Lisa Miscione - Twice

“But you know her, don’t you, Orlando? You’ve loved her for years.”

He looked at her, the exposure seeming to shame him. He lowered his eyes.

“It’s true,” he said slowly. “But even in love we don’t always know each other. Sometimes even less so.”

She walked over to a long table that stood covered with neatly kept bottles of paint, a jar of brushes, some folded tarps, a stack of palettes. The surface of the table was covered with thousands of drops of dried paint, leaving behind a multicolored pattern that was at once bumpy and smooth as glass. She lay the sketchpad down and opened the cover.

Outside Payne Whitney, she’d flipped through the sketchpad and saw a chaotic collection of nightmares, intricate and insane, a window into Julian Ross’s twisted psyche. But she also had the powerful sense that somewhere inside what she saw were the messages of a sane woman trying to escape her own diseased mind. She wanted to talk to someone who’d known Julian before she’d lost her mind. And she could only think of one place to go.

“Tell me what you see here, Orlando,” she said. “Tell me what you know. For Julian.”

He walked to stand beside her and she could smell the light aroma of his expensive cologne. He moved his hand and ran light fingers over the sketch. His nails were perfectly manicured. The delicate bones and thick veins of his hand danced beneath skin the color of caramel.

A naked woman lay sprawled in a sea of blackness, her hands reaching out to the image of two children who huddled together beneath a giant set of jaws. The woman’s eyes and face showed a kind of resignation, a hopelessness.

“She’s been stripped bare, left in the darkness. She’s lost her children to some danger and she feels sure she’ll never see them again. She’s never painted them before, the twins. She’s never painted anything that gives her joy, anything that she’s loved.”

He flipped the page to the image of a house. Lydia recognized it as the house in Haunted, twisted and bleeding, with fire leaping from its windows. It had the personality of pain, seemed to reach out as the fire consumed it. Drawn into the flames, the twins clung to each other, surrounded by a vast, living darkness writhing with demons. In their eyes was the reflection of the burning house.

“Hmm,” said Orlando.

“What?”

“This house has come up again and again in her work,” he said. Lydia tried to call to mind others of Julian’s paintings with which she was familiar and couldn’t remember seeing it.

“Nothing that has ever been sold or published,” said Orlando, as if reading her expression. “I’ve asked her about it. She said, ‘The past is immortal. It might be forgotten, but it never dies. It lives in us. It can live in the structures we build, in the children we bear.’ The house symbolized that idea for her.”

On the next page was the image of a man hanging by the neck from the landing above the foyer at the house in Haunted. He was young and beautiful, seemed to float in the air, the noose hanging just loosely about his neck like a scarf. His eyes were closed, his expression serene. Lydia recognized him as James Ross, the young man she’d seen in the photograph, not the monster in the large portrait that stood behind them. On the ground looking up at him was the image of a demon with wild eyes and claws, head thrown back in a violent roar. The demon’s scaled hands reached out toward James, but he was just out of reach.

“Her twin,” said Lydia.

“You know about her twin?” asked Orlando.

Lydia nodded.

“Then you know that’s him, too,” he said, using his eyes to gesture to the portrait behind them.

“Yes,” she said, thinking back to the night she came across his photograph in Haunted. “I figured it out eventually.”

“She never accepted his death,” he said, his voice sounding far away, contemplative. “She always believed she’d been lied to.”

“Why would anyone lie about that?” she asked.

“That’s what I asked her.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said she was sure she would feel it when he died,” he said with a mystified laugh. “And she never felt it. She believed he was still out there waiting for her.”

“She may have been right,” said Lydia. “I think I may have seen him.”

There was something then that came over Orlando. It was a kind of stillness, a waiting. Lydia saw him almost visibly stiffen. “Is that possible?” he asked, his voice almost a whisper.

“Anything’s possible, isn’t it?”

“But the body they found last year in Haunted. It was positively identified,” he said. He had the look suddenly of someone trying to appear nonchalant. She watched as a tiny muscle started to dance involuntarily at the corner of his eye.

Lydia shrugged. “Records can be falsified.”

“Could he be responsible for all of this?” he said, looking at Lydia with alarm.

“If he’s alive, it seems like a highly likely possibility.”

He seemed to turn the possibility over in his mind. He closed his eyes for a second. “It’s her worst nightmare realized,” he said.

“She’s afraid of him?”

“He tried to kill her and her mother when they were teenagers,” Orlando said, turning to look at her. “They put him away, but he escaped. She always believed that her brother was responsible for the murder of Tad Jenson.”

“But she never implicated him?”

“In spite of her terror of him, there’s a bond there that I could never understand,” he said.

She remembered what Julian had said about her brother, that he was her “angel,” always trying to protect her. You can never be sure with crazy people if what they said was the deepest truth or the most outrageous fantasy.

“Did she ever have any contact with him? Did she know where he was?”

He shook his head. “Not that I know of. She always said that she believed he was lying in wait for her to be happy again, and then he was going to tear her life apart. He’s like her bogeyman, you know. The embodiment of all her worst fears… about the world and about herself.”

“About herself?”

“That’s what she said. She never explained except to say that they were one… what he was, she was.”

Lydia shuddered as his words reminded her of Jed McIntyre. One mind, one heart .

They flipped through the rest of the images slowly, the burning house, the huddled children, the naked woman, the young beautiful James, and the monster were images that repeated over and over. Then, on the last page of the sketchpad, Lydia was surprised to see a drawing she’d missed the first time. Filling the page was a mass of curls, and the malicious stare of giant eyes. Smoke danced upward in rings from the bowl of a pipe. Delicately drawn into one of the smoke rings was the scene of the murder of Annabelle Taylor’s children that the librarian Marilyn Woods had described to Lydia. Five small corpses lay on the ground in a field of fire, as the figure of a man stood with a gun drawn. In another of the rings was an image of the twins lying lifeless on the ground before the burning house. Half the face on the page was that of Maura Hodge, the other half was Eleanor Ross. Julian had written, “Behold the Queens of the Damned and the havoc they have wrought on all of us.”

“ Jeff, it’s Ford. Listen, Lydia was right. That DNA evidence from the Milky Way bar links whoever attacked her in the Ross home with someone present at the Jenson scene. I’m not sure what it means, but I’m heading up to Haunted. This can’t wait till tomorrow, especially with the twins missing. I’ll keep you posted.”

As he’d listened to the message, Jeffrey had felt a surge of dread. He was relieved to have a lead on Ford, where he’d gone, and why; but it had been more than seventy-two hours since Ford had left that message. Jeffrey had lost the phone to Jed McIntyre and for all he knew it was lying somewhere in the tunnels. He hadn’t even missed it until he’d been wracking his brain, trying to figure out what Ford’s move would have been after leaving Donofrio, wondering what would have led him to take off, not letting anyone know where he was going. Out of desperation he’d called his own cell phone, hoping maybe there was a message there.