Cemetery of Angels (23 page)

Point: When Van Allen had been a teenager, he had been up late one night studying for a high school exam. It had been about 2:00 A.M. Suddenly, he was aware of the strong scent of perfume. Not just perfume, but the specific lilac perfume worn by a favorite aunt. Van Allen looked around, not knowing why his aunt, who lived in nearby Chula Vista, would be in their house. He even rose from his work and looked through the house. The scent of the lilac perfume remained strong. Next day, he learned that she had died the previous evening.

Point: Van Allen’s older brother and sister-in-law had moved into a new home about five years earlier. The home was in the Sherman Oaks. For the first year, they were certain that they heard a baby crying somewhere in the house. But they couldn’t find the source of the sound, and no neighboring house had small children. One day, Van Allen’s brother ran into the man who had previously owned the place. The brother inquired about the noise. The previous owner looked stricken. “Don’t ever ask my wife about this,” the man explained softly. “Our first child died in that house. Crib death, sudden infant death syndrome. That’s why we moved. Too many painful memories. “

And a final point: In his own memory, his estranged wife was still chiding him, dissing him the way only she could, an accusation of failure and ineptitude in every breath. “You never open your mind. You never accept anything new. You’re the sworn enemy of new ideas, Ed.”

“All right, Margaret,” he thought to himself, addressing her in absentia, “here’s one that will tax even you, you post-menopausal witch, so try it on.”

The dead walk among us. They come crashing out of their tombs every once in a while and mingle in with us while we go to the store or get our cars washed. Let me know if you see Billy Carlton, would you? Should be able to recognize him easily. He might not look too healthy; he’s been dead since 1931. And say “hi” for me, and tell him I need him for questioning.

Telepathically he sent this to Margaret.

He waited. No response from Margaret.

Van Allen looked around him. The girl in the red skirt was gone, as was the nervous man with the glasses. Van Allen was the last reader left in the reference room. He rose and left the library.

Van Allen walked out into a cool evening and found his car. In one way, he was convinced that he had wasted several hours of his time. What he had really been looking for, some sort of insight into the mind of a grave robber, had escaped him. Other than the profit motive or the motive of medical research.

He put the key into the ignition and prepared to drive. He would stop first at his office and then take the freeway home to Pasadena.

He watched traffic carefully. It was dark. But what he kept seeing was bright indeed, even though it was in his mind.

It was the trail of debris from Billy Carlton’s coffin coming upward from the earth.

Then this vision flew apart, and he saw another one: that of the huge seraphic tombstone being lifted in the air, as if by some titanic supernatural force bringing it to land sixty feet away in the cemetery.

The thought gave him violent chills. And he saw it in his mind, bright as day, picturing it — he figured — much in the way that it must have happened.

Then, as he drove, he realized that this was what was bothering him. The more he consciously tried to stay away from a certain thought, the more the thought repeated on him. And each time it came back, it did so with increasing urgency.

It wasn’t just that the human remains were missing from Billy Carlton’s tomb. And it wasn’t that he had failed to find something about the minutes of some coven of self-styled witches or Devil worshipers who might have stolen it.

What bothered him was that every shred of evidence from the crime scene suggested that the remains had somehow been propelled upward from within the coffin. That analysis kept formulating itself somewhere inside him and kept taking shape, despite his best efforts to dismiss it.

How was he to explain something like that?

Even if some sicko had used some sort of unusual tool to burrow down to the corpse, how could it have been dragged upward without the skeleton falling apart?

How could the movement of the marker be explained? And why had the grave of Billy Carlton been disturbed? Other graves in the yard were far more accessible.

Then, of course, there were the further logistics of the desecration. How had someone come in and out of San Angelo unobserved? Through locked gates or over high walls? How, in daylight without being seen? How, with equipment, without leaving any tracks?

Van Allen stopped at his office and returned half a dozen phone calls, none of them important. He called Martinez and angled around to find out if anything new or unusual had happened at the cemetery. Nothing had.

He drove home, thinking back to the information he had digested at the public Library.

Sometimes dead is better!

Now there was a thought that pursued him, remaining in his mind all day, like an unpleasant tune. He took it to the next level.

“Yeah? Better than what?” he asked himself again.

He thought back to Champollion, the Frenchman who had solved the mysteries of the Rosetta Stone. Equally, he thought of all the other mysteries that were waiting to be unraveled. If only a man had the right key to the lock.

He made himself dinner and turned on the Lakers. They were back East, hammering the pathetic Knicks. At least Kobe was having a good day, even if Van Allen wasn’t.

He thought a final time of Champollion, and how the man had solved this great mystery of the ancients, only to die prematurely.

There was another uneasy thought, sudden premature death. It stayed with him overnight, woke him at 3:00 A.M., and then was tiptoeing across his subconscious the next morning when he woke at 6:15A.M.

That reminded him of something else.

Since being called to the Cemetery of Angels three days earlier by Martinez, Van Allen had been unable to get one good night’s sleep.

He faced the new day and made a decision. A profit motive of some sort had to have been the motive for the desecration of the grave at San Angelo. Anything else was too horrific even to consider.

In Fairfield, Connecticut, Sergeant David Chandler was at war with the front right corner of his desk. Thereupon was a small bin for correspondence marked, in a sardonic attempt at humor, with a skull and crossbones.

The bin contained unfinished but open cases. Police investigations that defied closure. Cases that Sergeant Chandler and others had put in weeks upon without results. On the fourth Friday in October, the last Friday before Halloween Saturday, Chandler attempted to make progress against this bin. It was late in the evening, a time when he might have been home with his young family. He was trying to clear old business.

Many of the cases were incidents which he had worked with the local town police: Fairfield, Bridgeport, Norwalk, and Westport. Included were numerous house breakings and car thefts. There was a smaller number of assaults and a pair of bank robberies. As he went through the files, it bothered him that these cases could not be closed. But, as he well knew by now, the world was imperfect.

At a few minutes before eleven o’clock, he came across the last file to be reviewed. It was the Rebecca Moore case from the previous February. Chandler had kept it on his desktop “just in case”

Just in case another such incident occurred.

Just in case he eventually found some new evidence in the incident.

Just in case he eventually swayed from the theory that Mrs. Moore had filed a false police report and no such incident as reported had ever occurred.

Chandler held the file in his hand for several seconds, wondering what to do with it. Of all the files on his desk, he reasoned, this was the one in which further activity was least likely. No parallel incident had occurred anywhere in the area. And the Moores had departed for California during the summer.

Chandler sighed. Here was a candidate for burial in the inactive zone. A prime candidate. He took the folder containing all the paperwork on the Moore case to the main files of the State Police headquarters. He prepared to bury it.

Yet something stayed his hand. If asked, he probably would not have been able to explain why, other than the fact that something about the case had never added up properly. Mrs. Moore had seemed like a reliable witness and an actual assault victim. Yet no evidence of any incident having occurred ever cropped up.

Sergeant Chandler didn’t like cases that contradicted themselves. And logic had always escaped him in the Rebecca Moore case. So Sergeant Chandler closed the drawer of the master file, the dossier still in his hand. He walked back to his desk. Thinking about the case anew caused it to prey on his mind all the more. There had always been something about the case that had eluded him. Something he couldn’t see.

Chandler returned the file to his desk and dropped it back into the corner bin with the skull and crossbones. The Moore case just wouldn’t go away, he told himself, even after eight months. It was just like a bad dream. He prepared to go home. Yes indeed, he concluded, the Moore case was exactly like a bad dream.

Another thought came to him from somewhere: Whose bad dream? Chandler glanced at his watch. He had put in more time than he had planned this evening, but at least he felt as if he had accomplished something. He turned the light off on his desk and departed.

It was 11:00P.M.exactly in the East.

At the same moment, on the other side of the continent, the subjects in what Chandler called “The Moore Case” were settling into their home for the evening. It was 8:00 P.M. in California. Rebecca and Bill had just put the children to bed.

Rebecca came into the living room, carrying a cup of herbal tea. She sat down on the new sofa, sinking onto the big cushions. She set down the cup down on the table beside her. She heaved a slight sigh. Across the room, her husband was stretched out on the other sofa, his nose and his attention in
Architectural Digest
.

She sighed again, this time to get his attention. His eyes shifted and, as they had some many thousands of other times in their marriage, found her.

“Yes?” he asked.

“What about a fire?” she asked. “We scrubbed out the fireplace and had the chimney inspected. Let’s do the fire thing.”

“To burn the house down?” he asked, making a joke of it. “I thought you liked the place. And we’re finally getting it fixed up.”

“No,” she answered, taking a sip of tea, “I was thinking more of containing the blaze to the hearth. You know, the type of thing we used to do back East. A fire on a chilly fall evening.”

“Oh,” he said, pretending to have not understood. “That type of fire. Why didn’t you say so?”

The intentional misunderstanding, played out in dry comedic tones, was part of an unwritten give and take between them, one that had become less frequent in recent months. And, in truth, even for Southern California, there had been a little nip in the air on that evening, something that had reminded them of the East. A little domestic conflagration, confined to the hearth, had been in the back of his mind, too.

A moment or two later he rose.

Rebecca had gathered some branches and small logs behind the house. He kindled a fire quickly and lit it. The flames hungrily took to the wood.

No, a fire wasn’t really necessary to warm the room. But, yes, it did bring a glow and comfort to the house. Bill went back to his reading, and Rebecca studied the flames.

Her thoughts divided among the events of the day. She had gone to two job interviews. One interview had panned into nothing: a weekly newspaper in Orange County had wanted someone to sell classified advertising, not write or report. The other interview had been an unbridled disaster, held in the office of a repulsive little immigrant who called himself Ben and whose accent could have come from any of two dozen small, hot countries. Ben ran a free “people to people” newspaper in West Hollywood and needed someone who could handle English properly. But sadly, Ben had been unable to control himself, either his grammar or his impulses. He had laced many of his questions with sexual undertone, and Rebecca had walked out of the interview three-quarters of the way through. Now, as the fire’s warmth enveloped the living room, she tried to dismiss the whole episode. She wondered if the incident would someday be funny. She doubted it. And now there was that creepy tune. That phantom melody again. She was hearing it again. It had been in and out of her subconscious all day, an unwelcome coda to the day’s events but now she could hear it for real.

When would this music go away? She didn’t like it, couldn’t place it, and it had been weighing upon her subconscious far too long now. As she sipped her tea and stared into the fire, she realized: that tune, that song that she couldn’t place, that kinky assemblage of weird notes on an unseen instrument, was what had been bothering her all day. Not the crappy interviews for jobs that she didn’t want.

Her thoughts were so involved with the song that she thought nothing of a creak somewhere else in the house, then another one on the front stairs.

Where had that melody originally come from, anyway? She wondered. How had it snaked its way into her head? Why couldn’t she get rid of it?

Rebecca finished her tea. The fire gave her some comfort. Then something flashed inside her when she realized that a small figure had appeared at the living room doorway.

Thoughts passed through her head, one after another, with a speed that had no measurement in time:

A miniature human being in the doorway! In their home!

A small adult. A child.

Her daughter!

Rebecca calmed quickly. Bill looked up from what he was reading.

“Mommy?” Karen said.

“What’s the matter, honey?”

“There’s someone in my room. He won’t leave.”

“What?”

“It’s Ronny.”

Rebecca felt a sinking sensation, followed by a surge of tension. It was as if the barometric pressure had collapsed all around her. She felt something hold her in its grip.