Twice: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  “We can get in,” he said, bending down and cupping his hands. “I’ll give you a leg up to the top of the post, and you just lower yourself down on the other side. I’ll be right behind you,” he whispered.

  “Great.” Jeffrey was always assuming that she had more grace and physical prowess than she actually did.

  She placed her foot in his hand and he hoisted her while she clumsily clawed her way to the top of the post, using every last ounce of upper body strength to push herself up and lift her butt to the top. She was breathless by the time she came to sit on top of the structure. She looked down the other side.

  “I can’t jump. It’s too far,” she said, feeling a little panicked. She was glad she had worn her black stretch Emmanuel jeans and her soft black leather motorcycle boots and matching leather jacket. The front of her gray sweatshirt was now lined with dirt from her climb. She looked over and saw that Jeffrey had already scaled the other post and was lowering himself onto the ground on the other side. He landed with a light thump and walked over to her.

  “Just turn over on your belly and lower your legs first. You’re not that high up,” he instructed.

  She remembered him saying almost exactly the same words to her in Miami not long ago. That little maneuver hadn’t ended well and she had a feeling this one was going to end up the same way. But she managed to lower herself and land on both feet without falling on her ass, though the impact was a bit jarring to her damaged insides.

  “Hey,” said Jeffrey. “You’re getting better at this.”

  “Practice makes perfect,” she said, holding her abdomen for a minute.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fantastic,” she said.

  They moved quickly and quietly up the drive toward the house, staying to the side under cover of the trees. The winter woods that surrounded them were silent and the air was sharp with cold. Lydia peered in through the trees and saw nothing but pitch-black in the moonless night. She shivered involuntarily.

  A black late-model Lexus was parked near the front door and Lydia and Jeffrey stood at the edge of the house, waiting for a moment to be sure no one was in the car. They stood like that, still and listening, when they heard a voice from inside the house. It was a man’s voice, speaking in light, comforting tones.

  Lydia and Jeffrey moved onto the veranda, Jeffrey drawing his gun, and they both peered into the window beside the door.

  The man was tall and thin, with slick blond hair. He was expensively dressed in royal blue oxford, sleek black pants, with a Gucci belt around his waist. His back was to them, but Lydia could see that he moved with grace, gesticulating grandly with his hands. A fire crackled in the hearth and on a couch that had been pushed beside the fire, Lola and Nathaniel Stratton-Ross huddled together beneath a blanket, their eyes wide and trained on the man before them. Lydia felt flooded with relief to see them; they looked terrified but otherwise unharmed.

  He turned suddenly as if he sensed eyes on him, and Jeffrey and Lydia moved away from the window. But not before she recognized his face. It was James Ross. They heard footsteps coming closer and managed to get off the veranda and hide themselves before James Ross exited the house with a twin on each hand. They were stiff and silent, both of them looking pale and tired, as though they had been drained from fear and sleeplessness. He put them in the backseat, made sure they were strapped in, and shut the door.

  “We’ll be with Mommy soon,” he said sweetly before locking the car with a remote he held in his hand. From the truck, he then unloaded five red gallon containers marked GASOLINE and walked back into the house with one in each hand, leaving the other three on the ground by the car. Lydia and Jeffrey exchanged a look. Lydia shrugged and they followed Ross into the house.

  They stood in the foyer watching as James Ross doused the living room with gasoline. It was a full minute before he felt their eyes on him and turned to see them. Instead of startling, he smiled. His face was so strikingly like Julian’s face, the face from her drawings and the portrait at DiMarco’s gallery, that Lydia almost gasped. His eyes were the searing blue of a crystal-clear sky, and in them she saw the same glitter of insanity she’d viewed in his sister. He may have cut his hair and changed his clothes, but she could see the maniac alive and well inside him.

  “You clean up pretty good for a dead guy, Mr. Ross,” said Lydia, trying through humor to trick her heart out of her stomach.

  He laughed good-naturedly. “It’s funny how the things people do to destroy you can wind up working out to your advantage. It’s like I always say, you can’t control the things that happen to you in your life. All you can control is your attitude.”

  He didn’t seem at all surprised to see them, seemed to know who they were. Lydia wondered how, somewhere in the periphery of her consciousness.

  “We’re looking for a friend of ours. Hoping maybe you can help us,” said Jeffrey.

  “You’ve come to the right place,” he said. “And maybe when I’m done with this, I can help you out.”

  “So … what are you up to?” asked Lydia, matching his casual tone.

  “I’m reclaiming what’s mine, Ms. Strong.”

  “Looks to me like you’re getting ready to set it on fire,” said Jeffrey, clicking the safety off his gun.

  James Ross looked at Jeffrey’s gun and then at the house around him. “Time for a fresh start,” he said brightly, clapping his hands together. “Our past is so ugly, ugly, ugly. I want my family to move forward from here. The twins deserve better than we had.”

  “That’s why you killed their father?”

  He blinked at Lydia as if she were an apparition that he wished would disappear. And she wondered for a second if he thought they were real or a product of his diseased mind.

  “I am their father,” he said slowly. “Julian’s husband may have been their sire, but those children belong to me.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Because Julian and I are one person,” he said with a sympathetic smile. “We come from the same seed; what she is, I am. What comes from her body, comes from mine. Can you understand that?”

  “What about Julian?”

  “Julian had her chance for us all to be together. I offered her freedom from a marriage to a man she could never love. But she couldn’t see that. She’d wanted this normal life that she could never have. That’s why she’s lost touch with reality, why she’s locked away in that hellhole. She can’t accept who she is, who we are. So the twins and I will just have to go on without her. Now I really have to be going.”

  Lydia nodded. “I understand how you feel, James. I do. Do you understand that we can’t let you burn this place down? And we can’t let you have the twins?”

  “What business is it of yours, anyway? My mother hired you, right? She’s dead. I’ll pay your fee and this can stay between us,” he said, like it was the most logical thought in the world.

  “That’s not the way it works, James,” said Jeffrey.

  “I’m not armed,” James said to Jeffrey, nodding toward his gun.

  “You’ve got a can of gasoline and, I’m assuming, a lighter in your pocket. I call that armed.”

  James shrugged. He paced a bit and then turned to them.

  “You’re looking for justice, right? Bring the murderer, the kidnapper, to justice. That’s noble. I respect that. But,” he said, and here his face changed, went from cool and reasonable to angry, “you don’t understand any of this. Don’t you know what they did to me?”

  His brow furrowed and his face flushed.

  “They locked me away from Julian. Said I tried to burn down this house, kill my sister and my mother. But it was a lie.” He spat the last word out like it burned his tongue.

  “Was it?”

  “Yes,” he yelled, and then composed himself. “Because Eleanor wanted to keep Julian and me apart. She thought we had something dirty. But it was never like that. Never. It was the purest love two people could share.

  “We loved
each other, we belonged together. Even Eleanor could see that. Jealous old cow. She said I was evil, afraid that I was the manifestation of that stupid curse she obsessed about every fucking day. So she had her lover lock me away. Dr. Wetterau. They were lovers. Did you know that? She always went on and on about how my father had been her one true love, that there would never be another. But it didn’t stop her from fucking around like a whore.”

  “So they sent you away. To keep you from Julian,” said Lydia.

  “But I escaped,” he said, and laughed.

  “And where did you go?”

  “Julian was at Chapin by then, in New York. So I went to her. But she didn’t love me anymore,” he said, and his eyes filled with tears. He turned away from them and stood before the hearth.

  “They’d brainwashed her, convinced her that I was evil. She turned me away, told me she wanted a normal life, a natural love. I was ruined, destroyed. Started to believe that I was evil. I was never far from her, always shadowing her, watching over her.

  “I lived like an animal for a lifetime. But now, as you can see, I’ve had a rebirth. I’ve claimed my children.”

  “Did you kill Tad Jenson?”

  “I didn’t mean to,” he said, and appeared truly remorseful. “I just wanted to see her, to touch her. And he wouldn’t let me. Things just got out of hand. You know how it goes … don’t you? The rage, that monster inside, just takes over.”

  “And Richard Stratton?”

  “The rage …” he said, and didn’t go on. He looked off in the distance now, into the past, a gallery of all his regrets and mistakes.

  “The past is so unforgiving,” he went on. “But the future is a blank slate. We can make anything of it. That’s what I’m going to do for the twins. They represent everything I have lost … my love, my fortune, my family. In them, all things will be made right.”

  “What about the curse? Where do Maura and Annabelle Hodge fit into this?”

  “Oh, they were happy for the opportunity to destroy Eleanor and Julian. When I finally found the courage to return to this place,” he said, looking around him. “You know, to set the past right. I went to see Maura. Because we had a common enemy, Eleanor, we became allies. We both got what we wanted. Maura and Annabelle got to see Eleanor’s worse nightmares come true and then they got to watch her die. It wasn’t really about the curse, you know. That’s just a myth. It was hatred pure and simple. Now Maura and Annabelle are long gone. Maura has her vengeance after all these years.”

  “What did Annabelle get out of all of this?”

  “I think Annabelle was more motivated by the payoff than anything. That and fear of her mother. Poor kid. And who wouldn’t be afraid of Maura? She’s fucking insane.”

  In her zeal to classify all human motivation, Lydia had neglected maybe the most powerful of all … hatred. It had been the food Maura ate most of her life and apparently had fed to her daughter. In a way, Lydia felt bad for Annabelle; she was as much a victim as Lola and Nathaniel, used in the same way.

  “Have you satisfied your curiosity, Ms. Strong? Do you know everything you want to know?”

  “There’s just one thing. Our friend, Ford McKirdy.”

  “Your nosey little friend almost ruined everything. Let’s make a deal, shall we? I’ll give you your friend, and you let me walk out of here. We’ll just pretend this little meeting never happened.”

  “How about you tell us where Ford McKirdy is and I don’t blow your head off?” said Jeffrey, losing his patience. It was then that from somewhere deep in the house they heard a pounding, the sound of a voice shouting through layers of wood and concrete. They both turned to look in the direction of the noise, and when they looked back, James was gone, the gas cans with him.

  Lydia took off in the direction of the noise, heading toward the basement. In the distance she heard the wail of sirens, but remembered the locked gate at the bottom of the drive and wondered how anyone could get up to the house. She pushed down panic as she moved through the long hallway. Suddenly she caught the scent of smoke.

  She stopped in her tracks. “Jeffrey,” she yelled. “There’s fire!”

  But he didn’t answer her. She’d drawn the .38 she’d had in the pocket of her leather jacket and was watchful of the dark corners, not sure where James lurked or what his agenda was. The pounding grew louder as she drew closer to the basement door, but when she turned the knob, it was locked.

  “Stand back,” she yelled to whoever could hear her. She gave it ten seconds and then she fired a round at the doorknob. The latch gave way and the door swung open and a dark stairway yawned below her.

  “Ford,” she yelled. But there was no answer and the pounding had stopped. A horrible moment passed during which Lydia feared that Ford had been standing behind the heavy door and she had just shot him. She reached in for a light switch and found one. But when she flipped it, no lights came on … naturally. Then she heard a croaking voice in the darkness. “Lydia.”

  “Ford?”

  She heard a weak groan.

  She ran down the stairs to find him bound to a chair. He’d knocked himself to the floor and had apparently gotten one leg free and was kicking at the wall. That was the pounding they’d heard. He was dirty and looked awful but seemed unharmed.

  “Ford. Thank God.”

  “I thought I was going to die down here,” he said.

  “Not if I can help it,” said Lydia, dropping to her knees and starting to work the knots in the ropes that bound him.

  “I smell smoke,” said Ford.

  “I think there’s a fire,” said Lydia, glancing up the stairs and wondering where Jeffrey was. Then she heard the sound of a gun firing. Her stomach twisted as she pulled on the bindings. The ropes were damp from the moisture in the basement and Lydia struggled with the tight knots, but was finally able to get him free.

  “Can you walk?” she asked as she helped him to his feet.

  “Yeah.…”

  “Let’s go.”

  By the time they reached the top of the stairs, the house was starting to fill with smoke. They turned the corner and were headed toward the door when Jeffrey jumped out at them through the black cloud that was gathering. He had his shirt pulled up over his nose. Ford and Lydia quickly did the same.

  “Where’s James?” asked Lydia.

  “I shot him, but he got away from me. He went deeper into the house. I tried to follow him, but this place is going up like kindling. We have to get out of here. He’s still in here. The Lexus is still parked outside with the twins in it.”

  Jeffrey grabbed Ford and dragged him the rest of the way out of the house, as Ford seemed to lose strength. Lydia paused before exiting, looked at the grand home being eaten by flames, and she wondered if this was James Ross’s funeral pyre. Then she ran out the front door.

  Outside, police and fire vehicles were moving up the drive, their blue and red lights casting the night in a bizarre strobe.

  Jeffrey helped Ford away from the house. Lydia, smashing in with the butt of her gun the front passenger side window, unlocked the Lexus and took the terrified, screaming twins from the car. She picked them up, one on each hip, and moved quickly behind Jeffrey and Ford. Though they’d only met her once, the twins clung to her. The five of them made quite a sight to Henry Clay as he stepped out of his prowler. And he would remember that as they passed him and moved toward the waiting ambulance, there seemed to be a moment of silence, when the house and the woods around them took a deep breath before an explosion blasted them all back at least ten feet. It was an explosion of such force that Henry Clay had his eyebrows and what was left of his hair singed to ash.

  • • •

  The house burned for hours. Every time it seemed that the flames might be dying, the fire appeared to reignite itself. The firefighters could only struggle to keep it under control as much as possible, keep it from spreading to the surrounding trees.

  Lydia watched from an ambulance, where she sat on a stiff white
seat, the twins lying against her. They had collapsed on her like puppies seeking warmth and comfort from her body heat. And she had draped an arm around each of them. They probably didn’t realize it, but they were comforting her, as well.

  Jeffrey had ridden in another ambulance with Ford, and Lydia had chosen to stay with the twins until someone could come for them. They didn’t really know her, but she was more familiar to them than anyone else on the scene and they seemed calmed by that.

  “My daddy used to take me to see the penguins at the zoo,” said Nathaniel solemnly.

  “He used to take us to the zoo,” corrected Lola. “He took both of us.”

  “Your daddy loves you very much,” said Lydia, using the present tense without really thinking.

  “He loved us,” said Lola. “He’s dead now. Dead people can’t love you.”

  “Lola,” said Lydia, thinking of the dream she’d had recently about her mother, “that’s not true. It’s not true at all.”

  chapter forty-three

  When Lydia and Jeffrey walked into his broom closet of an office, Ford McKirdy was cleaning out his desk. And though it was a bright cold day, he wore a festive Hawaiian shirt and a pair of khakis. A big down parka rested on the chair by the door.

  “So you’re finally getting a life,” said Lydia with a smile.

  He stopped what he was doing and looked at them. “Thanks to you two, yeah,” he said. He walked over and embraced each of them.

  “Have a seat,” he said, hanging his parka on a hook behind the door.

  “We’re going to Europe,” he said, with the excitement of a kid on his way to Disneyland. “Me and Rose. Can you believe it?”