She had to put more distance between herself and her uninvited guest. She ordered him to sit down in the chair again, and she back stepped carefully until she could perch on the arm of the couch and rest her gun hand on her knee.
She knew she should call 911 or her own precinct house. She should have done it right away for that matter, but she’d wanted to have some kind of handle on the situation before she made the call. She didn’t want to sound unhinged, even if she was feeling like Alice in a free fall down the rabbit hole. She’d try one more time to get a sensible answer out of him. Then, whether or not she succeeded, she’d call for help.
“I’m still waiting to hear how you got in here, Mr. Drummond,” she said, temporarily putting aside the matter of the vanishing gun.
“Well now, the truth is that I never actually left.”
“All right, then,
when
did you gain entrance to this house?” Was it possible that he’d been here since yesterday? Was he the shadow she’d thought she’d seen in the bedroom doorway? The shape she’d seen in the window last week? A chill leapt up her spine, and she steeled herself to keep from shuddering. It wouldn’t be wise to show vulnerability.
“You really expect me to believe that you don’t know?” Ezekiel no longer sounded amused. “Mac said he’d make sure you knew. And one thing about Mac—he always kept his word.” His tone was accusatory, and Rory actually felt herself squirm under his suddenly baleful gaze.
“What exactly am I supposed to know?” she replied sharply, determined not to be put on the defensive. Her unwelcome guest knew Mac? Had talked to him about her? It didn’t seem possible that this encounter could become any stranger.
Ezekiel ignored the question, a frown working over his eyes. “He said he’d put it all down on paper so that there’d be no misunderstandin’,” he muttered as if he were trying to make sense of this apparent lapse on Mac’s part.
Rory realized that he could still be playing her. He might have seen the notice of Mac’s death in the obituary column. Her dad had listed his brother’s full name along with the nickname that most people knew him by. But even if this assumption were true, she still had no idea what the intruder’s motivation could possibly be, which brought her right back to the question of his sanity.
Okay, time was up. From her perch, she grabbed the portable phone from its base on the side table adjacent to the couch and dialed 911.
Oh my Lord, the letter!
Before anyone could pick up, she clicked off and set the phone down again. How on earth could she have forgotten the letter? The one Friedlander had given her, the one that Mac wanted her to read as soon as possible. She’d put it into the manila envelope with the rest of the papers. Although she’d already closed out Mac’s bank accounts and transferred the title documents to a safe deposit box at the bank, the few remaining papers, including the letter, were still in the envelope on the passenger seat of her car. It was hard to imagine any explanation that would make sense at this point, but she had to give Ezekiel the benefit of the doubt before turning him over to authorities. For all she knew, Mac had given the man a key to the house, which would at least answer one of her questions.
“Mr. Drummond,” Rory said, rising. “I have to get something that I left in my car. With any luck, we should have this whole thing sorted out very soon.” She wasn’t ready to admit that she might be at fault in this encounter. “But I have to make sure that you stay put for the next few minutes.”
The only door in the house that could not be opened from the inside was the coat closet that was tucked beneath the staircase. Rory marched her unwelcome guest across the room to it with the gun at his back. He walked with a peculiar gait that was jerky and poorly coordinated, as if he suffered from some neurological problem.
She opened the closet door and switched on the low-wattage bulb that illuminated the cramped space, and Ezekiel, although still clearly disgruntled, stepped inside without argument, which in retrospect should have set off some alarms in her head.
She retrieved the envelope from the car and took it back inside with her. But before she sat down to read the letter, she went back to the closet to assure her prisoner that she would soon be letting him out.
“Mr. Drummond, are you okay? It will just be a couple more minutes.”
There was no response.
“Mr. Drummond?”
Nothing. He couldn’t have used up the oxygen in the closet that quickly. But if he were claustrophobic, he might have fainted. Rory drew the gun out of her pocket where she’d temporarily stowed it and cautiously unlocked the closet door. It was a shallow closet, and without clothes hanging from the single pole, it was immediately clear that Ezekiel was no longer in there.
She spent the next twenty minutes going through the house in search of him. She had no idea how he had managed his escape, but it was just one more unanswerable question to add to the growing list of them. Once she was certain that she’d checked every conceivable place in which a man over six feet tall might hide, she decided that he must have slipped out of the house while she was retrieving the letter.
She locked all the doors and windows and reset the alarm, and when the house was as secure as she could make it, she sat down on the couch with her gun beside her and opened Mac’s letter.
Chapter 5
My Dear Li’l Mac,
As they say in those hammy old B movies, “If you’re reading this letter, I guess I’m dead.” That was the easy part. I’m not exactly sure how to tell you this next part, which is probably why I didn’t tell you up until now. I kept meaning to, but I was afraid it might change our relationship, that you might think differently of me. Hell, I even think differently of me. So hold on, here goes:
I don’t know how much you remember about the early years of my detective agency. Suffice it to say that it paid my bills, most of the time anyway. When I bought the house, I could barely hang on to it. In fact your folks bailed me out a few times when I couldn’t manage the mortgage payments. But then pretty suddenly the business turned around. Everyone said that I’d finally found my groove, my inspiration, my sixth sense. They all had different names for it, but technically none of them were right. And I never tried to correct their misconceptions. I couldn’t. By the time you’ve finished reading this letter, I hope you’ll understand. And I hope that you’ll forgive me for having been less than honest in this one regard.
Anyway, as I got better and faster at closing each case, word of mouth spread and it wasn’t too long before I had the luxury of choosing the ones I wanted to pursue. My clients were happy, and the money was finally rolling in. Which brings us to the big “reveal,” as they say on those reality shows. I didn’t do it alone; I had help. A federal marshal by the name of Ezekiel Drummond. This guy can out think Colombo. He’s the one who’s inspired, intuitive, in the groove, whatever you want to call it. But that’s not the whole story. Zeke came east from Arizona on the trail of the man who’d kidnapped and strangled several young girls. Even after their files had been relegated to cold case limbo, Zeke refused to give up, made it his life’s work to find the son of a bitch right up until the day he was shot in the back in the living room of what is now your house. That was on October 16 in 1878 and he’s been there ever since.
Okay, L’il Mac, about now I imagine that you need to take a deep breath. Maybe a couple of them. Don’t worry, your uncle has not come unhinged, though I imagine that explanation might be easier for you to live with.
Now you have every right to choose never to enter the house again. You can put it on the market today and never have to deal with Marshal Drummond. I would never hold it against you. But I’ve known you all your life and I’ve never seen you run away from anything. I’m betting that given a little time to process what I’ve just dumped on you, you won’t run from this either. There’s a lot you can learn from my friend Zeke.
As always, you have my love, sweet girl. I’m not quite sure how things work where I’m headed, but if I can pull some strings, I’m determined to spend the first part of eternity watching over you.
The letter was signed:
With love, Your Big Mac.
Rory put the letter down on the cocktail table, away from where the spilled tea had dried to a pale brown circle. Tears had risen in her eyes as she came to the end of the letter, but her mind was in chaos. All she could think to do was grab her gun, get her purse from the kitchen and leave the house as fast as possible.
The sun had just scaled the horizon when she jumped into Mac’s Volvo. She started driving with no destination in mind, because her mind was too preoccupied to come up with one. She stopped at traffic lights and stop signs. She signaled before turning. She maintained something close to the speed limit. Yet when she finally bothered to look around, she found herself on Jericho Turnpike two towns away in Syosset, with no real sense of how she’d gotten there. She needed someplace where she could stop and think before she found herself in Ohio.
It was too early to go back to her parents’ home, especially if she didn’t want to explain why she was, quite literally, up at the crack of dawn. Then she spotted one of the ubiquitous Starbucks signs up ahead. Low on options and craving caffeine, she pulled into the lot.
Given that it was a Sunday and most decent folks hadn’t even awakened to go to church yet, she was the only patron in the coffee shop. The middle-aged man behind the counter gave her a broad grin, pleased to have a customer to wait on. She ordered a mocha frappachino with extra whipped cream. If he thought it was a strange beverage for that time of day, he didn’t say so.
Rory settled herself at a table in a back corner. She sipped the creamy confection that was only loosely related to plain old coffee, and tried to bring some order to the anarchy raging in her head.
She wondered if her reaction would have been different if she’d read the letter immediately, as Mac had asked her to do. She decided that under the circumstances, it wouldn’t have mattered very much, except that she might have questioned her uncle’s state of mind as she now questioned her own. In the absence of a family gene for a highly specific hallucination, she would have to accept that Ezekiel Drummond was real, or at least that he had been. Since Mac had never mentioned a belief in ghosts during any of their long talks over the years, he must have gone through a hectic period of adjustment himself before he was able to accept his unexpected housemate. On the plus side, if Mac’s letter were to be believed in its entirety, Drummond had been a good man, the best kind of man, one who went to his grave trying to find justice for those young girls and their families. Of course, the downside was that if she wanted to keep the house, she was going to have to learn to live with a ghost.
Rory sighed and took a big, icy swallow of her frappachino. How she would love to crawl beneath the covers of her childhood bed where she had once dreamt of things fearful and fantastic but had been able to leave them all behind her when she awoke.
She had long since finished her drink when the tables around her started to fill up with the usual complement of drowsy, caffeine-starved Sunday patrons. She tossed her empty cup away and went back to her car. She’d had no epiphanies and the only conclusion she had reached was that it was going to take more than a couple of hours and a sugar-caffeine high to come to terms with this new world order. Although it might prove to be impossible, she needed to put it on a back burner of her mind and try to go on about the normal business of her life. With any luck, her mind would acclimate in its own good time. Any decision she made regarding the house would have to wait until then.
Since the normal business of her life now included Jeremy Logan’s case, she’d planned to drive out to Mount Sinai for a firsthand look at the house where his sister died. According to Jeremy, the place was up for sale again and there was an open house scheduled for today. The owners had apparently decided that they didn’t want to live in a house where someone had died. After the past twenty-four hours, Rory couldn’t say that she blamed them. In any case, their decision came at a fortuitous time, since she’d had no idea how she would have gotten inside to look around if the owners had been living there. She couldn’t very well have told them that she’d taken it upon herself to reopen the investigation into the death of their interior decorator, at least not if she wanted to keep her day job. Now she could just say that she was house hunting.
But before that, she needed a shower and a change of clothing. It was seven thirty by the clock on the dashboard, which would put her at her parents’ house a little before eight. She hoped that was a reasonable enough hour to deflect any suspicions about how her first night in Mac’s house had gone.
When she arrived she found her parents in the kitchen drinking coffee. Since they seemed a bit surprised to see her there so early, she admitted that it had been a little weird to spend the night alone in Mac’s house. There, close enough to the truth that it didn’t feel like lying. Her father gave her a hug and said that it had been a little weird to spend the night without her, too, and her mother was so pleased to see her that she whipped up a batch of pancakes.
R
ory found The Woodlands of Mount Sinai without a problem. Construction had almost been completed on the thirty-acre subdivision. She passed streets aptly named for woodland creatures, where families were already settled in their new homes, busily pursuing the American dream. Children rode bicycles and skateboards, played catch and threw Frisbees. Fathers mowed their lawns and washed their cars. Mothers pushed baby carriages or stood in small groups chatting. Dogs barked from behind fences. The scene was so idyllic that it was hard to believe that just around the corner Gail Oberlin had either fallen or been pushed to her death.