Lisa Jackson - Most Likely To Die

They tiptoed around her for months after Jake died, attributing her withdrawn behavior entirely to the fact that her longtime boyfriend had been brutally slain and she had found his body.

They seemed relieved when Lindsay announced she was leaving two months early for college, and they didn’t bat an eye when she said the campus dorms were unavailable until the fall semester. No, they never suspected that her temporary summer address was a diocesan-run home for unwed mothers.

Lindsay left the details in Sister Neva’s capable hands without a second thought…until it came time to hand over her son to the waiting adoption official.

That was her first moment of regret-and far from her last.

But by then, it was too late.

In a matter of seconds, the baby was gone, whisked from her life and into another, presumably with a pair of loving parents, a stable home, and a brighter future than an unwed, unemployed college freshman could provide.

She went on to get her undergraduate degree at Fordham and her MBA at Columbia.

In the two decades that followed, not a day had gone by without Lindsay wondering about her lost son. Wondering what he was doing, where he was, who he was. Every time she passed a boy about his age on the street, she did a double take-especially if the boy happened to have dark hair and eyes like her own…and like the father’s.

The father.

She had long since taken to thinking of him that way, ever since the nuns in the home first questioned her about him that summer.

“Have you told the father, child?”

“No. He…died before I could tell him.”

It was easier that way, she told herself and God, asking forgiveness for the lie.

She alone signed the adoption papers. She alone suffered the barren consequences that lingered for years, lingered even now.

Especially now.

Thanks to those unsettling phone calls.

Obviously, somebody had stumbled onto the truth and wanted to torment her now, just when her life felt settled at last.

But who would do such a thing?

Chuckling softly to herself, she hung up the telephone, pleased with Lindsay Farrell’s frightened reaction to her taunts.

I bet you thought nobody knew what you did, she silently told her former classmate, picturing her, alone and scared, in her far-off East Coast apartment. You tried so hard to hide your tracks.

Or so Lindsay Farrell must have believed.

She’d had no way of knowing that her every move was being watched. That someone had stealthily followed her up and down the aisles of the drugstore, watching her furtively pluck a pregnancy test from the shelf. Her forced nonchalance was laughable. She did everything but roll her eyes skyward and whistle tunelessly as the cashier rang up her purchases.

Of course, I couldn’t follow her into her bathroom back at home and watch her take the test…

No, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out the results. Not when she proceeded to buy test after test in the days that followed, as if hoping to convince herself that the first one was wrong.

So. Lindsay Farrell was pregnant with Jake Marcott’s baby.

Whether Jake carried that news to his grave or was oblivious to it was unclear.

What was clear was that to this day, Lindsay remained troubled by what she did.

I can hear it in her voice.

I just wish I could see it in her eyes, too.

But it wouldn’t be long now.

The reunion was less than two months away.

Lindsay would be winging her way back to Portland, unaware that her first trip home in twenty years would be her last.

Unless…

What if she isn’t planning to attend the reunion at all?

That would be a shame.

No, it would be more than just a shame. It would be disastrous.

I’ll just have to give her a good reason to come home.

Phone still in hand, she quickly dialed general nationwide directory assistance.

“Yes, I’d like the number for United Airlines, please.”

Settling her head against the pillows once more, Lindsay inhaled, held her breath for as long as she could, then exhaled, the way she did when she was stretching and winding down from her strenuous Saturday morning spinning class.

Right now, though, her pulse was racing faster than it ever had at the gym.

Maybe I should call the police, she speculated…and quickly discarded the thought.

The NYPD had far bigger concerns. Terrorism, gridlock, a masked rapist who had been attacking women on the Upper East Side. They’d probably laugh at her if she approached them about a couple of prank phone calls.

It wasn’t as though she’d been harmed.

Not physically, anyway.

Emotionally…

Well, that was a different story. But she’d survive. She always did.

She did better than survive, actually.

Look at me now, Nana, she would think every time she achieved another milestone. Her undergrad degree, her master’s, her first entry-level job, her first promotion, the launch of her own business…

Look at me now.

Her grandmother would have been proud of her. She owned a spacious-for Manhattan, anyway-one-bedroom co-op on the East Side, with a terrace. She had furnished the apartment with a mix of custom-made pieces and antiques handed down from Nana herself. She had even recently enrolled in a cooking class so that she could become proficient in the kitchen; her own family had always relied on their personal chef.

Plus, she was single-handedly running Lindsay Farrell Events as efficiently as her widowed grandmother used to run Farrell Timber.

Of course, Nana had help from Lindsay’s father, Craig, and his brother, Andrew. If you could call it that. The brothers never got along. They couldn’t even agree where their mother should be buried when she passed away, back when Lindsay was in high school.

Grandpa had been cremated, his ashes scattered over the timber farm. Nana didn’t want that. She was a devout Catholic; she wanted to be buried beneath a granite cross on sacred ground. But the cemetery that adjoined Saint Michael’s, her home parish well east of Portland, was too close to the Columbia River. There were old wives’ tales of caskets being lowered into watery graves. Dad was vehemently opposed to that.

Uncle Andrew was just as opposed to Nana being buried right in the West Hills, at St. Elizabeth’s cemetery. He reasoned that Nana’s ties to that church were too recent; she’d only started attending when she moved in with Lindsay and her family, too infirm to care for herself any longer.

In the end, Dad, the elder sibling, won out. He usually did.

Lindsay was pleased. She’d visited her grandmother’s grave often-until she left St. Elizabeth’s, and Portland, for good.

Now, her mother had told her the last time they talked, the old school and church were about to be razed. The news was unsettling.

“What’s going to happen to Nana’s grave?”

“I imagine the cemetery will stay intact,” her mother said vaguely and changed the subject to yet another investment property she and Lindsay’s father were purchasing in Nevada, where they’d moved after retirement.

Lindsay hung up troubled by the thought of the familiar old red-brick school-her alma mater-being destroyed.

Ironic, since her lingering memories of the place were less than positive.

It was there, in the garden labyrinth that lay between the school and the cemetery, that she had discovered Jake Marcott’s body, pinned to a tree by a crossbow.

The macabre sight had haunted her ever since…

Among other grim memories.

I should be glad that St. Elizabeth’s will be closed down, she told herself now. Maybe that will bring some closure.

For Jake’s horrific death, and for her own persistent maternal ache.

Except…