The Black Widow (15 page)

Then she’s back on the line: “Okay, I got it. Are you ready to write it down?”

“Ready.” Mouth set grimly, Ivy takes down Carlos’s mother’s and her boyfriend’s names, address, and phone number, not certain what—if anything—she should do with them.

Chapter 7

Sitting on a chair outside a vast warren of department store dressing rooms, Gaby thumb-types in response to Ben’s latest text:
At Macy’s, waiting for Jaz to try something on. How about you?

Just finished swimming,
is the reply.

She smiles, picturing Ben in the water.

That first summer they met, she often sat on the lifeguard tower and watched him doing laps in the sound, admiring his speed and grace as he pulled himself through the sparkling water with powerful strokes. He swam hard, just the way he did everything else, she’d soon come to realize: as if he were trying to reach some long-sought, distant goal. He’d been the strongest candidate in their training class in part because he was ultra-conditioned and in part because he welcomed and thrived on a challenge.

When at last he’d emerge like a glistening god sprung from the sea, she’d try not to stare. The sun had bronzed his skin and he had a lean swimmer’s build—broad shoulders, long torso, tight abs, muscular legs . . .

It’s been a long time since she looked at him that way; a long time since she felt that forbidden stirring deep inside of her. Forbidden then because she was young and inexperienced, and they were co-trainees and then coworkers, obligated to focus on the task at hand and not each other.

Forbidden now, because their time together has long since come and gone.

Yet twenty-four hours from now they’ll be together on the beach again, and who knows . . .

“Gabriela?” Jaz pokes her head out of the dressing room. “Come check out this dress. What do you think?”

Still holding her phone, Gaby goes to look. Her cousin’s hourglass figure is spectacular in a turquoise summer dress with a wide red belt.

“You’re gorgeous.”

“Does it make me look too hippy?”

“No! You need to buy that dress. And I might need to borrow it—not that it’ll look like that on me.”

“It’ll look better on you. You don’t need to lose fifteen pounds like I do. In fact, how about you buy it and I’ll borrow it?”

“Can’t. I just bought three new dresses at Saks and now I’m broke again.”

“Saks? Ooh,
sofisticado
!”

“They were on sale.”

“On sale at Saks is still expensive. You must be trying to impress someone.”

Before Gaby can reply, her phone buzzes in her hand with another incoming text.

“You’re
still
going back and forth with Ben?” Jaz shakes her head, adding,
“Es loco,”
as she retreats into the dressing room again.

Gaby looks at the phone. The text isn’t from Ben this time. It’s from Ryan.

He’s looking forward to their date tonight.

She isn’t.

She can’t help it.

Maybe she’s crazy, as Jaz said. Maybe she should pretend—for Jaz’s sake, and for her own—that she hasn’t fallen in love with her ex-husband again. But it’s not true.

I love him. I love him again, or maybe . . .

I never stopped loving him.

If only she were convinced that reconnecting—perhaps reuniting—with Ben was truly the right thing to do. But is she really capable of letting go of all that anger and hurt?

Not if it means letting go of Josh.

That’s the simple answer.

For Gaby, the only way to truly move past the pain would be to allow herself to forget. But forgetting that Josh died—forgetting
how
he died—might mean the rest of it would start to fade, too.

Memories are all that’s left of her son, and . . .

How can I let go?

Ivy’s nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right has grown into full-blown panic that something has gone terribly, perhaps dangerously, wrong.

She’s ninety-nine-point-nine-percent certain there was no car accident in Costa Rica. Either Carlos lied, or . . .

Somebody else did. But who? And why?

Hesitant to call the numbers Roxanna had given her, she’d instead searched online for his mother, Maria-Elena Diaz, and her boyfriend, Pasqual Herrera. Neither was listed in any accident report or death notice, but there was plenty of evidence that they’re both alive and well and living in Costa Rica at the address Carlos’s ex-wife had provided.

Pasqual is active on several social networking sites, and none of his pages are privacy-protected. Nothing he writes is in English, but Ivy absorbed enough high school Spanish to have a general idea what he’s talking about.

According to his Twitter feed, he disagrees with a referee’s call in last night’s well-publicized World Cup soccer match, and he’s spending this Saturday morning fishing for wahoo on Drake Bay. And on his Facebook page there are several recent photographs of him with Maria-Elena, many snapped over the last few weeks. He’s one of those people who chronicles daily minutia in his status updates, detailing what he’s eaten for dinner, friends he’s visited, movies he’s seen . . .

Pasqual may not be Carlos’s father, but he’s very much alive.

Maria-Elena is most definitely Carlos’s mother—photos show that she looks just like him—but by no means is she lying in a hospital bed.

And Carlos’s father might be dead, but he has been for decades. Armed with his name, thanks to Roxanna, and the date he’d been killed in a robbery, Ivy easily confirmed that information.

She paces her apartment, growing more troubled by the minute.

Why the lie?

Had she actually spoken to Carlos, she could assume that he’s just a jerk who was trying to get some unscheduled time off. But he’s accumulated three weeks of vacation to use this year, so it’s not as if he doesn’t have the days coming.

Plus, on every other occasion when he unexpectedly needed time off—because he was sick, or had an appointment, usually with his divorce attorney—he followed company protocol and called to let her know directly. If she wasn’t there, he always just left her a voice mail.

Why now, even with a family emergency, would he merely e-mail? And why would he then proceed to ignore her subsequent calls and e-mails?

“He wouldn’t do that,” Ivy informs Snoopy, her white cat, as he hops from the top of the couch to the countertop in the kitchenette. “I know he wouldn’t.”

Snoopy arches her back and blinks, as uninterested as Garfield is, still snoozing on the rug beneath the chair Ivy had vacated.

Anyone could have gained access to Carlos’s e-mail account by guessing his password—or by getting their hands on his desktop, his laptop, his phone . . .

“This isn’t good,” Ivy tells Snoopy.

Carlos lives in a crime-ridden neighborhood. There are shootings and break-ins out there all the time. Something could have happened to him. Someone could be trying to cover up a crime.

“I have to do something,” she tells Snoopy, who watches her cross over to pick up the phone again.

She hesitates before dialing, but only briefly.

If she’s wrong, and Carlos is putting one over on her, then she’ll simply look foolish for calling the police. She’ll look even more foolish if anyone finds out she snuck into his office and went through his computer files—and not just after she grew suspicious last week.

Foolish? I could lose my job for that.

But if she doesn’t call the police simply to preserve her own dignity, and Carlos is in trouble somewhere—or worse—

I’d never forgive myself.

Her mind made up, Ivy swallows hard and dials 911.

Ben
.

Alex has always liked the name. It’s manly. A real man is exactly what she needs right now, having disposed of the cowardly Carlos.

Ah, Ben. Ben is promising.

Her mouth curves into a smile as she clicks from his online headshot, depicting classic Latin good looks, to his InTune profile.

Specific criteria—searching for a Hispanic New Yorker in his thirties or forties—led her to his page. Now she scans the information, hoping the other key pieces will fall into place.

She’s never going to find an exact replica of Carmen’s DNA. She can only hope to find someone who possesses the most prominent traits her husband passed down to their son. Not just physical characteristics and ethnicity, but a passion for buildings and music and baseball . . .

Ben is a structural engineer. Check.

Ben likes classic rock. Check.

Ben likes the New York Yankees. Check.

Ben . . .

Alex’s eyes widen as she reads the entry that clinches for her the idea that she might have found not just the latest candidate for unwitting sperm donor, but—perhaps—her soul mate as well.

Ben lost a child.

Back at home, Gaby slumps in the chair by the window, legs propped on a stack of books, laptop open. Her intent was to read an electronic manuscript submission her assistant discovered in the virtual slush pile last week, but she can’t seem to get past the first paragraph. A promising paragraph, all things considered, but still . . .

She can’t stop thinking about Ryan.

Not the way she thought about him after their first—or second—kiss, which is unfortunate. She’d give anything to recapture that glimmer of excitement for someone new, someone who isn’t Ben.

But as the day wears on, the more she thinks ahead to her date with Ryan, the more certain she is that she can’t go through with it.

It isn’t fair to let Ryan wine and dine her under the assumption that their relationship will continue to progress. She thought she was ready to move on, but she clearly still has a lot of healing to do.

In the grand scheme of all that is fair and unfair, her worst crime by far was to blame Ben for what had happened to their son. It was cruel and irrational, but she couldn’t help herself then. Placing blame was easier, somehow, than accepting the sheer randomness of the incident.

She’d never imagined herself capable of forgiving Ben.

But maybe she’s the one who needs to be forgiven.

How could I have pushed him away when he needed me?

We needed each other.

I still need him.

I have to tell him—

But first things first. Sitting up straight, she thrusts aside her laptop and reaches for her phone, plugged into its charger on the end table beside the housewarming plant Jaz brought. It still sits in its foil-wrapped plastic pot on the end table, where it receives very little light, and water only when Gaby thinks to dump the last drops from her Poland Spring bottle into the dirt.

Somehow it’s managed to survive despite her neglect, while . . .

Oh, Joshua.

For seven months—no, almost sixteen, from the moment she found out she was expecting a baby—she had been consumed by nurturing that fragile new life. In the end that didn’t matter. In the end . . .

She reaches past the plant, picks up her phone, goes into her contacts list and clicks on Ryan’s phone number. The call connects instantly.

He answers on the first ring. “Hey! How are you?”

“I’m . . .”

. . .
coming down with something.

No. Not fair.

“I’m fine,” she tells him.

“That’s a relief. I was afraid you might be calling to cancel on me.” His tone is teasing.

Her heart sinks. “Actually, I do have to cancel.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Not really. I’m dealing with some personal stuff right now, and I can’t . . . it’s just not a good time for me.”

After a long pause, he asks, “Is there anything I can do to help you with whatever’s going on?”

“No, it’s not . . . not like that.”

“Oh.” Ryan inhales, exhales. “Okay, well . . . how about if you call me when it is a good time?”

“I will,” she lies, and hangs up, knowing she’s never going to speak with him again—a great guy, a guy who has no baggage, no connection to her tragic past; the kind of guy any single woman in New York would want to meet.

What the hell did she just do?

The right thing. You did the right thing.

You’re not ready for a new relationship when you haven’t resolved the old one. And you can’t will yourself to care about someone any more than you can will yourself to stop.

Sullivan Leary was—quite literally—born to be a New York City detective.

Her father, her uncles, and her grandfather on the Leary side were all NYPD. So were most of the men in her mother’s family—going right back to Paddy Sullivan, a beat cop who’d been born in County Cork and was killed in a Prohibition-era bootlegger brawl.

Back in the late sixties, Sullivan’s parents—both the products of sprawling Irish-Catholic families—broke with tradition and didn’t marry until they were both thirty, then made the progressive decision to have just one child. One, they felt, was all they could afford to raise on a cop’s salary.

This detail certainly wasn’t something they shared with their priest, their families, or even Sullivan herself. Not until recently, a few years back.

That day, Sully called her father and said, “I have some news for you. You might want to sit down.”

“Good news or bad news?”

“That depends on how you look at it.”

“I’m sitting. Are you pregnant?”

She winced. It was no secret that she and her husband had been trying to conceive for a while.

“No, I’m not pregnant. And that’s good news, Da, considering that I was calling to tell you that Rick and I are getting divorced.”

Which was also good news—not just for her, as it turned out. That day her father admitted that he and Sully’s mother—who had died shortly before Sully and Rick were engaged—had never cared for her husband.

He also promised her that he’d manage to survive if no one ever called him Grandpa.

“I thought you always said you wanted grandchildren.”

“I said it would be nice. It would be nice to win the lottery, too, but you won’t see me crying if I don’t. Anyway, you might meet someone new. You could still make me a grandpa someday”