cold air.
“This is a crime scene,” said the cop. He was young, red-faced, with a bristle of strawberry blond hair on his head. He had a sleep crease on his cheek where he’d obviously rested it against the door as he napped. His gold nameplate read REED.
“NYPD Detective Malone was supposed to call with clearance,” said Jeffrey, holding out his identification.
The cop looked from Jeffrey to Lydia with suspicion but then reluctantly pulled the radio from its hook on the dash and muttered into the mouthpiece unintelligibly. He waited, silent, not looking at them, while the radio crackled with static and other communications.
Lydia looked up at the house and remembered the last time they’d been there. She remembered the noises upstairs she’d heard when they’d interviewed Maura, how Dax had seen a figure in the upstairs window. The thought made her skin tingle. The windows were dark now, had that air of desertion like the rest of the town.
“Forty-one, forty-one,” the radio yelled.
Reed grabbed the radio and seemed to puff up with self-importance. Lydia noticed that his fingers were long and girlish in their shape and apparent softness.
“Forty-one,” he said into the mike.
“Clearance granted for Mark and Strong.”
“Ten-four.”
“You can go in,” he said, friendlier now that they had been cleared. “Holler if you need anything.”
“Thanks,” said Jeffrey.
The smell that Lydia remembered from their first visit seemed to have staled and solidified. She felt the same swelling of her sinuses just seconds after stepping though the door. A staircase to her left led into darkness.
“Let’s split up,” she said. “I’ll head upstairs.”
Jeffrey looked at her and flashed on the attack in the basement of the Ross house. The habits of the last few months, the feeling that someone always had to be with her because of Jed McIntyre, were dying hard.
“Okay,” he said with effort.
Lydia smiled at him, squeezed his hand. “I’ll
The stairs groaned beneath her weight and the wood felt like it had a bit too much give. But she made it to the top of the stairs without falling through. She pushed the door open to the immediate right of the landing and flipped on the light. It was totally bare, the windows boarded up. She walked across to a closet and saw only a single wire hanger lonely on a mauve tension rod.
Two other rooms she entered were identically empty, though the rest of the windows were free of plywood. Lydia walked down the hallway over sagging wood floors, her footfalls sounding loud to her own ears. At the end of the hall, she turned the brass knob of one of the two remaining bedrooms. Here the smell was more powerful than anywhere else in the house, some combination of mold and dust, maybe wood rot.
The room was full of junk. A blue bicycle with rusted handlebars and a missing front wheel leaned against the wall. A Singer sewing machine, its plastic case yellowed and cracked, sat atop a rickety wood table. The fading light outside struggled in through windows that were opaque with grime. Lydia flipped the light switch and a bulb hanging from a wire, naked of fixtures, sizzled to life, albeit dimly. It flickered as she moved through the stacks of junk. Ripped and soiled clothes-a man’s gray wool overcoat with the pockets torn out, a flowered housedress covered with dark red stains, a child’s red corduroy jumpsuit cut with scissors-were piled randomly about the space. A tower of old record albums teetered in a corner. It was a big room, maybe four or five hundred square feet, and Lydia moved through the maze of junk.
One of the major principles of good Feng Shui is to clear all spaces of clutter. Clutter represents stale energy. A person who feels comfortable in clutter is the kind of person who holds on to the past, can’t let go. Lydia was not surprised to see a room like this in Maura Hodge’s home. Maura could hold a grudge… even one that wasn’t necessarily her own. Righteous anger like that was addictive; it allowed a person to stagnate, wallow in her contemplation of injustice, spend all her energy seeking revenge and never for a second thinking that there might be another way to live. Lydia herself had been guilty of this for many years.
Something in the far corner of the room was covered with a white sheet. As she approached, a gust of wind traveled through the house with a low groan. Lydia felt a little flutter of fear and was glad when a second later she heard Jeffrey’s footfalls on the stairs. She’d had too many people leaping out of the dark at her in the last several days; she was getting a bit skittish.
“Where are you?” he called.
“The room at the end of the hall.”
“Find anything?” he said as he entered.
“Not yet,” she said, walking over to the sheet and yanking it.
The sheet came down in a cloud of dust to reveal a bookcase filled with the same leather-bound volumes Lydia remembered seeing at the Haunted Library. She scanned the titles embossed in gold on the bindings.
“Christ,” said Jeffrey. “How many volumes could you fill with the history of Haunted?”
“Looks like about thirty. Three centuries’ worth.”
The books, all titled
“Fascinating.”
“You know,” Lydia said, “all these books have exactly the same binding. So did all the books in the Haunted Library.”
“So?”
“When’s the last time you were in a library and all the books were the same?”
“I haven’t been in a library since Quantico,” he said with a shrug. “In fact, I’m not sure I even remember how to read.”
She picked a book off the shelf at random and turned to the title page.
by
Maura Hodge
“Voodoo priestess-slash-author,” said Jeffrey, leaning over Lydia’s shoulder.
“Looks self-published.”
“Didn’t Eleanor say that Maura had been commissioning writers and historians to document the history of Haunted?” said Jeffrey.
“Yeah, I guess she’s been publishing the work as well. Or at least binding it. That must be why all the books have the same package.”
Lydia grabbed another volume and saw that it, too, was written by Maura Hodge. In fact, after a few minutes of inspection it appeared that Maura had written them all.
“Wow, that’s stamina for you,” said Jeffrey.
“No. That’s obsession.”
“She’s obsessed with Haunted? Doesn’t seem like much of an obsession.”
“With the past. Remember how Ford said that the person who killed Tad Jenson and Richard Stratton was enraged? And how Maura’s grudge was over one hundred and fifty years and had nothing really to do with her immediate world so she couldn’t muster the rage it took to commit those crimes?”
“Yeah…”
“Well,
“So… what? Because she wrote a few books that means she killed Tad Jenson, Richard Stratton, Eleanor Ross, and took Lola and Nathaniel?”
