“I’m so sorry,” I said, and she disappeared.
I did a full sweep of the space under the bed. She was gone. I pulled my head back, avoiding bashing it a second time. Was she behind me?
No. She was nowhere.
I didn’t think that I had scared her off but someone, or something, had, which meant that there was something a lot more frightening in the room there with me, except I could not see it. Or perhaps she was reliving a scene from her life.
I went downstairs.
“Did you see anything?” Belle inquired anxiously as I returned to the kitchen.
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Under the bed?”
“You’re really serious?”
“Yes.”
“So what happened?”
“I stared at her. She stared past me. She was crying. I spoke to her and she vanished. I wonder who she was.”
“She could have been the wife - the one who did the killing - or the woman who was killed, or maybe whoever it was who was shot in the bed. And those are the ones we know about. Maybe she was somebody completely different.”
“This house was built over one hundred years ago,” I agreed. “There could be any number of ghosts here. How do we find out?”
“There may be some photos in the newspapers at the time, when the ex-wife killed her husband. The realtor may know something about it. There’s not much we can do about the woman in the bed. She could have been anyone. The guy in the shop said that the bed had come from Baton Rouge originally. Let’s try the recent killings first. They only happened a couple months back. We can probably find a date.”
“The police will have records too.”
“Good idea. The cops. Let’s go and see them tomorrow.”
“Will they show us photos?”
“They might.”
“So much for my end-of-year accounts.”
“You had better do them soon. If your guys are as tough as our IRS, they will be a lot scarier than any ghost.”
Chapter 10
That night I didn’t get much sleep. Even as I held Belle, my eyes were edging around the room evaluating the shadows again. Soon Belle was asleep and I lay on my back, slightly propped up, fearing, and maybe hoping for, the ghost’s return.
Eventually I must have dozed off because somewhere in the middle of the night I woke up with a huge weight pressing down on me. I had heard of this. Belle had told me about it, it even had a name – ‘old hag syndrome’. People who slept in Rose’s Room in the Golden Hill Hotel in Virginia City had reported ghosts weighing down on them so that they could barely breathe.
The weight on my feet was George. I moved my foot and he muttered, disturbed in his sleep. So who or what was this?
I didn’t dare open my eyes immediately but, whatever it was, it was breathing into my face. Why wasn’t George barking by now? Weren’t dogs meant to be able to see ghosts?
When I did screw up the courage to face reality, there was a face peering down at me. This time it was a man’s face and it was looking right at me.
It groaned and I leapt out of bed, bringing the gruesome creature with me.
“Ow!”
Ow?
There was a giggling from the doorway. Stevie.
“That hurt,” said Zack. “You should be more careful, Luke. I could have broken my arm.”
“What’s going on?” came Belle’s sleepy, concerned voice. “Zack, is that you?”
“We were just fucking with Luke,” replied Zack, rubbing his arm.
“You certainly did,” I confirmed.
“Go back to bed, Zack,” said Belle. “I need more sleep. You too, Stevie.”
“OK,” they both agreed and went running down the landing, celebrating their prank.
“Close the door,” Belle told them.
Steve retraced his steps and closed the door.
Belle turned over and was instantly asleep again.
It took me another hour.
* * *
I awoke to a shriek and an empty bed.
“Oh my God!” Belle was shouting from the hallway. “Oh my God!”
I heard her heading upstairs.
“Look at this, Luke,” she said, holding out a piece of paper.
You can RUN but can never HIDE
“What this?” I asked, suspecting the answer.
“It was in the mail slot in the front door. Luke, that man has been here. He really does want to kill me.”
“Shit.”
Belle was trembling. “He was the other side of our front door.”
“Or somebody was. It wasn’t necessarily him.”
“He knows where we live, though. This is reality, not the Internet anymore.”
“You don’t think it can be another game the twins are playing on us?”
“Don’t think so. I’ll ask them.”
The boys earnestly denied all knowledge of the note. “We would never do that to you, Mom,” they said. “Maybe to Luke,” they added with identical grins.
“You’re sure you know nothing about this?”
“Sure, Mom.”
After that they started quizzing Belle as to its significance.
“Holy crap!” Zack said when he read the Oscar death threat. “These guys are serious.”
Stevie went up to Belle and hugged her.
“Are you boys going to protect me?” Belle asked.
“Sure,” they said together.
Zack had second thoughts. He had missed a massive bargaining opportunity. “How much will you pay us?”
* * *
We went to see the police that morning at the nearest station we could find to explore the possibility of getting a restraining order against whoever was doing this and to get more information on the background to the murder that had taken place in our house.
The police were sympathetic, as the San Francisco police usually are, and characteristically laid back.
“Do you know who is doing this?” the officer asked.
“No, but we have our suspicions. We think it is Luke’s psychotic ex-wife,” Belle said.
“And where is she - San Francisco?”
“England.”
“England … Could she be over here now, do you think?”
“We don’t know. She might be. I have had several death threats from her by e-mail and also on my cell voice message service.”
“That’s good. You can apply for a restraining order against her, and if she is in San Francisco, we can act on it. We cannot handle restraining orders here, you will have to go to the Court House on McAllister, then, if she violates the restraining order, we can arrest her.”
“McAllister?”
“400 McAllister.”
“Thank you, Officer. What we also wanted to ask you about was a murder that took place in our house a couple of months ago …“
“Where was that?”
Belle gave the address.
The officer shook his head with awe. “That was a bad one,” he said. “I was called there myself. A family of four, all shot dead, and even their dog.”
“Their dog too?”
“Even their dog.”
“What happened?”
“Ex-wife had keys to the house. Stole them off one of the children when they were visiting her. So she let herself into the house. Shot the new wife, shot the children, shot the husband, and then shot the dog.”
“Have you caught her?”
The officer shook his head regretfully. “Not yet. She skipped the state, we think. That doesn’t stop her from coming back, though. Do you think it could have been her?”
“Don’t think so. She sent the death threat via e-mail first and she wouldn’t have had my e-mail address.”
“If you think it is her, we could certainly do something about that. Anything else I can help you with?”
“Do you have any photos of the family or of the killer.”
“Of them dead, mostly. Why would you want
to see those?”
“We want to know what everyone looked like.”
“Why would you want to know that?”
“There was a woman in our house and we don’t know who she was.”
“You think it could have been her?”
“It could have been.”
“What did she look like?”
“Red hair, freckles, green eyes, round face, slim, white top, blue jeans, black shoes.”
“It’s not the killer. She was blonde, 150 pounds or so. It sounds a bit like the victim, though, which doesn’t make sense unless you have a ghost.” He laughed. “Did you talk to her?”
“No, only saw her briefly,” I said.
“What happened to her? Where did she go?”
“We don’t know. She may have left by one of the windows or hidden somewhere in the house and left by one of the doors later.”
“You saw her downstairs, then?”
“No, on the second floor.”
“So she probably didn’t leave by a window.”
“Probably not.”
“Were any of the windows open?”
“No.”
“Huh.”
A pause.
“If we could see some photos, I can tell you whether it was anyone involved in the murder or not.”
“You got a good look at her?”
“A very good look at her.”
“And she managed to get away?”
“Yes.”
“A trespasser in your house?”
“Yes.”
“Huh.”
A pause.
“How can we get photos of them?”
“San Francisco Chronicle. They had pictures of all of them in there over several days.”
“When was the murder?”
“Around the middle of August. Go to the public library at the Civic Center. You will find all you need there.”
“Thank you, Officer. Thank you so much,” said Belle.
“Huh.”
“Have a good day, Officer.”
“You too.”
As we got back out into the street, Belle commented, “He thought we were really weird, didn’t he? I thought he was going to 5150 us.”
“Any sane person would think the story weird. I don’t blame him and the San Francisco police really are very nice.”
* * *
At the main public library we looked up electronic copies of the San Francisco Chronicle, and there she was - Jess DeGamo - the first victim of the shooting. The photo didn’t do her justice.
“That really is her?” asked Belle.
“Definitely her.”
“So we have a real ghost in our house?”
“Surely do. Do you think we should go back and tell that nice police officer?”
Belle feigned weighing my question for a second. “Maybe not. He might just go, ‘Huh’, or he might 5150 us after all.”
“I’d like to see his face, though.”
“He’d probably remain impassive. They usually are.”
“Let’s go and tell him.”
“We could.”
We returned to the police station and tracked down the officer we had spoken with earlier.
“Did you find anything?” he asked.
“We did,” I replied. “The woman I saw was the victim.”
“The victim?” His face remained impassive. “So you have a ghost in your house?”
“Looks like it.”
“Huh. And a hired hit man outside your door?”
“Looks like that too.”
“Huh. Well, if either of them attacks you, give us a call. Never taken in a ghost before.”
“They’re slippery customers,” I commented wryly.
“Whatever that means.”
Outside, Belle repeated one of her favorite quotes. “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all possible doubt. If we do phone them in an emergency, I doubt we’re going to get much of a response.”
“We are on our own, then, facing up to seven ghosts, including the dog, and at least two mass murderers. It’s exactly as we Brits imagine America to be after all.”
Chapter 11
After that nothing happened for a month - no ghosts, no half-sightings, not even an inexplicable event. That was inside the house.
Zack and Stevie took to referring to Belle as the ‘neurotic’ and me as the ‘psychotic’, a riff on that description of the difference between the two – ‘neurotics build castles in the air; psychotics go and live in them’ – except that this version was that Belle feared that there were ghosts and I actually saw them. At least someone had been paying attention in one of his classes for a moment or two.
Outside the house, Belle was becoming increasingly neurotic. Every set of footsteps on the street behind her suggested the stealthy approach of a contract assassin. When she went back to work after her vacation, I volunteered to accompany her there and back. Sometimes she said no, but several times she said yes.
It was the fact that someone associated with the hit man, or maybe the hit man himself, had visited the house, knew where we were, was tracking each one of our movements, and was waiting patiently, sociopathically, for the clean moment when the hit could go down without his being caught.
I certainly couldn’t explain the presence of the note. It hadn’t been sent in the mail - it had been hand-delivered - and it could hardly be laughed off as an incidental mass distribution prank - what would have been the odds? At the very least, someone hated us and they had been up to the threshold of our house.
How do you get a note like that delivered? Rafaella was the most likely to have sent it but only in the mail. She had friends in the neighborhood? In theory she didn’t even know our address. If she had friends who lived in California, were they local or were they prepared to go to considerable lengths to frighten us on her behalf, in which case what else were they prepared to do?
If it wasn’t Rafaella, could it be Robert, Belle’s ex-husband? Had he been roused by seeing me at the storage place? Was he in San Francisco? Was he planning to hit Belle or me, or simply to take back the boys?
The boys continued to treat the whole predicament as stupid adult paranoia, like having to pay utility bills, and paid no attention to it at all as having no relevance to their lives, except when it suited them, such as Halloween, which was only a few weeks away.
“We have to have a party,” Zack encouraged us. “We have a murder house, that’s seriously cool. We can re-enact the murder in your bedroom, Mom. Everyone will love it.”
“Cool,” said Stevie, but little more.
We had a party, decorating the house with lights, ghosts, fiends and demons, amid much speculation from the boys as to how to coax the real ghosts out. Of course, they hadn’t yet seen a real ghost, and I had, so it was a lot funnier for them than it was for me, with Belle looking on indulgently.
Belle’s parents came to stay for the weekend and Belle rustled up another twenty-five friends to participate in the festivities. None of them knew anything about what had really taken place in the house, so when I gave them a murder-mystery ghost tour they were impressed to the point of being visibly nervous, elated or skeptical.
“A real murder?”
“A real murder.”
“In this house?”
“Yes.”
“Four people?”
“And a dog.”
“Two children?”
“Yes.”
“In that room at the top of the stairs?”
“Yes.”
“Think of those poor children …”
“I don’t think the adults liked it much either.”
“Did you find any blood?”
“No, it had all been cleaned away meticulously. I have met the wife, though.”
“The killer?”
“No, the new wife - the victim.”
“I thought you said she was dead.”
“She is.”
> “You met her before she died?”
“No, afterwards.”
“She was a ghost?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you meet her?”
“On the landing, just there.”
“Then what happened.”
“She went into our bedroom, there, and hid herself under the bed.”
“How do you know she hid under the bed?”
“Because I found her there.”
“Why would a ghost have to hide under a bed?”
“I don’t know. That is what I asked myself too.”
“It was really a ghost?”
“Yes.”
“And it was really her?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“We found a photograph of her in the San Francisco Chronicle.”
“Oh.”
…
“Did she say anything?”
“No.”
“Was she all rotted?” This from one of the children.
“No, she was as if she was alive, and very beautiful. I did talk to her, though.”
“What did you say?”
“I can’t remember. Something like ‘Hello’.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing. She disappeared on me.”
“Is she any of these people here, mwahaha?” asked Frank who could be relied upon to liven up any dull conversation.
I looked him straight in the eyes. “Yes, Frank, she is standing right next to you. There!”
I even raised a frisson, but not from Frank. “I tell the jokes around here,” he said.
We had a whole Halloween party and not a single ghost turned up, nor a serial killer.
Similarly to my reaction when I tried to discover a ghost in our bedroom at night and couldn’t find one, most people seemed half-relieved and half-disappointed. If only they could catch a glimpse of one briefly, without it looking back at them or doing any seriously scary shit.
If only …
Chapter 12
Black Friday.
I had never heard of ‘Black Friday’ until I came to the US. It is not remotely as ominous as it seems - very much the opposite. It is when several of the major retail chains sell a mass of stuff at ridiculously cheap prices during the night of Thanksgiving.
Before There Were Angels Page 5
