Twice: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  Now, of course, the real question was how to use what he’d learned to its maximum effect. As darkness closed around him, he waited for inspiration.

  “You cheating Aussie bastard,” Lydia complained weakly as Dax destroyed her for the third time at the game of Go. He had a gift for pattern recognition and a strategy that was truly unsurpassed, and at the moment Lydia hated him for it.

  “The least you could do is let me win,” she said, feeling better for a few hours of thinking about nothing more serious than little black and white stones on a wooden board. Her nightmares had temporarily been put on hold and she was almost feeling normal again. Whatever that meant.

  “Never. I have too much respect for you,” he said. She looked at him for evidence of sarcasm, but his face was serious.

  “Oh, please,” she said with a laugh.

  “And I’m sure you’d be even a worse winner than you are a loser.”

  “You’re probably right about that,” she said, leaning back on the couch. It was good to be with Dax, good to be with someone who didn’t share her loss, whose face wasn’t a mirror of her own sadness. The hurricane of emotions she’d experienced over the last few days had left her drained, too numb to feel anything at the moment. She knew the comfortable numbness wouldn’t last. Grief wasn’t linear, getting progressively better with time. It came in waves, in an ebb and flow. For a moment or a day, you’d feel almost whole, ready to begin the move forward. Then it came again out of nowhere like a tsunami, wiping you out with a crushing force. And then, of course, there was the Jed McIntyre nightmare looming, the innocent Rebecca in his clutches.

  “So how long are you going to sit around in your pajamas?” asked Dax, regarding her with an open, honest face.

  “Hi, I just had surgery?”

  “Laser surgery,” he said, as though it didn’t count.

  “Oh, yeah, I’m a real slug for lying around for two days after having a miscarriage,” she said, getting a little pissed at him for being such an insensitive clod.

  “Three days. And I think you should throw away those painkillers. Whatever pain you’re in at this point is bearable. Those things will slow your recovery, and they make it easier for you to lie around here wallowing in depression.”

  “I’m not wallowing,” she said defensively.

  “Not yet,” he said with a shrug, putting the Go pieces into their little wooden bowls.

  “Why is everybody always telling me what to do?” she said, realizing that she sounded like a sullen teenager.

  “Look. Jeff loves you. He wants to protect you from any pain or danger that might befall you. He’d be happy to keep you in a padded room under twenty-four-hour guard until Jed McIntyre is six feet under. But that’s not you, you know? With everything going on, and now this,” he said, pointing to her belly as if it were the offending party, “I think it would be easy for you to get really depressed. You need to pull yourself together and get back to work. Worry about someone else’s messed-up life for a while.”

  She looked at Dax and wondered why she’d never realized he was so smart. Everything he’d said had been dead on and she added a new layer of respect to her concept of him.

  “Fuck off, Dax,” she said with a frown and a shrug. He just smiled and got up to put away the game. The phone rang.

  “Can you get that?” she called as he disappeared upstairs.

  “Get it yourself,” he called back. She laughed and went over to the phone.

  “Hello?” she answered.

  “Is this Lydia Strong?” came a woman’s voice, sounding edgy and fragile.

  “Who’s calling?” asked Lydia, trying to place the familiar voice.

  “This is Julian Ross.”

  Lydia let a second pass as the information sank in. She could hear the sound of people talking in the background. She heard some laughter and then what sounded like a wail off in the distance.

  “What’s happening, Julian?”

  “I need to see you. I need to talk.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the Payne Whitney Clinic. Can you come? Can you come right away?” she asked. Her voice was desperate and Lydia could hear she was on the verge of tears.

  “I’ll be there in an hour,” she answered without hesitation.

  Forty minutes later they were in the Rover. There was something beautiful about a late fall dusk in New York City. The sky had taken on a kind of blue tinge, and Lydia watched as people hustled along the sidewalks, rushing to or from, carrying bags. Christmas was just a few weeks away and the shop windows were dressed to draw in holiday shoppers. She loved the energy this time of year, the excitement of tourists in the city to see the tree and look in the windows of the department stores on Fifth Avenue, the ringing bells of Salvation Army Santas outside Macy’s. It reminded her of when she was a child, how thrilled she’d been when her mother took her into the city for these things, and for the museums and the theater, for the ballet and the Philharmonic. She’d never wanted to live anyplace else and she couldn’t imagine her life without these things. She looked over to Dax, who was staring intently at the road ahead though traffic was thick and they were barely moving.

  “It’s an amazing city, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “New York City is a whore,” said Dax with disgust. “It looks good enough from a distance, but there’s disease at its core. It makes a lot of promises, but in the end you pay for what it gives you with your soul.”

  “That’s nice, Dax,” she said, not knowing quite how to respond to that.

  A homeless man drifting up the street beside the Rover made her remember the tunnels that existed beneath the streets, made her think of the hole in the laundry room floor, and in turn of Ford McKirdy. She took her phone out of her purse and dialed his cell phone number.

  “McKirdy,” he answered.

  “It’s Lydia,” she said.

  “Hey, Lydia. How are you? You scared the shit out of me the other day.”

  “I’m okay,” she said quickly, not wanting to be reminded that she should really still be in bed. “Listen, Julian Ross gave me a call. I’m on my way to talk to her.”

  “Good luck,” he said with a laugh.

  “You’ve been to see her?”

  “Yeah, she seemed lucid enough at first, but she’s fried,” he answered. “I got nothing from her.”

  “What else has been happening? I’m a little behind,” she said. There was a slide show in her mind of the events in the days before she’d collapsed. She saw Maura Hodge smoking her pipe in her Gothic drawing room, the monster attacking Dax in the basement of the Ross house, Dr. Wetterau shining his penlight into her eyes and telling her about James Ross but not the whole story. A thought was starting to take form in her mind, but she couldn’t quite make out the shape.

  “I’ve been trying to reach Jeff all day,” said Ford, sounding a little exasperated. “I hated to bother you guys, knowing what you’re going through. But I found something that makes me think you may have been on the right track after all.”

  “Why? What do you mean?”

  He told her about the nanny and his visit to the Sunnyvale Retirement Home.

  “So who was she?”

  “The name on her employment record was Annabelle Hodge. She’s from Haunted.”

  Lydia heard blood rushing in her ears and her heart did a little flutter. She was transported back to that night over a hundred years ago when Annabelle Taylor watched her five children die before her eyes because of Elizabeth Ross’s cowardly heart. The vision was so vivid she smelled gunpowder.

  “Annabelle Hodge. Who is she? Maura’s sister?”

  “Her daughter. Must be. She’s only twenty-something. Looks like old Maura got a late start in the baby race.”

  Lydia remembered Maura telling her that all her children had been stillborn. More lies.

  “I don’t get it. Did Julian know that ‘Geneva’ was Maura Hodge’s daughter? Or did Eleanor?”

  “Eleanor says she
had no idea. Says that she hasn’t been to Haunted in twenty years, how could she have known? She and Maura weren’t exactly on speaking terms. She didn’t even know Maura had a daughter.”

  “Or so she says.”

  “Right.”

  “Hey, Ford,” she said. “What are you doing tonight?”

  “Funny you should ask. I was just about to take another little ride upstate. The address on Annabelle’s employment record was a place you’ve visited recently. The residence of Maura Hodge.”

  She remembered then the noises she’d heard upstairs when they’d interviewed Maura, and the feeling she had that there was so much more going on than Maura was willing to reveal.

  “Can you meet us at Payne Whitney in an hour? We’ll go up with you.”

  “I never mind the company … unofficially, of course. You up to that?”

  “Why not?” she said, her tone clipped, daring him to question her.

  “Whatever you say, Lydia.”

  “That’s an excellent philosophy.”

  chapter twenty-six

  Special Agent Charles Goban had a long, crooked nose set between small eyes so dark that his iris and pupil appeared to be one. His gray hair was close-cropped and Jeffrey could see his pink, slightly flaky scalp glowing under the overhead lights. A light sheen of sweat glistened on his wrinkled brow. Goban had the wiry build of a featherweight fighter and stood nearly three inches shorter than Jeffrey. Exuding a kind of pent-up nervous energy, he was a cork about to shoot off a champagne bottle. Although there was nothing to celebrate at the moment.

  “I’m trying to get my head around why I didn’t hear about this sooner,” Goban said, wiping away the sweat from his forehead and looking at Jeffrey with some combination of suspicion and condescension.

  “It was just a rumor,” answered Jeff. “We were following up. We never found him. Or any real evidence that he’d ever been down there.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. Lying to the FBI was not high on his list of things to do. He’d done it before and he’d probably do it again. But he avoided it when possible.

  On the train on his way to the office, he’d been staring out the window and saw a dark figure disappear into a hole in the tunnel wall. It had reminded him of Rain and that tomorrow was the deadline he and Dax had issued for the whereabouts of Jed McIntyre. But all bets were off now that Rebecca was missing. He was sorry to fuck with the order of things down there, recognizing it as a way for people who didn’t belong to have a place in the world. But Jed McIntyre had Rebecca and the thought that she could be down there filled him with dread. He could only imagine her terror, and the thought of it caused a sharp pain behind his eyes. She was a good person, kind and hardworking, close to her mother. She didn’t deserve to be drawn into this nightmare, a pawn for Jed McIntyre to cause Jeffrey and Lydia pain. Jeff felt an intense guilt and desperation to find her … alive. But there was also the voice in his head that whispered to him that it was already too late.

  When he’d arrived at the office, it was crawling with agents. The space was being treated like a crime scene, with technicians scouring for evidence, photographers snapping shots of their offices. An agent stood behind Craig as Craig showed how their security systems worked. The whole thing made Jeffrey extremely uneasy; he didn’t like other dogs on his turf. But it couldn’t be avoided now and he was going to have to deal with whatever it took to help Rebecca.

  Christian Striker looked pale and agitated as he paced the foyer.

  “This is so fucked up, man,” he said as Jeffrey approached.

  “I know. What are we doing for Rebecca?”

  “I’ve got ten of our guys visiting her friends and family, checking surveillance tapes from some of the other buildings on the block to see if we can get a handle on which way they went after they left. There’s not much we can do, honestly. We know he took her, but no one’s had a handle on Jed McIntyre in months. If we couldn’t find him before, how’re we going to find him now? It’s not good. We’re all too close to this, too worried to be thinking clearly and objectively.”

  “I think I know where he might have taken her.”

  “Christ, where, man?”

  “Where’s Goban?”

  “He’s in your office.”

  So he told the agent about their trip into the tunnel and how it had yielded nothing but a window into a world he never knew existed. Before he had even finished, Goban was mobilizing a team to head down beneath the streets.

  “You’re a fucking cowboy, Mark. You always have been. If you had told us about this sooner, Rebecca Helms wouldn’t be in this situation at all.”

  Jeff didn’t reply, just sat staring and wondering if Goban was right.

  “What were you going to do when you found him?”

  Jeff shrugged.

  “Yeah, do me a favor and don’t answer that. Just tell me one thing. Can you find your way around down there? Do you know where you’re going?”

  Before he could answer, a young agent walked into the room. With his slick black hair and bright blue eyes, he wore all the idealism and righteousness on his handsome face that Jeff had felt during the first few years on the job. The feeling had faded fast.

  “Sir, a body’s been found in Central Park matching the description of Rebecca Helms.”

  Dax watched Lydia disappear through the glass doors of the Payne Whitney Clinic and shifted the Rover into park. He sat with the engine idling and the heat blaring, keeping his eyes on the entrance to the hospital. No one would get in or out without his noticing. He knew Jeff was going to kick his ass for encouraging Lydia to be up and about. But aside from being a little sore, and a little broken inside, she was fine. Jeff wanted to treat her like she was made out of glass. That’s why Dax never wanted to fall in love. From what he could see, it clouded your judgment terribly.

  He could still see Lydia in the foyer trying to negotiate her way in, though only ten minutes remained for visiting hours. He was not surprised when he saw the guard relent and let her through. He wondered what she’d said to get her way.

  When his cell phone sang inside his pocket, he had a feeling he knew who it was. He hadn’t forgotten Rain’s deadline, and he was sure Rain hadn’t forgotten, either. With Rebecca missing now, the stakes were even higher.

  “Dax-ie,” said the husky voice on the other line. “How are you, darling?”

  Danielle’s voice was slurred and sloppy. There was a desperation to her mock-seductive tone. She was making Dax more and more uncomfortable every time they spoke. He could see that she had entered the downward spiral of booze, drugs, and dangerous sex that would likely end with her dead in an alley somewhere. He didn’t want to feel badly about that when it happened. He needed to find a new street contact, someone not so high-risk, someone with better self-preservation instincts.

  “What have you got, Danielle?” he said, trying to keep the disgust out of his voice.

  “Can you come get me? I’m cold and hungry and I have some news for you,” she said in a singsong voice that she must have imagined was enticing.

  “Give me the news now and I’ll come get you later. A woman is missing and I don’t have time to play games with you.”

  There was a pause on the other line. And when Danielle spoke again, her voice had turned sharp and angry.

  “Well, fuck you, too, Daxie.” She hung up the phone with a loud slam. Dax just sat there, knowing she would call back in under a minute. She was jonesing and she needed him. The phone chirped and blinked in his hand.

  “Let’s try to be civilized, shall we?” he said as he answered.

  “Come get me right now or I’m not going to give you Rain’s message,” she said, now pouting and sullen like a child. “I mean it, Dax.”

  Again the stab of pity in his heart for her. “Okay, okay. I’ll be there. Where are you?”

  She gave him her location and he hung up the line. “Bloody hell,” he said, looking back at the glass doors through which Lydia had disappeared. He dialed Jeff’s
number and got voice mail, but didn’t leave a message.

  As he put the phone back in his pocket, Ford McKirdy’s Taurus pulled up beside him and Dax rolled down the window. Ford got out of his car and walked over. Fatigue and stress radiated off him like an odor.

  “Did you hear?” asked Ford.

  “Hear what?”

  “We found a body in Central Park that matches the description of Rebecca Helms.”

  “Christ,” he said, feeling a wave of anger and sadness.

  “I know,” said Ford with a slow shake of his head.

  “Listen,” said Dax after a moment. “I have to go. I’ll meet up with you two in Haunted. Ford, just watch out for Lydia. I’ll be right behind you.”

  He didn’t like leaving Lydia, especially since Ford had another agenda. But if Danielle had a line on Jed McIntyre, it couldn’t wait. McIntyre had killed Rebecca and was moving closer to Lydia and Jeffrey. Dax could feel it, could smell it like a scent on the wind.

  “Where are you going?” called Ford. But the Rover was already pulling down the street.

  Julian Ross looked like one of the tortured figures in her paintings. She stood in the corner, huddled there as if protecting herself against some imagined assault. She had a white-knuckled grip on one of the room’s orange plastic chairs, as if she might need to lift it and use it to ward off lions. Some of her color had returned, but her wild eyes spoke of a living nightmare. Her fear and confusion were palpable in the stale air of the room. Her hair looked grayer and she looked thinner than when Lydia had seen her last. So much had happened since then that it seemed like a month, but really it had been less than a week.