Twice: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  The nearest hospital was over thirty miles away, so Dr. Wetterau was apparently the man to call with minor emergencies day or night, or so they were told at the gas station where they stopped for directions, the very same gas station, in fact, where they’d stopped earlier. There was a different slack-jawed attendant now on shift. The young man—Hank, if the embroidered name on his striped uniform shirt was to be believed—gave them the good doctor’s number. Of course, the earlier attendant had also worn a shirt with the name Hank embroidered on it. Were they both named Hank or were they sharing a shirt? Lydia wondered pointlessly, as “Hank” stared into the Rover at her and Dax, whose bruised and bloody condition was definitely notable.

  They’d walked a narrow path along the back of the house as per the instructions the doctor gave Jeffrey over the phone and the old man was waiting for them at the door. Lydia saw him look them each up and down, his expression betraying neither shock, wonder, nor judgment, just a mild curiosity. Inside, a woman in a neat red dressing gown, trimmed with white, looking like nothing so much as Mrs. Claus with a wide pink face framed by graying hair in a bun on the crown of her head, sat primly at a small reception desk and took their names and addresses, entering the information into some type of logbook. She offered them water or tea and, when they declined, retired through a door marked private that Lydia assumed led to their home.

  Alone with the doctor now, Jeff and Dax sitting out in the waiting room, Dax’s cut newly cleaned and stitched, Jeff she assumed sinking into a foul mood and plotting ways to keep her locked up forever, Lydia sat stiffly as the doctor shone a light into each of her eyes.

  “Mrs. Smith,” he said, “what kind of an accident did you say you, your husband, and your, uh, brother were involved in?”

  “We didn’t, Doctor,” Lydia answered calmly.

  The doctor nodded, reaching into a small refrigerator and offering her a gel icepack wrapped in an Ace bandage pouch. She pressed it to the side of her head, the cold and the pain causing her to feel light-headed again. She lay back, hearing the crinkle of the sanitary paper over the vinyl table. The sound reminded her of childhood visits to the doctor, her mother, and how nice it was to feel cared for when you were sick.

  “You do appear to have a mild concussion, Mrs. Smith. Now, I don’t have the proper equipment here to check on the health of your baby. And I’m going to suggest that you get to your OB as soon as possible. But I will tell you that any type of trauma to the mother will put the fetus at risk. So my other suggestion is that you minimize your exposure to situations where you are vulnerable to, uh, accidents.”

  She turned to look at him and even though things were a bit on the fuzzy side, his eyes, the clearest blue she’d ever seen, were intelligent and a bit stern. She felt like he knew her, though they were strangers to each other. In him she recognized her own ability to intuit the truth about people, about who they truly were, by noticing small details, the things they said and didn’t say. Everybody has a face they wear, the one they want people to see, to recognize as their true face. And for a few people, you get what you see. But usually there’s something more beneath the surface, something hidden. The furtive gesture, the shifting glance, the tapping foot offered so much, revealed facets of personality that people tried to hide. Lydia had always possessed the ability to see quickly through façades. Tonight she wondered what this doctor saw when he looked at her. Someone careless, someone reckless, someone more concerned with chasing investigations than she was for the life of her child. Someone scared that she was not up to the responsibility about to be bestowed upon her. Someone running from her own problems by burying herself in nightmares that belonged to someone else.

  “That’s not always possible in my line of work,” she said, feeling a little defensive.

  He placed a hand on her arm. “Then take a vacation,” he said gently.

  His hand was big and warm, slightly callused. He looked like someone’s daddy, someone’s grandpa, the man who was always there for his family, the one everybody leaned on. She wondered what it would have been like to grow up with a man like that as your father. Life would be easier, she was sure. Decisions would be a lot less daunting. There would be fewer questions about what was right and wrong when you had someone like Dr. Wetterau to ask. Lydia fought the urge to cry; pregnancy was making her more emotional than she liked.

  She managed a nod and sat up slowly. “You might be right,” she admitted.

  He kept watching her with those eyes and she started to feel a twinge of discomfort. When she returned his glance, her vision sharper than it had been a moment earlier, she saw he had the eyes of a combat soldier. There was a look a man got on his face when people had died at his hands. It was as if a piece of cosmic truth had been revealed to him that others never even glimpse, and as if that knowledge had come to rest in the color of his eyes. It’s there even when he’s laughing or looking on you with eyes of love. Her grandfather had eyes like that, as if the slightest trigger could start a cavalcade of images too awful to share with anyone who hadn’t been there, who didn’t know. But Lydia thought maybe if she looked deeply enough into the abyss of his pupils, she would see it all there playing like a movie on a screen, as if his eyes had a memory of their own. She saw it in Dr. Wetterau, clear as day.

  “Did you know the Ross children?” Shot in the dark.

  He rubbed the side of his face thoughtfully and looked at her as if deciding whether it was in either of their best interests to answer her question.

  “I did,” he answered, letting the sentence dangle.

  “Julian and …,” she said, hoping he’d finish the sentence for her.

  “Is that why you and your friends are here? Are you looking for him?”

  Lydia didn’t answer, but cast her eyes down as if her clever ruse had been uncovered. “Do you know where he is?” she asked after a moment.

  “James? I know where he belongs,” he answered. “But he hasn’t been there for over ten years.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “On my recommendation, his family committed him to Fishkill Facility, a psychiatric hospital not far from here.”

  “What for?”

  “He tried to burn down his family home, his mother and sister along with it,” said the doctor with a sad shake of his head. “A very disturbed young man.”

  “Did he say why he did it?”

  “He claimed that his mother and sister had put a curse on him and that the only way to save himself was to burn them both and the house. The house, he believed, held all their negative energy.”

  “He thought they were witches?”

  “Sometimes,” said the doctor with a shrug. “There was that, and his bizarre obsession with Julian. He believed that her body housed the spirit of his true love from another life and that her soul could only be free if Julian died. He was later diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. At first he was largely unresponsive to medication. But after many years of treatment, he graduated to a work release program. One night, after his shift at a library was over, he didn’t return to the facility. That was ten years ago.” The memory seemed to sadden the doctor. “He was the first person I thought of when I heard the news about Julian’s husband.”

  “Which one?”

  “Both. Tad was murdered just months after James disappeared.”

  “Did you go to the police?”

  He sighed and shook his head. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Another heavy sigh. “The Ross family is like … a virus. If you want to preserve your health, you should just stay away. I learned that lesson a long time ago. I have a feeling you might benefit from learning that lesson as well, before it’s too late.”

  “An innocent woman might have gone to jail,” said Lydia.

  “Let me tell you something: When it comes to the Rosses, there’s not an innocent among them,” he said, turning a joyless smile on her along with those eyes that had seen too much.

  “What do you mean
by that, Doctor?”

  “Just stay away from them, Mrs. Smith. Take my advice.”

  She could tell by the firm line of his mouth and the flatness that had come to his eyes that he had said all he was going to say on the subject of the Ross family.

  “You can keep the ice pack,” he said, offering her a hand to help her off the table, which she accepted.

  Jeffrey paid the bill in cash and they left the office. On the walkway, Lydia turned around and looked at the doctor, who stood in the doorway. The night had grown bitterly cold and Lydia wrapped her coat tightly around her. A harsh wind had crept up and a few stray snowflakes danced around them. The doctor’s large frame filled the doorway.

  “He’s here, you know. In Haunted.”

  The doctor didn’t seem surprised. “Some people claim he’s been here all along, living in the woods. He’s mythic in his way. Parents use him to warn their children to stay out of the woods at night.”

  “Be good or James Ross will get you?”

  “That’s right.”

  Back in the relative warmth of the Rover, Lydia told Jeff and Dax what the doctor had shared with her. Even with the heat blasting, the cold felt like a fourth presence in the car. Lydia was shivering, cupping her hands against one of the vents. She was grateful when the air grew warmer as the car heated up.

  “Should we call Henry Clay?” she wondered aloud.

  “And tell him what? That we broke into the Ross home and saw the bogeyman?” asked Jeff, driving carefully down the dark road, slick with the light snowfall.

  “And that he kicked our asses,” added Dax from the backseat.

  “James Ross is not the bogeyman. He’s a viable suspect for two murders and he’s wandering around Haunted unchecked. He’s dangerous,” said Lydia.

  “Sounds to me like he’s only dangerous to his family.”

  “I beg to differ,” said Dax. “I’ve got eight bloody stitches to make my argument.”

  “We don’t know that,” said Lydia, responding to Jeff. “He’s got to get picked up at some point for questioning at the very least.”

  “But we’re not the people to do it at the moment. And I don’t feel like answering to the police about why we broke into the Ross home.”

  “So, what? We just leave him out there?”

  “No, we’ll call Ford, tell him what we’ve found. He can arrange something with the Haunted police.”

  “What if it’s too late by then?”

  “Lydia, the guy has been on the run for ten years and he’s still hanging around his own backyard. My guess is he’s not going to go far. In fact, if he’s mentally disturbed, I bet he even goes directly back to his tent in the basement. We’ll get him. Just not tonight.”

  For once, Lydia was too tired to argue. Her head was pounding and fatigue made her limbs feel like they were filled with sand. Besides, Jeffrey’s logic, as usual, was irrefutable.

  Lydia had wanted to stop at Maura Hodge’s again before leaving Haunted, but she didn’t even bother to broach the subject as Jeffrey pulled onto the highway going back to New York. The air between Lydia and Jeffrey was charged with a million things each of them wanted to say. But neither had the energy to say any of them. So after Jeff put in a call to Ford, letting him know about James Ross, they rode in silence until Lydia fell into an uneasy sleep, jerking awake every few miles, seeing alternately the face of her attacker and Jed McIntyre raging toward her over and over again.

  chapter nineteen

  WCOU Bar on Second Avenue was slow on Monday nights. That, and the fact that the old bartender mixed a dangerous Manhattan and looked as much like a relic as the antique jukebox and the glowing neon art deco clock on the wall, was the reason Ford chose to stop there with Irma. The room was smoky and narrow, dim, with high tables and stools against the walls. It had atmosphere in that kind of nonchalant way that made it real. If the lights came up, you’d see cigarette butts on the floor, nicks in the wall, that the ceiling was mottled with water stains. But in the glow of low-wattage bulbs beneath glass shades, you felt like you were in a black-and-white movie and any second Humphrey Bogart was going to saunter through the door and bum a smoke.

  So far, the forensics team had turned up nothing at the laundry room. He and Irma had stopped up after the interview with the twins to check in with the forensics scientist heading up the team. The Luminol had detected no blood traces. Because so many people had access to the laundry room, no one was optimistic that any of the prints, hairs, or fibers collected at the scene would have any relevance to the case. And no one was happy about how much work it was going to take to determine that.

  Ford ordered their drinks from the bartender and then carried them back to the table Irma had chosen at the far back corner of the bar. Shedding his coat, he folded his arms and looked at her.

  “So what are your thoughts on the twins?”

  Irma sighed lightly and took a sip of her Cosmopolitan. “The children are deeply veiled,” she said, keeping her voice low and her face close to Ford’s. “Someone is exerting a lot of power over them. They’re both very intelligent, especially Lola, so they have an instinct that something is wrong. But they feel powerless. And, of course, they are, in the context of their situation.”

  “So who’s exerting this power?”

  “Someone who frightens them, someone who in Nathaniel’s mind has taken on the proportions of a monster, his bogeyman.”

  Irma took another sip of her cocktail, while Ford drank his Perrier with lime. Technically, he was still on duty, so the Manhattan was going to have to wait for another night.

  Ford’s mind jumped from Irma’s comments, to the news Jeffrey had just given him about Julian’s twin, to the picture he’d seen in the gallery, and then to the description of the man Jetty Murphy claimed he saw the night Tad was killed. Was James Ross the bogeyman Nathaniel claimed to have seen? Was he also guilty of the murder of Tad Jenson?

  The fact that Julian had a twin brother was another crucial piece of information he hadn’t had when investigating Tad’s murder. The thought made him sick with frustration and anger—anger at himself for not digging deep enough. The knowledge threatened a cornerstone in his self-narrative. In his own mind, the excuse he gave himself for being a shitty father and husband was that he was a good cop. Tonight he didn’t even feel like he was that. His mood was low and getting lower.

  Efforts to calm Nathaniel Stratton-Ross had failed and Irma convinced Ford that pressing forward to find out why they were in the laundry that night would be pointless at best, traumatic at worst. So the interview with the twins had ended with both of the children in tears, Nathaniel screaming his head off, and Eleanor threatening Ford’s job. Not that he cared much about that at the moment. The conversation he’d had with Lydia in the car kept coming back to him. I don’t even know what I am if I’m not a cop, he’d told her. Maybe you should find out, she’d answered him. He was starting to wonder if she was right.

  “Lola is clearly the dominant personality,” Irma went on. “But I sense that she’s just as afraid as Nathaniel is; she’s just better at hiding it under a sullen façade.”

  “Do you think it’s possible that they saw who killed their father?”

  “I’m inclined to say that no, they didn’t witness the murder. To be honest, there haven’t been that many studies done on children who witness the death of their parents. But to watch their father murdered so brutally and to display no evidence of trauma or distress would be highly unusual.”

  “What if they’re repressing the memory,” said Ford.

  Irma shook her head. “Repressed memory is far less common than you think. If anything, emotionally charged events are the least forgettable of all memories.”

  “But it’s possible.”

  She shrugged her assent. “It’s possible. But say they had completely blocked out their memories of the event, there would be other indicators of repressed memory of the trauma. Probably any mention of that night would cause terror and pa
nic. But they remember every detail happily until they went to bed.”

  “But Lola was down in that laundry room. We’ve got the videotape. And Piselli found Lola’s nightgown back at the apartment. She didn’t mention that.”

  “But that doesn’t mean they’ve repressed the memory. It will take more time to find out what happened at that point. They’ve been instructed not to discuss that with anyone. That much was clear. Lola tried to warn Nathaniel to be quiet. But he couldn’t hold it in. He’s afraid of someone. They both are.”

  “What about Nathaniel? If Lola went into the laundry room to move the washing machine …”

  “Wait, she’s just a little girl. How is she going to move that machine by herself?”

  “It was on casters, very easy to move.”

  “Okay.”

  “Is Nathaniel smart enough to turn off that camera, wait till his sister and whoever have cleared the laundry room, and then turn the camera on again?”

  She thought about it for a second. “It’s hard to see Nathaniel acting like that on his own. He seems very dependent on Lola. He’d probably be able to follow instructions, but I doubt very much if he’d be able to carry out a task like that alone.”

  Ford took a sip from his Perrier and wished it were a Manhattan. He turned the pieces around in his mind, circling the edge of his glass with his fingertip, trying to fit everything together, what he knew, what Lydia and Jeffrey had come across.

  Things weren’t falling together, even with the possibility of James Ross as a suspect. There were just too many questions: Where had he been all these years? Why would he kill his sister’s husbands when it was her he supposedly hated? And logistically, how would he have gotten from Haunted to New York City and back again? How did he know there was a tunnel leading to the building? How was he communicating with the children? It just seemed too far-fetched. Maybe Lydia and Jeffrey had time to play X-Files, but he needed a chain of hard evidence. He could only hope that, after taking James Ross in for questioning and analyzing the evidence Lydia and Jeffrey had collected, some tangible connection could be made, that answers would start to evolve from the tangled mass of questions in his mind.