Strong 03 - Twice (22 page)

“They’re my associates,” said Lydia vaguely, but looking Maura straight in the eye. You couldn’t give an inch to a woman like Maura Hodge, otherwise she’d bulldoze right over you. Anyone could see that. Lydia could also see that she was mostly bark. Though she couldn’t speak for the Dobermans lying on the porch behind Maura, their black and rust coats gleaming in the rays of sun that sliced
through the tree cover like fingers reaching down from heaven. They looked a little lazy, though. They hadn’t even raised a head at her arrival.

“Now, I’ve had two calls. One from Marilyn telling me you are a writer interested in the Ross case. And one from Henry Clay telling me that your ‘associates’ here are investigators. Which is it?”

“A little of both,” said Lydia.

If Lydia had to imagine what the descendant of an angry voodoo priestess might look like, Maura came pretty close. Generations of mixed races had lightened her skin to a coffee-and-cream color, but her eyes were as black as rage itself and they fairly glowed with intensity. The burden of a lifetime of bitterness seemed to have bent her back into a permanent slump. Her mouth was a hard cold line that looked as though it might never have smiled or spoken words of love.

Lydia approached the woman and reached out her hand. In a heartbeat, the dogs were on their feet, teeth bared, emitting low growls of warning.

“Easy, boys,” said Maura lightly, and the three resumed their reclined positions, reluctantly. Lydia began to breathe again. “Now call
your
dog off,” said Maura. Lydia turned to see that Dax had managed to draw his gun. How he’d done it so quickly, she couldn’t imagine. Jeff hadn’t even managed to get out of the car yet. Jeff and Dax looked more scared than she was.

“Easy, tiger,” said Lydia to Dax.

“I hate fucking dogs,” said Dax, lowering his weapon, staring at the beasts with suspicion.

“I’m sure they feel the same way about you,” said Maura. She turned and walked into the old house, her dogs at her heels. The three visitors stood for a second. Jeffrey looked to Lydia and she shrugged. The air was growing colder and Lydia could feel her cheeks and the tip of her nose going pink from the chill.

“I’ll stay with the car,” said Dax, getting into the driver’s seat
and starting the engine as though he thought they might need to make a quick getaway. Lydia thought he was just afraid of the dogs.

“He just doesn’t like things he can’t intimidate,” Lydia whispered to Jeff.

“Who does?” answered Jeff with a shrug.

There was something rotten about the inside of Maura Hodge’s home. There was an air of neglect, visible in the dingy walls and dusty surfaces. Bits of grit crackled beneath Lydia’s feet as they stepped onto the creaking floorboards of the foyer. A chandelier looked a bit less stable than it should. The gilt frame on a mirror across the entranceway was chipped, the glass foggy. And there was an odor. Or maybe a mingling of odors … mold, dirt, moisture trapped in wood. Lydia couldn’t place the smell exactly, but her sinuses began to swell and a headache debuted behind her eyes. By the time they’d followed Maura in through the front door, she was nowhere in sight. They followed the sounds of the dogs’ collars and their nails scratching on the floor through a dim hallway. Lydia looked around for a light switch but saw that the fixtures were bare of bulbs. Above their heads they briefly heard what could have been footsteps, but the sound was gone as quickly as it came. Lydia wasn’t positive it wasn’t just the house settling.

“Does someone else live here with you, Ms. Hodge?” asked Lydia as they entered a large sitting room where a fire burned in the hearth and Maura sat on a high-backed dark wood chair, her gun across her lap.

“I thought you wanted to talk about the Rosses,” she said, looking at Lydia with a kind of sneer that may have been her natural expression.

Lydia sat on the couch across from the woman, though she hadn’t been invited to, and Jeffrey stood beside her. “Police Chief Clay claims that there’s bad blood between you and Eleanor Ross. Is that right, Ms. Hodge?”

The woman laughed a little. It was kind of a verbalization of her
permanent sneer, accompanied by a shake of her head. “I sincerely hope you have not come here to talk about that stupid curse,” she said.

“In fact—”

“Because I’ll tell you right now that it’s pure bullshit.”

Lydia felt like they were sitting in Dracula’s parlor, as Gothic manor was the general decorating theme of the room. A dark red wall-to-wall carpet was badly in need of a vacuuming and steam clean. The gigantic fireplace was topped by an elaborately carved maple mantel where a wrought-iron candelabra sat, its many white candles nothing but melted wax that had been allowed to drip carelessly on the wood and on the hearth below like stalactites. The feet on the overstuffed red and gold brocade sofa and chairs, antiques that Lydia couldn’t name, were lions’ paws. A beautiful rolltop desk made of a highly varnished wood nestled in a dark corner and was covered in ledger books, letters, all manner of papers. Lydia’s fingers practically itched to rifle through the piles of documents.

“Marilyn didn’t seem to think so,” said Lydia.

“It’s a ghost story, Ms. Strong. An urban—or maybe in this case a small town—legend.”

“Most legends have some element of truth to them,” said Jeffrey.

“I’m not saying the history is false,” said Maura, reaching to a standing ashtray to her right and retrieving a pipe that rested there. She tapped out some stale tobacco from the bowl. “I’m saying that the matter of the curse is merely town gossip.”

She removed a velvet pouch from the pocket of her skirt and pinched out some tobacco. She put the pipe to her lips and lit it with a small gold lighter. Lydia could see that her fingers were yellowed and the nails short and cracked.

“And yet the men that marry the Ross women do seem to fall on some bad luck, don’t they?” said Lydia flatly.

For the first time, Maura Hodge smiled. “I’m afraid I can’t explain that.”

“But it amuses you?”

“They reap what they sow,” she said, leaning back in her chair. Lydia could see that Maura Hodge was not a kind woman, that the heavy burden of hatred she carried had made her cold. The tobacco was a pungent cherrywood and the smell was making Lydia nauseous. Or maybe it was the company.

“So there’s no curse. But you
do
hate the Ross family? Why?”

Again there was a noise from upstairs. She saw Jeffrey look up at the ceiling from the corner of her eye. Even one of the Dobermans, who had settled themselves at Maura’s feet, pricked up his ears and then emitted a small whine.

“It might be hard for someone like you to understand,” Maura said to Lydia in a mildly condescending tone, smoke filling the air around her, dancing like thin ghosts in the light shining from a lamp beside her. “But when you come from a family of slaves, generally you don’t find yourself overly fond of people who descend from a family of slave owners.”

“But, according to Marilyn, you descend from both.”

A look of annoyance flashed across Maura’s face, as if she resented someone trying to talk her out of her hatred. “My father and mother loved each other, Ms. Strong. But any white blood in my mother’s veins got there through rape, slave owners raping their female slaves. That kind of crime, that kind of injustice … let’s say you don’t just forget it.”

“So that’s why you disliked Eleanor Ross?”

“That and the fact that she’s a bitch and a liar and a damn jezebel,” she said, but without the heat of anger. There was no passion in her voice, just an old hatred, long hardened. Lydia thought of what Ford had said about the overkill, about how the murder was a rage killing. Maura Hodge was a big, strong woman, but there was a lethargy to her, like she might be as hard to move as a piece of the heavy old oak furniture. Time to see what her temper looked like.

“You grew up together in this town,” said Lydia, more a statement
than a question. Jeffrey heard a little flame of mischief light up in her voice.

“That’s right.”

“So what was it then, really? She stole your date to the prom? She took your clothes while you were skinny-dipping in the creek with your boyfriend? She wrote your telephone number on a bathroom wall? Or is it just that she was beautiful and rich and you were not—just jealousy, plain and simple? Why do you hate Eleanor Ross?”

There was a flash in the woman’s eyes, her jaw tightened. But Lydia didn’t get the reaction she was hoping for.

“It’s an inherited hatred,” Maura said easily, taking a long puff on her pipe. “Woven and handed down by Annabelle Taylor.”

“Is it a powerful enough hatred that it would drive you to murder?” Obviously, she wasn’t expecting a confession, just a reaction she could read, something to move the investigation forward.

Maura Hodge chuckled and the chuckle evolved into a full belly laugh. “You think
I’m
murdering the husbands of the Ross women?” she said when she’d finished.

Lydia said nothing, just sat with her eyes on Maura, waiting. It took a little more than laughter to rattle Lydia’s cage.

“Look,” Maura said, turning a hard gaze on Lydia, “the Ross family doesn’t even need a curse. They are so fucked up in so many ways that they curse themselves.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Karma, Ms. Strong. Bad karma.”

“But how are they fucked up?” pressed Lydia.

“That’s a question best answered by Eleanor. Only she really knows the answer. The rest of us can only imagine what went on in that house after Eleanor’s husband was killed. Most of us weren’t old enough to remember Eleanor’s father’s murder. But when Jack was killed, in the same house, no less—you can imagine the frenzy, the scandal in this town. For most people, it was as if the Headless Horseman himself had ridden into Haunted. Of course, people
never looked at
me
the same after that, either. As I am the daughter of the daughters of Annabelle Taylor, naturally they believed that I had something to do with it—mystically or otherwise. As if I were sitting in my living room casting spells.”

“And did you have something to do with it?”

“Please,” she said, shifting her girth in the seat and rolling her eyes.

“Do you have daughters, Ms. Hodge?”

“Stillborn,” said Hodge brusquely. “I’ve never been able to carry a child to term.”

Here Lydia saw the anger she’d been looking for—anger and sadness laced with a mammoth disappointment. Always a volatile mix.

“I’m sorry,” Lydia said.

“Maybe it’s for the best. Then this business of the curse will die with me.”

“What do you know about Eleanor’s brother?”

“Most people think he’s dead,” she said, her tone indicating that there was more to come. Maura was silent for a minute, chewing on the end of her pipe. Lydia could see she had something more she wanted to say and was debating whether to continue. The keen desire to gossip was clear in her black eyes.

“Some people say he loved her,” she said finally, her voice lowering a bit. “Not in the way a brother loves a sister. They say it tortured him, drove him mad.”

“What happened to him?”

“I was told his family sent him away. Some people believed he joined the army, but the popular rumor always was that he was sent to an asylum, where he killed himself. And others …” she said, pausing dramatically, “others believe he escaped—either the army or the asylum, depending on who’s telling the story—came back, and killed Eleanor’s husband because he couldn’t stand another man touching her. They say he ran off, leaving her to take the rap to punish her for not loving him.”

She shook her head. “But I never believed that. Paul was a quiet boy, gentle, maybe even a bit on the slow side. He didn’t have it in him. Just more stories for the bored little minds in this town.”

Lydia was quiet.

“He was the only one of them who wasn’t rotten at the core,” Maura said, looking off over Lydia’s head. She opened her mouth again, then clamped it shut as though to keep trapped whatever was about to escape. Her face grew harder and she looked at Lydia. Lydia could sense that they’d outworn their dubious welcome, but she pressed on.

“So who do you think is killing the husbands of the Ross women?”

A smile at once mocking and victorious spread across her face. “Well, it’s always been my hope that it is Annabelle Taylor herself, come back from the grave to do the job.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in curses,” said Lydia, fighting a chill that had raised goose bumps on her arms.

“I don’t,” she said, expressing streams of smoke from her nostrils like a dragon. “But I never said I didn’t believe in ghosts.”

S
itting quietly on the couch, sunlight streaming in from the large window overlooking Fifth Avenue, Lola and Nathaniel Stratton-Ross looked less like children than they did tiny adults. But they
were
children and interviewing them was a delicate matter. It had occurred to Ford on the way back from Haunted that maybe he didn’t have the finesse, the delicacy it might require. He didn’t want to fuck it up, so he put in a call to a woman he knew, a child psychologist by the name of Irma Fox.

He and Irma had worked together a couple of times in the past five years. Most recently when his only witness to a double homicide was the six-year-old son of one of the victims. He remembered Nicholas Warren as he’d found him that night, in his
Toy Story
pajamas, holding tight to a wilted stuffed dog, freckled with blood splatter.

They’d found him crouched in the bedroom closet, where he’d clearly had a front-row seat as his father and his new stepmother were shot to death while they slept in their bed. He told Ford that night that he’d come to his father’s room to wake him after a bad dream but hid in the closet when he heard something on the stairs. He’d not closed the door, he said, but he’d covered his eyes, so he hadn’t seen anything. Ford
knew
that Nicholas had seen it all and believed he could identify the killer. But he wanted the information without traumatizing the kid further.

It took Irma to bring Nicholas to a place where he was able to reveal the truth about that night. After two hours behind closed doors
with Irma, Nicholas revealed that he’d let his mother into the house that night, as he’d promised her he would. And that she’d killed his father and his father’s new wife. “So that I could live with just Mommy again.” Nicholas’s mom was doing two consecutive life sentences and Nicholas was living with his aunt and uncle in a Brooklyn Heights townhouse. Ford hoped the kid was getting some good therapy and didn’t wind up on the FBI’s most wanted list sometime in the future.