Lisa Miscione - Twice

Once they were back in the SUV, Jeff had a brief conversation with Ford in which they’d exchanged information about their respective interviews.

“So you got ghosts and I got the bogeyman,” Ford had said with a laugh.

“That’s about the size of it. Now what?”

“I’m going to head back over to the laundry room and watch the forensics team. If someone did that crime and then left through the laundry room, there has to be blood evidence. Even if it was wiped clean, the Luminol has a chemiluminescent compound that reacts to the iron in the hemoglobin and glows under a blue light. If nothing else it could prove someone else was at the scene that night.

“The other thing I wanted to tell you was that we have about twenty guys down in those tunnels trying to find a trail to follow… the Luminol might help with that, too. I learned, however, from this New York City architectural historian that I located at Columbia University that tunnels like this are not at all unusual in older buildings. They were blasted out during Prohibition, made quick getaways for speakeasy proprietors and bootleggers. Interesting, huh? I never knew that before.”

“Me neither.”

“Anyway, they’re all over the place, especially in the East Village. Most of them have been sealed up, though.”

Jeff was silent a minute, thinking of the whole network of passages beneath the street connecting to buildings. It added another dimension in his mind to the city he thought he knew. With Jed McIntyre crawling around down there, it made him more than a little uneasy.

“Jeff?” said Ford.

“Sorry. We’re going to head over to the Ross estate,” he said, snapping back to the conversation. “Apparently it has sat empty and untouched for years. Lydia thinks we’ll find some answers there.”

“Good luck. See you in the morning.”

Breaking and entering just didn’t seem like that big a deal anymore. Lydia remembered a time when it seemed very exciting in its grayness, in the way it walked the line between right and wrong. But tonight it took Jeff about fifteen seconds to pick the lock and they were into the Ross home as easily and with as much a sense of entitlement as if they’d had a key.

“That lock is new,” commented Jeff as the door swung open, creaking on its hinges. They’d bickered briefly in the car about Lydia waiting outside in the event that floorboards and such in the house were unstable. She, naturally, wouldn’t hear of it. So Jeffrey guessed that their agreement about her not involving herself in the more dangerous aspects of the investigation was little more than a sham. It was his turn to be angry now. Angry that she was so stubborn; angry that his concerns for her safety-completely natural concerns, given the circumstances-were ignored. She made him feel like a Neanderthal for wanting to protect her and their child-and he was starting to resent the hell out of it. He wondered when she was going to start acting as if she cared about her own safety… and if she was going to start acting and feeling like a mother at some point.

The three of them stood in the grand foyer and looked about them at the havoc time and neglect had wrought. Their Maglite beams cut through the darkness like tiny kliegs, circles of light falling on graffiti across the walls, beer bottles on the floor. Spider webs glittered and swayed from the chandelier above their heads. In a drawing room off to the right of the foyer, the stuffing had been ripped from an antique sofa and chairs, a fireplace was filled with trash. The wind was picking up outside and it blew through the house with a moan.

“What are we looking for?” asked Dax.

“I’ll know it when I find it,” answered Lydia as she walked down a hallway that led deeper into the house. Dax headed off to the right toward the staircase. After a second, they could hear the steps creaking dangerously beneath his weight. Lydia half braced herself, waiting for him to come crashing through the wood until she heard him reach the landing above.

At the end of the hallway, she and Jeffrey reached a set of double doors that led to a library, where every inch of wall space was covered with books on rich oak shelves. With high ceilings, an elaborate Oriental rug over dark wood flooring, a cavernous fireplace across from a leather sofa and matching wingback chairs, a low, wide cocktail table, the room was elegant in a masculine way. Everything was covered by a thick layer of dust, had the aura of decay and abandonment.

Lydia walked over to the books and observed leather-bound volumes of all the classics-full collections of Tolstoy, Dickens, Milton, Lawrence, Hawthorne, Shakespeare-pretty much every major author Lydia could imagine. She also noticed medical and law texts, volumes on botany, biology, psychology. She reached up and extracted one of the books, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, and opened it to realize by the stiffness of the binding and the pristine condition of the pages that the book had never been read. But written on one of the endpapers was a note:

To Eleanor

We will never be apart .

Paul

It made her think back to what Maura Hodge had said about Eleanor and her brother. There was something so final in his assertion, almost as though it were more of a threat than a declaration of brotherly love. Really, there was nothing brotherly about it, and looking at it written on the page in the faltering hand of a younger person, dark wonderings about the Ross family started to dance in Lydia’s mind like haunting specters.

Glittering particles hung in the beam of Jeffrey’s flashlight like stardust as he shone it toward Lydia. She turned to smile at him and showed him the inscription.

“Weird.” He nodded, taking the information in and wondering what it meant to the investigation at hand.

She placed the book on the shelf and walked behind a gigantic desk that stood before a bay window. The leather chair creaked beneath her weight as she seated herself and started opening drawers by their gilt handles. She looked like Alice in Wonderland, sitting in furniture that had clearly been made for someone much larger than herself. Jeff was just about to sit on the sofa across from her when he noticed a used condom there. He decided to stand.

“Let’s think for a second,” he said, walking behind her and glancing out the window behind him into blackness.

“Okay,” said Lydia. “What do we know for a fact?”

This was their ritual. To line up the facts like cans on a wall, then shoot at them one by one with logic, intuition, evidence, or just plain guesswork. The last can standing was the winner, or the loser, depending on how you looked at it.

“That both of Julian’s husbands, as well as Eleanor’s husband, were brutally murdered in very similar ways. And that all three of those crimes are as yet unsolved.”

“We know that Eleanor Ross has a twin brother who may or may not be dead,” said Lydia. “And we know that she never revealed this fact to us. She also never revealed that her husband was murdered, until I cornered her with it. So what does that tell us about Eleanor?”

“That she’s hiding things.”

“So why did she hire us, then?”

“Because she doesn’t know who’s killing these men, either?”

“Or because she’s afraid?”

Jeffrey shrugged, the question hanging in the air while Lydia rifled through what looked like old letters. He walked over and sat on the windowsill behind her, glancing over her shoulder.

“Afraid of what?” he asked.

“Or afraid of who?” She put the letters back into the drawer, apparently not finding anything that interested her. Then she opened another that was filled with old photographs jumbled together in a pile so large that she had to struggle to pull the drawer out all the way.