In The Falling Light

by John L. Campbell

  The heat did kick on then, but she didn’t blow away. Cesar was glad it had, as the sprawling, Victorian mansion was prone to all sorts of drafts and chills. He wore two shirts under his pale blue scrubs, the first a simple white undershirt, the next a long-sleeved thermal. Sausalito sat on the north side of the bay, and the house rested on a cliff-side property overlooking the water, San Francisco visible to the south when it wasn’t shrouded in fog. It got chilly up here, much cooler than Southern California, but the long-sleeved shirt wasn’t just for the cold of the climate and the house. It was as much to conceal his tattoos, especially the ones he had picked up at Chino. The baggy scrubs also went a little ways to hide his build; broad-shouldered and solid, like a boxer. He had been hard when he went inside the last time, but four years work on the weights in the yard had made him harder, and bigger too.

  “They get so lonely,” the woman mouthed as she gummed her soggy cookie, “and then they lash out, like angry children. Do you understand?”

  “Sure, Mrs. A.”

  “Please, Lyle, call me Rosie.”

  “Okay, Rosie,” said Cesar. He didn’t know who Lyle was. It could have been one of the many home health care workers who had gone before him, or a person remembered over the century of her life, or maybe just someone she invented. He didn’t care. He did know a few things, though.

  He knew he despised changing her soiled diapers, despised the noises she made, her raspy voice and breath, her dead eyes. He knew she was frail, and that nearly anything could finish her off; a fall, a choking spasm in her sleep, a sickness. Hell, by now even Death had to be tired of waiting around for this artifact to check out from old age. Yet she clung to life, never deteriorating beyond her current state, as if she had pulled out of a dive and was now circling just above death in a holding pattern. Essentially, despite her vulnerability, she was healthy, and Cesar had to keep her that way.

  Not because it was his job. That was a joke.

  He had to keep her healthy because she was loaded. Rosalyn Acre was said to be worth in the neighborhood of two-hundred-forty million. No living heirs, her vast fortune scheduled to be distributed among a wide variety of charities – including the State of California, the biggest fucking charity case of all – upon her passing. Cesar imagined there was a phone book worth of people marking off days on the calendar towards that great payoff moment. Not Cesar. He needed her alive, because he believed she kept a lot of her wealth right here in the house, in cash.

  And he hadn’t found it yet.

  If the old broad died, he would be immediately out of a job and out of the house, unable to continue his search. It was in his best interest to keep her warm and properly medicated and living.

  Cesar knew one other thing. Once he found her stash, he was gone.

  Killing the old bitch then would just be an added bonus.

  Rosie’s head was drooping even further, and Cesar quickly snatched the cup and saucer away before she could drop them. He had no worry she would topple forward out of the chair. He always belted her in. Ragged snoring now, so Cesar headed to the kitchen with the china.

  He passed through a room big enough to handle banquets of a hundred plus, then stepped out the back door and lit up a smoke. The bitch flipped out if she smelled cigarette, so he was careful to always go outside, and kept mints in his pockets just in case. Behind the mansion was an expansive green space of manicured lawns and flowerbeds bursting with color, all leading to a walled drop-off and the water beyond. Although it was well over a hundred feet down to where the surf rolled and crashed against rocks at the base of the bluff, it could still be heard as a soft, rhythmic shushing. It was peaceful. Tall pines provided shade for walkways meandering through the greenery, which Rosalyn frequented when the weather was fair, Cesar always in attendance, bringing the wheelchair in case she needed it. She usually didn’t, relying on an aluminum cane – not even a walker! She was strong for her age, and he smirked through his cigarette smoke. All those motherfuckers sitting around waiting for their big “Rosie’s-dead-now-pay-up” moment were going to be waiting a long time.

  At least until Cesar got what he wanted.

  She wouldn’t nap long in the chair, so there would be no searching until later. Cesar lit another smoke, leaning against the wall. He wondered what it cost for the landscapers to take care of this place, and shook his head. All that fucking money to cut grass and trim hedges. What a waste. He had better things to do with cash.

  Cesar had been on his last three months of a four year robbery bit – out early on good time – when he was given a new cellmate, a skinny black kid named Jevon who got himself jammed up in a bigger-than-average coke deal with weapons present. He’d landed a fifteen year stretch, and this was his first taste of hard time. Jevon was scared and ill-equipped for what awaited him. Cesar made the kid his bitch immediately, satisfying his own needs and renting him out for smokes and protection.

  Jevon talked a lot, and that was what originally set Cesar on the path which would bring him here. Before moving south to LA and getting busted, the kid had worked for the Youngman-Price Healthcare Agency in San Francisco. The agency provided live-in health workers who cared for those who were not yet ready for – or refused – full time residential placement, and could afford to have someone stay with them four or five days a week to see to their medication, feeding and cleaning. Jevon explained what it took to get that kind of gig, and Cesar had been shocked. Three months of training in basic first aid and geriatric care, a clean background check, and some prior experience preferred. That was it. Fucking California, man. It was that same, half-assed system which allowed so many pedophiles to slip undetected into the education and daycare system. It made him sick.

  Jevon talked about when the agency had sent him to look after this rich old broad in Sausalito, all alone in a big, drafty house and worth millions. Completely batshit as well, but she refused to live in a rest home and had high power lawyers to keep her out of one. Jevon said the place creeped him out, that there were strange noises and things moving at the corner of your eye and laughter like from a little kid. He said no one lasted on the job more than a couple months, and lots of them just took off and never came back to the agency. Superstitious nonsense. But then he started talking about the cash.

  He didn’t know where the stash was, even admitted he’d made an attempt to find it, but he swore it was there. People would come to visit her sometimes, charity people, and she’d always have a fat envelope of bills for them.

  “Where’s she get the envelopes?”

  Jevon looked at him with those stupid eyes and said, “I dunno, Staples?”

  Cesar broke his nose for that one.

  Later he asked, “No, dumbfuck, where’d the cash come from?”

  Jevon shrugged, looking over his icepack, and his voice was thick and nasally. “She just had it. I’d go to get something for her, and when I came back she’d have it in her lap, waiting for the charity people.”

  “So she kept it close by.”

  Jevon shook his head. “Nah, man, I looked all over. She’s too old to use the stairs, sleeps in a little room on the main floor, but I searched that whole level. Never found nothing.”

  Now, seeing that Rosalyn Acre was a good deal more agile than she appeared, and could probably manage stairs, although slowly, Cesar knew a much broader search was required. Jevon was just lazy.

  Just before his release, Cesar brought a sharpened piece of Plexiglas into the showers and stabbed Jevon to death, holding the kid by the throat and staring into his surprised and frightened eyes while he did it. No one was able to put the killing on him, and he was released as scheduled. Jevon wouldn’t be telling anyone else about the rich old lady with fat envelopes of cash.

  Cesar crushed out his butt and slipped it into a Pepsi can he kept concealed inside the spout of a drain pipe, then headed back in, popping a mint and stopping in the kitchen to wash his hands and scrub his face. When the water stopped he could hear tiny snorts and w
heezes, the sign she would be waking up soon. He went back to the parlor.

  It took six months of muling heroin for Cat Santos in Orange County, living like a monk and saving every cent, until he had enough money put away to relocate north and get what he needed from some specialists he met in prison. The cost of the health worker training was nothing compared to what he spent on a new identity, fabricated background and phony job references. It wiped out his savings, but within a year of leaving Chino he had completely disappeared from the system, left his parole officer behind, and became a clean-cut employee of Youngman-Price. He had considered the quicker and less expensive route, simply doing a night-time home invasion and grabbing what he could. But if what Jevon said was true, that the money was hard to find, then a couple hours in the house might not be enough. Instead, Cesar decided he’d be smart about it.

  It was surprisingly easy to land the Rosalyn Acre gig. As Jevon had said, no one wanted it, no one lasted long, and most never came back. And the stories! Holy Christ, the bullshit that floated around about the house being haunted and the old woman being a witch. He heard plenty of that, but nothing about large amounts of cash hidden away.

  Cesar had been here three weeks now, on duty and staying overnight five days straight, then off for two when Rosie went into the medical center for a couple days as the doctors ran tests and verified she would live another week. Only a few people came to the house, including the gardeners who showed up once a week, but they stayed outside. A cleaning service came every other Wednesday, grocery and pharmacy delivery was on Friday, and one time a Youngman-Price supervisor had dropped in unannounced to check up on his employee. The visit was brief, and the supervisor left satisfied. Cesar wasn’t allowed to stay in the house while she was away at the medical center, and had to return to his dumpy apartment in Oakland until she came back. Those were frustrating days, since it was lost time, time which could be spent searching the house.

  Though there were plenty of bedrooms on the upper floors, he slept in a narrow, converted hall closet not far from Rosalyn’s first floor bedroom, a baby monitor on the floor beside him so he could hear her in the night if she went into distress. His room was simple and bare, cell-like, and the irony was lost on him.

  He had to admit that Jevon was right, the place was creepy, more so at night than in the day. He was sure he’d heard running feet on the floors above, and what at first sounded like a child’s giggle but was certainly just air in the plumbing. He’d caught movement out of the corner of his eye several times, but he suspected the old bag had a cat somewhere. She said she didn’t, but shit, she was senile, probably wouldn’t remember it even if she had one. Probably rats in a place this old. And of course there was the frequent, uneasy feeling of being watched. More than once he had awakened in the dark absolutely certain someone was in the room with him, watching as he slept. Cesar knew that was just holdover paranoia from being in the joint.

  Three weeks of searching after she went down for the night, poking through room after room with a big six cell flashlight, checking under beds and inside closets packed with moth-eaten clothes and ancient hat boxes, looking in dressers and behind paintings. Nothing. No steamer trunk full of bills, no hidden safes or cubby holes. As big as the place was he had drawn a rough map and checked off rooms already inspected, and even after all this looking there remained unexplored areas. He was confident he’d find it.

  Especially since he had seen the envelopes.

  It happened on two occasions, once right before a visit from UNICEF, the other during a begging call from the Greater Bay Area Animal Rescue Shelter. One moment it wasn’t there, but turn around for a second and look back, and there it was, a plump envelope resting on the afghan in her lap. And the hag hadn’t moved from her chair.

  Said hag was waking up now, snuffling and rubbing bony knuckles at weepy, pale eyes, smacking her lips. Cesar checked his watch and brought her some water and her medication, having to hold the glass for her as she choked it down. She looked up at him with dull gratitude, and he smiled gently back at her, imagining how wonderful it would be to punch her in the face, to hear those bones crack.

  “I want my pictures,” she announced.

  Cesar just looked at her. What the fuck was she talking about?

  “There,” she pointed past him, and he turned towards a full bookcase against one wall. “My pictures. I want to look at them.”

  Cesar moved to the bookcase, eyes running up and down the many shelves of leather-backed books. They all looked old, and some were probably rare and worth a lot by themselves.

  “On the bottom. My pictures.” Her voice was petulant, like a child.

  Cesar squatted and looked at the bottom shelf – something darted under a table on the left, out of the corner of his eye, but when he snapped to look there was nothing there.

  “My pictures!” Now she was wheeze-shrieking.

  “Okay, Mrs. A, I’m looking.”

  “Rosie!”

  “Yes, Rosie. I’m looking.” He spotted a cluster of photo albums, pulled one out and held it up. “This?”

  “No! Cock asshole…” she shook her head, and seemed to lose interest as she poked at a mole on the back of her hand. Cesar wasn’t surprised by the outburst or the language. She was batshit, after all, and he’d heard it from her before. He started to put the book back.

  “The red one,” Rosie said.

  There was only one that color, a big book with a cracked, dark red leather cover. He pulled it as she unbuckled herself – he didn’t know she could do that – and tottered towards a flower-patterned love seat, carefully lowering herself to the cushions as if the very act of sitting down could fracture her bones. And likely it could, he thought.

  Rosie patted the cushion beside her. “It’s very large, I’ll need you to hold it for me, Lyle.”

  “Yes ma’am,” he said, keeping from rolling his eyes. Now he’d have to sit for the next hour or so and look at old photos of people she wouldn’t remember, listening to rambling stories about the ones she did, and all the while not giving a flying fuck. He sat and opened the book.

  Cesar didn’t know much about history, but the way people were dressed in the old black and white photos looked to be from the turn of the century. The previous century, and he wondered again just how old the bitch might be. The photos in this book appeared to be from her childhood, and he endured her stories, patiently turning the pages when she asked, holding back sighs when she trailed off into the fog of memory, having trouble recalling names or places, watching her get frustrated at times as she studied long-gone faces and tried to remember who they had been. He barely heard her.

  “This is me with Pumpkin,” she said as a new page was turned.

  Cesar was thinking of a stripper he had known in LA with the tattoo of a tarantula on her inner thigh, and remembering the way she looked up and batted her long black eyelashes while her mouth was occupied. He glanced down at the page, and instantly forgot about the stripper, looking instead at where the old woman was pointing. It was a faded image, brown with time, of two little girls playing on a wooden floor with a collection of dolls and tin toys. Sunlight was streaming through an odd, circular window set in an alcove, dust motes heavy in the air and giving the scene a mystical look. In the background he could see a pile of trunks, a heavy wardrobe, a wire dress dummy with a frilly hat on it and a stack of paintings partially covered with a tarp. A large object stood just inside the shot on the far right, tall and smooth, a pair of side by side doors on heavy hinges, each with a large handle, and one with a big dial.

  A vault. A big, free-standing vault.

  Rosalyn was babbling about someone called Pumpkin, but Cesar didn’t hear her. He was staring at the vault, at the objects in the room behind the girls, and at the window. He recognized the unusual shape and design of that window. The house had half a dozen of them which could be seen from the outside, all set in dormers. That was an attic window. Rosie’s vault was in the attic.

&nbs
p; “Such happy days,” she crooned, fumbling to turn the page. Cesar let her do it, his eyes staying on the image of the vault until it disappeared into the book.

  It was eight-thirty, and the old woman had been asleep for an hour. Cesar climbed the narrow stairs from the third floor to the attic landing, the baby monitor clipped to his belt, its red light flickering as she snored softly in the background. He carried the Maglite in one hand, and had a dozen pillow cases draped over the other arm.

  The landing’s boards creaked as he stopped before the single door, the flashlight throwing a white circle on the plain wood. He reached for the cut glass knob and turned, expecting it to be locked, fully prepared to shoulder it open if it was. It wasn’t. The door swung in quietly, revealing a vast dark space. A breeze puffed through the opening, smelling of dust and mold and age. Cesar stepped inside, closing the door softly behind him, and panned the flashlight around.

  The attic ran the length of the house, a ten foot central beam peaked overhead, the roof angling down on each side with exposed rafters. Moonlight glowed in the circular dormer windows, spilling washed-out light into some places and casting deep shadows in others. He checked for a light switch, found none, traced the flashlight beam along the walls and roof, saw no light fixtures. It was dusty, and he sneezed twice. A lot of junk had collected up here in the century since that photograph was taken, creating a maze of tarp-draped furniture, stacks of crates and trunks, decaying cane patio chairs and rotting umbrellas, more dress dummies and lots and lots of paintings. He heard a skittering noise to his right. Rats for sure.

  The window he had seen in the photo was in front of him on the opposite wall, and he made his way past a lumpy couch and a pile of cracked leather suitcases, reaching a central aisle running both directions through the center of the junk. He panned the light right and immediately picked out the top of the vault, right where the photo had shown it, hidden behind a draped wardrobe. That it was still here was not particularly surprising, the thing must weigh a ton or more, and must have been a real bitch to get up to the attic in the first place. Cesar walked towards it, wondering how much stuff he would need to move to get to it, then wondering how he was going to get it open. He had no tools. Might have to wake the old bag up and shake her until she spit out the combo.