The Thing in the Alley (Anomaly Hunters, Book 3)

by J. S. Volpe

6

  “So what do you think?” Calvin asked Cynthia when they were back in the Prius ten minutes later. They had questioned Betty a little longer but had learned nothing else of note except that Betty was the only remaining resident in the building who had been there at the time of Simon Bradley’s suicide. Even the management had changed twice since then. Which meant there was no one else they could interview about the incident. And since no one else knew anything about Brad Vallance’s murder either, there was no point in sticking around any longer. But they could always come back: Betty assured them she’d be more than happy to buzz them in should they ever need to visit West Train Apartments again.

  “What do I think about what?” Cynthia said. “Betty?”

  “Yeah. About what she said.”

  Cynthia didn’t answer for a moment, being too preoccupied with safely starting the car and pulling out of the parking space.

  “I hate to say it,” she finally said as she navigated through the lot toward the exit, “but she seemed kind of desperate for someone to talk to. I can’t help but wonder if she might have been tailoring her narrative to suit our interests so we’d hang around longer.”

  “What, you think she was making it all up?”

  “Not everything. Not the basics. But I’m worried she might have, I don’t know, embroidered things here and there to keep us Night Stalkers interested. I don’t think we should uncritically take her word for everything.”

  “No, but it’ll be hard to verify most of what she told us.”

  They turned onto Train Avenue and headed west. As they passed the mouth of the alley, Cynthia slowed down a little, and they stared into the dim brick corridor.

  “What was it?” Cynthia said. “‘No’ and ‘I did it’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Huh. I wonder who did what.” She glanced at Calvin. “Do you think it even matters? Do you think it could be connected with the death of Brad Vallance?”

  “I don’t know. They’re both strange events, and they happened in the same location, but they happened years apart and don’t have any obvious causal connection. They both involve echoes, but in very different ways. They both involve someone dying, but again in very different ways.” He shrugged. “It seems like there could be something there, or it could just be a complete coincidence. It’s all so vague. For now I think we should just focus on Brad Vallance’s death and not cast our net too wide, at least not without a better reason. One thing at a time.”

  “Yeah. Besides, psychic echoes don’t carve men up like that. Someone or something very real did that.”

  Two blocks west of the apartment building, they turned south down Benton Road, which led straight to the Elm Hill neighborhood where the Fishes lived.

  While they waited at a traffic light, Calvin noticed two children, a boy and a girl about five years old, playing in a front yard. The boy had a squirt gun and kept chasing the girl round and round the trunk of a massive old oak tree, their hysterical giggles audible even with the car’s windows rolled up. Calvin watched them for a moment, then turned to Cynthia.

  “I was wondering,” he said, “when exactly did Emily start hanging out with John Coyote and Anna West?”

  “Why?”

  “Mr. May added us all to the trust in 2008, which would’ve made Emily only seven. I was wondering if she’d even started hanging out with those two yet.”

  “I don’t know. They were all in the same grade at school, so they at least knew each other to some degree since kindergarten. I’m not exactly sure when John and Anna first entered the picture on a more serious basis. It was probably more of a gradual thing, you know? I don’t remember them visiting the house until much later—when Emily was around eight or nine—but that doesn’t mean they didn’t, and I just didn’t notice, or that she wasn’t hanging out with them at school the whole time. It’s just too hard to say. It’s too hard to remember details from that long ago.” The light changed, and she accelerated down Benton. She glanced over at Calvin. “What are you getting at anyway? That Mr. May knew in advance who Emily’s friends would be? That he was, what, psychic? Or a time-traveller from the year 2100?”

  “I’m just trying to think through all the angles. But who knows? Maybe during one of his investigations he did learn stuff about the future.”

  “It couldn’t have been very reliable information, seeing as how he originally left the Collection and the house to Emily. If he’d really known the future, he would’ve known what was going to happen to her.”

  They came to Revere Place and turned left. Cynthia drove slowly so they could read the house numbers.

  “Wow,” Cynthia said. Over the last few blocks the homes had grown larger and larger, and by now they practically qualified as mansions. “I don’t think the Fishes really needed Mr. May’s hundred thousand dollars very much. Every house on this street probably costs at least five times that.”

  “Yeah.” Calvin suddenly sat forward. “There it is.” He pointed at a brick neo-Colonial coming up on the left. A plaque beside its front door read “714.” A dark blue Audi S5 of recent vintage sat in the driveway.

  Cynthia parked next to the Audi. They got out and headed to the front door.

  “Do we have a game plan here?” she asked.

  “Just tell the truth, I guess. No need for guile or rehearsals.”

  “Do we want to admit that we investigate strange phenomena?”

  “Let’s wait and see where the conversation takes us. For all we know, this guy could be some old acquaintance of Mr. May’s who already knows the truth.”

  “Fair enough.” She rang the bell.

  The door was answered by a well-dressed middle-aged man with glasses, a mustache, and brown hair that was going white at the temples in a way that reminded Calvin of Mr. Fantastic from the Fantastic Four.

  He quickly looked Calvin and Cynthia up and down and said, “Can I help you?” in a tone both brusque and remote, as if he suspected they were solicitors but wanted to confirm it before shutting the door in their faces.

  “Yeah,” said Calvin. “We’re looking for Tiffany Fish.”

  The man stiffened, suddenly looking suspicious.

  “What is it you wish to see her about?” he asked.

  Calvin and Cynthia glanced at each other.

  “Um, that’s kind of complicated,” said Calvin.

  The man raised one eyebrow.

  “I have time,” he said, his tone conveying that he was more than willing to stand there until they gave him a full explanation.

  Calvin decided to mirror the man’s stiff, formal demeanor as best he could; in his experience it was easier to gain someone’s sympathies if they saw a bit of themselves in you.

  “It is my understanding that five years ago Ms. Fish was the recipient of one-hundred thousand dollars, left to her by a Mr. Robert May of May, Ohio.”

  The man’s tight, wary look went slack with surprise.

  “Yes,” he said, his voice excited and urgent. “Do you know something about that?”

  “Yes. He left money to us, as well.”

  “Not only that,” said Cynthia. “But we actually knew him. In fact—”

  Before she could say more, the man stepped aside and said, “Come in. Please.”

  They stepped into a long, spacious hall with a checkerboard floor and a high ceiling hung with a pair of crystal chandeliers. Doors and archways led off it to various rooms and corridors.

  The man led them through a door on the left and into a large office dominated by dark woods and black leather. An executive desk faced the door, a computer humming softly upon it next to a neat stack of papers. Behind the desk hung a variety of diplomas, awards, and certifications made out to Andrew Fish, Esq. The centerpiece of the display was a diploma from Harvard Law School. The other walls bore framed prints of golfing and hunting scenes, plus several bookshelves that contained binders and folders rather than books. Two framed photos sat at the near edge of the desk, facing out for guests to see. On
e showed the man—much younger and without the mustache—with an attractive blonde woman, he in a tux, she in a bridal gown, their beaming faces pressed cheek to cheek. The other showed a little blonde girl about five years old, posing regally in a pink princess costume, her nose in the air, her blue eyes cool and haughty, her prim lips pressed tight.

  The man gestured at a pair of black leather chairs in front of the desk.

  “Please, have a seat,” he said. He started to circle around the desk to the bigger black leather chair behind it, then stopped with a soft grunt and turned around, his hand extended.

  “I apologize for my unforgivably lax manners,” he said. “You kind of caught me by surprise here. I’m Andrew Fish.”

  “Calvin.”

  “Cynthia.”

  “Nice to meet you both,” Fish said.

  They all sat down.

  “So you actually knew Robert May?” Fish said as he quickly shifted the stack of papers from the desktop to a drawer.

  “Somewhat,” Calvin said. “I met him only a few days before he passed away. Cynthia here knew him a bit better.”

  “Not by much, admittedly,” Cynthia said. “I lived next to him my whole life but barely exchanged half a dozen words with him until that final week.”

  Fish’s eyes brightened with recognition.

  “Ah,” he said. “I should have realized it earlier. You’re Cynthia Crow, right? Your sister…I remember that incident well. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Thanks. I’m a little surprised you would recognize me, though. I wasn’t really in the news that much.”

  “No, but, um…” Fish looked uncomfortable. “I did look into the situation fairly closely. With Robert May’s death occurring so soon after your sister’s, and with her abduction having occurred on his property, I couldn’t help wondering if there was some connection between the two. Did you both receive a hundred thousand like Tiffany?”

  “I did,” Cynthia said. “And so did everyone in my family. But Calvin…”

  “He left me one million plus his house,” Calvin said.

  Fish raised his eyebrows, impressed. “You’re lucky. That’s a nice house.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  He nodded. “A few months after Tiffany received the inheritance, I stopped by there one day, just out of curiosity. Nobody was home, and the house looked unoccupied—no car in the driveway, no lights on—so I just took a quick look around the outside and left.” He smiled. “I assume you were probably in school at the time.”

  “Actually, I wasn’t technically allowed to take possession until I graduated from college.”

  “Yes, it’s the same thing with Tiffany. She won’t be able to touch a cent of it for at least a few more years. She only just graduated from high school last week.”

  Calvin and Cynthia looked at each other, surprised. They’d been operating under the assumption that Tiffany was Andrew’s wife. But no: She must be his daughter.

  “Is that her there?” said Cynthia, indicating the photo of the little girl.

  “Yes,” he said, smiling warmly at the photo. “Although she’s much bigger now, of course. That’s, uh, that’s an old picture.” A cloud passed over his face, and his smile died. When he looked up at Calvin and Cynthia again, his expression was troubled and uncertain. “Do you have any idea why Mr. May chose to leave her that money?”

  “Actually, we were hoping you could tell us,” said Calvin.

  Fish shook his head. “Before Tiffany’s inheritance, I’d never even heard of Robert May. Neither had Tiffany. I sometimes wonder if he just picked her name out of a phone book at random.”

  “What about Tiffany’s mother?” asked Cynthia with a glance at the wedding photo. Fish hadn’t mentioned her at all, and he wasn’t wearing a wedding band, which suggested that either Mrs. Fish was dead, or she and her husband had gotten divorced. “Could there be some connection on her end?”

  Fish shook his head. “Not that I know of. Sarah died in childbirth. As far as I recall, she never mentioned Robert May. Or the city of May, for that matter. She wasn’t even from around here. She was born and raised in California. She didn’t move out here till 1997.”

  “I hate to say it,” Calvin said, “but of all the people he left money to, your daughter seems to be the only one with no real connection to him at all.”

  Fish spread his hands in a display of helpless bafflement.

  “You said you inherited his house,” he said. “There wasn’t anything in there that hinted at any possible explanation?”

  “No, though I haven’t gone through everything yet. It’s possible there’s something still tucked away in there that might explain everything. Otherwise, um…”

  He glanced at Cynthia with a quick, questioning raise of his eyebrows. She intuited what he was asking and gave a small nod, albeit a bit grudgingly.

  Calvin cleared his throat, then said to Fish, “Mr. May had an interest in what you might call anomalous phenomena: paranormal or just highly unusual events. Could that have something to do with it? Could you or Tiffany have come to his attention in that context?”

  Fish briefly looked startled at this revelation. Then his face closed up like a cell door slamming shut.

  “I don’t think so,” he said flatly.

  It was clear he was hiding something. But given the terseness and finality of his tone, the matter seemed closed to further discussion. And yet a moment later Fish apparently reconsidered and continued to pursue the subject anyway.

  “What, uh, what exactly did he do?” he asked, trying to sound casual, as if he were simply making conversation. But the hawk-like fixity with which he watched them belied his blasé tone. “Did he investigate these phenomena? Did he solve them, or explain them?”

  “Sometimes,” Calvin said. “He studied strange events and gathered evidence connected with them. Sometimes he was able to explain them, sometimes not. He almost seemed more interested in recording or cataloguing them than in anything else.”

  “I see.” He gazed at them in silence for a moment, his expression distant and thoughtful. He opened his mouth to say something more, but just then a car pulled into the driveway.

  Fish glanced in that direction—there was no window in the office that faced the driveway—then at Calvin and Cynthia. His mouth curled up slightly at the sides in what might have been a grimace, or a quick smile, or just a nervous tic.

  “That must be Tiffany.” He stood up. “I’ll introduce you.”

  Calvin and Cynthia got up and followed him into the hall. Just as they got there the front door opened and Tiffany Fish walked in.

  She was a far cry from the imperious little girl in the frilly pink princess gown. Her long blonde hair was drawn back into a ponytail with a simple black rubber band, though a number of stray wisps stuck out, forming a frizzy aureole around her head that shone goldenly in the light coming in through the front door’s sidelights. She wore no makeup or jewelry, and her skin was unusually pale, as if she spent all her time indoors. She was dressed in an oversized, figure-obscuring black-and-white checked shirt which she wore unbuttoned like a jacket over a plain gray T-shirt, plus rumpled, loose-fitting blue jeans, and a pair of scruffy white New Balances with frayed laces.

  When she saw the two strangers in the hall, she froze like a frightened rabbit, blinking, the plastic shopping bag she carried emitting a faint crackle as her fingers tightened around its handles.

  Calvin, too, froze and blinked, but for a very different reason. Rather than anxiety or alarm, he felt something akin to déjà vu. The instant he laid eyes on Tiffany Fish he was struck to his core by a feeling of delighted recognition, as if this girl were someone special he had known long ago, or had been expecting to meet for a long time. A feeling of: her.

  And then his college-trained rational faculties kicked in, and he mentally shook his head at himself. He had never seen this girl before in his life. He was sure of it. Perhaps she reminded him of someone he had once known and liked
but didn’t consciously remember—a childhood babysitter or a classmate at school. Or perhaps it really was déjà vu, only applied to a person rather than an event. (Was there a word for that, he wondered?) And surely it wasn’t insignificant that the feeling (whatever it was) was inextricably bundled up with the fact that he was quite strongly attracted to her despite her frumpy, uncaring appearance.

  Had he been a different sort of person he might have interpreted this remarkable and unprecedented reaction as love at first sight. But he was sure it wasn’t love. How could it be? He didn’t know anything about this girl, and you couldn’t love someone you didn’t know, except in a hippyish, all-embracing kind of way. Could you?

  “Um, I’m home,” Tiffany said quietly to her father, though she was barely looking at him. Her eyes kept darting nervously back and forth between Calvin and Cynthia. She looked as if she wished she’d come home a lot later, preferably long after these two had left.

  “How was the mall?” Andrew Fish asked.

  For a moment she just kept staring at the strangers, her gaze now settling more and more on Calvin and flicking back to Cynthia almost as an afterthought. Then her father’s question finally registered and she glanced at him and said, “It was mallish.”

  “Tiffany, this is Calvin and Cynthia.”

  “Um, hello,” she mumbled.

  “Hi,” said Cynthia.

  “Nice to meet you,” Calvin said, unable to keep a big, broad smile from his face as he spoke to her for the first time. What the hell was this? Why was he feeling like this? Why couldn’t he keep his eyes off her? It wasn’t like him.

  “You remember that money you got from that man, Robert May?” Fish said to Tiffany.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Calvin and Cynthia stopped by because they received similar inheritances and are hoping to learn the reasons behind it.”

  “Oh!” Tiffany peered closely at the duo, her shyness overridden by curiosity. “Fellow mystery giftees. I thought I was the only one.”

  “Nope,” said Calvin. “You’re one of an elite group. One of, um…” He quickly totted up the numbers in his head. “Nine.”

  “Nine?” Cynthia said. “Wait…”

  “I’m not counting Violet. She wasn’t one of the original, um, mystery giftees.” He said this latter phrase with a smile and a small nod at Tiffany, as if to thank her for it. He was disappointed to find that she hadn’t even noticed. She was staring into space, her brows furrowed.

  “Nine,” she murmured. She bit her lip, the furrows deepening. Calvin noticed that the index finger of her left hand was twitching slightly as if she were unconsciously writing with it. “Nine…”

  Andrew Fish cleared his throat loudly and said to his daughter, “They had to finish college first, too. Just like you.”

  “They had to too?” Tiffany muttered, still staring off into space, the comment only feeding into her strange reverie. “Had two too? Two, just like…” Tiffany looked up, all attention again. “Had to? Past tense?”

  “Yeah, we just graduated yesterday,” Calvin said.

  “Congratulations.” Her eyes drifted away again. “Congratulations,” she mumbled. “Con grad you…you lay shuns? Elations? Con grad elations. Huh.”

  Calvin and Cynthia glanced at each other, not a little weirded out by all this. Andrew Fish looked uncomfortable, almost embarrassed by his daughter’s behavior.

  “Your dad told us you just graduated high school,” Cynthia said to Tiffany, hoping to cut through the thicket of discomfort that had sprung up around them. “So congratulations to you, too.”

  Tiffany smiled politely.

  “Thanks. Yes. I’m a rite of passage behind you.” She looked down, her smile taking on a rueful tinge. “Whole mazes of passages, probably.”

  “Um, have you picked a college yet?” Calvin asked.

  “I was thinking of Ames University.” She said this with a wince and a small shrug as if it was an admission she found embarrassing. Perhaps it was. Ames U, while decent, seemed an unusually modest choice for the daughter of a bigwig lawyer. Either her academic history was pretty poor or she didn’t want to travel far from home for some reason.

  “Oh, that’s where we went,” said Cynthia.

  Tiffany perked up, her interest piqued by this information.

  “Really?” she said.

  “Yep.”

  “Huh.” She tilted her head to one side, her eyes narrowing to slits, and then in a melodramatic tone that might have been meant to be humorous but also might have been meant only to sound humorous to hide a deeper and potentially off-putting seriousness, she said, “It’s fate.”

  Something about her expression and the way she spoke those words struck some deep and joyful chord in Calvin’s heart, or his soul, or his mating instinct, or whatever it was that was responding to her so powerfully, and he was barely able to keep himself from grinning in a dopey, giddy manner that was totally inappropriate in front of a girl you’ve just met and, more importantly, in front of said girl’s father.

  “Fate, huh?” he said.

  Without otherwise changing her position or expression in any way, she swiveled her eyes from Cynthia’s face to Calvin’s, and in a decidedly non-melodramatic tone, a tone, in fact, that was plain and direct, as if she were reporting some commonplace piece of information, she said, “The world is made of secret connections.”

  This comment reminded Calvin of what Betty Romero had said near the end of their interview. Maintaining eye contact with Tiffany, he gave her a small nod and said, “It all converges.”

  Tiffany’s head snapped upright, and she stared at him, dumbstruck. Then she smiled a smile as huge and delighted as the one Calvin had been repressing. She looked as if she had finally heard the secret password she had been starting to think she would never hear.

  “Yes!” she said, nodding vigorously. “That’s exactly right!”

  Cynthia couldn’t help smiling a little herself, amused by the weird rapport Calvin and Tiffany were sharing. Clearly Calvin had found a new cute girl to obsess over. Usually these obsessions of his remained one-sided and doomed, but given how Ms. Fish was responding, this one could wind up having a very different outcome. Personally Cynthia found Tiffany’s weird manner and pasty skin somewhat repellent, but if Calvin liked the girl, then good for him.

  Cynthia wasn’t the only one to notice Calvin and Tiffany’s happy rapport. Glancing at Andrew Fish, she found that he was watching the duo with a stiff, humorless expression. Uh-oh.

  Fish cleared his throat again, even more loudly than before.

  “It’s getting rather late,” he said. “I imagine we’ve kept you here long enough.”

  Calvin and Tiffany finally broke eye contact. Calvin stared at Fish blankly for a moment, then realized what Fish had said and checked his watch.

  “Oh,” he said. “Yeah, I guess it is getting kind of late.”

  “But what about the inheritance?” Tiffany said. She looked at Calvin and Cynthia. “You haven’t told me what you know about it.”

  “They told me all the details,” said Andrew Fish. “I can fill you in later and—”

  “But I want to hear it from them.” She spoke in the flat, demanding tone of someone ready to shut down the whole world to get her own way. This was a far cry from the bashful girl who’d come through the door five minutes earlier. Evidently the pink-clad princess wasn’t entirely gone.

  “Tiffany—” Fish started to say.

  “I want to hear it,” she said.

  Father and daughter stared at each other, their expressions equally set and stubborn. Calvin and Cynthia realized they had somehow become the rope in a familial tug-of-war.

  After several tense and silent seconds, Fish folded. Dropping his gaze from his daughter’s, he waved his arm in a broad, sweeping gesture that said, “Go ahead; do something foolish.”

  In as brief and simple a manner as possible, Calvin told Tiffany what he and Cynthia had told her father earlier. Tiffany
listened raptly, not interrupting once.

  When he reached the end of the retelling, Calvin hesitated, unsure if he should do what his gut was telling him to do, then decided to forge ahead.

  “Actually, Cynthia and I—we, uh, we’re carrying on Mr. May’s work,” he said. He wasn’t admitting this simply to impress a girl he found cute and fascinating (though that, of course, was part of it). More importantly, he thought that if he and Cynthia had any hope of getting to the bottom of the mystery of the inheritances, it was wisest to be honest and lay all the cards on the table. It was only then that any explanatory connections could emerge.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Andrew Fish frown at this unexpected development, and he saw Cynthia’s head whirl toward him in surprise. Only Tiffany took the revelation in stride, nodding calmly as if Calvin and Cynthia’s being investigators of strange phenomena made perfect sense.

  “Yes,” she said, her eyes fixed on Calvin’s. Her voice was low, almost a whisper, as if she were talking to herself as much as to him. “Connections.”

  She was about to say something more when her father stepped in front of her and said to Calvin and Cynthia, “It’s getting late. I must insist we adjourn. I thank you for stopping by. It was…most informative.”

  “But Daddy—” Tiffany began, her blue eyes sparking with outrage.

  “Now, now,” Andrew Fish said. “It’s late. It’s nearly time for dinner.” His tone made it clear that this time no amount of princessy insistence would sway him. Tiffany’s lips pursed into an unhappy moue.

  Calvin dug into his pocket and pulled out a pen and a small spiral notebook. On a blank sheet he scribbled down his name and phone number, then tore out the page and handed it to Andrew Fish, making sure as he did so to angle it so that Tiffany could read it. He was glad to see her eyes devour the info written thereon as if her life depended on it.

  “Here,” he told Fish. “Give me a call if you have any questions, or if any new information turns up concerning the inheritances. Likewise, I’ll let you know if we learn anything more.”

  Andrew Fish gave a single terse nod, then took the piece of paper and slipped it into his pocket without looking at the number.

  “You can call at any time,” Calvin added with a quick glance at Tiffany to make it clear that the offer applied to her, as well. He was pleased to see her draw in a sudden, sharp breath, a small, nervous smile flickering on her lips.

  “It was nice meeting you,” she called out as her father escorted them to the door.

  Before the door closed, Calvin managed to catch one last glimpse of her over Andrew Fish’s shoulder. He felt glad and giddy to see that she was likewise craning over the same shoulder to catch a glimpse of him. And then the door shut hard enough for the brass handle on the knocker to flap up then drop back down with a faint clock.