Friday, same time
TRAFFIC WAS HEAVY ON AMSTERDAM, A STALLED CAR THE PROBLEM. Rannie tried calming herself by attempting to figure out more of the puzzle. Perhaps Jem Marshall, not Ms. Hollins, was the mischief maker all along, responsible for the glass of Coke on her desk, the creepy notes. He probably had been told of the one sent to Tut. Rannie could envision Ms. Hollins, in her soft drawl, saying something along the order of, “Jem, Larry’s received a threat. He thinks it’s nothing. But you should know…” Jem Marshall had heard Augusta light into Rannie for snooping. He’d caught Rannie searching through the school phone log…and perhaps she hadn’t been so clever about concealing his personal file.
It took ten endless minutes before the cab finally turned onto her street. However, a “Say It With Flowers” truck was double-parked by her building, and the cars stalled in front of her cab were honking in staccato bursts that became ever more insistent the longer the truck didn’t budge. She considered paying now, then cautioned herself to remain right where she was, fidgeting with her trusty blue pencil, until finally a delivery guy exited her building and jumped into the passenger seat of the flower truck. It drove off a moment later, allowing other cars to move and the cab to drop her directly at her doorstep.
Keys already in hand (but no Mace, alas!), she sprinted from the cab and buzzed the intercom, a signal to Nate that she was on her way up. Prudently she checked over her shoulder before unlocking the inner door and entering the empty marble-columned lobby. Her heart was still hammering in her chest. Calm down, she commanded herself, and concentrated on the numbers on the brass plaque above the elevator as they blinked from four to three to two. The elevator creaked to the ground floor, wobbling up and down for a second before it came to full stop. The door opened; Rannie entered and was pushing the sixth-floor button when suddenly she felt herself shoved from behind with enough force to send her sprawling to her knees in the elevator cab. As the door closed, a hand clamped over her mouth, allowing her no time to scream.
The elevator started slowly ascending. Her head was wrenched back so far, it felt as if her neck would snap. She found herself staring upside down at the brim of a baseball cap. Please, please just be another ordinary mugger, she chanted, although her brain had already registered the fact that a knife pointing at her chest was grasped in her attacker’s left hand. Right then a primitive terror, cold and liquid, seized hold of her, shuddering up her spine, turning her legs floppy as a rag doll’s. Rannie groped wildly for the alarm button, her arms pinwheeling, making contact with empty air. Her teeth bit down on the thick canvas glove over her mouth; her legs kicked uselessly.
“Shhhhhh, stop struggling. It won’t do any good,” Jem Marshall whispered almost soothingly in her ear while he hit the top floor button. At the sixth floor, when the elevator door opened, the sight of her umbrella stand, her front door only feet away, brought tears to her eyes. She made another futile attempt to break free, but the elevator door closed and the next time it opened, it was on ten.
Roughly he pulled her into the hallway towards the back stairs. Her brain was too frozen to remember who lived on the floor, whether anyone was likely to be home. Go limp, some atavistic instinct for self-preservation ordered. Make it harder for him. But he managed to drag her up half a flight of stairs, under his arm, with no more effort than a parent subduing a tantrum-throwing toddler. He wasn’t even breathing heavily when he spotted the door to the rooftop and unlatched it.
“Scream and you’re dead,” he said quite matter-of-factly before scanning the rooftop space, a rectangular area of about 200 square feet hedged in by a low retaining wall. Satisfied that no one was around, he pushed her outside.
Oh, God! Oh, God! He was going to throw her over the rooftop, just like Ms. Hollins. Rannie’s brain didn’t seem capable of holding onto any other fact except this single horrifying one. She never came up here although she suspected her kids sometimes did with their friends, to drink or smoke pot late at night. Her eyes darted around, looking for a means of escape, but except for the wood-slatted water tower in front of them, the rooftop was nothing more than an expanse of fake grass. Lights glowed in some of the windows of the two taller apartment buildings to the north, but the sky was growing darker by the minute—already a deep menacing purple, like a bruise mark—and it was doubtful that anyone glancing out a window would take notice of them.
“I don’t want to hurt you. I really don’t,” he said.
A flicker of hope. Maybe he wasn’t going to kill her.
“It’ll be quick. I promise.”
Flicker extinguished. She was outraged at her own stupidity, forgetting the fucking obituary, a careless oversight that was going to leave her kids motherless.
“Sit.”
Rannie lowered herself onto the fake grass right beside the dried-out, belly-up carcass of a water bug. He sat facing her, his back pressed against the access door. With the tip of the knife pointed at her, Jem Marshall said, “Remember what I said. Scream and I’ll kill you right now.”
She nodded. He had changed out of the gabardine trousers and blazer he’d been wearing at Chaps earlier and now, in addition to a Yankees cap, was clad in baggy jeans, an open North Face windbreaker, a Triple Five Soul hoodie underneath it.
“You had to keep poking around, didn’t you? You just wouldn’t stop.” With his right hand, he pushed back the brim of the cap. His face was flushed, his hair damp with sweat. “When I saw the obituary you left in the printer, it hit me that John-o’s been dead almost as long as he was alive.” He turned his gaze toward Rannie. “He was a great brother. He understood me. Mother and Father bought whatever the shrinks said, but John-o knew I wasn’t dangerous.” He caught Rannie’s eyes sliding to the six-inch kitchen knife. “I’m not a violent person. This is your fault. I warned you. Many times.”
“He was your twin,” she managed to say, sounding, she hoped, sympathetic. “It must have been a terrible loss.”
“I’m not stupid so don’t patronize me! I was just as smart as John-o,” he sputtered vehemently. “When I took the SATs, I got a 790 on math—twenty points higher than John-o. One of the doctors at the hospital timed me, just like it was the real thing.”
Life was beyond farcical: This was the ultimate truth, Rannie realized, that she would carry to the grave. Here this man was about to kill her and yet taking the time to brag about his SAT score. He was facing her, his legs sticking straight out in front of him. His choice of footwear, she now noticed, was bizarrely out of whack with the rest of the outfit. A pair of buttery leather Italian driving loafers, the kind with nubbly soles advertised in high-end catalogues. Rannie had always wondered who actually bought them; now she knew—homicidal maniacs.
“How’d you get in my building?”
“Easy. I was across the street waiting. A delivery truck arrived. I went over to your front door, told the delivery guy I forgot my keys and when he got buzzed in, in I went, too.” Marshall shrugged and added in a condescending tone, “That’s a risk you take living in a non-doorman building, I guess.”
His wristwatch, with an expensive alligator band, told her it was now 6:15. If he was going to kill her, what was he waiting for and why was he so eager to chat? To justify himself? To boast? And why the clothes? Did he plan to make it look like a robbery gone bad? Her bag was only a foot away on its side. The tip of her cell phone was protruding. The possibility of distracting Marshall, hitting Nate’s number, threw itself out like a lifeline. Had Nate thought to wonder why she wasn’t in the apartment already? She’d buzzed him from downstairs.