Smoke (13 page)

“Someone’s coming. He parked down the street and came up on foot; I didn’t see him at first,” said Dax. “Shit. He’s in the gate. Scary-looking dude.”

Jeff hung up and killed the flashlight. A second later, they heard footsteps downstairs. Firm and purposeful, they crossed the span of the downstairs room. Male, medium build, Jeffrey surmised. Expecting to hear someone climb the stairs, he drew the Glock he carried at his waist. He and Lydia retreated quickly and quietly to the separate far dark corners of the space, and waited. He felt the adrenaline start to pump.

But instead of feet on the stairs they heard a door open and then close hard. Then there was silence. They waited a second, two, then met in the middle of the room.

“I didn’t see a door downstairs,” whispered Lydia.

“Neither did I,” he said, moving close to her.

At the bottom of the stairwell, they crouched in the cover of the pitch darkness, waiting. They didn’t see the door that had slammed. There was no back exit, no closet, no other rooms.

“Maybe—” Lydia started to say in the darkness. But then a panel in the floor lifted and a rectangle of light slid across the wood surface. A large man in jeans and a long leather coat emerged from the floor. Before he closed the trapdoor behind him, Jeffrey saw his face in stark impressions. A hard, white face with a granite ridge for a brow, heavy dark eyebrows, a wide, stern mouth. His head was shaved, scalp shining in the yellow light from below.

He let the door drop loudly and he started toward the exit and then stopped, seemed to lift his nose to the air. He turned toward them. They were not ten feet from him, but in the pitch-black corner where they crouched, Jeffrey was relatively sure they could not be seen. Jeffrey heard rather than saw him take a step in their direction and he felt Lydia’s body tense behind him. She was wearing perfume, a light floral scent. He could smell it and he wondered if the man in leather could smell it, too. They both stopped breathing and the air felt electric with bad possibilities.

But the man turned suddenly, as if he’d heard something, and moved quickly toward the front door. They caught sight of him once more in the relative light of the outside and then he was gone, shoes knocking loudly on the stone stairs outside. Jeff took the phone from his pocket and dialed Dax.

“He’s coming back out. Follow him,” he said and hung up without waiting for a response. Lydia was already on her way to the trapdoor they’d seen. She dropped to a crouch and felt the floor with her hands, searching for a seam in the wood. It took them a few seconds to find the latch, sunken into the wood. Lydia tugged at it, but it proved too heavy.

“I can’t get it,” she said, breathless. She moved to the side and he took her place. It took all of Jeffrey’s strength to heave the door open, heavy as it was on stiff hinges, though the other man had seemed to manage it with little effort. When it was open, they peered over the edge. A bare bulb on the wall cast light on a narrow stone passageway surrounding a wooden staircase. They exchanged a look, both
remembering what had happened the last time they dipped below the surface into tunnels beneath. Then they headed down anyway.

L
ydia felt the adrenaline of discovery flooding her system, as well as the exuberance of hope. Perhaps finding Lily would be as easy as opening this door. But a dark current of fear ran beneath her optimism. Perhaps finding Lily
would
be as easy as opening this door. Jeffrey worked the lock as she shone the flashlight beam, and after what seemed like an hour—but was really just a few minutes—they both heard a solid click and the door swung open.

Her heart sank with disappointment as they stepped through the door into an empty room containing a cot and what looked like hospital equipment—a heart monitor, a metal tray empty of instruments, and a ventilator. The room was windowless. Drywall had been erected to make the room seem more like a hospital room and there was an odor of antibacterial cleanser, but beneath it all Lydia could smell the decay and rot of old wood. The place made her nervous; nothing good could happen in a room like this. She was sure of that, if nothing else.

“What are we looking at here?” asked Jeffrey, walking around the room inspecting the machines, the space under the bed.

Lydia shook her head slowly. “I have no idea. But I don’t like it.”

“And what was he doing in here?” asked Jeff.

She took her cell phone out of her pocket and thought about taking a few pictures of the room, the hallway leading to the room. But then she realized that they were in the dark except for the beam of their flashlight and didn’t have a flash.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Jeffrey after a minute of looking around and seeing nothing further. “I wouldn’t want to be trapped in here if that guy comes back. And I’m feeling claustrophobic.”

Jeffrey was a tough guy, but in small spaces and airplanes he had to be medicated. Vodka usually did the trick. She stood and walked toward the door. She made a last sweep of the room with her flashlight. Something glinted beneath its beam.

“What was that?” she said, having just caught it out of the corner of her eye as she turned to leave the room.

“What?”

He took the light from her and walked over to the corner of the room. He shone the beam and saw only piles of dust and dirt that had been swept to the edge of the room with a broom and left there. He could see the tracks of the broom bristles, the straight edge to the dust piles. He reached down into the dirt and came back with something delicate and pink. A heart-shaped gem, small in his palm but big enough to be expensive as far as jewels went. He handed it to Lydia and shone the light on it; the gem glittered brilliantly in her hand.

“Wow,” said Lydia, her eyes widening.

“What?”

“It’s a pink diamond,” she said, turning the stone in her hand. “Do you know how much this is worth?”

“It could just be glass or crystal,” he said.

“Look at the brilliance, the fire inside of it. It’s a diamond, trust me,” she said. “This is one of the rarest stones in the world. Less than one tenth of one percent of diamonds can truly be classified as pink.”

He stared at her. “For someone who doesn’t like diamonds, you seem to know a lot about them.”

“Just because I didn’t
want
a big diamond, doesn’t mean I don’t
like
them,” she said. She turned those gray eyes on him. “Do you know how many people die in those mines every year? Whole cultures are oppressed and enslaved by the diamond mining industry.”

“I know, I know,” he said, trying not to roll his eyes. “You mentioned it.”

He’d been disappointed when she said she didn’t want a diamond for their engagement last year. She’d lost so much, been ravaged by so much pain and loss; he’d just wanted to give her something that promised a brighter future for them both, something glittering and precious, something only he could give to her.

But it was hard to give Lydia anything; she was intensely independent, had her own money and managed most of his money besides. What she needed or wanted, she generally got for herself. Though she loved beautiful things, he knew they didn’t mean anything to her. They were just objects.

“You’ve been manipulated by the media to think that all women
need a diamond as proof of their husband’s love and devotion,” she’d told him. “All I need is to look into your face and I
know
. Besides, the fact that you put up with all my crap is proof enough.”

So they’d settled on matching wedding bands, sapphires in hers being the only flourish she wanted. He’d thought of surprising her with a diamond, but in the end he couldn’t decide if that was just his impulse to control her, to give her what he thought she should have rather than what she wanted and needed.

“What’s it doing here?” she said, gazing at it. “Who would just leave this here?”

“Do you recognize it as something Lily wore?”

She shook her head. “Not that I noticed. And I think I would have noticed.”

He took it in his hand. “It doesn’t have any hardware on it that indicates it was part of a piece of jewelry.”

“No,” she said. “It has to be more than a carat. Unbelievable.” She took it from him, wrapped it in a tissue she took from her pocket, and placed it in her coat. She took a long look around the room.

“Do you think she was down here?” she asked, not really expecting an answer.

“I really hope not.”

T
hey didn’t realize how bad the air had been inside until they were outside again, drawing the crisp cold night into their lungs. They hustled down the stairs and Dax was waiting in the Rover. They piled in, Jeffrey in the front, Lydia in back.

“Did you follow him?” asked Jeffrey, when Dax started the car.

“Yeah, I did,” he said, moving around the corner. “He was parked over here.”

Dax pointed as they passed a spot about a tenth of a mile from the empty house.

“He got into a large white van. It had a logo on it that I didn’t recognize, it looked like a sun with some kind of geometric design in its center. I followed him up this way.”

They wound up a dark road that edged the subway yard, where
sleeping trains reflected the light from streetlamps off their silver roofs. A thin moon revealed itself as dark clouds drifted slowly in the night sky. They wound past opulent homes behind stone gates, through a small town center, and eventually to streets that bordered the Henry Hudson Parkway. Dax slowed down but didn’t stop as they passed a building that looked like a church. It was a brown clay structure with a vaulted roof and short stout bell tower containing no bell. Within the center of the triangular roof was a stained glass version of the logo Dax had described. Lydia could just make out the sign that hung above the door. It read:
THE NEW DAY
. Something about it sent a cold finger tracing down her spine.

“We could just walk up and knock on the door,” suggested Jeffrey. “Start asking questions about Lily and Mariah.”

“Or try to get in the back?” said Lydia, itching a little to get inside the brown building that tried hard to look like a church. Something about it felt like a dare to her.

Jeffrey shook his head. “Breaking and entering an abandoned building is one thing.”

“Breaking into an inhabited one takes research,” said Dax. They pulled away slowly, Lydia looking at the building until it was out of sight.

They’d headed back to Dax’s place. From the outside, Dax’s Riverdale home looked like a hundred other big Victorian houses in the tony suburb. But the inside was mostly bare of furniture, except for a big leather recliner parked in front of a giant flat-screen television that received about five million channels and a DVD player in the den. There was a giant wrought-iron four-poster bed in an upstairs room, with another flat-screen hanging on the wall.

His basement was a maze of rooms—one a weapons armory filled with enough fire power to equip an army; one with a cruel metal table, complete with five-point restraints; yet another adjacent to a second room connected by a two-way mirror. Lydia never tired of questioning him about these things, but he never gave her a straight answer. But she wasn’t interested in the mystery that was Dax tonight. She Googled.

“Welcome to The New Day,” said Lydia out loud. Dax and Jeffrey came to stand behind her where she stood at the kitchen counter tapping away on Dax’s laptop.

“Damn. I love the Internet,” said Dax.

The screen flashed with the icon they’d seen on the stained glass window of the church. Another image flashed, this one of smiling people, one white, one black, Arab, Asian, dressed in white tunic shirts and blue jeans, arms linked, feet bare. That faded and was replaced with an image of two men holding hands, then two women with their heads together and laughing eyes. A young Latina girl held a baby in her arms and wore an expression of joy. The gallery of images kept fading into one another.

“When did churches start acting like country clubs where only the elite among us are welcome?” Lydia read. “Jesus didn’t judge, nor did Buddha, nor did Allah. So why do our major religions today seem to create so much pain, so much violence? The Middle East, abortion clinic bombings, Catholic priests violating our children: these are all symptoms of institutions that are diseased at their core, institutions created to control, to alienate, to steal, and to ultimately divorce us from God rather than bring us home.

“But there is another way. A New Day has dawned.”

“I’m convinced,” said Dax. “Sign me up.”

“Me, too,” said Jeffrey.

“Don’t you find,” Lydia went on reading, “that no matter how much you accomplish, it always feels like something is missing? That you’re always looking on to the next thing you think will
finally
make you happy.”

“Well, no, not really,” said Dax.

“Yeah, no, not so much,” said Jeffrey.

“As you accrue your wealth, amass possessions, spend endless hours pursuing your career, obsessing over your physical appearance, isn’t there something deep within that nags at you? Isn’t there a voice that whispers:
Is this all there is?
”

“Wow. Other people are hearing voices?” said Dax. “I’m so relieved.”

“Dax, will you shut it? This is serious,” asked Lydia without turning to look at him. He made a face at her behind her back. Jeffrey rolled his eyes.

“Do you find that you hold onto grudges and pain year after year?
Perhaps you’ve suffered a tragedy, a terrible loss, and you find you just can’t move on. Or do you find that your inner life is a broken record of angry and hateful thoughts, not just about others but about
yourself
. It’s not your fault. You have been programmed to think that way. From the day you were born, you have been socialized to be dissatisfied. Why? Because as long as you are dissatisfied with your life and yourself, divorced from your spiritual center, you will continue to
consume
. Because in this society, happiness is always one Mercedes, one face-lift, one diamond ring away.

“But there is another way. A New Day has dawned.”