The hallway lights stopped pulsing, and the living room lights bloomed bright once more, the furniture returning with the sudden illumination.
Somehow the dark living room had not been this room now well lit. It had been another version of this room in a distant time, though his mind could not process what his intuition told him.
From elsewhere in the house, a voice rose in song. A clear, beautiful soprano. Crystalline notes. A sorrowing Celtic ballad.
David went to the swinging door between the hall and kitchen.
“If my Irish boy is lost He’s the only one I adore And seven years I’ll wait for him / On the bank of the Moorlough shore.”
He pushed through the door into the kitchen.
She sat at the table, staring into her teacup as she sang.
“Farewell to Sinclair’s castle grand / Farewell to the foggy dew Where the linen waves like bleaching silk And the falling stream runs still.”
She appeared to be in her late forties. Under a shaggy mop of auburn hair, her face—lovely, freckled, elfin—was known to him. He had seen a photograph of her with her husband, Patrick, when he had visited Estella Rosewater in Santa Barbara. Nanette Corley. Stained-glass artist. She had died of cancer twelve years earlier.
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The melancholy song had an eerie edge that raised the hairs on the nape of David’s neck, and he stood transfixed by the sight of the woman.
Neither surprised by nor concerned about his sudden entrance, she rose from the table and took her cup to the sink and rinsed it under running water and put it aside on the drainboard.
“Near here I spent my youthful days But alas they are all gone For cruelty has banished me / Far from Moorlough shore.”
As though the song worked a spell of silencing, storm light flared as bright as ever at the window, but no thunder followed.
He said, “You’re Nanette Corley.”
She turned to him, her stare solemn and disapproving, her voice cool. “Nanette died of cancer. She’s rotting in a grave.”
“Then who are you?”
“Technically, I’m nobody. I won’t be born for another sixty-seven years.”
“What the hell does that mean?” David was frustrated by the endless mysteries, deceptions, and evasions.
“It means you shouldn’t have come here. Didn’t Richard Mathers tell you this place is haunted?”
“You’re no ghost.”
“What a keen mind you have. Razor sharp. Penetrating.”
This sarcastic woman wasn’t the kind and gentle artist whom Estella Rosewater had described.
“Who are you?” David asked. “What are you? What is this damn place?”
“It’s the last place you’ll ever be.”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“There’s nothing but death for you here.”
“Where’s Maddison? I’m taking her out of here.”
Her laughter was sour with mockery. “Who’s taking whom?” She crossed the room to the swinging door. “You’re doomed, scribbler. But she’s still a fool, putting the mission at risk, and for what? For you? As though you wouldn’t run screaming if you realized what a monster she really is.”
She stepped into the hall, the swinging door whisking the space where she’d been standing, as though it swept her out of existence.
Storm light tore the sky, and fierce demonic faces of white fire flickered in brief witness at the windows.
He’d imagined various things that might happen when he entered the house, but his imagination had failed him. The strangeness of the place, markedly greater than on his first tour, unnerved him.
He would have followed the woman, but the rhythmic throbbing and the electronic hum rose again from under the house, drawing his attention first to the floor and then to the connecting door to the garage. The entrance to the basement was out there, and it seemed to him that the fullest answer to this mystery might lie below.
Moving toward the door, he noticed that the digital clocks on the double ovens and on the microwave were blinking zeros.
The garage wasn’t the filthy space that it had been before. Clean. Well ordered. The cabinetry had been restored. Maddison’s Mercedes 450 SL and the beige Ford van were parked side by side.
He made his way to the basement door, tried the knob, and found it locked. The key was on the back porch, in a box attached to the bottom of one of the chairs.
“You must want very much to die.”
Turning, David discovered Patrick Corley just this side of the door to the house. He looked as powerful and furious as when he had used a Taser in the cemetery groundskeeper’s office.