by Noel Hynd
She looked at the wall. The bold letters beneath the paint: You are in danger. In her mind, it was still there, its origins still mysterious as ever.
Had it been meant for the children? Or for her? She thought of how her husband had tried to convince her that she had imagined it. Then a thought came to her from somewhere: she was only midway through this ordeal. And perhaps the biggest part was yet to be played.
“Ronny?” she asked aloud. “Did you just give me that notion? Did you send me a thought?” There was another creak over her head. A response? Or a tick in the old floorboards.
She felt a shiver.
“Am I crazy?” she asked aloud. “Anyone? Come forward. Please.”
Then another image was upon her. That of herself as a mad woman, wandering from room to room in a rattling old house, complaining of voices and spirits only known to her. She had seen such deranged ladies in the streets. They wore tattered, once expensive winter coats during the summer heat. Their glasses were crooked, their lipstick askew, and they talked to people unseen, rambling on and on over real or imagined grievances from decades past, asking for spare change from anyone whose eye they caught, arguing with the long-dead.
Was this her future, she wondered. Would she lose her children and would the loss send her tumbling downhill into just such madness?
“No, Rebecca.”
She almost jumped. “What?” she answered.
Again the house was still. But that answer had been as clear as a bell. She had heard a voice.
Out loud? Or in her mind? She wasn’t sure.
It had been a male voice. Human. Or ghostly human. Whatever. She had heard it! She knew she had. Or was this, too, part of the incipient lunacy?
“Talk to me!” she demanded, her voice loud and vibrating through the turret room and the still hallway beyond. “Where are you? Say something again!”
“You will be safe.”
“Who are you? If you’re the spirit who has my children, I want to see you again! I want to see them!”
The silence that answered was so complete that Rebecca already wondered whether she had imagined the entire exchange.
“I demand to see you!” she said next. But her demand was not met. She waited several seconds for more to be forthcoming, but none was.
She moved to the window, watching the day turn into evening. Her eyes traveled across the backyard of her home. Her gaze hit the wall and lifted over into the cemetery.
She saw the same vision that nuisance of a detective had had when he had stood in the same place. She felt herself in his shoes, retracing his visual path.
She felt another thought forming inside her, but couldn’t grasp it yet. It was as if she were mentally trying to sort out an accumulation of letters on a page, letters that made no sense until rearranged into the proper order.
A silky whispering answer, a deathly voice riding on a breeze:
“Yes. That’s correct”.
“What’s correct?” she demanded.
The voice was like a murmur now, a whisper from every direction. She continued to look out the window. Her line of vision danced among the old tombstones in the cemetery. The old stone markers stood like little sentries, a small army of guards.
Guarding what? What was going on in her head?
“Keep looking…!”
“For what?” she answered.
“Rebecca. Look!”
“At what?”
Her eyes settled upon something strange in the cemetery. Something big and gray and misshapen that appeared to be lying on its side.
A heavy breathy whisper came to her this time, as from an invisible pair of lips not far from her ear. Lips that could kiss or caress or share a secret.
“Yes! Go!”
“What?”
“Go!” the husky voice demanded. And within the room where she stood there was an angry thump. Like the weight of a man who had jumped into the air with heavy boots and had come down hard on the wooden floor.
“Go to the cemetery! Now!”
This time she didn’t know whether she had imagined the conversation and the demand. But she did know she would obey. She ran from the room and down the stairs. She left her house through the front door and was again relieved to see no one with a notebook or camera or microphone.
She went to the street and jogged to the end of the block. She turned and continued toward San Angelo.
The gates to the cemetery were still open. She passed through them. She saw no attendant or caretaker. She looked past the armada of tombstones and grave markers and could see the roof of 2136 Topango Gardens beyond the rear wall of the cemetery. Her home. She hurried forward, as if there were some element of time involved in this timeless place.
She walked in the direction of her house, which also took her toward the overturned marker she had seen from the turret room.
The angel! The grandest angel in the Cemetery of Angels. Fallen.
She wondered:
Fallen from the sky?
Fallen from where he had stood in this yard?
Or fallen because its own universe was out of order?
The huge granite marker took on an aura before her eyes as she approached it. From the distance, she had been unable to make out its detail. Now its detail was almost hyper real.
She moved to within a few feet of it and stopped. She was afraid to go any closer. There was something almost sacred about it.
A heavenly figure that had crashed to the soil. A graceful pair of wings that no longer gave flight. And that hand: oversized but ethereal. Sensitive but ever protective.
A poor man’s Michelangelo.
She was almost afraid to look at the face. She expected it to be that of her otherworldly visitor. Or she thought the eyes might blink. But she summoned the courage and looked. She saw a beautiful carved stone face that she did not recognize.
The face of an angel. A solitary angel.
She looked at the base of the marker and read the name.
Billy.
She knelt down and ran her hand across it.
She liked the touch. It was tactile and bold. And strangely, while she had expected the stone to be cold, it wasn’t. It was as warm as flesh. The sun had been directly upon it. But was that the reason?
“Billy,” she said aloud. Then she repeated it as she stood. The name had an eerie familiarity, a gentle, comfortable ring on her lips. It was the name her husband had never wanted, the name she had never wanted to call him.
Why?
At the back of her neck she felt something cold. Hands touching her lightly. Hands causing her again to shiver. In fear, but almost as in passion. For some reason, she recalled how her husband-to-be, when they were first lovers, used to kiss that spot on the back of her neck.
He hadn’t kissed it for years.
No, wait a minute, she told herself. Bill Moore had never kissed her there.
Never kissed her like that?
Then who had? She couldn’t place it. But she knew there had been someone.
Her brow knit in confusion.
Then her eyes rose. Her gaze went directly over the wall to her own home. It settled on the upstairs window in which she had stood a few minutes earlier. The turret room.
What in Heaven’s name was going on, she wondered. What had prompted her to run over here and look at her home from the base of this fallen tomb?
So many questions, and she didn’t have a single answer. Her heart nearly jumped out of her chest when a nearby male voice addressed her.
“Lady?”
She whirled. A gnarled older man stood near her, studying her, obviously surprised by her presence.
“Yes?”
“The cemetery is about to close,” he said. “I no can let you stay.”
He was the caretaker, she could see quickly. An old Mexican with a kindly face. He was the man she had seen from the Mustang when driving by with Melissa the previous day.
“What happened here?” she asked, indica
ting the fallen tombstone.
The old man shrugged. “Tomb got tipped over,” he said.
“How?”
He shrugged again. “Who knows?”
“Where’s the grave?” she asked.
He pointed to a gaping hole in the ground more than fifty feet away. She didn’t understand. “How did the monument get way over here?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it flew.”
He meant it as a joke. She didn’t take it as one. She looked at the distance and couldn’t picture what could have happened.
“So it just traveled through the air and landed here?” she asked.
“Don’t know,” he said. “And I don’t know how it going to get back. This is a private cemetery. Gonna cost five thousand dollars to get the marker put back. I just learned. We don’t have the money for it. State’s broke. City’s broke.”
“So it will just lie here?” Rebecca asked.
“I guess. Till somebody pays.”
“The tomb only says Billy,” Rebecca said. She stood. “Whose grave was this?” “An actor in the 1920s,” Martinez said. “Billy Carlton. You ever heard of him?”
She thought about it. It had an odd ring. Almost familiar, but not quite.
“No,” she finally said. “I don’t remember him. Sorry.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” he said. “‘B list.’ That’s what they call it, don’t they?”
Several moments passed. The old man stood close to her, breathing heavily through his mouth and watching her. She was still trying to figure out the odd circumstances of Billy Carlton’s granite angel when the old Mexican spoke again.
“I’m sorry, lady,” he said. “I got to close the gates now. You come back tomorrow if you like.”
It took a moment for his words to sink in. She was still unsuccessfully trying to fathom what was before her.
“Of course,” she finally said.
Rebecca took a final look at the angel’s face. Then she turned away from Billy Carlton’s marker. The caretaker followed her to the gate. As she started home she could hear the chains and padlock going around the iron bars.
She walked back to 2136 Topango Gardens, hoping that she might run into Melissa on her way home. But Melissa did not appear.
The only car she recognized, in fact, was the one sitting in her own driveway when she returned. It was her husband’s. She found herself disappointed when she saw it, not that she hadn’t expected it. It was just that, strangely, her husband’s presence now seemed like an intrusion of some sort.
Once again, she couldn’t decipher her own feelings. Even if she had tried to explain that sensation to a friend like Melissa, she would not have been able to do so.
Chapter 38
Ed Van Allen looked at the file upon his desk in his office and felt his blood begin to boil. It wasn’t just that his initial instincts in the Moore case were being confirmed. It was that they were being confirmed so flagrantly. Stuff like this made him look and feel like a fool.
Sometimes he wondered. Maybe he was one.
He uttered a low curse and thumbed through the FBI record on William Moore. And, Van Allen noted quickly, the fingerprints and social security number had confirmed what was in front of him. Rebecca’s husband was the same Bill Moore as in these files.
Moore’s resume read like a criminal counterpoint to the film career of Billy Carlton. After all, the credits were stacked up much the same way:
“Aug. 15, 1991, Richmond, Virginia, Penal Code 3412, possession of controlled substance; charges dismissed; Oct. 21, 1984, Manassas, Virginia, Penal Code 3402, attempted sale of controlled substance; pleaded guilty to possession of marijuana, sentenced to $500 fine plus community service, latter never completed; June 2, 1999, Maryland Antidrug Trafficking Ordinance 15-T6, arrested for possession of one pound raw cannabis, charges dismissed on technicality surrounding illegal search and seizure (local authorities declined to prosecute), pleaded guilty to related firearm possession (unloaded handgun under passenger’s seat of car) sentenced to one year probation, probation completed; New York (King’s County) May 16, 2002, arrested possession of cocaine, pleaded guilty to DWI, sentenced to fine of $1000, loss of motor vehicle operator’s privileges in New York State for two years. Fine paid.”
Bill Moore was no one’s choirboy. What emerged was a portrait of a longtime chronic substance abuser and sometime dealer, a man whose architectural endeavors might have some financing that did not necessarily have to do with the construction or design of buildings. To Van Allen, the subtext that emerged was the profile of a man who could easily harm his own family.
Van Allen leaned back from his desk. How exactly this played into the current crime, Van Allen didn’t know. But he now had a new angle. He wondered whether to go after Moore first or his wife. One thing was for certain: he would eventually need to play them off against each other. That’s how cases like this worked.
The only question, as he mused further, was how much Moore may have lurked beneath this and how much his wife might have been a victim, at least in part. But then Van Allen thought back to sections of the lie detector test, the parts where she had denied knowing anything that she hadn’t revealed to the police. Van Allen thought he had the answer there, too.
Alice Aldrich walked in and out of the room, looking over Van Allen’s shoulder, but saying nothing. The phone on his desk rang. Van Allen picked it up and found himself talking to a Sergeant David Chandler of the Connecticut State Police. Chandler was returning Van Allen’s earlier call.
Van Allen sat still and listened.
Chandler spun yet another intriguing tale about the Moores, this one from the previous February. Chandler waded through all the details, concluding with a few cryptic words about the indeterminate open status of the investigation.
“I’m not sure I’m following you,” Van Allen finally responded.
“This is all unofficial,” Chandler said. “But as far as we know, the alleged abduction from last spring remains unsolved. There never really was a resolution to the case. Probably won’t be.”
“No evidence?” Van Allen asked.
“No one ever saw the perpetrator. No other crimes or abductions in the area or, as far as I know, even in the state. God knows, I looked hard.”
“So what was the bottom line?” Van Allen asked.
“We thought Mrs. Moore might have been making up the whole story,” Chandler said. “Why, I don’t know. I couldn’t even guess. But when I put this to Mr. Moore, he did nothing to dissuade me from that theory.”
“Moore agreed with that theory?” Van Allen asked.
“Yes. In some ways, he encouraged it.”
Van Allen’s brows knit in confusion. He searched for the angle. He could only apply the patterns of criminal behavior that he had learned through years of experience: whenever a suspect — and Bill Moore was now a suspect — wanted something, its benefits had to be carefully analyzed.
So why would Bill Moore have encouraged the investigating officers to disbelieve his wife’s story?
“Didn’t you say there were shots fired?” Van Allen asked. “Into some woods or something?”
“Rebecca Moore said there were shots fired. Again, no witnesses.”
“You didn’t find any spent rounds?”
“There was snow on the ground.”
“Anyone look after the snow melted?’ There was an embarrassed pause on the Connecticut end of the line.
“No. No one looked,” Chandler answered. “That was long after the fact.”
“The rounds could still be out there,” Van Allen said.
“So could a lot of things,” Chandler answered.
“And you’ve had other cases, and long ago you concluded that maybe the whole Rebecca Moore story was a fabrication,” Van Allen suggested. “Am I correct?”
Another embarrassed pause, then,
“I guess I’d have to say you’re correct, Detective,” Sergeant Chandler said. “Unofficially co
rrect, of course.”
Van Allen let a moment pass. His mind was alive now with images of floating the overturned grave markers, drug dealers turned architectural consultants, and now sloppy police work in a case where a shooter might or might not have ever shot.
“Why don’t you have a look now?” Van Allen asked.
“Now?” Van Allen sighed.
“I mean, we’re dealing with a major investigation on this end,” he began. “Would that be some sort of major problem, to go have one more look for a spent round?”
A pause, then…
“I guess I could take a look,” Chandler said.
Van Allen thanked the young sergeant across the country. He put down the phone and stared straight ahead. He wondered where exactly any of the details in this case would start to intersect.
He again flipped open the file containing his notes. It was time to start turning the screws upon one of the Moore parents. He made a decision. Rebecca was probably the weaker of the two. He would put her feet to the flames first, and he would do so right in her home.
After all, he told himself, the bodies were there somewhere, too.
“Convenient: there’s a cemetery right next door.”
Van Allen shook himself. Where in the world had that thought come from, he wondered.
Chapter 39
Dr. Chang Lim’s wife, Sonya, who was also his nurse, met Rebecca at the door to Dr. Lim’s office in Westwood. It was Monday morning at eleven.
Sonya was a stout Russian-born woman with an accent. She guided Rebecca into the doctor’s interview chamber almost immediately after her arrival.
Dr. Lim received Rebecca cordially. He was wearing an open necked print shirt, beige slacks, and green sneakers. No socks. He talked for a few minutes on the theory and philosophy of hypnotism. He noted that the success of the therapy was in proportion to how great the patient’s desire to reveal the inner aspects of his or her consciousness.
“I need you relax, Rebecca,” Dr. Lim stressed, Hong Kong still flavoring his English. “I need you relax and trust me. And I tell you also this: if we fail today, that does not preclude our success on another day. We keep working.”
“I understand,” Rebecca said.
