He was pleased to observe that the room was a good distance from the nurses’ station and to be told that Kate was asleep. If the nurse had just checked on her, it was unlikely that she would come back soon. Being careful not to seem in too much of a hurry, he walked down the corridor to 1106. His mind was churning.
He knew that the caller who told him yesterday he had one week to pay up meant business. His only chance of putting his hands on nearly $4 million was to collect the insurance. He knew that the insurance company wasn’t going to budge until Kate could be interviewed about what had happened that night.
If Kate was dead, they’d never be able to prove that she had anything to do with setting off that explosion. A good lawyer could make the argument that when she happened to call her old friend Gus, as she sometimes did, he laid a trap by asking her to meet him in the museum. Gus was the one with the technical know-how to set off an explosion and he was just bitter enough to do it.
The disgruntled dealer was smart enough to know that if he comes after me, he’ll never get paid. If I can convince him that the insurance company will have to pay the claim in the next couple of months, he’ll wait but he’ll keep racking up the interest.
How could Jack and I have had the colossal misfortune to have timed that explosion for just when Kate and Gus happened to be there in the middle of the night?
And how could that antique desk have turned out to be a fake? It had been in the museum for forty years. Even my father was fooled on that one, Connor thought. And he bragged that he knew everything there was to know about antique furniture.
His mind jumping wildly, his breath coming in short gasps, he nodded to a patient whose door was open and who was looking directly at him as he passed by.
I planned everything out so carefully, he thought, almost bewildered at how everything had gone wrong. When I told Jack I was thinking of putting him in charge of the plant five years ago, I laid out my entire plan for him. It was so simple. One by one over the next five or six years, we would take a valuable antique from the museum and replace it with a reproduction. We’d do that until we had just enough left of the real stuff for the insurance investigators to find genuine remnants in the ruins of the fire that we would set.
“This way we make millions by selling the real stuff privately,” I told Jack. “There are plenty of people in China and South America who will pay top dollar in cash for the originals, no questions asked as to which private collection they came from. So our records will indicate for the insurance company that all of the originals were in the museum when the fire destroyed it.” I promised Jack 10 percent of every sale. He jumped at it.
But that was why we had to retire Gus. He would have spotted a reproduction in the museum with his eyes closed.
For five years, they had been removing the priceless originals at night and replacing those pieces with the fine copies that to an untrained eye were indistinguishable. It had been easy for Jack to manipulate the documentation showing the supply of stock in the warehouse.
I’ve gone through the money I made, Connor thought. I’ll bet Jack has most of his in an offshore account.
They always met in the hours after midnight. After they made a substitution, Jack would drive a van containing the antique and deliver it to the middleman in Connecticut who worked for the dealer. We were careful, Connor thought, as he neared the end of the corridor. It was only one sale every three or four months.
That homeless guy must have been sneaking in at night at the very back of the parking lot. On the news they said he admitted that he was inside that van when that college girl tried to talk to him. He admitted punching her and then hearing her yell for help. They all think he killed her.
Connor put his hand on the door, that had been angled closed, of Kate’s room. He thought back to when Jamie Gordon came running across the parking lot at three o’clock in the morning a few years ago and saw them carrying the antique table out of the museum. She was holding her jaw. It was bleeding. She was screaming, “Help me, help me!” and begging us to call the police. I grabbed her by her scarf and twisted it around her neck. I could see that Jack was panicking, but I had no choice. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that was her doing. She was on my property. Jack was a wreck, but I told him to pull himself together. I made him tie up her body and put it in the van. He dumped it in the river on his way to deliver the armoire.
That detective said Jack was being cooperative. Did he tell the cops that I killed Jamie Gordon? How could he do that without burying himself? That cop was bluffing. Jack’s too smart. He knows they have no real proof of what he did.
If Kate is dead, no one will ever know that I’m not the real Douglas Connelly.
No one will ever be able to prove anything about me, either. Tracey Sloane was dumb enough to write me that sympathy note after the boating accident and ask if I had injured my hand. She wrote that she had seen a picture of me at the burial in the papers and she had noticed that I had a clenched hand, just like Connor did. She wrote that when she was waiting on his table at Tommy’s Bistro, Connor once told her the reason that he clenched his fist out of nervous habit was because his father insisted he keep flexing his hand to strengthen it after he broke it once.
It would only have been a matter of time before she figured the truth out or mentioned my clenched hand to someone who would have figured out what really happened. I couldn’t risk it. I had to get rid of her. She thought she was getting a ride home from my bereaved brother Douglas that night. My big mistake was to take advantage of the fact that they were paving over the parking lot and extending it farther back. It was easy that night to dump her under all the dirt. I never expected that godforsaken sinkhole would open at that spot all these years later.
Taking care not to make a sound, he stepped inside Kate’s room. Then he closed the door quietly behind him. The room had a small entrance foyer. Noiselessly, he moved the few steps to the end of it and looked into the spacious private room. It had a sitting area with a couch and chairs. He could see that the reason there was so little light was that the shades had been drawn. Kate was lying on the bed motionless. There was an IV in her right arm and what appeared to be some sort of monitoring device hooked up on the other side.
He would have to be quick. He had anticipated that when her breathing stopped, a dozen people would come rushing in. It wouldn’t work to smother her. The only way to get this done would be to make her swallow the powerful sleeping pills that were now in his jacket pocket. By the time the monitors reacted, it should be too late for them to bring her back. If she died in her sleep, they might attribute it to the brain injury or to a mistake in her medication.
They’ll know that I was here. Her loving father. I’ll make sure that I say good-bye to them on the way out. I’ll tell them she was still sleeping and thank them again for taking such good care of her.
I’ll be only one of many people who had access to her in this room today. Maybe they’ll even think it was one of those “angel of death” type nurses who did it.
Connor moved to the side of the bed. He reached into his pocket and opened the vial of sleeping pills. Realizing that she might have difficulty swallowing them whole, he broke all of them and dropped them into the glass of water that was on the night table. He watched as they dissolved and then placed his hand around the back of Kate’s neck and raised her head several inches.
“Time for your medicine, my little girl,” he whispered.
She opened her eyes and gasped with instant recognition that he was going to harm her. “Tell me one more time what you were never permitted to say again.”
When she did not move her lips, his tone became harsh. “I told you to say it.”
“You’re not my Daddy,” she whispered, now defiant.
“Why do you think I punched that mirror that night, little girl? I had to be sure that my hand was in a cast for a while so if I did ever flex it, there’d be a reason. It hurt a lot but it worked until I was
able to get over that habit.”
Connor reached for the glass. “Now drink this. It’s not going to hurt. It’s going to kill you . . . If you don’t, I’m going to kill Hannah. You wouldn’t want that, Kate, would you?”
Terrified, she began to open her lips, then as he held the glass up to them, her expression changed. She was looking past him.
“I heard you!” Hannah screamed. “I heard you!” As he spun his head around, he saw that she was standing directly behind him. Before he could react, she lunged for the hand that was holding the glass. Knowing that it was all over, he still tried to force the contents down Kate’s throat, but she pursed her lips and turned her head, the contents of the glass spilling onto her neck and the sheet.
As Connor turned to attack Hannah and his fingers closed around her neck, Kate frantically groped for and then pressed the call button, which was covered by a fold in the blanket.
When the nurse responded on the intercom, somehow Kate managed to get out the words that eerily were almost the same as the last words Jamie Gordon had uttered. “Help us. Help us.”
Fifteen seconds later a burly male nurse rushed in to find Hannah, now losing strength, struggling to claw Connor’s fingers away from her neck.
Instantly, he lunged to pull Connor away from her and forced him down to the floor. As Connor continued to violently resist, other aides came pouring into the room. It took three of them to subdue him.
One of the nurses was tending to Hannah, who was desperately trying to pull herself up. “Is Kate all right?” she asked, sobbing. “Did he hurt Kate?”
“No. She’s all right. Look for yourself,” the nurse assured her as she helped Hannah to her feet. Kate outstretched her arms and Hannah let herself collapse onto the bed next to her sister.
Epilogue
One Year Later
Connor Connelly had chosen not to go to trial. He well understood the mountain of evidence against him. He pled guilty to the murders of Tracey Sloane and Jamie Gordon, the felony murder of Gus Schmidt, the attempted murder of his niece Kate Connelly, the aggravated assault upon his niece Hannah Connelly, and to insurance fraud.
He admitted that after the boating accident, when he was still in shock, he had heard the nurse call him Douglas. He realized then that he must have grabbed his brother’s wallet by mistake. And it was his big chance.
When he went home, it was easy enough to slip into Doug’s life. At first he pretended to have spells of forgetting names and details, and that covered him.
Hannah was just a baby. Kate became the problem. She was the only one who sensed he was not her real father. When he knew that he could not stop clenching his hand, he deliberately broke it again while she watched. And she had buried that memory until she was injured in the explosion.
As anguished and angry as they were, Kate and Hannah had drawn some comfort from the fact that the pleas Connor Connelly had entered would ensure that he would die in prison.
When Jack Worth had abruptly ended his last session at the district attorney’s office, after Detective Matt Stevens had as much as accused him of killing Jamie Gordon, he had understood that it was only a matter of time before he would hear the knock at the door that meant he was about to be arrested.
He had gone home, collected his passport, packed a suitcase, and booked a flight from Kennedy Airport for seven o’clock that evening to go to the Cayman Islands, where he had maintained his offshore bank account. He had been standing at the head of the line when the agent at the ticket counter of gate thirteen announced that passengers with first-class seats could begin boarding.
It was at that moment that he had felt the hand of Detective Matt Stevens grip his shoulder. “Not so fast, Jack. You’re coming with us.”
Connor “Douglas” Connelly had been only too happy to drag Jack Worth down with him when, crying and shouting that he had never been treated properly by his father, he admitted to all of his own crimes and to Jack’s complicity in some of them.
Jack was now serving a sentence of twenty-five years to life.
Harry Simon pled guilty to the murder of Betsy Trainer, the young woman he had dragged into the courtyard in the Lower East Side. Reluctantly, the district attorney’s office had allowed a sentence of twenty years to life, instead of the standard twenty-five years to life. Noah Green had effectively argued that Simon’s information about Tracey Sloane getting into that furniture van had been invaluable.
It was obvious to the detectives that even if Clyde Hotchkiss had tried to help Jamie Gordon, he would have been too late to stop Connor from killing her and would have ended up dead himself.
A statement was given to the media exonerating decorated Vietnam veteran Clyde Hotchkiss from having any part in Jamie’s death. A grateful Peggy Hotchkiss phoned Frank to thank him and added, “Now Clyde can truly rest in peace, and I can go on with the rest of my life.”
Lottie Schmidt had provided the last piece of the puzzle. Angry and bitter when he knew he would soon be forced into retirement, Gus had enacted his revenge. With consummate skill he had created a perfect replica of a small writing desk that had been in the Fontainebleau suite in the museum. He had made the substitution and had sold the antique through the underground market. With the $3 million that he had been paid in cash, he had bought Gretchen’s house and the annuity to maintain it for the rest of her life.
That was the desk that Connor had unwittingly sold to the dealer who had later threatened his life, never dreaming that it was a replica that had been created by Gus Schmidt.
Kate and Hannah did not press charges against Lottie for her complicity in Gus’s theft of the antique desk. They knew how much she had suffered, and they decided to allow Gretchen to keep her house.
Now Kate, her hair grown back to shoulder length, and, except for a tiny scar on her forehead, showing no sign of the injury that had nearly killed her, reminisced to Hannah, “I can’t believe it’s been a year already. As I told the police, I didn’t understand why Gus was so nervous that night. I had been in the museum and suspected that the desk, which I had seen so many times over the years, looked a little bit different. That’s why I asked Gus to secretly meet me at that hour. I thought that maybe Jack Worth was stealing from us and I knew Gus could tell in a minute if the desk had been switched. Now we know that it was Gus himself who had made the switch.”
They were sitting on the couch in Kate’s apartment. On the nearby table were the documents they had both signed relating to the final sale of the Connelly complex property.
The others were about to join them for dinner. Mark and Jessica, who had become inseparable . . . Mark’s mother, in for a visit, who was lovingly pressuring him about how much she wanted a grandchild. And Justin. He and Hannah, whose own design line had proven successful, were planning their spring wedding.
In the kitchen, on the windowsill, the bromeliad plant that had brought Justin and Hannah together was blooming.
MARY HIGGINS CLARK, #1 New York Times bestselling author, has written thirty-two suspense novels; three collections of short stories; a historical novel, Mount Vernon Love Story; two children’s books, including her latest, The Magical Christmas Horse; and a memoir, Kitchen Privileges. She is also the coauthor with Carol Higgins Clark of five holiday suspense novels. Her books are international bestsellers, with more than 100 million copies sold in the United States alone.
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COPYRIGHT © 2013 SIMON & SCHUSTER
BY MARY HIGGINS CLARK
The Lost Years
The Magical Christmas Horse (Illustrated by Wendell Minor)
I’ll Walk Alone
The Shadow of Your Smile
Just Take My Heart
Where Are You Now?
Ghost Ship (Illustrated by Wendell
Minor)
I Heard That Song Before
Two Little Girls in Blue
No Place Like Home
Nighttime Is My Time
The Second Time Around
Kitchen Privileges
Mount Vernon Love Story
Silent Night / All Through the Night
Daddy’s Little Girl
On the Street Where You Live
Before I Say Good-bye
We’ll Meet Again
All Through the Night
You Belong to Me
Pretend You Don’t See Her
My Gal Sunday
Moonlight Becomes You
Silent Night
Let Me Call You Sweetheart
The Lottery Winner
Remember Me
I’ll Be Seeing You
All Around the Town
Loves Music, Loves to Dance
The Anastasia Syndrome and Other Stories
While My Pretty One Sleeps
Weep No More, My Lady
Stillwatch
A Cry in the Night
The Cradle Will Fall
A Stranger Is Watching
Where Are the Children?
BY MARY HIGGINS CLARK AND CAROL HIGGINS CLARK
Dashing Through the Snow
Santa Cruise
The Christmas Thief
He Sees You When You’re Sleeping
Deck the Halls
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.