Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (175 page)

“I mean, what are you supposed to do? You can’t apply for a job, because you can’t use your real name,” Tatiana said. “The only way to eat is to steal something or go on the game.”

Lilly knew what she meant. The first time she had run away from home, at the ripe old age of twelve, she was gone for three weeks. The first few nights were great. She had a few dollars to party, met some cool kids. After that it was hell. She slept behind a grocery store on Wallace Avenue. She got up at 4
AM,
just before the delivery trucks would roll in. She got day-old bread and brown vegetables from the Dumpster, half-smoked cigarettes from the gutter. Who says life on the road ain’t glamorous?

Then one morning she woke up with a flashlight in her eyes. It was the cops.

She refused to tell them her name. She refused to say
any
thing. She spent four days in Juvie, and they had no choice but to let her go. The entire time, she didn’t say a single word. But they did fingerprint her and take a few pictures, so she knew that everything had changed there and then.

This time it was different.

She looked out the window. Because they had cruised for a while, she wasn’t quite sure where she was. It seemed like South Philly. She couldn’t be sure.

“My dad is
such
a fucking Cro,” Tatiana said. “I swear to God, if I stayed around, I would have caught him chewing on his toenails one day.”

Lilly assumed she meant “Cro-Magnon.” Who could tell with these people? She wasn’t from around these parts. She wasn’t insufferably hip.

Niles fired up another joint, passed it back. It was time to start asking questions. Pretty soon these people would be circling Saturn.

“Can I show you guys something?” Lilly asked.

They all looked at her; stoned, wondering, waiting, as if to say,
Why not?

Lilly reached into her bag, pulled out the photo. It was pretty wrinkled by now. It was kind of fuzzy to begin with. She smoothed it out on the seat. “Anybody ever been here?”

She passed the photo around. Everyone nodded at the sheer magnitude of the place. Nobody copped to knowing it.

“
Dude.
Who lives here?” Thom asked. “The Addams Family?”

Thom was from Akron, Ohio. He really was kind of cute—curly brown hair, long lashes, pug nose. He reminded her of Frodo, but without the big hairy feet. In another life she might have let him make a move on her.

“I don’t know,” Lilly said, thinking that it might have been the first thing she’d said in a long time that wasn’t a lie. “I really don’t know.”

F
OR THE REST OF THE MORNING
she hung out at the Greyhound Station at Tenth and Filbert. She bummed a cup of coffee from a pair of kids from Syracuse, smoked a little weed in an alley. She spent a half hour or so on the Net at a nearby cybercafe, until she was kicked out.

She asked a lot of questions, showed the picture to everyone. Some of the kids were suspicious, as if Lilly were a narc.

Through the course of the morning she talked to more than twenty street kids, swapping horror stories, triumphs, near misses, jail time, cops. Always the cops. If you were a runaway you knew all about cops.

One girl she met—a runaway from Buffalo, a girl who called herself Starlight—told her of an experience she’d had in New York City. Starlight was a force of nature, all hands and hips and flying red hair when she told a tale, a story about how she was almost gang-raped. Lilly hoped for the best for her, didn’t expect it. Starlight said she’d been on the street in Philly since last Christmas.

Lilly realized they all had a story of alienation or neglect or mistreatment, a fear of the future. To a person, they all had a saga of woe—abusive mothers, abusive fathers, abusive siblings, abusive life.

They had no idea how bad life could get.

“H
EY,” THE KID SAID
.

Lilly turned around but not too quickly. They were standing near the corner of Ninth and Filbert, outside the BigK.

The kid was a street rat. Lilly didn’t like the looks of him. Tall and skinny, dirty blond hair, greasy skin, red Tony Hawk T-shirt. Skate-board grunge had never been her thing. She ignored him, glanced at her watch. A few moments passed. He didn’t leave.

“I said
hey,
bitch.”

Here we go, Lilly thought. Fucking
boys.
She’d been here before, of course, stuck on a street corner, harassed by some punk. They all had a line they thought was magic, a smile they felt God-given. Then it turned ugly. But it was always on her turf, her hometown. This was an alien landscape.

She tensed, glanced over her shoulder. She was less than a block from the bus station. She could make it back inside in a few seconds. She was that fast. But there was a principle at work here. She wasn’t about to be run off the street by some low-rent spod. She turned to face him.

“I’m sorry, what did you call me?”

The kid smirked, took a step closer. Lilly now saw that he was not all that skinny after all. He was muscular. “I think you heard me, Snow White.”

He grabbed her arm. She tried to wrestle free. She couldn’t. He was strong.

“Let go of me!”

He laughed. “Or what?”

Lilly planted her left foot, shifted her weight. It was a familiar move. She tried to knee him but he turned, blocking it. He laughed again.

“Damn, girl. Why would you want to go and do something like that?” The kid grabbed her other wrist. “You don’t want to make me mad.”

“I said let
go
of me!”

Lilly tried to break free. She could not.

The kid glanced up the alley, smiled again. He was going to drag her up there. She couldn’t let him do that.

But before he could make a move a shadow fell across the sidewalk. They both turned. There was a man standing there. He seemed to appear out of nowhere. He was in his thirties, maybe, wearing a dark blue suit and a burgundy tie.

What was
this
about?

“I think you should leave,” the man said, soft-spoken, authoritative. Lilly’s head spun with this weird development. The board boy let go of her arms. She backed up a few steps, but she didn’t run.

“I’m sorry,” the kid said, turning fully to deal with the man. “Are you addressing me?”

“I am.”

The kid planted himself. He racked his shoulders. “What did you say? I mean, you know, exactly.”

“Exactly?” the man asked. “Would you like that verbatim? Or would you like me to distill the essence?”

The kid smirked, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of confidence behind it.

“What the
fuck
are you talking about?”

“I believe the young lady would like you to leave.”

The kid laughed. Psycho shrill. “And who are you, her
father
?”

The man smiled. Lilly felt a little charge run through her. It wasn’t that the guy was so good-looking or anything, but there was something about that smile that said she had nothing to worry about.

“Just a friend.”

“Well, I’m gonna fuck you up, friend-o. I’m gonna fuck you up big time. This is
my
corner.”

The man made a move, a quick shift of his right hand, almost too fast to see. To Lilly it was a like a bird had flown between them, flapped its wings, then flown away. Time stood still for a few seconds. Then, in the next instant, Lilly felt a rush of warm air.

She glanced first at the man. He was still standing there, hands at his sides, his blue eyes sparkling in the afternoon sun, his expression unreadable. She then looked at the kid, and saw something she never expected to see, something horrifying.

The kid’s face was on fire. But just for a second. Lilly instantly smelled singed flesh and burnt hair.

“What … what the
fuck,
man!” The kid recoiled, his hands to his face. He took five or six steps backward, out into the street. A car almost hit him. When he pulled his hands away Lilly could see that his face was bright pink.

“What the fuck did you do to me?” the kid yelled. “What did you
do
?”

“I asked you to leave,” the man said.

The kid pulled a bandanna from his back pocket, began to blot his face. His nose was runny, his eyes were tearing up. Lilly noticed that his eyelashes were gone.

“You are a dead man,” the kid yelled. “You are … you are
so
fucking dead.”

Lilly watched in stunned silence as the kid backed up, turned, ran the length of the block, then disappeared around the corner. She discovered that she hadn’t taken a breath in maybe a minute or so.

What the hell had just happened?

She knew the basics. She had been hanging on the corner. A board rat had approached her, threatened her,
grabbed
her. A man appeared out of nowhere and set the kid’s face on fire.

Somehow. Like magic.

She looked up Filbert Street, saw a police car trolling. It looked like they hadn’t seen what happened. She turned to ask the man his version of the events, to say thank you, but he had vanished.

| FORTY-TWO |

J
ESSICA GOT ON THE COMPUTER
. F
OR THE PAST TWO DAYS SHE’D BEEN
trying to block out an hour or so to run some things. If their killer was playing a sick game with the department, the city, then there was a chance that there were things they were not seeing, pieces of the puzzle that did not quite fit. Yet.

She made a list of names, references, places, possibilities, and impossibilities.

She knew that sometimes a search engine could make a connection you might never think of. Sometimes the result of a search was so far off it got you thinking in a new direction.

Forty minutes later she had answers. She knew Byrne was down in the cafeteria. Unable to wait for the elevator, she ran down the stairs.

B
YRNE WAS NURSING
a cold coffee, a wooden Danish, skimming the
Daily News.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Jessica said.

“Man, do I love it when conversations begin this way.”

Jessica pulled out a chair, sat down. “I ran everything I could think of through a few search engines, along with a couple of things I never thought would click.”

Byrne folded the paper. “Okay. What do we have?”

“Well, I think we know what game he was playing with the name Jeremiah Crosley. Nonetheless, I ran a search regarding the Book of Jeremiah. Interesting guy, but not one of the biggies. Josh was right. Jeremiah was no ray of sunshine. Nothing jumped.

“Next, our guy said he lived at 2917 Dodgson Street. As we know, there is no Dodgson Street in Philly, right?”

“Can’t argue with the folks at MapQuest.”

“I have issues with MapQuest. They always seem to lead me right into construction. But that’s for later. Anyway, I found a Dodgson Street in Lancashire, England, but I figured that would be one hell of a commute, even for a psycho. There are, however, a number of other references. The one that stuck out was a person’s name. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Ever heard of him?”

Byrne shook his head.

“That’s because he was much better known by another name: Lewis Carroll, author of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Turns out he was also a fanatical game and puzzle enthusiast. Plus, I discovered there’s something called the Alice in Wonderland syndrome, also known as micropsia, which causes a person to perceive large objects as being much smaller.”

“The big red, yellow, and blue boxes in that crawlspace, and the small colored squares in the Bible,” Byrne said.

“It might be a stretch, but yeah, it crossed my mind.” Jessica pulled up another chair, put her feet up on it. “Next I ran
ludo.
Guess what it means?”

“You’re going to make me guess everything, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I have no idea what it means.”

Jessica held up a color printout. It was a graphic of a game board: a large square marked with a cross. Each arm of the cross was divided into three columns; each column was divided into six smaller squares. The large squares were brightly colored. “Ludo.”

“It’s colored squares,” Byrne said. “Again.”

“Yeah, but there are four of them, not three.”

“Is it possible we missed something down there?”

“In that crawlspace? Not a thing,” Jessica said. “I also looked up the origin of
ludo,
as in, the origin of the word. Guess where it comes from?”

“Greek.”

“Latin,” Jessica said. “It gets its name from the word
ludus.
”

“Which means?”

Jessica put both hands out, palms up, in her best ta-da fashion. “It means
game.
”

Byrne turned to the window. He tapped his coffee stirrer on the rim of his cup. Jessica let him absorb the details.

“I think we can safely assume that the old woman was completely certifiable, yes?” he finally said.

“Yes.”

“And deeply involved in this somehow.”

“Up to her broken neck.”

Byrne turned back to the table. “Remember that puzzle I did? The one with the geometric shapes?”

“Tangram.”

“Right. She had that book about tangram and other games. The one with all the diagrams in it.”

“What about it?”

“I think we should find a copy of that book.”

“She said the author lived in Chester County.”

“Even better.”

B
YRNE CALLED
Chester County Books & Music. He got the store manager on the line, identified himself.

“What can I do for you?” the man asked.

“We’re trying to locate a local author.”

“Sure. What’s the name?”

“That I don’t know, but I believe he lives in Chester County. He wrote a book about games and puzzles, and in it were a lot of—”

“David Sinclair,” the man said, interrupting him. “He’s written a few books on the subject. He’s done some signings here.”

“Do you know how to get hold of him?”

“I’m sure I have his number somewhere.”

“Could you ask him to give us a call? As soon as possible if you can. It’s very important.”