Caught up in the Toska family album, she’d all but forgotten about the messaging shorthand that made her suspect someone else had been responsible. Now she’s not even sure about that—about anything—other than that she needs to end the relationship. It doesn’t feel like love. It feels like control—his intensity, his all-encompassing need to be with her, to tell her how to be.
It’s going to be a messy breakup. But she can get through it, when the time comes. Right now, her more pressing concern is finding answers about the photos she saw.
Below, the footsteps move through the first floor to the back of the house. She hears the distinct creak of the door opening to the basement. After a few minutes, water groans through old pipes—the washing machine.
Mom is doing laundry?
Under ordinary circumstances, it wouldn’t surprise Stacey, even at this hour on a Saturday night. Maybe she should take it as a sign that whatever happened down the street wasn’t earth-shattering.
Nora
Naked, shivering, and scrubbed clean, Nora steps out of the basement shower stall and wraps herself in a towel. She’d plucked it from a basket of laundry waiting to be folded, and her terry cloth robe from the dryer.
She should have grabbed another towel to use as a bath mat. She wraps herself in the robe and walks barefoot, careful not to slip on the linoleum. It’s cracked and ugly, gold with brown flecks, installed by the family that had lived here from the 1960s until 1986.
By then, the Toskas had been in New York for a few years. They had, as WITSEC required, assimilated into their new identities and become self-sufficient. They bought 104 Glover Street in Lena’s name. She’d never changed her will after the divorce and remarriage to Stanley. That left her first husband as beneficiary in the event that her only child, Anastasia, didn’t survive her.
If not for that unexpected twist in a tragic tale, this house would never have stood empty for twenty-five years. The Howell family would now be living instead in some tiny Manhattan apartment, or perhaps Nora and the girls wouldn’t have accompanied Keith after all.
If he’d come to New York alone, their marriage would have been over. They couldn’t go on the way they were even under the same roof. With a few thousand miles between them, they’d have become strangers—even more than they already are.
But it’s not too late. They still love each other. They just have work to do. Now, at last, she can give their relationship the attention it deserves, and even find a way to build the career she’d sacrificed for her family.
Strange how things worked out, she thinks as she climbs the basement steps.
Kato is waiting for her with an expectant wag of his tail.
“You want a treat, don’t you? Okay, boy. You deserve it.”
If he hadn’t found those binoculars, she wouldn’t have realized that a violent, dangerous man had been watching this house, watching her daughter.
She glances at the empty shed roof next door as she turns off the kitchen light.
Should she feel remorse for killing a man who’d been watching her house, stalking her child, seeking vengeance for a crime that in his madness, he thought Stacey—as Ellie—had committed?
No. She should feel only relief. With Jacob gone, her daughter—her family—will be safe.
And so will your secret.
No one will ever know who she really is. She’s finally free to heal and move on.
She takes a last satisfied look around the kitchen, taking in the modern appliances, expensive cabinetry, sleek countertops and backsplash.
She’d picked out everything from afar, envisioning how it would look in a house she hadn’t seen in years and at the time, believed she might never see again. That was back in 2012, after Hurricane Sandy had left the house with significant water damage.
“It needs a lot of work,” Teddy told her, after flying to New York to inspect it. “What do you say? Is it time to sell?”
“It’s your house. I can’t stop you, if you want to—”
“It’s my house in name only.”
Yes. Because Teddy had inherited from her husband, Victor. Because the rightful heir—the daughter he’d had with his first wife—no longer exists.
“This is your decision, my love,” Teddy said. “I just worry that hanging on to it makes it impossible for you to fully move on.”
“Then do the work and get ready to sell.”
But even after the house had been repaired, and renovated, she couldn’t let it go. It just sat there like a monument to tragedy.
Forget-me-not . . .
When Keith told her about the move to New York, she instructed Teddy to hire a rental agent.
“But make sure you retain full approval over the new tenant. And I don’t want it listed until Keith and I get to New York. I want to be the first to see it.”
“Then you’re not going to tell him—”
“No! I’ll let him think I stumbled across it.”
Silence. Then Teddy asked if maybe it was time for her to tell her husband the truth at last. “He already thinks you’ve been unfaithful. Wouldn’t it be best to set him straight about that, and—”
“You mean, tell him that I’m not who he thinks I am? That I’ve lied to him from the moment we met? How is that best? If I do that now, Teddy, while we’re on shaky ground, I’ll lose him. Maybe I can tell him the truth someday, but first I have to deal with it and resolve it, just like you said. All I want is to heal without losing anyone else I love.”
And now, tonight, at last, she can start.
It’s a most fitting birthday gift for the woman who’d been born to Victor and Magdalena Montgomery on this date in 1975.
Anastasia Montgomery—later known as Anna Toska—now known as Nora Howell.
Stacey
Standing at the top of the stairs, Stacey watches her mother ascend.
She’s wearing a robe, and her hair is still wet. Or is it wet again? Had Stacey been wrong that she’d left the house? Maybe she’d been here all along.
But something is different about her. The urgency and concern have been lifted; her energy no longer weighted.
“Mom?”
She looks up, startled. Sees Stacey, and then sees the photo album in her hands.
“Where did you get that?” Her voice sounds strangled. She climbs the last few steps slowly.
“I found it in your room. I was looking for you, and I saw it.”
A veil descends over her mother’s face. What is she hiding?
Maybe Stacey really is adopted, as Lennon had guessed, and Mom had denied. Maybe that explains what she found in the album.
Though, how? It still wouldn’t make sense.
The thing that would make sense, the absolutely preposterous thing, tries to push its way into her brain. She shoves it back, talking instead of thinking, her tone too bright, the words rushed, a statement and not the intended question.
“Mom, the little girl in these pictures . . . she looks exactly like me.”
Her mother opens her mouth, closes it, and looks away.
For a long moment, she stares down at dead Gertrude Williams and her family, hanging on the stair wall.
Then she turns slowly back to Stacey, wearing a peculiar expression.
Stacey thinks of Margaret Williams, and Lizzie Borden. Such nice, respectable, normal women . . .
Until they snapped.
Anna
Memento mori.