Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub
“Big? You’d better do fifty bucks, then. Twenty-five seems cheap.”
“The limit is twenty-five, Big Spender.” She grins, shaking her head. “So, how much homework do you have?”
“Not a lot.”
Same question every night; same answer. The truth is, he usually has a lot of homework, and it doesn’t always get done.
“Look on the bright side,” Jake says, whenever she frets that even with an early diagnosis, academic accommodations, and medication, Mick has shortchanged himself. “We won’t be paying Ivy League tuition when it’s his turn.”
“No, we’ll just be supporting him for the rest of his life.”
“It might be the other way around. He’s an enterprising kid. Maybe he’ll invent a billion-dollar video game.”
Maybe. Or maybe he’ll turn himself around academically, find his way into a decent college, make something of himself . . .
You did,
she reminds herself.
And if Mom and Dad were still alive, they’d still be reminding you they weren’t so sure that was ever going to happen.
“Did you get your grade back yet on the English test?”
“Which test?”
As if he doesn’t know. She’d spent two hours helping him study for it last Monday night. “The one on literary devices.”
“Oh. That test. Nope.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yep. So stop looking at me like a detective who thinks the witness is lying.” He flashes her a grin. “See? I know what a metaphor is. I bet I got an A plus on that test.”
“I hate to break it to you, kiddo, but that’s not a metaphor. It’s a simile.”
“That’s what I meant.” Mick pushes aside some clutter and settles on a stool with the pile of mail, looking for something to leaf through while he eats, which will take all of two minutes.
“What’s this?” He holds up the brown parcel addressed to Rowan.
“Probably something I ordered for you for Christmas. Don’t open it.”
“Is it the keys to my new car? Because don’t forget, I’m taking my road test in less than a month.”
“It is not—” she plucks the package from his hand—“the keys to your new car because there will
be
no new car.”
“Then what am I going to drive?”
“You can share the minivan with me. And you already have the keys to that, so you’re all set. Here—” she gives him the red envelope—“you can open Aunt Noreen’s Christmas card.”
“Bet you anything they made Goliath wear those stupid reindeer antlers again.” Goliath is a German Shepherd whose dignity is compromised, as far as Rowan’s kids are concerned, by a costume every Christmas and Halloween.
“Don’t worry, Doofus,” Mick says, patting the dog, who lies on the hardwood floor at the base of his stool, hoping to catch a stray crumb with little effort. “We’d never do anything like that to you if
we
had a Christmas card picture.”
“He wouldn’t know he had a costume on if we zipped him into a horse suit and hitched him to a buggy,” Rowan points out. “Plus, we do have a Christmas card picture. I mean, we
have
had one.”
“When?”
“Back in the old days.”
“When?” Classic Mick, persisting to demonstrate that he, as the youngest kid in the family, has suffered some slight, real or imagined.
It rarely works on Rowan, who as the lastborn of Kate and Jonathan Carmichael’s four children is all too familiar with that technique.
“Back when we lived in Westchester,” she tells Mick. She distinctly remembers having to cancel a family portrait shoot repeatedly to accommodate Jake’s schedule. He was working in the city then, never home.
“Before I was born doesn’t count, Mom.”
“We had a few after you were born.”
“We did not.”
“Sure we did.”
Did we?
It’s a wonder they even found time to conceive Mick back then, let alone take a family photo.
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe not,” she concedes. “After we moved here, I probably didn’t get my act together to send cards. But God knows we have plenty of family pictures. They’re just not portraits.” Her favorites—and there are many—are framed, cluttered on tabletops and hanging along the foyer stairs in a hodgepodge gallery.
“That’s not the same thing.”
“You poor, poor neglected little working mom’s son.”
“Stop.” He squirms away from her exaggerated sympathetic hug.
“But I feel so sorry for you!”
“Yeah, right.”
She shrugs. Her mother never wasted much time feeling guilty for being a working mom, and she tries not to, either.
She used to be a stay at home mom. Giving it up hasn’t always been easy, but she’s never questioned that it was the right decision for her family, or her marriage.
Mick was three when she resumed the teaching career she’d launched back when she and Jake were newlyweds. She could have waited to go back until the kids were older if they’d stayed in the New York City suburbs and Jake had stuck with the higher-paying advertising sales job that kept him away for weeks at a time. But that would have been tempting fate, because . . .
She doesn’t like to think back to those days. Things were so different then. She and Jake were different people then: different from each other; different from the way they are now.
He quit his job and they sold the house and moved back to their hometown. The cost of living is much lower in Mundy’s Landing than had been in Westchester County, allowing Jake to take a lower-paying, less glamorous job as a sales rep in Albany. They still couldn’t make ends meet on one salary, though, even after he was promoted within the first year. She had to work, too.
“Oh, geez! Poor Goliath!” Mick waves the Christmas card at her.
“Antlers?” she guesses.
“Worse. An elf hat. A whole elf costume. Look at this!”
Rowan takes in the sight of a humiliated-looking German Shepherd decked out in green felt and red pompons alongside her sister’s picture-perfect family. “Poor Goliath,” she agrees. “But everyone else looks great. I miss them. Maybe we should try to get together for Christmas.”
“Mom—you said never again, remember?”
“That wasn’t me, that was Dad.”
“That was all of us, including you. It took us a whole day to get home in traffic last time we went to see Aunt Noreen for Christmas.”
“That was a freak blizzard. It doesn’t usually snow on Long Island over the holidays.”
“Well, it always snows
here
.”
Mick is right. In Mundy’s Landing, Currier and Ives Christmases are the norm. On the banks of the Hudson River, cradled by the Catskill mountains just to the south and the Adirondacks to the north, the village sees more than its share of treacherous weather from October through May although, as the hardy locals like to say, “We know how to handle it.” Plows and salt trucks rumble into motion, shovels and windshield scrapers are kept close at hand, and it’s business as usual.
She opens three drawers before she finds a pair of scissors to slit open the packing tape on the box addressed to her.
It’s not from Amazon or Zappo’s or any number of places where she does most of her online shopping. There’s no return address, just her own, computer-printed on a plain white label—yes, the kind over-achievers like Noreen refuse to use for their Christmas cards.
Inside is a layer of crumpled newspaper.
Slightly yellowed newspaper, which strikes her as strange even before she sees what’s beneath it.
“What is it?” Mick asks, looking up from his pie.
“I . . . I have no idea.” She pulls out a flat black disk, turning it over in her hands.
“Who sent it?”
She shakes her head, clueless.
“I bet it’s from your Secret Santa.” Mick is beside her, rummaging through the box.
“That doesn’t start until next week, and we leave the gifts for each other at school. We don’t mail them.”
“There’s a bunch of those things in here,” he notes, counting.
Yes . . . a bunch of what? Charcoal? There’s a charred smell to the disks, whatever they are.
“There are twelve,” Mick tells her. “Thirteen altogether, with the one you’re holding. Unlucky number. Hey, this newspaper is pretty old. Cool, check it out. It’s the
New York Times
from fourteen years ago. I was only two.”
Fourteen years ago . . .
A memory slams into her.
It can’t be. Nobody knows about that. Nobody other than—
“What’s the date?” she asks Mick abruptly. “On the newspaper?”
“Whoa—it’s November 30th, same as today! Think that’s a coincidence?”
No. It’s not a coincidence.
Nor is the fact that there are thirteen blackened disks in the box.
A voice—
his
voice—floats back over the years; fourteen years: “A baker’s dozen . . .”
It happened fourteen years ago today. A Friday, not a Monday. In Westchester. It was snowing.
“Hey, I think these are cookies,” Mick says. “Looks like your Secret Santa burnt your treat.”
Cookies . . .
Rowan’s fingers let go and the charred object drops back into the box.
Either
he
tracked her down and sent this package as some kind of reminder, or a sick, twisted joke, or . . .
Someone else did.
Someone who knows her secret.
Driving along the New York State Thruway, northbound from New York City toward Mundy’s Landing, Casey has had the same tune looping on the car’s speakers for almost two hours now.
The songs are important. You can’t just play any random tune when you’re driving. That’s one of the rules. You have to play a specific song, over and over, until you get to where you’re going.
Sometimes it’s country: Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” or Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again.”
Sometimes it’s rock and roll: Journey’s “Lights” or The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm.”
Today’s song has great significance, a strong reminder of why this has to happen.
Every time it begins anew, Casey’s fingers thrum the military drumbeat on the steering wheel until it’s time to howl the chorus again:
“Sunday, bloody Sunday . . .”
By now, Rowan must have gotten the package that had been mailed on Friday from the city.
If her weekday unfolded the way it usually does, she was the one who reached into the mailbox this afternoon and found it.
Throughout the fall, Casey seized every opportunity to watch her, documenting her daily routine. Sometimes, that could even be accomplished from inside the school where she teaches. Security at Mundy’s Landing Elementary is a joke. There are plenty of news articles online that would seem to indicate otherwise, dating back to the most recent school shooting and meant to reassure jittery parents that their precious children were well-protected under the new security measures.
It’s true that all visitors have to be buzzed past the locked front door, but there are plenty of other ways into the building. It’s surrounded by woods on three sides, so you can easily hide there watching for some delivery man to leave a door propped open, or try tugging doors and windows until you find one that’s unlocked.
Once, feeling especially bold, Casey even showed up at the front door wearing a uniform and got buzzed in by the secretary. She didn’t even bother to request credentials or double-check the made-up story about a faulty meter in the basement.
That was in the early morning, before the students arrived. Casey wandered the halls searching the teachers’ names, written in black Sharpie on cardboard cutouts shaped like bright yellow pencils and taped beside every classroom. Rowan’s was evident even before Casey spotted the pencil marked
Ms. Mundy
: she was in there talking to another teacher, and her voice echoed down the halls.
Some might find her chattiness endearing.
I used to.
Now it grates.
Four days a week, Casey knows, Rowan leaves school not long after the bell, just after three-thirty. But she always stays at least an hour later on Mondays. That’s when she supervises the tutoring organization that matches volunteers from a nearby community college with local elementary school students.
Perched with binoculars high in a tree across the road from the house—a vantage that never failed to inspire a unique exhilaration in and of itself—Casey loved to watch her pull up in front of the mailbox at the foot of the driveway. She’d usually rifle through the stack of letters and catalogues quickly, toss them onto the seat, and drive on up to the house. But once in awhile, something seemed to catch her eye and she’d open an envelope or package right there at the curb.
Sometimes, Casey seized the opportunity to stick around watching the house long after she’d disappeared inside, occasionally daring to scale a tree right on the property. Daring not because of the height—Casey has always been exhilarated by great heights—but because of the proximity to the house.
All any of them ever had to do was take a good, hard look, and they’d have seen me. But they never did.
Casey would sometimes stay late into the night until the last light was extinguished. Oblivious to a voyeur in their midst, the Mundy family went about their lives behind the sturdy plaster walls of the home that had been built well over a century ago—one hundred and twenty-seven years ago, to be exact.
Casey had left no stone unturned when it came to investigating Rowan’s charmed life. One never knows when a seemingly irrelevant detail might come in handy.
An entire year of preparation has finally paid off.
November 30th has finally arrived.
The endgame has begun.
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and
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bestseller WENDY CORSI STAUB is the award-winning author of more than seventy novels and has twice been nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award. She lives in the New York City suburbs with her husband and their two children.
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