Head bowed, eyes closed, Eli knelt before the sixth window in the procession. His lips moved silently, hurriedly, appealing to the window’s inhabitant to once again seek out the last angel, to fetch and bring her back to this very sanctum.
This same errand had been attempted yesterday, but was foiled when the courier inadvertently stumbled upon the Bently girl in Los Angeles, alive and no worse for wear according to rumor. He would dispatch another courier for her today, as well, and shuddered to think of the consequences should the runty, trouble-making bitch slip by him this time.
Katherine Bently aside, Eli never knew who he was getting until she arrived, and only that the girl would be ten years old and fatherless. And in this day and age, that left a lot to choose from. But whether the child was picked at random or was pre-selected, he did not know. His hunch, though, had always been that each one was singled out for possessing special qualities; qualities Mr. Gamble himself must have looked highly upon, as it was he who made the shopping list.
Besides, he imagined that the couriers did a fine job leaving the FBI and local authorities with nothing but the Jersey Devil to investigate. And any witnesses—no matter how compromised the authorities might come to consider them—were dealt with personally by Gamble.
Some of his fondest moments, Gamble had once told Eli, were the times when he questioned the witnesses himself. “I tell ya,” he’d bragged, “I can shake down a snitch like you wouldn’t believe.”
Eli could only imagine Gamble’s methods of interrogation.
Then again, maybe he couldn’t. And that was probably for the best.
Although Eli had been kept in the dark all these years about what Gamble was truly up to, he couldn’t help but wonder on occasion what his good mentor hoped to harvest from seven dead girls. But the restless nights when he pondered such mysteries had grown rarer with time, and he was more content now than ever to remain in the closet. For the most part, he was satisfied to be left alone to build and cherish his window collection, and perfect the incomparable craft of angel-making.
Most important of all, though, was the gratuity he’d earned for his unflagging devotion to Mr. Gamble and his cryptic cause. That being, he’d been given full artistic control over his imminent rebirth. He could be whoever or whatever he wanted when the time came—given the thumbs-up, of course, from his mentor.
That’s what Eli was hoping his side of the crop would yield.
He desperately wanted his own wings, had ever since he could remember, and thus had set out creating the Wall of Faces. He figured even the most reserved connoisseurs of contemporary art would admit to seeing the obvious corollaries between a black-and-white montage of dead, winged little girls and a mad priest’s obsession to fly.
If they could see starving Ethiopian children in a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup, he thought, then they could see anything. And if the critics were to ever come back nay-saying, then he’d just kindly direct them to the dome of St. Patrick’s Church.
Let Andy Warhol top that!
Satisfied that his wishes had been made clear, he opened his eyes and slowly rose before the window. He then touched the glass with one finger, dispatching the entity from its multicolored, puzzle-pieced medium and into a similar world where edges come together almost as dramatically; where borders and margins are sharply pronounced, separating color and demography. Into a world where scenery is now more often segregated by manmade lines and boundaries than allowed to naturally blend.
Man’s need for structure was evident in everything he touched, Eli knew. Especially his faith.
Unleashed, the apparition swiftly grew distant behind the glass, fluttering like a leaf down a well.
Eli then walked the length of the basement wall and hesitated before the second window in the series; the second one he’d obtained. “The Dawning,” he’d named it long ago; appropriately so, for the bottom of the window portrayed a black sun rising beyond a horizon blazing with orange-red flames. Farther up in the mural, near its center, those tongues of fire eerily metamorphosed into vaulting demonic figures, the higher and more complete ones bending and arching downward like divers off of springboards, cannon-balling and belly-flopping back down into the flames that had given birth to them.
But the image he adored most was near the top, the likeness of a little girl-angel falling headfirst from a golden sky, her feather wings tearing apart in her swift descent, her white gown rippling like a mast in a squall. Her face was terror-stricken; mouth agape, eyes wide. And there were many hands reaching down from the sky, trying to catch her, to snatch her up before being consumed by the fires below.
Until yesterday afternoon, it had never occurred to him that they might prove successful.
Perhaps those hands have managed some kind of desperate clutch after all, he thought.
“Kathy, Kathy, Kathy,” he whispered, shaking his head. “Someone has clipped your wings. But who?”
He stared at “The Dawning,” then into it, focusing on its inhabitant, whose wings fluttered then, as if in eager anticipation of his impending instructions.
“And you, my old and ornery friend,” he commanded, “will once again bring back to me the little bitch called Katherine!”
He touched the glass: “To the City of Angels!”
2.
Duncan sat at his desk, staring at a Chagall lithograph on the opposite wall. He’d not slept a wink since having returned from the photographer’s place, but already it had begun to feel like a dream; that point where reality elbows its way in as the eyes flutter open, and a sigh raises the drawbridge, leaving any monsters in fast pursuit to the discretion of the mote’s black, bottomless waters.
Duncan’s eyes were open, but he hadn’t yet exhaled; was still holding that breath, wanting to sift a little longer through the macabre flotsam.
Although the likelihood was good that someone had stopped payment on his reality check, it had by no means reached a foregone conclusion. In fact, he was feeling quite lucid, despite some cheap tequila that now had his brain shimmering like a patch of sun-baked asphalt.
Not too long ago, Rachel had finally come out and accused him of being an alcoholic. Insulted, he’d quickly countered that he was a drunk, not an alcoholic. Alcoholics, he explained, went to meetings.
In his right hand was a cordless phone, one he’d been caressing, fondling, petting for the last four hours or so. In a few minutes he would have to call the college and talk with Matt Doyle, Dean of Criminal Justice, and advise him that he would not be in today, as he was sick. Although psychotic might be the better clinical term, he had no desire to leave his good friend and boss with mental pictures of him naked and apish on his roof, throwing feces at passing cars. And Matt Doyle was just the sort of guy to drudge up those very images, being an ex-cop himself.
His idle cuddling of the phone was not manifest anticipation of that call, but rather for another he would very soon have to make.
The morning sun was just now snooping through the vertical blinds, revealing upon each burgundy slat Juanita’s streaked endeavors with a damp sponge.
Lazy as well as loco, he thought.
“You look like something the cat dragged in,” Rachel observed from behind a mask of facial cream the color of jade. She was in a knee-length blue silk robe with big white orchids. Little balls of cotton were pinned between her painted toes.
Duncan thought she looked like a geisha with a sheep-kicking fetish.
“You didn’t come to bed,” she said. “Been down here all night?”
He nodded, a bit bewildered. Last he checked, “down here” was the Dog House. And after having confessed his love affair with Patricia Bently, he was damned surprised that he wasn’t staring down at a Motel Six continental breakfast.
“It’s a bit early for that, don’t you think?” she said, pointing to the shot glass and bottle of tequila on his desk.
“Early?” he said. “In dog years, it’s practically dinnertime.”
“Uh-hu
h,” she said, looking at him curiously. “How did it go with that Mike Dillard guy?”
“Mitch Dillard,” he said, more suspicious than surprised. “And what makes you think I saw him?”
She smiled. “I just know.”
Well, Super Sleuth she was not. After all, it had been his very intention to do just that. He was still a little jumpy, he supposed. No. A lot jumpy, and the last thing he needed to be right now was paranoid. But he was definitely not going to relive those events with Rachel; not now. He didn’t need his wife placating him with phony smiles and goo-goo talk while she phoned the state hospital.
“The guy was okay”, he said, staring again at Chagall’s stone-signed litho. “He had nothing to do with what happened to Amy.” He clucked, then added sourly, “Whatever that might have been.” Then, more chipper: “Got a joke for ya. Two nuns are bicycling through town, as they often do. One says, ‘Hey, I’ve never come this way before.’ And the other nun says, ‘Yeah, it’s the cobblestones.’”
“Uh-huh,” she grunted, obviously too afraid to laugh lest she fragment the moo goo gai pan on her face. “So, what was it like playing detective again?”
“The flood of sweet sentiment was more than I could bear.”
“Great,” she said. “So, what’s with the Chagall?”
“The what?” Duncan said, baffled.
She pointed: “The Chagall. You’ve been staring at it. Is it crooked or something?”
Duncan ignored her question. “I have to call her, Rachel.”
Rachel grew silent, then disappeared back into the bathroom.
What am I going to tell Patricia? How am I going to tell her? Duncan had been asking himself those questions all morning and, so far, had not heard back with any sane suggestions.
All serious psychosis aside, he was now convinced that something had been set into motion. But he was still short an abstract, so what could he possibly say to Patricia—or anyone else, for that matter—without coming off as a total loon? Hi, Patricia! Just thought I’d call and let you know what a hell of an impression you left, seeing how my ten-year-old daughter not only looks exactly like yours did at the same age, but actually believes herself to be your daughter! So, how’ve ya been?
Hell, if he approached it like that, he thought, then he might as well include the news that all Ansel Adams pictures were about to be recalled by the Department of Agriculture, having been deemed a threat to all crops, gardens, and old hippie photographers.
Pesky slugs.
He poured another shot.
No, the only way to get Patricia’s undivided attention would be to plop Amy right on her doorstep.
Still, he had to call her, to prime the situation. Regardless of her reaction, Duncan could say that she had at least been warned. And if for nothing else, he blandly thought, meeting Katherine would prepare him for what Amy would look like in eleven years.
Rachel reappeared with a toothbrush in her mouth. “I’m not real keen on this, Dunc. Besides, isn’t it just a tad early to be calling on ex-lovers?”
“It’s mid-morning on the East coast,” he reminded her.
“Well, I see you thought of everything,” she said, shoulders sagging, as if he’d personally created the time zones just to facilitate the phone call.
He glowered at her. “Look, Miss Saigon, I think we both know it’s necessary.”
Giving her toothbrush a breather, she folded her arms across her chest. “Alright, but let me talk to the slut.”
He rolled his bloodshot eyes. “Jesus, Rachel, that horse is deceased already.”
“Oh, hell” she said, brushing again, “they probably don’t even live there anymore.”
Duncan just stared at the phone.
Astonished, Rachel yanked the toothbrush again from her mouth. “You’ve already tracked her down, haven’t you, detective!”
“Please, it’s not like I hired Sherlock Holmes at great expense,” he said. “Information didn’t have a listing for a Patricia Bently in Rock Bay, but it did have one for her mother, Joan Pendleton. She still lives at the same address as when I’d met her, the very one Amy gave the paramedics. Patricia had only taken me there a few times, so I suppose that’s why it didn’t jump right out at me at the hospital.”
Her eyes lit up. “She took you home to meet Mom? How charming.”
Without making a face, Duncan swallowed the remark. “Anyway, back then, Mrs. Pendleton wasn’t doing so hot,” he said. “Arthritis, I think. And as I recall it, Patricia was planning to move in and take care of her. Maybe that’s why Amy gave that address, because it’s where Patricia and Katherine are living now.” His hands came off his lap and spread out, as if to catch a low-thrown basketball. “Of course, I’m just speculating.”
“Of course you are,” she said. “I mean, what reasons would I have to doubt that you would be anything but totally on the up-and-up with me.”
“Damn it, Rachel, I never lied to you,” he said. “I just…didn’t tell you.”
“Spoken like a true man,” she proclaimed. “With those kinds of scruples, you’re a shoe-in for Commander-in-Chief.”
Duncan shook his head, ashamed of himself. “Jesus, you’re right. I’m sorry.”
She emancipated a long sigh, their paranormal situation obviously winning over her feminine principles. “Okay, call her. But I want to be here when you do.”
“I have an even better idea,” he said. “When I make the call, why don’t you just pick up in the other room, then you can eavesdrop to your heart’s content.”
This proposal writhed inside Duncan, not so unlike the bag of worms Patricia would open if she felt in the mood to reminisce. Just the wrong word, the wrong phrase and Patricia could have him on his knees begging for mercy in a variety of civil and criminal poses. He quailed. Rachel now knew of his affair with Patricia Bently, but she didn’t know the whole story. Not the half of it.
“Eavesdrop,” Rachel grinned mischievously. “Now you’re thinking like a woman.”
“This concerns both of us, Rachel,” he reminded her, “because it concerns Amy.”
“I agree,” she said, walking toward the door. “Try her now.”
Duncan nodded, then dialed the number.
Rachel picked up on the other extension.
“One ringy-dingy,” he said, overcome with a childish urge to heckle her. “Two ringy-dingies—”
“Grow up,” Rachel said.
Please don’t be there, he thought. But his bull’s-eye intuition told him she would be.
“Hello?” answered a lady’s voice.
Duncan paused, then: “Uh, Patricia? Patricia Bently?”
Incertitude hung in the pause. Then: “This is she.”
“Hi, Patricia, this is…is Duncan McNeil,” he confessed, the words clicking on the parched roof of his mouth.
For a moment, Duncan was sure he had only a conch pressed to his ear.
“Patricia?” he prompted.
“My God, you’re the last person I thought I’d ever hear from,” she finally, somberly, replied.
“Yeah,” Duncan said. “It’s been awhile. Geez, almost—”
“Twelve years,” she said. “Last time I saw you, you were leaving the hospital in a wheelchair.”
“I’ll never forget how the sun felt on my face,” he said. “But…I don’t recall you ever being at the hospital.”
“Your wife and police buddies were around, so Katherine and I just sort of watched you from a distance.”
He winced. “Wow. I mean, I had no idea...”
“The prefix on my caller ID indicates that you’re phoning from California. Is that right?”
“Yes, LA.”
“Uh-huh,” she said suspiciously. “My question is, why would you be calling from anywhere at all?”
“Well, it’s about my daughter,” he began. “Funny story. You see, she’s in the hospital and, oddly enough, she told the hospital staff that she lives at the same address that…well, you’re currently at.
”
“I don’t remember you having a daughter—”
“I didn’t…not, not when I, you—”
“She’s how old then?”
“She’s ten.”
“Ten”, she said timidly, as if haunted by that number.
There was a tremendously long pause, and Duncan was almost sure she’d hung up.
Finally, Patricia cleared her throat. “What’s your daughter’s name?”
“Amy.”
She bounced the name back to him. Then: “Assuming that this isn’t a joke—and I’m not—that would be quite the coincidence, don’t you think, for your daughter to give my address as her place of residence?”
“Well, there’s more,” Duncan said. “At one point, Amy also believed that her…that her name was Katherine Bently.”
“This is a joke, you sick bastard!” Patricia snarled.
“Whoa, calm down, calm down,” Duncan softly urged. “Why would you think that?”
“You know why!”
“No, I swear, I...”
Patricia was bawling now. “Katherine’s been missing for eleven years!”
Duncan nearly fell out of his chair. Missing for eleven years?
“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Patricia, I’m so sorry—”
“Screw you, McNeil! No matter how indebted I am to you, it will never be enough for me to tolerate this…this kind of bullshit!”
Duncan stood up. “Patricia, don’t hang up! Please, there’s something else—”
“This isn’t a joke, Mrs. Bently,” Rachel interjected. “I promise you.”
“Who the hell are you?” Patricia demanded, sniffling.
“I’m Rachel, Duncan’s wife.”
She cackled. “Oh, I see. The family that tricks together sticks together.”
“Listen,” Duncan said, “I…we have a picture of you and Katherine, all dressed up in western get-up. It was found in Rock Bay—”
“So?”
“So,” Duncan said, “Katherine is approximately ten years old in the photo, and she’s the spitting image of Amy, could be her identical twin.”
Having controlled her emotions somewhat, Patricia said to Duncan, “I remember that picture. It’s on the fireplace mantel. I’m heading over to it right now, as a matter of fact. But if I remember correctly, it was taken after you disappeared from our lives. So how and where did you get it?”
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