She Loves Me Not (22 page)

Eat, because gorging yourself on food might keep you from feeling so incredibly hollow . . .

As she steps out of the car, her feet promptly splash into a puddle left over from yesterday's rain.

“Damn,” she says softly. “Damn, damn, damn.”

A lump rises in her throat as she stares down at her soggy leather flats, feeling more sorry for herself than ever, if that's possible.

You've done enough crying today.

She attempts to push the lump back down again. It refuses to budge. It only takes a few moments for her eyes to become as soggy as her shoes.

Crying freely, she pulls two bulging shopping bags from the back of the station wagon. The first thing she's going to do when she goes into the house, she decides, is turn up the heat. She'll turn it up to sixty-five. No, seventy. She'll turn the heat up to seventy and if Ben comes home and dares to—

“Umm . . . hello?”

Startled, Christine looks up to see a young woman peering at her over the hedge that separates the Kirkmayers' yard from the Larrabees'. She has a long brown ponytail and she's not wearing a coat over her navy hooded sweatshirt.

“Hi,” Christine says warily, sniffling and balancing the bags in one arm so she can wipe her eyes on her sleeve.

“I'm Leslie Larrabee, Rose's sister-in-law.”

Oh, no. After what happened yesterday with the children, Christine has no idea what to expect. For all she knows, Rose is about to hit her with a lawsuit.

“I just wanted to—are you okay?” Leslie breaks off to ask, as Christine juggles her packages and swipes at her eyes again.

“I'm fine,” she says, just as a jumbo-sized package of Doritos tumbles out of one of the bags.

“Are you sure you're okay?”

“I'm fine,” she repeats through clenched teeth.

Leslie doesn't look as though she believes her, but goes on, “Well, I just wanted to check with you . . . the kids' puppy is missing, and—”

“They think I took it?” Christine is incredulous. “I would never—”

“No! Nobody thinks you took it. He's just gone, and we think he must have run away last night, and the kids are really upset. I'm checking with all the neighbors to find out if anyone's seen him.”

“I'm sorry, but I haven't.”

“But if you do . . .”

“I'll bring him home.”

“Thanks. Rose would appreciate it. She had to go to work and she's worried sick about the dog, and the kids, and . . . Well, she's going through a really bad time right now.”

Christine contemplates that, then finds herself asking tentatively, “Will you give her my best? And tell her . . . tell her I'm really sorry. About the dog, and about yesterday. I didn't mean to scare her. I should have called before I brought the children out.”

Leslie nods. “I'll tell her.”

“Aunt Wes-wee!” Leo calls from the open back door of the house. “The toast popped up! Can I put the choco-wat on?”

“Coming, Leo.” Rose's sister-in-law turns away.

Christine watches her give the little boy a hug, then bring him back inside.

Poor little guy,
she thinks, as she carries the groceries toward the house. She'll have to ask Ben—when she decides to start speaking to him again—to keep an eye out for the missing puppy.

W
hen at last David hangs up the telephone, he lets out a tremendous, shuddering sigh.

Olivia McGlinchie is dead.

Murdered, after disappearing during a snowstorm last winter. Her mother, distraught the entire time she was telling him about the case, mentioned that Olivia's body was found by hunters after the spring thaw somewhere upstate, in the mountains.

Could it be . . . ?

No. Absolutely not. That would be too bizarre a coincidence.

David's heart is pounding as he takes out his laptop computer and flips it open.

As he goes through the succession of steps required to log on to the Internet, he searches his memory, frustrated. He remembers reading about a murdered woman from the New York boroughs . . .

But it couldn't have been her. Of course it wasn't. Things like that happen all the time.

Swiftly launching a search engine, he types in Olivia McGlinchie.

He taps his fingers nervously on the arm of his chair as the computer hums and clicks, processing the name.

When the search results come up, there are dozens of them—mostly references to news stories.

He clicks on the first.

POLICE BELIEVE BODY THAT OF MISSING STATEN ISLAND WOMAN

He squirms in his chair. The headline is vaguely familiar, but back when he read it the first time, he never connected it with the organ recipient from Staten Island. Why would he? He never even knew her name.

Olivia McGlinchie can't be the woman he remembers reading about. That simply would be too far-fetched a coincidence.

But as David scans the article, his blood turns to ice in his veins.

He struggles to wrap his mind around the impossible:

Olivia McGlinchie's body was found a mile from his cabin in the Catskills.

B
efore Isabel can cry out again, a gloved hand roughly clamps something over her mouth. Some kind of tape.

Duct tape.

“I knew you'd be late, Angela.” The voice is chillingly guttural, yet recognizable.

Mr. Gabriel.

Dear God.

As she begins to struggle, the first dazed, coherent thought she manages to form is that she was right about him all along. She should have listened to her instincts.

Her next thought: who on earth is Angela?

“Are you listening, Angela?” He remains behind her, unseen, a madman who clearly believes she's somebody else.

“Angela?” he barks, and she nods, whimpering behind the tape, still struggling, panting through her nose.

She can't get enough air. She feels light-headed and her knees have gone liquid, as though she's going to faint. But she can't. If she does, she knows, she'll never wake up.

“Now, listen. Here's what I want you to do,” Mr. Gabriel says calmly, as though he were a kindergarten teacher about to teach a child how to tie her shoes. “First, I want you to stop fighting with me for a moment and stop trying to scream. You're wasting all that effort. There's nobody to hear you.”

If you cooperate, he might let you go.

She forces herself to go utterly still and silent in his grasp, even as hysteria screeches through her.

“Good.” His voice is laced with an eerie calm. “Now isn't that better? You really should listen to me, Angela. If you had listened to me in the first place, we wouldn't be here. We'd be together on a tropical island somewhere, living happily ever after. But you didn't want that. You chose
him
instead.”

Isabel attempts to swallow the saliva welling in her throat, and chokes. Her body wracked with spasms, she begins to struggle again.

“No. Be still!” he barks. “You aren't doing what I want you to do.”

I can't breathe. Oh, please, I can't breathe. I'm going to die.

Bile is rising in her chest.

“Breathe through your nose,” he commands. “That's all you have to do. Take a long, deep breath through your nose.”

She sucks in air through her nostrils.

“Good. Now hold it.”

With one rapid movement, he raises something in front of her face, holding it high over her head.

A rock,
she thinks frantically,
he's going to kill me with a rock or
—

But when he presses it against her, it's not a rock. It's soft.

“Did you savor that deep breath, Angela?” he asks. “Because it was the last one those lungs of yours are ever going to take.”

A pillow.

He's clamping a pillow over her face, holding it fast, blocking out oxygen.

She falls to the frozen ground. He pins her there, flat on her back in the snow, smothering her with the pillow.

He's killing me.

Panic sets in.

“Just remember that the odds for survival are with you, Isabel.”

Galvanized by Dr. Henry's long-ago words, she grapples with the steely arms above her, but they won't budge. She raises her knee sharply, hoping to make contact with his groin. He grunts in pain, but his death grasp doesn't flinch.

“There's an excellent chance you'll be around to dance at your daughters' weddings.”

Her lungs are aching, violently straining for air.

No, Dr. Henry. You were wrong about that. I won't be around for my daughters' weddings or anything else. And they need me. My children need me.

Her strength waning, her lungs on fire as she slowly suffocates, Isabel's anguished last thought is that now she knows.

Jenny Cavilleri was wrong. It
does
hurt.

Death isn't falling off a cliff in slow motion.

It is hurtling through an icy black pit toward her doom, hitting bottom with an explosion of sheer agony.

D
riving home from the bookstore, Rose does her best to prepare herself for the difficult evening ahead.

When she called Leslie earlier to check in, she learned that both Jenna and Leo have been crying on and off all afternoon about the missing puppy. Leslie even took the kids around the neighborhood to call his name, but there's been no sign of him.

“They keep accusing each other of having been the one who let him out last night or this morning but they're both denying it, Rose. One of them must be lying, but I can't tell who it is.”

Rose almost told Leslie her suspicions about Leo, but then she'd have to bring up the necklace. And if she brings up the necklace, Leslie is going to think Hitch is the one who left it there.

Of course it wasn't Hitch,
Rose tells herself.
The necklace had somebody else's name on it.

It had to be Leo. He stole the wrapped gift from someone who meant to give it to a woman named Angela, and then he lied about it.

Just as he lied about going outside, or at the very least, opening the door this morning.

Approaching the last intersection in town, she keeps a wary eye on the green light up ahead.

If it wasn't Leo . . .

That is, if somebody actually snuck into the house last night to leave the necklace . . .

Well, the puppy could have slipped out then.

Round and round her thoughts keep spinning, making her dizzy with confusion.

If you really think somebody broke in, why didn't you call the police first thing?

The light changes to yellow.

Because you can't bother them for another false alarm.

Her nerves on edge, she accelerates a bit to make it through the intersection. All she wants is to get home.

Do you really believe an intruder was in the house?

Of course not.

Fine. So now that that's settled . . .

She'll ask Leo again about the necklace.

And if he denies it . . .

Well, she'll have to ask around at Toddler Tyme to find out who this Angela could possibly—

A blaring horn shatters the thought.

Rose slams on the brakes.

Oh my God.

The light is red.

She was about to barrel right through it.

The Blazer screeches to a stop inches from the car that had the right of way. The driver, a woman Rose's age with children strapped in back, shakes her head and mouths something at Rose as she drives by.

Shaken, Rose doesn't blame her. She could have caused a terrible accident. She could have killed those children, or their mother . . .

Or yourself.

Then Jenna and Leo would be orphaned.

Leaning forward, Rose touches her forehead to the steering wheel, shuddering at the thought of what her death would do to her poor babies.

They'd be traumatized.

Closing her eyes, Rose can't fathom how they could possibly get through the death of a parent for the second time in their short lives.

After the initial shock wore off, would they be okay, just as they eventually were after Sam's death? Would they go on without their mommy, just as they went on without their daddy?

If something happens to Rose, Leslie will be the children's legal guardian. Rose and Sam planned it that way when they wrote their will shortly after Leo's birth.

The will was their lawyer's idea, just in case something happened to them, and Rose's father came out of the woodwork seeking custody of the kids or their meager assets. After all, he had suddenly popped up to unsuccessfully stake a claim in Rose's inheritance when his ex-wife died.

How lighthearted she and Sam were when they made their will. She remembers how they joked their way through the process. Sam said Leo was so colicky they should probably put in a special clause just in case Leslie tried to refuse to take him. And they both found it amusing that they had nothing to leave anyone but the kids, a fixer-upper Victorian on the unfashionable side of town, and a pile of bills.

“But that's okay, because we're not going anywhere for a good sixty or seventy years,”
Sam said as they signed the papers.

“Yeah, just think . . . by then, maybe we'll actually have something to leave behind,”
Rose told him.

“But Leslie still gets the kids. I don't want them going into any nursing home,
” Sam quipped, and they laughed again.

Had either of them sensed what loomed before them, they would never have joked their way through—

Behind her, a car horn honks.

Rose bolts upright in the driver's seat, looking around wildly, relieved to discover that this time, the honk was merely because the light has turned green.

She isn't in danger. Not this time.