But when Stacey walked next door to the Edgemont Grind, there she was.
She was stunned to see her mother, and mostly dismayed, but also maybe a tiny bit relieved. If the strange man popped up again now, Mom wouldn’t let anything happen to her. Maybe she’d admit to Stacey that she’s been spooked, too, about living in the house. Maybe she’d tell Dad they have to get out of here, move back to California.
Is that what you want?
Right now, Stacey isn’t sure. She only knows that telling her mother about the conflict with Lennon had been a bad idea. Telling her about the stranger who’d called her Anna would have been a worse one.
Good thing the conversation blew up before she could mention it.
Mom already wants her to see a psychiatrist. At least she had, back in California. She probably still does.
Maybe you should. Maybe you imagined that man.
Lennon hadn’t seen him, and he was right across the street.
The others had, though—the guys in the cardigan sweaters, and a few people who’d come running to her rescue . . .
Unless they weren’t real, either.
She peers out the window alongside the door. If they’re out there on Glover Street now, watching the house, then they’re only in her head, like the eerie crowd Jack saw in the hotel bar in The Shining.
They’re not there.
“At least you’re not crazy,” she murmurs to herself, turning away to see a human shadow looming in the hall. She screams, loud and high. Somewhere in the back of the house, Kato starts barking.
“Stacey!”
It’s just her father. She presses a hand to her racing heart.
“Sorry, Dad, I . . . I didn’t think . . . I asked if anyone was home when I came in.”
“I just got here. I was out back looking for Mom, but she’s not there. I wanted to show her—I joined a fitness center.” He’s wearing sweats and sneakers, and holding a membership folder.
As he tells her about the facility’s state-of-the-art equipment, she nods as if she’s interested, wishing she could escape to her room.
“I got the family membership, so you and Piper and Mom can go, too.”
“I’m really not much of a gym person, Dad.” Like, not at all.
“That’s okay. Piper and Mom will go. I wonder where she is?”
“Mom? She’s at the Edgemont Grind. I just saw her there when I stopped for coffee.”
A strange look crosses his face. “Who is she with?”
“She’s by herself.”
“Is she meeting someone?”
“I don’t think so. She has her laptop.”
“Huh.”
Stacey turns toward the stairs. Her gaze falls on the Victorian portrait.
“By the way, Dad . . . did Mom tell you about . . .” She points at the photo. “Memento mori?”
“What?”
Stacey explains, his eyes widen, and he ascends the stairs to examine the portrait.
He turns back to her with a grim nod. “It does look that way. But I doubt Mom knows about it, because she would have mentioned it.”
“To you. Not to Piper and me, because she doesn’t want us to be scared to live here.”
She hesitates, longing to tell him about the watcher, and Anna . . .
Then she sees the troubled, distracted expression in his blue eyes. Now isn’t the time.
“You’re right,” he says. “Mom doesn’t want to say anything that might upset any of us. Do me a favor, and don’t mention it to Piper, okay?”
Stacey promises that she won’t, tells him she’s got some studying to do, and escapes to her room.
She dumps the contents of the shopping bag on her bed. She examines the toiletries and then stashes them in the back of a drawer.
She opens the pack of cigarettes, takes one out, and holds it the way Lennon had shown her. She’s tempted to light it and practice, but her father might smell it. So she stands in front of a mirror and goes through the motions to see how she looks.
Wow. Much older and much cooler.
Back home, she wouldn’t have dreamed of smoking. None of the smart kids did.
Right. Because they know it’s stupid and addictive and toxic.
Why, if Stacey knows that, too, does it seem like a good idea now?
Because Lennon smokes, and she wants to impress him?
Yeah, maybe that’s part of it. But it’s the stress, too. The sudden doubt about who she is, and whether her parents are her parents. And living here, with the growing certainty that someone’s watching the house, watching her. Maybe he’s just some random creeper. Or maybe he’s the escaped murderer.
Everything she’s read about the Toska family theorizes that the father’s suspected involvement in organized crime had led to contract killing.
Hit men don’t typically take out the wives and children.
And a hit man wouldn’t return to the scene of the crime. And if he’d killed Anna Toska, he wouldn’t be looking for her, or confusing a stranger with her, twenty-five years later.
So who would?
She hides the cigarettes in the back of a drawer and grabs her laptop.
Opening a search window on her laptop, she types in Toska Family Homicide Brooklyn January 1994, and hits Enter.
Nora
Nora picks up a small flat of potted herbs on the way home from Edgemont Grind. It’s late in the season for tender annuals, but she needs a reason not to spend the rest of the afternoon in the house, where Keith will be impossible to avoid.
He’s dozing in his leather recliner in front of a televised college football game when she walks in, and barely turns his head at her greeting.
“Where were you?”
“Doing errands on the Boulevard. And I had coffee with Stacey.”
“I heard.” He’s focused on the television.
Maybe because an intense play is unfolding on the field. Or maybe because he’s still stewing in the earlier tension between them.
“Jules and Heather invited us to have dinner with them tonight in Little Italy. What do you think?” she asks, as if it’s an option and not an accepted invitation with a reservation for four.
“Sounds great.”
“Great.”
She spends the rest of the afternoon in the garden, planting, weeding, watering, and trying to not think about the past. Jacob.
Nora’s dressing for dinner when Piper pops into the master bedroom to return the credit card, weighed down with shopping bags and brimming with anecdotes about her day with Courtney.
“Did you get your snow boots?”
“Boots? Yes.”
“Let’s see.”
“I’ll model them for you later. Courtney said you and Dad are going out with her parents, so we’re getting takeout and having a sleepover at her house. She’s going to kick out her brother. Oh—I almost forgot! Did you know he and Stacey are together?”
“What? He’s in her room?” Nora hasn’t seen Stacey since she got home, but had called to her through her closed bedroom door to say she and Piper will be on their own for dinner.
“Mom! Not right this second. Not in her room! I meant in general. She’s—”
“His girlfriend. Yes, she told me.”