The Thing in the Alley (Anomaly Hunters, Book 3) Page 2

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  Calvin Beckerman laid another bag of Dan-Dee Corn Twistees on one of the folding tables he had set up in the parlor of what he still couldn’t help thinking of as the May house. It wasn’t the May house anymore. As of today, the house, its contents, and the several acres of mostly wooded land on which the house sat were legally his. Among the house’s contents was the Collection, a vast assemblage of objects related to anomalous phenomena, which the house’s previous owner, Robert May, had spent his life investigating. Calvin had vowed to continue the investigations with the help of a small group of close friends. Now, with the house and the Collection officially his, they could finally get to work.

  He looked around the room to make sure everything was set up for the housewarming-cum-graduation party/first official meeting of the group. Then he stifled a yawn. Great. Only seven-thirty and he was already wiped out. But that wasn’t exactly surprising. He’d had an eventful day: This morning he, along with Cynthia Crow and Brandon Taylor—two of his best friends and fellow members of the nascent group—had graduated from Ames University ten miles to the north, the graduation ceremony being a grueling two hours of increasingly achy backs and asses courtesy of the granite-like seats of the Front Campus Auditorium and increasingly benumbed brains courtesy of the soporific commencement address by James Booth, president of Booth Industries, a local Fortune 500 company. After the ceremony, Calvin had driven here, his hometown of May, Ohio, where he spent nearly two hours in local lawyer Stephen Krezchek’s office signing a vigintillion papers which made little sense to him but which left him one million dollars richer and the owner of the coolest piece of real estate in town. He spent the remainder of the afternoon moving his meager belongings into the house and replacing the old bedding on the antique four-poster bed in the master bedroom. Barely had he finished that than it was time to meet his mom for a celebratory dinner at the Golden Goblet, a ritzy restaurant in Kingwood. (His dad, whom his mom had divorced three years ago, had treated Calvin to a separate celebratory dinner the previous night.)

  After dinner he headed back to the house to set things up for the party. It took a lot longer than it should have. The awareness of his new and improved circumstances kept intruding on his consciousness, and he would pause in the middle of unfolding a table or setting out a stack of paper plates and look around at his new home, smiling and full of dumb wonderment.

  Over time, however, his gaze came to settle more and more on specific items—the coffee table, the bookshelves, the curtains—and then instead of smiling he would frown, thoughtful and a little troubled.

  Though the house was now Calvin’s, most of the décor was still Mr. May’s. Most of the things that Calvin had retained from his apartment in Ames were currently stuck in odd corners until he could figure out where to put them, and in any case they would be barely enough to furnish a single room. Though he was excited at the prospect of redecorating this huge old house however he liked, he also worried that any significant changes to the place would be somehow disrespectful to Mr. May’s memory. These had been the old man’s possessions, accumulated over his long and storied life, and Calvin didn’t feel quite right getting rid of any of them.

  Well, okay, maybe not any of them. There were a few rickety wicker chairs in the basement and a hideous snot-green throw rug rolled up in a corner of a closet that were already earmarked for Goodwill. But beyond that, Calvin found himself immobilized by uncertainty, caught in the Lagrange point between his urge for self-determination and his desire to honor the memory of the man who had bequeathed him all of this.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the low purr of an engine coming up the long driveway. He peeked out the curtain and was surprised to see a black Toyota Prius he had never seen before rolling to a stop behind his Honda Accord. He was even more surprised to see Cynthia Crow behind the wheel.

  He hurried from the parlor and down the hall to the front door, which he threw open to reveal Cynthia trotting up the steps to the front porch, her long red hair flapping behind her.

  “Guess what I just bought!” she said.

  “I saw it,” said Calvin. “It’s cute.”

  “Isn’t it?” said Cynthia. “My very first car. Admittedly, it’s not actually new new. It’s used, but only about a year old. It’s only got five thousand miles on it. The interior even still smells kind of new.”

  “Nice. But, uh, you know, I could have just walked over to look at it. As of today, we’re next-door neighbors, after all.”

  “Screw that. I wanted to surprise you. Besides, before I came over, I took it for a cruise.” She paused, a giddy grin on her face. “Hee. I can actually say, ‘I took my car for a cruise.’” She started jumping up and down and shaking her fists in front of her chest as if she were playing maracas. The floorboards creaked like a bed in a porno movie. The house was well over a century old, and although Robert May had done his best to maintain it, some parts of the house, Calvin reflected, might require more than just decorative changes.

  “Um, maybe we should go inside before the porch collapses.”

  “Sorry. But don’t you want to take a closer look at the car? We could even…go for a cruise.”

  Had he been talking to any other girl, Calvin might have inferred some kind of sexual innuendo from the way she emphasized the words and waggled her eyebrows. But Cyn was gay, however much he might wish otherwise. She was just excited about her new car.

  “Later,” Calvin said. “Everyone else should be arriving any minute. But I promise, you can take me for a cruise another time.”

  “Count on it.”

  They went inside to the parlor.

  “Mind if I start in on the food?” she said. “Or should I wait till the others get here?”

  “Help yourself.”

  She picked up a piece of celery from the veggie tray, which he had bought mainly with her vegetarian diet in mind, then swiped up a gob of fat-free ranch dressing on the end of it and took a bite.

  “And what about you?” Cynthia asked between crunches. “Now that you’ve got a cool million in your pocket, have you thought about replacing that rusty bucket of bolts with something a little less fate-tempting?”

  “My car works fine,” Calvin said, a little defensively. She had been criticizing his admittedly rather rusty Accord for years now and seemed to think that every trip would be its last. “Besides, I was thinking about trying to fix up Mr. May’s old 78 Thunderbird.”

  “That old thing? I figured it would have to be towed off to a junkyard. I mean, it must’ve been sitting under that sheet in the garage for eons.”

  “Not that long, actually. I was checking it out the other day, and it looks like it’s in pretty good shape. The body, at any rate. It probably needs new tires, new belts, stuff like that. A new battery, too, though surprisingly enough, the battery isn’t all that old. It’s from 2008.”

  Cynthia paused in mid-bite to do the math.

  “That recently? Mr. May would’ve been, what, about ninety-two? Judging by what we read in his files, I got the impression he gave up driving a long time before that.”

  “That’s what I thought, but…” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Just because he replaced the battery doesn’t mean he actually drove the car. Maybe he just wanted to keep it maintained in case of an emergency.”

  Even though Calvin was still digesting the stuffed salmon and the slice of chocolate cherry cheesecake he had had at the Golden Goblet, the sight and sound of Cynthia munching away at the food compelled him to start nibbling as well.

  “So, where are Donovan and Violet?” he asked as he scooped up a handful of pretzels. “I thought they would’ve come over with you.”

  Donovan was Cynthia’s younger brother, who had just finished his sophomore year at Ames. After a rocky freshman year, during which he had majored in Journalism like his idol Hunter S. Thompson, he switched majors to Chemistry and appeared to have finally found his calling, earning a B-average for the first time since junior high school, a feat which co
mpelled his family to all but break out the champagne. Violet O’Donohue was Donovan’s girlfriend. In the year since graduating high school, she had gone through eighteen different minimum-wage jobs, mostly at fast food restaurants and gas stations. Whenever she got a new one, everybody bet on how long it would take before she got fired. The truth was, the only reason she got the jobs in the first place was because her dad had made gainful employment a condition of continuing to live under his roof. He never specified, however, that said employment couldn’t be varied and serial and livened up by, say, taking three-hour-long Mad Dog breaks, or telling the customers what puffed-up dumbfucks they were.

  “I assumed they’d come with me, too,” Cynthia said. “But about an hour ago Donovan said something about some mysterious business they had to take care of, and they took off.”

  “Why am I suddenly worried?”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Cynthia had never been entirely comfortable with Donovan and Violet being part of the group. Yes, Donovan was her brother and she loved him and all that, but she also knew how irresponsible he could be, especially under Violet’s anarchic sway. And as for Violet herself, she was, to put it bluntly, crass, ignorant, and willfully obnoxious. Cynthia feared that sooner or later one of them would blab about the group to the wrong person, and she would wake up one morning to find the media camped on her doorstep and predacious TV producers clamoring to turn the group’s doings into some vacuous reality show/cash factory. Private to a fault (just like old Robert May, really), Cynthia wanted the group to pursue their investigations quietly, without any intrusive and distracting publicity. And although Calvin had some amorphous notions about a far-flung global network of operatives like some kind of comic-book superteam, he ultimately echoed her views. But since, for good or ill, Violet and Donovan knew the truth, it was best to keep them on as short a leash as possible, which meant humoring their wish to be full-time team members.

  Lights flashed through the parlor curtains. A car was coming up the driveway. Calvin and Cynthia started to head to the window to see who it was, but when they heard the cricket-like chirp of a fan belt in need of replacement and the low groan of aging brakes, they stopped and in unison said, “Brandon.”

  The fifth and final member of the team, Brandon Taylor was a tall, animated, bespectacled fellow with a punk fashion sense and a compulsion to recast the world around him into art. He was the only member of the group who hadn’t inherited anything from Robert May. He didn’t seem to mind, though. If anything, he regarded his perpetually precarious financial situation (he was currently unemployed) as a mark of his artistic integrity.

  Brandon’s black 1994 Ford Econoline van, whose decrepitude made Calvin’s Honda Accord seem like a brand-new Rolls Royce, grumbled to a stop, then fell silent. The driver’s side door slammed. And then nothing. No knock. No bell. Not even footsteps on the creaky porch.

  “What’s he doing?” Cynthia said.

  “I’d better go see,” Calvin said.

  He went to the front door and opened it. Brandon stood at the foot of the porch steps, gazing up at the house’s façade. In his hand he held a six-pack of Great Lakes Brewery Edmund Fitzgerald Porter.

  “What are you doing?” said Calvin.

  “I still can’t get over how fucking awesome this house is. It kind of reminds me of the Psycho house.”

  “Yeah. Everyone says that.”

  Brandon stared at the house for a few moments more, then stepped up onto the porch, his black Doc Martens clumping on the boards.

  “I brought beer,” he said, holding up the six-pack.

  “I told you before commencement this morning, I already bought plenty of beer.”

  “You can never have too much beer.”

  Calvin led him inside. As they headed down the hall to the parlor Brandon kept pausing to examine the paintings on the walls. The paintings were Mr. May’s, of course. More stuff Calvin had to figure out what to do with.

  “A lot of these suck, I hate to say,” Brandon announced. He pointed at a painting of a white church on a daisy-covered hill. “Totally fucking banal and oppressive subject matter and a style that’s duller than an egg. But some of the others are awesome.” He nodded at a scene of a satyr gamboling in a clearing with some nude nymphs. “Nice.” He bent forward for a closer look at the nymphs. “Very nice.” He grinned and stuck out his tongue, looking like a satyr himself.

  “Horndog. And here I thought you were interested only in aesthetics.”

  “Hey, man, there’s nothing more aesthetically pleasing than a smokin’-hot chick with her clothes off.”

  “Agreed,” said Cynthia from the parlor doorway. “I was wondering what you two were doing. You’d better get in here before I eat all the wasabi peas.”

  Brandon’s jaw dropped. “You got wasabi peas? Dude!”

  He brushed past Cynthia and made a beeline for the food. By the time Calvin and Cynthia caught up with him, he was already gobbling a fistful of the peas.

  “Whoa,” he said around a mouthful of mushy, half-chewed peas, his eyes watering. “Thethe’re hot!”

  The doorbell rang. Calvin and Cynthia glanced at each other.

  “Must be Donovan and Violet,” Cynthia said.

  “This is it, then,” Calvin said. “The gang’s all here.”

  “The whole sick crew,” Brandon said.

  Calvin returned to the front door. When he opened it, he was surprised to find three people on the porch instead of the expected two. Standing there with Donovan and Violet was an attractive twenty-something girl Calvin didn’t recognize at first. She had long, wavy dark-brown hair, skin that was creamy and flawless except for a small comma-shaped scar on her left cheekbone, and large doe-like hazel eyes that looked both friendly and anxious at the same time. She wore a thin brown cardigan over a white button shirt, a knee-length tan skirt, and black flats.

  “Surprise!” said Violet.

  “Uh…” Calvin said, his eyes on the mystery girl.

  “Um, hi,” the girl said, raising one hand in a little wave. After a brief pause, she smiled wincingly. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

  He hadn’t, but as soon as he heard the voice and saw her speaking, he did. It was Lauren O’Donohue, Violet’s older sister, who had been in the class ahead of Calvin, Cynthia, and Brandon’s in high school. Calvin had never had more than a passing acquaintanceship with her but had always found her pleasant and charmingly nerdy, especially when she started talking about history, her big passion. After graduating, she had headed off to college somewhere in Maryland. Five years away had changed her for the better; she had ditched the mousy glasses, lost about fifteen pounds, and figured out how to do something with her hair other than put it up in a ponytail. And yet, pleased as he was to see her, especially given her geek-to-chic transformation, her presence here put a major crimp in their plans.

  “Lauren,” he said, trying to hide his mixed feelings behind a smile. “This is a surprise.”

  Something in his tone or his expression must have reflected his true feelings because Lauren’s smile abruptly winked out.

  “Oh, crap. I’m, like, party-crashing, aren’t I?” She gave her sister a light kick on the calf. “You said it would be okay, you pulchritudinous perambulator.”

  “Don’t call me names!” Violet snapped. “Are those even real words anyway?”

  “No, actually, it’s okay,” Calvin told Lauren. “Really. Come on in.”

  He led them into the parlor. Cynthia and Brandon did a double-take when they saw their uninvited sixth, then glanced at Calvin who gave them a quick, discreet spread of his arms and a look that said, “We’ll have to play the cards we’re dealt.”

  They played.

  “Lauren, hey,” Cynthia said. “I didn’t know you were back in town.”

  “Yep. Back to stay this time. I just graduated, and I’ve already landed an amazing job nearby. But, um…” Though Lauren hadn’t seen Calvin’s expression a moment ago, she hadn’t
been blind to Cynthia and Brandon’s momentary nonplussation, nor to the smallness of the group gathered here. “Look,” she said to Calvin, “if you guys have some private thing going on, I don’t want to intrude. Really. I mean, if I am, just let me know and I would be more than happy to—”

  “No no no,” Calvin said. “Please stay. It’s cool. Really. A big part of what we’re doing is celebrating our own graduations from Ames this morning—me and Cyn and Brandon. So you are more than welcome to stay and celebrate yours, too.”

  “Um, okay,” she said, not looking entirely convinced. “I can’t stay too late anyway, though; I have to get up super-early for some on-the-job training tomorrow.”

  “So what’s this amazing job?” Brandon asked.

  “Actually it’s at your very own alma mater. I’ll be working in the Ames University Library’s Special Collections.”

  “Cool,” Cynthia said.

  “Yeah. It actually puts my college education to good use, which is more than most graduates can say about their jobs these days.”

  “Your degree was in History, I assume?” Calvin said. “I remember that being your big interest.”

  Lauren bobbled her head about in a kind of semi-nod. “Partly. I actually wound up getting two degrees: History and Library Science. That’s why it took me an extra year. But, yeah, a huge chunk of the Special Collections at Ames is devoted to historical texts. And not just general history, either. They’ve got the most extensive collection of local historical documents of anyplace in the area. They have every issue of the old Kingwood Sentinel, even the first few that were basically just pro-temperance screeds printed on Ebenezer Blackman’s crappy basement printing press. They also have James Bard’s original journals from when he was surveying this area back in 1798. Plus, they, uh…” She paused and gave a sheepish smile. “Sorry. Kinda geeking out.”

  “That’s pretty much par for the course around here,” Cynthia said. “Especially where Calvin’s concerned. He has two degrees, too, you know: Physics and psychology.”

  Lauren grinned at Calvin. “So, what, you can psychoanalyze atoms?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “I’ve already established that their compulsion to form covalent bonds reflects a deep-seated lack of self-esteem.”

  She cackled. “Oh, God. Nerd jokes. We are such nerds.”

  “Speak for yourself, crackwhore,” said Violet.

  “Pipe down, you callipygian creophage.”

  Violet scowled. “Stop calling me stuff I’ve never heard of!”

  She stalked away to grab some beer from the buffet table. As soon as she was at a safe distance, Cynthia whispered to Lauren, “She really has no idea those aren’t even insults?”

  “Not in the slightest,” Lauren said. “I call her all kinds of things, and she never looks them up. She just assumes they’re derogatory. She once threw a banana at me because I called her an inveterate masticator.”

  Cynthia laughed. “Wow. I’m in awe of your Violet-handling skills.”

  “Well, I did grow up with her, after all. I know how her mind works. Or fails to, as the case may be. So what about you? You graduated today, too, right? What’s your degree in?”

  “Philosophy.”

  “Ah, yes,” Brandon interjected. “The art of splitting imaginary hairs.”

  Cynthia rolled her eyes. “Here we go.” To Lauren, she added, “I get this from him all the time.”

  “I think philosophy’s cool,” said Lauren.

  “It’s fine unless you’re looking to actually accomplish anything worthwhile,” Brandon said.

  “Oh, right,” said Cynthia. “Like you’re gonna accomplish so much with your Studio Art degree. I’m sure you’ll wind up saving the world with a wicked ceramics exhibition. I’m telling you, if you’re not careful you’ll be forced to swallow your indie ideals and do commercial art for some rapacious corporation.”

  “Oh, no. We’ve already determined that your sell-out date is far sooner than mine, young lady. You’re the one who’s already thrown in her lot with the petty bourgeoisie by taking a job at her dad’s bookstore.”

  “For some reason I feel like I just walked in on the fifteenth episode of a serial or something,” Lauren said. “I’ll let you guys rocket toward episode sixteen while I grab some grub.”

  While Cynthia and Brandon continued to debate the relative impracticality of their respective fields, Lauren helped herself to a bottle of Bass Ale and some Cool Ranch Doritos.

  After a moment Calvin appeared beside her and took a beer for himself.

  “So are you going to live here in May, or in Ames?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure yet. Right now I’m living at my parents’ house, which is, well, far from ideal. Especially the way my dad and Violet keep inching toward mutual homicide. But I’m hoping to be out of there and in my own place after I’ve got a few paychecks under my belt. I guess where I live will depend on the availability of decent apartments.”

  She shoved a handful of Doritos into her mouth and began to chew, then was suddenly struck by an idea. Her mouth too full of half-ground corn chips to speak, she jabbed a finger at Calvin and then, grunting loudly, waved her arms about in big, broad arcs. Calvin had no idea what she was trying to convey and shook his head to express his bafflement. Lauren held up a finger, signaling him to wait, while she chewed and swallowed.

  “Speaking of living arrangements,” she said, “this is your house now, right? You actually own this place?”

  “Yep.”

  “I am sick with envy. I mean, I was always fascinated by this place. The history. The architecture. Are there really secret rooms and stuff?”

  “I don’t think so. The twenty-eight non-secret rooms seem to be taking up all the available space.”

  “And you guys actually got to know Mr. May, right?”

  “Yeah. We knew him for only a few days before he died, but we all hit it off really well. By the time he died, I felt like I’d known him all my life.”

  “He must’ve felt the same way if he left you, y’know, all this. The house and everything.”

  “Yeah. But the weirdest part is, I found out he named me in his trust a few years before I even met him.”

  “And you don’t know why?”

  “Nope.”

  “What about Violet and the Crows? I know he left some money to all of them. I assumed it was because you were all searching for Emily together. But had they been mentioned in the trust for years, too?”

  Emily was Cynthia and Donovan’s little sister, who had been abducted and murdered five years earlier. The mention of her name caught everyone’s attention.

  “What are you guys talking about?” Cynthia asked, heading over to the buffet table. The rest of the group followed close behind.

  “The inheritances,” Calvin said. To Lauren, he said, “Yeah, according to Stephen Krezchek, the Crows had been listed for a few years, too, but in their case it kind of makes more sense, since they were Mr. May’s neighbors and they had at least had some kind of contact with him over the years, minor though it was. I’m not sure when Violet was added.”

  “What about anyone else?” Lauren asked. “Did he leave any other surprise bequests?”

  “I heard that a couple of Emily’s friends also got a hundred thousand each.”

  “Yeah,” Cynthia said. “John Coyote and Anna West. They were Emily’s best friends.”

  “But beyond that….” Calvin shrugged. “I don’t know. I never actually saw a copy of the trust documents. Stephen Krezchek was in charge of all that.”

  “But…” Lauren gestured at the house around them. “Didn’t Mr. May keep a copy for himself somewhere?”

  Calvin stared at her in silence, feeling like an absolute moron. He had never even thought to look for a copy of the trust. Though he had explored most of the house’s manifold nooks and crannies, he had yet to look through Mr. May’s papers, kept in file cabinets in an upstairs office. He hadn’t had any reason to, and perhaps more imp
ortantly, he had always felt a bit uneasy at the thought of fingering through Mr. May’s personal documents. It seemed somehow disrespectful, an invasion of privacy. And perhaps part of him feared he would uncover something unsavory or embarrassing about the old man and thus diminish him forever. Now, though, the notion that the answers to long-pondered secrets might be hidden away up there made Calvin eager to rush upstairs and start flinging open cabinet drawers.

  “There might be something upstairs,” he told Lauren. “I’ll have to take a look around up there sometime soon.”

  “Gee, can I help?” she said with a big smile, eyebrows raised pleadingly.

  “What?”

  “I’m kidding. I really just want to see the house. I’ve always wanted to explore this place. Seriously, do you think you could give me a tour sometime?”

  “Um…” He wanted to say yes, but there was the Collection to think of. It filled five rooms, with a sixth devoted to Mr. May’s extensive files on the items and the cases they pertained to. If Calvin gave Lauren a tour, how would he explain avoiding nearly a fifth of the house? Or should they take Lauren into their confidence? It might not be a bad idea; she seemed trustworthy and likely to be sympathetic to their aims. And heck, with her knowledge of history, she might prove an invaluable asset to the team. Perhaps if she was interested she could even become a full-fledged member.

  And then Lauren brought his internal debate crashing to a halt when, seeing his hesitation, she waved a hand in a placating way and said, “It’s okay, you don’t have to show me the Collection if you don’t want to.”

  Calvin blinked at her in surprise. “You what?”

  “Yeah, I kind of know about it already.” She gave a wincing smile. “Sorry.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then multiple heads swiveled toward Violet.

  Violet spread her hands, her face a mask of baffled innocence.

  “What!”

  “Hey, now, you can’t entirely blame her,” Lauren said. “I could tell she wasn’t being entirely forthcoming about things, and, well, let’s just say I know exactly what kind of leverage to use to get her to talk.”

  “Ooh, you’ll have to share that with us,” Brandon said.

  “You will not,” Violet told her sister.

  “Um, how much exactly did she tell you?” Cynthia asked Lauren.

  “You mean, do I know about the anomaly investigation thing you’ve got going on?” Lauren asked.

  “God damn it, Violet!”

  “She’s my sister!” Violet said.

  “Yeah, well, let’s just hope she inherited all the genes for dependability that seem to have bypassed you.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Lauren said. “This little game of telephone ends with me. I haven’t told anyone else and don’t plan to. I think what you’re doing is really cool.”

  “Honestly, we haven’t even really done anything yet,” Calvin said. “I mean, Cyn and I did have a case that sort of fell into our laps during our sophomore year of college, but other than that we’ve been waiting for our inheritances to kick in, which the trust stipulated would happen only once we finished college. In the meantime we read our way through all of Mr. May’s four thousand files, and lately I’ve been researching investigative techniques. One of the things we’re hoping to do tonight is discuss our M.O. You know, how we’ll conduct investigations, how we’ll find out about new strange happenings to investigate, stuff like that.”

  “Ooh, if you need strange stuff to investigate, what about the passenger pigeons? Wouldn’t that qualify as a strange happening?”

  Two years ago, after a spate of unconfirmed sightings, it was conclusively established that a flock of passenger pigeons, a species long believed extinct, was living here in Bard County. The government immediately sent out teams to study the pigeons and designated the birds’ nesting grounds protected wildlife areas (much to the outrage of some local farmers whose lands, being part of those areas, were seized under eminent domain). When first discovered, the flock numbered barely a hundred, which researchers found worrisome, given that passenger pigeons were a highly colonial species thought to require huge populations to sustain themselves. But despite fears that the birds would sink into extinction once again, their numbers had steadily increased and recently crossed the two hundred mark.

  “Um…” Calvin glanced at Cynthia, an eyebrow cocked questioningly. She understood what he was asking, and she nodded, telling him to go ahead. She, too, thought Lauren was worth taking into their confidence.

  “Actually,” Calvin said to Lauren, “we kind of think we already know where they’ve been. Or rather, where they came from.”

  “Oh? Do tell!”

  “We think they came from the woods out back. Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Something happened in the clearing back there around the time Emily died,” Cynthia said. “You know that round clearing northeast of here?”

  “Yeah,” Lauren said. “That’s, y’know, where they think it happened, right?”

  Cynthia nodded. “Yeah, that’s where he killed her. There was also a weird burned area there that no one could really explain, a circle where the grass was scorched right down to the dirt. A few days later my aunt Wendy had a seizure and died right in the same clearing. I was there when it happened, and the moment she died, this weird dome of light filled the middle of the clearing. Except I’m pretty sure it was really more of a sphere; it’s just that half of it was underground.”

  “A sphere of light?” Lauren said. “How does that fit with the pigeons?”

  “Well, when everybody finally caught up with Roger Grey, Emily’s killer, he had stereotypically returned to the scene of the crime to kill a couple of Emily’s friends. And all of us kind of wound up there, too.”

  “Except me,” Brandon said.

  “Except him.”

  “You shoulda been there, man,” Violet told Brandon. “We totally kicked Grey’s ass.”

  “That’s…certainly an interpretation,” Cynthia said. “The way I remember it, he headbutted you into an unaccustomed silence.”

  “Only for a second,” Violet muttered.

  “Yeah, and then he shot me,” Calvin said.

  “He shot you?” Lauren said, her eyes flicking up and down his body as if she expected to find blood soaking through his clothes.

  “Here.” He tapped an inch-long groove of scar tissue on his left temple. “The bullet just glanced off my skull, but still, it wasn’t pleasant.”

  “Anyway, the guys from the FBI who were investigating the case were there, too,” Cynthia said, “and there was a quick shootout that left Grey and one of the FBI agents dead. And then all of a sudden the clearing filled with light again, and we all saw…things in the light. Images.”

  “It was like a thousand movies all playing at once on the same screen,” Calvin said. “Just all these overlapping images.”

  “And some of ‘em were damn weird,” Donovan said. “I remember seeing flying lady heads with bat wings where their ears should be.”

  “And dinosaurs,” Violet said. “There were dinosaurs.”

  “Yeah, and I saw what looked a bit like one of those Ents from The Lord of the Rings,” Cynthia said.

  “Are you sure you didn’t all get dosed with LSD or something?” Lauren asked, only half jokingly. “Or maybe you breathed in some kind of fumes that induced hallucinations?”

  “Pretty sure,” Calvin said seriously. It was a perfectly valid question, and one he had asked himself many times. “Besides, the stuff we saw wasn’t all weird. A lot of it was more normal, realistic stuff. People and mountains and buildings and things like that.”

  “And then the light winked out,” Cynthia said, “and all the crazy images winked out with it, and in their place there was a small flock of what looked like some kind of pigeon fluttering around the clearing. None of us really got a very good look at them before they flew off, but it wasn’t more than a few weeks after that that the fi
rst sightings of the passenger pigeons started coming in.”

  “Okay, so…” Lauren frowned. “The pigeons were some kind of hallucination made real?”

  “I don’t think they were hallucinations,” Calvin said. “I think something more was at work.”

  “Like what?”

  “Magic.”

  “Magic?” Lauren’s eyebrows nearly reached her hairline. She looked as if she were trying to decide whether everyone present was clinically insane or just pulling her leg.

  “You don’t believe in magic?”

  “I assume you don’t mean the David Copperfield kind of magic, with skinny women hidden in the stage floor.”

  “No.”

  “Well…” Lauren drew in a long, deep breath. “I’m open to the idea, at least in theory, but a claim like that needs some major-league proof.”

  “I don’t blame you.” He gave her an appraising look. “You’re a history geek, right? How well do you know your local history?”

  “Pretty damn good, I should say.”

  “Yeah,” said Violet. “She really does know all that shit. She’s memorized the names and favorite colors and penis sizes of every mayor dating back to, like, 1582. And the worst part is, she’ll actually tell you all this stuff.”

  “Silence, you impavid illustrissimo.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “What about the history of the woods right here?” Calvin asked Lauren. “The Indians and the May and Crow families?”

  “Of course I know that stuff,” Lauren said.

  “You think you do.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “I know I do.”

  “All right, then, do you know what happened to Firebird, the chief of the Indian tribe who used to live here?”

  “He killed himself on Indian Hill during a ceremony.”

  “And the original May house—”

  “Burned down by Luther Jones in 1871 with most of the May family trapped inside.”

  “And Spirit Cave—”

  “Was where Luther Jones hid afterward and then got killed by Turner May and Hamilton Crow.” She pointed at Calvin as if she were one-upping him. “And that was also where Olive Crow’s body was found after she drowned in the Kanseeka.”

  “Randolph Crow and Anna May?”

  “Young lovers who met a tragic end. She died in the May house during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 and he subsequently blew his brains out.”

  “Where?”

  “Next to the Stone Pillar in the woods.”

  “This is like Jeopardy on speed,” Donovan said.

  “I’d like Fucked-Up Local History for four hundred, Alex,” Brandon said.

  “Okay, what about Eugene Scott?” Calvin asked Lauren.

  Lauren paused, her mouth open, looking uncertain for once. “Um, wait, that was the guy who married Wendy Crow, right? The one who died mysteriously in the Crow house?”

  “Yeah. You’re probably not as familiar with it because it’s more recent history. The 1970s.”

  “But what does all of this prove? Just because a bunch of tragic events happened in the same area over the years, that doesn’t mean there’s some kind of connection between them.”

  Calvin smiled.

  “Follow me,” he said, heading toward the door. “I’ll show you something that might change your mind.”

  Lauren followed, a little uncertainly. She looked behind her and saw the others following, too, the small anticipatory smiles on their faces showing that they already knew what Calvin was going to show her.

  “You’re gonna like this,” Brandon told Lauren. “Trust me. I remember when they showed me. I was, like, ‘whoa!’”

  Calvin led them down the corridor to the center of the house, where a spiral staircase stood at the junction of the house’s four wings. They trooped up the stairs to the second floor, then down the west wing to a door on the left, which led to the very office that not twenty minutes ago Calvin had realized he must soon hunt through in search of a copy of Mr. May’s will. But that would have to wait till later. Right now his task was to show Lauren what hung on the wall behind Mr. May’s desk.

  It was a satellite image of the large block of land on which they now stood, a perfect square demarked on the north by Baumgartner Road, on the west by Indianview, on the east by Potts, and on the south by Oaks. The picture must have been taken in the summertime, for the woods that shrouded most of the block were lush and verdant, and everything was crisply lit by a high sun. All but the northern fifth of the block, which the city had bought long ago and transformed into Indian Hill Park, was owned by the Crows and, as of today, by Calvin. Their respective houses sat near the bottom of the map, in large round clearings connected to Oaks Road via barely discernible ribbons of driveway, Calvin’s house on the west, its four wings making it look like a plus sign, the Crows’ on the east, its shape more traditionally boxy. Midway between the two driveways the Kanseeka River rose up from the middle of the map’s bottom edge, flowing due north. The natural and legal boundary between the two properties, the Kanseeka neatly bisected the lower third of the block before veering northeast toward Spirit Falls, a small, scenic waterfall that was visible on the map as a white knot along the green-grey thread of the river. Just beyond the falls the river curved northwest, passing the mouth of Spirit Cave in the process, the cave and the low rocky rise it penetrated showing up as tiny flecks of gray and black through the dense overhanging verdure. The river continued northwest until, shortly after crossing over into the western half of the block, it swept in a sharp curve around the base of Indian Hill, a high prominence whose composition of bare shale and clay made it a large and rather ugly dark-gray blotch on the green landscape. Coming out of the curve, the river flowed due east along the southern edge of Indian Hill Park and exited the block beneath the Potts Road Bridge.

  The image was so large and clear that even the clearing where Emily and her killer had died was visible as a tiny, irregular circle that was a brighter, grassier green than the woods that surrounded it. Even the Stone Pillar—a weathered shaft of limestone of disputed origin—could be seen as a minute gray dot amid the trees. Still, visible as the Pillar and the clearing were, their small size meant that it would have taken even a trained eye a long while to locate them if their positions hadn’t already been marked.

  The clearing was marked by a black push pin, which Mr. May had put there in the wake of Emily’s abduction. The Stone Pillar was marked in a much different manner; it was one of the five points of a perfectly formed pentagram that Calvin had drawn on the map five years ago, on the same night he and the others had witnessed the white light in the clearing and the strange visions within it. The star’s other points were Indian Hill, Spirit Cave, and the May and Crow houses, the very spots where the tragedies catechized by Calvin and Lauren minutes earlier had unfolded over the last two hundred years. And the black push pin, the clearing, was situated precisely in the center of this pentacle of misery and death.

  Lauren studied the map in silence for a minute. Nose inches from the glossy paper, she checked and double-checked to make sure the image hadn’t been tampered with and that the scale was regular throughout. Everything checked out, as she had been pretty sure it would. She was familiar enough with this area to know how it looked even from above. Her examination had been mainly a formality, persnickety but necessary.

  “Okay, that’s just weird,” she said, her eyes still roving across the map. “But what does it mean? It can’t be accidental.” She looked at Calvin, her expression suddenly uncertain. “Can it?”

  “I’m assuming not.”

  “But who was behind it, then? Over so many years, it’d have to be the work of some kind of intergenerational conspiracy, or else…” She trailed off, not sure she wanted to posit anything more than that at the moment.

  Calvin had no such qualms. “Or someone or something extremely long-lived.”

  “Like what, vampires?” Lauren said with a small, nervous la
ugh. “Ghosts? The Highlander?”

  “We don’t know for sure. We have all kinds of vague and probably hare-brained theories, of course, but at the moment the important thing is the effect it all had. What happened in the clearing. The light. The birds.”

  “So, what, this was all just to bring a bunch of passenger pigeons back to life? That makes no sense. Most of the tragedies in question occurred long before the birds went extinct.”

  “I don’t think the pigeons were the point. I mean, we’ve been debating this for a few years now, and so far the best hypothesis we’ve come up with is that whatever happened here in the woods, it somehow opened a gateway to…” He shrugged. “Somewhere else. Or somewhere elses.”

  “Somewhere elses?”

  “Like other dimensions or alternate realities. That would certainly explain the diversity of the images we saw in the light. They might have been a bunch of alternate realities all being seen simultaneously.”

  “There are alternate realities with walking, talking trees in them? I mean, not that that wouldn’t be cool and everything, but, I mean…really? No offense, but I’m not quite ready to give up on the psychotropic drugs hypothesis.”

  “Psychotropic drugs wouldn’t explain that,” Cynthia said with a nod at the pentagram on the map.

  “True,” Lauren conceded.

  “It might not have been alternate realities per se that they saw,” Brandon said. “I always wondered if it might not have been, like, the raw stuff of imagination made manifest.” He looked at Calvin and Cynthia. “Didn’t you guys say that you and Mr. May had been talking about passenger pigeons a few days before they appeared?”

  “Yeah,” Cynthia said.

  “Well, there you go. They were on your minds, and boom, there they were.”

  Cynthia smiled thinly. “I think Emily was on everyone’s minds a lot more than some birds that got discussed for all of three seconds one day. So why didn’t she appear?”

  “Uh…”

  “At any rate,” Calvin said to Lauren, “the point is, yes, the clearing in the woods is where we think the pigeons came from. The precise details are still a bit fuzzy, obviously.”

  Lauren glanced out the window at the woods. The sun, close to setting, was obscured behind the trees, and the woods were filling with murk.

  “I’d like to see this magical clearing,” she said, “but I guess it’s getting kind of dark for it right now.”

  “There isn’t much to see anyway,” Cynthia said. “It only does funky things when someone dies there. Otherwise it’s just a clearing.”

  “You wanted to see the Collection, too, didn’t you?” Calvin said to Lauren. “I could give you a quick tour of it right now, if you like.”

  “Ooh,” Lauren said. “Yes, please. Thank you. But just quick. I don’t want to keep you guys from your big strategy session, or whatever it is.”

  “It’s cool,” Calvin said. “There’s plenty of time, and I suspect the whole strategizing thing is something that’ll require more than one meeting anyway.”

  “Besides,” Brandon said. “Calvin likes showing off the Collection. It’s like his baby or something.”

  They spent the next hour giving Lauren a tour of the Collection, which was housed in two rooms on the second floor and three on the third. Like everyone else seeing the Collection for the first time, Lauren was agog at the array of outré items filling row after row of old wooden shelves. Naturally enough, she gravitated to items that were clearly of historic origin: a Phoenician coin (which, Calvin told her, had been unearthed in a Kansas cornfield in 1888), a Viking battleaxe (said to have fallen out of a clear sky, along with half a dozen cherry tomatoes and a number of small stones, in Darwin, Australia, in 1954), the scorched remains of an Elizabethan dress (supposedly worn by a spontaneous human combustion victim at the time of her fiery death), and so on. Lauren was particularly impressed with four cards from the so-called Ur-Tarot, the purported prototype of the Tarot’s major arcana, said to have been created by a psychic monk over a thousand years ago.

  “Wow,” she said, studying the painted images, each safely ensconced within its own acid-free plastic bag. “You do realize these would fetch a not-so-small fortune if you ever decided to sell them, right?”

  “Yeah, but they’re not for sale,” Calvin said. “None of it is. This is bigger than money.”

  “Besides, we collected that one ourselves,” Cynthia said, pointing at one of the cards, which was numbered “VI” and depicted a young blond man and a young redheaded woman standing in a clearing in a forest. “It’s the fruit of our only real case so far.”

  Lauren stared at the card a moment, then glanced at Calvin and Cynthia, then looked back at the image.

  “Um, you know…” she began.

  “Yes, we know. It looks kind of like us.”

  “That psychic monk obviously had some mad skills,” Brandon said.

  “That’s just freaky.” Lauren put the cards back on the shelf, then surveyed the vast and eclectic assortment of items that filled the room. “You guys have a lot of work ahead of you if you hope to match Mr. May’s output. That man must have had quite a remarkable work ethic.”

  “Yeah,” Calvin said with a small sigh. “We still haven’t really figured out where we’re going to find cases to investigate.”

  “I think we should try to find stuff close to home to start with,” Cynthia said. “We might not find a lot of dramatic, exciting cases, but it would help us find our feet and get a sort of investigatory rhythm going.”

  “What about that weird murder last night?” Lauren said. “You guys could always investigate that.”

  “What murder?” Calvin said. He glanced at the others and found only puzzled looks that matched his own.

  “In Kingwood yesterday. It’s been all over the news. Haven’t you heard about it?”

  “No, we’ve been caught up with graduating and the inheritances and everything. What murder? What happened?”

  “I don’t remember all the details, but some guy was found dead in an alley with big chunks of him missing, and the coroner seemed kind of baffled about who or what could have caused the injuries.”

  Calvin checked his watch. Almost ten o’clock.

  “Come on, everybody,” he said, striding to the door. “If we hurry we can catch the local news.”