Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(35)

There are distinct decorative touches, too—baskets, candles, a vase of fresh flowers, albeit a bit wilted. On an end table, several oversized hardcover art books are held upright between a pair of granite bookends. The nearby bookshelf is crowded with an eclectic mix of titles from recent best-sellers to the familiar vintage butter-colored spines of the Little House on the Prairie books he remembers Lynn reading when she was a girl.

As she drones on in his ear, he looks around for framed photographs. You’d expect to find them scattered in a room like this, but there are none.

Well, the same is true in his own place. Naturally, Carrie has no snapshots of family or old friends, and she doesn’t want Mack’s on display, either. When they were first married, he stuck a snapshot of Marcus, the boy he’d once mentored through the Big Brother program, under a magnet on the fridge.

Marcus was in the army now, stationed in Europe, and he’d sent a smiling picture of himself wearing army fatigues. One day, Mack noticed that it had disappeared from the fridge. When he asked Carrie about it, she said she’d put it away.

“It’s my kitchen, too,” she said. “I don’t want a total stranger looking at me every time I walk in there.”

Last year, after Mom died, when he and his sister cleaned out their parents’ house to put it on the market, Lynn took pretty much everything that had value—sentimental, or otherwise. She offered Mack every treasure they unearthed, but he kept shaking his head, saying there was no room in his tiny Manhattan apartment for any of it.

Not the cherry armoire made by Great-Uncle Paddy, or the lace curtains his parents had brought back from their first trip to Ireland, or his mother’s antique bone china.

Certainly not the cherished, aging family dogs, Champ and Bruiser—the tail end, as it were, in a series of strays and rescues soft-hearted Mack brought home over the years.

Carrie didn’t like dogs.

Well, she claimed she was allergic, but Mack never saw evidence of that. He noticed that on the rare occasions they visited Lynn, whose canine menagerie now includes Champ and Bruiser, Carrie didn’t sneeze or wheeze. She just recoiled.

“Are you sure you don’t want anything?” Lynn kept asking him that last day in Hoboken, and in the end he impulsively salvaged a stack of vintage ancestral photos from the wallpapered dining room wall.

“What are you going to do with those?” Carrie asked when he brought them home.

“Put them up?” Seeing her expression, he said, “No? Not put them up?”

“Not put them up.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know—I don’t want them around.”

“But why not?” It was a typical discussion for them—her stubbornly ruling something out, him trying to make sense of her reasoning.

“I don’t know . . . They’re strangers. I’d feel like they were watching me.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Maybe. But I can’t help it.”

“Is it that you don’t have any pictures of your own?”

“No! Maybe it just seems too . . . you know, personal, to put all that stuff out there for anyone to see.”

She was talking about the pictures, he knew—but Mack didn’t miss the metaphor.

“Carrie was so strong, Mack,” Lynn is saying, and he’s jolted back into the conversation. “If there was a way out of there, she would have found it.”

“You’re the second person who’s said that to me today.”

“Said what?”

“How strong Carrie is.” He clears his throat. “But some of that is just a front, you know, to hide her weaknesses.”

There’s a moment of silence on the other end of the line. “What weaknesses?”

Mack stops pacing. Maybe it’s time to come clean—with Lynn, anyway—about Carrie Robinson’s troubled past.

But before he can say another word, he hears a jingling of keys at the door. Allison must be back.

“I have to go,” he tells Lynn as he hurriedly returns to the couch and sits. The furtive reaction is instinctive; he’s not sure where it comes from. Maybe he doesn’t want her to think he was snooping around her apartment.

“Wait,” Lynn protests. “Just tell me what you mean about—”

“Later.”

“But—”

“I’ll call you back in a little while.” He hangs up just as Allison opens the door.

Seeing him with the phone in his hand, she asks expectantly, “Any news?”

“No. That was my sister. Everything is status quo.”

She doesn’t look surprised. She isn’t expecting him to get any news, he realizes—not good news, maybe not even bad news. Nothing definitive. Not for a long time.

He thinks about the jet fuel that incinerated the top of Carrie’s building and everything—everyone—it encountered. He thinks of the massive destruction downtown. It’s going to take weeks for them to dig through it. Months, more likely. Maybe even years.

The families with missing loved ones are going to have a long wait before anyone confirms anything . . . but surely the truth is painfully clear.

“I checked the hospitals while I was out there,” Allison tells him. Her mood is noticeably more subdued; he wonders how bad it was, out on the streets today. He doesn’t want to know. Not yet.