The Black Widow (26 page)

“That’s Bobby with my sister, not long before she left. This is the last picture he ever took with her. Maybe it’s the only one he even had. He kept it by his bed here after she took off, and everyplace he ever lived after that. I found it on his nightstand in Jersey City when I went over to his place the day his boss called me. If he was going away for good, this is the one thing he would have taken with him.”

How many times has Sully heard a bewildered, abandoned loved one say something like that?

He/She would never have left without . . .

His car.

Her kids.

Me.

How many times has that turned out to be a mistaken assumption?

Every day, without warning or explanation, people willingly leave behind cherished belongings—and cherished people.

Sully would have assumed Bobby Springer is one of them, but there are simply too many coincidences.

Foul play might be rare, but it happens. And Sully is almost positive it happened here.

Making her way across the beach, Gaby takes it all in: the sea of people, the greenish-gray water beneath a gray sky, the pervasive odor of cooking grease and sweat and garbage baking in the heat, the cacophony of voices and music, screeching whistles and screeching gulls . . .

It’s been a few years since she last visited, but she doesn’t remember it being like this. Chaos reigns in every direction, and there’s no sign of Ben anywhere.

She should never have come.

She should have kept the damned phone and the damned box until—

The box!

She stops short, realizing she’s not carrying it.

Someone slams into her from behind.

“What the hell—watch where you’re going, lady!”

Gaby spins around, eyes blazing. “You watch where you’re going!”

The kid behind her—some bare-chested, tattooed punk—gets right into her face, wearing a menacing expression. “What did you say?”

“I said
you
watch it! You’re the one who walked into me!” The old Gaby—streetwise, fiery Latin temper—is, apparently, back in business. Abuela would be proud.

The kid curses at her and walks away.

Feeling sick inside, Gaby hurriedly turns and begins retracing her steps, looking for Ben’s box of memories. It’s not where she left it by the boardwalk. Nor is it in any nearby trash can.

It’s gone.

Number 42 Cherry Street is a brick cape with an attached garage, one of the smallest houses on the block. Ivy notices a few straggly flowers in the overgrown garden beds along the foundation, but here there’s no trace of mulch, and there are no cheerful planters. The grass needs to be mowed, the white trim could stand a paint job, and the shades are drawn.

Ivy rings the bell and hears it echoing faintly inside the house. Somehow, she senses that it won’t be answered even before she waits . . . knocks on the door . . . waits again in silence marred only by birds chirping, lawn mowers buzzing, sprinklers spritzing, and the distant happy shouts of kids down the block.

Carmen Rodriguez isn’t home—or if she is, she’s not interested in visitors.

Frustrated, Ivy turns away, descends the steps, and notices that the neighbor is still sitting on the porch, watching her. She hesitates on the sidewalk. She’s still carrying the photo of Carlos. Maybe she should show it to the woman across the street just in case she’s seen him coming and going.

“Can I talk to you for a second?” Ivy calls.

“Are you selling something? Because if you are—” She gives a pleasant laugh. “—I’m flat broke.”

“No, I just wanted to ask a quick question, if that’s okay?”

“Sure.”

The house is, like the others on the block—with the exception of number 42—well-kept, as evidenced by the splashy planters and mulched beds. If Ivy’s cozy suburban happily-ever-after dream ever comes true, she’ll have to remember that: flowers + mulch = curb appeal.

Now that the woman on the porch has stood up, Ivy can see that she’s pregnant. Not enormously so, just a slight swelling that protrudes from the ubiquitous stretchy yoga pants and top. She’s sporting a bouncy blond ponytail as well, and there’s a paper latte cup on the glass-topped table beside the porch swing. It’s marked in black Sharpie: DC/S. Ivy is well-versed enough in coffee bar lingo to know that stands for Decaf Soy.

“What’s up?” she asks Ivy, looking a little cautious, as though she expects Ivy to pull out a suitcase full of cosmetic samples or, at the very least, a political petition on a clipboard.

“You live here, right?” Silly question, but the woman smiles and nods.

“Finally, yes. I inherited the house a couple of years ago after my great-aunt died, but it was tied up in probate forever.”

“You
inherited
it?” Some people, Ivy can’t help but think, have all the luck. She inherited nothing when her parents died but a bunch of useless tchotchkes and plenty of headaches from a ne’er-do-well kid brother.

“My aunt didn’t have kids, so she left the house to me. I thought that was a good thing before I had to deal with all the red tape. It’s still a good thing, I guess. That’s what my boyfriend says, anyway. We were both living in tiny apartments but now we get to live together—here.”

So she’s not married to her baby daddy. Ivy wonders how that goes over here in the land of happily ever after. Maybe it explains why this mom-to-be is sitting alone on her porch and not mingling with her fellow Cherry Street breeders.

There’s a moment of silence—awkward, Ivy realizes, until the other woman fills it. “I’m Heather Toomey.”

“I’m Ivy Sacks. I just took a train up from the city.”

As if that explains anything at all.

“Okay, so you’re Ivy and I’m Heather. I guess our moms both liked to garden, huh?”

“What?”

“Ivy—Heather—both plants.”

“Oh. Um, I don’t think my mom was into gardening.” Ivy’s mother lived most of her life in a twenty-fourth-floor rental. No terrace. Not even any potted plants.

“Oh. Well, maybe you were named after someone in the family. I was named after my aunt—sort of. You know, just the first two letters. Thank goodness they didn’t call me Hester. But I was still her favorite. I was the only one of the cousins she invited to come up here and spend summers away from the city—although maybe she felt sorry for me because I’m an only child and my parents went through the world’s worst and most dragged-out divorce.”

Ivy doesn’t know what to say to all that. Heather is the kind of person who talks a lot but doesn’t ask many questions, which doesn’t leave you with a lot to say when she pauses to let you get a word in.

Now, though, when Ivy fails to speak up, Heather does ask a question: “Are you looking for my neighbor?”

“You mean Carmen? Actually, I’m looking for my brother. He’s dating her.”

“Dating who?”

“Dating Carmen.”

Something flickers in Heather’s gray eyes, and is gone. “Are you sure about that?”

So much for not asking questions.

“Am I sure about
what
?”

“That your brother is dating Carmen? I mean, is that what he told you?”

Ivy isn’t sure about anything. Anything at all.

Her expression must give that away, because Heather reaches out and touches her arm.

“The thing is,” she says gently, “Carmen wasn’t a woman. I don’t know how you feel about that . . .”

Her words twirl crazily in Ivy’s brain.

Carmen wasn’t a woman.

Carmen wasn’t . . .

Wasn’t
?

Who the hell is—
was
—Carmen?

“Maybe your brother didn’t want you to know he was dating a man,” Heather goes on, “because some people aren’t cool with that, and—”

“No, it’s not like that. Not at all. It’s—is Carmen . . .
around
?”

“Nope. His wife is still living in the house, though.”

“Is her first name Sofia?”

Heather shakes her head. “I’m not sure what it is. Alison, Alexis—something like that. Definitely not Sofia. I’ve only actually met her a few times.”

“Does she drive a black BMW?”

“Yes.”

“An older model?”

Again: “Yes.”

Ivy reaches into her pocket, pulling out the picture of Carlos and thrusting it at Heather Toomey. “This is my brother. His name is Carlos Diaz.”

Heather glances at the photo and gives her a dubious look. “Wow, you guys . . . you look absolutely nothing alike.”

“He’s my stepbrother,” Ivy amends quickly. “Have you seen him around across the street?”

The woman studies the photograph more carefully, shakes her head, hands it back. “No. Sorry.”

“It would only have been recently—in the past week or two.”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well, I’m a teacher at a private school so I’ve been off since the beginning of June, mostly hanging out right here. And actually, I’ve never seen anyone over there. She’s kind of . . .”

When she trails off, Ivy holds her breath, waiting for the rest.

It doesn’t come.

“She’s kind of what?”

“I don’t know. Just—I guess ‘not all there’ is a nice way to put it. But I barely know her. I just see her over there sometimes. Like I said, I’ve been sitting out here a lot because my boyfriend redid the hardwoods when we moved in last winter and I can still smell the varnish. I worry about it—you know, about the fumes. With the baby.”

Ivy nods as if she cares. “So you’ve been living here a few months, at least?”

“Right. But Aunt Hester was here forever. She bought this house way back in the 1930s. She’s the one who said . . .”

“Said what?” Ivy prompts when Heather trails off.

“You know. That the woman across the street was strange.”

“Strange how?” Ivy doesn’t wait for that question to be answered, adding another: “What does she look like?”

“Tall. Long dark hair. Really, really toned body. Like, a lot of women around here work out, but she’s more . . . muscular. And attractive, I guess, for an older woman.”

“How old?”

Heather shrugs. “I have no idea. Probably in her fifties, at least.”

“Did you know her husband, too?”

“No, but Aunt Hester knew him his whole life. He grew up down the street, and then he moved back to the block with his wife as an adult.”

“Carmen? We’re talking about Carmen, right?”

“Right. I was just a little girl then. I can barely remember him. But anyway, his mother used to live over there—” Heather points at a house on the other side of the street “—at number fifty-eight. See it? The Victorian?”

Victorian—yes. Ivy is no old house buff, but she recognizes the distinctive architectural style that sets it apart from the other homes across the street: fish-scale shingled gables, bay windows, and a wraparound gingerbread porch.

“The place was empty for years. A caretaker kept it up. But a family lives there now. They moved in just before we did. They have a bunch of kids, all under five years old. I always see the mom in the yard with them. She looks frazzled.”

“So she moved away?”

“Who?”

“The mother!”

“No, but I wouldn’t blame her if she took off someday. Like I said, she has all those kids—”

“No, not
her
. I mean Carmen’s mother, the one who used to live there.” Between the extraneous details and the stifling heat, Ivy has lost all patience.

“Carmen’s mother died years ago, probably before I was born. She had a bad fall. You know, with old people . . . that happens. That’s why we were always worried about Aunt Hester. She was—”

Ivy quickly steers her back on track. “What else do you remember about Carmen?”

“He used to travel a lot on business. One summer, when I came back to stay, Aunt Hester mentioned that he’d left over the winter and he didn’t come back. Aunt Hester was predicting that was going to happen for years before it finally did. She liked to keep an eye on things.”

“Did something happen to him?”

“Yeah. I’m guessing he finally got sick of his crazy wife.”

“So she’s crazy.” Unsettling, to say the least.

Heather shakes her head. “I probably shouldn’t say that.”

“Dangerously crazy?” Ivy’s thoughts are whirling.

“No! Definitely not dangerous. Not like—you know. That’s not what I meant. She was always really nice to me when I first met her, when I was a little kid. After that, I never saw her. So it’s not like I know her very well—at all, really. But there were stories . . .”

“Your aunt told you stories?”

“The kids in the neighborhood did. Aunt Hester told me to mind my own business, which was pretty ironic, you know, because she never did. But anyway, my parents would send me up here to stay with her every June when school got out, and I had summer friends . . .”

“The local kids.”

“Yes, and they would talk, you know, the way kids do . . .”

“What did they say?”

“Okay, this is kind of creepy, but since you asked—” Heather breaks off at the sound of a cell phone ring tone. She pulls it out of her pocket and looks at it. “This is my boyfriend. He’s at work. He’s a cop, and it’s hard for me to get ahold of him, so when he calls me to check in, I . . . you know, I have to get it. He worries.”

“That’s fine. I’ll wait.”

Heather steps inside with the phone, leaving Ivy alone on the porch to glance uneasily from the Queen Anne Victorian to the brick cape across the street.

The Lost and Found is Gaby’s last resort.

Doubtful that anyone would have carried the missing box all the way up here from the boardwalk, she’s convinced it’s gone forever. Someone probably grabbed it, opened it, kept whatever had any value—old baseball cards, maybe?—and ditched the rest. Although not in any garbage can in the vicinity, because she’s searched them all. Not fun in this heat.

A lobster-burnt guy is manning the Lost and Found.

“ ’Sup?” he greets her, pushing aside a wisp of damp gray hair poking out from beneath his bandana doo-rag in OB orange and green.

“Hi. I’m looking for something I lost out on the boardwalk.”