Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(55)

Chapter Nine

When the alarm goes off on Thursday morning, Allison rolls over and hits the snooze button, same as she does every weekday at seven A.M. She’s about to doze off again for a few minutes, as usual, when she remembers.

Her eyes snap open.

The terror attack.

Kristina.

The knife.

Is this what it’s going to be like from now on? Will she spend the first few seconds of every morning in blissful oblivion before harsh reality hits her all over again?

It was like this after her mother died. But only for the first few days, when her brother came to stay with her in the house in Centerfield.

She would wake up in her own bed and she would think everything was normal—a relative description, in her world, anyway.

Then it would hit her, and she’d force herself to get up to face another long day of packing up her mother’s things and dealing with strangers who were obligated—professionally, morally, guiltily obligated—to help her. They only made things harder, all of them, regardless of their motives. She didn’t want anyone’s pity—not even her brother’s.

“You want to come back and live with me and Cindy-Lou?” Brett offered—reluctantly, she could tell. “I can ask her folks if it’s okay . . .”

“No, thanks. I want to finish school here,” Allison told him.

And the second she had her diploma, she wanted to get the hell out of there—not just Centerfield, but Nebraska, the Midwest.

So Brett signed some papers, and she went to live with a foster family on a farm just outside of town. Every morning before dawn, a rooster’s crow would jar her from a sound sleep, reverberating instant awareness about where she was—rather, where she wasn’t—and what she had lost.

That was hard.

Is this harder?

Maybe they’re a blessing—those first few misty moments of morning, when you’re allowed to forget what your life is really like today.

But then you remember and you suck it up and deal, the way you always have.

Allison sits up and pulls back the covers. The knife is there, on the mattress.

Great. She could have rolled over on it and cut herself in her sleep.

She leaves it there, gets out of bed, and goes over to the window. Looking down at the street, she notes that there are no longer police cars parked in front of the building.

What does that mean?

Is it over?

Did they arrest Kristina’s killer sometime in the night?

Was it Jerry?

The way he behaved in the laundry room . . .

And the way he furtively ducked out into the alley that night . . .

It had to be Jerry.

Not Mack . . .

No way.

Allison goes into the living room and takes the chair out from beneath the doorknob. For all she knows, Kristina’s killer could have tried to get in here with the key sometime in the night, and could have been stopped by the chair.

Somehow, though, Allison doubts it.

She starts a pot of coffee, then starts the computer, thinking she can find the names of a couple of locksmiths and call one this morning. As the brewing and the booting get underway, she showers and throws on a T-shirt and the same jeans she wore yesterday, the one pair of functional old Levi’s she keeps around for cleaning days and sick days.

Farm girl clothes, she used to call them, back in Nebraska. She used to wear black spandex and suede stilettos to school when everyone else was in jeans and boots—the kind of boots you wear to muck out stalls. Even the girls.

Allison vowed she would never go out in public looking like that.

Yesterday, she left the building in these tattered jeans, and she had on sneakers, no less, on the streets of Manhattan.

Yesterday, it didn’t seem to matter. Today, though . . . today will be different. Today, she needs to look like herself again, feel like herself again. That’s important.

People like to say that what’s on the outside doesn’t count, but they’re wrong, as far as Allison is concerned. It’s always best to look like you’ve got it together even when the world is falling apart around you and you’re falling apart inside. That way, at least you can pretend you’re okay, and people give you some space. If you feel like hell and you look like hell, people hover, trying to help.

Before her mother’s funeral seven years ago, one of the church ladies insisted on taking Allison shopping in Omaha for something “suitable” to wear to the service. The drive was interminable—the lady kept talking about how Allison had nothing to worry about, because God was going to save her.

Really? Is God going to give me my mom back—not my mom the way she was, but healthy and strong, wanting to live, wanting to take care of me . . . And, while he’s at it, is he going to give me a dad, too? Not my dad. A decent one. One who will stick around.

She didn’t say any of that to the church lady, of course. Her mother had taught her to be polite to her elders. Her manners always seemed to catch people off guard, though. Given the way she and Mom lived, they probably assumed she was a rude, rough-around-the-edges brat.

When the church lady walked Allison into Von Maur, the fancy department store, she loudly informed the saleswoman that “this little lady’s mama has just killed herself, isn’t it awful? She was on drugs.” That last word was stage-whispered, and delivered with a knowing, disgusted nod. “Poor little thing needs something respectable to wear to the funeral.”