“Show yourself!” Joe demanded.
The shadow stood up by the refrigerator, and in the red security light he saw that it was a teenaged girl. She had tousled blond hair and a face that was pinched with hunger.
“Don’t shoot me! Please don’t shoot me.”
He let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. He’d never been so relieved in his life. She was real. She was flesh and blood.
Except that…
She wasn’t the one who’d been whispering to him.
“Who are you, and what are you doing in here?” he asked her.
He didn’t expect the response he got. The girl burst into tears and came running toward him, then threw herself against him. “I’m so scared!” she told him.
“Hey, hey, it’s all right,” he said awkwardly. He drew away from her and realized that she must be a runaway.
“What’s your name?”
“Debbie,” she said.
“Debbie what?” he pursued.
“Smith,” she said.
He almost laughed out loud. She was making it up.
“All right, Debbie…Smith, why are you so scared? And what are you doing in this house?” he asked gently.
“I…slipped in before they locked up.”
“And you left the door open,” he told her.
She looked at him, shaking her head. “No, I didn’t,” she said firmly.
“All right, hang on,” he said, and pulled out his phone, thinking he should call the police. But he didn’t. He hesitated, and then he called Genevieve, instead.
“Joe?” She sounded relieved to hear from him, but also uneasy. He wondered why, but there wasn’t time now to ask her. “Gen, I, uh, I think I have need of your prowess as a social worker,” he told her.
“Oh?” she said, clearly curious. “Joe, where are you?”
“Hastings House,” he admitted.
“Hastings House?” She sounded worried.
“The door was open,” he explained, leaving out the how of it. “And I found a young…lady named Debbie Smith hiding inside, and now I’m not sure what to do with her.”
“How old is she?” Genevieve asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll come down there right away.”
“No!” He didn’t want her going out alone, especially at night. In fact, he didn’t want her going out alone at all, he realized, an opinion she would not appreciate.
“Fine. Come by and pick me up, then. You can bring her with you. I’ll stand right by the doorman until you get here.”
“Okay,” he said. “Ten minutes.” Then he hung up and looked at the girl, who looked eerie in the strange red light.
“You…you won’t call the police on me, will you?” she begged.
“Not yet. But let’s get out of here and go see a friend of mine. I’ll have to call someone to come lock this place up for the night,” he told her.
He didn’t close the door as they left, but it closed behind him, and he heard a lock slide into place.
“Shit!” the girl said, jumping.
“It must lock automatically,” Joe said, glad not to have to call someone and try to explain what the hell he had been doing there. He led her down the front walk, and when they stepped out onto the sidewalk, the gate closed behind them, as well.
“You’re not going to leave me here, are you?” Debbie asked, panic in her tone.
“No, I told you, we’re going to see a friend of mine. She’ll know what to do,” Joe said.
The traffic was bad once they picked up his car, and Joe chafed at the thought of Genevieve standing out on the street, even with her doorman. He knew he was being paranoid, but he couldn’t escape his dreams.
Nor the fear that his own sense of insanity seemed to be growing worse.
The girl at his side was silent. He realized that he wasn’t helping matters, but he wasn’t sure what to say. “So, Debbie…where are you from?” he asked at last.
She stared at him as if he had just threatened her with torture. “Here,” she said. Like “Smith,” he knew it was a lie.
“Whatever,” he muttered. “Let me try this one. What’s your favorite food?”
She’d been staring straight ahead, but she looked at him then. “At this moment? Anything not out of a Dumpster,” she told him, and he knew that, at least, was honest.
His nerves felt totally stretched by the time he finally pulled up in front of Genevieve’s apartment, and then he was afraid he would snap like a bowstring from the tremendous sense of relief he felt when he saw her there, chatting with Mac, the doorman. She ran up to the car and hopped into the backseat.
“Hey,” she said cheerfully to Debbie. “I’m Genevieve.”
“Debbie,” the girl said.
“Where should we go?” Joe asked, looking at Genevieve in the rearview mirror.
She shrugged. “O’Malley’s, of course.”
He nodded, and a few minutes later he let the two of them off in front of the pub and went in search of a parking space. Luckily, he found a place in a lot a block or so away. He made his way back as quickly as he could and found that Genevieve and Debbie were playing darts with his two favorite old timers, Angus MacHenry and Paddy O’Leary, and had claimed a nearby booth as their own.
“Joseph Connolly, that took ye long enough,” Paddy told him.
“Hey, I’m not as young as I used to be,” Joe said.
“Well, this young ’un is a pip at darts,” Angus said. “And she’s a Douglas. A nice Scottish lass.”
He looked at Genevieve, who shrugged and gave him a little grin. “A Douglas from Philadelphia,” she said softly.
To his surprise, Debbie walked over to him and gave him a quick hug, then looked at him with embarrassment.
He smiled at her, trying not to look as awkward as he felt. “Philly, hmm?” he said.
She nodded, then threw her next dart.
“Good shot,” Genevieve said encouragingly.
Joe watched as Angus challenged Debbie to a head-to-head match, and she replied with a laugh and a promise to best him.
“Runaway?” he whispered to Genevieve.
“Yes. But we’ve called her parents. They’re on their way.” She turned to him, speaking softly. “She came up here with some older friends, who wound up leaving her on her own a few days ago when they decided to get warm and cuddly with a couple of druggies. There were some toughs on the street, and she got scared, so she ran into Hastings House. Luckily, they weren’t able to follow her.”
“Weren’t able to?” he asked.
Genevieve shrugged. “Strange, huh?” she said, staring at him.
“What’s so strange?” he asked, feeling as if he were choking.
“When she was running, the gate and the door both opened. But as soon as she was inside, they both closed. And locked.”
He frowned, staring at Genevieve. “No. They must have just decided to let her go. When I was on the street, both the gate and the door were open.”
“Right,” Genevieve said, looking into his eyes.
“The security system must be going haywire,” he heard himself say.
“Haywire,” she echoed, but it didn’t really sound as if she were agreeing with him.
“Was everything all right with you today?” he asked her.
She nodded and smiled. “Great. How did it go with Larry Levine?”
He shrugged. “I believe him,” he told her.
“So…we’re not getting anywhere,” she said.
“Gen, you know as well as I do that finding out the truth can take a long time,” he said.
She nodded, biting her lower lip.
“Hamburgers coming up!” Bridget, their waitress of a few nights back, called as she made her way through the crowd milling near the bar. Debbie all but clapped her hands.
“Oh, thank you,” she said fervently.
Angus punched Joe lightly on the arm. “Thank ye kindly, Joe. Gen said you’d be buying tonight.”
“My pleasure,” Joe said, and laughed, then watched as Angus, Paddy and Debbie made themselves comfortable in the booth and started reaching for the ketchup and mustard.
“You did a good thing tonight, Joe,” Gen told him.
“I did?”
“Debbie just got in with a wrong crowd. She’s been here five days. Her parents reported her missing, but…well, you know how that goes. Anyway, if you’d called the police, it might have gotten complicated.”
“Well, then…I’m glad I called you.”
“Me, too. So, do you want a hamburger, too?”
“Sure. I’ll just go with the flow,” he said.
She grinned and started toward the bar to find Bridget and put in his food order. He slid in beside Angus on the banquette.
“Did ye hear about the way the old house welcomed the girl?” Paddy asked him.
“What?”
Debbie looked at him. She was a pretty kid, with warm brown eyes. “That house saved me tonight,” she told him softly. “Well, you did, too, of course. But it was really weird, the way the house just let me in when I needed to get away from those guys.”
“Security system,” he said, but he didn’t even believe that himself.
Because he’d heard her.
That night, he’d heard Leslie whisper to him, trying to make sure he knew Debbie wasn’t a criminal, that he didn’t shoot her.
But he couldn’t escape the sense that she’d been trying to tell him something else, as well.
He gritted his teeth. Hard. “Security system,” he repeated.
Debbie looked at him. “The house saved me,” she said somberly. “It really did.”
Hastings House, he thought. The place where Matt had died. The entry to the tunnel and the room where Leslie had died, where Genevieve had been kept prisoner.
The place was damned, he decided.
But not, he insisted to himself, haunted.
A moment later Genevieve came back and slipped into the booth next to him.
“Just how old is she?” Joe asked, indicating Debbie, who had finished her burger and gotten up to play darts again.
“Fifteen.”
“Such a kid,” he said.
Genevieve arched a brow at him. “You’ve had to look for enough missing kids. Debbie is lucky, and you know it. Most of the time, a kid of fifteen, she’s already on drugs. Then she’s hooking.”
“Then she’s Candy Cane,” Joe said.
“Yeah.” Genevieve said, studying him. “Have you heard from her yet?”
He shook his head. “I’ll go back over tomorrow,” he told her.
A few hours later, Debbie’s parents walked in. There were a lot of tears as they embraced their daughter, then thanked Joe and Genevieve.
A few minutes later, when it was time to leave, Debbie gave Genevieve a long hug. After that, she walked over to Joe and looked at him solemnly. “Thank you,” she said simply.
“Stick with the folks, huh?” he said. “They seem like nice people.”
“I guess.” She hesitated, then whispered, “He’s not my father. He married my mom. They have a new baby.”
“They still love you.”
She squared her shoulders. “Look, I know I was a jerk. I just thought it would be cool to see New York. And…I know this is gonna sound weird, but I think that house used me to get to you.”
He shook his head. “Debbie, it’s just a house.”
She stared back at him gravely. “No. It’s not just a house. That house…it breathes. It’s like it has a heartbeat. Honest. It’s not evil, though. I’m telling you, it saved me. But it wanted you.”
He felt a slight tremor shoot through him. There was a kid in front of him—a kid—telling him that Hastings House was…alive.
Ridiculous.
She had been scared, traumatized, that was all, and she was seeing things as spooky and chilling, when there was undoubtedly a perfectly logical explanation.
As soon Debbie had left with her parents, Joe decided that he needed a beer.
Later, he drove back to Genevieve’s.
He pretended exhaustion. He couldn’t help it. There was a whisper in his ear, and that whisper was Leslie.
But when he fell asleep, he dreamed again. And in his dream, Genevieve was walking toward him. They were on a beach, or maybe they were in the clouds. She was wearing something light that trailed behind her in the breeze. She was smiling, her expression radiant. Her hair whipped behind her like auburn silk.
And her eyes…
Her eyes were that endless blue.
She smiled, excited, as if she were expecting something…something good.
Then the bruises began to appear on her throat, and her eyes widened and began to bulge as she stared at him, choking, gasping for breath.
He heard her whisper, Help me. Please, help me, and he woke with a start, bolting upright in the bed.
He didn’t wake her, though. Genevieve was asleep at his side in a soft yellow tank top and ladies’ boxers, breathing easily. The light filtering in from beyond the drawn curtains played brilliant fire tricks with her hair.
He lay back down, convinced he really was losing his mind, then jerked into a sitting position again.
Debbie had claimed that Hastings House seemed to breathe. That it had a heartbeat. That it had tried to save her.
And the house—or someone in it—had whispered to him.
Dead people whispered to him.
He stared up at the ceiling, teeth clenched. No. He didn’t want to talk to ghosts. He didn’t want to listen to dead people and he damned well didn’t want to believe that a house could be haunted, much less alive.
Suddenly he was afraid, but not for himself. For Genevieve.
Afraid that his dreams meant something, that she was in danger.
He perched on one elbow and watched her sleep, wanting to touch her, not wanting to awaken her.
But her eyelids fluttered suddenly, as if she sensed him, sensed his concern, even in the depths of her sleep.
Her eyes opened, and she caught him studying her.
“What?” she asked, and started to sit up.
“Nothing,” he said softly.
“Then…?”
“I was just watching you,” he said, knowing it was both a lie and the truth.
She reached up and touched his face in that special way of hers. Then her knuckles brushed down over his chest, and the next thing he knew, she was pushing him down against the mattress and straddling him. When he would have touched her in return, she whispered a soft but commanding, “No.”
She bent and quickly brushed her lips against his.
Then she teased his chest with her kiss and the silky caress of her hair.
Finally she moved lower, but not until he was so aroused that he couldn’t stand it did she allow him to reach for her, lift her and bring her back down on his erection. He felt as if the world exploded along with him as he entered her.
Later she slept again, and he lay beside her knowing that he had kept the truth from her. That she didn’t know he was crazy. That he had gone to Hastings House and heard the whisper of the woman with whom he’d once been falling in love.
Leslie.
A dead woman.
And Gen didn’t know that he kept seeing her eyes as the life was choked out of her.
She didn’t know that the man she was depending on was slowly losing his mind.
In the morning, he left before she woke up.
He was suddenly anxious, because Lori Star had never contacted him.
At Lori’s apartment, he once again got no response to his knocking. Before he could move on to Susie’s place, her door opened and she came out to speak to him. She was clearly distressed. “I was going to call you today. I don’t know what to do. I don’t think Lori ever came home.”
He frowned. “You haven’t seen her since Sunday?”
“No. And I don’t know what to do. I mean, I’m not her next of kin or anything. And I always heard that a person had to be missing for forty-eight hours before anyone could fill out a missing-persons report, but I don’t even know if she is a missing person. Oh, God, I’m so upset. I just don’t know what to do.”
“It’s all right. But it’s definitely time to fill out a missing-persons report. I’ll go down to the police station with you.”
“Police station?” she said, and cleared her throat. “Um, Mr. Connolly, you should know…I’ve been arrested before.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he assured her.
But she wasn’t going to go down to the station with him, he quickly realized, so he put through a call to Raif.
“That’s Missing Persons,” Raif told him.
“Raif, this is the woman who was on television after that pileup on the FDR, saying she was psychic.”
“Then talk to Traffic,” Raif said.
“Raif, dammit, Sam Latham was in that accident. It might be connected.”
“And it might not!”
Exasperated, Joe held his temper. “So do you have any answers on the Thorne Bigelow murder yet?” he demanded.
“No,” Raif admitted after a moment, then sighed. “All right, I’ll get someone from Missing Persons and come over.”
“We’ve got to get into the apartment,” Joe added.
“Ask her friend if she has a key,” Raif told him. “Maybe she’s supposed to water the plants or something like that.”
Raif turned to Susie. “Do you have a key to the apartment?” he asked.
She shook her head, and Joe went back to his call.
“She’s a missing person, Raif. Can’t we get a warrant on probable cause to find out if she happens to be lying dead inside?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Raif said. “All right, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Eventually Raif showed up with, as promised, an officer from Missing Persons. Susie did her best to answer all the necessary questions, but it was difficult. If Lori had living parents or other family, Susie had never met them. She didn’t even know if Lori Star was her real name.
While the officer worked with Susie, Raif, who had the warrant in his pocket, entered the apartment. Joe followed him in without asking permission.
“There’s nothing out of order,” Raif said. He sighed, turning to Joe. “Look, I know you thought there was something believable about her, but…the woman is a prostitute. Who knows? She wasn’t bad-looking. Maybe she found someone she could, um, ‘work’ for a while. Maybe she’s shacked up in a motel somewhere.”
“She didn’t leave with any of her belongings, not according to what Susie told us,” Joe said. “She went ‘to see a man about a horse.’ It sounds to me like she went out to meet someone, and that it didn’t go very well.”
“Either that,” Raif argued, “or she went to meet someone and it went very well. Didn’t you see Pretty Woman?”
“Raif, are you serious?” Joe demanded.
“No, but…I don’t know what to tell you.”
Frustrated, Joe looked through Lori Star’s apartment, but try as he might, he couldn’t see anything out of order, either. Nor had she left a note of her destination scribbled down on her phone pad.
“Can you trace her phone records, at least?” Joe asked Raif.
“I’ll get someone on it,” Raif promised.
At last, with nothing else to do, Joe left, still entirely frustrated.
But as he left Lori’s apartment, he thought of the first time Genevieve had come to him about Thorne Bigelow’s murder.
Quoth the raven: die.
New York City hadn’t been especially good to Poe. The man had been self-destructive, true, but he had come to New York to make his fortune. In the end, the city hadn’t afforded him the fame he had craved, much less any riches. Down and out, he had left the city to take a job in Philadelphia.
After he had left the city, a murder had occurred, that of Mary Rogers, known in the papers of the day as the beautiful cigar girl. She had disappeared on a Sunday.
Just like Lori Star.
Mary had left her home of her own free will.
Just like Lori Star.
Suddenly a sense of panic seized him, and he was desperate to see Genevieve, to make sure she was all right. He raced to her building, gave his name to the security guard and was cleared to go up. She met him at her door, an anxious look on her face.
“Joe, what is it?” she asked.
“Lori Star never came home,” he told her.
He barely noticed that she returned to the phone on the counter and told someone, “I’ll call you back later, okay?”
“Did you call the police about her?” she asked.
“Yes, of course.” He met her eyes. “I’d like to go to my apartment,” he told her.
“All right.”
“And I want you to come with me.”
“Sure,” she agreed.
He felt some of the tension easing out of him.
Genevieve was fine. There was no reason for him to keep feeling this awful sense of panic.
“Joe, what’s going on with you? What’s wrong?” she asked him.
“Nothing. It’s just…an uneasy time,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I’m not going to be happy until we find Thorne Bigelow’s killer.”
She looked at him and nodded, but she knew there was more to what was bothering him than that. But arguing with him wasn’t going to get her anywhere.
He tried to keep things light as they drove out to Brooklyn. He asked her about Eileen, making sure she was keeping in regular touch with her mother.
“Of course,” she told him.
“What are we doing here?” Genevieve asked him when they got to his place.
“I live here,” he said as lightly as he could.
“No, I meant what are we going to do while we’re here? What are we looking for?”
He hesitated. “This may be really farfetched and stupid,” he told her.
“I’m listening.”
“All right, let’s suppose that someone really is reenacting Poe’s work with real victims. Thorne was the first victim. And Sam…maybe that was intentional, too, or maybe the killer just saw a convenient chance and took it. But if the two are connected, the murderer must have been scared shi—alarmed when Lori Star started getting attention from the media.”
“Even if they’re not connected, Lori Star’s certainty that she knew what happened on the highway might have disturbed someone,” Genevieve pointed out.
“True.”
“You think she’s dead, don’t you?” Genevieve asked him.
He started to deny it, but then he met her eyes and tried not to turn away. Tried not to imagine her being strangled, even though the vision haunted him night after night.
“Yes,” he said.
“And…you think all three deaths are connected, don’t you? Even though you’re the one who told me that Poe’s characters never committed vehicular homicide?”
He stared back at her. “Yes,” he admitted flatly.
“Okay, so what are we doing here?”
“Research.”
“On…?”
“‘The Mystery of Marie Roget.’ You take the story itself. I’ll look up what really happened.”
She looked skeptical, but she accepted his collection of Poe stories, while he turned to his computer. They worked in companionable silence for a while.
The Internet was full of leads, but also sent him from page to page following them up. He made notes as he went.
“There’s a forword to the story in your book, you know,” Genevieve said. She had curled into the extra chair in his office.
“Yes?”
“It was originally published in three segments. Poe probably knew the real girl, but he was living in Philadelphia when she was killed. He thought the story would put him on the literary map. He was convinced that the girl’s first disappearance—she had disappeared for several days a few years before her murder, then reappeared—had something to do with her death. He had planned on making the murderer a Navy man, but then they discovered that she might have gone for an abortion, and that she might have died in a house in New Jersey, a small inn of sorts, owned by a woman named Loss who had three sons. They thought the sons might have tried to dispose of Mary’s body. No one ever went to trial and, according to this preface, no one ever discovered the truth of her death. Poe altered his story before the final segment was published so it would agree with the latest facts in the investigation.”
“When her body was first found,” Joe said, studying his monitor, “the coroner noted that she’d been strangled. That there were bruises around her throat, and a piece of her torn dress was so tightly tied around her neck that it was embedded in the flesh.”
He looked at Genevieve. “I don’t believe Mary Rogers died because of a botched abortion, though that might have been what sent her to New Jersey. I believe the coroner’s initial report was right and she was strangled. But what I believe isn’t important. What matters is that I think the murderer also believes that she was strangled. And that he acted on that.”
“Joe, we don’t even know for sure that Lori’s dead, much less how she died,” she said.
“Let’s take a ride over to New Jersey,” he suggested.
“We’re going to find her in New Jersey?” she asked doubtfully.
“Her body will turn up in New Jersey,” he said with complete certainty.
Just then his cell phone started to ring. He answered it with a brief, “Connolly.”
“Joe, it’s Raif.”
His friend sounded strange, Joe thought, and asked, “What is it? Have you found something?”
He could hear the deep breath Raif took before answering.
“Yes.”
“What?”
“We’ve found her body.”
Genevieve was staring at him, frowning intently.
“Lori Star?” Joe asked, though he didn’t really need to. He knew that it was her. And he could make an educated guess as to what condition they’d found her in, too.
“Yeah, or so it seems. It’s in pretty bad shape.”
“You found it in the river on the New Jersey side, right?” Joe said.
“How did you know?” Raif demanded.
“I’ve read ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget,’” Joe told him.
“What? Oh, hell, a Poe story, right? Shit. I’m going to have to brush up on my reading.”
“There was a real murder, too.”
“Great,” Raif said. “Just what we need.” Joe could see Raif in his mind’s eye, sitting in the passenger seat and talking on the phone while Tom drove.
To Jersey?
“So this murder winds up in the hands of the New Jersey police, huh?” Joe said.
“Yeah, but the lead detective isn’t a bad guy. I told him I had an interest, which he understood. I explained that we’re all looking at a connection between Lori Star and our other vics. Folks can be territorial in law enforcement, but not usually stupid, so we’re welcome to be in on it.”
Joe winced, running his fingers through his hair. “Can I tag along?” he asked.
“That’s why I called you,” Raif said. “We’re on our way over to Jersey now.”
Bingo, Joe thought. “Tell me where I’m going and I’ll meet you there,” he said.