Twice

“And what did she say?”

“She said she was sure she would feel it when he died,” he said with a mystified laugh. “And she never felt it. She believed he was still out there waiting for her.”

“She may have been right,” said Lydia. “I think I may have seen him.”

There was something then that came over Orlando. It was a kind of stillness, a waiting. Lydia saw him almost visibly stiffen. “Is that possible?” he asked, his voice almost a whisper.

“Anything’s possible, isn’t it?”

“But the body they found last year in Haunted. It was positively identified,” he said. He had the look suddenly of someone trying to appear nonchalant. She watched as a tiny muscle started to dance involuntarily at the corner of his eye.

Lydia shrugged. “Records can be falsified.”

“Could he be responsible for all of this?” he said, looking at Lydia with alarm.

“If he’s alive, it seems like a highly likely possibility.”

He seemed to turn the possibility over in his mind. He closed his eyes for a second. “It’s her worst nightmare realized,” he said.

“She’s afraid of him?”

“He tried to kill her and her mother when they were teenagers,” Orlando said, turning to look at her. “They put him away, but he escaped. She always believed that her brother was responsible for the murder of Tad Jenson.”

“But she never implicated him?”

“In spite of her terror of him, there’s a bond there that I could never understand,” he said.

She remembered what Julian had said about her brother, that he was her “angel,” always trying to protect her. You can never be sure with crazy people if what they said was the deepest truth or the most outrageous fantasy.

“Did she ever have any contact with him? Did she know where he was?”

He shook his head. “Not that I know of. She always said that she believed he was lying in wait for her to be happy again, and then he was going to tear her life apart. He’s like her bogeyman, you know. The embodiment of all her worst fears… about the world and about herself.”

“About herself?”

“That’s what she said. She never explained except to say that they were one… what he was, she was.”

Lydia shuddered as his words reminded her of Jed McIntyre. One mind, one heart.

They flipped through the rest of the images slowly, the burning house, the huddled children, the naked woman, the young beautiful James, and the monster were images that repeated over and over. Then, on the last page of the sketchpad, Lydia was surprised to see a drawing she’d missed the first time. Filling the page was a mass of curls, and the malicious stare of giant eyes. Smoke danced upward in rings from the bowl of a pipe. Delicately drawn into one of the smoke rings was the scene of the murder of Annabelle Taylor’s children that the librarian Marilyn Woods had described to Lydia. Five small corpses lay on the ground in a field of fire, as the figure of a man stood with a gun drawn. In another of the rings was an image of the twins lying lifeless on the ground before the burning house. Half the face on the page was that of Maura Hodge, the other half was Eleanor Ross. Julian had written, “Behold the Queens of the Damned and the havoc they have wrought on all of us.”

“Jeff, it’s Ford. Listen, Lydia was right. That DNA evidence from the Milky Way bar links whoever attacked her in the Ross home with someone present at the Jenson scene. I’m not sure what it means, but I’m heading up to Haunted. This can’t wait till tomorrow, especially with the twins missing. I’ll keep you posted.”

As he’d listened to the message, Jeffrey had felt a surge of dread. He was relieved to have a lead on Ford, where he’d gone, and why; but it had been more than seventy-two hours since Ford had left that message. Jeffrey had lost the phone to Jed McIntyre and for all he knew it was lying somewhere in the tunnels. He hadn’t even missed it until he’d been wracking his brain, trying to figure out what Ford’s move would have been after leaving Donofrio, wondering what would have led him to take off, not letting anyone know where he was going. Out of desperation he’d called his own cell phone, hoping maybe there was a message there.

Jeffrey was certain now, as Lydia had been all along, that the answers to Richard Stratton’s and now Eleanor Ross’s murders, as well as the disappearance of the twins and Ford McKirdy, would all be found in Haunted.

“Don’t leave me here like this, man,” begged Dax, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. He sat on Lydia and Jeffrey’s couch, legs up on the ottoman, phone and remote control within easy reach. He looked pale and anxious, as if Jeff were leaving him on the battlefield to die.

“We’re only going to be a few hours, Dax.”

“Look,” he said, “I can help you.”

“You can’t walk, Dax,” Jeffrey said gently.

“I can walk,” he insisted.

Really, the truth was that he could hobble. With enough painkillers, Dax could get himself around a small area. But he had been instructed to stay off his feet to allow the partially severed tendons to heal properly. So Lydia had insisted that he stay with them in their downstairs bedroom until he could get around his house in Riverdale a little better. Dax had grudgingly agreed, though Jeffrey thought he was secretly glad for the offer. The three of them were close now, more so than they had been before everything went down. The things they had endured together had bonded them.

“Besides, you don’t need legs to fire a gun. Just prop me up in the backseat and I’m good to go.”

“It’s not going to be like that,” said Jeffrey, pulling on his leather coat. “You’d just be sitting uncomfortable in the car when you could be here resting. And there aren’t going to be any shootouts.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Dax said with a snort. “That’s why you have the Desert Eagle, then?”

“Seriously, we’ll be back in a couple of hours. We’ll call if we’re going to be late.”

Dax turned on the television and tuned Jeffrey out. He really wasn’t handling his recovery period very well.

“Do you need anything before I go?” asked Jeffrey, starting to feel like the nanny to a difficult child. “I have to meet Lydia.”

“I’m fine,” Dax said sullenly. “I’ll just sit here like a completely useless turd until you get back.”

“Cheer up, man,” said Jeffrey, patting Dax on the shoulder. “We’ll be back before you know we’re gone.”

He put in a quick call to Malone and Piselli to let them know about Ford’s last message and headed out the door.

chapter forty-one

Maybe it was because snow threatened, turning the sky a moody gray and black. Or maybe it was the time Lydia spent with Orlando probing the depths of Julian Ross’s twisted psyche. But on crossing into the Haunted city limits, the town felt unwelcoming to the point of menace. It seemed emptier, almost deserted, not that it had been a bustle of activity before. But something about it now had the air of abandonment. The depressed little Main Street, which on their first visit had been more or less innocuous, if approaching dilapidation, seemed… haunted. As they pulled off of Main and up the winding roads to the outskirts of town, the black dead trees rising up on either side warned them away with branches reaching like witch’s fingers into the sky.

They pulled the Kompressor off the main road and through the open gate that led to the Hodge house. At the end of the drive, they came to a stop behind a black-and-white prowler that sat in front of the porch where they’d first seen Maura Hodge with her shotgun and Dobermans. They climbed out of the car and Lydia could see by the tilt of his head that the cop sitting in the car was dozing.

“I’m not sure this is what Malone and Piselli had in mind when they said the Hodge residence was under surveillance,” Lydia said as they approached the driver’s side of the squad car.

Jeffrey tapped on the window and the cop awoke with a startled snort. He looked around for a few seconds, disoriented, and then rolled down the window. A mingling scent of body odor and stale coffee wafted out into the