Nora looks at Keith. “We need to go.”
“I don’t know . . . I mean, the doors are locked, and she’s got the dog,” he adds, as if Kato is a ferocious Rottweiler.
“Lennon just got back to me.” Jules waves her phone. “He’s at a party. Sorry. I really thought they were supposed to be together at your place tonight. Stacey should go hang out with Piper and Courtney.”
“It’s okay. I’m sure everything is fine at home,” Keith says. “She just gets a little . . . She’s always been an anxious kid.”
“That’s why we should get home.”
“You sound like a new mom dealing with a frantic babysitter and colicky infant,” Heather tells Nora, while sending a rapid-fire text on her own phone. “Stacey’s a big girl. She can handle it. I just told Courtney she’s coming over and to keep an eye out for her.”
“What? No! She won’t want to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’d be embarrassed!” Nora’s voice is sharper and louder than she’d intended. The cozy young couple at the next table falls silent and looks over.
Keith touches her arm. “Nora . . .”
She shakes him off and shoves back her chair. “I’m going to talk to her.”
She flees into the night air. The street is crowded and bright, strung with light strings and festive red and green bunting. Chatter, laughter, and jaunty old-fashioned organ-grinder music spill from a rollicking bistro across the way. The air wafts with pungent garlic and cigarette smoke.
Thinking of Jacob, Nora dials Stacey’s phone.
She answers on the first ring with a breathless “Mom?”
“What’s going on? Dad said you thought you saw someone watching the house? Did you see what he looked like?”
A pause. “No. Why?”
“I don’t know, I just . . . I mean, if you think you saw a man, that’s the logical question, right?”
“It was dark out there. It was just, you know . . . the silhouette of someone with binoculars.”
“And Dad said you think someone approached you on the street this after—”
“I don’t think things happen, like some delusional crazy person! It happened, and so did this! I didn’t make it up!”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“Mom, I’m fine now, okay? I’m sorry I said anything. Go back to your dinner.”
“Stace—”
She’s hung up.
Nora exhales a shaky breath and leans her head back, eyes closed. When she opens them, she’s looking at the sky, stars lost in the ambient glare of neon and light strings.
What now? She can’t bring herself to go back into the restaurant.
At the curb, a cab pulls up to dispatch a family of three. Father, mother, teenage daughter. The parents are bickering as they head toward the crowded bistro, the girl trailing behind, sullen and fixated on her phone.
The man has Stanley Toska’s swarthy complexion, the woman Lena’s worry lines. But the girl . . .
Her gaze briefly meets Nora’s as she passes.
The girl has Gertrude Williams’s lifeless eyes.
Memento mori . . .
Remember, you must die.
Remember, you are dead.
The roof light on their vacated cab flicks to Available.
Nora considers jumping in.
Where would you even go?
Anywhere, in this moment, would be better than home and better than back to the table to eat food with strangers, her husband included. She doesn’t trust them. Any of them.
“Taxi!” A pair of tourists with flailing maps and fanny packs rushes past her and snaps up the cab.
Nora watches it pull away, leaving her stranded on a frenetic street where the lights are garish and the air reeks and the organ-grinder music swamps her like an encroaching tide.
She doesn’t recognize the melody, but it triggers a familiar one in her head.
No.
She can’t stand here listening to it, wondering about what might have happened in her distant past that has something to do with that song, or with a mulberry bush, a monkey . . .
She pivots back to the restaurant. Through the wide window, she can see Keith, Jules, and Heather, candlelit and animated and twirling pasta on their forks.
She thinks about that first day at the dog run. How she’d just happened to meet Heather.
Brooklyn is the biggest small world in the world, she’d said when Nora marveled that they lived on the same block, just a few doors apart. And Jules . . .
Jules had lived there around the time the triple homicide occurred. She claims she knew the victims. Her son wants to write a book about it. Her son is making Stacey cry, saying that she’s adopted, that Nora is a fake.
If not for that chance meeting at the dog run, this new life might have been the healing fresh start Nora had intended. Her family might never have found out about the murders.
None of them, not even Keith, suspects that it hadn’t been news to Nora.
Or that the rainy Sunday last month hadn’t been her first visit to 104 Glover Street.
Stacey
Dammit. Stacey should have known better than to call Dad and tell him about the man on the roof.
She does know better.
Stacey’s mood swings and quirky habits and appearance don’t mean there’s something wrong with her . . .
Those words echo back as she paces her small bedroom holding her phone, ignoring the incoming text vibration. It’s either from her parents or from Piper.
There’s no way Stacey’s going to run scared down the street to her little sister, at Lennon’s house, no less. No way in hell.
“I can’t do that,” she’d told her father when he’d suggested it, saying it would only be for an hour, hour and a half at the most, until they get home.
“But why not? If you’re scared to stay home alone, then—”
“I’m not scared to stay home alone!” she shouted into the phone.
Yes, she is. But not like that. Not like a little girl frightened that the boogeyman might be hiding under the bed.
The boogeyman is right there in the open, watching her, calling her Anna . . .
If you see something, say something.
When she did, her father seemed to assume she only thought she’d seen something. And when she insisted that she had, he said that if she thought she was in danger, she needed to call 9–1–1.
She would have, if not for that conversation she’d overheard months ago.
I think she might be unstable and I want her to see a psychiatrist . . .
“I don’t think I’m in danger! I am not crazy!” she screamed at her father into the phone.
He told her to calm down. She hung up on him.
A minute later, he’d texted her that he’d told Piper she was on her way.
Dammit, dammit, dammit.
He’s the one who’d defended her months ago, when her mother wanted to send her to a shrink. That’s why she’d chosen to call him instead of Mom. But tonight, his attitude made it clear that he, too, questions her sanity.
Stacey herself is no longer even certain about what she’d seen.