Richard Montanari (53 page)

    She
closed the closet door, walked quickly over to the dresser, her heart pounding.
She eased open the bottom drawer. The same shirts were inside - one blue, one
white, one white with thin gray stripes. She mind-printed the way they were
arrayed in the drawer so she could put them back in precisely the same manner.
She bunched the three shirts together, lifted them. They seemed almost hot to
her touch. But when she looked beneath the shirts, she saw that the picture was
gone.

    Had
she imagined it?

    No.
It
had
been there. She had never seen that particular photograph before,
but she knew where it had been taken. It had been taken at the ice-cream parlor
on Wilmot Street. It was a photo of her mother, and her mother was wearing the
red pullover sweater that Lucy had taken from Sears at the mall.

    Lucy
turned, looked at the rest of the room. It suddenly seemed foreign, as if she
had never been here before. She put the shirts back in the drawer, arranging
them carefully. She noticed something in the pocket of the shirt on top, the
blue one. It was a piece of paper, a piece of Le Jardin notepad paper.

    Lucy
slipped her fingers gently into the pocket, took out the paper. It read:

    
Meet
me here on Sunday night at 9:30. Love, Lucy
.

    It
was her handwriting.

    
It
was a note she had written and had left in the room for Mr. Archer to find
.

    She
looked at her watch. It was 9:28.

    The
room began to spin. It felt for a moment as though the floor beneath her was
about to give way. She slammed the drawer shut. It no longer mattered if she
didn't get everything back the way it was supposed to be. The only thing that
mattered was getting out of this room.

    She
recoiled from the dresser as if it were on fire, and suddenly heard—

    —the
bell.

    Her
bell. Her
special
bell.

    Lucy
felt calm, completely at peace. She knew what she had to do, what she
must
do. She walked to the hotel room door, propped it open. Then she entered the
closet, closed the door, sat on the floor.

    Once
inside she smelled apples, pipe smoke, the essence of George Archer, the
essence of evil. But this time she was not afraid.

    As
footsteps passed by the closet - two sets, a few minutes apart - the night
closed in around her, and Lucy Doucette remembered it all.

    '
It's
okay, Eve, ' he said.
'There's been an accident. I will take care of
you.'

    
He
held out his hand. On it he wore a ring in the shape of a snake. The air was
thick with smoke, the sky darkened from it.

    
'
What kind of accident?' she asked.

    
Mr.
Archer opened the door to his car. Lucy got in. 'A plane crash,' he said. 'A
bad plane crash.'

    
'Where's
my mom?'

    
'She
wants me to watch after you. She's going to go help the people where the plane
crashed.'

    
'My
mom is?'

    
'Yes,
Eve.'

    
Mr.
Archer started the car.

    
He
led her down
the narrow wooden steps, through a small door into a drafty
room with stone walls. The room was lit only with candles. It seemed as though
there were hundreds of them. The room smelled like bad perfume and fermenting
apples. Even the dust and cobwebs were cold.

    
When
Mr. Archer left, and Lucy heard the door at the top of the stairs lock, she saw
that there was another girl sitting there. She was about Lucy's age, eleven or
so, but she was wearing a grown-up dress. It was spangly and short, and had
straps over the shoulders. The girl's face was smeared with make-up. She had
been crying for a long time. Her eyes were red and puffy.

    
'Who
are you?' Lucy asked.

    
The
girl shivered.

    
'I'm
... I'm Peggy.'

    
'Why
are you here?'

    
The
girl did not answer. Lucy looked at the girl's arms and legs. There were deep
purple bruises on them. Then she looked over and saw a second dress hanging
from one of the pipes in the ceiling
.

    
On
the third day she took a bubble bath. The bathroom was in a small room off the
cellar. The walls were a pink enamel. The sink had gold-colored faucets.

    
When
it was dark Mr. Archer came downstairs to get her. He brought her up to the
dining room for the first time. The table was set for grown-ups. Wine glasses
and more candles. Lucy found herself in her own grown-up dress, and wearing
high heels that were too big for her. Mr. Archer was dressed up like a man in
an old movie. He had on a white bow tie. He walked to the kitchen.

    
Lucy
looked at the window. She walked across the room, edged it open, slipped
through.

    
'Eve!'
Mr. Archer yelled.

    
Lucy
ran. She ran as far and for as long as she could, through endless apple
orchards, tripping and falling, scraping her knees and elbows, mushing the
rotting apples beneath her. She looked over her shoulder, watching for Mr.
Archer. She didn't see him. She soon came to a large pipe that emptied into a
lake, crouched down inside, waited. She didn't know how long she was there.
Hours and hours. She must have cried herself to sleep, because the next thing
she knew there was a light in her face.

    
'It's
okay,' the man with the flashlight said.

    
But
it wasn't. It wasn't okay.

    
Her
mother took her home. Time passed, and the man with the ring in the shape of a
snake faded from her mind but took up faceless residence in that nest of fear
inside her, flying overhead in the darkness of her dreams.

    
At
night she would hear him humming, she would hear the sound of the car door
slamming, the creak of the old wooden steps, the softness of his voice, she would
hear
—

    The
bell.

    The
bell rang again.

    It
seemed to come from far away, as if it were at the end of that long drainage
pipe in which she had crawled. For the briefest of moments she smelled the sewage,
felt the dampness of the air. Then it was gone.

    Lucy
looked around. It took a while for her to realize where she was. She was in the
hotel. Le Jardin. She knew every inch of this place. She looked around the dark
closet, felt overhead.

    How much
time had passed? She didn't know. She stood, opened the closet door, stepped
into the room. The air had changed, changed in a way you could only know from
being in a place day after day, knowing its walls, it ceilings, its corners,
its very presence.

    The
door to the hallway was closed. Lucy looked at her watch. She hadn't been gone
long. She had to get out of this room. Mr. Archer could be back any second.

    She
turned to leave, but suddenly felt lightheaded. She sat on the edge of the bed
for a moment. Her mind began to clear, but something was wrong. Something felt
wet underneath her. She got up, looked at her hands. They were coated in
bright, glossy scarlet. She turned around and saw, in the dim light, the form
under the blood- soaked sheets.

    Lucy
felt the contents of her stomach come up inside her throat. She backed away,
certain that her heart was going to explode. She could no longer hold it in.
She vomited on the floor.

    Then
she looked at the telephone on the desk. It seemed a mile away. The smell of
her own vomit reached her at the same time as the metallic smell of blood. She
was going to be sick again.

    She
ran to the bathroom.

    Jessica
watched the show from the back of the Crystal Room. The speaker at the lectern
was a pathologist from Toledo, formerly with the Ohio Bureau of Investigation.
He was talking about a cold case that took place in a suburb of Toledo in 1985,
a case involving a woman and her elderly mother who were bludgeoned to death
with a long piece of steel, believed to be the support beam of a single bed
frame.

    Behind
the lecturer, photographs of the crime scene were projected on a screen.

    Jessica
watched the photographs come and go. She realized that the man could have been
from Tucson or Toronto or Tallahassee. In some ways it was all the same. But
not to the families of the victim. And not to the investigators whose task it
was to root out the people responsible for the crime and bring them to justice.
She had been at it long enough, and knew enough people in her line of work, to
know that an unsolved crime eats away at your soul until it is either closed or
replaced by a new horror, a new puzzle. And even then it does not disappear,
but rather makes room.

    She
thought about Joseph Novak's diary.

    What
was his connection? All she could find on Marcato LLC was that it had been
formed nearly fifteen years earlier, and listed as its primary business the
publishing of music. Joseph Novak, by all accounts, had a partner. But no one
at any bank had any record of anyone other than Novak.

    'Detective?'

    A
man's voice. Close. Jessica spun around. It was Frederic Duchesne, the dean of
Prentiss Institute. He had approached without a sound. Not good. She was
distracted, which meant she was vulnerable. She took a deep breath, tried to
fashion a smile.

    'Mr.
Duchesne.'

    'I'm
sorry if I frightened you,' Duchesne said.

    Frightened
wasn't the word, Jessica thought. Provoked would be a better term. 'Not a
problem,' she said, meaning something else. 'What can I do for you, Mr.
Duchesne?'

    'Frederic.
Please.'

    'Frederic,'
she said. She glanced around the room. All was well. For the time being.

    'I
was wondering if you received the material I sent.'

    'Yes,
we did. Thank you very much.'

    'Do
you have a moment to talk?'

    Jessica
glanced at the clock over the door. It was just slightly little less rude than
looking at her watch. She had a little bit of time. 'Sure.'

    They
walked to a quiet corner of the room.

    'Well,
when you were in, your partner asked about program music. Symphonic poems.'

    'Yes,'
Jessica said. 'Do you have further thoughts on this?'

    'I
do,' Duchesne said. 'Aesthetically, the tone poem is in some ways related to
opera, the difference being that the words are not sung to the audience. There
are examples of absolute music that contain narrative of sorts.'

    Jessica
just stared.

    'Okay,
what I'm getting at is that, while there may be nothing in the music itself, a
lot of times material has been written as an adjunct to the music - a poetic
epigraph, if you will.'

    'You
mean, written after the fact?'

    'Yes.'

    Duchesne
looked out over the room, then back.

    'Are
you a fan of classical music, detective?'

    Jessica
sneaked a covert glance at her watch. 'Sure,' she said. 'I can't say I know too
much about it, but I know what I like when I hear it.'

    'Tell
me,' Duchesne began, 'do you ever go to concerts?'

    'Not
too often,' she said. 'My husband is not a big classical-music fan. He's more
of a Southside Johnny guy.'

    Duchesne
shot a quick glance at Jessica's left hand. She never wore her wedding ring -
or any jewelry, for that matter - when she was in the field. Too many
opportunities to lose it, not to mention having it give away your position when
you needed silence.