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

9

  After lunch the next day Calvin settled down at the still-cluttered desk in the upstairs office, got online, and started hunting through the Kingwood Morning Star’s archives. He thanked the gods of media that the paper kept online copies of every article they had run during the last six years. He searched first for unsolved violent deaths in Bard County but found nothing consistent with the attack on Brad Vallance. He then searched for missing persons in the area, and though he turned up over a dozen, there was no way to tell if they were connected with the leucrota attacks (or, as Lauren would have it, the presumed leucrota attacks). The disappearances followed no obvious patterns, being evenly distributed chronologically and more common in larger population centers, exactly as one would expect if the disappearances were random, unrelated occurrences. He checked the FBI’s crime database and found that the missing person rate in Bard County matched that of the U.S. as a whole. Nothing suspicious there, then.

  Next he searched for sightings of unusual animals, and here he found one possibly relevant report, nearly a year old, from Castle Township, due south of May.

  On July 25th the previous year, a farmer named Ephraim Levi was awakened one night by a “hubbub” in the chicken coop behind his house. Fearing a coyote attack, of which, the article claimed, there had been a spate in western and central Castle Township in recent months, Levi grabbed his shotgun and charged outside. As he approached the coop, a large animal burst out and bolted into the nearby woods. The swift-moving animal was hard to see in the darkness, but its size and its long-legged physique suggested a deer rather than any carnivore Levi was familiar with. The farmer fired off one shot as the creature disappeared into the foliage, but managed only to blast a chunk out of a tree trunk. The interior of the coop was a slaughterhouse, over half the chickens torn to shreds and many others so badly mauled they had to be put down. The article concluded with a statement from a County Division of Wildlife officer who speculated that the animal may have been a large stray dog with Great Dane or greyhound blood.

  Inspired by the reference to coyote attacks, Calvin shifted the focus of his search to attacks on and disappearances of pets and livestock. He got over thirty hits from the last two years. Some of them were clearly instances of predation by coyotes, wolves, bored dumb teens, and other non-anomalous creatures. But the rest weren’t so clear-cut, and they formed a pattern that was blindingly obvious once you knew what you were looking for.

  Here, from only two months ago, was a story about a pet German shepherd found half-eaten one morning in the upscale Banbury neighborhood in southwestern Kingwood. Shortly before Halloween last year there had been a brief spate of pet disappearances on the outskirts of Deermont, a quiet suburban community due south of Kingwood. One rather histrionic letter to the editor speculated that the disappearances were the work of Satanists gathering up sacrifices for their unholy rituals on All Hallows Eve. The previous summer had witnessed the string of livestock attacks in Castle Township, due west of Deermont and due south of May. With the exception of Farmer Levi’s chicken coop, everyone pinned the attacks on coyotes, whose population in Northeast Ohio had burgeoned in recent years. Despite the popular consensus, a close reading of the articles revealed that no one had actually produced any concrete evidence that coyotes were in fact responsible. There were no sightings of coyotes, no tracks, no scat. Just dead and missing animals and a lot of presumptions.

  A little over a year ago a trio of cows belonging to the Pepper Family Dairy had been found dead and mutilated in a field in Riddle, a rural township west of Castle. The cows had been missing various portions of their anatomy, including their throats and faces. Calvin remembered the incident well, mainly because Riddle’s alarmingly large contingent of surly right-wing kooks were convinced that the cattle mutilations had been the work of some ill-defined New World Order/UFO conspiracy, with one woman asserting that she had spotted unmarked black helicopters in the area the day before the cows were killed.

  Four months earlier a horse had been “savagely butchered” in a stable in Phoenix Township west of May. The article gave few details about either the condition of the body or any suspects, largely because a police investigation was underway. If there had been any follow-up articles about the case, Calvin couldn’t find them. Presumably the investigation had gone nowhere and was quietly backburnered.

  Four months before that, there was a tiny article, barely more than a blurb, about a rash of pet disappearances in western Ames, the city due north of May that was the home of Calvin, Cynthia, and Brandon’s new alma mater. Since he had been a resident of Ames at the time, Calvin would have liked to say he recalled the incident, but he didn’t, probably because nothing about it struck him as overtly anomalous. Everyone’s favorite scapegoat, coyotes, were identified as the likeliest culprit.

  Calvin was surprised that none of the later articles had mentioned this one, especially the ones about the supposed coyote attacks in Castle Township and the one about the Halloween pet disappearances in Deermont. But upon reflection he realized that the Ames story had been a minor one and had occurred two townships away and roughly a year earlier. On the other hand, the Ames article referred to an article that had run two months earlier involving a brutal attack on a pet dog on Landis Road on the far northern edge of May. Here was another close-to-home incident that Calvin felt guilty and embarrassed for not being aware of. He immediately looked the story up.

  The article related how the Pritchett family had been awakened at three a.m. by the low, syrupy yowls of Bones, the family beagle, who slept in a doghouse in the backyard. At first none of the family was too concerned, figuring that a raccoon was taking a shortcut through the backyard as had happened many times before. But then came a splintering crash, and Bones’s yowls twisted into a shrill yelp of pain before stopping with frightening abruptness. Flashlight and baseball bat clutched tight, Barry Pritchett raced into the backyard, where he found the doghouse torn open and splashed with blood. Inside lay Bones’s corpse, the beagle’s throat torn out so badly his head was almost severed. Barry frantically shone the flashlight around, but saw no sign of any animals, raccoons or otherwise. The article once again raised the specter of coyotes as a possible culprit and concluded with a plea from the local animal warden to immediately report any potentially dangerous animals and to never under any circumstances try to interact with one yourself.

  And before that incident, nothing.

  Calvin sat back, the office chair creaking, his gaping mouth slowly spreading into a smile.

  It all formed a very clear story. Nearly two years ago something had appeared here in May, probably from the anomaly in the clearing. After killing poor Bones, the creature had headed north into Ames, gobbling down dogs and cats as it went. Then over the next twenty months it slowly traveled along a huge arc through the counties that surrounded May: from Ames southwest to Phoenix, then south to Riddle, then east through Castle and into Deermont, and finally north into Kingwood. It was all right there, incontrovertible.

  Calvin barked out a joyous laugh and cried, “I’ve got it!” He looked up into the air as he said it, announcing his victory to the house and to Mr. May, the two of them having become somehow isomorphic in Calvin’s mind. Calvin beamed with pride and accomplishment, feeling as if he had finally proven beyond all doubt that he was a worthy heir to the old man’s legacy.

  But then his ebullience dimmed. If the creature—like Lauren, he wasn’t quite ready to label it a leucrota, but he was now certain it was not of this earth—had spent two years gladly gobbling down animals of various kinds, what had made it shift its diet to people? For that matter why had it entered the city at all? True, Kingwood was on the arc the leucrota had been following, but given the locations of the other incidents, the creature had skirted populous areas when it came to them in the past. Even the Banbury neighborhood, where the German shepherd had been killed, was situated on the edge of Holly Hills Metropark, which originated on the border with Deermont and jutted deep into southw
estern Kingwood like a giant green finger. So what had happened in the last few weeks to change the creature’s pattern, to drive it out into the open and start murdering humans?

  The article about Bones’s death was still on the monitor, and as Calvin mulled over the problem, his gaze was drawn to the phrase “animal warden” in the last line. Something about it rang a bell. Hadn’t he read something about the animal warden recently?

  No, wait. It wasn’t the animal warden; it was the game warden. The county game warden. Something about deer, wasn’t it?

  He looked it up in the paper’s database, and yes, only three weeks ago there had been a press release by the game warden, which revealed that the deer population this last hunting season had been shockingly low, the lowest since records started being kept. For that matter, the numbers of several other wild species, including opossums, raccoons, and even coyotes appeared to have declined during the same period, at least in certain areas. Determined to learn the cause of these sudden, dramatic, and worrying declines, the warden, in collaboration with the County Park Service, planned to send several large teams into Holly Hills Metropark, one of the places where the population declines had been worst, to look for both living and dead specimens of the animals in question. The search would begin the second week of May and continue until the end of the month.

  “That’s it!” Calvin cried. Everything fit perfectly. The search teams must have driven the creature out of the park and into the city. In fact…

  He grabbed Mr. May’s old Bard County map book to check the precise location of Holly Hills Metropark. As he had suspected, the northern tip of that thick green finger was only four blocks southwest of West Train Apartments.

  He sat back in the chair again, grinning and flush with pride.

  “Wow,” he said.

  Unfortunately, knowing how the creature had gotten there wasn’t going to help them stop it from killing any more people. They had to figure out where it was holing up now. But how?

  Somewhere in the depths of the house he heard a faint trill. Startled, he sat up straight, looking with wide eyes out the open office doorway and into the hall. For a moment he thought something in the Collection was acting up—a haunted mirror, perhaps, or a screaming crystal skull—but then the noise sounded again, and he realized it was the doorbell. He had heard it only a handful of times over the years, and only when he was near it on the first floor. From here, on the second floor and in a different wing, it was just a muffled phantom of the sound he had heard before. On the third floor or in the tower, it would probably be completely inaudible.

  He sprang to his feet, hurried out of the office, and raced down the hall toward the stairs. That was one thing he didn’t like about this house: It was too damn big. And for all his frantic effort to reach the door in time, he would probably get there only to discover the caller was a salesman or a Jehovah’s Witness. He should look into installing an intercom system to spare his legs and lungs the stress.

  The doorbell rang a third time as he pounded down the spiral staircase.

  “Coming!” he shouted, not sure if whoever-it-was could even hear him from here.

  He leaped the last few steps, then sprinted down the long corridor that ran the length of the south wing to the front door. Through the thin white curtain that was drawn across the window in the upper half of the door, he could see a long-haired silhouette. A girl? Had Cynthia’s dad let her off early? Or maybe it was Lauren. Or Donovan, sans his usual hair band.

  He skidded to a halt before the door, then opened it while swiftly rearranging his red, panting face into something he hoped resembled a smile. When he saw that his visitor was Tiffany Fish, the quasi-smile froze for a moment, then blossomed into a genuine smile, huge and happy.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Um, hi,” she said. She did one quick survey of his sweaty face and his heaving chest, then gave him a wincing smile. “This is a bad time, isn’t it?” She shook her head at herself and spat out a soft, bitter laugh of self-recrimination. “I knew it,” she muttered. “I should have called first. I’m so—”

  “No, it’s fine. It’s a fine time. I was just on the other side of the house when the bell rang, that’s all.”

  She gave him a sidelong look as if she suspected he was saying that just to be polite. “Really?”

  “Really. So what brings you here?”

  She didn’t seem to know exactly how to answer that question. Her eyes met his, sidled away, met his again, dropped to his chest; her mouth opened, closed. Finally she gave a quick, twitchy smile and said, “I don’t know, I guess I wanted to know more about…about you. And about this Robert May person and everything.” She shrugged. “I figured that since he left us money and we don’t know why, we’re sort of connected, entangled together in a mystery. Therefore it seemed appropriate that we get to know each other better.” She nodded at the house. “Besides, I wanted to see this place. My father told me a bit about it last night. It sounded architecturally interesting. Porches and towers, wings and scales.”

  She stepped backward off the porch and down the steps, her eyes fixed on the facade of the house as it slowly emerged from behind the porch roof overhead. Calvin watched with alarm, ready to spring forward and catch her should she stumble and fall. But she navigated her backward descent without a single misstep. She didn’t even seem aware of the possibility of having an accident.

  Calvin trotted down the steps after her, facing forward not just for safety’s sake but so he could look at her while she looked at the house. She was dressed in a white button-front top with a white lacey collar and lacey cap sleeves. Like yesterday, she wore blue jeans but these were much nicer than the other pair, less worn, less baggy. Her sneakers were also much nicer than yesterday’s, though they were the exact same brand and color: white New Balances. In fact, as Calvin looked at the shoes he realized they were completely unscuffed, the white whiter than white, the laces crisp and stiff. She must have just bought them.

  For him? Remarkable as it seemed, it had to be true. He felt a strange, giddy sense of lightness at the thought, as if his body were filling with some substance more buoyant than air and any second now he would float straight up like a child’s lost balloon. But at the same time, more levelheaded concerns kept him grounded. If he wanted to try to get closer to her, as the sum totality of his being yearned to do, he had to be careful. She seemed unworldly and fragile. He didn’t need a Psych degree to see how shy and socially awkward she was and how her odd mindset might on the one hand alienate some people and on the other make her abnormally sensitive to such reactions. And yet even as he thought this, it struck him how much courage it must have taken for her to pay him this visit, and he recalled the stubborn princess who had manifested yesterday to face down her father. Shy and fragile on the outside, but with a tough, determined core.

  He joined her on the sidewalk that connected the front steps to the driveway. Her head was tilted back so she could look at the house, her right hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun. Even in the shadow of her hand the blue of her eyes shone through. Calvin couldn’t keep from staring at those eyes, at the slender fingers arched across her brow, at the delicate folds of her ear, the sweeping curve of her jaw, the flutter of her pulse in the side of her bared neck. He felt an urge to lean in and press his lips to that little patch of fluttering skin and feel the warmth and rhythm of her pulse.

  “This is an extraordinary house,” she said.

  “I take it you weren’t with your dad when he came out to look at it that one time?”

  The question flustered her for some reason. She glanced at him sharply, her eyes looking almost panicked for a second. Then she reined in whatever it was that had started to gallop away with her, and shook her head.

  “No. I was…I didn’t go.”

  He nodded, then resumed studying the house in silence, making no mention of her flusterment. She did likewise. After a moment she looked at the west wing on the left, then at the east win
g on the right, then said, “There’s another wing in the back, isn’t there?”

  “Yep.”

  “It’s symmetrical. Four wings, one for each cardinal point.” She frowned slightly and tilted her head to one side, then murmured, “Wings. Cardinal. Bird. Crow.” The frown deepened. “Huh.”

  Not sure how to react to these comments—feeling, in fact, a little freaked out by them despite how much and how quickly he was growing to like their utterer—Calvin responded instead to Tiffany’s initial observation about the house’s symmetry.

  “I’ve always thought of the house as being shaped like a big plus sign, myself.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s not a plus sign. It’s a wheel. The tower in the center is the axle. The wings are the spokes.”

  He looked at the house, trying to see it the way she did, then nodded slowly.

  “You know, you might be right. I never thought of it like that. The guy who built the place, Turner May, was kind of eccentric and didn’t really explain why he designed it the way he did. But if it is a wheel, it’s a wheel that doesn’t go anywhere.”

  “Sure it does. The continental plate inches along, and the Earth rotates and revolves around the sun, and they both shoot through space as the universe expands. It travels plenty.”

  Calvin stared at her, his huge, happy smile from yesterday returning. He loved the way this girl’s mind worked, the way she effortlessly recast the world around her in fascinating and unpredictable ways. Her thoughts and comments made his own seem rather prosaic. But instead of feeling small or envious or annoyed because of this, as some people would, he felt glad she was there to share that perspective with him and thereby enrich his own.

  Eyes still on the facade, she said, “Can I see inside?”

  “Sure.”

  As he led her back up the steps, he noticed her car parked beside his in the driveway. He had been so wrapped up in Tiffany that he hadn’t even seen it there till now. It was a silver Audi S5, the same as the dark-blue one he had seen in the Fishes’ driveway yesterday, only several years older. Calvin guessed this one used to be her dad’s car, and Tiffany had inherited it when Andrew Fish upgraded to the newer model. The sight of Tiffany’s car parked next to his gave Calvin a small, warm thrill, as if it were a portent of more direct and genuine togetherness yet to come.

  Calvin gave her a tour of the first floor: the parlor, the book-crammed library, the dining room with its crystal chandelier and mahogany table big enough to seat a dozen with ease, and so on and so on, through all four wings and eleven rooms. Tiffany took it all in without comment and without, it seemed, much interest, much to Calvin’s disappointment. But then, what did he expect? If the Fishes’ current home was anything to go by, she had grown up amid greater wealth than his and no doubt all the luxuries it could afford. Spacious rooms and pricey antiques were probably old hat to her.

  But that, he soon learned, wasn’t the only reason for her disinterest. When he showed her the study in the east wing, she briefly surveyed the brown leather furniture and the framed hunting prints on the wall, then said, “Most of the things in this house aren’t yours, are they?”

  “Uh, no. It’s mostly Mr. May’s furniture. I haven’t gotten around to deciding what to do with a lot of it.”

  “You need to redecorate. You need your own things in here. It’s not right living in a house with someone else’s furnishings. It’s like wearing someone else’s face. It’s a false you. It’s duplicitous.”

  Once again Calvin’s big, broad smile returned. This time Tiffany saw it and, giving him an uneasy smile in response, said, “What!”

  “I think you just helped me decide what to do with most of this stuff.”

  She looked alarmed. “Oh, gosh! Don’t do something just because I said so.”

  “But you’re right. A lot of this furniture is nice and all, but it isn’t really me. I was holding onto it out of…I don’t know, sentimentality, or misplaced respect, or something. It’s certainly not stuff I would’ve bought on my own. Well, maybe some of it, like the leather couch in the parlor, and that neat old grandfather clock.”

  “Yes, I like the clock. The intricacy of the gold filigree on the hands is amazing. You could get lost in all those loops.”

  “Very lost,” he agreed with a smile, looking at her meaningfully.

  Her eyes went wide, and her body went stiff. For a moment she looked as if she were about to whirl around and run away and hide somewhere, maybe under that overlong dining room table. But then the sides of her mouth crept up to form a small, shy smile of her own, and the two of them just stood there smiling at each other.

  “So,” she said finally, shifting her gaze away from his and toward the study door, “what’s next?”

  He led her upstairs to the second floor. All throughout the tour he had been debating with himself whether or not to show her the Collection. She already knew that he and Cynthia investigated strange phenomena, so the existence of the Collection wouldn’t exactly come as a shocking revelation. And he felt pretty sure he could trust her not to tell anyone else about it. Given what he’d learned about her so far, he suspected she didn’t know a lot of people anyway. On the other hand, he remembered how unhappy Cynthia had been when he unilaterally decided to spill the beans to the Fishes yesterday. Perhaps he should discuss the matter with Cynthia and the rest of the group first.

  Still, the Collection was his. He could do what he wanted with it. He could show it to whomever he liked. When he imagined showing it to Tiffany and seeing her amazed and wondering smile, his concerns about Cynthia’s peevishness faded. He decided he would show it to Tiffany.

  And why stop there? Maybe Tiffany could join the group, too. He had a feeling she’d fit right in.

  Wanting to save the Collection for last, he started the tour of the second floor with the library in the south wing, which was twice the size of the one on the first floor and contained rarer and more unusual books, including Mr. May’s extensive collection of works on the paranormal. Against the west wall sat a line of cardboard boxes that contained most of Calvin’s books, which he planned to start shelving as soon as he found the time. The way things had been going, he would probably be in his nineties by then.

  “Books books books,” Tiffany mumbled, scanning the floor-to-ceiling shelves. “Words words words.” She didn’t look or sound even a fraction as enthusiastic as Calvin had expected. If anything, she sounded a little disappointed, even sad. It occurred to him that he had no concrete reason for thinking she liked books or reading. He supposed he had unthinkingly presumed that their attraction to each other meant they would share most of the same interests.

  After briefly perusing the shelves, an act that Calvin got the impression was done mainly to humor him, Tiffany made a beeline for the boxes on the floor and peered through the open flaps at the topmost books.

  “These are yours, yes?” she said.

  “Yeah. But I’m keeping most of the others, too.” He felt compelled to defend Mr. May’s books for some reason. “Most of them are classics in their fields. He had impeccable taste.”

  “Impeccable,” Tiffany murmured as she bent down to examine the books in the boxes more closely. She said it softly, absently, seemingly unaware she was saying anything, the way some people hum tunes while they work. “I’m peckable. Bird peck. Crow peck. Peck peck. Taste.”

  Calvin said nothing, troubled by this strange, compulsive wordplay, which could be a sign of a mild mental disorder. It didn’t negate his liking for her, of course. Not even close. But it was enough to temper that liking and prevent him from seeing her as golden and perfect, her flaws fuzzed out by the misty glaucoma of young love, or at least young infatuation, something to which Calvin knew he was sadly prone. No, instead these dual feelings balanced each other, leaving him with something more cautious, more realistic. More mature, he supposed.

  “You like graphic novels,” she said, peering into one of the boxes. On top were the first few
volumes of The Walking Dead.

  “Yeah.”

  She nodded. “Words and pictures.” She sounded pleased for some reason.

  “Do you read stuff like that?”

  She looked at him over her lace-shrouded shoulder, her expression suddenly hesitant, nervous.

  “I…” She turned and looked down at the box again, her long blonde hair, worn loose today, veiling her face from him. “I don’t read much anymore.”

  “Oh.” He wanted to ask why not, but held his tongue. He didn’t want to risk upsetting her. It wasn’t his business anyway.

  She continued staring into the box in silence for a moment, then stood up.

  “What’s next?”

  He decided to skip the master bedroom, afraid that showing it to her might come across the wrong way, and instead led her to the office in the west wing. He didn’t expect to be in there for long. There wasn’t much to see. Just the desk, the computer, the file cabinets, the shelves of reference books.

  He had forgotten about the map of May on which he had drawn the pentagram, and he remembered it only after he opened the door and saw it hanging there on the far wall, facing him. By then, of course, it was too late; Tiffany had seen it, too. She stiffened at the sight of it, and Calvin heard her gasp faintly.

  “A star,” she said.

  “Um, yeah…” Calvin’s mind raced, wondering how he was going to explain its presence on a satellite map of May. He wasn’t sure he wanted to tell her the truth. Not yet anyway. Informing her that his house was one of the main points of a catastrophe-riddled black-magic pentagram might scare her off permanently.

  “And a black spot.”

  It took him a moment to realize she was referring to the black push pin that marked the clearing in the center of the pentagram.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  She walked into the room, her gaze never leaving the map. Calvin followed, watching her closely. She walked straight forward until she came to the edge of the desk, then stopped, the front of her blue-jeaned thighs pressed against the desk’s front edge. Calvin expected her to circle around the desk for a closer look at the map, but she stayed right there, staring at the map over the cluttered desktop.

  Several silent seconds passed, during which Calvin desperately tried to figure out how to answer her inevitable barrage of questions.

  Finally she said, “I take it those places are important somehow.” Her voice was tight, clipped. For some reason the starred map bothered her.

  “They might be,” Calvin said. “It’s, uh…sort of a local anomaly we’ve been looking into.”

  “Low cull,” she muttered. “Low cal. In awe mill E.” She turned to him, her face drawn, and seemed about to say something more. But then her gaze shifted to something over his right shoulder, and her eyes widened in surprise.

  Calvin turned. She was looking at the movie poster, the lurid image of the sinister face and hooked fingers looming above the brave gun-toting hero and the cowering blonde damsel.

  “It’s a movie,” Calvin said, turning back to Tiffany. Now she was simply staring at the poster with a thoughtful look. “Mr. May hung it here. I still haven’t figured out why. As far as I can tell, he wasn’t much of a cinephile.”

  “Well, it’s there for a reason,” she said, her gaze never leaving the poster. “Everything’s there for a reason.” Her eyes narrowed. “Eris. Heiress. Terrible heiress. Huh.” She looked at Calvin. “Eris was a goddess, wasn’t she?”

  “Yeah. The Greek goddess of chaos.”

  She nodded, then looked back at the map.

  “This is a particularly interesting room. I like it.”

  “I’m so glad you approve,” Calvin said drily. “I rather like it myself.”

  She smiled.

  “You’re funny,” she said. “I rather like that myself.”

  “I like that you like that.”

  “I’d like to say that I like that you like that I like that, but let’s not infinitely regress.”

  “Good idea.”

  As they grinned at each other, it suddenly occurred to Calvin that he had been standing in almost the exact same position with Cynthia five years ago when he had made a misguided move on her only for her to rebuff him and awkwardly confess she was a lesbian. Calvin was fairly certain Tiffany would not rebuff him. And while he yearned to lean in and kiss those soft, pink, unadorned lips, he felt it wasn’t quite the right time yet. He had met her only yesterday after all, and he had concerns about her unworldliness and her psychological soundness.

  Though he held back, some trace of his desires must have shown through, for Tiffany’s cheeks suddenly flushed, and she lowered her eyes with a small smile. Her gaze fell on the desktop and the items jumbled thereon. A kangaroo paperweight. A chain of paperclips. A sheet of notebook paper covered with columns of Mr. May’s tiny handwriting. Her eyes finally settled on the Bard County map book, which Calvin had left lying open to the two-page spread of the West River neighborhood and the northernmost tip of Holly Hills Metropark.

  Tiffany’s smile slid from her face, and she looked up at Calvin with an expression that was equal parts dread, excitement, and sorrow. Her blue eyes bored into his so intently he almost took a step away from her.

  “You’re investigating the death of that man in the alley, aren’t you?”

  He could see in her eyes there was no sense denying it.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is…” She bit her lower lip and regarded him with an uncertain sidelong look. “Is that what brought you to me and my father?”

  Calvin shook his head, baffled.

  “What? Why would that bring me to you two?”

  “You don’t know.” The words were low and flat, a statement of fact rather than an accusation.

  “Know what? Did you know the dead man, or something? Did you know Brad Vallance?”

  “Vallance,” she muttered. “Valence. Valiance. Violence. Hn.” Then she shook her head and in a normal tone of voice said, “No. I never saw him before in my life.”

  “Then…” He shook his head again. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  She regarded him in silence, then heaved a deep, shaky sigh. She looked scared, though of what Calvin wasn’t sure. Scared of talking about something? Scared of his reaction if she did? Calvin’s heart began to quicken in expectation of whatever was about to happen.

  “I know I’m weird,” she said. “I talk weird. I think weird. I can’t help it. I can’t not be this way.”

  “Weird isn’t necessarily bad,” Calvin said gently. “Not to me.”

  She flashed him a small smile to acknowledge the kindly sentiment.

  “The thing is, I wasn’t always like this. When I was a little girl I was a different person. I was a brat. A snobby blonde brat, as spoiled as mayonnaise left in a hot closet.”

  Calvin recalled the princess in the photo on her father’s desk. Apparently the girl’s nose-in-the-air snootiness had not been an act.

  “You would have hated me,” Tiffany said. “I was a spoiled little rich girl who wanted a pony and a life-size Barbie Dream House and all those other silly things that spoiled little rich girls want. And usually get. But I got something else because one night when I was nine we went to the theater.”

  “The theater?”

  “The Blackhorse Theater, two blocks north of the alley. My dad and I went there a lot back then. He did legal work for the theater owners, and on top of his usual many-digit fees, they gave him two free tickets to every show.” She cocked her head. “He’s a lawyer. Did you know that?”

  “Yeah. I saw all the diplomas and stuff on the wall behind the desk in his office.”

  “On the wall behind the desk in his office,” she said with a nod at the map of May. The pentagram. The pin. “Exactly.”

  A chill raced down Calvin’s spine, though he wasn’t entirely sure why one should. Lots of people hung important items behind their desks. It was a fairly meaningless coincidence. And yet somehow, in Tiffany’s
presence, it felt important. Everything did. The longer he was exposed to her idiosyncratic ways of thinking, her revisionings of the world, her linguistic vivisections and homophonizings, the more everything began to feel fraught with meaning.

  “I liked going to the theater,” Tiffany went on, “because it made me feel smart and adult even though I didn’t always understand what I was seeing or hearing, and because there was something very comforting about being there, snug in those plush velvet seats in the womby dark, passive and inert while comfortingly predictable stories were enacted on the bright stage, a whole other world brought to life before me.

  “That night’s free play was a romantic comedy called Check, Mate. Two words, with a comma between them. I seem to recall enjoying it, though I don’t really remember much about it. The details got…superseded.” She paused a moment, eyes distant, as if the word had set off a separate train of thought. Then she resumed the story. “We had walked to the theater. It was a long walk. Half an hour. Thirty minutes. Eighteen hundred seconds. But it was a beautiful night. The air was balmy, and the sky was starry, and the smell of flowers filled the air. Tulips and roses and Bradford pear blossoms. It was the same time of year as now. Spring. Late May.” Her eyes drifted out of focus again. “Late May. The late Robert May. Huh.”

  Again Calvin felt a chill.

  “In fact…” Tiffany looked around the room in search of something. Not finding it, she looked at Calvin. “What day is it?”

  “The twenty-third.”

  She nodded. “The same day. It’s the exact same day nine years later. And I was nine then. My whole life over again. Lived through twice now, and here we are back to that day once more. What are the odds I would be telling you about that day on the same day it happened?”

  “One in three hundred and sixty-five, I should think,” Calvin said in a calm, even tone that in no way reflected how spooked he was feeling. The chills were racing down his spine nearly nonstop now.

  Tiffany smiled. “You have a good head for math. Anyway, the play ran late and by the time it was done, it was nearly ten. That was my usual bedtime, and with the hour so late, I was very tired. My dad was tired, too, as I recall. I think he’d been really busy with some kind of urgent lawyerly business that day, but I’m not positive (though I’m not really negative either), and I can’t ask him because we never talk about that night.”

  Calvin almost asked why they never talked about it, but he remained silent, figuring he’d probably learn soon enough.

  “So the play was over, and we headed home, leaving the theater late at night just like Batman as a boy before he loses everything that matters.

  “Our path took us past the alley. The same alley, at the same time of year. We were walking past it, heading west on the opposite side of the street, our path perpendicular to the alley so that our route and it formed a giant T. T for trouble. T for me. T for…”

  She gave a quick, sharp shake of her head as if trying to clear it or to jostle her thoughts back onto a more acceptable path.

  “I don’t think either one of us spared the alley a glance or a thought or anything else as we passed it,” she went on. “But right when we were parallel to the alley’s mouth, when we reached the apex of the T’s stem, where the two directions intersected, a woman’s voice screamed, ‘No!’ from somewhere in the alley. We slowed down and looked over. The alley was dark, a pillar of blackness between the buildings, and in its shadowy mouth two women were fighting, one with light hair, the other dark.

  “‘What are they doing?’ I asked my dad.

  “‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  “The light-haired one knocked down the dark-haired one, then whirled around to face us. It looked like she was pointing a small object at us. Maybe a gun. Or a camera. It was too dark to tell.

  “She stopped moving for a second, then suddenly looked back over her shoulder as if she had heard a sound behind her.

  “My father and I had been holding hands as we walked, and now he gave mine a tug and said, ‘Come on, Tiff, we’d better—’

  “And then there was a faint, muffled bang, like the report of a gun, but not from the alley. It sounded like it came from the apartment block next door, though it was hard to be sure because of the way the noise echoed off all the hard, flat planes of brick and concrete that formed the T around us. I glanced at the apartment block, saw nothing notable, and then…”

  She hesitated for a moment, her eyes sad and faraway, seeing things nine years gone.

  “And then I looked at the alley again, and the moment I did, the light-haired woman vanished right before my eyes, one second there, the next gone. It wasn’t a trick of the light or the dark. It wasn’t an illusion, optical or otherwise. I was looking right at her, and then I was looking at blackness. And out of that blackness emerged the second woman, the dark-haired one. She took a step forward and raised both arms like a runner crossing a finish line, and then she lifted her face to the stars and shouted, ‘I did it!’

  “And then she vanished too. And—”

  She glanced at Calvin and saw the stunned look on his face.

  “What?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “I…” He shook his head. “I’ll tell you in a minute. Please, just finish the story.”

  “There isn’t much more to tell. All that’s left is the bad girl’s comeuppance. Everything went wrong in the wake of that night. My life. My head. Not right away, though. At first I thought the whole experience was kind of neat, like something out of a movie. But then I started having nightmares about being shot. For a long time barely a night went by when I didn’t wake up screaming. I had panic attacks. I started sleepwalking and…and other things.”

  “What about your father? Did it affect him too?”

  “I don’t know. We almost never discussed that night, and the few times we did he made sure we didn’t for long. He dismissed the whole thing as a non-event. I know he saw those women disappear, same as I did, but he insisted it was only a trick of the light. Maybe he even believed that. I don’t know. I do know that around that time he started drinking heavily, and he grew more stressed out, more anxious, though that was probably only because of my own distress and anxiety. Being woken up nearly every night by your daughter screaming in mortal terror does nothing for your nerves, I’m sure.”

  “I imagine not.”

  “And the grim repercussions weren’t limited to my dreams. I made the mistake of telling the other Barbies at school what I saw, assuming they’d be impressed that I had witnessed something so remarkable.” She breathed out a bitter, rueful laugh and shook her head. “My social instincts stunk. I mean, how stupid could I be? I was one of the top dogs at school, you know. Woof woof. Bow wow. Bow down. Bitch bitch. I was pretty and blonde and my dad had money and I had all the most fashionable clothes and the snootiest, most self-centered attitude a pampered, privileged nine-year-old girl can possibly have. And then the Monday after the alley incident, when I was back in school, I met up with all my pseudo-friends, and I told them, ‘Hey, guess what I saw,’ and…”

  She gave a small, sad smile. Calvin thought it had to be one of the saddest smiles he had ever seen.

  “They fell on me like wolves on sheep. My former friends now dubbed me Witchy Tiff and started doing everything they could to ruin me. They even got most of the other students involved, too. I got mocked and taunted, locked in lockers, tripped and pushed, doused with Mountain Dew, pranked, slandered, and generally denigrated. Things got so bad my dad had to pull me out of the academy and have me home-schooled. It all happened so fast. One day I’m queen of the world, the next I’m toilet paper.

  “Under other circumstances I might have handled things better, done some swift and brutal damage control, threatened the bitches with lawsuits, barked louder, bit harder, whatever. But my other problems—the nightmares, the anxiety—they were leaving me rattled, off-balance. And perhaps more importantly my experience on that dark and flowery May night—what I saw in
that alley, or half-saw, or unsaw—it changed something in my head on a very deep and profound level. That might sound like hyperbole, but…”

  She fell silent for a moment, thinking. Calvin waited patiently. Then she went on:

  “Everyone thinks they understand what it would be like to experience an event that transcends the familiar rules of everyday reality because they see such things in movies all the time. Or at least fabricated representations of what the fabricators think those things would be like. But when you see it in real life it’s different. It’s a violation of everything your brain knows is real and possible. You’re witnessing the unreal happen in the real world. It’s like seeing a color that’s both orange and blue at the same time. Or hearing a sound that’s both loud and quiet. They’re two things that can’t exist together, an impossible dichotomy. And to experience them simultaneously induces a sort of existential trauma.” She paused, then gave him a small, self-conscious smile. “Am I making sense? I know sometimes people think I don’t. They might be right.”

  “I understand what you mean,” said Calvin. “But there’s something you need to know. You and your father weren’t the only people who were affected by whatever happened that night.”

  Tiffany looked at him sharply, surprised. “What?”

  “Do you know who Simon Bradley is?”

  “No.”

  “Well, listen…”

  He told her what Betty Romero had told him and Cynthia about Simon Bradley’s suicide and the voices Betty and her husband heard.

  “Now, I don’t know for sure since she couldn’t remember the exact date all this happened,” Calvin said, “but it has to be the same thing you and your father witnessed. There was a gunshot from the apartment building, plus a commotion in the alley in which people shouted, ‘No,’ and ‘I did it.’ Plus, of course, there were puzzling psychological aftereffects, though what Betty and her husband experienced wasn’t anything close to what you went through.”

  Tiffany stared at him with shining eyes, her breath hitching in her chest. She was close to tears, Calvin realized. Not out of sorrow or pain, but relief. Relief that she had finally received proof her story was true. That she wasn’t crazy. That she wasn’t witchy. She had always known it in her heart, but until now the rest of the universe had been reluctant to back her up.

  “Except…” A cloud passed over Tiffany’s face. “It didn’t really fade away for me. Not like it did for Mrs. Romero. In the ways that matter things only got worse. Much worse.” Before Calvin could ask what she meant, she veered off in another direction. “Who was Simon Bradley? Why did he want to kill himself? It sounds like he might be the key to everything. Unless those long-locked women in the alley are the real keys.”

  “I don’t know. Cyn and I have been too busy with the, uh…” He had been about to say “leucrota” but he was reluctant to tell Tiffany the details of the investigation until he had cleared it with the others (mainly Cynthia) first. “The investigation. We haven’t had time to really look into Mrs. Romero’s story.” He glanced at the file cabinets. “There’s also something else you should know. I don’t know for sure that it ties in with everything else, but it might.”

  “You’re full of surprising revelations today. I never guessed my visit here would be such a cornucopia of information. And here I thought I was the one who threw nothing but curveballs. So what’s your latest divulgence?”

  He opened the file cabinet and pulled out the penultimate trust, then sat down on the edge of the desk and cleared some space for Tiffany next to him. He really needed to put a few more chairs in here.

  As she sat down, her thigh brushed his, sending a warm jolt through him. Stiffening, he glanced at her. She seemed not to have noticed anything and was eyeing the binder expectantly. Her long blonde hair smelled faintly of some kind of floral shampoo.

  “Here,” he said, opening the binder to the last page, where Mr. May and Stephen Krezchek had signed and dated the document. “This is the second-to-last trust Mr. May made, the one where he names us and a bunch of other people for the first time—people, so far as I can determine, he had never met. Notice the date.”

  “November 2008.”

  “Same year as the alley incident.”

  “You think he knew about it?”

  “Possibly.”

  “But how? Aside from the Barbies at school and a few, um, mental health professionals my dad took me to, I never talked about it with anyone. And like I said, my dad kept mum about it, too. Besides, why make me the recipient of such a hefty sum just because I had a weird experience? It sounds like Mr. May investigated weird experiences aplenty over the years, and I can’t imagine he left that much money to the numerous weirdness experiencers I’m sure he must have met along the way. Why leave some to me, then? It makes about as much sense as a gopher in a hot-air balloon.”

  “True.” While she had been talking, Calvin had flipped to the page that listed the beneficiaries and the amounts they received, thinking that if Tiffany saw all the names together, it might jog loose some old, long-forgotten memory.

  Instead, when she saw the list, she frowned and said, “I thought you got the house and the land, not Emily Crow.”

  “That’s why this is the second-to-last trust. The last one just switches me and Emily around.”

  “This Emily Crow person is one of Cynthia’s relatives, I take it?”

  “Yeah. You know: Emily Crow.” Noticing her blank look, Calvin said, “Emily Crow! She got abducted and murdered here in May a few years ago?”

  Tiffany shrank down, looking uncomfortable and vaguely ashamed, as if she felt she had failed to meet some basic standard of knowledge for a Bard County resident.

  “I don’t really watch the news. Sorry.”

  “No, it’s…it’s okay. It’s just a little surprising, is all.” Frankly “surprising” seemed like far too mild a word. Calvin had not yet met anyone in the area who hadn’t heard about the death of Emily Crow. It was one of the most famous Bard County crimes of the last couple of decades, right up there with the Deermont child murders and the creepy triple homicide involving that FBI agent. Calvin was tempted to ask if she had heard of any of those, but he already felt bad for making her feel bad. “It’s okay. It’s kind of cool that you’re not all wrapped up in worldly affairs.”

  “Thanks.” She didn’t sound like she believed him.

  “But anyway, yeah, after she went missing, Mr. May amended the trust. I’m still not sure why he chose me to be the recipient of the Cuh…” He stopped himself before he could say “Collection.” He didn’t want to tell her about it yet. He wanted to surprise her. “The house and everything.”

  He was afraid that Tiffany had caught his clumsy reversal, but when he glanced at her he found that she was studying the trust.

  “I’m the only who got a book?” she asked. She tapped the spot where it listed Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales as part of her bequest.

  “Oh, yeah. I meant to ask you about that. Do you have any idea what that was about?”

  “None at all. I was hoping you would. Your Mr. May was a very confounding and mysterious individual.”

  “He played it close to the vest, I’ll give him that.”

  “I’ll give him more. Whatever his reasons for bequeathing me the book, I’m very glad he did. During my…my troubles, I read it over and over. It was comforting to read all those tales of folks whose pain turned out to be meaningful and character-building and constructive.” Then, as if the one thought somehow logically segued into the next, she looked up from the binder to Calvin and said, “You still have to show me the rest of your house.”

  “Oh.” He felt a rush of excitement at the thought of showing her the Collection. If she thought he had been a cornucopia of curveballs so far, she hadn’t seen anything yet.

  His excitement died when Tiffany hopped off the desk and added, “But it’ll have to be some other time. I need to head home. It’s getting late.”

  “Ah,” he
said, disappointed. “Well, you’re more than welcome to come back any time you want.”

  She cocked her head.

  “Am I?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She smiled. “Okay, then.”

  He smiled. “Okay.”

  They stood there smiling at each other.

  Then she said, “Oooh,” and poked his chest with her index finger, her touch once again sending a jolt all through him. “I’m gonna help you out. I’m gonna find out whatever’s findable about Mr. Simon Bradley.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I do. And not just for you. For both of us. I’m involved in all of this, too. Somehow. Someway. It all converges, remember?”

  He smiled. “Okay, then. I look forward to hearing your report.”

  She went stiff as a board and clocked her feet together and gave him a snappy salute like a soldier in a slapstick comedy.

  “Agent 144, on the case.”

  They headed downstairs and out to the driveway, where they paused beside Tiffany’s car, smiling at each other once again. The high sun glinted off the corners of her Audi and his Honda Accord. Her hair shone like spun gold, almost too bright to look at directly. Calvin found himself yearning to reach out and touch that hair, to feel it hot and silky under his palm.

  Tiffany’s cheeks started to redden again as if she had sensed his thoughts. Or perhaps she had simply been thinking something very similar.

  She looked down at her brand new shoes, then back up at him, all business and seriousness now, her smile tucked away.

  “It’s time for me to go,” she said.

  “All right.”

  She lingered a moment longer, just looking at him, obviously not wanting to go. But she had to. She gave him one last, crisp nod, which he returned, and then she climbed into her car.

  She maneuvered her Audi around until it was facing down the driveway, then drove away. Right before the car disappeared into the tunnel of trees where the driveway passed through the woods, she waved. He waved back, and then she was gone save for the swiftly diminishing purr of the Audi’s engine.

  He stood there looking down the driveway until the sound of the engine was lost beneath the peep of birds and the sough of the wind in the trees, and then, still smiling, he headed back inside.