All the Way Home (52 page)
Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub
“I’m sure.”
The mid-segment of the hall opens up with an elaborately carved wooden railing along one side. This is the balcony of the grand staircase—that’s what Sandra likes to call it, anyway—that leads down to the entrance hall. Or foyer, pronounced
foy-yay
by Sandra.
Realtors, apparently, like to embellish.
The master bedroom at the far end of the hallway isn’t large by today’s standards. And it isn’t a suite by any stretch of the imagination, lacking a private bath, dressing room, or walk-in closet.
But that, of course, is what Sandra Lutz calls it as she opens the door for the second time today:
the master suite.
The room does look bigger and brighter than it did years ago, when it was filled with a suite of dark, heavy furniture and long draperies shielding the windows. Now bright summer sunlight floods the room, dappled by the leafy branches of a towering maple in the front yard.
“Here.” Sandra walks over to the far end of the room and indicates decorative paneling on the lower wall adjacent to the bay window. “This is what I was talking about. See how this wainscot doesn’t match the rest of the house? Everywhere else, it’s more formal, with raised panels, curved moldings, beaded scrolls. But this is a recessed panel—Mission style, not Victorian. Much more modern. The wood is thinner.”
She’s right. It is.
“And this”—she knocks on the maroon brocade wallpaper above it, exactly the same pattern but noticeably less faded than it is elsewhere in the room—“isn’t plaster like the other walls in the house. It’s drywall. Did you know that?”
“No.”
There wasn’t even wainscoting on that end of the room twenty years ago. Obviously, someone—Father?—rebuilt the wall and added the wainscoting, then repapered it, undoubtedly using one of the matching rolls stored years ago on a shelf in the dirt-floored basement.
“There’s a spot along here . . .” Sandra reaches toward the panels, running her fingertips along the molding of the one in the middle. She presses down, and it swings open. “There. There it is. See?”
Dust particles from the gaping dark hole behind the panel dance like glitter into sunbeams falling through the bay windows.
“Like I said, it’s about two feet deep. I wish I had a flashlight so that I could show you, but . . . see the floor in there? It’s refinished, exactly like this.”
She points to the hardwoods beneath their feet. “In the rest of the house, the hidden compartments have rough, unfinished wood. So obviously, this cubby space was added in recent years—it must have been while your family owned the house, because as I said, the room was two feet longer when it was listed by the previous owner.”
“When you opened the panel, was there . . . was this all that was inside?”
“The notebook?” Sandra nods. “That was it. It was just sitting on the floor in there, wrapped in the rosary. I gave it to you just the way I found it. I figured it might be some kind of diary or maybe a prayer journal . . . ?”
The question hangs like the dust particles in the air between them and then falls away unanswered.
Predictably, Sandra waits only a few seconds before filling the awkward pause. “I just love old houses. So much character. So many secrets.”
Sandra, you have no idea. Absolutely no idea.
“Is there anything else you wanted to ask about this or . . . anything?”
“No. Thank you for showing me.”
“You’re welcome. Should I . . . ?” She gestures at the wainscot panel.
“Please.”
Sandra pushes the panel back into place, and the hidden compartment is obscured—but not forgotten, by any means.
Does the fact that the Realtor speculated whether the notebook is a diary or prayer journal mean she really didn’t remove the rosary beads and read it when she found it?
Or is she trying to cover up the fact that she did?
Either way . . .
I can’t take any chances. Sorry, Sandra. You know where I live . . . now it’s my turn to find out where you live
.
That shouldn’t be hard.
An online search of recent real estate transactions on Wayside Avenue should be sufficient.
How ironic that Sandra Lutz had brought up Sacred Sisters’ proximity to her new house before the contents of the notebook had been revealed. In that moment, the mention of Sacred Sisters had elicited nothing more than a vaguely unpleasant memory of an imposing neighborhood landmark.
Now, however . . .
Now that I know what happened there . . .
The mere thought of the old school brings a shudder, clenched fists, and a resolve for vengeance. That Sandra Lutz lives nearby seems to make her, by some twisted logic, an accessory to a crime that must not go unpunished any longer.
They descend the so-called grand staircase to the first floor.
“Shall we go out the front door or the back?”
“Front.”
It’s closer, and the need to get out of this old house, with its dark, unsettling secrets and lies, is growing more urgent.
“I thought you might like to take a last look around before—”
“No, thank you.”
“All right, front door it is. I never really use it at my own house,” Sandra confides as she turns a key sticking out of the double-cylinder deadbolt and opens one of the glass-windowed double doors. “I have a detached garage and the back door is closer to it, so that’s how I come and go.”
Oh, for God’s sake, who cares?
“You know, your mother just had these locks installed about a year ago. She was afraid to be alone at night after your father passed away.”
Mother? Afraid to be alone?
Mother, afraid of anything at all—other than the wrath of God or Satan?
I don’t think so.
“What makes you assume that?”
“Not an assumption,” Sandra says defensively, stepping out onto the stoop and holding the door open. “Bob Witkowski told me that’s what she said.”
“
Who?
”
“Bob Witkowski. You know Al Witkowski, the mover? He lives right around the corner now, on Redbud Street, in an apartment above the dry cleaner’s. His wife just left him. Anyway, Bob is his brother. He’s a locksmith. I had him install these same double-cylinder deadbolts in my house when I first moved in, because I have windows in my front door, too. You can’t be too careful when you’re a woman living alone—I’m sure your mother knew that.”
“Yes.” The wheels are turning, turning, turning . . .
Stomach churning, churning, churning at the memory of Mother.
Mother, who constantly quoted the Ten Commandments, then broke the eighth with a lie so mighty that surely she’d lived out the rest of her days terrified by the prospect of burning in hell for all eternity.
“A lock like this is ideal for an old house with original glass-paned doors, because the only way to open it, even from the inside, is with a key,” Sandra is saying as she closes the door behind them and inserts the same key into the outside lock. “No one can just break the window on the door and reach inside to open it. Some people leave the key right in the lock so they can get out quickly in an emergency, but that defeats the purpose, don’t you think? I keep my own keys right up above my doors, sitting on the little ledges of molding. It would only take me an extra second to grab the key and get out if there was a fire.”
“Mmm hmm.”
“Of course, now that it’s summer, I keep my windows open anyway, so I guess that fancy lock doesn’t do much for me, does it? I really should at least fix the broken screen in the mudroom. Anyone could push through it and hop in.”
It’s practically an invitation.
Stupid, stupid woman.
Sandra gives a little chuckle. “Good thing this is still such a safe neighborhood, right?”
“Absolutely.”
Yes, and thanks to Sandra’s incessant babble, a plan has taken shape.
A plan that, if one were inclined to fret about breaking the Ten Commandments—
which I most certainly am not—
blatantly violates the fifth.
Thou Shalt Not Kill.
Oh, but I shall.
It won’t be the first time.
And it definitely won’t be the last.
Keep reading for
excerpts from
Wendy Corsi Staub’s
chilling new trilogy
September 2012
October 2012
February 2013
From HarperCollins
An Excerpt from
C
HAPTER
O
NE
September 10, 2001
New York City
7:19
P.M.
A
llison Taylor has lived in Manhattan for three years now.
That’s long enough to know that the odds are stacked against finding a taxi at the rainy tail end of rush hour—especially here, a stone’s throw from the Bryant Park tents in the midst of Fashion Week.
Yet she perches beneath a soggy umbrella on the curb at the corner of Forty-second and Fifth, searching the sea of oncoming yellow cabs, hoping to find an on-duty/unoccupied dome light.
Unlikely, yes.
But
impossible
? The word is overused, in her opinion. If she weren’t the kind of woman who stubbornly challenges anything others might deem impossible, then she wouldn’t be here in New York in the first place.
How many people back in her tiny Midwestern hometown told her it would be impossible for a girl like her to merely survive the big, cruel city, let alone succeed in the glamorous, cutthroat fashion publishing industry?
A girl like her . . .
Impoverished, from a broken home with a suicidal drug addict for a mother. A girl who never had a chance—but took one anyway.
And just look at me now.
After putting herself through the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and working her way from an unpaid post-college internship at Condé Nast on up through the editorial ranks at
7th Avenue
magazine, Allison finally loves her life—cab shortages, rainy days, and all.
Sometimes, she allows herself to fantasize about going back to Centerfield to show them all how wrong they were. The neighbors, the teachers, the pursed-lipped church ladies, the mean girls at school and their meaner mothers—everyone who ever looked at her with scorn or even pity; everyone who ever whispered behind her back.
They didn’t understand about Mom—about how much she loved Allison, how hard she tried, when she wasn’t high, to be a good mother. Only the one girl Allison considered a true friend, her next-door neighbor Tammy Connolly, seemed to understand. She, too, had a single mom for whom the townspeople had disdain. Tammy’s mother was a brassy blonde whose skirts were too short, whose perfume was too strong, whose voice was too loud.
Tammy had her own cross to bear, as the church ladies would say. Everyone did. Mom was Allison’s—hers alone—and she dealt with it pretty much single-handedly until the day it ceased to exist.
But going back to Centerfield—even to have the last laugh—would mean facing memories. And who needs those?
“Memories are good for nothin’,” Mom used to say, after Allison’s father left them. “It’s better to just forget about all the things you can’t change.”
True—but Mom couldn’t seem to change what was happening to them in the present—or what the future might hold.
“Weakness is my weakness,” Brenda once told a drug counselor. Allison overheard, and those pathetic words made her furious, even then.
Now Mom, too, is in the past.
Yes. Always better to forget.
Anyway, even if Allison wanted to revisit Centerfield, the town is truly the middle of nowhere: a good thirty miles from the nearest dive motel and at least three or four times as far from any semi-decent hotel.
Sometimes, though, she pictures herself doing it: flying to Omaha, renting a car, driving out across miles of nothing to . . .
More nothing.
Her one friend, Tammy, moved away long before Mom died seven years ago, and of course, Dad had left years before that, when she was nine.
Allison remembers the morning she woke up and went running to the kitchen to tell her mother that she’d dreamed she had a sister. She was certain it meant that her mom was going to have another baby.