Strong 03 - Twice (44 page)

“I guess ghost stories are like that. Part of us wants to believe in the fantastic, no matter how frightening and horrible it might be.”

The doctor walked around to the seat behind his desk and sank into the leather chair. He was pale, and dark circles had appeared under his eyes.

“I noticed the police haven’t arrived,” he said after they’d all been silent for a long moment, realizing maybe that Lydia hadn’t quite told him the truth.

“Must be caught in traffic,” said Jeffrey, looking at his watch.

Lydia got up and moved toward the door. Jeffrey followed.

“That DNA evidence you mentioned?”

Lydia just smiled. “Might be a good time to start considering retirement, Doctor.”

“I was just thinking that.”

They stepped out of the office and into the cold, Lydia pulling the door closed behind them.

“You’re an accomplished liar,” said Jeffrey as they got into the Kompressor and pulled to the end of the drive. They paused there as a pair of headlights approached from the right.

“Thank you,” she answered.

“I’m not sure I meant it as a compliment.”

“There are lots of different ways to get to the truth. Lying is just one of them.”

“Well, when you’re right, you’re right.”

“So where to?”

“To the only place we’ve ever seen James Ross.”

Jeffrey didn’t pull out into the road right away. Instead he put the car in park.

“What’s wrong?” asked Lydia.

“I’m just afraid of what we’re going to find up there.”

Jeffrey sighed and rested his head on the steering wheel. Cold air blew from the vents but started to warm as the car heated up. They sat in the darkness, with only the glow from the dashboard lights. Mick Jagger and the Stones sang “Start Me Up” softly from
the radio. Lydia reached over and turned it off. She wasn’t sure what to say.

“There’s so much loss,” Jeffrey said quietly into the steering wheel. “How much more of this can we take?”

Lydia didn’t have the answer to that question so she said nothing, just moved her hand from his arm to the back of his head. The air coming from the vents had gone from frigid to lukewarm; still Lydia shivered.

“The pregnancy, Rebecca, now Ford,” he said. He turned to look at her then, his head still resting on his arm draped over the steering wheel. “I really wanted that baby.”

His words felt like a blow to her solar plexus and tears sprang to her eyes, more from the surprise and the pain than from sadness. “I know,” she managed.

Lydia had never seen Jeffrey like this. He was a man of action, believing that motion was the way to deal with fear, anger, sadness. Tonight he seemed to buckle under the weight of everything.

“It will be better when we try again,” she said, withdrawing her hand and looking away from him. “We won’t be living with the worry of Jed McIntyre, where he is, what he’s planning. Won’t it be better to bring a child into a life that isn’t controlled by fear?”

The car was filled with their breath and their sadness, quiet except for the vents blowing the slowly warming air. Lydia’s toes felt cold, and her heart ached, but she knew with an odd certainty that what she said was not just hopeful but true.

“You’re right,” he said, reaching out to touch her face and wipe the tear that trailed down her cheek. She turned back to him. “You’re right,” he said again. Jeffrey sat up and took a deep breath, seemed to shake off the mood.

“Good,” she said with a nod. She didn’t want to think about any of this anymore tonight. “People need us right now, Jeffrey. We can worry about ourselves when they’re safe.”

He leaned in to kiss her softly on the lips. He put the car into gear and they moved toward the road.

“Ford, where the hell are you, man?”

With the moon behind thick cloud cover, the night was eerily black. No streetlights lit the road ahead of them.

T
hey drove about half a mile past the Ross house and parked the car at the side of the road. From where they parked, they could see the outline of the dark house. The place had a definite presence and Lydia thought again back to Julian’s drawings. The home where Julian grew up had become a symbol of terror for her, her father had been murdered there, her brother allegedly tried to kill her by burning it down. Maybe she was right, maybe the past did live in the structures we build, radiated off them like an aura.

A deep sense of unease had taken hold of Jeffrey. He didn’t like that no one knew where they were or what they were doing.

“Call Dax,” he said. “Tell him what we’re doing.”

Before he’d finished the sentence, Lydia’s phone was chirping. She pressed the button on the dash that answered the phone.

“Do you want the good news or the bad news?” said Dax.

“The bad news,” answered Jeff.

“I just heard on the news that the Haunted police found Ford’s car in a river over there in Haunted.”

“Shit,” said Jeffrey, feeling a brew of fear, adrenaline, and sadness boil in his stomach. “What’s the good news?”

“The good news is he wasn’t in it.”

Lydia sighed in relief. “Well, that’s something.” Hope was always something.

“Where are you two?”

“We’re at the Ross house. We think James Ross is alive. We’re going to check it out.”

“I thought you were just going to be asking questions,” said Dax, sounding like the kid picked last for the dodgeball team.

“Listen, Dax. If you don’t hear from us in an hour, call the Haunted police. Okay?” asked Lydia, trying to keep him involved.

“Right,” he said sullenly. “Be careful.”

W
hen they reached the bottom of the drive, the tall iron gate that had stood unlocked during their last visit was now shut tight, a new lock in place where the old one had rusted away. Jeffrey removed the picklock from his pocket and tried to work the lock, but he couldn’t get it. After a few minutes, he sighed and stood back, looking up at the gate, which was supported on either side by high brick posts. It hadn’t been designed with any real security in mind; it was probably partly for show and partly to keep curious or lost people from driving up to the house.

“We can get in,” he said, bending down and cupping his hands. “I’ll give you a leg up to the top of the post, and you just lower yourself down on the other side. I’ll be right behind you,” he whispered.

“Great.” Jeffrey was always assuming that she had more grace and physical prowess than she actually did.

She placed her foot in his hand and he hoisted her while she clumsily clawed her way to the top of the post, using every last ounce of upper body strength to push herself up and lift her butt to the top. She was breathless by the time she came to sit on top of the structure. She looked down the other side.

“I can’t jump. It’s too far,” she said, feeling a little panicked. She was glad she had worn her black stretch Emmanuel jeans and her soft black leather motorcycle boots and matching leather jacket. The front of her gray sweatshirt was now lined with dirt from her climb. She looked over and saw that Jeffrey had already scaled the other
post and was lowering himself onto the ground on the other side. He landed with a light thump and walked over to her.

“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.

T
hey 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.