Onyx Webb: Book One Read online

  Onyx turned out the light and lay back down. “Get the money back, Ulrich,” her voice came from the dark. “Just get it back.”

  The next day—October 29, 1929—Ulrich worked his eight hours installing windows from scaffolding hanging on the outside of the eleventh floor of the hotel. Besides an unusual amount of noise from police sirens on the streets below, it was an uneventful day.

  When his shift ended, Ulrich went to the Purple Pig in the 4800 block of N. Broadway, the establishment he’d been at the day before—its attraction being a Greenland pig covered in purple paint, thus the name. But the man from the stock market was nowhere to be seen.

  “Get me a gin,” Ulrich said to the bartender. “On second thought, make it a double.”

  “Everyone’s drinking doubles today,” the bartender said, reaching back and briefly lifting the blanket to expose the sleeping pig for less than a second, then went to work pouring Ulrich’s drink. “Bad news is always good news for a bar. It drives people to drink.”

  Ulrich froze, the bartender’s words finally settling in.

  “The bad news?”

  “Yeah, you know, the stock market crash,” the bartender said, setting Ulrich’s double gin on the bar in front of him. “Lost 11 percent at the opening bell, the market did, and it only got worse from there. What, you didn’t hear?”

  “You mean the stock market—it, it…”

  “Thirty billion dollars up in smoke. Can you imagine?” the bartender asked. “They’re calling it Black Friday.”

  Ulrich grabbed the glass and downed the double gin in one gulp. “The man who was here yesterday? The one in the nice suit with the carnation on his lapel?”

  The bartender shook his head. “Shame, huh? Can you imagine jumping from the top of a building?” the bartender asked. “I mean, over money?”

  Yes, Ulrich thought.

  Yes, I can.

  It only took a day before all construction on the hotel was halted—temporarily everyone was told.

  How temporary was temporary?

  No one knew.

  The day after that, Onyx’s shifts at the restaurant were cut back to almost nothing. Buying a house now—even if they had the money—was out of the question. They couldn’t even pay the rent on their room.

  Three days after that, Ulrich and Onyx were on a train to New York City, where Ulrich said he could get a job with his brother, Lucas.

  “My brother owns the biggest art gallery in all of New York,” Ulrich said. “The Schröder Gallery in Times Square. I’m told it is right in the middle of everything,” Ulrich said.

  “Told?” Onyx asked. “You’ve not been there?”

  “Well, no,” Ulrich said.

  “It will take the last of our funds just to get there,” Onyx said. “Are you sure he will hire you?” Onyx asked.

  “Of course,” Ulrich said. “He must. He’s my brother.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Savannah, Georgia

  June 4, 1979

  Considered by many to be one of the most beautiful cities in America, Savannah was the oldest city in Georgia and a case study in excellent urban planning. Originally designed as a place for colonists to conduct military exercises, the city was laid out in a distinct grid pattern of streets and squares. As such, it took less than an hour for authorities to organize a grid search for Juniper Cole.

  Forsyth Park was established as the LPS (Last Point Seen) and served as one of two command locations, the second being the obelisk in the center of Johnson Square.

  By its very nature, a grid search tended to move in a slow and methodical way, with volunteers sent out to find clues and report back.

  Six hours in, no clues had been discovered. No one had seen a thing.

  Quinn Cole was beside himself.

  Helicopters flew overhead at night, lights shining down in fields and backyards.

  Nothing.

  Twelve hours into the search, leaders began to ask questions. Should they expand the search area? How far beyond the LPS should they go? Maybe it was just a bastard search, one in which the person wasn’t really lost at all. People were tired and tensions were running high. Maybe the girl is just “shacked up” with her boyfriend somewhere.

  Quinn did interview after interview, showing Juniper’s picture and asking anyone who’d seen her to come forward.

  No one had.

  The hours wore on, but nothing changed.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  In Loll…

  The girl stumbled forward through the grayness, the faint echo of thunder in the distance.

  She tilted her head back and gazed upward, lifting her eyes to a sky that was neither light nor dark, neither day nor night. It simply … was.

  How long had she been here, wherever this was? How long had she been walking? It couldn’t have been too long. Her legs were not tired.

  She looked down, trained her eyes on her legs and watched them in amazement as they did their job, moving her forward with grace and efficiency.

  I have legs, she thought.

  Then she remembered the boy; the dark-haired young man with the scar on his forehead looking back at her. Where was that? Oh, yes, the hotel.

  She’d been there many times before, she knew.

  That’s when the mirror had caught her eye.

  She’d seen the mirror before but had always followed the rules.

  There were three unbreakable rules:

  Rule one: Do not touch an animal.

  Rule two: Do not touch another person.

  Rule three: Never, ever, under any circumstance, touch a mirror.

  Where had the rules come from? She did not know. She just knew them.

  Everyone did.

  But then—as if she knew there was something beyond where she was; another world, another life—she reached out and touched the mirror.

  And she was right.

  She made her way to the old building, up the stairs and past the piano, then down the hallway.

  She knew why she’d come back to this place.

  She was going to break the rule again.

  She was going to touch the mirror.

  Damn the rules.

  Would the boy still be there?

  But when she got to the end of the hallway, the mirror was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  New York City

  June 23, 1931

  Much of the last two and a half years in New York had been financial hell.

  Onyx and Ulrich arrived from Chicago virtually broke, used the last of their savings for a small apartment in a rat-infested building in Brooklyn, and scraped by as best they could. Meals were often at free soup kitchens crowded with scores of other victims of the “Great Depression.”

  Ulrich told Onyx he could get work with his brother, Lucas, but he had been wrong. When he approached his brother, Lucas told Ulrich that when Ulrich abandoned the family business, he’d abandoned the family as well. “As far as the Schröder family is concerned,” Lucas said, “you are dead to us all.”

  “Maybe Lucas will change his mind?” Onyx asked.

  “I told you to never speak of my brother in this house!” Ulrich shouted. “Lucas is a back-stabbing rat!”

  With no work to be had, Ulrich crawled even deeper into the bottle, so much so that Onyx had come to believe her husband was a certified alcoholic. But, ironically, Ulrich’s drinking led to a chance meeting with a guy in a bar—a Mohawk Indian, of all people—who helped Ulrich get an exciting but extremely dangerous job working construction on the Empire State building.

  “Another construction job?” Onyx asked.

  “It’s because of what I did for a living before coming to the United States,” Ulrich said. It was the first time her husband had shared anything about his life before they met. Every time Onyx had asked about his past he refused to talk about it.

  “What did you do?” Onyx asked.

  “I was a trapeze artist,” Ulrich said.

 
“You were a trapeze artist?” Onyx said, breaking into laughter.

  Ulrich nodded, his face serious.

  “You’re serious,” Onyx said.

  “My father and mother started the show, with all of their children expected to become part of the troupe,” Ulrich said. “The six of us—my parents, Lucas, and my younger brother and sister, Jan and Lisileto—we were the Soaring Schröders of Berlin.”

  Onyx remained silent for a few seconds, but then could not contain herself, bursting into laughter again.

  “This is why I don’t speak of it!” Ulrich said storming out of the room and slamming the door behind him.

  At least now Onyx understood why every time her husband did find work it was always dangling on the outside of a building at the end of a rope.

  Ulrich had not taken his brother’s rejection well and forbade Onyx from having any contact with Lucas, but fate had other plans.

  To make ends meet, Onyx decided to try to sell her artwork. She had been painting on and off their entire time together, whenever funds would allow.

  Within months, Onyx was out-earning her husband, though it wasn’t hard to do. While some men would have been threatened by their wives’ success, it gave Ulrich more cash to go drinking with the boys.

  Initially, Onyx tried selling her art from street corners, but with times being tough for so many people, she had few buyers. Knowing the major galleries only dealt with established artists, she needed to find another way to get her work seen by people with wealth.

  Onyx was walking down the street, a completed canvas under her arm, when she saw a well-dressed man holding the door open for an equally well-dressed woman.

  It was the door to a restaurant.

  Within months, Onyx had placed her art—on a consignment basis—in six upscale eateries in Manhattan. It was the perfect quid pro quo; they were delighted to sell her work for a share of the proceeds, and she desperately needed the money.

  The biggest challenge facing Onyx was transporting her finished paintings on busses and trains from their small apartment in Brooklyn into the city. Selling her work anywhere else was futile. She needed to display her work where people with money lived and worked.

  Manhattan was the only answer.

  “I’ve found a better place for us to live,” Onyx told Ulrich one day. Ulrich was laying on the sofa, reading a three-day old copy of the New York Times he’d dug out of a corner trash bin.

  “What’s wrong with living here?” Ulrich asked, not bothering to look up at her.

  “I need to be near my customers,” Onyx said. “I’ve found a place on West Forty-Sixth Street, just around the corner from Times Square.”

  “West Forty-Sixth?” Ulrich replied. “How much do they want for this place?”

  “They wanted $125 per month, but they agreed to $95,” Onyx said.

  “Agreed? What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I’m tired of sharing a bath and having no place to store my work,” Onyx said. “I’ve signed a lease and—”

  “Signed a lease? Did I say you could—?”

  “Please don’t argue with me, Ulrich,” Onyx said. “We move in at the end of the month.”

  “But…”

  “It is done, Ulrich,” Onyx said.

  One day, as fate would have it, Lucas Schröder was dining with a friend at the 21 Club on West Fifty-Second Street, a place where the table you were given said a lot about who you were. He’d just placed his order for steak tartar when he spotted one of Onyx’s pieces on the wall.

  “That painting, who is the artist?” Lucas asked.

  “Onyx,” the maître‘d said.

  “Does this Onyx have a last name?” Lucas asked.

  The maître‘d shrugged. “She comes in on Tuesday to drop off new paintings and collect for anything we’ve sold, that’s all I know.”

  A week later, Lucas Schröder sat in the 21 Club bar waiting for the mysterious artist, Onyx, to arrive. When she did, Lucas handed Onyx his business card and told her he wanted to sell her work in his gallery.

  Onyx looked at the card. “I can’t,” she said handing the card back to him.

  Lucas dealt with artists every day, most of them begging to have their work placed in his gallery.

  “I don’t think you realize who I am,” Lucas said.

  “I don’t think you realize who I am,” Onyx replied. “I am your sister-in-law, Onyx Schröder. I am Ulrich’s wife.”

  Intrigued with the woman, Lucas insisted they talk and Onyx reluctantly agreed. Lucas revealed that Ulrich had said nothing about having a wife.

  “Would it have made a difference?” Onyx said.

  “Not in the slightest,” Lucas told her. “Ulrich is a drunken scoundrel with no work ethic.” Onyx agreed, having found out the hard way. Then the conversation turned to what had brought them together in the first place.

  Art.

  When Onyx finally glanced at her watch, she was shocked to see how quickly four hours could go by when talking with the right man about some shared interest.

  Unfortunately for Lucas, no matter how many times he asked Onyx to relent, she would not agree to place her art in his gallery. “Ulrich has forbidden me to talk with you, so even this was a breach of my word.” That’s when Lucas came up with the idea for Onyx to study with Hans Hoffman.

  “You know Hans Hoffman?” Onyx asked.

  “Know him? His work hangs in my gallery,” Lucas said.

  “Under one condition,” Onyx said. “Neither of us may tell Ulrich of this arrangement.”

  “That, and Hoffman agrees to accept you. I have yet to even show him your work.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Savannah, Georgia

  June 4, 1979

  No one would believe that pretending to be a paraplegic could be so exhausting, Sergent Elton Nahum thought to himself.

  But it was.

  Yes, getting to sit all day was a plus, but rolling around in the chair using nothing but his arms was more exhausting than walking, by a long shot. Combine that with having been up most of the night before watching the TV news coverage on the disappearance of local mini-celebrity Juniper Cole, and he was exhausted.

  He’d been lying in bed the night before, watching that blonde-bubble head, Skylar Savage, again— Juniper Cole’s light blue prom dress hanging on the back of the door, her shoes and yellow panties in a plastic bag sitting on the floor beneath it—when the idea had hit him.

  Nahum sat up in bed, opened the nightstand drawer and pulled out a box containing more Scrabble® letters, something he kept in every part of the house. He found the letters he needed:

  S-E-R-G-E-N-T E-L-T-O-N N-A-H-U-M

  Then, as he’d done earlier—Nahum began rearranging them until he’d found a name he liked:

  G-L-E-N-N-A T-H-O-M-S-E-N - T-R-U-E

  How ironic, Nahum thought. He was a man… pretending to be a woman… telling an enormous lie… with the last name True.

  Hilarious.

  And he’d finally get to use the voice modulator he’d purchased a year earlier.

  Now, sitting at his desk across from Leo Igler—watching the old detective toil away, trying to decide if he should arrest Wyatt Scrogger for Juniper Cole’s disappearance—he almost felt sorry for the man.

  But not really.

  Nahum glanced over at the clock and decided it was time to call it quits for the night. He wanted to be well rested when he killed the Cole girl in the morning.

  But first things first.

  He needed to implement his plan—one that would seal Wyatt Scrogger’s fate—and remove any possible need for the Savannah PD to continue looking for other suspects. Not that they’d find him anyway.

  “Goodnight, Detective,” Nahum called out.

  Leo looked up and watched as Sergent Elton Nahum rolled his way into the elevator, the door sliding closed behind him.

  Leo tried to like Nahum, but after six months of the man being on the job, he still possessed a palpable
disdain for the crippled photographer.

  For one thing, Sergent wasn’t Nahum’s rank—it was his first name—not to mention that it was spelled wrong, with the letter a missing. Sergeant, with an a after the second e was the correct spelling. What were his parents thinking?

  It also bothered Leo that, though Nahum was nothing but the department photographer, the man had insisted he be allowed to carry a badge, and the chief—a total pushover—let him.

  And then there was the makeup.

  Maybe Nahum had acne. Maybe he was simply vain. Or maybe he was gay? Leo had no idea. All he knew was that a man wearing makeup just wasn’t right.

  But the final straw was the elevator.

  After Nahum had interviewed for the photographer position and Leo had passed him over, Nahum threatened the department with a civil rights lawsuit, saying he was being discriminated against because of his disability. The department buckled, gave Nahum the job, and had an elevator installed. All so one man could go up and down a few times a day, and the thing was slower than shit.

  The taxpayer’s dollars hard at work.

  Detective Leo Igler was sitting at his desk, reviewing the evidence, which at that moment consisted of nothing but the notes he’d taken from his interviews with Quinn Cole—Juniper Cole’s highly distraught older brother—and the only person of interest in the case so far, Quinn Cole’s friend Wyatt Scrogger.

  Everything he’d learned so far told Leo that Wyatt Scrogger was probably involved in Juniper Cole’s disappearance, if not the perpetrator himself. That would, of course, make solving the case fast and easy.

  But the voice in the back of his head—and his gut instinct—told him the Scrogger kid wasn’t the guy who’d taken her.

  And Leo’s gut was rarely wrong.

  Wyatt Scrogger had answered all of Leo’s questions, and he’d looked genuinely shocked when he’d been told Juniper Cole was missing. Even more, Scrogger hadn’t asked for a lawyer.