She didn’t fully trust Mr. Young. He withheld too much. She still didn’t know if he chose to withhold-or if some power prevented him from revealing too much. But she knew that he possessed information that could help her find an answer. By not sharing such information with her, he made her job more difficult-just as he had made Kip’s job more difficult, and no doubt Dr. Fifer’s job and the jobs of all those who had tried to end the curse before her. It was as if, on some level, Mr. Young didn’t want them to succeed.
But that’s crazy, Carolyn thought as she reached the other side of the street. His grief is very real. He has seen so much tragedy. He wants it to end. I have to believe that he wants it to end.
On the sidewalk ahead of her, a dreadlocked young man played the xylophone. Carolyn smiled to see a trained gibbon, attached to the man’s leg by a leash, dancing to the music its master made. People had stopped to watch and laugh.
If only I could stay here in New York, Carolyn said. Never go back to Maine.
Maybe she should have refused the assignment. But she wasn’t able to walk away. Not then, not when she realized that someone would die and that she was their only chance. And certainly she couldn’t turn her back on the job now, not when it might be Douglas who faced death.
I like him, Carolyn thought. I like him a great deal.
That was why she had been distant the day she left. The emotion was too troubling. The last time she had fallen in love, she had been hurt. Badly. Now, she might fall in love only to watch the man she loved walk into that room and never walk back out. And it would be because of her. Because she never found the solution.
“Diana must have the answer,” Carolyn said out loud, heading up the brownstone steps and ringing the doorbell. “She must.”
“Who is it?” crackled the voice over the intercom.
“Diana, it’s Carolyn Cartwright.”
“Oh, yes, Carolyn. Come upstairs.”
The door buzzed, and Carolyn pulled it open.
The tenement was in bad repair. The plaster on the walls was cracking, and the entire building had sunk a bit, leaving the steps at an angle. Diana lived on the very top floor, the fifth. There was a rickety, early twentieth-century cage elevator, but Carolyn preferred the stairs. She had been here several times before. Once she’d gotten stuck in the elevator. She didn’t want that experience again.
Only slightly winded, Carolyn finally made it to the fifth floor. Diana’s flat was in the rear of the building. She had lived here for more than fifty years, since she was a little girl. It had been her mother’s flophouse then, a place where she turned tricks for money. Diana had been born from one such liaison. She never knew who her father was, but she thanked him for one thing: the extraordinary power she had. “It had to have come from my father,” Diana told Carolyn. “Because my mother was as ordinary as she could be.”
Yet not so ordinary, really. It took extraordinary courage to do what Diana’s mother did. Against the furious demands of the state and city welfare departments, she insisted on keeping her baby. She understood that Diana would never be like other girls, but no one else, she said, was going to raise her baby girl.
Carolyn tapped lightly on the door. “Diana?” she called.
As she expected, the lock in the door slid open, and the door opened inward on its specially designed spring. Carolyn’s eyes flickered instinctively to the ceiling of Diana’s flat, where a cord ran from the door across the length of the room to Diana’s custom-made chaise by the window. Diana could lie there and open the door-with her teeth.
Carolyn smiled. Diana held the cord between her teeth, because she had no arms. Nor did she have legs. She was just a head and a small torso, thirty-three inches from top to bottom. She was wearing only an oversized white T-shirt emblazoned with a big Superman S.
“Carolyn!” Diana called, spitting the cord from her mouth. “How wonderful to see you again.”
Carolyn closed the door behind her, even though she knew, with a different tug of her cord, Diana was perfectly capable of doing it herself.
“Hello, Diana,” she said. “How are you doing?”
“Busy writing another book.” The walls were lined with Diana’s books, volumes describing the various escapades she had assisted with. There were a couple of adventures with Carolyn recounted in those pages. Of course, Diana disguised it all as fiction, changing names to protect both the innocent and the guilty. She didn’t want any more freaks coming by her door to bother her. She had enough as it was.
Like Carolyn.
“You’re getting rich off these books,” Carolyn said, sitting down in a chair opposite Diana’s chaise. “Why don’t you buy yourself a nicer place?”
“I could never leave the East Village,” Diana said. “This is home. I don’t need a lot of space, as you know.” She winked.
Carolyn smiled. “I’ve just come back from Maine. So much space up there.”
“I’ve been up there a few times. You know, being in the country makes me nervous. All those crickets and birds.” She shuddered. “I can’t fall asleep without the sounds of the city outside my window.”
Carolyn nodded. “I admit it’s been quite a comfort being back.”
“It was that bad, huh?” Diana narrowed her round blue eyes. She was a blonde, and rather pretty. Her face looked far younger than her fifty-plus years. “You indicated on the phone that this was one real doozie of a case.”
“You know, every other case I’ve investigated, there has always been that little possibility that a rational explanation could be found, that maybe the supernatural wasn’t really involved. Not this time.”
Diana grimaced. “Why do you speak as if rational and supernatural are opposites? I would have thought the experience with George Grant would have convinced you that the supernatural is a real, provable, palpable phenomenon.”
“Well, Diana, you know, some people say George Grant was just taking drugs, or that maybe his wife had given him drugs, and that’s why he appeared that way…”
“He was a zombie!” Diana maneuvered herself up with the stubs that served as her shoulders, moving her face forward at Carolyn as she made her point. Her small breasts heaved against the Superman insignia. “Come on! You saw him! I was with you that day on the pier. We both saw him!”
It was true. The image of George Grant’s face emerging from the shadows had never left Carolyn. At the time, it had been the most terrifying moment of her career. She thought it was possible that Diana saved her life that night. Hidden in a baby carriage, Diana had peered out to see Grant moving toward Carolyn. He walked with the gait of the undead, his eyes blind yet somehow seeing. It was only as he passed Diana’s carriage that he slowed down-stopped in his tracks by the words she said and the blood she spit at him. She had held the small balloon in her mouth, waiting for the moment to propel it at him with her tongue. The blood of a chicken. As the balloon popped and the blood stained the front of Grant’s shirt, Diana had uttered whatever mumbo jumbo she had been taught. Carolyn had watched in awe as the man staggered, then fell to his feet. When he awoke, hours later, he was once again himself.
“Good thing you had me with you,” Diana reminded her now. “You thought I was just there to observe. But I knew I had to be ready.”
“If George Grant really was a zombie, then you saved my life,” Carolyn said, smiling.
“What do you mean if?” Diana sighed.
Carolyn just went on smiling. “Did you ever want to be anything other than a witch doctor?”