The Killing Room (6 page)

Carolyn sat in the parlor with a mountain of books and papers spread out on the table in front of her.

He does not look like David
, she thought to herself. Douglas Young did not look
anything
like the man she had loved so much, who had betrayed her so horribly. Douglas was blond; David was dark. Douglas’s skin was smooth and unlined; David had had a pink scar running down the side of his face. Douglas was her age or possibly even younger; David had been in his late thirties. But
something
had reminded her of David….

The dimples. It had been the dimples.

And the eyes. The way he flirted with her. The confidence in his appeal. The devil-may-care toss of his head…

Damn it,
she said to herself, shaking her head. Thinking about David was the last thing she could afford to do at the moment.

Because the case at hand was like nothing she had encountered before.

The blood on the wall had been real. She had seen it, touched it. It had simply appeared—and during the time it took her run up the stairs to fetch her camera to take a picture of it, it had disappeared.

Now, of course, it could have been some kind of ingenious trick. For whatever purpose, maybe Mr. Young was making all of this up. Or someone else was playing a hideous game with him. That’s what Carolyn needed to determine first. She’d need to inspect that wall to see if there was some kind of device embedded in it. A screen perhaps. Or maybe the message in blood had been a hologram of some sort.

Except, as she reminded herself, holograms aren’t wet and sticky to the touch.

She had walked over to the wall and placed her finger directly into the blood. It was real. And so was the abject terror on Mr. Young’s face and the distress he’d felt afterward, which caused him to retreat to his room.

Carolyn sighed as she flipped through the death certificates in front of her. The blood on the wall might conceivably have been a trick, but there was no way that these documents weren’t real. To verify them, all Carolyn needed to do was troop over to the clerk’s office at the Youngsport town hall—which she certainly planned on doing. Still, every certificate was stamped with the clerk’s official seal. Her trained researcher’s eye told her these weren’t fakes. There were more than a dozen certificates, each from the first year of a decade, with the earliest dating back to 1930. The deaths came in ten-year intervals after that, one to a decade, except in those instances Mr. Young had called “slaughters”: when the family had defied the curse and either not sent anyone into the room or sent the wrong person.

The first such slaughter had been at the very beginning. Sixteen-year-old Jacob Young’s name had been drawn in the lottery. He had steeled himself to spend the night in the room. But his father—and Howard Young’s father as well—Desmond Young had insisted he take his son’s place. The result was even greater tragedy. Instead of one death, there had been four. Desmond died, but so did poor Jacob, as well as the two youngest and most innocent members of the family, thirteen-year-old Timothy and the infant Cynthia. Carolyn stared down at their death certificates now. On every one the cause of death was listed as “seizure.” Only the wealth and privilege of the Youngs could have staved off the kind of investigation four deaths in the same house on the same night would have prompted otherwise. Even, somehow, the grisly manner of Desmond’s death never made it to the official record. That could happen, Carolyn supposed, when a family had its own private graveyard.

The second slaughter came twenty years later, when the family decided to abandon the house and the lottery altogether. On three successive nights, in cities spread across the country, a Young family member died suddenly. Carolyn looked over their certificates now. Howard Young had assembled them all, providing a full record of his family’s enduring tragedy. The most recent slaughter had been in 1980. Ernest Young had skipped out on the lottery, breaking with his family and taking his wife and daughters to an undisclosed location. They’d even changed their names. But on the night that one of his cousins died in the basement room, Ernest and his immediate family were also wiped out, murdered savagely in their home. Carolyn felt as if she might cry looking at the death certificates of the little girls. Ann Marie was ten. Susie was seven.

She stood, overcome by all this death. Mr. Young had given her all the particulars. The family reunions every ten years. The lottery. The requirement that one member of the family be chosen to spend a night in the room—a room that had once been a servant’s quarters. The inevitable death that occurred during that night. The slaughters that took place if the ritual was not followed exactly, and by everyone.

She walked to the window and stared out at the cliffs and the whitecapped waves of the sea beyond. He had given her all of the particulars but one.

How the whole thing had started. And why.

“Who imposed this horrible thing on you?” Carolyn had asked, but the old man had just shook his head, seeming unable to tell her.

She had looked at him in disbelief.

“You mean to tell me,” she asked, “that this is the part you expect me to find out on my own?”

Howard Young had simply nodded, then headed to his room to lie down.

“It can’t be that he doesn’t know,” Carolyn said out loud to herself, still staring out over the cliffs. “He was here when it began. He would have been eighteen years old. He must know how this curse began. Either he isn’t telling me for some reason—or he
can’t
tell me. Perhaps he is somehow prevented from telling me.”

She turned around and looked up at a portrait that hung over the mantel. It was a young man in Edwardian-era clothing, with a high stiff collar and high-buttoned waistcoat. Carolyn suspected it might be Desmond, the father of Howard, who had gone into the room in an effort to save his son Jacob and died in the process.

“Was it you?” Carolyn asked the portrait. “Did you somehow bring this curse upon your family?”

But the portrait was of a young man. Probably not much more than twenty. Desmond Young was fifty years old at the time of his death in that room. Carolyn knew that from his death certificate. The face she was looking at was a face unmarked by future tragedies. Whatever had happened to cause this terrible thing occurred around 1930. The world was mired in the Depression; the movies had just learned to talk; Europe was still holding together in the calm before the storm. So much history between then and now, and yet still, every ten years, the Young family sent one of its own into that room to die.

Why?

Carolyn was not a psychic. She was not even an expert on the paranormal. She was an investigator. She was more Dana Scully than Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She had learned a great deal, of course, investigating the supernatural, but nothing—not even the case with the so-called zombie—had ever definitely proved without a question the existence of things beyond what one could see or hear or logically quantify. It wasn’t that Carolyn was a disbeliever. To call her a skeptic would also be wrong. She had seen enough to become convinced that the supernatural could be a real, definable force—but she had also never seen anything that might change that “could be” into a definite belief.

That’s what made her a good investigator. She retained an open mind, but a critical one. It was why her first task was to find proof that all this wasn’t some terrible hoax, either one set up by Howard Young for some twisted reason or one perpetrated upon him by unknown persons. Yet the deaths—so many of them—couldn’t be denied. The deaths were real. What Carolyn had to determine was if they were being caused by normal or paranormal forces. A rather daunting assignment.

She sat back down in front of the papers and books Mr. Young had set out for her. How the hell was she supposed to figure it out? He’d told her to study the results of others’ investigations. Several people had tried to end the curse before her, starting in 1930 and continuing up through the years. The latest was Kip Hobart, who’d tried to uncover the mystery of that room a decade earlier. But like all who’d come before him, he’d had no success.

Carolyn knew Kip; they’d worked together on a couple of cases. He was well respected in the paranormal world. If Kip Hobart had been unable to find out and prevent what was going on in this house, how possibly could
she
? Kip was an expert on the supernatural. He had studied with the most esteemed names in the field. She was just a gumshoe.

If not for the million dollars dangling over her head, Carolyn would have walked away from this assignment. It was too big. Too many unknowns. But a million dollars…

She’d never had a lot of money. Her father had been a postal clerk who’d died of prostate cancer when Carolyn was eleven. Her mother had soldiered on, trying as best she could to provide her two daughters with a comfortable life. Carolyn’s younger sister Andrea had severe Down syndrome, and Mom was insistent she never be sent away and that she attend only the very best special schools. To enable this, Carolyn’s mother worked several jobs in their town of Rye, New York, juggling her commissions as a real estate agent with the tips she earned as a waitress at a local diner. When the diner was robbed at gunpoint, forcing Mom to hand over all the cash in the register as well as her diamond engagement ring, Carolyn, just fourteen at the time, had felt a profound sense of violation. At that tender age she decided she wanted to be a police officer, and Mom had scrimped and saved in order to send her to college to major in criminal justice.

But still, on campus, Carolyn had needed a side job to offset expenses. A professor recommended her for a spot as a paid intern to the local district attorney. So impressed was the D.A. with her astute skills at observation and deduction that, upon graduation, he provided a glowing reference to the New York field office of the FBI. Securing a position there, she impressed her superiors almost immediately by solving a homicide case that had perplexed them for years. Carolyn had detected a strong resemblance between a photo of one suspect and the victim’s ex-husband. Turned out it was the same man, just made over with thousands of dollars of plastic surgery. “The eyes were the same,” she said simply. “They can change the eyelids but not the eyes.” The man was arrested, and Carolyn got promoted to Washington.

From there, her rise was swift, with a series of “unusual” cases leading to Carolyn’s reputation as the “go-to” person for the paranormal. It was all quite ironic. Carolyn had never even believed in Santa Claus. Neither of her parents were religious. It was simply a coincidence that these cases were assigned to her, but as she proved herself with one, she was given another. Maybe it was because she was so clear, so neutral on the subject. Neither a believer nor a disbeliever, she had exactly the right stuff to be a successful investigator.

Yet her salary never reflected her success or the esteem in which she was held by her superiors. Part of it was the glass ceiling, of course, and she was very aware of that: male agents were always paid better than female agents. Part of it was also the fact that rank-and-file government employees made a lot less money than their critics in the media thought. But perhaps the biggest part of it was the cash she sent back to Rye every month. Mom had developed Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. She’d never had good health insurance, and now her medical bills were exploding through the roof. Carolyn did not want her mother placed in a nursing home, not after all the long years she had labored so that Carolyn could have a better life. So she paid for round-the-clock nursing care to keep Mom at home. Of course, Andrea still needed money for her care as well, living in a beautiful, very expensive assisted-living facility in Dutchess County. So there was very little money left over for Carolyn at the end of each month.

It made sense, then, that Carolyn would leave the Bureau and move to New York. She told colleagues it was time that she opened her own agency, but in truth it was mostly so she could be closer to her mother and sister. Rye was just a short train ride away from Grand Central Station, and Carolyn went home as often as she could, sitting at the side of Mom’s bed, regaling her with stories of strange cases, like the so-called haunted houses and the guy who thought he was a zombie—and maybe was. Finally, after three difficult years, Mom passed away. Carolyn had spent a small fortune taking care of her mother. But she never regretted one penny.

What she did regret was David Cooke. When she’d arrived in New York, she was single and alone. For the last several years she’d been immersed in her work and taking care of her family. She’d never had time for a real boyfriend. Now she found herself alone in the Big City, knowing very few people and susceptible to the charms of a smooth-talking man. That man was David Cooke. For all of Carolyn’s shrewd powers of observation on the job, she failed to see through David’s shiny, happy façade. They’d met when she was hired by the family of nineteen-year-old Lisa Freeman, a student from NYU who had gone missing. David Cooke had dated Lisa briefly, and the girl’s parents thought he knew more than he was saying. But after a half hour of questioning, Carolyn concluded that David had nothing to do with Lisa’s disappearance. He was sweet and harmless. David was able to make her laugh like no man had ever done before, teasing her about her pug nose and freckles. She found herself surprisingly attracted to him. She’d even found the scar on his face strangely erotic. It was a pink, jagged line that extended from his left temple down to his cheek. A boating accident when he was a boy, David explained.

When she got up to leave after the interview, Carolyn was stunned when David asked her to dinner. She hesitated a moment, then accepted. Eating sushi and strolling through Central Park, they had a delightful time, and as he walked her home, he asked if he could see her again. On the second date, Carolyn slept with him; he was her first lover since college. On the third date, David told her that he loved her. Carolyn was over the moon.