The Black Widow
Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub
For the girl next door, Shari Lou, with lots of love on her milestone birthday!
And for the big strong guys who always have my back: my father, Reg; my brother, Rick; my husband, Mark; my sons, Morgan and Brody.
With gratitude to Mari Corsi, George Catalano, Clay Smith, Mike Shapiro, Dave McEntarfer, Deborah Salanitro, Adriane Avila Vieira, Julianne Goulding Macie, and Tammy Bankoski for their contributions; to my editor, Lucia Macro, and the countless people at HarperCollins who played a role in bringing this book to print; to my literary agent, Laura Blake Peterson, her assistant Mina Feig, and my film agent Holly Frederick at Curtis Brown, Limited; to Carol Fitzgerald and the gang at Bookreporter; to Peter Meluso; to booksellers and librarians everywhere; and above all, to my readers: I’m blessed that I’m able to write because of you, and for you. Thank you for your tremendous support.
Contents
“Some things,” Carmen used to say, “just don’t feel right until the sun goes down.”
It was true.
Cocktails . . .
Bedtime stories . . .
Turning on the television . . .
Putting on pajamas . . .
All much better—more natural—after nightfall, regardless of the hour or season.
There are other things, Alex has since discovered, that can only happen under cover of darkness. They’re far less appealing than the ones to which Carmen referred, but unfortunately they’ve become increasingly necessary.
Alex opens the door that leads from the kitchen to the attached garage, aims the key remote at the car, pops the trunk.
It slowly opens wide. The interior bulb throws enough light into the garage so that it’s unnecessary to flip a wall switch and illuminate the overhead fixture.
Not that there are any windows that might reveal to the neighbors that someone is up and about at this hour . . .
And not that the crack beneath the closed door is wide enough to emit a telltale shaft of light . . .
And even if it did, it’s not likely that elderly Hester Toomey, who lives directly across the street, will be up at this hour, sitting in her usual spot on her porch . . .
But still, it’s good to practice discretion. One can’t be too careful.
And Mrs. Toomey notices everything.
Alex removes a square-point shovel from a rack on the sidewall. The steel blade has been scrubbed clean with bleach; not a speck of dirt remains from the last wee-hour expedition to the remote stretch of hilly forest seventy miles north of this quiet New York City suburb in Westchester County.
Into the trunk goes the shovel, along with the rake used for clearing the ground of fallen leaves before digging and the headlamp purchased from an online camping supply store.
Now comes the hard part.
Alex returns to the house with a coil of sturdy rope and a lightweight hand truck stolen from a careless deliveryman who foolishly left it unattended behind the supermarket last year. It’s come in handy. Alex is strong—but 150 pounds of dead weight is . . .
Well, not dead
yet
.
The figure lying prone on the sofa is out cold, courtesy of the dissolvable pill dropped into booze-laced soda.
Rohypnol—the date rape drug—is no longer prescribed in the United States and thus harder to come by. But Alex wisely stocked up during a trip to Mexico when it became apparent there would be a need for it.
In Mexico nobody asks questions.
When this is all over, and he’s back in my arms, maybe that’s where we’ll go.
But now is not a time to daydream about the future. There’s a lot to do before the sun comes up.
Stepping around the usual floor clutter, Alex carries the glass of spiked soda to the kitchen. There’s still an inch or two of liquid in the bottom, but the amount that was consumed certainly did the trick. Now, Alex dumps the contents into the sink and washes it down the drain. The glass and the sink are scrubbed with bleach, the glass returned to its place in the cupboard beside a row of colorful plastic sippy cups with tops and baby bottles that are ready and waiting . . .
Just waiting.
Then it’s back to the living room. Dozing on his favorite chair, the black cat—a former stray who’s been here for a long time now—lazily opens one eye. Alex had named him Señor Don Gato after a childhood song a foster mother sang years ago in a cozy little home that reminded Alex of a gingerbread cottage. The woman loved cats and was always taking in strays. Stray cats, stray kids . . .
Yet for some reason, she didn’t want to adopt me.
“It’s time for our guest to go now,” Alex informs Gato.
In response, not a twitch of movement from either the cat or the guest.
Under Gato’s watchful gaze, Alex rolls the hand truck over to the sofa and unfurls a length of rope. The end whips through the air, toppling a framed photo on the end table. It’s an old black-and-white baby photo of Carmen, a gift from Alex’s mother-in-law the day after their son was born.
“El niño mira justo como mi Carmen,”
she had said, and then translated in her heavily accented English for Alex’s benefit: “He looks just like my Carmen.”
On that day, gazing into the newborn’s face, all patchy skin and squinty eyes from the drops the nurses had put in, Alex couldn’t really see it.
But as the days, then weeks and months, passed, the resemblance became undeniable. Strangers would stop them on the street to exclaim over how much parent and child looked alike.
At first it was sweet. Soon, though, Alex started to feel left out.
“He looks like you, too, sweetie,” Carmen, ever the supportive spouse, would claim. But it wasn’t true.
“You’re just trying to make me feel better.”
“No—he has your blue eyes, see?”
“All babies have blue eyes,” Alex pointed out, “and he has your
face
. Everything about him is you—even his personality.”
The baby had been so easygoing from day one, quick to smile, quick to laugh . . .
As their son grew into a boy, he loved buildings and music, even learned to play the guitar like . . .
Like Carm.
He was nothing like you.
Alex leaves the photo lying facedown on the table.
Carmen—even baby Carmen—doesn’t need to witness what’s about to happen here.
I know you wouldn’t approve, Carm. But too bad. You’re not here, and I have no choice. It’s the only way.
Five minutes later Alex is in the car heading north on the Taconic Parkway. The cruise control is set at five miles above the posted limit—just fast enough to reach the familiar destination in little over an hour, but not fast enough to be pulled over for speeding.
Even if that were to happen, nothing would appear out of the ordinary to a curious cop peering into the car. Alex would turn over a spotless driver’s license and explain that the sleeping person slumped in the passenger’s seat simply had too much to drink. No crime in that statement, and quite a measure of truth.
Three hours later the first traces of pink dawn are visible through the open window beyond the empty passenger seat as Alex reenters the southbound lanes on the parkway. All four windows are rolled down and the moon roof is open, too, despite the damp chill in the strong west wind on this first day of March.
Some distance ahead, taillights glow in the dark. Twin red orbs, exactly parallel, that remind Alex of—
No. Stop. Don’t think of that.
Alex hits the gas pedal hard and speeds up—a necessary risk in order to pass the other car. But as soon as the disturbing red taillights have given way to a distant glare of headlights in the rearview mirror, Alex slows to a speed that won’t attract police radar.
The radio is set, as always, to a classic rock station.
Real
music—that’s what Carmen always used to call it.
None of that techno-electro-hip-hop-pop crap for us, babe. Just good old-fashioned rock and roll . . .
Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” opens with a powerful electric guitar; eerie, wailing, lyric-free vocals from Robert Plant.
The fresh air and the music make it better somehow. Easier to forget throwing shovels of dirt over the wooden crate that contains a still unconscious human being lying at the bottom of the pit. Easier not to wonder what it would be like to regain consciousness and find yourself buried alive.
Maybe that won’t happen. Maybe it never has, with any of them. Maybe they just drift from sleep to a painless death, never knowing . . .
But that’s not very likely, is it?
Chances are it’s a frantic, ugly, horrifying death, perhaps clawing helplessly out of the box only to be crushed by the weight of dirt and rocks, struggling for air . . .
Alex reaches over to adjust the volume on the radio, turning it up even higher in an effort to drown out the nagging thoughts.
Sometimes that works.
Other times they persist, refusing to be ignored.
Not tonight, thank goodness.
The voices give way to the music, which shifts from Led Zeppelin to the familiar opening guitar lick of an old Guns N’ Roses tune.
Singing along—screaming, shouting—to the lyrics, Alex rejoices. There is no more fitting song to punctuate this moment. It’s a sign. It has to be. A sign that everything is going to be okay after all. Someone else will come along. Another chance. Soon enough . . .
“Oh . . . oh-oh-oh . . . sweet child of mine . . .”
“No, come on. That one wasn’t good either. Now you just look annoyed.”
“Maybe because I
am
annoyed,” Gabriela Duran tells her cousin Jaz, watching her check out the photo she just snapped on her digital camera.
Yes, digital camera.
Gaby had assumed a few cell phone snapshots would suffice, and would make this little photo shoot far less conspicuous. But Jaz, who’d enrolled in a photography class at the New School not long ago, insisted on using a real camera, the kind that has a telephoto lens attached. It’s perched atop a tripod, aiming directly at Gaby.
Which might not be a terrible thing if they were in the privacy of her apartment. But in the middle of jam-packed Central Park at high noon on this sunny Sunday before Memorial Day . . .
Yeah. Definitely a terrible thing.
Especially because she’s prone to seasonal allergies. This has been the worst spring for mold and pollen in years. Hanging out in the city’s greenest pocket has ignited a raging sinus headache.
“Can’t you please just smile for two seconds,” Jaz begs, “so that I can get a decent shot? Then we can be done.”
Gaby sighs and pastes on a grin.
“You just look like you’re squinting.”
“I
am
squinting.” They’ve been here so long that the sun has changed position, glaring directly into her eyes. Also not helping her headache. “How about if I just turn the other way?” She gestures over her shoulder, preferring to face the clump of trees behind her rather than the parade of New Yorkers jogging, strolling, and rolling past on the adjacent pathway.
“No, I need the light on your face. Here, just take a few steps this way . . . no, not that far, back a little, back . . . back . . . okay, good!”
A group of tourists—identifiable by their pastel windbreakers and purses diagonally strapped across their bodies—stops to gape.
“I think that’s Jennifer Lopez,” one of them says.
Another calls out, “Is this a movie shoot?”
Jaz laughs and tells them that it isn’t, but they don’t seem convinced, sticking around to watch the proceedings from a distance, taking pictures with their phones just in case.
Jaz raises the viewfinder again. “Okay, smile . . .
without
clenching your teeth.”
“Jaz, I swear—”
“Come on,
mami,
” her cousin cuts in, strategically using the Latina term of endearment. “It’s for Mr. Perfect.”
Gaby already thought she’d found Mr. Perfect, a long time ago. She thought he’d stay with her forever; believed him when he promised he’d never leave, even after—
But he left. Not right away. But one day he walked out the door and he didn’t come back, just as she’d expected him to do, almost dared him to do, ever since—
“Mr. Perfect doesn’t exist,” she snaps at Jaz.
“Not true.” Jaz shakes her head, her chestnut ringlets bobbing around her shoulders.
Gaby would have exactly the same hair if she didn’t typically pull it back in a ponytail, or blow it out straight, as she did today.
Ben loved her untamed curls . . . back when Ben loved her, and she loved Ben.
But Ben is gone and the curls are gone, and this is how her life is now: posing for her cousin’s camera in a public place so she can post her picture online to attract strange men.
“He exists,” Jaz goes on, eye to camera, snapping away, “but he doesn’t know
you
exist, and he won’t unless I get a picture that captures the real you.”
The real me . . .
Gaby has no idea who that even is these days. All she knows is that the real Gabriela, who once laughed her way through life and was no pushover when it came to anything, is gone.
She hasn’t felt remotely like herself since last fall before the divorce. After five years of marriage—and three years together before that—life without Ben has been unanchored and unfamiliar. Even now, most days she feels as though she’s inhabiting a strange body in a strange place, having swapped someone else’s life for her own.
In a weak, lonely moment, after too many happy hour cocktails on Cinco de Mayo, the new Gaby allowed Jaz to convince her that online dating was the answer to all her problems.
“Hello, everyone does it,” her cousin told her.
“Not everyone.”
“I do.”
“You’re not everyone.”
“Everyone else does, too. Trust me . . . Excuse me,” Jaz called to a pretty waitress scurrying past their outdoor table with bowls of tortilla chips and guacamole. “Can I ask you a quick question?”
“Sure, what’s up?” The waitress paused, looking pleased at the momentary reprieve from running around in the heat. Hands full, she rested the tray against the top of an empty chair and blew her bangs away from her sweaty forehead.
“Have you ever been on an Internet dating site?”
“It’s how I met my husband.” Balancing her tray with her right hand, she waved the diamond ring and gold band on her left.
“That’s great. Congratulations. That’s all I wanted to know. Oh, and we’ll take another round when you have a chance.”
The waitress walked on, and Jaz looked smugly at Gaby. “See that? You can’t argue with a wedding ring.”
“Don’t bet on that.”
She’d been so sure that together, she and Ben could withstand any challenge. For better, for worse . . .
When you’re young and in love and standing there in a white dress and veil, you honestly think those wedding day promises mean something. You speak those vows with all your heart, and you keep them . . .
For better, anyway.
When the worst happens . . .
You leave. If you’re Ben, you leave.
But Jaz—and the tequila, and the thought of yet another solitary weekend in her tiny studio apartment—had finally worn her down.
She shrugged. “Oh, all right, why not? I’ll give it a try.”
Naturally, Jaz was thrilled. Even Dr. Milford thought it might be a good idea—another positive step toward getting over Ben, starting a new chapter in her life.
That was three weeks ago.
Gaby talked herself out of the idea in the cold, cruel light of day on May sixth, but her cousin threatened to create a profile for her anyway—and is quite capable of following through.
And so, resigned to the fact that she’s going to find herself with an online dating profile one way or another, Gaby manages to muster a halfhearted smile for her cousin’s camera.
But the carefree girl she once was had died long ago, along with her fairy-tale marriage and her only child.
Having completely forgotten about the long holiday weekend, Alex is alarmed by the sight of a police roadblock on Main Street in Vanderwaal on Monday morning.
They know. They know, and they’re looking for me.
There’s nothing to do but stop and dutifully roll down the window as the cop beside the blue barricade comes walking toward the car.
“Good morning, officer.”
“Morning. You’ll have to turn around and detour back up Bridge Road to get to the other side of town. Memorial Day parade is about to start.”
Memorial Day parade!
It’s Memorial Day!
Thank God, thank God, it’s just a parade, and not . . .
Come on, of course it’s not about you. They can’t possibly know about you. You’ve been so careful . . .
“All right, officer. Thanks so much. You have a great day now, okay?”
Was the last part overkill? Alex wonders, carefully making a K-turn and making sure to use directional signals. Is being too polite and friendly a blatant red flag to the cop?
Nah. People always tell each other to have a great day.
Even if Alex were summoned back—and for what?—there’s nothing in the car that would alert the cop that anything is amiss. Even if the officer were to examine the contents of the plastic drugstore shopping bag on the passenger’s seat, there still wouldn’t be any reason for suspicion. Of course not.
And of course it was Alex’s imagination—an overactive one, Carmen used to say—that the clerk back at the store had raised her eyebrow when she rang up the purchases: Advil, Band-Aids,
Rolling Stone
magazine, a pack of gum. Decoy items all, meant to distract attention from the main objective: an over-the-counter pregnancy test.
“Find everything?” the clerk had asked—routine question, yet Alex worried for a moment that it was a precursor to something more probing, less discreet.
But of course that was pure paranoia. No clerk would ever question a total stranger about something so personal.
No clerk had any way of knowing that a random customer—paying with cash—had purchased the same test countless times before all over the tristate area.
You have nothing at all to worry about. Just get home and take care of business.
Alex keeps the speedometer precisely at the posted limit all the way up Bridge Road and around to the other side and stops at the intersection, staring unseeingly at the traffic light until it blurs and doubles. Now there are two red lights, glowing elliptical red, a disturbing reminder of—
The light turns green and Alex drives on, past familiar rows of old maples framing well-kept suburban houses that line block after block here in Vanderwaal. Most of them are occupied by young, upper-middle-class families who can afford the astronomical housing costs and property taxes and who take advantage of the high quality public schools. The older people in the neighborhood, who lived here when Carmen was growing up, have either died off or retired someplace where the cost of living is low and the weather is warm.
All is quieter than usual on Cherry Street this morning. It’s well within walking distance of Main Street, and the stroller-and-leash brigade has most likely headed out early to claim prime spots along the parade route.
Noticing the flags flying from poles and porches, Alex makes a mental note to put up a flag, too, back home. There’s one somewhere in the basement.
The basement.
Back when the Realtor showed them the brick cape at 42 Cherry Street—long before Alex and Carmen were married—there were a couple of major selling points. One was that they’d be able to keep a close eye on Carmen’s aging mother, who lived alone in a house right down the street. Another was that it was affordable—smaller than most of the homes in the area, many of which had been renovated and enlarged.
And then there was the basement. The house looked small from the outside, and it
was
small, with only two bedrooms tucked beneath the low, gabled ceilings of the second floor. But the basement was large and finished.
“The family that lived here in the sixties added over five hundred square feet of living space when they turned this into a rec room,” the Realtor said, flicking a light switch and leading the way down the flight into a large open area where a familiar scent wafted in the air.
Once, living in a rural foster home—not the gingerbread cottage—Alex had forgotten to roll up a backseat car window. It rained overnight, and the carpet and upholstery got soaked. After that the car’s interior was permeated by a strong mildew odor, much to the foster mother’s disgust and fury.
The basement smelled the same way. It didn’t bring back good memories. But the added space was undeniably attractive.
“This would make a great home gym,” Carmen mused, glancing around. “A treadmill, some weight machines . . .”
“Absolutely!” the Realtor agreed, bobbing her blond head enthusiastically. “But let me show you the rest.”
She was mostly talking to Alex, which annoyed Carmen. But Alex was the one buying the house, even though they had every intention of getting married at some point. Carmen was essentially broke at the time, facing massive loans for all those years of undergrad and graduate school. Alex had been working at the hospital for a few years by then and was financially solvent.
The Realtor led them across the basement. The walls were paneled in brown wood, the floors covered in green indoor-outdoor carpeting that gave way to linoleum in one corner, where an old olive-green washer and dryer sat alongside a slop sink. Small horizontal rectangular windows were scattered high on three walls. On the fourth there was just a door.
The Realtor opened it, and an even stronger dank smell greeted their nostrils. “Wait until you see this,” she trilled, as if she were about to reveal something utterly dazzling: a stocked wine cellar, or fully equipped home theater . . .
“What is it?” Carmen asked, nose wrinkled, peering into the dank—apparently vacant—interior.
“A bomb shelter. The house was built back in the cold war era. People were afraid Russia was going to drop a nuclear bomb.”
Alex had seen the black and yellow fallout shelter signs on sturdy public buildings all over the city, but . . .
“A nuclear bomb
here
?”
The Realtor shrugged. “New York is always a major target, and we’re right in the suburbs. The assumption was that the radiation contamination would spread up here if the city were hit. People wanted to protect their families. Back in the day, this room was filled with canned goods, bottled water, lamps, cots, a space heater, even a toilet.”
“That explains the smell,” Carmen murmured. “It’s even worse than cat.”
The last house they’d looked at had smelled strongly of feline urine, and there was visible fur everywhere, though the pets—and their elderly owner—were long gone. Being severely allergic, Carmen had vetoed it immediately.
“Oh, this is just musty and damp from being closed up for all these years,” the Realtor assured them as they sniffed around the bomb shelter room at 42 Cherry. “A dehumidifier would take care of it. But it’s a piece of history. Isn’t it fabulous?”
Fabulous wasn’t quite the right word. Not back then.
Not now either.
Now . . .
Well, the word
godsend
comes to mind.