Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(21)

Her neighbor Mack was here. She told him about the glorious Marc Jacobs party—the last hurrah, it now seems, in a city that believed itself immune to the afflictions of the great unwashed.

God only knows if Mack is even alive tonight—rather, this morning, because it’s well past midnight now. And his wife, what about her? Carrie worked down there.

Cantor Fitzgerald. That’s the name of her company. Allison recognized it as soon as she heard it on the news earlier. A reporter said the firm occupied the top floors of the north tower.

Was Carrie there?

Did she make it out alive?

Numb with exhaustion, Allison pushes the troubling question from her mind.

She robotically unlocks the front door, crosses the threshold into the vestibule, closes the door behind her. Pausing at the row of mailboxes, she can’t imagine there might be anything in her box that hasn’t been rendered obsolete.

Magazines, sales fliers, department store credit card bills . . . it’s all so meaningless. The things that mattered most to Allison when she left this morning for the Liz Lange fashion show seem utterly insignificant now.

As she moves past the mailboxes toward the elevator, Allison hears a sound at the far end of the hall.

A door opens.

Someone comes out of the stairwell.

In the murky light, she can just make out a human shadow. Who would be lurking around the halls at this hour, on this night?

Jerry? The burglar? Insomnia-stricken Mack?

Her first guess was correct.

She watches Jerry step briefly into the splash of light from a hallway bulb before disappearing into an alcove where the door to the back alley is located. A moment later, she hears the door open quietly, and then close.

Allison presses the up button.

Several stories above, the elevator grinds into motion. She rests her forehead against the wall, waiting for it to come and carry her home.





Chapter Four

Standing in the dimly lit corridor outside his office, Mack watches the copy machine rhythmically spit one flier after another into the mounting stack in the tray. Carrie’s face stares up at him from the pile, frozen in an unnatural smile. Mack snapped the picture last spring, at his family’s annual Saint Patrick’s Day party, not long after they started infertility treatments.

Large gatherings are always somewhat uncomfortable for Carrie, who told him early on in their relationship that she wasn’t used to big families.

“That’s too bad,” Mack said easily, “because I have one.”

“That’s too bad,” she returned, and he remembers thinking that she was teasing.

She wasn’t.

She married him anyway, just a few months after they met. He proposed on a whim. They eloped—the only way she’d do it. She didn’t want a big family wedding like his sister and cousins, or even a small church wedding in Jersey, at his hometown parish. Anyway, his mother was dying; a big wedding, even if Mack wanted one, would have to wait until after she was gone. And after she was gone . . . what would be the point?

So it was just the two of them, Mack and Carrie, spur of the moment in a far-off town with a justice of the peace.

Later, he realized that his judgment had been clouded by grief over his mother’s illness, both when he proposed to Carrie, and when he agreed to elope.

He should have known it would break his mother’s heart to learn, after the fact, that her only son—yes, a grown son, but still—had run off and married a girl she barely knew. Hell, a girl Mack himself barely knew.

As a result, in the scant time she had left, Maggie MacKenna never warmed up to her new daughter-in-law. She wasn’t unkind to Carrie, but she didn’t embrace her the way she had various friends—or even stray cats—Mack and his sister, Lynn, had brought home over the years. Nor did she immediately consider Carrie one of the family as she had Lynn’s ex-husband, Dan. Even after his sister separated from her ex—headed for an amicable divorce, as she likes to say, and she and Dan are living proof that such a thing exists—Dan remained more a part of Maggie MacKenna’s family than Carrie ever would be.

Mack always thought it was mostly the elopement that upset his mother, but after Maggie died last fall, Lynn revealed that their mother didn’t think Carrie was right for him.

“Mom called her a cold fish,” his sister said matter-of-factly one day as they sorted through mementos in their childhood home back in Hoboken, preparing to move their father into an assisted-living facility. “She said she would have talked you out of marrying her if you’d let her know in advance.”

Those words made him cringe—though he probably always knew on some level how his mother felt about his wife. But hearing the truth especially bothered him because it was too late to change his mother’s mind—or to share with her some of the things about Carrie she didn’t know. Things Carrie had made him swear never to tell anyone. Things that, if he’d dared break that promise to Carrie, might have made his mother feel differently about her.

But Mom is dead, and Dad—who always deferred to his wife anyway—is in his own little world now, slowly losing his mind to Alzheimer’s.

To her credit, easygoing, talkative Lynn doesn’t need reasons to like anyone. On the few occasions Carrie visited her home, Lynn tried to make her feel welcome.

Still, Mack remembers the March day the photo was taken as being particularly uncomfortable, because it was spent surrounded by his sister’s kids, all their cousins, and various relatives amid the easy, happy chaos of effortlessly established families.