Last Dance, Last Chance

called me, I probably wouldn’t have remembered it. But when someone told me the name—Anthony Pignataro—it certainly had a familiar ring. Curious, I reread the manuscript he had sent me and realized that it had to be the same heartsick doctor who had lost his license to practice medicine in 1998. By 2000, he appeared to have even more problems in his life.
    When I heard about the charges against Dr. Pignataro, I contacted the District Attorney’s office in Erie County, New York. The Pignataro case was being handled by the chief assistant D.A. in charge of the Special Investigation Unit: Frank Sedita. I told Sedita about my short correspondence with Dr. Pignataro. Because I knew that Pignataro had read my books, I sent Sedita two volumes that I thought might have significant ties to his current investigation: Everything She Ever Wanted and Bitter Harvest.
    Frank Sedita eventually passed them on to Deborah Pignataro, Dr. Pignataro’s estranged wife.
    And one day, she called me. She told me of an all-too-true scenario that seemed almost unbelievable.
     
    This story began quite routinely as a civil matter, but it became an incredibly tangled spiderweb of pretense, deception, deadly plots, and tragedy. Once again, just as I had been when I researched And Never Let Her Go, I was drawn back to a place where I had lived long ago. This time it was western New York State, where I spent two years when my then husband was assigned to an antiaircraft battery in the middle of the Tuscarora Indian Reservation. We lived in a small trailer a few miles from the tiny village of Youngstown, New York, in the farthest northwestern corner of New York State.
    My first child was born in Niagara Falls at Mt. St. Mary’s Hospital. Army pay for second lieutenants was $300 a month, so we rarely had money enough to go to Buffalo, the closest big city in the area. I remember seeing Guys and Dolls and High Society in a luxurious Buffalo theater, and then driving home across Grand Island, hungry because we couldn’t even afford to buy hamburgers and Cokes after the movies.
    Erie and Niagara Counties were wonderful in the summer and fall when the fruit trees of western New York were laden with apples and peaches, and bitterly cold in the winter when the wind roared inland from Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. At 28 degrees below zero, the waves near the shoreline froze into giant icy “doughnuts.” Before living there, I hadn’t realized that moving water could freeze. But Buffalo gets so cold that Lake Erie turns to ice even as it crashes against the shoreline.
     
    Just as I never thought of Dr. Anthony Pignataro after our brief phone meeting in 1998, I never expected to return to Buffalo or Niagara Falls or the thin eastern belt of Ontario where the land barely separates Lake Ontario from Lake Erie. But the twists and turns of our lives are nothing if not unpredictable.
    In 2002, I went back to the place where I had lived as a very young wife. Fittingly, it was winter. The bitter cold was still a shock, although Buffalo natives barely acknowledged it. They did acknowledge the blizzard that brought ten feet of snow and virtually paralyzed the city at the end of 2001. When I arrived two weeks later, the billowing drifts had diminished, but they were still there.
    Going back to my own early days was the only way I could explore the labyrinth of lies that defined the story of Anthony and Deborah Pignataro. Their falling in love and getting married once seemed like the happy ending to a dream romance. Sadly, it wasn’t.

Part One
Debbie

1
    I t was so hot, and the air was heavy and muggy with humidity. Even rain didn’t cleanse the air; it only became thicker and harder to breathe. The woman who lay on the couch had been sick for so long that she couldn’t remember feeling well. Sometime earlier—last week or maybe last month—she had been able to walk. But now her feet and legs had become leaden stumps, unwilling to accept any messages from her brain.
    Her brain wasn’t working very well, either. She knew she was still living in her old familiar neighborhood, but it all looked as if it were underwater or as if someone had painted it a different color. She remembered that when she could still navigate, the street signs were wavy and jarring, and she got lost. She remembered vaguely that she had walked into a neighbor’s kitchen, a neighbor she barely knew. She didn’t know why she was there, and the woman who lived there certainly