Strong 03 - Twice (20 page)

Lydia smiled politely, not exactly interested in a history lesson. The woman must have read it on her face. “I know it seems like I’m starting a long way back, but I think it’s relevant to what you want to know,” she said.

“Please, go on,” said Lydia. “It’s fascinating.”

“By the beginning of the early 1800s the Rosses were by far the wealthiest farming family in the North. They also owned the largest number of slaves. In fact, before slavery was abolished in 1865, New York had the largest number of slaves of any northern state.”

She paused here and took another sip of her tea, looking at Lydia over the rim of the mug, gauging her reaction.

“The Rosses were notoriously brutal to their slave workers. In particular, Hiram Ross, Eleanor Ross’s great-great-great-grandfather, was rumored to have beaten and even murdered his slaves. Beatings, of course, were not unusual. But actual murder was rarer than you might think because slaves were extremely valuable. A strong young male could be worth as much as twenty-five hundred dollars, which in that day was an extremely large sum of money, as odious as it is to talk about human life in such a way.”

Lydia nodded her agreement and understanding. She felt cold suddenly and had the sense that the history lesson was about to get ugly.

“Anyway, Hiram Ross was hated and feared by just about everyone who knew him … his slaves, his fellow farmers, even his family. He was a thief, a liar, and, if rumor was to be believed, a rapist and murderer. He was believed to have fathered a great many children by his female slave workers; children who grew up to be his slaves, as well.”

Marilyn was by this time leaning forward on her chair toward Lydia, her face animated by the story she was telling. Lydia’s interest was piqued, as well.

“Now, Elizabeth Ross, Hiram’s wife, was not exactly a saint herself. In fact, she herself was carrying on an affair with one of the slave workers, a man named Austin Steward. They were both young, no older than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and they were supposedly truly in love. Hiram was no fool and he learned soon enough about the affair. The story goes that one night, while he was supposed to be
away selling the season’s crops, he came home early to find the two in the throes of passion on the parlor floor.”

Lydia could imagine the two lovers entwined on the floor of a grand parlor, the light from a full moon bathing their naked bodies. She could see a man enter and stand at the doorjamb, watching, his face contorted in anger, rage flowing through his veins.

“Hiram was obviously enraged,” Marilyn went on. “And Elizabeth, whether out of terror or cowardice or both, claimed that Austin Steward had raped her.”

Lydia could see the young woman, moving away from her lover, maybe gathering her clothes around her, hiding her naked body from the gaze of the two men … her lover and her husband, the circumstances having made them both hostile strangers to her.

“Austin was also married, to a young Haitian slave named Annabelle Taylor. Of course, that was her slave name. There are no records of her true Haitian name that I’ve been able to find. Hiram took Austin and Elizabeth out to the shack where Austin and Annabelle lived with their five children. He pulled those children out of their beds and asked Elizabeth again if she was having a willing affair with Austin or whether he had raped her. He promised to kill a child each time she lied. She lied five times. And Hiram killed all five children with a shot to the head while Annabelle and Austin looked on, restrained by Hiram’s slave drivers. Naturally, Austin was arrested and hanged. And Elizabeth, it’s said, went quite insane. She died of the flu the next winter.”

Marilyn had told the tale as though it were a ghost story, something that was heinous and terrifying but not real. And she spoke with a kind of alacrity that Lydia found a tad inappropriate. Lore was like that; the years drained the horror from it, leaving just an echo over time. But in Marilyn’s telling, Lydia had been transported and was left with a cavity of sadness in her chest at the cruelty and harshness of the story. She could imagine vividly the scene that night, see
the bloated full moon, hear Annabelle screaming for the lives of her children, hear Elizabeth lying again and again as the children were slain, see their small bodies fall lifeless to the ground, smell the gunpowder in the air as the shots rang out. It was one of the worst stories she’d ever heard. And she’d heard some bad ones.

“That’s an interesting piece of folklore, Marilyn. But I’m not sure what it has to do with—”

“There’s more. Annabelle lived to be a very old woman. It’s said that the only thing that kept her alive was her hatred for the Ross family. Some people believed that in Haiti Annabelle had been a voodoo priestess. And on the night her children died, she created a curse against the Ross bloodline. A curse that could only be kept alive by herself and her daughters, and her daughters’ daughters—a kind of legacy of hatred.”

“And what was the curse?” asked Lydia.

“That none of the women descended from Hiram would know a natural love. That if they fell in love and married, a horrible fate would befall their husbands.”

“What about the children? Hiram killed her children. Wouldn’t she want revenge for that?”

“No, supposedly she would not wish harm to children, no matter what the crimes of their ancestors.”

“So I take it Annabelle’s bloodline is still alive and well.”

“And residing in Haunted. Annabelle remarried and had more children some years after the tragedy. She was just nineteen when her children by Austin were murdered.”

“Really,” said Lydia, less a question than an exclamation. “And how did you come by all of this information?”

“In addition to being the librarian, I’m also the town historian,” she said with pride. “And Annabelle’s descendant is the woman I mentioned whose trust funds this library. It’s Maura Hodge. A descendant of Thomas Hodge, Benjamin Hodge, married a descendant
of Annabelle Taylor, Marjorie Meyers … a very controversial marriage in its day, since Marjorie had Haitian blood in her veins. Maura was their only child. Her ancestors settled
and
worked as slaves on this soil. She knows everything there is to know about the history of this town, the Ross family, and especially the curse.”

“So when Eleanor’s husband, Jack Proctor, was murdered, people believed that it had to do with the curse?”

Marilyn lowered her eyes for a second, then raised them to meet Lydia’s gaze.

“I suppose it seems silly to someone who’s … not from here.”

“No one other than Eleanor was ever suspected? No rumors?”

Marilyn looked thoughtful, but shook her head. “In a place like this where so little goes on and so little ever changes, the past just seems closer. Superstitions, ghost stories, they seem more real, I guess. When Eleanor was acquitted and no one else was ever charged, it almost seemed like proof that the curse was alive and well.”

Lydia looked at Marilyn and she seemed suddenly strange and innocent. Haunted was only a couple of hours from New York City, but it might as well have been on the moon, it was so removed.

“Anyway, like I said,” Marilyn went on, “Maura knows a lot more about the curse and the Ross family than I do. But I’ll warn you that she’s not overly friendly. And she’s suspicious of outsiders. Since her ancestors settled this town, she kind of thinks of it as hers. There’s not much left to it, but she’ll protect it with her life.”

Lydia thought of the roads riven with potholes and the crumbling neglected Main Street. She thought of a land wrested from the Native Americans and tilled by slaves who worked and bled and died on it. She thought of Annabelle Taylor and the souls of her dead children. She thought maybe there was never a more fitting name for a town.

“There’s a lot of blood in the ground,” said Lydia, half thinking aloud.

“Indeed there is.”

•  •  •

“
F
rankly, Detective, I don’t see what my mess, from nearly forty years ago, has to do with your present situation.” Police Chief Henry Clay was a fat, sour man with a big belly and a face that was as wrinkled and dirty as an old potato. He was bald except for a few determined silver strands that were currently being blown every which way by the heat coming from the vent above his head. His hands were thick and pink, reminding Jeffrey of nothing so much as wads of Silly Putty.

“Well, sir,” said Ford, trying his level best to use honey instead of vinegar, “it might have nothing to do with it; it might have everything to do with it. But we would sure be interested in your thoughts on the ’65 case.”

The old man made a noise that was somewhere between a grunt and a belch as he pushed himself up from the chair behind his desk. He walked past them and opened the wood and opaque glass door that bore his name and said to his secretary, who was seated outside his office, “Can you go down to the archives, Miss Jean, and see if you can’t find the Ross file?”

There was a moment of silence, and the woman, who was at least as old as the police chief, sounded incredulous as she repeated, “The Ross file, Henry? Eleanor Ross?”

“Well, goddammit, woman, you heard me,” he answered, and closed the door.

“The case was never solved, is that right, Chief Clay?” asked Jeff.

“That’s right,” he said with a sigh as he sat back in his chair, which groaned in protest of his tremendous girth.

“Who were the other suspects?” asked Ford.

“Well, there were no other suspects, officially. No one we could ever charge.”

“But you had someone in mind,” led Ford.

“There had always been bad blood between Eleanor Ross and
another longtime resident, a crazy old woman named Maura Hodge. It was something ancestral, some kind of family feud that went way back to when their people settled this town. But that was just a lot of gossip. Maura’s always been an angry woman, very bitter. And she had a well-known hatred for Eleanor. Jealousy, I always thought. You know how women are.”

Jeff said a silent thank-you that Lydia was not with them. She really had a distaste for misogyny and could not be counted on to hold her temper when faced with men like Henry Clay.

“Oh, yeah.” Ford laughed in a complicit man-to-man kind of way.

“She’s still alive?” asked Jeff.

“Yeah, that old bitch is too mean to ever die,” he said with a laugh that ended in a rasping cough. “She lives just up the road a piece in a big old house. Gorgeous old mansion from her husband’s estate. Heard it’s gone to disrepair over the years, though. She doesn’t keep it up the way she used to. Doesn’t let anyone on her property to help her. Like the Ross estate. Now, there’s a piece of property that’s gone to shit.”

“The house where Eleanor’s husband was murdered?”

“The same. The Rosses still own it, but it’s sat empty some fifteen years. They still pay taxes on it, though, so it stands as they left it. Furnished and everything. We have lots of trouble with kids up there, breaking in. They claim it’s haunted, course.”

The chief was loose and talking now, so Ford kept pumping. “Anyone else you thought at the time might be a suspect?”

The old man leaned back even farther in his chair and lifted his arms, folding his hands behind his head. He looked above them with his small blue eyes and squinted as if he were looking off into the past.

“Well, Eleanor’s brother was always trouble when they were growing up. Something wrong with him … you know, in the head. He was never right. There were always rumors about him and Eleanor.
That their relationship was …” He stopped before finishing his thought and looked at them. He seemed angry suddenly, as if they had tricked him into talking about things he hadn’t wanted to discuss. “But that’s all ancient history.”

“Where’s Eleanor’s brother now?

“Paul? He disappeared more than thirty years ago. Most people think he’s dead,” he said, looking at his watch. Just then there was a knock at the door and Miss Jean pushed in before waiting for an answer.

“Sir, I just can’t find those files for the life of me,” she said, looking at them apologetically. Ford didn’t believe her for a second. “I’ll keep looking, though, and let you know if they turn up.”

“All right, then, Miss Jean,” the chief said with a nod. “Well, gentlemen, if you leave your card, I’ll give you a call if those files turn up.”

Ford handed him a card and the chief regarded it suspiciously before stuffing it in his breast pocket and standing. “If there’s nothing else …”

“Actually, Chief Clay, I’m just curious,” said Ford, leaning in and lowering his voice to a low, just-between-us-cops tone. “Do you think that Eleanor Ross killed her husband? Did she get away with murder?”

He looked at Ford and an ugly smile split his face. “Tell you what. You were thinking of marrying one of those Ross women? I’d tell you to think again.”

W
ord was that he wasn’t welcome in the tunnels any longer. But that was just too damn bad. Word was that Rain, the omniscient, omnipresent Rain whom the bottom-feeders had deified into their lord and savior, was angry over Violet’s murder and was planning to make him pay. Jed couldn’t give a shit less. He didn’t fear the wrath of Rain the way Horatio the Dwarf seemed to when he’d found Jed and delivered the news.

“You better leave, and leave soon,” he’d said, shifting nervously from foot to foot and wringing his hands. Jed handed him a black-and-white cookie for his warning. Horatio was funny that way. He didn’t care about money or drugs; he didn’t even drink. But he had a sweet tooth and kept Jed in the loop for fresh cookies and pastries from some of the fine food purveyors in the city. Horatio didn’t like packaged foods; only freshly baked would do.

“I’m not going anywhere, Horatio,” he’d said, patting the little man on the head.

“That’s what you said before. Where would you be now if you hadn’t listened?” he asked, his mouth full of cookie.

It was true. When Horatio had pounded on his door yesterday to warn Jed about the approach of intruders, he’d had only twenty minutes to pack his belongings and disappear deeper into the tunnels. He’d loaded Horatio up like a pack mule and sent him off while he waited in the darkness. When Jeffrey Mark and Dax Chicago burst into his hovel, he quickly and easily killed their guide, so they
would have no choice but to turn around and go back. He’d thought about going after them, too, when they were trapped with no exit in his space. But Dax Chicago stood at the door, never turning his back. And he had the biggest handgun Jed had ever seen. That one couldn’t be trusted to go down easily; he was crazy. Not to mention incredibly strong. So Jed slung Violet’s body over his shoulder—she was surprisingly heavy for such a short woman—and disappeared. He dumped her where she would be found. He wanted the twisted corpse to be a warning to those who might think about trying to lead anyone to him again.