Shadowkiller (23 page)

They did the same thing for Allison on Mother's Day, and she spent a good part of that afternoon scrubbing sticky maple syrup from every surface in the kitchen, including the narrow space between the stove and cabinets, and trying to figure out why the garbage disposal was clogged. (Tea bags—with strings attached—and banana peels.)

Tomorrow morning, she'd better be up bright and early to help the girls prepare their planned menu for Mack, which is top secret but probably involves the broiler, since Hudson wrote “bakin” on the grocery list a few days ago, trying to disguise her kindergarten handwriting for Allison's.

About to log off the computer after all, she notices that the mailbox icon on her desktop indicates new mail. Clicking on the box, she sees that it's from [email protected]. Her brother and sister-in-law share an account, so it could be from either of them.

She clicks on the message.

Dear Allison
, it begins, below a typed dateline, and she smiles. Cindy-Lou always composes her e-mails like formal letters.

How is your weekend going? Fine, I hope. Ours is fine, too.

Brett and I are so excited that you will be coming here in July! Which day are you planning to arrive? It's such a long drive from New York and I don't know if you'll feel like getting back into the car after you get here, but we are trying to plan some things to do while you are around. I know you haven't been back to Nebraska since you left, but not all that much has changed—for better or for worse! Since there's nothing much to do close by, check out these links to some of the sights that are within a couple of hours' drive from here and tell me what you think.

There are several links—to a farm equipment museum, a local arts festival, and of course, the county fair. Beneath them, Cindy has signed off with:

Sincerely,

Cindy-Lou Downing

Downing is Brett's last name—the one their mother grew up with. Allison wonders, not for the first time, whether her own father ever considered adopting him. Maybe she'll ask Brett about it when she sees him.

Or maybe she won't ask him about anything tied to the past. Maybe she doesn't want to know, even now.

Then why are you wondering about it at all?

Who are you kidding?

You're not just going back to Nebraska to see Brett, and you might as well admit it, if only to yourself.

One of the Web site links Cindy-Lou sent is to a doll museum not far from Centerfield. If it had been there when Allison was growing up, no one ever mentioned it or thought to take her there.

She types a quick response to Cindy-Lou.

If the drive goes as planned, we'll be getting to the farm on July 3. Thanks for the info. The girls would love the doll museum.

She hesitates, then deletes the last line.

After a moment, she retypes it.

Then she deletes it again, replacing it with,
How about if we just take it day by day when we get there?

She hits send before she can change her mind, then closes her laptop and goes up to bed.

N
ebraska
.

Carrie stares at the intercepted e-mail, stunned.

Of all the cosmic signs that have come her way, this is the greatest of all. Greater, even, than Mack's name being Mack.

It can't be pure coincidence that Allison is going back to Nebraska, where it all began—and that Carrie got here in time to follow her out there.

Well, perhaps not
literally
follow her.

Remembering how complicated it was—and how long it took—to make her way north from Florida, Carrie realizes she doesn't have time to do the same thing all the way to the Great Plains. A road trip is out of the question.

But if Allison is going to be in Nebraska by July 3, then . . .

So am I.

She'll have to fly.

That means she'll need a new identity right away. Luckily, she's done her homework—again. She knows just where to go for a fake driver's license and credit card—advertised, on an illicit Web site, as being guaranteed to get her a plane ticket on any airline, and past the TSA at any airport.

Chances are that there are no direct flights to Omaha. That's okay. She'd be better off flying between major cities with crowded airports. Any of the three in metropolitan New York will do, and she'll fly into Denver, maybe, or Minneapolis, Kansas City . . . Anyplace that will land her close, but not too close, to Nebraska.

Yes. It's a good plan.

Of course, there's always a chance that the fake identity won't work with all the new regulations. But this is one time Carrie's willing to take a risk. If she gets caught, they'll find out everything she's done and she'll probably spend the rest of her life in prison.

But if she doesn't . . .

She'll be free at last. Free of the nightmares and the memories; free of the burden of guilt she's been carrying around for years.

Out there by the driveway earlier, seeing Allison again, hearing her easy laughter—that, for Carrie, was the turning point.

Yes, meeting Allison in Nebraska will be an incredibly perfect, full-circle ending to a journey whose purpose didn't become clear until tonight.

Gone is any naïve illusion that the two of them might actually connect on some level, perhaps build a relationship to replace all the ones that had shattered in the past.

No, Allison stole everything that ever mattered to Carrie—including Mack.

He was supposed to have been Carrie's ticket to normalcy. Together, they should have had everything—
could
have had everything. A happy marriage, a beautiful home, children . . .

A life. A happy, normal life . . .

The kind of life he now has with Allison.

It's time she learned that nothing—not even happiness—comes without a price.

Chapter Twelve

Saturday, June 30, 2012

“A
ll set, Al?”

She turns to see Mack in the doorway of the master bedroom and quickly tosses the last few pillows on the just-made bed. “Yes. Are they still sleeping?”

“Still sleeping.”

“Even Hudson?”

“Even Hudson.”

Their seven year-old has been more excited than anyone about the road trip to Nebraska—so excited that when Allison tucked her into bed last night, she thought she'd never get to sleep.

Indeed, Hudson was still awake at eleven o'clock when Allison checked on her. She was in bed, but with a flashlight and the map of the United States that she'd marked with a highlighter to trace the cross-country route they're planning to take.

“Are you sure we can't stop in Chicago, Mommy?” she asked. “It's only about thirty miles out of the way.”

“Not this trip,” Allison told her yet again. “We want to spend as much time as we can with Uncle Brett, and we're already wasting six whole days of Daddy's vacation on the road.”

“
Wasting?
”

“Not
wasting
,” Allison told her apologetically. “The drive is going to be really fun. You'll see.”

Fun . . . but long.

“Get some sleep,” she told Hudson, taking away the flashlight and the map.

“You too, Mommy.”

Knowing that a last-minute client emergency could have curtailed the whole trip, Allison didn't breathe easily until Mack pulled into the driveway close to midnight, having stayed at the office to tie up loose ends.

“Good to go?” she asked him.

“Unless something somehow goes wrong between now and tomorrow morning.”

“What are the odds of that?”

“In this business,” he told her, “I learned never to say never.”

She went to bed wondering if maybe some part of her had been hoping that a crisis would arise at the office and keep them from leaving.

But the rest of the night passed uneventfully.

Now it's four-thirty
A.M.
, three sleeping kids are strapped into the backseat, and it's actually going to happen. They're actually going to Nebraska.

“Come on, Al,” Mack says around a yawn, jangling the car keys. “We've got to get on the road if we're going to beat the holiday weekend traffic over the bridge.”

It's the same route they follow every year on the way to the Jersey Shore. But this year, once they've crossed the Hudson River, they'll continue heading west, not south.

Allison takes one last look around.

The next time I walk into this room, it'll be over.

She'll have gone to Nebraska, faced down the past, and survived. Then she'll be able to get on with normal life again, focusing on going forward, not back.

She turns off the bedside lamp, plunging the room into predawn darkness, and follows Mack down the shadowy stairs.

“Oh—wait, did you get the girls' tote bags? They were by the door.”

“I got them. What the heck was in them? Rocks?”

“Books. Hudson wants to read the Little House series since we're heading out to the prairie, so I brought that—”

“The whole series?”

“What's wrong with that? They were mine when I was a little girl, just like some of the books in Maddy's bag.”

“Allie, it's really sweet that you saved your favorite books for your own little girls and lugged them all the way here from Nebraska—but do we really need to lug them all the way back again?”

“Yes,” she says simply, not bothering to explain to him that salvaging all those well-worn books from her childhood bedroom years ago had nothing to do with preserving them for future daughters. Nor was it because her father had bought them for her and read them to her.

She did it for herself, because she thought she might need them someday. Growing up, she'd learned that when the real world became hard to bear, she could always pull a book off the shelf and lose herself in a make-believe one. It was a relief to step into a fictional character's shoes and deal with someone else's problems instead of her own, knowing that things would work out in the end.

Outside, it feels like the middle of the night. The streetlights are still on, crickets are chirping, and the newspaper trucks have yet to toss plastic bags containing the
New York Times
or
Wall Street Journal
onto driveways up and down the street.

Standing beside Mack as he locks the front door, Allison remembers something. “I'll be right back.”

“Where are you going?” he asks as she hurries down the steps.

“To check the backyard.” It's been raining the past couple of days, and she never found a chance to get outside and make sure the sandbox was covered, the little plastic pool was drained, and everything was put away.

She called Randi last night to give her Brett's name, address, and phone number, so that someone on this end would know where they were headed. Randi promised to drive by and check on the house every couple of days while they're away, but Allison doesn't want her picking up grungy plastic toys from the lawn.

Dewy grass brushes her toes, bare in flat summer sandals, as she makes her way around the side of the house. Through the trees and shrubs that border the edge of the property, she can see the large house looming next door.

A year ago, it was full of life. Phyllis and Bob Lewis were living there. Their two children were home from college for the summer, using the saltwater pool and the sunken patio with its outdoor stone fireplace and wet bar, hosting loud parties most weekends when Phyllis and Bob retreated to their Vermont cottage.

To think Allison and Mack used to complain—if only to each other—about the noise. Now she'd take wee-hour laughter, music, and slamming car doors any day over the eerie silence that's fallen over the vacant house.

Desperate to get away from the horror of what happened here, Phyllis's grieving husband accepted a year-long overseas assignment in February. Their son had graduated from college in May and taken a job on the West Coast, and their daughter, Bob told Allison in a recent phone call, didn't have the heart to return to an empty house for the summer.

“I'm going to see if I can rent it out until I get back,” he told her. “I hope you don't mind.”

“Not at all, Bob. Let me know what I can do to help.”

“Thank you. I will,” he said in a hollow voice, and she knew that he, too, was remembering the last time he'd needed her help. As keeper of the Lewises' spare set of keys, Allison was the one who discovered the grisly murder scene after a worried Bob called from a European business trip and asked her to go check on his wife.

Every time she looks at the house, she remembers that night. Remembers Phyllis's bloodied corpse in the master bedroom and remembers, with a shudder, that she'd actually suspected, at one point, that Mack might have had something to do with it.

She's glad the house hasn't been rented yet. She doesn't want to see it come to life again, occupied by strangers. That would feel just as wrong as the “For Rent” sign does, and—

Frowning, Allison stares into the dense foliage that separates her own yard from the Lewises'.

There, amid the branches, she could have sworn she just saw a human shadow . . .

Just like that night a few weeks ago.

She blinks, and it's gone.

Unnerved, she gives the backyard a cursory glance, making sure there are no stray toys on the lawn. As she hurries back around front, she takes a long last look at the property line.

Nothing. It must have been her imagination again, playing tricks on her as it had a few weeks ago. It makes sense. She's anxious about leaving, not to mention deliriously tired.

Mack certainly is. He yawns deeply as they head to the car.

“Did you sleep at all?” Allison asks him.

“I must have. Last thing I remember, the clock said three forty-five.”

The alarm, she knows too well, had gone off at four.

“You only got fifteen minutes. I got almost four hours. I'll drive the first leg.”

Predictably, Mack argues with that.

But Allison is behind the wheel when they pull out of the driveway a minute later, her husband sleeping as soundly as the three kids by the time she merges onto the Saw Mill River Parkway, heading southbound toward the George Washington Bridge.

Traffic is already starting to build. The Fourth of July falls on Wednesday this year, and a lot of people are taking the whole week off, or at least a five-day weekend.

That's the thing about living where they do. When you're competing for space with the millions of others who occupy the metropolitan area, even the simplest endeavor demands a serious head start and considerable advance planning.

It's going to be nice, Allison tells herself, approaching the bridge at last, to have some breathing room for a change. Out on the wide open plains of Nebraska, she recalls, it's possible to drive for miles without seeing another car. At least, that used to be the case. She wonders if it still is.

Noticing that the sun is coming up out to the east, behind the city, she reminds herself that in just a few days, she'll see it rise over a grassy horizon for the first time in years.

She told the girls all about that just the other day—about how you can see all the way across a great, flat expanse to where the earth meets the sky.

“You've never seen anything like it around here,” she told her daughters.

“That's how it is down the shore,” Hudson reminded her. “Only there, it's water meeting the sky. Does Nebraska look like that? But green instead of blue?”

“Not exactly. The ocean only stretches in one direction. You can stand in the middle of a field in Nebraska, and it spreads out all around you, so that there's nothing but grass and sky no matter which way you turn. And when the sun sets at night, it looks like it's lying right on the grassy edge of the earth.”

“That sounds like the card I made you for Mother's Day!” Maddy exclaimed. “See, Hudson? I told you it was okay to put the sun on the grass.”

“There's no edge to the earth,” Hudson replied, to both of them. “It's round.”

“But it looks flat in Nebraska,” Allison told her. “All the way to the sky, there's nothing. Not a house, not a tree, not a person.”

“It sounds peaceful.”

A wide-eyed Madison disagreed with her sister. “I think it sounds scary. What if you needed help? Or what if you needed to hide?”

“You wouldn't need help, and you wouldn't need to hide,” Hudson told her before Allison could respond, “because Mommy said there's not a person around. So there wouldn't be any reason to hide.”

Those words—and the haunted look on Madison's face—sent a pang of sorrow through Allison. Her poor girls had been through so much at the hands of a depraved human being. Thank goodness they weren't going back to the shore anytime soon. Thank goodness they were headed far, far away.

Now, Manhattan's skyline falls into the rearview mirror as they head west. Dawn is breaking, its rainbow sherbet palette tinting the glittering steel and glass facade of the new Freedom Tower rising above the scarred ground that once held the burning ruins of the World Trade Center.

For a fleeting, foolish moment, Allison considers waking Mack to show him the spectacular sight. She quickly thinks better of it, not just because he's exhausted.

Even now, over a decade later, still riddled with guilt over what happened to his first wife, he balks at reminders of that fateful day.

Even so, he recently mentioned that last year around the tenth anniversary, he'd actually considered looking into Carrie's past. He'd thought it might be time to uncover her true identity: who she'd been before her family vanished into the witness protection program. He never got around to doing it, and when he mentioned it to Allison, she was glad.

She still remembered what her brother had said to her years ago, when she briefly toyed with the idea of searching for the father who had walked out on her.

“Why would you want to go dredging that up again after all these years? Why can't you leave well enough alone?”

She'd have said the same thing to Mack, had he told her he was going to delve into Carrie's roots.

That situation was entirely different from her own.

Carrie was dead. Mack wasn't looking for her. He was looking for truth; perhaps, even after all these years, for closure.

Can Allison blame him?

Isn't that what I'm doing right now?
she wonders as she drives west through New Jersey.

Nothing but highway stretches behind her now in the rearview mirror, but again she thinks of the Freedom Tower.

She visited the site only once, when there was nothing to see other than steel girders, blue scaffolding, and a large sign that read “Never Forget.”

Built to symbolize rebirth and strength, the soaring structure now casts its long shadow over the gaping footprint where the twin towers once stood, and the bronze memorial etched with the names of the victims who died on that spot.

Carrie Robinson MacKenna, of course, is among them.

“Do you want to go see it?” Allison had asked Mack last fall, when the memorial opened and the victims' families were invited to be among the first to visit.

His reply was the same as it had been a few years earlier, when he was invited to join other bereaved spouses at ground zero on the 9/11 anniversary to ceremoniously read from the long list of victims' names: a flat, predictable no.

Allison hadn't pressed the issue then, and she didn't now.

What if her father's name were etched in stone somewhere? Would she be drawn to the spot, or fiercely determined to avoid it?

It's different
, she reminds herself again, focusing on the road ahead.