by Noel Hynd
Double A had temporarily finished speaking with the Moores. Both parents had then followed the police to the second story of their home. Rebecca stood close to Van Allen, her arms folded in front of her. Bill Moore put his arm around his wife as they stood nearby and watched the detectives work. Four yellow walls surrounded them.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Rebecca said softly. “It’s all so unreal. Like something out of a nightmare.” Van Allen glanced at her.
“Sometimes these things have logical explanations and happy endings,” he answered. “Try to begin with that outlook, Mrs. Moore. It will make things easier.”
Rebecca bit her lower lip. When her gaze settled on a snapshot of Patrick on the chest of drawers, however, her composure folded. She started to dissolve into tears.
“I’d like to take my wife downstairs,” Bill Moore said.
“Of course,” Van Allen said. “I’ll be down shortly. Do you mind leaving us here?”
Moore said he didn’t. But before leaving, Bill looked at the three policemen poking through their children’s playroom. Bill Moore’s antagonisms bubbled over.
“Just see that you don’t break anything,” he said. Then Moore escorted his wife downstairs. Van Allen watched them go. Detective Aldrich went downstairs with the parents of the missing children.
Ed Van Allen looked at the same photograph that had caused Rebecca to lose composure. He held it in his own fingers, carefully shielding it from prints. He took a good look at the children.
He sighed again. He had to admit, for all the reassurance that he had just given the Moores, this didn’t look good. Missing children never did. And the longer they were missing, the more liable to remain missing. Permanently. But already there was a strange spin to the case. Two children disappearing together? From their home? With no sign of forced entry? No enemies in sight? No ransom message? Some things just didn’t make sense — like Billy Carlton’s flipped-over tombstone. That didn’t make sense, either.
That reminded him: he was in the same neighborhood. He wasn’t far away from San Angelo. Van Allen’s brow crunched into a frown. He began to wonder about something. He set down the picture of Patrick Moore. He walked to the window in the children’s playroom. He looked out, scouring the backyard with his eyes. It was a small but tidy patch, recently renewed as the Moores had suggested. His eye traveled to the rear of the yard. Then his gaze climbed the brick wall and wandered through the field beyond. Then he froze, a little wave of suspicion overtaking him, followed by a creepy bumpy feeling across his skin.
He realized that he was looking at the south lawn of San Angelo Cemetery. Moments later, in the distance, he was staring at the exhumed grave of Billy Carlton. A little farther on, Van Allen could see Carlton’s granite marker lying on its side.
A great big gray fallen angel, dead as a desiccated haddock, lying on its side.
Waiting to be lifted.
Or resurrected.
And waiting just to give wing? Give flight?
Van Allen wondered.
He now had two cases with inexplicable circumstances right within sight of each other. In his line of work, he had always believed, there was no such thing as coincidence. Yet here it was, staring him in the face, unless there were parallels. And if there were, perhaps he was looking at the beginning of an explanation.
Chapter 27
Halloween evening arrived.
Children from the neighborhood came by the house at 2136 Topango Gardens. A police car remained posted near the house, and the word quickly spread through the neighborhood that both Patrick and Karen were missing.
On Sunday, this translated into a stream of well-wishers from the neighborhood. They came to wish the Moores luck and offer support. Prayers were said in the nearby churches. Privately, most people feared the worst for Patrick and Karen.
Monday arrived. So did the first full week of November. The Moore case had made the local news. An FBI team was assigned to the investigation. Agents from the local office in Los Angeles interviewed Rebecca and Bill Moore again, asking them the same questions over and over. Their answers and explanations did not waver.
Bill and Rebecca handled their grief and their concern differently. Rebecca was given to bouts of sleeplessness and sorrow, including long fits of crying. Melissa stood by her and tried to be of comfort. Rebecca also played with the idea of calling her mother back East to let her know what had happened. But she continued to veto the idea. It somehow would have only made things worse.
Bill became quick-tempered and sullen, even more than usual. The tension of his children’s disappearance exacerbated his work situation. It made it almost impossible for him to concentrate on architecture. Still, he tried to work. Or at least he said he did, spending hours away from the house. It was Rebecca who was trapped at home with her thoughts. Again, Melissa was with her constantly, proving to be as good a friend as Rebecca had ever made.
Detective Van Allen set the San Angelo desecration on the back corner of his desk. Then, with Alice Aldrich assisting, he became the principal city detective in the investigation of the Moore children’s disappearance.
Search parties, which included dogs, failed to find a trace of Patrick or Karen. No ransom note arrived. No friend or relative had seen them. No teacher had any reason to think that they might have been upset.
When Ed Van Allen went to Santa Monica next, passing an hour studying the ocean, he was a deeply perplexed man. From all accounts, the children had disappeared inside the house at 2136 Topango.
Van Allen cringed. He knew the direction his thoughts were taking. The last time he had a case that matched that description, two small bodies had eventually been found encased in the concrete of the foundation, their throats cut.
Van Allen thought he had honed some good instincts over the years. The Moores didn’t seem like the type to have done something to their children. Bill Moore was a little difficult to decipher, he decided, but Rebecca Moore’s grief and concern were legitimate.
He sighed. Unfortunately, he would have to ask the Moores to take polygraph tests. Not an easy step, as it would surely antagonize the people he was most trying to help. But the administration of lie detector tests to the victimized parents was an increasingly common step in cases with missing children.
Van Allen considered an incident in South Carolina a decade and a half earlier. A mother had drowned her children by strapping them into the family car and driving them into a lake. An early polygraph might have saved the police days of trouble in that case.
By Tuesday morning, there were no new leads. Van Allen asked the FBI agents in charge if they would administer the lie detector exams. The FBI said they would make the request, but reminded Van Allen that at this juncture they could only ask the Moores to comply. They couldn’t make the test mandatory. Not yet, anyway.
But the request was made. Rebecca said she would do it. Her husband said he would consider it. His response did not endear him to the LAPD. The test was scheduled for late in the week. Probably Friday morning.
Tuesday died. Wednesday morning arrived.
Rebecca and Bill Moore began to accustom themselves to the presence of reporters near their driveway or spilling over into their property. There always seemed to be at least one reporter camped out in front of 2136 Topango Gardens. Usually, there were half a dozen.
The story of Karen and Patrick Moore’s disappearance was one of regional interest now. And one of the national tabloids had sent a reporter, working on the angle of the children disappearing within the confines of their eerie old home. Inquiring minds again wanted to know.
The Moores both hated the idea of the lie detector. They couldn’t comprehend what, if anything, a polygraph of victimized parents could have to do with the return of their children. But Rebecca reasoned further that if the test were enough to eliminate her as a suspect, which was the only real reason why detective Van Allen would want to have it done and send police in the proper direction, it was worth h
er time.
It was only then, when she scheduled the test for the next Friday afternoon, that her darkest doubts about her husband surfaced. She wondered why he wouldn’t just accede to the test and remove himself from any lingering suspicions.
But he wouldn’t.
Her ruminations were shared by Detective Van Allen. But neither mentioned their suspicions to the other. Bill Moore was too busy burying himself in his work even to issue a denial. And Rebecca avoided at all costs mentioning what she perceived as supernatural events in her home: why risk another trip back to the loony bin?
Chapter 28
Thursday morning came. Still nothing new in the case. Rebecca had clipped from the newspapers a pair of classified ads for employment, but had no stomach anymore for going to job interviews. She lived in a constant state of tension, waiting for the moment when her telephone would ring with a break in the case, or when Sergeant Van Allen would arrive at the door with news.
Good news or bad news. Emotionally, Rebecca didn’t even want to entertain the thought of a tragic end to the case. But subconsciously, she was readying herself for one. Or, worse, what if the case were never resolved at all? How would she live with that, never knowing what had happened to her two children?
At night, the nightmares were gone, replaced by real fears and real sleeplessness. She felt helpless. She spent her time around the house, preoccupied by fear and anxiety, and trying to keep busy with small tasks.
Small tasks like putting shelf paper in a cupboard on the second floor. Like taking the first steps in stripping and refinishing the steps that led to the attic. Like doing something about that dreadful scent — the scent of death that still materialized from time to time in the turret room.
Strangely enough, a small touch of the bizarre intruded. In cleaning a shelf in the kitchen, Rebecca came across a smashed pair of red-framed eyeglasses in the rear of a cabinet.
She was about to throw them out, thinking they were left from the previous tenant. And then she realized that the glasses were the pair that Essie Lewisohn had misplaced on the day the broker had first shown the house to the Moores.
Rebecca turned the glasses over curiously in her hand. Essie had thought she had left the specs on a table in the living room? How could they have jumped to the kitchen cabinet? And why hadn’t she or Bill noticed them before? When she found them, they were visible. Why hadn’t they been visible previously?
Who moved them? And why, for that matter, were they broken? Rebecca didn’t understand. And yet this paled in relation to the events of Thursday afternoon.
Rebecca had spent the early part of the afternoon on the second floor of her home. She was, of all things, tending to her children’s rooms.
She was trying to think positively of the current situation. She wanted to have both rooms ready for them the instant they returned home. She refused to think in any other terms.
Patrick and Karen would return, she kept telling herself, and they would return soon. She was in Patrick’s room, reorganizing the clothes in his closet, when she heard a noise in the hall. Rebecca left Patrick’s room to investigate.
The noise had sounded like footsteps, and she thought her husband was home.
When she stepped into the hall and called his name, however, she knew that she was mistaken. “Hello?” she called. “Is anyone there?”
She walked through the hall and went to the front window. The same little knot of reporters was there that had been there all morning. Whenever someone came or went from the house, the reporters were on their feet with cameras and note pads. They were sitting tranquilly now, so Rebecca knew no one had come or gone.
She walked back toward her son’s room.
But when she passed the turret room she stopped short. Once again the door was open. And she knew that she had firmly closed and latched it twenty minutes earlier.
She stared at it for several seconds. A wave of goose bumps crawled across the entire flesh of her body.
She knew she wasn’t alone.
And now for the first time in several days, she could hear the piano music again. Bold music this time. Not as tinny or canned as previous times. And the tune sounded like a theme. Or a background from an old movie. The music was clearer than it had ever been before.
Melissa’s cheerful voice came back.
“You’ve got a ghost. Maybe two.”
Rebecca could feel the hair rise on the back of her neck. And from somewhere came a shiver. She felt herself fighting off a sense of dread, one of which she couldn’t identify the origin.
Then there was a male voice. It was more distinct than it had ever been before. It was slithery, but clear. And Rebecca thought that it had a vague echo of a middle Atlantic state. Virginia perhaps. Or Maryland.
The voice called again.
“Rebecca… ?”
It beckoned. It summoned.
Rebecca went toward the open doorway. She slowly approached it. She felt herself thinking that she didn’t want to know who had opened it. She didn’t want to see anyone. She didn’t want to know who was in the room.
Nonsense, Rebecca, dear. Don’t be scared.
And yet, another part of her screamed out that she wanted to know. Another part of her was drawn to the room. One way or another, she knew she had to find out.
Doors didn’t just open by themselves?
Did they?
A hand is needed to turn a knob, even if the hand is invisible. A thought shot through her head. Maybe we are all surrounded by invisible hands, turning the knobs and locks to our lives without our knowing it.
She was ten feet from the entrance to the yellow room. Then five. Never before in her life had a doorway loomed so large.
Rebecca drew a breath.
She looked past the door to what she could see of the empty room. All she could make out was some of the furniture that she had bought for her children. That and the windows and the walls. But deep down, she knew. Someone, something, some presence, was in that room. It was in there now, waiting for her.
Next, she pushed the door wide open, the feeling of dread now giving way to something else: a mixture of both fear and attraction, polar opposites tangling with each other, like the needle on a compass spinning wildly out of control.
The door went wide. There was sunlight in the room. She stepped in, expecting to see someone.
But instead she saw no one.
Didn’t see. But knew he was there.
“Ronny?” she asked softly.
No movement. But there was this sense of a presence that she somehow thought she recognized. Something familiar, as familiar as a kiss from a cherished lover. And her sense of being watched, that old sense that she had always had, was as keen as it had ever been.
It was more than fear that motivated her now. She felt that there was a pair of eyes upon her, a pair that she couldn’t see but which was closely upon her, like some feral beast lying in wait for a prey.
But where were they?
“I’m very near, Rebecca. Very near.”
An even more unsettling notion gripped her: if whoever had unlatched the door wasn’t in the room, he, or she, or it, was somewhere else in the house. But this thought dissipated too, giving way to an even stranger one. This one had words to it, almost like a voice speaking to her. And then she realized.
“Close enough to touch you. Close enough to embrace you.”
The voice was speaking to her. No way to ignore it any more.
“Come into the room, Rebecca, my love. Please come into my room and be comfortable.”
This voice that she heard now, and this low murmur she had heard on other occasions, were one and the same.
She stepped farther into the room. No one. But her feelings were ambivalent now. Her fear drifted away, like a bad headache that was suddenly lifted. And the turret room seemed to embrace her.
Her heart, fluttering as it had been, calmed itself and settled. She drew a breath again. She inhaled and exhaled, deeply both
ways. She moved to the window and looked out. Now she felt as if she were in a trance.
“Am I mad?” she thought to herself. “Have I finally gone completely crazy? Have I finally slipped off the edge of sanity?”
“No, darling, no. You are quite fine. You have merely entered another plane, where I have waited for you.”
“Where are you?” Rebecca asked. “Who’s talking to me?”
“I’m near enough to touch you.”
She whirled, looking everywhere, seeing nothing.
“Then touch me,” she begged. Something did, and Rebecca jumped. Something like a breeze fluttered through her hair, gentle and caressing, soft as a kiss.
“Where are you?” she asked, her voice a whisper now.
“Promise not to tell? It’s our secret?”
“Where are you?” she asked again. “I want to know.”
“Go to the window. Look outside.”
Rebecca turned again. She looked through the window.
“I don’t see anything,” she said.
“Nonsense. You see everything! Concentrate!”
“But… ?” A whisper:
“Concentrate on what you see.”
She studied the landscape. The backyard was coming around to good shape, she noticed. The brick wall was looking better since her husband had worked on it. Above it and beyond it, the fallow territory of the cemetery lay beneath a calm sky.
Was that what she was meant to see?
Then she noticed something funny. There was a tiny shadow creeping rapidly across the rear of the cemetery, like the image of a cloud moving at a high speed. It came directly toward 2136 Topango Gardens.
It seemed to accelerate. It was heading straight toward her! She knew…
“Oh, God protect me!” she muttered.
The shadow crossed the fence and came across the back lawn of 2136 Topango. It came directly toward her home, and then it covered it. And when it did, she felt something strange, like an acute change in the atmospheric pressure in the room.
