by Lisa Unger
“Oh,” said Lola with a little frown, as if sensing the complexity of the answer but too young to really understand.
“What happened to your face?” asked Nathaniel, pointing to her bruise. “It looks bad.”
Lydia smiled at Nathaniel and then looked up at Eleanor. “Can we have a few minutes with you?”
Eleanor nodded and escorted the children from the room.
“Nice to meet you,” Nathaniel tossed over his shoulder with a little smile. He had been taught to be polite and the lesson had stuck.
When Eleanor returned, Lydia didn’t waste any more time.
“Why didn’t you tell us you had a son, Eleanor? A son who’d been committed and escaped from a mental institution; a son who tried to kill you and Julian.”
A stillness came over Eleanor. She moved over to the couch and sat unsteadily.
“My son is dead,” she said quietly.
“No, I don’t think so, Ms. Ross. I have this bruise on my face to prove it. He attacked me in the basement of your house in Haunted.”
Eleanor shook her head firmly. “Whoever did that to you, it wasn’t my son. He was found dead last year in that same house. There’s a death certificate to prove it.”
Lydia was feeling a little unsteady herself suddenly. Her face had flushed with a rush of heat and she moved to the chair beside Eleanor.
“What about your brother, Eleanor? What about Paul? Where is he?”
Eleanor shook her head again, this time slowly. She cast her eyes to the floor. A deep sadness had come over her and for the first time since Lydia had met her, Eleanor seemed human.
“He’s been missing for many years,” she nearly whispered. “I’ve long believed him dead. He was my twin; I’d know if he was still alive.”
“There are rumors, Eleanor. Ugly ones. About you and Paul, about James and Julian.”
Eleanor slammed her hand suddenly down on the coffee table in a hard, flat slap.
“Goddammit!” she yelled. The lid that had opened in Lydia’s office flew wide and all the demons flew out. “Why do you think I took Julian and left that place? Those rumors, the curse—they plagued us. Do you know what it’s like to live beneath the shadows of others’ fear and ignorance, their voyeurism? Everyone always whispering; thinking that they know you, your family. It is a nightmare.”
She stopped and took a shuddering breath. Lydia and Jeffrey were silent, allowing her to collect her thoughts.
“When Jack was murdered, things became unbearable for us in that town. All they had was each other, James and Julian. None of the other children would play with them; at school they were taunted, bullied. James was fighting every week, defending himself and his sister. They became inseparable, united against the rest of the town. But then James started to change. I’d seen it before in Paul. The mental illness, the delusions, the terrible rages. That is the curse of our family, the shadow we live under.”
Lydia imagined James and Julian, their father murdered, their mother accused, the people of the town treating them like pariahs. Adolescence is such a tortured time under the best of circumstances; there was no telling how additional pressures like that could damage a person.
“But there is no incest in our family, if those are the rumors you’ve heard. James and Julian loved each other, needed each other, were closer than other siblings because they were twins. That’s it. Nothing more. The same was true for Paul and me. People in that town are so small and sick, so bored, they’ll do anything, say anything to entertain themselves. God, I hated that place.”
Eleanor was crying now. Silent tears streamed down her face and she looked old, frail, shattered. Her regal posture sagged, as though the truth had deflated her.
“What can you tell me about your relationship with Maura Hodge?”
Lydia saw Eleanor cringe at the sound of her name.
“Maura Hodge.” She said the name as if it were sour on her tongue. “She hates us. Hates our family. Hates me most of all.”
“Why?”
“She’ll tell you it’s because of years of injustice, starting with Hiram Ross. I’m sure you’ve heard about that curse. She’s made sure that that legend never dies with that library of hers. She’s been commissioning writers and historians for decades, making sure the history of Haunted is preserved forever. As if anyone cares but her.”
“She claims not to believe in the curse, either,” said Lydia, remembering what Maura had said about the Ross family cursing themselves.
“Whether she believes or not, she used it to turn the town against us when Jack was killed. A part of me holds her responsible for James losing his mind.”
“How’s that?”
“I just wonder if the people in the town hadn’t been so cruel, hadn’t bought into all the rumors and made James and Julian feel like monsters, maybe James would have recovered. Maybe—” Eleanor stopped herself short. She looked past Lydia, rested her gaze on something far away.
“But Paul and James are dead now,” she said after a moment, with a kind of relief in her voice, as if everything had been settled. “They’re at peace.”
“Great,” said Lydia. “But that doesn’t explain who killed your husband or who killed Tad Jenson and Richard Stratton. That doesn’t help Julian.”
Lydia waited for Eleanor to respond, but she didn’t. The emotion she’d displayed earlier seemed to have drained from her and her former chilly demeanor returned. She wiped her eyes and straightened her back.
“Do you think Maura Hodge could be behind the murders?” asked Lydia, reaching now.
“I suppose it’s possible,” she said without conviction, almost without interest.
“Eleanor, you must have some idea. Some theory.”
“Actually, dear,” she said, “that’s why I hired you.”
The Eleanor who had raged about Haunted and the Eleanor who now sat cold and hard as an ice sculpture were two entirely different women.
“What are you hiding, Eleanor? What don’t you want us to know?” asked Lydia.
“I have nothing else to say. I’ve told you all I can.”
They had been dismissed.
chapter twenty-two
“Dead men don’t eat Milky Way bars,” said Lydia, handing over to Ford the baggies of evidence she’d collected in the Ross basement.
They stood in Ford’s office, which was a little bigger, but not by much, than a broom closet. In the back of the main homicide office, a maze of busy cubicles and ringing phones, it was dank and dusty, but at least there was a door to pull closed. The blinds were pulled down over the only window and the room was lit by a flickering fluorescent overhead and a small desk halogen.
“Well,” he said, handing her a document, “Chief Clay had the hospital records department fax over his death certificate. Whoever it was did that to your face, it wasn’t James Ross.”
“I know what I saw,” Lydia said stubbornly, perusing the paper in her hand.
“You lost consciousness, right? You have a concussion? You can’t be sure of what you saw,” said Ford.
She looked at the document in her hand.
“You’d just seen the photograph of Julian’s twin. It was a moment of intense stress. And it was very dark,” said Jeff pragmatically. “Isn’t it possible that you just imagined his face on whoever it was that attacked us?”
Lydia shook her head. She had been frightened in the moment and injured afterward, but she certainly wasn’t going to let anyone convince her that she couldn’t believe her own eyes.
“According to Chief Clay, his body was found in the Ross home last year by some kids who snuck in there to do some drinking, fool around,” said Ford. “He’d hanged himself from the landing over the foyer.”
“Jesus,” said Jeffrey.
Lydia still hadn’t taken her eyes off the paper Ford had handed her. According to the death certificate, James Ross had been found last April 16, dead over a week, cause of death determined as suicide by asphyxiation. He was positively
identified by his dental records. She looked down at the signature. Dr. Franklin Wetterau.
“If James Ross was found dead, then why didn’t Dr. Wetterau tell us that last night?” she said, showing Jeffrey the doctor’s name on the document.
Jeffrey shrugged. “No idea,” he said.
“Maura Hodge never mentioned that Julian even had a twin brother. Henry Clay didn’t say anything about him when the two of you spoke yesterday. Eleanor never even mentioned him until we confronted her, and he’s her son. Doesn’t that seem odd to either one of you?”
“Maybe we just weren’t asking the right questions,” said Jeffrey.
“Anyway, what difference does it make? He’s no good to me dead,” said Ford. “If he’s in the ground over a year, he didn’t kill Richard Stratton.”
“But he could have killed Tad Jenson.”
“I suppose he could have. But that case is cold. I need to solve this one. You guys follow whatever leads you want.”
“Just see if the hairs match the ones from the Jenson case, Ford. See if there’s any DNA on the candy bar wrapper.”
“And what if there is? How does that help this case? Even if the hairs match and the wrapper has the DNA from James Ross’s ghost, what does that tell me about Richard Stratton?”
She looked at him and shook her head slightly, but didn’t bother arguing. He had a case to solve and their investigation was becoming too far-fetched for him, she could see it in his eyes. It was like this when you were a private investigator; cops sometimes cooperated when they thought you might help. And Jeffrey had a lot of contacts, people who owed him favors, people he’d worked with in the past either with the FBI or as a private consultant, who gave them the kind of access of which other PIs could only dream. But when you started to get in the way, you got the official boot. She didn’t blame him, that’s just the way it was.
“Look,” he said, “you guys are all over the board here … curses, ghosts, incest, family feuds. Sometimes, you know, the simplest solution is the right solution. Maybe someone hired a killer to do Richard Stratton. Maybe someone wants you to think James Ross is still alive, stalking his sister and murdering her husbands.”
She nodded. “Maybe you’re right,” she said.
Ford and Jeffrey both looked at her with disbelief as she turned and walked out the door.
Outside the precinct, the air was cool, and that was exactly what she needed. A cold rain had fallen in the early morning, but now the sky was a bright blue with some light wisps of white clouds. The trees in the lot across the street were nearly bare and the wind blew the fallen leaves up to flutter into the sky, some of them sticking to the wet hoods of the crisp blue and white cruisers that lined the block.
Lydia took the cold air into her lungs and tried to breathe against the pain she felt in her abdomen. But instead of subsiding the way it had the last few times, it seemed to grow hot and sharp inside her. She clutched her bag to her side, leaned against the concrete of the precinct building, and tried to keep herself together. Suddenly she wished she hadn’t walked out of the building and away from Jeffrey, but the office had seemed so hot and close. She’d thought if she could just get some air, she would feel all right again. Now she was alone on the street and the pain grew even more intense. Somewhere in the distance, she heard a familiar voice, heard her name. Then there were hands on her. Everything around her pitched horribly, like she was on a boat in a storm. Then the street and the sky and her awareness of these things faded away.
part two
chapter twenty-three
It was a bright, clear day as Ford McKirdy pulled his Taurus up the sidewalk in front of the Sunnyvale Retirement Home on Broadway in the Bronx. It was a sad-looking place, as were all nursing homes, no matter how hard they tried. Really, there was no escaping the fact that even the best of them were the antechamber to death. As he pushed open the white double doors and was assaulted by the odors of decay and disinfectant, he tried not to imagine himself in a place like this, nothing but a nuisance to his children, awake all day with his regrets, waiting to die.
Geneva Stout didn’t exist. Well, she had existed, until two years ago when she’d died alone at the age of eighty-eight in a nursing home in Riverdale, leaving no children, no relatives at all. There was no one registered at NYU under that name. So the nanny, whatever her real name was, had disappeared.
But he had to wonder how the nanny had managed to usurp Geneva’s identity, and his wondering had led him to the place where the old women had died, looking for answers.
Nurse Jeremiah was about as pleasant and easy on the eyes as an old bulldog. With a pronounced underbite, and a head of gray hair that was clearly store-bought, her tremendous girth commanded about two-thirds of the counter behind which she sat. She turned an evil eye on Ford as soon as he’d put foot on the linoleum floor, her scowl seeming to deepen the closer he came.
“Good morning,” he said with his most winning smile.
“If you say so,” she answered, staring at him as if trying to figure out his game.
He took out his gold detective’s shield and placed it on the counter in front of her, expecting her attitude to improve.
“I’m Detective Halford McKirdy from the New York City Police Department,” he said.
She glanced at him, then down at his shield with cool distaste.
“That supposed to scare me?” she asked.
“Uh, no.”
“What do you want, Officer?”
“Look, what’s your problem? You get bonus pay for attitude?”
“I don’t get bonus pay for nothin’. I see you walking in here and I know you’re going to make my morning difficult. I can just see it in that cocky walk of yours.”
Ford looked into her middle-aged face and saw that beneath the crust was a marshmallow center. There was a glitter to her brown eyes and just the slightest upturning of the corners of her thin pink lips. In the lines on her face, he saw a woman who had changed diapers, read stories, gone to graduations. He saw a woman who, in spite of her size, still got out on the dance floor at weddings, whose generous arms were a safe place for the people who loved her. He smiled and leaned in to her a little.
“Come on,” he said. “Give me a break?”
She gave a little laugh, knowing somehow that he’d seen through her. “All right,” she sighed. “What is it?”
“Does the name Geneva Stout mean anything to you?”
She looked past him as if running the name through her mental database.
“I do remember Geneva,” she said finally. “A sweet, sweet old woman. She liked to play Scrabble. Never gave anyone a moment’s trouble. She was all alone, I remember. No one to visit.” She followed her sentence with a quick little cluck of her tongue, a noise that communicated sympathy and a little sadness. “What about her?”
“It’s not her so much as who was working here when Geneva died that interests me.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “This place has a revolving door. It’s gritty work, sad work. Reminds people of what the end could bring.”
“She’s a young woman, maybe in her late teens, early twenties when she was here. Exotic-looking, long dark curly hair. Pretty, petite. On the short side, maybe five-two, five-three.”
She shrugged. “Like I said, a lot of people have been through here.”
“What about employment records?”
The woman heaved a sigh. “See, now, there you go.”
“What?”
“I knew you were gonna make me get up from this seat,” she said, but she gave him a smile and hefted herself from the desk.
“Follow me,” she said, buzzing him through a door to her left.
She asked another woman to watch the front for her and led Ford down a hallway, and through a door marked RECORDS.
“What’s your name?” he asked her as they walked into the room.
“Katherine Jeremiah, my friends call me Cat. You can call me Nurse Jeremiah,” she said with a t
easing smile.
When she flipped on the light switch, he expected to see rows of file cabinets; instead, he stood in a room filled with computers. The room was ice-cold and somewhere a vent rattled.
“Most everything is on computers these days. It took years to convert all our records. But we’re mostly caught up. The older files got moved into the basement. And these machines hold all employee and patient files since, I think, 1980 or something.”
Ford just nodded and smiled politely as if he cared. She pulled up a chair in front of one of the computers and began to type.
“Let’s see, if she was that young, then she probably wasn’t a nurse and definitely not a doctor,” she muttered, thinking aloud. “I’m going to search for all females between the age of seventeen and twenty-five working here from 1998 to 2001, and that should cover it.”
She typed a few things on the keyboard and then sat back. “Should take just a minute.”
“You have photographs on there?” asked Ford after they’d waited for a minute.
“There should be a photograph for everyone who worked here.”
She swiveled around in the chair and gave him a blatant once-over. “Wife left you?” she said out of nowhere.
“What?” Ford felt like she’d punched him in the gut.
“I’m just wondering because I see you’re wearing a ring. But no wife would let her husband go out of the house looking all messy like you slept in your clothes. You have a five o’clock shadow and it isn’t even noon.”
“It’s none of your business, Nurse Jeremiah,” he said with a frown.
She shrugged and gave him a knowing smile.
“Get her back,” she said, turning back to the computer. “All women who leave are hoping you’ll beg them to come back.”
“Thanks for the unsolicited advice,” he said, a little angry, a little embarrassed, and a little bit wondering if she was right.
A soft bing from the computer announced that twenty-five matches had been found to the criterion she had entered. She motioned Ford over and he came to stand behind her as she scrolled through each of the entries, each record complete with driver’s license photograph. She flipped slowly through and each face was unfamiliar to him, all of them young, most of them pretty, none of them the woman he was looking for.
