"And where does she do that?"
"In her study. I'll show you," he said, leading Jack toward a spiral staircase. "She used the second bedroom for a while but all her reference materials pretty quickly outgrew that, so we converted the attic for her."
Lew's short leg made for slow progress on the narrow treads, but finally they reached the top. Jack found himself in a long, low-ceilinged room running the length of the house; a beige computer desk near the staircase, a window at each endan easel by the far windowfour filing cabinets clustered in the center, and all the rest an enormous collection of papera Strandesque array of books, magazines, pamphlets, article excerpts and reprints, tear sheets, and flyers. The shelves lining every spare inch of wall space were crammed full; the tops of the filing cabinets were stacked at least a foot deep, and the rest was scattered in piles on the carpeted floor.
"Her reference materials," Jack said softly, awed.
He sniffed the air, heavy with the scent of aging paper. He loved that smell.
"Yeah." Lew walked past one of the shelves, running a finger along the book spines. "Everything you could ever want to know about UFOs, alien abductions, the Bermuda Triangle, Satanism, telepathy, remote viewing, mind control, the CIA, the NSA, HAARP, the Illuminati, astral projection, channeling, levitation, clairvoyance, seances, tarot, reincarnation, astrology, the Loch Ness monster, the Bible, Kaballah, Velikovsky, crop circles, Tunguska"
"I get the picture," Jack said when Lew stopped for a breath. "All for her Grand Unification Theory."
"Yes. You might say she's obsessed."
Jack noted Lew's use of the present tense when he referred to his wife. A good sign.
"I guess so. I was going to ask you what else she did with her time, but I guess we can skip that."
"She was also into real estate for a while. Not that we needed the money, but she got her license and did a few deals."
"I doubt that has anything to do with her disappearance."
"Well, it might. She didn't do real estate the way most people do. She never gave me the details, but she did tell me her activities were related to her research."
"Such as?"
"Well, she'd buy a place herselfalways in the developments along Randall Road on the south side of the highway. Then she'd hire some men to dig here and there around the yard, then resell it."
"Did she tell you what she was looking for?"
"She just said it was part of her research. And I couldn't complain much, because she usually resold the properties at a profit."
One weird lady, Jack thought, looking around. And part pack rat, to boot. I'm supposed to find a clue to her whereabouts in this Library of Congress of the weird? Fat chance.
Jack wandered down toward the far window. The Sound was visible through the bare branches of the trees. As he turned he caught a glimpse of the canvas on the easel, and it stopped him cold. This one made the grim paintings downstairs seem bright and cheery. He couldn't say why the seemingly random swirls of black and deep purple bothered him. The longer he stared at it, the more heightened the feeling that things were watching him from within the turbulent shadows. He gave into a sudden urge to touch its glistening surface. Cold and ...
He pulled back. "It feels wet."
"Yes," Lew said. "Some new paint Mel started using. Supposedly it never dries."
"Never?" He checked his fingertipsno pigment on them, even though they still felt wet. "Never's an awful long time."
He touched the surface again, in a different spot. Yes ... cold, wet, and
"Damn!" he said, jerking his hand away.
"What's wrong?"
"Must be something sharp in there," Jack said as he stared at the tips of his index and middle fingers.
He didn't want to say that he'd felt sharp little points digging into them, like tiny teeth snapping at his flesh. But the skin was unbroken. Still felt wet, though.
"Let me show you something on her computer," Lew said, heading for the desk.
With a final glance into the hungry depths of the painting, Jack shook off a chill and followed Lew, still rubbing his moist fingertips.
At the deck, Jack noticed a green and blue image of the earth spinning on the monitor screen; and as it spun, chunks began disappearing from its surface, as if some invisible being were gnawing at it. After the globe was completely devoured, the sequence looped back to the beginning.
"Cheerful screen saver," Jack said.
Mel programmed that herself."
"Imagine that."
"But here's what I wanted to show you," Lew said, fiddling with the mouse. The apple-core shaped remnant of the earth disappeared, replaced by a word processor directory. Lew opened a directory labeled GUT.
"Gut?" Jack said.
"G-U-T. That's how Mel refers to her Grand Unification Theory. And look," he said, pointing to the blank white screen. "It's empty. She had years of notes and analysis stored in that folder, and someone's erased it."
"The same people who have her, you think?"
"Who else?"
"Maybe the lady herself. She knew she was going away; maybe she copied the contents onto floppies and"he resisted saying gutted"cleared the contents herself to keep them secret. Is she the type to do something like that?"
"Possibly," he said, nodding slowly. "It never occurred to me but, yes, that's definitely something she might do. She was pretty jealous about her researchnever gave anybody but Salvatore Roma so much as a peek at what she was up to."
Roma ... that name again. "Why him?"
"As I said, he was helping her. They were in almost daily contact before Mel ... left."
Mr. Roma was looking better and better as the possible bad guy here.
"Did you contact him?"
"No. Actually, he contacted me, looking for Mel. She was supposed to call him but hadn't. He was worried about her."
"And he had no idea where she might be."
"Not a clue."
Why don't I believe that?
Jack looked around the cluttered study and the missing Mel's words came back to him: Only Repairman Jack can find me. Only he will understand.
Sorry to disappoint you, lady, he thought, but Jack doesn't have a clue.
"How about friends? Who'd she hang with?"
"Me, mostly. We're both pretty much homebodies, but Mel has acquaintances all over the world via the Internet. Spent a lot of time on her computer."
"How about her car? What does she drive?"
"An Audi. But I haven't gotten a call that it's been found anywhere."
"No other contacts?" Jack said. He felt his frustration mounting. "What about family?"
"Both her folks are dead. Her father died before we met, her mother died just last year. Mel was an only child so she inherited the house and everything in it. I keep telling her to sell it but"
"She has another house? Why didn't you tell me?"
"I didn't think it was important. Besides, I searched the place just yesterday. She wasn't there. I've been there before, but never actually searched through it. I found something odd in the cellar, but"
"Odd? Odd how?"
"In the cellar floor." He shrugged. "Nothing that would relate to Mel's disappearance."
We're talking a very odd woman here, Jack thought. Two odds sometimes attract.
"Can't hurt to look," he said, desperate for something to give him direction. "Where is it?"
"It's a ways from here. A little town named Monroe."
"Never heard of it."
"It's near Glen Cove."
"Great," Jack said. "Let's take a look."
Not that he had much hope of finding anything useful, but this Monroe was back toward the city, and he had to head in that direction anyway.
But if the Monroe house yielded as much as this place, he'd have to return Lew's down payment. This was going nowhere.