Lola?”
“I don’t remember,” she answered sullenly.
Nathaniel looked over at his sister and seemed to be affected by her mood. He reached out a hand to touch her leg and she took it in hers. Ford saw the closeness there that he’d seen the first night. Nathaniel slid in closer to Lola.
“I remember,” Nathaniel said. “You wore your red nightgown with the hearts. Remember?”
Bingo, thought Ford. Neither child seemed to feel that they had anything to hide about their attire. He’d half worried that Lola was smart enough to understand why they wanted that information. Ford cast a glance at Eleanor. But if she was having a reaction to what Nathaniel had revealed, she hid it well. She stood with her arms folded, her eyes fixed on the monitor. Her lawyer sat on the sofa watching, as well, and taking notes.
“So let’s go back to that night. Close your eyes and think hard for me, okay, guys? Your grandmother read
At this, Nathaniel’s eyes widened. Lola looked over at him with a severe glance as he started to sniffle.
“What, Nathaniel? What is it?” asked Irma, her voice coaxing.
“Nathaniel” Lola said, her tone a warning. He looked over at her and his little mouth curled, his eyes filled with big tears.
“The bogeyman,” said Nathaniel. “The bogeyman came.” And he released a wail that raised goose bumps on Ford’s arm, that was at once heartbreaking and frightening.
“Roaches, tunnels, curses, dogs-now ghosts. Give me good old hand-to-hand combat any day compared to this shit,” said Dax from the back of the Rover. The sky had turned to blue velvet outside and stars began to glitter in the night. They had the heat on full blast and Lydia still didn’t seem to be able to warm up after their visit with Maura Hodge.
“What’s the matter, Dax? Chicken?” she said.
“Not bloody likely,” he said, snorting his contempt. “But that woman and her beasts gave me the shivers. Who else was in the house?”
Lydia looked over at Dax. “She said no one. But I heard some movement upstairs, or thought I did.”
“Well, I saw someone in the window upstairs. There was definitely someone up there.”
“Man, woman? What?”
“What do I have, a fucking bionic eye? It’s dark; I couldn’t tell.” Then, “Where are we going now?”
“Haunted house,” said Jeff, looking in the rearview mirror. “No pun intended.”
“Naturally.”
They’d left the Hodge residence with the uneasy feeling that Maura was either crazy or deceitful or both. Lydia was unsatisfied with the interview; it felt like a tease and that they had left with more questions than answers. Lydia had the distinct impression that Maura had talked to them only because she knew they weren’t going to take no for an answer. And that she’d carefully evaded giving any actual information about anything. Or maybe she really didn’t know anything. Maybe she was just an old woman, alone with her bitter and crazy thoughts, and that was all she had to share.
Once they were back in the SUV, Jeff had a brief conversation with Ford in which they’d exchanged information about their respective interviews.
“So you got ghosts and I got the bogeyman,” Ford had said with a laugh.
“That’s about the size of it. Now what?”
“I’m going to head back over to the laundry room and watch the forensics team. If someone did that crime and then left through the laundry room, there has to be blood evidence. Even if it was wiped clean, the Luminol has a chemiluminescent compound that reacts to the iron in the hemoglobin and glows under a blue light. If nothing else it could prove someone else was at the scene that night.
“The other thing I wanted to tell you was that we have about twenty guys down in those tunnels trying to find a trail to follow… the Luminol might help with that, too. I learned, however, from this New York City architectural historian that I located at Columbia University that tunnels like this are not at all unusual in older buildings. They were blasted out during Prohibition, made quick getaways for speakeasy proprietors and bootleggers. Interesting, huh? I never knew that before.”
“Me neither.”
“Anyway, they’re all over the place, especially in the East Village. Most of them have been sealed up, though.”
Jeff was silent a minute, thinking of the whole network of passages beneath the street connecting to buildings. It added another dimension in his mind to the city he thought he knew. With Jed McIntyre crawling around down there, it made him more than a little uneasy.
“Jeff?” said Ford.
“Sorry. We’re going to head over to the Ross estate,” he said, snapping back to the conversation. “Apparently it has sat empty and untouched for years. Lydia thinks we’ll find some answers there.”
“Good luck. See you in the morning.”
Breaking and entering just didn’t seem like that big a deal anymore. Lydia remembered a time when it seemed very exciting in its grayness, in the way it walked the line between right and wrong. But tonight it took Jeff about fifteen seconds to pick the lock and they were into the Ross home as easily and with as much a sense of entitlement as if they’d had a key.
“That lock is new,” commented Jeff as the door swung open, creaking on its hinges. They’d bickered briefly in the car about Lydia waiting outside in the event that floorboards and such in the house were unstable. She, naturally, wouldn’t hear of it. So Jeffrey guessed that their agreement about her not involving herself in the more dangerous aspects of the investigation was little more than a sham. It was his turn to be angry now. Angry that she was so stubborn; angry that his concerns for her safety-completely natural concerns, given the circumstances-were ignored. She made him feel like a Neanderthal for wanting to protect her and their child-and he was starting to resent the hell out of it. He wondered when she was going to start acting as if she cared about her own safety… and
The three of them stood in the grand foyer and looked about them at the havoc time and neglect had wrought. Their Maglite beams cut through the darkness like tiny kliegs, circles of light falling on graffiti across the walls, beer bottles on the floor. Spider webs glittered and swayed from the chandelier above their heads. In a drawing room off to the right of the foyer, the stuffing had been ripped from an antique sofa and chairs, a fireplace was filled with trash. The wind was picking up outside and it blew through the house with a moan.
“What are we looking for?” asked Dax.
“I’ll know it when I find it,” answered Lydia as she walked down a hallway that led deeper into the house. Dax headed off to the right toward the staircase. After a second, they could hear the steps creaking dangerously beneath his weight. Lydia half braced herself, waiting for him to come crashing through the wood until she heard him reach the landing above.
At the end of the hallway, she and Jeffrey reached a set of double doors that led to a library, where every inch of wall space was covered with books on rich oak shelves. With high ceilings, an elaborate Oriental rug over dark wood flooring, a cavernous fireplace across from a leather sofa and matching wingback chairs, a low, wide cocktail table, the room was elegant in a masculine way. Everything was covered by a thick layer of dust, had the aura of decay and abandonment.
Lydia walked over to the books and observed leather-bound volumes of all the classics-full collections of Tolstoy, Dickens, Milton, Lawrence, Hawthorne, Shakespeare-pretty much every major author Lydia could imagine. She also noticed medical and law texts, volumes on botany, biology, psychology. She reached up and extracted one of the books,
It made her think back to what Maura Hodge had said about Eleanor and her brother. There was something so
