The Black Widow (33 page)

She even stayed for a few minutes to toast her icy hands in the warmth of the blaze before she hurried back out to the car and drove back home where Carmen and Dante lay sleeping. The prized Tuscan stained-glass windows glared after her in the rearview mirror like a pair of fiery eyes.

By the time Carmen got word of the fire, the house had been reduced to wet, smoking cinders. The investigators told him it was most likely started by local kids partying in the vacant house.

Still, Alex fully expected him to accuse her.

He didn’t. He didn’t say much of anything at all, just watched her closely, suspiciously, just as he had ever since their daughter had died a month earlier.

“Did it bother you for all those years you were gone?” she asks now, watching him pause to lean on the shovel and wipe sweat or rain from his forehead. “That you never knew for sure, I mean.”

“Never knew what?”

“Exactly what happened. The night of the fire. Or the night the baby died.”

He stiffens. “What do you mean?”

“I can tell you if you want to know. Do you want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Tell me.”

She shrugs and leans closer to him, whispering, “It was
her
.”

“What?”

“She was back. I could see it in her eyes, every time she looked up at me. The eyes don’t lie. You were the one who said that.”

“Who was back?”

“Your mother! Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. She came back masquerading as that innocent little baby, thinking I wouldn’t realize it was her. Every time I picked her up and she looked at me, I saw her mocking me. I’d already gotten rid of her once before. I wasn’t going to let her—”

“You’re insane.”

“Shut up!”

“You are. You’re insane, and—”

“Stop saying that! You don’t know—you don’t know anything! The records are sealed!”

“I know that you killed your own baby.”

“No! It wasn’t my baby! It was your mother! You knew it, too!” She aims the gun at him, holding her arms straight out in front of her, trembling. “You knew it and you pretended I was wrong. You told me that I was . . .
crazy
.” She whispers the final word, the one that had haunted her all these years, the one that had kept her from being adopted, and loved . . .

He shakes his head, as if in disgust.

Turns away. Picks up the shovel again.

Then, in one swift movement, he picks it up and swings it toward her.

She pulls the trigger.

A shot rings out and he falls to the ground.

Street lamps are reflected in the rain-slicked pavement of Cherry Street as Sully hurries across, heading in the direction of Stockton’s voice. Grabbing her flashlight from her belt, she turns it on and sees her partner silhouetted on the driveway, along with a much smaller man—the current homeowner?

Striding closer, Sully can see that he’s slightly built, with dark hair. He’s wearing a suit and has a leather satchel over his shoulder, looking like he just stepped off the commuter train that stops less than a mile away.

He looks uncomfortable standing there with Stockton—and even more uncomfortable when he spots Sully coming toward them.

“What’s going on?” she asks Stockton.

“This is Detective Sullivan Leary. Detective Leary, this gentleman moved into that house about six months ago, with his wife and their children. He inherited it from his father,” Stockton informs her, wearing a meaningful expression that irks her.

What does he want her to do? Congratulate the guy? Commiserate with poor Stockton who never inherits anything but a bunch of crap from his own dead relatives?

But Stockton goes on, “I’m sure my partner will be interested to hear your name, sir. Can you tell her, please?”

“My name?”

“Yes.”

Still looking uncertain, the man turns to Sully. “It’s Dante. Dante Rodriguez.”

Pain explodes in Ben’s shoulder.

He drops to the ground, hit by a bullet.

He’d been close, so close, to catching her off guard, knowing he only had one chance. Timing was everything. He was waiting for just the right moment to attack her with the shovel, but . . .

He chose the wrong one.

Now he’s going to pay with his life.

The woman stands over him, still holding the gun, an unmistakable firestorm of madness flashing in her eyes.

“You lied to me! You said you would always be there for me. But you left, and you took him away! My son . . .”

“I’m not Carmen!” Ben shouts at her, writhing in agony.

“Shut up!” she screams, taking aim again.

He closes his eyes.

This is it.

He’s going to die, lying in the mud in this godforsaken spot.

“No!”

At her shriek, he opens his eyes and sees her striding toward him. She reaches down . . . but her hands are no longer holding the gun. Instead, they close around the handle of the shovel.

“This is going to go my way! Mine! Not yours!”

She thrusts the blade into the ground, ferociously deepening the hole he’d been slowly digging to her specifications: long and narrow and deep.

Wet dirt flies over her shoulder, pelting Ben with chunks and pebbles as he drifts away to a place that’s mercifully free of pain.

“You’re Dante Rodriguez?”

“Sí,”
the man tells Sully. “You know my name?”

“Yes. We’re investigating your mother.”

“What about her?”

“She may be involved in a case we’re working on.”

“There seems to be some mistake,” he says in a distinctive Spanish accent. “My mother died twenty years ago.”

“Excuse me?”

“She died when I was a boy. Five years old.”

“I’m so sorry.” Sully masks her confusion.

“What happened to her?” Stockton asks.

“She got sick. My father and I, we went to South America to stay with family because she wasn’t doing so well, and she died not long after that.”

“How do you know that?”

“My father told me.”

“And how did you come to be here,” Sully asks, “in Vanderwaal? In this house?”

“When my father passed away last year, I inherited it. He grew up here. All these years, he was paying someone to take care of it.”

“Was he planning on coming back, then?”

“No! Never. He never wanted to come back to the United States. He never wanted me to come either. But not long after he died, a job opportunity came up in New York, and my wife and I thought it would be good if I took it.”

“But you haven’t seen your mother . . .”

Dante Rodriguez looks frustrated. “I told you. She died when I was a kid.”

“And you’re sure about that?”

“Sí.”
He looks from Sully to Stockton. “Shouldn’t I be?”

Before they can react to the question, the glare of headlights arcs over the street. A Jeep turns onto the block and goes tearing past, braking to an abrupt stop at the curb in front of the brick cape. Sully and Stockton glance at the Jeep and then at each other.

“Gabriela Duran,” Sully realizes. She heads in that direction, calling over her shoulder to Stockton, “Don’t let him disappear!”

With one shovelful at a time, her headlamp illuminating the gaping hole at her feet, Alex peels away the black earth as if she’s laying bare a long-forgotten trove of secrets that were supposed to stay buried forever.

“Your records are sealed,” the caseworker told her on that long ago day. “No one will ever know. Not unless you choose to tell.”

Choose to tell? She would never tell a soul about any of it: not about the kittens or the fire; certainly not about having been diagnosed, as a teenager, with some bizarre mental illness she’d never even heard of.

The psychiatrist tried to explain it to her. “Delusional disorder involves psychosis. Do you know what psychosis is?”

She shook her head numbly.

“It’s when you can’t tell what is real from what is imagined. Do you understand that, Alex?”

“Are you saying I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t?”

“This disorder can make it very difficult to tell them apart.”

“But I’m not crazy. I’ve seen crazy people. They rant and rave and—”

“People who are afflicted with this particular mental illness can interact very well with others and behave just like anyone else, apart from their particular delusional subject. It only disrupts their lives when they become fixated on their skewed perceptions of reality.”

He went on talking, explaining, but Alex stopped listening, deciding he was the one who was imagining things. She was just fine. Yes, she’d had some problems—some issues with anger—but who wouldn’t, after what she’d been through?

Afterward, as she waited in the next room wondering what was going to happen to her now, she heard him ask her caseworker, “Is there a family history?”

She heard only one word of the caseworker’s response—
abandoned
—before she stopped trying to eavesdrop. It was a pointless conversation. You can’t have a family history if you don’t have a family. And if people find out that there’s something seriously wrong with you—something called delusional disorder—then you never will.

But the doctor prescribed antipsychotic medication and the caseworker and her next foster parents forced her to take it. The pills made the troubling thoughts and urges go away at last. They made her more comfortable in her own skin, allowed her to live a normal life, go to nursing school, get a job, fall in love, get married . . .

It was real, the doctor reassured her, time and again. All of those wonderful things were really happening to her. She wasn’t hallucinating anymore.

But once Carmen was in her life and she’d settled into her job at the hospital, she stopped seeing the doctor. She had no choice because once, when she’d snuck away for an appointment, Carmen caught her in a lie and thought she was up to something.

“Where were you?”

“Shopping.”

“You weren’t shopping. Don’t lie to me. I can see it in your eyes. The eyes don’t lie. Who were you with?”

“I was alone!”

“You were with another man. Why else would you lie?”

“I would never cheat on you!” she protested, and she meant it.

She realized then that she couldn’t risk going back to the doctor, ever again.

But that was okay. Psychotherapy was a waste of time now. All she really needed was the medication the doctor prescribed. In her profession, there were other ways to get her hands on it. As long as she kept taking it, everything would be fine.

But then it was time to start a family, and she knew she had to go off the medication for her baby’s sake. She was going to be a good mother, the mother she’d never had and always wanted. Good mothers didn’t ingest chemicals.

She slowly tapered off the drug, knowing it could be dangerous to go cold turkey. She didn’t even tell her obstetrician she’d been on anything, because then it would be in her record and Carmen might find out.

She figured she’d simply go back on it after she’d had the baby. Surely it couldn’t hurt to take a break.

She was right about that. Everything seemed fine after the medication left her system. Apparently, she didn’t need it after all.

All she needed was Dante.

For a while she had him, and Carmen, too.

He traveled a lot, though. Too much. His mother kept coming around, poking her nose where it didn’t belong.

“He was
my
son,” Alex tells Carmen, lying unconscious on the ground beside the hole that yawns wide and deep enough at last. “Not hers! Mine! And you were mine! But she tried to take you both away, and I made her stop . . . but then she came back . . .”

She closes her eyes, remembering the terrible night she looked into her newborn daughter’s eyes; eyes that weren’t blue, like hers and Dante’s, or even a warm brown like Carmen’s. They were pitch-black like his mother’s, contaminated with familiar accusation.

It was a cold January night, snowing. Carmen was working late in the city. He’d stopped traveling in the month before the baby was born and wasn’t scheduled for another trip until February.

February . . .

But this was still January: he came into the nursery that night when he got home and found her standing by the crib with the pillow in her hands.

“What are you doing?” he asked frantically. “The baby’s blue! She’s not breathing! What did you do?”

So much of what happened after that is a blur . . .

Carmen told her what to say, what to do . . . It was a long time before it sunk in that he had protected her. The death certificate said the baby had died of natural causes. Crib death.

Privately, Carmen kept telling her she was sick. That she had to get help.

She didn’t need help. She just needed her boy.

But one cold February morning, a few days before he was scheduled to leave on his trip, Carmen drove away with Dante in the backseat. He said he was dropping him at school, but . . . they never came back.

They just vanished into thin air.

She knew they had died, just like Carmen’s father had, on an icy winter road. No one came and told her the news. She figured it out when their ghosts came back to haunt her.

The man on the ground isn’t Carmen’s ghost, though.

This is Carmen himself. He’s come back from the dead in someone else’s body, just like his mother did.

“And now I’m going to bury you. Forever.”

She makes her way up to the shed that still stands just a stone’s throw from the ruins of their dream house.

Inside, she rummages until she finds the perfect wooden crate—the one in which his precious stained-glass windows had been shipped from Tuscany.

She drags it back out to the hole, pulling off the top and setting it aside.

The rain has stopped now. The night is glistening, dripping, poised, waiting . . .

Night
.

Down, down into the hole goes the wooden crate, open side up, waiting to receive its cargo.

She turns toward Carmen, lying on the ground.

“It’s time,” she says simply.

She drags him to the hole and kicks him until he topples limply into the box. She bends over and arranges his body so that his arms, one of them still bleeding from the bullet wound, are folded across his chest, hands clasped peacefully as if in prayer.