Stones Unturned (14 page)

Frustrated and angry with himself for the disappointment and resentment that lingers in his heart, Graves moves up to the rear of the seats that have been arranged in the gardens.

The violins have given way to a lilting chorus of horns. He glances at the symphony and starts toward the musicians along the central aisle. Several people notice him, but no one attempts to stop him. Graves peers at each row of guests, searching one side and then the other for the suspicious, stealthy man who darted away upon seeing him.

Only guilt makes a man flee like that.

Whoever the rabbit is, he must be working for Professor Zarin. Which means that the madman truly is up to something here this evening. Perhaps the rumors of a bomb are true.

If so, Graves has to move fast. If he cannot find that man, he realizes, he will have to warn the guests, tell them to evacuate the gardens. He has to get Gabriella out of here. The violins come back in to join the horns and the music rises toward a crescendo that any other night would have lifted his heart.

Frantic, now, he spins around as he moves toward the head of the aisle, right in front of the symphony. The musicians have begun to notice him now. The conductor will not turn, will not allow himself to be distracted, and the music goes on. But a woman in a shimmering bone-white gown points at him, and a round-bellied, balding man stands and begins to bluster at him.

Graves cannot hear him, so near to the music.

He spins again, searching for the skittish man.

How could he have just disappeared?

The melody sways, a haunting air. Then comes a jarring, discordant cello note. Graves frowns and turns to see the cellist pointing past him, toward the Pitti Palace.

The bullet strikes Dr. Graves in the back, scraping spine and ricocheting inside him, punching through his heart.

Death and darkness claimed him, the echo of that discordant cello still in his ears.

On the drive south from Connecticut the weather had taken a turn for the worse. In New York the sky had begun to cloud over and by the time they were passing through Jersey it had begun to rain lightly. A cold November rain.

Clay kept his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel. The Cherokee's wipers shushed out a gentle rhythm. The ghost of Dr. Graves seemed to have weight and substance in the gloom, and when Clay chanced a look over at him, he saw that the spirit had turned to peer out the rain-slicked window into the gray nothing beyond.

Graves had just finished relating the tale of his own murder. Clay had been aware of the basics, but had never known the details. Hearing it from the man who'd lost his life that day made it all the more tragic. The world had lost a great man, but Graves had lost his life and his love.

"It's just like death," the ghost whispered.

A glance at the speedometer told Clay he was going too damned fast. He eased up on the accelerator and edged slightly away from the tractor trailer that careened along in the next lane, water hissing up from under its tires.

"What is?" he asked.

"This. The storm," Graves replied, still staring out the window. "Gray nothing. Only shapes in the mist."

A stranger to death, Clay did not know how to reply to that. They traveled for several minutes with only the shush of the wipers and the patter of the rain for company. Clay thought about turning on the radio but did not want to seem as though he was attempting to prevent further conversation. The highway thrummed beneath them.

"You haven't told me how you know these people in Washington," the ghost said, his voice sounding far away, as though in a dream.

Clay glanced at him. The ghost watched him intently, eyes crystal clear, as though they were the only part of him truly in this world.

"I'm surprised Conan Doyle hasn't shared that part of my background with you."

"Arthur shares only what he wants to share," Graves said.

With a barely amused grunt, Clay nodded. "You've noticed that, have you? That's Doyle, all right."

The ghost shifted, floating slightly forward and sideways. He still appeared to be sitting on the passenger's seat, but didn't seem to notice that his knees were partially lost in the glove compartment of the Cherokee.

"Are you purposely avoiding my question, Joe?"

Clay smiled and reached up to scratch an ear. "You might say that. Not for long, though. It's just that it's not my finest moment."

Dr. Graves did not push, only waited for him to continue. Clay stared out through the Cherokee's windshield at the traffic and the rain, and flexed his fingers on the wheel.

"All right, the simple version. During a period of my life, I lost track of who I really was. Let's say I was confused for a few decades and leave it at that. The point is, some unsavory people in the American government decided my abilities could be put to unpleasant use. That went on far longer than I like to think about, them manipulating me. When it was over, I dealt with those responsible, but there were others . . . they weren't the ones who did it to me, but they could have intervened and chose not to. That's government, for you. The period I refer to as my 'memory lapse' covers the years when you were active, including your death. Given what they were using me for, it's even possible I pulled the trigger myself."

If ghosts could flinch, Graves did. Otherwise it was merely an ectoplasmic shudder, a flicker of the ethereal substance of his spirit.

"You're saying you might have killed me?"

Clay frowned, knuckles tightening on the wheel. "I was joking, but I guess it isn't funny. It's not impossible, but not likely, either. We'll find out in D.C. The point of all of this is that there are people I knew in those days, people who were still alive when it was all over, who owe me for what they did or what they didn't do . . . or just because I let them live."

A grim silence fell between them, then. Neither of them approved of outright killing, but Clay would bend the rules if there was no other choice. Especially in the aftermath of his memory lapse.

"I'm going to call in a marker," the shapeshifter went on. "Professor Zarin was public enemy number one for the better part of a decade back then. I want to see what I can find out about him and about his current whereabouts. Maybe we'll learn something you haven't been able to discover on your own."

This time, when Clay glanced at him, Graves seemed less substantial, as though he had merged with the storm outside, his form made up of mist and rain and gray skies.

"I appreciate your help with this, Clay. I'd be lying if I said I was confident in the investigation I conducted on my own. After that night — after my murder at the symphony — it took me quite a while to accept the truth. Years passed in the tangible world. I had never believed in the afterlife, so getting used to being spectral was very difficult.

"When at last I stopped being so stubborn, I did my best to investigate, but I did nothing but chase threads that led nowhere. At the time I had difficulty manifesting properly and tended to terrify anyone I wished to speak with. All those tabloid reports of people seeing my ghost . . . obviously, those stories are true. That was my investigation, and it's how I encountered Arthur for the first time. Once he had vowed to help me solve my murder, I gladly left it with him."

Clay heard in his tone how much Graves regretted leaving it to Conan Doyle for so many years, but he said nothing. Pointing out the obvious would help nothing.

A soft smile touched the corners of the ghost's mouth, and his eyes lit up.

"What?" Clay asked.

Graves waved a phantom hand as though to brush the question away, but the smile did not go away. He shook his head.

"Sometimes," the ghost said, "especially when I'm in the spirit world, I still hear that one song, the melody that the symphony was playing in the moment the bullet struck me.

"I like to think it's Gabriella, calling me home."

CHAPTER SEVEN

Conan Doyle's house loomed above Louisburg Square that afternoon. The day had dawned beautifully, but by mid-afternoon the sky had darkened and now seemed to threaten rain.

Julia Ferrick stood on the sidewalk in front of the old brownstone and stared up at the imposing facade of the house. Most days it seemed unassuming in spite of the obvious wealth of the neighborhood. That was the way its owner wanted it. The last thing Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to do was draw attention to himself.

Yet today the place exuded a strange air of desolation, like an abandoned house or a mausoleum. Nothing stirred behind the windows. Just looking at it, Julia got a sense of emptiness from the brownstone. As she walked up the steps and took out her keys, her certainty that no one was at home only grew.

As did her worry for her son. If no one was here, not even Squire or Dr. Graves, they were likely off doing something dangerous. No matter how adept Danny had become in taking care of himself, no matter how tough he was or thought he was, she remained his mother.

The key turned smoothly in the lock and the door, perhaps slightly off center, swung inward. Julia pocketed the keys.

In her entire life, she'd never imagined owning a key to the house of a man she wasn't sleeping with. But, then, how could she ever have conceived of the relationship she had developed with Mr. Doyle and his friends? Her son lived here, now, with others who could understand what he was going through.

As she entered and closed the door behind her, she felt like an intruder. No matter how welcome they claimed she was, Julia was an ordinary woman, and that made her an outsider in the house where her son now lived.

"Hello?" she ventured, stepping into the house.

The plastic bag in her hand crinkled as she shifted it from one hand to the other. It contained a copy of
Killbillies
, a new video game Danny had been talking about. She did not really approve of him playing such things, especially when he had seen enough horror with his own eyes to last an eternity. But her son had seemed tense and distant of late, and she wanted to surprise him with something that would put a smile on his face, even if just holding the hideous thing made her want to shudder.

Julia set her pocketbook on a small table beneath the mirror in the foyer and moved deeper into the house.

"Hello?" she called. "Anyone home?"

The house swallowed her voice without echo. Julia shivered and glanced around, wary of the shadows. She tried to tell herself how foolish she was being, like some little girl afraid of the thing in the closet or the monster under the bed. But in this house, there was no telling what lurked in the shadows. Being frightened wasn't childish, it was smart.

Still, she'd come to bring the game to Danny, and she would feel ridiculous if she left without giving it to him.

The stairs creaked underfoot, and the house shifted and popped with the usual noises of a structure as old as Conan Doyle's brownstone. Julia made her way up to the top floor and down the hall to Danny's room. She rapped on the closed door, not expecting an answer.

None came.

The plastic bag crackled in her hand as she tightened her grip. She turned the knob and pushed the door open, stepping inside.

The room stank of teenaged boy sweat and sulfur and another smell, equally unpleasant, that made her think of coffee grounds and meat just beginning to go bad. To call it a mess would have been far too complimentary. Julia winced as she crossed the threshold, forcing herself not to give in to the temptation to pick the place up.

Danny lived here, now. It wasn't her house, or her room. If this squalor was the way he wanted to live — pizza boxes on the floor, filthy clothes, pyramids of soda cans, towels that looked so dirty they might well stand up on their own — that was between her son and Mr. Doyle.

A noise escaped her with a shudder of disgust. No longer afraid, but wanting more than ever to leave the house, she went to Danny's bed and dropped the plastic bag with the video game onto the twisted sheets and spread.

Something caught her eye, and her mouth pursed in revulsion and concern. Dark stains dotted the sheet; blood and something else that she knew seeped from her son's flesh whenever his molting skin drove him to scratch too hard, pulling off the dry, scaly stuff before it would have fallen off on its own.

Julia tried very hard to focus on Danny as her son and not on the thing he was becoming. When she saw things like this, she could not escape the terrible thoughts that crossed her mind or the dread that touched her heart.

A sound came from outside the window. Julia flinched, pulse quickening, and turned to see a dark figure crouched like a gargoyle outside the glass, silhouetted by the stormy skies. The rain had begun to fall, and it spattered the glass.

She stared in horror at the thing, thinking that Doyle's house was under attack by monsters yet again. Only as she opened her mouth to scream did she realize that the creature that had frightened her so was her son.

Danny slid the window open and came inside, dropping to the floor in a crouch. Slick from the rain, his skin took on a cinnamon hue. He might have frowned as he looked up at her, but in the gloom, and him with no eyebrows, it was hard to tell. All she could see was the pinpoint red gleam in his eyes and the sharpness of his horns. She could not be certain, but it seemed to her that the horns had grown slightly, just in the past few days.

"Mom," he said, his tone curt. "What are you doing here?"

Julia could have simply told him about the game, tried to make small talk, been the mother she always tried to be with Danny. But the edge in his voice, in the way he held himself, troubled her.

"My son lives here. Do I need another reason?"

Danny rested a hand on the windowsill and looked out at the storm. His body was rigid, muscles taut, as though he were about to spring back through the open window, or scream . . . or as though he wanted nothing more than to run away, and keep running.