Twice: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

  No real sense of relief had come since the death of Jed McIntyre. It didn’t feel as though a burden had been released. The world didn’t seem like a better, safer place, and the loss of her mother was no less with her. None of the things that she imagined would happen if the world were suddenly free of her bogeyman had happened. Maybe it was too soon. Or maybe, as was her fear, the damage had already been done. That she wouldn’t heal the way Dax would heal, or Rain would heal. Maybe she was so altered by the events of her life, so damaged, that part of her was as dead as Rebecca or Marion, buried and gone for good. She was trying not to believe that, but a funeral was a difficult place to cultivate a positive attitude.

  Lydia watched as Rebecca’s mother and father approached the graveside, each with a white rose in hand. They were quiet, brave. Lydia knew they were enduring the most awful possible moment, the last second of physical connection to their daughter. She knew that when the roses dropped from their fingers and landed on the casket, it was the last time anything they touched would have contact with anything she touched. That each of them was screaming, raging inside with grief and fury, pain that would cause them to wish for death more than once over the next months, maybe years. But they were stoic. Lydia wanted to scream for them. Maybe they were the last victims of Jed McIntyre.

  The crowd began to thin, as people stopped at the graveside and then moved along to waiting cars and limos. The day was cruelly clear and bright, a light blue sky with a round white winter sun. Better to rain. God didn’t seem so oblivious then to the pain of His children.

  The three of them came to stop at the edge of Rebecca’s grave and they looked down onto her gleaming silver casket littered with the roses dropped by the people who loved her. Jeffrey dropped the three white orchids he had been holding for them. And Lydia said quietly, “I’m sorry, Rebecca.”

  After all, what else was left to say?

  At the Rover, Jeffrey and Lydia helped Dax into the backseat and he bore the assistance like a rectal exam, uncomfortable and humiliated. Jeffrey put the wheelchair in the back of the car and Lydia reached to help him settle and strap in.

  “I’m not a child,” said Dax, grabbing the seat belt from Lydia’s hand. He didn’t look at her and his face was flushed with embarrassment.

  “Well, then stop acting like one, you big baby.”

  She patted him on the head and he glared at her, but there was no heat in it. He was just tired and crabby and hurting. She understood and he knew she did. She was about to open the front passenger door for herself when she was aware of someone standing behind her. She turned to see Detectives Malone and Piselli.

  “Ms. Strong,” said Malone. “We need to talk.”

  “What’s up, guys?” she asked, Jeffrey walking up beside her.

  The two of them looked uncomfortable, worried. They exchanged a glance and then Piselli spoke up.

  “When’s the last time you heard from Detective McKirdy?”

  The events of the last few days came rushing back in a wave as Lydia tried to remember the last time she’d talked to Ford.

  Slowly they’d filed into the underground chamber, Rain’s legions. Quietly, shuffling and unspeaking, they’d carried Rain and Jed McIntyre up the long metal staircase and eventually out of the tunnels, Lydia and Jeffrey following in a kind of haze. The surreal quality of the whole ordeal made it easy for Lydia to pretend she was participating in an incredibly vivid lucid dream. When they emerged into the city night, the cold air snapped her back a bit and the events that had just transpired began to sink in. At the corner of Prince Street and Lafayette, they were greeted by the stone-faced Special Agent Goban and the rest of the FBI team, as well as some NYPD uniforms.

  Dax had been taken from the tunnels hours earlier, Lydia later learned, and was rushed to the hospital. Before the emergency surgery to repair his injured legs, he managed to explain to one of the hospital staff that they needed to contact the FBI and tell them where Lydia and Jeffrey were. The man, whom Dax couldn’t name and probably wouldn’t recognize, had done that, hence the greeting committee.

  A waiting ambulance rushed Rain to Bellevue, where he was recovering from a gunshot wound to the chest. And Lydia had the grim satisfaction of watching the coroner’s office team zip Jed McIntyre into a body bag. He lay white, his eyes staring, a thin line of blood dripping from the corner of his mouth. She watched as he was swallowed by black plastic and loaded into the back of the van, the doors slamming hard and final behind him.

  “Where will you bury him?” she asked one of the men. “No one will claim him.”

  He shrugged, not looking at her. “Depends.”

  “How do I find out?” Something in her voice must have caught his attention because he turned his eyes on her. He was an older Hispanic man, with deep lines etched around his eyes and a receding hairline. In his face she saw the reflection of a thousand ugly, anonymous deaths.

  “Call the office tomorrow,” he said, with something like sympathy in his voice. “Ask for Hector, that’s me. I’ll let you know.”

  “Thanks,” she said, offering her hand. But he didn’t see it and walked off.

  “Time to let go,” said Jeffrey from behind her. “You don’t need to know where the body goes.”

  She nodded but knew she would call to find out anyway. Why? She didn’t really understand, herself.

  The next two days, they’d barely talked, left the house only to go to the hospital to be with Dax. They walked around each other in a kind of daze of pain and loss, touching more than speaking. That had always been the way with them in times of trouble; they communicated better with their bodies than with words. Everything that had happened before the tunnels had become a distant memory. Everything, of course, except the loss of the pregnancy. Lydia carried that with her like an arm in a cast. The physical pain was subsiding; she imagined the emotional pain would fade eventually, as well.

  Julian and Eleanor Ross, the missing twins, their drama, all seemed to exist on a distant planet in another galaxy. Their client was dead. The questions were still out there, floating in the outer edges of Lydia’s consciousness, her curiosity, but she didn’t have the energy to acknowledge them again yet. She hadn’t even thought about Ford.

  This morning Dax had insisted on coming to Rebecca’s funeral. He didn’t have insurance, so the hospital was looking to unload him anyway. Lydia believed that he needed to stay another few days, just to assure he’d stay off his injured legs. Against their better judgment, they wheeled him out and here they were.

  “I haven’t seen Ford since we discovered Eleanor Ross’s body at the duplex,” she answered finally.

  “That’s the thing,” said Piselli, lighting a cigarette. “Neither have we.”

  “It’s not like him. He’s not going to just take off,” said Piselli, sitting in the pub where they’d decided to meet at on Astoria Boulevard in Queens. It was a dump of a place called Cranky’s. Every inch of the wall had a beer-bottle cap nailed to it like some alcoholic mosaic. The jukebox played “Love Me Do” by the Beatles. A couple of old men hunched in the corner, nursing pints and arguing about Giuliani. The typical bar aroma of booze and cigarettes was accented by a subtle but definite hint of vomit.

  Piselli and Malone sat across from Lydia and Jeffrey in a red vinyl booth; they’d parked Dax’s wheelchair at the end of the table.

  Lydia really looked at them for the first time. They were both pretty good-looking guys, Piselli with slicked black hair and dark eyes that observed sharply and missed nothing. He had a fashionable bit of stubble on his square jaw and a slight hook in his nose didn’t detract from his face but made it almost aquiline, at once sexy and regal. They were both young, but Malone had more of a boyish look to him, a soft innocence around the corners of his eyes. The acne scarring she’d noticed when she’d met him the first time didn’t seem as angry or red as it had. His skin was unlined, shaven, and clean. He smelled of Ivory soap.

&
nbsp; Lydia and Jeffrey ordered Amstels from the bartender; Malone ordered a Coke. And Piselli drank coffee from a white ceramic mug that read ONE DAY AT A TIME. Dax sulked.

  “This is what we know,” said Piselli, lighting the fourth cigarette he’d smoked since approaching them at the Rover. Lydia fantasized about asking for one but didn’t.

  “He had a uniform take Anthony Donofrio down to the station while he hung around the scene for a while with us. He poked around the apartment, then headed down after them. We know that he spent about forty-five minutes with Donofrio; he taped the conversation. During this conversation he learned that Annabelle Hodge had entered the building just hours before you and Ford found Eleanor Ross dead.”

  “I talked to him right after he learned about Annabelle Hodge,” interjected Piselli. “He wanted me to cooperate with Rawls, the head of MCU. Make sure he got anything he needed from our files. But I didn’t ask him where he was going and he didn’t say.”

  “We know he spoke to his wife briefly that evening late, after midnight. She called from Houston,” Piselli said.

  “Did you talk to Donofrio?” asked Jeffrey.

  “We can’t find him.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Lydia, taking a sip from her beer.

  “Rawls headed back there and spent some more time with him, but he basically just went over and over the same stuff he’d told Ford. Rawls had nothing to hold him on, so they had to let him go. He never made it home after he left the precinct.”

  “You think he fled?” asked Jeffrey.

  “With no money, no change of clothes, no call to his mother? No,” said Piselli with a shake of his head.

  “Do you have the videotape of their conversation?” asked Lydia.

  Piselli pulled a videotape from the inside pocket of his coat and handed it to her. “I didn’t know if it would help you, but I thought I’d bring you a copy.

  “They talked about Annabelle Hodge, mostly,” he said, and then ran down the general content of the conversation. “How much she hated Julian Ross and a bunch of other crap about how she was a voodoo priestess or some shit.”

  Lydia and Jeffrey exchanged a look.

  “You think she’s the shooter? That she took the twins?”

  “She’s suspect number one as far as the Missing Children’s Unit is concerned.”

  “Have you been up to Haunted?” asked Lydia.

  “We been up there, looking for Ford and Geneva Stout, a.k.a. Annabelle Hodge. No sign of either of them. But we got a warrant and with the help of the locals up there, we took the Hodge residence apart. They’re still watching the place.”

  “What did you find?”

  “We found a knife that was consistent with the injuries incurred by Richard Stratton. But it had been thoroughly cleaned, no prints, no blood evidence.”

  “You talked to Maura Hodge?” asked Jeffrey.

  Malone and Piselli shook their heads.

  “Can’t find her, either?”

  “She’s gone, too,” said Malone.

  “The Missing Children’s Unit is working around the clock. Julian Ross’s attorneys are riding them like you wouldn’t believe. Those kids are worth millions.”

  “No leads?”

  “Nothing, and I mean nothing. They’re taking tips from a hotline. They’ve been canvassing the neighborhood and Haunted, too. The lawyers posted a reward, we’ve got sketches of Annabelle and Maura Hodge all over the television, newspapers, the streets. Rawls won’t admit it, but he’s feeling desperate. You can see it in him.”

  Lydia felt a flutter of panic and a little guilt. She’d been so overwhelmed with the events of her own life that she hadn’t even thought about the kids since she’d left Eleanor’s apartment that night. Lydia thought of their sweet faces, remembering shaking each of their little hands that day at the hotel. She felt a little ache in her chest, wondering what had happened to Lola and Nathaniel, their father and grandmother dead, their mother locked away.

  “It’s cold and getting colder. The case is at a dead end. Two bodies, two missing children, one missing detective, the only survivor whose whereabouts we know of,” said Piselli, showing the palms of his hands, “in the nuthouse. Crazy, talking about ‘destroyers’ and monsters eating her young.”

  “Eating her young …” said Lydia. “She’s been saying that from the beginning.”

  “She has, hasn’t she?” said Jeffrey.

  “A cop disappears like that,” said Malone, apparently not listening to the conversation but thinking about Ford, “people figure he turns up somewhere having parked with a bottle and his service revolver. You know what I mean?”

  There was a look of worry and sadness on his face; the job hadn’t yet taught him how to hide his emotions better, hadn’t desensitized him to the ugliness of a cop’s life. Lydia found herself hoping that maybe he’d get out before it did. There was something refreshing about a young man whose feelings you could read on his face. Even Jeffrey had learned a game face; Lydia couldn’t always tell what he was feeling by looking into his eyes.

  They were all quiet for a minute. “We been to Ford’s place in Brooklyn,” said Piselli. “Rose came back; she’s worried sick, of course.”

  “Though maybe if she was so worried she wouldn’t have left in the first place,” said Malone with a disapproving snort.

  “Not your business,” said Piselli, giving him a look.

  “You said he talked to Rose the night he disappeared. What was that conversation about?” she asked.

  “She told him she was coming back so that they could talk.”

  “He would have been happy about that; the conversation would have made him hopeful,” said Lydia. She remembered her conversation with Ford when they’d driven upstate. He’d seemed very depressed then, unsure about the future and doubting the way he’d lived his life. Those things and the pressures of the job, the lack of an outlet for his emotions and a viable support system … well, it led a lot of cops to the end Malone feared. But not with Rose coming back. Unless that added a whole other set of pressures that he couldn’t handle.

  “Ford wouldn’t go out like that,” said Jeffrey, sounding certain. “Especially not with Rose coming back. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “So what can we do, guys?” said Lydia.

  Now that they were talking about the case again, she was infused with a sense of urgency. It gave her a jolt of energy that she hadn’t felt in a while. Her fear for Ford and the twins and the itch of curiosity awoke a familiar fire within her. She felt a little guilty, but part of her was relieved to have a problem to solve. Her work had always helped her keep her mind off of her life … for better or for worse.

  “Nothing,” said Piselli with a shrug and a sideways glance. “We’re just following up with you, Lydia, since you were one of the last people to see him.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Yeah, since you know, legally we got no reason to go back up to Haunted and take another look around,” he said, looking pointedly at Lydia. “The Richard Stratton case takes precedence over Ford, since there’s no evidence of foul play in Ford’s case. MCU is handling the twins and our help is not exactly welcome. We have no chain of evidence that leads us back to Haunted, with Maura and Annabelle Hodge nowhere to be found. We’re stuck.”

  “Well,” she said, leaning back and looking at Jeffrey, unable to keep the edge out of her voice. She was hoping that he wasn’t going to try to stop her from getting involved. “We should be getting back to work on the Ross case, anyway.”

  “Even though our client is dead, we have a responsibility to Julian Ross to follow through,” agreed Jeffrey. “Maybe we can come up with something on Ford while we’re up there.”

  Lydia observed the same combination of concern and energy in Jeffrey’s face, in the way he was so quick to agree. Distractions could not be overrated when the options were sitting around grieving and reliving nightmares.

  “Of course, you’ll let us know how it goes,” said Piselli w
ith a satisfied nod.

  “Naturally,” answered Lydia.

  They all looked at one another for a minute, the questions and possibilities turning in front of their eyes.

  “Why doesn’t anybody in this country just say what they mean?” said Dax sourly.

  chapter forty

  Back at the apartment, they watched the tape of Ford’s interview with Anthony Donofrio. Jeffrey and Lydia sat next to each other on the couch and Dax had asked to be parked by the window. Lydia had a pad on her lap and a Montblanc pen in her hand. She tapped the pen quickly on the arm of the couch, turning things over in her mind as the tape played.

  “So Annabelle—” said Jeffrey when the taped had ended, getting up and flipping off the VCR, “why would she hate Eleanor and Julian so much?”

  “Maybe it’s inherited hatred. Passed from mother to daughter, like the curse?” answered Lydia, speculating.

  “As far as we know, she was the last person to see Eleanor, the last person to enter that apartment before the twins went missing,” Jeffrey said.

  “But why? Why kill Eleanor in cold blood and take the twins? What does she have to gain?”

  There was no answer for that question that Lydia could get her brain around. She knew the facts, that Annabelle was the obvious person to be looking at for the murder of Eleanor Ross and the disappearance of the twins. But the motive seemed weak to her: Kill Eleanor because Maura hated her. And even if that were the case, why take the twins?

  “So we go back to the basic question: Who has the most to gain now that Richard Stratton and Eleanor Ross are dead and Julian is locked away?” said Jeffrey, sitting beside Lydia. “I mean, it looked for a while like Eleanor had the most to gain.”