“No!” Anna shouted so loudly that all noise stopped and everyone in the diner looked at her for a moment before returning to their burgers, veal cutlets or Mom’s homemade meatloaf.
“No!” she whispered emphatically. “I can’t do that.”
“Why not? To hell with the money.”
“It’s not the money, Tom.”
“Then what is it?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t.”
“You do know this sounds crazy, right.”
Anna paused. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
“Good.”
“But I have to find out what’s going on. I’m just not sure how.”
“Okay,” Tom looked into her eyes. “If you really have to do this, why don’t you just call the guy who sold them to you. He told you they were from France, right? Maybe he knows more.”
Anna smiled and bent over the table to kiss Tom. “Great idea, baby.” she slapped her forehead lightly. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it.”
“See, you need me,” Tom returned her kiss.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Anna teased. “I knew you had to be good for something.”
“Is that the only thing I’m good for?”
Tom’s mind had returned to its usual one track. It was a track Anna often enjoyed taking. She leaned back, kicked off a shoe and ran her foot up the inside of Tom’s leg. “Maybe I can think of a couple of others.”
“I know I can,” Tom reached down and moved her foot up until it reached his desired destination. “Want to hear some of them?”
The waitress interrupted the conversation. “So, sweetie,” she looked at Tom. “What’ll it be?”
Both Anna and Tom laughed.
“Do you need a couple of minutes?” the waitress asked, not getting or caring about the joke.
“Come on, give me some credit. I take longer than that.” Tom looked at Anna. “Okay, usually.”
“Huh?” The waitress snapped her gum.
“Ignore him, please.” Anna removed her foot from Tom’s crotch. “I think we know what we both want.”
Two of the three people at the table again started to laugh. The waitress walked away, only to return a few minutes later. This time Anna and Tom knew they were on the verge of being asked to leave and quickly ordered their meals.
Anna was happy to laugh, even if it was somewhat forced. She now had a plan, so she could push her fears aside and concentrate on what needed to be done to accomplish her goal. Contacting the auction house was concrete, real and diverting. She tried to remember the phone number.
Anna happily ate her eggs, and Tom complained bitterly about the state of his steak.
“I said well done,” Tom shook his head. “This is a bloody mess.” He pushed his plate aside and stuffed his mouth full of bread.
“Ah, that’s it. Now I remember.” Anna pulled a pen from her purse and wrote the number down on a napkin. “I’ll call them tomorrow.”
* * *
A short while later Anna and Tom walked out of the diner. Tom had left most of his steak and a tiny tip on the table. Anna had finished everything on her plate.
At his insistence, Anna let Tom drive, and he drove them directly back home.
“Would you check,” Anna pointed to the dining room as soon as they entered the house. “Please.”
“Sure,” Tom smiled. “We wouldn’t want the boogie-box to get us.” He walked directly into the dining room before Anna could respond.
Anna watched from the hallway as Tom disappeared into the room. A moment later the light came on. Anna waited. Ten seconds became twenty, then thirty.
“Tom?”
There was no answer. Anna took a couple of steps forward and called out again. “Tom? Is everything all right?”
Tom suddenly burst from the room, screaming for help. He was frantically trying to pull an open music box from his throat.
“Tom!” Anna screamed and raced to Tom, who fell to the floor still grasping at the box around his neck.
“No!” Anna shouted. “Leave him alone!”
When Anna got to Tom she looked down at his contorted face. His tongue hung out from one side of his mouth and his eyes were crossed.
Anna kicked him. “You jerk!”
Tom jumped up and offered the mahogany music box to Anna. She quickly turned away.
“God, what happened to your sense of humor?” Tom asked.
“No,” Anna responded. “The real question is what happened to yours?”
Anna felt the adrenaline racing through her body. She waited for it to stop, or for her heart to explode, whichever came first.
Tom took the music box back into the dining room. “I’m sorry,” he called out to Anna. “I was just trying to lighten things up a bit. I kept seeing a headline: MAN MURDERED—MUSIC BOX IN CUSTODY.”
“Not funny.”
“Actually, I think it kinda is.”
Tom came out of the dining room. He was smiling. “Come and take a look for yourself my little Ms. Para Noid. There’s nothing weird in there. Well, except for your Aunt Clara’s furniture of course”
“That’s okay,” Anna closed the dining room door. “I trust you. . .I think.”
Anna followed Tom upstairs, but made an excuse that she had go down to get a glass of water. Instead of going to the sink, she wedged a chair up against the dining room door. Then, she pushed another chair up against the first one.
Once back in the bedroom, Anna closed the door, and locked the lock. After Tom had fallen asleep she moved her stationary exercise bike up against the door. She then read every magazine she could find before finally falling into a form of sleep; one where there is no rest.
* * *
Anna was awake when the sun rose. She was heading for work an hour later. The office suddenly seemed more like a sanctuary than the prison it had felt like for the past several years. As soon as she got to her desk she looked up the number of the auction house where she had purchased the music boxes. Now there was nothing to do but settle in and wait until 9. Anna put her head down on her desk and immediately fell into the first peaceful sleep she had in three days.
“Wake up sleeping beauty.” Jeffrey massaged Anna’s shoulders gently. “Or Tony might start charging you for lodging.”
Anna pulled her head up from her arms. Her cheek was sweaty and creased from the folds in her shirt.
“Ummm, Jeffrey,” Anna stretched her arms into the air and yawned. “I was having the best sleep.”
“Sweet dreams?”
“No dreams,” Anna smiled.
* * *
At 9 o’clock sharp, Anna was on her phone. The auctioneer immediately came on the line as soon as his secretary told him who was calling. Anna had to promise that they might, some day, have lunch, before he would give her the name and phone number of the antique exporter in Paris who had arranged for the sale of the music boxes.
Anna said a quick “thank you,” and hung up before the auctioneer could finish saying “I’ll call you next week.”
Just as Anna was about to call Paris, the light on her interoffice phone line started to blink.
“Go away. Go away. Go away,” Anna whispered.
It kept blinking.
“Be Jeffrey. Be Jeffrey. Be Jeffrey,” she prayed and picked up the phone.
“What-cha working on?”
Shit, Anna thought. “Cold calling for new clients.”
Anna used her usual answer to Tony’s question.
“Got a minute?”
Shit. “Sure.”
Tony’s “minute” lasted until almost lunch. When he finally called in an intern and ordered his CB on an OR with regular mustard, Anna practically ran to her desk. With the time difference, it was now almost 5 p.m. in Paris, and she didn’t want to wait another day, or night, to find out whatever she could.
Her fingers shook as she started dialing the 14 numbers that would, she hoped, connect her with some answers. “Fuck!” she had to start four times before
she dialed all of the numbers without making a mistake. Finally she heard a phone starting to ring.
Come on, answer the phone. Come on, come on, come on.
“Bon jour,” a male voice answered on the tenth ring.
Finally
“Bon jour,” Anna said. She immediately realized she couldn’t really say any more. “Um, do you speak English?”
There was a pause. Then there was a terse, “No.”
Anna tried to think fast, but apparently she didn’t do so fast enough. The man said “au revoir,” and the phone went dead.
“Uggggg,” Anna growled and dialed again. This time she got it right on the first try.
“Bon jour,” the same voice answered.
“Monsieur, Monsieur . . .”
How do you say: please? That’s it!
“Sil vous plait, sil vous plait. Don’t hang up! Sil vous plait.”
How do you say: do you understand? Ah!
“Comprende vous?”
“Oui,” the man said.
“Good. I mean, bon. good. Yo se Anna. . . ”
Shit, that’s Spanish! I think.
“Moi estoy: Anna McAlister. Et tu?”
“Monsieur LaRoche,” the man sounded like he was smiling.
“Oh Monsieur. I no parlay vous Francais.”
The man on the phone started laughing.
“Oh fuck,” Ann said softly.
“Ah, fuck,” the man said. “The universal language of fuck.”
“That, you understand?” Anna groaned. “Wait a minute, you do speak English.”
“Of course I do. I took many years of English in school. I was the best in my class.”
“But you said you didn’t speak it.”
“What can I say? I lied.” The man made a popping sound at the end of his sentence. It sounded very French.
Anna laughed.
“So, Anna McAlister. How can I help you?”
“I recently purchased a collection of music boxes that I believe you arranged to sell in the United States.”
“Ah Oui, the music boxes. I remember them well.”
“I was wondering if you could tell me anything about their history. Who owned them before? Why did they sell them? Where did they come from?”
“Please, slow down, mademoiselle. This is information that I cannot release without the approval of my client. Those for whom I work demand their privacy.”
“I understand, but this is really important. I have to learn everything I can about those music boxes.”
“Pourquoi, I mean, why?”
“You would think I’m crazy if I told you.”
“I think all Americans are crazy. So, it is safe for you to talk.”
“Okay,” Anna said. “But I warned you.”
After Anna told Monsieur LaRoche the entire story he asked for her address and simply said, “I will see what I can do.”
Before Anna could probe further, he said “au revoir” and hung up the phone.
Chapter 6
At five that afternoon it started to rain. It was a steady rain that would last all night. Anna remembered her grandfather calling this kind of ground-soaking rain, “God’s good rain.” The thought made Anna laugh out loud.
“Nothing good about it today, Grandpa,” she said as she walked to her car without opening the umbrella she was carrying in her briefcase. “Not today.”
* * *
Anna, Jeffrey and Stacy were to meet Tom at a bar after work for a drink. Anna needed it. As a matter of fact she needed it a few times over. She abandoned her usual white wine, in favor of something a bit stronger.
“Double Chivas on the rocks. Quickly . . . please.”
While Jeffrey and Stacy laughed about a client, the Merriman Hair Transplant Clinic, Anna downed her first drink, then another, and even a third.
“Did you see the footage of that hair transplant operation?” Stacy asked. “The part where they cut the strip of hair from the back of the head to get the implants? It looked like someone went after the guy with a meat cleaver. Blahhhh. Disgusting.”
A quick vision of a knife slicing skin and the skin opening flashed in Anna’s mind. She ordered another scotch.
“I always wondered where they got the hair to transplant,” Jeffrey said. “One guy in this bar downtown told me that he had his pubic hair transplanted on to his head.”
“And you believed him?” Stacy asked.
“Well, his hair was short and kind of curly.”
“You dick head.”
“I think that was his name. But, he usually went by Richard.”
Stacy threw some popcorn at Jeffrey. He delighted in setting her and Anna up for his little jokes. They always fell for them because they always believed him.
“I actually prefer my men bald,” Jeffrey sat back in his chair.
“Don’t you mean, shaved?” Stacy teased.
“On a good date, sure.”
Anna drained her fourth double scotch. “I called Paris from work today.”
That got her friends’ attention.
“There’s something wrong with my music boxes.”
Jeffrey and Stacy looked at Anna.
“I think they’re haunted.”
Speaking with courage born 12 years earlier at a distillery in Scotland, Anna was quite literally feeling no pain. For the first time that day, nothing hurt. Or, if it did, Anna didn’t notice.
No one said a word for a minute, then Jeffrey smiled. “The haunted box? Sounds like Stephen King gone porno.”
Jeffrey had assumed Anna was kidding.
Anna and Stacy both laughed. Then, Anna stopped and stared right at her friends. “I’m not joking. They’re haunted.”
Now no one was laughing.
Anna told them everything she could remember. Things were getting a bit fuzzy and out of focus. “More Scotch, please,” she raised her glass toward the bartender.
“Just another dream?” Stacy asked.
“Nope,” Anna shook her head from side to side. “Nope, nope, nope.”
“How can you be sure?”
Anna leaned forward. She was starting to slur slightly. “I wasn’t asleep.”
“Were you awake?” Stacy asked.
“Nope.”
“Then what were you?”
Anna motioned for her friends to lean forward with her. When they did she whispered., “I don’t know.”
“What did the man in Paris say?” Jeffrey broke what was probably his longest stretch of silence in years. He had felt a sudden chill as Anna spoke. He knew that it had nothing to do with the temperature in the room. He shuddered slightly, remembering his grandmother saying that such a chill meant someone had just walked across what would be your grave.
“Did he give you any information?”
“He just took my address and said he’d find out what he could.”
“And what do you plan to do until then?” Stacy asked.
Anna lifted her glass, this time to her lips. “Drink.”
* * *
Tom arrived ten minutes later, just in time to watch Anna attempt to sit back down after a bathroom trip and miss her seat completely.
“Oops,” she said while sitting in a puddle of old beer, spilled by the previous occupants of the table. “Missed.”
Tom joined Stacy and Jeff as they lifted Anna to her feet.
“Tommy!” Anna stuck her tongue deeply into Tom’s mouth and roughly searched the front of his jeans.
“My ass is all wet, Tommy,” her slur was now complete. “Just like you like it.”
“Music boxes?” Tom looked at Stacy and Jeffrey who just nodded their heads.
“I think we better get you home,” Tom put his arms around Anna’s waist and moved her toward the door.
“No!” Anna said, for just a moment her voice sounded cold, stone sober. Then it returned to its previous drunken state. “Your place. Not mine.”
As they walked to the door Anna tripped and fell into the lap of a man. She
looked up at him and said, “I have haunted music boxes you know.”
Tom lifted her up and guided Anna to the exit. She looked up at him, her eyes wide and cloudy. “I really do.”
“I know,” Tom comforted Anna. “I know.
Anna patted him on the chest. “Good.”
* * *
The next morning even Anna’s eyelashes hurt. She had been this hung-over only twice before, the morning after prom night and the day of her father’s funeral. Both times she thought she was going to die. Today, the pain made her feel strangely alive. This was pain she could understand. This pain was normal, and anything normal was good.
The hangover made it impossible to focus on what had occurred over the past few days, and what Anna feared would happen in the days ahead. So, even though it hurt to blink, Anna didn’t mind.
“Hey drunky, welcome to the world of living,” Tom walked into the room and noticed that Anna had regained at least semi-consciousness. He had the good sense to whisper his greeting.
Anna moaned, and tried to sit up in bed, but it hurt too much. She lay back down, and that hurt even more.
“I brought you some coffee.” Tom put the cup on the nightstand. “Very strong, very hot, very black.”
“Very good,” Anna somehow managed to move up to a sitting position on the bed. She opened first one eye, and then the other before taking a sip. Anna was surprised to see that she was completely naked. Surprised, and annoyed, assuming that Tom had taken full advantage of her drunken state.
“What did you do, Tom?”
“What do you mean?”
“You really shouldn’t have sex with me when I’m too drunk to remember it.”
“Hey, it wasn’t my idea.”
“You took my clothes off.”
“No, actually, you did.”
“I did?”
“Yep, in the parking lot on the way to the car.”
“Uhhh,” Anna groaned. She now had a feint memory of rain on her breasts, wind between her legs, and of unzipping Tom’s pants in the car. She also remembered lowering her head and taking him into her mouth as he drove.
“Well, at least was I good?” Anna slurped her coffee. Some of it dribbled down her chin. She didn’t care.
“For awhile,” Tom said. He sat down next to Anna on the bed.
The Haunting of Anna McAlister Page 4
