“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.” Mrs. Owens smiled—a crooked smile, since only the right half of her mouth lifted. “I keep forgetting. So foolish of me. What’s your name again?”
“Sarah.”
“Sarah. Yes. Of course. And you’re a friend of . . .”
Sarah sighed. “I live in the house on West Thirty-fifth Street,” she said. “I rent from you. You were going to tell me about the house.”
Mrs. Owens frowned. “Now, what stories did you hear? We don’t generally tell people. You know how it is. Rumors and gossip. And people don’t feel comfortable. Although there has never been any trouble. Some people won’t live in a house where there has been a murder. They just don’t like the idea. But the house isn’t haunted, you know. It was only my late husband who felt that. It was a personal thing, because it was his mother. And his father.”
“When did this happen?”
“Oh, a long time ago. Back in the Twenties. And no one who lived there ever since—although it was empty for awhile after, I believe—ever had any trouble. There was never any reliable report of . . . ghosts, or anything like that. My husband found it too painful to go back to the house where his parents had died so horribly, but that was understandable. No one else ever saw or felt anything in the house, despite all the talk about witchcraft and black magic, and the nasty rumors . . .” Mrs. Owens moved up on her pillows slightly, seeming more alert than she had been yet.
Sarah stared at her, questions bubbling in her mind, but did not speak. She was afraid of asking the wrong question and sending Mrs. Owens off on a tangent, slipping and sliding among all her memories of years past.
“You mentioned black magic and witchcraft,” Sarah said carefully. “What did that have to do with the murders?”
“It was the reason for it. That’s what they said. She—Albert’s mother—she was involved in some sort of magical practices.” Mrs. Owens sighed and closed her eyes. Then she opened them again and smiled her lopsided smile at Sarah. “Sorry, dear. I don’t mean to bore you.”
“You aren’t boring me. I want to know about it,” Sarah said. “You were telling me about your husband’s mother. Was she a witch?”
“Oh, my, no, she was a very sweet woman, from what I understand. But different. Perhaps overeducated for her time. Interested in things which weren’t common for Texas in the Twenties. Imaginative, sensitive, but very strong-willed. When her husband ran off she took it very hard, and the people she turned to for friendship were not . . . ordinary folks. They involved her in strange things. Magic, they called it. Shocking things . . . It’s all in her diary. What happened, or what she thought happened. Perhaps she was crazy, but it wasn’t her own craziness. It was those people, that man she got involved with, a sorcerer or magician or whatever he was. That man who called himself Jade.”
It changed everything. Mrs. Owens’ story created a new picture. A man called Jade in the 1920s—a demon called Jade nearly sixty years later—they were connected, possibly even the same being. What did it mean?
Sarah hoped the diary Mrs. Owens had spoken of would tell her more. Perhaps it held the clue to what Jade was, and how he could be destroyed.
Mrs. Owens had expressed a sleepy, drifting surprise at Sarah’s interest but had agreed that she might borrow and read the diary. Impulsively, Sarah planted a kiss on Mrs. Owens’ thin, dry cheek.
“Thank you,” she said. “You don’t know how this may help! I’ll be back to see you after I’ve read it. Maybe I’ll have a story to tell you!”
But in spite of her impatience to read the diary, Sarah had to wait. Several hours passed before she was able to find the neighbor who could open Mrs. Owens’ house for her, and then she spent a frustrating half-hour searching for the book. She found it at last, not in the drawer where Mrs. Owens had thought it would be, but on a shelf between two Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. It was a small volume covered in dark red leather. The diary of Nancy Willis Owens for the year 1923.
Sarah felt excitement rising in her as she held the book. Flipping through it, the name Jade seemed to leap off the handwritten pages at her. But she restrained herself; she didn’t want to read it in bits and pieces, but all at once. There was an answer in this book; maybe the answer she was looking for. Just as it had seemed most hopeless, she had been presented with a new weapon against her enemy.
Realizing she’d had nothing to eat all day, Sarah drove by the Burger King. Impatience to read the diary made her eat quickly, but something still nagged at her mind.
And then she had it. That photograph—the torn snapshot which she had found the day she had taken the house. She remembered now where she had seen the face of the man in her dream, the stranger she had recognized. He had been the man in the photograph.
But what had she done with it? Sarah scrabbled through her purse without success before remembering—seeing the image so clearly she could not doubt it—that she had put the torn picture away in her desk drawer. It was in the house.
Shoving aside her half-eaten hamburger, Sarah gnawed her lip instead. Now that she had thought of it, she was certain that the photograph was yet another connection—not merely with her dream, but with Nancy Willis Owens and the murders that had taken place there decades earlier, and with the man or the spirit called Jade. She had to see it again. Clear as it was in her memory, Sarah knew she would not be content until she had held it in her hand again.
So despite her promise to Beverly, despite her promise to herself, Sarah drove back to the house on West 35th Street, and this time she went inside.
Nothing happened. All was calm.
Sarah looked around the familiar, empty kitchen, her mind alert for signals of another presence. Jade, wherever he was, made no sign. Sarah wandered through the house, wondering where he was. In the air? In the walls? As well ask where the soul resided in the body, she thought, and yet the mind demanded a material answer.
She found the photograph in the desk drawer where she remembered putting it, and she gazed at it eagerly. The shadowed face, the faintly glinting eyes, told her nothing, did not even mock her.
Sarah suppressed a faint feeling of disappointment, and made another slow circuit of the house, both the diary and the snapshot clutched together in one hand. It was still daylight, and the slanting rays of the sun lit the high-ceilinged rooms gently, making the worn wooden floors gleam. It was a comfortable house, Sarah thought with regret, but it wasn’t hers. It belonged to Jade, even if she could not feel his presence.
She told herself to go. She knew she should leave the house, drive across town to the library, find a comfortable chair and settle down to read the diary. But the stifled, public air of a library did not appeal to her; nor did the idea of returning to the Marchants’ apartment to face Pete’s guilty hostility and Beverly’s bewilderment.
What she wanted was to stay here. To curl up on her own couch in her own house, in comfort and privacy. Why shouldn’t she do something so simple? She felt safe, and why shouldn’t she trust her own feelings? If there was a trap in her logic, Sarah didn’t want to know about it. She would stay.
Feeling pleased with herself, Sarah took a beer from the refrigerator and settled down on the couch to read.
Chapter Ten
February 2
I can delay no longer. Tomorrow I must take my children and move into the new house. To think that once I longed for this day . . . It was to have been our home, but now it is merely another trial to bear, a strange place, without warmth or meaning. Walter and I planned that house together, watched it grow as we watched our children. Without him, it means less than nothing to me. Somehow I imagined that when the house was finished he would come back to me, and we would be a family once again in our new home. Foolish of me, I know, but even now, as I write, sitting in this room for the last time, spending the last night in the house where I was once so happy, I still expect a reprieve. I still strain my ears for the sound of his footstep outside, the sound of his voice calling the children as he enters. I tell myself that he is gone forever, but I cannot believe it. I cannot believe that I mean so little to him, that the years we spent together, the love we had, has all been for nothing. To be thrown away as if I meant nothing to him. My pride, I suppose. Aunt Gena said as much, although I was not meant to hear; said that it was my haughty ways, my pride in my good education, my constant talk of books and art that drove Walter to the arms of a simpler, more properly submissive woman. But Walter liked my learning, and my pride, when he met me, and he must have known—surely I proved, in all the years we were together—that I never thought of anything more, any higher calling, than to be his wife and the mother of his children? I would have done anything he asked. I would still do anything. Anything, to have him back.