Touch & Go (2 page)

So this is what five million dollars bought you. Bright, sunlit rooms, a charming rooftop patio, not to mention an entire neighborhood of beautifully restored redbrick buildings, nestled shoulder to shoulder like long-lost friends.

The townhome was on tree-lined Marlborough Street, just blocks away from tony Newbury Street, not to mention walking distance to the Public Gardens. The kind of neighborhood where the poor people drove Saabs, the nannies spoke with French accents and the private school had an application process that started the baby’s first week of conception.

Justin gave me carte blanche. Furniture, art, draperies, carpets. Antiques, no antiques, interior decorator, no interior decorator. He didn’t care. Do whatever I had to do, spend whatever I had to spend, just make this our home.

So I did. Like that scene out of
Pretty Woman
, except it involved slathering painters and decorators and antiques dealers, all plying their wares while I sat my pregnant bulk on various divans and with an elegant wave of my hand ordered a bit of this, a dash of that. Frankly, I had fun with it. Finally, a real-world application for my fine-art skills. I could not only fashion jewelry out of silver-infused clay, I could renovate a Boston brownstone.

We were giddy those days. Justin was working a major hydroelectric project. He’d helicopter in and out, literally, and I’d show off the latest progress on our home, while he rubbed my lower back and brushed back my hair to nuzzle the side of my neck.

Then, Ashlyn. And joy, joy, joy. Happy, happy, happy. Justin beamed, snapped photos, showed off his precious baby girl to anyone who made eye contact. His crew filed into our Boston town house, muddy boots left in the gleaming foyer so a bunch of former Navy SEALs and ex-marines could make googly eyes at our sleeping daughter in her
pink-coated nursery. They swapped tips on diaper changing and proper swaddling, then set out to teach a newborn how to burp the ABCs.

Justin informed them their sons would never date his daughter. They accepted the news good-naturedly, then made googly eyes at me instead. I told them they could have whatever they wanted, as long as they’d change diapers at 2:00 A.M. This led to so many suggestive comments, Justin escorted his crew back out of the house.

But he was happy and I was happy and life was good.

That’s love, right? You laugh, you cry, you share midnight feedings and eventually, months later you have really tender sex where you realize things are slightly different, but still, fundamentally great. Justin showered me in jewelry and I took up the requisite yoga while learning hideously expensive places to buy baby clothes. Sure, my husband was gone a lot, but I was never the kind of woman who was afraid of being alone. I had my daughter and soon Dina, who helped out so I could return to playing in my jewelry studio, where I fashioned and created and nurtured and glowed.

Now, Justin slowed the Range Rover, starting the futile search for curbside parking. Our town house included a lower-level garage, a luxury nearly worth the property taxes, but of course Justin saved the space for me, leaving him to play the highly competitive game of street parking in downtown Boston.

He passed by our town house once and my gaze automatically went up to the third-story window, Ashlyn’s room. It was dark, which surprised me as she was supposed to be staying in for the evening. Maybe she simply hadn’t bothered with the overhead light, sitting before the glow of her laptop instead. Fifteen-year-olds could spend hours like that, I’d been learning. Earbuds implanted, eyes glazed over, lips sealed tightly shut.

Justin found a space. A quick reverse, a short pull forward and he’d neatly tucked the Range Rover into place. He came around the front to get my door and I let him.

Last few seconds now. My hands were clenched white-knuckle on my lap. I tried to force myself to breathe. In. Out. Simple as that. One step at a time, one moment after another.

Would he start by kissing me on the lips? Perhaps the spot he’d once discovered behind my ear? Or maybe we’d both simply strip, climb into bed, get it over with. Lights off, eyes squeezed shut. Maybe, he’d be thinking about her the whole time. Maybe, it shouldn’t matter. He was with me. I’d won. Kept my husband, the father of my child.

Door opened. My husband of eighteen years loomed before me. He held out his hand. And I followed him, out of the car, down the sidewalk, neither of us speaking a word.

JUSTIN PAUSED AT THE FRONT DOOR. He’d been on the verge of punching the code into the keypad, when he stopped, frowned, then shot a quick glance at me.

“She disarmed the system,” he muttered. “Left the door unsecured again.”

I glanced at the door’s keypad and saw what he meant. Justin had installed the system himself; not a mechanically controlled bolt lock, but an electronically controlled one. Punch in the right code, the system disarmed the locks, the door opened. No code, no entry.

The system had seemed to be an elegant solution to a teenage daughter who more often than not forgot her key. But for the system to work, it had to be armed, which was proving to be Ashlyn’s next challenge.

Justin tried the knob, and sure enough, the door opened soundlessly into the darkened foyer.

My turn to frown. “She could’ve at least left on a light.”

My stiletto heels clipped loudly as I crossed the foyer to flip on the overhead chandelier. No longer holding on to Justin’s arm, I didn’t walk as steadily. I wondered if he noticed. I wondered if he cared.

I made it to the wall panel. Flipped the first light switch. Nothing. I tried again, flipping up and down several times now. Nothing.

“Justin…,” I started in puzzlement.

Just as I heard him say: “Libby…”

A funny popping sound, like a small-caliber gun exploding. Whizzing. Justin’s body suddenly arching. I watched, open mouthed, as he stood nearly on his tiptoes, back bowing, while a guttural sound of pain wrenched through his clenched teeth.

I smelled burning flesh.

Then I saw the man.

Big. Bigger than my six-two, two-hundred-pound husband who worked in the construction field. The massive black-clad figure loomed at the edge of the foyer, hand clutching a strange-looking pistol with a square-shaped barrel. Green confetti, I noted, almost hazily. Little pieces of bright green confetti, raining down on my hardwood foyer as my husband danced macabre and the faceless man took another step forward.

His finger released on the trigger of the gun, and Justin stopped arching, sagging instead. My husband’s breath came out ragged, right before the big man hit the trigger again. Four, five, six times he made Justin’s entire body convulse while I stood there, open mouthed, arm outstretched as if that would stop the room from swaying.

I heard my husband say something, but I couldn’t understand it at first. Then it came to me. With a low, labored breath, Justin was ordering me to run.

I made it one step. Long enough to glance pleadingly at the darkened staircase. To pray my daughter was tucked safely inside her third-story bedroom, rocking out to her iPod, oblivious to the scene below.

Then the huge man twisted toward me. With a flick of his wrist, a square cartridge was ejected from the front end of what I now realized was a Taser, then he leapt forward and planted the end of the barrel against the side of my leg. He pulled the trigger.

The contact point on my thigh immediately fired to painful, excruciating life. More burning flesh. Screaming. Probably my own.

I was aware of two things: my own acute pain and the whites of my attacker’s eyes. Mask, I realized faintly. Black ski mask that obliterated his mouth, his nose, his face. Until he was no longer a man, but a faceless monster with white, white eyes, stepping straight out of my nightmares into my own home.

Then Justin lurched awkwardly forward, windmilling his arms as he rained feeble blows on the larger man’s back. The black-masked figure turned slightly and with some kind of karate chop caught Justin in the throat.

My husband made a terrible gurgling sound and went down.

My left leg gave out. I went down as well. Then rolled over and vomited champagne.

My last thought, through the pain and the burning and the panic and the fear…don’t let him find Ashlyn. Don’t let him find Ashlyn.

Except then I heard her. High-pitched. Terrified. “Daddy. Mommy.
Daddy!
”

In my last second of consciousness, I managed to turn my head. I saw two more black forms, one on each side of my daughter’s twisting body, as they dragged her down the stairs.

Briefly, our gazes met.

I love you
, I tried to say.

But the words wouldn’t come out.

The black-masked figure raised his Taser again. Calmly inserted a fresh cartridge. Took aim. Fired.

My fifteen-year-old daughter started to scream.

PAIN HAS A FLAVOR.

The question is, what does it taste like to you?

Chapter 2

THE TWEETING OF HER CELL PHONE woke her up. This surprised her for two reasons. One, because, in theory, she no longer had a job where phones rang in the small hours of the morning. Two, because it meant she must’ve fallen asleep, something else that, in theory, she hadn’t done for months.

Tessa Leoni lay on the left side of her bed as her phone began a louder, tumbling cascade of chimes. Her hand was outstretched, she realized. Not reaching toward her phone, but toward the empty half of the bed. As if even two years after his death, she still reached for the husband who once slept there.

Her phone chirped louder, more obnoxiously. She forced herself to roll toward the nightstand, noting that actual sleep turned out to be more disorienting than chronic insomnia.

She answered her phone just as the last chime was fading. She registered her boss’s voice, a third surprise as he was rarely the one who initiated contact. Then the last of her fogginess faded and years of training took over. She nodded, asked the questions she needed to ask, then had the phone down and clothes on.

A final moment’s hesitation. Firearm or no firearm? Not a requirement anymore, unlike the days when she’d been a Massachusetts state police trooper, but still sometimes practical in her new line of work. She contemplated the brief amount of information her boss
had relayed—the situation, the timeline, the number of known unknowns—and made her decision. Gun safe, back of her closet. She rolled the combo with practiced fingers in the dark, withdrawing her Glock and slipping it into her shoulder harness.

Saturday morning, 6:28 A.M., she was ready to go.

She picked up her cell phone, slipped it into her jacket pocket, then crossed the hall to alert her live-in housekeeper/nanny/longtime friend.

Mrs. Ennis was already awake. As with many older women, she had a nearly preternatural ability to know when she’d be needed and generally operated one step ahead. Now she was sitting upright, bedside lamp snapped on, notepad in her hands for last-minute instructions. She slept in an ankle-length red-and-green-plaid flannel nightgown Sophie had given her last year for Christmas. All she needed was a small white cap, and Mrs. Ennis would look just like the grandmother in “Little Red Riding Hood.”

“I’ve been called in,” Tessa said, an obvious statement.

“What should I tell her?” Mrs. Ennis asked. “Her” meant Sophie, Tessa’s eight-year-old daughter. Having lost the only father she’d ever known to violence two years ago, Sophie wasn’t keen on letting her mother out of her sight. It was for Sophie’s sake, as much as her own, that Tessa had resigned from being a state trooper after Brian’s death. Her daughter had needed more stability, to know at least one parent would be coming home at night. Tessa’s new job in corporate investigations generally allowed for nine-to-five hours. Of course, this morning’s call…

Tessa hesitated. “From what I can tell, the situation is urgent,” she admitted. “Meaning it might be a day or two before I return. Depends on what kind of juggling I have to do to gain traction.”

Mrs. Ennis nodded, didn’t speak.

“Tell Sophie she can text me,” Tessa said at last. “I don’t know if I’ll always be able to answer my phone, but she can touch base by text and I’ll answer.”

Tessa nodded as she said the words, satisfied with that answer. Sophie needed to be able to reach her mother. Whether with the touch of her hand, or the push of a button, Sophie simply needed to know, at all times, that her mother was there.

Because once, Tessa hadn’t been, and even two years later, those kinds of wounds left a mark.

“She has gymnastics this morning,” Mrs. Ennis said. “Perhaps she can invite a friend over afterward. That’ll keep her busy.”

“Thank you. I’ll try to call before dinner, definitely before bedtime.”

“Don’t worry about us.” Mrs. Ennis sounded brisk now. She’d been caring for Sophie since she was a newborn, including the long years Tessa had spent patrolling on graveyard shift. There was nothing involving the household or Sophie that Mrs. Ennis couldn’t handle, and she knew it.

“Go on now,” Mrs. Ennis said, waving her hand dismissively toward the door. “We’ll be fine.”

“Thank you.” Tessa meant it.

“Take care of yourself.”

“Always.” She meant that, too.

Tessa eased down the darkened hallway. Her footsteps moved slower than she would’ve liked, pausing before her daughter’s room. Going in, waking her sleeping child would be an act of selfishness. So she contented herself with standing in the open doorway, peering across the dusky room until she could make out the tumble of her daughter’s dark brown hair across her light green pillow.

Two night lights burned, as Sophie was no longer comfortable with the dark. Tucked between her hands was her favorite doll, a Raggedy Ann–like toy named Gertrude with brown yarn hair and dark button eyes. After Brian’s death, Gertrude wore a Band-Aid on her chest. Because her heart hurt, Sophie would say, and Tessa would nod in understanding.

Sophie wasn’t the only one with scars from two years ago. Each time Tessa walked out the door now, whether heading to work, going for a run or popping down to the grocery story, she felt the separation from her child as a physical ache, a tearing of herself in half so that she couldn’t be whole until she returned home again. And sometimes she still dreamed of snow and blood, of reaching for her husband’s falling form. But just as often, she dreamed of herself still holding the gun, still pulling the trigger.