Strong 03 - Twice (21 page)

Now Horatio was the only one who was aware of his new location. The sudden move had been inconvenient at the time, but in the end he found himself a much better spot, closer to an exit. Closer to Lydia. The map he’d begun was lost, but he’d committed it to memory, had started to draw it in a notebook that he carried with him.

Horatio, who was not very bright and resembled nothing so much as a shabbily dressed, down-on-his-luck Umpa Lumpa, was the closest thing Jed had had to a friend since he was in grade school. With scraggly long black hair, a long, wide face covered with patches of hair that should have been a beard but didn’t really seem to grow in right, and bright blue eyes, he seemed more like a creature from Grimm’s than he did a man. He wasn’t much, but he’d proven useful and loyal.

“You’re the only one who knows where I am, right?” said Jed, turning his gaze from his notebook to Horatio, who seemed to jump a bit.

“Of course,” he said eagerly.

“Then we don’t have anything to worry about. Do we?”

“Rain knows these tunnels better than anyone. If he wants to find you, he will,” Horatio said, his brows knit, the rest of the cookie forgotten in his hand.

“You’ll have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“How?”

“I have every confidence that you’ll find a way to lead them away from me.”

“I don’t know”

“Find a way, Horatio. You wouldn’t want Rain to know that you’ve betrayed him. Then it will be back up topside for you, doing little dances on the subway to make money.”

Horatio had made the mistake of telling Jed how frightened he was of the streets, how much abuse he’d taken as a homeless dwarf, how he’d almost been killed more than once. Rain had given him a home and community where he felt safe. Now Jed used the information to control him. The dwarf looked sadly at his cookie as if it were the reason for the predicament he found himself in and nodded.

“Good,” said Jed. “I have to keep a low profile for a few days. I’m going to need some help with a few things.”

T
he food was worse than the coffee at the Rusty Penny, where Ford, Lydia, and Jeffrey sat at a booth toward the back. New Yorkers never realized how spoiled they were when it came to eating out until they left the city. Even the worst greasy spoon in Manhattan usually had something to offer, a personality, a history, something. But the Rusty Penny was like a boil on the buttocks of Haunted, nothing you’d want to look at too closely and certainly producing nothing you’d put in your mouth.

Lydia picked at the sesame bun on her chewy and grizzled hamburger. Ford, however, hadn’t seemed to notice and was eating as if he hadn’t had a meal in a week. Jeffrey had pushed away his turkey club and ate potato chips from a small bag.

“I think it’s better if we’re not there when Ford interviews the twins,” said Jeffrey, taking a swig from a bottle of mineral water. “After all, we’re supposed to be on Eleanor’s team. It wouldn’t look good to show up with the cops, especially given her opinion of them.”

“Not that you should be showing up with me anyway. As far as I’m concerned, you guys don’t even exist,” said Ford, looking at his watch.

Lydia nodded. She had been curious to hear the interview, but she was more interested in meeting Maura Hodge.

“How are you guys going to get back?” asked Ford.

“Dax is on his way,” said Jeffrey. “He’s meeting us with the
Range Rover.” Dax had been tied up that morning with one of his other “clients.”

“What does that guy
do
exactly?” asked Ford. Then he held up a hand. “You know what? Don’t tell me.”

They were quiet for a second. Lydia couldn’t stop thinking about what Marilyn Wood had told her.

“What do you think about the librarian’s story?” she asked Ford.

“What,” said Ford, with a laugh. “You mean the
curse
.”

“You think it’s funny?” asked Lydia, leaning in to him.

“I wouldn’t say
funny
, exactly,” answered Ford with a smile, his amused skepticism wrinkling his eyes and turning up the corners of his mouth.

“It’s possible, isn’t it, that this Maura Hodge is making sure her ancestor’s curse is fulfilled … one way or another?”

“What do you mean … like she’s killing the husbands?”

“Or paying someone to do it. Or she has some kind of accomplice.”

Ford shrugged, looked up, and seemed to be considering the possibilities. “Seems a little far-fetched,” he said finally.

“What’s so far-fetched about it?”

“How old is this woman?”

“In her sixties, according to the librarian.”

“So that would make her in her late twenties around the time of Eleanor’s husband’s murder.”

“About that. What’s your point?”

“Nothing. Just that all these murders have been overkill. You know, rage killings. A killer for hire isn’t going to rip someone to pieces. And as for Maura Hodge, how much anger could she muster up for someone else’s two-hundred-year-old gripe?”

“Gripe? A woman watched her five children murdered before her eyes and then her husband was hanged. All because Elizabeth Ross didn’t have the courage to tell the truth. I’d say that’s a little more than a gripe.”

“Whatever you call it, it’s Annabelle’s gripe. Not Maura Hodge’s gripe. See what I’m saying? Whoever killed those men was filled with rage
right now
,” he said, tapping his finger hard on the table in time with his last two syllables. “Not a hundred and fifty-some years ago.”

She was there again on that night, inside Annabelle’s skin. She could feel the rage, the pain, the immense sadness that must have threatened to burst out of her chest, turn her mind toward insanity. She could imagine her powerless fury, hear her screams that must have sounded like an animal’s howl in the night, carrying all the panic and terror into the air. What if rage like that, pain like that, left an imprint on your DNA? What if over generations it became like a congenital disease that was passed down from one soul to the next? And what if, over time, that rage grew stronger instead of weaker? But these were things she wouldn’t say aloud to people like Ford McKirdy. He was so grounded, so flat to the earth; he would think she was insane. She couldn’t tell him that the buzz was louder than it had ever been. That she sensed an evil in this broken-down town and she couldn’t be sure whether it lived and breathed or whether it was just a part of the ground on which the town sat, that it had sunk into the water and poisoned the whole damned place.

She moved her hand to her belly. It was an unconscious gesture, but when she’d done it, felt the denim beneath her hand, she acknowledged a feeling that had been growing, fluttering in the periphery of her consciousness since she’d discovered she was pregnant. It was the sense that she was no longer alone in her skin. That everything she felt and thought, everything she ate, even the air that she breathed was being shared by another being. All of this, of course, she knew intellectually. Sitting there in the Rusty Penny, she experienced a palpable moment when the information reached her heart. And in that moment, she just felt so
real
.

She wasn’t sure why this feeling had come to her now. Maybe it was thinking of what people passed on to their children. How the baggage people carried was unloaded onto the most innocent among
them; how the generations of two families since that awful night long ago might have been impacted by hatred and revenge, one way or another. And maybe it made her think of her own baggage and how she was going to try like hell not to pass it along to their child. She looked up then and saw both Ford and Jeff looking at her.

“What?” she said. “I wasn’t listening.”

“What’s going on in there?” said Jeff, looking at her with a little worry and putting a hand on the back of her head.

“Nothing,” she said. She looked into his eyes and smiled.

“Well, curse or no curse, I gotta head back to the city,” Ford said, wiping the grease from his mouth. He threw ten dollars on the table. “No offense, Lydia. I can’t handle this hocus-pocus bullshit. I have to deal with the facts, find out who crawled up through that hole, if anyone, who let him in, which of them killed Richard Stratton. We’re not going to figure that out digging into some town legend.”

“And what about Eleanor’s mysterious missing brother? And the town recluse, Maura Hodge? What if the answer to your question is right here in Haunted?”

“Call me on my cell. But watch out for the Headless Horseman, will ya?”

“Very funny.”

“Seriously, keep me posted. I’ll call you when I’ve finished with Eleanor and the twins.”

“Ford, what about the autopsy results? When do those come back?” asked Jeff.

“Should be today; they’ve been a little backed up. Busy homicide month. But they pushed mine up because it’s high-profile. There’s a meeting in the morning—ME, crime scene technicians, junior detectives, ten
A.M
. Midtown North. You guys can drop by afterward if you keep a low profile. I’ll fill you in.”

“We’ll be there,” said Jeff as Ford slid out of the booth. He stopped a second before walking out the door. He regarded them with a frown and pointed a paternal finger at them.

“You two be careful,” he said, thoughtful, as if his mind were already on something else. “Call me if you run into anything tangible.”

Lydia watched him as he muddled out the door. With his worn old beige raincoat and bad navy blue suit, he looked like a sad cliché of himself. Run-down middle-aged cop, nothing in his life but the job.
Anything tangible
 … she thought. As far as she was concerned, the information the librarian gave her was the most tangible thing they had.

“
I
say,” said Dax with a wicked smile from the backseat, “we go in, guns blazing. Ask questions later.”

The three of them sat in the Range Rover in front of a giant elaborate wrought-iron fence, its bars formed to look like a network of vines and thorns. A sign was posted to the right of the gate explaining that the owner was legally entitled to shoot anyone who set foot on her property. It also warned that trained Dobermans roamed the property and that the owner was not responsible for the actions of said animals in the event someone decided to trespass. However, the gate was ajar. It felt oddly to Lydia like a dare.

“As much as I appreciate your input, Dax,” said Lydia flatly, “I think we’ll try a more civilized approach.”

She pulled her cell phone from the pocket of her black leather blazer.

“I’ve seen Chiclets bigger than that thing,” Dax said, pointing to her tiny cell phone. “I’d have to have a six-pack of them. I’d crush one a day at least.”

Lydia smiled in spite of herself. She was trying to treat both of them with a disdainful distance for their actions of yesterday. But they were hard to stay angry with, especially since she knew they were motivated only by concern for her.

“There,” said Dax, catching her smile in the rearview mirror and issuing a triumphant laugh. “I knew you wouldn’t be a bitch all day.”

“Just keep talking. You’d be surprised how long I can hold a grudge,” she answered, turning away so he wouldn’t see her smile widen.

“
I
wouldn’t,” said Jeff, with his best henpecked sigh. Lydia smacked him on the arm with her free hand.

A small Post-it that she’d tacked to the back of her phone had scrawled on it Maura Hodge’s number. Lydia dialed and waited while it rang three times before a machine picked up. “Leave a message,” said an angry voice. “Though there’s no guarantee I’ll get back to you.”

“Ms. Hodge, my name is Lydia Strong. Marilyn at the library said you might be willing to speak with me. I’m in Haunted, at the bottom of your driveway, to be exact, and I’d like to take a little bit of your time. Please call me when you get this message. And by the way, the gate is ajar. Thought you might like to know.” She left the number and hung up.

“Now what?” said Dax.

“We wait a few minutes.”

“What makes you think she’ll call back?” asked Jeff, skeptical.

“Because she’s lonely. Lonely people always like to talk. Especially when they think they have a cause.”

“Maybe we’ll get points for not busting in even though the gate was open.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

They waited a few minutes in silence before the phone rang and Lydia picked up.

“Hello?”

“What do you want?” came the same voice from the machine in even less pleasant tones. She knew she’d have exactly one chance to enter the property with Maura Hodge’s permission. Otherwise it was going to be B&E, with the possibility of either getting shot or mauled by Dobermans.

“I’m writing an exposé on the Ross family. Marilyn told me that
you know a lot about their history. I was hoping you would share the truth about them with me, Ms. Hodge.”

There was a moment of silence during which Lydia held her breath. Then, “Come up and make sure the gate is closed behind you.”

“Okay,” Lydia said, and hung up the phone. She looked at Jeff. “Let’s go up.”

Dax jumped out to open the gate, waited until the Rover was through, then closed it behind them. Closed it mostly, anyway. There was no way he was going to lock the only exit he knew of from the property. When he was back in the car, they headed up the narrow drive, shaded by a canopy of trees so thick that after a few feet it seemed like all the light had faded from the sky. Jeff turned on his headlights, wondering why they always seemed to be headed into the dark unknown.

M
aura Hodge was a goddess with a sawed-off shotgun. She stood on her porch waiting, the gun cradled in her arms like an infant. Her hair was as black and wild as a storm cloud, reaching out every which way and down her back nearly to her waist. In a diaphanous patchwork skirt and long black wool tunic, she was a large woman, with big soft breasts and wide shoulders, legs like tree trunks, arms like hams. She looked at them as they approached, with a withering stare that probably turned most people right around. Luckily, they weren’t most people. Though Lydia was starting to wish they were.

“Those your bodyguards?” asked Maura, nodding toward Jeff and Dax as Lydia exited the vehicle.