by Lisa Unger
“But now she’s dead.”
“So presumably the Stratton-Ross estate will go to the twins.”
“But they’re only children. So right now probably those lawyers Piselli was talking about would be in charge of their trust.”
“So the lawyers have the most to gain.”
“Assuming that all of this comes down to money.”
“Doesn’t it usually?” said Dax.
Someone had said to Lydia not very long ago that it was not money but the love of money that was the root of all evil. She didn’t want to believe that … there was something so cheap about the concept that the human soul could be corrupted by something so fleeting, so ultimately unsatisfying as monetary wealth.
“Maybe it’s not about money. Maybe it’s about revenge,” said Lydia.
“The curse, you mean?” said Jeffrey.
“Yeah.” The quest for justice, no matter how twisted, was something that Lydia could understand better.
“So who’s invested in the fulfillment of the curse?” asked Jeffrey.
“Maura and Annabelle Hodge. The daughters of the daughters of Annabelle Taylor. Cops found that knife at the scene.”
Jeffrey shrugged. “Without prints or blood evidence. I mean, you could probably find a knife in our kitchen that was consistent with the knife that killed Richard Stratton.”
Lydia nodded. “But still, it’s something.”
They were quiet for a minute.
“If you ask me—” said Dax sullenly, “and you didn’t—whether it’s about the money or it’s about the curse, whether it’s Annabelle or Maura Hodge, or the goddamn ghost of whoever, there’s only one person left to get any answers from.”
They both looked at him.
“Julian Ross.”
• • •
Sitting on an orange plastic chair in the Payne Whitney waiting room, Lydia, in spite of everything, felt a strange lightness, like the relief that comes after the blinding pain of a migraine subsides.
She had come to Payne Whitney unaccompanied. And though it was a grim errand, the fact that she had traveled here not stalked by Jed McIntyre, not watched by the FBI, and not guarded by Dax and Jeffrey gave her a sense of freedom she didn’t remember feeling for years.
As she’d stepped off the train, moved through the platform, and jogged up the concrete steps to the street, she had the sudden thought: Jed McIntyre is dead. And something inside her shifted. She had the powerful sense that a higher justice had been served. The grief and numbness she’d been feeling wasn’t gone exactly, but she could see thin fingers of light splitting the gray she’d been dwelling beneath. Then she wondered, was it the satisfaction of a vengeance that made her feel this good—vengeance for her mother, for herself, for all his victims living and dead—or was it just relief? She looked into her own heart and didn’t find the answer. But she did realize that, for her, revenge had been a powerful motivator—love, even greater. And, sitting in the sterile clinic waiting room, that thought led her to draw the conclusion that love, revenge, and money were probably the most powerful drives she could think of, outside of survival. It applied to everyone she could think of, including Jed McIntyre. She wondered which of those things were at play in the Ross case; she was starting to suspect all three.
Every time Lydia had come to see Julian Ross, she seemed smaller and grayer. Her lips were cracked and her eyes were dull, side effects, Lydia imagined, of her medications. The woman who had turned into a demon before her eyes just days earlier seemed incapable of even sitting up straight. Still, a burly orderly stayed in the room during their interview this time.
“What do you want?” asked Julian, looking at her with darting, paranoid eyes.
Lydia sat down so that they were eye-level. She held eye contact and made sure her voice was clear and strong. “Listen, Julian. This is your last chance to play straight with me.”
Julian narrowed her eyes. “They sent you, didn’t they?”
“No, Julian, they didn’t. Listen to me,” she said, using the voice she would use to speak to a child. “The destroyers have your children. You need to tell me how to help them. Right now, before it’s too late.”
Dax was right. Julian was their only hope for answers, their only hope for a direction that might lead to Ford and the twins. Maybe, by speaking Julian’s language, she might get something that they could use.
But Julian stared blankly at Lydia, blinked her eyelids heavily, slowly, as though they were filled with sand. A long minute passed and Lydia wondered if she’d made a mistake. She looked into Julian’s eyes, searching for something there that she might appeal to, but they were flat and glassy.
“Your mother is dead and the twins are gone,” she said finally. “If you don’t help me, I can’t help find your children.”
She didn’t seem moved by the information, but something flickered on Julian’s face and then she rose and walked over to her bed, casting a glance at the guard by the door. She reached beneath her mattress and withdrew a large sketchpad. Some black ink pens clattered to the floor.
“She’s not allowed to have that,” said the orderly quickly, moving toward Julian.
“It’s okay,” said Lydia, reaching her hands out to Julian. “I’ll take it. Please.”
Julian handed it to her. “Now get out,” she whispered venomously. “I have nothing left to say.”
Remembering their last encounter, Lydia didn’t have to be told twice.
• • •
“I wondered when you’d find your way back to me,” he said, with just a hint of smugness. The gallery was empty and Orlando DiMarco was alone in his office. He’d risen to greet her, but she’d made it to his office before he’d reached the gallery floor. Lydia noticed that Julian Ross’s last canvas still leaned against the wall where she and Jeffrey had viewed it on their first visit.
“I thought it might be gone by now,” she said.
“No, there will be an auction when it goes on sale.”
“It’s not on sale yet?”
“No. Not yet.”
“What are you waiting for?”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. Maybe I’m having trouble parting with it. Afraid it might be her last. Believe me, I’m not very popular right now. There are a lot of very wealthy people who are dying to get their hands on this canvas. But I just …” His voice trailed off.
Lydia regarded him carefully. He was expensively dressed in a beautifully cut black suit, with a white collarless shirt. His dark, thick hair hung loose around his shoulders. In his handsome face, tanned dark brown, with a strong nose and thick red lips, she saw the lines of grief. It was a tightness at the corners of his mouth, a slight upturn of the tips of his eyebrows. She wondered, of the three major motivators she had recently been contemplating, which was his.
Lydia held up the sketchpad Julian had given her. He looked at her blankly for a moment and then seemed to recognize what she held.
“Where did you get that?” he asked, moving toward her quickly.
“Julian Ross gave it to me.”
“Why would she do that?” he said, and he looked hurt.
“Did you bring this to her?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “I smuggled it in the back of my jacket. They wouldn’t let her have any paper or pens. She was miserable. I brought her that and some charcoal pencils and some fine artists’ pens. I thought, at least then she could draw. You cannot separate an artist from her art. It’s the cruelest punishment, like cutting out someone’s tongue.”
“Because this is how she communicates.”
“Of course,” he said, as if she were some kind of philistine.
“I’m glad you see it that way. I was hoping you might have some insight into what she was trying to tell me in giving me these drawings.”
He looked at her and then down at the sketchpad as though it were an infant he believed Lydia might drop on its head.
“An artist’s paintings are like dreams … the symbols oft
en mean something only to her,” he said with a shake of his head. “Especially Julian’s work. Even she wasn’t always sure where those images came from.”
Lydia looked at him for a second and their eyes locked. In his face, she saw the same love she had seen when she first visited his gallery. Unrequited, she thought now. Maybe they’d been lovers once, as Ford had claimed. But Julian had never loved Orlando the way he loved her. Lydia could see the longing and the pain and she appealed to that part of him.
“But you know her, don’t you, Orlando? You’ve loved her for years.”
He looked at her, the exposure seeming to shame him. He lowered his eyes.
“It’s true,” he said slowly. “But even in love we don’t always know each other. Sometimes even less so.”
She walked over to a long table that stood covered with neatly kept bottles of paint, a jar of brushes, some folded tarps, a stack of palettes. The surface of the table was covered with thousands of drops of dried paint, leaving behind a multicolored pattern that was at once bumpy and smooth as glass. She lay the sketchpad down and opened the cover.
Outside Payne Whitney, she’d flipped through the sketchpad and saw a chaotic collection of nightmares, intricate and insane, a window into Julian Ross’s twisted psyche. But she also had the powerful sense that somewhere inside what she saw were the messages of a sane woman trying to escape her own diseased mind. She wanted to talk to someone who’d known Julian before she’d lost her mind. And she could only think of one place to go.
“Tell me what you see here, Orlando,” she said. “Tell me what you know. For Julian.”
He walked to stand beside her and she could smell the light aroma of his expensive cologne. He moved his hand and ran light fingers over the sketch. His nails were perfectly manicured. The delicate bones and thick veins of his hand danced beneath skin the color of caramel.
A naked woman lay sprawled in a sea of blackness, her hands reaching out to the image of two children who huddled together beneath a giant set of jaws. The woman’s eyes and face showed a kind of resignation, a hopelessness.
“She’s been stripped bare, left in the darkness. She’s lost her children to some danger and she feels sure she’ll never see them again. She’s never painted them before, the twins. She’s never painted anything that gives her joy, anything that she’s loved.”
He flipped the page to the image of a house. Lydia recognized it as the house in Haunted, twisted and bleeding, with fire leaping from its windows. It had the personality of pain, seemed to reach out as the fire consumed it. Drawn into the flames, the twins clung to each other, surrounded by a vast, living darkness writhing with demons. In their eyes was the reflection of the burning house.
“Hmm,” said Orlando.
“What?”
“This house has come up again and again in her work,” he said. Lydia tried to call to mind others of Julian’s paintings with which she was familiar and couldn’t remember seeing it.
“Nothing that has ever been sold or published,” said Orlando, as if reading her expression. “I’ve asked her about it. She said, ‘The past is immortal. It might be forgotten, but it never dies. It lives in us. It can live in the structures we build, in the children we bear.’ The house symbolized that idea for her.”
On the next page was the image of a man hanging by the neck from the landing above the foyer at the house in Haunted. He was young and beautiful, seemed to float in the air, the noose hanging just loosely about his neck like a scarf. His eyes were closed, his expression serene. Lydia recognized him as James Ross, the young man she’d seen in the photograph, not the monster in the large portrait that stood behind them. On the ground looking up at him was the image of a demon with wild eyes and claws, head thrown back in a violent roar. The demon’s scaled hands reached out toward James, but he was just out of reach.
“Her twin,” said Lydia.
“You know about her twin?” asked Orlando.
Lydia nodded.
“Then you know that’s him, too,” he said, using his eyes to gesture to the portrait behind them.
“Yes,” she said, thinking back to the night she came across his photograph in Haunted. “I figured it out eventually.”
“She never accepted his death,” he said, his voice sounding far away, contemplative. “She always believed she’d been lied to.”
“Why would anyone lie about that?” she asked.
“That’s what I asked her.”
“And what did she say?”
“She said she was sure she would feel it when he died,” he said with a mystified laugh. “And she never felt it. She believed he was still out there waiting for her.”
“She may have been right,” said Lydia. “I think I may have seen him.”
There was something then that came over Orlando. It was a kind of stillness, a waiting. Lydia saw him almost visibly stiffen. “Is that possible?” he asked, his voice almost a whisper.
“Anything’s possible, isn’t it?”
“But the body they found last year in Haunted. It was positively identified,” he said. He had the look suddenly of someone trying to appear nonchalant. She watched as a tiny muscle started to dance involuntarily at the corner of his eye.
Lydia shrugged. “Records can be falsified.”
“Could he be responsible for all of this?” he said, looking at Lydia with alarm.
“If he’s alive, it seems like a highly likely possibility.”
He seemed to turn the possibility over in his mind. He closed his eyes for a second. “It’s her worst nightmare realized,” he said.
“She’s afraid of him?”
“He tried to kill her and her mother when they were teenagers,” Orlando said, turning to look at her. “They put him away, but he escaped. She always believed that her brother was responsible for the murder of Tad Jenson.”
“But she never implicated him?”
“In spite of her terror of him, there’s a bond there that I could never understand,” he said.
She remembered what Julian had said about her brother, that he was her “angel,” always trying to protect her. You can never be sure with crazy people if what they said was the deepest truth or the most outrageous fantasy.
“Did she ever have any contact with him? Did she know where he was?”
He shook his head. “Not that I know of. She always said that she believed he was lying in wait for her to be happy again, and then he was going to tear her life apart. He’s like her bogeyman, you know. The embodiment of all her worst fears … about the world and about herself.”
“About herself?”
“That’s what she said. She never explained except to say that they were one … what he was, she was.”
Lydia shuddered as his words reminded her of Jed McIntyre. One mind, one heart.
They flipped through the rest of the images slowly, the burning house, the huddled children, the naked woman, the young beautiful James, and the monster were images that repeated over and over. Then, on the last page of the sketchpad, Lydia was surprised to see a drawing she’d missed the first time. Filling the page was a mass of curls, and the malicious stare of giant eyes. Smoke danced upward in rings from the bowl of a pipe. Delicately drawn into one of the smoke rings was the scene of the murder of Annabelle Taylor’s children that the librarian Marilyn Woods had described to Lydia. Five small corpses lay on the ground in a field of fire, as the figure of a man stood with a gun drawn. In another of the rings was an image of the twins lying lifeless on the ground before the burning house. Half the face on the page was that of Maura Hodge, the other half was Eleanor Ross. Julian had written, “Behold the Queens of the Damned and the havoc they have wrought on all of us.”
“Jeff, it’s Ford. Listen, Lydia was right. That DNA evidence from the Milky Way bar links whoever attacked her in the Ross home with someone present at the Jenson scene. I’m not sure what it means, but I’m heading up to Haunted. This can’t wait till tomorrow, especially with the twi
ns missing. I’ll keep you posted.”
As he’d listened to the message, Jeffrey had felt a surge of dread. He was relieved to have a lead on Ford, where he’d gone, and why; but it had been more than seventy-two hours since Ford had left that message. Jeffrey had lost the phone to Jed McIntyre and for all he knew it was lying somewhere in the tunnels. He hadn’t even missed it until he’d been wracking his brain, trying to figure out what Ford’s move would have been after leaving Donofrio, wondering what would have led him to take off, not letting anyone know where he was going. Out of desperation he’d called his own cell phone, hoping maybe there was a message there.
Jeffrey was certain now, as Lydia had been all along, that the answers to Richard Stratton’s and now Eleanor Ross’s murders, as well as the disappearance of the twins and Ford McKirdy, would all be found in Haunted.
“Don’t leave me here like this, man,” begged Dax, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. He sat on Lydia and Jeffrey’s couch, legs up on the ottoman, phone and remote control within easy reach. He looked pale and anxious, as if Jeff were leaving him on the battlefield to die.
“We’re only going to be a few hours, Dax.”
“Look,” he said, “I can help you.”
“You can’t walk, Dax,” Jeffrey said gently.
“I can walk,” he insisted.
Really, the truth was that he could hobble. With enough painkillers, Dax could get himself around a small area. But he had been instructed to stay off his feet to allow the partially severed tendons to heal properly. So Lydia had insisted that he stay with them in their downstairs bedroom until he could get around his house in Riverdale a little better. Dax had grudgingly agreed, though Jeffrey thought he was secretly glad for the offer. The three of them were close now, more so than they had been before everything went down. The things they had endured together had bonded them.
“Besides, you don’t need legs to fire a gun. Just prop me up in the backseat and I’m good to go.”
“It’s not going to be like that,” said Jeffrey, pulling on his leather coat. “You’d just be sitting uncomfortable in the car when you could be here resting. And there aren’t going to be any shootouts.”