by Lisa Unger
“I’ve heard that before,” Dax said with a snort. “That’s why you have the Desert Eagle, then?”
“Seriously, we’ll be back in a couple of hours. We’ll call if we’re going to be late.”
Dax turned on the television and tuned Jeffrey out. He really wasn’t handling his recovery period very well.
“Do you need anything before I go?” asked Jeffrey, starting to feel like the nanny to a difficult child. “I have to meet Lydia.”
“I’m fine,” Dax said sullenly. “I’ll just sit here like a completely useless turd until you get back.”
“Cheer up, man,” said Jeffrey, patting Dax on the shoulder. “We’ll be back before you know we’re gone.”
He put in a quick call to Malone and Piselli to let them know about Ford’s last message and headed out the door.
chapter forty-one
Maybe it was because snow threatened, turning the sky a moody gray and black. Or maybe it was the time Lydia spent with Orlando probing the depths of Julian Ross’s twisted psyche. But on crossing into the Haunted city limits, the town felt unwelcoming to the point of menace. It seemed emptier, almost deserted, not that it had been a bustle of activity before. But something about it now had the air of abandonment. The depressed little Main Street, which on their first visit had been more or less innocuous, if approaching dilapidation, seemed … haunted. As they pulled off of Main and up the winding roads to the outskirts of town, the black dead trees rising up on either side warned them away with branches reaching like witch’s fingers into the sky.
They pulled the Kompressor off the main road and through the open gate that led to the Hodge house. At the end of the drive, they came to a stop behind a black-and-white prowler that sat in front of the porch where they’d first seen Maura Hodge with her shotgun and Dobermans. They climbed out of the car and Lydia could see by the tilt of his head that the cop sitting in the car was dozing.
“I’m not sure this is what Malone and Piselli had in mind when they said the Hodge residence was under surveillance,” Lydia said as they approached the driver’s side of the squad car.
Jeffrey tapped on the window and the cop awoke with a startled snort. He looked around for a few seconds, disoriented, and then rolled down the window. A mingling scent of body odor and stale coffee wafted out into the cold air.
“This is a crime scene,” said the cop. He was young, red-faced, with a bristle of strawberry blond hair on his head. He had a sleep crease on his cheek where he’d obviously rested it against the door as he napped. His gold nameplate read REED.
“NYPD Detective Malone was supposed to call with clearance,” said Jeffrey, holding out his identification.
The cop looked from Jeffrey to Lydia with suspicion but then reluctantly pulled the radio from its hook on the dash and muttered into the mouthpiece unintelligibly. He waited, silent, not looking at them, while the radio crackled with static and other communications.
Lydia looked up at the house and remembered the last time they’d been there. She remembered the noises upstairs she’d heard when they’d interviewed Maura, how Dax had seen a figure in the upstairs window. The thought made her skin tingle. The windows were dark now, had that air of desertion like the rest of the town.
“Forty-one, forty-one,” the radio yelled.
Reed grabbed the radio and seemed to puff up with self-importance. Lydia noticed that his fingers were long and girlish in their shape and apparent softness.
“Forty-one,” he said into the mike.
“Clearance granted for Mark and Strong.”
“Ten-four.”
“You can go in,” he said, friendlier now that they had been cleared. “Holler if you need anything.”
“Thanks,” said Jeffrey.
The smell that Lydia remembered from their first visit seemed to have staled and solidified. She felt the same swelling of her sinuses just seconds after stepping though the door. A staircase to her left led into darkness.
“Let’s split up,” she said. “I’ll head upstairs.”
Jeffrey looked at her and flashed on the attack in the basement of the Ross house. The habits of the last few months, the feeling that someone always had to be with her because of Jed McIntyre, were dying hard.
“Okay,” he said with effort.
Lydia smiled at him, squeezed his hand. “I’ll holler if I need anything.”
The stairs groaned beneath her weight and the wood felt like it had a bit too much give. But she made it to the top of the stairs without falling through. She pushed the door open to the immediate right of the landing and flipped on the light. It was totally bare, the windows boarded up. She walked across to a closet and saw only a single wire hanger lonely on a mauve tension rod.
Two other rooms she entered were identically empty, though the rest of the windows were free of plywood. Lydia walked down the hallway over sagging wood floors, her footfalls sounding loud to her own ears. At the end of the hall, she turned the brass knob of one of the two remaining bedrooms. Here the smell was more powerful than anywhere else in the house, some combination of mold and dust, maybe wood rot.
The room was full of junk. A blue bicycle with rusted handlebars and a missing front wheel leaned against the wall. A Singer sewing machine, its plastic case yellowed and cracked, sat atop a rickety wood table. The fading light outside struggled in through windows that were opaque with grime. Lydia flipped the light switch and a bulb hanging from a wire, naked of fixtures, sizzled to life, albeit dimly. It flickered as she moved through the stacks of junk. Ripped and soiled clothes—a man’s gray wool overcoat with the pockets torn out, a flowered housedress covered with dark red stains, a child’s red corduroy jumpsuit cut with scissors—were piled randomly about the space. A tower of old record albums teetered in a corner. It was a big room, maybe four or five hundred square feet, and Lydia moved through the maze of junk.
One of the major principles of good Feng Shui is to clear all spaces of clutter. Clutter represents stale energy. A person who feels comfortable in clutter is the kind of person who holds on to the past, can’t let go. Lydia was not surprised to see a room like this in Maura Hodge’s home. Maura could hold a grudge … even one that wasn’t necessarily her own. Righteous anger like that was addictive; it allowed a person to stagnate, wallow in her contemplation of injustice, spend all her energy seeking revenge and never for a second thinking that there might be another way to live. Lydia herself had been guilty of this for many years.
Something in the far corner of the room was covered with a white sheet. As she approached, a gust of wind traveled through the house with a low groan. Lydia felt a little flutter of fear and was glad when a second later she heard Jeffrey’s footfalls on the stairs. She’d had too many people leaping out of the dark at her in the last several days; she was getting a bit skittish.
“Where are you?” he called.
“The room at the end of the hall.”
“Find anything?” he said as he entered.
“Not yet,” she said, walking over to the sheet and yanking it.
The sheet came down in a cloud of dust to reveal a bookcase filled with the same leather-bound volumes Lydia remembered seeing at the Haunted Library. She scanned the titles embossed in gold on the bindings.
“Christ,” said Jeffrey. “How many volumes could you fill with the history of Haunted?”
“Looks like about thirty. Three centuries’ worth.”
The books, all titled History of Haunted, New York, were shelved in order by decade dating back to the 1700s and ending in the early 1900s. Some of them were slim, no thicker than a hundred pages.
“Fascinating.”
“You know,” Lydia said, “all these books have exactly the same binding. So did all the books in the Haunted Library.”
“So?”
“When’s the last time you were in a library and all the books were the same?”
“I haven’t been in a library since Quantico,” he said with a shrug. “In fa
ct, I’m not sure I even remember how to read.”
She picked a book off the shelf at random and turned to the title page.
The History of Haunted, New York
1800–1810
by
Maura Hodge
“Voodoo priestess-slash-author,” said Jeffrey, leaning over Lydia’s shoulder.
“Looks self-published.”
“Didn’t Eleanor say that Maura had been commissioning writers and historians to document the history of Haunted?” said Jeffrey.
“Yeah, I guess she’s been publishing the work as well. Or at least binding it. That must be why all the books have the same package.”
Lydia grabbed another volume and saw that it, too, was written by Maura Hodge. In fact, after a few minutes of inspection it appeared that Maura had written them all.
“Wow, that’s stamina for you,” said Jeffrey.
“No. That’s obsession.”
“She’s obsessed with Haunted? Doesn’t seem like much of an obsession.”
“With the past. Remember how Ford said that the person who killed Tad Jenson and Richard Stratton was enraged? And how Maura’s grudge was over one hundred and fifty years and had nothing really to do with her immediate world so she couldn’t muster the rage it took to commit those crimes?”
“Yeah.…”
“Well, look at this. I mean, to write all these books, she must have lived for this town and everything that happened here. She must think about it every day. For Maura Hodge, the past is right now. It’s more present for her than the present, living in this place, isolated from the world, harboring her grudge against Eleanor and the Ross bloodline, planning her vengeance for Annabelle Taylor. For Christ’s sake, she named her daughter after Annabelle.”
“So … what? Because she wrote a few books that means she killed Tad Jenson, Richard Stratton, Eleanor Ross, and took Lola and Nathaniel?”
“Or her daughter did. She must have been fed that hatred like mother’s milk.”
Jeffrey could hear that edge in Lydia’s voice that brooked no argument.
“I don’t know,” he said anyway. “It seems weak.”
Lydia shrugged and crouched down, looking at the books on the bottom shelf. She slipped one out and stood, flipping it open to the title page:
“ ‘The Legend of Haunted, New York: The Murder of Innocents, by Maura Hodge,’ ” she read out loud. She turned the page and saw the dedication: “To Paul, the only pure soul.”
“Who’s Paul?” asked Jeffrey.
“When we were here last, we talked to her about Paul—Eleanor’s brother, remember? She said something like: ‘He was the only one of them that was any good.’ Remember that? Remember how soft and wistful her voice became?”
It was a fairly light volume and Lydia flipped through, scanning the pages, with Jeffrey looking over her shoulder. She read over the legend as Marilyn Woods had told it to her. Much of the text was rambling, clearly unedited, with poor grammar, fraught with typos. There were some crude line drawings of Hiram and Elizabeth, of the Ross house, of the shack where Annabelle had lived with her five children. There was a striking drawing of Annabelle Taylor and Austin Steward, the lines dark and dramatic, Annabelle’s hair a wild mane of black curls much like Maura’s. Lydia came to the final chapter, called “The Curse.”
The curse of Annabelle Taylor is alive and flowing through my veins. For years, I was electric with the purpose of continuing Annabelle’s quest for vengeance. But I grew weak when J left me. I thought that they had won and I had lost everything. I felt the cold disapproval of Annabelle herself, felt her anger in my blood. She hated me and my weakness so much that she took my only child from me. I wanted to die in my failure. Then a miracle occurred.
On a night in the fall when the harvest moon hung bloated in the sky, much like the night that Annabelle lost her children, Austin Steward came to me. And he made love to me as he had made love to Annabelle; he said her name over and over. Nine months later I gave birth to my only daughter. I named her Annabelle.
“Okay,” said Jeffrey. “So Maura thinks that the ghost of Austin Steward visited her and impregnated her with Annabelle.”
“It would appear that way,” said Lydia.
“There must be something in the water in this town. These people are nuts.”
“Who do you think she’s talking about when she writes, ‘when J left me’?”
Jeffrey considered it. “I have no idea, and unfortunately, everyone who might be able to tell us is either dead, missing, or nuts.”
“Not quite everyone.”
“I very nearly lost my job after your last visit, Ms. Strong. I’m afraid I have nothing left to say to you.”
“Ms. Woods, with two dead bodies, a missing detective, and two missing children, I’m afraid you don’t have much of a choice.”
“You’ve come to the wrong place,” said the librarian. “I don’t know anything that’s going to help you.”
“Then tell me who does.”
The librarian shook her head hard from side to side and pressed her mouth into a thin, hard line.
“Where’s your boss?” probed Lydia. “Where’s Maura Hodge?”
“I have no idea.”
“You are aware, Ms. Woods, that if you try to impede the progress of this investigation and we later learn that you knew something that you didn’t reveal, you could be charged as an accessory to murder?”
Jeffrey turned so that Marilyn Woods wouldn’t see him roll his eyes. Lydia’s statement, of course, was a lie. It would probably have been a lie even if she was a cop. It had sounded pretty convincing, though; he’d give her that.
“Don’t give me that crap,” said Marilyn. “I watch television. I know my rights.”
Jeffrey heard Lydia sigh. She was dwarfed by the large desk that Marilyn sat behind, which elevated her by about two feet above Lydia. The librarian stared down at Lydia behind thick glasses and a hard expression that seemed as immovable as stone. She looked more like a judge than a bookworm.
“I thought if anyone could be counted on to help us find the truth, it would be you, Marilyn.”
She’d shifted flawlessly from intimidation to manipulation, but it hadn’t chiseled even a chip from Marilyn’s expression.
“You’re more worried about your job than you are about the lives of two innocent children?” Lydia pressed, her voice a combination of disgust and disapproval.
The first crack in her indifferent façade appeared as Marilyn’s face flushed red.
“I don’t know anything. I told you,” she said, her tone somewhat less emphatic and her voice catching at the end.
But Lydia backed off. She placed a business card on top of the desk.
“When your conscience catches up with you, give me a call on my cell,” she said. “In the meantime, we’ll be giving your name to the NYPD. Expect a visit.”
This was another lie, but it hit its mark. As Lydia and Jeffrey walked toward the door, the librarian called them back.
“Wait,” she said.
They stopped and turned to face her.
“What I know … it’s just gossip.”
“Let us decide,” said Lydia, walking back. The librarian walked to the door and locked it, turning around a sign that read BACK IN FIVE MINUTES though it was well after dark and there didn’t appear to be an especially high patronage of the Haunted Library. She went to her office, beckoning Lydia and Jeffrey to follow.
“Well, no one knows where Maura has gone. I’ll tell you that much,” said Marilyn, seating herself behind the desk. Lydia sat on the sofa, and as was his habit, Jeffrey stood by the door.
“It’s about Maura and Eleanor. There’s a bit more to the hatred between them than just the curse. I heard that Eleanor had been killed and it made me think about the past.”
Lydia waited while the woman seemed to be composing herself. Marilyn sighed heavily and seemed unsure as to whether she should go on.
“And …” said Lydia.
“Jack Proctor and Maura Hodge were lovers,” she finally said in a whisper, as if someone might overhear.
“So that was the ‘J’ she referred to in her book?” asked Lydia.
Marilyn nodded. “They were high school sweethearts and everyone thought they would get married. But in the end, he succumbed to pressures from his family and married Eleanor Ross instead. Maura, because she had Haitian blood in her veins, was thought to be an inappropriate wife for Jack, who was the sole heir to his family’s considerable fortune.”
“That would be another reason for Maura to hate Eleanor. A more contemporary reason,” said Lydia, looking at Jeffrey.
“Yes. And it didn’t end there. After Jack and Eleanor were married, he continued his affair with Maura,” she said. Then she shook her head and added with a cluck of her tongue, “Everybody knew.
“But when Eleanor became pregnant, Jack ended the affair with Maura. Unfortunately, Maura was pregnant, as well. She paraded about town, telling anyone who would listen that she was having Jack Proctor’s child. It was a humiliation for everyone. But Maura’s child was stillborn. Eleanor gave birth to Julian and James. Jack never saw Maura again. And five years later, he was murdered.
“Everyone suspected Maura,” said Marilyn. “Even after Eleanor was accused and went to trial, people still believed it was Maura, that it had something to do with the curse.”
“Eleanor said that Maura wanted people to believe that,” said Lydia, remembering her last conversation with Eleanor. “That she used it to hurt Eleanor and the children even after Eleanor had been acquitted.”
“She told anyone who would listen that it was the curse of Annabelle Taylor,” said Marilyn. “Even though it made her an outcast, as well. She didn’t care, anything to hurt Eleanor.”
“And all that money … from the Proctor estate?”
“Went to Eleanor, James, and Julian, I assume. Now just Julian, I guess. James Ross’s body was found at the Ross house last year.”
“Combine that with the Jenson and Stratton money, not to mention Julian’s own fortune, and we’re talking about a huge pile of cash,” said Jeffrey.