Wendy Corsi Staub Page 3

  She swivels her chair to face her desk again as her assistant obediently retreats with the contract.

  Today’s stack of mail is a few inches high, as usual. Fiona begins sorting it efficiently into piles: trade information, client queries, bills…personal?

  Yes, personal.

  She examines the large rectangular white envelope that looks like a greeting card or invitation. The printed label is addressed not to Fiona Fitzgerald Public Relations, but to Ms. Fiona Fitzgerald. It’s postmarked right here in Cedar Crest.

  That’s unusual. Her personal correspondence invariably goes to her home several blocks away from this converted Victorian office building on Main Street.

  Then again, her home address has been unlisted, as a safety measure, ever since she got divorced and started dating again. A single woman just can’t be too careful these days.

  Fiona is curious about the contents of the envelope—but not curious enough to interrupt sorting the remaining mail and open it. One doesn’t get as far as she has by being easily sidetracked from the task at hand.

  Self-discipline. That’s what it’s all about.

  Anyway, she’s seen enough junk mail disguised as personal correspondence that she should probably just toss the card into the garbage can unopened.

  But she’ll probably open it. Later, when she has a chance. Just in case it really is a greeting card, or an invitation. Fiona doesn’t receive many of those these days, unless they’re business-related.

  She was a shrewd negotiator in the divorce—she got their two-story, 2,000-square-foot Tudor home and all the furniture, plus the BMW, full custody of Ashley, and shared use of the vacation cabin up in the mountains.

  Patrick got the Jeep, parental visitation rights…

  And the friends.

  She probably shouldn’t have been surprised that everyone in their old social circle—both husbands and wives—chose to align themselves with Pat. Her ex is easily the most affable guy in town—when it comes to everything and everyone but Fiona, that is.

  Theirs was a bitter divorce. She had hoped they could at least be civil—as much for Ashley’s sake as for her own. This is a small town, she doesn’t care to have their marital disaster aired for public opinion. Yet even now, two years after the papers were signed, Pat has very little to say to her—and too much to say through the local grapevine.

  The lines are clearly drawn, and it’s lonely on Fiona’s side.

  Even her own parents are once again all but estranged from her. Staunch Catholics, they were devastated by her divorce and abandoned her in a time when she really could have used their support.

  Oh, well. She still has Brynn, even if they don’t have a lot in common these days—or much time for each other.

  That doesn’t matter. They’ll always be sisters—just bonded by friendship rather than by blood.

  Or maybe a bit of both, Fiona thinks with a shudder, remembering that awful night.

  “We’ll always remember…That fateful September…”

  How often in the past decade has she been haunted by the opening lines to the Zeta Delta Kappa song?

  Haunted, and taunted.

  Maybe Brynn is, too. But they don’t talk about it.

  Better to forget it ever happened and keep their friendship—their sisterhood—grounded in the present.

  Yes, Fiona has Brynn. She has a flesh-and-blood sister, too: Deirdre—or Dee, as she was called before she shed the childhood nickname, along with her ties to Cedar Crest and just about everyone in it.

  Deirdre might not possess Fiona’s type A energy, but she is literally Fiona’s other half—not just her identical twin but her mirror image. In genetic terms, that means the egg didn’t split until late in the embryonic stage. Any later, Fiona learned in a college biology class, and twins would be conjoined.

  For practical purposes, “mirror image” means that Fiona is left-handed while Deirdre is right-handed; Fiona’s auburn hair naturally parts on the right, Deirdre’s on the left. They have the same petite, waiflike figure, the same whiter-than-white, unblemished complexion, the same slanty green eyes.

  So close were they throughout their childhood that Fiona and Deirdre—Fee and Dee—might just as well have been literally joined at the hip.

  Not anymore.

  Fiona hasn’t seen her sister since she visited Deirdre at her home on St. John in the Virgin Islands to celebrate their twenty-ninth birthday almost a year ago.

  “What are we going to do for our thirtieth?” Deirdre asked as they said good-bye at the airport. “How about an Alaskan cruise?”

  Fiona countered with, “Why don’t you come to Cedar Crest and we’ll just drink a bottle of champagne, or two or three, together? I’ll buy you a plane ticket.”

  “You know I can’t plan that far ahead.”

  “Youcan, Dee…You just don’t like to.”

  “Exactly. Anyway, Antoinette will want to be with me on my birthday.”

  “So bring her,” Fiona suggested, as though her sister bringing her lesbian lover for a hometown visit is an everyday event.

  “Yeah, Mom and Dad would love that.”

  “Are you kidding? You think I’m planning on celebrating my birthday—ourbirthday—withthem? They won’t even have to know you’re in town. You’d stay with me.”

  “Well, considering they told me never to darken their doorstep again, you know I wouldn’t stay withthem .”

  “Does that mean I should go ahead and buy you a ticket? You and Antoinette?”

  “I can’t plan that now, Fee. I probably won’t even know until the day before what I feel like doing for my thirtieth birthday.”

  Thirty!

  Another looming milestone for Fiona.

  One Brynn is facing as well. And within the next month, too. Even Matilda.

  And Rachel…

  Rachel would have been thirty this year, too. In fact…

  Fiona’s eyes automatically go to her desk calendar.

  Today,she realizes, startled by the coincidence.Today would have been Rachel’s thirtieth birthday.

  Yes, she’s positive about the date. It’s indelibly imprinted on her brain.

  Rachel Lorent was born on September 7th…the same day she died.

  “What’s that, baby?”

  “Hmm?” Cassandra Ashford looks up to see her fiancé watching her with interest.

  She quickly tucks the greeting card and its envelope into the new issue ofEssence, which arrived in the same batch of mail she picked up on their way into the condo just now.

  Alec Bennett tilts his head. “You have a secret admirer or something?”

  “A secret admirer?” Cassie forces a laugh as she shoves the magazine into her brown leather tote bag, still slung over her shoulder. “Why would you say that?”

  “Because you just hid that card in your magazine, that’s why. And now you’re trying to hide the magazine in your bag.” He reaches across the breakfast bar to playfully tug at the bag. “Is there something in there that you don’t want me to see?”

  “No!” she says quickly—too quickly—and pulls away.

  Alec raises an eyebrow and thoughtfully rubs his neatly trimmed black goatee. “Really.”

  “Really.” Cassie kicks off her white leather shoes and walks barefoot across the beige-colored carpet toward her bedroom, still carrying her bag.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To take a shower.”

  “I thought we were going out for Italian.”

  “We are. I want to get cleaned up first.”

  “Good, then I can catch the beginning of the Red Sox game.”

  His secret admirer suspicions apparently forgotten, Alec heads for her living room and the portable TV that is perched almost as an afterthought on an end table.

  Before Alec came along, it was barely used. When she wasn’t working around the clock on her medical residency in pediatrics, Cassie was content to spend her meager free time riding her beloved horse, Marshmallow, boarded at a nearby barn.

  Or, of course, catching up on much-needed sleep.

  Alec, who will be bringing his 42-inch plasma screen television when he moves into her condo after their November wedding, is a televised-sports fanatic. Most of the time, that’s fine with Cassie. He’s a successful podiatrist who has a lot more time on his hands than she does. Television keeps him busy while she’s finishing her last year of residency at the hospital in Danbury.

  Almost one more year to go on that…and less than three months now until they walk down the aisle. If Cassie had her way, the nuptials would wait until next fall. But Alec is anxious to wed—an unusual quality in most men she’s encountered.

  He sounds too good to be true—for God’s sake, don’t let him get away,Tildy advised last spring after he proposed, when Cassie confessed her ambiguity about getting married so soon.

  Tildy.

  Cassie has to call her right away.

  In the white-carpeted master bedroom, she closes the door behind her, and, after a moment’s hesitation, presses the knob button to lock it. Not that she expects Alec to barge in; he respects her privacy.

  The bedroom is shadowy. She left the blinds drawn this morning in her haste to get to the hospital for early rounds. She debates opening them now to let in some late-day sun, but decides against it. It’ll be dark outside in an hour or so—and they’re leaving the house anyway.

  She does turn on a lamp, but oddly the splash of light does little to warm the room.

  As Cassie hangs her tote bag on the white iron bedpost, she glances from the sunny yellow and white patchwork quilt to her framed art posters to the antique bookcase brimming with well-worn childhood favorites.

  Why does she feel so skittish in her own room, among familiar belongings?

  Because I’m scared, that’s why.

  Finding that card in the mail—like she needed a reminder that today is September 7th—has put all sorts of crazy thoughts into her head.

  Now, as she takes the cordless phone from its cradle on the nightstand, she finds herself looking over her shoulder, almost as if…

  As if someone might be here with her, watching her?

  Yeah, right. She’s alone in the bedroom, and Alec is way on the opposite end of the condo.

  You’re not thinking about Alec, are you? You’re thinking about some nameless, faceless stranger.

  Someone who knows…

  What nobody can possibly know.

  Unless one of the others told.

  But we swore each other to secrecy.

  Cassie refuses to consider that any one of her friends—hersisters —could possibly have broken that solemn vow made a decade ago tonight.

  Yes, just as she refuses, absolutelyrefuses, to check under the bed and behind the slats in the louvered closet door.

  Frightened little girls do things like that. Especially frightened little girls whose big brothers warn them incessantly about the lurking bogeyman.

  But Cassie’s a grown woman now—a doctor, for God’s sake.

  Shaking her head at her folly, she takes the phone into the bathroom and closes that door, too. Then, just to be safe, she turns on the shower. The sound of the water will drown out her voice, should her fiancé decide to eavesdrop.

  Which he won’t.Alec will be safely ensconced in front of the Red Sox game for however long she takes to get ready for dinner.

  She presses the familiar series of touch-tone numbers. The phone rings once on the other end, and again. And then again.

  Come on, pick up, Tildy…Where are you?

  The machine picks up with a lengthy greeting. Not surprising. Tildy always did like to hear herself talk.

  Waiting for the outgoing message to give way to a beep, Cassie gazes into the mirror above the sink. She looks the same as she always does at the end of a workday: a touch of makeup to accentuate her fine bone structure and mocha complexion, her hair in neat cornrows that hang well below her shoulders, her only jewelry a pair of simple gold post earrings, and, of course, her diamond engagement ring.

  Her mahogany eyes are different tonight, though.

  I look like I’ve just seen the bogeyman,she notes, staring at herself as the fog from the shower rolls in from the edges of the mirror.

  Or maybe, I’ve just heard from him.

  “Hey, it’s Cassie…Listen, you need to call me, please, as soon as you get this message. I have to talk to you…”

  Matilda Harrington quickly presses a button on the answering machine.

  “Message…deleted…” a computerized voice informs her.

  Tildy turns and walks briskly from the den, an alcove on one end of the living room, toward the back of the town house.

  Her eyes shift briefly, as always, to the gilt-framed oil painting in the hall.

  The only formal Harrington family portrait that was ever done—or ever will be. The canvas is illuminated from the arc of gallery lighting positioned directly above. It casts the four faces—father, mother, daughter, son—in a soft, almost ethereal glow.

  Tildy has a vague memory of sitting for the portrait at her family’s Beacon Hill mansion, where Daddy still lives.

  She remembers how little baby Jonathan kept spitting up as usual, and her mother had to repeatedly hand him to the nanny to be cleaned up.

  And how she got to sit on her father’s knee for hours, and how the artist commented that she was such a good little girl, never fidgeting or complaining.

  Tildy’s mother said something like, “Oh, Daddy’s Little Girl would be content to just sit there on his lap forever.”

  She sounded somewhat wistful about that, Tildy remembers. For a long time afterward, she thought that must have been because Mother regretted that Daddy was usually much too busy with his real estate empire to spend much time with his family.

  But later—much later, years after the plane crash that killed Mother and Jonathan—Daddy mentioned that her mother was often jealous.

  “She always thought you loved me more than you loved her, Matilda.”

  That’s because I did, Tildy thought matter-of-factly, and without guilt.

  Distraught as she was to lose her mother and baby brother so suddenly and violently, she remembers how relieved she was that it wasn’t Jason Harrington who died that awful night.

  Daddy was her favorite, the one she always worried about; the one who traveled all over the world on business, usually on his private jet.

  Ironic, then, that it was Mother and Jonathan who were killed, along with Daddy’s pilot, when the jet went down in a snowstorm near Baltimore. That night, Tildy was back home in Beacon Hill with Lena, her nanny; Daddy was at a business dinner with his protégé and closest friend, Tildy’s godfather, Troy Allerson.

  It wasn’t even snowing in Boston that night. Tildy’s biggest worries were that she’d lose a hand of Old Maid to Lena, and that her father wouldn’t make it back home in time to tuck her in, though he’d promised he’d try.