Lisa Miscione - Twice

“What about you?”

“For me,” she said, her expression darkening just slightly, “it might take longer. But I’m getting there.” A brightness came back to her, but this time it seemed forced.

“There were just some loose ends I wanted to tie up…”

“Oh, your fee!” she said, hopping up as if to rush off for her checkbook. “Of course. How much did my mother agree to pay you?”

“It’s not the fee, Julian.”

The other woman must have heard something in Lydia’s voice, because the color drained from her cheeks. She sat back down and was suddenly wary. “What is it, then? As you can see, I’m quite busy.”

“It won’t take long,” Lydia said with a smile. She rose and walked over to one of the open windows and looked down the fourteen stories to the street below. It was a busy midafternoon, with cabs rushing by, people swiftly walking along the sidewalk. From the window, Lydia could see the top of the Chrysler Building gleaming in the bright afternoon sun, smell the wood burning from fireplaces.

“We looked into the ownership of the Lexus James was driving and found something interesting. We found that it was registered to you, purchased just a week before Richard was killed.”

The words hung in the air between them.

“That’s not possible,” Julian said with a shake of her head. But she diverted her eyes to look out the window behind Lydia.

“We also discovered that on the same day, you opened a small checking account for Nathaniel and Lola and placed ten thousand dollars there.”

“So?”

“So… someone was using a bank card to draw on that money. We’ve managed to get a surveillance photo from one of the ATM machines. And guess who it was.”

“I have no idea,” she said, drawing herself up in the same way Lydia had seen Eleanor do.

“Your brother.”

Everything Lydia had said was true except for the part about the surveillance photo. That was a lie.

After Lydia and Jeffrey had posed their questions to Ford, he’d immediately contacted the DMV and the banking institutions where Julian Ross and Richard Stratton had kept their liquid assets. It had taken them less than an hour to come up with the vehicle ownership and the information about the small checking account. It had been a small enough withdrawal not to arouse suspicion during the initial investigation into Richard Stratton’s murder, as Julian and Richard regularly made purchases and withdrawals in that ballpark, and the police weren’t really working a murder-for-hire angle.

“He could have stolen that bank card. How should I know?” Julian said, a kind of calm seeming to come over her. “I’m going to ask you to leave now.”

Ford and Jeffrey, along with Detectives Malone and Piselli, walked in through the front door. The moving men paused in their activities, sensing that something was going down. Julian looked over at them, and then back to Lydia. She seemed to deflate a bit.

“Where is he, Julian? Where’s James?”

“This is crazy,” she said simply. “I want my attorney.”

“With Ford McKirdy missing, I think you knew it was a good bet that we’d head back up to Haunted and the trail would eventually lead us to the house. I think James wanted to confess his whole plot to us and then allow us to see him die. This way, he could take the rap for everything, you’d be cleared of all charges, and he’d be ‘dead.’ You could go to a country where no one would know him and finally, Julian, you would be reunited after all these years apart.”

Lydia wasn’t positive that she had it exactly right, but she was confident that all the elements were there. How had James recognized them? How had he known they would eventually come back to the house? These were questions for which she didn’t have answers. But she knew that she and Jeffrey were meant to hear his confession and see him die that night. Her gut told her this with cold certainty.

Looking now into Julian’s eyes, she could see that she had hit her target.

“Why did you decide to give in to him, Julian? You’d fought so hard to have a normal life. First with Tad, then, even when your mother begged you not to marry, you tried again with Richard.”

Julian sat stone-faced.

“You watched him kill Tad, didn’t you? Jetty heard you scream. What was it you said to him? ‘I never loved you. Not like that.’ But it wasn’t the truth, was it? You did love him. You were so afraid that your love for your twin was the unnatural love of the curse, the threat of which your mother tortured you with all your life. The thought repulsed you, terrified you, but you couldn’t help it. You loved him so much that even when you could have implicated him in Tad’s murder, you didn’t. Even when you might have gone to jail for a murder you didn’t commit, you didn’t implicate James.”

Lydia let silence fill the room.

“Your mother must have made you feel so sick, so dirty. How she must have punished and tortured you just to make you see how wrong it was. In her own way, just to save you from the curse she was so afraid of.”

Julian looked at her with surprise. Tears filled her eyes and trailed down her face.

“But it had been the same with her, hadn’t it? She loved her brother. And he killed Jack Proctor. What happened to Paul, Julian?”

Julian spoke for the first time.

“She killed him. He came for her again. After my father was dead and my brother sent away. She shot him dead. Even though she loved him, she killed him. I helped her bury the body behind the house. Then we left Haunted and never went back. She thought she’d ended it for us. She really believed that. Then James escaped.”

“Why didn’t she tell the police about him when Tad was murdered?”

“She loved him, too. He was her son, don’t forget. She thought I would be exonerated. If it looked like I might be convicted, she would have come forward. I promised her that I would never marry again. And she thought that was enough to keep him away. But I broke my word.”

“Why? Why would you take that risk?”

She shrugged and looked down in shame. “I was lonely. I was afraid. I felt him always right behind me, shadowing my life. Richard was strong, safe. And…” She paused. “I didn’t really love him. I thought it would be safe if I didn’t love him. But then I got pregnant. It was an accident, but I got pregnant with the twins. He came for me again. He wanted the twins.”

“When did you decide to give in?”

“I didn’t,” she said weakly. “He did this to my life. Now he’s dead. And we are finally free, Lola, Nathaniel, and I.”

“No, Julian. You ended your therapy with Dr. Barnes. You moved your family into this building with access to the tunnels beneath the street. You hired Geneva Stout.”

“I didn’t know who she was when I hired her. I hadn’t been to Haunted in over twenty years.”

“I don’t believe you, Julian. Maybe you were James’s victim once. But I believe you’re his accomplice now. Your breakdown… maybe it was real, maybe it was an act. But it seems like you helped him orchestrate all of this so you could look like the victim, so that he could take the rap and then fake his own death. I think you’re planning on meeting him in Switzerland.”

Everyone, Jeffrey, Ford, the other officers and the moving men, stood silently looking at Julian.

“Maybe Maura Hodge was right,” said Lydia. “She said, ‘The Ross family doesn’t even need a curse. They are fucked up in so many ways that they curse themselves.’ ”

It happened so fast, Lydia barely knew what hit her. Julian went from the calm woman sitting before her to the demon Lydia had met once before at Payne Whitney. She lunged at Lydia like a wildcat and Lydia went staggering back toward the open window behind her with Julian at her throat. All Lydia could think was that the other woman’s strength was phenomenal, and try as she did she couldn’t pull herself from Julian’s grip. In the periphery of her consciousness, she heard Ford shouting as her waist hit the sill, Julian on top of her. Lydia felt the cold of the outside air and heard the street noise below her as she and Julian leaned out the window, the upper halves of their bodies dangling over a straight drop to the sidewalk. Somewhere on the street, a woman screamed.