Mirror Image (10 page)

“Dad, oh Dad. Jesus Christ I'm sorry. I just felt someone standing behind me, and I thought…”

“Its OK,” he gasped, taking Manny's arm, allowing her to haul him to his feet. He was ashen, his breath rasping through tortured bruised muscles. “I'm sorry, I just saw the door was unlocked and I thought…” He stopped. He hadn't been thinking. He had opened the door purely on impulse—just in time to see the faceless figure coming towards him, barely distinguishable in the gloom. And then he had felt the pain. “At least it's nice to know that the martial arts classes you're taking work.”

“Dad, I'm sorry…”

“Don't worry about it. But what were you doing here?”

Manny shrugged. “I just came for a look.” She shifted her head, pointing with her chin. “At that.”

“Curiosity killed the cat,” he said, and then immediately regretted it. “So what do you think about it?”

Manny shrugged “It's very ugly, it's … plain. And disappointing. I'd been expecting something else.” She didn't add that the mirror disturbed her. But the image of the face in the glass had already faded to a vague memory, in which she could barely remember the features on the face except that it had been female, yes definitely female. “And what are you doing down here anyway? I thought you were supposed to be in bed.”

“I was.”

Manny suddenly noticed the item he'd been casually holding away from her, partially shielding with his body. “Dad, what have you got in your hand? Is that a gun? I didn't know you even had one.”

“It came in with a job lot of Second World War militaria. Tony cleaned it up and got it working. It's a Browning Hi-Power. Don't tell your mother,” he added immediately.

“But I thought you had banned guns from the property?”

“I did, but I kept this one.”

“And what are you doing down here with it?”

Jonathan Frazer lifted the weapon, smiling uncomfortably. “Well, I thought that whoever had come for the mirror might just try again. They've had two tries, their next one might be successful.”

“So what do you think you're going to do?”

“I'm going to spend the night here and wait for them.”

“No. Fucking. Way. Dad, this is absolutely crazy. Tony's dead; his death was an accident. Diane is dead, and we're not sure how or why.”

He lifted the gun. “This sort of evens the odds.”

“Dad, please don't do this, don't even think about doing this. Let the police handle it. Call them, they'll come round.”

“Manny, I have to.”

“Why?” she demanded fiercely, the same look of obstinacy appearing on both their faces.

“Because two people are dead, two people I knew very well, one of whom was among my closest friends. And I want to know why. I owe it to them; I owe it to myself.”

Manny glanced back into the darkness towards the mirror. “You're crazy, this is crazy,” she muttered. “And all because of a mirror…”

“I know. But I have to do it.”

“Dad,” Manny said finally, “will you do something for me?”

“Anything, you know that, sweetheart.”

“Take the gun, and blow that fucking mirror apart!”

“Manny!”

“Do it Dad; destroy it before it destroys you, before it destroys us all.”

Jonathan Frazer raised the gun and pointed it at the glass. His finger curled around the trigger. But he couldn't pull it.

 

17

T
HERE WERE
three text messages from Celia on Jonathan's cell phone, each one becoming increasingly unpleasant. The final message was delivered in person by Manny. She stood in the doorway, arms folded across her chest, head tilted to one side resting against the doorframe.

“And what else did she say?”

“That's all.”

“I doubt that very much,” Jonathan said.

“She just cannot understand why you won't come back to the house.”

“I've already explained all this to her,” he said patiently.

“She's concerned.”

Jonathan grunted. “She's afraid I'm going to shoot someone and bring more police around. That's what really upset her about the two deaths, you know that. Neither Tony's nor Diane's deaths caused her a second thought: she's more concerned about what the neighbors think, and how it affects her standing in the community.”

“And the cost of the house,” Manny added.

“That too,” he agreed. “So, no.” He shook his head. “I'm here for the night. At the very worst, it'll be uncomfortable and I'll probably catch pneumonia. At best, I might just catch this person and finish this, once and for all.”

“You left out the bit where you might die.”

“I did,” he admitted. The thought curled and twisted at the back of his head. If the scarred man had killed Tony and Diane, he would have no hesitation about killing again. “I told you, I've made up my mind.” Jonathan Frazer didn't look around. He was busy clearing a free area in the center of the room around a chaise longue. With great difficulty he had maneuvered the mirror to the center of the room, leaving a clear path to the door. Anyone entering through the doorway would be immediately visible, though he, hopefully, would be invisible in the shadows.

“And what happens if someone comes looking for the mirror?”

Her father glanced over his shoulder, his bruised face pale in the gloom. “Then I'll hold him for the police, and maybe I'll ask him a few questions before they arrive.”

“And the gun?”

“For personal protection only,” he muttered, turning away and not meeting her eyes.

“Dad…”

“Yes.”

“Be careful, Dad. Don't do anything…”

“Heroic?” he suggested.

“Stupid,” she said.

Jonathan Frazer straightened, dusting off his hands. “Don't worry. You know I'm a coward.”

“Yes, that's why you came charging in here the other night, and nearly got yourself killed. That's the sort of thing cowards do.”

“You sound like your mother,” he said gently.

“Dad!” she said in disgust, turning and walking away into the evening.

*   *   *

J
ONATHAN FRAZER SPENT
the next two hours wandering around the guesthouse, looking through some of the pieces Tony had been in the process of repairing. Some of them had been there for years and now would never be repaired. There was far too much stuff here: it was no way to run a business, he had certainly overbought. But then he hadn't expected the downfall in the economy and the slump in the interior design business. Although that was no longer his primary source of income, he relied on it for cash flow. His father had made the money, and then secured it with shrewd investments; all he had had to do was to consolidate.

Sitting in a late Victorian basketwork chair, he wondered what he would do now without Tony. Every firm that dealt in retail of any sort had someone like Tony Farren, someone whose knowledge was essential to the running of the business. Without Tony, things would be different; he would try to replace him, but finding someone with knowledge and experience was going to prove extraordinarily difficult and expensive. Also, he'd built up a lifetime of trust and respect for Tony.

Jonathan stood, the chair creaking and crackling beneath him. He would have to start taking a more direct hand in the day-to-day running of the business. And the first item on the agenda would be to sell off as much of this stuff as possible. He'd take it down to the store and maybe have a sidewalk sale. Looking around, he realized that he had tens of thousands of dollars tied up in stock.

He pulled aside a flatiron desk, wincing as glass slivers from the shattered light bulbs stung his hands. Diane had done a good job of cleaning up most of them, but … but she'd never completed the job. First thing in the morning he'd get someone in to replace the lights, and check the circuits: obviously something had overloaded them, some power surge from the house maybe, or the alarm. Yes, that was it, the alarm had overloaded, tripping the breakers, though he was surprised they simply hadn't just died rather than exploding so spectacularly.

Then, maybe with Manny helping him, he could close the store for a couple of days and bring Robert, the sales assistant, in to help him clean the place up, do a little re-organization. Maybe he'd give some of the odd pieces of junk that Tony had been working on to a consignment store, see if he could make a little quick money.

He only realized the light was almost gone when he found himself squinting to read the sale label on a bookcase. He looked at his watch, it was late, and he was hungry, but reluctant to go back to the house and possibly have another argument with Celia. And he didn't want to leave the guesthouse.

He maneuvered his way through the mess and lay down on a brown leather chaise longue, stretching out and crossing his feet at the ankles. Lifting the gun out of his waistband, he rested it on the top of his right leg, his hand loosely wrapped around the grip, the barrel pointed away from him where the mirror was a pale rectangle against the shadows. Carefully, deliberately, he turned the gun to point down. He didn't want it going off accidentally and destroying the leather chaise. Or the mirror.

If you dealt with any old, antique or second hand artifacts for any length of time, you soon learned that there certainly were some pieces which came with a history and were
unlucky—
cursed was probably too strong a word for them. Every dealer had stories about cursed pieces. An Arizona dealer he knew had a penchant for knives, he'd been collecting them for years, and had one of the finest collections in the Southwest. A couple of years ago, he'd purchased a second hand Gypsy Jack folding knife online at a bargain price. When it had arrived he had opened the gleaming blade, admiring its finish and as he had closed it, it had snapped back unexpectedly, slicing off the tip of his finger.

An accident.

As he was attending to his wounds, his three-year-old son had somehow managed to open the knife. It dropped from his hands and stabbed him in the foot.

An accident.

Deciding to quickly resell the knife, one of the sale assistants almost severed his little finger while retracting the blade.

An accident.

But three accidents with the same piece? The dealer investigated. It turned out that the knife had belonged to a teenager who had used it to stab both his parents to death. The same day, the collector took the knife and flung it into the Yaqui river.

Such stories weren't unusual, there were many unlucky pieces out there. A lot of antique jewelry had bad luck attached to them and a couple of years ago, he'd almost bought a bed which was reputed to be cursed: a couple had committed suicide in it. Tony had dissuaded him.

So was it unusual that the mirror could be cursed in the same way? Or was he simply allowing his imagination to run away with him?

Tony was dead. But Tony had had accidents before. Jonathan smiled, remembering the time he had become locked in an eighteenth-century sea chest, and then again when he'd become trapped in a fourteenth-century suit of armor. He took risks, he did stupid things … and he drank. Who was to say that he hadn't been drinking that day, overbalanced and pulled the mirror down on top of him? Accidental death, the coroner had said.

And Diane?

Well, she knew the rules about playing around in the workshop. You simply didn't do it, you concentrated and focused. She'd learnt that rule a long time ago when Tony had been teaching her how to use a SKILSAW. She had taken her eyes off the piece of wood for one second; had Tony not wrenched the plug from the wall, she would have lost all the fingers on her right hand.

And the scarred man? Why had he broken into the guesthouse—for the mirror certainly—and yet it wasn't exactly hidden the night he had broken in. And even if he had found it, what was he going to do with it? It had taken four firefighters to lift it off Tony Farren's body; how was one man going to haul it away? A sudden thought struck him: hadn't the scarred man mentioned Tony's name? Maybe he'd been involved with Tony, maybe there'd been an argument and the mirror had been pushed down onto him.

Jonathan Frazer sat bolt upright. This was craziness. He could feel his head spinning, his thoughts chasing one another. He was thinking like a madman, curses and plots and murders. He must be still feeling the effects of the valium the doctor had given him. Maybe that's why he was so confused and sleepy.

But what would happen if he fell into a drugged sleep now? What would happen if someone broke into the guesthouse tonight? A pulse started in his temple and he felt his heart begin to pound in a panic attack. All the windows were screened, the skylights secured, so the only way in was through the door and that was bolted on the inside. He climbed up out of the chaise longue and lifted a box of tacks from the workbench and scattered them over the floor. He tied a length of fishing wire across the entrance to the little clearing where he had positioned the mirror so that anyone approaching him wouldn't be able to do it without making enough noise to wake the dead …

Frazer began to laugh, a dry hissing sound, at the thought of waking the dead—Tony Farren's and Diane Williams's faces floating before his eyes. The laughter went on for two minutes before dissolving into gentle snoring.

 

18

T
HE FULL
moon was high in the heavens, the sky clear and cloudless, its light cold and sharp across the dirty streets.

Edmund Talbott stood at the window of the apartment and looked out over the almost deserted street through a tiny rent in the newspaper he had pasted over the glass. The young woman in a too-tight, too-short dress and thigh-high boots had finally left her post on the corner across the road, obviously hoping to pick up a late customer coming out of the 7-Eleven at the end of the road.