Lullaby and Goodnight (35 page)

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Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub

BOOK: Lullaby and Goodnight
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“You hear about this crazy shit?” Sam Basir throws a morning tabloid paper onto Jody’s desk.
She doesn’t bother to glance at it. “What, the hostage beheading in Iraq? Yeah, it’s—”
“No, that was the front page of the
Post.
This is the
Daily News.
Take a look.”
The attractive face that stares back from the cover is unfamiliar, as is the name in the caption.
It’s the headline that gets her.
In the month since they obtained a search warrant and ascertained that Derry Cordell was not indeed capable of being pregnant, Jody has managed to push the subway pushing homicide to the back burner.
Yes, she’s still convinced the missing wife murdered Linden Cordell. No, she doesn’t understand why she was pretending to be pregnant. Perhaps she even fooled her husband into believing it, or maybe he knew the truth. Maybe that was why he didn’t share the news with anyone.
In the end, Jody came away with the realization that the enigmatic Derry Cordell managed to disappear, perhaps never to be found, not even if Langella had the means and the time and the leads to try.
But she didn’t. She left her card with the doctor, the receptionist, and Nancy, the nurse, asking them to get in touch if anyone thought of anything that might help.
She didn’t expect to hear from them.
And that was that.
Until now.
She flips through the paper to the cover story, skims it, and looks up at Sam. “Think it’s related to Derry Cordell’s disappearance?”
“What do you think?”
“I think we’d better move on it,” she says, already on her feet and heading toward the door.
“We have to call the police, Rita,” Peyton says urgently, still holding the phone from the call she hastily ended from Julie.
Her heart is pounding as the midwife tugs a pair of sneakers over her bare feet, her stomach roiling with the baby’s squirms and twitches, as though it’s been stirred into action by a sudden injection of fear-induced adrenaline. Peyton rests a hand on what she believes is the baby’s elbow protruding beside her navel, as if she can somehow calm her child despite her own teeming apprehension.
“We will call the police, from my cell after we get out of here.” Rita ties one lace and then the other, hands flying, voice quaking. “Any second now, Tom is going to find a way into this building.”
Tom.
This feels like her worst nightmare come to life, but it’s real. Peyton can hear his frantic pounding and angry shouts from the street even from here.
“We’ll go out the back of the building to the garden and through to the next block where I parked my car.”
“Car? I thought you took the subway.”
“I do, most days. “ Rita is pulling Peyton to her feet even as she says, “J.D. usually drives to work but today I have the car, thank God. Let’s go.”
Thank God, Peyton echoes silently, feeling dizzy as she allows herself to be led through the door, down the shadowy basement corridor, to the back exit opening onto the courtyard.
She hasn’t taken more than a few steps at a time in a month. Now, heaven help her, she might have to run for her life.
“Rita,” she says, stopping to grab on to the cool, painted concrete wall for balance. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“You have to, sugar pie,” the midwife says grimly, giving her hand a squeeze. “Come on, I’ll be with you every step of the way.”
“But . . .” She doubles over as a pelvic cramp slices through her.
“Contraction?” Rita’s voice is laced with concern.
“I think so.”
Overhead, Peyton vaguely realizes, the pounding and shouting have given way to momentary, ominous silence.
“I’m going to give you something to hold it off as soon as we get to the car,” Rita promises, wielding the medical bag she wisely remembered to grab on their way out. “And I’d better take you straight to the hospital.”
 
Mary rarely watches television during the day.
Now that the dog days of August have given way to golden September, she spends most afternoons wheeling Dawn through the nearby park in the secondhand baby carriage Javier bought.
But she awakened this morning to the rumble of thunder and an overcast sky that soon spilled sheets of rain.
It’s just as well. She spent the morning catching up on all there is to do around the house. Her daughter looked on, gurgling happily from her high chair in the kitchen and her swing in the living room.
Now Dawn is dozing in her cradle, the house is back in order, and the sky appears to be clearing. Wondering about the forecast, Mary turns on the noon news and settles on the couch with a bowl of canned soup to watch it. If the weather is supposed to be nice later, she might put the baby into her carriage and walk down to the park.
Channel seven’s meteorologist has appeared twice already in teaser segments before the broadcast breaks away to commercials. Every time the newsroom and anchors reappear, Mary expects the weather report, but they keep turning to other stories.
Grim accounts of carjackings and rapes, robberies at gunpoint, and now a violent suicide.
Mary shakes her head as the victim’s picture appears: a lovely African-American woman, a young mother with a new baby. The mother hurtled herself from the balcony of her high-rise apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, leaving her newborn daughter safely asleep in her cradle, and no sign of a note.
“Police are investigating Wanda Jones’s death and have not confirmed sources who say that there may be a link between this woman and the disappearance of a close friend back in May. That woman, Allison Garcia, was almost nine months pregnant when she vanished from her home on Mother’s Day.”
Mother’s Day?
Mary’s breath catches in her throat. Frowning, she sets the soup bowl on the coffee table and picks up the remote, raising the volume.
“While Jones’s death is officially being called a suicide, and there is no evidence of foul play, police have learned that both she and Garcia were members of a local support group for unwed mothers. Anyone with any information regarding Allison Garcia’s disappearance is asked to call this number.”
The anchorwoman’s face is replaced by a graphic screen: an eight hundred number printed below a photograph.
The moment she sees the ebullient-looking young woman with a halo of black ringlets, Mary knows.
She
knows.
The facts slam into her like a series of metal gates, clanking one after another into place with numbing finality.
Dawn was born on Mother’s Day.
Dawn’s face is a miniature version of the missing Allison Garcia’s.
And Rose Calabrone lied.
“Hey, Langella,” a desk sergeant calls as Jody and Sam head for the door. “I got an urgent call for you.”
“Who is it?” Not that it matters, she realizes, not even slowing her pace. “I can’t take it now, Jimmy. Not unless it’s life-and-death.”
He shrugs. “It’s somebody from a Dr. Lombardo’s office. You decide.”
Life-and-death?
Her decision made in an instant, Jody does an about-face and hurries toward the phone, trailed by Sam.
 
Lying in a fetal position on the backseat of Rita’s car, Peyton fights off another painful contraction. She hugs her stomach, fearful for her child, and asks, “How long until that pill starts to work, Rita?”
“Any second now,” the woman promises, careening around another corner.
“Are we almost to the hospital?”
“Almost,” Rita replies . . . and then curses.
“What is it?”
“I think we’re being followed by somebody in a cab. Hold on, Peyton. I’m going to try to lose him.”
“Tom?” she asks dully, her body taut with pain and her head suddenly swimming.
“I think so.”
The car jerks and jolts. The brakes slam on, followed by the gas pedal.
“I’m sorry, sugar pie,” Rita calls as they bump and sway around another corner.
Too woozy to reply, Peyton closes her eyes and prays.
 
“Who was it?” Basir asks anxiously, as Langella hangs up the phone.
“Lombardo’s nurse. Nancy. Remember her?”
“The gossip. Yeah. Why’s she calling now?”
“She said she might have more information about the Cordell case.” Jody is already retracing her steps toward the door, with Sam right behind her. “She wants us to meet her.”
“Yeah? Where? At the office?”
“No, she said the place is a zoo. Reporters are camped out all over the place.”
“So where are we meeting her?”
“Calvary Cemetary in Queens.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Let’s go.”
“How do you know she isn’t some loony tune pulling one over on us?”
“I don’t,” Jody tells him grimly. “But we’re going anyway.”
 
Once again, it all comes down to carelessness.
Killing Wanda was a stupid, impulsive move, albeit a necessary one, because she had somehow figured it out.
She was never supposed to figure it out, and she was never supposed to die.
Only the donors were supposed to die.
Wanda wasn’t a suitable donor. She wasn’t married, but her baby was going to have a father. She didn’t engineer her pregnancy with anonymous sperm and a test tube. The father has his faults, but he’s raised two other children, and he’s clearly going to be there for this one.
Wanda didn’t have to die.
But she got suspicious, and she got scared. She instinctively went into hiding when she found herself in labor, as though she’d sensed the danger lurking nearby. She must have delivered at some suburban hospital, where she felt safe . . . not that it matters now.
She never even knew for certain whether her suspicions were founded. Not until that final confrontation in her twenty-eighth-floor apartment with its lovely terrace.
Until yesterday she probably thought she was well protected, hidden away in her elegant tower like a princess, behind triple dead bolts with an obedient doorman to protect her.
Just as Peyton Somerset finally believed she was safe in
her
elegant fortress with loyal Rita to protect her.
But, in a misguided attempt to warn Peyton of her suspicions, Wanda crossed the wrong path. All those fancy precautions of hers meant nothing in the end. It was laughably easy to slip past the doorman and up to the twenty-eighth floor. It wasn’t even all that difficult to cajole Wanda into unlocking the door.
What a shame she only lived a few minutes longer to regret that fatal move.
What a pity tiny Erica, dozing peacefully in her Ethan Allen crib as Wanda fell to her bloody death, won’t have a mother.

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