Lennon was upset, speaking so loudly that Nora could hear his end of the conversation.
“I figured out I must have dropped it, like, two minutes after I walked away,” he told his mother. “But when I went back for it, it was already gone. Someone must have seen it and picked it up.”
“Okay, calm down, baby. It’s okay. I’ll help you.”
Jules’s efforts to placate him got under Nora’s skin. He wanted a replacement phone immediately—a better one, as if the phone would never have been lost in the park if it had been the latest, most expensive model. Jules promised to meet him in Manhattan after his guitar lesson and buy it for him, though it sounded like it would be something of a scavenger hunt to find one in stock.
Preoccupied with her own problems, Nora thought it was no wonder the kid expected his relationships to revolve around his own needs. Then she put the missing phone out of her head.
But when she saw those texts, she knew.
The heart emoji, followed by of mine . . .
Heart of mine . . .
Jacob.
If Jacob had been following Stacey, watching her, then he could have found that phone and been clever enough to use it to lure Stacey to the park.
Just not clever enough to suspect that someone might be one step ahead of him.
Again.
But then, she hadn’t known he was there that January night in 1994, had she? That he’d seen . . .
His last words ring in her ears.
I’m going to kill Ellie.
He thought Stacey was Ellie and he said he was going to kill her, and—
But he won’t. Because it’s over. Because you did what you had to do to make sure that delusional son of a bitch will never hurt Stacey.
She bends over the crumpled figure at her feet and checks his pockets. Wallet, keys, and sure enough, two cell phones.
Taking everything but his cigarettes, she walks away, and the cold hard rain rinses his blood from her, into the muddy earth.
Stacey
Flipping through the pages, Stacey scrutinizes one snapshot after another, searching for some logical explanation for how her own baby photos came to be pasted in this album.
It takes her longer than it should to grasp that the photos are old—much older than she is. And when she calms down enough to realize that there’s writing in the margins, and then manages to actually read the captions, she sees that the handwriting isn’t her mother’s.
The baby isn’t Stacey.
Her name is Anastasia.
Anna.
It makes perfect sense. Not just the photo album, but the other contents of the box as well—the Toska family’s belongings, the stacks of cash, the evidence of lives lived in another place, under different identities.
This, then, is why the press accounts of the murders held so few photos of the Toskas, and none at all of Anna. The family was in hiding.
Ties to organized crime, Jules had said. And the murders were presumed to be a professional hit . . .
The box must have been hidden somewhere in the house. That, too, seems logical. The outside is caked in grime, and it smells damp, like wet dirt, as if it had been buried. Maybe it was. Maybe Mom dug it up when she was working in her garden.
It makes sense, now, most of it. Even the wild-eyed man on Edgemont Boulevard who’d called Stacey “Anna.” All but one thing:
Why does Anna Toska, a stranger born in 1975, look exactly like Stacey?
Nora
There’s a long line of young people waiting in the rain outside Lovely ’Ritas when Nora pays her fare with cash and steps out of the cab.
She steps over the streaming gutter, around a deep puddle, and retraces the path she and Jules had taken earlier.
Neon signs and streetlamps are reflected in shiny pavement and plate glass windows. Music, laughter, conversation, and people spill into the street. Several clubs have long lines; others just a scattering of smokers huddled beneath dripping awnings.
No one pays any attention to her, but even if they glanced in her direction, they’d see nothing out of the ordinary. Just the hooded figure of a woman, walking. No reason to later connect her to the anonymous dead derelict in the park.
She rounds a corner onto a dark, quiet block at the river’s edge. The commotion falls behind her as the deserted warehouse looms. From the sidewalk and street, water access is blocked by buildings and security gates.
But not from the roof.
She ducks along an alley to the door she and Jules had used to access the garden and quickly enters the four-digit code she’d committed to memory: 1–2–4–4 . . .
The lock clicks.
Her footsteps echo along the cavernous corridor. The elevator is waiting on the ground floor. She steps in and presses R, for roof.
It jerks into motion, seeming to rise inch by agonizing inch.
She does her best to stay calm. She can’t allow panic to overtake her. Not when she’s come twenty-five years, thousands of miles, full circle, to make things right.
Memento mori . . .
She thinks of them all—the lost people she’d once loved.
Just a few more minutes, a few more steps, and it will be over.
At last, the doors open. She exits onto the rooftop into a cold, drenching wind and walks to the edge. She looks out at the iconic skyline glittering against a black sky, then down at blacker water far below.
Memento mori.
Remember you must die.
Jacob’s words, too, echo in her head.
Maybe she couldn’t live with herself after what she did . . .
She takes a deep, shuddering breath.
She reaches into her pocket and takes out the gun.
Memento mori . . .
It lands with a splash far below. The keys follow, and the wallet, one phone, the other phone, and then it’s over.
Maybe she couldn’t live with herself . . .
And maybe now she can.
Stacey
Stacey put the box back under her parents’ bed, but carried the album to her own room. She’s just sitting, holding it in her lap, questions twisting her brain every which way, trying to avoid the only answer that could possibly make sense . . .
Because it doesn’t.
Sirens wail in the night. More sirens than usual, it seems. Or is it that the rain drowned them out, making them more noticeable now that it’s trickled to a steady drip . . . drip . . . drip . . .
Another sound reaches her ears.
Downstairs, the front door opens and closes. Either Mom is home, or Dad and Piper are.
Footsteps.
Just one set, not two.
She waits for her mother to come upstairs. She’s going to open Stacey’s door, and say . . . what?
Something about Lennon? Had she talked to his moms, or directly to him? Had he denied watching her from the roof next door? And sending the texts . . .