousness.

I woke up in an ambulance. The first face I saw was Jeffrey MacKingsley's. The first words he said were the ones I wanted to hear: “Don't worry, Jack is fine.” The second words seemed filled with promise. “Liza, I told you everything was going to be all right.”

W
e have lived in the house for two years now. After much thought, I decided to stay there. For me it was no longer the house in which I had killed my mother, but the home in which I had tried to save her life. I have used my skills as an interior designer to complete my father's vision for it. It is truly beautiful, and each day we are building happy memories to add to the ones of my early childhood.

Ted Cartwright accepted a plea bargain. He got thirty years for murdering Zach Willet, fifteen years for killing my father, and twelve years for causing the death of my mother, the sentences to be served concurrently. Part of his agreement was that he would confess that he came to the house that night intending to kill my mother.

He had lived in the house while he was married to my mother, and he knew that there was one basement window that for some inexplicable reason had never been wired into the security system. That was the way he got in.

He admitted that he had planned to strangle
my mother as she slept, and if I had awakened while he was there, he would have killed me, too.

Knowing that the impending divorce would make him a suspect in her death, he had placed a call from our basement phone to his home and waited an hour before starting upstairs on his murderous journey. He had planned to tell the police that my mother had asked him to come to our house the next day to discuss a reconciliation.

But that planned explanation for the phone call had to be changed when I awoke and the confrontation and shooting occurred. Instead, on the witness stand at my trial, he testified that my mother had called him late that evening and pleaded with him to come to the house while I was asleep.

Once he was in the house, Ted got the new code out of my mother's address book and disarmed the security system. He unlocked the kitchen door, again planning to make it seem that my mother's carelessness had allowed an intruder to sneak in. At my trial, his story was that my mother had disarmed it and unlocked the door because she was expecting him.

Ted also indicated that the other “moving man” was Sonny Ingers, a construction worker on his town-house project. His identification of Ingers was corroborated by Rap Corrigan's description of Ingers's strawberry birthmark and partially missing index finger. Since there was insufficient evidence linking Ingers to Zach's murder, he pled guilty to
the burglary of Zach's apartment and got three years in prison.

When Ted's plea was entered in open court, and he related all of these details to the judge, I think that a lot of people in the community were ashamed that they had fallen for his story, and had condemned a little girl.

Henry Paley emerged from the investigation without any criminal charges. The prosecutor's office concluded that Henry's conspiracy with Ted Cartwright was limited to trying to convince Georgette Grove to sell the Route 24 property. None of the evidence indicated that he knew about or was involved in any plan to harm anyone.

It will be many, many years, if ever, before either Robin Carpenter or Alex Nolan will be released from prison. They are both serving life sentences for the murders of Georgette Grove and Charley Hatch, and for the attempted murders of Jack and me.

Robin admitted that she had been the one who shot both Georgette and her half brother Charley Hatch. She had taken from Georgette's shoulder bag the picture of Alex and Robin that Georgette had found in Robin's desk. She had placed my picture in Georgette's shoulder bag and my mother's picture in Charley Hatch's pocket.

So many people stopped by our house during those first weeks after Jack and I were nearly killed. They brought food and flowers and friendship. Some of them told me how their grandmothers and
mine were schoolmates. I love it here. My roots are here. I've opened an interior design shop in Mendham, but I've had to limit my clients. Life is very busy. Jack is in the first grade and plays on every team he can find.

In the weeks and months following Alex's arrest, my relief over Ted's confession was overshadowed by my sadness at Alex's betrayal. It was Jeff who helped me to understand that the Alex I thought I knew had never existed.

I'm not exactly sure of the moment when I realized I was falling in love with Jeff. I think he knew before I did that we were meant to be together.

That's another reason why I am so busy. My husband, Jeffrey MacKingsley, is getting ready to run for governor.

Simon & Schuster

Proudly Presents

WHERE ARE YOU NOW?

Mary Higgins Clark

Please turn the page for a preview of

Where Are You Now? . . . .

1

It is exactly midnight, which means Mother's Day has just begun. I stayed overnight with my mother in the apartment on Sutton Place where I grew up. She is down the hall in her room, and together we are keeping the vigil. The same vigil we've kept every year since my brother, Charles MacKenzie Jr., “Mack,” walked out of the apartment he shared with two other Columbia University seniors ten years ago, and has never been seen since then. But every year at some point on Mother's Day, he calls to assure Mom he is fine. “Don't worry about me,” he tells her. “One of these days I'll turn the key in the lock and be home.” Then he hangs up.

We never know when in those twenty-four hours that call will come. Last year Mack called at a few minutes after midnight, and our vigil ended almost as soon as it began. Two years ago he waited until the very last
second to phone, and Mom was frantic that this slim contact with him was over.

Mack has to have known that my father was killed in the Twin Towers tragedy. I was sure that no matter what he was doing, that terrible day would have compelled him to come home. But it did not. Then on the next Mother's Day, during his annual call, he started crying and gasped, “I'm sorry about Dad. I'm really sorry,” and broke the connection.

I was sixteen when Mack disappeared. His kid sister, Carolyn, following in his footsteps—like him, I attended Columbia, then unlike him I went on to Duke Law School. Mack had been accepted there before he disappeared. After I passed the bar last year, I clerked for a criminal court judge in the courthouse on Centre Street in lower Manhattan. Judge Huot has just retired, so at the moment I'm unemployed. I plan to apply for a job as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, but not quite yet.

First, I must find a way to track my brother down. What
happened
to him? Why did he disappear? There was no sign of foul play. Mack's credit cards weren't used. His car was in the garage near his apartment. No one of his description ever ended up in the morgue, although in the beginning, my mother and father were sometimes asked to view the body of some unidentified young man who had been fished out of the river or killed in an accident.

When we were growing up, Mack was my best friend, my confidant, my pal. Half my girlfriends had a crush on him. He was the perfect son, the perfect brother, handsome, kind, funny, an excellent student. How do I feel about him now? I don't know anymore. I remember how
much I loved him, but that love has almost totally turned to anger and resentment. I wish I could even doubt that he's alive and that someone is playing a cruel trick, but there is no doubt in my mind about that. Years ago we recorded one of his phone calls and had the pattern of his voice compared to his voice from home movies. It was identical.

All of this means that Mom and I dangle slowly in the wind and, before Dad died in that burning inferno, it was that way for him too. In all these years, I have never gone into a restaurant or theatre without my eyes automatically scanning to see if just maybe, by chance, I will run into him. Someone with a similar profile and sandy brown hair will demand a second look, and, sometimes, close scrutiny. I remember more than once almost knocking people over to get close to someone who turned out to be a perfect stranger.

All this was going through my mind as I set the volume of the phone on the loudest setting, got into bed, and tried to go to sleep. I guess I did fall into an uneasy doze because the jarring ring of the phone made me bolt up. I saw from the lighted dial on the clock that it was five minutes of three. With one hand I snapped on the bedside light and with the other grabbed the receiver. Mom had already picked up, and I heard her voice, breathless and nervous. “Hello, Mack.”

“Hello, Mom. Happy Mother's Day. I love you.”

His voice was resonant and confident. He sounds as though he doesn't have a care in the world, I thought bitterly.