Now You See Her Page 0,25

was nothing, not even a tree trunk for her to lean against. Like many new subdivisions, this one was pretty much void of trees. In modern-day Ireland, it seemed gray was the new green. Marcy glanced up at the cloud-filled sky. As long as it doesn’t start raining, she thought.

It’s raining, it’s pouring, she heard her mother sing, her soft voice snaking up the hillside. The deceptively soothing voice continued, swirling around Marcy like a gust of autumn leaves. The old man is snoring.

Marcy began striding back down the hill, taking larger steps than necessary, her arms swinging purposefully at her sides, as if warning her mother to keep her distance. Bumped his head, and he went to bed. Her mother’s stubborn voice followed after her, carried by the wind.

“It’s starting again,” Marcy remembered whispering to Judith. She was, what … all of twelve at the time?

“What’s starting?”

“With Mom. It’s starting again.”

“How do you know?” Judith had asked. Although she was older than Marcy by two years, she was slower than her sister at sensing when disaster was imminent.

“Because I can feel it.”

Judith had argued. “She’s just depressed because it’s raining. You know how personally she takes the weather.”

“I’m telling you,” Marcy said. “It’s starting.”

“Shit,” she said now, stopping when she reached the bottom of the street. What was she doing all the way down here again? Now she’d have to climb all the way back up. She checked her watch. Almost four o’clock. Maybe she should head back into the main part of the city, grab a bite to eat, come back later.

Except it was too late for lunch and too early for dinner and she had no appetite anyway.

“You have to eat something,” Judith had told her in the aftermath of Devon’s accident. And then again after Peter had walked out. “You have to keep up your strength,” she’d insisted, pushing a heaping spoonful of peanut butter toward Marcy’s tightly pursed lips.

Marcy closed her eyes, trying to block out the myriad unpleasant memories that were flooding her brain. “Enough,” she said out loud, her voice disappearing under the wheels of a passing car. A Rolls or a Bentley, she thought, opening her eyes in time to see the big black sedan disappear around the bend in the road and knowing instinctively it belonged to the O’Connors. She raced back up the street, stopping at the top of the hill to catch her breath and watching the car pull to a tentative stop in the driveway of the yellow-brick house.

From a distance of maybe fifty yards she saw a woman exit the passenger side of the car with shopping bags in each hand. As she reached the front door, she turned and called to the driver as he was about to proceed into the garage: “Don’t forget the groceries in the trunk.”

The woman was young, early thirties, and very pretty, with shoulder-length auburn hair and shapely, if sturdy, legs. She was wearing a navy blue skirt that covered her knees and a loose blue cardigan over a conservative print blouse. Marcy guessed from the woman’s easy familiarity with her companion that this must be Mrs. O’Connor and not the nanny.

Now’s your chance, she thought as the woman fished inside her designer bag for her keys. Marcy commanded herself to move, forcing one foot in front of the other, then stopping abruptly when the man emerged from the garage seconds later, his arms loaded with groceries. She saw that he was older than the woman by at least a decade and that he managed to look quite distinguished even as he struggled to keep the groceries from spilling out of the bags.

“Can you manage?” the woman asked from the doorway.

“Out of my way, woman,” her husband responded with a laugh. Seconds later, still laughing, they disappeared inside the house, the door closing after them.

“Mr. and Mrs. O’Connor, I presume,” Marcy said, marveling at their easy camaraderie and trying to remember the last time she and Peter had laughed that way together. About anything. Maybe in the beginning, she thought now. Before Devon. “Stop it. You’re not being fair.” Tempting though it was, she couldn’t blame Devon for all the problems in her marriage.

Judith’s unwanted and uninvited voice once again asserted itself. “You’re sure you want to do this?” she’d asked when Marcy first informed her she was expecting. “You’ll never have another peaceful moment, you know. You’ll always be waiting, watching.…”

“Shut up, Judith,” Marcy had said.

“Shut up, Judith,” she said