by Noel Hynd
“And I’ll tell you what really bothers me. Both the kids used to report seeing a man in the house.” Einhorn’s head shot up from his notes.
“A prowler?”
“No. An imaginary friend. They called him ‘Ronny.’”
“Ronny?” the doctor repeated.
“I think Ronny was the ghost,” Rebecca said. “I think they were seeing the same thing I saw. And this Ronny? The night before the kids disappeared, he said that he was going to take them with him.” Einhorn was fascinated.
“This is a chat you had with your children?” he asked.
“My husband will verify that part,” she said. “He was included in the discussion.”
“I see,” Einhorn said, thinking. “Where does this ‘Ronny’ name come from?”
“I have no idea,” she said.
“Please think hard on this: Did you or your husband ever suggest the presence of an invisible friend. A ‘Ronny?’”
“No.”
“Keep thinking. As hard as you’ve ever thought, Rebecca.”
“No,” she repeated.
“Do you know anyone who has ever had that name?”
“No!”
“Friend? Relative? Enemy? An old boyfriend?” the doctor pressed.
“No one,” she said. “No one whom I can consciously remember. And yet…”
“And yet, what?” Einhorn asked.
“And yet, it all seemed so familiar. Even more now today while I’m trying to concentrate on it. His face, his mannerisms, his hands. The way he held his arms.”
“How did he hold them?” Rebecca made a gesture of the way she first saw the ghost, arms akimbo, before he held the hands of her children.
“It was so… I don’t know,” she said, the stress rising in her voice. “There was something that I’d seen somewhere before.”
“You’re probably right,” Einhorn said, easing back slightly. “There probably was. The question for us now is finding what that something was. And where it came from.”
He glanced at the clock and led Rebecca through another quarter hour’s worth of discussion. Then Dr. Einhorn fell silent for several minutes, organizing his notes. At one point he stood and walked behind his desk to a bookshelf. Rebecca watched him as he went to a reference book of some sort, looking something up. He pursed his lips when he found it, and then returned to his chair. He wrote for another minute. Then he went to the window, adjusted the shades to increase the light in the room, and gave Rebecca a smile.
“If it’s time to analyze,” Rebecca said, “can Melissa come into the room?”
“If those are your wishes,” Einhorn said, “I have no objection.” Einhorn hit the buzzer and asked Del to bring Melissa in. Melissa sat down in an extra chair on Rebecca’s side of the chamber. “I’m going to tell you what I think,” Dr. Einhorn finally began. “With everything that’s been going on in your life, your case borders on the unique. So I think we should treat it in a unique and aggressive manner. Okay?”
“Okay so far,” Rebecca said.
“Let me sum up a few things first. You are still dealing with the trauma from last February,” he began, “and now there’s all the stress and anxiety surrounding this horrible disappearance of your children.” He paused. “From the stand point of the mind, it’s as if your body is attacked by a virus, and then medical complications set in.”
He adjusted the pad on his lap and continued.
“If you wanted to do a pop psych analysis of the vision you saw,” Einhorn explained, “I think the conclusions that would be drawn are clear. Ghosts come from the land of the dead. Your children were with a ghost, albeit a benevolent one. Some therapists would suggest that you entertained this vision because your inner self is attempting to adjust to the idea that your children are, God forbid, already dead. And you want to believe they are with a responsible adult figure who will protect them.”
Rebecca cringed slightly,
“I expect to see my children again alive,” she said. “I’m not making any such concessions.”
“No,” he answered gently. “Not consciously, you’re not.” She waited a moment. “Why a man and not a woman?” Rebecca asked.
“The paternal figure in this instance is perhaps more reassuring to you,” Dr. Einhorn said. “Many women would find the idea of their children with a substitute mother to be more of an adversarial situation. I know this isn’t politically correct, so don’t take me to task for it: but many women find the idea of a male protector to be comforting.”
Rebecca sighed and nodded. Melissa smirked.
“You may consider everything I just said,” Einhorn continued. “You can accept it or dismiss it. Whichever, because I have some further thoughts on the incident. You see, I might be proved wrong here, but I want to venture out onto a limb. I think there’s something else going on here, too. Something even more significant. And I’m not sure that it doesn’t lie at the heart of everything.”
“You’re losing me, Doctor,” she said. “Something else of what sort?”
“Don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “I don’t know because I can’t see inside your head. But I sure would like to. And there are ways.” He paused. “Since there’s a criminal case involved, this might even be easier to arrange.” There was a slight hesitation then the doctor asked, “Rebecca, have you ever been hypnotized?”
She was astonished.
“Is that what you’re suggesting?”
“Yes, I am.”
“You want to hypnotize me?” Dr. Einhorn shook his head.
“Not me personally. I wouldn’t. Hypnotism is a specialty. It has to be done carefully by a psychiatrist who specializes in hypnotherapy. There are a handful of doctors in Los Angeles whose practices center around such things.” Rebecca looked at Melissa, then back to the doctor.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve got to think that my head is scrambled enough already.”
“This might be your finest opportunity to unscramble it,” Dr. Einhorn said. “A hypnotist can get at something that’s lurking even deeper than your reaction to recent events. A hypnotherapist can get right down to what’s beneath the surface.” He paused again. “You’d be amazed at what we might find.”
“I might be frightened at what we might find,” Rebecca answered. Dr. Einhorn laughed slightly then frowned, tiny spidery lines furrowing his small forehead.
“Why do you say that?” he asked. Rebecca threw up her hands.
“I don’t even know why I said that,” she said. He looked at her soberly.
“All the more reason, Rebecca,” he said. “You’ll get to know yourself much better, as long as you go into this in a positive frame of mind.”
“May I interject a question?” Melissa asked.
“Of course,” the doctor answered.
“What if there’s something subconscious about the disappearance?” Melissa said. “I didn’t mean that Rebecca did anything to her kids. What I mean is… “
“Might we explore that avenue?” Einhorn asked. “Might we prowl around for something that’s useful in that direction? Is that what you’re asking?”
“Yes,” Melissa said.
“That would be fifty percent of our objective,” Henry Einhorn said. “If there were a chance in a hundred that we could find something that way, something you might have seen subliminally, I would think you would leap at the opportunity.”
Rebecca looked to Melissa who gave it a thumbs-up gesture. Then she looked back to the doctor.
“Who would the hypnotherapist be?” she asked.
“The best hypnotherapist in the city is at UCLA Medical in Westwood. Dr. Chang Lim. I’ll call his office if you’ll permit me.”
Rebecca looked to Melissa for support. Melissa gave her an enthusiastic nod.
“As I said,” Dr. Einhorn continued, “I’ll call his office. But if I were you, I’d get in touch with him right away. If this can have a positive solution, the sooner the better.”
Rebec
ca nodded again. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
Chapter 30
In a different part of Los Angeles, at exactly the same hour, Ed Van Allen stood at his desk and picked up the results of a fingerprint inquiry. He had a clear thumb impression of both Mr. and Mrs. Moore, as well as a forefinger print for Bill Moore. Both had been taken from the photograph of Van Allen’s son Jason that the detective had pulled from his wallet. Van Allen carried an extra photo for exactly that purpose.
He had run the prints through the LAPD’s detective bureau on Friday morning. The results had come back near 1:00P.M. There was no linkage of the Moores’ fingerprints to any known criminal activity in Southern California.
Double A came by Van Allen’s desk and saw him looking at the results.
“So?” Alice asked. “Are the Moores like in a cult of devil worshipers?” she asked.
“You think they’re clean, don’t you?” he asked, raising his eyes. Double A was wearing a light blue shirt and tan slacks today. To Van Allen’s tired eyes, Alice carried a heavy fox quotient, an especially high one for a member of the detective bureau. But Van Allen stuck to business.
“I still don’t like something about them,” Van Allen said. “There’s something wrong somewhere. I don’t know whether it’s with him or with her. Their story doesn’t work. They’re telling me that their kids disappeared without leaving the house.”
Double A shot him a skeptical glance. She took the finger print report from him and glanced at it.
“Don’t believe me, huh?” Van Allen asked.
“I’m like just not following your line of investigation, okay?” Van Allen reached for some coffee.
“Let me tell you,” he said. “If they had a walk-in freezer in that house, I’d want to look in it.”
Van Allen took the prints back from Alice and left the room. He faxed the prints to the FBI crime laboratory in Quantico, Virginia. Double A disappeared to work a competing case, a housebreaking in Los Feliz. A local TV producer’s apartment had been cleaned out a week after he had done a thirty-minute special on burglary prevention.
That evening, Van Allen drove by 2136 Topango Gardens on his way home. Rebecca was at home again with Melissa. Bill Moore was still at work at 5:30 P.M., and the detective was starting to entertain the notion that Mr. Moore was avoiding him.
If so, he wondered, why?
He would have liked to have slapped fulltime surveillance on Moore — instinct yet again — but instead had to settle for keeping Rebecca under occasional scrutiny.
This evening, as was the case on other evenings, it was Van Allen’s responsibility to inform her that no new leads were apparent in the case.
Left to his own devices, Van Allen would also have liked to have gone into 2136 Topango Gardens with a search warrant. The more he thought about it, the more he would have loved to attack with some sledgehammers and take the house apart. The thing was, he thought to himself, the LAPD’s German Shepherds had already sniffed all over the place and found nothing.
Van Allen hung around the house for several minutes. By pre-arrangement, Alice Aldrich came by, dropped off by another female detective, and they rendezvoused there. They kept looking for any sign of digging—a new rose garden or a newly planted tree — that might have been used to cover a pair of small graves or some sort of renovation under the basement.
But nothing was apparent. And when Van Allen thought about such things within the house, an uneasy buzz settled upon him. It was almost as if some unseen voice was telling him he was off on the wrong track.
“Fine,” he eventually mumbled to himself. “Then what’s the right track?”
No answer came to that question.
He and Alice Aldrich ran a small gauntlet of reporters as they departed. Van Allen shrugged and told them there were no new developments in the case. Then they left together in Van Allen’s car. They tossed around some possibilities.
“Of course,” Van Allen growled to Double A, “if those kids are buried in six feet of concrete, no dog with a sophisticated snout is going to find them, either.”
Alice might have offered a pretty sharp comment in her own right, but the case perplexed her just as much. They rode in silence for several seconds. A police radio crackled under the dashboard of his car, but he ignored it.
“Know what?” Van Allen finally said. “Got a couple of minutes? I got that other case right in this area.”
“Which one?”
“Cemetery of Angels. The grave robbery.”
He glanced at his watch. It was late in the day. Five-fifty. Martinez should have been just closing the yard.
“I have time,” Alice said.
San Angelo Cemetery was just a few minutes away, and Van Allen had been correct. As daylight died, the old caretaker was hanging around the gates, anxious to put a chain and padlock on them. Most of the light at this hour came from streetlamps.
Ed Van Allen wished he had a C-note for every time in his life he had had to use the phrase, “no new development.” As in the case of the Moore disappearance, he had nothing new in the Billy Carlton tomb desecration, either.
Martinez stood by the front gates with chain and padlock in hand, listening patiently as Van Allen told him all this. Then Alice chatted him up for a few moments, while something within the cemetery caught Van Allen’s attention.
Standing way back in the yard, about fifty yards away near where Billy Carlton had lain for decades, there was a man in a white shirt facing the entrance of the cemetery.
Van Allen was surprised to see him. His gaze settled upon him with intense curiosity. The detective squinted, because the figure was in shadow-laced light from a streetlamp. His image was almost flickering.
Then the figure near the Carlton grave raised a hand and waved. A friendly wave, not one of beckoning. Van Allen waved back. Then he took his eyes off the figure and turned to Martinez. “Who’s that?” he asked. “You got a crew working?”
“What?” Martinez asked.
“Who’s that?” Van Allen asked again, motioning with his head.
“Who’s who?” Martinez asked again.
Van Allen turned his head and looked again where the figure had been. He found no one.
“There was someone there a second ago,” Van Allen said. “A man waved to me.”
The old Mexican grinned.
“You finally loco,” he said. “We the only people in the yard.”
“Horsecrap!” said Van Allen. “You got at least one visitor back there whether you know it or not.”
Martinez looked in the direction that Van Allen indicated. His grin turned to a scowl. Like Van Allen, he couldn’t see anyone.
“You got better eyes than me? So you find someone,” the caretaker challenged. Sometimes Martinez sounded like Chico Marx. Now was one of those times. Van Allen glanced toward his partner.
“Okay, you wait here,” he said to Alice. His suspicion was piqued. Who would play hide-and-seek among tombstones, he wanted to know. “If anyone comes hustling out of here, detain him.”
Alice nodded. “Cool,” she said.
Moments later, Van Allen limped across the thick grassy carpet of the graveyard, walking directly toward Billy Carlton’s tipped stone. His strained calf muscle was irritating him again. He approached the fallen angel, itself. Its arm was still upraised but now, tipped over; it pointed into the soil of the graveyard.
The soil of the graveyard. The soul of the graveyard.
Those phrases turned themselves over in Van Allen’s mind, permutations of words he couldn’t control. He was feeling weird these days. He passed the fallen granite marker. Who in heaven’s name had tipped that thing, Van Allen mused as he walked past it. Better yet, who was going to pony up the dough to set it right? Not the city or state: both were broke. Not the penny-pinching trustees of the cemetery.
Something invisible tapped at Van Allen’s shoulder as he passed the granite angel. Van Allen brushed at the spot and couldn’t find it, b
ut he did see, or thought he saw, a dragonfly a few feet away. He brushed again.
“Bugs,” he muttered. There was no second tap. The dragonfly whirled away.
There was no one near the grave. Or any other grave. Van Allen stood and let his eyes wander all through the forlorn old stones in the back quadrant of the cemetery. He let his eyes adjust to the shadows and the dim light. He wandered a few feet to improve his line of view, trying to see if anyone could have crouched behind a tombstone. Then he had an idea. He used his cell phone to call Alice and asked that she join him. He asked that Martinez remain in place.
Alice jogged to him, the movements of a fit woman in her thirties.
“I know I saw something, Double A,” he said.
“‘Something’ huh? Like what?”
“Oh, stop treating me like I’m a head case and help me out on this,” he snapped. “There’s been trouble in this cemetery and there were two children who disappeared just over that cemetery wall. Does that suggest anything to you?”
“Not really.”
“Thanks.”
“You asked me for my thoughts? Those are them.”
“Keep your hand on your weapon, and cover me, okay?”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to walk to the rear wall of the yard,” Van Allen said. “I want to see if someone is hiding back there.”
“Convenient if we shoot someone,” she said. “We can bury him right here and no one other than the old Mex has to know.”
“Very funny.”
“Not meant to be, Ed.” Van Allen glowered at her.
“Now who’s the psychopath?” he asked. She smiled sweetly and his irritation took wing.
“You’re sure you saw something, aren’t you, Ed?” she asked, turning a little more serious. He looked at her as if she had suggested that he was insane.
“I’m sure,” he said.
“Then I’ll cover you.”
“Thanks.”
Alice drew her weapon and held it by her side. Van Allen spent a quarter hour wandering among the old stones. Night and darkness tightened its grip on the yard. His leg was murdering him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Martinez standing near the gates, arms folded across his chest, waiting. Cemetery of Angels, Van Allen mused. He would welcome a little help from the angels right now. For starters, he could use a new set of legs. Bionic ones this time, please.
