Dead Ringers (15 page)

“What is it?” Lili asked, her expression darkening as she realized something was truly wrong.

Tess shook her head. “Nothing. Something for later, maybe. Sorry I'm late.”

Lili stared across the street as Tess entered the café, but if she saw anything strange, she said nothing. Instead, she led Tess toward the back of the café to a four-top table where Nick waited with Aaron Blaustein. It gave Tess a shiver to see Aaron, after she thought she had seen him last night at the Nepenthe Hotel. She told herself that could not have been the same man as the one sitting in the corner at the back of the café, sipping tea and picking at a slice of peach coffee cake.

When he spotted Tess, Nick rose to greet her.

“How's Maddie?” he asked as he leaned in to kiss her cheek, one hand on her arm. No smile, and no recrimination for the strange phone call she'd made to him two days earlier.

“Home, coloring with Erika,” she said.

Aaron kept his seat in the corner. They hadn't seen each other in more than a year, but he did not even glance up—just held his teacup and kept swirling the last of its contents in a circle as if the motion of the brown liquid mesmerized him.

“I guess Lili's already laid it out for you,” Tess said, glancing from Aaron to Nick.

“You were late and they were impatient,” Lili said.

Nick searched Tess's eyes. “I'm trying to tell myself this is some kind of gag, that you guys are playing a joke, and maybe if we were still married that would make some sense to me. But we don't have that kind of relationship anymore—”

“Why don't we sit down?”

He hesitated, looking at her almost angrily. Lili took a seat next to Aaron, so Tess slid out a chair and sat across from her. Nick stared at her.

“You two must be—” he started.

Aaron set his teacup down hard enough to get their attention. “Nick. Take a fucking seat.”

After a moment, Nick complied. He glanced at Aaron but then turned a laser focus back on his ex-wife.

“Stop looking at her like that,” Aaron said.

He used a fork to split off a piece of his coffee cake, breaking it up idly with no apparent intention to eat another bite. Then he dropped the fork as if he'd caught himself doing something that offended him and looked around the table.

“This isn't a delusion, because it wouldn't be affecting both of you,” he said. Aaron Blaustein had always come off as something of an asshole, but he wasn't stupid.

“No. It's not a delusion,” Tess confirmed.

“Okay,” Aaron said. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “There are some things you apparently saw at the Nepenthe Hotel last night that Lili wasn't in the room to witness. We've heard her version. I'd like to hear yours.”

Tess took a deep breath, unused to speaking of impossible things to anyone other than Lili, who had reason to believe her. Still, this had been the reason they had asked the guys to meet them, so she launched into the story and told it as swiftly and succinctly as possible. When she had finished, Nick stared at her again.

“This guy,” Nick said. “How much does he look like me, really?”

Tess felt her skin flush. “I don't think there's anyone who's seen you as up close as I have for as long a period of time. Not yet, anyway. If this guy was sitting here at the table, I think I'd be able to tell the difference, but only based on mannerisms and the fact that he's in a little better shape than you. I doubt anyone else would be able to tell. Maybe not even Maddie.”

“Maddie's my daughter.”

“That's what I'm saying.”

Nick swore, shaking his head.

The server came over and smiled politely as she took their coffee orders, perhaps sensing the tension around the table. Lili ordered a cinnamon twist but Tess could not imagine eating anything.

“Tess,” Aaron said when the server had departed, arrogant as ever, trying to be in control of something uncontrollable. “You're sure the psychomanteum at the hotel is the one we found at the Otis Harrison House?”

“Not a hundred percent,” she said. “How could I be? But it shouldn't be hard to find out.”

“Come on,” Lili said. “What are the odds of there even being another psychomanteum in Boston?”

Aaron blinked. “Admittedly not great.”

A quiet came upon them. The sounds of the café continued unabated, voices and clinking spoons and Amos Lee playing softly from the speakers overhead. Tess figured they were all thinking about the project that had first brought them all together, the dig that had taken place in the cellar of the Otis Harrison House. A man named Silas Ford had bought the historic mansion and hired contractors to restore it to its original grandeur. In the process, Ford's contractor had discovered a stairwell hidden behind a false wall. Since the wall was not part of the architect's design, the contractor had removed it and then descended into a rear cellar that was not in any of the records Aubrey Ford had found referencing the house.

In that cellar, the contractor had found the psychomanteum, covered in dust but otherwise intact and in pristine condition. But it wasn't the apparition box that had brought about the intervention of the New England Historical Museum and the Bostonian Society, or drawn in an archaeological team from Boston University. In the center of the room, a section of the stone floor had fallen into what the worried contractor told a justifiably panicked Aubrey could only be a sinkhole underneath the house. The walls and floor around the sinkhole had been covered in occult symbols.

The contractor and the house's owner cared more about that sinkhole than they did about the five withered corpses they had found in a circle around it, or the one they had discovered inside the psychomanteum itself. Though Aubrey Ford admitted to the temptation to making the bodies vanish, knowing that such a find could seriously impede his restoration of the house, his fear that the contractor and his employees would be unable to keep the discovery secret forced him to involve city officials.

Ford's fears had been justified. The restoration had been put on hold while experts were consulted, and soon a small archaeological team was at work beneath Beacon Hill. Lili and Nick had been brought in to oversee and catalog the work and any discoveries, with Tess and Aaron as consultants for the Bostonian Society and the museum, respectively. Given the obvious occult elements of the site, Tess and Nick had asked around and eventually brought Audrey Pang in to advise the rest of the team on what, exactly, they might be dealing with.

It was Audrey who had identified the psychomanteum and who had explained what she believed the dead people in that cellar had been doing on the day they died.

Summoning a demon,
she had said.

Tess remembered the conversation well, even though two years had passed.

You mean trying to summon a demon,
Nick had replied.

Audrey had arched an eyebrow.
If you say so
.

Tess had not taken her very seriously after that. Audrey had a great deal of knowledge, but her beliefs were of the sort that the pragmatist in Tess had always scorned. Among the other items found with the corpses had been a journal in which their leader, Simon Danton, had identified them as a group of occultists who called themselves the Society of the Lesser Key, after a seventeenth-century magical grimoire entitled
The Lesser Key of Solomon
. In the journal, Danton had made it clear that they were conducting a séance, trying to replicate the work of someone they called “the master,” and that they had built the psychomanteum as some sort of safeguard, to prevent them from sharing his fate … whatever that had been.

An autopsy had not offered any conclusion as to the cause of death for the six corpses in that cellar, though a journalist who had taken an interest in the case would later suggest that the occultists could have taken poison. Tess had allowed herself to believe the explanation of poison because there was something tidy about it, and it allowed her not to wonder anymore.

Audrey had gone through Danton's journal and translated the bits that had not been written in English, but learned little more. Frustrated, she had pursued outside research that eventually led her to uncover the writings of an arcane scholar who had actually mentioned the 1897 disappearance of the Society of the Lesser Key in his memoir. According to Audrey, the society had been following in the footsteps of Cornell Berrige, a man of distinct wealth and occult beliefs of his own. Berrige had bought the Otis Harrison House in 1868 and vanished two years later without an heir.

When the archaeology team had excavated the sinkhole in the middle of that claustrophobic cellar, they found it to be thirteen feet deep. At the bottom of the hole they found another corpse—older than the six in the cellar—that Audrey persuaded them all must be the body of Cornell Berrige. His bones had been charred black, but they could find no sign of the presence of fire anywhere in the hole or the cellar. Audrey had an explanation for that which involved things none of them believed in. She had managed not to be insulted by their skepticism.

Or, at least, not to show that she had taken offense.

Aaron cleared his throat as the server returned with coffee for Tess and a refill for Lili, along with her cinnamon twist. Normally Tess loved the smell of cinnamon, but today it made her stomach clench and she had to edge away from Lili.

“You know we're going to need to talk to Audrey Pang,” Tess said, shifting in her seat to alleviate the deep ache in her spine. “I'm not saying what's going on here is black magic or something. I don't know what I believe. But there's obviously a connection to the Harrison House project and we need to get a better handle on what exactly happened in that cellar.”

Lili sipped her coffee. “I spoke to Audrey an hour ago. She agreed to meet with me tomorrow, so I can fill you all in after that. I'm not gonna lie, though. She seemed a little
off
.”

Aaron sniffed. “She's an occultist. Isn't that off to begin with?”

“Occult expert. Not that same thing,” Tess said curtly. “The woman was incredibly knowledgeable and her research was top-notch. Don't dismiss her just because she believes in things you don't.”

A chilly silence went around the table. Tess felt as if she could hear the ticking of an invisible clock.

“You haven't seen what we've seen,” Lili said quietly.

“What Tess has seen, you mean?” Aaron replied.

“I saw a woman who looked so much like me that it felt like I'd woken up in the
Twilight Zone,
” Lili told him. “So maybe keep an open mind, Aaron. Don't be so sure Tess is having a breakdown or whatever.”

Tess froze, staring at Aaron. “Is that what you think?”

“Take a step back to Thursday morning, before this all started for you, and ask yourself what you would have thought if I'd come to you with the same story,” Aaron said. “Come on, Tess. We're friends.”

Tess took a long sip of her coffee, glancing toward the plate glass windows at the front of the café. “I
thought
we were.”

Nick rapped his knuckles gently on the table. “This doesn't help anyone. Aaron, it's obvious Tess and Lili aren't just messing with us. Let's ask the obvious questions and worry about the answers when we get them.”

Blinking, Aaron nodded. “Sorry, Tess. It's just…”

“We know,” Lili said, ripping off a piece of her cinnamon twist and popping it into her mouth. “Crazy.”

“Whatever's at the bottom of this,” Tess said, “we've all agreed it's connected to the Otis Harrison House. We need to contact everyone who worked on that project and see if anything similar has happened to them.”

“If they've run into their doppelgängers on the streets of Boston?” Aaron asked.

The rest of them ignored him.

“Nick,” Tess said, “you still have the files, right? When you moved out—”

“I have them,” he agreed. “The number's fairly small, really. The four of us, Audrey Pang, Bob Costello and his partner, the three students—”

“Jalen, Marissa, and the girl from Sicily,” Lili said. “What was her name?”

“Hilaria,” Nick replied.

Tess drank her coffee. “You'll call them?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Don't forget the writer,” Lili said. “What the hell was his name?”

Nick froze, then glanced stiffly at Tess. “Lindbergh,” he said, signaling the server that she should bring the check. “Frank Lindbergh. I've got his number somewhere, too.”

Tess tore off a piece of Lili's cinnamon twist without asking and put it in her mouth. Her shoulder throbbed and she wished she had taken a Vicodin this morning. But it wasn't really her chronic pain that had tensed her up. It was the mention of Frank Lindbergh's name.

“Glad you're feeling better,” Lili said, amused that Tess had helped herself.

Tess smiled. Lili was her best friend, but there were things she didn't know. Tess had told her about kissing another man at a party and the way that moment had lit the fuse that detonated her marriage … but she had never told Lili that the man had been Frank Lindbergh. They'd all met Frank at the same time, during the Harrison House project. Handsome and smart, the journalist had been of immediate interest to Lili, but Tess had lobbied against her getting involved with him because he talked too fast and drank too much and seemed not quite certain where his career was headed. Tess had talked Lili out of pursuing Frank, and then gotten drunk and made out with him at a party. At the time, the news would not have gone over well with Lili. Now enough time had passed that it wouldn't be the act that would piss her best friend off, but the fact that Tess had kept it from her.

So she shot Nick a dark look and said nothing.

The server gave him the check and he handed her his American Express card.