Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(27)

But even then . . .

She never told Mack much about that life, either. Her parents were gone by the time he met her, and she said it was too painful to talk about her childhood. She mentioned having lived for a while in the Midwest, and he could occasionally hear it in her accent, so he knew that, at least, was the truth. But she never said where, exactly. On the few occasions he dared to ask, she shut down.

Who could blame her? She’d lived a difficult life, and she didn’t want to rehash it. He accepted that.

But that, of course, was before he met—and married—Allison.

She, too, had grown up in the Midwest and lived a difficult life. While she didn’t want to rehash it, she did share it with him. Because that’s what you do in a relationship, right? It’s only natural to tell each other about the individual journeys that led to the point where your lives converged. It helps you to understand where the other person is coming from.

But Carrie was in the witness protection program, Mack reminds himself. That’s not the same thing as just having a troubled childhood.

It would be natural for someone who had lived her formative years essentially in hiding to continue to act as though she had something to hide.

But what if . . .

What if . . .

The thought flies from Mack’s head like an inadvertently released helium balloon.

He yawns, realizing that his brain is fuzzy and his limbs and spine have melded into the Tempur-Pedic mattress.

He yawns again.

Hmm . . .

Maybe the Dormipram is actually going to work.

With the house quiet and everyone—including Mack—upstairs in bed, Allison finally found a chance to get online and run Jerry Thompson’s name through a search engine. It’s something she’s been tempted to do for the last couple of days, but she just hasn’t had time.

Really? You’ve had time for other things. Reading two chapters in this month’s book club selection, sorting through the baby’s dresser to get rid of clothes he’s outgrown, having lunch with Randi. . .

All right, so maybe she was trying to avoid the ugly subject.

Maybe she thought that if she ignored what had happened, Jerry would just leave her life once and for all. But somehow, with his death, he’s come alive again in her head.

She keeps hearing his voice, remembering how halting it was the few times she heard him speak. She keeps seeing that vacant stare of his—not evil-vacant, the way people have described other serial killers’ eyes, but more like . . .

The lights are on but nobody’s home.

That’s what Allison thought the first time she ever crossed paths with Jerry the handyman.

Dim-witted doesn’t equal guileless, she reminds herself.

Still, having grown up fending for herself, she learned early on how to read other people, instinctively grasping whom she could trust and who might be dangerous.

Not dangerous, necessarily, in a physical sense, but dangerous to her emotional well-being. It would have been harsh enough to grow up in an impoverished single-parent household in a gossip-fueled, intolerant small town. But with a deadbeat father who walked out one day and never looked back, and a mother whose drug habit was common knowledge . . .

Yes, Allison learned exactly whom she could trust back in her hometown: not a soul.

Later, in college and in Manhattan, she did eventually forge relationships with friends and with a few men she dated. But her instincts about new people always proved to be dead-on.

How could she have been so wrong about Jerry?

How could she not have known?

Somehow, she should have picked up on something about him.

But you didn’t, okay? Why is this nagging you ten years later, especially now?

You have to let it die with him. You have to.

Sitting here on the couch in her cozy lamp-lit living room, she’s read everything she could find on the Internet about his suicide. She’s hoping that if her lingering questions are answered, she’ll be able to put it to rest once and for all.

She learned that he’d done it with poison. He’d swallowed cleaning fluid.

It’s not clear how he managed to get his hands on it. One of the guards was quoted—anonymously, of course—as saying that inmates who work on janitorial duty have been known to smuggle chemicals into their cells.

But Jerry worked in the prison library. According to the guard, he wouldn’t have had access to cleaning fluid.

So what does that mean? That he convinced someone to get it for him? God only knows what he had to do in return.

So what? He was an animal. He deserved whatever he got, and then some.

Another guard reported that it wasn’t an easy death, or a pretty one.

Yeah, well, neither was Kristina Haines’s.

Allison closes out of the last screen, leans her head back, and exhales slowly through her nostrils.

Okay.

Now she knows.

Now are you satisfied?

She listens for an answer, but all she hears is a dog barking someplace outside and the ticking of the clock in the next room. It’s an antique. Mack’s sister, Lynn, gave it to them when they bought the house.

“It used to be our grandmother’s,” she told Allison, “and then it was in our house when we were growing up. I took it when Mack and I were packing up the house to sell it. I took just about everything, because he was afraid to.”

“What do you mean?”