I overheard when Eddie got the news that Mitch Mabry and his goons had been killed, and the machine shop burned to the ground.  From the sound of it, Eddie had called a mutual friend to find out why Mitch might have turned on him, who he'd been working for.  Eddie said he had hoped to talk to Mitch directly, but wasn't sure if it was safe to.  He wanted to know what the son of a bitch had done to his partner.  Not assistant; he called me his partner, and he sounded angry.  I got a warm feeling in my belly at that.  I almost felt bad for eavesdropping.

"You say someone took Mitch and all of his cronies out, with maximum prejudice," Eddie said.  There was a pause.  "Tortured?" he said, surprised.  "Punishment, maybe?  Okay, don't speculate.  No, I have my own suspicions.  Thanks, Greg.  I think they've found me.  Talk to you later."

I ducked back into my room as Eddie came out.  He didn't see me.  He went downstairs, and called Martin's name.  I went to Lexi's room and down her secret staircase, then through the kitchen and into the turret room, where I could sit in the shadows and see Eddie and Martin in the library.  I strained my ears, and could hear them, too.

Lexi was still working obsessively on the scattered mess of car parts she had arranged in there.  The high-ceilinged library and ballroom were the coldest rooms in the house, not surprisingly.  Lexi's furnace worked hard to keep up with the winter that raged outside, but there was only so much to be done with all of that air space.

"Afternoon," Eddie said to both of them.  Martin turned and nodded.  He had a mug, probably of mulled cider, which Lexi had made a crockpot full of--I had seen it in the kitchen.

"Gozer the Gozerian, Gozer the Destructor...the traveller has come," Lexi said in a gravelly voice, without looking up from the car part in her hands.

Eddie and Martin looked at each other, apparently with some unspoken agreement that they could talk in front of Lexi if she was acting insane.  "Martin," he said.  "Talk to you for a second?"

"Sure," Martin replied.  "What's up?"

"I just wanted to mention something to you, that came up in the course of my business, see what you thought."

"Your patients, you mean?"  There was a hint of sarcasm in Martin's voice.  I wondered if Eddie realized that Martin knew he was a fake.

Eddie grinned.  He knew.  "Something like that.  On one of my other cases.  During the course of our usual discussion and...idea exchange, some other information came up.  Completely unrelated to the case at hand, of course, but extremely interesting information."

"I'm totally unfamiliar with the laws, on that.  What's the protocol for a situation like that?" Martin asked, taking a sip of his cider.  "It sounds like an easy way to get in a hell of a lot of trouble."

Lexi stood up and started fussing with the engine on the stand in the middle of the room.  "Choose and perish," she growled, apparently to herself.  "Choose the form of the Destructor."  I could barely hear her from so far away, but I recognized the pitch and tone of her words as being from Ghostbusters, and figured it out.

"Well, naturally, it's unethical to use such information.  It would be like insider trading, on the stock market.  Bad news.  So my inclination is, of course, to forget about it."

"I'll bet that would make a lot of people happy."

"With this kind of information, I think you're right.  Trouble is, I'm concerned that others may suspect I've found out what I've found out."

"Why are you asking me about it?"

Eddie shrugged.  "It's helpful to have another person to bounce ideas off of.  I talk to you, and get my thoughts in the open, my ducks in a row, so to speak, and it helps me to solve my internal dilemma, you get it?"

"Yeah," Martin said.  "I guess I do.  So have you solved your dilemma?"

"I think so.  I'm not interested in using this stuff I've learned.  And I don't have anything to gain by making trouble for the folks who want it kept a secret, you know?  The trick is to let them know that I'm on the same page as they are, and that we can come to an agreement."

"Hope it's not mutually assured destruction," Martin said.

"I think everyone in the world has learned that that's a shitty option, don't you?  I'm sure things will settle down, once I've had the chance to prove that I'm not after the same things everyone thinks I am."

"You sound pretty confident."

"I have to have faith in a positive outcome," Eddie said.  "Otherwise I wouldn't be in this business.  You see more failures than successes."  He smiled and left the room casually.  Martin went nonchalantly back to watching Lexi work.

I realized that I had clenched my fists.

*  *  *


Lexi came looking for me later that day.  I was in the kitchen, munching on bread and jam.  She had homemade bread, and I couldn't get enough of it.

"Treasure!" she burst out.  "I have to show you what I've found," she said.  I put my bread and jam on a paper towel, brushed my skirt even though nothing was clinging to it, and followed Lexi to the front door.  "Outside?" I asked, disappointment in her voice.

"Oh yes, oh yes.  Some of the most wonderful things are outside, you know..." she said, opening the front door.

Apparently Lexi couldn't comprehend that it was incredibly cold out and not everyone liked snow.  I wondered if she even felt the cold.  "Let's put coats on first, Lexi.  You're some kind of fucking penguin."

"Penguin?   Hardly.  I'm better dressed," she said, rocking back and forth on her heels, doing a little dance in place.  I brought her boots and coat as well and she put them on.

"Nice day for a walk," Taiisha called suddenly.  I looked up, letting fly a gasp of surprise.  She was on the second floor landing, looking enigmatically down at us.  The cloudy sunlight filtering in through the windows up there made her look as if she were in black and white.

"It's...Gray," Lexi said, taking her time in recognizing Taiisha.  "Every day is a nice day for a walk.  If you know where to walk."  Lexi went out the front door and I followed her without looking up at Taiisha again.

It wasn't any warmer.  The sky was sunless.  A solid ceiling of clouds threatened more snow, a threat the Weather Channel had backed up earlier.  If it snowed much more, I wouldn't be able to leave the porch without ending up neck-deep in snow. 

The snow didn't slow Lexi down.  She was already off the porch and headed for the derelict garage that stood a dozen yards or so from the house.  It looked as though it had been a carriage house originally.  It had weathered seventy-odd years' indignities with less composure than the house had; I could see cracks in the doors and walls where gray sunlight peeked through.  The roof was slate, with some missing and broken tiles.  I followed Lexi's path through the snow, which was still up past my waist.  Lexi seemed to be following an earlier trail, although I had never seen her go to the carriage house.

"Don't like her much," Lexi said.  I assumed she meant Taiisha.  She was talking more to herself than to me.  "One can't like everyone, true, but her I don't like.  She can scramble her own eggs, thank you very much.  She's the one, isn't she?"

"The one?"

"The one you told Malice about.  She's not what she says she is, and she scares you, so I thought she might be the one."

I got a sinking feeling in my gut.  "She is," I said as softly as I could.

"That's not a good thing, is it?"

"No."  I was too afraid to give her more of a warning than that.  I wanted to tell her to steal Eddie's car and get away, to drive as far away as she could, but I just said no and hoped she understood.  There was some childish fear that if  voiced the threat, it would become more real.

Lexi just nodded.  "I'll fortify," she said seriously.

"What are we going to see?" I asked.

"Hm?  Oh...shomething wonderful, dahlink," she intoned.  She slipped through one of the cracks in the doors with a giggle.

I followed.  The shadows weren't as deep as I expected from the dim day.  There was an old car parked in the middle of the garage.  It was a big car, some kind of limousine, with running boards and spare tires mounted in the front fenders.  It was the kind of car that pinstripe-suited gangsters would have stepped out of in a movie about Prohibition.  The car had a feeling of sleek opulence, even though it had been there so long that all four tires had gone flat, and it was gray-brown with a thick coating of dust.  Lexi stepped softly toward it, a hand extended.  She moved as if she was entranced, as if she was afraid of startling it.  After a few careful steps her fingertips touched a gracefully curving fender, and she brushed dust off of it.  I could smell it, the warm soft smell of old things and a coarser scent of oil or rust.  It made the air seem clearer.  Warmer too.  Or was I just inheriting some of Lexi's obvious excitement? She walked around the car, making noises to herself.

"It's old," I said unnecessarily.  "What is it?" I asked her.

"It's a Packard," she said.  The fact that her recently deceased fiancée's name was Packard was not lost on me, but I didn't remark on it.  "1939.  It's a Twelve.  A touring sedan."

"What does that all mean?"

"V-12.  A twelve-cylinder engine.  Touring sedan is the body style.  I think it's Marion's car.  You know, one of the ghosts."

A streak of goosebumps raced up my arms; I was afraid of the car, of the way it suggested that maybe Lexi was right about her house being seriously haunted.  The headlights stared like big, blank eyes.  I went closer anyway.  Lexi opened the driver's door and leaned inside.  The smell of old upholstery became stronger.

"I thought I'd share it with you, since I told you Marion's story.  I feel a little bit closer to her."

I laid a hand on the cold metal, like she had.  "Something like that," I said.  There were more fingerprints in the dust, where Lexi had been running her hands all over the car.  "Something like that," she said.

Lexi walked around the car.  "It's whole," she said.  "Thirty-two thousand miles.  I bet she parked it one day and just left it."  She unscrewed the gas cap and sniffed, then replaced it and dropped to her hands and knees to look under the car.  "It's going to be a nightmare to put it back together.  It's been sitting here at least forty years.  It'll take all of next year just to adjust the valvetrain."  She sounded like she relished the challenge.

I looked in the open door.  The scent of the interior rushed out at me, the smell of antique cloth and a hint of powder, delicate and feminine.  I was smelling a dead woman.  This was what one of the house's previous tenants had smelled like when she was alive.  She'd sat there.  I touched the seat and an involuntary shudder ran through me.  "You've fixed cars like this before?" I asked.

She nodded.  "Natch.  Ren and I..." Lexi's train of thought derailed when she got to the name.  She took a tremulous breath and looked out the window, deleting the emotional discord.  It was upsetting to watch.  Seeing that door slam shut behind Lexi's normally expressive eyes was violently unnatural.  Without even thinking about it, I took a step forward and put my hand on Lexi's.  "You don't just find Packards like that," she said finally.  "It's a special thing."  She went on about the car, as if to prove she wasn't talking about Ren.

I closed the door gently and walked around to the other side of the car.  There was a screech of protesting metal from the front of the car.  I looked up to see that Lexi had folded one of the hood panels open.

"Yick," she said.  "Rodent residence."

I tripped over something on the floor, looked down and saw a deep crack in the concrete-slab floor.  It was half an inch wide under my feet, widening to several inches as it ran toward the wall.  The floor was sagging toward the gaping crack.  "Lexi."

"Hmnh?"

"Do you know the floor in here's caving in?"

She came around to my side of the car and looked at the crack with an appraising frown.  "You certainly are, aren't you? What's wrong with you?" I never got used to her habit of talking to inanimate objects.  Lexi walked along the edge of the crack to its widest point at the wall.  She tapped the floor experimentally with her foot, then squatted and put her hand in the crack.  "S'deep," she said.  "I can feel the slab moving up and down a little."

"Maybe there's a basement," I said.

"Carriage houses didn't usually have them, but this is a weird house.  Maybe there is."  She stood up.  "At any rate, I need to drag this six-thousand pound shithead out of here before he falls through the floor.  I'll get Furious to drag him out.  What shall I name you?" she said, addressing the car.

"What do you mean, you'll need to get furious?"

She laughed.  "Oh, no no no.  Furious is our--my--Suburban.  He can tow anything, even a certain three-ton car with its drivetrain frozen solid."

"You laugh all the time but you have a cat named Malice, a car named Furious.  A shrink would love to peel your brain."

"Many have tried," Lexi said.  "Most have gone mad themselves.  Walk not down that path."

That made me laugh.  "And speaking of frozen solid," I said, "can we go back inside now?"

All the way back to the house Lexi talked about going and getting her truck so she could move the car.  I half-listened; I was intent on not falling in the snow.  Despite my comments, I was cozy and warm in the coat Eddie had bought me, though my fingers and nose were as frozen as usual.

I went back to the kitchen.  Lexi followed me and sat at the kitchen table, folding her hands.  She was lost in thought, and I didn't interrupt her.  I had thoughts of my own.  I selected a can of Campbell's soup from the several dozen in the pantry, in which the cans had all been arranged by color rather than content thanks to Lexi.  She claimed to have done it so that the French wouldn't be able to find anything, when they invaded her house.

Lexi accepted the bowl of chicken and rice soup I heated for her and began eating without much interest in it.  At least she was eating.  "I think the car was special to Marion.  A little stodgy-Gothic, but you can't blame Packard for that.  They were hard-core luxury, back in the day, you know.  Marion was a lady who liked the finest stuff."

"Have you ever seen her?"  I already had a good idea of the answer.

She nodded.  "One of the first nights I was here, she opened a box of books and threw them all over the place.  I think she was looking for something to read."

I heard someone walking down the back hallway toward the kitchen.  It was Martin.  "Oh oh, what are we gossiping about?" he joked.  I was noticing more and more that he had a smell that I didn't like.  It reminded me of cigars, even though he didn't actually smell of them.

"Shoes and ships and sealing wax," Lexi said.  "Cabbages and kings." She laughed.  "He's so confused," she said.

"He never read Lewis Carroll," I said.  Lexi favored me with one of her sunshine smiles.  I liked being part of her secret world.

"How's your back?" Martin asked.  He opened the refrigerator.

"Fine."

Lexi looked at me, concerned.  "What's wrong with your back?" I shook my head slightly, and she said "Oh, wait, I already know that."

"May I have some of your orange juice?" he asked, holding up the container.

"You can eat anything you want," Lexi said, "except for the cats, that cheesecake, or Nikki, unless she invites you to."  I glared at her.  "And I don't expect her to do that.  So enjoy the orange juice.  I hear a truck."

"What?" Martin and I said it at the same time.

"I said, I hear a truck.  Out front."

"Delivery truck?"

"No, smaller.  Probably a spute.  Probably a Ford."

"A what?" Martin asked.  He was holding the pitcher of orange juice.  Lexi had him so confused he seemed to have forgotten it.

"A spute.  An SUV.  A sport-utility vehicle.  Sport ute.  Spute.  Get it? It's just evidence of the collapse of the English language, which I'm trying to propagate.  Soon everyone will talk like me, in short words which represent longer ones.  You'll be able to communicate a whole paragraph in six or seven words.  Think of how quick the State of the Union address would go."

"I see," he said.  "And how do you know it's a Ford?"

"Fords have a goofy induction noise.  Bet you it's an Explorer.  With a V8.  Go and see if I'm right," she said.  "And check for the V8 badge."

Martin was obviously impressed, and went to check.  He put the orange juice down before he went.

Lexi got up and poured herself a glass.  "I wonder who it is? I don't know any Explorers." She stopped and looked at me abruptly.  "Where have all of my friends gone, Nikki?"  She sounded terribly alone and lost.

"You're hiding from them," I said.

She seemed to appreciate the honesty.  Lexi leaned close and whispered to me.  "I skipped my pill this morning, you know."

I knew, but I didn't let myself react.  "You sound more lucid."

"Thank the Packard.  It makes a nice focus."

"Thank yourself," I said.  "Are you feeling okay?"

Lexi tilted her head and made a noncommittal sound.  "I don't think I'm ready to start going through boxes and staring memories in the face just yet, but I'm okay."

"It's a start.  If...if I can help, I will."

"Same to you," Lexi said with a secretive smile.

Martin came back into the kitchen.  "It's a friend of yours.  I think his name's Ian?"

"Oh, lovely," Lexi said with a smile.  "I'll have to make chili for dinner."