It was a ten-minute walk from the courthouse to Nick’s cottage, which, like his office, was in Old Gate’s official historic district. The houses on Botetourt Street weren’t the oldest in town—those were over on the west side near the Presbyterian and Anglican churches—but dated from the late nineteenth century. Their low wrought iron fences had been grandfathered in during the 1950s, when the historians in town began to worry about outsiders moving in and ruining the town’s historic character, and put fence restrictions in place. Nick had narrowly avoided being named to the Old Gate Historic Commission more than once in the past two decades, but he thought he might try it when he stopped practicing law.
He’d been drawn to Old Gate’s low-key, civilized atmosphere after graduating from Georgetown Law School. It hadn’t hurt that his uncle had had a practice here from which he wanted to retire. But most of his clients came to him because he’d done his undergrad degree at Virginia Tech. It made him a kind of rebel, given the town’s proximity to UVA. He nurtured that persona publicly, and had given himself a reputation for being a little loud, occasionally a little déclassé. He liked to keep his private life private. And quiet. These days, he was spending less and less time at his apartment in Charlottesville, preferring the cottage in Old Gate. Sometimes he worried that he was just getting old.
The dusk-to-dawn front porch light was on, drawing moths and other flying annoyances to his doorway. Otherwise, the cottage was dark. His car was in the driveway where he’d left it.
He jangled the keys in his pocket—a habit that Scott had always teased him about, telling him he was turning into a country lawyer like his old man—and debated whether he should get in the car and go (he didn’t have any morning appointments), or call it a night. The evening was fair, and it would have been pleasant to sit in one of Charlottesville’s outdoor cafés or in the bar up at the Grange, have dinner, maybe drink a half-bottle of something decent, then see where it took him.
But thinking about Scott had made him sad, and he was too tired to drive the forty-five minutes into Charlottesville. He swung open the wrought gate at the end of the walk and went into the house to see what he could find for dinner.
The house was welcoming, but markedly empty. He thought briefly about the detective, Lucas. The sex with him in Charlottesville had been great, but they were awkward together afterwards. Lucas had enormous charm and, like Karin, a pleasing, aggressive sexuality. But although he and Lucas had law and order in common, they didn’t have much else. Still, sometimes any company was better than being alone. He held out a slender hope that Lucas might stop by again.
Locking the front door behind him and shutting off the porch light, Nick turned on a few lamps. He went straight to the freezer in the kitchen and pulled out a serving of some chili he’d made weeks earlier. Once it was heating in the microwave, he opened the refrigerator for a beer.
Inside, he found the bottle of wine he’d shared with Bertie. He’d made a quick trip to the hospital around lunchtime, but they were only letting family in to see her. Randolph Bliss was in intensive care watching over his wife, and the cretin son, Jefferson, was stalking the waiting room and had stopped just short of telling Nick that Bertie was none of his business. Poor Bertie, living her whole life with that pair of assholes.
Maybe you won’t have to much longer, dear Bertie.
Nick undressed down to his socks, hung up his suit, and put on his robe. Usually he made himself sit down at the table to eat dinner, disinclined to slide the whole way into the incivility of permanent bachelorhood, but tonight he settled for eating on the couch, in front of the TV.
The beer was cold, and the television show ridiculous. He found that he wasn’t all that hungry. Resting his head back on the couch, he closed his eyes.
What a shit of a week.
It was his last coherent thought.
The garrote caught him deftly beneath the Adam’s apple, and his head was snapped forward so the thing could go all the way around his neck. Nick grabbed instinctively at his throat but quickly realized that clawing at it was useless, so he tried for the hands gripping it. Strong wrists, masculine. Forearms, hairless. Nothing to hold onto, to tear. His nails were short, but he scratched—something would be found beneath them! Whoever the man was, he was much stronger than Nick and kept him from thrashing enough to get him off balance, or pull him over the back of the couch.
Beyond the immediate pain was the feeling that the world outside him was imploding, sucking itself down to nothing, while the inside of his head was expanding exponentially. An imitation of the universe: airless, weightless, infinite.
At the last moment, a sob tried to escape his throat, but there was nowhere for it to go, and it died with him.
Chapter 51
When the gynecologist came into her office, Lucas stood politely. She didn’t smile, but only nodded in greeting and told him to “please, sit down.”
In the photographs of her with a pair of girl twins—holding them as infants, wearing a tired but obviously delighted smile, then building a miniature snowman with them, the ends of their blond curls escaping their matching toddler bunny hats—she looked like a different person. Today her thick blond curls had been tamed into a tight bun, and her lips were drawn in a serious line. She sat down in the chair behind her desk, not looking at all pleased to see him.
“You’re going to have to convince me, Detective, that your having this information is really necessary. I can’t be compelled to give it, and I’d just as soon make you convince a judge, first,” she said.
The DA had been less than encouraging about the possibilities of getting a warrant, calling it a long shot. Lucas started there.
“To tell you the truth,” he said, spreading his hands, “it’s a long shot.”
When she looked neither suitably impressed nor vindicated, he continued.
“Everyone we’ve spoken with insists that Mrs. Powell wasn’t depressed. Which makes the idea of suicide less and less plausible. From her GP, we’ve already learned that she had a prescription for Lorazipam, in addition to her medications for her hypersexuality.”
The doctor pursed her lips at the word.
“The ME says she had a significant amount of Lorazipam in her system when she died.”
Now Erin P. McDonald, OB, GYN (as it said on the shiny wooden and brass block on her desk) held a poker face.
“So?” she said. “What does that have to do with her records here?”
“We know that she recently had a termination procedure at a clinic in Charlottesville.”
“That’s a decision that some women make,” she said.
“It doesn’t surprise you?” Lucas said.
Erin McDonald shrugged. “Why should it?”
Lucas looked at her more closely. Why isn’t she surprised?
“There were two people that we know of, with some certainty, who were aware of the child,” he said. “Her husband and her lawyer. The husband, Gerard Powell, knew about the pregnancy and fully believed that they were going to become parents. He had no idea that she’d terminated before her death. Her lawyer, as one of her closest friends, also knew, but she didn’t give him any reason for the termination.” He didn’t add that Nick Cunetta had driven her to Charlottesville for the procedure.
“I still don’t understand what this has to do with me or her death,” she said.
Lucas shook his head. “Do you know why she terminated? Here’s the thing: If there was some anomaly with the child, it would go a long way to explaining the why of it, considering—according to her husband—they were happy about the pregnancy.” Maybe “happy” was an exaggeration, but he went with it.
At this, the doctor raised her eyebrows.
“What?” Lucas said. She’d opened the door, and he wasn’t going to let her shut it again. “Did she say something about her husband?”
The doctor stayed silent.
“Listen,” he said. “We know that he knows it wasn’t his child. He’s been open ab
out that, as well as about her other sex partners.”
The doctor’s shoulders relaxed a little.
“I just want you to understand what’s already been established,” Lucas said.
Leaning back in her chair, the doctor said, “But you wouldn’t be investigating her death just to confirm it was a suicide. Why are you really here? Do you think he killed her?”
“We haven’t nailed down one particular suspect, if that’s what you mean. That’s not to say that murder isn’t a real possibility. There were marks on her that implied that some kind of violence was done to her shortly before her death.”
She seemed to consider him for a moment with her frank brown eyes. The office was silent. She’d shut the door behind her on her way in, which had told him that she was at least going to hear him out.
“So, you’re telling me that it’s a definite possibility that she might have been a victim of a crime? Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”
She opened the small laptop that she’d brought into the room with her. “You people never get to the point.”
Lucas knew better than to respond. He just wanted the information, not to be the winner of a pissing contest.
“Karin called my nurse saying she was spotting and had some cramping. We had her come in that afternoon,” she said, looking at the screen. “She seemed calm enough. A lot of women would panic.” She looked up at him from the laptop. “But in her case, panic was appropriate. There was no fetal heartbeat, and we immediately did an ultrasound.”
“What happened?” Lucas asked.
Lucas left the office understanding Karin Powell better than he had. Rather than letting nature take its course, or having the D & C performed at the small local hospital, she’d opted to have Nick drive her to Charlottesville, where fewer people knew her. It seemed a small difference to him. But he wasn’t a woman who had just lost a child. The news had seemed even more tragic to him when the doctor said that she and the radiologist had looked at the images later and determined that the baby had developed with a neural tube defect—probably anencephaly. The doctor hadn’t had the chance to tell Karin Powell. As she was already dead, Lucas saw no need to put that in his report.
Chapter 52
For the second time in twenty-four hours, Ariel woke up with no immediate memory of how she’d gotten where she was. This time, her face was pressed into a blanket, and her head was filled with the smell of stale cigarette smoke and rot: old clothes, dust, decaying paper.
Before she woke, she’d been dreaming that she was at their old house in Kirkwood with her grandmother, mother, and father, and that they were playing Scrabble, one of her grandmother’s favorite games. Ariel was losing as she always did. Without saying why, her father pulled out a violin from a box beneath his chair and started playing. He closed his eyes as he played, and his face was as pale as it had been when she had last seen his ghost in her bedroom. So pale, it was like he’d never been out in the sun. Even the mournful music coming from the violin sounded weak and transparent. Her mother helped Ariel’s grandmother out of her chair so they could sway to the music together, slowly, Ariel’s mother towering over her grandmother who was as small as a seven-year-old. They tried to get Ariel to dance with them, but she was embarrassed. The music receded as her father faded away, until it was finally replaced by the whiny hum of a nearby motor, and she woke.
Ariel rose onto her hands and knees and looked around, worried that she hadn’t really woken up at all. In that moment of being not-quite-awake, she didn’t yet panic.
She’d never been in a room like this: low-ceilinged and damp, the light from the sconces on the wall so faint that she couldn’t even tell what color the paint was. Its surface was uneven, maybe some shade of gray, like burned-out charcoal. The humming noise came from a small refrigerator in one corner; there was a café table with two cane chairs crowded near it. The bed she was on was tall, like her mother’s antique bed, but the headboard was carved with strange human and animal figures.
Seeing an open door to her left, she exhaled with relief. It meant she could leave anytime she wanted. The idea calmed her until she looked to the opposite wall and saw, a foot or so from the ceiling, an ornate brass curtain rod with bare hooks strung along its length. No curtain. No window, and no sign of there ever having been a window. It whispered of deceit to her. Someone had once played a trick on someone else, hanging a curtain there. A cruel trick in this secret place. Knowing that, Ariel was far more frightened that when she’d first awakened.
She remembered. Not much, but something.
Remembered getting quietly out of her mother’s bed, making her way through the room by the nightlight. Walking into the hallway of the sleeping house, the big clock ticking downstairs, measuring her steps. Laughter. She remembered that she had laughed out loud, as though she were embarking on some fun adventure.
No, not me. It wasn’t me. I wanted to sleep!
No, it was another girl who had laughed. Another girl, wearing Ariel’s robe, who was making her way upstairs to the ballroom. Who opened the door and went across to the fireplace and found, even in the darkness, the flashlight that Ariel had left there. It wasn’t Ariel who opened the door beside the fireplace and, pulling it closed behind her, went down the hidden stairway, unconcerned that someone might hear her. There was no one to hear her.
And at the bottom of the stairs? The door. She reached up and pressed the first tile, then the last in the row, then pressed the first again. The door swung open, silent on its hidden hinges.
Now Ariel knew how to get into this place beneath the house. But how did she know? Who else knew about it?
Jefferson knew, and had practically challenged her to find her way inside. Looking around, she found it hard to imagine him in the dim, musty room. This was like a room in a museum. The furniture was worn out, but the refrigerator looked like it was almost new. How did things age here? Was there even time in this place? Carefully climbing down from the bed, she crossed the oriental rug covering most of the floor and opened the refrigerator door. Inside, she found two beers, several bottles of water, some dried-up cheese loosely wrapped, and an uncorked bottle of wine.
Ariel closed the door nervously, feeling like she was trespassing on someone else’s life.
What is this place?
She tried to tell herself that she wasn’t afraid, but she was suddenly anxious to be upstairs, out of this room. Reaching for the flashlight on the bedside table, she knocked a shiny paper box on the floor. Quickly bending to pick it up, she saw it was an open box of condoms. She blushed and dropped it on the table. Maybe Jefferson brought girls here. The idea made her feel slightly sick to her stomach.
She turned on the flashlight and stepped out into the hallway. Her heart beat hard in her chest.
Expecting to see the door leading to the outer tunnel right in front of her, she was startled to see that she was actually in a long hallway. Yes, the big door was to her right, but shining the flashlight to her left, she saw the hallway went on. It wasn’t like the tunnel on the other side of the door that led out to the springhouse, but more like a hallway in a house. The walls were rough but painted, decorated with a strip of wainscoting. There were also two more doorways.
Ariel took a couple of slow steps, the flashlight making the hallway loom larger in front of her. She thought about the ghost-hunting show one of the nurses had gotten her hooked on in the hospital, and how her light looked much the same as theirs did. They were always listening for sounds, and now she found herself listening for the faintest sounds too. In the room she’d just left, the tiny refrigerator clicked off with a distant whine. Now there was real silence. She quickly turned her back on the rooms beyond the light, her free hand already reaching for the door into the outer tunnel.
It was there, a few feet away.
Finding it closed, Ariel dropped the flashlight and threw herself against it, pounding it with her palms.
“Who’s there?” she cried. “Let m
e out! Let me out!”
When there was no answer, she grabbed up the flashlight again and shone it above the door. Yes, there was a row of tiles identical to the ones she remembered being on the outside. Closing her eyes, she whispered to herself, trying to recall the order in which she’d touched them to get in.
How did I know?
Whatever, whoever, had guided her down here had known how to get in.
But the same combination wasn’t working. Ariel pressed the first and last tiles again and again. Nothing happened.
She began to sob in frustration. Maybe whoever had brought her here hadn’t known how to get out either.
Chapter 53
“What’s wrong with you?” Michael said. “You didn’t eat any of the food I brought the other day.” He took Allison by the arm and spun her about to face him. He hadn’t been to see her in a long time. Now that she’d stopped eating, she couldn’t count by meals—in fact she hadn’t made actual meals since she could remember.
“Take that robe off.”
Allison crossed her arms over her chest and took a few steps back. Her body felt light. There were times now when she thought she might be able to float from one part of the room to another. When she last awoke, she found that a tooth was loose in her mouth. It had come out easily. As a joke, she’d put it under one of her pillows so that Michael might find it. Now she wished she still had it in her hand so she could slip it in his pocket when he wasn’t paying attention. The idea made her smile, but she kept her smile small so as not to reveal the hole in her mouth. He would notice soon enough.
He didn’t look so frightening to her in the candlelight. She’d gotten so used to seeing him that she hadn’t noticed that he was starting to lose his hair at the sides, around his widow’s peak. It made his nose look even larger. He was starting to look like an old man.
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