Lethal Love novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Across the Street

Jemma can't cancel and can't give the money back, so she watches the Halsted townhouse on Friday night, and the man in the black car crosses the street and says her real name.

I didn't sleep.

At six I was still at the cutting table, reading the New York Post on my phone with the sound off.

Domenico Scarano had been charged with racketeering twice and extortion once.

Nothing had stuck.

A witness in the second case had moved to Arizona and stopped remembering things.

At 6:40 I opened the app and typed with my thumbs shaking.

"I can't do Friday. Something came up."

He answered before I could put the phone down.

"I don't cancel."

"You don't cancel, or I can't?"

"Both."

"I'm sending your money back."

"I don't want it back."

"I don't care what you want."

He didn't answer that.

I logged into the shop's account and sent fourteen thousand dollars to Scarano Holdings LLC.

Gran came down at seven in her housecoat with the radio already going in her pocket.

"You look like a ghost that lost a bet," she said.

"I didn't sleep."

"You never sleep. Put the kettle on."

I put the kettle on.

At 9:15 the bank called.

A very polite woman told me the transfer had been returned.

"The receiving account doesn't accept incoming payments," she said. "Is there anything else I can help you with?"

"Can you make it accept them?"

"No, ma'am."

I went to the branch on 86th Street at lunch and took it out in cash.

The teller counted it twice and put it in a white bank envelope.

I thought about mailing it to Scarano Holdings.

I thought about the address on the company's filing, a lawyer's office on Court Street.

I thought about a man in an overcoat opening an envelope of hundreds with my grandmother's name in the corner.

I put it in the thread drawer, under the spools of black.

Then I wrote to him again.

"I want to be very clear. I'm not who you think I am."

"Wear the red dress."

"I don't own a red dress."

"I know."

I turned the phone face down on the cutting table.

Gran was hemming a pair of police uniform trousers by the window, and she looked at me over her glasses.

"Who's texting you at lunch?"

"Nobody."

"Nobody's got you the color of skim milk."

"A customer."

"Then charge him extra," she said, and went back to her hem.

All week I tried to work out what the red dress meant.

There were four hundred photos on Oakley's page, and I went through every one.

White, cream, ivory, black, silver, one gold.

No red.

On Wednesday night I typed, "Who are you?"

He wrote back, "Someone who reads very carefully."

On Thursday I didn't write at all, and at midnight he did.

"You haven't told me what you ate."

I looked at the crackers next to my machine.

I didn't answer.

On Friday I closed the shop at six.

I told Gran I was going to a movie.

"Which one?" she said.

"The one with the boat."

"They've all got a boat," Gran said. "Bring me back the popcorn."

I took the R train to Manhattan with the bank envelope in my tote bag.

I didn't have a plan.

I had a bench.

East 70th Street at a quarter to eight was quiet and expensive.

The Halsted townhouse had its front lights on and music behind the curtains.

I sat across the street on a bench by a tree with a little iron fence around it.

I had walked past that house every school morning for four years, because the bus stopped at the corner.

Freshman year, Oakley had told the whole cafeteria I smelled like bleach.

I ate lunch in the third-floor bathroom stall until Christmas.

I pulled my cardigan tighter and watched the door.

At 7:58 a black car turned the corner and stopped in front of the townhouse.

It didn't honk.

It just sat there with the engine running.

At 8:04 the front door opened, and Oakley came down the steps with three friends.

She was in silver, laughing at something on her phone.

She didn't look at the car once.

They piled into a white SUV at the curb and were gone toward Park Avenue in a cloud of perfume and noise.

I let my breath out.

So that was it.

He'd see she wasn't coming out for him, and he'd drive away.

The back door of the black car opened.

A man got out.

He was tall, in a dark overcoat, with no hat and no hurry.

He didn't look after the white SUV.

He didn't even turn his head.

He stood on the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets.

He looked at the Halsteds' front door, as if he were waiting for someone else to come out.

Nobody did.

The music went on behind the curtains.

He looked at that door for one full minute.

Then he looked across the street at me.

I stopped breathing.

I told myself he was looking at the tree.

He checked both ways, the way my mother taught me, and crossed East 70th Street.

He stopped in front of my bench.

Up close he had a thin white scar through his left eyebrow, and he smelled like cold air and something warm, like bread.

He looked down at my tote bag, my sneakers, the pencil in my hair.

"Hello, Jemma," he said.

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