Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(28)

“I haven’t heard from her,” Mack says, and she turns her focus back to his weary face. “I keep wondering why. Some people she works with—she was on the 104th floor, I don’t know if you knew that—some of them called their husbands and wives. She didn’t call me.”

“Maybe she tried and couldn’t get through.” Allison speaks in a rush, wanting—needing—to give him hope.

Even false hope?

She ignores the disapproving voice in her head. “The local lines were all jammed up. Is there someone else who might have heard from her? Someone outside the city, maybe?”

He’s shaking his head before she finishes speaking. “She doesn’t have anyone else.”

That strikes her as an odd thing to say. Maybe he just means that Carrie is from New York City, and others she might have tried to reach would be here, with snarled phone lines.

But the phrasing—she doesn’t have anyone else—it just seems so definitive, almost as though Carrie has no one in the world but him.

Almost like me, Allison finds herself thinking. If I were in a life-or-death situation and needed to connect with someone, who would I call?

I wouldn’t call anyone—because I’m self-sufficient.

She’s been taking care of herself for years—even when her mother was alive. She never had anyone to lean on, or depend on.

“I keep wondering what it means that I didn’t hear from her,” Mack goes on. “Because she’s always been a caller, you know? She’ll call ten or twelve times a day. She likes to stay in touch.”

He’s thinking Carrie didn’t survive the initial blast long enough to make a call.

Maybe that was a blessing, Allison thinks, remembering what she witnessed yesterday on television—all those people trapped in a towering torture chamber, people who concluded that jumping to certain death was the most merciful way out.

Allison thinks of her mother—of the choice Brenda Taylor made, seven years ago.

For the first time, she experiences a glimmer of an emotion other than the anger and disgust and pity that always accompany the memory of her mother’s suicide.

Allison always thought of her as a coward, taking the easy way out. But maybe she was wrong. Maybe there is no easy way out.

“I made these . . .” Mack picks up a sheaf of paper and hands it to her.

She finds herself looking at a child’s drawing of a stick figure man and woman. Puzzled, she looks up at Mack, not sure what to make of it.

“Oh, that—Not that.” He snatches it away. “That’s—my friend’s daughter . . . she felt sorry for me, so . . . it’s, you know, supposed to be me and Carrie . . .” He trails off, swallows hard.

Her heart goes out to him.

She looks down at the paper now on top of the stack. It’s a photo of a woman beneath the bold black word “MISSING.”

“Do you think it looks enough like her?” Mack asks.

She knows the image is of Carrie, of course—her name, “CARRIE ROBINSON MACKENNA,” is right beneath it—but it obviously wasn’t taken recently. It doesn’t look much more like her than the little girl’s crayoned drawing, with its smiling mouth and lemon yellow hair.

But Allison assures Mack that the photo is fine, wondering if it even matters anyway.

If Carrie was at work on the 104th floor of the first tower that was hit, and the plane struck the building a few floors beneath her, then how would she have gotten out? The stairways must have been blocked by that massive fire. All those people jumping, falling . . . they wouldn’t have been doing that if there was any other way out.

“I have to go put up these fliers,” Mack says. “I already did a bunch last night—this morning, really—but then I thought I should come back home to see if she was here.”

“Maybe she was here earlier, and then she left and went looking for you.”

“No. She wasn’t home. If she had been, she would have changed her clothes, or . . .”

“Maybe she didn’t want to—”

“No,” Mack cuts in sharply, “if she’d been here while I was gone, I’d know it.”

“Maybe—” Seeing the look on his face, Allison clamps her mouth shut. She hates herself for needing to deny out loud what he must already know, and has maybe even accepted.

But, having stepped into the middle of a virtual stranger’s tragedy, she can’t seem to help herself. For some reason, she’s compelled to keep dangling useless lifelines before Mack—like tossing a length of sewing thread to a drowning man-overboard.

He takes a deep breath and says flatly, “Carrie left for work yesterday morning, and she never came home. Period.”

He’s trying to convince himself of that, Allison finds herself thinking, as much as he’s trying to convince me.

God knows it’s probably true, and yet . . .

It’s almost as though he’s trying to make this harder on himself, even, than it has to be.

She remembers yet again how he was sitting alone outside the other night, seemingly troubled. Maybe he’d had a fight with his wife. Maybe he’s feeling guilty now, on top of everything else.

Whatever the case, he’s on the verge of falling apart, poor man.

She feels oddly tempted to reach out and put her arms around him.