Before There Were Angels

by Sarah Mathews

  “I’m surprised you didn’t run away with one of them,” I commented.

  Belle smiled. “It was tempting, let me tell you. Sean Penn gave a street person at least one hundred dollars. He came out of a little art supply store and a street person asked him for money. He put his hand in his pocket and he pulled out a handful of cash. It could have been two hundred dollars, I don’t know. I am guessing at around a hundred. And Alec Baldwin was so gorgeous.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “No I couldn’t work up my nerve. I just gaped at him and made weird strangling sounds while he smiled at me. I was so embarrassed - my hero and I could not get a single word out. OK, are we ready?”

  By now Stevie seemed actually excited to go out and hear Belle’s stories. A walk is a walk but to hear about Sean Penn and Alec Baldwin, that was sort of interesting. Maybe to hear about his father too.

  “And I’m taking you on a ghost tour,” Belle added.

  “As if we didn’t have enough ghosts in the house already,” I carped.

  “We have one ghost,” Belle corrected me, “and I haven’t even seen her yet. And I am the one around here who is interested in ghosts. It’s not fair.”

  “Two ghosts, actually,” Stevie called down the stairs as he collected something from the attic.”

  “Two?” I asked, coloring immediately as I thought Stevie must have been referring to Rafaella whose visit I hadn’t yet divulged to Belle.

  “I’ve seen Zack too,” Stevie continued triumphantly. “He’s doing really great, though he is sad for us.”

  Belle and I exchanged glances. I didn’t know which possibility I feared most. If Stevie had really seen Zack, how would Belle react? Would she feel deprived and snubbed by Zack, that he had come back to see Stevie but not her? Would it dredge up all her sorrow and deluge her with it anew? On the other hand, if Stevie was imagining Zack, that raised concerns about his mental health. It might be temporary, a necessary illusion to get him to come to terms with what had happened and with his personal loss that was probably far greater than even Belle’s, or Zack’s death might have given him a shock that was sending him schizophrenic. Or, of course - and this was becoming a more and more tenable assumption - the ghost of Zack was really visiting Stevie and would make itself apparent to Belle too. The trouble was that, despite her interest in ghosts, Belle seemed virtually impervious to them, unable to connect with them, unable even to sense their presence.

  If only Zack was around, he would be one welcome ghost.

  Stevie came bounding down the stairs. “Ready!” he declared. “Let’s go.”

  We marched out, climbed Haight Street, then walked along the end of Golden Gate Park to Geary and through Jordan Avenue to California Street. Belle was preoccupied and I was preoccupied because she was. She kept slipping Stevie questioning looks as I kept the conversation going with anything I could think of to say to keep Stevie on board. However, as soon as we reached California Street, Belle perked up.

  “I always knew San Francisco would be my home,” she started, “… one day. At fifteen I was not getting along with my parents and more or less got thrown out of their house. I had some money saved up and when I was offered a modeling contract in San Francisco, I jumped at it. A personal assistant to Nina Blanchard spotted me on Fifth Avenue in New York when I was visiting a friend there and gave me his card. I ignored it at first but Julie read the card and said, ‘Nina Blanchard. You have got to go for this, Belle.’ So I did. My friend Sammy, another model, and I got a room in Cable Car Court, which is further down. The first thing I am going to show you is the house where the Winchesters lived, to the left of here. The husband was the heir to the Winchester rifles fortune and he married Sarah Winchester. They had a daughter and then both the husband and the daughter died. Mrs. Winchester saw a psychic in Boston who told her that the family was being haunted by the spirits of all the Native Americans who had been killed by Winchester rifles and that the only way she could save herself was to build a house and keep building it as directed by the spirits. She mustn’t stop, even for one day. So she bought a farmhouse in San Jose and started building and never stopped for thirty-eight years until she died. It is called the Winchester Mystery House. There are doors that lead into walls, and staircases that lead nowhere, and room after room after room. A whole part of the house was damaged by the 1906 quake and she closed it off forever, believing that the spirits were punishing her and demanding that she never use that part of the house again. I’ll have to take you there.”

  “Cool!” said Stevie who had never shown any interest in architecture before. “Can you see the spirits?”

  “You might be able to,” Belle retorted sardonically, “but I never saw any. It’s a really interesting place, though.”

  “And their first house was around here?” I asked.

  “I’ll show you it in a second.”

  We sat on the grass outside the house and speculated as to what the Winchester Mystery House would look like.

  “I’ll now show you where Sammy and I lived.”

  We crossed Van Ness Avenue and Belle pointed across the street to one of many historic apartment blocks lining California Street.

  “Sammy and I lived here. One night we were in the basement that had been turned into a kind of lounge or games room, and we found a Ouija board. We couldn’t resist it. We set it up, put a glass onto the board, and the glass immediately started spinning around the board. I’m sure neither of us was controlling it. It started spelling out letters that said it was communicating with us on behalf of a twenty year old nurse who had been drowned in the bathtub there by a doctor thirty years earlier. It even gave us the name and phone number of the doctor whom she said had murdered her. We phoned the number and got the wife of the doctor at the other end of the line who put us through to the doctor. The doctor was very aggressive. ‘What do you want? Why are you calling?’, he said. We told him the name of the girl - I’ve forgotten it now. He sounded scared, haunted. We hung up.”

  “This is all true?” asked Stevie.

  “Yep, it’s all true,” said Belle. “It was really bizarre. The doctor couldn’t have had the same telephone number as thirty years earlier. The girl must have been tracking him after her death in order to have his phone number. How scary is that? How could a ghost possibly do that? We asked the apartment manager about the history of the building the next day. He said it had been a nurses’ residence originally and that a nurse was murdered there in the bathroom. What really scared us was that she was living in the same apartment Sammy and I were sleeping in. After that we hardly managed to sleep. We used to sit most of the night with our knees hunched up to our necks, watching for the ghost. We never took a bath there ever again either since she was supposed to have been killed in there. We only took showers and never went to the bathroom alone again.”

  “And all that happened to you, Mom?” Stevie asked, eyes wide.

  “It did. It is a totally true story. It really shocked me. I have always loved the idea of ghosts but I don’t think I really believed in them. Then this happened and I can’t explain it. You said you’ve seen ghosts too now, Stevie, so it must be easier for you to believe, but I was never expecting actually to be in contact with one of them, especially not one that stalked her killer for thirty years. That was really scary. That means ghosts aren’t just memories, they are active people, or kind of people anyway, who are capable of thinking like you and me, just without bodies. That thought still sends shivers up my spine.”

  “The first time I saw the red-haired woman in our house, Jess DeGamo,” I said, “I thought I was seeing something that happened in the past, but when I went to Stevie’s room after he saw her, and she came rushing out, that seemed quite different.”

  “What second time?” asked Belle sharply.

  “Yes, what second time?” echoed Stevie.

  Ah!

  “Yes, I didn’t tell you about that part,” I continued, stuttering slightly. “I didn’
t want to upset you. When I went to Stevie’s room, she came rushing out, looking really scared and it seemed like she was really scared now, not in the past. I can’t explain why I thought that,” well, I could have done but I wasn’t going to, “but that is the impression I got, that there is something in the house which is spooking even the spooks in our house.” And indeed there was but I was going to limit myself to dropping hints. There was no way I was going to talk about meeting Rafaella. That would really blow the lid off things and send Belle into a panic. Stevie would probably be OK because I didn’t think Rafaella meant anything to him, but if Belle knew that Rafaella could somehow appear in our house at will, she was really going to freak.

  “What was Jess afraid of, do you think?” Belle asked.

  “I really don’t know. It was just an impression I got. And after what happened to Zack, I really, really don’t know. I do feel that something or someone dangerous has access to our house, though.”

  “That’s what Zack says,” said Stevie. “He says that there is someone haunting us but she isn’t a ghost. He doesn’t know what she is but she’s really powerful and she’s the one who killed him. She is a living person but she turns up in different forms so he can’t figure out who she really is. She has a hard on for you and Luke, though. Zack says to be careful. There is not much you can do to protect yourself against her - it might even be a man but she usually appears as a woman, Zack says - but do the best you can.”

  That wasn’t good news and I had a pretty good idea I knew who she was.

  Belle was looking really shocky, although she recovered fast. “Here we are, Huntington Square. This is where the gold and silver barons of Virginia City in Nevada built their palaces which are now the Huntington Hotel, here, the Fairmont Hotel, there, the Mark Hopkins Hotel, there, and the Crocker Club, that dark building there. The Top of the Mark, the top of that hotel there, is where you are supposed to propose if you are really romantic. The Huntington is the most exclusive hotel in San Francisco, where presidents stay when they come here and with the best restaurant in the city – the ‘Big 4’. The Fairmont has the Tonga Room which has a South Pacific feel to it and a big pool in the middle where it rains and where they play music from an island in the middle. They say the Fairmont has more ghosts than there are rooms. Then there is Flora Sommerton who was a member of the Crocker family. When she was coming up to her eighteenth birthday, she was told it had been arranged for her to marry a much older man. During her eighteenth birthday ball, she ran away in her ball gown. The family posted a $250,000 reward for finding her, which was a huge amount of money in those days, but her body was only discovered after she died fifty years later in Montana, where she had been working as a housekeeper. The creepy thing is that when she died they found her wearing the same gown she had been wearing at the ball when she ran away and was surrounded by newspaper articles reporting her disappearance. Since she died, people keep seeing her on foggy nights running down Knob Hill in her ball gown.”

  “You do love your ghost stories,” I laughed. “I think I am going off ghosts.”

  “I like Zack,” Stevie protested.

  “Do you think you could get Zack to talk to me?” Belle asked Stevie.

  Stevie frowned. “He doesn’t really talk …”

  “So how did he tell you about the dangerous entity in our house?”

  His frown deepened. “I don’t really know. We communicate but we don’t talk, like it’s in my head. I can’t explain it. But it is him.”

  “I’m sure it is,” Belle reassured him. “OK, do you mind us going to Starbucks? I need a latte. Then we can go down to the Bay and see the sea lions. Don’t worry, Stevie. We’ll get a street car on our way back. I love the street cars.”

  “So do I,” said Stevie.

  We cut down Powell Street and went to the Starbucks on O’Farrell where Belle and I had coffees and we all had paninis.

  Walking down Market Street, Belle pointed out the Palace Hotel. “Paul Bern’s crazy ex-wife, Dorothy, stayed there. Paul Bern was married to Jean Harlow,” she turned to Stevie, “an old movie star. One night Dorothy left the hotel, went to Beverly Hills, shot Paul Bern, then returned to the Palace Hotel here for an hour before booking onto the old paddle boat to Sacramento and throwing herself off the side. When they went to her room in the Palace Hotel, there were articles and pictures of Jean Harlow and Paul Bern stuck all over the walls.”

  “You sure know your San Francisco,” I said.

  “Only the parts where somebody dies in them,” Stevie corrected me.

  “All good stories have death in them,” I countered. “Love and death. The red rose.”

  “What red rose?” Stevie asked.

  “The red rose in paintings, indicating sex and death. They were very closely related in the old days because of the diseases you got from sex.”

  “AIDS?”

  “No, syphilis then. AIDS only turned up thirty years ago. But it would work for AIDS too. You always have to be careful when you have sex. Best to remember that, Stevie. Let’s go and see those sea lions. Sharks and death work too, which is why the City of San Francisco gave the sea lions a safe haven in the yachting marina next to Pier 39.”

  After visiting the sea lions, Belle decided she wanted another Starbucks so she went into the one at the bottom of Powell Street. She came out laughing.

  “Our cops are really wonderful,” she said, “and they love their coffee. There were two of them in there sitting by the door in those red chairs. They were on duty because I could hear a dispatcher talking over their radios saying how he had been expecting fog when he set out for work but it was now a beautiful day. One cop was doing the crossword, the other was playing with his iPad. A street person walked in, went straight up to the counter and stole the tips out of the jar. The cute little guy behind the counter shouted, ‘Hey! Don't steal our tips!’. The cop doing the crossword cop looked up, then went back to his crossword. The other cop didn't look up at all. The guy behind the counter shouted, ‘Hey! Don't steal our tips!’ again, looking at the cops. Neither of the cops paid any attention. The street person had to brush past their knees as he walked out because the cops were right next to the door. ‘Wow,’ the guy behind the counter said, ‘that was really helpful of you.’ The cop with the crossword said, ‘You handled yourself really well there, I thought.’ The other cop didn’t say anything. Some of the people in the line were obviously tourists and their jaws were almost falling to the floor in shock. The locals just put their hands in their pockets and filled the tip jar up again. Only in San Francisco!”

  “Well, I suppose it was a lot cheaper not to arrest him. No harm was done. The tip jar got filled, the people in the line felt good about themselves for doing a good deed, and the cops got their coffee and cakes in peace. Perfect world.”

  “How do you become a cop? It sounds like a really great job,” Stevie asked.

  * * *

  On the way home in the street car, Stevie asked about Robert. “How did you meet Dad, Mom?”

  “We met in the street, where I meet all the right people, including Luke here.”

  “Yes, we did,” I confirmed.

  “In fact it was an almost identical meeting, except one was in Pine Street and the other was over on Sea Cliff.”

  “You met Robert in Sea Cliff?” I asked, surprised. “What was he doing there?” Sea Cliff is where all the old, huge houses of the San Francisco aristocracy are - the Spreckels, the Gettys and Danielle Steele.

  “He was looking around, sight-seeing, just like I was. And he was gorgeous. Still is.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes, I do. Which doesn’t mean he is easy to live with -“

  “I like him,” protested Stevie. “I like Luke too,” he added.

  “I won’t go into details as to what happened next but we went to the Presidio, found a quiet spot and when I finished my modeling assignment, I went back with him to Arizona, we got married and I found out that I was pregnan
t with Zack and Stevie. It was a mistake - my mistake. I shouldn’t have married him but I got carried away, and I never modeled again.”

  “You married me within a month of us meeting,” I said.

  “Yes, but that wasn’t a mistake. With you I was sure. With Robert I was just infatuated.”

  “You’ve never told me you were a model,” I continued.

  “I only did one assignment. It wasn’t worth mentioning. And I don’t miss it at all. It was fun, that’s all.”

  “So you don’t miss it?”

  “Hell no. I don’t miss anything now, except Zack. I really miss Zack.”

  A thoughtful expression crossed Stevie’s face. He was evidently working on a plan. I was pleased about that. Having Zack around the house as a ghost would be a bit weird but a great comfort to Belle, and that was all that mattered to me.

  He might even help us rid ourselves of Rafaella.

  Chapter 19

  Sarah in the call center of my company told me that they hadn’t found Rafaella yet. She no longer lived in our old house and the people who had moved in after us had never been given a forwarding address. She was not registered on the electrical roll and there were no updated addresses on the credit reference databases. She would keep looking, though.

  Which is why, when I saw two cops standing outside our front door, my blood froze. Thip had assured us that I was very unlikely to be arrested and thrown out of the country on the next plane, that I would have to appear before an immigration judge and even then I would be given thirty days to buy my own ticket and leave voluntarily, but you never know what authoritarian government agencies will decide to do on whim.

  Much to my relief as I opened the door, a noticeable tremble shaking my body, one of the officers was Luiz Martinez.

  “We’ve come to update you on our investigations,” he said. “Is now a good time?”

  At that point, given that their visit had nothing to do with immigration after all, I would have agreed to anything.