Strong 03 - Twice (46 page)

“You remember Julian’s shrink, Dr. Barnes?” Lydia said. “Something she said keeps coming back to me. She said about a year before Stratton was murdered, Julian ended her therapy. She told the doctor that she’d decided to ‘surrender’ to her true self. And that fits with something James told us. He said that he’d been sent to Fishkill because Eleanor believed they had an incestuous relationship. Not because he’d tried to set the house on fire. When he found Julian again, he said she didn’t love him anymore. And that all this time, he’d been stalking her trying to convince her that they belonged together.”

She stopped and looked at Ford as he tried to connect the dots.

“Lydia, just what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking,” said Lydia, “maybe after all these years of being apart, maybe after all these years of ‘trying to have a normal life,’ Julian gave in to James. Maybe Julian and James finally found a way to be together.”

T
he Park Avenue duplex was a bustle of workers, covering furniture and carrying boxes out the doors and to a waiting freight elevator. Some of the windows were open, Lydia assumed to air out the place, but she shivered against the cold. Julian Ross didn’t seem to notice the temperature, even though she wore only jeans and a thin white silk turtleneck. Looking fit and healthy, her cheeks a robust pink, her eyes clear, Julian greeted Lydia at the door with an embrace. Lydia regarded her and thought that she looked truly happy, that it radiated from the inside out.

“The children have gone on ahead to Switzerland with Orlando,” she said, leading Lydia into the parlor, which was still relatively intact. “They’ve come to love and trust him so much.”

They sat together on a red velvet sofa that was still uncovered.

“How are they holding up?”

“Young children are resilient,” she said calmly. “They’ll have the best counselors when we’re settled.”

“What about you?”

“For me,” she said, her expression darkening just slightly, “it might take longer. But I’m getting there.” A brightness came back to her, but this time it seemed forced.

“There were just some loose ends I wanted to tie up.…”

“Oh, your fee!” she said, hopping up as if to rush off for her checkbook. “Of course. How much did my mother agree to pay you?”

“It’s not the fee, Julian.”

The other woman must have heard something in Lydia’s voice, because the color drained from her cheeks. She sat back down and was suddenly wary. “What is it, then? As you can see, I’m quite busy.”

“It won’t take long,” Lydia said with a smile. She rose and walked over to one of the open windows and looked down the fourteen stories to the street below. It was a busy midafternoon, with cabs rushing by, people swiftly walking along the sidewalk. From the window, Lydia could see the top of the Chrysler Building gleaming in the bright afternoon sun, smell the wood burning from fireplaces.

“We looked into the ownership of the Lexus James was driving and found something interesting. We found that it was registered to you, purchased just a week before Richard was killed.”

The words hung in the air between them.

“That’s not possible,” Julian said with a shake of her head. But she diverted her eyes to look out the window behind Lydia.

“We also discovered that on the same day, you opened a small checking account for Nathaniel and Lola and placed ten thousand dollars there.”

“So?”

“So … someone was using a bank card to draw on that money. We’ve managed to get a surveillance photo from one of the ATM machines. And guess who it was.”

“I have no idea,” she said, drawing herself up in the same way Lydia had seen Eleanor do.

“Your brother.”

Everything Lydia had said was true except for the part about the surveillance photo. That was a lie.

After Lydia and Jeffrey had posed their questions to Ford, he’d immediately contacted the DMV and the banking institutions where Julian Ross and Richard Stratton had kept their liquid assets. It had taken them less than an hour to come up with the vehicle ownership and the information about the small checking account. It had been a small enough withdrawal not to arouse suspicion during the initial investigation into Richard Stratton’s murder, as Julian and Richard regularly made purchases and withdrawals in that ballpark, and the police weren’t really working a murder-for-hire angle.

“He could have stolen that bank card. How should I know?” Julian said, a kind of calm seeming to come over her. “I’m going to ask you to leave now.”

Ford and Jeffrey, along with Detectives Malone and Piselli, walked in through the front door. The moving men paused in their activities, sensing that something was going down. Julian looked over at them, and then back to Lydia. She seemed to deflate a bit.

“Where is he, Julian? Where’s James?”

“This is crazy,” she said simply. “I want my attorney.”

“With Ford McKirdy missing, I think you knew it was a good bet that we’d head back up to Haunted and the trail would eventually lead us to the house. I think James wanted to confess his whole plot to us and then allow us to see him die. This way, he could take the rap for everything, you’d be cleared of all charges, and he’d be ‘dead.’ You could go to a country where no one would know him and finally, Julian, you would be reunited after all these years apart.”

Lydia wasn’t positive that she had it exactly right, but she was confident that all the elements were there. How had James recognized them? How had he known they would eventually come back to
the house? These were questions for which she didn’t have answers. But she knew that she and Jeffrey were meant to hear his confession and see him die that night. Her gut told her this with cold certainty.

Looking now into Julian’s eyes, she could see that she had hit her target.

“Why did you decide to give in to him, Julian? You’d fought so hard to have a normal life. First with Tad, then, even when your mother begged you not to marry, you tried again with Richard.”

Julian sat stone-faced.

“You watched him kill Tad, didn’t you? Jetty heard you scream. What was it you said to him? ‘I never loved you. Not like that.’ But it wasn’t the truth, was it? You did love him. You were so afraid that your love for your twin was the unnatural love of the curse, the threat of which your mother tortured you with all your life. The thought repulsed you, terrified you, but you couldn’t help it. You loved him so much that even when you could have implicated him in Tad’s murder, you didn’t. Even when you might have gone to jail for a murder you didn’t commit, you didn’t implicate James.”

Lydia let silence fill the room.

“Your mother must have made you feel so sick, so dirty. How she must have punished and tortured you just to make you see how wrong it was. In her own way, just to save you from the curse she was so afraid of.”

Julian looked at her with surprise. Tears filled her eyes and trailed down her face.

“But it had been the same with her, hadn’t it? She loved her brother. And he killed Jack Proctor. What happened to Paul, Julian?”

Julian spoke for the first time.

“She killed him. He came for her again. After my father was dead and my brother sent away. She shot him dead. Even though she loved him, she killed him. I helped her bury the body behind the house. Then we left Haunted and never went back. She thought she’d ended it for us. She really believed that. Then James escaped.”

“Why didn’t she tell the police about him when Tad was murdered?”

“She loved him, too. He was her son, don’t forget. She thought I would be exonerated. If it looked like I might be convicted, she would have come forward. I promised her that I would never marry again. And she thought that was enough to keep him away. But I broke my word.”

“Why? Why would you take that risk?”

She shrugged and looked down in shame. “I was lonely. I was afraid. I felt him always right behind me, shadowing my life. Richard was strong, safe. And …” She paused. “I didn’t really love him. I thought it would be safe if I didn’t love him. But then I got pregnant. It was an accident, but I got pregnant with the twins. He came for me again. He wanted the twins.”

“When did you decide to give in?”

“I didn’t,” she said weakly. “He did this to my life. Now he’s dead. And we are finally free, Lola, Nathaniel, and I.”

“No, Julian. You ended your therapy with Dr. Barnes. You moved your family into this building with access to the tunnels beneath the street. You hired Geneva Stout.”

“I didn’t know who she was when I hired her. I hadn’t been to Haunted in over twenty years.”

“I don’t believe you, Julian. Maybe you were James’s victim once. But I believe you’re his accomplice now. Your breakdown … maybe it was real, maybe it was an act. But it seems like you helped him orchestrate all of this so you could look like the victim, so that he could take the rap and then fake his own death. I think you’re planning on meeting him in Switzerland.”

Everyone, Jeffrey, Ford, the other officers and the moving men, stood silently looking at Julian.

“Maybe Maura Hodge was right,” said Lydia. “She said, ‘The Ross family doesn’t even need a curse. They are fucked up in so many ways that they curse themselves.’ ”

It happened so fast, Lydia barely knew what hit her. Julian went from the calm woman sitting before her to the demon Lydia had met once before at Payne Whitney. She lunged at Lydia like a wildcat and Lydia went staggering back toward the open window behind her with Julian at her throat. All Lydia could think was that the other woman’s strength was phenomenal, and try as she did she couldn’t pull herself from Julian’s grip. In the periphery of her consciousness, she heard Ford shouting as her waist hit the sill, Julian on top of her. Lydia felt the cold of the outside air and heard the street noise below her as she and Julian leaned out the window, the upper halves of their bodies dangling over a straight drop to the sidewalk. Somewhere on the street, a woman screamed.

“You won’t keep us apart,” Julian whispered fiercely. Lydia felt herself tip toward the ground, the sky tilting around her, the buildings dancing. And she felt an odd lightness as gravity pulled on her. She felt the fragile thread that connected her soul to her body stretch to the point of snapping and she wondered,
Am I going to die here?
She reached out and held on hard to Julian. The woman had a death grip on Lydia’s throat, and she felt like she was breathing though a straw. White stars had started to dance before her eyes.

Things seemed to be happening so slowly as Lydia felt the balance shift from most of their weight being in the building to most of their weight being out. And in the next second, she felt her feet lift from the floor and her body tilt more steeply toward the ground. Julian must have felt it, too, because her expression morphed from malice to surprise and fear. She loosed her grip on Lydia’s throat. It was then that Lydia felt strong hands on her ankles. Julian’s body started to slip over hers. Lydia tried to hold on, but the momentum of Julian’s fall was too great. Julian flipped over her like an acrobat, Ford getting to the window a millisecond too late. There was a shocked silence among them, as Julian fell, her scream like a siren ending abruptly as she hit the sidewalk. It was a gruesome sound; everyone who heard it felt the shattering of bones. Screeching tires, the
sound of metal on metal, yelling voices from the street below carried up and filled the room.

Jeffrey pulled Lydia in the rest of the way and she sank to the floor, feeling every nerve ending in her body pulse with the relief of mortal terror. He held on to her as she buried her head in his shoulder, taking in the scent of his skin, the strength of his muscles, the sound of his breath. She’d never been so glad to be alive.

T
he ferry ride was grim and it was a journey she made alone. Jeffrey thought she was having her run and then going on to Central Park West, visiting her doctor for an early morning follow-up visit after her laparoscopy. And she would do that today, as well. But later.

It was six-thirty and the sky was a flat dead gray. The air was cold, and coming off the water it was downright frigid, but Lydia stood at the bow away from the cargo and near the workers, who were bundled in layers and drinking coffee from thermoses. Hector approached her.

“I don’t know why anyone would want to be here if they didn’t have to be,” he said, his Dominican accent heavy.

Hector, the morgue worker she’d met the night Jed McIntyre died, had been true to his word when she called to ask where the city would bury him. When a week later she’d called again and offered him a thousand dollars cash to take her to his grave, he’d said, “Lady, are you nuts? Go back to your life.”

“That’s just it,” she’d told him. “I can’t do that until I’ve seen the grave.”

He’d reluctantly agreed and told her to meet him at City Island in the Bronx and that he’d take her over to Potter’s Field on Harts Island when he took over that day’s Jane and John Does. She stood and watched as twenty anonymous pine coffins, branded only with serial numbers, were loaded from a van onto the waiting ferry. An old
priest stood by waiting and she wondered if he started every morning like this, watching as workers loaded the bodies of God’s forsaken children onto a boat that would take them to their unmarked graves. She wondered how it didn’t shake his faith. But she didn’t ask. She had her own faith to worry about.

“I do have to be here,” she said.

And Hector just nodded at her. He had a thick brown face with wide features and sharp eyes. He was looking at her with those eyes that were neither warm nor cold, neither kind nor cruel. They were eyes that saw things the way they were and didn’t judge. She turned away from him and watched as the island approached, looking into the murky choppy water of the Long Island Sound. And she thought about her recent breakdown of motivations. She thought about Julian and James and their twisted love for each other. A love they thought excused them from moral behavior, a love that made it okay to lie and scheme and murder to be together. And how it had ended with Julian a broken mess of herself on a city sidewalk. James Ross was still at large.