Twice

put them in the backseat, made sure they were strapped in, and shut the door.

“We’ll be with Mommy soon,” he said sweetly before locking the car with a remote he held in his hand. From the truck, he then unloaded five red gallon containers marked GASOLINE and walked back into the house with one in each hand, leaving the other three on the ground by the car. Lydia and Jeffrey exchanged a look. Lydia shrugged and they followed Ross into the house.

They stood in the foyer watching as James Ross doused the living room with gasoline. It was a full minute before he felt their eyes on him and turned to see them. Instead of startling, he smiled. His face was so strikingly like Julian’s face, the face from her drawings and the portrait at DiMarco’s gallery, that Lydia almost gasped. His eyes were the searing blue of a crystal-clear sky, and in them she saw the same glitter of insanity she’d viewed in his sister. He may have cut his hair and changed his clothes, but she could see the maniac alive and well inside him.

“You clean up pretty good for a dead guy, Mr. Ross,” said Lydia, trying through humor to trick her heart out of her stomach.

He laughed good-naturedly. “It’s funny how the things people do to destroy you can wind up working out to your advantage. It’s like I always say, you can’t control the things that happen to you in your life. All you can control is your attitude.”

He didn’t seem at all surprised to see them, seemed to know who they were. Lydia wondered how, somewhere in the periphery of her consciousness.

“We’re looking for a friend of ours. Hoping maybe you can help us,” said Jeffrey.

“You’ve come to the right place,” he said. “And maybe when I’m done with this, I can help you out.”

“So… what are you up to?” asked Lydia, matching his casual tone.

“I’m reclaiming what’s mine, Ms. Strong.”

“Looks to me like you’re getting ready to set it on fire,” said Jeffrey, clicking the safety off his gun.

James Ross looked at Jeffrey’s gun and then at the house around him. “Time for a fresh start,” he said brightly, clapping his hands together. “Our past is so ugly, ugly, ugly. I want my family to move forward from here. The twins deserve better than we had.”

“That’s why you killed their father?”

He blinked at Lydia as if she were an apparition that he wished would disappear. And she wondered for a second if he thought they were real or a product of his diseased mind.

“I am their father,” he said slowly. “Julian’s husband may have been their sire, but those children belong to me.”

“How do you figure?”

“Because Julian and I are one person,” he said with a sympathetic smile. “We come from the same seed; what she is, I am. What comes from her body, comes from mine. Can you understand that?”

“What about Julian?”

“Julian had her chance for us all to be together. I offered her freedom from a marriage to a man she could never love. But she couldn’t see that. She’d wanted this normal life that she could never have. That’s why she’s lost touch with reality, why she’s locked away in that hellhole. She can’t accept who she is, who we are. So the twins and I will just have to go on without her. Now I really have to be going.”

Lydia nodded. “I understand how you feel, James. I do. Do you understand that we can’t let you burn this place down? And we can’t let you have the twins?”

“What business is it of yours, anyway? My mother hired you, right? She’s dead. I’ll pay your fee and this can stay between us,” he said, like it was the most logical thought in the world.

“That’s not the way it works, James,” said Jeffrey.

“I’m not armed,” James said to Jeffrey, nodding toward his gun.

“You’ve got a can of gasoline and, I’m assuming, a lighter in your pocket. I call that armed.”

James shrugged. He paced a bit and then turned to them.

“You’re looking for justice, right? Bring the murderer, the kidnapper, to justice. That’s noble. I respect that. But,” he said, and here his face changed, went from cool and reasonable to angry, “you don’t understand any of this. Don’t you know what they did to me?”

His brow furrowed and his face flushed.

“They locked me away from Julian. Said I tried to burn down this house, kill my sister and my mother. But it was a lie.” He spat the last word out like it burned his tongue.

“Was it?”

“Yes,” he yelled, and then composed himself. “Because Eleanor wanted to keep Julian and me apart. She thought we had something dirty. But it was never like that. Never. It was the purest love two people could share.

“We loved each other, we belonged together. Even Eleanor could see that. Jealous old cow. She said I was evil, afraid that I was the manifestation of that stupid curse she obsessed about every fucking day. So she had her lover lock me away. Dr. Wetterau. They were lovers. Did you know that? She always went on and on about how my father had been her one true love, that there would never be another. But it didn’t stop her from fucking around like a whore.”

“So they sent you away. To keep you from Julian,” said Lydia.

“But I escaped,” he said, and laughed.

“And where did you go?”

“Julian was at Chapin by then, in New York. So I went to her. But she didn’t love me anymore,” he said, and his eyes filled with tears. He turned away from them and stood before the hearth.

“They’d brainwashed her, convinced her that I was evil. She turned me away, told me she wanted a normal life, a natural love. I was ruined, destroyed. Started to believe that I was evil. I was never far from her, always shadowing her, watching over her.

“I lived like an animal for a lifetime. But now, as you can see, I’ve had a rebirth. I’ve claimed my children.”

“Did you kill Tad Jenson?”

“I didn’t mean to,” he said, and appeared truly remorseful. “I just wanted to see her, to touch her. And he wouldn’t let me. Things just got out of hand. You know how it goes… don’t you? The rage, that monster inside, just takes over.”

“And Richard Stratton?”

“The rage…” he said, and didn’t go on. He looked off in the distance now, into the past, a gallery of all his regrets and mistakes.

“The past is so unforgiving,” he went on. “But the future is a blank slate. We can make anything of it. That’s what I’m going to do for the twins. They represent everything I have lost… my love, my fortune, my family. In them, all things will be made right.”

“What about the curse? Where do Maura and Annabelle Hodge fit into this?”

“Oh, they were happy for the opportunity to destroy Eleanor and Julian. When I finally found the courage to return to this place,” he said, looking around him. “You know, to set the past right. I went to see Maura. Because we had a common enemy, Eleanor, we became allies. We both got what we wanted. Maura and Annabelle got to see Eleanor’s worse nightmares come true and then they got to watch her die. It wasn’t really about the curse, you know. That’s just a myth. It was hatred pure and simple. Now Maura and Annabelle are long gone. Maura has her vengeance after all these years.”

“What did Annabelle get out of all of this?”

“I think Annabelle was more motivated by the payoff than anything. That and fear of her mother. Poor kid. And who wouldn’t be afraid of Maura? She’s fucking insane.”

In her zeal to classify all human motivation, Lydia had neglected maybe the most powerful of all… hatred. It had been the food Maura ate most of her life and apparently had fed to her daughter. In a way, Lydia felt bad for Annabelle; she was as much a victim as Lola and Nathaniel, used in the same way.

“Have you satisfied your curiosity, Ms. Strong? Do you know everything you want to know?”

“There’s just one thing. Our friend, Ford McKirdy.”

“Your nosey little friend almost ruined everything. Let’s make a deal, shall we? I’ll give you your friend, and you let me walk out of here. We’ll just pretend this little meeting never happened.”