Before There Were Angels

by Sarah Mathews

  “What motive do you think your ex-wife would have to kill Zack?” Martinez asked.

  “I don’t know exactly but I am sure she has, or had.” I was sure she had a motive because I was sure she had killed him but I was having problems understanding her motive myself. ‘Just to fuck with us’ didn’t sound that convincing a motive. “Maybe she felt that by leaving her, I was depriving her of her own children, so she decided to deprive us of one of ours.” I spread my hands. “I really don’t know.” It sounded like lame psychology even to me and it certainly didn’t seem to satisfy either Martinez or Nielsen.

  “So you are saying she is insane, because that is one insane way of thinking?” suggested Nielsen.

  I laughed. “Oh yes, she is definitely insane. I cannot even count the ways she is insane.”

  “She doesn’t know what she is doing?” Nielsen followed up.

  “She knows exactly what she is doing,” I assured him, “at least most of the time. Sometimes you can’t tell whether she does or doesn’t, but in terms of what she is doing to us now it is a carefully planned and vicious, vengeful campaign.”

  “Because you deprived her of a child?”

  “She probably thinks I deprived her of her life, the one she and I would have had.”

  Nielsen frowned. “Did you ever hit her, Sir?”

  “No, never.”

  “Or mistreat her in any way …?”

  I couldn’t help smiling at that. “Oh, according to her I mistreated her in every way, every day.”

  “In what ways?”

  To have to go back over all this was exhausting.

  “I forgot to put the garbage bags out for collection day and I tied them the wrong way at the top. I used too much soap when I washed the dishes, or too little, or I didn’t rinse the plates and glasses under fresh water before I stacked them to dry, or I left the sponge in the washing up water, or I left marks on the plates or glasses, or I didn’t clean out the sink afterwards, or I didn’t clean around the garbage can … That more or less covers my wholesale abuse of Rafaella around the kitchen sink.”

  The officers had expressions on their faces suggesting that I was being facetious and petty but I had hardly been lying; these were exactly the kinds of things Rafaella had constantly cited as being examples of my wholesale abuse of her.

  “Any more substantial examples, Sir?”

  I smiled again, ironically and apologetically. “I didn’t believe that Kumar was the detailer of God, that she talked to archangels, that crystals necessarily healed or that, if they did, she necessarily knew how to use them to heal, etc..”

  If you can weigh a forehead, the officers were weighing their foreheads, and their irritation was with me for reporting what Rafaella claimed ridiculously to be abuse rather than with Rafaella herself for having beaten me up over this shit for so long.

  “Did you ever hit her?” Martinez demanded, shifting in his chair, the hair probably bristling all over his body.

  “No, I’ve already told you that. I didn’t criticize her and I didn’t even argue with her. I sometimes questioned what she was doing or why she was having some stupid argument with someone, but mostly I co-operated, which was no good at all.”

  Both officers were being forced to cross a psychological swamp they didn’t even know existed and it was bugging them. Things no doubt didn’t roll for them that way at home.

  And now I was in a danger of a different sort, not of being killed by Rafaella, not of being arrested for the murder of Zack, but merely of being arrested. That repetition of the question of whether I had ever hit Rafaella seemed to have been coming directly from the complaint Rafaella had filed with the INS. If these officers decided to take me to the station, they would probably soon be taking me before an immigration judge and throwing me out of the country. Of course, if we all went on the run, Belle, Stevie and I, it might actually make it harder for Rafaella to find us and I could run my company from anywhere, but I loved living in San Francisco, as did Belle, so I didn’t want to leave, not to mention that I didn’t want to suffer the humiliation and indignity of being processed by the criminal and immigration systems and of maybe remaining caught up in their net for months before being released one side of the Atlantic or the other. If they really thought I might have been responsible for Zack’s death, they wouldn’t be rushing to release me anywhere, and all those images from England of immigrants being held in detention centers passed before my eyes.

  “What’s wrong with co-operating?” Martinez asked.

  “It is mere compliance,” I replied.

  “And …?”

  “It is no whole-hearted support. It is not anticipating needs before they are even articulated and acting enthusiastically to meet those needs.”

  “That is what she expected you to do?”

  “Yes. That is exactly what she expected me to do.” At last they were getting some true measure of Rafaella’s nature.

  “I’m glad I’m not married to her,” said Martinez.

  “I’m glad I’m no longer married to her too but it doesn’t seem to be helping us at the moment.”

  Martinez leaned forward. “Let’s go back over the events of Thanksgiving Night …” He glanced over at Stevie who had entered the room a few minutes earlier and who had been sitting there silently, listening intently.

  I decided that Stevie could stay. It was up to him what he chose to do with his Saturdays and in many ways Zack had belonged to him even more than to the rest of us. “Yes?”

  “You say you were at Target for their Black Friday sale …?”

  “Correct. Except Zack who didn’t want to come.”

  “Do you have any proof of that?”

  “Other than the Christmas tree that was sitting on the steps and the two new iPads that were lying in the hall when the emergency services arrived?”

  “We weren’t there then.”

  “Yes, we have got the receipts which show us as being in Target more or less at the time when Zack sent his last text message to Stevie.” Stevie nodded. “I’ll have to find them. It would have been easier to produce them at the time. They may have been thrown away, but it will be on the paperwork behind our bank records if the worst comes to the worst.”

  “But someone else could have bought them for you …”

  “Using our debit cards?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s possible … but they didn’t. We were there.”

  “We were there,” Stevie cut in.

  Martinez ignored him. “You see, we are having some difficulties understanding the scenario you are suggesting here …”

  “I am not suggesting any scenario,” I countered. “All I am saying is that I believe Rafaella is behind this somewhere. I’m not sure why she is but I am sure she is.”

  “You are saying, or proposing, that your ex-wife, for no reason that makes any sense to us, wanted to murder your son, and got into the house without any sign of a forced entry and without any likelihood of having access to any keys - so Zack must have invited this complete stranger into the house. Then, last night, the same thing again. Your ex-wife, presumably, gets into your house, which is locked up, without making a forced entry and without keys, and tries to burn the place down. None of this makes sense.”

  “It does,” I said, “but none of us wants to go there.”

  “Where don’t we want to go?” quizzed Martinez.

  “Into the realms of the paranormal.”

  Martinez held up his hand and laughed shortly. “No, Sir, nobody is looking to go there.”

  “But you still have to explain Genevieve Giraud.”

  “What about her?”

  “That nobody can photograph her.”

  “That is your story -“

  “Officer Nielsen here has tried to talk to her on several occasions and she keeps disappearing, so it isn’t only us.”

  Nielsen raised his eyebrows in an ‘it’s a fair cop’ expression.

  “Let’s stick to the f
acts. Zack died by hanging. Either he committed suicide or he was murdered. We heard a message from Zack’s cell phone in which he asked for help and we heard a laugh from a woman. Those are the facts. Those are the only facts we have. Then you say that you were in Target at the time of Zack’s death -“

  “We were in Target,” Stevie shouted suddenly.

  “… but there is no convincing motive for anyone else to have killed him - neither your ex-wife nor Martha DeGamo - then there is this kitchen incident last night … What are we supposed to believe?” It wasn’t an aggressive statement, it was a despairing one.

  “So you think we killed Zack … that I killed Zack?” Stevie screamed in outrage. He stood up and balled his fists, glaring at Martinez.

  Martinez held up his hand. “Let’s all try and stay calm here.”

  “Calm?” Stevie spat. “You sit there and you accuse me of murdering my brother, my twin brother, and you think I’m going to be calm about that. You’re a fucking idiot.”

  It was my turn to hold up my hand. “Stevie …”

  “I’m sorry, Luke, but this guy is a complete asshole, cop or no cop.”

  Martinez took it. He even leaned back in his chair.

  Stevie glared at Martinez. “If you think that I killed Zack, or that I had any part in Zack being killed, you are one stupid motherfucker.”

  “Let’s calm down, Stevie,” Martinez repeated. “You are right. I don’t believe for a second that you had anything to do with the death of your brother.”

  Stevie was close to tears. “So then what are you saying?”

  “That we have to start with the premise that you were all at Target when Zack died and that you had no part in his death …”

  “If my cell phone had been on, I might have been able to save him,” said Stevie.

  “Probably not, Stevie,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s what Zack says.”

  “What Zack said when?” Nielsen asked, re-joining the conversation.

  Stevie looked at him defiantly. “You won’t believe me but Zack comes back to be with me sometimes. He told me that there was nothing I could have done, that any of us could have done. There is no way to beat Rafaella.”

  “You see his ghost?” Nielsen asked neutrally.

  “Mostly I feel his presence and his voice in my head,” Stevie said.

  “And he tells you that Rafaella, your step-father’s ex-wife, killed him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mmm. I’m not sure what we do with that. I don’t want to be writing that in any report I put my name on but I have a suspicion that it might be true. The question is how. Where is she and how did she get into the house twice?”

  “Three times,” I corrected him.

  “What was the third time?” snapped Martinez.

  “When I saw her in Stevie’s room.”

  “You saw her in my room?”

  “Yes, Stevie, the night I followed Jess DeGamo into your room after you saw her outside our bedroom.”

  “Have you told Mom about that?”

  “No. I didn’t want to freak her. I’d rather she didn’t know now either.”

  “You saw Rafaella in Stevie’s room in this house?” asked Martinez for clarification.

  “Yes.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She demanded that I return to her in England. That I get on a plane.”

  “Did she attack you?”

  “She was her usual aggressive self but she didn’t attack me physically as such. I don’t know if she even could have done.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she wasn’t there the way you are here. It was some kind of projection of her. I don’t know how she did it. I heard her last night too from the kitchen and saw her standing in Stevie’s room looking out of the window at us.”

  “As a projection?”

  “I assume so. I don’t think she broke into the house by kicking down doors. She seems to be able to come and go as she pleases.”

  The officers looked at each other. “Boy, that is a hard one,” said Martinez. “Murdered by a living ghost. That will be a first.”

  Nielsen laughed dismissively. “No way am I going to be writing that. Then again, at least according to you, Genevieve Giraud might be a ghost too.”

  “Well we all know that,” replied Martinez, without even a hint of sarcasm.

  “No, I mean she really might be. I looked up the name. The only reference I could find was to a Genevieve Giraud from Baton Rouge who was stabbed to death in her bed by her husband who thought she was having an affair, and who was a drunk and an abuser of women besides.”

  “I think Belle bought our bed in New Orleans but that it originally came from Baton Rouge. Somebody was meant to have been murdered in it. There is still blood on the headboard.”

  “It’s disgusting,” Stevie agreed. “Scary.”

  The two officers stared at us in belief.

  “It’s still a story of ghosts,” said Martinez. “God help us.”

  Chapter 21

  Stevie was as good as his word and didn’t mention to Belle about my having seen Rafaella in his bedroom. Nevertheless, after the kitchen incident, Belle decided it would be safer for Stevie to go back to Phoenix and live with his father for a while. This was probably a good strategy too. Since Zack’s death, Robert had been criticizing us constantly for ‘bad parenting’ for want of a better phrase and for behavior that led to Zack wanting to kill himself. He hadn’t bought for a moment the idea that someone was stalking us. I doubt the ghost idea would have played any better with him either. He just saw us as being careless and irresponsible, much as Belle had always portrayed him, so recent events had provided him with cause for self-vindication.

  “Let Robert take care of Stevie for a while. He misses his dad and he will be safer there, and I’m sure Robert will kick him back to us soon enough, but maybe by then we will have fixed whatever is happening here.”

  I wasn’t entirely convinced that Stevie would be safer with Robert but I was in no position to explain why, and Stevie seemed quite excited to visit his father, although he said he wanted to come back soon because he couldn’t stand leaving Zack behind and was frightened that he would drift away without Stevie to keep him here. He didn’t seem to think that Zack would be following him to Phoenix. Why, he didn’t say.

  Stevie got on a plane and arrived in Phoenix without incident, which turned out to be a good decision in the light of what happened next, or perhaps it provoked what happened next, in which case it was a disastrous decision.

  Rafaella was always planning to ratchet things up, to escalate her demands. She always had.

  * * *

  We woke up at three in the morning, two days after Stevie had left, to violent screaming. It was agonized and prolonged, a mixture of a shriek and a wail, with maybe some elements of the early stages of a hurricane thrown in, leaving plenty of scope for the later stages to follow.

  Belle sat up in bed. “What?”

  “I’m glad Stevie isn’t here. If he were, I would be freaking out.”

  “I’m freaking out anyway. What do you think is making that horrible noise?”

  I opened the door to our bedroom and the level of screaming tripled to the point where it threatened to burst my eardrums and pop my eyes.

  “Holy shit,” I shouted.

  Belle was holding her hands over her ears.

  I went along the landing to Stevie’s room and entered it apprehensively. There was nothing there. I checked the spare room. Nothing there either.

  Some huge crashes and bangs were coming from above my head in the attic. It sounded like Stevie’s things were being wrecked one-by-one. Why was Rafaella always targeting the boys? I suppose the answer was obvious - that is where she could hurt us most.

  I was about to pull down the attic ladder and climb up to stop the blitzkrieg taking place up there when Zack appeared in front of me. “Don’t go up there,” he said. “She is planning to kill you,” exc
ept that he didn’t actually say it, his lips didn’t move, it was more a voice in my head.

  ‘I have to,’ I thought. ‘I cannot let everything Stevie has be destroyed and Belle will be devastated if things Zack owned are smashed. They are almost like holy relics to both Belle and Stevie.’

  ‘You can’t go up there,” emphasized a female voice and I found Jess DeGamo standing next to me too, trying to hold me back except that she could not make physical contact with me.

  “I feel a total coward,” I told them.

  “Better a coward than a dead hero,” came a third voice. I turned to find Martha DeGamo had joined us. I took a step back. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  Martha laughed. “What are any of us doing here? Trying to protect you.”

  “I need this much protection?” I quipped.

  “You need a great deal more protection than we can provide,” Martha cautioned me, “but we are doing our best, all of us - Zack, Jess, Genevieve and me.”

  “I thought you killed Jess.”

  Martha shook her head sadly. “Not consciously. Unwillingly. I believe that doesn’t count. Someone took over my mind, then used my body to kill Dan, Jess and the boys. It was all planned out to get you here.”

  “To get us here?”

  “Yes, to get you here. Rafaella knew that Belle could never resist a house with a mass killing, so there had to be a mass killing.”

  “Are you saying that Belle indirectly killed you?”

  “Nobody is blaming Belle,” Martha assured me, “nor you, but you could say the Belle is the cause of all this because it is Belle Rafaella wants to torture and kill, and Belle somehow attracts ghosts. You see us but Belle attracts them, even though she can’t see us. Your job is now to protect Belle.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “For a start, don’t go up that ladder. If you do, you won’t even be able to save yourself, never mind Belle. For the rest, you will have to figure that out for yourself. We will help you as much as we can but I must warn you that Rafaella is a phenomenon none of us understands, very, very determined and very, very vengeful and hurt.”