Strong 03 - Twice (30 page)

“How’re you doing there, girl?” he asked, his green eyes sincere, concerned. No wisecracks, no insults. It was awful. If Dax felt like he had to be nice to her, things must be worse than she thought.

R
ebecca was a strong girl, with big, tight thighs. She may even have had some martial arts training and Jed McIntyre had some bruised ribs and a black eye to show for it. But in the end none of that had done her much good. Even the toughest women had throats with skin as soft and easily torn as silk. That had always been his favorite end for the women in his life. It was so intimate, so final. To feel their mortal struggle against his chest, panic radiating off their skin like a perfume, the pain as they tried to scratch at his arms, the music of the death rattle in their throats. Then the peaceful moments when life left them to sag into his arms. Then silence. Frankly, sex didn’t even compare to the release. Yes, Rebecca was a strong girl. But he was stronger.

Nobody paid attention to the homeless man pushing his shopping cart up Central Park West, making a right at Eighty-sixth Street onto the path that led into park. Most people would rather stick their face in a public toilet than get too close to the man who shuffled, mumbling to himself, his clothes stiff with filth, his nails long and caked with dirt. He’d piled his red hair into a stocking cap and pulled it down over his ears, wore an old pair of sunglasses he’d found in the tunnels. They were missing one plastic arm and hung crooked on his face. He’d found a pair of old scrubs in the Dumpster behind Mount Sinai Hospital and he wore those over thermal underwear and under a bright red bathrobe. Combat boots from the Salvation Army were a lovely finish to the ensemble. In his current
capacity, he found it necessary to abandon vanity. It was truly liberating. And where else but New York City did you have to make an utter spectacle of yourself to disappear completely?

The right front wheel of his cart was making an irritating squeal and the temperature had dropped significantly in the last few minutes. His hands were going red in the cold and his load seemed to grow heavier with each passing second.

He wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to do. He was waiting for inspiration, which he hoped would come soon, sometime after dark and sometime before rush hour when the park would fill with commuters and joggers. Then he’d be forced to wait outside for hours just to get a little privacy. This was another thing about New York: You could never find anyplace to be alone.

He’d developed a special affection for Rebecca over the last few days. She’d brought him closer to Lydia, and more important at this point to Jeffrey Mark, than he’d ever dreamed he would get. Of course, she struggled valiantly to keep the little details of their lives from him. It was the hydrochloric acid that had changed her mind. And then there was no shutting her up. Until he shut her up permanently.

He suspected she had known she was going to die whether she talked or not, even though he’d promised otherwise. He didn’t like to lie, but sometimes it was necessary. He thought she was hoping not to be disfigured, for her family’s sake. He found it so odd that people cared about things like that. But she
was
pretty in death. Prettier, he thought, than in life.

He looked out over the Great Lawn, the grand Metropolitan Museum of Art white and stately across the park, took in the cold air and the aroma from a nearby hot dog vendor’s cart. He watched as the short Mexican man bundled in a New York Yankees sweatshirt, scarf, and hat against the cold, handed a dog, lathered in mustard and kraut to a young rollerblader. The young man glided off down a slope, eating joyfully as he went.

“The devil is in the details,” Jed said aloud, as he came to a bench, pulled his cart over, and sat heavily. None of the people moving past him on the path, not the businesswoman in her red wool coat and frumpy, well-used Coach briefcase, not the young mother pushing a stroller carting a baby so wrapped up that he resembled a cocktail wiener, not the old man and his little kerchiefed wife in their matching black coats and orthopedic shoes, turned to look at him when he spoke aloud. Persistent ignorance. He laughed out loud and noticed how people quickened their pace.

It’s an acquaintance with the minutiae of a life that makes people truly intimate with each other, he thought. It’s the knowing of preferences, habits, idiosyncrasies, the little quirks of personality that really allow you to get inside someone’s head. When you know what someone loves, what someone fears, what turns someone on, what repulses him, and most important what
hurts
him, you have the lock, the full nelson. Nobody was going to give that to Jed McIntyre. He couldn’t get close enough to Lydia and Jeffrey to figure it out for himself. So he’d had to hijack it.

Well, okay, maybe he hadn’t exactly gotten into their heads via the information Rebecca had about them and what he could find in their offices. But what he did find was appointment books, cellular phone numbers, things he’d been lacking. The tunnels hadn’t really given him the access for which he’d been hoping. They’d gotten him close, but not close enough. He’d fantasized that he’d find a way into Lydia’s building through one of the mythic speakeasy tunnels he’d heard so much about. But it didn’t work out that way.

So, he’d cased the offices of Mark, Striker and Strong and found easily the flaw in their security. The Speedy Messenger service, the one that came at the end of the day when most people had gone. It was easy enough to derail a few of the messengers … a flat tire here, a busted chain there. And then finally, grabbing the guy from his route, surprising him at the service exit of the CBS building with a pipe to the head. As far as Jed knew, no one ever found the naked
body he’d left in the Dumpster. He took the kid’s outfit, his bag, and his cellular phone. Called into the preprogrammed number on the phone to the Speedy dispatcher and told him he’d run into delays but would still make the stops. It was that simple. Rebecca had just been caught off guard.

Now, of course, the real question was how to use what he’d learned to its maximum effect. As darkness closed around him, he waited for inspiration.

“
Y
ou cheating Aussie bastard,” Lydia complained weakly as Dax destroyed her for the third time at the game of Go. He had a gift for pattern recognition and a strategy that was truly unsurpassed, and at the moment Lydia hated him for it.

“The least you could do is let me win,” she said, feeling better for a few hours of thinking about nothing more serious than little black and white stones on a wooden board. Her nightmares had temporarily been put on hold and she was almost feeling normal again. Whatever that meant.

“Never. I have too much respect for you,” he said. She looked at him for evidence of sarcasm, but his face was serious.

“Oh, please,” she said with a laugh.

“And I’m sure you’d be even a worse winner than you are a loser.”

“You’re probably right about that,” she said, leaning back on the couch. It was good to be with Dax, good to be with someone who didn’t share her loss, whose face wasn’t a mirror of her own sadness. The hurricane of emotions she’d experienced over the last few days had left her drained, too numb to feel anything at the moment. She knew the comfortable numbness wouldn’t last. Grief wasn’t linear, getting progressively better with time. It came in waves, in an ebb and flow. For a moment or a day, you’d feel almost whole, ready to begin the move forward. Then it came again out of nowhere like a tsunami, wiping you out with a crushing force. And then, of course,
there was the Jed McIntyre nightmare looming, the innocent Rebecca in his clutches.

“So how long are you going to sit around in your pajamas?” asked Dax, regarding her with an open, honest face.

“Hi, I just had surgery?”

“Laser surgery,” he said, as though it didn’t count.

“Oh, yeah, I’m a real slug for lying around for two days after having a miscarriage,” she said, getting a little pissed at him for being such an insensitive clod.

“
Three
days. And I think you should throw away those painkillers. Whatever pain you’re in at this point is bearable. Those things will slow your recovery, and they make it easier for you to lie around here wallowing in depression.”

“I’m not wallowing,” she said defensively.

“Not yet,” he said with a shrug, putting the Go pieces into their little wooden bowls.

“Why is everybody always telling me what to do?” she said, realizing that she sounded like a sullen teenager.

“Look. Jeff loves you. He wants to protect you from any pain or danger that might befall you. He’d be happy to keep you in a padded room under twenty-four-hour guard until Jed McIntyre is six feet under. But that’s not you, you know? With everything going on, and now this,” he said, pointing to her belly as if it were the offending party, “I think it would be easy for you to get really depressed. You need to pull yourself together and get back to work. Worry about someone else’s messed-up life for a while.”

She looked at Dax and wondered why she’d never realized he was so smart. Everything he’d said had been dead on and she added a new layer of respect to her concept of him.

“Fuck off, Dax,” she said with a frown and a shrug. He just smiled and got up to put away the game. The phone rang.

“Can you get that?” she called as he disappeared upstairs.

“Get it yourself,” he called back. She laughed and went over to the phone.

“Hello?” she answered.

“Is this Lydia Strong?” came a woman’s voice, sounding edgy and fragile.

“Who’s calling?” asked Lydia, trying to place the familiar voice.

“This is Julian Ross.”

Lydia let a second pass as the information sank in. She could hear the sound of people talking in the background. She heard some laughter and then what sounded like a wail off in the distance.

“What’s happening, Julian?”

“I need to see you. I need to talk.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at the Payne Whitney Clinic. Can you come? Can you come right away?” she asked. Her voice was desperate and Lydia could hear she was on the verge of tears.

“I’ll be there in an hour,” she answered without hesitation.

F
orty minutes later they were in the Rover. There was something beautiful about a late fall dusk in New York City. The sky had taken on a kind of blue tinge, and Lydia watched as people hustled along the sidewalks, rushing to or from, carrying bags. Christmas was just a few weeks away and the shop windows were dressed to draw in holiday shoppers. She loved the energy this time of year, the excitement of tourists in the city to see the tree and look in the windows of the department stores on Fifth Avenue, the ringing bells of Salvation Army Santas outside Macy’s. It reminded her of when she was a child, how thrilled she’d been when her mother took her into the city for these things, and for the museums and the theater, for the ballet and the Philharmonic. She’d never wanted to live anyplace else and she couldn’t imagine her life without these things. She looked over to Dax, who was staring intently at the road ahead though traffic was thick and they were barely moving.

“It’s an amazing city, isn’t it?” she asked.

“New York City is a whore,” said Dax with disgust. “It looks good enough from a distance, but there’s disease at its core. It makes a lot of promises, but in the end you pay for what it gives you with your soul.”

“That’s nice, Dax,” she said, not knowing quite how to respond to that.

A homeless man drifting up the street beside the Rover made her remember the tunnels that existed beneath the streets, made her think of the hole in the laundry room floor, and in turn of Ford McKirdy. She took her phone out of her purse and dialed his cell phone number.

“McKirdy,” he answered.

“It’s Lydia,” she said.

“Hey, Lydia. How are you? You scared the shit out of me the other day.”

“I’m okay,” she said quickly, not wanting to be reminded that she should really still be in bed. “Listen, Julian Ross gave me a call. I’m on my way to talk to her.”

“Good luck,” he said with a laugh.

“You’ve been to see her?”

“Yeah, she seemed lucid enough at first, but she’s fried,” he answered. “I got nothing from her.”

“What else has been happening? I’m a little behind,” she said. There was a slide show in her mind of the events in the days before she’d collapsed. She saw Maura Hodge smoking her pipe in her Gothic drawing room, the monster attacking Dax in the basement of the Ross house, Dr. Wetterau shining his penlight into her eyes and telling her about James Ross but not the whole story. A thought was starting to take form in her mind, but she couldn’t quite make out the shape.

“I’ve been trying to reach Jeff all day,” said Ford, sounding a little exasperated. “I hated to bother you guys, knowing what you’re
going through. But I found something that makes me think you may have been on the right track after all.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

He told her about the nanny and his visit to the Sunnyvale Retirement Home.

“So who was she?”

“The name on her employment record was Annabelle Hodge. She’s from Haunted.”

Lydia heard blood rushing in her ears and her heart did a little flutter. She was transported back to that night over a hundred years ago when Annabelle Taylor watched her five children die before her eyes because of Elizabeth Ross’s cowardly heart. The vision was so vivid she smelled gunpowder.

“Annabelle Hodge. Who is she? Maura’s sister?”

“Her daughter. Must be. She’s only twenty-something. Looks like old Maura got a late start in the baby race.”

Lydia remembered Maura telling her that all her children had been stillborn. More lies.

“I don’t get it. Did Julian know that ‘Geneva’ was Maura Hodge’s daughter? Or did Eleanor?”

“Eleanor says she had no idea. Says that she hasn’t been to Haunted in twenty years, how could she have known? She and Maura weren’t exactly on speaking terms. She didn’t even know Maura
had
a daughter.”

“Or so she says.”