4 Angel Among Us

by Chaz McGee

  Table of Contents

  A Selection of Titles by Katy Munger

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Epilogue

  A Selection of Titles by Katy Munger

  The Dead Detective Mysteries

  (formerly under the pseudonym Chaz McGee)

  DESOLATE ANGEL

  ANGEL INTERRUPTED

  (writing as Katy Munger)

  ANGEL OF DARKNESS *

  ANGEL AMONG US *

  The Casey Jones Series

  LEGWORK

  OUT OF TIME

  MONEY TO BURN

  BAD TO THE BONE

  BETTER OFF DEAD

  BAD MOON ON THE RISE

  * available from Severn House

  ANGEL AMONG US

  Katy Munger

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2012 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  This eBook edition first published in 2012 by Severn Digital an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2012 by Katy Munger.

  The right of Katy Munger to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Munger, Katy.

  Angel among us. – (The dead detective mysteries)

  1. Fahey, Kevin (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Delaware–Fiction. 3. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  813.6-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-310-5 (epub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8201-1 (cased)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  For Zuzu, my angel on earth – may your life always

  be filled with love and joy.

  PROLOGUE

  She had known unimaginable pain before and survived it. She had known day after day of deprivation and survived that, too. She had known fear so deep that it infiltrated her dreams at night like a vulture seeking flesh. She had endured all of it and come out of those terrible months with an unshakeable confidence in her own strength. She had survived.

  This time was different. All she endured in the past – the beatings, rape, torture, the threats to her family – had all been directed at her. She had proved she could take anything and live. But things were different now. A life so precious it made her own seem irrelevant hung in the balance, depending on her for its survival.

  She must not panic. The walls around her were damp and caked with clay. The floor was tamped down to rock. The air was thick with her own exhalation and so devoid of life that she felt as if she were spiraling down, down, down into a deep black hole. She splayed a palm wide against the dirt walls of her prison. It comforted her to feel the coolness of the earth and to know that, however far she was beneath its surface, she was still alive. She still breathed and the child inside her remained oblivious to their captivity.

  The child. She forced herself to shut out everything but the life that stirred within her. The baby had been restless for the past two days, as if it, too, wanted to escape confinement. It would not be long now, she thought. And with that realization, fear overtook her. That was what he was waiting for. He had not yet said so, but she knew it to be true. As soon as the baby was born, he would take it from her and she would be left, forgotten beneath the earth. No one would ever know she was there.

  Panic welled in her. The room was no bigger than half a boxcar and she was chained to one wall of it. She shifted the hand bound by metal and flexed her fingers, seeking relief from the pain. Her fingers brushed against something sharp in the dirt and she froze. She could use anything for a weapon. Anything at all. She began to brush the dirt away from the protrusion with her fingertips, moving carefully to avoid cutting herself on the object’s sharp edges. She worked mechanically and did not know for how long, but at last she had smoothed away the earth enough to slide her fingers along a slender object buried just below the floor’s surface. She willed herself to memorize its contours and tell her what it was. It took less than a minute to understand and, when she did, her panic was absolute.

  It was a finger bone and it led to a hand. Just beneath the surface of the dirt floor, she had discovered a human hand now reduced to nothing more than bone, bone that was part of a skeleton. She knew it. She could feel it.

  Others had died in this dark hole before her.

  She wrapped her free arm around her belly and began to pray.

  ONE

  As time ticks onward, taking me further and further away from my death, I have started to lose even the memory of what it was like to have a body. Flesh. Bone. Blood. Pain and arousal. They are nothing but words to me now. Like a man examining a car he is thinking of buying, I have taken to studying the bodies of the living with no motivation other than nostalgia. There is no more excitement in watching a young girl as there is in watching an old man in the park feeding the pigeons. Yes, I see beauty in the human form – but it is an unpredictable call as to what I find beautiful these days. Appreciation comes upon me unexpectedly, in places I never expected to find it.

  For example, babies (once sticky, squalling messes best left to others) seem like miracles to me now, with their faces open to all the world and their spirits radiating joy at being alive. Young people are beautiful to me, too, even as they struggle to understand who they are inside the bodies they wear. There are times when I stop by the high school to watch the young men training on the baseball field, marveling at how effortlessly strong their bodies are as they dart across the field. They accept their physical perfection with the careless grace of those who do not yet understand that youth d
oes not last forever.

  Perhaps because of my own, all too tortured life, I often find myself turning away from the perfection of youth. I am drawn to those who have suffered the slings and arrows of misfortune long enough for it to show in their splotchy faces and sagging skin. They have lived life to the fullest, however unwillingly, and it shows.

  There are two old men I sometimes watch as they soak in the baths of a downtown Russian men’s club. They carry the scars of a long-ago war on fireplug bodies covered with skin so tough they look upholstered in hide. They do not seem to notice the gouges of shiny flesh from old bullet wounds that mar their torsos like miniature mouths. Their spirits fill their war-torn bodies with a resigned acceptance, as if they have signed a treaty with their limbs not to complain so long as they draw breath.

  But now that I am dead and I know what awaits them, it can be painful for me to view those whose blood and bones and tissue have betrayed them. Their strength sometimes seems to ebb before my very eyes. I can spot the sickly cast to their skin from across a room and feel how their blood falters in their veins. There is a weariness emanating from them that is unmistakable, for it is tinged with the fear of what lies ahead. I find I cannot stay long in the company of the ill, not just because, if they are too close to my world, there is a chance that they will see me, but also because I sometimes think that I feed on the life force of others in some way and I do not think that they have any to spare.

  In truth, though, my very favorite place to watch the glory that is the human body is the playground of an elementary school on the outskirts of town. It is located in a neighborhood where the Irish and Italian meet, and where, in recent years, housefuls of Mexican immigrants have taken up residence, each home seemingly holding a dozen or more of them. The neighborhood school reflects their hopes for the future, regardless of where their pasts have taken them. Sturdy children shriek and chase one another across the playground, hugging just to feel the newness of their bodies together. They hold hands and form friendships blind to both color and physical beauty. If you catch them soon enough, that is. By second grade, I can see that their capacity for unbridled affection is gone, replaced by a sometimes cruel judgment of others. But if they are younger, they do not care whether the object of their affection is fat or poor or ugly. They bestow their love abundantly and it is a joy to watch.

  I was doing just that one morning when I first caught a glimpse of a beautiful Mexican woman with skin the color of honey, whose flawless face was made even more exquisite by a hint of sadness that showed in her eyes. I could feel a deep love for the children on the playground emanating from her like the rays of a sun, yet I could feel her sorrow, too, as if something treasured had been taken from her and she knew that she would never get it back. The children called her ‘Seely’ and clustered around her, clutching her legs, stroking her hair, kissing her cheeks when she lingered long enough. They adored her as she herded them to and fro, soothing their scrapes and intervening with gentle admonishments during the rare fights. She was possessed of such patience it astonished me. No matter how chaotic the playground became, she sailed through it, calm and reassuring to all.

  For a while, I watched her with the children morning after morning until, at last, I felt all there was to feel from their unfettered exuberance. I left to learn more elsewhere. But I took the memory of Seely’s face with me when I left. It was, I thought, the face of an angel.

  I did not see her again for half a year, not until the day I felt compelled to follow a visibly sick woman home from the market to make sure that she would be OK. Watching her struggle up the steps that led to her front door had wearied me. I left her and sought out the bustle of her neighborhood’s main street, needing to feel the energy of the thriving around me. I found myself near the elementary school where I had stood for over a month watching the children play. School had let out for the day. The streets around me were filled with people from a dozen different countries. My little town was changing. Everyone seemed in a generous mood, as if they were glad to be sharing the streets with others.

  It was June and the sun bounced off the store windows in bursts of glory. A pregnant woman caught my eye. She was standing in front of a Korean greengrocer whose business thrived thanks to an endless selection of vegetables and fruits wildly unfamiliar to me. Each night he took his displays down as carefully as if they were jewels, and then put them back up again early the next day, never seeming to weary of building his colorful pyramids. I envied him his contentment at this daily task.

  I drifted closer to the pregnant woman, drawn by a feeling that I knew her. She was well along, although I am no expert in such things, having left every aspect of childbearing to my wife. I did not recognize her at first and so I saw her through the eyes of a stranger. Her cheekbones were high and angular, sloping down to a chin exquisitely carved below a wide mouth the color of strawberries. Her hair gleamed like chocolate in the sun and swayed as she picked her way through a crate of oblong fruit with an orange tint and intoxicating smell. She examined each fruit carefully, holding it to her nose and inhaling its fragrance before putting it back down again in search of something better. She was slender and her belly protruded out in front of her as if it, too, was a fruit ripening in the sun. She wore a yellow sundress that contrasted with the creamy tan of her skin and made me think of lemons.

  As I stood, drinking in her beauty beneath the June day, I realized that I did know her – it was the preschool teacher from the nearby elementary school, the woman the children had called Seely. Pregnancy had filled out her frame and crowded out her nascent sorrow.

  She still had, I thought, the face of an angel. Wide sleepy eyes and a drowsy smile that lingered at the corners of her mouth. There was still sadness there, after all, I decided, though further underneath than before, perhaps hidden by daydreams of her life to come.

  When she finally selected her fruit and made her way down the block, I followed – when you are dead, there is not much else to do. She loaded her purchases into the back seat of a battered green Volvo and I decided to hitch a ride. I sat next to her, unseen, as she drove out of my town and into the gently rolling hills of Delaware growing thick with corn, soybeans and wheat. She did not use air-conditioning but rolled all four windows down. I enjoyed the wild rush of air as much as she did and perhaps even more, for I could watch the silken strands of her hair whipping wildly in the wind as she drove.

  Ten minutes outside of town, she turned and we bumped merrily down a rutted road gouged by tractor tires that wound through fields of new growth. She pulled up in front of a white farmhouse and unloaded her groceries from the car with the same placid calm she had shown in choosing them. She had not bothered to lock her back door and pushed her way inside with a bump of her hips. Clearly, this house was home.

  Leaving her bags on the counter, she wandered languidly down the hall. I could feel the sleep starting to overcome her. As she entered a cheery yellow bedroom decorated with bright quilts and flowers, she pulled her sundress over her head and fell on to bed. She was asleep almost instantly, her body as still as the cool afternoon air that held the room in abeyance. That was when I saw them – dozens of scars criss-crossed against the creamy brown skin of her back that wound their way over her swollen abdomen and breasts, some long and an angry pink, others dark welts or mounds of puckered tissue from old burn marks.

  I was paralyzed by what I saw. Above, she had the face of an angel. Below, a devil had surely been at work.

  TWO

  Her name was Arcelia. I learned that when – just as the sun had lost its bite and the afternoon had turned into an early summer evening – a tall man with brown hair in need of a haircut entered the farmhouse covered in dust from the fields. The door banged shut behind him and I came back out into the kitchen to see who had arrived. He was standing in the center of the room, clearly at home, looking around for his wife. When he found her in the bedroom, fast asleep with her hands cradling her belly, he left without a sound. H
e returned to the kitchen and began preparing the evening meal. He ate no meat. He pulled vegetables from drawers and washed them reverently. He sautéed them in restaurant-quality pans, adding seasonings and sauces with such ease I knew he had once worked as a chef.

  Wonderful smells filled the kitchen and I could feel the hard labor of the day falling from him as he paid homage to the bounty of the earth. I wondered if he had grown the vegetables he was eating. He didn’t look like any of the farmers I had ever known. He was in his mid-thirties, with clear blue eyes, an angular nose and a close-cropped beard that he seemed, somehow, to hide behind.

  When the dinner was done, he prepared a plate and carried it in to his still sleeping wife. He sat on the edge of her bed and gently touched her shoulder. ‘Arcelia,’ he whispered.

  Her eyes flew open – she was instantly awake. For a moment, I saw the fear in her eyes and knew she was close to panic. Then she saw her husband’s face and relaxed again. ‘I fell asleep,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Good,’ the man said. He smiled lovingly at her. ‘I made dinner.’

  She struggled to sit upright, her belly making it difficult to maneuver. ‘I’m as big as a house,’ she admitted as she reached for the plate and ate hungrily. Her husband smiled, amused at her appetite. ‘I’m not sure how much longer I can take it,’ she said, but was instantly distracted. ‘Are these the purple potatoes you told me about?’

  The man nodded. ‘What do you think? I’ve got three restaurants in Wilmington that say they’ll take all I can grow. It was a little early to pull them, but I wanted you to try them.’

  ‘They’re amazing.’ She looked down at her dinner plate ruefully. ‘And they’re all gone.’

  The man laughed and reached for her plate. ‘I’ll bring you more.’

  ‘And more butter?’ She said this hopefully, widening her eyes a little, knowing it would melt him into submission.