The Eternal Ones (16 page)

“No problem,” the cabbie replied with a hint of disappointment in his voice.

As the taxi tore south through the city, Haven watched the skyscrapers pass as if they were part of a movie that she’d seen before. But new scenes had been added and others removed. The effect was baffling, at times disturbing. Everything was taller, shinier, brighter than she’d expected. She was relieved when the cab stopped in front of the gilded entrance of the Windemere. Curtains of rain cascaded from the hotel’s awning as streaks of lightning wove between nearby buildings. The driver dumped her suitcase on the curb, and Haven watched passengers disembark from another cab that had pulled up in front of the hotel. The man from the train was not among them.

“May I?” The doorman reached for Haven’s bag, and she jumped. “You are a guest, are you not?”

“Yes,” Haven sputtered.

“Right this way,” the man told her, leading Haven through the lobby. When Haven reached the reception desk, a haughty woman in a stiff gray suit looked her up and down.

“May I help you?” she droned.

“I have a reservation under Haven Moore.”

“Let me check,” the woman said suspiciously. She typed in the name. “Yes. Here it is.”

“Good evening, sir.” The clerk at the next desk was a little too chipper. “How may I help you this evening?”

“I don’t have a reservation, but I’d like a room.”

Haven looked over and saw the man from the train sliding an ID across the counter.

“Excuse me,” she said, suddenly feeling emboldened. “Weren’t you just on the train with me?”

The man’s face remained expressionless. “I don’t know. Was I?” he asked.

“I saw you on the train,” Haven insisted. “The train from Tennessee.”

“That may be true,” said the man. “But I didn’t see
you
.”

“Miss?” Haven heard the clerk say. “Your key.” There was something about the woman’s smug smile that made Haven want to punch her.

Haven checked under the bed and inside the closet before climbing between the sheets. She left the curtains open and watched the lights in the office buildings across the street extinguish one by one. She dreamed of Ethan. She felt him beside her, his chest rising and falling, each breath expelled with a soft, purring snore. When the bright summer sun finally woke her, Haven found herself wrapped around a pillow, clinging to it like a life preserver.

She splurged on room service coffee and called her mother. Mae was troubled to learn that her daughter had skipped town, though after Dr. Tidmore’s sermon, she was hardly surprised.

“Why
now
?” she whispered in case Imogene was listening. “Why couldn’t you wait?”

Haven searched for a reasonable explanation but didn’t find one. There was no point in telling her mother that she was in New York to find out what had happened to a girl who’d been dead for ninety years. Or that later that night she’d be standing outside the Apollo Theater, hoping to catch a glimpse of a rich boy who was suspected of murder. And even if she’d tried, she couldn’t have described the forces that had compelled her to act when she did.

Once the dreaded call was out of the way, Haven dressed and hopped a number 6 subway downtown. When she climbed up the stairs and emerged onto Spring Street, she felt, for the first time in her life, that she was where she needed to be. As she walked east, a woman in a pleated skirt and T-strap heels hurried past her. A green ribbon wound around the bottom of her bell-shaped hat. At the curb, a man waited behind the wheel of a fancy car with whitewall tires and a rumble seat in back. It was in remarkable condition for a vehicle that had to be almost one hundred years old. The newspaper the man held bore the headline BRITISH EXPLORER FEARED LOST IN THE AMAZON. A nearby store offered the latest in “Victrola Talking Machines,” and a movie poster plastered to the side of a building advertised a Charlie Chaplin film.

Haven blinked and the scene disappeared. Though the buildings around her remained the same, the cars and pedestrians belonged to the present day. She turned down Elizabeth Street and found the neighborhood stores had been converted into cafés and boutiques. She chose some overpriced jeans and two T-shirts from one of the shops she visited, making the first real dent in the money she’d been hoarding since the fourth grade.

At the next boutique, she selected a pair of heels to match the black dress Beau had insisted on making. As she waited for a gum-cracking salesgirl to return from the storeroom with a pair of size eights, Haven wondered what she was doing. She had come to New York to solve a mystery—to find what Constance wanted her to find and stop the visions once and for all. Now here she was, choosing an outfit to impress a boy who, by all accounts, was nothing but trouble. Yet when Haven imagined seeing Iain Morrow later that night, she found herself out of breath. Somehow a single grain of hope had sprouted and strangled her common sense.

She tried to be rational. Iain Morrow was a notorious womanizer—and if the Jeremy Johns rumors were true, he might soon be in jail for the rest of his life. But Haven’s logic was of little use. Haven knew she still hoped for nothing more than to find Ethan Evans walking down the red carpet at the Apollo Theater.

The slim salesgirl arrived with a silver box in her hands and knelt to pull the shoes out of their tissue. A wisp of blonde hair was sticking out from under the girl’s slick black bob, and Haven realized she was wearing a wig. Haven slipped on the heels and adjusted the straps. As she took a turn around the shop, she happened to glance out the windows. Across the street, in another store, a man was watching her. He was casually flipping through a rack of men’s shirts, but his eyes never left Haven. It wasn’t the man from the train, though they shared an uncanny resemblance. Perhaps it was the cut of his gray suit or the razor-sharp part in his hair. Haven put the shoes in their box.

“I’ll take them,” she said. “By the way, is there an exit at the back of the store?” Haven asked as the salesgirl started to ring her up.

“Why?” the girl responded suspiciously. “What exactly are you planning to do?”

“There’s a man across the street. I think he’s been following me.”

“Really?” The girl looked out the window. “You mean the guy who looks like he’s with the FBI?”

“That’s the one.”

“
Is
he with the FBI?” the girl asked. “Is this one of those ‘If you see something, say something’ moments?”

“What?” Haven blurted out. “Of course not!”

“You’re not a terrorist or anything?”

“Are you kidding? I’m from Tennessee.”

“The Unabomber was from Chicago. Timothy McVeigh grew up in Pendleton, New York. The Weathermen—”

“Okay!” Haven stopped her. “I get it. I’m not a terrorist.”

“Well, in that case, yeah, we share a courtyard with a lighting store on Bowery. Tell them Janine said to let you through.”

“Thanks,” Haven said.

“No problem. Listen, you sure you don’t you want me to call the police or something?”

“What would we tell them? They can’t do anything unless he does something. I’m not sure I want to find out what he has in mind.”

“Good point,” said the girl. “Follow me.”

Haven grabbed her shopping bag and let the shopgirl lead her to a door at the back of the store. Two minutes later, she hailed a cab on Bowery and sailed back uptown.

 

STILL A LITTLE anxious from the near encounter with the mysterious man on Elizabeth Street, Haven rushed through the lobby of the Windemere, eager to get upstairs to her room. She almost failed to notice the man from the train lounging in one of the leather chairs. Once again, he was pretending not to see her, though she could tell that his eyes weren’t reading the magazine he held in his hands. The surge of panic left her a little dizzy, but she managed to make her way to the reception desk. It wasn’t until she’d already started speaking that she realized she was addressing the same unfriendly woman from the night before.

“That man has been following me,” she gasped.

“Which man?” the clerk inquired without a trace of concern.

“The one in the chair by the palm tree. He has short brown hair and he’s wearing a navy suit.”

As she spoke, the man in question was joined by another man wearing an identical suit. They looked enough alike to belong to the same family or cult. The two men spoke for a few seconds, then exited the building together without so much as a glance at Haven.

“I’m sorry,
which
man did you say was following you?” the clerk asked rudely.

“Never mind,” Haven spat back.

BY SEVEN THIRTY, Haven was sitting on the bed in her hotel room, fully dressed and watching the clock on the bottom left corner of Channel One. At precisely eight twenty-five, she stood and checked her reflection in the mirror. She’d done her best with her hair, and the black dress that she and Beau had made tricked the eye into believing she was shapelier than she had any right to appear. Haven added a touch of cherry lip gloss and pursed her lips for the mirror. She looked good. Even the handsome bellhop who helped her avoid the lobby and leave through the hotel’s service entrance flirted with her the entire way.

Outside the Apollo Theater, the crowds were writhing behind the velvet ropes that lined a crimson carpet. It took Haven fifteen minutes to slither and slide her way to the front row, and by the time she was standing with her belly pressed against the rope, the guests were already arriving. Beau would have loved the parade of movie stars and socialites, but none of them were of any great interest to Haven. She watched the end of the line as they glided past, searching for the face she’d come to see. All she wanted was one quick look at Iain Morrow.

As nine o’clock approached, Iain Morrow had yet to make his appearance, and Haven’s feet had begun to ache. The line of luminaries was thinning, and the star power had dimmed. At last, a black Mercedes with tinted windows arrived at the end of the carpet. A door swung open, and a stunning girl in a short silver skirt toppled out of the car, laughing hysterically. The flash of paparazzi cameras lit up the night, and it was several minutes before three figures emerged from the blaze of blinding lights. The girl in the silver skirt wobbled on three-inch heels, and if it hadn’t been for the arm around her tiny waist, she would have kissed the carpet. The arm holding her up belonged to Iain Morrow, and his other one was draped around an even prettier girl who wore a glazed expression and little else. The girls were both clearly wasted, but Iain Morrow walked a straight line down the red carpet, barely blinking in the glare. The crowd had gone wild watching the spectacle, and the black-clad bodyguards who tailed the threesome scanned the ropes for signs of danger.

For a few seconds, Haven didn’t bother breathing. The world had gone quiet and still around her. Though he looked nothing like Ethan, Iain Morrow was more beautiful in person than Haven had imagined. Tall and lean, with a body that could make any outfit look fashionable. Dark brown hair worn delightfully unkempt and the sort of tan one only acquires while lying on hidden beaches in the south of France. Arched brows that hovered mischievously over bright green eyes. As he moved closer, Haven instinctively tried to take a step back, wishing she could vanish into the crowd. But she found herself pinned against the rope, unable even to turn away. Just as the trio passed by, one of the models caught her heel in the carpet and stumbled toward Haven, all whirling arms and smudged mascara. Haven reached out to catch her, and as she did, her hand brushed another that had come to the girl’s rescue. A jolt shook Haven, and she felt herself totter just as the model regained her balance. Haven looked up to see Iain Morrow peering down at her, a lopsided grin on his lovely face. He turned to one of his bodyguards and pointed to Haven. His lips moved, but she couldn’t hear his words.

“Her?” The bodyguard mouthed. Iain gave the man a sharp nod and continued down the red carpet with his two tipsy strumpets in tow.

Still trapped at the front of the mob of spectators, Haven could only watch them leave. She didn’t notice the bodyguard ducking under the velvet rope. He lifted Haven by the waist and carried her through the crowd.

“Hey! What are you doing? Let me down!” she cried, though only a few people seemed to hear her and no one seemed to care.

The man lugged her through a service entrance at the side of the building and down a long, dark corridor. Weak fluorescent lights flickered from the ceiling and exposed pipes gurgled along the walls. Haven had given up demanding an explanation. The bodyguard remained mute no matter what threats she hurled at him. Finally, they came to a plain metal door. The man opened it, turned on a light, and set Haven down inside the empty room.

“Wait here. He’ll be down soon,” the man informed her brusquely before leaving.

“
Who
will?” Haven shouted at the closed door.