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  Chapter Three

  Friday, September 16

  “So things are finally back to normal now, know what I mean?”

  “Definitely,” Allison tells Randi, who’s spent the last ten minutes talking about how relieved she is that her in-laws have gone back to their Florida retirement home after a three-week visit.

  Both Mack’s parents are deceased, so aside from his sister, Lynn, Allison doesn’t have in-laws. But she can certainly relate to life finally being back to normal.

  With the sunroom painted at last, Mack got back on his usual 7:19 commuter train yesterday morning, bleary-eyed as always, but at least having promised to start his new sleep medication over the weekend.

  “I’m glad you made me go to see Dr. Cuthbert,” he said, kissing Allison on the cheek. “You were right.”

  “I’m always right,” she replied with a smile, trying to hide the vague uneasiness she’s felt since Mack came home from his appointment on Wednesday with a prescription for something called Dormipram.

  Allison immediately looked it up on the Internet. She wasn’t thrilled about some of the side effects, but the good news was that it was supposed to be nonaddictive. Anyway, the last thing she wanted to do was undermine Mack’s cooperation with the doctor.

  If only she could ignore the troubling ghosts of her own past—a more distant past than the tragic events of September 2001. Her mother was an addict, not just street drugs, but prescription, too—and died of a sleeping pill overdose. It wasn’t accidental.

  Suicide—that thought segues Allison right back to Jerry Thompson, but she pushes him from her mind. She’s been doing it for days now. He’s dead. It’s over.

  Craving normalcy—and some female company—after dropping Madison at preschool on this sunny, unseasonably cool Friday afternoon, she drove with J.J. over to Randi’s three-story redbrick mansion for a late lunch.

  “Anyway . . .” Randi wraps her perfectly manicured fingers around a baby carrot and dredges it through lemon-artichoke hummus. “Sometimes I wish we hadn’t gone all out with that huge guest wing upstairs. It makes it a little too easy for my in-laws to come and stay . . . and stay . . . and stay . . .”

  “I can’t really blame them.” Allison has toured the luxurious guest wing: two large bedrooms, each with its own bath, connected by a large sitting area featuring a state-of-the-art entertainment system and a wet bar.

  Until a few years ago, the Webers lived with their two children, Lexi, fourteen, and Josh, nine, in a regular suburban house a few blocks away from the MacKennas’. The two families used to walk back and forth for backyard barbecues and snowstorm game nights. They had a lot in common—parallel lives, Randi used to say.

  Ben had launched his career in an ad agency bullpen alongside Mack right out of college. When he moved into the more lucrative sales side of the industry, he recruited Mack and was his boss for years.

  Last year, Ben left the network to become executive vice president of sales and marketing at another. The Webers immediately moved to the “estate” side of town, where rambling mansions sit on woodsy lots beyond low fieldstone walls—and security fences and access-control gates.

  At first, Allison worried that Ben going from a mid-six-figure yearly income to one that’s over seven figures would jeopardize their friendship. But it didn’t.

  “We’re just one step ahead of you,” Randi said when it happened. Coming from her, it was somehow not insulting. “We had a head start, but we’re right where you guys will be in a couple of years.”

  Allison isn’t sure that’s true, and she isn’t sure it’s what she wants. Ben seems to be home even less often than Mack is. And she loves the house they live in now. It’s the first place she’s ever lived that truly feels like home, and she envisions herself and Mack growing old together there.

  Watching Allison pry a potentially deadly baby carrot from J.J.’s clenched, drool-covered fist, Randi comments, “He’s like a little octopus.”

  “More like a pickpocket. You’re lucky your kids are past this stage.”

  “I won’t argue with you.”

  “That reminds me—can you do me a favor? Do you have your iPhone in your pocket?”

  Of course she does. She pulls it out immediately, asking, “Who are we calling?”

  “We’re not calling, we’re using the GPS locator to find my phone. It’s not in my pocket and I’m hoping it’s either out in the car or that I forgot it at home, because for all I know J.J. grabbed it and threw it on the ground someplace between my house and here.”

  “What do I do?”

  Allison directs her to the application and instructs her to type in the cell phone number.

  Randi does, then looks up. “I need your password.”

  “It’s HUMAMA.”

  “Who-mama? How’d you come up with that? Like, Who’s your mama?”

  Allison laughs. “No—like, Hudson, Madison, Mack. First two letters of each of their names.”

  “What about J.J.?”

  “He wasn’t born yet when I got the phone. I remember thinking I’d probably never need to use this locator app, but . . . I pretty much need it every day.”

  Smiling, Randi punches the password into her own phone, waits for a moment, then shows Allison the screen. It shows a map, with a big, pulsating blue dot sitting over their address on Orchard Terrace.

  “Okay, as long as I know it’s home. But with this guy, I can never be sure.” Allison sighs. “I should probably get going.”

  “It’s still early. Do you want some more salad?” Randi gestures at the bowl.

  “No, thanks—I’m full.”

  Not really. The mix of organic baby arugula, goat cheese, and seared red peppers didn’t really hit the spot today. Sometimes lately, when she’s feeling low, Allison finds herself craving good old-fashioned, bad-for-you comfort food. Right now, she wouldn’t mind a salami sandwich on white bread with yellow mustard—or even a wedge of iceberg lettuce with bottled blue cheese dressing and synthetic bacon bits, which passed for salad in her distant small-town past.

  “Are you sure? Did you not like it?” Randi asks. “Because I won’t feel bad if you didn’t. It’s not like I made it.”

  Allison knows she’d bought the salad mix in a plastic container at David-Anthony’s, the gourmet café in town, then tossed it with a shallot vinaigrette—also from David-Anthony’s—in an enormous hand-carved wooden salad bowl that probably cost more than Allison had paid for her first car back in Nebraska.

  “No, it was great,” she assures Randi. “I’m just not that hungry.”

  “What about dessert? Look what I got!” Randi leaps up and grabs a white bakery box stamped with the gold David-Anthony’s seal. She opens the lid to reveal a dozen oversized, frosted sugar cookies that cost seven-fifty each.

  Allison knows that because she herself made a rare venture into David-Anthony’s on the first day of school last week, thinking it might be nice to pick up a treat for the girls. She picked out two individually cellophane-wrapped cookies, an intricately decorated school bus and a red apple, and was halfway to the register when she noticed the price stickers.

  She put them back.

  It isn’t that she can’t afford to spend fifteen dollars—but for two cookies? Given the current state of the economy, she has to draw the line somewhere. Always in the back of her mind is the threat that Mack might lose his job, like so many colleagues in his fickle industry. If that happens, they will be, as Mack recently said and an eavesdropping Hudson later colorfully quoted, up a certain creek without a paddle.

  Allison knows only too well what it’s like to be laid off without warning. But at least when she lost her job at the magazine, she and Mack were childless newlyweds, and he could support them both on his salary—with a nice cushion in the bank, thanks to his dead wife.

  For the first time in her life, someone was taking care of Allison, and it felt good.

  Most days, it still does. Stay-at-home motherhood is fulfilling.
But once in a while, she longs for something a little more stimulating. Unlike Randi and most of the other women she’s met here in the affluent suburbs, she isn’t into yoga, golf, manicures, or day spas.

  Then again, whenever she’s around petite, striking Randi, who has a thick mane of dark red hair and a tanned, Pilates-toned body, Allison wonders if she’s let herself go.

  She rarely wears makeup these days, and this isn’t the first time she’s gone too long between dye jobs at the salon, resulting in a streak of dark roots along her part line. Plus, her once-willowy frame isn’t quite as taut as it used to be.

  This morning, realizing the weather had gone from summer to fall overnight, she’d pulled on a pair of jeans—faded Levi’s, as opposed to Randi’s dark-wash 7 For All Mankind. After an active summer with the kids—wearing shorts and sundresses that have a lot more give than denim—the jeans feel snugger than she’d expected; the last ten pounds of her third pregnancy weight gain are conspicuously drooping over the top button.

  She reinforces her no to the dessert Randi is offering but says yes to a cup of coffee—black—and lingers to sip it as Randi chatters on and J.J. delightedly turns a seven-dollar pumpkin-shaped cookie into sugary sludge.

  Interrupting her tale of Lexi’s upcoming first high school dance to peer closely at Allison’s face, Randi asks, “Are you just quiet today, or am I boring you to tears and not letting you get a word in edgewise?”

  Oops—I must have drifted.

  Allison shakes her head. “I’m just quiet today.”

  “Yeah? I think you’re just too polite to tell me to please shut up. Most people don’t have that problem. Ben sure doesn’t.”

  Allison grins. “Mack doesn’t, either. With me, I mean.”

  “Or with me,” Randi says wryly. She and Mack have long had a casual, brother-sister relationship. “Ben said he took a few days off this week. I thought maybe it was to make up for the three vacations he missed out on, but Ben said no.”

  Three vacations . . . In addition to the curtailed July week at the beach and the September Disney trip they’d had to forgo, Mack and Allison had planned a late August getaway to a charming, family-friendly Vermont inn recommended by Phyllis next door.

  But Mother Nature seemed bent on robbing them of any pleasure they might salvage from this all-too-fleeting summer. The day before they were supposed to leave—and just forty-eight hours after the freak earthquake—the unprecedented Hurricane Irene came barreling up the coast with New York in her crosshairs. Not only did the storm leave Glenhaven Park littered with downed trees and wires, but floodwaters swept the New England inn they were to visit.

  “Don’t bother to come up here,” Phyllis Lewis advised over the phone, having driven to Vermont ahead of the storm. “It’s like a war zone. You’re better off just staying home.”

  Ah, but the one comfort zone they could always count on—their Happy House—had been cast in perpetual shadow, unnervingly silent in the absence of reassuring electronic hums, with rotting food in the fridge and not even the promise of a hot shower to wash away the tension of a difficult day.

  The Webers had a generator and Randi called to invite Allison, Mack, and the kids to come to their house until the power was restored.

  “We have plenty of room,” she said, “and it’ll be fun. We never see enough of each other anymore.”

  “I thought your in-laws were already staying with you.”

  “I can always kick them out.”

  “Randi!”

  “I’m kidding. Sort of,” Randi added dryly. “Listen, no arguments. You and Mack and the baby can have the master suite, your girls can share Lexi’s room, and Ben and I will camp out downstairs.”

  “We’re not going to put you out of your own bed. We’re fine at home,” Allison told Randi firmly. “I’m sure the power will be back on any second now.”

  Famous last words. A full week elapsed before electricity was restored; a week Mack opted to spend back at work, leaving a homebound Allison to keep the kids fed and clean and entertained without appliances, lights, electronics, hot water . . .

  Those strange, unsettling days had been hard on her. But they were even harder on Mack, she now realized. This year, not only was there no escaping the real world, but even the real world bore little semblance to its usual self. Home didn’t feel like home, yet the city wasn’t a refuge, either. Not with all the talk of the looming anniversary and the construction of the new Freedom Tower, rising one more story per week above the altered skyline.

  Allison had detoured past the site early in the rebuilding stage, when there was little more to see than blue scaffolding, construction equipment, steel girders, and an American flag-bedecked “Never Forget” sign. Predictably, Mack wasn’t interested in seeing it then, and he isn’t now.

  “Mack just couldn’t deal with being in the city on the ten-year anniversary, huh?” Randi asks.

  “Is that what he told Ben?” Allison is surprised. It isn’t like Mack, ever the stoical Irishman, to share his feelings, even with his friends.

  Randi shakes her expertly highlighted mane. “That’s what Ben and I guessed. I know this is always a hard week for you guys.”

  “It is. I thought having him around the house would be nice, and the girls were so excited—you know how they are about Mack—”

  “Daddy’s girls.” With a nod, Randi utters the phrase Allison so often uses to describe her daughters.

  Randi has one of her own for J.J.: mama’s boy. It doesn’t sit well with Allison, in part because it’s overwhelming to be the only person who can comfort and care for her son so much of the time. Often, when Mack tries to help her out by taking him off her hands, J.J. fusses so much that Allison winds up taking him back.

  “That’s just how it is—little boys love their mommies,” her sister-in-law, Lynn, observed, having two sons of her own.

  Yes, but they love their daddies, too—especially when they get to see a lot of them.

  This early childhood stage is going to be so different for J.J. than it was for the girls. Mack’s job wasn’t this demanding when they were little; he had more time to bond with his daughters than he ever will with his son.

  Most nights, the baby is in bed long before he comes home, and though J.J. is an early riser, Mack’s daily dash out the door to catch the train doesn’t allow for father-son interaction.

  “So it wasn’t good having Mack home this week?” Randi prompts.

  “Well, he got the sunroom painted, but he was so preoccupied he barely gave them the time of day. He promised he’d take them out for ice cream after dinner one night, and that never happened, which isn’t like him.”

  “Uh-oh—were they upset?”

  “They must have been.” She sighs, remembering what it was like when her mother broke promises—a frequent occurrence—and her own vow to never break a promise to anyone. “But you know how it goes with my girls. In their eyes, Daddy can do no wrong.”

  “Wait till they turn thirteen,” Randi says darkly. “Then nobody—including Daddy, but especially you—will be able to do anything right.”

  “Terrific. Can’t wait.”

  “You know, it’s really too bad you guys couldn’t go to Disney this year. Or even Vermont. I’m sure not getting a vacation made all of this much harder on Mack.”

  “That, and . . .” Allison trails off, not sure whether she should even bring it up.

  “What?”

  “It’s nothing, really.”

  “When people say that, it’s always something, really.” Randi leans forward and props her chin in her hand. “I’m an expert bullshit detector, you know. It’s my favorite claim to fame.”

  Allison smiles briefly. “So I’ve heard.”

  “Tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “Did you by any chance hear about Jerry Thompson?”

  Randi, of course, knows who he is. She frowns. “What about him?”

  “He killed himself in prison last weekend.”
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br />   “Really? Well, good riddance, right? You must be so relieved.”

  “I am.” Allison absently uses a napkin to wipe a smudge of crumby paste, courtesy of J.J., from her hand.

  “You don’t seem convinced.”

  “It’s just . . . I don’t know, I guess I expected to find some kind of peace knowing he’s dead, but . . . it’s kind of the opposite.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She hesitates, not wanting to admit that the news seems to have dredged up a whole new wave of paranoia, leaving her jumpy and uneasy the last few days—and for no conceivable reason.

  Now, more than ever, she should finally be able to put the whole nightmare behind her.

  “I guess it just brought back a lot of bad memories,” she tells Randi. “And I keep remembering how wrong I was about him. Kristina herself said he gave her the creeps, and I told her he was harmless. The next thing I knew, she was dead. How could I have been such a terrible judge of character?”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Allie. You barely knew the guy. We can never really be sure what’s going on in someone else’s head, even someone we think we know well, let alone a virtual stranger.”

  “I know, but . . . even after she died—after I saw him there that night—there was some little piece of my brain that wouldn’t accept that he was the one.”

  “Until he attacked you in your apartment and almost killed you.” Randi shakes her head grimly.

  “No—not even then. I never saw his face, and I was so sure it was someone else . . . Right up until the police arrested him and he confessed.”

  “Serial killers are cunning. They fool people. Look at Ted Bundy. My cousin Mindy was at Florida State back in the seventies when he killed those sorority girls. She’d seen him hanging around campus, and he seemed totally normal.”

  This isn’t the first time Randi has brought that up.

  Allison shudders, remembering the horrific details of how Bundy crept into the Chi Omega house in the middle of the night to rape and murder sleeping young women. It was eerily similar to what Jerry did to Kristina Haines and that other woman, Marianne Apostolos.