The Thing in the Alley (Anomaly Hunters, Book 3) Read online

11

  Calvin’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” ringtone woke him up at eight a.m. With a grunt he snatched his phone from the bedside table.

  “H’lo,” he said, his voice and mind still thick with sleep.

  A pause, then: “Um, is this Calvin?”

  Tiffany Fish. Calvin found himself wide awake faster than he ever would have thought possible. He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed.

  “Tiffany, hi,” he said, his voice now amazingly clear. “What’s up?”

  “Um, I woke you up, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t mind. You’re worth getting woken up for.”

  There was a long silence on the other side. Calvin felt certain she was smiling and blushing. The thought made him grin.

  “So, to what do I owe this pleasant little wake-up call?” he asked, hoping to coax her out of her silence.

  “Oh, um, I thought I’d let you know: My mission has been successfully accomplished. I found out about Simon Bradley, the man who shot himself.”

  “Wow, that was quick work.”

  “Actually, a trip to the Kingwood Public Library was all it took. One old newspaper clipping and two back issues of The Clarion, and I was done.”

  “What’s The Clarion?”

  “That’s Kingwood University’s student newspaper. Simon Bradley was a grad student there. Are you free today? I can give you all the details, and you can finish giving me the tour of your house.”

  “Well, I’m booked solid this afternoon, but I’ve got the whole morning free.”

  “Oh. Okay.” She sounded a little disappointed. “Um, you probably need time to wash and dress and eat and excrete and stuff, so—”

  “Not much time. If you can be here in half an hour, that’d be perfect.”

  “Thirty minutes, zero problem.” She sounded positively chipper now. “See you then.”

  Calvin managed to shower, dress, wolf down a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, and brush his teeth in twenty minutes. For the next ten minutes he paced the parlor, pausing every thirty seconds to peek out the window in hopes of seeing Tiffany’s silver Audi coming up the driveway. The minutes oozed past at a sludge-like pace.

  Finally he heard the Audi’s engine, and after racing to the bathroom to check himself in the mirror and make sure his appearance hadn’t gone to hell in the last ten minutes, he hurried to the front door and opened it to reveal Tiffany ascending the front steps.

  She lit up when she saw him, a big, radiant smile spreading across her face. She was totally devoid of the hesitancy and nervousness she had shown when she first showed up here yesterday. He could tell she felt comfortable around him now, as if they had known each other a lot longer than two days. The feeling was mutual.

  “Come on in,” he said, holding the door open for her. “So, tour now, or would you prefer to tell me the fruits of your research first?”

  “I should share my fruits first. They’re more important. Though not very pleasant. Bad apples from the tree of knowledge.”

  “That’s okay. I’m an adventurous eater.”

  They sat down in the parlor, Tiffany on the green leather couch, Calvin on a matching chair that sat at a right angle to it.

  “So how did you even know where to look for info about him?” Calvin asked. “I mean, I can’t imagine ‘Bradley, Simon’ was in the library’s card catalogue.”

  “Easy. I just searched the Kingwood Morning Star’s obituary section in the days following the alley incident. And bam, two days later, there he was. He was twenty-three years old. He was a Libra. He was born and raised in Kingwood. He attended Kingwood University, where he was working on a PhD in physics.”

  “Physics?” Calvin said, surprised. “That’s interesting. One of my degrees is in physics.”

  Tiffany only nodded, this news not surprising her in the slightest.

  “That was it for the obit,” she said, “so I checked to see if the library had any copies of the university paper. Turns out they had a complete collection dating back to the paper’s founding in 1935. I wound up spending a few hours poring over every issue between 2003, the year Mr. Bradley started there as a freshman, and 2008, when he died.”

  “You didn’t have to go to all that trouble.”

  “This concerns me, too. I needed to know.”

  Calvin nodded. “So what did you learn from The Clarion?”

  “He was in a 2007 issue, one of three students profiled as rising stars in the Physics department. It had a photo of him. He…” She gave a rueful grimace. “He deviated quite widely from common standards of attractiveness. He was short and stooped and had a wide, froggish face, with big, cavy nostrils and thick glasses that trebled the size of his eyes, and even at twenty-three his hairline was badly receding. But the way the article described him, his brains more than squared any physical deficiencies. The word ‘genius’ was used more than once. He was said to have had some brilliant theories about the behavior of certain subatomic particles.”

  “Did it say which ones?”

  She shook her head. “The article didn’t go into any detail about his work. It would’ve been over the heads of most of the readers. It wasn’t a physics journal, after all; it was just a lowly student newspaper. It didn’t even include any direct quotes from Mr. Bradley. Apparently he was too busy with his research to talk to reporters, which sounded like the usual state of affairs with him. The writers did, however, talk to a few professors from his department, all of whom praised his intelligence. The most interesting quote came from, uh…” She consulted a small spiral notebook she had brought with her, much as Lauren had the night before. “Professor Amos Huxley, who said that he believed Mr. Bradley ‘was on the verge of startling breakthroughs in particle physics,’ and that he—Huxley that is—‘would bet money that future generations will mention Simon Bradley in the same breath as Einstein.’”

  “Wow. That’s high praise.”

  “Yeah. That was the December 11, 2007, issue of the paper. A little over six months later Bradley blew his super-brilliant brains all over his apartment. Professor Huxley lost his bet.

  “But that brings us to the second Clarion article, a commemorative piece they ran right after he died. It repeated a lot of what the earlier article said. Again, they relied on his professors for quotes.”

  “Doesn’t sound like he had many friends.”

  “No. His work was his life.”

  “What about family?”

  “That was part of the problem. His father died when he was a child, he had no siblings, and his mother had been fighting brain cancer for the last year. Bradley wasn’t coping with her decline very well. One of his professors—not Huxley; this was a man named Cartwright—said that during the last few months of his life Bradley’s schoolwork had grown increasingly ‘incoherent.’ The faculty recommended he take some time off, see a psychiatrist, things like that. Bradley refused, insisting his work was flawless; the professors were just too dumb to understand it. (That’s not what the article actually said. I’m reading between the lines here.) His worsening scholastic performance in turn worsened his already bleak mental state, and when his mother died at the end of April, that was the proverbial last straw. Three weeks later he decided to join her.”

  “Geez. So here we have an isolated, friendless geek who lost the one person he was close to and who had started out as a sort of wunderkind only to wind up spouting seeming incoherencies that alienated him from his professors. That’s pretty depressing.”

  “Tell me about it,” Tiffany muttered, staring down at her notebook.

  Calvin had been only giving lip-service to the depressingness of the case—it was hard to feel too depressed about the decade-old death of a man you didn’t know—but Tiffany sounded genuinely sad for Simon Bradley.

  Then he remembered that her mother was dead, she lived with her father and no siblings, and she had been ostracized by her friends in school, all of whom thought she’d gone bonkers. And perhaps she had, at least to so
me extent, given the anxiety and nightmares she experienced. He wondered what her life had been like the last nine years. She hadn’t mentioned any friends, or lovers, or jobs.

  He looked at her sitting there, sad and pale and quiet in her still radiantly white shoes, her head down and her loose blonde hair hiding her face, and his heart ached with sorrow for her—and even a little for poor Simon Bradley now, too, whose pains echoed hers. Calvin wanted to do whatever he could to ease her troubled soul. She was too wonderful a person to feel that way. He wanted to make her feel happy the way she made him feel happy.

  “Is that it, then?” he said.

  “Yep,” she said, still looking down at her notebook. “That is it. Doesn’t tell us much, does it?”

  “We can worry about it later. Why don’t I show you the rest of the house right now, if you’re up for it.”

  She looked up, her face bright and eager now, her somberness gone.

  “Yes! I am up. I am definitely very up.”

  He led her straight to the Collection room in the east wing.

  “I think you’ll be pretty interested in this,” he said, and opened the door.

  She stepped inside and spent a moment surveying the diverse array of objects that crowded the shelves. Then she looked at Calvin and said: “What strange repository have I stumbled into here?”

  “This,” he said, waving his arm with a showman-like flourish, the way Mr. May had done for him and Cynthia five years earlier, “is the Collection. These are artifacts from Mr. May’s investigations into anomalous phenomena.”

  “Huh.” She peered at a few of the items on a shelf near the door—a black glass ashtray, a dead cicada, a music box shaped like a miniature gramophone. “Are the objects themselves anomalous in some way?”

  “Some of them. Others are objects that were affected by the phenomena or connected with it in some other fashion. A lot of the actual phenomena were frustratingly intangible.”

  She nodded. “Like ghosts. Or words.”

  “Right. This isn’t the only room, either. There are four more, plus one room devoted to files on the anomalies.”

  “Files?” She scanned the shelves again. A numbered sticker was affixed to the shelf in front of each item. She tapped the music box’s sticker, which read “2314.” “Let me guess: These are the file numbers, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  She nodded and looked around the room. “There are a lot of numbers in here…”

  For the next hour Calvin gave her a grand tour of the Collection, pointing out some of the more notable items as they made their way first through the rooms on the second floor, then the ones on the third. Tiffany was clearly interested and intrigued, though not brimming with pop-eyed wonder as Calvin had been when he first saw the Collection. Her reaction was quieter, more thoughtful. At times she seemed almost wary, as if she were passing through rooms full of unexploded ordnance. At other times she seemed more interested in the stickers than in the objects themselves, and she scanned them closely as if watching for specific numbers.

  “It must have taken Mr. May a long time to investigate so many cases,” she said. They were in the west room on the third floor, a room Calvin had always thought of as the freezer room, since it contained a Frigidaire that housed the Collection’s perishable items.

  Calvin nodded. “Nearly seventy years. Most of his life.”

  She looked around the room, then back at him, her expression suddenly apprehensive.

  “Am I here somewhere?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Have you read all the files? Every one?”

  “Yes.” Then he realized what she was getting at. “Tiffany, you’re not mentioned in any of the files, and neither is the alley, or Simon Bradley, or any of that stuff.”

  “He must have known, though. If he knew of me, if he left things to me, he must have known what happened.”

  “Not necessarily. He left things to the rest of us, and at that point none of us had experienced any paranormal phenomena at all, at least not as far as we can recall. There aren’t files about any of us. Not anywhere.”

  “He could have investigated things without making files.”

  “True. But I doubt he had time for very many investigations beyond the ones he made files on. His dance card was pretty full.”

  “Then why did he choose us?”

  “I…I don’t know. I wish I did.”

  She wandered down one of the aisles, watching the varied items go past, her expression closed and distant. Her eyes settled on a shelf that contained nothing but human skulls and bones, and she stopped with a faint, indrawn breath.

  “Memento mori,” she muttered. “Moment of death. Memento of death. More E.” Pause. “Hh.”

  “What?”

  She turned to him.

  “Will you investigate the alley? You suggested you might.”

  “Uh, probably. Unless you would prefer we don’t.”

  “You should be careful,” she said. “Exploring the unknown might make things known to you that you would prefer you didn’t know.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Do you?”

  “I…” Did he? “I think I do.”

  “Maybe.” She didn’t sound convinced. “What I saw that night in the alley, it had repercussions. Echoes. It’s still having them.”

  “I don’t think all unusual events are like that,” Calvin said. “I saw some birds materialize out of thin air not far from here. So did Cynthia and some other people. And Mr. May witnessed hundreds of strange events. But none of us experienced any effects like what you experienced.”

  “Birds, huh?” One side of her mouth curled up in a small, humorless smile. “They weren’t crows, were they?”

  “Um, no.”

  She cocked her head. “So are you saying the problem was with me, then, and not with the event itself?”

  “Not necessarily. The Romeros experienced strange aftereffects, too, remember.”

  “Not with anywhere near the same severity. They just heard some fuzzy echoes. They didn’t have nightmares, mood disorders, psychotic episodes. Their lives weren’t destroyed. Not like mine. And it can’t be a matter of their having only heard the incident rather than seeing it, because my dad saw it too, and he didn’t experience the same shattering consequences I did. Therefore the problem must be with me, right?”

  Her words suggested a swift and worrying descent into bitterness and self-pity. Her tone, however, was calm and rational, and her expression thoughtful. Still, he felt compelled to reassure her that he didn’t think there was anything wrong with her. Not at all. Just the opposite; he thought she was resoundingly right in every way.

  “Tiffany—” he began.

  Before he could say another word, she fixed a level gaze upon him and in the same flatly demanding regal tone she had used to silence her father the other day, she said, “I want to join your group.”

  “You do?” Calvin felt lost but had the idea he shouldn’t be. He got the impression that this was one apparent non-sequitur that really wasn’t and that he was just a little slow catching up with her swiftly moving train of thought.

  The look she gave him—her head sticking out, eyebrows raised, as if to say, “Haven’t you been listening to a word I said?”—underscored that.

  “Well, yes,” she said. “The only way to determine if that hypothesis is correct is for me to expose myself to further anomalous phenomena. If I can’t deal with them, then the problem is with me. If I can, then the problem was clearly with the incident in the alley itself (or perhaps with the specific combination of me and the incident). We have to know.”

  She said “we.” What did that mean? Given her princessy tone a moment ago, it made him think of the royal we, the way a queen would speak for all her subjects. But he didn’t think it was that. It was more likely either a “we” in the sense of “you and I,” or a “we” as in “the group.”

  “Please,” she added. There was nothin
g regal about her now. Her eyes were desperate, beseeching.

  “Actually, just last night the others and I discussed the possibility of your joining,” he said. “Everyone seems amenable to the idea, but of course they’d like to meet you first.”

  “Oh.” She looked intimidated at the idea of meeting a group of strangers.

  “I’ll be seeing them later today. We’re going to be looking for areas where the thing that killed Brad Vallance might be hiding out. You, uh, you could come if you like.”

  “I…I can’t. I have plans. Um…”

  “We’ll probably be meeting up again tomorrow. Would you be free then?”

  “Maybe. Probably.”

  “I’ll give you a call once we’ve settled on a time.”

  “Okay.” She flashed him a grateful smile. “Thank you.” Then the smile faded, and she tilted her head to one side. “You sound certain that Brad Vallance’s killer is a thing. The police think it’s people, a duo or a gang.”

  “Yeah, uh…” Time to tell her the truth. “We think it’s a leucrota. What’s more, we think it came out of a, uh, an anomaly in the woods.” He nodded at the north wall. “Out there.”

  She looked at the wall, then back at him. One blonde eyebrow rose. “I think you have a story to tell me.”

  “I think I do. But not here. You still have to see the tower. There are chairs up there. We can sit and talk.”

  He led her back to the spiral staircase, then up to the small room at the top of the tower. A card table and four chairs comprised the room’s only future. On every side a window offered a view of the world below.

  Tiffany pressed her face against the east window and looked out. Directly below, the roof of the east wing stretched away like a dark pier, its sides covered with fishscale singles, its edges bordered with black iron cresting shaped like alternating circles and vertical spikes. Beyond the house, the lawn extended flat and green toward the dark wall of the woods.

  Mr. May had installed very thick, almost soundproof windows, so none of the traffic noises from Oaks and Potts Roads reached in here. Calvin and Tiffany might have been the only people in the world. It was so silent up here that Calvin could hear Tiffany breathing, the sound still a little ragged from her ascent of the stairs, the soft rustle of her jeans as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, the faint wet click as she swallowed.

  “It’s scenic up here,” she said, face still pressed to the window. Her breath had left an oval of fog on the glass, and she pulled back a little to look at it, then drew a 12 in the fog with her index finger. She started to write something next to it, but then gave a small jerk like someone startled awake from a doze. She glanced back at Calvin with a sheepish look, as if she’d just been caught doing something wrong, then wiped away the writing with her palm, her skin squeaking on the glass.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I probably got prints on your window.”

  “It’s fine. I don’t clean much anyway.” He gestured at the table and chairs. “Have a seat.”

  They sat.

  “So what’s a leucrota?” Tiffany asked. “Does it have something to do with whiteness?”

  “Whiteness?”

  “From the combining form ‘leuko,’ like in ‘leukemia.’”

  “Oh. Actually, I don’t know. I’m not sure of the origin of the word.”

  “Okay. And, um…” She looked sheepish again. “Sorry if I seem kind of obsessive about words sometimes. I’m just trying to get at the reality behind language. After all, where did language come from?”

  He shrugged. “We made it, right?”

  “Not wholly consciously. And in any case, if our brains made language, what made our brains? What established the patterns and thought-structures within them that guided language’s form?”

  “Evolution?”

  “And what made the rules of evolution?”

  “This is become another infinite regress, isn’t it?” he said with a smile.

  She smiled back. “We keep having problems with those, don’t we?”

  “Infinite problems.”

  She groaned and rolled her eyes.

  “Why don’t you tell me about your leucrota and why you think it came out of your scenic woods. But, um…” She checked her watch. “Bear in mind I have to leave in half an hour.”

  “Okay, Cliff Notes version, then.” He took a deep breath. “It all started a few years ago when Cynthia’s sister Emily got abducted…”

  He sketched out the events surrounding Emily’s murder and what happened in the clearing the night her killer died there. He then recounted their recent investigation into the murders in Kingwood. Despite his attempt at succinctness, by the time he had finished telling her the whole tale, the thirty minutes was up.

  Tiffany pushed her chair back from the table and stood up. “Thank you for the enlightening story. It’s given me a lot to think about.”

  He rose, too.

  “I hope it hasn’t scared you away,” he said, only half joking.

  She cocked her head. “Why would it?”

  “You know, the house being situated on a sort of magical network of tragedy.”

  “No,” she said. She looked out the window at the woods. The treetops were stirring in an unheard wind, their branches bobbing, their leaves flashing their paler undersides. She watched the restless foliage for a moment, then quietly said. “It probably isn’t what you think it is anyway. Things rarely are.”

  He led her downstairs and out to her car. They turned to face each other next to the Audi.

  “Call me once you’ve got a time set up,” she said.

  “Will do.”

  “And good luck with your monster hunt.”

  “Thanks.”

  They looked at each other in silence, neither of them making any move to part. Calvin felt an almost overpowering urge to kiss her. But like before, he hesitated, still afraid it was too soon and Tiffany too fragile.

  When their eye contact carried on a beat longer than propriety recommended, a rosy flush tinged Tiffany’s cheeks and a smile flickered at her lips. Calvin smiled, too, but more broadly.

  Her blush deepening until it seemed as if she were wearing liberally applied rouge, she looked down at the ground, cleared her throat, and swiped a stray lock of hair from her cheek.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I, uh…I should go.”

  “Right.”

  She went. As before, he watched her drive away until the car was out of sight, and then, still smiling the same smile he had been smiling for the last three minutes, he went back inside.

  He was about to turn on the TV to see if there had been any new developments with the Kingwood murder investigation when his stomach rumbled, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten anything today except a bowl of Cap’n Crunch. He went to the kitchen and threw together a ham and cheese sandwich with a heap of potato chips on the side. He had eaten only three chips and one bite of the sandwich when the doorbell rang.

  Figuring it was Tiffany, that maybe she had left something behind or forgotten to tell him something—or better yet had decided to hurl herself into his arms and pepper his face with kisses and demand to be made love to immediately—he hurried to the front door and threw it open. His expectant smile died on his lips.

  It was Andrew Fish.

  “We need to talk,” Fish said.

  “Uh…” What the hell was this about? Did Fish know his daughter had stopped by? He must. “Come on in.”

  Fish looked over Calvin’s shoulder at the long hallway lined with paintings, then shook his head.

  “Why don’t we talk out here?” He gestured at the porch.

  “Uh, sure.”

  Calvin stepped outside, no longer hungry, feeling instead a greasy, heavy sensation in the pit of his stomach, the sort of feeling you get before taking a test, or having a job interview, or some other undertaking your whole future might hinge on.

  They sat down on the top step, facing the woods to the south of the house. Beyo
nd the woods in that direction was Oaks Road, and every now and then the muffled whoosh of a passing car came to them.

  “So,” said Calvin, needing to fill the silence between them with something, anything, no matter how banal. “How are you?”

  Andrew Fish nodded without looking at Calvin. “As well as I can be, I suppose.” He stared at the woods a moment longer and then, still without looking at Calvin, said, “I know Tiffany’s been coming here.”

  Calvin had suspected as much, but now that the words had been spoken and the truth laid bare, he felt angry, outraged.

  “You’ve been following her? You’re spying on your own daughter?”

  Fish turned to him, his lips pressed together in some odd combination of guilt and self-righteousness.

  “I’m making sure she’s all right.”

  “Forgive me for saying so, but that sounds grotesquely overprotective.”

  Fish nodded. “It does sound that way, doesn’t it? I suppose it’ll sound even worse when I tell you that I did some checking up on you, too.”

  Calvin’s mouth opened, but he was too flabbergasted to speak for a moment. Before he could find the words to give vent to his swiftly mounting outrage, Fish went on.

  “Nothing serious. Just making sure you were who you said you were, checking your grades, things like that. Nothing that isn’t publicly available. For what it’s worth, I’m impressed: A double major in physics and psychology in only four years? Not everyone can pull that off.”

  Calvin’s mouth closed. He wasn’t sure what to think now. If Fish was trying to mollify him with flattery…well, he was doing a pretty good job of it.

  “When I first learned that Tiffany had visited you the other day,” Fish said, “I debated long and hard whether or not I should come out here to have a talk with you. It was learning of your background in psychology that convinced me to do it. I guess I’m hoping it will help you understand Tiffany’s…unique history.”

  That heavy, greasy feeling returned, worse than before.

  “Tell me,” Calvin said.

  Fish sighed and leaned forward a little, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped, his eyes fixed on the ground. He suddenly looked very tired and much older than he was.

  “Tiffany is…special.”

  Calvin frowned. “That’s what they say about retarded people.”

  “No, that’s what they say about people who are different from most.” He gave Calvin a sidelong look. “When she was nine, something happened…”

  “The women in the alley. She told me about that.”

  Fish straightened up, staring at him in surprise. “She did?”

  Calvin nodded. “The two of you were walking home from a play one night in Kingwood and you saw two women vanish in an alley.”

  The corner of Fish’s mouth twitched. “That’s what she says. I don’t think they disappeared. It was dark and at a distance.”

  “She said you saw it too.”

  “I saw what appeared to be two women disappear in an alley. The eyes play tricks, especially late at night when it’s dark and you’re tired. Did she tell you what happened in the wake of the incident?”

  “She said she didn’t handle it too well. She said she had some nightmares.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Also some anxiety attacks and sleepwalking.”

  But that wasn’t all, was it? She had said something else, too. I started sleepwalking and…and other things. She hadn’t specified what those other things were, and he hadn’t felt comfortable asking. Now, however, he had a feeling he was about to find out.

  “Did she tell you about the incident with the mirror?”

  “No.” Calvin’s stomach was a sack full of grease now, heavy and bloated and ready to burst.

  Fish stared at the distant trees in silence for a few seconds, then said, “She had nightmares nearly every night for two years. She would wake up screaming in pure, primal terror from nightmares in which people were shooting her in the head. It was horrifying. I had never really understood the expression ‘blood-curdling scream’ until then. Nearly every night for two years I sat with her for hours, trying to calm her down, to get her to stop crying and trembling like some beaten and traumatized animal. It got to the point where she was afraid to go to bed. She would have panic attacks. I took her to a child psychologist, who wound up prescribing an anti-anxiety medication when regular psychotherapy failed to have any effect at all. It helped with the panic attacks, but not with the nightmares.”

  “She also told me she got ostracized at school.”

  Fish nodded. “There was that, too. She made the mistake of telling the other kids about the disappearing women in the alley, and, well, I’m sure you know how kids can be. That, of course, didn’t help things. Not only had her dreams turned against her but her so-called friends had, too. Things got so bad I wound up having her home-schooled. It seemed easiest for everyone that way.”

  Fish fell silent again and looked out at the trees. He toyed nervously with a large onyx ring on the ring finger of his right hand, pulling it up to the knob of the second joint, then shunting it back down to the knuckle.

  “About three months after the alley incident, she started sleepwalking. It didn’t happen often, and when it did it was usually very minor. She’d wake up out of a sound sleep to find herself standing by her bedroom door or on the landing of the second-floor stairs. At first it scared her, of course, and she would come to my bedroom and shake me awake. But after it had happened a few times, she started getting used to it. She no longer felt compelled to wake me up and instead quietly went back to bed on her own.

  “And then one night I was startled awake by a string of deafening bangs and quick bright flashes that lit my bedroom in stark black and white. Immediately recognizing them as gunshots, I leaped out of bed, convinced that the house was under attack and I was about to be murdered. By the time I got my bearings, the shots had stopped. In the moonlight shining in through the windows, I saw Tiffany standing near the far corner of the room, her back half-turned to me and a smoking gun in her hand. My gun. It was the Smith and Wesson I kept locked in a safe under my bed. The safe now sat in the middle of the floor, open and empty, the key, which I kept on my keychain, jutting from the lock.

  “I hurried over to Tiffany. She was standing in front of the wreckage of a Victorian cheval mirror that had belonged to Sarah, my wife. The glass was shattered and lay in sharp, glittering heaps on the carpet, and the mirror’s wooden backing was riddled with bullet holes.

  “Tiffany appeared to be in shock; she just stood there staring at the ruins of the mirror like she couldn’t figure out what it was or what was happening. But when I knelt down beside her and pulled the still-smoking gun from her hand, she whirled toward me, startled and screaming, her face a mask of stark terror. When she saw it was me, she flung her arms around me and clung to me, sobbing hysterically.

  “It took a while to get her to talk, and even longer until she started making sense. She claimed she had no idea what had happened. The last thing she remembered she had been in bed, falling asleep, and the next thing she knew she was in my bedroom watching her own reflection get blown to pieces by a gun she had never even been shown how to shoot. She couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me anything else.

  “Oddly, this incident, terrifying though it was to both of us, signaled the beginning of the end of her problems. Over the next few months the nightmares steadily grew rarer, and her anxiety faded to the point where she no longer needed medication. She was doing well enough that she started attending school again, though I managed to get her enrolled in a different school system where she wouldn’t have to face the same kids. And for a couple of years things went well. Very well. Almost back to normal. But then when she was thirteen…” He paused again and looked down at the onyx ring, which he was now twisting round and round his finger like a millstone rotating on its axle.

  There’s more? Calvin thought, his heart sinking. The worst part was,
something in Fish’s manner suggested that everything he’d related so far was little more than a prologue to the real story.

  “One morning I woke up and was heading downstairs to make coffee,” Fish said. “As I passed Tiffany’s room, I heard a faint squeaking sound through the closed door. I didn’t think much of it. I figured she had woken up early and was just…I don’t know, doing something innocuous. So I went downstairs, made the coffee, made breakfast, and called Tiffany down to eat. She didn’t answer. I called again. Still no answer. I went upstairs to see what was going on. When I came to her door, I could still hear those faint squeaks. I knocked. She didn’t answer. There was only that incessant squeak-squeak-squeak. So I opened the door.

  “Sometime during the night she had moved all of her furniture into the center of the room—how she did it without waking me up, I have no idea—and she had covered half of one wall with…well, it looked like complete gibberish to me. The squeaking was the sound of the black magic marker on the wall’s light-blue paint as she wrote.

  “I couldn’t see Tiffany from where I stood—she was hidden from view behind her dresser and the bean bag chair she had draped atop it—but I could hear the marker working and I could see where the line of…of graffiti, or whatever you want to call it—I could see where it stopped.

  “I called her name. I think she might have made a faint noise, like an ‘mm,’ or I might have imagined it. Either way the squeak of the marker never even paused.

  “I stepped into the room and around the dresser, and there she was. She sat cross-legged on the floor, still wearing her pajamas. Her face was close to the wall, her nose almost touching it, and she was rocking back and forth as she scribbled away.

  “I asked her what she was doing three times in increasingly urgent tones. She didn’t make a sound. She just kept rocking and scribbling with a pinched, intent look like a monk copying scripture.

  “Finally I reached down and snatched the marker from her hand. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know how else to make her stop and listen.

  “Her reaction was…” He closed his eyes, sighed, opened them again. “She leaped up at me, screaming incoherently and grabbing at the marker. Holding it out of her reach, I tried to talk to her calmly and rationally, to ask her what she was doing and why it was so important, but she didn’t even seem to hear me. She grabbed hold of the arm I was holding the marker with and started clawing at my flesh to make me let go. Within moments my forearm was covered in blood. She was savage, feral. There was nothing rational in her eyes. I’d never seen her like that. I’d never seen anyone like that.

  “I…I slapped her. Right across the face. I had never raised a hand to her before in my life, but I didn’t know what else to do. I was startled and scared and in pain, and I just…just reacted.”

  He glanced at Calvin as if he expected Calvin to voice some protest. Calvin didn’t. He didn’t trust himself to speak. The thought of Andrew Fish striking thirteen-year-old Tiffany, even in those singular circumstances and in what could certainly be seen as self-defense, made him sick with indignation. Then again he wondered what he might have done differently had he been in the same situation. He didn’t know.

  Fish must have read some of this on Calvin’s face because he nodded slightly as if in agreement, one side of his mouth rising in a rueful, humorless smile.

  “But you know what?” he said, looking out at the trees again, his eyes old and tired and sad. “She was so far gone she didn’t even notice that I’d slapped her.”

  He sighed again, then looked down at the wooden step between his shoes and went on:

  “I finally just gave her the marker back. I didn’t see any other options. I held it out to her, and she snatched it from my hand, then dropped to the floor and resumed writing on the wall as if nothing had happened.”

  “What exactly was she writing?” Calvin asked. “Do you remember?”

  Fish gestured vaguely, as if it were a matter not worth pursuing.

  “Like I said, it was gibberish. I honestly don’t remember much of it. I don’t want to remember much of it. There were some regular words but usually they were strung together in ways that didn’t make much sense. Most of what she wrote wasn’t even words, though. It was like…equations made of symbols instead of numbers. Strange pictographic equations, using things like skulls and spirals and squares and eyes. The symbols for Venus and Mars came up a lot, too—the same symbols used for male and female, like on the old Ben Casey show. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And there were numbers, too, here and there. Especially twelves. Lots of twelves. I seem to recall quite a few fours and eights, as well. Some parts of her graffiti were just lists of those weird symbols, or of cryptic abbreviations. Other parts almost looked like flowcharts, with arrows pointing to sequences of equations. There were elaborate sigils whose shapes kind of reminded me of the designs on an old Navajo rug my parents used to own. There were circles within circles, and stars inside of stars…”

  Stars? Calvin remembered Tiffany’s weird reaction to the star he had drawn on the map in his office. No doubt it had reminded her of her own strange wall-borne writings.

  “Anyway,” Fish went on, “for the next hour, I tried to talk to her, reason with her, plead with her, but she just kept writing away on the wall, oblivious to me and every single thing I said.

  “I called the psychologist she had been seeing before—their sessions had ended over a year earlier, the psychologist having concluded that her problems were mostly solved—and taking his advice, I had Tiffany institutionalized.

  “When the police came to take her to the hospital she fought like a wildcat. She screamed and clawed and bit as if the world would end if she didn’t keep writing on the walls of her room. The policemen were finally forced to handcuff her. They wrangled her into the squad car and drove her to the hospital. I followed in my own car. I could see her in the police car ahead of me thrashing about and kicking at the metal screen that divided the front and back seats. She barely seemed human…”

  His voice had grown wobbly with emotion, and now he paused and stared at his shoes for a long time. When he resumed his tale, his voice was calm and even once again.

  “Her psychologist had set everything up at the psychiatric hospital by the time we got there, and Tiffany was admitted, uncuffed, and locked in a private room for observation.

  “I was at the front desk with the head psychiatrist, filling out paperwork, when one of the nurses came running up and told the psychiatrist that he’d better see what was happening in Room 1001. That was Tiffany’s room.

  “We all ran down there and peered in through the square window set into the door. It had chicken wire in the middle, set between two panes of glass. I found that particularly depressing for some reason.

  “The room was small and sparsely furnished, with only a bed, a table, a chair, and a small closet. She had dragged all the furniture into the center of the room to expose the walls, just like in her bedroom at home. The walls were a soft yellow color that reminded me of sand, and Tiffany was kneeling in front of one of them, writing. She’d already covered a swath of the wall above her with her bizarre equations. I wondered for a moment where she’d gotten hold of a marker, but then I realized the writing was dark red and she was writing with her index finger, whose tip was covered in blood. They later determined she’d simply bitten her finger till it started bleeding enough to write with.”

  Fish glanced at Calvin to check his reaction. Calvin simply stared out at the trees across the lawn, not sure what to think of any of this. He had difficulty reconciling the shy, pretty girl he had spent the morning talking to with the obsessive, blood-spattered creature Andrew Fish was describing.

  “They rushed in to stop her,” Fish went on, “but the moment they pulled her away from the wall, she started snarling and hitting and kicking just like before. Someone was about to rush off to get a straitjacket, but I pulled out the marker she had been u
sing in her bedroom that morning. She had dropped it when the police were cuffing her, and I had absently picked it up and put it in my pocket. I shouted, ‘Just give her this!’ They did, and everyone was shocked when she immediately calmed down and resumed writing, this time with the marker instead of her finger. With only a little bit of trouble they managed to get her to write with her left hand, her unfavored hand, while they cleaned and treated the wound on her other hand. She didn’t seem to care which hand she wrote with as long as she could keep writing. Hell, once she started writing again, she didn’t even seem to be aware anyone was in the room with her anymore.

  “The doctors soon determined that she would let them do pretty much anything they wanted as long as it didn’t interfere with her writing. She let them change her clothes, give her sponge baths, anything, as long as they always left her one hand free to write with.”

  “Some things she would even do by herself. By the end of that first day they discovered that if they set a tray of food beside her, she would eventually eat it on her own, robotically spooning the food into her mouth while she continued writing. She wound up with food stains all over her clothes, but I doubt she even noticed.

  “When she grew too tired to continue, she slept right there on the floor in the spot where she had stopped writing, her marker clutched to her chest like a favorite stuffed animal, ready to uncap it and start writing again the moment she awoke. And as the days went by, the writing spread farther and farther across the walls. The head psychiatrist allowed it. He thought that whatever she was writing was a key to understanding her mind, and that the act of writing might even be helping her to work out whatever was wrong with her. And maybe he was right.

  “After about a week, the amount of writing she did decreased, and for long periods she would just sit there staring at what she’d written, as if she’d reached a point where she had to think through the rest of it. Every now and then she would lean forward and add a few more words, or another weird equation, or a diagram, or a shape.

  “And you want to know something? After the first couple of days, I compared what she’d written in the hospital with what she’d written in her bedroom, and they matched. At least up to a point. In the hospital, of course, she was allowed to get much further than she had at home, but those early parts were exactly the same, word for word, symbol for symbol. Exactly.”

  “It meant something,” Calvin said. “It wasn’t gibberish. At least not to her.”

  “It was gibberish to everyone except her.”

  “I don’t suppose you have a copy of what she wrote, do you?”

  “I did for a while. I pored over it every now and then, hoping I might be able to understand what it meant to her. But I never discerned any real meaning in any of it, and eventually I threw it out. The doctors might have kept a record of it. I seem to recall someone taking Polaroids of the walls at one point. Whatever the case, it didn’t help; the doctors didn’t understand the writing any more than I did, although they spent hours discussing it. They seemed to have a weird professional interest in the situation, as if it were something they hadn’t seen before. Maybe they hadn’t. I don’t know.

  “They tentatively diagnosed her as a schizophrenic, but when they tried the various drugs normally used to treat schizophrenics, none of them had any effect at all. Nor did several other drugs they tried. Not even any side effects. Nothing. As you might guess, this only heightened the doctors’ interest in her case that much more.

  “I visited her every day, spending every free minute I had at the hospital. I would sit with her for hours at a time, talking to her as she stared at the wall or wrote on it. I might as well have been talking to the wall.

  “But then one evening about three weeks after her admission I was sitting there with her in her room, telling her about how I’d taken on some new clients—just idle chitchat so there would be something to hear other than the squeak of her marker and the moans and cries of the other patients—and then suddenly she turned and looked at me—I mean, really looked at me, seeing me, focusing on me—and in this tiny, raspy voice, a voice that was rusty from disuse, she said, ‘It’s all so much older than we think, you know. And a lot younger, too.’ Then she smiled a strange, sly smile, and went right back to staring at the wall.

  “I was actually weeping with joy. It was the first articulate thing she had said in nearly a month.

  “Over the following days, she started having more and more of these moments of lucidity, while writing less and less on the wall. At first her statements were bizarre non-sequiturs that I assume related to her writing. I don’t recall many of them. They didn’t make a lot of sense. I do remember that at one point she said something that made me think she was talking about archeology. Something about artifacts and ages.

  “After a few days she started making more normal conversation. ‘How are you?’ and ‘How was your day?’ and all that. It became clear that she knew who she was, and who I was, and where she was, and on some level she probably had all along. But the writing had been more important than anything else. One day I asked her about it directly. I gestured at the wall and said, ‘Why are you doing this? What does it mean?’ She stared at the writing a moment, then said, ‘It’s everything. I have to get it all down before I forget. I think I’ve already forgotten parts of it.’ And then she turned to me and smiled—it was so normal, that smile, just like her old smile, a smile I hadn’t seen in months—and she said, ‘I think I’ve done almost as much as I can.’

  “And she was right, I guess, because she only made a few more additions to the writing after that. She started talking more and more normally, too. But she wasn’t completely the same. There was an odd, haunted look in her eyes that had never been there before, a look you sometimes see in the eyes of elderly people who’ve lived hard, brutal lives; and she still spent long hours staring at the wall and resisted any suggestion that the writing be removed or painted over. And more importantly, the way she thought and perceived things had changed. She no longer saw the same world she used to, the world as most people see it.

  “About five months after she had first been institutionalized, the head psychiatrist called me in for a meeting. He told me he was amazed at Tiffany’s improvement and was going to release her, though he strongly recommended regular outpatient visits so the doctors could monitor her status. He said he believed that the writing, whatever it had been about, had indeed had a cathartic effect on whatever had been troubling her, and that I should remain vigilant for future bouts of similar behavior.

  “When the time came for her to return home, everyone was concerned about how she would react at being separated from her bizarre writings, even though by that point she hadn’t written anything on the wall for nearly two months. But she didn’t seem to care one bit. As Tiffany was packing her bags, one of the nurses asked her if she wasn’t sad to leave behind all the work she had done. Tiffany just shrugged and said, ‘I don’t need it anymore. You can have it now. You should probably hold onto it if you want to understand things.’

  “And so I took her home, and she stayed well. Or at least as well as she was going to get. There was no more crazy writing, no nightmares, no undue anxiety or hostile behavior. Whatever had bedeviled her was over, it seemed. But whatever it was all about, it had changed her in deep and permanent ways.”

  Fish fell silent. Calvin figured the story was over and started casting about for something to say that would adequately convey the roiling mix of shock, horror, and compassion he felt.

  Then Fish glanced at Calvin and said, “There’s one other aspect to all this that I feel I should tell you. Frankly, I’m a little reluctant to do so, since I’m concerned you’ll take it the wrong way.”

  Calvin stiffened, suddenly feeling horribly certain that despite the whole litany of madness and weirdness he’d already heard, what Fish was about to tell him was the biggest revelation of all.

  “What?” Calvin said in a low voice, not sure he wanted to hear it.


  “The date.”

  “The date?” Calvin thought Fish meant today’s date, like some weird replay of his conversation with Tiffany in the office yesterday, when she pointed out that she was telling him about the incident in the alley on the very same day it had happened nine years earlier.

  “The night she had her breakdown,” Fish said. “I don’t know the exact time it started, of course, but it was sometime in the small hours of the morning of October 19, 2012.”

  Calvin sat speechless, chills chasing each other down his spine. That was the date and the approximate time Emily Crow had been murdered in the clearing.

  Fish saw Calvin’s expression and grimaced.

  “I don’t believe that there is any kind of meaningful connection between those events.”

  “You don’t?” Calvin asked, incredulous.

  “No, but I understand that some people might, including Robert May. After Tiffany received that peculiar inheritance, I tried to find out anything I could about Mr. May in hopes of learning why he had named her in his will, but I was unable to turn up very much about him at all. When I learned that Emily Crow had been abducted and murdered on his property, I naturally wondered if he had had a hand in her death and had perhaps been driven by guilt to balance the scales by helping another unfortunate young girl. I soon found out that Emily’s killer was indisputably that Roger Grey fellow, and that Mr. May couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it. Once again I was left with a mystery I seemed unable to solve. Until you and Ms. Crow visited the other day. What you told me helped me to understand, I think.”

  “How so?”

  “You told me that Mr. May investigated paranormal phenomena. As you might have guessed, I myself do not believe in such things. I believe in law and free markets and a good glass of port after dinner. The world I live in is too solid and well-understood to have any room for bogeymen or angels or UFOs. But I know that some people do believe in those things, and Mr. May was clearly one of them. I don’t presume to understand exactly what went on in his mind, but it’s not unlikely that he posited some supernatural connection between Emily Crow’s death and Tiffany’s problems. And given that one of the events in question occurred on his property, he no doubt imagined some further connection between those events and himself. And so he chose to aid someone to whom he believed himself linked in some supernatural nonlocal manner.”

  Calvin drew in a breath to vehemently protest what he perceived as an appallingly one-sided take on events, but Fish held up a hand, palm out in a stop gesture.

  “Now now,” he said. “I’m not here for a philosophical debate.”

  “It’s not a matter of philosophy,” Calvin said. “Tiffany was listed in Mr. May’s trust in 2008, four years before her breakdown and Emily’s death.”

  Fish stared at him in surprise. Then his eyes narrowed.

  “Was this before or after the incident in the alley?”

  “After. About six months after.”

  “Well then, he must have found out about the incident somehow and left her the money out of sympathy. Perhaps it was a case he investigated.”

  “And, what, the same girl just happened to have a psychological meltdown the very same night another girl is murdered on his property? Are you just going to chalk that up to coincidence?”

  Fish raised an eyebrow, his expression calm and cool.

  “Why not? The world is full of coincidences every minute of every day. They happen all around us. There are so many things going on in the world at any given moment that it’s inevitable that many of those events will echo each other. It’s simply a matter of statistics. Most of these coincidences are things we think nothing of. We barely even notice them because they hold no particular meaning for us, like when someone is talking about blue cars, and a blue car passes by outside. You might take note of it in a vague and amused way, but then you forget about it because it had no larger significance. It was just a quirk of chance. But statistics dictate that every once in a while coincidences that seem more meaningful will occur, and inevitably certain, ah, less critical-minded people will attach undue importance to those coincidences.”

  Calvin wanted to object, but in his mind he heard himself telling Tiffany how the odds of her telling him about the alley incident on the very same day it occurred were one in three hundred and sixty-five. Was Fish’s argument any different in the end? It was only a difference of degree, not of kind.

  Still, Fish didn’t have all the facts. Fish didn’t know about the anomalous events connected with the clearing where Emily died. Nor did he know that Calvin and Cynthia and the others were currently investigating a strange death that occurred in the very same alley in which Fish and his daughter had seen two women disappear (or appear to disappear, as Fish would no doubt reframe it). Nor did Fish know of the eerie echoes heard by Betty Romero and her husband.

  Calvin chose not to mention any of this. He knew Fish would craft perfectly reasonable explanations to dismiss the incidents, one and all. And however implausibly huge the mountain of coincidences grew, Fish would minimize it as still being well within the realm of statistical possibility.

  “We’ll have to agree to disagree,” Fish said, sounding a little smug and amused. Perhaps he had noticed the frustration on Calvin’s face and believed it to be due to Calvin’s inability to counter his arguments. In truth it was actually due to Calvin’s growing awareness of the futility of arguing with someone who would employ his lawyerly wits to explain away anything not to his liking.

  “I suppose we will,” Calvin agreed.

  Fish nodded. Then the faint smile on his lips faded.

  “As far as I am aware, Tiffany doesn’t know about the connection between her breakdown and Emily Crow’s death. I’m sure she’ll learn of it sooner or later, and when she does I would prefer the matter be handled without reference to any supposed supernatural aspects.”

  “So, what, is this the part where you warn me off seeing her anymore?”

  Fish looked at him in surprise.

  “No! Just the opposite. I want you to understand her and her unique situation. She’s eighteen now. I can’t shelter her forever. She needs friends. She needs people to interact with, people she has things in common with, not a stuffy old lawyer like me. It’s not healthy for her. I’m happy she’s meeting new people. I won’t deny that I have serious reservations about this paranormal investigation nonsense, but you and your friend seem like nice people, relatively intelligent and well-adjusted, even if you believe in some things that I think are childish fantasies. No, I’m not trying to warn you off. I’m trying to lay all the cards on the table. Because you need to know.”

  He fixed a stern and ominous gaze on Calvin. “If associating with you and your friends starts to affect her in a negative way, if this paranormal stuff seems to be fueling her abnormalities and making her worse, I want you to cut ties with her, is that clear? I will give this a chance—she needs a chance like this—but at the first sign she’s not handling it well, I want it stopped. Do you understand?”

  Calvin nodded. “I understand perfectly. I don’t want to see her hurt any more than you do.”

  “Good,” he said. He stood up. Calvin did too. “I should go. I know this has been awkward, but it was necessary, as I think you see now.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I would appreciate it if you didn’t tell her I was here. Which means, as well, don’t let on that you know about her breakdown. She almost never talks about it anymore. The last time I mentioned it, I later heard her crying up in her bedroom.”

  “What if she brings it up on her own?”

  “She won’t.” Seeing that this wasn’t good enough for Calvin, he added, “If by some unlikely chance she does, just let her tell you as much as she wants. Don’t force anything. And don’t talk about anything she hasn’t already told you.”

  “Understood.”

  Fish stuck out his hand. Calvin took it.

  “It was nice talking to you
,” Fish said, giving Calvin’s hand a firm shake.

  “Same here,” Calvin said. Although, of course, it really hadn’t been very nice at all.

  The shake ended. Fish kept hold of Calvin’s hand.

  “Remember,” he said, “my daughter is the only thing of any genuine importance in my life. She likes you and your friend, and I can accept that. I might think you’re a kid with a head full of silly pseudoscience, but I’m willing to let that slide, because you seem to make her happy, and that’s what’s important. But if you should hurt her any more than she’s already been hurt, well…don’t forget I’m a lawyer. A very good one. I can have this house and your whole inheritance in my pocket before you can say ‘breadline.’”

  Calvin said nothing.

  Fish gave him a pleasant smile and a nod.

  “Good day.”

  He trotted down the steps, got into his car, and drove away.

  The moment the car was out of sight, Calvin let out a long breath and slumped against one of the porch’s wooden pillars. Then he shook his head with a small laugh.

  “I sure know how to pick ‘em, don’t I?” he said.