Twice

notice and was eating as if he hadn’t had a meal in a week. Jeffrey had pushed away his turkey club and ate potato chips from a small bag.

“I think it’s better if we’re not there when Ford interviews the twins,” said Jeffrey, taking a swig from a bottle of mineral water. “After all, we’re supposed to be on Eleanor’s team. It wouldn’t look good to show up with the cops, especially given her opinion of them.”

“Not that you should be showing up with me anyway. As far as I’m concerned, you guys don’t even exist,” said Ford, looking at his watch.

Lydia nodded. She had been curious to hear the interview, but she was more interested in meeting Maura Hodge.

“How are you guys going to get back?” asked Ford.

“Dax is on his way,” said Jeffrey. “He’s meeting us with the Range Rover.” Dax had been tied up that morning with one of his other “clients.”

“What does that guy do exactly?” asked Ford. Then he held up a hand. “You know what? Don’t tell me.”

They were quiet for a second. Lydia couldn’t stop thinking about what Marilyn Wood had told her.

“What do you think about the librarian’s story?” she asked Ford.

“What,” said Ford, with a laugh. “You mean the curse.”

“You think it’s funny?” asked Lydia, leaning in to him.

“I wouldn’t say funny, exactly,” answered Ford with a smile, his amused skepticism wrinkling his eyes and turning up the corners of his mouth.

“It’s possible, isn’t it, that this Maura Hodge is making sure her ancestor’s curse is fulfilled… one way or another?”

“What do you mean… like she’s killing the husbands?”

“Or paying someone to do it. Or she has some kind of accomplice.”

Ford shrugged, looked up, and seemed to be considering the possibilities. “Seems a little far-fetched,” he said finally.

“What’s so far-fetched about it?”

“How old is this woman?”

“In her sixties, according to the librarian.”

“So that would make her in her late twenties around the time of Eleanor’s husband’s murder.”

“About that. What’s your point?”

“Nothing. Just that all these murders have been overkill. You know, rage killings. A killer for hire isn’t going to rip someone to pieces. And as for Maura Hodge, how much anger could she muster up for someone else’s two- hundred-year-old gripe?”

“Gripe? A woman watched her five children murdered before her eyes and then her husband was hanged. All because Elizabeth Ross didn’t have the courage to tell the truth. I’d say that’s a little more than a gripe.”

“Whatever you call it, it’s Annabelle’s gripe. Not Maura Hodge’s gripe. See what I’m saying? Whoever killed those men was filled with rage right now,” he said, tapping his finger hard on the table in time with his last two syllables. “Not a hundred and fifty-some years ago.”

She was there again on that night, inside Annabelle’s skin. She could feel the rage, the pain, the immense sadness that must have threatened to burst out of her chest, turn her mind toward insanity. She could imagine her powerless fury, hear her screams that must have sounded like an animal’s howl in the night, carrying all the panic and terror into the air. What if rage like that, pain like that, left an imprint on your DNA? What if over generations it became like a congenital disease that was passed down from one soul to the next? And what if, over time, that rage grew stronger instead of weaker? But these were things she wouldn’t say aloud to people like Ford McKirdy. He was so grounded, so flat to the earth; he would think she was insane. She couldn’t tell him that the buzz was louder than it had ever been. That she sensed an evil in this broken-down town and she couldn’t be sure whether it lived and breathed or whether it was just a part of the ground on which the town sat, that it had sunk into the water and poisoned the whole damned place.

She moved her hand to her belly. It was an unconscious gesture, but when she’d done it, felt the denim beneath her hand, she acknowledged a feeling that had been growing, fluttering in the periphery of her consciousness since she’d discovered she was pregnant. It was the sense that she was no longer alone in her skin. That everything she felt and thought, everything she ate, even the air that she breathed was being shared by another being. All of this, of course, she knew intellectually. Sitting there in the Rusty Penny, she experienced a palpable moment when the information reached her heart. And in that moment, she just felt so real.

She wasn’t sure why this feeling had come to her now. Maybe it was thinking of what people passed on to their children. How the baggage people carried was unloaded onto the most innocent among them; how the generations of two families since that awful night long ago might have been impacted by hatred and revenge, one way or another. And maybe it made her think of her own baggage and how she was going to try like hell not to pass it along to their child. She looked up then and saw both Ford and Jeff looking at her.

“What?” she said. “I wasn’t listening.”

“What’s going on in there?” said Jeff, looking at her with a little worry and putting a hand on the back of her head.

“Nothing,” she said. She looked into his eyes and smiled.

“Well, curse or no curse, I gotta head back to the city,” Ford said, wiping the grease from his mouth. He threw ten dollars on the table. “No offense, Lydia. I can’t handle this hocus-pocus bullshit. I have to deal with the facts, find out who crawled up through that hole, if anyone, who let him in, which of them killed Richard Stratton. We’re not going to figure that out digging into some town legend.”

“And what about Eleanor’s mysterious missing brother? And the town recluse, Maura Hodge? What if the answer to your question is right here in Haunted?”

“Call me on my cell. But watch out for the Headless Horseman, will ya?”

“Very funny.”

“Seriously, keep me posted. I’ll call you when I’ve finished with Eleanor and the twins.”

“Ford, what about the autopsy results? When do those come back?” asked Jeff.

“Should be today; they’ve been a little backed up. Busy homicide month. But they pushed mine up because it’s high-profile. There’s a meeting in the morning-ME, crime scene technicians, junior detectives, ten A.M. Midtown North. You guys can drop by afterward if you keep a low profile. I’ll fill you in.”

“We’ll be there,” said Jeff as Ford slid out of the booth. He stopped a second before walking out the door. He regarded them with a frown and pointed a paternal finger at them.

“You two be careful,” he said, thoughtful, as if his mind were already on something else. “Call me if you run into anything tangible.”

Lydia watched him as he muddled out the door. With his worn old beige raincoat and bad navy blue suit, he looked like a sad cliche of himself. Run-down middle-aged cop, nothing in his life but the job. Anything tangible… she thought. As far as she was concerned, the information the librarian gave her was the most tangible thing they had.

“I say,” said Dax with a wicked smile from the backseat, “we go in, guns blazing. Ask questions later.”

The three of them sat in the Range Rover in front of a giant elaborate wrought-iron fence, its bars formed to look like a network of vines and thorns. A sign was posted to the right of the gate explaining that the owner was legally entitled to shoot anyone who set foot on her property. It also warned that trained Dobermans roamed the property and that the owner was not responsible for the actions of said animals in the event someone decided to trespass. However, the gate was ajar. It felt oddly to Lydia like a dare.

“As much as I appreciate your input, Dax,” said Lydia flatly, “I think we’ll try a more civilized approach.”

She pulled her cell phone from the pocket of her black leather blazer.

“I’ve seen Chiclets bigger than that thing,” Dax said, pointing to her tiny cell phone. “I’d have to have a six- pack of them. I’d crush one a day at least.”

Lydia smiled in spite of herself. She was trying to treat both of them with a disdainful distance for their actions of yesterday. But they were hard to stay angry with, especially since she knew they were motivated only by