Sleepwalker (22 page)

“We tried to call earlier and see if it was okay to stop by, but we couldn’t get ahold of you,” Nathan puts in.

“We just came from the wake.” Randi puts the platter of brownies on the table and peels back the plastic wrap.

“Was it awful?”

No, it was absolutely delightful
, Allison finds herself wanting to say to this Zoe person who apparently made Saturday night plans with Mack and puts spinach in brownies and has now taken off her coat to show off a killer body. No cleavage—the dress is conservatively cut—but it’s slinky enough to reveal that she’s either had a boob job, or is wearing the world’s most invisible bra.

Allison can’t help but check to see if Mack is looking at Zoe’s figure, but he’s not. He catches her eye and his mouth quirks a little, not a smile, not a frown, but an expression she can easily decipher after all their years together.

Sorry about these people
, he’s saying.
I know you’re not in the mood to socialize with strangers.

He’s right about that.

Suddenly, she longs to be home, despite everything. Home with her husband and children, where they belong. Home where she’ll feel more like herself and Mack will act more like himself and everything will be back to normal . . .

Except, how can it ever be normal now?

“I’m sorry we had to meet under these circumstances,” Nathan is saying, and Allison realizes he’s talking to her.

“Oh . . . I . . . so am I.”

“We’d still love to have you guys over,” Zoe tells her, “after the dust settles.”

After the dust settles—an awkward thing to say after a funeral, but the irony seems to escape Zoe, making Allison like her even less.

Again, she looks at Mack.

Reading her mind, he says, “I forgot to tell you, Al— right before everything happened, I ran into Nate on the train and he and Zoe had invited us over for Saturday night—tonight.”

“That’s . . . nice.”
But who the hell are these people?

“You’ll have to be sure and take that rain check,” Zoe says, “and I promise that when you do come, we won’t just talk about old times.”

“You’re the one who already dug out all those old pictures to show Mack and Ben,” her husband reminds her.

“I’m sure Allison and Randi want to see them, too.”

“Are they incriminating?” Randi asks Zoe, and Allison notes that her martini glass is almost empty. “Because I always like to see incriminating pictures from Ben’s past . . . as long as they were taken before he met me.”

“Well, I’m sure Nate has a few of those. The guys used to go to all the big media parties.”

“So did you,” Mack tells Zoe, with a grin.

For a brief, irrational instant, Allison resents it.

How, she wonders, can he be suddenly smiling after all that’s gone on the last few days? And at a total stranger—if only to Allison—who’s returning it with such ease; an outsider who came barging in at the least opportune moment, when Allison was ready to be alone with her friends and her husband and her thoughts and her good, stiff drink.

Oh please. It’s not about you
, she reminds herself, picking up her glass and relishing another burning sip.
Don’t be petty.

Still, she can’t help but feel wistful over Mack’s sudden jovial demeanor, given the darkness of his mood these last few days. Never one to share emotions—ha, understatement of the year—he seems to have retreated emotionally more than ever lately, whenever they’re together.

Which hasn’t been often. To Allison’s dismay, he went into the office on Wednesday morning for a few hours to attend his meeting, and back again on Thursday, after taking the first part of the day off to handle the alarm installation. Yesterday, he put in a full day at work.

“I have to go,” he told her when she protested, and reminded her that she and the kids are completely safe at Ben and Randi’s. The house is like a fortress. It isn’t even just the house; the property is surrounded by an electronic security fence and an access-control iron gate.

“I’d feel safer with you here,” she told Mack.

“Okay, but it’s not like you really
are
any safer, and it’s not like going to work is optional. Especially with everything that’s going on right now.”

He was talking about what was going on at the office, she knew—as if that could possibly hold a candle to the hell that had broken loose in their lives.

“You get personal days, though, Mack. Maybe—”

“I used them up in September when I stayed home to paint the sunroom, remember?”

“What about a bereavement day? You can take one for Phyllis’s funeral on Monday morning—”

“I only get those if an immediate family member dies,” he replied, and the words made her shudder inside.

“Someone
did
die. This is serious, and—”

“Allison, for the love of God! Stop! Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I
want
to go to work?”

Taken aback by his explosion, she just looked at him.

“I’m up to my eyeballs in problems right now and heads are already rolling! I can’t just take off right now because a neighbor passed away!”

“She didn’t pass away—she was murdered!”

“Do you think that makes any difference at all to my boss? My job is on the line here!”

So are our lives
, she wanted to remind him—but when she noticed the irate look in his eye, she was afraid to. Suddenly, she was afraid of
him
.

Looking back on that conversation—as she has done many times since—she’s convinced herself that she overreacted. She used to have a corporate job herself; she knows the kind of pressure he’s facing. At least, she used to know.

Mack is just doing what he has to do: going to work, earning a living. She doesn’t need to make it harder for him; she’s always prided herself on being self-sufficient, perfectly capable of taking care of herself and the kids—and on not being one of those wives who spends her husband’s money without a care. She’s not like that. She knows how hard he works.

So why did you have to give him such a hard time? It isn’t like you.

No, and Mack wasn’t behaving like himself, either.

The pressure is getting to both of them.

With Allison’s self-loathing over her resentment of his obligation to his job has come a hefty dose of guilt—
it’s not like you’re sharing the breadwinner burden
—and, more than anything else, terror.

She jumps at every little noise, perpetually looking out the windows and over her shoulder, expecting to see . . .

Him
.

The hooded figure who attacked her in her bedroom that night ten years ago.

The Nightwatcher.

God help her, God help them all; it wasn’t Jerry Thompson, who is safely dead and buried.

It was someone else, and he’ll be back, and how can Mack just be standing here right now in the Webers’ kitchen holding a beer and smiling like an idiot at this woman who won’t shut up?

“I never went to the magazine parties where the guys all met the
Penthouse
Pet of the Year,” Zoe is saying, ostensibly to Randi and Allison, though she’s looking at their husbands, “and I wasn’t even invited the time Hugh Hefner flew everyone out to the Playboy Mansion for—”

“Whoa, easy now, Zoe,” Ben cuts in with a laugh. “Randi doesn’t want to hear about that, do you, babe?”

“Trust me, I don’t, and Allison doesn’t, either, do you, Al?”

“No, thanks,” she says with absolute conviction.

Now she remembers—Zoe. She’s the woman Mack used to work with, the one who got married and moved up here not long ago. Allison didn’t recognize her with her hair pulled back. Mack was talking to her the night of the Webers’ party, the night . . .

The night I noticed that my nightgown was missing.

She closes her eyes and swallows hard, remembering the last time she saw it—bloodstained, on Phyllis Lewis’s lifeless body.

The others continue talking and laughing around her as though nothing terrible has happened, and Allison loses herself, once again, in the nightmare.

“ . . . 
just the way you look . . . tonight
.” Rocky finishes singing and leans over to kiss his wife’s forehead. “Yeah, yeah, I know . . . I’m no Sinatra, but I’d say that wasn’t half bad, huh, Ange?”

Encouraged by the ripple of movement beneath her closed eyelids, his heart lifts another notch, buoyed by a gust of hope.

It’s been happening more and more frequently today—this visible twitching of her eyes and her mouth and her fingers. Yesterday, too, according to Carm, but Rocky wasn’t here much, busy with the case up in Westchester.

The news that Phyllis Lewis had been raped really threw things off for him, and instantly led to a couple of conclusions. Most importantly, he’s almost positive—much to his relief—that he hadn’t arrested the wrong guy in the Nightwatcher case after all.

Given the departure in signature, it looks more like they’re dealing with a copycat killer—and clearly, it isn’t a female, which lets Allison Taylor MacKenna off the hook. As for her husband . . . James MacKenna was there with her that day ten years ago. Not married to Allison at the time; he was just a neighbor, as was Kristina Haines.

Rocky clearly remembers interviewing him back then, and quickly dismissing him as a suspect. He was as all-American Mr. Nice Guy as they come: former altar boy and Big Brother volunteer, with a respectable family background and solid career, not an overdue library book or parking ticket to his name. Beyond that, the guy’s wife had been among the thousands of New Yorkers missing in the twin towers; his alibi the night of Kristina’s murder was that he’d been desperately searching hospitals and victim centers for her.

As Rocky recalls, Carrie MacKenna was one of the first names to emerge on the official lists of those who had been confirmed dead.

Later, the
New York Times
printed the “Portraits of Grief” series that captured each of the victims—not in formal obituaries, but essays about their personal lives, about who they had been, rather than what they had done. He remembers reading the one about Carrie, and noting that her husband mentioned that they’d been trying to start a family, battling infertility . . .

At the time, Rocky’s oldest son, Tony, and his wife, Laura, were enduring the same grueling, expensive treatments. He remembers feeling sorry for James MacKenna, who had gone through so much already in his efforts to become a father, and in the end found himself alone and bereft.

What are the odds that the guy might emerge a decade later as a cold-blooded copycat killer?

Not nearly as high as the odds that Jerry Thompson talked in prison.

Rocky and Murph are planning to head over to Sullivan Correctional to see what they can find out. Thompson could very well have shared the details of his crimes with a since-released inmate—one who decided to duplicate the crimes for kicks, and add rape to the signature. With luck, they’ll be able to pinpoint a suspect and match him to the semen collected at the scene.

But right now, with Ange showing signs of coming out of the coma, the case can wait. Rocky’s been at her side since early this morning. The doctors instructed him to talk to her, so he did, and when he ran out of things to say, he started singing to her—every song in his repertoire, with repeat performances of his favorites.

“The Way You Look Tonight” was the first dance on their wedding day. He’s sung it maybe ten, twelve times in the last hour or two, filling in his own words wherever he forgets the lyrics. He knows that one pretty well, but some of the others, he has to wing almost completely.

“What else do you want to hear?” he asks Ange. “More Sinatra?”

He gets through a few lines of “Mack the Knife” before faltering on the lyrics.

“Never mind,” he tells Ange. “How about some pop? ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’?”

She’s not big on that song, but he’s always loved it, because it makes him think of her.

“Okay, okay, I know—forget ‘Brown-Eyed Girl.’ This show is for you. I’ll do some Beatles.”

He remembers teasing her back in junior high when she camped out in front of the Ed Sullivan Theater with a bunch of other girls, trying to catch a glimpse of the Fab Four. And he remembers being secretly, irrationally jealous of her favorite Beatle, Paul McCartney, for most of seventh grade and part of eighth.

But Paul didn’t get to give Ange her first kiss. That privilege belonged to Rocky, on the deserted playground one cold January afternoon when the sky was impossibly blue and the wind kept whipping Ange’s long hair across her eyes as they talked, until he had to reach out and brush it away. He saw the expectant look in her big brown eyes right before she closed them, and he knew that she thought he was about to kiss her, so he did.

Now, looking at those closed eyes, he remembers the first thing she said when she opened them that long-ago day after he kissed her.

“Thank you.”

Taken aback, he’d asked, “For what?”

“For finally doing that. I thought I was going to have to make the first move.”

They’ve laughed about that many times over the years.

“
Finally
, Ange? You said
finally
? We were twelve years old. My voice hadn’t even changed yet. What did you expect, a full-blown Junior High Casanova?”

“Well, at least you were a fast learner once you got things going.”

Sitting here now, he brushes a tear from his eye, remembering that day on the playground with her. So many days on that playground with her, teeter-tottering when they were so little their legs didn’t touch the ground, pushing each other on the swings while their mothers chatted, and in later years, pointedly ignoring each other during recess—Ange skipping rope with the girls, Rocky playing stickball with the boys.

There was never a time without Ange.

There will never be a time without Ange.

“Okay,” he says, a bit hoarsely, “some Beatles. At least I know the words to most of those songs.”

He sings “Love Me Do” and “She Loves You.” Ange’s favorite has always been “Michelle,” but damned if Rocky’s going to try that one—he has a hard enough time singing lyrics in English. Forget French.