Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(16)

“I mean you should see Dr. Cuthbert sooner than that,” Allison tells him now. “You’re home this week, and—”

“Why do I need to see him sooner? I did everything he said to do. I stopped drinking coffee after noon, I bought the Tempur-Pedic mattress that cost a fortune, I—”

“I know, but none of that seems to be enough. You can’t go on like this, not sleeping at night, grouchy during the day . . .”

“It’s been this way all my life, Allie. You know that. I’m sorry I’m grouchy.”

“I’m just worried about you.”

“I’m okay. Some days—nights—are worse than others, but I’ll live.”

“There’s no reason to for you to suffer, Mack.”

Something flashes in his eyes, and then is gone. She recognizes the expression, though.

Guilt.

“Maybe you don’t want to help yourself,” she hears herself suggesting. “Maybe you’re still trying to punish yourself.”

“For what?”

“For Carrie going off to work and dying on the very morning you told her you wanted a divorce.”

The words are harsh, but true. How many times has she heard him utter them himself?

She knows his story; knows that ten years ago on a rainy Monday night in September, Carrie told Mack she was putting an end to her infertility treatments, no longer interested in trying to conceive a child.

Mack was devastated.

The next morning, he told her their marriage was over. She walked out, and he never saw her again.

That’s a hefty burden for anyone to live with. Is it any wonder he can’t sleep at night?

“I had insomnia long before that happened, Allison,” he says evenly.

“I know, but it’s worse than ever.”

“It’ll get better. This is the anniversary. When everything dies down—”

“But you and I both know that it’s never going to go away.”

There was always something, it seemed, to bring back the pain.

A few years ago, it had been the death in Iraq of a young soldier named Marcus. Mack had mentored him years ago through his volunteer work with the Big Brother organization, and they’d stayed in touch over the years, though Allison had never met him. Mack took the news that he’d been killed pretty hard.

She had thought he might finally find some measure of closure last spring, when the mastermind behind his wife’s murder was killed in Pakistan. But Bin Laden’s death only seemed to unexpectedly dredge up the pain again, at a time when Mack was totally unprepared for it.

Looking back, Allison knows that was when Mack’s latest bout with insomnia began.

It only got worse last month when a freak earthquake struck the East Coast. Exactly like the terrorist attack just shy of ten years earlier, it hit out of nowhere on a sunny summer Tuesday. In the midst of a sales call on a high floor of the Empire State Building, Mack had—like countless other Manhattanites—flashed back to September 11. For a nerve-rattling couple of minutes, he was sure the skyscraper beneath his feet had been hit by a plane, or a bomb.

Long after he knew what had really happened, he was up all night, still shell-shocked.

“I don’t know why I can’t get it out of my head,” he told Allison. “It was just . . . I don’t know. Maybe if it hadn’t been a Tuesday. I hate Tuesdays.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d said that over the years, prone to noticing the bad things that happened on that particular day of the week. Allison had long since given up trying to convince him that just as many bad things—and good things—happened on other days of the week, but Mack didn’t buy it.

He’d met Carrie on a Tuesday, he said, and his mother had died on a Tuesday, and of course, so had Carrie . . .

And now this, today—Jerry Thompson all over the news. Dead.

“You need help, Mack,” she tells him. “You need to take care of yourself and get some rest, or the stress is going to kill you. If you won’t see Dr. Cuthbert about the sleep issues, then maybe we can find a psychiatrist—”

“No,” he cuts in quickly. “No way. I don’t need a shrink. I don’t have time for a shrink. I can’t sleep, okay? That’s my only problem.”

“It’s a big problem. You need to make an appointment to see Dr. Cuthbert again. Look, I’ll go call him right now and see if he can get you in this week—later today, or tomorrow, while you’re home.”

Mack just looks at her.

But he’s considering it. She can see it. He’s almost reached his breaking point.

She reaches out and touches him on the arm. “Come on. I love you. Let me help you. Do it for me. Okay?”

He shrugs. “Okay.”

Hunched over beneath the low ceiling of the crawl space, Jamie throws one last shovelful of dirt over the spot.

There.

Dead and buried—literally.

Jamie stamps over the freshly disturbed earth with the thick soles of her work boots. Just as hastily as she’d changed into the heels and pantyhose, skirt and sweater before the old man came knocking, she’d changed out of them again.

Not just because lugging the old man down to the crawl space and burying him was going to be dirty work, but because everything she was wearing had been spattered with blood. It’s probably not going to come out, either. The clothes and shoes will have to be bagged up and thrown in a Dumpster miles from here.