The Black Widow (34 page)

He looks dead but he isn’t. Not yet. She can feel his heart still beating.

She remembers the night she pressed the pillow over the baby’s face with one hand and pressed the other against her spindly little neck until her pulse ceased.

Satisfied, she turns to grab the lid and reaches toward the hole.

But now, illuminated in the beam of her headlamp, she sees Carmen’s eyes snap open abruptly.

For a split second they’re bewildered. Then they flicker with the horror of what’s about to happen.

Alex brings down the lid with a resounding thud.

“Wait, where are you going?” Jaz asks as Gaby jumps out of the Jeep. “It doesn’t even look like she’s home.”

“It’s not like she’s going to leave on the welcome light for us.”

“No, but you can’t just go barging up to the door.”

“Why not?”

“Esto esta loco!”

“I don’t—”

“It’s dangerous. Where are the cops?”

“I don’t know, but we’re here, and—” Gaby hesitates at the foot of the steps, looking up at the house. “What if Ben is in there?”

“He’s not,” a voice says behind her, and she turns to see a woman moving purposefully up the walk toward her. “Are you Gabriela Duran?”

“Yes.”

“Detective Sullivan Leary, NYPD.” She flashes a badge.

Gaby barely glances at it.

Jaz is out of the Jeep now, swiftly coming to stand beside Gaby, resting a protective hand on her shoulder as she introduces herself to the detective.

Gaby interrupts. “How do you know he’s not in there?” Fearfully, hopefully—but mostly fearfully—she adds, “Did you find him?”

“No. But the woman who lives here drove away a little while ago with someone in the car.”

“Was it Ben?” Jaz asks, tightening her grip on Gaby’s shoulder.

“We don’t know. We didn’t see them leave.”

“Who did?”

“Neighbors across the street.”

Gaby finds her voice at last. “So this is just based on what they said?”

“If you’re insinuating that—”

“I’m not insinuating anything. But did you make sure no one else is here?”

“Not yet. Wait, where are you going?”

“To see if anyone is home.” Gaby takes the front steps two at a time and rings the doorbell.

“Mrs. Duran, you can’t—”

She’s not Mrs. Duran anymore. But she’s not inclined to correct the detective as she reaches for the doorknob.

Ben. That’s all that matters. Getting to Ben.

“What are you doing?”

Ignoring the question posed in unison by the detective and Jaz, she turns the knob and gives it a push. To her shock, the door swings open.

“Gaby!” Jaz is beside her again, grabbing her arm.

“We need to look for Ben.” She turns a pleading gaze on the detective.

“We can’t go in.”

“You’re the one who said no one is here, Detective. And the door is unlocked.”

“That doesn’t matter. We don’t have a warrant.”

“
You
don’t. But I don’t need one,” Gaby shoots back, and boldly plucks the flashlight from the detective’s hand before darting over the threshold.

Ben had known, when she commanded him to dig the hole, that it would serve a sinister purpose. But staring down the barrel of that gun, he’d assumed he would meet his fate long before his body was tossed into that crude grave. By then, he assumed, his soul would be well on its way to being reunited with Josh.

Now, lying on his back in pitch-black, he flinches at an explosive thud that comes not from a gun going off, but from the unmistakable weight of several pounds of dirt being deposited just inches from his face. Only a panel of wood separates him from immediate suffocation.

Another blast of noise.

More dirt.

She’s burying him alive—but he won’t be for long, unless he does something.

Ignoring the sting where the bullet hit his shoulder, he impulsively starts to sit up. His head immediately encounters the lid of his makeshift coffin.

He raises his knees; they, too, hit the lid of the box.

And when he moves the only arm he can move, the one that hasn’t been shot, his bent elbow hits the side of the box.

It’s no use. He’s trapped. Helpless. There’s no way out.

The chilling words of his captor ring in Ben’s ears with every thump of dirt hitting the box overhead.

I will kill her . . .

There’s a part of Sullivan Leary that’s deeply infuriated with Gabriela Duran’s brazen move.

There’s also a part of her that can’t help but admire it.

She tries to quell the admiring part as the infuriated part informs the cousin, Jacinda, “She can’t do that.”

“She just did.”

“What the hell is going on?” Stockton has arrived on the scene, with Dante beside him.

“Call the local police. She’s inside the house.”

“Who’s inside the house?”

“My cousin.” Jacinda raises her voice, shouting, “Gaby! Are you okay?”

No answer.

“Gaby!”

They wait uneasily. Then . . .

“Come in here, Jaz!” Gaby shouts. “You too, Detective!”

It takes Alex a long time to shovel the heap of dirt back into the hole. At last the wooden crate is buried with Carmen inside it. No one will ever know unless she chooses to tell.

She never will. She’s about to make sure of that.

Spent, she walks a short distance away and sits on the ground in a small clearing surrounded by shrubs.

It’s peaceful here. That’s why Carmen’s father liked it. He wanted to spend the rest of his days here. When he died, his wife and son scattered his ashes in this very spot.

“This is where I want to be, too,” Carmen told her the first time he brought her up here when they were young and in love and the future was full of promise. “For the rest of our lives. And when I die, I want to be buried here.”

“You got your wish,” she whispers into the emptiness.

And so it’s over.

Really, it’s been over for a while now, ever since that day in the obstetrician’s office last summer when she received the devastating news that she wasn’t pregnant—nor could she ever be pregnant again. Something had snapped inside her that day. She had been so sure the doctor was wrong, so desperate to hold her son in her arms again, so convinced that it could happen . . .

Is it possible she only saw what she wanted to see?

Reaching into her pocket, she pulls out a frayed scrap of pink fabric and a yellowed piece of paper scrawled with words she memorized years ago, when she first learned to read.

Her name is Alex. Please keep her. I’m afraid I might hurt her.

“Is there a family history?” the doctor had asked Alex’s caseworker.

Alex never heard the reply. She didn’t have to.

She reaches into her pocket again for the gun, puts it to her temple.

Carmen’s voice floats back to her:
Some things just don’t feel right until the sun goes down.

You were right,
she thinks.
About everything.

The last thing she sees before she pulls the trigger is the starless night sky.

In the kitchen of the deserted house, Gaby stands in a sea of rotten cat food and spoiled milk, her flashlight beam trained on a refrigerator covered in crayoned drawings.

Not just a few, or even a dozen, but dozens—hundreds of drawings, stacks of them, precariously clinging to the refrigerator beneath magnets.

At a glance, they’re typical kid art: stick figures, a rudimentary house and trees.

Beyond a glance, though, it gets disturbing.

For one thing, every picture is identical. Four figures—large and small pairs, male and female in each—are posed before a house depicted in the usual triangle-atop-a-rectangle way. But instead of one chimney, there are two—depicted in red crayon as rectangles encompassing tic-tack-toe grid lines. The obligatory windows on either side of the rectangle front door are ovals, filled in with the red crayon. And there aren’t just one or two trees beside the house; there are countless trees, meant to depict a forest.

The quirks would seem to indicate a creative kid-artist—but it goes beyond that.

In every picture, the house is encompassed by orange and yellow plumes clearly meant to depict fire. And in every picture, the large male figure and small male and female figures are crossed out, each covered by a bold black X.

There are footsteps in the next room, voices, Jaz exclaiming over the stench.

Then they’re in the kitchen: Jaz and Detective Leary, accompanied by two men. Covering their mouths and noses, they pause to take in the scene.

Then, gaping at the drawings on the refrigerator, the smaller of the two men utters a few incredulous words:
“Es la casa de mi padre.”

Gaby doesn’t know whether the detectives can translate, but she sure as hell understood what he just said.

That’s my father’s house.

Overwhelmed by the irrational urge to bend his arms and his legs and sit up, Ben forces himself to lie still and flat. The pain in his shoulder is agonizing. He can feel that the wound is soaked in blood, can smell it filling the close, stale air.

He tries to breathe slowly, deeply. The more he panics, the more oxygen he’ll waste.

Does it matter?

When death is inevitable, why prolong it?

He isn’t afraid.

His son is waiting. His son, and his parents, and yes even Abuela.

Cuidala . . .

I meant it when I made that promise,
he tells the old woman.
I took care of her the best I could, for as long as she’d let me. I’m still trying. I hope you know I tried to the end. I hope Gaby knows that.

But of course, she won’t. She’ll never know what became of him. No one is going to find his body buried up here in the middle of nowhere.

He only prays that this lunatic—who so chillingly described the murder of her own daughter—will stop here, with him.

If he only could be sure that she’ll leave Gaby alone—that Gaby will go on to live a full life, the life she deserves, even if it’s without him . . .

She will. He has to believe that. It’s the only thing that will make this okay: believing that Gaby will be happy again. That she’ll find someone else, marry again, have another child . . .

She was such a devoted mother. When Josh died, a part of her died as well.

How do you heal from something like that?

You don’t.

Or do you?

He’d glimpsed her again the last few days—the old Gaby. He’d found hope that she might somehow come back to him, battered and bruised, but having survived her worst nightmare . . .

He remembers how she used to cry in the night, inconsolable at the thought of Josh being alone and afraid without them . . .

It’s okay,
he tells her now, as his eyelids close
. I’ve got this. I’ll be with him.

“Who lives here?” Dante Rodriguez asks, and something in his voice tells Sully that he already knows the answer. “Who drew those pictures of my father’s house?”

“Mr. Rodriguez—”

“Please, tell me . . .”

Sully turns from the drawings on the refrigerator to Dante Rodriguez. The man’s blue eyes beseech her to voice the truth he already knows.

“The house is owned by a woman named Alex Jones.”

“My mother. She died—”

“She didn’t. She’s alive. She lives here. I’m . . . I’m sorry.”

Dante seems to crumple. “I lived here, too. I knew when I walked in—it seemed so familiar. But I forgot. My father—he wanted me to forget this. Forget her. She was too sick to take care of me, he said. I thought it was cancer, something . . . Why would he tell me she died?”

“Maybe it was easier that way.”

“Not for me.”

“For him, but maybe for you, too.”

He seems to consider that before nodding. “We had a good life, the two of us. But I always remembered her. She’d crawl around on the floor with me, playing, and we’d draw pictures, and I wondered . . . I wondered . . . if she died alone. Once, I asked my father. He said he was here with her when it happened. I thought that was a lie, but I didn’t question him. It was easier . . .”

He sighs, shakes his head, looks around the kitchen, then again at the drawings.

Sully follows his gaze. “Where is that house? The one she drew?”

“About an hour from here. I inherited the property when my father died, but the house burned down years ago. He used to talk about it—”

“But do you know where it is, exactly?”

Dante nods. “I told you, I own it. I’m going to build a house there again someday—”

Gabriela Duran cuts him off. “That’s where she is. That’s where she took Ben.”

The ride up to the country in the backseat of Detective Leary’s car is endless.

Sitting beside Dante Rodriguez, Gabriela stares silently out at the black night sky, thinking about Ben, remembering a long-ago sunrise when the world was full of promise.

In the front seat, Detective Barnes’s cell phone rings abruptly.

He’d called the local police up in the country. By now they must be on the property. Gaby keeps thinking they’re going to call and say they’ve found Ben alive.

“Yeah?” Barnes says into his phone. “Yeah? Okay, good. Good. No? Keep looking. We’re almost there.”

He hangs up the phone.

Gaby sees Leary shoot him a questioning look.

“They found the car. Black BMW.”

“Where?”

“There,” is all he says. “Where we thought.”

Gaby’s heart pounds.

The headlights illuminate a green sign.

“That’s the exit,” Dante says, and Leary flicks on the turn signal.

Gaby thinks about Ben as they follow the curved ramp off the exit and begin a slow climb up into the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. He’d want her to be strong.

Jaz, too—

“Be strong,” she had said when they parted ways back on Cherry Street, forced to stay behind as they drove off into the night.