Chapter Fifty-Eight
Fifty-Eight
‘So, you call yourself Mary Smith these days, do you?’ Mary heard the woman’s voice come from behind her, sending goosebumps flying all over her body and tying a knot at the back of her throat.
But Mary didn’t panic.
In a synchronized movement that seemed rehearsed, she swiveled her body around, while her hand reached into her handbag for her pepper spray. Her fingers wrapped themselves around the small canister just as she and the woman standing across the hallway from her finally locked eyes.
The knot at the back of Mary’s throat reached the size of a golf ball.
The woman took off her baseball cap and allowed her dark hair to tumble down past her shoulders. She was wearing a gray NYU sweatshirt, faded blue jeans and white running sneakers.
Mary’s eyes widened, as adrenaline flooded her body fast and hard, making all of her senses spark like fireworks. Her fingers tightened their grip around the canister inside her handbag and right then, Mary was sure that she could hear her heart echoing inside that hallway.
Maybe the woman could hear it too because she immediately raised a hand at Mary.
‘Easy now. You’re not going to have a heart attack, are you?’ Her gaze darted to Mary’s handbag before coming back to Mary. ‘Or spray me with pepper spray?’
Something pirouetted inside Mary’s stomach and threatened to erupt up her throat and out of her mouth, but instead of vomit, what dribbled out of Mary’s lips were words.
‘What the fuck?’
Mary knew that woman.
She’d seen her in court, over a year and a half earlier, during Nelson’s trial, but the woman hadn’t been sitting at the back like gangster-suit man had.
She hadn’t been part of the audience either.
The woman standing across the hallway from Mary had been a witness.
In fact, she’d been ‘the’ witness – the Prosecution’s Secret Weapon, brought in right at the last minute to completely collapse Nelson’s defense.
Mary took a deep breath, trying desperately to keep her heart from exploding. She knew that she wasn’t drunk enough to be seeing things, so this had to be true.
The woman looked a little different – a few pounds lighter…
her hair longer and wavier, perhaps – but there was no doubt in Mary’s mind that right there, inside the entrance hallway of her apartment building in Bayview, San Francisco, Mary was staring at Candice Logan – Nelson’s lover – the woman who had testified that she had ended her eleven-month affair with Nelson because she couldn’t take the beatings anymore.
‘How…? Why…?’ The sentence choked in Mary’s throat and in a millisecond, fear swapped sides with anger. She decided to go with ‘what’. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
Candice finally allowed the door to shut behind her before walking over to where Mary was.
Mary didn’t move, as she seemed to be paralyzed to the spot at the bottom of that stairwell. Her hand stayed inside her handbag, but her fingers loosened their grip around the pepper spray canister.
Candice stopped right in front of her, both women gazing deeply into each other’s eyes.
‘You really want to know what the fuck I’m doing here?’ she finally asked, her tone firm and angry in equal measures.
Mary held Candice’s stare for two seconds too long before she finally smiled.
Candice smiled back, her arms wide. ‘It’s nice to see you again, sis. I missed you.’
Mary simply walked into the hug. ‘I missed you too.’