“And where was this apartment?”
“The Pontalba, on St. Peter Street, next to Jackson Square. Apartment nine. The woman remained until the next morning, when she reappeared, wearing different clothing, looking quite refreshed, and went for coffee and beignets at the Café du Monde. Where she sat for two hours, reading an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. The Great Gatsby.”
“So she was out of her apartment for two hours?”
“Yes.”
“During which time your...person...had apartment number nine at the Pontalba searched.”
“Yes. It is the natural course of such things.”
“And what was found?”
Her confusion returned here, and she was quiet for a while. They waited. From the street came the sound of a jazz quartet, and the crowds were building up as the evening came on. The courtyard was full of customers and the chatter and clatter of the place was growing louder.
“Several items that indicated that the person living in the apartment was named Selena D’Arcy, and that her family had lived in this apartment since the early 1900s. The original names on the lease—dated the seventh of November, 1903—were Beatrice and William D’Arcy.”
D’Arcy, thought Jack, remembering their talk with Gerald Walker in his hospital room. The name that Diana Bowman had been looking for.
D’Arcy, not Dorsey.
D’Arcy.
And the locket’s inscription.
To Bea from Will Xmas 1909.
But Annabelle was still talking.
“According to the records—at least the records as they were last week...”
Here she paused, gave a strange look, as if to say, Remember that point.
“The—the apartment has been vacant since September 8, 1914. Rent all paid up, decade after decade, but unoccupied.”
“But that’s wrong, isn’t it?” said Jack. “The records were wrong? Had to be.”
She shook her head.
“It’s much more complicated than that. Let me tell you in my own way. No interruptions, okay?”
“Okay.”
“So, the apartment itself looked as if it had remained untouched since 1914. It was neat and well maintained, very clean and well-ordered, but there was nothing in it that looked newer than the early 1900s. And the clothes in the closets were all decades out of date. The person searching the apartment was...unsettled...by the way it looked. The person described it as a well-preserved tomb, a kind of mausoleum. The person also observed that all of the mirrors in the apartment had been covered with linen cloth.”
Clete heard that.
“That’s a Creole superstition, isn’t it?”
She nodded.
“Yes. They believe that the spirits of the dying will confuse the mirror for the gates of eternity, and so will pass into the mirror instead of going through to eternity.”
“And their souls will remain trapped in the mirror?” said Jack, who had heard of this superstition years ago.
“Yes. That is their belief.”
“Okay. Got all this,” said Clete. “But something’s bothering you, Annabelle. I can see it in your eyes. What is it?”
She looked down at the file, but not because she was reading it. She was looking for time.
After a while, she looked up.
“Well, yes, there is something very strange here. Will you listen, and try not to say anything?”
“I’ll try,” said Clete.
“Try harder,” she said, softening it with a hand on his wrist. “Well, in this place, apartment nine of the Pontalba, according to the police reports, something very bad happened on the afternoon of September 7, 1914. The people down in Jackson Square hear screaming, and the sound of breaking glass, and then the kind of silence that comes after something terrible has been finished. So the neighbors arrive, they knock at the door, and there is no answer. So they break it down.”
Silence, finally, from Jack and Clete, and Annabelle paused, took some coffee. The jazz band had moved off down Royal Street, and the evening had gradually become night.
“In the parlor, two dead people, Beatrice and William, both stabbed many times, stabbed with a big knife, and by someone very strong. Beatrice is on the divan, very much mutilated, torn as if by wolves, and the husband, William, it looks as if he died first, in the hall, and they think maybe he was the one to open the apartment door, because the first wound is in his belly, as might happen if you were to open the door—you stand there, one hand on the doorknob, you are exposed, open, and so the knife goes in. And he is down, in the hall, and the killer slices him up, the throat, the belly...the eyes are gone, so the report says, stabbed out, gouged, and then the killer goes for Beatrice, catches her on the divan, and so she dies too.”
Jack and Clete said nothing, but Jack thought, This woman feels this, as if she had been there to watch. Pandora had that gift too.
A sigh, and then...
“So there is also a little girl, a five-year-old, we are told, since there is a birthday cake on the parlor table, with five candles, all blown out, and three slices taken from it, and the plates with silver forks set down. The little girl is in the second bedroom, a lovely room, all white—or at least it was—with windows that open onto Jackson Square. And she has been killed also, stabbed many times, in her bed, twisted into the sheets. You can see this? I do not have to go on?”
She was speaking in a whisper now, living it. Jack and Clete waited. She shook herself, lifted her head, came back into the present.
“So we have the three dead—Beatrice, William and the little girl. The little girl, according to her birth certificate, is Selena D’Arcy. She died on the seventh day of September in 1914. It was her fifth birthday.”
A long silence.
Finally, Jack had to ask.
“Did they catch the killer?”
Annabelle looked at her file.
“The D’Arcys also had a ward, apparently a relative of Will D’Arcy’s. Her name was Philomena. Last name not recorded. Her age is uncertain, because the record is confused. I will return to that in a moment.”
She sighed, went inward, took some coffee, organizing her thoughts.
Neither man interrupted her.
“Well, Philomena, last name unknown, age unknown, was confined for a time to a mental hospital. She was violent, and dangerous, and was taken away by the authorities after she had begun to set fires, and they think she also killed some animals, cats and stray dogs. Birds when she could trap them. The authorities had to do something, since the D’Arcys could not control her. She was committed to East Louisiana State Hospital, in the town of Jackson, in East Feliciana Parish. On the third of September of that year she escaped by hiding herself inside an ice delivery wagon. She was believed to have made her way to New Orleans, and it was also believed that she broke into apartment nine of the Pontalba on September 7, and it is believed that she killed every person in it, Beatrice and William and Selena, who was five at the time. As I have said.”
She sighed, picked up her cup and took a sip.
“What did they do with the ward? Philomena?”
“What did they do? They did nothing.”
“Why?”
“She was never caught. She was never seen again.”
“So who is living in apartment nine right now?”
Annabelle shrugged, a very French gesture, but it was also very much a Pandora Jansson expression.
“According to the records, at least as they were last week, no one is in the apartment. I am coming to that. I have a theory. But you’re not going to like it.”
She took some more coffee, lit another cigarette.
“Well, as I have said, apartment nine at the Pontalba has been under the control of the D’Arcy family for many years. So the records tell me. But there is something very wrong with the reco
rds. For several years after the killings of September 7, 1914, the apartment was listed as sealed and unoccupied. Yet the rent continues to be paid, not regularly, but consistently over the years, by drafts from various banks, handled by one law firm after another. And this goes on for a very long time, decades, from after the Great War, through the Depression, through the Second World War. So mysterious, yes, but not unheard of, especially for New Orleans.”
“So what is it that caught your eye?” asked Jack, caught up in the story and her voice as she told it. She smiled at him, a secret element in it meant only for him. Or so he hoped. She looked down at her notes, and then sighed again, a cop confronting something not easily explained, and harder still to convey.
“Well, now we come to it. I searched the records very thoroughly—Cletus’s friend was paying a great deal of money—and I came across something I can’t explain. Understand that I went through these records over a period of several days. I had to return to the Parish Registry because you cannot take the books out of the building. Last week, the record was quite clear. Apartment nine had been vacant from September 8, 1914, to October 2, 1943. You understand me?”
They did.
“So yesterday I go back to confirm, and the records have changed.”
“They’ve been changed, you mean?” said Clete. She shook her head.
“No. That’s impossible. The record pages are in bound books, a series of huge ledgers, kept over many years, very old, the pages are yellowed with age, brittle, the script of many clerks, all writing in ancient green ink, all written by hand. Different hands. It would be impossible to alter them without it being detected.”
“But...?”
“But the registries have changed. Physically changed! This is impossible. But it is also true. Now the records in the Parish Registry show that apartment nine of the Pontalba has been occupied continually from October 2, 1943, to the present day. This is impossible. But it is also true. The records have changed. They changed—as far as I can see—perhaps two days ago.”
“Apartment nine is occupied. By whom?”
She shrugged, letting her frustration show.
“By a woman named Selena D’Arcy. According to her birth certificate, she was born in Plaquemine Parish on the seventh of September in 1909.”
“So she’d be...forty-eight now?”
“Yes.”
“But Selena D’Arcy was killed? Stabbed to death. At the age of five, on September 7 in 1914.”
She smiled, closed the file folder, pushed it across to Clete, patted it with her hand.
“That was then, my friend. This is now.”
* * *
They gathered to go, since there was nothing left to say. Clete went to pay the bill, and Annabelle caught Jack’s arm, a gentle touch, and she leaned in close to him.
“You are at the Monteleone.”
Not a question.
“Yes.”
“Your room?”
“Room 319.”
“Tonight, I will come to you.”
“Yes, please.”
“Do you know why?”
“I think so.”
“Good,” she said and kissed his cheek, and then she turned and walked away down Royal. She didn’t look back, but then she didn’t have to.
the death and life and death of mary alice
How to break the Reddings, how to distract them, destroy them if possible, this was Selena’s goal. She felt the solution might lie in an oblique approach. If they had other and more pressing concerns, such as a war with the Vizzini Family, she might slip between their minds. But she needed a key, and she knew of only one.
Clete Redding’s wife, Mary Alice.
She remembered that in the original time stream, Mary Alice had died in a single-car crash. An accident, as far as she remembered—Tessio had denied any involvement in it, saying that the Vizzinis did not make war on wives and children—but the accident did have fatal consequences for the Vizzini family.
But that was only because the Vizzini family had been taken by surprise, so many vital men killed before they could react.
She could do something about that.
She could warn Tessio this time, and if she did, she was certain that Clete Redding would end up dead shortly afterward. Which would solve her problem with the Redding family once and for all.
But in this time stream, that decisive crash hadn’t happened yet. Could she leave it to chance, wait and see if her arrival back here wouldn’t have a cascade effect on the time stream, that Mary Alice would still die in a single car crash on Friday, the thirtieth of August?
No. She could not. She had no choice. She had to make certain of it. She had to arrange it herself. And, to be safe, it had to happen at the same spot where, sixty years later, Jack Redding’s wife and child would die, in a head-on crash with a Mercedes-Benz driven by Anson Freitag.
Because Selena was what she was, and not what she thought she was, it never occurred to her that the only reason Mary Alice was going to die at the same spot where Jack’s family would die sixty years later was because Selena, at this precise moment in 1957, decided to make that happen.
This turned out to be a bad decision.
* * *
She called down to the front desk of the Alcazar, and a few minutes later the bellman brought up a copy of the telephone directory for St. Augustine, Florida.
She still remembered the address of the beach house Redding lived in—it hadn’t been lost in her flight down the Long Hall—it was 32 Avenue A in Crescent Beach. She leafed through to the listings for Redding...and found four, but none of them had the first name listed as Cletus, or even began with a C, and not one of them showed an address of 32 Avenue A in Crescent Beach.
She sat down on the couch, wrapped up in her silk robe, sipped a glass of Chianti and thought about it. Redding was a police officer. It would stand to reason that he wouldn’t want his home phone and address listed in the phone directory for any vengeful criminal to look up.
So what would he do?
Put it in his wife’s name?
She sat back, closed her eyes, thought about that obituary she had read when she first realized that Clete Redding was Jack Redding’s grandfather. She had looked it up on Will Coleman’s computer. She remembered that his wife’s first name was Mary Alice, because it had been mentioned in the obituary. But was her maiden name listed?
They usually were, weren’t they? She was sure it had been...but she couldn’t bring it back. This fragmented memory stream was a side effect of the Shimmer, and it was maddening. Would she have to go through every page of the St. Augustine Telephone Directory looking for 32 Avenue A, Crescent Beach? Over seven thousand listings, at a rough guess?
And then hope that—if he had used his wife’s maiden name—she would recognize it when she saw it? Is that what she would have to do?
Yes, she would have to do that.
So she did.
Kearney, M. 32 Ave A, Crescent Beach
JA9-6630
She looked at the number for a while, thinking about how to handle the call and what to say. After a while she dialed it, waited, waited...let it ring...and she was about to hang up when the call was picked up.
“Hello?”
A woman’s voice, a Spanish accent.
“Hello, may I speak to Mary Alice Kearney, please?”
“Sorry she not here. I take a message?”
“Oh...do you expect her back soon?”
“No. She gone to see her cousin family in Rattlesnake Island. Not come back for a while.”
“Oh dear... I was hoping to reach her.”
“Is an emergency? Something happen to Mister Cletus?”
Selena got the idea that she was talking to a maid. And that Clete Redding wasn’t home either.
“No, no. He
’s fine. I’m calling from Personnel, actually. We’re trying to update Detective Redding’s life insurance policy and we needed to—”
“You working very late.”
“Yes, yes...records have to be accurate. Time isn’t waiting. Thing is, we need to have Mrs. Redding’s permission to amend the policy to include enhanced health benefits—”
“Okay, she will send a letter, okay?”
“Well, thing is, my filings all have to be in by noon tomorrow? It’s our Year End, and all I really need is her verbal permission. Would you know the phone number? Where she is now?”
“Yes...momentito, por favor...she leave on a note here...a dónde, madre mia, a dónde...”
Selena waited, listening to the sound of the woman’s breath in the mouthpiece, and papers being shuffled, and then she came back.
“Yes, here, Mister and Mrs. Frank Forrest, numero—the number—is Jacksonville 9-7522.”
“Oh, lovely, thank you so much.”
* * *
“Hello?”
“Yes, hello...am I speaking to Mrs. Forrest?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“I’m sorry to call so late. My name is Alice Stein. I’m calling from the United States Postal Distribution Center in Jacksonville, and we have a registered letter for a Mr. Frank Forrest, but we’re showing an address in Flagler Beach, and that address doesn’t show a Mister Frank Forrest resident there. Do we have the right address?”
“What is the letter?”
Selena took a moment, shuffled some newspaper pages, came back.
“It looks like it’s from the IRS.”
“Oh dear.”
“So we have the wrong address?”
“Oh, I think so. Yes. You do. We’re at 77 Florala Parkway, on Rattlesnake Island.”
“My, that’s an exotic name. Where is that?”
“We’re right on the coast, just south of Matanzas Inlet.”
“Oh my. Sounds lovely, Mrs. Forrest.”
“It is, it’s very pretty here. Can you tell me what the letter is about, perhaps?”
“Sorry I can’t. But, since you ask, and don’t tell anyone I said this, we are seeing a lot of them, and they all look to be some sort of survey.”
The Shimmer Page 19
