The Black Widow (30 page)

Upstairs, the ceiling is much lower. There’s a short dark hallway with closed doors on either end and another door—ajar with the light on—in between.

The woman pushes it open. “Nick? Someone’s here to see you.” Over her shoulder, she whispers to Ivy, “He’s taking a bath. He does that a lot. It soothes him.”

She beckons Ivy to cross the threshold, but Ivy hangs back, gripped by growing uncertainty.

“I don’t think he’d want me to—”

“Don’t be ridiculous. He’s your boyfriend, isn’t he? I mean, that’s what you
said
.”

“He is.”

But the woman doesn’t believe her. She can tell.

“What are you waiting for? Go ahead.” Her voice hardening with every word, she holds the door open wider and takes Ivy’s arm, all but pushing her into the bathroom.

Ivy loses her footing and falls against the murky green-tiled wall, hitting her head. Momentarily disoriented, she rubs her forehead, then catches sight of Mrs. Rodriguez watching her from the doorway, her large frame filling it, blocking it.

Maybe she really is crazy,
Ivy realizes, seeing the gleam in her eyes.
And . . . not so harmless after all.

She turns away, seeking the reassurance of Carlos’s presence. The tub is filled with water, and a tattered green bath mat is placed on the tile floor in front of it as if someone was about to take a bath, but . . . the tub is empty.

“Where is he?”

“I bet the cat scared him away with all that meowing. He’s allergic, you know. So I put him into the linen closet.” She points at it. “The cat, I mean. He’s in the closet. He’s afraid of water, like you said.”

“I didn’t—”

The woman shakes her head and presses her hands briefly to her ears, shouting “Stop!” as if the room is filled with noise. “I have to do what I have to do! You know that!”

She yanks the narrow door open, exposing shelves full of towels and sheets. Ivy instinctively takes a step back, expecting an angry feline to burst from its depths.

Seeing her movement, the woman whirls and reaches for her. “Where are you going?”

“I’m not . . . I—”

“This is your fault. You should never have come here.” Her hands clamp down hard on Ivy’s fleshy upper arms.

Propelled backward by her surprising strength, Ivy loses her footing and again falls onto the wall. But this time she can’t regain her footing; Mrs. Rodriguez is pushing her down . . . down . . . down . . .

She hits the water face first.

The intense heat instantly blisters her skin. Gripped by agonizing pain, she gasps, sucking the searing water into her lungs. She attempts to lift her head, but the strong hands hold her captive underwater.

She struggles, skin burning, waterlogged lungs on fire. She feels herself being pushed and lifted until her entire body is immersed in the scalding tub, arms flailing, legs kicking in a desperate, futile effort to escape.

At last she does, slipping away into the blackness where nothing can hurt her again.

Back upstairs in her apartment, Gaby is again confronted by the vase of yellow roses Ben brought her—and by the temptation of his cell phone still in her pocket.

Had she not ridden home from the Bronx with Junie, she most certainly would have snooped into Ben’s private files again before now.

This time, though, for his own good.

She can’t shake the nagging image of Ben, out of it—for whatever reason—driving away with a virtual stranger.

I have to see what I can find out about this woman.

She kicks off her flip-flops, scattering specks of sand on the parquet floors, and sinks into her usual chair by the rain-spattered window.

The phone’s warning message indicates that the battery is dangerously low. That’s okay. This won’t take long. All she wants to do is check out the woman’s profile one more time. Just to see whether there are any red flags that might indicate she’s into . . .

Drugs? Is that it?

What if she talked Ben into trying something that hadn’t agreed with him, and—

And . . . so what? He’s a big boy. He’ll survive and learn his lesson, just like anyone else.

The thing is, though . . .

This is
Ben
. He isn’t so straitlaced that he never had a beer before he turned twenty-one, but he definitely doesn’t dabble in illegal substances.

Not by choice anyway.

As the rain pours down outside and the ominous possibilities take hold, Gaby wonders if she should run this by someone else. Someone who not only knows Ben, but knows her. And knows what’s been going on—more or less.

She swaps Ben’s phone for her own and quickly dials Jaz’s number.

Her cousin answers on the first ring. “What happened? Your beach date got rained out?”

She quickly brings her cousin up to speed, and is forced to listen to a couple of well-meaning “I told you so’s.”

Then her cousin interrupts the story to ask, “Junie Cordero? He’s still single? How does he look?”

“He’s got a girlfriend, Jaz. And he’s about a foot shorter than you are. And bald. So—”

“Okay, okay, never mind. Sorry. Go on.”

Gaby finishes the story. Jaz is silent.

“Are you there?”

“I’m here. I’m just trying to— So Ben was really out of it and this woman he was with acted like a bitch to Junie? Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“And . . . ?”

“And I’m worried.”

“Why? He’s not your concern anymore, Gaby. Why were you even there, at the beach?”

Can she possibly explain? She tries. “Remember when Abuela forced us both to go to my mother’s wake, even though we were scared and so little? And then the same thing when it came to your mother’s wake?”

“We weren’t so little then.”

“No. But it was so hard anyway. And then there was . . .”

Josh’s wake. She can’t even say it.

“I know,” Jaz says quietly. “You’ve been through a lot, Gabriela.”

“Abuela always said that when you lose someone, it’s important to acknowledge the loss.”

“See the corpse in the casket.”

“Right. Closure. So maybe for me, seeing Ben with another woman was supposed to be—”

“What about Ryan?”

“
Ryan?
What about him?”

“You should reach out to him now that you have your closure. You liked him before this started up again with Ben.”

That’s true. But the last thing she feels like doing is reconnecting with Ryan. And, as she points out to Jaz, she’s pretty sure Ryan isn’t sitting around waiting to hear from her.

“If you want my advice,” Jaz says, “you should put Ben out of your head and move on. But that’s always been my advice. And every time I think you’re taking it, you backpedal.”

“I know.” Gaby stares out the window at the rain.

“Gaby. I get why this is so hard.”

“Do you really? I’m not even sure if I get it. Why can’t I get past this? Why do I feel like the rest of my life is going to be about what ifs?”

“Because it will be, unless you make a conscious decision to move on.”

“I was trying. I was moving on. I was.”

“I know. Listen, how about . . . I can drive down and meet you for dinner if you want.” Good old Jaz. She doesn’t sound the least bit enthusiastic, but her cousin is there for her. She always has been.

“That’s sweet, but . . . I think I’d rather stay in tonight. I have to work tomorrow, and the weather’s lousy.”

“Tell me about it. I was all set to watch the
Real Housewives
marathon but the storm knocked out almost every station on my cable. All I can get is the local news. And if I see the meteorologist one more time, all breathless and excited when he talks about the storm . . . He was practically fondling the Doppler radar map.”

Gaby lets out a much-needed laugh—maybe for the first time all day. “Jaz!”

“What? I swear he’s getting off on this weather, Gaby . . .”

They chat good-naturedly for a few more minutes before hanging up, making plans to meet after work tomorrow night for drinks and dinner.

Her smile fading, Gaby reaches again for Ben’s cell phone. But when she presses the button, nothing happens.

Okay. So the battery is dead.

It’s just as well.

She leans back and closes her eyes, listening to the rain patter on the windowpane as she dozes off.

Alex leaves the dead woman sprawled facedown in the bathtub. For now anyway.

She pulls the vinyl shower curtain across it to hide the corpse, eager to get back out to the garage. Any second now the drug is going to start wearing off. She doesn’t want him to wake up and find himself locked in.

“That might give him the wrong idea,” she tells Gato, who sits by, unblinking red eyes boring into her as she uses a couple of bath towels to sop up the water that sloshed onto the floor. She throws the towels into the hamper and tells the cat, “There. Done. For now. But don’t you get the wrong idea. Your time is coming.”

She’s surprised he doesn’t squirm away when she reaches down to pick him up and put him back into the linen closet. This time, as if resigned to his fate, he doesn’t even emit a meow of protest, just stares at her.

She slams the closet door shut and takes one last look around the bathroom. She reaches to adjust the shower curtain a bit.

Then, satisfied everything is in order, Alex hurries back down the stairs, stepping around the obstacle course of bowls and saucers, still unnerved by the thought of those glowing crimson ovals staring from the depths of the linen closet.

Chapter 13

The voice reaches Ben from across a great distance.

At first it seemed to be speaking gibberish, but gradually it’s beginning to make sense.

“Wake up . . . come on, sweetie, wake up . . .”

It takes several tries for him to open his eyes. When he does, he can’t see anything at all. He closes them again, confused. His head is pounding.

“No! Stay with me, Carm!”

Carm . . .

The words still seem garbled.
Carm . . .

What does
Carm
mean?

Ben forces his eyes open again. This time he’s blinded by a bright beam of light.

“Oh, sorry . . . that’s my headlamp. I put it on so that I can help you into the house. It’s kind of dark and I don’t want to turn on the lights just yet and I don’t think you’re steady enough to walk on your own . . .”

It’s a female voice. Unfamiliar.

Ben tries hard to remember who she might be, and where he might be . . .

“Come on . . . sit up . . .”

He allows himself to be tugged into a sitting position and realizes he’s in a car. A car . . .

“Here . . . you can lean on me. That’s it . . .”

He’s up on rubbery legs, and whoever she is, she’s strong.

Strong . . .

He remembers.

The woman on the beach.

His date.

“Where . . . ?”

“Shh, it’s okay, Carm.”

Carm?

What the hell does
Carm
mean?

He struggles to make sense of her words; struggles to voice his own.

A door creaks in front of them.

His foot bumps something.

“Careful,” she says. “There’s a step. Up . . . that’s right. Good.”

An unpleasant smell assaults his nostrils.

“Where . . . ?” he manages again.

This time she answers. “You’re home.”

Sprawled on the couch in front of the window fan, Heather Toomey hears her boyfriend coming in the back door.

“Daddy’s home,” she whispers, giving her stomach a pat. “Don’t you stop kicking like you did the last time, okay? You keep making a liar out of me.”

“Heather?” Jimmy Pontillo calls from the kitchen.

“In here.”

He appears in the archway, handsome as always in his NYPD uniform. His stubbly short sandy hair is damp and there are dark spots on the shoulders of his blue shirt.

“Is it raining out?” she asks, surprised.

“Yeah. I figured that was why you weren’t out on the porch in your usual spot when I drove up.”

“It’s too steamy out there tonight. Come feel my stomach, babe. The little guy’s kicking up a storm.”

Jimmy sits beside her on the couch and presses a hand against her belly.

“Feel it?”

“Nope.”

“Wait . . . it’ll happen again. I ate two chocolate bars after dinner. I think it made him dance. There! Feel that?”

“Nope.”

She sighs and shakes her head. Ever since she started feeling the baby’s movement, she’s been trying to share it with Jimmy. But either he’s not around when it happens or he can’t feel the fluttery lurches from the outside the way she can from the inside.

Sometimes he acts as though she’s making it up. It bothers her when he does things like that, calling her a ditzy blonde.

But if she tries to make him see how offensive that is, he tells her he means it affectionately and that she’s being too sensitive. Especially now that she’s pregnant.

“Your emotions are in overdrive,” he told her just yesterday. “And your brain is preoccupied. It makes you spacier than usual.”

The comment made her cry. Which allowed him to prove his point.

Sometimes she wonders if they’d still be living together if she hadn’t accidentally gotten pregnant.

“Just keep your hand there,” she tells him. “He’ll kick again.”

“We don’t know that he’s a he,” Jimmy reminds her.

“
I
know he’s a he.”

“And here we go again with the woman’s intuition.”

“Hey—I was right when I thought I was pregnant before I even missed my period, remember?”

“Well if you’re right again and this kid is a boy, then he kicks like a girl. I’ll have to do something about that before he gets to the soccer field.”

“If you’re insinuating that girls can’t be great soccer players—”

“Yeah, I know, you were an amazing soccer player. But that’s because you don’t kick like a girl.” Jimmy leans against her bare legs and the back of the couch, looking exhausted.

She decides to let his chauvinistic remarks pass for once. She doesn’t feel like launching into an argument; they’ve had far too many in the scant year they’ve been together. Which is why, when he said he wanted to marry her and “make it right”—the baby, that is—she told him they shouldn’t jump into anything. It didn’t stop him from continuing to ask. Maybe one of these days she’ll say yes. Single motherhood is almost as scary a prospect as turbulent marriage.

“How was your day?” she asks.

“Crazy as usual. How was yours?”

“Not crazy as usual.”

“Yeah? What about that woman who popped up looking for her brother? That sounds pretty crazy.”

“Oh, right.” Heather had almost forgotten about that.

Jimmy, who—by nature and by profession, trusts no one—definitely wasn’t thrilled to hear about her visitor when he called this afternoon. In fact, he told her to get rid of her.

And what did you do? You gave her lemonade.

Maybe she was just lonely for company. Or maybe it was to spite him. She does get tired of him telling her what to do.

But at least she didn’t share the local gossip about their across-the-street neighbor—which he also warned her not to do.

“You don’t want to go around spreading rumors about the neighbors, Heather, when we’re new on the block,” Jimmy said, and he was right.

It really was all just hearsay. Heather never personally witnessed Mrs. Rodriguez’s bizarre behavior.

The other kids did, though. They said it was really creepy.

They said, too, that it was why her husband had left her.

Remembering the stories, Heather instinctively wraps her arms protectively around her midsection. She herself might go off the deep end, too, if—

“Heather?”

“Hmm?”

“You okay? You’re not having stomach pain or anything, are you?”

“Oh, no. Nothing like that. I was just remembering something about Mrs. Rodriguez.”

“What about her?” Jimmy asks, eyes closed, leaning back against the couch cushions again, worn out from his day.

Heather hesitates, remembering something else. It had troubled her earlier, but then she took a long nap and forgot about it.

Maybe sometimes you really are a ditz
, she scolds herself.

“The woman who was here—her name was Ivy,” she tells Jimmy. “When she said she was looking for her brother, I wasn’t thinking it was some kind of missing persons thing. But it turned out that it was. She said the police are involved.”

Jimmy’s eyes snap open. “What does that have to do with you—or with the house across the street?”

“Well at first, she said her brother was dating Carmen Rodriguez.”

“Who?”

“Our neighbor’s husband. He lived there with her years ago, when I was a kid. But I don’t think Ivy knew he’s a man, and when I assumed the brother might have been trying to cover up that he was gay or something, it turned out she might have been talking about the wife instead . . .”

“You’re not making sense.”

“It wasn’t very clear. She seemed kind of confused.”

“Well, so do you. Maybe there is no brother. Maybe she made it up.”

“Maybe she did. I can check.” Heather pulls her iPhone out of her pocket. “She told me his name. Carlos Diaz. He’s her stepbrother, actually—or so she said.”

“What do you mean?”

“I almost felt like I caught her in a lie. When she said her brother’s name, I was surprised that it was Hispanic because she didn’t look like she is. She showed me his picture, and they didn’t look like they can possibly be related . . .”

“Okay,” he says, wearing that overly patient expression he gets when he thinks she’s being flighty, “but that doesn’t mean they aren’t related. Plenty of people who—”

“No, I know that, but when she changed brother to stepbrother as soon as she realized I was curious about it—it was kind of like she was trying to cover up a slip or something.”

From Jimmy, ever the devil’s advocate: “I call my stepbrothers my brothers all the time.”

“I know. It’s just the way she said it . . .” She quickly types
Carlos Diaz
into the search engine, along with the word
missing,
and hits Enter.

The search results are instantaneous.

“So if she made it up,” Jimmy is saying, “then why—”

“She didn’t make it up,” Heather cuts him off. She clicks on a link and gets a close-up look at an official flyer bearing the familiar department logo and the very same photo Ivy showed her this afternoon. “He really is a missing person.”

“Here, let me see.”

She hands Jimmy the phone and watches him examine the listing, fiddling with the screen to enlarge it. “I’m going to call Leary.”

“Who’s Leary?”

“The detective in charge of this case, see?” Jimmy shows her the name and phone number at the bottom of the online flyer.

“You know him?”

“There are 35,000 cops in New York, Heather. We don’t all know each other. We don’t sit around drinking coffee and shooting the breeze like you do in the teachers’ lounge.”

“Why do you have to be so sarcastic?”

“Why do you have to be so sensitive?”

She swallows back her irritation. “What are you going to say when you call?”

“That someone was here asking about this guy and claiming to be his sister.”

“She might really have been his sister.”

“Or maybe not. Sometimes you have to go with your gut. And your gut told you she wasn’t, right? Or should I say your ‘woman’s intuition’?”

Naturally, the second Jimmy stands up and walks away to place the call, the baby kicks. Hard. As if to say,
Don’t worry, Mom, everything’s going to be okay. Sometimes he’s a jerk, but he doesn’t mean to be.

She smiles and pats her stomach.
Hey, thanks, little guy.

Another kick.

Amazing, she thinks, the way she’s bonded with this baby already and he won’t even be born for another five months.

She thinks again of the stories about Mrs. Rodriguez. Now that she’s expecting a baby herself . . .

Well, there’s nothing funny about a woman whose baby died—a woman who had lost everything—holding a blanket-wrapped doll, talking to an imaginary toddler, pushing an empty swing in the backyard . . .

Nothing funny at all.

Gaby is awakened by a ringing telephone.

Disoriented, she realizes she’s still in the chair where she sat down when she got home from the beach. Twilight has fallen and the room is cast in shadows. It takes a moment of fumbling to figure out which phone is ringing. There are three: her cell phone, the landline—and Ben’s.

This afternoon’s drama rushes back at her as she answers the landline. “Hello?”

“Gaby? Are you still home?”

“Jaz?”

“Are you home?” her cousin repeats urgently.

“Yes.”

“Turn on the TV.
Now
.”

“What—”

“Just turn it on! Channel 4! They’re about to come back from the commercial. Hurry!”

Gaby lurches into motion, grabbing the remote, aiming it at the television, tuning it to Channel 4.

She finds herself looking at a middle-aged man in a backward Mets cap, sitting on a couch in the glare of bright television lights, talking to a female reporter well-known for her
Crimestoppers
segments.

“What is this?” Gaby asks Jaz.

“Shh! Listen!”

“ . . . and they told me, my nephew, he isn’t the first one this has happened to. They think there’s a serial killer out there.”

“A serial killer, Mr. Morales?” the reporter asks. “That’s what they said?”

“Well no, not exactly. No one was killed . . .” The man stops to cross himself. “But they said that a couple of other guys have disappeared. Latino guys, just like Bobby. And they think it might have something to do with those dating Web sites Bobby was using. Like maybe he met a woman online who was, you know, up to no good. Maybe they all did.”

Gaby’s heart stops.

The scene cuts back to the news desk, and the anchor is talking, but fear roars through Gaby’s head, drowning out every word.

Still wearing her headlamp, Alex leads Carmen through the dark house without turning on the lights. It’s more romantic that way, and besides . . .

Well, the house isn’t quite as clean as he likes it. She hadn’t realized that until she caught sight of her earlier visitor glancing in distaste at the bowl of cat food and milk by the stairs. That was when she realized that the milk had soured and the food in the bowl was wriggling, alive.

It would serve Gato—Mr. Finicky—right if she decides to force-feed it to him before she drowns him in the tub alongside the unfortunate woman who’d shown up telling lies about . . .

Wait, why was she here again?

Alex can no longer remember. It’s so hard to keep track of details.

All she knows for certain is that Carmen is back at last. After all these years of leaving the front door unlocked just in case he or Dante found their way home again . . . it’s actually happened.

He’s home. He’s home. He’s home!

The refrain in her head matches the beat of the rain pattering on the roof. She likes the sound of rain again now, and the earthy smell of it, and even the rumble of thunder. Storms sometimes scared her after he left. But that doesn’t matter anymore.

Stomach filled with giddy butterflies, she tells him, “You probably think I’m completely surprised that you’re here, but I’m not.”