The Darkness Gathers: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  She sat on the bed, sipping the hot, strong coffee, waiting for the bathroom to fill with steam, half-listening to the happy chatter of the morning show hosts on the television. She pulled open all the upstairs shades, so the room was flooded with the morning light. Lydia relished these minutes of peace, like she relished the thought of the hot shower that awaited her, knowing that they might be her last for a while. She concentrated on her breathing for a moment, centering herself. She should have gone for a run, but she just didn’t have it in her after the last few days. She reached for the remote and switched off the television, then turned on the radio.

  “Roxanne, you don’t have to put on the red light,” she sang in unison with Sting as she walked into the steamy bathroom, closing the door behind her.

  The people standing on the platform barely glanced at him as he lifted himself from the tracks. He ran across the tile floors and up the concrete steps, taking two at time. He was nearly breathless, every joint in his lower body screaming in pain as he ran back up Lafayette. He pulled his cellular phone out of his pocket and dialed their home number. “Please, God …” he whispered as the phone rang. “Please.” The machine picked up, and he heard Lydia’s voice as the simple message played: “We’re unavailable. Leave a message.”

  “Lydia,” he yelled, “pick up the fucking phone.” But she didn’t, and as he rounded the corner onto Great Jones Street, he could see that the door to their elevator vestibule was ajar.

  He wondered how she’d react when she saw him. Would she collapse? Would she scream? Would she act all tough and smart-ass, pretend he wasn’t the leading man in all of her worst nightmares? He couldn’t wait to find out, couldn’t wait to feel her writhing in his arms.

  The upstairs, he noted, was as tastefully decorated as downstairs. He bet the king-size four-poster bed had seen some serious action. The look on Jeffrey Mark’s face had been worth the risk he’d taken by following him to the subway; it was priceless: confusion, then disbelief, then horror, all within milliseconds as the train passed by. He laughed a deep, satisfying laugh. He took in all the details of the bedroom, the tousled sheets, the coffee cup on the nightstand, the suitcases standing by the closet door. There was a picture on the nightstand; he couldn’t quite make out the image.

  Jed McIntyre almost felt bad as he peered through his binoculars and saw Jeffrey burst into his bedroom. He was red in the face, his hair matted with sweat, his pants filthy with black dirt. Picking the street lock and leaving the door open in the elevator vestibule was a nice touch; it had probably sent the poor guy’s terror meter off the charts. Yes, he did feel bad for Jeffrey. After all, they both loved the same woman. And only one of them could have her.

  Lydia, wrapped in a plush pink towel, opened the bathroom door, releasing a plume of steam as Jeffrey came crashing through the door.

  “Jesus Christ, Jeffrey,” she yelled, “what are you doing? You scared the shit out of—” But the look on his face was enough to make her shut up and run over to him.

  “What? Jeffrey, what’s wrong?”

  He dropped to his knees and wrapped his arms around her thighs, resting his head on her stomach. He was breathing heavily, and holding on to her as if he were about to drown.

  “Oh, Jeffrey, what happened?” she said, dropping to her knees beside him. He looked down at her and took her face in his hands. She could hardly believe her ears when he said, “Jed McIntyre. I just saw Jed McIntyre. I thought … Oh God. Thank God.” He kissed her mouth and held her as if she had returned from the grave.

  chapter twenty-seven

  Lydia had never questioned the existence of God—though she questioned whether most religions had anything to do with God at all. She had never asked herself the question “Is there a God?” But rather, “What must he think of us?”

  It was not much of a faith. But it had always worked for her, had always helped her through the uncrossable spaces of her life. There was some force larger than she was, larger than the world she knew. Someday, it would all make sense.

  Today was not that day. But she felt that it was important not to overreact. It was very, very important that she sit still on the bed while Jeffrey, red-faced, vein bulging on the side of his neck, roared at whomever he had called on the phone. But he was far away, behind a kind of emotional glass. She just sat staring out the window, smoothing out the covers on either side of her with the flat of her palms. You opened the door again. You can’t be surprised when the monsters waiting outside walk in, she thought.

  Nearly seventeen years after her mother, Marion, was murdered, Lydia remembered her only in snapshots. The moments she held in her mind were blurred and mysterious, underexposed and grainy. Older women on a crowded subway platform, their black hair streaked with gray, could begin a slide show before Lydia’s eyes. A feverish memory of Marion leaning over her, concern wrinkling the corner of her eyes and drawing her mouth into a thin, tight line on the night that Lydia came down with chicken pox. Marion in round wire granny glasses, checking over Lydia’s homework under the orange light of the imitation Tiffany lamp that hung over their kitchen table, her face a mask of studious concentration. The rarer moments when she laughed with abandon, how she would throw her head back, her hair loose from its tight bun, her eyes glistening. And she could hear her mother’s voice inside her head. Of course, now it had mingled with her own voice and was sometimes indistinguishable from it. It was a strong and reliable combination. She often wondered if this voice was her mother’s, speaking to her from the world beyond. Watching her, guiding her. But she could never be sure.

  “She’s with you, Lydia. She will always be with you,” her grandmother had said over and over again since Marion’s death.

  But though Lydia could see her and hear her, she could never claim to have felt her. So many times she’d heard people who had lost loved ones say, “I can feel her inside me.” But try as she had, she could never feel the essence of her mother hovering over her in the way she might have imagined, had desperately wanted to. She had always been disappointed by that, always felt cheated in that way, always jealous of people who claimed that they carried their dead parents with them in their hearts somehow.

  There was a level of rage and fear in Jeffrey’s voice that Lydia had never heard before, and it drew her from her thoughts to focus on him. Jeffrey rarely lost his temper. And it always frightened Lydia when he did. Because if Jeffrey couldn’t control a situation, it generally meant that it couldn’t be controlled.

  He hung up the phone and looked at it for a second as if it were Jed McIntyre himself, hatred burning crimson on his cheeks. Then he picked the phone up and with deliberate intent ripped it from the wall and threw it out the bedroom door, where it then crashed down the spiral staircase. This seemed to spend him, and he sat deflated on the bed. Lydia slid over next to him and placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “They released him. He didn’t escape. They let him go.”

  “How is that possible? He wasn’t scheduled to have another release hearing until 2005. The last time, that director told you that he had about as much chance of being released as Charlie Manson.”

  “I don’t know. I can’t get anyone to give me any answers.”

  “Are you sure it was him?” she asked pointlessly.

  “I’ve never been more sure of anything.”

  The buzzer rang downstairs and both of them startled. Jeffrey pressed the intercom button next to the bedroom light switch. “Who the fuck is it?” he barked.

  “It’s Jacob. Can I come up? I heard the news and came right over.”

  Lydia and Jeffrey exchanged a look, both of them thinking the same thing: How could he have found out so fast?

  “Listen, I don’t want to be the one to say I told you so … but I told you so,” Jacob said to Jeffrey, stripping off his overcoat. He sat down on the plush chenille sofa, leaning back comfortably. Jeffrey tried to remember that they were still friends, but a fresh gnawing distrust of Jacob made him short and impati
ent.

  “What are you talking about now, Jacob?”

  Jacob looked at Jeffrey as if he needed to ride to school on a special bus—with some combination of disgust and pity. “I’m talking about Jed McIntyre. You don’t think this is a coincidence, do you?”

  “You think this has something to do with Tatiana Quinn?”

  “I think it has to do with Nathan Quinn.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Why do you think that, Jacob?” asked Lydia, who had appeared at the top of the stairs above them. Her hair was still wet; she looked tiny in one of Jeffrey’s gray Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirts and a pair of black leggings. She perched on the top step as if waiting to take flight. She hadn’t told Jeffrey about their conversation and probably wouldn’t. It would only make him angry, and it wouldn’t change the fact that Jacob disliked and distrusted her … and vice versa. “What would he have to gain?”

  “To keep you out of his affairs? As a distraction, to draw your attention from the investigation.”

  “That’s pretty extreme. Wouldn’t it have been easier just to have us killed?”

  Jacob shrugged. He couldn’t argue with that. “I’m not Nathan Quinn. I don’t know how his mind works. But I do know that not many people could have orchestrated something like this.”

  “So why do you care about any of this, Jacob? I mean, what does any of it have to do with you?” asked Jeffrey.

  “Because this is my firm, too, Jeff. Don’t you think this firm’s involvements affect me?” he asked, glancing at Lydia.

  “To be honest with you, Jake,” said Jeffrey, “I don’t know what to think about you these days. I mean, look at this from my perspective. I’ve been asking you for months to see the books and you’ve been stalling. I tried to log on to our accounting program and found that I needed a password that I didn’t have. Within a few hours of our landing in Miami, we were being followed. Someone was on top of every single move we made there, in spite of our only being in regular contact with the firm—namely, Craig—back in New York. Everyone we talked to is dead. Someone tried to set us on fire. You meet us at the airport with all these cryptic threats.

  “Now, all of a sudden, Tatiana is supposedly dead … her body found in some New York City crack den … just another runaway. Case closed, kids.… Walk away. And suddenly I’m remembering the whole George Hewlett case, things from more than a decade ago.”

  “It’s ancient history, Jeff,” said Jacob.

  Both Lydia and Jeffrey turned to stare at Jacob. He watched them both now from his seat across the wide room. Jeffrey got up and walked slowly over near the couch and sat in a chair facing Jacob.

  “What happened that night, Jacob?”

  “It was a hundred years ago.… I barely remember it,” he said with a forced laugh. “I thought Lydia was the one in charge of the far-fetched scenarios.”

  He laughed again, more uncomfortable by the second with both of their eyes on him. “You guys are serious? What? You think I had anything to do with everything that’s going on right now? What motivation would I have to hurt either one of you?”

  A convincing look of resigned hurt shadowed his features, as he leaned forward and reached into the briefcase he’d brought with him. He removed a bound stack of papers.

  “Jeff,” he said, “here is a summary printout of the last five years of accounting and the password so that you can log on and see all the details. I want you to know that I have never deceived you. I have never betrayed you. I have only, always, looked out for you.”

  “What’s going on, Jacob?” asked Jeffrey coolly, but there was sadness and uncertainty in his eyes.

  The two men looked at each other, and Lydia could see a battle being waged within each of them. They were men who used to trust each other, rely on each other, but the currents of their lives had swept them so far apart somehow that they were practically strangers.

  “Trust me when I tell you that literally nothing is what you think,” said Jacob slowly and softly. He didn’t look at either one of them, staring instead at some distant space between them. Lydia and Jeffrey both waited, looking at Jacob as he stood and pulled his coat back on.

  “Nathan Quinn has grown very powerful, too powerful. Steps are being taken to change that.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Jeffrey.

  “That’s already more than you should know,” he answered. “Just take my advice and stay out of this. Forget about Albania. Forget about Tatiana.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Lydia shouted, “I am so sick of all this crap. I feel like I’m in a rerun of The X-Files.”

  “Let me put it in plain English. You fucked around with Nathan Quinn and now he’s fucking around with you. It’s gone too far now and it’s beyond my powers to help either of you. I tried. Now, like I said before, you’re on your own.”

  He stood up to leave.

  Jeffrey frowned. “How do you know we’re going to Albania?”

  Jacob hesitated before saying, “If you don’t want me to know your travel plans, then don’t make your reservations via our Expedia account.”

  “I want you out, Jacob,” said Jeffrey.

  “I’m leaving.”

  “No, I mean out of the firm. You can’t be trusted anymore. Name your price. I’ll buy you out.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Were you a part of this? A part of Jed McIntyre being released?”

  He laughed with disdain. “Do you think I have that kind of power?”

  “How did you know what happened? How did you get here so fast?”

  “While you were ripping the director of the mental hospital a new asshole, he was sending me an E-mail to call you off. It wasn’t his fault. It all happened above his head.”

  “I don’t give a shit whose fault it was. Jed McIntyre’s out there now and he’s after Lydia.”

  “And now you have two psychos on your hands. That was some ‘vacation’ you took to Miami. Was Tatiana worth all of this?”

  Jeffrey and Jacob were standing inches from each other; Lydia was bracing herself for the conflict to come to blows. But Jeffrey backed away, his fists clenching. When he spoke again, his tone was quiet but lethal.

  “Get out, Jacob. Get the fuck out. And get a business lawyer, because I’m going to have you out on the street so fast, you won’t know what hit you. That’s my firm and don’t you forget it.”

  “We’ll see.”

  They were silent after Jacob had disappeared into the elevator. Lydia felt like their life was unraveling and she only had herself to blame. She wished that brown envelope had never dropped to the floor, that she’d never broken the seal. Was Tatiana worth all of this? Worth the reanimation of her worst nightmare?

  “Next time,” he said, sitting next to her on the couch, “I get to pick where we go on vacation.”

  chapter twenty-eight

  Jeffrey was smart enough to know that Lydia had a few things about herself that she kept from him. It didn’t bother him. He didn’t need to be inside her skin, inside her head every second … as long as he knew he was in her heart. And of that, he was sure. He had a few things that he kept to himself as well, though they were strictly professional.

  There was quite a bit, in fact, about the private investigation firm of Mark, Hanley and Striker that Lydia wasn’t privy to. She knew, for example, that the firm worked on cases with the FBI and the NYPD. But she didn’t know what those cases were and that people from the firm very often were brought in to go places where men carrying shields were not permitted to go. He’d shared a lot with her, probably some things that he shouldn’t have, but not everything. Just as she had sources and contacts that she had never revealed, so did Jeffrey.

  Sometimes the law imposed more shackles on its enforcers than it did on its offenders. Anyone on the job knew that. The price of living in a “free” society dictated that, as of a day ago, Jed McIntyre was a man who had served his debt to society. Obviously, something dirty, something evil had been
behind his release. The police were not going to be of any help to them. But he knew someone who would.

  He listened as Lydia moved around upstairs, packing for the trip they still had every intention of taking. He was surprised and relieved that she still wanted to go to Albania after hearing the news that Jed McIntyre was on the loose. A trip that had seemed pretty risky last night was probably the safest option for them right now. But Jed McIntyre could not be allowed to roam the streets.

  He picked up the phone, keeping his eyes on the staircase, and dialed. Dax Chicago didn’t so much answer the phone as groan into the receiver.

  “Dax?”

  “Yeah,” he answered, his heavy Australian accent dragging the word out to three syllables.

  “It’s Jeff Mark.”

  “Wuzup, mate?”

  “I have a job for you.”

  Lydia could hear Jeffrey talking on the phone downstairs, the authoritative rise and fall of his voice, his quick, hard sentences, and wondered to whom he was speaking. She had pulled down the shades again in the bedroom, conscious now of who might be watching her, and tried to shake the feeling that the happy life she and Jeffrey had constructed was shaking at its foundation and that she was to blame.

  She wasn’t exactly chastising herself; after all, she’d only done what she’d always done—followed her instincts, tried to help someone who had reached out to her. She wondered now if being herself meant that her life with Jeffrey would unravel, wondered how true a home they had made together. Or maybe she just wasn’t meant to be happy and safe; maybe that wasn’t her fate. Was she being forced to make a choice between the thing that drove her, her purpose, and their life together? No, that wasn’t fair. She could have both. She wasn’t sure she could live without either.