Dead Ringers (18 page)

Lili shut off her Prius and climbed out of the car, eyes slitted against the sun's glare. She chuckled quietly at her musing.
These are the places your brain goes when you're single,
she thought.

As she strode up the flagstone path, the front door opened. In black yoga pants and an Arsenal soccer sweatshirt, Audrey leaned against the doorjamb and sipped from a mug of coffee.

“Good morning, Lili. I'm glad you found us all right.”

Lili smiled as she approached the door. “Last time we saw each other you had scarlet hair.”

“I'm going for a more professional look these days,” Audrey said. “Listen, a day like this … what do you say we go for a walk on the beach while we talk?”

Lili saw her gaze flicker toward the inside of the house for a fraction of a second and wondered if Julia had objected to this Sunday-morning visit.

“I hope I'm not intruding,” she said.

Audrey smiled. “You're fine. The house is a disaster and Julia wanted to pick up before you came, but we overslept.”

“A walk would be perfect,” Lili agreed. “We're not going to have many more days like this before winter. I don't want to squander it.”

“There's a place with wicked good coffee a couple of doors down from Kelly's now,” Audrey said. “Let me just put this down.”

She left the door halfway open as she retreated into the shadows of her home. Lili imagined her giving Julia a farewell kiss-and-nuzzle and felt another twinge of envy. Then Audrey returned, now empty-handed, and pulled the door closed behind her as they started down the driveway.

“It's a hard life,” Lili said, “living two blocks from the beach.”

They kept the conversation light all the way to the ocean. On a summer weekend, Revere Beach would have been packed, and even today the sun had brought out many of the locals. People biked along the road that ran parallel to the sand. Old men sunned themselves as if they'd never heard of skin cancer, their hides brown and rough as leather. Sixtysomething women in tracksuits walked in clutches of three or four, pumping their elbows enthusiastically as they engaged in savage gossip. Lili preferred her beaches a little more picturesque, but Revere Beach had a sense of preserved history whose appeal she could not deny. Once upon a time there had been a roller coaster here. As they crossed the street and started north along the sand, she fancied that the joyful cries of the coaster's passengers could still be heard on the occasional gust of wind.

Here you go with ghosts again,
she thought. And that put a stop to the small talk. She couldn't pretend that she had only come here to chat with an old friend.

“There's something freaky going on,” she said.

Audrey smiled as they moved across soft sand to the darker hardpack near the surf. “So you implied. And as much as I like you, Lili, we're not the kind of friends who go for Sunday morning walks on the beach for no reason. People who call me usually have something freaky to talk about.”

“You don't believe in any of this stuff, though.”

Audrey hesitated. Lili glanced at her and saw a kind of skittishness in her expression, in her eyes, as if she wanted the conversation to be over already, even though it had really just begun.

“That's not really true,” Audrey said after a moment. “I believe most of what people claim to be supernatural experiences is misinterpretation, hallucination, or invention. Most, not all. I've seen things I can't explain. I've had some experiences myself.… I don't want to go into it, really.”

“But at the Harrison House—”

“The Otis Harrison House creeped me the hell out because when they went down into that cellar it was full of dead people who had been trying to summon a demon to do their bidding, or whatever. But I found no evidence that…”

She faltered.

Lili came to a stop on the sand, watching her, and Audrey stopped as well.

“What?” Lili prodded.

Audrey turned to stare out at the waves. The wind kicked up and even with the sun out, the air grew colder.

“There's no evidence that the Society of the Lesser Key succeeded,” Audrey said, watching the surf roll in. “But I didn't like the psychomanteum. So much malignant energy coming off it. And that pit in the cellar—”

“Wait, you felt that stuff?” Lili asked quietly, going back over their time at the Harrison House, seeing it all again for the first time. “You never said a word.”

“You hired me as an occult expert,” Audrey said, turning toward her again. “You didn't want a medium. I was there to explain what you had found—who you had found—and help you determine its historical value. That's all. Not to mention that, honestly, none of you should have needed me to tell you there was something
wrong
down there. You all felt it. You especially, Lili. Don't you remember how sick you got while the pit was being excavated and all of the writing on the walls was being transcribed? There were a few days there when you couldn't keep a bagel down, never mind a whole meal.”

“I had a stomach bug.”

“Yeah,” Audrey said. “There was a lot of that going around.”

Now that she'd brought it up, Lili remembered how bad it was—how nearly every member of the team had been sick at some point.

“Hilaria,” she said.

Audrey nodded. “The Italian girl—”

“Sicilian.”

“—somebody took her over to the hospital and they had to give her drugs to stop her from throwing up. She was out for days. By the time she came back your team had dismantled the psychomanteum and filled that pit with dirt and rocks and mortar. For me, that was the end of it. Whatever unpleasant echoes were left over from the things those creepy fuckers did … they didn't matter anymore.”

Lili threw her hands up. “Except the psychomanteum's out of storage. It's been dusted off and put on display as a curiosity.”

Audrey frowned. “The curator? Blaustein? Was this him?”

“Nothing that simple,” Lili replied. She shook her head and gestured for Audrey to walk with her again, and they set off along the sand.

Lili told her everything, beginning with Tess on the sidewalk with the man who looked like Nick and ending with the events of Friday night, outside First Light Gallery, and the blindfolded man sniffing the air and then staggering off into the shadows.

“
The raggedy man,
I call him. In my head, anyway,” Lili said.

Then she saw the way Audrey's eyes had widened, the thin line of her lips where they pressed so tightly together.

A knot of ice tightened in Lili's stomach. She felt nauseous, as if Audrey's reminder of her earlier sickness had summoned it up again.

“What?” she said quietly, reaching out as Audrey stopped short on the sand.

Audrey started back the way they'd come.

“Hey!” Lili said. “Come on, you can't just give me that look and then take off.”

“We're going back,” Audrey said.

“What did I say?” Lili asked, hurrying to catch up. “Was it the raggedy man? I saw your eyes, Audrey. Have you seen him, too? If you know who he is, you need to—”

She caught up and clutched Audrey's arm.

“I don't know!” Audrey snapped, yanking her arm away. Her gaze went faraway a moment and then she turned to stare across the beach—across the street—back toward her home. “I have no idea who he is. I wasn't even sure I'd really seen him. I get these … spells, I guess you'd say. I passed out a second, maybe, and I thought I saw this man and then he was gone. But it happens sometimes. I've seen things that are like waking dreams and…”

Audrey stared. Put up a hand, though it wasn't clear if the gesture was meant to halt her words and train of thought or to warn Lili to keep back.

“I don't want this,” she said quietly. “I don't owe you guys anything. I like you, Lili. But I want to stick to research and helping people who are being taken advantage of by assholes pretending to talk to the dead. There's a dark streak through all of this, something that goes back to that cellar. I felt it then and I don't want anything to do with it now. I owe it to Julia to—”

“I didn't bring this to you,” Lili said.

Audrey started for the road again, picking up her pace. “You called me, remember?”

Lili chased after her. When Audrey crossed the road too fast, forcing a growling Ford Mustang to jerk to a halt on the pavement, Lili caught up. The driver laid on the horn and swore at them out the window, but both women ignored him. On the other side of the road, they hurried away from the water toward Audrey's street.

“I called you, yeah,” Lili said. “But if you saw the raggedy man, you were involved with this before I picked up the phone.”

Audrey sagged as she walked, slowing enough that Lili didn't have to hurry to keep up with her. Eyes closed, Audrey hung her head.

“Fuck.”

“You're in it, Audrey,” Lili said gently. “And you're the only person we know who has any hope of figuring out what the hell is going on.”

“What do you expect me to do?” Audrey asked as they turned the corner onto her street.

“Come to the hotel with us. Figure out who these doubles are. Maybe they're another group like the Lesser Key assholes and this is some kind of glamour or whatever. See if you see or feel anything weird. I don't know, Aud. This is your area.”

Audrey gazed sadly at her house. “I don't want it to be my area anymore.”

“You know, on my way here I had half convinced myself it was nothing. Just coincidence, or someone screwing with us somehow. Then you started talking about what you sensed at the Harrison House and it felt like I couldn't breathe. None of us wants anything to do with this. You're not alone in that, and you're not alone, period.”

They reached the driveway. At Lili's car, Audrey stopped and looked at her. When she spoke, it was with her voice low, just in case Julia might be within earshot of a window.

“I'm on another case,” she said, “so I can't do it tomorrow. I'll meet you Tuesday. Just tell me when.”

“Six o'clock,” Lili replied. “If you want to go earlier, we can manage, but we have jobs we're supposed to be going to.”

“Fine.”

The ocean breeze kicked up, but instead of the clean salt air that Lili had smelled before, this time the wind brought that other ocean smell. Low tide and dead things.

“One other thing,” Audrey said, pale with worry. “I'll go with you to the hotel, but not over to the Harrison House. I don't care how many raggedy men we see. I won't go back to that place again.

“Not ever.”

 

MONDAY

 

ONE

Tess came awake in the middle of the night, body heavy with sleep and head full of muzzy cotton. Her eyes itched, and she blinked a few times while her head made sense of the clock she kept on top of the tall jewelry cabinet between her bedroom windows. The little red dot indicated that her alarm remained set, but it was the time that confounded her. It felt as if she'd been sleeping most of the night, but the numbers told a different story: 2:37. She'd been asleep less than three hours.

She tugged the covers up to her neck, nestling further into the bed, expecting to drift back to sleep. A tightness formed across her forehead and she felt herself tense. Insomnia had not plagued her in some time, but she was familiar with its army of small anxieties.
Not tonight,
she thought, shifting to make herself more comfortable. Suddenly nothing felt right to her. The pillow felt too warm, so she flipped it to the cool side. Her neck ached, and the cable box beneath the TV on her bureau buzzed too loudly.

She sighed in frustration.

Behind her, someone else sighed.

Tess froze, breath trapped in her lungs. Fear crawled over every inch of her skin on tiny insect legs. Her back felt soft and yielding, the perfect home for the sharp plunge of a knife. Her itchy eyes burned with tears and her lungs with that held breath, her unvoiced scream. Seconds of paralysis ticked by without another sound and she tried to convince herself that she hadn't heard it, but really there was only one way to do that. Only one way to
know
.

How many times had she woken up in the night to a creak or a knock, or blinked and seen a jacket hanging from the closet door that for just a moment seemed an ominous shape? Only one way to ever really know for sure.

She drew a breath, steeling herself.

Behind her, someone else drew a breath. Followed by short exhalation, just a little thing. A quiet laugh.

She pressed her eyes together, then opened them and stared again at the gleaming red numbers on her alarm clock.

“Please,” she rasped.
Please don't hurt me. Please don't kill me. Please just go.

A floorboard creaked, and a rush of very different emotion swept over her. If it meant a knife in her back or strangling hands around her throat, none of that mattered. Her visitor could not leave the room.

Because Maddie slept right across the hall.

This fear had a different hue, a cold and violent red, and she whipped back her covers and hurled herself off the other side of the bed. Her right hand found the nearest thing, the alarm clock, and she ripped it off the table, tugging the plug from the wall as she spun to face the sighing, laughing intruder.

The alarm clock hung by its cord in her hand.

Of course,
Tess thought.

The clothes were unfamiliar. Dark turtleneck sweater and yoga pants. The earrings that glittered in the dark had to be real and expensive. Otherwise, the woman was Tess. Her mirror.

Seeing Nick on that street corner and understanding that it wasn't really him had been one thing, but this was something different. Lili had seen the artist through the window at First Light Gallery and had paled, unraveled by it. Tess felt herself unraveling now, faced with the impossible, the simply-cannot-be. In her mind she could almost hear the tearing of fabric, as if all her life she had been wandering through a grand performance and never understood that other truths existed beyond the curtains.