Angel Among Us (25 page)

‘I'm sorry, man,' Calvano said gently, patting him on the back. Danny Gallagher had begun to cry again, the combination of hope, followed by hope lost once again, proving too much for him. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘Let's all get some sleep,' Maggie said. ‘We'll start again in the morning.'

‘No,' Danny said. He wiped away his tears. ‘Not yet. I want to visit Aldo Flores.'

‘Why?' Calvano asked, unable to help himself.

‘Because he's the only one who knows what I'm going through,' Danny said. ‘He's the only one who can really understand.'

I could feel the possibilities flitting through Maggie's head, but she did not really think that Danny Gallagher and Aldo Flores had somehow conspired with one another to kill their pregnant wives. ‘You can see him,' she decided. ‘But everything you say to him has to be in English and I'm going to be right there beside you listening in.'

Danny nodded and they rode down in the elevator to the second floor in silence. The guard outside the holding cells looked a little confused when he recognized Danny Gallagher, but Calvano gave him the nod and he backed away.

Aldo Flores was sitting up on his bunk, unable to sleep, staring out a square window in the wall of his cell. He recognized Danny Gallagher at once and went over to the bars, his voice cracking as he asked, ‘What is it? Have they found your wife? Was she alive?'

‘No, man,' Danny said. ‘They haven't found her.' He grasped the other man's hand and held it tight. ‘I didn't mean to get your hopes up. I just wanted to come by and tell you how sorry I was that your wife is missing. That your wife and baby are missing.'

Aldo Flores did not hesitate. ‘Me too, my brother, me too,' he said. He reached through the bars with his free hand and patted Danny Gallagher on the arm. ‘I know what you're going through, what your head is telling you right now, and I'm sorry it happened.'

‘Yeah, but you're in there and I'm out here,' Danny said. ‘It doesn't seem fair, does it?'

Aldo Flores was unconcerned with how differently he had been treated. He just wanted his wife and baby back. And he wanted to make the man who was suffering as much as he was feel a little bit better. He stared at Danny's injuries. ‘Maybe I am safer in here,' he said.

‘Maybe,' Danny admitted.

‘Can you do something for me?' Aldo asked Danny. He sounded almost apologetic.

‘Anything,' Danny told him.

‘Make them understand that someone else did this. They won't believe me. They are never going to find who took our wives if they don't look beyond you or me.'

‘I will,' Danny told him. ‘I promise that I'll make them understand.'

‘Thank you, my brother,' Aldo Flores said. ‘Do you want to pray together?'

Danny nodded. Both men bowed their heads and began to pray. I didn't think there was any doubt by anyone in the room about what they were praying for – which is why I bowed my head and joined in.

T
he dead of night can wreak havoc with your soul. There is something about the darkness, and the way the rest of the world is silent, that causes your regrets to rise and run through your mind, reminding you of your failures again and again. I often think that the biggest reason why I drank was to escape those bleak hours in which I was forced to confront the choices I had made, the decisions I had waited to make until it was too late, and the actions I had failed to take.

It is also during the dead of night that I have often discovered the truth about human nature. Or at least about those truths we hide from others.

I returned to the Delmonte House in the wee hours of that night, determined to make contact with my fellow traveler again or, perhaps, hoping to catch a glimpse of the true nature of those who lived within its walls. I could feel Arcelia Gallagher near. I had walked through the unmistakable essence of her despair earlier on the lawn and I now knew how to recognize it. I could feel it even more keenly in the dead of the night without interference from others. I could feel her everywhere. I could also feel the unhappy presence who had struggled to make me understand its needs. Wherever it had gone earlier, it was back.

As I passed through the empty foyer of the house, the moon came out from behind the clouds and threw its light off the marbled floor. I followed the moonlight through room after room, feeling the other presence near me but never quite seeming to make contact with it. I stopped in the drawing room and turned slowly in a circle, hoping to catch a glimpse of the other presence. There, over in one corner, I thought I saw the outline of something manlike, about the size of what I had seen in the kitchen. It could have been a trick of the light, but it felt tangible and sad, so sad, as if all the sorrows of the world had converged in that one spot. As the night shadows settled around me, the shape took form. It was a rough outline of a man, filled with a thousand tiny stars that sparkled like diamonds as they danced within the confines of the amorphous shape.

I shut my eyes for a moment and with a rush of insight, there it was – I was somewhere else, somewhere hot with a blinding sun overhead, and I was looking at a mother being ripped away from her children. I could hear their screaming and the mother sobbing, and I could feel the anger that rose in me like a beast. White men were dragging my wife away. She was flailing and struggling against them, crying out the names of our children. I was struggling, too, straining against the chains that bound me. I could feel the bite of the metal in my skin. And then, just as suddenly, I was back in the library and I was myself again.

That was the connection. The being that wandered this house had once had his wife and children taken away from him. He knew where Arcelia Gallagher was. He knew she was a mother and that someone, somewhere, was grieving for her. He was trying to tell me where she was. ‘I am ready,' I thought, trying to will my acceptance to my fellow traveler. ‘I am ready for you to show me.'

I felt a heaviness growing within me, as if I was once again carrying the burden of flesh and blood. I grew drowsy, an equally unexpected sensation, and began slipping into an inky void. I felt the sensation of falling, as if I were spiraling backward through time and space. It was that shape, I thought to myself as I lost control and fell into the void, it was that shape with the stars dancing inside its borders. It was the unhappy spirit, inviting me into its world. I felt myself free-falling through what felt like miles of space until I found I had stopped, without any sense of slowing. I was staring at a crying woman huddled in the corner of a dank, dark room. The walls were made of heavy clay reinforced with wooden timbers. The floor was dirt as hard as concrete. A tray of half-eaten food had been kicked into one corner and the woman was sobbing quietly to herself in another. Her thick hair fell over her face and her hands were clutched across her swollen belly, though one arm was affixed to a hook in the wall by a handcuff and chain.

I had found Arcelia Gallagher.

The amazing core of strength I had sensed within her was fading. She sobbed in the darkness of her prison, fearful for her life and the life of her unborn child. The air was cold and smelled of earth. I knew we were underground. No light broke the darkness and, yet, I could see her enough to know she was huddled beneath a sweater for warmth, one she had spread over herself like a blanket.

The room was little bigger than a large bathroom. No more than four men could have stood in it at one time. I counted the days that she had been down here, breathing in the dank air, and I marveled that she seemed as healthy as she did.

A great weariness enveloped her. She was no stranger to suffering nor to sorrow, or even physical cruelty. But she had already endured the unmanageable once upon a time, and lived through it, and perhaps keeping those memories at bay had taken away all her strength. She was not equipped to endure more suffering, not in her condition. I could feel her hope leaking from her, draining as surely as water down into the earth.

There was nothing I could do. There she was – the woman we were all searching for, still alive, still pregnant, yet barely holding on. The baby inside her was strong. But its strength meant that it was drawing energy from its mother, sapping her own strength, taking from its host what it needed to survive.

I felt helpless and ashamed and inadequate. Why had the other spirit sent me here? What did it want me to do?

As I thought of the other being, I could feel it near me. It was both near and not near. Part of it
was
me, I thought irrationally. Or maybe he had lived here, in this place, and lingered still. Then I had it – the thought flashed through me with certainty: he had died in here.

My realization scared me. Death lived in this strange room. It hovered in its corners. It filled the air. It was embracing Arcelia Gallagher in its arms.

I wondered if she could sense my presence. I wondered if it comforted her or frightened her. I wondered what the other spirit wanted me to do. I tried to think of how I could help her. There was so little that I could do.

Arcelia's sobbing subsided. She no longer had the strength to cry about her confinement. She needed to sleep, she wanted to sleep, but her fear was keeping her awake. I could feel the bad memories pressing in on her, memories of times past when her freedom had been taken away from her and angry men with quick fists and cruel imaginations had visited her again and again. I knew that the longer she stayed in this strange dungeon-like room, the more those bad memories would return. I had to do something to help her.

I willed myself to enter her mind. It was a meager ability but all I had to offer. I fought through the bad memories and called on newer ones, conjuring up sunny days spent on the farm helping her husband till the soil and happy evenings arranging the nursery for the baby to come. I entered those memories, and I felt their warmth. I felt the sun on my skin and heard the buzz of the bees and I smelled the sweetness of strawberry jam. I could feel the rough wood of the kitchen table and a lightness in my heart as I looked up and saw my beloved crossing the room toward me. I concentrated on it all. I felt every ounce of its beauty, and the warmth of being loved and the gloriousness of feeling safe. I clung to her happy memories.

It was difficult. Her darker memories called to me. Always the remembrance of cruel men with cruel appetites threatened to overshadow the joy. But I turned my back on the darkness again and again. I followed the light and the goodness she held in her heart. I found her hope and I fanned it back to life, I meandered through her memories to an even simpler time when she was a child beneath the hot Mexican sun, the earth parched around her but the steps to her simple home swept clean of the desert sand. I could hear her mother singing in the kitchen and smell a rich aroma from something spicy bubbling on the stove. There were pigs rooting in the brush nearby and the air was filled with the laughter of her brothers and sisters as they chased one another, shrieking, through the front yard. Yes, I thought, this was the place where I needed to keep her. This was where she had been loved and cherished. This was where she had been free beneath an endless desert sky with acres of sunlight and unbound vistas beckoning everywhere she turned. Yes, I would keep her in that place as long as I could. I would keep her there so that she could breathe. I would lead her there so that she could sleep.

I
do not know how long I stayed in that strange hypnotic state. It could have been hours or it could have been minutes. But slowly I felt myself rising back to the surface of my world and found myself in the drawing room of the mansion with the morning light just starting to leak through its windows. The old butler's wife was sitting in a chair by the empty fireplace, staring intently at me. Her expression was blank but her eyes unwavering in their focus on me. I smiled at her but she did not respond this time. She was lost in a world even more inaccessible than the one I inhabited.

I knew now for certain that Arcelia Gallagher was being held somewhere nearby. But where to begin to find her? Perhaps by determining who in the house had taken her. It could not have been the old butler. He was far too frail. Perhaps the gardener after all? Perhaps Rodrigo's carefree attitude was not a sign of a clean conscience but, rather, the sign of a psychopath? I thought of what I had seen the evening before – Dakota Wylie's manager paying off that odd couple in the beat-up Chevy with the Alabama plates. They looked like just the types to have done Lamont Carter's dirty work for him. But why? And did Carter even have it in him? Yes, he was angry, but he was also passive. I had seen him give in to Dakota often, unable to keep from indulging her whims.

I drifted upstairs, hoping to find his room. That would tell me more about him.

The master bedroom where Enrique Romero lived, apparently without his wife, was lavish beyond good taste and devoid of any personal objects. It could have been an opulent suite in a Vegas hotel. I wondered how many nights he had spent there, if any. His whole life here seemed a sham.

The next bedroom over was empty and waiting for guests that never came. Two more bedrooms appeared to be the same. But a fourth bedroom in the middle of the long hallway had to belong to Lamont Carter. He wasn't there, but it definitely looked and felt like him. It was strangely lowbrow, given the rest of the house. A huge widescreen TV covered most of one wall and he had arranged leather couches in front of it like a living room. There was a bar built along another wall. Empty glasses and dishes littered its countertops. His bed was round and unmade, its black silk sheets draping to the floor. It was like an adolescent boy's dream of the perfect bedroom, a fantasy of what life in the Playboy Mansion might be like. And yet, it was also an unhappy room, filled with resentment. Lamont Carter felt out of place in this room, I thought. He felt out of place in this house.