“So what is it? Some kind of Black Widow curse?”
Lydia shrugged. “I don’t know.” Her mood had turned foul since her interview with Eleanor Ross, not that it had been so great leading up to that.
“What’s the matter with you anyway? You’re all punky.”
“Where are Dax and Jeff?” she asked, not answering his question.
“I don’t know,” he answered, eyes intent on the road ahead. “They were gone when I got there.”
“Yeah, right,” said Lydia.
Ford pretended not to notice her sarcasm.
Her interview with Eleanor had ended abruptly. The woman had just stood up and left. As she was clearly at the end of her rope, Lydia just let her go. They’d talk more later, she was sure of that. Eleanor had more to tell. The past was insidious that way; you could only press the horrors down for so long. Once the lid on the box in your heart had been opened a crack, the demons rushed forth. You could never close that lid again.
She had walked across the hall to tell Jeff what she had discovered and he was gone. So was Dax. Ford McKirdy sat in the waiting area reading a copy of
“Jeff and Dax had to run out,” said Rebecca, her Brooklyn accent thick, drifting out over cotton candy pink lips. She had a round pretty face and a sophisticated layered blond bob. Her face was dominated by bright, deep brown eyes.
“Jeff said he’ll call and to stay with Ford McKirdy until he does.”
“Was that an order?” Lydia asked, directing her annoyance at Rebecca, who really didn’t deserve it. She noticed how Ford kept his nose in the magazine during this encounter, not even looking over at them.
Rebecca lifted up her hands, cool and unflappable as she always was. “Don’t shoot the messenger. They were out of here like their pants were on fire.”
“Where did they go?”
“I swear, Lydia, I have no idea.”
Lydia had the distinct impression that she had been “handed off” to Ford, and the thought filled her with resentment and a fierce need to bust away from all of them. But what bothered her most of all was wondering where Dax and Jeffrey had gone and why they hadn’t told her where they were going. It was totally out of character and she felt a swell of anxiety that she couldn’t quash. A hard twinge in her lower right abdomen caused her to inhale sharply.
“You okay?” asked Ford, glancing over at her. But the pain passed as quickly as it had come.
“I think so,” Lydia said, though in her heart a tiny seed of dread was blooming.
Dax and Jeff walked down the stairway that led to the long-closed Lafayette Street station. As they rounded the bend past the staircase, they faced a locked metal gate. A bright hard shaft of light shone in from the street above them, but on the other side of the gate a tunnel led into such blackness that it looked as though a curtain had been drawn. The walls around them were covered with the work of graffiti artists, and the single bulb that lit the tunnel buzzed and dimmed, threatening to go dark. Jeff watched as Dax removed a key from his pocket and fit it into the lock on the gate.
“Where’d you get that?” asked Jeff, pointing toward the key.
“Apparently, when the city retires subway stations, they put these special locks on the gates. They make about four hundred keys for transit workers. But my contact told me about a hardware store in Brooklyn that actually
“Leave it open in case we need to get out of here in a hurry,” said Jeff. Dax nodded as he wrapped the chain back through the metal bars and hung the padlock from the last link.
Dax jumped down on the tracks and Jeffrey followed. They made their way through the dank and dirty tunnel, the rumbling of trains audible in the distance, the stench of urine and mold heavy in the air. Beneath the streets of New York City was a labyrinthine network of subway and train tunnels, gas and water mains, sewer lines and cables. There were layers of lines for phone, cable, and electric, street and traffic lights, then gas mains on top of water mains. There were over a hundred miles of steam mains, below which lay the sewer lines and tunnels. The organization of this vast network was pure chaos. No cohesive map of the underground network existed. Over the years so many different companies had been responsible for the installation of lines and networks that even the workers responsible for upkeep and repairs now never knew what they would find when they entered the tunnels. Jeffrey had read that a merchant sailing vessel from the eighteenth century was found under Front Street, part of the landfill when Manhattan’s lower tip was being extended. Wall Street was named for a three-hundred-year-old wall that still stood beneath the street, presumably designed to keep out intruders, probably Indians.
Below all of that were miles of abandoned subway tunnels and stations. Here thousands of homeless people were rumored to live, creating communities and social networks beneath the streets. Most people considered the idea of people living under the streets to be an urban legend, too fantastical to be true. But working with the NYPD for so long on so many different cases, Jeffrey had learned that this was a sad and certain fact. One that the police tried to keep as quiet as possible. The burgeoning homeless population was one of the department’s greatest challenges and the fact that thousands of displaced people now lived beneath the city didn’t make the situation any better.
“Why does your contact think he’s down there and how did she know to tell you?” Jeffrey had asked Dax back at the office. Dax had looked reluctant to reveal how he got his information.
“I put the word out there with some of the people I know on the street and this is what came back,” he said with a shrug. “It’s going to cost you, too. I had to pay five hundred dollars for it. Plus another seven at McDonald’s.”
“Just put it on your expense report,” said Jeff absently. “What do you mean, you ‘put the word out there’?”
“You know, there’s this network aboveground and belowground. Information is passed from one person to the next.”
“So it’s about as reliable as a game of ‘Telephone.’ ”
“It’s all we have, mate. Let’s check it out,” Dax said sensibly. “We’ve got nothing to lose.”
So they’d waited for Ford to arrive, filled him in on their plans, and asked him to stay with Lydia until they got back. Then they slipped out before her meeting with Eleanor was over. He knew she wasn’t going to be happy. But there was no way he was going to allow her to tag along on this errand and there would have been no way to stop her if she knew where they were going. So he’d take his beating later.
“According to Danielle, the entrance should be coming up here on the right,” Dax said, his voice low. A moment later they came upon an opening in the concrete wall. They could hear voices in the distance. Dax and Jeff exchanged a look. “After you,” said Jeff with a smile, and Dax disappeared into the hole. Jeffrey followed him into the darkness.
The New York State Facility for the Criminally Insane rose like a beige monument to misery against the horizon. Lydia and Ford had driven for miles through heavy trees without passing another car or seeing another building, and a light snow had started to fall. Whether it was the stark lines of the structure, or the bars on the windows, or just the knowledge of the hell within its walls, Lydia went cold inside as they grew closer. The place had always existed in her imagination as a house of horrors… where patients suffering from disease of the mind, and maybe the soul, wandered about trying to sort out reality from delusion. She imagined flickering lights, wet gray hallways, somewhere the sound of someone scraping, someone moaning. A place where the cures-shock therapy, lobotomy-were more horrifying than the disease. She wondered if the walls of the structure soaked up the nightmare visions of its residents, she wondered if their fantasies lived somehow in the concrete and gates-if that’s why the sight of it filled her with dread.
She was glad there was still a half an hour of distance to cover; she was almost sorry she had come at all. What good did it do for her to come to this place, former home of Jed McIntyre? It was like she was always trying to prove something… how brave, how strong, how able she was to handle any situation.
“So how’s Rose?” asked Lydia, trying to make idle conversation. Billy Joel sang “The Piano Man” on the easy
