Lucy felt calm, completely at peace. She knew what she had to do, what she must do. She walked to the hotel room door, propped it open. Then she entered the closet, closed the door, sat on the floor.
Once inside she smelled apples, pipe smoke, the essence of George Archer, the essence of evil. But this time she was not afraid.
As footsteps passed by the closet — two sets, a few minutes apart — the night closed in around her, and Lucy Doucette remembered it all.
'It's okay, Eve, ' he said. 'There's been an accident. I will take care of you.'
He held out his hand. On it he wore a ring in the shape of a snake. The air was thick with smoke, the sky darkened from it.
' What kind of accident?' she asked.
Mr. Archer opened the door to his car. Lucy got in. 'A plane crash,' he said. 'A bad plane crash.'
'Where's my mom?'
'She wants me to watch after you. She's going to go help the people where the plane crashed.'
'My mom is?'
'Yes, Eve.'
Mr. Archer started the car.
He led her down the narrow wooden steps, through a small door into a drafty room with stone walls. The room was lit only with candles. It seemed as though there were hundreds of them. The room smelled like bad perfume and fermenting apples. Even the dust and cobwebs were cold.
When Mr. Archer left, and Lucy heard the door at the top of the stairs lock, she saw that there was another girl sitting there. She was about Lucy's age, eleven or so, but she was wearing a grown-up dress. It was spangly and short, and had straps over the shoulders. The girl's face was smeared with make-up. She had been crying for a long time. Her eyes were red and puffy.
'Who are you?' Lucy asked.
The girl shivered.
'I'm… I'm Peggy.'
'Why are you here?'
The girl did not answer. Lucy looked at the girl's arms and legs. There were deep purple bruises on them. Then she looked over and saw a second dress hanging from one of the pipes in the ceiling.
A long time passed. Hours and hours of which Lucy had no mind, no memory. Days of darkness.
On the third day she took a bubble bath. The bathroom was in a small room off the cellar. The walls were a pink enamel. The sink had gold-colored faucets.
When it was dark Mr. Archer came downstairs to get her. He brought her up to the dining room for the first time. The table was set for grown-ups. Wine glasses and more candles. Lucy found herself in her own grown-up dress, and wearing high heels that were too big for her. Mr. Archer was dressed up like a man in an old movie. He had on a white bow tie. He walked to the kitchen.
Lucy looked at the window. She walked across the room, edged it open, slipped through.
'Eve!' Mr. Archer yelled.
Lucy ran. She ran as far and for as long as she could, through endless apple orchards, tripping and falling, scraping her knees and elbows, mushing the rotting apples beneath her. She looked over her shoulder, watching for Mr. Archer. She didn't see him. She soon came to a large pipe that emptied into a lake, crouched down inside, waited. She didn't know how long she was there. Hours and hours. She must have cried herself to sleep, because the next thing she knew there was a light in her face.
'It's okay,' the man with the flashlight said.
But it wasn't. It wasn't okay.
They talked to her for hours, but Lucy didn't say a word. What happened to her was locked away inside.
Her mother took her home. Time passed, and the man with the ring in the shape of a snake faded from her mind but took up faceless residence in that nest of fear inside her, flying overhead in the darkness of her dreams.
At night she would hear him humming, she would hear the sound of the car door slamming, the creak of the old wooden steps, the softness of his voice, she would hear The bell.
The bell rang again.
It seemed to come from far away, as if it were at the end of that long drainage pipe in which she had crawled. For the briefest of moments she smelled the sewage, felt the dampness of the air. Then it was gone.
Lucy looked around. It took a while for her to realize where she was. She was in the hotel. Le Jardin. She knew every inch of this place. She looked around the dark closet, felt overhead.
How much time had passed? She didn't know. She stood, opened the closet door, stepped into the room. The air had changed, changed in a way you could only know from being in a place day after day, knowing its walls, it ceilings, its corners, its very presence.
The door to the hallway was closed. Lucy looked at her watch. She hadn't been gone long. She had to get out of this room. Mr. Archer could be back any second.
She turned to leave, but suddenly felt lightheaded. She sat on the edge of the bed for a moment. Her mind began to clear, but something was wrong. Something felt wet underneath her. She got up, looked at her hands. They were coated in bright, glossy scarlet. She turned around and saw, in the dim light, the form under the bloodsoaked sheets.
Lucy felt the contents of her stomach come up inside her throat. She backed away, certain that her heart was going to explode. She could no longer hold it in. She vomited on the floor.
Then she looked at the telephone on the desk. It seemed a mile away. The smell of her own vomit reached her at the same time as the metallic smell of blood. She was going to be sick again.
She ran to the bathroom.
Chapter 76
Jessica watched the show from the back of the Crystal Room. The speaker at the lectern was a pathologist from Toledo, formerly with the Ohio Bureau of Investigation. He was talking about a cold case that took place in a suburb of Toledo in 1985, a case involving a woman and her elderly mother who were bludgeoned to death with a long piece of steel, believed to be the support beam of a single bed frame.
Behind the lecturer, photographs of the crime scene were projected on a screen.
Jessica watched the photographs come and go. She realized that the man could have been from Tucson or Toronto or Tallahassee. In some ways it was all the same. But not to the families of the victim. And not to the investigators whose task it was to root out the people responsible for the crime and bring them to justice. She had been at it long enough, and knew enough people in her line of work, to know that an unsolved crime eats away at your soul until it is either closed or replaced by a new horror, a new puzzle. And even then it does not disappear, but rather makes room.
She thought about Joseph Novak's diary.
What was his connection? All she could find on Marcato LLC was that it had been formed nearly fifteen years earlier, and listed as its primary business the publishing of music. Joseph Novak, by all accounts, had a partner. But no one at any bank had any record of anyone other than Novak.
'Detective?'
A man's voice. Close. Jessica spun around. It was Frederic Duchesne, the dean of Prentiss Institute. He had approached without a sound. Not good. She was distracted, which meant she was vulnerable. She took a deep breath, tried to fashion a smile.
'Mr. Duchesne.'
'I'm sorry if I frightened you,' Duchesne said.
Frightened wasn't the word, Jessica thought. Provoked would be a better term. 'Not a problem,' she said, meaning something else. 'What can I do for you, Mr. Duchesne?'
'Frederic. Please.'
