Strong 03 - Twice (25 page)

She sat up and gave a smile to show she was all right. Her head throbbed and the room seemed to lurch and blur.

“Don’t move,” he said, kissing her on the top of the head. Then he raced after Dax, taking the stairs two at a time, the Glock in his hand. When he was out of sight, Lydia leaned over and threw up the coffee and bad food she’d eaten at the Rusty Penny. It tasted even worse the second time around.

When she was reasonably sure that the room had stopped spinning, she reached for the flashlight that had rolled away from her and turned off. She pressed the black rubber button beneath her thumb and the beam sliced into the darkness. She could hear Dax shouting in the distance outside and she tried to struggle to her feet, but the floor wouldn’t stay solid and she figured she’d be more a liability than a help to them in her present condition. It was probably the first smart decision she’d made all day. Another shot rang out, and she made herself believe that as long as she could hear them, they were okay.

Her mind was doing cartwheels, her heart racing, and her hands were still shaking from the adrenaline coursing through her veins like an Indy 500 race car. She reached into her back pocket and pulled out the photograph she’d been looking at upstairs. What she had seen in that photograph right before Dax entered the room was a young boy and girl standing side by side under a glade of trees. They were so alike, their features narrow and refined, the same bright green eyes, the same slight smile. The boy was much taller, much wider through the shoulders than the girl. He draped a protective arm across her shoulder and glanced at her, a mischievous glint to his expression. The girl was Julian Ross, the boy, Lydia deduced, her brother, possibly her twin. Why she hadn’t thought of it before, she wasn’t sure. If Eleanor was a twin, and Julian’s children were also twins, it was very possible that Julian could be a twin herself. Lydia would put money on the fact that they’d just met Julian’s other half … in the man who’d attacked them tonight.

She tried again to stand and the room did a little dance, a weird
up-and-down, side-to-side kind of action, and Lydia braced herself for another bout of nausea.

“I’m sorry,” she said to the baby, without thinking, patting her stomach and grabbing one of the steps to try to haul herself to her feet. It didn’t quite work and she sort of hung there halfway between standing and falling. She tried not to think about the damage she might have done to herself; she just willed herself to be strong and solid, to walk it off. And as soon as she could stand, she was going to do that.

Thunderous footsteps broke the silence as Jeff and Dax ran down the stairs like a herd of buffalo. Lydia felt the sound on every nerve ending in her rattled brain.

“What happened?” she asked as Jeffrey helped steady her.

“Gone. Into the woods. I think I hit him, though,” said Dax.

“You can’t shoot a fleeing suspect, for Christ’s sake,” said Jeffrey, his face red from exertion and his brow knitted with concern for Lydia and anger at Dax.

“I didn’t shoot him for
Christ’s
sake,” Dax shouted. “I shot him for
my
sake. He scared the shit out of me. He practically killed me. He hit Lydia. I’m not the fucking
cops
. I play by my rules.” The adrenaline was clearly making him more aggressive and less reasonable than usual.

Jeffrey shook his head and rubbed his eyes.

“Let’s put our philosophical differences aside, shall we, and get the fuck out of here before Julian’s evil twin comes back?” said Lydia.

“Julian’s twin?”

She handed the photograph to Jeffrey. “More information not provided by our client,” he said, handing the photograph back to her.

“Sounds like it’s time to fire the old hag,” said Dax.

“I want to make one more stop before we do,” said Lydia.

“My thoughts exactly,” said Jeff, taking her arm. “The emergency room.”

•  •  •

A
t first glance, Dr. Franklin Wetterau had the look of a man who had swabbed a million throats, delivered a thousand babies, and listened to endless lists of symptoms and ailments ranging from the common cold to stomach cancer. He looked as though he’d offered countless words of comfort, advice, and reprimand with the same gentle smile and knowing eyes he now turned on Lydia as she sat bruised and tired on his examining table. Dr. Wetterau was an old-fashioned country doctor, with his small office in the back of his old Victorian home on Maple Street.

The nearest hospital was over thirty miles away, so Dr. Wetterau was apparently the man to call with minor emergencies day or night, or so they were told at the gas station where they stopped for directions, the very same gas station, in fact, where they’d stopped earlier. There was a different slack-jawed attendant now on shift. The young man—Hank, if the embroidered name on his striped uniform shirt was to be believed—gave them the good doctor’s number. Of course, the earlier attendant had also worn a shirt with the name Hank embroidered on it. Were they both named Hank or were they sharing a shirt? Lydia wondered pointlessly, as “Hank” stared into the Rover at her and Dax, whose bruised and bloody condition was definitely notable.

They’d walked a narrow path along the back of the house as per the instructions the doctor gave Jeffrey over the phone and the old man was waiting for them at the door. Lydia saw him look them each up and down, his expression betraying neither shock, wonder, nor judgment, just a mild curiosity. Inside, a woman in a neat red dressing gown, trimmed with white, looking like nothing so much as Mrs. Claus with a wide pink face framed by graying hair in a bun on the crown of her head, sat primly at a small reception desk and took their names and addresses, entering the information into some type of logbook. She offered them water or tea and, when they declined,
retired through a door marked private that Lydia assumed led to their home.

Alone with the doctor now, Jeff and Dax sitting out in the waiting room, Dax’s cut newly cleaned and stitched, Jeff she assumed sinking into a foul mood and plotting ways to keep her locked up forever, Lydia sat stiffly as the doctor shone a light into each of her eyes.

“Mrs. Smith,” he said, “what kind of an accident did you say you, your husband, and your, uh, brother were involved in?”

“We didn’t, Doctor,” Lydia answered calmly.

The doctor nodded, reaching into a small refrigerator and offering her a gel icepack wrapped in an Ace bandage pouch. She pressed it to the side of her head, the cold and the pain causing her to feel light-headed again. She lay back, hearing the crinkle of the sanitary paper over the vinyl table. The sound reminded her of childhood visits to the doctor, her mother, and how nice it was to feel cared for when you were sick.

“You do appear to have a mild concussion, Mrs. Smith. Now, I don’t have the proper equipment here to check on the health of your baby. And I’m going to suggest that you get to your OB as soon as possible. But I will tell you that any type of trauma to the mother will put the fetus at risk. So my other suggestion is that you minimize your exposure to situations where you are vulnerable to, uh, accidents.”

She turned to look at him and even though things were a bit on the fuzzy side, his eyes, the clearest blue she’d ever seen, were intelligent and a bit stern. She felt like he knew her, though they were strangers to each other. In him she recognized her own ability to intuit the truth about people, about who they
truly
were, by noticing small details, the things they said and didn’t say. Everybody has a face they wear, the one they want people to see, to recognize as their true face. And for a few people, you get what you see. But usually there’s something more beneath the surface, something hidden. The
furtive gesture, the shifting glance, the tapping foot offered so much, revealed facets of personality that people tried to hide. Lydia had always possessed the ability to see quickly through façades. Tonight she wondered what this doctor saw when he looked at her. Someone careless, someone reckless, someone more concerned with chasing investigations than she was for the life of her child. Someone scared that she was not up to the responsibility about to be bestowed upon her. Someone running from her own problems by burying herself in nightmares that belonged to someone else.

“That’s not always possible in my line of work,” she said, feeling a little defensive.

He placed a hand on her arm. “Then take a vacation,” he said gently.

His hand was big and warm, slightly callused. He looked like someone’s daddy, someone’s grandpa, the man who was always there for his family, the one everybody leaned on. She wondered what it would have been like to grow up with a man like that as your father. Life would be easier, she was sure. Decisions would be a lot less daunting. There would be fewer questions about what was right and wrong when you had someone like Dr. Wetterau to ask. Lydia fought the urge to cry; pregnancy was making her more emotional than she liked.

She managed a nod and sat up slowly. “You might be right,” she admitted.

He kept watching her with those eyes and she started to feel a twinge of discomfort. When she returned his glance, her vision sharper than it had been a moment earlier, she saw he had the eyes of a combat soldier. There was a look a man got on his face when people had died at his hands. It was as if a piece of cosmic truth had been revealed to him that others never even glimpse, and as if that knowledge had come to rest in the color of his eyes. It’s there even when he’s laughing or looking on you with eyes of love. Her grandfather had eyes like that, as if the slightest trigger could start
a cavalcade of images too awful to share with anyone who hadn’t been there, who didn’t
know
. But Lydia thought maybe if she looked deeply enough into the abyss of his pupils, she would see it all there playing like a movie on a screen, as if his eyes had a memory of their own. She saw it in Dr. Wetterau, clear as day.

“Did you know the Ross children?”
Shot in the dark
.

He rubbed the side of his face thoughtfully and looked at her as if deciding whether it was in either of their best interests to answer her question.

“I did,” he answered, letting the sentence dangle.

“Julian and …,” she said, hoping he’d finish the sentence for her.

“Is that why you and your friends are here? Are you looking for him?”

Lydia didn’t answer, but cast her eyes down as if her clever ruse had been uncovered. “Do you know where he is?” she asked after a moment.

“James? I know where he belongs,” he answered. “But he hasn’t been there for over ten years.”

“Where’s that?”

“On my recommendation, his family committed him to Fishkill Facility, a psychiatric hospital not far from here.”

“What for?”

“He tried to burn down his family home, his mother and sister along with it,” said the doctor with a sad shake of his head. “A very disturbed young man.”

“Did he say why he did it?”

“He claimed that his mother and sister had put a curse on him and that the only way to save himself was to burn them both and the house. The house, he believed, held all their negative energy.”

“He thought they were witches?”

“Sometimes,” said the doctor with a shrug. “There was that, and his bizarre obsession with Julian. He believed that her body housed the spirit of his true love from another life and that her soul could
only be free if Julian died. He was later diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. At first he was largely unresponsive to medication. But after many years of treatment, he graduated to a work release program. One night, after his shift at a library was over, he didn’t return to the facility. That was ten years ago.” The memory seemed to sadden the doctor. “He was the first person I thought of when I heard the news about Julian’s husband.”

“Which one?”

“Both. Tad was murdered just months after James disappeared.”

“Did you go to the police?”

He sighed and shook his head. “No.”

“Why not?”

Another heavy sigh. “The Ross family is like … a virus. If you want to preserve your health, you should just stay away. I learned that lesson a long time ago. I have a feeling you might benefit from learning that lesson as well, before it’s too late.”

“An innocent woman might have gone to jail,” said Lydia.

“Let me tell you something: When it comes to the Rosses, there’s not an innocent among them,” he said, turning a joyless smile on her along with those eyes that had seen too much.

“What do you mean by that, Doctor?”

“Just stay away from them, Mrs. Smith. Take my advice.”

She could tell by the firm line of his mouth and the flatness that had come to his eyes that he had said all he was going to say on the subject of the Ross family.

“You can keep the ice pack,” he said, offering her a hand to help her off the table, which she accepted.

Jeffrey paid the bill in cash and they left the office. On the walkway, Lydia turned around and looked at the doctor, who stood in the doorway. The night had grown bitterly cold and Lydia wrapped her coat tightly around her. A harsh wind had crept up and a few stray snowflakes danced around them. The doctor’s large frame filled the doorway.

“He’s here, you know. In Haunted.”

The doctor didn’t seem surprised. “Some people claim he’s been here all along, living in the woods. He’s mythic in his way. Parents use him to warn their children to stay out of the woods at night.”

“Be good or James Ross will get you?”

“That’s right.”

B
ack in the relative warmth of the Rover, Lydia told Jeff and Dax what the doctor had shared with her. Even with the heat blasting, the cold felt like a fourth presence in the car. Lydia was shivering, cupping her hands against one of the vents. She was grateful when the air grew warmer as the car heated up.

“Should we call Henry Clay?” she wondered aloud.

“And tell him what? That we broke into the Ross home and saw the bogeyman?” asked Jeff, driving carefully down the dark road, slick with the light snowfall.

“And that he kicked our asses,” added Dax from the backseat.