by Janet Fox
I pulled inside as another stab of lightning illuminated the lawns. And my breath caught. There. There!
The rain blinded me. I rubbed my face, but it streamed over my eyes and I still couldn’t see. But I had to; I had to be sure.
I jumped from the chair and ran back to the bedroom and pressed against the window glass, felt the thunder shake the house, tried to see through the rain. I was so sure I’d seen him, there at the edge of the trees….
Another flash, and, yes! Teddy.
My Teddy. Teddy, so solid, standing there staring up at the house, in that same old beat-up jacket he wore back from France, I knew it was him, looking for me, and I wanted to cry out and warn him but also gather him, bring him back, bring him back firmly and forever from the dead, I missed him so much. Teddy was also wearing that look of astonishment and determination that I so loved because I knew it was meant for me.
I ran between the two windows trying to see, but without the benefit of the lightning it was dark as pitch. Another flash—but he was gone now, and I almost broke down in tears, so helpless as I was. Was he a phantom, or really here?
I sank down onto the floor with my back against the bed. Maybe I could wait out the rain that now poured in through the open bathroom window. Maybe…
Another great streak and almost simultaneous clap of thunder, and I heard buzzing and arcing, as if the house had been struck. I leaped up again and then I saw it, the electric pole by the drive, by the side of the garage, burning like a torch from the lightning strike. It flamed to the sky, brilliant. I turned on one of the lamps: nothing. No electricity.
I ran to the bathroom window and pulled myself up again. Even if I broke my neck, I had to try. The electric pole burned bright, bright enough for me to see the cornice, the bricks, bright enough for me to see…
Teddy.
I saw a figure, a shadow on the cornice onto the balcony of the room next to mine. Joy filled me, mixed with fear over the flames now shooting skyward as the creosote-covered pole torched.
I pulled on shoes and ran to the door of my room. Shouts came from the hallway. From behind me the red firelight of the burning pole created a rosy pall, and the shadows leaped against the walls of my room, dancing. I heard the chair in the hall scrape as Neil pushed up, heard his footsteps in the hall, heard him curse about not being able to see, heard him yell down, “Get me a torch! I’m blind up here!”
I tried the door to my room. It was not locked.
Ah, Teddy. He’d come in and unlocked my door.
I opened the door, and as I did the door caught Neil’s chair and knocked it over so that it hit the wood floor with crack, then I heard Neil’s surprised shout and awkward flail as his feet tripped and danced and then I heard him tumble down, down, falling over and over down the broad steps to the second-story landing.
And a shadow, a man’s shadow, followed Neil down the stairs, running all the way down.
Teddy. Had Neil stumbled, or had Teddy pushed him?
My heart pounded. There were shouts from downstairs now, but they didn’t make sense, coming first from one side of the mansion and then the other, and no one seemed aware of what had just happened to Neil. From far below I heard the crash of some great glass and wood thing falling.
Then I heard a gunshot, short and sharp and heard Louie scream once, clipped, which gave me the courage I needed. Louie, Charlie. I needed to get to them. What was happening to them?
I crept out into the hall and clung to the railing. It wasn’t until the next flash of lightning that I saw what had happened to Neil, how he lay crumpled, distorted, on the landing, his head thrown back at an unnatural angle that made me shiver all over.
I slipped down the stairs, gripping the banister. When I reached the landing, I hesitated. What if Neil wasn’t dead? But the next flash of lightning told me there was no question. His eyes were open, staring, vacant; his mouth, the blood…I swallowed bile and slid past him, careful not to touch his twisted body.
The shouting had stopped, and I paused halfway down the next flight of stairs. The storm raged as if it had stalled right over the house, thunder and lightning crashing and bursting; through windows that faced the front of the house the red light from the burning pole cast an odd glow.
Teddy was there in the dark somewhere. He’d come to rescue me; he was trying to find me. I could feel him.
I reached the main floor and went to one of the two tall windows that flanked the front entry. The pole still burned, and the fire had spread to the garage now, the garage being made not of brick but of wood, and it must have been dry wood at that, from the way the fire flared through the roof. Wires lay arcing and spitting on the ground across the drive. The cupids in the fountain at the center of the court, made lifeless by the lack of electricity, reached skyward with grinning, mocking mouths, streaked by the rain that seemed unable to quench the fire. It was unnatural. It made my skin burn, my scar tingle. I wanted out of the house, away from the fire.
I had to find Charlie and Lou.
My eyes had begun to adjust to the dark. With each flash of lightning, I had to pause now, as if someone had flashed a bulb at me, and I saw stars for a few seconds until my eyes adjusted again to the blackness. I slipped from one room to another on the main floor, pausing at each doorway. The servants had gone for the night. As far as I knew it was only Danny, Ryan, Charlie, Lou, and me in the house. Now that Neil was gone.
And Teddy now, Teddy was here, too. Somewhere, looking for me.
I moved along the wing that splayed toward the Sound and opened a door; I’d reached Connor’s odd museum. Beyond it lay the small sunroom that led out across the lawn to the greenhouse. I slipped inside the museum and closed the door behind me.
I remembered the museum layout. The fossils were arranged first, bones and impressions and petrified pieces. The intact skeleton of the ape. Then came the jewelry and small artifacts, the books, then the antiquities. All in order of age from oldest to youngest except that one, the pride of Danny Connor’s collection, the one that made me so squeamish. The sarcophagus.
The sarcophagus lay at the very back of the room, just before the doors. Upon it, that jackal sat watch with its white all-seeing eyes.
Against the white walls, even in the darkness, the skeletons stood out in relief, all teeth and claws. Another flash of lightning bit the dark, and in that room with those white walls and the high clerestory windows I was blinded. I threw my hand over my eyes and stopped moving, my other hand on one of the display cases. Stars shimmered behind my eyelids for almost a minute before I could open my eyes again.
I left my hand on my forehead, shading my face, in case there came another blinding flash. Past the artifacts, past the necklace that Connor had wanted to copy for me, past the books. Into the antiquities: prehistoric, Egyptian, Greek, Roman. Then the last, the jackal guarding its brilliantly painted sarcophagus.
A coffin. That’s what it was, a coffin. An old, decorated coffin. According to Connor, still holding remains.
Someone had pushed on the lid. The lid was ajar, a two-inch-wide black crevasse open along the side closest to me.
My spine tingled with fear. I had no choice but to go around it, right around, in order to reach the doors on the other side. I slid to the wall, pressing my back right against the wall, feeling that those white jackal eyes—eyes that shone in the dark as if they were lit from within—followed me. I reached the door to the sunroom and put my hand on the knob. Which turned under my grip, from the other side, a complete surprise.
I scuttled back, my heartbeat quickening to a gallop, and dropped to my knees behind the plinth.
The door opened, and someone stepped into the museum from the sunroom, and I could tell at once, by the way he carried his broad shoulders, by his wolfish gait.
“Charlie!” My voice came out a harsh, whispered croak.
He turned to me as I reached him, and he clapped a hand over my mouth. Then he dragged me back through the door and into the sunroom an
d shut the door behind us. My heart pounded in my ears; I couldn’t breathe.
I struggled against him, fighting Charlie, as he wrapped one arm around my waist and kept his hand over my mouth while he dragged me across the sunroom, and fear and confusion and tears of pain and misery welled up.
And then he pressed his mouth to my ear.
“Sssh. It’s okay. No noise.”
When I relaxed, he lifted his hand from my mouth.
I whirled to face him. I was so mad I was ready to slug him—but instead, I reached both hands up to his face and kissed him hard on the lips before pulling away. And I knew. Because he reached for me and kissed me back, equally hard, drawing me against him and wrapping me in his strong arms, strong but gentle as his kiss softened and melted into mine, and then both of his hands lifted as we pulled apart and he cradled the back of my head and touched his forehead against mine, and I knew. I knew.
He mimed not to speak but to follow him. In the far corner of the sunroom, Louie sat huddled against the wall, her face, when the lightning revealed her, drawn and pale.
I crouched down with Charlie and Lou, and we put our heads together, Lou reaching for my hand and taking it in one of hers. She was trembling, badly.
“Danny?” I whispered. “Ryan?”
“I was fighting Ryan,” Charlie said. “We fell against that big bookcase, and it came over. I got out of the way in time, but Ryan didn’t. He may be dead. Sure looked it.”
“Neil is dead, too,” I said.
We all exchanged looks.
“Neil fell down the stairs,” I said. “But Danny?”
“Don’t know,” said Charlie. “But…” He looked at his sister. She lifted what I now saw was a folded sweater from her shoulder, and I saw the blood.
“He stabbed me,” she whispered. “And he has a gun.”
I sucked in breath, reaching for her.
“I’ll be okay,” she whispered, cracked.
But it was a lot of blood, soaking her shoulder, the sweater, a swelling dark stain. “We’ve got to get you out.”
“There’s someone else here, Jo,” Charlie said. “Someone came down the stairs and grabbed Danny just after he stabbed Lou. He moved so fast…I couldn’t see who it was. And Danny fired at him. I thought it was Neil, but that doesn’t make sense now. Who is here?”
Then we heard it. A noise from the other side of the door. From inside the museum. The crack of something, glass, or maybe porcelain, followed then by a clattering that went on and on. I imagined one of the skeletons, maybe the ape, in pieces, scattering across the marble floor. Instinctively, the three of us drew together, Charlie pulling me tight against him and turning so that he was protecting both Lou and me.
In all the pain, the tension, the worry, the fear, I felt his warm body against mine, his arm around me, and now I smelled his sweet musky scent, his aftershave, and I pressed into him, fitting into him like a key into a lock, pressing my cheek to his shoulder.
Another noise, a scraping, and then the door from the museum flew open and someone fell into the sunroom, tripped, then ran to the other side and flung open the door that led out into the lawns and the night. The wind howled through the room, throwing both doors from side to side, slamming them back and forth in a rage, cracking glass and wood. In the confusion I thought I saw someone else run through the room and out into the dark. Then I realized that the rain had stopped but the wind still shrieked and now scattered sparks from the fire in all directions. The burning garage met the house just outside this sunroom, and the entire garage was all at once in flames, the old wood popping and bursting into red tongues of fire. I grabbed Charlie’s arm and pulled him and pointed at the fire that was licking up the outside walls of the house.
Fire and flames. My heart pounded in my chest like it might explode.
Charlie turned and picked up Louie, lifting her like a child, as she stifled a cry. He made for the door with me right behind him just as the wood-frame windows of the sunroom exploded in flames.
I felt the heat on my back, my scar, and I held my hand tight over my mouth so I wouldn’t scream as I pushed through the broken glass, following Charlie and Lou out of the burning building and into the night.
CHAPTER 49
Lou
So you think I did it, don’t you? Well, get a load of this. Danny stabbed me. I didn’t stab him. All I could think then was that if I didn’t die from loss of blood, I’d die of a broken heart. That’s what I wanted, anyhow.
He stabbed me in the shoulder, the big jerk. He should’ve put the knife in a little lower. One pain to replace the other. End it all as it should end.
So there, Detective. Danny Connor was the love of my life. Just keep that in mind and have a little pity.
CHAPTER 50
JUNE 10, 1925
The high, thrilling song of the Sirens will transfix him,
Lolling there in their meadow, round them heaps of corpses
Rotting away, rags of skin shriveling on their bones…
—Homer, The Odyssey, Book 12, 50–52
Jo
I fell to my knees on the wet grass. Ahead of me Charlie stumbled, then knelt so that he could let Louie down. I heard her moan.
Behind us, the sunroom exploded into flame. I turned. The mansion was burning, flames licking the walls of the museum, striking high into the air with ash and sparks and smoke. It was only a matter of time now. Every treasure there would burn, and then the house, all of it. I felt the heat on my face: an all-consuming fire.
“It might collapse. We’ve got to get farther away,” I said to Charlie, trying to control my shaking voice.
He bent and picked up Louie. She cried out. “She’s bleeding pretty bad,” he said, short of breath as he struggled to lift her.
Down the slope the greenhouse loomed, its glass reflecting the light of the flames. The wind still whipped around us, fanning the flames and driving a fine cold mist, and neither wind nor mist could be good for Lou.
“Let’s get to the greenhouse,” I said.
“Greenhouse!” Charlie turned. “But Connor…”
“Yes. He could be there. But—” I couldn’t tell Charlie about Teddy; I couldn’t tell him what I felt. “It’s shelter. We’ve got to get her inside.”
We stumbled down the slope. As we reached the bottom we saw a flash—not of lightning this time, but of a gun, and the report just after, both coming from the dock that jetted out over the Sound.
Charlie and I stopped dead, but no noise came from nearby; from below, on the water, we thought we heard something…voices? They were drowned out by the explosive sounds coming from the mansion behind us, as the fire whipped from one end of the house into the middle, destroying everything in its deadly path. I turned. The whole lawn glowed ghastly pink. Flames rose into the sky as if whipped by the devil himself. As things inside combusted they created small explosions, like shots, and the cracking of glass and crashing of wood echoed through the dark.
I turned back to Charlie. “The greenhouse!” I said.
The door was locked. I saw that as a good sign; I didn’t think Danny Connor would be inside with the door locked. The door had small glass panes. I stuffed my fist deep into the sleeve of my shirt and hit the glass door once, twice before one of the glass panes broke. I reached inside the door and unlocked and opened it, then stepped inside; after listening for a few seconds, I beckoned Charlie in.
The center table was meant for propagating, and sections of it were bare. I swept my arm over the surface to clear a space large enough for Lou. Charlie laid her down. Even what I could see of her in the darkness that was illuminated only by the burning mansion was not comforting.
Louie was sheet white, and semiconscious, moaning softly. The sweater that now lay loose against her shoulder was saturated with blood.
“Charlie, someone has to go for help. Otherwise, she’ll bleed to death right here.”
“What about the phone?”
I shook my head. “Even if the
re were a phone out here, the power and phone lines were certainly strung together.”
“But I can’t leave you.”
We looked at each other. I lifted my hand and touched his cheek. “It doesn’t matter. The one who stays takes one risk. The one who goes takes another.”
He put his hand up and took mine and pulled it to his lips and kissed my palm. From my hand through all of my body I felt that kiss, running down my arm and into my gut, into my soul. I closed my eyes so that I could feel the damp press of Charlie’s lips on my palm. And then he pulled me toward him, a single fluid movement, so that his lips were now on my lips, and he pressed his body full against mine, soaking into me as the rain had soaked into the ground around us, the heat from his lips like the fire coursing through the house.
It lasted only a moment, then he pulled away.
“I’ll be back as quick as I can. Look.” He pulled a pistol from where he’d tucked it into his belt, placed it in my palm. “Found it on the floor next to Ryan.”
I looked at the gun, silver and menacing, then I nodded. Charlie touched Lou, and she turned and groaned, and then he was gone, closing the greenhouse door, and loping with that wolfish gait across the lawn, past the burning house that now lit up the sky, running toward the road.
I looked at Lou. She was unconscious now. Our only hope lay in the fire—that the flames brought help out to the mansion and that Charlie intersected that help on the road.
The greenhouse held its humid warmth tight, its musky earth smell close. Except for the glow from the fire, there was no light. I went to the greenhouse door, intending to lock it, but something stopped me.
Fear. Somewhere out in the dark Connor still lurked. Somewhere down by the dock. Teddy was there, too, I believed, but I couldn’t be sure which of them prevailed. I had to know. I had to know who would be left. And whether he would save us, or kill us.
