Lisa Miscione - Twice

Lydia sat in the front seat beside Ford, with Jeff in the back of the old Taurus.

“Ford, why don’t you get a new car? This is a piece of shit,” said Lydia when he had picked them up on Great Jones Street a few hours earlier. In spite of a restless sleep, she was feeling stronger than she had last night. The daylight made the events of yesterday seem surreal and far away. And she left them there, temporarily putting Jed McIntyre out of her mind.

“I take offense at that. Just because something looks like shit doesn’t mean it is shit,” he replied, looking in the rearview mirror and tamping down an errant hair as they climbed into the car. “Meanwhile, I’m lucky it’s running at all the way you drove it yesterday. I’m surprised the engine didn’t fall out.”

“You let her drive?” asked Jeff. “You shouldn’t let her drive when she’s angry.”

“I’m a very good driver,” said Lydia indignantly.

“Yeah, I’m sure that’s what the monster truckers think, too.”

She gave him a look to let him know he was still on her shit list and would be there until further notice.

“So, what happened last night?” she said, turning to Ford.

“Not much after you left. Forensics showed up, did their thing… obviously, there were a lot of different prints, fibers, hairs down there. No way to know if any of it will mean anything. However, no prints on the ladder rungs or on the door handle. Wiped clean. We got men down in the tunnels seeing where they lead. At least we know now that someone could have gotten into the building without anyone seeing. That’s good news for Julian Ross. Of course, it raises a lot more questions for us.”

“What about blood evidence?”

“Nothing visible. We’re going to do some Luminol later tonight. So we’ll see. Meanwhile, Eleanor Ross is expecting us at four, says we can speak to the twins then… with her lawyer present, of course.”

“Of course,” said Lydia and Jeffrey in unison, exchanging a look in the sideview mirror.

“I didn’t tell her about the warrants I’d be bringing to search their belongings at the apartment and at the hotel. I gotta admit, though, Lydia, it seems a little crazy to think those kids had anything to do with it.”

“Stranger things have happened. People use kids as pawns in all kinds of games. Some sicker than others.”

She could think of a number of cases she’d come across where children had committed or been used in the commission of heinous crimes. Roger Jeffers, a middle-aged New Orleans tax attorney, used his ten-year-old son to lure other young boys out of community pools and parks, then made him watch while he sodomized and then murdered them. Even the Cheerleader Murders case, the first that Jeffrey and Lydia worked together, had involved a teenage girl. Fifteen-year-old Wanda Jane Felix, who’d been tormented and humiliated by the victims, helped her mother to abduct and mutilate the girls in retaliation… though Mrs. Felix had done the actual murders. Then there was twelve-year-old Randy Crabtree, who sold raffle tickets door-to-door to raise funds for his school soccer team. When one eleven-year-old boy who was home alone claimed not to have a dollar to buy a ticket, Randy forced his way into the house and beat the child to death with a coaxial cable. Kids, they were growing up so fast these days under the careful tutelage of sick adults. True, the twins were young. But they were old enough to follow orders. Children made loyal and diligent little soldiers, eager to please, their only knowledge of right from wrong hand-fed to them. Okay to murder, bad to tell anyone about it.

They pulled off the smaller highway that they’d been on since they’d exited the Interstate and followed the signs to Main Street. Unlike some upstate New York towns that prided themselves on their quaint, gentrified downtown areas lined with pretty, well-kept buildings, sweet cafés, and trendy boutiques, Haunted looked as though someone had dumped it on the side of the road in the seventies and forgot to come back and pick it up. It wasn’t dilapidated as much as it appeared to be the victim of determined and persistent apathy.

The Taurus cruised up a street riven with potholes. An old woman hobbled along the sidewalk and took a turn into a bakery that didn’t have a name-bearing sign. The word BAKERY was painted in a fading baby blue on the storefront window. There was a hardware store and a barbershop, complete with the requisite red, white, and blue pole beside the door. The Rusty Penny was a diner that from the street looked utterly empty except for a bored-looking waitress reading a paperback at the counter. All the buildings were painted the same slate gray and seemed to blend into the sky around them. Some hardened and brown snow edged the sidewalk, though most of yesterday’s snowfall seemed to have melted away. They stopped at a light, though there was no other traffic except a decrepit red Chevy pickup behind them. It felt like they waited an inordinately long amount of time before the light changed again.

“Cheerful little burg,” said Ford. “Where should we start?”

“Let’s find the library,” said Lydia. “Drop me off there, then you and Jeff can go off and talk to the local police. See if anyone from 1965 is still around and willing to talk.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

The librarian at the Haunted Public Library was as leathery and dusty as an old unabridged dictionary. Directed there by a gas station attendant who looked like he was high on something, they’d found it about ten minutes north of Main Street. As luck would have it, the local police station was just a quarter of a mile down the same road, visible from the parking lot of the converted old Protestant church-cum-library. Lydia would have expected to be treated with distrust and suspicion in a small backward town like Haunted; anyway that’s what she’d always heard about small towns. But the few residents they’d encountered-the kid at the gas station, the waitress at the Rusty Penny where they’d stopped to pick up some truly vile coffee-had seemed to barely register their existence. In fact, they seemed to barely register their own existences. The librarian was another story.

Lydia had been inside a few small town libraries. She’d expected a few shelves of bestsellers, some back issues of Reader’s Digest , and the archives of the local paper. She’d expected a gray institutional place with faux-wood shelving and bad carpet, fluorescent lights and the sour smell of apple juice spilled during a particularly riotous story hour. What she found was a musty old place, dimly lit. A heavy oak information desk with a gold-plated sign reading WELCOME TO HAUNTED PUBLIC LIBRARY, MARILYN E. WOODS, HEAD LIBRARIAN seemed to act as a sentry against entering. Two banker’s lamps with rich green glass shades sat atop the desk, casting a warm yellow light. Behind the desk, Lydia could see row after row of richly varnished oak shelving, stacked high with what looked like leather-bound volumes with gilt-edged pages. A staircase led to a gated loft, where more volumes could be seen behind glass. Off to the right was a cozy sitting area, where red brocade overstuffed chairs stood imperiously beside a long table the same varnished oak as the shelves. It was the kind of library Lydia would have expected to see at an Ivy League university or in some Gothic mansion.

“Can I help you?”

Marilyn E. Woods looked as though she had been born to be a librarian. She was a tiny woman, frail about the shoulders but with a long, graceful neck. Her graying hair flowed in thick curls down her back, a few strands pulled back from her face with a barrette. Her skin was as pale as moonlight. Wire-rimmed spectacles sat atop a beakish nose; the eyes beneath were dark and searing, wrinkled at the corners but glittering with intelligence and curiosity. She wore a simple black long-sleeved empire waist dress, and a jade amulet hung from prayer beads around her neck. She had an aura of belonging where she was, as if she were as much a fixture of the library as the oak shelves.