Now You See Her - Michael Ledwidge [47]
Mary Ann turned back to me. “Please? For old times’ sake?”
That’s when I noticed on the cover contact sheet that Harris’s lawyer lived in Key West. Fear of Mary Ann recognizing my photograph was replaced instantaneously with fear of death. My mind flashed on a memory. Elena’s bullet-riddled, bloody body splayed out on the gas station floor.
Go back to Key West? I thought, failing to banish the image with a sip of latte.
Not after seventeen years. Not after seventy.
If I bumped into Peter, I’d be the one receiving the death penalty.
I handed the case file back to her as if it burned my fingers.
“I can’t,” I said emphatically. “Sorry. Emma’s got the SAT coming up.”
The lies came as easily as always. I guess I should have felt guilty. I didn’t.
“Fine,” Mary Ann said. “Fine. Of course, I’d get the short straw. I always get the short straw.”
No, I felt like saying to her. I’d just missed it for once.
Chapter 58
I DECIDED TO WALK back to work. It was one of those bright, iconic New York spring days that make you forget about things like triple-digit parking tickets and transit strikes and construction crane accidents.
But for some strange reason, I wasn’t in the mood for thinking about April showers or stopping to smell the Park Avenue tulips.
Back inside my small office on the forty-fourth floor of my Lexington Avenue office building, I closed the door and just stood at the window, staring down at the people scurrying in and out of Grand Central Station. Beyond the Empire State Building to the south, downtown Manhattan sprawled and glinted under the midday sun, intricate and magical, like Monopoly pieces placed on a giant Oriental carpet.
Gazing on it, I thought about the Eighth Avenue pimps and potholes that formed my first vista on my first night in New York and how much I’d accomplished since then.
I continued to stand at the window, hugging myself. At first, I felt sad, then suddenly furious. For all this to get dredged up now, so close to home, just when my life was starting to take off, felt beyond coincidence. It felt intentional.
A media case? I thought. Hadn’t I suffered enough? I thought about the life I’d struggled to put together. All the comments and lewd offers I’d received from asshole restaurant managers and customers. The eyebrow raises I’d had to endure from my co-op board for the crime of being a young single mom. All the packed buses and subway cars and work, housework and homework, that never seemed to give me a moment’s peace.
Most of all, I thought about all the abject terror that I’d gone through in the middle of the night with Emma those first few months when she was colicky. Night after night, I would rock my swaddled baby, weeping along with her, convinced that I was a day away from failing, losing Emma, being fired, being found out.
That wasn’t enough, huh? I thought, staring up at the blue sky. Sacrificing for my daughter, constantly having to look over my shoulder as I worked my fingers to the bone? I haven’t paid enough?
Besides, it wasn’t like I’d done nothing to try to set things straight. After about a year, when I’d scored a decent studio rental and a solidly paying waitressing job at a SoHo supper club, I saw an article in the Post about the Jump Killer. As guilt started to eat away at me one night after I picked up Emma from day care, I took the PATH train out to Hoboken. From an I-95 highway pay phone, I called the New York office of the FBI and gave an answering machine a description of the Jump Killer and his dog and his car.
Over the years, from time to time, I’d think about doing the same thing about Peter, but in the end, I feared that he—with all his law enforcement contacts—might somehow find out. The call would be traced. Peter would know that I wasn’t dead and come looking for me and Emma.
I let out a breath as I finally sat at my desk. My brow beaded up with cold sweat as I remembered the Jump Killer’s face. The office seemed to fade, and there I was