Dearly Beloved (45 page)

Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub

The woman at the bar darts a look at her watch as she slurps the last inch of her rum runner, and Carrie realizes it’s now or never.

“Ready for your second drink?” She reaches across the bar to remove the empty glass, with its gummy pink film coating the inside.

“Oh, that’s okay. I don’t want another—”

“It’s a freebie. Two-for-one happy hour for cruise ship passengers.”

“Really?”

No, not really.

Carrie nods, already reaching for the bottle of Tortuga Rum. “All you have to do is show me your ship ID. What’s your name?”

“Molly.”

Carrie nods, smiles, points to her own plastic nametag. “I’m Jane.”

As in Doe.

Well, not quite. Jane Doe had translated, in her clever mind, to Jane Deere—
Doe, a deer
—and that’s the name she’s been using for years now. Jane Deere. Before that, she was Carrie Robinson MacKenna, and before that . . .

Before that doesn’t matter.

“Nice to meet you.” Molly’s face glistens with island humidity, and moist strands of her dark hair are plastered to her forehead. She glances again at the Timex strapped around her thick wrist.

“Don’t worry. You have time.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’ve been working here a long time. I know the sailing schedules.” That is most definitely
not
a lie.

Such is life in this harbor town: the same-but-different routine every day, set to the rhythm of the cruise lines’ itineraries.

Carrie has always appreciated the precision with which she can see the gargantuan vessels begin to appear every morning out on the turquoise sea, an hour or two after sunrise. From the window of her rented apartment above the bar, she watches the same ships glide in and out of Saint Antony Harbor at the same time on the same days of the week, spitting thousands of passengers onto the wide pier.

The same passengers, it sometimes seems: waddling Americans in shorts and fanny-packs; hand-holding honeymooners; chain-smoking Europeans in open-collar suits and dresses with high heels; multi-generational families of harried parents, tantrum-throwing toddlers, sullen teens, silver-haired, scooter-riding grannies . . .

Carrie serves them all; knows them all. Not on a first-name basis, but by type and, often, by ship. Sure, some crowds of passengers are interchangeable—on, say, Tuesday, when megaships from Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Princess are simultaneously in port. They all cater to middle-class Americans—families, retirees, and honeymooners alike.

But today is Thursday. Three different cruise lines; three distinctly different crowds.

“Which ship are you on?” Carrie asks. “The Carousel?”

Molly raises an eyebrow. “How’d you know?”

Easy. It’s a singles cruise out of Miami. There are two others in port for the day, but one is a Disney ship favored almost exclusively by families with young children; the other, a small luxury line popular with wealthy South American couples.

This woman is definitely single, U.S. born and bred . . . and U.S. bound, or so Molly thinks. Little does she suspect that if all goes according to Carrie’s plan, the Carousel will be setting sail in a little over an hour, at five o’clock sharp, without her.

“How’d I know? Lucky guess.” Carrie shrugs. “Like I said, I’ve been working here long enough.”

“It must be hard to be inside on the job when it’s always so beautiful out there.”

“Sometimes.” Much easier to agree than to explain that she prefers it this way.

Carrie’s never been an outdoorsy girl—not by choice, anyway. After all those childhood summers working the fields in the glaring, burning sun of the Great Plains, she welcomed the architecture-shaded canyons of Manhattan. And yes, she had regretted having to leave New York behind so soon. Given proper time to plan her exit strategy a decade ago, she’d have opted for a fog-shrouded city like London or San Francisco, or perhaps rainy Seattle or Portland.

But at the time, her objective was to get out quickly—in the immediate aftermath of September 11, no less, when public transportation was at an inconvenient standstill. Had she been trying to enter the U.S., she’d have been out of luck, given the sudden, intense border scrutiny on incoming travelers.

But she only wanted to leave—and hitchhiking was the only way to go, from truck stop to truck stop, down the East Coast. Riding high in the cabs of eighteen-wheelers along an endless gray ribbon of interstate brought back a lot of memories. Good ones, mostly.

As she made her way to Florida, she perfected her cover story: she was supposed to meet her terminally ill fiancé in the Caribbean to marry him that Saturday.

People were in a shell-shocked, help-your-fellow-American mode. Every time she mentioned that she’d escaped the burning towers in New York, strangers bent over backward to help, giving her rides, food, money.

Eventually she encountered a perpetually stoned, sympathetic trucker who was more than happy to connect her with a man who was willing to help her complete her so-called “wedding journey.” For a steep price—one she could easily afford, thanks to years of stockpiling cash—she was quite literally able to sail away on a little boat regularly used for smuggling illegal substances
into
the country, as opposed to smuggling people
out
of it.

She’d chosen Saint Antony for its relatively close proximity to the United States and for its unofficial “look the other way” policies when it comes to just about everything. She figured she’d stay awhile—six months, a year, maybe two—and then move on. Once she was here, however, complicated post-9/11 security measures made it a challenge to return to the States.

She could have gone elsewhere—Europe, maybe, or the South Pacific—but she wasn’t really interested in doing that. America was home, and someday she might want to go back.

As always, she’d done her homework and figured out how she would eventually be able to get around the new security obstacles. She came up with the perfect plan, but she wasn’t in any hurry to put it into action. Maybe she’d stay here forever. Maybe not. It was just good to know she could escape if she wanted—or needed—to.

She didn’t, until the morning six months ago when she turned on her television and was blindsided by her own face staring back at her. There she was, in an old photograph that accompanied a news report from suburban New York.

“So do you like bartending?” the woman at the bar, Molly, asks her. “I bet you meet a lot of interesting people.”

“Sure do,” Carrie agrees, but of course that’s another lie.

These people don’t interest her. At times, they just bore or frustrate her, but mostly they merely remind her that there’s a world beyond this island. A world Carrie is ready to rejoin at last.

A generous shot of rum splashes into the blender, and then another for good measure, along with ice, mixer—and the powdered contents of a packet Carrie surreptitiously pulls from her pocket, where it’s been waiting for months now. Waiting for just the right opportunity . . .

About the Author

New York Times
bestseller WENDY CORSI STAUB is the award-winning author of more than seventy novels. Wendy now lives in the New York City suburbs with her husband and their two children. Learn more about Wendy at www.wendycorsistaub.com.

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Also by Wendy Corsi Staub

Hell to Pay

Scared to Death

Live to Tell

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A print edition of
Dearly Beloved
was originally published in 1996 by Zebra Books, an imprint of Kensington Publishing Corp.

Excerpt from
Nightwatcher
copyright © 2012 by Wendy Corsi Staub.

Excerpt from
Sleepwalker
copyright © 2012 by Wendy Corsi Staub.

Excerpt from
Shadowkiller
copyright © 2013 by Wendy Corsi Staub.

DEARLY BELOVED
. Copyright © 1996 by Wendy Corsi Staub. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition AUGUST 2012 ISBN: 9780062229939

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