Twice

made her an outcast, as well. She didn’t care, anything to hurt Eleanor.”

“And all that money… from the Proctor estate?”

“Went to Eleanor, James, and Julian, I assume. Now just Julian, I guess. James Ross’s body was found at the Ross house last year.”

“Combine that with the Jenson and Stratton money, not to mention Julian’s own fortune, and we’re talking about a huge pile of cash,” said Jeffrey.

“But none of it has ever bought that family a moment’s peace,” said Marilyn with a slight smile. “Even now.”

“And what about Annabelle Hodge?”

Marilyn shrugged and shook her head. Lydia saw a quick shift of her eyes, though. She registered it but said nothing.

“Why didn’t you mention her the last time I was here?”

“You didn’t ask.”

Lydia looked hard at the librarian. “What do you know about her?”

“Nothing, really. Maura got pregnant late in life. She’d never married but had the child anyway. Annabelle was home-schooled, went off to college a couple of years ago.”

“So who’s her father?”

“No one knows, really.”

“A town this small, a woman bears a child out of wedlock, and usually there are rumors, at least.”

“Well, if there were, I didn’t hear any of them,” she said primly, straightening her back.

“Seems like there’s not much you don’t know about this town,” said Jeffrey gently.

“Maura is not well,” said Marilyn.

“We were just at the Hodge house and saw the book she’d written about the curse,” said Lydia. “Seems like she believed that the ghost of Austin Steward impregnated her.”

Marilyn lifted her frail shoulders and nodded. “That’s what she believes.”

“Still?”

“Still. Or so she says.”

“What about Annabelle? What does she believe?”

“If you ask me, Annabelle doesn’t know what to believe. She’s a puppet, more or less, to Maura’s whims. Maura totally isolated that child; she never even went to the school here. Maura educated her at home.”

“I can only imagine what that lesson plan looked like,” Jeffrey said from the door.

“And you, Marilyn,” coaxed Lydia. “Who do you think might be Annabelle’s father? Any thoughts at all?”

“Honestly, Miss Strong, when it comes to those families, the less you know, the better.”

“Okay,” said Jeffrey back at the wheel of the Kompressor. “So I get why Maura hated Eleanor Ross, why she might have been motivated to kill Jack Proctor, and even Eleanor, though why she’d wait all this time to kill her is beyond me. I also get the whole curse thing, and why that might motivate someone to kill Julian’s husbands, you know, if they believed it was their ancestral duty or whatever. And there’s a lot of money at stake, we know that. But how these things fit together… it doesn’t make sense.”

“If it was just about revenge, about the ‘curse,’ why take the children? They’re not part of it.”

“What if it’s about the money?”

“Yeah, but the kidnapper isn’t going to inherit the money if Julian is declared incompetent. We talked about who had the most to gain and how it seemed like Eleanor.”

“But now Eleanor is dead.”

“Maybe it’s not about money; maybe it’s just about hatred pure and simple. Maybe someone just hates Julian Ross.”

“Then why not just kill her?”

“When you hate someone enough, maybe death seems like an easy way out.”

Jed McIntyre’s face flashed in front of Lydia’s eyes and she heard his threat to her, Life will be your punishment. She’d given a lot of thought to something else he’d said, as well. When she ran from him in the tunnels and he’d finally caught her, he’d said, I could have shot you in the back anytime I chose. Ask me why I didn’t. She hadn’t asked him, because she already knew the answer. He didn’t want to kill her because he wanted to possess her. That’s why he’d gone after her grandparents, why he’d taken Dax and Jeff. He wanted to destroy everything she loved so that she’d have nothing left; he wanted to strip her bare. Imagining that when she was a shell of herself, he would be able to control her, own her. Insanity had a way of making the ridiculous seem possible.

She thought then of Julian Ross, about the image in her drawing of the naked woman sprawled in the darkness.

“Julian Ross has been stripped bare,” she said, turning to look at Jeffrey, who had his eyes on the road. “She’s nothing but a ghost of herself, her life in shambles.”

“Yeah…”

“So maybe it’s not about the money, or about the curse, or even about hatred and revenge. Maybe someone just wants to destroy Julian’s life,” she said, shifting forward in her seat.

“But why?”

“Because when you’ve lost everything, what do you become?”

Jeffrey shrugged.

“Whatever you have to be to survive,” Lydia said.

“So who hates her that much?”

“I think the better question is: Who loves her that much?”

“Let me guess where you’re going with this,” said Jeff.

“James Ross is alive.”

He paused a second. “I thought we were looking at Maura and Annabelle.”

“They might be a part of it. But look at who is the real victim here. It’s Julian. She’s the one who’s lost everything. Her husband, her mother, her children, her sanity. Maura and Annabelle hated Eleanor enough to kill her. But did they hate Julian enough to wreak such havoc on her life? It had to be someone else, someone intimate to Julian. And I think that’s James Ross.”

“Did you forget that we have a death certificate on him?”

“None of this makes sense without him.”

He released a sigh at her stubbornness.

“What about the DNA evidence?” she said.

“The DNA evidence only proves that someone who was at the scene of the Tad Jenson murder was also in the basement of the Ross home.”

“And how many candidates do you think there are for that?”

Jeffrey considered the question for a minute, then shrugged. “The police chief, the hospital records, and Eleanor, even the librarian, all say James Ross is dead.”

“But the man who signed his death certificate, Dr. Wetterau, he could have told us that when we were in his office. But he didn’t. Why?”

“I don’t know,” Jeffrey admitted.

“Well, I think we’d better find out. Because when we find James Ross, we’re going to find Ford and the twins.”

In an investigation, Lydia noticed, no one was ever as friendly or cooperative on your second visit. And even though they’d visited him for a completely different reason the first time, Dr. Wetterau looked like he’d seen a vision of the Headless Horseman himself when he entered his waiting room to find Lydia looking over Jeffrey’s shoulder as he flipped through the December issue of Cosmopolitan.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. He looked over at the door that led to the outside. “Wasn’t that door locked?”

“Not well,” said Jeffrey pleasantly.

“I’m calling the police,” he said, reaching for the phone that stood on the reception desk.

“No need,” said Lydia, standing. “I’ve already called them.”