The Final Act Page 28

  Except it wasn’t as easy as that, and Cindy knew it. Postpartum depression, if indeed that’s what Faith was suffering from, couldn’t be cured with simple platitudes or even common sense. Another case of hormones running amok, Cindy thought, wondering if Ryan had taken her earlier advice, talked to Faith’s doctor about prescribing stronger medication.

  I certainly can’t keep running over here every time there’s a problem, she thought, carrying Kyle up the stairs to the nursery.

  Why not? she wondered. What else do I have to do?

  Cindy felt an unexpected tear wend its way down her cheek, then drop onto the top of Kyle’s head. He stirred, his little fist shooting instinctively into the air, as if preparing to defend himself. Cindy pressed him tighter to her breast, hunkered down in the chair, began rocking back and forth.

  Within minutes, she was fast asleep.

  (Dream: Cindy is walking down the empty corridor of Forest Hill Collegiate, where she attended high school, trying to locate the principal’s office. It’s over there, Ryan tells her, appearing out of nowhere to pass her in the hall. Suddenly Cindy is standing in front of the long reception desk in the middle of the main office. I’m looking for Julia Carver, Cindy tells Irena, who is too busy ironing a pair of men’s slacks to look up. Room 113, Irena says curtly. Cindy races down the hall, past a drinking fountain that is shooting water blindly into the air, then bursts through the door to Room 113, her eyes sweeping across the rows of curious student faces. Where’s Julia? she demands of the dwarf like man at the head of the class. Michael Kinsolving lowers the script he is holding to his sides and walks menacingly toward her. Who’s Julia? he asks.)

  Cindy woke with a start, causing the infant in her arms to stiffen and cry out. “It’s okay,” she reassured him softly, coming fully awake, grateful when the baby’s body drifted back into sleep. She took a deep breath, carefully adjusted Kyle’s position, and checked her watch. Eleven o’clock! She’d been asleep almost two hours. She checked the time again to make sure, then pushed herself out of the rocking chair, her legs wobbly, her shoulders and arms stiff. “Those pills of Neil’s were really something.”

  Slowly, with meticulous care, Cindy deposited Kyle on his back in the crib, then crept from the room, closing the door after her. She proceeded down the hall to the master bedroom, each step a deliberate exaggeration, then cocked her ear against the closed door, wondering if Faith was still asleep. After several seconds, she pushed open the door, and stepped inside.

  The room was dark and stuffy, an ether like pall filtering through the air, like a miasmal mist. Cindy inched her way across the clothes-strewn broadloom toward the huge cast-iron bed that sat against the far wall. Faith lay on her back in the middle of the bed, one arm tossed carelessly above her head, one foot peeking out from underneath a pile of heavy blankets, her uncombed hair matted against her forehead, her mouth open, a series of snores emanating from between parched lips. Cindy smoothed the damp hair away from Faith’s face, then replaced her foot beneath the covers. How many times had she done the same thing for Julia? How many times had she tucked in errant toes and smoothed away stray hairs?

  Don’t do that, Julia would protest, slapping at her mother’s hand, even in her sleep.

  Cindy was halfway down the stairs when she heard the steady sound of barking and realized it was coming from next door. Elvis! She’d forgotten all about him. Had he been barking the whole time she’d been away?

  “I should run home and let him out,” Cindy said to an imaginary panel of judges. “It’ll just take two minutes.” Except it wouldn’t. You just didn’t let Elvis out. You escorted him around the block and waited while he sniffed each blade of grass until he found just the right one on which to do his business, and then you went through the whole ritual again. And again. And again. There was no such thing as two minutes with Elvis. Twenty minutes was closer to the truth. And she couldn’t leave Kyle alone for twenty minutes, even with his mother sleeping in the next room. Faith was practically comatose. She couldn’t just take off. Who knew what might happen? How many times had she read articles about children dying in fires while their caregivers were out of the house? I only left him alone for two minutes!

  “Okay, so what do I do?” Cindy asked the empty hall.

  Shouldn’t have been so quick to get rid of me, she heard her mother say.

  Please, her sister added. You think this is a problem? You should spend a day at my house.

  The baby started crying.

  “Well, that settles that.” Cindy scribbled a note for Faith telling her she was taking Kyle for a walk, then left it on the floor outside her bedroom door. “We’ll change you later,” she told the baby, carrying him down the stairs and grabbing the house key hanging from a nail near the front door.

  She located the large English-style carriage hidden along the side of the house, and laid Kyle inside it, the baby’s fierce screams bracketing Elvis’s angry barks. Leaving the carriage in her driveway, she bounded up the outside steps and unlocked her front door. Elvis shot out at her, as if from a cannon, almost knocking her over. “How did you get out of the kitchen?” Cindy asked in amazement, watching as Elvis ran down the front steps, and peed against the wheel of the carriage. “Great. Oh, that’s great. Okay, wait. Let me get your leash.” Cindy opened the hall closet, her hand whipping across the floor in search of the dog’s leash. “Where is it? Damn it, where are you?” Where had she put the silly thing? “Okay, stay there,” she directed the dog, whose response was to bark loudly four times, then run toward the side-walk. “Where’s the leash?” Cindy yelled at the empty house, racing into the kitchen, checking the countertops, trying not to look too closely at the floor.

  She finally located the leash in one of the drawers she reserved for old birthday cards and unsolicited stationery that had been sent by various charities trying to pressure her into making a donation. “Elvis,” Cindy called out, carrying the leash outside, seeing the dog disappear around the corner. “Come back here.” Cindy pushed the carriage to the sidewalk, then stopped dead, her heart-beat freezing in her chest.

  The baby was gone.

  She knew it even before she looked down.

  She’d left him alone for no more than sixty seconds, and in those sixty seconds some lunatic had jumped out from behind a nearby maple tree and absconded with her neighbor’s child. Already the abductor was in his car, speeding toward parts unknown. She’d lost another child. The Sellicks would never see their baby again.

  “No,” Cindy pleaded, fearfully lowering her eyes to the carriage, her knees buckling as she saw Kyle’s huge blue eyes staring up at her, his tongue poking out between his lips, a cascading bouquet of tiny bubbles balanced on its tip.

  He was there. He was safe.

  Cindy crumpled to the sidewalk, as if her legs were made of paper, her heart all but exploding in her chest. “You’re going to give yourself a heart attack if you keep this up,” she whispered into the sweaty palm of her hand. And suddenly Elvis was at her side, licking her face and poking his head toward his leash, his tail pounding eagerly against the side of the carriage.

  What are you doing goofing off down here? he seemed to be asking.

  Cindy attached the leash to the dog’s collar, then pulled herself to her feet. Kyle lay on his back, kicking his legs into the air and gurgling happily. “Thank you, God,” Cindy whispered, pushing the pram toward Poplar Plains, then continuing south toward Edmund. So much construction going on, she thought absently, noting the new fence going up around a sprawling Tudor-style home on the corner of Clarendon and a concrete porch being erected in front of a modern town house just across the street. Large trucks were everywhere. Workers in hard hats and tight jeans toted heavy rocks and tall ladders, nodding as she walked by. How long had they been in the neighborhood? Long enough to notice Julia?

  Nobody struts a street quite like Julia, Ryan had remarked.

  On Edmund Street, Cindy turned left, her eyes flitting warily between the lar
ge duplexes on the north side of the street and the single-family homes and large apartment buildings on the south. Was Julia somewhere inside one of these structures?

  Cindy had always considered the area around Avenue Road and St. Clair to be so safe.

  Was it?

  Hadn’t Julia stepped onto these very streets—soon after eleven o’clock in the morning, almost the same time as now—and disappeared without a trace?

  Cindy shivered, feeling cold despite the unseasonable heat, and picked up her pace, all but colliding with a frizzy-haired woman juggling an empty stroller while trying to maintain a grip on her squirming toddler’s hand. That’s right, Cindy urged the woman silently Hold on tight. It’s not as safe as you think.

  It’s not safe anywhere.

  Elvis balked when they rounded the corner back onto Balmoral, obviously sensing his brief walk was about to end. “Sorry, boy,” Cindy told him, dragging him up the outside steps of her home and pushing him through the front door. Clearly there was no point in trying to lock him in the kitchen. “I’ll take you for a really long walk when Ryan gets home. I promise. Please don’t pee on the floor.”

  The baby started crying almost the second they were back inside the Sellick house. Cindy carried him into the kitchen and retrieved another bottle of Faith’s breast milk from the fridge, then popped it into the microwave oven. She fed the baby, took him back upstairs, retrieved the untouched note she’d left for Faith, and changed Kyle’s diaper, careful this time to stand well out of the line of fire. After swaddling him tightly in a soft blue cotton receiving blanket, she laid him on his back in the crib and stood over him, gently rubbing his tummy until he fell asleep.

  Her own stomach started rumbling, and she realized she’d forgotten to have breakfast. How many times in the last several weeks had she forgotten to eat, despite the constant prodding of her mother and sister? Her face was starting to look thinner, more drawn. Her bra was feeling a little roomy. Women gain weight from the bottom up and lose it from the top down, Julia had once remarked.

  And Julia would know. Julia knew about such things.

  Cindy checked on Faith to see if she was awake and interested in lunch, but she was still fast asleep, her bare toes once again protruding outside their covers. Cindy closed the door, found herself staring down the narrow upstairs hallway toward the bedroom at the front of the house. What was in that room? she wondered. Why was the door closed?

  What if Julia is inside? she suddenly thought, marching down the hall and reaching for the doorknob, knowing she was being ridiculous, but unable to keep such thoughts out of her head. What if the Sellicks were a couple of deranged perverts who’d kidnapped Julia and were deriving sadistic satisfaction from having both mother and daughter under the same roof at the same time?

  (Image: Julia, bound and gagged, struggling against her restraints, unable to give voice to her desperate cries, while her mother, oblivious to her daughter’s presence, changes diapers in the next room.)

  Was it possible?

  She’d read that murderers often attended their victim’s funerals, prolonging their sick pleasure by luxuriating in the family’s suffering.

  Was it possible such monsters lived right next door?

  The door fell open and Cindy stepped over the threshold, both relieved and disappointed by the thoroughly ordinary room that greeted her eyes, its furnishings utilitarian and undistinguished. Obviously Ryan’s home office, Cindy realized, noting the cluttered desk, the stacks of books, the architectural drawings spread across the large drafting table in front of the window. Black-and-white photographs of local buildings adorned the walls. Cindy’s eyes swooped into each corner of the room, seeing no trace of her daughter anywhere. Had she really expected to find anything?

  The phone rang, poking her in the back like an accusing finger.

  Cindy gasped, grabbed for the phone on the desk before it could ring a second time. “Hello?”

  “Cindy, it’s Ryan,” the voice said evenly. “I’m so sorry, but this is the first chance I’ve had to call you all morning. How’s it going?”

  “Everything’s fine.” Cindy noticed a closet in the far corner of the room. What did they keep in there? “Faith and the baby are both asleep.”

  “That’s good. Look, we’re almost finished here. Shouldn’t take too much longer, and then we’ll head home. Think you can hold out another couple of hours?”

  Cindy checked her watch. A few more hours and it would be almost two o’clock. Her eyes returned to the closet door. “No problem.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”

  “I’ll see you soon.” Cindy hung up the phone, walked to the closet, pulled open the door.

  (Image: Julia, her mouth covered by duct tape, her hands bound behind her back, her feet tied at the ankles, sits naked and shivering in a corner of the closet.)

  The closet was filled with winter clothes, each item freshly cleaned and hanging inside a long plastic bag. Cindy examined each article of clothing—a man’s heavy brown coat, a woman’s purple fleece jacket, men’s wool suits in brown, gray, and navy, a woman’s black dress, a long teal skirt. She rifled through the built-in shelf full of sweaters, extricating a strong-smelling bar of soap from inside the layers of soft wool. By the time she realized someone was watching her, it was too late. Cindy spun around, the bar of soap flying from her hand and landing at Faith Sellick’s feet.

  Faith looked from Cindy to the closet, then back to Cindy, her eyes as cold as steel. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Faith. I didn’t hear you.”

  “What are you doing here? Where’s Ryan?” Faith shifted from one foot to the other, her toes disappearing into the soft pile of the beige broadloom. She was wearing a pair of red tartan flannel pajamas that were too big for her body and too warm for the weather, although she didn’t seem to notice either. Several hairs drooped lazily into her eyes and she made no effort to push them aside.

  “He had to go to Hamilton. You were sleeping. He didn’t want to wake you.”

  “So he asked you to come over and baby-sit his incompetent wife.”

  “No, of course not. He just wanted you to catch up on your sleep.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Around eight. Apparently he had an important meeting. . .”

  “They’re always important.” Faith looked toward the window. “What time is it now?”

  Cindy glanced at her watch. “Almost noon.”

  “So I’ve been unconscious all morning,” Faith noted dully.

  “Obviously you were exhausted.”

  “Kyle. . .?”

  “Sleeping like a baby,” Cindy said, hoping to elicit a smile. Failing. “I’ve fed him twice, taken him for a walk around the block. . .”

  “You’ve been very busy.”

  Cindy cleared her throat, coughed into her hand. “Are you hungry? I could make us some lunch.”

  “You can tell me what you were doing snooping around in my closet.”

  “I’m really sorry about that,” Cindy said, stalling, trying desperately to come up with a believable excuse. “It’s just that I was feeling a little cold, and I thought you might have a sweater I could throw on.”

  Faith’s shoulders relaxed as she rushed to embrace the lie. “It is cold in this house. I keep telling Ryan that, but he insists the temperature’s just right. If it were up to me, I’d do away with air-conditioning altogether.” She pointed to a long yellow sweater hanging from a thick wooden hanger toward the back of the closet. “Try that one.”

  Cindy slipped the luxurious cashmere sweater from its hanger. “That’s better,” she said, the warm wool laying like a sunburn across her back.

  “Color looks good on you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You should keep it.”

  “What?”

  “It looks better on you than it does on me. You might as well have it.”

>   “Oh no. I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s yours.”

  Faith shrugged. “Ryan’s in Hamilton, you said?”

  “Actually, he just called, said he should be home in a few hours.”

  “Is Marcy with him?”

  “Marcy?”

  “Orange hair, big boobs, lots of teeth.”

  “Sounds like the woman who picked him up.”

  Faith nodded knowingly. “Marcy Granger. The senior partner’s daughter and Ryan’s close associate.” She verbally underlined the word “close.” “I’m pretty sure they’re having an affair.” She bent down and scooped up the bar of soap. “You think soap really keeps moths away?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never tried it.”

  “Your husband used to cheat on you all the time, right?” Faith asked.

  Cindy tried not to look too shocked by the question. Had she heard Faith correctly?

  “Sorry. I guess it’s none of my business.”

  “Who told you my husband cheated on me?”

  “You did.”

  “I did?”

  It was Faith’s turn to look flustered. “Last week. When I had tea over at your place.”

  Cindy fought to remember the conversation over tea. She vaguely recalled talk of children, of Faith’s concerns for the future, her calm recitation of family suicides, her concern that Ryan no longer loved her. She remembered clarifying that the Cookie was Tom’s wife, but she had no memory of having mentioned anything about Tom’s assorted infidelities.

  “I’m hungry,” Faith announced. “Did you say something about lunch?”

  Cindy took the soap from Faith’s hands, returned it to the middle of the pile of sweaters, and closed the closet door, her mind racing. If she hadn’t said anything to Faith about Tom’s affairs, who had?