Two Songs This Archangel Sings

by George C. Chesbro

  Holmes frowned. “You suspect Veil Kendry?”

  “No, sir. But he’s definitely connected to it somehow, and more people—young people—may die unless we find him soon. The information you have in that file in front of you could be important.”

  “But I don’t see how.”

  “That’s why you’re an educator and I’m a cop. Let me decide if it’s important. I give you my word that the information won’t be used if it’s not necessary; if it is used, nobody will be told where we got it from. Please, Mr. Homes. Lives are at stake.”

  Holmes considered Garth’s words, finally nodded. “According to these records, Veil Kendry was a very disturbed and violent young man, Lieutenant; the reason he was living with his aunt was because he was thrown out of his own home at the age of fourteen by his parents, who could no longer tolerate his bizarre behavior. He was twice committed to a mental hospital, once by his parents and once by the courts.”

  “What’s the name of the facility?”

  “At the time it was called Rockland State Hospital. It’s downstate, and I’m familiar with it. Now there’s a separate facility for kids, called Rockland Children’s Psychiatric Center, but it still serves the same purpose. Children usually aren’t committed there unless they’re homicidal or suicidal—sometimes both. He did attend Colletville High otherwise, but there’s no record of his having graduated. That’s about it, Lieutenant.”

  Garth and I looked at each other, and I wondered if disappointment was as clearly etched on my face as it was on his. The trail in Colletville was more than two decades old, and there was nothing left here but the cries of a tormented young man still echoing in a musty, yellowing school file.

  “Thanks, Mr. Holmes,” Garth said, rising and shaking the other man’s hand.

  Holmes read my brother’s voice and face. “I was right. It isn’t any help, is it?”

  Garth shrugged. “It sheds light on a few things, but it won’t help us find him. We very much appreciate your cooperation.”

  “Wait,” Holmes said as Garth and I headed for the door. We stopped, turned back. “Jan Garvey, one of our social studies teachers, graduated from Colletville High. I don’t recall exactly when she graduated, but she’s been teaching here for quite a few years. I think there’s a good possibility she was a contemporary of this Veil Kendry, or at least may know something about him.”

  “We’d very much like to talk to her,” Garth said quickly.

  “I don’t want to disturb her during class, but if you’ll wait a moment I’ll check her schedule and see when she has a preparation period.”

  “No. We’ll wait until after school. I don’t want her to feel rushed.”

  “That will be fine. Naturally, I have to get her permission. School is dismissed at three fifteen. If Ms. Garvey agrees, you can see her then.”

  Garth nodded. “Thanks, Holmes. When you get your school in New York City, you look me up. Having good contacts with the cops won’t hurt you in trying to run a school in the South Bronx. Consider me a good contact.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” Holmes said, smiling. “I appreciate that. I’ll see you later. Come here to my office, and I’ll introduce you to Jan Garvey.”

  14.

  Something had come up to prevent Holmes from meeting with us again after school, but his secretary told us that Jan Garvey was expecting us, and we should go up to her room on the second floor.

  The social studies teacher turned out to be an extremely attractive woman, close to six feet tall in her heels. Her hair was auburn-colored, graying nicely at the temples to give her a ripe, sexy look. Her features were accented by dark, soulful eyes. She projected an aura of toughness with dignity, like someone who had known much suffering but come back from it a deeper and better person than she had been before. She was, I suspected, a survivor, and probably an outstanding teacher, one with the sensitivity and intelligence to comfort and counsel those students who needed it, yet at the same time be able to back the biggest bad-ass in class right up against the wall.

  At the moment, the woman’s dark eyes were shadowed with anxiety, and she looked shaken as she stood in the doorway of her brightly decorated classroom and greeted us. “Hello, Lieutenant,” she said to Garth, then looked at me. “I’ve read a great deal about the colorful Dr. Robert Frederickson, also known as Mongo. It’s a pleasure and honor to meet you.”

  “I’m flattered,” I answered with a smile. “I’ve been called a lot of things, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard myself described as ‘colorful.’ I’m going to have to note that in my diary, Ms. Garvey.”

  “Call me Jan, please.”

  “I’m Mongo, as you mentioned, and the lieutenant’s name is Garth.”

  “I understand that you want to talk to me about Veil Kendry,” the woman said as she ushered us into her room and closed the door behind her. The warmth in her voice had been replaced by wariness and tension.

  “Yes,” Garth replied.

  “What is it you want to know?”

  “Anything and everything you can tell us about him.”

  “How is he?”

  “He’s in a lot of trouble, Jan.”

  Again, shadows moved in Jan Garvey’s eyes, and she shook her head sadly. “I’m very sorry to hear that. I thought he was doing so well. I’ve read articles about him and reviews of his work. Once, I made plans to go to New York to see one of his exhibits, but I backed off at the last moment. I … I’m not sure why. I guess I was afraid that being that close to Veil would remind me of too many things I don’t want to be reminded of.”

  “Then you did know him well?” Garth said carefully.

  The woman’s thin laughter was laced with sadness. “Yes, Garth, I’d say so; I’d certainly say so. Can you tell me what he’s done?”

  “He hasn’t done anything, Jan,” I said, knowing that Garth would probably take strong exception. “Some other people are trying to do things to him—and us. For your own protection, we can’t tell you much more than that. But it’s very important that we find him, and soon. Lives could depend on it. We’re asking you to trust us. You’re the last person we know to speak to, the last hope we have of finding out things about Veil which we need to know.”

  The woman studied me for some time before speaking. “Then you’re not looking for him because of some crime he’s committed?”

  “No. But he’s disappeared, and something in his past is the key to why—and maybe where—he’s gone. We’re not exaggerating at all when we tell you lives are at stake. We’re hoping that something you know might be of help.”

  Jan Garvey turned away quickly. “It all seems so long ago,” she said in a small voice. “I haven’t seen Veil in more than twenty years. How could anything I say be of any use to you?”

  “Jan,” Garth said with more gentleness in his tone than I’d heard from him in a long time, “we’re not sure just what it is we’re looking for. The only thing we know for sure is that you’re the last link to him we know of. We’d like you to tell us everything you know, or have heard, about Veil Kendry, and let Mongo and me filter and weigh the information. It’s obvious that you cared deeply about this man at one time, and still care. I give you my word that nothing you say to us will be used to hurt him.”

  “I believe you,” the woman said with a catch in her voice that was close to a sob. “But it hurts me so much to remember.” When she turned back to look at us, tears suddenly sprang to her eyes, and she bolted for the door. “Excuse me,” she called back over her shoulder. “I’m sorry, but I have to get some coffee. I’ll be right back.”

  “What the hell are we still doing here?” Garth asked almost an hour later as we stood by the classroom windows staring out at the gathering dusk. A storm was on its way, making the sky even darker. There were snow flurries in the air, harbingers of the much heavier flakes that would begin falling soon.

  “Just wait,” I replied, listening to the rising wind whistling outside the window.

&n
bsp; “You keep saying that. She’s stiffed us, and for all we know we’re locked in here now. She’s not coming back.”

  “We caught her by surprise, and we upset her. I think she’ll be back.”

  “Why is it so damn hard for you to take a hint?”

  “Five more minutes, okay?”

  Garth glanced at his watch. “Okay. It looks like she loved Kendry, doesn’t it?”

  “Still does.”

  “That’s one beautiful woman.”

  “Yep.”

  “If we didn’t already know that Kendry was out of his mind, this would confirm it. Can you imagine having a woman like that still loving you after twenty years and not doing anything about it?”

  “Maybe he didn’t do anything about it precisely because he loves her. Whatever burden he’s been carrying, he didn’t want her to have to share it with him. Don’t forget the bullet hole in his window. How could he ask someone to share his life if that could also mean sharing his death?”

  “Okay,” Garth said simply as he continued to stare out the window, where thick flakes had now begun to fall straight down from the sky. “What a schmuck,” he added distantly.

  “Give the man a break, Garth,” I said irritably. “Veil chooses to live the life of a monk so that people he cares about won’t be hurt, and you call him a schmuck.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Kendry.”

  “Then who’s a schmuck?”

  “Anybody who’d camp out on the side of a mountain in weather like this.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Garth crouched down to my eye level, pointed toward a mountain in the distance. “About eleven o’clock, near the top of the second mountain. There’s a fire up there. See it?”

  I looked along the direction of his pointing finger, squinted into the gloom, but could see nothing but snow falling and the barely discernible outline of the mountains. “No. You must be on drugs.”

  “I don’t see it now, but I’m telling you that I did see a fire up there.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Our argument about nothing was interrupted by the sound of a door opening and closing behind us, and we spun around. Jan Garvey, looking pale and with melting snow glistening on her face and clothes, stood just inside the doorway. A brown paper bag stuck out of her open purse. “Forgive me,” the woman said softly. “I still have so much feeling inside, and there’s so much hurt associated with … the things you want me to talk about. I got scared. Thank you for understanding, and thank you for waiting. I do want to help in any way I can.” She set her purse down on a desk top, took out the bag. Inside was a bottle of bourbon and three plastic glasses. “I can’t fool around with the ghost of Veil Kendry without a little booze,” she continued with a wry smile. “I hope you two like bourbon.”

  “I love bourbon,” Garth said, “and Mongo will drink anything that has alcohol in it.”

  “Sorry there’s no ice.”

  “Ice will only ruin good booze,” Garth replied, bringing me my drink. We sat down in two of the student desks, watched as the woman downed her drink, immediately poured herself another.

  “I feel him in this room,” she said with a shudder. “We sat in this classroom together, in those desks back by the window.”

  “How long did you know him?” Garth asked quietly.

  “We grew up in this town together. He was my first lover, and he made me pregnant for the first time. I had to have an abortion. I went to some butcher who damn near killed me.”

  “Jan,” I interrupted, “those aren’t the things we need to hear, and you certainly don’t have to talk about them.”

  “Please,” she whispered. “You asked me to tell you anything and everything I remember. There’s so much that I just didn’t know where to start … so I started there.”

  “Go ahead,” Garth said. “You tell us anything you want, any way you want to.”

  The woman nodded, sighed. “It’s all right. I can talk about it now—after a lot of craziness on my part and two broken marriages. There was always a lot of madness in this town. Maybe that’s why I decided to come back here to teach; I’d finally defeated it, the madness, and I was proud of that.” She paused, passed a hand across her eyes. “He may have come back for the opposite reason—the madness had finally defeated him.”

  Suddenly I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. I straightened up in my desk, but it was Garth who asked the question.

  “Who are you talking about, Jan? Veil Kendry?”

  The teacher shook her head, gazed down into her drink. “No, not Veil. Veil never came back.”

  We waited for her to tell us whom she’d been referring to, but she resumed where she had left off, and neither Garth nor I wanted to interrupt her.

  “I probably wound up with Veil because we were both wild,” Jan Garvey continued after a period of silence. “But there was a big difference between the two of us. I was just a bad-ass kid out of control, with no self-discipline. A lot of Veil’s craziness wasn’t really his fault. He was born brain-damaged, you know.”

  Garth and I looked at each other. “We didn’t know that, Jan,” I said. “We’d like to hear about it.”

  We watched as the woman slowly walked across the room to stand by the window. It had grown too dark in the room to see her features, but I figured she knew where the lights were if she wanted to turn them on.

  “He almost died at birth of a very high fever,” she said in a low voice. “He wasn’t supposed to live more than a few hours. It’s how he got his name; his parents gave it to him as a kind of prayer that he would pass safely through the veil separating death and life. Obviously, he did, but the fever damaged a part of his brain and he ended up with a curious affliction. He was—is—what physicians and psychiatrists call a ‘vivid dreamer.’ To Veil, his dreams have always been as real as everyday life. It was years before anybody realized it. As a child, when Veil would have a nightmare, he wouldn’t wake up like a normal child when he had monsters of all sorts chasing him. His first hospitalization in a mental institution came when he was ten years old; he’d drunk gasoline in an attempt to kill himself.”

  I shuddered, trying to imagine the unspeakable terror of a child when the ogres that chase all of us through dreams always caught him, perhaps did things to him; I wondered if phantom teeth sinking into dream flesh could cause real pain, suspected that they could.

  “They kept him there six months during his first stay,” the woman continued, “and it was there that they discovered his vivid dreaming. They treated it with medication, stabilized him, and sent him home. But this is a small town, and everyone knew where he’d been. By the age of eleven he’d been permanently branded as crazy, and the other kids constantly teased him.

  “The medication helped, but one of its side effects was that it made him sleepy all the time. He had a choice—exist in a drug-fog most of the time and not have terrible nightmares, or do without the drug and suffer the consequences when he went to sleep at night. Veil was always incredibly gutsy, even as a kid. He kept challenging himself, trying to wean himself off the drugs. Then, finally, he found something to replace the medication.”

  “Violence,” I said softly.

  The silhouette of the woman’s head against the window nodded. “Yes. Without the medication, Veil was in a constant state of tension. He began to fight all the time. He almost always fought older and bigger boys, and—in the beginning—usually got beaten up. But he kept fighting, because he’d discovered that the fighting drained off the psychic poison in him, and he could sleep at night without suffering from the nightmares. Then he got sent back to the mental hospital, after he’d been kicked out of his house and gone to live with his aunt, when he almost killed the captain of the football team, who’d made the mistake of challenging a much smaller and younger Veil Kendry to fight. This time he was referred to the hospital by the courts.

  “He spent almost all of his junior year in the hospital. We wrote each other constantly
, I went to visit him, and he was sometimes allowed to come back for home visits. He changed a great deal during that year. He was still like a time bomb waiting to go off, but he was far more controlled and self-contained than he had been. He had new medication, which was far better than the stuff he’d been given before. Also, he had something else; someone at the hospital had begun teaching him the martial arts as an outlet for his aggression and a means of obtaining self-control. Veil practiced his martial arts and read about them every free moment. That second stay at the hospital saved him. He had tremendous respect for the teachers and therapists there, and maybe it was the way he talked about them that made me finally get my act together years later, go to college and get a degree in order to become a teacher myself. But that was a long time coming. I still had a lot of wildness to get out of my own system.

  “Veil liked to roam at night on his motorcycle—and I roamed with him. By this time he’d gained a very big rep around the area as a fighter, and there was always somebody who wanted to take him on. Veil always obliged all comers, whether it was in the parking lots of bars or in some field where a fight had been prearranged. It wasn’t long before a lot of money started changing hands at these matches, with Veil making a lot by betting on himself and giving large odds. Sometimes he’d fight three or four men in one night. I didn’t understand something—not then. I thought Veil was fighting for the money, but he wasn’t. The others were fighting for money, or a reputation as the man who beat Veil Kendry. Veil was literally fighting for his life, his sanity; fighting was the only way he could keep his demons at bay.”

  There was a prolonged silence, and once I thought I heard Jan Garvey try to stifle a sob. However, when she spoke again, her voice was clear and strong.

  “Then he got in trouble with some local sheriff’s deputies. He was only seventeen, but he really was an incredible fighter, what with the karate he’d learned and the moves he was always making up. A lot of macho men around here didn’t like the fact that a seventeen-year-old kid should have such a big rep. When one of the deputies got his jaw broken in a challenge match with Veil, he got four of his buddies to go after Veil and try to arrest him. Veil beat up all four of them. Then he was arrested by the State Police. Everyone in three counties, including the State Police, knew about the challenge matches, and the judge had a pretty good idea of what had really happened. He sympathized with Veil, but also—justifiably—considered Veil to be an increasingly dangerous man. The charges were dropped in exchange for Veil’s agreeing to enlist in the army. Veil did, and two weeks later he left. I drove him to the bus station. It was the last time I ever saw him.”