“Rebecca Helms had a great deal of love in her life, it’s clear to see,” said the young preacher at the graveside. “She’ll be deeply, grievously missed by friends and colleagues, and most especially by her younger brother Peter, by her mother and father, Ruth and Gregory. In that love, part of her will live on.”
The preacher was thin and pale, with light blond hair and blue eyes that glowed with his faith. His strident voice carried through the cold and over the heads of the mourners gathered to say good-bye to a woman whose life was over far too soon. Jed McIntyre’s last casualty, the last person destroyed by a man who had been destroyed long ago. Lydia leaned into Jeffrey, hanging back behind the crowd of Rebecca’s close family and intimate friends. One hand rested on the back of Dax’s wheelchair, where he’d be until his Achilles’ tendons healed. He looked up at her with grim green eyes, his face solemn and drawn from sadness and physical pain. He had a bit of a stunned look to him. She moved her hand to his shoulder and he patted it.
Jeffrey shivered beside her and Lydia couldn’t tell if it was the chill or the pall that had settled over all of them. She tightened the arm she held around his waist and pressed down the feeling of helplessness, the useless parade of “if only’s” and “why her’s” that marched around in her conscience. Did she hold herself responsible? No. Jed McIntyre and no one else was responsible for the murder of Rebecca Helms and the others. But did she feel as though she had inadvertently written a part for Rebecca in the twisted, morose symphony of her life? Absolutely. She’d have to live with it, that and so many things.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
No real sense of relief had come since the death of Jed McIntyre. It didn’t feel as though a burden had been released. The world didn’t seem like a better, safer place, and the loss of her mother was no less with her. None of the things that she imagined would happen if the world were suddenly free of her bogeyman had happened. Maybe it was too soon. Or maybe, as was her fear, the damage had already been done. That she wouldn’t heal the way Dax would heal, or Rain would heal. Maybe she was so altered by the events of her life, so damaged, that part of her was as dead as Rebecca or Marion, buried and gone for good. She was trying not to believe that, but a funeral was a difficult place to cultivate a positive attitude.
Lydia watched as Rebecca’s mother and father approached the graveside, each with a white rose in hand. They were quiet, brave. Lydia knew they were enduring the most awful possible moment, the last second of physical connection to their daughter. She knew that when the roses dropped from their fingers and landed on the casket, it was the last time anything they touched would have contact with anything she touched. That each of them was screaming, raging inside with grief and fury, pain that would cause them to wish for death more than once over the next months, maybe years. But they were stoic. Lydia wanted to scream for them. Maybe they were the last victims of Jed McIntyre.
The crowd began to thin, as people stopped at the graveside and then moved along to waiting cars and limos. The day was cruelly clear and bright, a light blue sky with a round white winter sun. Better to rain. God didn’t seem so oblivious then to the pain of His children.
The three of them came to stop at the edge of Rebecca’s grave and they looked down onto her gleaming silver casket littered with the roses dropped by the people who loved her. Jeffrey dropped the three white orchids he had been holding for them. And Lydia said quietly, “I’m sorry, Rebecca.”
After all, what else was left to say?
At the Rover, Jeffrey and Lydia helped Dax into the backseat and he bore the assistance like a rectal exam, uncomfortable and humiliated. Jeffrey put the wheelchair in the back of the car and Lydia reached to help him settle and strap in.
“I’m not a child,” said Dax, grabbing the seat belt from Lydia’s hand. He didn’t look at her and his face was flushed with embarrassment.
“Well, then stop acting like one, you big baby.”
She patted him on the head and he glared at her, but there was no heat in it. He was just tired and crabby and hurting. She understood and he knew she did. She was about to open the front passenger door for herself when she was aware of someone standing behind her. She turned to see Detectives Malone and Piselli.
“Ms. Strong,” said Malone. “We need to talk.”
“What’s up, guys?” she asked, Jeffrey walking up beside her.
The two of them looked uncomfortable, worried. They exchanged a glance and then Piselli spoke up.
“When’s the last time you heard from Detective McKirdy?”
The events of the last few days came rushing back in a wave as Lydia tried to remember the last time she’d talked to Ford.
Slowly they’d filed into the underground chamber, Rain’s legions. Quietly, shuffling and unspeaking, they’d carried Rain and Jed McIntyre up the long metal staircase and eventually out of the tunnels, Lydia and Jeffrey following in a kind of haze. The surreal quality of the whole ordeal made it easy for Lydia to pretend she was participating in an incredibly vivid lucid dream. When they emerged into the city night, the cold air snapped her back a bit and the events that had just transpired began to sink in. At the corner of Prince Street and Lafayette, they were greeted by the stone-faced Special Agent Goban and the rest of the FBI team, as well as some NYPD uniforms.
Dax had been taken from the tunnels hours earlier, Lydia later learned, and was rushed to the hospital. Before the emergency surgery to repair his injured legs, he managed to explain to one of the hospital staff that they needed to contact the FBI and tell them where Lydia and Jeffrey were. The man, whom Dax couldn’t name and probably wouldn’t recognize, had done that, hence the greeting committee.
A waiting ambulance rushed Rain to Bellevue, where he was recovering from a gunshot wound to the chest. And Lydia had the grim satisfaction of watching the coroner’s office team zip Jed McIntyre into a body bag. He lay white, his eyes staring, a thin line of blood dripping from the corner of his mouth. She watched as he was swallowed by black plastic and loaded into the back of the van, the doors slamming hard and final behind him.
“Where will you bury him?” she asked one of the men. “No one will claim him.”
He shrugged, not looking at her. “Depends.”
“How do I find out?” Something in her voice must have caught his attention because he turned his eyes on her. He was an older Hispanic man, with deep lines etched around his eyes and a receding hairline. In his face she saw the reflection of a thousand ugly, anonymous deaths.
“Call the office tomorrow,” he said, with something like sympathy in his voice. “Ask for Hector, that’s me. I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks,” she said, offering her hand. But he didn’t see it and walked off.
“Time to let go,” said Jeffrey from behind her. “You don’t need to know where the body goes.”
She nodded but knew she would call to find out anyway. Why? She didn’t really understand, herself.
The next two days, they’d barely talked, left the house only to go to the hospital to be with Dax. They walked around each other in a kind of daze of pain and loss, touching more than speaking. That had always been the way with them in times of trouble; they communicated better with their bodies than with words. Everything that had happened before the tunnels had become a distant memory. Everything, of course, except the loss of the pregnancy. Lydia carried that with her like an arm in a cast. The physical pain was subsiding; she imagined the emotional pain would fade eventually, as well.
Julian and Eleanor Ross, the missing twins, their drama, all seemed to exist on a distant planet in another galaxy. Their client was dead. The questions were still out there, floating in the outer edges of Lydia’s consciousness, her curiosity, but she didn’t have the energy to acknowledge them again yet. She hadn’t even thought about Ford.
This morning Dax had insisted on coming to Rebecca’s funeral. He didn’t have insurance, so the hospital was looking to unload him anyway. Lydia believed that he needed to stay another few days, just to assure he’d stay off his injured legs. Against their better judgment, they wheeled him out and here they were.
“I haven’t seen Ford since we discovered Eleanor Ross’s body at the duplex,” she answered finally.
“That’s the thing,” said Piselli, lighting a cigarette. “Neither have we.”
“It’s not like him. He’s not going to just take off,” said Piselli, sitting in the pub where they’d decided to meet at on Astoria Boulevard in Queens. It was a dump of a place called Cranky’s. Every inch of the wall had a beer-bottle cap nailed to it like some alcoholic mosaic. The jukebox played “Love Me Do” by the Beatles. A couple of old men hunched in the corner, nursing pints and arguing about Giuliani. The typical bar aroma of booze and cigarettes was accented by a subtle but definite hint of vomit.
Piselli and Malone sat across from Lydia and Jeffrey in a red vinyl booth; they’d parked Dax’s wheelchair at the end of the table.
Lydia really looked at them for the first time. They were both pretty good-looking guys, Piselli with slicked black hair and dark eyes that observed sharply and missed nothing. He had a fashionable bit of stubble on his square jaw and a slight hook in his nose didn’t detract from his face but made it almost aquiline, at once sexy and regal. They were both young, but Malone had more of a boyish look to him, a soft innocence around the corners of his eyes. The acne scarring she’d noticed when she’d met him the first time didn’t seem as angry or red as it had. His skin was unlined, shaven, and clean. He smelled of Ivory soap.
Lydia and Jeffrey ordered Amstels from the bartender; Malone ordered a Coke. And Piselli drank coffee from a white ceramic mug that read ONE DAY AT A TIME. Dax sulked.
“This is what we know,” said Piselli, lighting the fourth cigarette he’d smoked since approaching them at the Rover. Lydia fantasized about asking for one but didn’t.
“He had a uniform take Anthony Donofrio down to the station while he hung around the scene for a while with us. He poked around the apartment, then headed down after them. We know that he spent about forty-five minutes with Donofrio; he taped the conversation. During this conversation he learned that Annabelle Hodge had entered the building just hours before you and Ford found Eleanor Ross dead.”
“I talked to him right after he learned about Annabelle Hodge,” interjected Piselli. “He wanted me to cooperate with Rawls, the head of MCU. Make sure he got anything he needed from our files. But I didn’t ask him where he was going and he didn’t say.”
“We know he spoke to his wife briefly that evening late, after midnight. She called from Houston,” Piselli said.
“Did you talk to Donofrio?” asked Jeffrey.
“We can’t find him.”
“What do you mean?” asked Lydia, taking a sip from her beer.
“Rawls headed back there and spent some more time with him, but he basically just went over and over the same stuff he’d told Ford. Rawls had nothing to hold him on, so they had to let him go. He never made it home after he left the precinct.”
“You think he fled?” asked Jeffrey.
“With no money, no change of clothes, no call to his mother? No,” said Piselli with a shake of his head.
“Do you have the videotape of their conversation?” asked Lydia.
Piselli pulled a videotape from the inside pocket of his coat and handed it to her. “I didn’t know if it would help you, but I thought I’d bring you a copy.
“They talked about Annabelle Hodge, mostly,” he said, and then ran down the general content of the conversation. “How much she hated Julian Ross and a bunch of other crap about how she was a voodoo priestess or some shit.”
Lydia and Jeffrey exchanged a look.
“You think she’s the shooter? That she took the twins?”
“She’s suspect number one as far as the Missing Children’s Unit is concerned.”
“Have you been up to Haunted?” asked Lydia.
“We been up there, looking for Ford and Geneva Stout, a.k.a. Annabelle Hodge. No sign of either of them. But we got a warrant and with the help of the locals up there, we took the Hodge residence apart. They’re still watching the place.”
“What did you find?”
“We found a knife that was consistent with the injuries incurred by Richard Stratton. But it had been thoroughly cleaned, no prints, no blood evidence.”
“You talked to Maura Hodge?” asked Jeffrey.
Malone and Piselli shook their heads.
“Can’t find her, either?”
“She’s gone, too,” said Malone.
“The Missing Children’s Unit is working around the clock. Julian Ross’s attorneys are riding them like you wouldn’t believe. Those kids are worth millions.”
“No leads?”
“Nothing, and I mean nothing. They’re taking tips from a hotline. They’ve been canvassing the neighborhood and Haunted, too. The lawyers posted a reward, we’ve got sketches of Annabelle and Maura Hodge all over the television, newspapers, the streets. Rawls won’t admit it, but he’s feeling desperate. You can see it in him.”
Lydia felt a flutter of panic and a little guilt. She’d been so overwhelmed with the events of her own life that she hadn’t even thought about the kids since she’d left Eleanor’s apartment that night. Lydia thought of their sweet faces, remembering shaking each of their little hands that day at the hotel. She felt a little ache in her chest, wondering what had happened to Lola and Nathaniel, their father and grandmother dead, their mother locked away.
“It’s cold and getting colder. The case is at a dead end. Two bodies, two missing children, one missing detective, the only survivor whose whereabouts we know of,” said Piselli, showing the palms of his hands, “in the nuthouse. Crazy, talking about ‘destroyers’ and monsters eating her young.”
“Eating her young…” said Lydia. “She’s been saying that from the beginning.”
“She has, hasn’t she?” said Jeffrey.
“A cop disappears like that,” said Malone, apparently not listening to the conversation but thinking about Ford, “people figure he turns up somewhere having parked with a bottle and his service revolver. You know what I mean?”
There was a look of worry and sadness on his face; the job hadn’t yet taught him how to hide his emotions better, hadn’t desensitized him to the ugliness of a cop’s life. Lydia found herself hoping that maybe he’d get out before it did. There was something refreshing about a young man whose feelings you could read on his face. Even Jeffrey had learned a game face; Lydia couldn’t always tell what he was feeling by looking into his eyes.
They were all quiet for a minute. “We been to Ford’s place in Brooklyn,” said Piselli. “Rose came back; she’s worried sick, of course.”
“Though maybe if she was so worried she wouldn’t have left in the first place,” said Malone with a disapproving snort.
“Not your business,” said Piselli, giving him a look.
“You said he talked to Rose the night he disappeared. What was that conversation about?” she asked.
“She told him she was coming back so that they could talk.”
“He would have been happy about that; the conversation would have made him hopeful,” said Lydia. She remembered her conversation with Ford when they’d driven upstate. He’d seemed very depressed then, unsure about the future and doubting the way he’d lived his life. Those things and the pressures of the job, the lack of an outlet for his emotions and a viable support system… well, it led a lot of cops to the end Malone feared. But not with Rose coming back. Unless that added a whole other set of pressures that he couldn’t handle.
“Ford wouldn’t go out like that,” said Jeffrey, sounding certain. “Especially not with Rose coming back. It doesn’t make sense.”
“So what can we do, guys?” said Lydia.
Now that they were talking about the case again, she was infused with a sense of urgency. It gave her a jolt of energy that she hadn’t felt in a while. Her fear for Ford and the twins and the itch of curiosity awoke a familiar fire within her. She felt a little guilty, but part of her was relieved to have a problem to solve. Her work had always helped her keep her mind off of her life… for better or for worse.
“Nothing,” said Piselli with a shrug and a sideways glance. “We’re just following up with you, Lydia, since you were one of the last people to see him.”
“Nothing?”
“Yeah, since you know, legally we got no reason to go back up to Haunted and take another look around,” he said, looking pointedly at Lydia. “The Richard Stratton case takes precedence over Ford, since there’s no evidence of foul play in Ford’s case. MCU is handling the twins and our help is not exactly welcome. We have no chain of evidence that leads us back to Haunted, with Maura and Annabelle Hodge nowhere to be found. We’re stuck.”
“Well,” she said, leaning back and looking at Jeffrey, unable to keep the edge out of her voice. She was hoping that he wasn’t going to try to stop her from getting involved. “We should be getting back to work on the Ross case, anyway.”
“Even though our client is dead, we have a responsibility to Julian Ross to follow through,” agreed Jeffrey. “Maybe we can come up with something on Ford while we’re up there.”
Lydia observed the same combination of concern and energy in Jeffrey’s face, in the way he was so quick to agree. Distractions could not be overrated when the options were sitting around grieving and reliving nightmares.
“Of course, you’ll let us know how it goes,” said Piselli with a satisfied nod.
“Naturally,” answered Lydia.
They all looked at one another for a minute, the questions and possibilities turning in front of their eyes.
“Why doesn’t anybody in this country just say what they mean?” said Dax sourly.
Back at the apartment, they watched the tape of Ford’s interview with Anthony Donofrio. Jeffrey and Lydia sat next to each other on the couch and Dax had asked to be parked by the window. Lydia had a pad on her lap and a Montblanc pen in her hand. She tapped the pen quickly on the arm of the couch, turning things over in her mind as the tape played.
“So Annabelle-” said Jeffrey when the taped had ended, getting up and flipping off the VCR, “why would she hate Eleanor and Julian so much?”
“Maybe it’s inherited hatred. Passed from mother to daughter, like the curse?” answered Lydia, speculating.
“As far as we know, she was the last person to see Eleanor, the last person to enter that apartment before the twins went missing,” Jeffrey said.
“But why? Why kill Eleanor in cold blood and take the twins? What does she have to gain?”
There was no answer for that question that Lydia could get her brain around. She knew the facts, that Annabelle was the obvious person to be looking at for the murder of Eleanor Ross and the disappearance of the twins. But the motive seemed weak to her: Kill Eleanor because Maura hated her. And even if that were the case, why take the twins?
“So we go back to the basic question: Who has the most to gain now that Richard Stratton and Eleanor Ross are dead and Julian is locked away?” said Jeffrey, sitting beside Lydia. “I mean, it looked for a while like Eleanor had the most to gain.”
“But now she’s dead.”
“So presumably the Stratton-Ross estate will go to the twins.”
“But they’re only children. So right now probably those lawyers Piselli was talking about would be in charge of their trust.”
“So the lawyers have the most to gain.”
“Assuming that all of this comes down to money.”
“Doesn’t it usually?” said Dax.
Someone had said to Lydia not very long ago that it was not money but the love of money that was the root of all evil. She didn’t want to believe that… there was something so cheap about the concept that the human soul could be corrupted by something so fleeting, so ultimately unsatisfying as monetary wealth.
“Maybe it’s not about money. Maybe it’s about revenge,” said Lydia.
“The curse, you mean?” said Jeffrey.
“Yeah.” The quest for justice, no matter how twisted, was something that Lydia could understand better.
“So who’s invested in the fulfillment of the curse?” asked Jeffrey.
“Maura and Annabelle Hodge. The daughters of the daughters of Annabelle Taylor. Cops found that knife at the scene.”
Jeffrey shrugged. “Without prints or blood evidence. I mean, you could probably find a knife in our kitchen that was consistent with the knife that killed Richard Stratton.”
Lydia nodded. “But still, it’s something.”
They were quiet for a minute.
“If you ask me-” said Dax sullenly, “and you didn’t-whether it’s about the money or it’s about the curse, whether it’s Annabelle or Maura Hodge, or the goddamn ghost of whoever, there’s only one person left to get any answers from.”
They both looked at him.
“Julian Ross.”
Sitting on an orange plastic chair in the Payne Whitney waiting room, Lydia, in spite of everything, felt a strange lightness, like the relief that comes after the blinding pain of a migraine subsides.
She had come to Payne Whitney unaccompanied. And though it was a grim errand, the fact that she had traveled here not stalked by Jed McIntyre, not watched by the FBI, and not guarded by Dax and Jeffrey gave her a sense of freedom she didn’t remember feeling for years.
As she’d stepped off the train, moved through the platform, and jogged up the concrete steps to the street, she had the sudden thought: Jed McIntyre is dead. And something inside her shifted. She had the powerful sense that a higher justice had been served. The grief and numbness she’d been feeling wasn’t gone exactly, but she could see thin fingers of light splitting the gray she’d been dwelling beneath. Then she wondered, was it the satisfaction of a vengeance that made her feel this good-vengeance for her mother, for herself, for all his victims living and dead-or was it just relief? She looked into her own heart and didn’t find the answer. But she did realize that, for her, revenge had been a powerful motivator-love, even greater. And, sitting in the sterile clinic waiting room, that thought led her to draw the conclusion that love, revenge, and money were probably the most powerful drives she could think of, outside of survival. It applied to everyone she could think of, including Jed McIntyre. She wondered which of those things were at play in the Ross case; she was starting to suspect all three.
Every time Lydia had come to see Julian Ross, she seemed smaller and grayer. Her lips were cracked and her eyes were dull, side effects, Lydia imagined, of her medications. The woman who had turned into a demon before her eyes just days earlier seemed incapable of even sitting up straight. Still, a burly orderly stayed in the room during their interview this time.
“What do you want?” asked Julian, looking at her with darting, paranoid eyes.
Lydia sat down so that they were eye-level. She held eye contact and made sure her voice was clear and strong. “Listen, Julian. This is your last chance to play straight with me.”
Julian narrowed her eyes. “They sent you, didn’t they?”
“No, Julian, they didn’t. Listen to me,” she said, using the voice she would use to speak to a child. “The destroyers have your children. You need to tell me how to help them. Right now, before it’s too late.”
Dax was right. Julian was their only hope for answers, their only hope for a direction that might lead to Ford and the twins. Maybe, by speaking Julian’s language, she might get something that they could use.
But Julian stared blankly at Lydia, blinked her eyelids heavily, slowly, as though they were filled with sand. A long minute passed and Lydia wondered if she’d made a mistake. She looked into Julian’s eyes, searching for something there that she might appeal to, but they were flat and glassy.
“Your mother is dead and the twins are gone,” she said finally. “If you don’t help me, I can’t help find your children.”
She didn’t seem moved by the information, but something flickered on Julian’s face and then she rose and walked over to her bed, casting a glance at the guard by the door. She reached beneath her mattress and withdrew a large sketchpad. Some black ink pens clattered to the floor.
“She’s not allowed to have that,” said the orderly quickly, moving toward Julian.
“It’s okay,” said Lydia, reaching her hands out to Julian. “I’ll take it. Please.”
Julian handed it to her. “Now get out,” she whispered venomously. “I have nothing left to say.”
Remembering their last encounter, Lydia didn’t have to be told twice.
“I wondered when you’d find your way back to me,” he said, with just a hint of smugness. The gallery was empty and Orlando DiMarco was alone in his office. He’d risen to greet her, but she’d made it to his office before he’d reached the gallery floor. Lydia noticed that Julian Ross’s last canvas still leaned against the wall where she and Jeffrey had viewed it on their first visit.
“I thought it might be gone by now,” she said.
“No, there will be an auction when it goes on sale.”
“It’s not on sale yet?”
“No. Not yet.”
“What are you waiting for?”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. Maybe I’m having trouble parting with it. Afraid it might be her last. Believe me, I’m not very popular right now. There are a lot of very wealthy people who are dying to get their hands on this canvas. But I just…” His voice trailed off.
Lydia regarded him carefully. He was expensively dressed in a beautifully cut black suit, with a white collarless shirt. His dark, thick hair hung loose around his shoulders. In his handsome face, tanned dark brown, with a strong nose and thick red lips, she saw the lines of grief. It was a tightness at the corners of his mouth, a slight upturn of the tips of his eyebrows. She wondered, of the three major motivators she had recently been contemplating, which was his.
Lydia held up the sketchpad Julian had given her. He looked at her blankly for a moment and then seemed to recognize what she held.
“Where did you get that?” he asked, moving toward her quickly.
“Julian Ross gave it to me.”
“Why would she do that?” he said, and he looked hurt.
“Did you bring this to her?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “I smuggled it in the back of my jacket. They wouldn’t let her have any paper or pens. She was miserable. I brought her that and some charcoal pencils and some fine artists’ pens. I thought, at least then she could draw. You cannot separate an artist from her art. It’s the cruelest punishment, like cutting out someone’s tongue.”
“Because this is how she communicates.”
“Of course,” he said, as if she were some kind of philistine.
“I’m glad you see it that way. I was hoping you might have some insight into what she was trying to tell me in giving me these drawings.”
He looked at her and then down at the sketchpad as though it were an infant he believed Lydia might drop on its head.
“An artist’s paintings are like dreams… the symbols often mean something only to her,” he said with a shake of his head. “Especially Julian’s work. Even she wasn’t always sure where those images came from.”
Lydia looked at him for a second and their eyes locked. In his face, she saw the same love she had seen when she first visited his gallery. Unrequited, she thought now. Maybe they’d been lovers once, as Ford had claimed. But Julian had never loved Orlando the way he loved her. Lydia could see the longing and the pain and she appealed to that part of him.
“But you know her, don’t you, Orlando? You’ve loved her for years.”
He looked at her, the exposure seeming to shame him. He lowered his eyes.
“It’s true,” he said slowly. “But even in love we don’t always know each other. Sometimes even less so.”
She walked over to a long table that stood covered with neatly kept bottles of paint, a jar of brushes, some folded tarps, a stack of palettes. The surface of the table was covered with thousands of drops of dried paint, leaving behind a multicolored pattern that was at once bumpy and smooth as glass. She lay the sketchpad down and opened the cover.
Outside Payne Whitney, she’d flipped through the sketchpad and saw a chaotic collection of nightmares, intricate and insane, a window into Julian Ross’s twisted psyche. But she also had the powerful sense that somewhere inside what she saw were the messages of a sane woman trying to escape her own diseased mind. She wanted to talk to someone who’d known Julian before she’d lost her mind. And she could only think of one place to go.
“Tell me what you see here, Orlando,” she said. “Tell me what you know. For Julian.”
He walked to stand beside her and she could smell the light aroma of his expensive cologne. He moved his hand and ran light fingers over the sketch. His nails were perfectly manicured. The delicate bones and thick veins of his hand danced beneath skin the color of caramel.
A naked woman lay sprawled in a sea of blackness, her hands reaching out to the image of two children who huddled together beneath a giant set of jaws. The woman’s eyes and face showed a kind of resignation, a hopelessness.
“She’s been stripped bare, left in the darkness. She’s lost her children to some danger and she feels sure she’ll never see them again. She’s never painted them before, the twins. She’s never painted anything that gives her joy, anything that she’s loved.”
He flipped the page to the image of a house. Lydia recognized it as the house in Haunted, twisted and bleeding, with fire leaping from its windows. It had the personality of pain, seemed to reach out as the fire consumed it. Drawn into the flames, the twins clung to each other, surrounded by a vast, living darkness writhing with demons. In their eyes was the reflection of the burning house.
“Hmm,” said Orlando.
“What?”
“This house has come up again and again in her work,” he said. Lydia tried to call to mind others of Julian’s paintings with which she was familiar and couldn’t remember seeing it.
“Nothing that has ever been sold or published,” said Orlando, as if reading her expression. “I’ve asked her about it. She said, ‘The past is immortal. It might be forgotten, but it never dies. It lives in us. It can live in the structures we build, in the children we bear.’ The house symbolized that idea for her.”
On the next page was the image of a man hanging by the neck from the landing above the foyer at the house in Haunted. He was young and beautiful, seemed to float in the air, the noose hanging just loosely about his neck like a scarf. His eyes were closed, his expression serene. Lydia recognized him as James Ross, the young man she’d seen in the photograph, not the monster in the large portrait that stood behind them. On the ground looking up at him was the image of a demon with wild eyes and claws, head thrown back in a violent roar. The demon’s scaled hands reached out toward James, but he was just out of reach.
“Her twin,” said Lydia.
“You know about her twin?” asked Orlando.
Lydia nodded.
“Then you know that’s him, too,” he said, using his eyes to gesture to the portrait behind them.
“Yes,” she said, thinking back to the night she came across his photograph in Haunted. “I figured it out eventually.”
“She never accepted his death,” he said, his voice sounding far away, contemplative. “She always believed she’d been lied to.”
“Why would anyone lie about that?” she asked.
“That’s what I asked her.”
“And what did she say?”
“She said she was sure she would feel it when he died,” he said with a mystified laugh. “And she never felt it. She believed he was still out there waiting for her.”
“She may have been right,” said Lydia. “I think I may have seen him.”
There was something then that came over Orlando. It was a kind of stillness, a waiting. Lydia saw him almost visibly stiffen. “Is that possible?” he asked, his voice almost a whisper.
“Anything’s possible, isn’t it?”
“But the body they found last year in Haunted. It was positively identified,” he said. He had the look suddenly of someone trying to appear nonchalant. She watched as a tiny muscle started to dance involuntarily at the corner of his eye.
Lydia shrugged. “Records can be falsified.”
“Could he be responsible for all of this?” he said, looking at Lydia with alarm.
“If he’s alive, it seems like a highly likely possibility.”
He seemed to turn the possibility over in his mind. He closed his eyes for a second. “It’s her worst nightmare realized,” he said.
“She’s afraid of him?”
“He tried to kill her and her mother when they were teenagers,” Orlando said, turning to look at her. “They put him away, but he escaped. She always believed that her brother was responsible for the murder of Tad Jenson.”
“But she never implicated him?”
“In spite of her terror of him, there’s a bond there that I could never understand,” he said.
She remembered what Julian had said about her brother, that he was her “angel,” always trying to protect her. You can never be sure with crazy people if what they said was the deepest truth or the most outrageous fantasy.
“Did she ever have any contact with him? Did she know where he was?”
He shook his head. “Not that I know of. She always said that she believed he was lying in wait for her to be happy again, and then he was going to tear her life apart. He’s like her bogeyman, you know. The embodiment of all her worst fears… about the world and about herself.”
“About herself?”
“That’s what she said. She never explained except to say that they were one… what he was, she was.”
Lydia shuddered as his words reminded her of Jed McIntyre. One mind, one heart.
They flipped through the rest of the images slowly, the burning house, the huddled children, the naked woman, the young beautiful James, and the monster were images that repeated over and over. Then, on the last page of the sketchpad, Lydia was surprised to see a drawing she’d missed the first time. Filling the page was a mass of curls, and the malicious stare of giant eyes. Smoke danced upward in rings from the bowl of a pipe. Delicately drawn into one of the smoke rings was the scene of the murder of Annabelle Taylor’s children that the librarian Marilyn Woods had described to Lydia. Five small corpses lay on the ground in a field of fire, as the figure of a man stood with a gun drawn. In another of the rings was an image of the twins lying lifeless on the ground before the burning house. Half the face on the page was that of Maura Hodge, the other half was Eleanor Ross. Julian had written, “Behold the Queens of the Damned and the havoc they have wrought on all of us.”
“Jeff, it’s Ford. Listen, Lydia was right. That DNA evidence from the Milky Way bar links whoever attacked her in the Ross home with someone present at the Jenson scene. I’m not sure what it means, but I’m heading up to Haunted. This can’t wait till tomorrow, especially with the twins missing. I’ll keep you posted.”
As he’d listened to the message, Jeffrey had felt a surge of dread. He was relieved to have a lead on Ford, where he’d gone, and why; but it had been more than seventy-two hours since Ford had left that message. Jeffrey had lost the phone to Jed McIntyre and for all he knew it was lying somewhere in the tunnels. He hadn’t even missed it until he’d been wracking his brain, trying to figure out what Ford’s move would have been after leaving Donofrio, wondering what would have led him to take off, not letting anyone know where he was going. Out of desperation he’d called his own cell phone, hoping maybe there was a message there.
Jeffrey was certain now, as Lydia had been all along, that the answers to Richard Stratton’s and now Eleanor Ross’s murders, as well as the disappearance of the twins and Ford McKirdy, would all be found in Haunted.
“Don’t leave me here like this, man,” begged Dax, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. He sat on Lydia and Jeffrey’s couch, legs up on the ottoman, phone and remote control within easy reach. He looked pale and anxious, as if Jeff were leaving him on the battlefield to die.
“We’re only going to be a few hours, Dax.”
“Look,” he said, “I can help you.”
“You can’t walk, Dax,” Jeffrey said gently.
“I can walk,” he insisted.
Really, the truth was that he could hobble. With enough painkillers, Dax could get himself around a small area. But he had been instructed to stay off his feet to allow the partially severed tendons to heal properly. So Lydia had insisted that he stay with them in their downstairs bedroom until he could get around his house in Riverdale a little better. Dax had grudgingly agreed, though Jeffrey thought he was secretly glad for the offer. The three of them were close now, more so than they had been before everything went down. The things they had endured together had bonded them.
“Besides, you don’t need legs to fire a gun. Just prop me up in the backseat and I’m good to go.”
“It’s not going to be like that,” said Jeffrey, pulling on his leather coat. “You’d just be sitting uncomfortable in the car when you could be here resting. And there aren’t going to be any shootouts.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Dax said with a snort. “That’s why you have the Desert Eagle, then?”
“Seriously, we’ll be back in a couple of hours. We’ll call if we’re going to be late.”
Dax turned on the television and tuned Jeffrey out. He really wasn’t handling his recovery period very well.
“Do you need anything before I go?” asked Jeffrey, starting to feel like the nanny to a difficult child. “I have to meet Lydia.”
“I’m fine,” Dax said sullenly. “I’ll just sit here like a completely useless turd until you get back.”
“Cheer up, man,” said Jeffrey, patting Dax on the shoulder. “We’ll be back before you know we’re gone.”
He put in a quick call to Malone and Piselli to let them know about Ford’s last message and headed out the door.
Maybe it was because snow threatened, turning the sky a moody gray and black. Or maybe it was the time Lydia spent with Orlando probing the depths of Julian Ross’s twisted psyche. But on crossing into the Haunted city limits, the town felt unwelcoming to the point of menace. It seemed emptier, almost deserted, not that it had been a bustle of activity before. But something about it now had the air of abandonment. The depressed little Main Street, which on their first visit had been more or less innocuous, if approaching dilapidation, seemed… haunted. As they pulled off of Main and up the winding roads to the outskirts of town, the black dead trees rising up on either side warned them away with branches reaching like witch’s fingers into the sky.
They pulled the Kompressor off the main road and through the open gate that led to the Hodge house. At the end of the drive, they came to a stop behind a black-and-white prowler that sat in front of the porch where they’d first seen Maura Hodge with her shotgun and Dobermans. They climbed out of the car and Lydia could see by the tilt of his head that the cop sitting in the car was dozing.
“I’m not sure this is what Malone and Piselli had in mind when they said the Hodge residence was under surveillance,” Lydia said as they approached the driver’s side of the squad car.
Jeffrey tapped on the window and the cop awoke with a startled snort. He looked around for a few seconds, disoriented, and then rolled down the window. A mingling scent of body odor and stale coffee wafted out into the cold air.
“This is a crime scene,” said the cop. He was young, red-faced, with a bristle of strawberry blond hair on his head. He had a sleep crease on his cheek where he’d obviously rested it against the door as he napped. His gold nameplate read REED.
“NYPD Detective Malone was supposed to call with clearance,” said Jeffrey, holding out his identification.
The cop looked from Jeffrey to Lydia with suspicion but then reluctantly pulled the radio from its hook on the dash and muttered into the mouthpiece unintelligibly. He waited, silent, not looking at them, while the radio crackled with static and other communications.
Lydia looked up at the house and remembered the last time they’d been there. She remembered the noises upstairs she’d heard when they’d interviewed Maura, how Dax had seen a figure in the upstairs window. The thought made her skin tingle. The windows were dark now, had that air of desertion like the rest of the town.
“Forty-one, forty-one,” the radio yelled.
Reed grabbed the radio and seemed to puff up with self-importance. Lydia noticed that his fingers were long and girlish in their shape and apparent softness.
“Forty-one,” he said into the mike.
“Clearance granted for Mark and Strong.”
“Ten-four.”
“You can go in,” he said, friendlier now that they had been cleared. “Holler if you need anything.”
“Thanks,” said Jeffrey.
The smell that Lydia remembered from their first visit seemed to have staled and solidified. She felt the same swelling of her sinuses just seconds after stepping though the door. A staircase to her left led into darkness.
“Let’s split up,” she said. “I’ll head upstairs.”
Jeffrey looked at her and flashed on the attack in the basement of the Ross house. The habits of the last few months, the feeling that someone always had to be with her because of Jed McIntyre, were dying hard.
“Okay,” he said with effort.
Lydia smiled at him, squeezed his hand. “I’ll holler if I need anything.”
The stairs groaned beneath her weight and the wood felt like it had a bit too much give. But she made it to the top of the stairs without falling through. She pushed the door open to the immediate right of the landing and flipped on the light. It was totally bare, the windows boarded up. She walked across to a closet and saw only a single wire hanger lonely on a mauve tension rod.
Two other rooms she entered were identically empty, though the rest of the windows were free of plywood. Lydia walked down the hallway over sagging wood floors, her footfalls sounding loud to her own ears. At the end of the hall, she turned the brass knob of one of the two remaining bedrooms. Here the smell was more powerful than anywhere else in the house, some combination of mold and dust, maybe wood rot.
The room was full of junk. A blue bicycle with rusted handlebars and a missing front wheel leaned against the wall. A Singer sewing machine, its plastic case yellowed and cracked, sat atop a rickety wood table. The fading light outside struggled in through windows that were opaque with grime. Lydia flipped the light switch and a bulb hanging from a wire, naked of fixtures, sizzled to life, albeit dimly. It flickered as she moved through the stacks of junk. Ripped and soiled clothes-a man’s gray wool overcoat with the pockets torn out, a flowered housedress covered with dark red stains, a child’s red corduroy jumpsuit cut with scissors-were piled randomly about the space. A tower of old record albums teetered in a corner. It was a big room, maybe four or five hundred square feet, and Lydia moved through the maze of junk.
One of the major principles of good Feng Shui is to clear all spaces of clutter. Clutter represents stale energy. A person who feels comfortable in clutter is the kind of person who holds on to the past, can’t let go. Lydia was not surprised to see a room like this in Maura Hodge’s home. Maura could hold a grudge… even one that wasn’t necessarily her own. Righteous anger like that was addictive; it allowed a person to stagnate, wallow in her contemplation of injustice, spend all her energy seeking revenge and never for a second thinking that there might be another way to live. Lydia herself had been guilty of this for many years.
Something in the far corner of the room was covered with a white sheet. As she approached, a gust of wind traveled through the house with a low groan. Lydia felt a little flutter of fear and was glad when a second later she heard Jeffrey’s footfalls on the stairs. She’d had too many people leaping out of the dark at her in the last several days; she was getting a bit skittish.
“Where are you?” he called.
“The room at the end of the hall.”
“Find anything?” he said as he entered.
“Not yet,” she said, walking over to the sheet and yanking it.
The sheet came down in a cloud of dust to reveal a bookcase filled with the same leather-bound volumes Lydia remembered seeing at the Haunted Library. She scanned the titles embossed in gold on the bindings.
“Christ,” said Jeffrey. “How many volumes could you fill with the history of Haunted?”
“Looks like about thirty. Three centuries’ worth.”
The books, all titled History of Haunted, New York, were shelved in order by decade dating back to the 1700s and ending in the early 1900s. Some of them were slim, no thicker than a hundred pages.
“Fascinating.”
“You know,” Lydia said, “all these books have exactly the same binding. So did all the books in the Haunted Library.”
“So?”
“When’s the last time you were in a library and all the books were the same?”
“I haven’t been in a library since Quantico,” he said with a shrug. “In fact, I’m not sure I even remember how to read.”
She picked a book off the shelf at random and turned to the title page.
The History of Haunted, New York
1800-1810
by
Maura Hodge
“Voodoo priestess-slash-author,” said Jeffrey, leaning over Lydia’s shoulder.
“Looks self-published.”
“Didn’t Eleanor say that Maura had been commissioning writers and historians to document the history of Haunted?” said Jeffrey.
“Yeah, I guess she’s been publishing the work as well. Or at least binding it. That must be why all the books have the same package.”
Lydia grabbed another volume and saw that it, too, was written by Maura Hodge. In fact, after a few minutes of inspection it appeared that Maura had written them all.
“Wow, that’s stamina for you,” said Jeffrey.
“No. That’s obsession.”
“She’s obsessed with Haunted? Doesn’t seem like much of an obsession.”
“With the past. Remember how Ford said that the person who killed Tad Jenson and Richard Stratton was enraged? And how Maura’s grudge was over one hundred and fifty years and had nothing really to do with her immediate world so she couldn’t muster the rage it took to commit those crimes?”
“Yeah…”
“Well, look at this. I mean, to write all these books, she must have lived for this town and everything that happened here. She must think about it every day. For Maura Hodge, the past is right now. It’s more present for her than the present, living in this place, isolated from the world, harboring her grudge against Eleanor and the Ross bloodline, planning her vengeance for Annabelle Taylor. For Christ’s sake, she named her daughter after Annabelle.”
“So… what? Because she wrote a few books that means she killed Tad Jenson, Richard Stratton, Eleanor Ross, and took Lola and Nathaniel?”
“Or her daughter did. She must have been fed that hatred like mother’s milk.”
Jeffrey could hear that edge in Lydia’s voice that brooked no argument.
“I don’t know,” he said anyway. “It seems weak.”
Lydia shrugged and crouched down, looking at the books on the bottom shelf. She slipped one out and stood, flipping it open to the title page:
“ ‘The Legend of Haunted, New York: The Murder of Innocents, by Maura Hodge,’ ” she read out loud. She turned the page and saw the dedication: “To Paul, the only pure soul.”
“Who’s Paul?” asked Jeffrey.
“When we were here last, we talked to her about Paul-Eleanor’s brother, remember? She said something like: ‘He was the only one of them that was any good.’ Remember that? Remember how soft and wistful her voice became?”
It was a fairly light volume and Lydia flipped through, scanning the pages, with Jeffrey looking over her shoulder. She read over the legend as Marilyn Woods had told it to her. Much of the text was rambling, clearly unedited, with poor grammar, fraught with typos. There were some crude line drawings of Hiram and Elizabeth, of the Ross house, of the shack where Annabelle had lived with her five children. There was a striking drawing of Annabelle Taylor and Austin Steward, the lines dark and dramatic, Annabelle’s hair a wild mane of black curls much like Maura’s. Lydia came to the final chapter, called “The Curse.”
The curse of Annabelle Taylor is alive and flowing through my veins. For years, I was electric with the purpose of continuing Annabelle’s quest for vengeance. But I grew weak when J left me. I thought that they had won and I had lost everything. I felt the cold disapproval of Annabelle herself, felt her anger in my blood. She hated me and my weakness so much that she took my only child from me. I wanted to die in my failure. Then a miracle occurred.
On a night in the fall when the harvest moon hung bloated in the sky, much like the night that Annabelle lost her children, Austin Steward came to me. And he made love to me as he had made love to Annabelle; he said her name over and over. Nine months later I gave birth to my only daughter. I named her Annabelle.
“Okay,” said Jeffrey. “So Maura thinks that the ghost of Austin Steward visited her and impregnated her with Annabelle.”
“It would appear that way,” said Lydia.
“There must be something in the water in this town. These people are nuts.”
“Who do you think she’s talking about when she writes, ‘when J left me’?”
Jeffrey considered it. “I have no idea, and unfortunately, everyone who might be able to tell us is either dead, missing, or nuts.”
“Not quite everyone.”
“I very nearly lost my job after your last visit, Ms. Strong. I’m afraid I have nothing left to say to you.”
“Ms. Woods, with two dead bodies, a missing detective, and two missing children, I’m afraid you don’t have much of a choice.”
“You’ve come to the wrong place,” said the librarian. “I don’t know anything that’s going to help you.”
“Then tell me who does.”
The librarian shook her head hard from side to side and pressed her mouth into a thin, hard line.
“Where’s your boss?” probed Lydia. “Where’s Maura Hodge?”
“I have no idea.”
“You are aware, Ms. Woods, that if you try to impede the progress of this investigation and we later learn that you knew something that you didn’t reveal, you could be charged as an accessory to murder?”
Jeffrey turned so that Marilyn Woods wouldn’t see him roll his eyes. Lydia’s statement, of course, was a lie. It would probably have been a lie even if she was a cop. It had sounded pretty convincing, though; he’d give her that.
“Don’t give me that crap,” said Marilyn. “I watch television. I know my rights.”
Jeffrey heard Lydia sigh. She was dwarfed by the large desk that Marilyn sat behind, which elevated her by about two feet above Lydia. The librarian stared down at Lydia behind thick glasses and a hard expression that seemed as immovable as stone. She looked more like a judge than a bookworm.
“I thought if anyone could be counted on to help us find the truth, it would be you, Marilyn.”
She’d shifted flawlessly from intimidation to manipulation, but it hadn’t chiseled even a chip from Marilyn’s expression.
“You’re more worried about your job than you are about the lives of two innocent children?” Lydia pressed, her voice a combination of disgust and disapproval.
The first crack in her indifferent façade appeared as Marilyn’s face flushed red.
“I don’t know anything. I told you,” she said, her tone somewhat less emphatic and her voice catching at the end.
But Lydia backed off. She placed a business card on top of the desk.
“When your conscience catches up with you, give me a call on my cell,” she said. “In the meantime, we’ll be giving your name to the NYPD. Expect a visit.”
This was another lie, but it hit its mark. As Lydia and Jeffrey walked toward the door, the librarian called them back.
“Wait,” she said.
They stopped and turned to face her.
“What I know… it’s just gossip.”
“Let us decide,” said Lydia, walking back. The librarian walked to the door and locked it, turning around a sign that read BACK IN FIVE MINUTES though it was well after dark and there didn’t appear to be an especially high patronage of the Haunted Library. She went to her office, beckoning Lydia and Jeffrey to follow.
“Well, no one knows where Maura has gone. I’ll tell you that much,” said Marilyn, seating herself behind the desk. Lydia sat on the sofa, and as was his habit, Jeffrey stood by the door.
“It’s about Maura and Eleanor. There’s a bit more to the hatred between them than just the curse. I heard that Eleanor had been killed and it made me think about the past.”
Lydia waited while the woman seemed to be composing herself. Marilyn sighed heavily and seemed unsure as to whether she should go on.
“And…” said Lydia.
“Jack Proctor and Maura Hodge were lovers,” she finally said in a whisper, as if someone might overhear.
“So that was the ‘J’ she referred to in her book?” asked Lydia.
Marilyn nodded. “They were high school sweethearts and everyone thought they would get married. But in the end, he succumbed to pressures from his family and married Eleanor Ross instead. Maura, because she had Haitian blood in her veins, was thought to be an inappropriate wife for Jack, who was the sole heir to his family’s considerable fortune.”
“That would be another reason for Maura to hate Eleanor. A more contemporary reason,” said Lydia, looking at Jeffrey.
“Yes. And it didn’t end there. After Jack and Eleanor were married, he continued his affair with Maura,” she said. Then she shook her head and added with a cluck of her tongue, “Everybody knew.
“But when Eleanor became pregnant, Jack ended the affair with Maura. Unfortunately, Maura was pregnant, as well. She paraded about town, telling anyone who would listen that she was having Jack Proctor’s child. It was a humiliation for everyone. But Maura’s child was stillborn. Eleanor gave birth to Julian and James. Jack never saw Maura again. And five years later, he was murdered.
“Everyone suspected Maura,” said Marilyn. “Even after Eleanor was accused and went to trial, people still believed it was Maura, that it had something to do with the curse.”
“Eleanor said that Maura wanted people to believe that,” said Lydia, remembering her last conversation with Eleanor. “That she used it to hurt Eleanor and the children even after Eleanor had been acquitted.”
“She told anyone who would listen that it was the curse of Annabelle Taylor,” said Marilyn. “Even though it made her an outcast, as well. She didn’t care, anything to hurt Eleanor.”
“And all that money… from the Proctor estate?”
“Went to Eleanor, James, and Julian, I assume. Now just Julian, I guess. James Ross’s body was found at the Ross house last year.”
“Combine that with the Jenson and Stratton money, not to mention Julian’s own fortune, and we’re talking about a huge pile of cash,” said Jeffrey.
“But none of it has ever bought that family a moment’s peace,” said Marilyn with a slight smile. “Even now.”
“And what about Annabelle Hodge?”
Marilyn shrugged and shook her head. Lydia saw a quick shift of her eyes, though. She registered it but said nothing.
“Why didn’t you mention her the last time I was here?”
“You didn’t ask.”
Lydia looked hard at the librarian. “What do you know about her?”
“Nothing, really. Maura got pregnant late in life. She’d never married but had the child anyway. Annabelle was home-schooled, went off to college a couple of years ago.”
“So who’s her father?”
“No one knows, really.”
“A town this small, a woman bears a child out of wedlock, and usually there are rumors, at least.”
“Well, if there were, I didn’t hear any of them,” she said primly, straightening her back.
“Seems like there’s not much you don’t know about this town,” said Jeffrey gently.
“Maura is not well,” said Marilyn.
“We were just at the Hodge house and saw the book she’d written about the curse,” said Lydia. “Seems like she believed that the ghost of Austin Steward impregnated her.”
Marilyn lifted her frail shoulders and nodded. “That’s what she believes.”
“Still?”
“Still. Or so she says.”
“What about Annabelle? What does she believe?”
“If you ask me, Annabelle doesn’t know what to believe. She’s a puppet, more or less, to Maura’s whims. Maura totally isolated that child; she never even went to the school here. Maura educated her at home.”
“I can only imagine what that lesson plan looked like,” Jeffrey said from the door.
“And you, Marilyn,” coaxed Lydia. “Who do you think might be Annabelle’s father? Any thoughts at all?”
“Honestly, Miss Strong, when it comes to those families, the less you know, the better.”
“Okay,” said Jeffrey back at the wheel of the Kompressor. “So I get why Maura hated Eleanor Ross, why she might have been motivated to kill Jack Proctor, and even Eleanor, though why she’d wait all this time to kill her is beyond me. I also get the whole curse thing, and why that might motivate someone to kill Julian’s husbands, you know, if they believed it was their ancestral duty or whatever. And there’s a lot of money at stake, we know that. But how these things fit together… it doesn’t make sense.”
“If it was just about revenge, about the ‘curse,’ why take the children? They’re not part of it.”
“What if it’s about the money?”
“Yeah, but the kidnapper isn’t going to inherit the money if Julian is declared incompetent. We talked about who had the most to gain and how it seemed like Eleanor.”
“But now Eleanor is dead.”
“Maybe it’s not about money; maybe it’s just about hatred pure and simple. Maybe someone just hates Julian Ross.”
“Then why not just kill her?”
“When you hate someone enough, maybe death seems like an easy way out.”
Jed McIntyre’s face flashed in front of Lydia’s eyes and she heard his threat to her, Life will be your punishment. She’d given a lot of thought to something else he’d said, as well. When she ran from him in the tunnels and he’d finally caught her, he’d said, I could have shot you in the back anytime I chose. Ask me why I didn’t. She hadn’t asked him, because she already knew the answer. He didn’t want to kill her because he wanted to possess her. That’s why he’d gone after her grandparents, why he’d taken Dax and Jeff. He wanted to destroy everything she loved so that she’d have nothing left; he wanted to strip her bare. Imagining that when she was a shell of herself, he would be able to control her, own her. Insanity had a way of making the ridiculous seem possible.
She thought then of Julian Ross, about the image in her drawing of the naked woman sprawled in the darkness.
“Julian Ross has been stripped bare,” she said, turning to look at Jeffrey, who had his eyes on the road. “She’s nothing but a ghost of herself, her life in shambles.”
“Yeah…”
“So maybe it’s not about the money, or about the curse, or even about hatred and revenge. Maybe someone just wants to destroy Julian’s life,” she said, shifting forward in her seat.
“But why?”
“Because when you’ve lost everything, what do you become?”
Jeffrey shrugged.
“Whatever you have to be to survive,” Lydia said.
“So who hates her that much?”
“I think the better question is: Who loves her that much?”
“Let me guess where you’re going with this,” said Jeff.
“James Ross is alive.”
He paused a second. “I thought we were looking at Maura and Annabelle.”
“They might be a part of it. But look at who is the real victim here. It’s Julian. She’s the one who’s lost everything. Her husband, her mother, her children, her sanity. Maura and Annabelle hated Eleanor enough to kill her. But did they hate Julian enough to wreak such havoc on her life? It had to be someone else, someone intimate to Julian. And I think that’s James Ross.”
“Did you forget that we have a death certificate on him?”
“None of this makes sense without him.”
He released a sigh at her stubbornness.
“What about the DNA evidence?” she said.
“The DNA evidence only proves that someone who was at the scene of the Tad Jenson murder was also in the basement of the Ross home.”
“And how many candidates do you think there are for that?”
Jeffrey considered the question for a minute, then shrugged. “The police chief, the hospital records, and Eleanor, even the librarian, all say James Ross is dead.”
“But the man who signed his death certificate, Dr. Wetterau, he could have told us that when we were in his office. But he didn’t. Why?”
“I don’t know,” Jeffrey admitted.
“Well, I think we’d better find out. Because when we find James Ross, we’re going to find Ford and the twins.”
In an investigation, Lydia noticed, no one was ever as friendly or cooperative on your second visit. And even though they’d visited him for a completely different reason the first time, Dr. Wetterau looked like he’d seen a vision of the Headless Horseman himself when he entered his waiting room to find Lydia looking over Jeffrey’s shoulder as he flipped through the December issue of Cosmopolitan.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. He looked over at the door that led to the outside. “Wasn’t that door locked?”
“Not well,” said Jeffrey pleasantly.
“I’m calling the police,” he said, reaching for the phone that stood on the reception desk.
“No need,” said Lydia, standing. “I’ve already called them.”
“What? Why?”
“Because you falsified a death certificate for James Ross when you knew full well that he’s alive. And I want to know why. I doubted you’d tell me, so I figured I’d see if the police have any luck when they take you in for questioning regarding the murder of Eleanor Ross and the disappearance of her grandchildren.”
Jeffrey had always admired that Lydia could lie with such complete self-righteousness.
“That’s ridiculous,” said the doctor, who suddenly seemed to need the doorjamb for support. “I’ve done no such thing.”
“Then explain how I was attacked by James Ross just a week ago when I have this document,” she said, pulling a copy of James Ross’s death certificate from the pocket of her coat. “With your signature on it.”
“You can’t prove that the man who attacked you was James Ross.”
“I have the DNA evidence to prove it. I recovered a candy wrapper from the basement with his saliva all over it.”
This half lie hit the doctor right between the eyes. He caved like a good man who’d done a wrong thing and worried every day since that it might catch up with him. What Lydia said was nothing less than his worst fears realized.
“Oh, Christ,” said the doctor, his giant shoulders sagging as he put his head to his hand.
“Now tell me what you know and you just might keep your medical license.”
The lighting in his office was dim and the room smelled of bandages and antiseptic. He leaned on the edge of his desk, which was covered with files, pictures of people she assumed were his kids and grandkids. Predictably, there was the Norman Rockwell print that every doctor has hanging on the dark-paneled wall of his office. His computer screen saver had turned on and a galaxy sped past.
“Eleanor Ross wanted her son declared dead,” he said, sitting down in one of the chairs across from Lydia and Jeffrey.
“Why?” asked Lydia.
“Because there were funds and properties held in trust for him that she couldn’t touch until he’d been declared dead.”
“Did she have money problems?”
“Not really. More than the money I think it was a matter of her wanting to put the past behind them. And also because of Julian.”
“What about Julian?”
“She dreaded him. He was her worst nightmare. Her fear of him led her to periods of deep depression. And Eleanor believed that if she thought he was dead, it might alleviate some of her suffering.”
“So how did it work out?”
“A drifter hung himself in the Ross home last year and there was suspicion that it was James Ross; he was about the same size and build. The body was so decayed as to be unidentifiable. Eleanor was informed and she came to me with her request.”
“And why would you oblige?”
The doctor shrugged and gave a sad shake of his head.
“She offered to pay you?”
“It wasn’t just the money. I wanted to give some peace to an old…”
“Flame?”
“Friend,” he said, glancing toward the door that led to his house. “And I thought, if it helped Julian, more the better. She’d suffered so much.”
“Part mercenary, part altruist. You’re a complex man, Doctor,” said Lydia.
“When Richard Stratton was murdered, did you think about coming clean?” asked Jeffrey.
“I thought about it. But that’s why Eleanor hired you.”
“What?”
“She and I agreed that if the evidence indicated that James was still alive and responsible for Richard’s murder, we’d come clean about what we did. Hopefully, you or the police would catch him and put him away for good. And we’d bear the consequences of our actions.”
“But when we came to you the first time, you could have lied. You could have said he was dead, but I noticed you stopped short of that.”
He shrugged. “Maybe part of me wanted the truth to come out.”
“And if we found someone else to be guilty?”
“The secret would die with us.”
“Good plan. You’re halfway there.”
He nodded his head slowly and he looked someplace inside himself.
“What can you tell us about Maura and Annabelle Hodge?” Lydia asked.
“I can tell you that they are two women with a lot of hatred in their hearts for the Ross bloodline.”
“How do you know that?”
He gave her a flat look that she couldn’t read and lifted his hands. “It’s common knowledge.”
“Or is it just a myth, like James Ross haunting the woods?”
“I guess it’s not as easy to tell the difference as one might think. Anyway, as far as their involvement in any of this, I don’t have the first idea.”
Lydia didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but she did believe he’d said all he was going to. He looked at her with tired, resigned eyes. But there was relief there, too. He’d unloaded a burden, and for better or for worse, at least he wouldn’t have to carry it around on his back any longer.
“So, who’s Annabelle’s father?”
The doctor shook his head. “Now, that’s something that only Maura Hodge knows for sure. I asked her that question many times.”
“And she told you Austin Steward.”
“That’s right… the ghost of Austin Steward. Tell you what, she was so adamant about it that I started to believe it myself.”
“I guess ghost stories are like that. Part of us wants to believe in the fantastic, no matter how frightening and horrible it might be.”
The doctor walked around to the seat behind his desk and sank into the leather chair. He was pale, and dark circles had appeared under his eyes.
“I noticed the police haven’t arrived,” he said after they’d all been silent for a long moment, realizing maybe that Lydia hadn’t quite told him the truth.
“Must be caught in traffic,” said Jeffrey, looking at his watch.
Lydia got up and moved toward the door. Jeffrey followed.
“That DNA evidence you mentioned?”
Lydia just smiled. “Might be a good time to start considering retirement, Doctor.”
“I was just thinking that.”
They stepped out of the office and into the cold, Lydia pulling the door closed behind them.
“You’re an accomplished liar,” said Jeffrey as they got into the Kompressor and pulled to the end of the drive. They paused there as a pair of headlights approached from the right.
“Thank you,” she answered.
“I’m not sure I meant it as a compliment.”
“There are lots of different ways to get to the truth. Lying is just one of them.”
“Well, when you’re right, you’re right.”
“So where to?”
“To the only place we’ve ever seen James Ross.”
Jeffrey didn’t pull out into the road right away. Instead he put the car in park.
“What’s wrong?” asked Lydia.
“I’m just afraid of what we’re going to find up there.”
Jeffrey sighed and rested his head on the steering wheel. Cold air blew from the vents but started to warm as the car heated up. They sat in the darkness, with only the glow from the dashboard lights. Mick Jagger and the Stones sang “Start Me Up” softly from the radio. Lydia reached over and turned it off. She wasn’t sure what to say.
“There’s so much loss,” Jeffrey said quietly into the steering wheel. “How much more of this can we take?”
Lydia didn’t have the answer to that question so she said nothing, just moved her hand from his arm to the back of his head. The air coming from the vents had gone from frigid to lukewarm; still Lydia shivered.
“The pregnancy, Rebecca, now Ford,” he said. He turned to look at her then, his head still resting on his arm draped over the steering wheel. “I really wanted that baby.”
His words felt like a blow to her solar plexus and tears sprang to her eyes, more from the surprise and the pain than from sadness. “I know,” she managed.
Lydia had never seen Jeffrey like this. He was a man of action, believing that motion was the way to deal with fear, anger, sadness. Tonight he seemed to buckle under the weight of everything.
“It will be better when we try again,” she said, withdrawing her hand and looking away from him. “We won’t be living with the worry of Jed McIntyre, where he is, what he’s planning. Won’t it be better to bring a child into a life that isn’t controlled by fear?”
The car was filled with their breath and their sadness, quiet except for the vents blowing the slowly warming air. Lydia’s toes felt cold, and her heart ached, but she knew with an odd certainty that what she said was not just hopeful but true.
“You’re right,” he said, reaching out to touch her face and wipe the tear that trailed down her cheek. She turned back to him. “You’re right,” he said again. Jeffrey sat up and took a deep breath, seemed to shake off the mood.
“Good,” she said with a nod. She didn’t want to think about any of this anymore tonight. “People need us right now, Jeffrey. We can worry about ourselves when they’re safe.”
He leaned in to kiss her softly on the lips. He put the car into gear and they moved toward the road.
“Ford, where the hell are you, man?”
With the moon behind thick cloud cover, the night was eerily black. No streetlights lit the road ahead of them.
They drove about half a mile past the Ross house and parked the car at the side of the road. From where they parked, they could see the outline of the dark house. The place had a definite presence and Lydia thought again back to Julian’s drawings. The home where Julian grew up had become a symbol of terror for her, her father had been murdered there, her brother allegedly tried to kill her by burning it down. Maybe she was right, maybe the past did live in the structures we build, radiated off them like an aura.
A deep sense of unease had taken hold of Jeffrey. He didn’t like that no one knew where they were or what they were doing.
“Call Dax,” he said. “Tell him what we’re doing.”
Before he’d finished the sentence, Lydia’s phone was chirping. She pressed the button on the dash that answered the phone.
“Do you want the good news or the bad news?” said Dax.
“The bad news,” answered Jeff.
“I just heard on the news that the Haunted police found Ford’s car in a river over there in Haunted.”
“Shit,” said Jeffrey, feeling a brew of fear, adrenaline, and sadness boil in his stomach. “What’s the good news?”
“The good news is he wasn’t in it.”
Lydia sighed in relief. “Well, that’s something.” Hope was always something.
“Where are you two?”
“We’re at the Ross house. We think James Ross is alive. We’re going to check it out.”
“I thought you were just going to be asking questions,” said Dax, sounding like the kid picked last for the dodgeball team.
“Listen, Dax. If you don’t hear from us in an hour, call the Haunted police. Okay?” asked Lydia, trying to keep him involved.
“Right,” he said sullenly. “Be careful.”
When they reached the bottom of the drive, the tall iron gate that had stood unlocked during their last visit was now shut tight, a new lock in place where the old one had rusted away. Jeffrey removed the picklock from his pocket and tried to work the lock, but he couldn’t get it. After a few minutes, he sighed and stood back, looking up at the gate, which was supported on either side by high brick posts. It hadn’t been designed with any real security in mind; it was probably partly for show and partly to keep curious or lost people from driving up to the house.
“We can get in,” he said, bending down and cupping his hands. “I’ll give you a leg up to the top of the post, and you just lower yourself down on the other side. I’ll be right behind you,” he whispered.
“Great.” Jeffrey was always assuming that she had more grace and physical prowess than she actually did.
She placed her foot in his hand and he hoisted her while she clumsily clawed her way to the top of the post, using every last ounce of upper body strength to push herself up and lift her butt to the top. She was breathless by the time she came to sit on top of the structure. She looked down the other side.
“I can’t jump. It’s too far,” she said, feeling a little panicked. She was glad she had worn her black stretch Emmanuel jeans and her soft black leather motorcycle boots and matching leather jacket. The front of her gray sweatshirt was now lined with dirt from her climb. She looked over and saw that Jeffrey had already scaled the other post and was lowering himself onto the ground on the other side. He landed with a light thump and walked over to her.
“Just turn over on your belly and lower your legs first. You’re not that high up,” he instructed.
She remembered him saying almost exactly the same words to her in Miami not long ago. That little maneuver hadn’t ended well and she had a feeling this one was going to end up the same way. But she managed to lower herself and land on both feet without falling on her ass, though the impact was a bit jarring to her damaged insides.
“Hey,” said Jeffrey. “You’re getting better at this.”
“Practice makes perfect,” she said, holding her abdomen for a minute.
“You okay?”
“I’m fantastic,” she said.
They moved quickly and quietly up the drive toward the house, staying to the side under cover of the trees. The winter woods that surrounded them were silent and the air was sharp with cold. Lydia peered in through the trees and saw nothing but pitch-black in the moonless night. She shivered involuntarily.
A black late-model Lexus was parked near the front door and Lydia and Jeffrey stood at the edge of the house, waiting for a moment to be sure no one was in the car. They stood like that, still and listening, when they heard a voice from inside the house. It was a man’s voice, speaking in light, comforting tones.
Lydia and Jeffrey moved onto the veranda, Jeffrey drawing his gun, and they both peered into the window beside the door.
The man was tall and thin, with slick blond hair. He was expensively dressed in royal blue oxford, sleek black pants, with a Gucci belt around his waist. His back was to them, but Lydia could see that he moved with grace, gesticulating grandly with his hands. A fire crackled in the hearth and on a couch that had been pushed beside the fire, Lola and Nathaniel Stratton-Ross huddled together beneath a blanket, their eyes wide and trained on the man before them. Lydia felt flooded with relief to see them; they looked terrified but otherwise unharmed.
He turned suddenly as if he sensed eyes on him, and Jeffrey and Lydia moved away from the window. But not before she recognized his face. It was James Ross. They heard footsteps coming closer and managed to get off the veranda and hide themselves before James Ross exited the house with a twin on each hand. They were stiff and silent, both of them looking pale and tired, as though they had been drained from fear and sleeplessness. He put them in the backseat, made sure they were strapped in, and shut the door.
“We’ll be with Mommy soon,” he said sweetly before locking the car with a remote he held in his hand. From the truck, he then unloaded five red gallon containers marked GASOLINE and walked back into the house with one in each hand, leaving the other three on the ground by the car. Lydia and Jeffrey exchanged a look. Lydia shrugged and they followed Ross into the house.
They stood in the foyer watching as James Ross doused the living room with gasoline. It was a full minute before he felt their eyes on him and turned to see them. Instead of startling, he smiled. His face was so strikingly like Julian’s face, the face from her drawings and the portrait at DiMarco’s gallery, that Lydia almost gasped. His eyes were the searing blue of a crystal-clear sky, and in them she saw the same glitter of insanity she’d viewed in his sister. He may have cut his hair and changed his clothes, but she could see the maniac alive and well inside him.
“You clean up pretty good for a dead guy, Mr. Ross,” said Lydia, trying through humor to trick her heart out of her stomach.
He laughed good-naturedly. “It’s funny how the things people do to destroy you can wind up working out to your advantage. It’s like I always say, you can’t control the things that happen to you in your life. All you can control is your attitude.”
He didn’t seem at all surprised to see them, seemed to know who they were. Lydia wondered how, somewhere in the periphery of her consciousness.
“We’re looking for a friend of ours. Hoping maybe you can help us,” said Jeffrey.
“You’ve come to the right place,” he said. “And maybe when I’m done with this, I can help you out.”
“So… what are you up to?” asked Lydia, matching his casual tone.
“I’m reclaiming what’s mine, Ms. Strong.”
“Looks to me like you’re getting ready to set it on fire,” said Jeffrey, clicking the safety off his gun.
James Ross looked at Jeffrey’s gun and then at the house around him. “Time for a fresh start,” he said brightly, clapping his hands together. “Our past is so ugly, ugly, ugly. I want my family to move forward from here. The twins deserve better than we had.”
“That’s why you killed their father?”
He blinked at Lydia as if she were an apparition that he wished would disappear. And she wondered for a second if he thought they were real or a product of his diseased mind.
“I am their father,” he said slowly. “Julian’s husband may have been their sire, but those children belong to me.”
“How do you figure?”
“Because Julian and I are one person,” he said with a sympathetic smile. “We come from the same seed; what she is, I am. What comes from her body, comes from mine. Can you understand that?”
“What about Julian?”
“Julian had her chance for us all to be together. I offered her freedom from a marriage to a man she could never love. But she couldn’t see that. She’d wanted this normal life that she could never have. That’s why she’s lost touch with reality, why she’s locked away in that hellhole. She can’t accept who she is, who we are. So the twins and I will just have to go on without her. Now I really have to be going.”
Lydia nodded. “I understand how you feel, James. I do. Do you understand that we can’t let you burn this place down? And we can’t let you have the twins?”
“What business is it of yours, anyway? My mother hired you, right? She’s dead. I’ll pay your fee and this can stay between us,” he said, like it was the most logical thought in the world.
“That’s not the way it works, James,” said Jeffrey.
“I’m not armed,” James said to Jeffrey, nodding toward his gun.
“You’ve got a can of gasoline and, I’m assuming, a lighter in your pocket. I call that armed.”
James shrugged. He paced a bit and then turned to them.
“You’re looking for justice, right? Bring the murderer, the kidnapper, to justice. That’s noble. I respect that. But,” he said, and here his face changed, went from cool and reasonable to angry, “you don’t understand any of this. Don’t you know what they did to me?”
His brow furrowed and his face flushed.
“They locked me away from Julian. Said I tried to burn down this house, kill my sister and my mother. But it was a lie.” He spat the last word out like it burned his tongue.
“Was it?”
“Yes,” he yelled, and then composed himself. “Because Eleanor wanted to keep Julian and me apart. She thought we had something dirty. But it was never like that. Never. It was the purest love two people could share.
“We loved each other, we belonged together. Even Eleanor could see that. Jealous old cow. She said I was evil, afraid that I was the manifestation of that stupid curse she obsessed about every fucking day. So she had her lover lock me away. Dr. Wetterau. They were lovers. Did you know that? She always went on and on about how my father had been her one true love, that there would never be another. But it didn’t stop her from fucking around like a whore.”
“So they sent you away. To keep you from Julian,” said Lydia.
“But I escaped,” he said, and laughed.
“And where did you go?”
“Julian was at Chapin by then, in New York. So I went to her. But she didn’t love me anymore,” he said, and his eyes filled with tears. He turned away from them and stood before the hearth.
“They’d brainwashed her, convinced her that I was evil. She turned me away, told me she wanted a normal life, a natural love. I was ruined, destroyed. Started to believe that I was evil. I was never far from her, always shadowing her, watching over her.
“I lived like an animal for a lifetime. But now, as you can see, I’ve had a rebirth. I’ve claimed my children.”
“Did you kill Tad Jenson?”
“I didn’t mean to,” he said, and appeared truly remorseful. “I just wanted to see her, to touch her. And he wouldn’t let me. Things just got out of hand. You know how it goes… don’t you? The rage, that monster inside, just takes over.”
“And Richard Stratton?”
“The rage…” he said, and didn’t go on. He looked off in the distance now, into the past, a gallery of all his regrets and mistakes.
“The past is so unforgiving,” he went on. “But the future is a blank slate. We can make anything of it. That’s what I’m going to do for the twins. They represent everything I have lost… my love, my fortune, my family. In them, all things will be made right.”
“What about the curse? Where do Maura and Annabelle Hodge fit into this?”
“Oh, they were happy for the opportunity to destroy Eleanor and Julian. When I finally found the courage to return to this place,” he said, looking around him. “You know, to set the past right. I went to see Maura. Because we had a common enemy, Eleanor, we became allies. We both got what we wanted. Maura and Annabelle got to see Eleanor’s worse nightmares come true and then they got to watch her die. It wasn’t really about the curse, you know. That’s just a myth. It was hatred pure and simple. Now Maura and Annabelle are long gone. Maura has her vengeance after all these years.”
“What did Annabelle get out of all of this?”
“I think Annabelle was more motivated by the payoff than anything. That and fear of her mother. Poor kid. And who wouldn’t be afraid of Maura? She’s fucking insane.”
In her zeal to classify all human motivation, Lydia had neglected maybe the most powerful of all… hatred. It had been the food Maura ate most of her life and apparently had fed to her daughter. In a way, Lydia felt bad for Annabelle; she was as much a victim as Lola and Nathaniel, used in the same way.
“Have you satisfied your curiosity, Ms. Strong? Do you know everything you want to know?”
“There’s just one thing. Our friend, Ford McKirdy.”
“Your nosey little friend almost ruined everything. Let’s make a deal, shall we? I’ll give you your friend, and you let me walk out of here. We’ll just pretend this little meeting never happened.”
“How about you tell us where Ford McKirdy is and I don’t blow your head off?” said Jeffrey, losing his patience. It was then that from somewhere deep in the house they heard a pounding, the sound of a voice shouting through layers of wood and concrete. They both turned to look in the direction of the noise, and when they looked back, James was gone, the gas cans with him.
Lydia took off in the direction of the noise, heading toward the basement. In the distance she heard the wail of sirens, but remembered the locked gate at the bottom of the drive and wondered how anyone could get up to the house. She pushed down panic as she moved through the long hallway. Suddenly she caught the scent of smoke.
She stopped in her tracks. “Jeffrey,” she yelled. “There’s fire!”
But he didn’t answer her. She’d drawn the.38 she’d had in the pocket of her leather jacket and was watchful of the dark corners, not sure where James lurked or what his agenda was. The pounding grew louder as she drew closer to the basement door, but when she turned the knob, it was locked.
“Stand back,” she yelled to whoever could hear her. She gave it ten seconds and then she fired a round at the doorknob. The latch gave way and the door swung open and a dark stairway yawned below her.
“Ford,” she yelled. But there was no answer and the pounding had stopped. A horrible moment passed during which Lydia feared that Ford had been standing behind the heavy door and she had just shot him. She reached in for a light switch and found one. But when she flipped it, no lights came on… naturally. Then she heard a croaking voice in the darkness. “Lydia.”
“Ford?”
She heard a weak groan.
She ran down the stairs to find him bound to a chair. He’d knocked himself to the floor and had apparently gotten one leg free and was kicking at the wall. That was the pounding they’d heard. He was dirty and looked awful but seemed unharmed.
“Ford. Thank God.”
“I thought I was going to die down here,” he said.
“Not if I can help it,” said Lydia, dropping to her knees and starting to work the knots in the ropes that bound him.
“I smell smoke,” said Ford.
“I think there’s a fire,” said Lydia, glancing up the stairs and wondering where Jeffrey was. Then she heard the sound of a gun firing. Her stomach twisted as she pulled on the bindings. The ropes were damp from the moisture in the basement and Lydia struggled with the tight knots, but was finally able to get him free.
“Can you walk?” she asked as she helped him to his feet.
“Yeah…”
“Let’s go.”
By the time they reached the top of the stairs, the house was starting to fill with smoke. They turned the corner and were headed toward the door when Jeffrey jumped out at them through the black cloud that was gathering. He had his shirt pulled up over his nose. Ford and Lydia quickly did the same.
“Where’s James?” asked Lydia.
“I shot him, but he got away from me. He went deeper into the house. I tried to follow him, but this place is going up like kindling. We have to get out of here. He’s still in here. The Lexus is still parked outside with the twins in it.”
Jeffrey grabbed Ford and dragged him the rest of the way out of the house, as Ford seemed to lose strength. Lydia paused before exiting, looked at the grand home being eaten by flames, and she wondered if this was James Ross’s funeral pyre. Then she ran out the front door.
Outside, police and fire vehicles were moving up the drive, their blue and red lights casting the night in a bizarre strobe.
Jeffrey helped Ford away from the house. Lydia, smashing in with the butt of her gun the front passenger side window, unlocked the Lexus and took the terrified, screaming twins from the car. She picked them up, one on each hip, and moved quickly behind Jeffrey and Ford. Though they’d only met her once, the twins clung to her. The five of them made quite a sight to Henry Clay as he stepped out of his prowler. And he would remember that as they passed him and moved toward the waiting ambulance, there seemed to be a moment of silence, when the house and the woods around them took a deep breath before an explosion blasted them all back at least ten feet. It was an explosion of such force that Henry Clay had his eyebrows and what was left of his hair singed to ash.
The house burned for hours. Every time it seemed that the flames might be dying, the fire appeared to reignite itself. The firefighters could only struggle to keep it under control as much as possible, keep it from spreading to the surrounding trees.
Lydia watched from an ambulance, where she sat on a stiff white seat, the twins lying against her. They had collapsed on her like puppies seeking warmth and comfort from her body heat. And she had draped an arm around each of them. They probably didn’t realize it, but they were comforting her, as well.
Jeffrey had ridden in another ambulance with Ford, and Lydia had chosen to stay with the twins until someone could come for them. They didn’t really know her, but she was more familiar to them than anyone else on the scene and they seemed calmed by that.
“My daddy used to take me to see the penguins at the zoo,” said Nathaniel solemnly.
“He used to take us to the zoo,” corrected Lola. “He took both of us.”
“Your daddy loves you very much,” said Lydia, using the present tense without really thinking.
“He loved us,” said Lola. “He’s dead now. Dead people can’t love you.”
“Lola,” said Lydia, thinking of the dream she’d had recently about her mother, “that’s not true. It’s not true at all.”
When Lydia and Jeffrey walked into his broom closet of an office, Ford McKirdy was cleaning out his desk. And though it was a bright cold day, he wore a festive Hawaiian shirt and a pair of khakis. A big down parka rested on the chair by the door.
“So you’re finally getting a life,” said Lydia with a smile.
He stopped what he was doing and looked at them. “Thanks to you two, yeah,” he said. He walked over and embraced each of them.
“Have a seat,” he said, hanging his parka on a hook behind the door.
“We’re going to Europe,” he said, with the excitement of a kid on his way to Disneyland. “Me and Rose. Can you believe it?”
“That’s great, Ford,” said Jeffrey, smiling broadly. “We’re happy for you, man.”
“Hey, I’m happy for you guys, too. Dax says you’re finally getting hitched. I know you’ll do a better job at it than I did. But I’m going to make up for it now.”
Jeffrey put his arm around Lydia and smiled into her eyes. Lydia had never seen Ford so animated, and it made her happy; it also made her think twice about why they’d come to see him.
“Hey, speaking of Europe, you guys’ll be happy to know this,” he said, sitting behind his desk. “Interpol picked up Maura and Annabelle Hodge in Paris yesterday. They had a palatial apartment and a big fat bank account. Anyway, they’re bringing them back to face conspiracy-to-murder charges. James Ross might be dead, but someone’s going to pay for all of this.”
The explosion and fire had consumed the Ross house so totally that James Ross’s body had not yet been recovered in the debris. The explosion had come from a rudimentary bomb in the kitchen and had been so powerful that the house was completely leveled. It had been three weeks and investigators were still sifting through debris. The remains of Anthony Donofrio had been recovered, investigators believing that his body had been on one of the top floors of the house. But they had yet to find James Ross. This detail hadn’t rested well with Lydia, and in thinking of it, a couple of other details weren’t sitting so well, either. That’s why they had come today to talk to Ford.
“So when’s your last day?” asked Lydia, looking at him guiltily.
“Tomorrow,” he said, turning his cop’s eyes on them, his voice shading suspicious. “Why?”
“There are just a couple of things nagging at us,” said Jeffrey, giving Ford an apologetic look.
“Man, you guys need to learn how to let things go. He confessed to you… didn’t he?”
“Yeah… but there are just a few things that don’t add up,” answered Lydia, sitting down. “If you can put them to bed for us, we’re on our way to Hawaii to meet my grandparents and to get married.”
He leaned back and looked at them, scowling, but Lydia could see the gleam of curiosity in his eyes.
“Like what?”
“Like where did he get all that money? The money to buy the Lexus and the new clothes? Presumably, now that you mention it, to pay Maura and Annabelle Hodge for their services. Remember he’d been declared dead. He had no funds, no assets.”
Ford nodded, seemed to consider the question. “What else?”
“Don’t you think it’s an awfully big coincidence that Julian Ross would wind up living in a building that had one of those Prohibition tunnels, convenient to her crazy tunnel-dwelling twin who happens to be stalking her?”
Ford shrugged. “What else?”
“That night in the house,” said Jeffrey. “I shot James in the foyer. He had a choice to run from the burning house, hop in his Lexus, and take off with the twins. But instead, he turned and ran up the stairs… into the flames. Why didn’t he just take off? Our car was all the way down on the street; he knew I wouldn’t leave you and Lydia in the house to chase after him. He would have had a clean getaway.”
Ford seemed to think about it. He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. “Well, the police were heading up the drive at that point, right?” said Ford, hopeful.
“And the other thing,” said Lydia, “may be the most important. James told us he took the twins so that he could reclaim his family and his fortune. But how would kidnapping the twins accomplish the recovery of his fortune? There was no way for him to claim their money when he was their kidnapper. We already know that Orlando DiMarco was named legal guardian of the twins. It doesn’t make sense.”
“So what are you getting at?”
“Now Julian, miraculously recovered, her evil twin dead, is cleared of her husband’s murder and reunited with her children,” said Lydia, mimicking a society column entry. “Even more fabulously wealthy than ever before, she’s about to embark on a new life, in a new country. She leaves for Switzerland next week, where her dear friend Orlando has a villa where she’ll stay until she and her children have found appropriately luxurious accommodations.”
They were all quiet, listening to the bustle of the busy precinct outside the office. Lydia looked at Ford and saw that none of what she’d said surprised him, that he’d been turning over the same questions in his mind. He shook his head slowly and closed his eyes.
“You remember Julian’s shrink, Dr. Barnes?” Lydia said. “Something she said keeps coming back to me. She said about a year before Stratton was murdered, Julian ended her therapy. She told the doctor that she’d decided to ‘surrender’ to her true self. And that fits with something James told us. He said that he’d been sent to Fishkill because Eleanor believed they had an incestuous relationship. Not because he’d tried to set the house on fire. When he found Julian again, he said she didn’t love him anymore. And that all this time, he’d been stalking her trying to convince her that they belonged together.”
She stopped and looked at Ford as he tried to connect the dots.
“Lydia, just what are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking,” said Lydia, “maybe after all these years of being apart, maybe after all these years of ‘trying to have a normal life,’ Julian gave in to James. Maybe Julian and James finally found a way to be together.”
The Park Avenue duplex was a bustle of workers, covering furniture and carrying boxes out the doors and to a waiting freight elevator. Some of the windows were open, Lydia assumed to air out the place, but she shivered against the cold. Julian Ross didn’t seem to notice the temperature, even though she wore only jeans and a thin white silk turtleneck. Looking fit and healthy, her cheeks a robust pink, her eyes clear, Julian greeted Lydia at the door with an embrace. Lydia regarded her and thought that she looked truly happy, that it radiated from the inside out.
“The children have gone on ahead to Switzerland with Orlando,” she said, leading Lydia into the parlor, which was still relatively intact. “They’ve come to love and trust him so much.”
They sat together on a red velvet sofa that was still uncovered.
“How are they holding up?”
“Young children are resilient,” she said calmly. “They’ll have the best counselors when we’re settled.”
“What about you?”
“For me,” she said, her expression darkening just slightly, “it might take longer. But I’m getting there.” A brightness came back to her, but this time it seemed forced.
“There were just some loose ends I wanted to tie up…”
“Oh, your fee!” she said, hopping up as if to rush off for her checkbook. “Of course. How much did my mother agree to pay you?”
“It’s not the fee, Julian.”
The other woman must have heard something in Lydia’s voice, because the color drained from her cheeks. She sat back down and was suddenly wary. “What is it, then? As you can see, I’m quite busy.”
“It won’t take long,” Lydia said with a smile. She rose and walked over to one of the open windows and looked down the fourteen stories to the street below. It was a busy midafternoon, with cabs rushing by, people swiftly walking along the sidewalk. From the window, Lydia could see the top of the Chrysler Building gleaming in the bright afternoon sun, smell the wood burning from fireplaces.
“We looked into the ownership of the Lexus James was driving and found something interesting. We found that it was registered to you, purchased just a week before Richard was killed.”
The words hung in the air between them.
“That’s not possible,” Julian said with a shake of her head. But she diverted her eyes to look out the window behind Lydia.
“We also discovered that on the same day, you opened a small checking account for Nathaniel and Lola and placed ten thousand dollars there.”
“So?”
“So… someone was using a bank card to draw on that money. We’ve managed to get a surveillance photo from one of the ATM machines. And guess who it was.”
“I have no idea,” she said, drawing herself up in the same way Lydia had seen Eleanor do.
“Your brother.”
Everything Lydia had said was true except for the part about the surveillance photo. That was a lie.
After Lydia and Jeffrey had posed their questions to Ford, he’d immediately contacted the DMV and the banking institutions where Julian Ross and Richard Stratton had kept their liquid assets. It had taken them less than an hour to come up with the vehicle ownership and the information about the small checking account. It had been a small enough withdrawal not to arouse suspicion during the initial investigation into Richard Stratton’s murder, as Julian and Richard regularly made purchases and withdrawals in that ballpark, and the police weren’t really working a murder-for-hire angle.
“He could have stolen that bank card. How should I know?” Julian said, a kind of calm seeming to come over her. “I’m going to ask you to leave now.”
Ford and Jeffrey, along with Detectives Malone and Piselli, walked in through the front door. The moving men paused in their activities, sensing that something was going down. Julian looked over at them, and then back to Lydia. She seemed to deflate a bit.
“Where is he, Julian? Where’s James?”
“This is crazy,” she said simply. “I want my attorney.”
“With Ford McKirdy missing, I think you knew it was a good bet that we’d head back up to Haunted and the trail would eventually lead us to the house. I think James wanted to confess his whole plot to us and then allow us to see him die. This way, he could take the rap for everything, you’d be cleared of all charges, and he’d be ‘dead.’ You could go to a country where no one would know him and finally, Julian, you would be reunited after all these years apart.”
Lydia wasn’t positive that she had it exactly right, but she was confident that all the elements were there. How had James recognized them? How had he known they would eventually come back to the house? These were questions for which she didn’t have answers. But she knew that she and Jeffrey were meant to hear his confession and see him die that night. Her gut told her this with cold certainty.
Looking now into Julian’s eyes, she could see that she had hit her target.
“Why did you decide to give in to him, Julian? You’d fought so hard to have a normal life. First with Tad, then, even when your mother begged you not to marry, you tried again with Richard.”
Julian sat stone-faced.
“You watched him kill Tad, didn’t you? Jetty heard you scream. What was it you said to him? ‘I never loved you. Not like that.’ But it wasn’t the truth, was it? You did love him. You were so afraid that your love for your twin was the unnatural love of the curse, the threat of which your mother tortured you with all your life. The thought repulsed you, terrified you, but you couldn’t help it. You loved him so much that even when you could have implicated him in Tad’s murder, you didn’t. Even when you might have gone to jail for a murder you didn’t commit, you didn’t implicate James.”
Lydia let silence fill the room.
“Your mother must have made you feel so sick, so dirty. How she must have punished and tortured you just to make you see how wrong it was. In her own way, just to save you from the curse she was so afraid of.”
Julian looked at her with surprise. Tears filled her eyes and trailed down her face.
“But it had been the same with her, hadn’t it? She loved her brother. And he killed Jack Proctor. What happened to Paul, Julian?”
Julian spoke for the first time.
“She killed him. He came for her again. After my father was dead and my brother sent away. She shot him dead. Even though she loved him, she killed him. I helped her bury the body behind the house. Then we left Haunted and never went back. She thought she’d ended it for us. She really believed that. Then James escaped.”
“Why didn’t she tell the police about him when Tad was murdered?”
“She loved him, too. He was her son, don’t forget. She thought I would be exonerated. If it looked like I might be convicted, she would have come forward. I promised her that I would never marry again. And she thought that was enough to keep him away. But I broke my word.”
“Why? Why would you take that risk?”
She shrugged and looked down in shame. “I was lonely. I was afraid. I felt him always right behind me, shadowing my life. Richard was strong, safe. And…” She paused. “I didn’t really love him. I thought it would be safe if I didn’t love him. But then I got pregnant. It was an accident, but I got pregnant with the twins. He came for me again. He wanted the twins.”
“When did you decide to give in?”
“I didn’t,” she said weakly. “He did this to my life. Now he’s dead. And we are finally free, Lola, Nathaniel, and I.”
“No, Julian. You ended your therapy with Dr. Barnes. You moved your family into this building with access to the tunnels beneath the street. You hired Geneva Stout.”
“I didn’t know who she was when I hired her. I hadn’t been to Haunted in over twenty years.”
“I don’t believe you, Julian. Maybe you were James’s victim once. But I believe you’re his accomplice now. Your breakdown… maybe it was real, maybe it was an act. But it seems like you helped him orchestrate all of this so you could look like the victim, so that he could take the rap and then fake his own death. I think you’re planning on meeting him in Switzerland.”
Everyone, Jeffrey, Ford, the other officers and the moving men, stood silently looking at Julian.
“Maybe Maura Hodge was right,” said Lydia. “She said, ‘The Ross family doesn’t even need a curse. They are fucked up in so many ways that they curse themselves.’ ”
It happened so fast, Lydia barely knew what hit her. Julian went from the calm woman sitting before her to the demon Lydia had met once before at Payne Whitney. She lunged at Lydia like a wildcat and Lydia went staggering back toward the open window behind her with Julian at her throat. All Lydia could think was that the other woman’s strength was phenomenal, and try as she did she couldn’t pull herself from Julian’s grip. In the periphery of her consciousness, she heard Ford shouting as her waist hit the sill, Julian on top of her. Lydia felt the cold of the outside air and heard the street noise below her as she and Julian leaned out the window, the upper halves of their bodies dangling over a straight drop to the sidewalk. Somewhere on the street, a woman screamed.
“You won’t keep us apart,” Julian whispered fiercely. Lydia felt herself tip toward the ground, the sky tilting around her, the buildings dancing. And she felt an odd lightness as gravity pulled on her. She felt the fragile thread that connected her soul to her body stretch to the point of snapping and she wondered, Am I going to die here? She reached out and held on hard to Julian. The woman had a death grip on Lydia’s throat, and she felt like she was breathing though a straw. White stars had started to dance before her eyes.
Things seemed to be happening so slowly as Lydia felt the balance shift from most of their weight being in the building to most of their weight being out. And in the next second, she felt her feet lift from the floor and her body tilt more steeply toward the ground. Julian must have felt it, too, because her expression morphed from malice to surprise and fear. She loosed her grip on Lydia’s throat. It was then that Lydia felt strong hands on her ankles. Julian’s body started to slip over hers. Lydia tried to hold on, but the momentum of Julian’s fall was too great. Julian flipped over her like an acrobat, Ford getting to the window a millisecond too late. There was a shocked silence among them, as Julian fell, her scream like a siren ending abruptly as she hit the sidewalk. It was a gruesome sound; everyone who heard it felt the shattering of bones. Screeching tires, the sound of metal on metal, yelling voices from the street below carried up and filled the room.
Jeffrey pulled Lydia in the rest of the way and she sank to the floor, feeling every nerve ending in her body pulse with the relief of mortal terror. He held on to her as she buried her head in his shoulder, taking in the scent of his skin, the strength of his muscles, the sound of his breath. She’d never been so glad to be alive.
The ferry ride was grim and it was a journey she made alone. Jeffrey thought she was having her run and then going on to Central Park West, visiting her doctor for an early morning follow-up visit after her laparoscopy. And she would do that today, as well. But later.
It was six-thirty and the sky was a flat dead gray. The air was cold, and coming off the water it was downright frigid, but Lydia stood at the bow away from the cargo and near the workers, who were bundled in layers and drinking coffee from thermoses. Hector approached her.
“I don’t know why anyone would want to be here if they didn’t have to be,” he said, his Dominican accent heavy.
Hector, the morgue worker she’d met the night Jed McIntyre died, had been true to his word when she called to ask where the city would bury him. When a week later she’d called again and offered him a thousand dollars cash to take her to his grave, he’d said, “Lady, are you nuts? Go back to your life.”
“That’s just it,” she’d told him. “I can’t do that until I’ve seen the grave.”
He’d reluctantly agreed and told her to meet him at City Island in the Bronx and that he’d take her over to Potter’s Field on Harts Island when he took over that day’s Jane and John Does. She stood and watched as twenty anonymous pine coffins, branded only with serial numbers, were loaded from a van onto the waiting ferry. An old priest stood by waiting and she wondered if he started every morning like this, watching as workers loaded the bodies of God’s forsaken children onto a boat that would take them to their unmarked graves. She wondered how it didn’t shake his faith. But she didn’t ask. She had her own faith to worry about.
“I do have to be here,” she said.
And Hector just nodded at her. He had a thick brown face with wide features and sharp eyes. He was looking at her with those eyes that were neither warm nor cold, neither kind nor cruel. They were eyes that saw things the way they were and didn’t judge. She turned away from him and watched as the island approached, looking into the murky choppy water of the Long Island Sound. And she thought about her recent breakdown of motivations. She thought about Julian and James and their twisted love for each other. A love they thought excused them from moral behavior, a love that made it okay to lie and scheme and murder to be together. And how it had ended with Julian a broken mess of herself on a city sidewalk. James Ross was still at large.
She thought about Maura and Annabelle Hodge, so warped by a legacy of revenge and hatred, by jealousy and greed, that they allowed themselves to be drawn into a plot that would end lives they considered less worthy than their own and children to grow up without parents. The righteous anger of their ancestor so many years ago, thwarted and used for their own selfish means. Lydia still wondered about Annabelle’s father, who he was, why he had disappeared. Lydia had her suspicions, thinking perhaps it was Paul, Eleanor’s brother. It was the way Maura had talked of him, the dedication in her book. Maybe she knew Eleanor had killed him, maybe she knew no one would ever believe her even if she told. Maybe all of this gave her a nudge a little further down the road to insanity. But it was just a guess and Lydia would probably never know the truth.
She thought about Orlando DiMarco. Of all of them, he was the one who confused her the most. When he returned from Switzerland with the children for Julian’s funeral, Lydia had visited him at his gallery. He was in the process of closing it down and moving to Switzerland permanently with Nathaniel and Lola, of whom now he was guardian.
“I think part of me always knew it would end like this for them,” he said when he saw her.
“You knew,” she said.
“I had an idea.”
“But you never implicated her… or him.”
“I loved her,” he said simply. “And they were one. Anything I’d done to harm him would have harmed her. Did you ever love anyone that much… that you’d do anything, no matter how wrong it was? Even if you knew they could never love you the same way?”
She didn’t want to judge him or say to him that she didn’t consider that love. That when love asked you to betray yourself and betray others, it was only need or fear in a clever masquerade. She only shook her head.
Lola and Nathaniel were chasing each other around the empty gallery space, their laughter echoing against the walls. To look at them, one would never know what they had endured over the last several weeks of their young lives. They seemed happy, normal.
“Do they ever talk about that night?”
“They told their therapist that they were playing a game with their nanny that night. I don’t know that they’ve quite connected that event with the death of their father. They don’t blame themselves. Anyway, they’ll be in therapy for a while.”
“Why did Julian ask you to take the twins?”
“I don’t know, really. She came to the gallery a couple of months ago and asked me if I would take the twins should anything happen to her and Richard. I told her yes, of course. I thought it was odd, but I wouldn’t have considered turning her down,” he said, looking past Lydia at the memory of that day.
“I think part of her suspected that all this would end in tragedy,” he went on. “She wanted to be sure that they’d be cared for. That’s as close as I can come to a guess.”
“And what about James? Do you think he’ll come for them?”
“It would be suicide. They’ll be watched by Interpol for a little while and then by a security team I’ve hired in Switzerland. If he comes near them, he’ll be arrested and charged with murder.”
Lydia nodded.
“It’s funny,” he said as she began to leave. “In Lola and Nathaniel, I have more of her in death than I did while she was alive. They are so much like her… it’s a joy and torture. I think they’ll bring me great pleasure and great sadness for the rest of my life, just like their mother before them.”
There was something beautiful and something ugly about what he’d said, something almost Gothic in its romance, its utter selflessness, and something sick about it, too.
As she left the gallery, she saw the twins peeking around a wall to look at her. They were beautiful children, but there was something old in their eyes. She knelt down and they came to her, each of them hugging her in turn.
“Remember what I told you, Lola,” Lydia said, releasing her. “You, too, Nathaniel.”
“You lose the giver, not the gift,” said Lola obediently. And Nathaniel nodded uncertainly. Lydia wasn’t sure that they understood yet the meaning of what she’d told them that night, but she believed that they might one day. She knew what it was like to go through life without parents; she hoped that her words would come back to them on the tough days and give them comfort.
When the ferry had docked and the gate opened, Hector handed her a piece of paper with a number on it and pointed toward the east.
“You got ten minutes. Don’t hold us up. You’ll get me in trouble,” he said. The other men, on the boat and on the shore, even the priest, all had their eyes on her. They were all curious, but no one asked any questions.
It was a dead place. There were no shading branches or grassy lanes lined with flowers, only black dirt paths and anemic trees scattered among the graves. She made her way on a rough walkway, through the maze of small white stone markers. No names, only numbers. And Lydia couldn’t believe how many there were. Hector had told her that there were between 750,000 and a million graves here. There were layers of them-the workers buried coffin on top of coffin-and Lydia felt unspeakably sad. Prisoners, indigents, orphans, and unknowns… all these lost souls. She thought of Rain and all the people below the subways who had helped them and wondered if most of them wouldn’t end up here like this. What path do you take that leads you to this end? She only knew the answer for one of them.
Across a vista of open grass, Lydia could see the ruins of old abandoned buildings, a hospital, a reformatory, a house. All once served a function for the city, now nameless and abandoned like the dead surrounding them.
She came upon the fresh grave with Jed McIntyre’s serial number on it and she reflected on why she’d come. It wasn’t to see him dead in the ground, as one might imagine. It wasn’t even for a sense of closure to the reign of terror he’d had over her life. She did not come to cry for her mother or for herself.
From a pocket of her long black cashmere coat, she removed the letter that Agent Goban had given her from Rebecca Helms’s crime scene. It had been opened and read by the people at the scene. But Lydia had never opened it. The letters she had received from him over the years had been like missives of reassurance that he was locked away. She didn’t need them anymore. She removed that pile now from another pocket and placed his most recent letter on top. She bent to pick up a rock she found by the path and she laid the letters on the earth, placed the rock on top to weight them down, and stood again.
She was here to give him back everything he had given her, all his pain, all his hatred, all his terror, all his letters. All the ugly parts of himself that she had allowed to become parts of her, she wanted him to have. For good. That was all. She turned away and walked back down the path toward the ferry.
When the ferry returned to the pier, Lydia saw Jeffrey standing on the dock. A gull screamed above her and a bell clanged in the wind as she approached him. He wore faded jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt underneath his distressed leather jacket. His nose and cheeks were pink, as though he’d been standing in the cold for a while.
“You followed me,” she said, trying to sound disapproving.
“You lied to me,” he answered simply.
She shrugged. It was true. She couldn’t argue.
“I had to come alone.”
He nodded his understanding. “Did you get what you wanted?”
“I have what I want,” she said, reaching for his hand. “I just left some things I didn’t need behind.”
She turned to look as though she might see those things waving there at her like flags, but there was nothing. Just the murky water and the flat, dead island.
He raised her hand to his cheek and held it there. And she knew with clarity in that moment that the past was dead, the future just a fantasy. It was only the present that lived and breathed. It was all they had. And it was all they needed.