Angel

by Nicholas Guild

  Jenny was more frightened than hurt, and there were a couple of red marks on her face that would certainly ripen into dark, ugly bruises. She was crying hysterically. Olmstead had to shake her vigorously for perhaps half a minute to get her to stop.

  “You’ll be needing some ice,” he told her, once she was calm enough to listen. About half a block down the street there was an all-night arcade of the kind that appeals to sailors and other adolescents. He bought her a snow cone without the syrup, wrapped it in his handkerchief, and gave it to her to hold against her battered face.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Are you a cop?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Then yes, I’m hungry. Can I have some pizza?”

  He bought her two slices, sausage and mushrooms, and a large Coke. They were able to sit at a table since the place was almost empty. She did the pizza full justice.

  “How long has it been since you’ve had a paying customer?”

  “Four days,” she answered, licking her fingers. “And then I got robbed.”

  “How long have you been on the streets?”

  “About three months.”

  “You don’t seem to have much of a flair for it.”

  “You want to fuck me? Fifty bucks. I owe you, so I’ll make it real nice for you. You got your car near here?”

  She wasn’t bad. She might even have seemed pretty, except that she was half-starved and probably hadn’t had a proper bath in two weeks. She looked like she’d been sleeping rough for a few nights. And then there was the fact that her face was like raw hamburger.

  “I don’t want to fuck you, and you haven’t seen fifty bucks in living memory,” he said, standing up. “But I might have a job for you. You can come with me now or you can stay here and finish your pizza. Then you can go back to your promising career.”

  She was out of her chair before he had finished speaking. “Can I take the rest of it with me?”

  He drove her up to White Plains and bought her a motel room, paying a week in advance. Then he drove home and got some sleep.

  When he showed up again the next afternoon, with a thermos of coffee and a sack full of roast beef sandwiches, she was in the shower. When she came out she looked better than she had the night before. She was clean, for one thing, and she’d had ten hours sleep. She sat on the edge of one of the twin beds, chewing on her sandwich, naked as dawn.

  “I washed my underwear,” she said. “It was getting really bad. My suitcase is in a locker at the bus terminal . . . .”

  “We’ll get you some clothes.”

  Olmstead was trying not to stare at her hard, pink little nipples. She must have noticed how difficult it was for him.

  “Look, if you want to fuck me that’s fine. Just let me finish my sandwich.”

  “All right, so I fucked her,” he told Kinkaid, as if the confession had been extorted from him. “I mean, Jesus, who wouldn’t? She really had the body. A guy my age doesn’t get a chance like that every day.”

  And she made it very easy, then and later. She didn’t pretend to think Lew Olmstead was the answer to her prayers, but she didn’t hold it against him that he wanted to climb on her. Lust wasn’t comical or ridiculous. It was inevitable, like hunger pangs. And she seemed to regard herself as having no rights in the matter.

  So for three weeks, until Mrs. Wyman was ready for her, he availed himself. He fed her and bought her clothes, including a woolen coat against the gathering cold. He talked to her, which she took as a special kindness.

  “I guess she had had a tough time at home,” he said of the experience. “She didn’t have much to say about it, but you could read between the lines. She wasn’t a bad kid.”

  And then an expression of pain crossed his face.

  “I liked her,” he went on, making this too into a confession. “And it wasn’t just that she let me screw her, although that was part of it. You can’t spend three weeks with a woman and not care about her at all, not if you’re human.”

  Kinkaid discovered that he really did not want to hear about Olmstead’s finer feelings. He did not want to share the man’s pain. So he took his revenge.

  “What did you tell her about the job?”

  Olmstead actually flinched, as if he had been struck in the face.

  “Not much—I didn’t know much. I asked her if she knew how to drive, and she did. Then she asked me if this thing I wanted her to do would get her put in jail, and I said no. ‘Will it get me killed?’ she asked, and I said no. ‘Then I don’t care what it is,’ she said.”

  You could see it in his eyes. He knew she was dead and that he had delivered her to death. No one had ever told him, but he knew. That was his punishment.

  “And then you delivered her to Mrs. Wyman.”

  “Yes, I did that. I drove her up to that house, in the middle of the night, and I waited in the car while she and Mrs. Wyman talked. It was maybe a week or ten days before Christmas and it was cold as hell. I remember how the wind blew. When Jenny came outside she was carrying an envelope.

  “‘It’s easy,’ she said. ‘I’m going to Canada.’ I didn’t ask her to explain. I just drove her to New Haven, where she took the train to Boston. I never saw her again.”

  “And that’s all you can tell me?”

  “That’s all I know.”

  Kinkaid believed him. He took the check out of his shirt pocket and left it on the table.

  And in that moment he had a kind of hallucination. He was standing on a railroad platform, watching as the train pulled away—watching as Jenny, whom he had never seen in life or in death, waved goodbye to him. She was smiling. She was ecstatic with happiness. Her face shone like a light. And it was Jenny’s face, and Angel’s, and Lisa’s, all at once. And he was Olmstead, and the guilt was his, for he knew he was the harbinger of death.

  “Do you know what happened to her?”

  And then the face that he saw was Olmstead’s, and he was himself again, James Kinkaid, Esq., of that name the fourth, and no one else. For the enchantment had been broken.

  “No idea,” he answered, lying.

  “Well if you ever find out, don’t tell me.”

  26

  The one person who knew for certain was just then staring out over the rocky California coastline and attempting to come to terms with the significance of Jimmy Carfax’s warning.

  It was neatly typed out on a sheet of her lawyer’s stationery, with his apologetic note above it: “Came back from vacation to find this in my E-mail. You’ll best know what it means. Sorry for the delay.” The date stamp on the message was from the week before.

  JK4 is busy adding up 2 and 2. Angel did not need to have the abbreviation interpreted for her.

  She subscribed to the Stamford Advocate and had read the elder Kinkaid’s obituary. Perhaps that event had unleashed Jim’s curiosity, or perhaps merely freed him to begin his search. She was reasonably sure the father would never have revealed anything about her disappearance to his son. And yet he had made his way as far as Sherman’s Crest.

  Well, maybe he would think the search ended there. Except that that was not what the message said: . . . busy adding up 2 and 2 . . . Jimmy Carfax might have given the game away just for the fun of it. She should have arranged something for the malignant little toad before she went over the wall.

  Except that it no longer mattered. If Jim had been to Sherman’s Crest he knew about the grave, so if he ever found out that she was still alive he would know she was responsible for at least one murder. Thus she could never return to New Gilead, never have him as the lover he had never quite managed to become. The door to the new life she had promised herself was slammed in her face.

  For ten years she had worked to clear the path. Everything she had done, her every thought had been focused on that one goal. She had achieved miracles—she had died and been reborn, she had erased the past—and now, just when she was about to reclaim everything that was hers by right, she found her way barred at
the last step.

  Dominic Franco had been her one mistake. In ten years, her only mistake. Now, after all this time, she couldn’t even remember why she had killed him. Yes she could. She had killed him because, in that one moment, she had had to kill someone to keep her sanity.

  Grandmother had driven her to it.

  “Do you imagine for a single moment that I am unaware of how you have been amusing yourself? Your mother was a whore and so are you. Do you honestly believe that boy, that pure boy who has the world spread out before him, is such a fool that he will still want you when he finds out?”

  She had said a great deal more. She had held nothing back, nothing. And in the end Angel had run from the house, had escaped into the darkness, blinded by her own tears.

  She could not remember why she had gone to the gardener’s hut, except perhaps that Dominic’s was the one name her grandmother had not thrown in her face—perhaps she did not know. Perhaps, if she had known, this connection was too degrading to allow her even to speak of it.

  Dominic had been her first. She had lost her virginity on his narrow little bed and then quickly lost interest in him. He drank too much to be a satisfactory lover and she had grown to hate the way he ran his hands over her, as if she had become his property. She had not been in his hut for five months.

  And then, suddenly, she was.

  He was asleep. The whole room smelled of whiskey, and he was so deep into his alcoholic coma that nothing could have roused him. He lay there on his back, his mouth open, and as he breathed he made a gurgling sound in the back of his throat.

  I gave myself to that, she thought. I lay on this bed, with those arms around me. The idea having been touched by him was repellent beyond endurance.

  With his mouth open he looked as if he were getting ready to announce to the whole world that I, Dominic Franco, the gardener, usually too drunk to unbutton my fly, nevertheless fucked Angela Wyman of the “Five Mile” Wymans.

  That he might say such a thing—ever, to anyone—was suddenly intolerable.

  “Don’t laugh at me, Dom,” she shouted. “Don’t you dare laugh at me!”

  The fact that he was in no condition to laugh, or even to hear her, was beside the point. In that instant she hated him more than she had thought it possible to hate anyone.

  There was a shovel leaning against the wall. Why he had brought it inside with him was impossible to guess. Perhaps if he had not he would still be alive. Perhaps nothing could have saved him.

  He never moved. The whole time, as she beat in his face with the shovel blade, as blood and splinters of bone spattered the bed, the floor even the walls, he never stirred. Could a man die like that and know nothing of it?

  At last, when she was calm again, she threw the shovel away and sat down on the floor to catch her breath. She would go to her room, she thought. She would take a shower and then go to bed. But first she would tell Grandmother what she had done.

  It was only as she walked back toward the house, and her dress, wet with blood, was beginning to grow clammy against her skin, that she realized this could not be kept simply a Wyman matter. Dominic was lying on his bed with his face smashed in, and he would never get up again. This could not possibly remain just within the family. It was the only time in her life she could remember being afraid.

  So she decided she would be mad.

  Ten years later, she could not remember if, just at first, she had been faking or if her trance had somehow been real—it did not seem a particularly important distinction.

  She remembered everything else. She could remember being terribly cold.

  And then all those years at Sherman’s Crest, pretending to be disconnected from life, seducing her psychiatrist through his professional vanity, making him her lover even though he never touched her. Making them all love and trust her until she was more free than any of them, except that they could leave and she could not.

  Grandmother had arranged everything. Angela Wyman could not be allowed to die in an asylum, even if she had murdered fifty gardeners. Whether it was love or pride or some pitiless mingling of the two, she would do whatever needed doing.

  “When the time comes, find me someone to take my place,” Angel had told her. “When I am ready to leave, they must imagine they know what became of me.”

  Because Jim’s father and that fat policeman would never let her come back. Dominic Franco’s death meant something to them, so they would never let her come back. If she ever returned to Five Miles it would have to be as someone else.

  And they would both have to be dead. Jim’s father obliged by having a heart attack, but Marshal Cheffins, Grandmother’s faithful watchdog, required some coaxing.

  It had been Angel’s experience that most people went to their deaths quite willingly, with only a little show of reluctance just at the end. There was something in every human soul that wanted to die. It was otherwise difficult to explain the willful stupidity with which murder victims rushed to embrace their fates. What was so wonderful about most people’s lives?

  Certainly, whatever Grandmother may have thought—and she made a great show of horrified remorse when she found out—the girl who in death became Angela Wyman seemed to have little enough to live for.

  “Where do we nab the car?” she had asked. “Somewhere around here?”

  If Angel ever knew her name she had long since forgotten it. She was just a girl waiting in a pale gray Toyota at a tourist rest stop about four miles down the road from Sherman’s Crest, and at that moment she was so near to death that names no longer mattered.

  At first Angel didn’t know what she was talking about, and then she remembered. The Official Plan involved stealing a car in Quincy, so the authorities would draw the obvious conclusion, and then letting the girl drive it up to the Canadian border, where she would flirt with one of the inspectors or cause a scene, anything to attract attention to herself. She had the right color hair and she was already wearing Angel’s coat—there was even a superficial resemblance. The car would clinch the identification. And meanwhile Angel was to take the Toyota and go off in another direction. It wasn’t a bad plan. It might even have worked.

  Angel, however, was not prepared to chance it.

  “What will you do once you get to Montreal?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “I don’t know—dye my hair I guess. God, we really look a lot alike. It’s a little spooky.”

  She laughed, as if she were embarrassed or perhaps only wanted to be friends. It didn’t matter.

  “Move over and let me drive. I need the practice.”

  And she did. One of her mother’s boyfriends had once spent an afternoon teaching her how, but that had been five years ago. Now, as she started up the road back toward the hospital, she wasn’t at all sure she remembered and it would be a great nuisance if she had to keep the girl alive just to act as chauffeur.

  But it came back quickly. Within a few miles she knew it would be all right.

  “Did you happen to bring anything to eat? I’m starving.”

  “I bought a couple of sandwiches in Manchester, just in case.”

  “Then let’s pull over somewhere.”

  It was so easy. They ate the sandwiches, then Angel announced she had to pee. She took the flashlight that was in the glove compartment and headed out into the darkness. She gave it about a minute and a half and then she screamed. The girl bolted out of the car and starting running straight for the narrow circle of yellow light where the flashlight was lying on the ground. When she reached over to pick it up Angel stepped forward and kicked her in the face, breaking her nose and knocking her over onto her back. There was no fight left in her. All that remained was to select a rock of the proper size and use it to crush her skull.

  By then it was already beginning to snow. There was a woman’s raincoat lying on the back seat of the car and Angel used it to wrap up the corpse’s head to keep it from bleeding all over the upholstery in the trunk, because by then she had pretty wel
l obliterated the face. There were plenty of cliffs along the road and almost no traffic. No one would be out with a blizzard coming.

  Once she had gotten rid of the body she headed south and east, away from the storm front. She was just inside Massachusetts when road conditions forced her into a motel. She was snowed in there for three days, living on the contents of the snack machine in the lobby, until the roads were cleared enough to let her go on to Boston, where she turned the car in at an Avis dealership and caught the train to New Haven.

  During the trip she entertained herself by going through the suitcase the dead girl had intended to take to Canada. The suitcase was full of new clothes, some with the price tags still attached—the J.C. Penny Spring Collection. It had been an act of mercy to kill her. Otherwise she would surely have frozen to death.

  As soon as the train arrived in New Haven she checked into Howard Johnson’s near the station.

  “Plenty of room,” the woman behind the counter told her. “Plan to stay long?”

  “I don’t know. Is Yale far from here?”

  “Only a few blocks, but there’s nobody around. Place closes down over the term break. Why? You know somebody there?”

  Angel didn’t answer. Instead, she collected her key and went to her room.

  Mrs. Wyman had a telephone on the night table in her bedroom. It was on a separate line and only half a dozen people on Earth knew the number. It was the only phone in the house which one could be reasonably certain would not be answered by a servant. The evening of her arrival in New Haven, Angel placed a call to that number from a pay phone in the hotel lobby.

  She told her grandmother where she was.

  “It will be impossible to come just now,” Mrs. Wyman said.

  “Don’t come at all if you don’t feel like it.”