“What about what’s her name?”
Regret shaded his features. “That was … self-medicating, I guess. I’ve already forgotten her. If I could make you forget her, I would. For now, I just want to make sure you’re not in any danger. I’ll sleep on the couch if you want. I’m off rotation for the next three days, but tomorrow I want to go over and have a look at the hotel, and the Harrison Otis place—”
“Otis Harrison House,” she corrected.
Steven gave her a lopsided smile. “Yeah. I’m on duty, or I’d go over today.”
“No,” she said, breathing a little more evenly. “I appreciate it.”
“Look,” he said, “I know you’ve got your friends in this thing with you, and I know you don’t need me sticking my nose in—”
“No, I do.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her.
Lili fixed him with a withering glance. “Not because you’re a big, strong man, jackass. Because you’re a cop and you carry a gun, and that feels like tangible reality, which I could really use a little bit of right now.”
“I’m glad you made that clear,” he said, crossing the kitchen to hug her good-bye. Steven kissed her on the top of the head and she let him. “When I see you again, make sure to call me jackass so I know it’s really you.”
She walked him back out to the foyer, glancing into the living room and shuddering as she remembered waking up on the carpet.
“About tonight,” she said as he opened the door, letting the cold breeze back in. “I’d welcome the company.”
He grinned, a mischievous sparkle in his eyes.
“You’re sleeping on the couch,” she added.
Steven held up his hands like she had him at gunpoint. “Whatever you say.”
They both knew where he’d be sleeping.
“Keep your eyes open,” he told her.
Lili promised she would, but as she watched him walk back to his patrol car, she thought about her blurry memory and the fact that she hadn’t recognized him—this man she had been afraid to really love—when she opened the door.
Would keeping her eyes open really make a difference? If her double came for her, would she even remember it afterward?
In the pocket of her pajamas, her cell phone buzzed again. She shut the front door and tugged out the phone, reading the messages from Tess again, including the latest one, which consisted of four words: Please don’t be dead.
Lili shuddered and locked her front door, then leaned against it as she held down the control button on her phone. “Call Tess,” she said once it had beeped.
“Calling Tess,” the phone replied.
It seemed they both had stories to tell.
But as she listened to it ring, she thought about the visitor Steven had received the night before, and for the first time she wondered if it would really be Tess who answered the phone.
SIX
Audrey stepped off the train at Porter Square T station and felt the warm rush of subway tunnel air envelop her. Her nose wrinkled with distaste. Down in the subway, she always felt far too cut off from the world, the air clammy and insinuating. Slipping off her small backpack, she unzipped it and stuffed her copy of the latest Carlos Ruiz Zafon novel inside. She hated the laziness of an escalator but Porter was one of the deepest stations she’d ever seen, so she rode up instead of using the stairs. Moving past a throng of commuters, she emerged into Porter Square and took a moment to orient herself before crossing the street and then turning left, toward Harvard.
Tess lived a mile or so from the station, a brisk fifteen-minute walk. It would have been faster for her to drive over from Revere—she’d taken the blue line into Boston and then switched for the red line out to Cambridge—but this time of day she would have been stuck in stop-and-go traffic on Route 16, breathing exhaust fumes, and this way she had been able to relax and read her book.
Well, maybe not relax. Julia had tried to hide her irritation, but it had been clear she would have preferred that her wife stay home tonight. Audrey would have preferred it that way, too, but she felt an urgency inside her that even the things Lili had told her could not quite explain. Julia had noticed that she had been feeling lethargic and out of sorts, and Audrey had said she just hadn’t been sleeping well enough. Which was mostly true.
But there was more to it than that. When she’d stumbled on her morning run and gotten sick, and seen that blind man, something had happened to her. Then Lili had come to her with her story about doppelgängers and genuine fear in her eyes, and Audrey had sensed the connection. This morning she had wrapped up the case she had been working on, and all afternoon she had been thinking about the Otis Harrison House.
When Lili had called to plead with her to come and meet with her and Tess and the others tonight, Audrey had wanted to refuse. Tomorrow she had plans to go and investigate the presence of the psychomanteum at the fancy Boston hotel where it had unexpectedly turned up. If she could be any help to these people, it would be tomorrow. Yet here she was, disappointing her wife and ignoring her own anxiety for a subway ride and a chilly evening walk to Tess’s house to spend a couple of hours with people who weren’t her friends. Sure, she liked them, but not enough for this.
So why are you here? she asked herself as she walked away from Massachusetts Avenue and past a small bar with live music thumping from inside its windows.
Audrey knew the answer. Something had gone wrong. Most strange happenings had ordinary explanations, but not this. This was real. Fear had spread through her like a low-grade fever, lingering, threatening to settle in more deeply, and she didn’t like being afraid. So she had ridden the subway and now she walked past a convenience store and an Italian bakery and then turned left at a stoplight, moving into a gentrified Cambridge neighborhood. Fewer cars passed by, and three blocks along she came to an intersection, this one with a darkened gas station on one corner and a Tex-Mex takeout place on the other. The smell of the food made her stomach growl.
Tugging out her phone, she checked her position against Tess’s address in her GPS, then turned right past the Tex-Mex place. Another hundred yards brought her within view of the Victorian she remembered envying the only other time she’d been here—for a celebratory dinner after the Otis Harrison job had ended. In the early evening, the house was lit up with a warm golden glow, as if every light inside had been turned on the moment night had fallen.
Audrey shifted her backpack straps as the wind picked up. Walking had seemed like a good idea until now, but the house was so close, just across the street and fifty yards ahead. There were several cars in the driveway and another pulled up to the curb even now. She watched its headlights wink out and the driver’s door opened. In the white glow of the Dodge’s dome light, she could make out a familiar face. That reporter … what was his name? Like the famous kidnapping case.
Lindbergh, she thought. Fred or Frank.
Then someone climbed out of one of the cars in the driveway and she saw that it was Lili Pillai. The wind gusted again and she bent against it, noticing something blowing along the sidewalk toward her. Black cloth, perhaps a scarf or rag. In the wind, it seemed almost serpentine, twisting along the concrete before it caught on her leg. Idly, she tried to shake it off, and somehow the rag unfurled. It flapped upward, wind blowing it open, so that suddenly instead of a scrap of cloth it seemed an entire bolt of flowing fabric, still wrapped around her leg at the bottom as though her presence there was its anchor.
Audrey felt its presence. How could she have missed it?
Then the stink hit her and her throat closed up with fear.
“No,” she rasped as spindly gray fingers thrust from within the flapping fabric and grabbed hold of her throat.
The wind whipped the rag to one side and the face of the blind man loomed before her as if he had always been there, grim and solid, with his hideous teeth and soiled blindfold. He cocked his head back and sniffed the air. Inhaled her scent.
And he grinned.
Audrey
screamed and tore from his grasp, struck him in the face with a dry crack of flesh on cold flesh. Then she was past him and running, and she had taken a dozen steps before she realized her mistake. She was running away from Tess’s house, away from the people she knew, and the blind man was giving chase.
She heard him breathing hard, right at her back … heard the slap of his shoes on the sidewalk. He grunted and she thought she heard his voice, a muffled word or two that she couldn’t make out. Farther back she heard Lili and Frank shouting and someone hammering on the door to Tess’s apartment.
Stupid, Audrey thought. He’s blind and old. Stop running.
Jaw clenched, backpack bouncing on her shoulders, she dodged to the right and started to turn back the way she’d come. The blind man whipped around, sniffing the air and then baring his teeth in anger. He lunged after her, somehow sensing the curb, and for the first time she wondered if he could see after all, even through the blindfold. She darted past him, picking up speed, and then his fingers snagged her hair. His fist tightened and he hauled her back. Audrey let out a scream as the blind man twisted her around and hurled her to the cracked pavement.
He loomed over her, steaming fetid breath in her face, and she saw the blood and dirt that stained his blindfold, saw the yellow and brown dental wreckage in his mouth, and tried to scramble backward on the street. The blind man grabbed the front of her jacket and yanked her upward, inhaling her scent again. A wave of cold spread inside her, like an ice storm had begun to churn in her chest.
“Get the hell away from her,” a voice snapped.
The old man snapped his head up just as Lili Pillai barreled into him, both hands straight out in front of her. She shoved him backward with enough force that he ought to have been knocked off his feet. Instead he seemed to flow backward, his long coat flapping in the breeze as part of the fabric wrapped around Lili’s wrist, dragging the two of them closer. On her ass on the street, Audrey stared in breathless horror. Whatever this was, it was real. For just a moment the jacket gaped open and she saw a swirl of motion in the shadows within … heard a whisper of voices.
Lili threw a solid punch—feet set, shoulders square, snapping her hips around to put her strength behind it—and Audrey heard the old man’s jaw crack as the blow connected. He snarled again, baring those hideous teeth, and grabbed Lili by the throat.
“No,” Audrey said, rising to one knee, reaching for the blind man’s coat.
Blindfold obscuring his eyes, somehow he studied Lili. Inhaled deeply, head cocked, taking in her scent. Then he let her go. Staggered back a step, forehead creased and lips curled back in confusion. Blindfold a blank slate, he turned at the sound of the others running toward them. Audrey spared only a glance for the sight of Tess and Nick rushing toward them, with Frank hanging back on the opposite sidewalk, face slack with fear.
“Where?” the blind man seemed to say. “Where are you?”
But Audrey could not tell if the words came from his lips or from the shadows inside that coat.
He turned away from them. The long coat flapped around him, collar flipping up to block his profile, and in a gust of icy wind the fabric folded in upon itself. It fell to the street, seeming to shrink until all that remained was that one black rag, no larger than a scarf. It blew along the road for a dozen feet and then circled in the wind, carried up off the ground until it sailed into the air, eddying and rippling in the night sky until it vanished over the roof of a house.
“Oh, my God,” Audrey said as she stood and reached for Lili. “Thank you.”
But when she took Lili’s hand, the other woman’s skin felt ice cold. Lili looked up at her as though waking abruptly from a dream and reached up to touch her own throat, where the blind man had gripped her.
“What just happened?” she asked.
For a moment all the color had drained from her face, so pale that it almost seemed that the moonlight passed through her skin. Then Nick and Tess were there, talking to both of them, and Audrey had to turn her attention to them.
“Tell me I didn’t just see that,” Nick said. “That’s gotta be some kind of illusion, right? That guy didn’t just fucking vanish.”
The women ignored his efforts to make it all less surreal. Less impossible. Tess took Lili in her arms and Audrey felt relieved. The cold she had felt when the blind man had touched her seeped deeper, aching in her bones, and she had enough terrors of her own without trying to comfort Lili.
Audrey glanced up and saw Frank walking toward them. He attempted to collect himself, but fear still radiated from him.
“Can we go inside?” he asked Tess. “I don’t think we should be out here.”
They all looked up into the night sky, at the place above the house where the shred of black fabric had disappeared into the dark. Audrey started to move first, and then they were all walking toward Tess’s apartment in a tight cluster. Frank fell into step beside Audrey and he no longer seemed so afraid. She understood. The cold had taken deep root inside her, but she felt safer with the others around her.
Safety in numbers, she thought as they reached Tess’s front door. Frank seemed to intuit her feelings. He smiled thinly and put a hand on her shoulder in solidarity as they waited for Tess to unlock the door.
At his touch, Audrey shuddered. She turned to study him, searching his eyes, startled by an aura of malice that seemed to surround him. He drew back his hand and gave her a darkly curious look, but then Tess opened the door and they were all filing inside, and there were other things to discuss. If Frank bore her some animosity, Audrey would deal with it later or not at all. After all, what was he to her? Just a man she’d met once on a job. Compared to the malign entity that had come for them tonight, Frank’s hidden feelings mattered not at all.
Tess closed the door behind them and Audrey exhaled, feeling safer.
But she kept glancing at dark corners and the shadows beneath chairs and tables, wondering if a locked door could do anything to keep them safe.
SEVEN
Tess felt numb. She asked Lili to make sure everyone had something hot to drink, but it was Nick who filled the teapot. While Lili fetched mugs, Tess checked on Maddie, whom she had left watching a movie, nestled in her own bed. She pushed open her bedroom door and saw Maddie propped on a pile of her mother’s pillows, entranced by The Princess Bride. Though the little girl had no interest in most films of a similar age, Maddie had latched on to the story of Buttercup and Westley and their friends.
“Hey, punkin,” Tess said, hating the quaver in her voice. She exhaled, steadying herself. “You okay?”
“I’d be more okay if I had cookies!” Maddie said brightly.
Tess smiled, some of her tension and fear burning off in the light of her daughter’s presence. “Coming right up. Okay if I send Daddy in with them?”
Maddie rolled her eyes as if to say of course it was okay.
Back in the kitchen, she sent Nick down the hall with a cookie delivery and checked to make sure that everyone had what they needed. The teapot hissed as it heated the water inside, and Tess was grateful to see that Lili already had put a tea bag in a mug for her and left it in front of her usual seat at the table.
“Audrey. Frank,” she said as she slid into her chair. “Thank you both for coming.”
Frank nodded, still pale. If he felt at all awkward about having made out with her at a party when she was still married to Nick, he didn’t show it. Instead, he glanced at the window over the kitchen sink. “You want to tell me what we saw just now, out there?”
“We’re not sure,” Tess replied.
“But it’s related to the Otis Harrison House somehow,” Lili added.
“It was a revenant,” Audrey said, slowly rotating her coffee cup in a circle on the table. “A dead person, but with a spirit still inside. Maybe the spirit of the dead man himself or maybe someone else’s.”
Frank stared at her. “Isn’t your job to say things like that don’t exist?”
“I have sev
eral jobs, Mr. Lindbergh. One of them is to evaluate situations in which someone has claimed the presence of something supernatural. Most of the time, those claims turn out to be either superstition or fraud or wishful thinking, because some people want to find ghosts in their houses. But I’ve never said things like that don’t exist. I know that they do.”
She’d been firm in her reply, even harsh, but now she faltered. Dropped her gaze.
“Never seen a revenant before. I’ve read about manifestations like that, but wasn’t sure they were really possible.”
“Audrey,” Tess said, “there’s something you should know.”
Nick had come back in and now they were all staring at her.
“The blindfolded man,” Tess said. “We’ve seen him before. Lili calls him the raggedy—”
“The raggedy man. I know.” Audrey shook her head. “Lili told me yesterday. Thing is, I’ve seen him before as well. Sunday morning, early. I was out for a run and I felt really terrible all of a sudden. Nauseous, like my stomach had just dropped into a pit. I threw up, actually. I saw him then, just for a second. When I looked back, he was gone. I thought … shit, I hoped I’d imagined him. Didn’t feel like myself for the rest of the day.”
Nick retrieved the steaming teapot and carried it to the table. “So what does this … dead thing … have to do with the doubles Lili and Tess have been seeing?”
Frank huffed and held up his hands. “Can we just … can you all start over? I just saw something my brain is telling me I could not possibly have seen.”
Audrey sipped her coffee. “You’re hiding something.”
As Nick poured her tea, Tess stared at her. “What?”
“Frank’s scared. We all are. But there’s something he’s not telling us. Not all of this is a shock to him,” Audrey said.
All eyes turned toward Frank.
Dead Ringers Page 17