Cemetery of Angels (24 page)

Karen came to her.

“Mommy, he won’t leave!” Karen said. She was frightened. “We told him to leave, and this time he won’t.”

Rebecca jumped again when Patrick appeared behind Karen.

“He’s there now,” the boy said sullenly. “He wants us to go with him.” A man’s voice boomed next. Bill’s.

“He what?”

“He wants us to go with him,” Karen said, repeating her brother.

Bill was on his feet. Rebecca was on hers. Both parents moved to the door to the hallway and brushed past their children. Bill looked furious. He grabbed a hatchet that was sitting in a toolbox near the stairs. He clutched it as he sprinted up the steps.

“I’ve had enough of this!” he snapped to Rebecca. “It’s time to put an end to it.”

He shouted back to the children.

“Where is he? Where’s ‘Ronny’? What room?” Bill took one step toward the yellow room when the answer came back. Both kids, in unison. Ronny was in Karen’s room, they said.

Bill charged into the room, Rebecca right behind him. He stopped short. So did his wife.

The room was empty as a broken vow. And a tiny breeze from nowhere riffled past them as they stood near the doorway.

“This is such bull!” Bill muttered furiously.

Rebecca eyed the vacant room and made no such statement. Bill calmed slightly, his temper subsiding. Rebecca could see her husband’s agitation and his efforts to keep calm.

“Go get the kids,” Bill said. “This type of thing has to stop. Now!”

Rebecca went downstairs and retrieved her son and daughter. She led them back upstairs. They stood in the hallway.

“Okay. Where did you see him?” their father asked. Karen pointed to her room.

“He came in,” she said. “I thought he was there to tuck me in.”

“He’s done that before, has he?” Bill asked.

Reluctantly, the girl admitted that he had. She gave a nod. Rebecca cringed.

“But he wasn’t there to tuck you in?” Karen’s father asked.

“He said we were going to travel tonight,” Karen said. “He said we were going to have a long trip, and we’d be back when things were better.”

“What ‘things’?” Rebecca demanded. Karen shrugged.

“He didn’t say,” she said. Bill Moore eyed his daughter, anger fused with impatience. He looked at Patrick.

“Patrick?” Rebecca asked. “Tell me what you saw.”

“Same thing,” he said shyly.

“So this Ronny was in two places at the same time?” Bill asked.

“No,” Karen said. “He came to my room first.”

“Then mine,” Patrick said. Rebecca’s spirits sank again. To the consternation of their parents, the children agreed on the chronology. Bill stood with his hands on his hips, looking at one child, then the other.

“All right,” he finally said. “It’s time for us to have a family understanding about ‘Ronny,’” he announced.

“Ronny doesn’t exist! Okay? No matter how much you guys think you see Ronny, he’s not here! He’s part of your imagination, all right?”

The kids looked disappointed. And disbelieving.

“And he’s not your friend,” Bill continued with barely concealed anger. “If you think you see him again, you tell him that this is not his house. He has to leave. And he has to leave you alone.”

Patrick and Karen looked particularly glum.

“And if I hear anything more about it, you’ll both be grounded for Halloween tomorrow like your mother wanted. Is that clear?” Bill asked.

Both children nodded. Then they looked to their mother.

“Your father’s right,” she said. “If Ronny appears again, you have to tell him that this is not his house. He has to leave.”

“I didn’t hear an answer,” Bill said.

Patrick and Karen both nodded. Grudgingly.

“You’ll tell him?” Bill insisted.

“We’ll tell him,” Patrick said. Sensing momentum, Bill continued.

“If Ronny’s here at all,” he said, “he’s a bad guy. And he deserves to be thrown out.” Patrick objected.

“He says he’s here to protect us,” the boy said.

“From who?” Bill snapped. Rebecca was astonished how angry her husband quickly became.

“What’s he say? Ronny’s going to protect you from who? From what?”

Rebuked, Patrick only shrugged. Bill eased slightly.

“Now,” he said, sensing triumph, “not only does Ronny not exist, but I’m going to make sure that there is no one in this house other than us.”

His eyes darted from one child to the other. His gaze stopped upon his wife for a moment, then went back to his children.

“I’m going to chase Ronny away for good!” Bill gloated, hefting the hatchet. “Or maybe I’ll catch him by the nose and chop him up and burn him in the fireplace.”

Karen smiled sadly. Rebecca stroked her daughter’s hair and gave her a hug.

Secretly, Rebecca was pleased that Karen had come downstairs. The fire warmed the home in one way, the love of her daughter warmed it in another. And if they could dispel all this Ronny stuff, so much the better.

“Okay,” Bill finally said. “Let’s go.”

The Moore family walked room to room. They found nothing more terrifying than a faucet in the rear upstairs bathroom that wouldn’t stop dripping. They looked in all the closets. As he calmed, as he became convinced there was nothing there, Bill made a macabre joke out of it by holding the hatchet aloft. “I’m going to smash anyone who comes out,” he whispered to Karen. “You get to pick up the pieces of his head.”

Rebecca made a pained expression at the image of gore. But Karen started to laugh. A nice cuddly girlish laugh.

Bill got down on his hands and knees and checked beneath the beds. He poked behind and under furniture with a yard stick. No Ronny. Rebecca gradually wondered if this might have been just what they all needed to eradicate whatever was in the house. As they went from room to room, with their makeshift weapons, the search-and-destroy mission took on the air of an impromptu family party.

After the search: No man. No disembodied spirit. Nothing scary. Nothing at all.

“Bedtime again,” Bill finally said to his daughter and son.

The children were tired by that time and didn’t resist the prospect of sleep. Their parents put them to bed in their respective rooms.

Rebecca checked on them ten minutes later. Patrick and Karen were sleeping peacefully. Set on dispatching Ronny in any way possible, Rebecca left an extra light on in the hallway so that either child, if he or she opened an eye during the night, would see only the friendly contents of their home and not the shadows that can turn into ghouls.

Rebecca went back downstairs.

She sat for several minutes on the sofa, leaning against her husband’s shoulder. She and Bill listened to music on the CD player. Bill read for a while. Rebecca studied the way the flames in the fireplace so methodically consumed the wood that Bill had fed to them. It looked like a metaphor for something, or an image, and several ideas tried to form themselves in Rebecca’s head. But none of them would completely take shape.

And when the images tried to shape themselves that melody interfered again.

The onset of insanity, Rebecca mused to herself. I’m thirty-two years old, an excellent age for a happily married woman, and I’m going quite crazy. Next bizarre thought, vaguely associated: I wonder if Bill would like to come with me. She smiled. And Bill, noticing that something had amused her, gave her a hug.

“I think it’s important that they go out to trick-or-treat with their friends tomorrow,” Bill finally said.

“I’m still nervous about it.” He shrugged.

“Go with them then,” he said. “And I’ll be here dealing with the little ghouls that come to the door.”

“Maybe,” she said. A moment passed. The fire hissed and shifted. Was it talking to her, she wondered. Then she was startled for a moment. Before her eyes, something in a strange smoky shape rose from the fire and almost took shape. But it dissipated and went up the chimney before she could say anything to her husband.

For several seconds she stared at the fire, wondering if another such shape would emerge. When none did, her nerves eased slightly.

She closed her eyes in an attempt at relaxation. She didn’t share her complete thoughts with her husband. Nor did she say anything about the phantom music that had been in her head. Then, suddenly, her spirits lifted. What she would remember about the evening was the underlying sense of happiness that she now felt, basking in the glow of her home and her family.

The sentiments of comfort seemed powerful enough to defeat the other thoughts within her, the ones that made her uncomfortable. She had something wonderful, she told herself, that no one could rightfully take away from her. She felt as if she had turned some invisible comer and could now indeed exorcise the spirits that pursued her.

Those images of happiness, of comfort, and of well-being, would stay with her for a while. They would further define themselves in her memory in the time that followed.

For, next morning, when Rebecca went to wake her children, she discovered that her life as she had known it would never again be the same. That bizarre melody was in her mind, stronger than ever. And when she opened the door to Patrick’s room she found his bed unmade and empty. She stared at this for a moment and assumed that the kids were together. So she walked quickly to Karen’s room. She threw open the door to Karen’s room. Her bed, too, was unmade and slept in. But no Karen. She called out.

“Patrick? Karen? If you’re hiding, come on out. You fooled me.” No answer. Silence throughout the house. If this was a Halloween gag, she thought, she already hated it.

“Come on, kids,” she shouted next, moving back to her son’s room. “The joke is over. Come on out!”

She opened closets. She looked in both bathrooms. She dashed up to the attic and back down. Her search was a perverse re-enactment of the one the previous night. First no Ronny. Next, no Karen or Patrick. She was angry, bordering on frantic.

“Kids? Come on!” she yelled. “Both of you, right now, down to breakfast!”

Still nothing. She stood perfectly still, waiting, hoping for a sound. A horrible vision flashed before her. It was the face of the man who had abducted her many months ago. She cringed. His face always repeated on her like bad acid trips at times when something unpleasant was happening. She waved the vision away.

“Kids?” she yelled again. Then she heard footsteps. They came from downstairs. It was Bill, walking from the kitchen to the base of the steps.

“Becca? What’s wrong? What’s going on?” he called.

Stunned, she moved to a position at the top of the steps. That tune was kicking in her mind again. She looked down stairs to her husband. And in a small voice, she told him what had happened.

“Bill?” she said. “They’re gone! Both Patrick and Karen are gone!”

He stared at her for a long second then raced up the steps. He ran through his house like a madman, ripping open closets and pulling away bedspreads.

Yet at the end of ten minutes, the bottom line was the same.

Patrick and Karen were gone. Both of them. Completely.

And there was no sign of Ronny, either.

Detective Sergeant Edmund Van Allen parked behind the LAPD sector car that was already at the curb before 2136 Topango Gardens. He stepped out of his car and drew a breath. He knew this neighborhood well, having worked it since the mid 1980’s. He knew it well enough to have recognized the address when it came across the phone lines at headquarters.

Two one three six, Topango. This used to be a rundown house belonging to an old woman named Dickinson, he thought to himself. He knew the old lady had passed away, and that the place had been sold. He did not yet know the new occupants, though he could have recited many other names on the block.

Van Allen also knew this neighborhood to be peaceful and professional, the type of place where he was rarely summoned for anything violent. Break-ins weren’t uncommon, nor was the occasional auto theft. But those weren’t usually the types of cases that Van Allen drew.

He knew many of the people around here and liked them. They tended to be attorneys, film people, and other professionals. These were people who considered themselves to be the social superiors of ordinary policemen, he knew, even though many of them were only one generation away from a blue-collar father themselves. Van Allen didn’t hold their prejudices against them, but he didn’t entirely forgive them, either. In any event, he could meet new people and hold back his own judgment.

He walked to the front door of 2 136Topango.

His knee was troubling him again this morning. He cursed his stupidity at trying to dislodge that granite monument at San Angelo. What had he been thinking to try to do that? The pain made him feel not quite as good a man as he used to be. Not as fast, not as flexible, not quite as complete. Aging, he concluded, sucked.

But he steered his thoughts in another direction and admired the neighborhood again. He had to give these new people credit for the way they had fixed up old Mrs. Dickinson’s place.

Fresh paint. Repaired front windows. New flowers around the base of the porch. Even the front lawn was green again. It was as if the house had sprung back to life. The batty old hen would have been pleased. He made a mental note to congratulate these new people, whoever they were.

He knocked on the door and waited. Several seconds passed.

Van Allen looked at the neighbors’ houses and scanned across the street where a Mexican adobe was slam-bang adjacent to an English Tudor. Well, despite the architectural incongruities, he would have loved to have lived on a block like this with his family. But hell, anyway, he thought to himself as he pulled himself together and limped to the front door. He couldn’t afford a neighborhood like this, and never would be able to by virtue of being honest. His kids had grown up and his wife had left him. So what did it matter? Maybe he was better off out in Pasadena.

And why no answer to his rap at the door?

He knocked louder the second time, figuring that the occupants might have been busy with the uniformed men somewhere in the rear of the house. He wondered if Alice Aldrich would also make her way over to have a look. She often came by to support him when he had an important call.