She sat down on the empty stool next to Hunt, waving at Dmitri for a drink as she did so. She leaned toward the man she had come to see.
“Can I buy you a drink?” she asked, over the noise.
He turned those dark sunglasses in her direction. “I’m sorry?”
“I asked if I could buy you a drink.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
The question caught her off guard. She didn’t have a ready answer so she simply shrugged, thinking even as she did it how stupid it was to shrug at a blind man. “Why not?”
His lips tightened into a thin line. “No, thank you. Maybe another time.”
Before she could say anything further Hunt abruptly stood up, laid a folded bill down on the bar next to his empty glass, and left without another word.
Denise looked at Dmitri. “Well, that’s a first,” she said, with a puzzled laugh. “Getting shot down by a blind guy. I must be slipping.”
The bartender scowled. “You don’t want to get mixed up with the likes of him, Denise. He’s trouble.”
She nodded. “You’re absolutely right, Dmitri. I don’t want to get mixed up with him.” She looked back at the door through which Hunt had disappeared. “But trouble or not, I don’t think I have any choice in the matter.”
11
THEN
It was almost a week after my daughter disappeared when the witness came forward. She claimed to have seen a girl matching Elizabeth’s description in the company of a man at a rest stop on I-93 shortly after she had been reported missing.
Martingale, the detective in charge of our case, called to let us know about the witness and to caution us not to get too excited. We get hundreds of these a week, he said, and only a slim few ever pan out. Despite being told to stay home, Anne and I hurried down to the station house in the hope that we might just have our first lead.
The witness patiently answered all of the detectives’ questions and then spent two hours going through the albums of mug shots, looking at felon after felon, trying to find one who looked familiar, who might have been the man she’d seen in the rest area with Elizabeth.
When that process came up empty, they sent a sketch artist into the interview room to work with her. If they could get a reasonable facsimile of the man’s face, we could release it to the media, which always brought in more information. Someone, somewhere would see the guy and call it in.
What seemed like hours later, Detective Martingale came out of the interview room, saw us waiting in the hall, and gestured for us to join him in the room next door. We were happy to oblige.
“Did we get anything useful?” I asked, coming in the door.
The detective was just sitting down at the conference table and waved us into a pair of chairs opposite. Anne and I sat down side by side. I gave her an encouraging smile and, taking her hand in my own, repeated my question.
Martingale’s expression was noncommittal as he said, “Well, that depends, Mr. Hunt. Before I get into what the witness had to say, I need to go over a few details of your testimony with you, if that would be all right.”
It wasn’t. I’d been over it a million times, could practically recite it verbatim by now, but when a cop asks you if it was all right you can’t say no without looking like a suspect.
I smiled tightly. “That would be fine.”
Martingale asked me all the usual questions: What time did I notice her missing? What time did I report the problem to the police? What had I done from the time I called 911 until the time the police first showed up at my house? Could anyone else vouch for where I was during those specific time frames? It was the same bullshit we went over every single time I spoke with them and I could feel myself rapidly getting annoyed at what I saw as a useless waste of time.
The detective must have noticed my irritation, for he smiled his lazy smile at me and asked if everything was all right.
“No problems here,” I answered, the same stupid smile plastered on my own face.
We went over it all again, this time with him checking my responses against the answers in the file in front of him. Right when I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, Anne stood up.
“This is ridiculous, Detective. We’ve answered your questions again and again, and frankly I’m getting sick of it. I’m sure my husband is as well. You’re treating us more like suspects than grieving parents and I’m not going to tolerate it any longer!”
Anne was angry, angrier than I had seen her in some time.
Rather than answer her verbally, Detective Martingale withdrew a piece of paper from his file and slid it across the table.
“That’s the sketch our witness came up with, the face of the man who was allegedly seen with Elizabeth just two hours after her disappearance.”
“Oh, my God!” Anne exclaimed, her hand going to cover her mouth.
I was too shocked to say anything.
It was all I could do to stare at the face on the paper in front of me.
My face.
“Now maybe you can understand why we had to go over all those details again,” the detective said.
“This can’t possibly be right,” Anne said.
Martingale just looked at us.
I suddenly felt guilty and I hadn’t even done anything wrong. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be in this room and know that you had committed a crime.
Anne wasn’t having the same reaction, however.
“This is bloody well ridiculous, detective, and I guarantee you that you’ll be hearing from our lawyer first thing in the morning. How dare you? How DARE you?”
Martingale finally held up his arms in a calming gesture. “Now take it easy, Mrs. Hunt. When you’ve calmed down, you’ll know that looking into this was necessary and …”
Anne cut him off, the indignation in her voice turning it to liquid steel. “Don’t tell me it was necessary, you son of a bitch. My daughter is out there somewhere, still missing, and you’re following up on half-assed theories that have her out on a Sunday afternoon joyride with her father while we were all answering questions in our dining room? Is that the kind of incompetence we can expect on this case? Did you even bother to check the time logs and match those up with the internal reports?”
Martingale was speechless; Anne’s vehemence was startling in a woman of her small stature, and I suddenly understood just what it was that made my wife such a good lawyer. No matter what the situation, she was convinced she and she alone was correct.
I was glad she was on my side this time around.
Perhaps recognizing that he was way out of his intellectual league, Martingale did the smart thing and backed off. He apologized for the inconvenience, thanked us for coming down, and got us out of the police station as quickly as he was able.
12
NOW
I caught a cab outside of Murphy’s and rode home in silence. Having learned from previous experience that the sight of my all-but-boarded-up home made taxi drivers uncomfortable, I had the cabbie drop me off at the top of the block and walked the rest of the way.
I live on a quiet, dead-end street and my house sits at the very end of the block, set back from the road and off by itself. It had cost Anne and me a pretty penny when we bought it fifteen years ago—a three-quarter-acre lot that backed up onto public land and had a fair degree of privacy was practically unheard of in an inner-city neighborhood like ours, so we’d jumped at the chance to make it our own. Anne had just made partner, I was working to get tenure at the university, and with dreams of having a family it seemed like the perfect place for us to spend the next several decades of our lives.
I doubted that she would even recognize the place now.
The ground-floor windows had all been covered with plywood, which kept out the light and let me function relatively normally inside my own home, no matter what time of day or night. The yard was overgrown and the mailbox sagged on its pole.
I’d added a six-foot-high wrought iron fence arou
nd the entire property. In order to get as much as I needed I’d had to buy it from a number of local suppliers, but the peace of mind it provided was more than worth the effort.
And the cost.
The gates barring the entrance at the front of the property had once stood before the largest cemetery in central Ohio, but the chains and padlocks had come directly from Sears by mail order. Still, they did the trick, which was to keep out the unwanted, both the living and the dead.
Speaking of which, as I drew closer I could feel the usual collection of ghosts gathered outside my gates. I had no idea what they wanted or why they felt the need to congregate there, but more often than not that’s what they did, staring in, as if they were expecting me to do something for them. Maybe they came simply because I knew they were there. Maybe the presence of Whisper and Scream drew them; I don’t know.
The border of my property was as close as I was willing to let them get, however.
As I approached, the crowd backed off a bit, the lodestone around my neck doing just what it was intended to do. That gave me enough room to unlock the chains securing the gates, slip inside, and relock them behind me. Turning my back on the dead, I headed for my house.
A paved walkway led from the gates, across the overgrown lawn, and to the front door. Even if I hadn’t been counting my steps, the gurgle of gently flowing water let me know when I was nearing the house itself. I’d dug the moat by hand last spring over the course of two weeks. Talk about backbreaking labor. The trench had to be three feet deep and as level as possible to support the semicircular pipe that lay within it, and that kind of precision isn’t easy when you’re blind and essentially digging in the dark. Still, I’d gotten it done without any major disaster and had then borrowed Whisper’s sight to conquer the hardest part of the project, installing the pumps that keep the water endlessly recirculating around and around my home.
The iron was my first line of defense; the running water my second. As both were anathema to a wide variety of supernatural creatures, it would take something pretty powerful to get past them, but if something did, there was still one last barrier that they would have to deal with.
Scream.
He was usually there to greet me when I came home, but tonight I didn’t feel the weight of his presence and I was frankly too worn-out to care.
The day’s events had gotten to me. Death was never easy to be around, and being reminded of my obligation to Stanton at the same time certainly didn’t help. My head was pounding from all the time I’d spent linked to Whisper, and the blatant come-on at Murphy’s—by one of the Gifted no less—had set my teeth on edge for some reason.
All in all, it had been a particularly shitty day.
I crossed the moat and made my way up to the front door. Once inside, I went straight to my desk and took out a large padded envelope. I slipped the mirror out of my pocket and, keeping it wrapped up tightly, slid it inside. I scrawled a quick note to a guard I knew at Walpole Prison, added that to the envelope’s contents, then addressed the outside of the envelope to his attention.
A day or two from now, that mirror would end up in the cell of a certain inmate. And maybe, just maybe, Velvet would have the chance to teach her killer a little something about fear in return.
But my good deed didn’t do anything to improve my mood. The house seemed particularly cold and empty to me, even more so than usual. Maybe it was the nature and brutality of the crime I’d been called to witness. Maybe it was the interaction with Whisper and the tendency she had to remind me of Elizabeth. Maybe I was just too damned tired to think straight. It didn’t really matter what caused it, just that I felt it like an icy hand had reached inside my chest and squeezed for all it was worth. I missed my wife. I missed my daughter. I missed the life we had, a life full of laughter and happiness and hope for the future.
A life wiped away in the space of a few minutes of inattention.
And I had only myself to blame.
Wearily, I climbed the stairs to the second floor and walked into Elizabeth’s bedroom, needing to feel close to her, even if it was only to quiet the silent screaming of my heart.
I’d left the room just the way it had been on the day she disappeared; her unmade bed still dominated the small space, her Nancy Drew books still lay scattered across the surface of her desk, right next to the drawing of the cat she’d been making for Halloween. Her clothes still filled the drawers of her dresser and the space inside her closet, her toothbrush still occupied its spot in the cup holder in the bathroom.
I cleaned her room regularly, so that when she came home again, it would all be ready for her.
I lay down on her bed, bunching the Scooby-Doo sheets against my face, searching for the faint scent that had once filled them, the last bit of evidence that my daughter had actually ever existed.
Eventually, I slept.
13
NOW
True to his word, the next morning there was a package from Stanton containing a thick sheaf of photographs waiting just inside my gates. The courier even had the decency to read the sign and call the house, leaving a message on the answering machine to let me know it was there.
I threw on a t-shirt and jeans, then made my way down the walk to retrieve it. Back inside, I grabbed the first of what would prove to be many cups of coffee, my usual vice, and got down to work.
I closed my eyes and summoned Whisper.
Or rather, I tried to summon Whisper. She didn’t respond. I spent ten minutes pushing the sending with all my mental strength, trying to feel that presence, that connection that told me she was nearby.
Nothing.
I didn’t want the entire day to go to waste, so reluctantly I decided I was going to have to get some other help. The fact that I knew how to banish a ghost from a particular area also meant that I understood how to keep one hanging around beyond its natural desire to leave. I didn’t do it often, but it appeared I didn’t have any choice at this point. I needed to see the photographs, and there was only one way I could do so.
I needed someone else’s eyes.
I opened my desk drawer, took out the battered old harmonica I kept there, and went back down to the front gate. It’s commonly recognized that music can tame even the most wild of beasts, but it is less widely known that it also has the same power over ghosts. Find the right tune and, like the Pied Piper with the children of Hamlin, you could lead a ghost anywhere.
I stood inside the gate for a little while, watching the crowd that gathered there. I needed a ghost strong enough to withstand the strain for several hours, but not one that was going to be difficult to control or send on its way once my work was finished. It took me about twenty minutes, but at last I found him.
He was young, probably in his midtwenties when he died, and he had that lost and disoriented look that the newly dead usually have. That would mean he wasn’t 100 percent comfortable in his new state and would respond better to the things he used to know, like music and the sense of being home.
I started slowly at first, pushing out a few lines of song here and there, looking for the right genre and the right tune to capture his attention.
It was “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger that finally did it.
The minute I broke into that opening sequence, his head came up, his eyes lost their focus, and he was lost in a sea of memories. The music called to him, caught his soul and spun him about, and I knew I had him. Still playing, I unlocked the gate, waited until he was just outside, and then opened it wide enough to let him slip inside.
He followed me up the walk and inside the house without incident. While he stood enrapt in the tune, I called up my music library on my computer, put the song on infinite loop, and, when his attention was distracted by the competing strains, I reached out and borrowed his sight.
While not as powerful as the live music I’d been playing, the recorded tune kept the ghost distracted and docile enough that I was able to turn my attention to the photographs Stanton had s
ent over and try, at last, to get some work done.
I started with the Chaldean script. It was a descendant of ancient Aramaic and having risen somewhere in the neighborhood of the second century BC, was perhaps the oldest language of those found at the Connolly crime scene. Because it was cursive and written from right to left, it would, given my lack of sight, be the hardest for me to deal with, so I wanted to be as fresh as possible when I tackled it.
Having asked Stanton to have his crime scene techs arrange the shots in a particular sequence—first a wide-angle shot showing all the writing on each individual wall, then photos of each group of words or phrases on that wall, and finally individual shots of each letter or glyph itself—I went through them in the same order.
I spent some time familiarizing myself with each image, noting those that were immediately recognizable and briefly puzzling over those that were not. Because I was “seeing” them through a different medium, the strangely malevolent feeling that had nearly overwhelmed me the night before wasn’t present, but I hadn’t forgotten it. Just the memory of it made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. The feeling reminded me to proceed with caution as I set to trying to translate in earnest.
Doing so, however, was much more difficult than I expected. I was able to recognize many of the individual letters and a good number of the words they formed, but that was as far as I could go because none of the word groups fit together into coherent phrases.
After a long, frustrating hour, I put the Chaldean aside and turned my attention to the Norse runes.
They were the version of Old Norse known as Elder Futhark, which consisted of twenty-four runic symbols typically arranged into three groups of eight. They dated from around 400 AD, and very few scholars outside of Scandinavia specialized in them. Fortunately, I was one of those few.
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