He pointed at Audrey. “You’re some kind of occult expert. When Nick called, he told me this all had to do with the mirror thing, the ghost box, whatever it is, and that you were going to be here. I figured there was something bizarre going on—I did a ton of research on that house and the bodies you found there, remember? Cornell Berrige and the Society of the Lesser Key. I wrote half the book already. The manuscript is printed and in the top drawer of my desk.…”
“And?” Tess prompted when his words trailed off.
Frank looked at her, an edge of hostility in his eyes. “And I never thought any of this was true until I saw your raggedy man out there vanish in the middle of the street. So maybe start at the beginning, okay? Get me caught up? Because I’ve got to reset every thought I’ve ever had about this sort of thing.”
Tess glanced at Audrey, who still looked at Frank as if she wanted more. But if they were going to figure any of this out, they needed everyone on the same page.
“What about Aaron?” she said, turning to Nick. “He’s late.”
“Lucky him,” Lili muttered.
Tess began. She had spoken to Lili earlier in the day and they had exchanged their own stories, Lili telling her about her certainty that her double had visited Steven during the night. Now they shared their experiences with Frank and caught Audrey up on things she had missed.
“There’s something else,” Nick said.
Tess narrowed her eyes. “You saw something?”
“Not exactly,” he said, keeping his focus on Frank and Audrey. “This morning I told Tess that my girlfriend and I are likely to be moving to London. The other day, someone who sounded very much like me called my Realtor and fired him.”
“Your double,” Audrey said.
“I don’t understand,” Lili said. “Why would they care if you went away? Wouldn’t they have been less likely to be discovered if they tried to build lives far away from us? It’d be better if you were gone.”
Frank ran his thumb over the handle of his coffee mug. “Unless they need you.”
They all looked at him.
“If they need us,” Tess said, “why are they trying to kill us?”
“I haven’t heard anything that indicates they’ve tried to kill you,” Audrey said. “At first, they were keeping clear of you entirely. If you hadn’t run into Nick’s double on the street, we might never have known that these people exist. Now they’re showing up in your lives and intruding. Tess, your double wanted to be close to Maddie. Lili’s double did the same with her ex.”
“It did something to me,” Lili said.
“And to Tess,” Nick added. “Mentally and physically.”
“I still haven’t recovered,” Tess admitted. “It’s like a part of me’s been…”
She searched for the right word. It was Audrey who supplied it.
“Siphoned,” the medium said.
Tess tapped on the table. “You know what this is. What they are.”
“Suspicions only.”
“What about the raggedy man?” Lili asked. “The others may not be trying to kill us, but he attacked me and Audrey just now, and I’m pretty sure he had murder on his mind. That didn’t feel like he just wanted to be buddies.”
They were all silent a few moments. Tess hadn’t experienced the raggedy man’s touch, but she could see it haunted Audrey and Lili.
“I wonder if he’s got eyes under that blindfold,” Audrey said.
Tess saw Frank stiffen, as if he’d understood something in the comment that the rest of them hadn’t.
“What difference would that make?” Nick asked.
Audrey sat back in her chair. “As part of the original ritual down in the basement of the Harrison House, our friend Berrige ripped his own eyes out.”
Lili gave a hollow laugh. “You think the raggedy man is Berrige? They found his bones down in that pit in the cellar of the Harrison House.”
Audrey fixed her with a grim stare. “I did mention that revenants are dead.”
“That still wouldn’t explain why he’s coming after us,” Nick said, looking pale and haunted himself. “They buried his bones. He should thank us, not try to kill us.”
“I can’t even believe we’re talking about this,” Frank said. “Dead people do not wander around and—”
“You saw him out there just now,” Lili scolded him. “Your eyes don’t lie. That was no magician’s trick. I agree with Nick, though. Why is he coming for us?”
Tess hugged herself tightly, tea forgotten. She stared at the center of the table, but her thoughts were on Maddie. Whatever happened to the rest of them, herself included, she would not allow any harm to come to her little girl.
“It’s possible he’s not coming for us at all,” she said. “The way he sniffs the air … outside the gallery where Lili and I first saw him, he very clearly said something like ‘I had the scent.’ He thought whatever scent he was tracking had led him to us. But maybe the scent he was following belonged to Lili’s double, and her pretending to be Lili confused him.”
Everyone looked to Audrey, then. None of them dared comment on the lunatic impossibilities of Tess’s theory without her chiming in first. She had her head down, fingers to her lips as though preventing herself from speaking until she could be sure of her words. When she glanced up at Tess, she nodded.
“There’s logic in that. Whatever these doubles are,” Audrey said, “whether they’re revenants or living people who’ve used magic to hide themselves behind your faces—”
“Our,” Nick said.
Audrey frowned. “Sorry?”
Nick shrugged. “Our faces. If your raggedy man is Berrige or if he isn’t, either way, you saw him before any of us brought you into this thing. If he’s hunting our doubles and getting confused by their scents mingling with ours—and his hunt led him to you—that means there’s a double of you out there somewhere, too.”
Audrey looked like she might throw up. She sagged in her chair. “Fuuuuuck.”
Tess snapped her fingers impatiently. “C’mon, Audrey. Freak out later. You were talking about the doubles.”
“All I’m saying is, whatever they are, they started out just using your … our faces. Like a reflection,” Audrey said. “But it’s more than just faces now. More than an image. They’ve started leeching something from us. Do they need it to survive, to sustain their appearance—”
“Or is it just to confuse the raggedy man?” Tess interrupted.
Audrey stared thoughtfully at her. “They need us for something, that’s for sure. Nick wants to move far away and they don’t want that to happen. And if we’re some kind of danger to them, my guess is if they didn’t need us they would just kill us.”
A knock came at the front door and they all jumped in their chairs. Tess’s breath caught in her throat and she turned to stare at Lili.
Nick was the first one to rise. “I’ll get it.”
“No,” she said. “It’s my place.”
But he followed her to the door. Nick tensed, ready to fight, but when she opened the door it was only Aaron Blaustein, wearing an apologetic look.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “What’d I miss?”
Beside her, Nick exhaled.
“Come in, Aaron,” Tess said. “I’ll get you a coffee and we can start at the beginning.”
EIGHT
The noise of a door opening made Frank shift in his sleep, muttering to himself. Then came the creak of footfalls on the stairs. He frowned, resisting the urge to wake for several seconds, but then consciousness seeped in and he felt the weariness of his bones and the throbbing soreness of his muscles. His shoulders were the worst of all, alight with blazing pain from using the chain of his handcuffs to saw at the rusty bolts holding the support post in place behind him.
His eyes popped open. The post. He’d passed out in the middle of his work and as he jerked the cuffs to one side he found the chain still caught beneath the metal lip at the base of the post. With a waking groan for cover, he sawed
the cuffs back and forth, but this time he pushed back, yanking them out from beneath the lip. The dust of rust and concrete would still be there. He had no time to clean up after himself.
The basement light was on. The power flickered as if a storm roared outside, but he wondered if it might not be something else—some energy that had nothing to do with electricity. Now that his momentary panic subsided, he remembered passing out … remembered the sudden irresistible fatigue that had swept over him. In the midst of working the cuffs against those rusty bolts, he had begun to tremble and then felt his muscles slump as if something had just given way inside him, his last vestiges of strength flowing out of him.
Waking to the sound of those footsteps had given him a small burst of adrenaline, but now it subsided and he bent his head, taking small sips of breath. His thoughts felt thin, his heartbeat shallow. Though he felt no hunger, the emptiness within him had gotten worse, as if there was little left of him now but a shell. In his mind, he pictured one of those Russian nesting dolls, their layers thin and fragile, and imagined himself one of them—with all of the smaller dolls removed, only the largest one, hollow and empty, left behind.
“Not feeling quite yourself tonight, are you?” a voice asked.
He blinked, jerking his feet as he glanced up. Frank Lindbergh looked down at him. The face was so familiar. He knew Frank well, but couldn’t focus on how they knew each other or the nature of their acquaintance. Too tired. The pain made it hard for him to concentrate.
“Frank,” he rasped.
The visitor laughed softly. He wore a gray suit with a thin black wool scarf, very stylish. His shoes were charcoal black, barely scuffed, and he had trimmed his facial stubble so that he had a silhouette of a beard rather than an actual one. Frank looked good. Maybe better than ever. The best possible version of Frank Lindbergh.
The prisoner shifted. Smelled the stink of his own body and of his blood, felt the sting of the wounds at his wrists where the handcuffs had chafed and cut him.
The cuffs, he thought. His brow creased as he remembered sawing the chain against the rusty bolt under the post at his back. The explanation for that memory seemed out of reach for a moment, but then he managed to reach into the fog of his thoughts and grab hold of it, drawing it close.
He lifted his eyes and stared at the stylish man. Was it cologne he smelled over the stink of his own blood and piss? He thought it was.
“I’m Frank Lindbergh,” he whispered, all that he could manage.
The other Frank crouched in front of him, black scarf dangling. The scent of his cologne grew stronger.
“You’re a shadow,” he said. “Pretty soon, you’ll barely be that.”
Frank focused on his breathing. In and out. He stared at the other Frank.
“Fuck you,” he grunted.
The visitor laughed softly. “I have to say, I admire the way you’ve held on. You didn’t have much of a life to begin with, so building a better one was easy enough. Tonight really ought to have taken most of what you had left of yourself. I mean, I sat down with people who are your friends. They’re scared but they’re smart enough that they’ve started to figure out what’s been happening to them, but even so, they looked at me and saw you. To them, I am you, and belief is a powerful thing. On top of how well things are going for me at work, I expected that to finish you. So well done. Truly. You’ve got my admiration.”
The man who wasn’t Frank rocked back a bit on his heels, still in a crouch. He laughed, rolling his eyes.
“Hell, could that be it? What an irony if my admiration of you is keeping your self intact.”
Frank grunted. He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, thirsty and repulsed by how long it had been since he had brushed his teeth, never mind bathed. He shifted, twisted his wrists inside his cuffs just a little—not enough for his visitor to pay attention to the cuffs or to come around and look at the concrete and rust that had been disturbed there, but enough to wake Frank up. Bring him back to himself.
For long moments he had let his mind slip away. It felt like he was holding on to his identity by mere threads and at any moment it might be torn from him, dragged off into an abyss. But it wasn’t his doppelgänger’s admiration helping him hold on. Frank felt sure of that.
It was the pain in his wrists and shoulders. The scent of his own blood. The way he gritted his teeth when he worked the handcuff chain against that rusty bolt under the post. He might be a shadow of himself, withering to nothing, but he wasn’t nothing yet. Instead, he felt alive with the knowledge that a moment before he had forgotten that the man in front of him was not Frank Lindbergh. Still brittle and gutted, but maybe not completely hollow. Not yet.
Not when he knew he had made progress with that rusty bolt.
His self would continue to fade, leeched away by the bastard in front of him. Frank knew that his time was running out. But he wasn’t a ghost yet.
“What are you doing to me?” he asked.
The man wearing his face smiled as if this were the most precious, most adorable question he had ever heard. He stood up from his crouch and slipped his hands into his pockets. Slowly, his smile diminished.
“All right,” he said. “I suppose you deserve to at least understand what’s happening to you while there’s still a ‘you’ in there. Considering what you’re giving up for me, I owe you that much. For you, this began the first time you stepped into the psychomanteum.”
“You mean the … the spirit box?” Frank rasped.
“The apparition box,” the man with his face replied. “Yes, the very one. You and your friends just stood there, looking into the mirrors …
“While we were looking out.”
TUESDAY
ONE
Steven Parmenter took the steps up from Park Street station two at a time. By the time he stepped out into the cold gray morning light, his heart was pounding in his chest and he had to draw long breaths to calm it down. He was a young man, but his gym schedule had been falling apart over the past few months and he had hurried up the steps to get in a little of the cardio he had been missing. Today was Tuesday. Captain Monahan had told him that he would know by Friday whether or not he would be promoted to detective. For the past six months he had been working his ass off, ignoring nearly everything else in his life in favor of the job. If Saturday morning came and he was still Officer Parmenter instead of Detective Parmenter, he wondered if he would feel it had all been for nothing. He hoped he would not have to find out.
With a glance up at the golden dome of the State House, he threaded his way along the path that ran parallel to Park Street, up the concrete stairs to Beacon Street, and took a right. It was worth going half a block out of his way to get a coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts. Maybe on a detective’s salary he would be able to afford to drink Starbucks all the time, but even then he knew he would stick to Dunkin’. Really, there was no contest.
Hot coffee in hand, he retraced his steps through the shadow of the State House, took a right up Walnut toward Mount Vernon Street. He wore jeans and a green cable-knit sweater, a black leather jacket and gloves, and a thick New England Patriots hat with a red, white, and blue pom-pom on top. He spent so much of his time immersed in serious, sometimes grim work, and the pom-pom made him feel silly. It reminded him that not every situation was life or death.
What this thing with Lili was, he had no idea. It sounded insane, but city cops encountered more than their share of crazy people, and he had never gotten that vibe off her. Which meant that something was going on, that someone had been messing with Lili and Tess, and Steven could not just let that go. He had spent the past twenty-four hours trying not to think about some of the things she had told him. Last night he had started on the sofa and ended up in her bed, but there had been no sex. Instead, he had just held her in his arms while she fell asleep and eventually drifted off himself.
As afraid as she was, the only way for him to take some of what she’d told him seriously was to assume tha
t she and Tess had been victims of a prank or some Hollywood-level makeup FX. If he found out later that it had all been a gag—that Tess’s ex-husband had done it all as some kind of joke—he would make sure Nick regretted it.
For now, though, he had decided to poke around on his own. His first stop this morning had been the Nepenthe Hotel. He’d gone into the restaurant at the back and looked at the mirrored box. It was odd, but its antiquity did make it a good fit for the room, and he could see how some of the hotel’s guests might find it intriguing to have breakfast or brunch inside the whatever-it-was-called. Steven had examined it closely and found nothing but mirrors, wooden walls, bolts, and a kind of musty odor.
No ghosts, no strange faces, nothing unusual about it at all.
He stuffed his hands into his pockets as he walked through Beacon Hill. The wind whipped around him and he shivered. His coat had a collar he could have turned up, but his mind was wandering, focused on other things. The morning he had met Lilandra Pillai, he had just come off duty and had stopped into a café near Boston University for a coffee before heading home. She had turned from the counter, focused on the cup in her hand, trying to get the lid fastened properly, and she had collided with him. Hot coffee had spilled down the front of his uniform and they had both backed away from the fresh puddle of coffee on the linoleum, raising their arms like startled birds ruffling their wings.
She’d looked up at his uniform, rolling her eyes with an expression of disgust, and said the words every guy wanted to hear from the lips of a beautiful woman: “Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding.”
Steven knew what she saw—a big ginger guy in a police uniform, with a coffee-stained badge and a gun at his hip. What he had seen that morning had been something entirely different, a formidable, no-bullshit woman of stunning beauty.
He wiped droplets of coffee off the front of his uniform and arched a single eyebrow. “So, is this what they mean by ‘meet cute’ in all those romantic comedies?”
The question shocked her out of her momentary paralysis and then she was grabbing a handful of napkins, trying to dab at his uniform while a sighing employee came out from behind the counter with a mop. Steven had promised her it was not a big deal, that he was on his way home. She insisted on buying his coffee and they had sat in the front booth in the sunshine coming through the plate glass, talking for an hour, until she had to run or risk being late to teach a class for which she was now woefully unprepared.
Dead Ringers Page 18
