“What are you hiding?” he said aloud, and then he frowned. The question had come unbidden, as if surfacing from his subconscious, but now that the idea had been voiced it stuck in his mind.
The way he’d stood in the doorway that day, blocking Harley’s view into the house, holding those cards …
Harley stopped breathing. Closed his eyes and focused on his memory of those cards. He leaned forward and put his forehead against the steering wheel, slowing exhaling.
“Oh, fuck,” he whispered in the confines of the car.
He’d thought they might be playing cards, even tarot cards, but something about them had been familiar. He hadn’t seen the backs of the cards or he would have recognized them right away. The way Jake had been holding them, he’d gotten only a glimpse of the front, and even then only the mostly yellow borders at the tops of the cards. They had seemed familiar and now he understood why. He’d played the game often enough as a little kid.
They were Pokémon cards.
A dreadful suspicion filled Harley. He stared out the windshield at the National Grid crew but barely saw them, his mind turning inward. What the hell was Jake Schapiro doing playing Pokémon with all the shades drawn, and whom had he been playing it with?
He reached for the radio but his fingers froze a few inches from it. This is Jake we’re talking about, he told himself. The guy’s your friend. You’re gonna ruin his life on a damn hunch?
No. He wasn’t going to do that. He felt guilty enough just to be thinking the things he was thinking. Jake Schapiro had never been the kind of guy to share his most intimate emotions or his secrets, but the same could be said of Harley. They were friends, and he had never gotten any indication that there was anything deviant about the guy. He had to go about this carefully.
Please, he thought to himself Please, don’t be a monster.
His cell phone had been acting hinky ever since the storm began, so it didn’t surprise him that his call didn’t go through the first time. By the fourth try, he’d grown frustrated enough that he was on the verge of leaving the National Grid crew on their own, but then the static on the line cleared and he heard it ringing.
On the fourth ring, there came a fresh burst of static and then a voice. “This is Keenan.”
“Detective, it’s Harley Talbot. We need to talk.”
As night came on, Ella popped a fresh pod into her coffeemaker and hit the button, listening to it gurgle and hiss for a few seconds before the French roast began to flow into her mug. Just the smell of it was enough to please her. Once she’d added the cream—she wouldn’t dare taint it with so much as a grain of sugar—she held the mug up and blew ripples across the liquid surface. The coffee would help warm her. Even with the heat on and the thick, black sweater she’d donned, the view out the kitchen window made her shiver. The storm raged out there and it didn’t look like there would be any end in sight.
Part of her was relieved. Business at The Vault had been thinner than usual with all this inclement weather and somehow it had lifted the burden of worry from her shoulders when she had realized that she had no choice but to stay home and keep the restaurant closed.
Of course, home had its own worries.
Ella sipped her coffee and tried to ignore her fears.
“Hey.”
She flinched, spilling hot coffee onto her hand.
“Son of a bitch,” she said, putting the mug down and rinsing her hand in the sink.
TJ came over and ripped a paper towel off the roll, wiping up the mess with a penitent expression.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“I’m just jumpy,” Ella said. One hell of an understatement. “Been jumpy all day.”
Paper towel balled in his hand, TJ leaned against the counter and looked at her. Ella used a dish cloth to wipe the coffee off the exterior of the mug and then took another sip, grateful that she had spilled only an ounce or two.
“What are we going to do about the little old lady in the living room?”
Ella stared at her coffee, not looking up. This was the conversation she’d been dreading all day. With the three of them snowbound together, it ought to have been an opportunity to watch movies or play games, a chance for Ella and TJ to continue to repair the cracks in their relationship and to shower attention on their daughter. That was what snow days were meant for, not this tension, this breathless confusion.
“I don’t know,” Ella said quietly, glancing at the kitchen door to make sure Grace had not come in after her father. “I thought it must be just a game she was playing, but this morning she’s even worse. Even more … strange.”
Strange wasn’t the way she had intended to finish that sentence. Even more of a bitch, maybe. More like an old woman.
“We need to bring her to a therapist or a psychiatrist or something, get her evaluated,” TJ said.
“God, I hate that word. ‘Evaluated,’ as if human emotions are fucking mathematics.”
TJ put a hand on her arm and Ella felt her anger draining away, leaving only her sadness and confusion. She turned to face him.
“You want to take her out in this storm?” she asked.
“No. But I want to make an appointment for her. I’ll make some calls, get some recommendations. I know the day’s getting away from us, but the doctor’s office will probably at least have the answering service covering the phones, even with the blizzard.”
“Hell,” Ella said, “maybe we should get an exorcist.”
A soft, girlish laugh came from the kitchen door and they both spun to see Grace standing there on the threshold, framed in the entrance to the room. Only she didn’t look like Grace; not really. Not now that Ella was looking at her dead-on and the girl had surrendered the effort she’d been making at normalcy.
“That’s pretty funny,” Grace said, her voice the same but with a harder edge. Her little girl, but with a jaded weariness that only adults ever achieved. “I always knew he’d marry a girl with a sense of humor.”
“Grace?” TJ said.
But Ella could tell that he no longer believed he was speaking to his daughter. She could see it in her husband’s eyes and hear it in his voice and for a moment her heart swelled with terror as she wondered if she might not have been too far off … if it was possible, after all, for a demon to have inhabited her baby girl.
“She’s here,” the girl said, “but I think we all know you’re not talking to her right now. Come on, Thomas. You were always very intuitive, for a boy.”
TJ raised a hand to cover his mouth, his eyes wide. Ella felt the wave of fear that came rolling out of him and it gripped her as well. Her eyes welled with tears. She had been half kidding before, but her whole world had just shifted.
“What the hell—” Ella began in a whisper.
Then TJ spoke a single word that shut her up.
“Mom?”
Ella turned to stare at him, pieces falling into place in her mind. Impossible pieces. The house was silent except for the brutal rushing of the wind that made it creak and sway and battered it with heavy snow.
“TJ?” Ella said, her voice cracking.
Grace stepped toward them.
“No!” TJ shouted, one hand up, shaking his head and trembling with emotion that seemed caught between fear and anguish. “You stay right there! Right fucking there!”
Grace watched them with ancient eyes. The little girl tilted her head and sighed impatiently, an aura of sadness around her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Thomas. Ella. I swear to you that I didn’t plan for any of this, and I certainly never wanted to hurt or frighten you. But it’s too late for apologies now, and too late for tears. You’re going to have to hide me, you see.”
“Hide you?” Ella echoed.
Grace turned to the window, chin high, looking stronger and wiser than any eleven-year-old girl ever ought to look.
“I can feel them out in the storm.”
Snow struck the screen outside the window, whit
ing out the world.
Grace turned back to them and looked at her mother with a stranger’s eyes.
“They’re coming.”
SEVENTEEN
Miri had spent most of the day hiding away from the storm. She’d had to fight the temptation to pull the drapes, order room service, and find a marathon of nineties’ sitcoms on TV, ride out the storm with Friends or Seinfeld, which seemed to be on one channel or another twenty-four hours a day. Instead she was out driving in the snow, hands white-knuckled on the wheel. The wind slammed her rental car hard enough to rock it from side to side and the blizzard punched at her windshield, snow falling so hard that her wipers couldn’t keep up. She sat forward in the seat, heat blasting at her face and heart slamming in her chest, doing her damnedest to see more than five feet beyond the nose of the car.
A burst of static came from the radio and she jumped, startled, and glanced down, only to find the panel dark. The radio had been silent before and it was silent now because she had turned it off when she’d gotten behind the wheel, not trusting herself to avoid distraction. Frowning, she tapped it on and listened to the music fill the car, an old Dave Matthews song that she had entirely forgotten until it sparked to life in her brain right then, filling her with thoughts of middle-school dances and the arrogant boys who’d always been her fascination. That had been her undoing, really. She loved Jake, but with him there was always the painful undercurrent of their shared anguish. With those arrogant boys, she had always been able to forget, but she had regretted every kiss and fumbling backseat fondle.
Inhaling sharply, she hit the button to silence the radio again. To silence the past.
Tonight, arrogant boys would not do. She needed not to forget but to remember, and she needed to talk to the one person who would understand what she was feeling. If she told Jake about going to her mother’s house the night before and finding her with Doug Manning, he would understand the pain in her heart implicitly. He knew her better than she knew herself.
Which is exactly why you moved three thousand miles away.
The thought stung her, but there was truth in it. She had left to escape her mother’s indifference, but also to put the past behind her. Put the pain behind her. And as much as she loved him, she could never separate Jake from that past or that pain.
Still, ever since she had decided to return to Coventry she had intended to go to see him. She had seriously entertained the possibility that she was losing her mind, and that was one of the reasons she needed to see Jake. Being in his presence, wrapping her arms around him and getting the rib-crushing hugs that she had only now begun to realize she had desperately missed … that would give her perspective. This morning, with the storm in full swing, she had decided to call him and arrange a visit for tomorrow. She’d tried several times and left messages, even sent texts, but received no reply. Miri knew that Jake owed her nothing after the way she had abandoned Coventry, and the way she had abandoned him, her best friend. But it still hurt.
Unable to reach him, she had decided to dare the storm, to roll the dice and hope that the tires on the rental car were up to the task. Only now that she was out driving in the middle of it did she realize that she had never really intended to make the drive out to Jake’s farmhouse. That could wait until the storm passed, until the city plows finally got around to clearing the side streets that they had thus far mostly ignored.
Last night she had seen her father’s ghost in the middle of a flurry of snow, and when the snow had stopped falling, the ghost had vanished. What now, then, with the blizzard raging around her? Every time her cell phone rang, she had hoped to hear his voice again, if only to erase whatever doubts she had about that first call. But she had not heard from him since.
You saw him, she thought. That’s better.
Leaving the hotel, she had stood in the parking lot and let the snow and wind pummel her as she called out to him, her voice stolen away by the storm. She had glanced around the parking lot, hoping to see him, wishing for any sign that he had not left her behind again.
Now she drove carefully, trying to stick to roads that had been recently plowed and sanded, but in most places it was difficult to tell. The snow fell too fast for the city to keep up. Still, she managed to get across the new bridge and, sticking to main roads, found her way to Allie Schapiro’s house—the last place she had seen her father alive.
Pulling to the curb, she killed the engine and shut off the headlights and sat in the darkness, watching the snow fall. Bent over the steering wheel, she looked up at the darkened windows of the room that Jake and Isaac had shared as boys. The window to the right drew her attention, though it could not have been any darker. Nothing moved there. The window had nothing at all remarkable about it except for the fact that once upon a time a little boy had fallen from it to his death.
The engine ticked as it cooled. Miri sat there watching the house, watching the snow swirl and eddy and gust with the storm, hoping. A light burned in an upstairs room—maybe Allie’s room—and the living-room windows on the first floor held a dim golden glow. The car rocked and the wind whistled around it and after a time the engine ceased its ticking, too cold to make a sound.
Miri sat in the car long enough for her hands to start to hurt from the cold.
“This is stupid,” she whispered, her voice seeming somehow louder than it should.
Despite her frustration, she could not bring herself to leave yet. Instead, she popped open the door of the car, a little alarm dinging inside until she plucked the keys from the ignition. She wore leather gloves and a knit cap and a handwoven scarf, but these were slight protection against the ferocity of the storm. It tore at her, hammered the cold into her bones. Stuffing her gloved hands into the pockets of her coat, she stepped into the middle of the street and inhaled deeply of the frigid air. Somewhere far away, a plow scraped pavement. The bell in the library tower rang, the sound echoing strangely in the storm and rising and falling with gusts of wind.
“Dad?” Miri called, looking around, feeling foolish as the cold wind bit at her exposed skin.
She went to the spot where Isaac had died. Memory rushed into her, stealing away her breath. She squeezed her eyes shut but grief waited for her there, inside her head, and so she opened them again to escape the images that still remained—images of little Ike Schapiro broken and twisted and then carted away on a gurney, his face the last thing visible as they zipped him into a body bag.
Miri glanced up at the window from which Isaac had fallen—or been dragged, the way Jake told it.
A face looked back down.
Her mouth opened, a tiny sound of terror escaping her lips as she backed away from the house. Her hands were shaking and her heart thrummed so loudly that it took her a moment to realize that the face looking down upon her belonged to Allie Schapiro. Ms. Schapiro put a hand over her mouth in surprise, but now she slid the window open.
“Miri? Is that really you?”
“Yeah,” she called up. “Sorry, Ms. Schapiro. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“What are you doing out in this weather?” she asked, but with an edge to her voice that very few people would have understood. What she meant was, What are you doing out in this storm when you know what can happen?
“It’s hard to explain,” Miri said, glancing back at her car.
“You wait right there, then,” Allie said. “You might as well tell me over coffee.”
“That sounds—” Miri started to say, but Allie had already slid the window shut.
Miri smiled to herself. She had always liked Allie, even back when the woman had just been Ms. Schapiro, her teacher, instead of her father’s girlfriend. During that brief time when she’d thought that they might all be a family, she had fantasized about what it might be like, and worried about what it might mean for her love for Jake.
Little-kid stuff, she thought. Puppy love.
She spared one more glance at the snow-packed road beneath her feet, remembering Isaac. Her
father had gone for help, rushing off to chase the distant sound of a plow—quite like the scrape and roar she could still hear, even now.
Miri turned to look off in the direction her father had gone that night, when she’d watched him vanish into the storm.
And he was there. Translucent, unaffected by the snow and the wind, the storm passing through him as if he weren’t there at all. But he was.
Her heart lit up. She had expected to be afraid or disoriented. Instead she felt nothing but joy, so powerful that she began to weep tears that felt warm on her cheeks.
“Daddy,” she said, and she started toward him.
Her father’s ghost smiled, his eyes even kinder than she remembered. He reached out a hand as if he might touch her, but when she went to take it her fingers passed right through him.
“I’m sorry,” the ghost said. “I can’t…”
A scream cut him off, then stopped abruptly, echoing in the storm. Miri spun just in time to see Allie faint dead away, tumbling headfirst out her front door and into the snow.
Miri took a step toward her and then halted, remembering the way the ghost had vanished the night before. She spun around, her heart aching at the thought of him going away again, but this time the ghost remained.
“It’s all right,” her late father said. “Go to her. There are things you both should know.”
The key was not to get greedy. Doug had reminded Franco and Baxter of that half-a-dozen times leading up to today and he knew they were sick of hearing it. Fortunately, it seemed they had been listening. Baxter had been a thief for most of his life and Franco had taken to it easily. Doug had taken more convincing and he had felt bad after each burglary, especially the night they had stolen a Bose stereo system. Yes, the sound was amazing and it was worth a mint, but at the end of the day it was just a stereo. Their shopping list was supposed to be simpler than that—jewelry, cash, credit cards, and anything kept in a safe that looked valuable. He dreamed of finding a stack of old bearer bonds, the kind of thing that people stole in movies from the seventies.
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