Lisa Miscione - Twice

Jeffrey was certain now, as Lydia had been all along, that the answers to Richard Stratton’s and now Eleanor Ross’s murders, as well as the disappearance of the twins and Ford McKirdy, would all be found in Haunted.

“Don’t leave me here like this, man,” begged Dax, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. He sat on Lydia and Jeffrey’s couch, legs up on the ottoman, phone and remote control within easy reach. He looked pale and anxious, as if Jeff were leaving him on the battlefield to die.

“We’re only going to be a few hours, Dax.”

“Look,” he said, “I can help you.”

“You can’t walk , Dax,” Jeffrey said gently.

“I can walk,” he insisted.

Really, the truth was that he could hobble. With enough painkillers, Dax could get himself around a small area. But he had been instructed to stay off his feet to allow the partially severed tendons to heal properly. So Lydia had insisted that he stay with them in their downstairs bedroom until he could get around his house in Riverdale a little better. Dax had grudgingly agreed, though Jeffrey thought he was secretly glad for the offer. The three of them were close now, more so than they had been before everything went down. The things they had endured together had bonded them.

“Besides, you don’t need legs to fire a gun. Just prop me up in the backseat and I’m good to go.”

“It’s not going to be like that,” said Jeffrey, pulling on his leather coat. “You’d just be sitting uncomfortable in the car when you could be here resting. And there aren’t going to be any shootouts.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Dax said with a snort. “That’s why you have the Desert Eagle, then?”

“Seriously, we’ll be back in a couple of hours. We’ll call if we’re going to be late.”

Dax turned on the television and tuned Jeffrey out. He really wasn’t handling his recovery period very well.

“Do you need anything before I go?” asked Jeffrey, starting to feel like the nanny to a difficult child. “I have to meet Lydia.”

“I’m fine,” Dax said sullenly. “I’ll just sit here like a completely useless turd until you get back.”

“Cheer up, man,” said Jeffrey, patting Dax on the shoulder. “We’ll be back before you know we’re gone.”

He put in a quick call to Malone and Piselli to let them know about Ford’s last message and headed out the door.

Maybe it was because snow threatened, turning the sky a moody gray and black. Or maybe it was the time Lydia spent with Orlando probing the depths of Julian Ross’s twisted psyche. But on crossing into the Haunted city limits, the town felt unwelcoming to the point of menace. It seemed emptier, almost deserted, not that it had been a bustle of activity before. But something about it now had the air of abandonment. The depressed little Main Street, which on their first visit had been more or less innocuous, if approaching dilapidation, seemed… haunted. As they pulled off of Main and up the winding roads to the outskirts of town, the black dead trees rising up on either side warned them away with branches reaching like witch’s fingers into the sky.

They pulled the Kompressor off the main road and through the open gate that led to the Hodge house. At the end of the drive, they came to a stop behind a black-and-white prowler that sat in front of the porch where they’d first seen Maura Hodge with her shotgun and Dobermans. They climbed out of the car and Lydia could see by the tilt of his head that the cop sitting in the car was dozing.

“I’m not sure this is what Malone and Piselli had in mind when they said the Hodge residence was under surveillance,” Lydia said as they approached the driver’s side of the squad car.

Jeffrey tapped on the window and the cop awoke with a startled snort. He looked around for a few seconds, disoriented, and then rolled down the window. A mingling scent of body odor and stale coffee wafted out into the cold air.

“This is a crime scene,” said the cop. He was young, red-faced, with a bristle of strawberry blond hair on his head. He had a sleep crease on his cheek where he’d obviously rested it against the door as he napped. His gold nameplate read REED.

“NYPD Detective Malone was supposed to call with clearance,” said Jeffrey, holding out his identification.

The cop looked from Jeffrey to Lydia with suspicion but then reluctantly pulled the radio from its hook on the dash and muttered into the mouthpiece unintelligibly. He waited, silent, not looking at them, while the radio crackled with static and other communications.

Lydia looked up at the house and remembered the last time they’d been there. She remembered the noises upstairs she’d heard when they’d interviewed Maura, how Dax had seen a figure in the upstairs window. The thought made her skin tingle. The windows were dark now, had that air of desertion like the rest of the town.

“Forty-one, forty-one,” the radio yelled.

Reed grabbed the radio and seemed to puff up with self-importance. Lydia noticed that his fingers were long and girlish in their shape and apparent softness.

“Forty-one,” he said into the mike.

“Clearance granted for Mark and Strong.”

“Ten-four.”

“You can go in,” he said, friendlier now that they had been cleared. “Holler if you need anything.”

“Thanks,” said Jeffrey.

The smell that Lydia remembered from their first visit seemed to have staled and solidified. She felt the same swelling of her sinuses just seconds after stepping though the door. A staircase to her left led into darkness.

“Let’s split up,” she said. “I’ll head upstairs.”

Jeffrey looked at her and flashed on the attack in the basement of the Ross house. The habits of the last few months, the feeling that someone always had to be with her because of Jed McIntyre, were dying hard.

“Okay,” he said with effort.

Lydia smiled at him, squeezed his hand. “I’ll holler if I need anything.”

The stairs groaned beneath her weight and the wood felt like it had a bit too much give. But she made it to the top of the stairs without falling through. She pushed the door open to the immediate right of the landing and flipped on the light. It was totally bare, the windows boarded up. She walked across to a closet and saw only a single wire hanger lonely on a mauve tension rod.

Two other rooms she entered were identically empty, though the rest of the windows were free of plywood. Lydia walked down the hallway over sagging wood floors, her footfalls sounding loud to her own ears. At the end of the hall, she turned the brass knob of one of the two remaining bedrooms. Here the smell was more powerful than anywhere else in the house, some combination of mold and dust, maybe wood rot.

The room was full of junk. A blue bicycle with rusted handlebars and a missing front wheel leaned against the wall. A Singer sewing machine, its plastic case yellowed and cracked, sat atop a rickety wood table. The fading light outside struggled in through windows that were opaque with grime. Lydia flipped the light switch and a bulb hanging from a wire, naked of fixtures, sizzled to life, albeit dimly. It flickered as she moved through the stacks of junk. Ripped and soiled clothes-a man’s gray wool overcoat with the pockets torn out, a flowered housedress covered with dark red stains, a child’s red corduroy jumpsuit cut with scissors-were piled randomly about the space. A tower of old record albums teetered in a corner. It was a big room, maybe four or five hundred square feet, and Lydia moved through the maze of junk.

One of the major principles of good Feng Shui is to clear all spaces of clutter. Clutter represents stale energy. A person who feels comfortable in clutter is the kind of person who holds on to the past, can’t let go. Lydia was not surprised to see a room like this in Maura Hodge’s home. Maura could hold a grudge… even one that wasn’t necessarily her own. Righteous anger like that was addictive; it allowed a person to stagnate, wallow in her contemplation of injustice, spend all her energy seeking revenge and never for a second thinking that there might be another way to live. Lydia herself had been guilty of this for many years.