Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(53)
Mack isn’t sure how he feels about that. He always liked Nathan—and Zoe was a great girl—but bringing new friends into the mix isn’t usually his department. Allison is the keeper of their social calendar, and he’s just fine with that.
Oh well. She might be open to meeting a new mom, considering that the ones she’s been hanging around with lately—in the neighborhood, at the girls’ playdates, and at her book club—have been getting on her nerves. Not Randi, of course—but they don’t see enough of each other anymore. Randi’s kids are older; she lives across town, travels in different circles.
Things change.
Sometimes for the better, but sometimes . . .
Mack leaves Nathan with a promise to talk to Allison about Saturday night.
As he makes his way to his car, he can hear a chain saw nearby; a crew working to clear fallen limbs from a neighboring street. His polished black wingtips crunch through what’s left of the weekend snow as he makes his way to his car; the musty scent of fallen leaves and sawdust mingling with wood smoke.
Unless it’s raining or he’s running late when he leaves in the morning, he always tries to park the BMW in the farthest corner of the commuter lot. He’s found that he enjoys the stroll to and from his car—even that short time somehow adding to the buffer zone between the harried world of work and the comforting one of home.
Although home, lately, has been just as harried.
Three kids . . . he loves them dearly, but they can be overwhelming.
“Do you and Allison seriously want to be outnumbered?” he remembers Ben asking him when he mentioned, almost two years ago, that they were thinking of trying for a third child.
At the time, Mack laughed.
Then J.J. came along, and there are some days that Mack and Allison seem to be outnumbered by far more than just one baby.
Not, Mack thinks hastily—and a bit guiltily—as he unlocks the car, that I’d have it any other way.
He rolls down the window to let the chilly air waft inside as he drives toward home, past heaps of fallen branches and toppled utility poles, and a cluster of political signs that somehow withstood the tempest. Election Day is still a week away, but with snow still heaped along the curb and shovels propped beside doors, it looks more like the holiday season. Already, several old-fashioned storefronts along Glenhaven Avenue have exchanged their rustic harvest-themed window displays for tinsel and silk poinsettias.
Mack may not have welcomed the havoc wreaked by the early snowstorm, but he isn’t one of those people who consider early November much too soon to start thinking about the holidays. He’s always loved Christmas—but that’s not why. In his mind, the holiday season marks the end of the period that began around Labor Day with a barrage of haunting reminders of losing Carrie on September 11, and his mother the October before that.
Tonight, there are sirens, and they grow louder as he draws close to home.
It’s all right. Don’t get yourself all worked up for no reason.
Maybe it’s just a leaf fire caused by a downed live wire—though he can’t smell anything burning now through the open window.
Well, if something were wrong at home, Allison would have called him.
But then, turning onto Orchard Terrace, he sees emergency vehicles, red lights flashing, parked in front of his house.
He hits the gas, full speed ahead until a cop steps out in front of him, waving his arms and shouting, “Slow down! What do you think you’re—”
“That’s my house!” Mack already has the car in park and is jumping out of the driver’s seat when he spots his wife.
Allison is standing with a couple of uniformed cops on the sidewalk, over by the bushes that divide the property from the Lewises’ house next door. She’s crying—but not hysterically. Not the way she would be if something had happened to one of the kids—a thought so horrific Mack didn’t allow it to fully form until now that he knows it’s not true. It can’t be. The children are Allison’s whole world. She wouldn’t be standing there talking, because her legs wouldn’t be holding her up and she’d be incoherent if the worst had happened.
Yet—something is obviously wrong.
His mind flashes back to another day when he saw her flanked by police officers, and he rushes toward her.
“Allison?”
“Mack!” She turns away from the cops.
“What happened?”
“Phyllis Lewis. Oh my God, Mack—he killed her.”
“What? Who? Who killed her?”
“Mrs. MacKenna,” one of the policemen puts a firm hand on her arm. “You don’t—”
“He did,” Allison is focused only on Mack. “I knew it wasn’t Jerry. I knew it all along. Jerry’s dead, but he isn’t. He came back, and he killed her.”
“Mrs. MacKenna, please!”
“Allison.” Mack takes her hand; it’s cold, so cold. “You don’t know—”
“Yes, I do,” she cuts in. “I do know.”
“How?”
Her next words slam into him like a runaway truck.
“Because she was wearing my nightgown.”
Chapter Nine
“Come on, girls, let’s go show Mommy and Daddy how well you packed all your things,” Randi announces loudly from the top of the stairs, and Allison, sitting in the living room, knows she’s sending down a warning: You need to pull yourself together fast so your daughters don’t see you crying.