Lisa Miscione - Twice

“Just turn over on your belly and lower your legs first. You’re not that high up,” he instructed.

She remembered him saying almost exactly the same words to her in Miami not long ago. That little maneuver hadn’t ended well and she had a feeling this one was going to end up the same way. But she managed to lower herself and land on both feet without falling on her ass, though the impact was a bit jarring to her damaged insides.

“Hey,” said Jeffrey. “You’re getting better at this.”

“Practice makes perfect,” she said, holding her abdomen for a minute.

“You okay?”

“I’m fantastic ,” she said.

They moved quickly and quietly up the drive toward the house, staying to the side under cover of the trees. The winter woods that surrounded them were silent and the air was sharp with cold. Lydia peered in through the trees and saw nothing but pitch-black in the moonless night. She shivered involuntarily.

A black late-model Lexus was parked near the front door and Lydia and Jeffrey stood at the edge of the house, waiting for a moment to be sure no one was in the car. They stood like that, still and listening, when they heard a voice from inside the house. It was a man’s voice, speaking in light, comforting tones.

Lydia and Jeffrey moved onto the veranda, Jeffrey drawing his gun, and they both peered into the window beside the door.

The man was tall and thin, with slick blond hair. He was expensively dressed in royal blue oxford, sleek black pants, with a Gucci belt around his waist. His back was to them, but Lydia could see that he moved with grace, gesticulating grandly with his hands. A fire crackled in the hearth and on a couch that had been pushed beside the fire, Lola and Nathaniel Stratton-Ross huddled together beneath a blanket, their eyes wide and trained on the man before them. Lydia felt flooded with relief to see them; they looked terrified but otherwise unharmed.

He turned suddenly as if he sensed eyes on him, and Jeffrey and Lydia moved away from the window. But not before she recognized his face. It was James Ross. They heard footsteps coming closer and managed to get off the veranda and hide themselves before James Ross exited the house with a twin on each hand. They were stiff and silent, both of them looking pale and tired, as though they had been drained from fear and sleeplessness. He 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.