Twice: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  She thought about Maura and Annabelle Hodge, so warped by a legacy of revenge and hatred, by jealousy and greed, that they allowed themselves to be drawn into a plot that would end lives they considered less worthy than their own and children to grow up without parents. The righteous anger of their ancestor so many years ago, thwarted and used for their own selfish means. Lydia still wondered about Annabelle’s father, who he was, why he had disappeared. Lydia had her suspicions, thinking perhaps it was Paul, Eleanor’s brother. It was the way Maura had talked of him, the dedication in her book. Maybe she knew Eleanor had killed him, maybe she knew no one would ever believe her even if she told. Maybe all of this gave her a nudge a little further down the road to insanity. But it was just a guess and Lydia would probably never know the truth.

  She thought about Orlando DiMarco. Of all of them, he was the one who confused her the most. When he returned from Switzerland with the children for Julian’s funeral, Lydia had visited him at his gallery. He was in the process of closing it down and moving to Switzerland permanently with Nathaniel and Lola, of whom now he was guardian.

  “I think part of me always knew it would end like this for them,” he said when he saw her.

  “You knew,” she said.

  “I had an idea.”

  “But you never implicated her … or him.”

  “I loved her,” he said simply. “And they were one. Anything I’d done to harm him would have harmed her. Did you ever love anyone that much … that you’d do anything, no matter how wrong it was? Even if you knew they could never love you the same way?”

  She didn’t want to judge him or say to him that she didn’t consider that love. That when love asked you to betray yourself and betray others, it was only need or fear in a clever masquerade. She only shook her head.

  Lola and Nathaniel were chasing each other around the empty gallery space, their laughter echoing against the walls. To look at them, one would never know what they had endured over the last several weeks of their young lives. They seemed happy, normal.

  “Do they ever talk about that night?”

  “They told their therapist that they were playing a game with their nanny that night. I don’t know that they’ve quite connected that event with the death of their father. They don’t blame themselves. Anyway, they’ll be in therapy for a while.”

  “Why did Julian ask you to take the twins?”

  “I don’t know, really. She came to the gallery a couple of months ago and asked me if I would take the twins should anything happen to her and Richard. I told her yes, of course. I thought it was odd, but I wouldn’t have considered turning her down,” he said, looking past Lydia at the memory of that day.

  “I think part of her suspected that all this would end in tragedy,” he went on. “She wanted to be sure that they’d be cared for. That’s as close as I can come to a guess.”

  “And what about James? Do you think he’ll come for them?”

  “It would be suicide. They’ll be watched by Interpol for a little while and then by a security team I’ve hired in Switzerland. If he comes near them, he’ll be arrested and charged with murder.”

  Lydia nodded.

  “It’s funny,” he said as she began to leave. “In Lola and Nathaniel, I have more of her in death than I did while she was alive. They are so much like her … it’s a joy and torture. I think they’ll bring me great pleasure and great sadness for the rest of my life, just like their mother before them.”

  There was something beautiful and something ugly about what he’d said, something almost Gothic in its romance, its utter selflessness, and something sick about it, too.

  As she left the gallery, she saw the twins peeking around a wall to look at her. They were beautiful children, but there was something old in their eyes. She knelt down and they came to her, each of them hugging her in turn.

  “Remember what I told you, Lola,” Lydia said, releasing her. “You, too, Nathaniel.”

  “You lose the giver, not the gift,” said Lola obediently. And Nathaniel nodded uncertainly. Lydia wasn’t sure that they understood yet the meaning of what she’d told them that night, but she believed that they might one day. She knew what it was like to go through life without parents; she hoped that her words would come back to them on the tough days and give them comfort.

  When the ferry had docked and the gate opened, Hector handed her a piece of paper with a number on it and pointed toward the east.

  “You got ten minutes. Don’t hold us up. You’ll get me in trouble,” he said. The other men, on the boat and on the shore, even the priest, all had their eyes on her. They were all curious, but no one asked any questions.

  It was a dead place. There were no shading branches or grassy lanes lined with flowers, only black dirt paths and anemic trees scattered among the graves. She made her way on a rough walkway, through the maze of small white stone markers. No names, only numbers. And Lydia couldn’t believe how many there were. Hector had told her that there were between 750,000 and a million graves here. There were layers of them—the workers buried coffin on top of coffin—and Lydia felt unspeakably sad. Prisoners, indigents, orphans, and unknowns … all these lost souls. She thought of Rain and all the people below the subways who had helped them and wondered if most of them wouldn’t end up here like this. What path do you take that leads you to this end? She only knew the answer for one of them.

  Across a vista of open grass, Lydia could see the ruins of old abandoned buildings, a hospital, a reformatory, a house. All once served a function for the city, now nameless and abandoned like the dead surrounding them.

  She came upon the fresh grave with Jed McIntyre’s serial number on it and she reflected on why she’d come. It wasn’t to see him dead in the ground, as one might imagine. It wasn’t even for a sense of closure to the reign of terror he’d had over her life. She did not come to cry for her mother or for herself.

  From a pocket of her long black cashmere coat, she removed the letter that Agent Goban had given her from Rebecca Helms’s crime scene. It had been opened and read by the people at the scene. But Lydia had never opened it. The letters she had received from him over the years had been like missives of reassurance that he was locked away. She didn’t need them anymore. She removed that pile now from another pocket and placed his most recent letter on top. She bent to pick up a rock she found by the path and she laid the letters on the earth, placed the rock on top to weight them down, and stood again.

  She was here to give him back everything he had given her, all his pain, all his hatred, all his terror, all his letters. All the ugly parts of himself that she had allowed to become parts of her, she wanted him to have. For good. That was all. She turned away and walked back down the path toward the ferry.

  When the ferry returned to the pier, Lydia saw Jeffrey standing on the dock. A gull screamed above her and a bell clanged in the wind as she approached him. He wore faded jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt underneath his distressed leather jacket. His nose and cheeks were pink, as though he’d been standing in the cold for a while.

  “You followed me,” she said, trying to sound disapproving.

  “You lied to me,” he answered simply.

  She shrugged. It was true. She couldn’t argue.

  “I had to come alone.”

  He nodded his understanding. “Did you get what you wanted?”

  “I have what I want,” she said, reaching for his hand. “I just left some things I didn’t need behind.”

  She turned to look as though she might see those things waving there at her like flags, but there was nothing. Just the murky water and the flat, dead island.

  He raised her hand to his cheek and held it there. And she knew with clarity in that moment that the past was dead, the future just a fantasy. It was only the present that lived and breathed. It was all they had. And it was all they needed.

  Author’s Notes

  The following texts and Web sites were invaluable in the writing of this
novel: The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City (Chicago Review Press) by Jennifer Toth; The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City (Yale University Press) by Margaret Morton; The Making of New York (www.nysl.nysed.gov); The New York Geneological and Biological Society (www.nygbs.org); Forgotten New York (www.forgotten-ny.com); and Ectopic Pregnancy Trust (www.ectopic.org).

  Special thanks to Larry Labriola, New York City Police Department Narcotics Detective (ret.) for his patient answers to my million questions on NYPD policy and procedures and to Dr. Thomas Walter M.D., F.A.C.O.G., for his invaluable insights on ectopic pregnancy.

  However, in spite of my careful research, I’m sure I’ve gotten something wrong along the way and I know I’ve taken artistic license as the narrative dictates. Either way, don’t blame my sources! All mistakes, intentional or otherwise, are mine.

  Acknowledgments

  With every book I write, the list of people to whom I am thankful grows longer. If I were to name here all of those who have bolstered and helped me in the process of completing this novel, I’m afraid I could go on for pages. Or worse, in the listing of them, I would neglect someone crucial. So I’ll just say that I have been blessed with an amazing network of family and friends without whom I would be pretty lost. They know who they are.

  I am most especially grateful to my wonderful husband, Jeffrey Unger, for his love, encouragement, patience, and tireless efforts as first reader, webmaster, and publicist; my agent, Elaine Markson, and her assistant Gary Johnson for their unflagging support; Kelley Ragland for her brilliant editing; and associate editor Ben Sevier and all the people at St. Martin’s who work so hard and achieve such wonderful results.

  About the Author

  Lisa Unger, writing as Lisa Miscione, is an award-winning New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author. Her novels have been published in more than twenty-six countries around the world. She was born in New Haven, Connecticut (1970) but grew up in the Netherlands, England, and New Jersey. A graduate of the New School for Social Research, Lisa spent many years living and working in New York City. She then left a career in publicity to pursue her dream of becoming a full-time author. She now lives in Florida with her husband and daughter. She is at work on her next novel.

  an excerpt from

  smoke

  BY

  LISA UNGER

  coming in May 2012

  part one

  the lost girl

  Until you’ve smoked out the bees,

  You can’t eat the honey.

  —Russian proverb

  one

  Lydia Strong wanted a cigarette to celebrate the defeat of her enemy. She leaned back in her chair and looked at the manuscript that sat fat and neat on her desk beside her computer. She felt like a prizefighter who had finally, after a brutal showdown, sent her opponent to the mat. The Lost Girl had taken her nearly a year to write and every page had been a battle. It was a first for her. Words were her tools, sometimes her weapons. Either way, she’d always wielded them with ease. But this book didn’t want to be written. Every day the blank page had seemed like a taunt, a dare, a bully on the playground looking for her lunch money.

  Maybe it was because in the writing of it, she had to let go of things she’d been clinging to for years. Maybe because, as painful as those things were, they were comfortable, familiar, and a part of her didn’t really want to see them exorcised. But now they were safely incarcerated in the pages of her manuscript. Soon they’d be edited and revised, edited and revised again. Then they’d be exposed to the light of the world. And, like all demons, in the sun they’d turn to piles of dust.

  She laughed a little, just because of the lightness of her relief. She got up from her desk and tossed around the idea of going out for a pack of cigarettes. Maybe if Jeffrey wasn’t lying on the couch reading the Sunday Times, she’d go down to the bodega on the corner of Lafayette and Great Jones, smoke a cigarette on the street and then throw away the rest of the pack. But he’d be able to tell and then he’d give her a hard time. It wasn’t worth it.

  “I’m done,” she called, walking out of her office and through the loft. But he wasn’t on the couch; he was standing at the counter that divided the kitchen from the living room, talking on the phone.

  “Oops, sorry,” she said when she saw him.

  He looked at her strangely when she walked in. She hadn’t heard the phone ring. She took a frosty bottle of Ketel One vodka from the freezer and poured herself a lowball, trying and failing to be quiet as she put some ice in the glass and squirted some lime juice from one of those little plastic bottles shaped cutely like a lime.

  “I see,” he said, lowering his eyes to the floor beneath his feet, tapping a pen on the countertop. “No, I’d rather tell her, David, if you don’t mind.”

  “Is that my grandfather?” Lydia asked, looking at him now. She could tell there was something wrong, but she sipped at the drink in her hand and pretended she couldn’t. She needed a few minutes to enjoy the completion of her manuscript before life leaked in and started demanding attention.

  Jeffrey put the phone back in the cradle and didn’t look at her right away.

  “Did you hear me? I’m finished. I finished The Lost Girl.”

  “That’s fantastic. Congratulations,” he said softly, moving toward her and taking her into his arms.

  “Want a drink?” she asked.

  “Not right now,” he said. She pulled away from him after a second and then walked over to the living room. The fire they’d made earlier in the afternoon was low, just a few flames danced. Outside, a light snow tapped against the windows and their view of lower Manhattan was obscured by frost.

  She sat on the couch and curled her legs up beneath her. Something in her chest was thumping. She didn’t like the look on Jeffrey’s face or the careful way he was moving toward her.

  “There’s some news,” he said, sitting beside her.

  “Are they all right?” she asked, bracing herself. Her maternal grandparents, David and Eleanor Strong, were the only living family members to whom she had any connection. She thought of them, both hearty, young-minded, still traveling, enjoying their lives and each other. It seemed like they would always be there. But with both of them in their early seventies, she knew she’d have to deal with their mortality at some point. But she hadn’t done that yet. And she wasn’t ready.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said quickly. “Yeah, they’re both fine.”

  She felt a wash of relief. “Okay,” she said, releasing a breath she’d been holding.

  “Then what?” she said, sitting up, leaning into him as he sat beside her. He took her hand in his and cast his eyes down.

  “Your father …” he said, letting the sentence trail.

  The phrase sounded so strange. She never thought of herself as having a father. Most times she forgot he even existed.

  “What about him?” she asked, frowning.

  “He’s dead, Lydia,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Something shifted inside of her. “Dead?” she said, like it was a word that didn’t have any meaning to her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, releasing her hand and taking hold of her shoulder. She looked at his face, saw worry there, sadness for her.

  “How?” she asked after a moment where she searched herself for feeling and came up with nothing. She wanted to feel something, but there was only a cool numbness.

  “Your grandfather didn’t have the details.”

  She’d met her father only once, when she was fifteen years old, on the day after her mother’s funeral. It was a lifetime ago, and she found that she remembered everything about that time like a lucid dream. Some details were vivid but a strange fog seemed to hang over the events.

  She remembered the door ajar on the day she discovered her mother’s body, the blaring stereo that greeted her as she arrived home. But the terrible discovery of her mother’s body and the grim investigation that followed was a ju
mble of isolated events with no real timeline in her memory. She remembered the crowded funeral service and the hushed sobbing and the somber voice of the priest, the burial on a day that was too bright and sunny, too beautiful. She remembered identifying Jed McIntyre as the man who’d been following her and her mother for days. She remembered the single garnet earring missing from her mother’s jewelry box. And she remembered her father’s visit. The one and only time she’d seen him in the flesh.

  She had sat alone in the living room staring out the bay window at the woods behind her house. The leaves were turning, a riot of orange, red, and gold. The day was cool and sun washed, and she remembered wishing for rain. She wanted thunder and gale-force winds, hail and lightning.

  She’d heard the doorbell but paid no attention, sure it was another neighbor come to offer their condolences. She pulled herself into a tight ball and closed her eyes, dreading having to smile politely, having to say she would be all right. Then she heard her grandfather’s voice as he opened the door, then a soft murmuring, then silence. Her grandfather’s voice sounded angry, but she thought she must be mistaken. Then she saw him at the door, his face tight and ashen.