666 Park Avenue (3 page)

Chapter Four

“Y
ou know,
I
’ve never actually seen you drive,
” J
ane
pointed out as Malcolm slid behind the wheel of the rental car. It was Christmas Eve, and their flight had landed in Strasbourg ahead of schedule. From the air, the highways had looked reassuringly clear, but that wouldn’t help them much if Malcolm was as uncomfortable in the driver’s seat as he looked. “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive?”

“Don’t be silly,” Malcolm insisted, fumbling with the keys. “Just because I have a chauffeur or three doesn’t mean—huh.” He gave the gearshift a dubious look. “Is this a manual transmission?”

“Out,” Jane laughed, giving him a little shove as she hitched up her belted gray coat and slid across the seats. Once he was settled on the passenger side (looking a little chagrined, she thought), she started the car and began making her way to the parking lot’s exit. “It’s still a good two hours away,” she told him, feeling oddly giddy, as though her nerve endings were firing off at random.

“Are you okay?” he asked, buckling his seatbelt and giving it an experimental tug. “You haven’t been yourself since we boarded the plane.”

I’m not really sure,
Jane thought, trying to suppress a shiver. “It’s just that when I left home, I really, really didn’t plan to come back,” she explained.

“I thought we were talking ‘quaint French farm village’ here,” Malcolm said. “What could be so bad about that?”

Jane forced a laugh; it came out as a nervous, high-pitched sound. “That’s why I don’t date Americans. You all think Europe is some kind of theme park—as long as you can go back to your glass high-rises with the never-ending supply of hot water, France is just
adorable
.”

“You object to your hometown on architectural grounds?” Malcolm’s eyebrow was skeptically high.

“Of course! And of course not
just
that,” she admitted. “My relationship with my grandmother is . . . complicated.”

She frowned and changed lanes abruptly to pass a truck that was struggling on the incline. She knew that “complicated” didn’t really capture the years of conflict and strain between her and Gran, but that part of her life was over now. All she wanted to do was focus on her future with Malcolm.
Just have to make it through this one little errand first, and then we’re home free.

“I know a thing or two about complicated families,” Malcolm replied, startling her out of her thoughts.

“Oh yeah? Did your mother ever chase the neighbor kids off with a broom, or read your diary and then yell at you about what you’d written?” At age nine, a precocious and very bored Jane had entertained herself by imagining an illicit affair between their neighbor Monsieur Dupuis (a thin man with an extremely long black beard) and Madame Foucheaux, the butcher’s wife (a round and rosy woman who seemed to have a meat cleaver perpetually in hand). Every time she had seen them together, she’d imagined a whole secret communication happening. The neighbor would say, “Half a kilo,” and Jane would hear: “Meet me at six so I can ravage you again.” When the reply came, “Like this much?” to Jane it would sound like “Make it seven.”

She had written down every last lurid detail. When Gran had found the diary, she’d screamed herself hoarse about the evils of gossip and what happened to little girls who told vicious stories. Jane shuddered as she remembered the thunderstorm that had rolled in while Gran yelled. Although she never would have said so out loud, Jane always thought that Gran had the same kind of luck with the weather as Jane herself did with electronics. Crashing thunder had been the soundtrack to
Jane’s in Trouble
for her whole life, and even now she couldn’t hear a storm coming without flinching.

Malcolm shook his head. “Well, no. Then again, I didn’t keep a diary, so . . .”

Jane let out a mirthless laugh. “Smart boy.”

“How did your boss take the news that you were leaving?” Malcolm asked, and Jane forced her mind to change gears.

“Much better than I expected, actually.” Elodie had scowled around the office, referring to Malcolm as “that kidnapper,” but as soon as Jane had said, “I’m in love,” the renowned Antoine of Atelier Antoine had squealed with pure French
joie
. Within moments, he had gone racing through his Treo, e-mailing her contact after contact in Manhattan. Just that morning, she’d spoken to a bubbly-voiced woman named Pamela, who was ecstatic to meet Jane. Apparently, Jane’s overseas experience was crucial to Pamela’s business plan. “I have a promising lead at Conran and Associates; they’re in the Village somewhere,” she told Malcolm. She hoped that sounded right. Didn’t New Yorkers on TV talk about “the Village”?

“That’s great.” She could hear his supportive smile, and she made her lips curve upward in a matching one.

They rode that way for a while, talking about everything and nothing, passing from flat fields into a thick tangle of trees, whose greedy limbs seemed to reach out to swallow the road.

Within moments, the sky was largely invisible.
Ten in the morning and it might as well be nighttime. Welcome home.
The air felt almost too oppressive to inhale. She opened the window a crack, hoping that it would help, but cold wind whipped around the car, making her ears and fingers numb, and she had to close it again. They rode the rest of the way in strained silence.

When the red, black, and white sign for Saint-Croix-sur-Amaury appeared, Jane gripped the steering wheel tight. Within moments, they would be in the village’s tiny center, where the shops huddled together like old friends along the main route—the only road in the town large enough to rate a name of its own. Farther along, there would be the patchwork clusters of farmhouses, surrounded by amber, green, or brown fields, depending on the season. Gran’s place was even farther beyond that, down a long dirt track that was headed determinedly toward the mountain. Gran’s house, unlike the others, stood completely alone.

“We should bring something,” Jane announced suddenly, trying not to hear how flat her words fell in the car’s silence. As a Christmas present for her grandmother, she’d wrapped a warm wool shawl in metallic green paper, but she suspected that after six years and with no warning, a hostess gift was probably warranted. “She’s big on manners.” Gran may never have been friendly or even neighborly, but she had always insisted that Jane observe proper etiquette.

“There’s a flower shop over there.” Malcolm pointed to a tired-looking building on the right. Dark tracks of a century’s worth of rain snaked down the stone façade, making it seem as though the upper windows were crying.

Jane nodded, and jerked to an unsteady stop by the curb. The road was so narrow that the ancient black Mercedes behind her had barely enough room to squeeze by.

Locking the car doors behind them, Malcolm and Jane entered the store. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. The tiny shop was overflowing with flowers—tulips, peonies, delphiniums, and rows and rows of waxy green fronds. The low beams of the ceiling seemed to press down on them, and the air was thick with growth.

“These are fine,” she said randomly, grabbing the first wrapped bunch she passed and handing them to Malcolm. He nodded amiably and carried them to a pitted wooden counter that held an ancient-looking cash register.

“Is strange,” a creaky voice said from behind her. The accent was thick to the point of being unrecognizable, but it was En-glish. Jane spun to see an old man sitting on a stool just inside the doorway, a high-crowned hat shoved down low on his forehead. Tufty eyebrows poked out from under the brim like opportunistic shrubs.

“Strange?” she prompted.
“Quelque chose d’étrange, Monsieur?”

“Normal people come one time,” he explained, pressing doggedly on in English in spite of Jane’s native accent.
French pride,
she thought with a mental eye-roll.
Half of them refuse to speak English ever, and you can’t get the other half to cut it out.
“They do not again,” the man elaborated. “Saint-Croix is not good for the touring.”

“Do I know you?” she asked, confused. Was he a friend of her grandmother’s? The man didn’t look like he’d remember what he had for breakfast, never mind a face from six years ago. Behind her, Malcolm quietly thanked the shopkeeper for the flowers.

Jane peered a little more closely at the old man’s parchment-skinned face, trying to make out any familiar detail. Malcolm materialized by her elbow, and the man’s watery eyes flicked between their two faces. Malcolm pressed her elbow a little more urgently, and she let him steer her out of the shop.

“Was he bothering you?” Malcolm asked her, an edge of anxiety in his voice. Jane felt a small twinge of satisfaction at his realization that her “quaint French farm village” wasn’t exactly picture-perfect. “What did he say?”

“It was nothing,” she assured him. She turned back once more to look at the old man, but his stool beside the door was empty, and there was no sign of him anywhere.

Chapter Five

T
he first thing
J
ane noticed when she pulled the car
into the long dirt driveway was the wide-open gate. “That’s not right,” she muttered. Gran was a firm believer in physical barriers as well as social ones, and Jane couldn’t remember ever seeing the gate standing open. As if to compound the strangeness, a loud, hoarse noise came from the stand of trees that separated the little stone house from the road. Jane’s eyes widened as a rangy German shepherd came bounding across the Boyles’ land, barking furiously.

“Honey?” The dog stalked closer more slowly now, mouth twisted into a snarl. Its fur was matted and rough-looking.

“He doesn’t seem to recognize you,” Malcolm pointed out tensely as the dog crouched low to the ground, as if ready to pounce.

“I don’t recognize him either,” Jane explained. “But he might be new. My grandmother always names her dogs Honey. She said she got tired of thinking up names.”

“Maybe it’s a stray?” Malcolm suggested.

Only Gran would never let her own dog get so skinny—or so aggressive. Jane fidgeted with the window, making sure that it was tightly closed. “Let’s just get to the house. I’m sure she’ll have heard the racket by now.” She pulled the little car up the slope of the drive, feeling her jaw relax slightly when the dog bounded off into the trees, away from the house.

Jane parked to the right of the dilapidated porch, whose white paint was peeling off in long strips. The house was dark, and there was no answer to Jane’s timid knock on the weathered wooden door.

Her stomach churned and her toes started to tingle. Lips pressed into a tight line, she pushed the door; it opened easily. The air inside the house felt stale and cold. Jane shivered. “Malcolm, something’s not right.”

“Maybe she’s traveling.” Malcolm’s voice sounded far too loud in the house’s stillness. Goose bumps rose on her forearms.

“She doesn’t travel,” Jane told him flatly, but she felt a spark of hope.
Maybe she does now,
she thought wildly.
Or she’s moved, and we’re trespassing on some stranger.

She drifted down the front hall, taking stock of the familiar reproduction of Matisse’s “Red Studio” on the wall and the worn-out Persian runner. But when she reached the low-ceilinged living room, where four-year-old Jane had built forts from overstuffed pillows and hand-knit afghans, she knew for sure Celine Boyle hadn’t gone on vacation or moved out. Her grandmother was right there, sitting on a floral chintz-covered chair, her hands folded primly on her lap. The skin of her fingers was gray, and her eyes stared through Jane, a white film covering her dark pupils.

“Oh God.” Jane instinctively held her breath, afraid to know how the air around her would smell.

“Jane.” Malcolm appeared at her side and gripped her elbow, trying to pull her from the room. But Jane couldn’t feel her feet, couldn’t move, couldn’t believe this was happening. She tried to speak, but her words couldn’t make it past the lump that had lodged itself in her throat. She felt like a ship whose moorings had come loose; her mind floated free and unattached. Her grandmother, the woman who had raised her, her only anchor in the world, the one constant, was dead.

“Jane, we need to go outside. We have to call someone.”

“No phone,” Jane said automatically. “She never had anyone to call.” Her voice sounded hollow, as though it was someone else’s. “You have to go to the neighbor’s.”

“We’ll use my cell,” he told her, his voice uncharacteristically snappish. “But let’s do it from outside.” She didn’t move, and he was pulling at her arm again. “Jane, I’m not leaving you here.”

Jane wondered why it mattered. She had already seen the body; there were no mysteries left in this room to protect her from. Malcolm could stay, go, talk, be silent . . . she just wanted to be here. Through the fog, she realized she had been away from this house for an unforgivably long time.

Jane heard Malcolm rummaging through his jacket for his cell phone, and closed her eyes, waiting. Her heart counted out the seconds she knew it would take him to give up on getting any kind of signal. And then she heard his curse—a low, soft sound that barely moved the heavy air—confirming that he had realized just how far away they were from the rest of the world. “I’ll be
right
back with help,” he told her firmly, and she wondered distantly if she was nodding, or acknowledging him at all. Either way, he stepped away from her side, and then the familiar snick of the door told her that she was alone with the dead body of her last family member in the world.

Gran’s vacant eyes stared straight ahead, and Jane suddenly imagined that the woman could see her somehow.
If anyone could . . .
Gran
had
always seemed to be watching her, even when she wasn’t there. Jane abruptly turned and walked down the hallway.

She paused in the small doorway to the kitchen. It was as if time had passed the farmhouse by, holding the wood structure constant while the rest of the world spun by. The same rough red curtains lined the leaded windows; the same curling but relentlessly clean linoleum covered the floor; the round breakfast table boasted Gran’s favorite blue-glazed vase exactly in the middle. The flowers in it were brown and shriveled. She guessed that they had been daisies, but it was hard to tell. They had clearly been dead for a while. The thought made Jane wince, and she left the kitchen without another glance.

She climbed the stairs and passed Gran’s room (bed neatly made, hospital corners and all), shutting the door on impulse to indicate its owner would not be back. There was only one place left to go now: the door at the end of the dark, narrow hall.

Her old room felt brutally familiar and painfully small. Dark wooden beams held up the low adobe ceiling, and a water stain shaped like an elephant marred one of the white walls. Teenage Jane had done what she could with the space: mirrors bounced gray light around the room, the furniture was the simplest she’d been able to get her hands on, and the surfaces were entirely free of knickknacks. But the steep gray foothills of the mountain still loomed outside the only window, blocking the sun, and trapping her inside the darkness.

Everything the same . . .

Actually, Jane realized with a start, everything was not the same. On the far wall, right next to the watermark, Gran had hung a small, round mirror set in thick, dark wood.
She had to know I’d hate it.
Jane approached it curiously.
Why would she put it here?
Gran may not have shared Jane’s tastes, but she had never interfered with this room. Other than this one anomaly, it didn’t look like the place had been touched in six years, except to rid it of dust. Jane slipped her fingers behind the unfamiliar thick frame before she could even imagine what she was looking for.

“Ow!” Her hand struck something sharp, and she jerked it out again.

She watched a drop of blood well up on her finger for a moment before reaching behind the mirror again, more carefully this time. Her fingers hit something hard and crisp, an envelope. It was marked “Jane” in her grandmother’s unmistakable cursive, and bulged oddly in the middle.

The heat in the hallway hissed on and the mournful yowl of a dog floated through the window. “What did you leave me, Gran?” Jane whispered as she opened the envelope. A yellowed piece of stationery fluttered out, along with a silver ring that flashed in the muted light before settling into Jane’s palm. She blinked. For a moment, she could have sworn the ring was engraved with antique carvings, but when she ran her fingers over it, she saw that it was entirely plain: just a smooth silver band with beveled edges.
Kind of my style,
she registered with vague surprise. She slipped it on her left middle finger and held it up to examine it more closely.

A violent shock tore through her hand, as though she’d stuck it in a live outlet. “What the—” Jane reached to tear the ring from her finger, but the silver object began to vibrate and hum. Jane’s eyes lost focus, and the edges of the room took on a weird, hazy glow.
Take it off!
her mind ordered frantically. The tingling flood of energy took over her arms, snaking through her veins like a shot of adrenaline, and there was nothing she could do to bring her limbs in line with her mind’s increasingly desperate commands. A burning pain flew down her torso and through her legs, pricking her skin as though she were being set on fire from the inside. She inhaled and tried to scream, but it was too late: the pulsing energy had reached her throat, and her vocal cords were as frozen as the rest of her.

Images from nowhere flickered along the whitewashed room: a horse reared back with an armor-clad knight on its back; a ringletted child in Victorian dress pulled a trapdoor closed behind her; seven stars traced an ellipsis around the earth; a ship cracked and sank below a clear blue sky. A pale woman with sad eyes and a crown of leaves watched from the corner, twisting her long-fingered hands together.

Jane felt herself torn in a hundred directions at once, unable to move or speak or even think. The invisible fire that held her still seemed to also be dragging her apart, and a more specific, familiar burn began in her chest. She had just enough time to wonder how long it had been since her last breath, when suddenly she was ten years old again, deep in the muddy water of Monsieur Pennette’s pond. She kicked for the surface, but the murky gloom and suspended tangle of flora made it impossible to tell which way was up. Gran had warned her almost daily to stay away from the water, but Jane had been desperate to see what lay beneath the lily-padded surface. As her lungs rebelled and her body went limp, she’d wished with all her strength that Gran would dive in and save her. And, just like magic, Gran had appeared. She had dragged Jane out of the dank standing water, and lectured her the whole way home about doing as she was told.

Now Jane was drowning again, this time in heat and darkness, but there was no Gran to pull her to the light. In the very last instant before she passed out on her bedroom floor, Jane’s mind succumbed to the fiery energy, and in that instant, she understood everything.