Angelina's Oak

by Jesse Reiss

Chapter 6

  The next morning as Paula applied her make-up and readied herself for work, she thought about what to do with Angelina and this mysterious coin. She didn’t want to leave her at home where she could run into another intrusion and couldn’t send her to spend the day with Sam again. Letting her go to school to try to enforce some normalcy into her life seemed the best idea.

  They ate breakfast sitting on bar stools around the kitchen counter, as they always did. This was a custom Jeremy brought with him from college where he would eat a bowl of cereal on the run and toss his dish in the sink for some nobody to clean up later.

  “Honey, its best we not talk about this tree incident with anyone else until we really sort out what it is all about.”

  Angelina had been staring at the cereal box, reading but not registering anything. She unfixed her eyes and looked at her mother. “And how do we sort it out?”

  “I don’t really know. Maybe we forget the whole thing and move on with our lives.”

  “Kinda hard to do, Mom. That coin and the raid on the house is a constant reminder that something happened. And it happened to me. I can’t ignore it. I tried that already and it didn’t work. It is like trying to imagine Dad never died. His absence proves it and all physical evidence says it happened.”

  The reminder of her husband’s death touched an unhealed wound in Paula and she wished Angelina hadn’t brought it up. “This is not at all comparable to that Honey. Please don’t bring Dad up in that manner.”

  Angelina was losing her cool. “And how is it not comparable? I’m either going nuts and should be taken to a spin bin or something actually happened!” She hit her hand on the counter, splashing milk. “It’s one or the other Mom. Losing Dad has hurt me more than anything in this life. And yes, losing my sanity might just be as bad.” She wiped tears from her cheeks and tried to steady her emotions.

  Paula said nothing. She was afraid anything further out of her mouth would be the wrong thing. She stepped over and took Angelina into her arms, hugging her.

  Holding her daughter and feeling her warm body against her, an idea came to her. “Honey, how about I drop you off and pick you up from school today and we go up into the park together. You can show me what happened and what you saw and maybe that would help make sense of things.”

  The idea of going back up to the oak tree with her mother and describing the incident again brought relief to Angelina and the tears stopped. She nodded in agreement.

  Angelina would usually ride her bike down Franklin Avenue to the Immaculate Heart at the corner of Franklin and Western, a block south from a main entrance to Griffith Park. Today Paula dropped her off and headed down Western on her way to work.

  There were things about the Immaculate Heart School that Angelina really liked. The school was a strict Catholic school that had a high success rate relative to other High Schools. It preached discipline and morals to the girls along with the religious practices, although Angelina didn’t really consider herself a true Catholic and probably because she and her mother didn’t attend church on Sundays.

  It was surprising to most to find a school like this a couple blocks from the craze of Hollywood Boulevard. The large buildings were designed to replicate a Spanish convent with turrets, arched windows and red-tiled roofs. On the property there was a large swimming pool, softball diamond and space to go sit on the grass under a tree on a warm day and study. Every girl was required to wear the same grey pleated skirt and starched white shirt, so there was no competition between who dressed better than whom, although plenty went on during the weekends and at parties. With many luminaries and Hollywood celebrities having graduated from the school in the past, there were expectations for the girls to excel and claim their place in the world. After one short tour through the place, Paula had decided this was where her daughter would go to school, no matter the religion or the tuition cost.

  Angelina met up with her best friend Cassie White at the gated entrance and they entered the school grounds together.

  “You wanted some days off from school or were you really sick?” Cassie asked with a smirk.

  “I wasn’t sick, like physically sick, just mentally sick, if you know what I mean?”

  “You — mentally sick? Right. Like what — a bout of depression?”

  “Something like that I guess.”

  “I don’t buy it. After all you have gone through in the past year with your Dad and all, it shouldn’t be surprising, but not you — not your style.”

  They walked down a hallway together, winking and smiling at friends and brushing shoulders with the other girls. Cassie pulled out an In-Touch magazine and showed it to Angelina. On the cover was Lucy Curry, dressed in a jogging suit in a park with two toddlers in a stroller, one Asian and the other African. The headlines screamed LUCY LEAVES THANE AND TAKES KIDS. The subheading read STILL HIDING SAM.

  “What do you think? She left him this time or is it another false alarm?” Cassie asked, her gum smacking on each noun. Cassie had long suspected that Angelina knew something about the Currys, but had never gotten anything other than a hint from her.

  Angelina rolled her eyes, “Did you actually waste a precious dollar on that trash?”

  “This isn’t trash. The photos are real. They can’t just be making this stuff up you know. Even if it isn’t all true, something must be true for it to get printed like this.”

  “It is all trash. Believe me. All of it.”

  “If all these rumors were trash, why haven’t we seen any photos of Sam since the baby photos were released, like a million years ago?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask them?” Angelina said, getting annoyed with where the conversation was going.

  “Obviously people have tried and they don’t want to answer. I think they don’t answer because they have either a) committed some serious crime and the kid is dead like the National Enquirer reports or b) they are keeping him hidden so it creates a mystery and they get more and more press about it, which makes them more popular. Got to be one or the other. What da ya think?”

  “I think they just want some privacy.”

  “Ha. LA is the wrong place to be for privacy, believe me. You know something, don’t you?”

  Angelina ignored her. They entered the classroom and took their seats next to each other. Angelina had been feeling better with the familiarity of her friends and the school environment, but this gossip set her emotions back on edge. The morning was begun with a brief prayer to start the day with an open mind and heart. The prayer ended as soon as it was started and she realized afterwards that she wasn’t able to pay attention to a single word that was said. She shook her head and focused her attention on the teacher as she began a class on the United States economy.

  As a Class President, Angelina was responsible for helping organize several community events that groups in the school would partake in, including a car wash fundraiser next month and, for the holidays in a few months, a donation drive for gifts for underprivileged children, sponsored by the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. She immersed herself in these projects between classes and in no time felt like herself again.

  Around noon, Paula’s Director of Sales, Jacqueline Horner, patched a call through to Paula from a superintendent at the Immaculate Heart. She took it in private, worried that something had happened with her daughter.

  “Miss Russell?”

  “This is she.”

  “Yes, this is Sister Rosemary from Immaculate Heart. How are you?”

  Bad question. “Fine”.

  “Good. I have that gentleman back here again…a detective Crunder…at the school reception. He says he has received permission from you to talk to Angelina about an investigation he is doing. I thought I would check with you as we had talked yesterday and he has nothing in writing from you.”

  Paula’s heart skipped a beat. “No, he does not have permission from me to speak to her.”

  “That’s what I thought. He’s ki
nd of a creepy fellow.”

  “I agree. I will be coming to pick Angelina up after school. Can you please make sure he isn’t hanging around when I get there?”

  “Oh, no problem. If he doesn’t vacate the premises within a few minutes after I warn him I’ll have the cops here to take him away,” she responded in a singsong voice of confidence. “They respond pretty fast to call from us about these things — you know — pedophiles, abusers and such.”

  Paula didn’t want to hear that. “Thank you, Sister.” She hung up and looked at the time. She wanted to go pick up Angelina right now, but still had a few hours to go. She was utterly disinterested in her work now, unable to concentrate on anything else but her daughter and these two detectives crawling around.

  Punctually as school ended, Paula pulled into the gate and around to the front and picked Angelina up. They went half a block up Western and into Griffith Park where the environment went from urban to wilderness. A minute later they were winding up mountain roads while Angelina chattered on about her day in school and made small talk about this and that.

  Neither noticed the maroon Ford Taurus following them at a comfortable distance.

  Thomas