Cemetery of Angels (37 page)

“Hammond” had disappeared with remarkable speed. He wondered whether this was some sort of weird setup: Chandler gets asked by an out of state cop to revisit a crime scene then a helper just happens to be on hand to guide him.

It made him suspicious. Chandler looked up and down the road in both directions.

No one. After another moment’s thought, he got back into his car.

His curiosity piqued, Chandler drove back to State Street, the main thoroughfare between Westport and Fairfield. He didn’t come across a single person walking. And near the church, as he had expected, he found no small plots as the stranger had suggested. There were only full one and two acre lots, plus the church property, which included the parish house and the small old cemetery. No one anywhere was named Hammond.

Chandler drove back to the State Police headquarters, thinking things over. The two spent rounds were both nine millimeter. A forensics expert guessed that they might have been in the tree for more than a few weeks, but less than a year.

All of which made a strong but circumstantial case that an attack on Rebecca Moore really had transpired. It was enough to make Chandler lean back in his chair to rethink the entire case. He cursed the fact that he had given up on the case rather than pursuing it. And he blamed himself for allowing the case to drop.

What kind of amateur cop was he, anyway, he demanded of himself. And where did this stranger get off, flitting in and out of a case like that?

The two bullets lay on their sides on his desk. He stared at them, wondering what they were trying to tell him. Also on his desk were the two arrowheads, which Chandler found almost equally perplexing. And even more difficult to figure, for that matter, was what higher message the stranger might have brought, as well. Chandler felt a queasiness and a shiver when he replayed to himself the events of the morning.

It was a feeling that would not go away.

On the other side of the country, Ed Van Allen stepped out of his car in front of 2136 Topango Gardens. He was prepared to do what he had refrained from doing all along. Confront his two chief suspects, one at a time.

The flock of reporters in front of the house had dispersed several days earlier. He brought along Alice Aldrich in order to have a policewoman present when he confronted Rebecca Moore. And he had called ahead to make sure that the suspect was home.

“No, nothing new, Mrs. Moore,” Van Allen said when Rebecca inquired upon his arrival. “We’d just like to ask you a few more questions.”

Rebecca eyed him and his partner at the door, then allowed them in.

“I wonder if we could chat upstairs,” Van Allen suggested. He wished to be closer to where the children had last lived. Better vibrations, he felt, and possibly better to wrench a confession from his suspect.

“I’m really not sure what this is about,” Rebecca said. “If you don’t have anything new, what are we talking about today?”

“I have a new thesis,” the detective began. “And I’d like to try it on you. May I?” Rebecca shrugged. She led them into the turret room.

Ronny’s room.

Rebecca sat down on a folding chair while Alice stood near a window. Van Allen positioned himself at the room’s center. For a moment, he thought he heard piano music from somewhere. Then he was sure he didn’t.

“Mrs. Moore,” Ed Van Allen began, “I think it is about time that you began to tell me the truth.”

Rebecca’s mouth went open in astonishment. “I have told you the truth,” she said.

“The complete truth,” he suggested.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she countered.

“Mrs. Moore, you’ve told me part of the truth,” Van Allen said. “But you haven’t told me all of the truth. Another way to say it, Mrs. Moore,” he said, “is that you’ve lied to me from the beginning.”

“I haven’t,” she said.

“You flunked your polygraph,” Van Allen said. “And we’re going to get a court order to force your husband to take one. But why don’t you make it easier for both of you? Why don’t you start telling us what we need to know before we talk to him?”

Alice leaned against the windowsill and watched the proceedings. When a tree rustled behind her, she turned, glancing at it with disinterest. For a moment her eye drifted to San Angelo. Then she turned and looked back to the room.

“I’ve told you the truth,” Rebecca said.

“You flunked the polygraph on three questions in particular, Mrs. Moore,” Van Allen continued. “I asked you if you were hiding anything. I asked you if you knew where your children were. And I asked if there was anything significant that you hadn’t told us.”

He paused, his own anger and resentment building.

“Know what, Mrs. Moore?” he then went on. “You concealed something when you answered each of those questions.”

Rebecca was incredulous, failing to understand.

“And I want to know what the proper answers are right now, Mrs. Moore, because I’m asking you those same questions again.”

She went to the window, moving closer to Alice, wringing her hands. Once again, her children were missing, and she was being treated like a criminal.

“I don’t know,” Rebecca said.

“Yes, you do, Rebecca,” Alice said gently. “And you’re going to have to tell us.”

“I’m waiting, Mrs. Moore,” Van Allen said.

From somewhere a cold draft struck him. He found it uncomfortable and unpleasant. He shifted his position in the yellow room and was okay for a moment. Then the draft found him again. Now it was an extreme chill.

“I know there was an incident with the police in Connecticut, Mrs. Moore,” Van Allen said.

She turned, furiously. “I was nearly killed,” she said.

“I also know your husband had an arrest record in New York, Maryland, and Virginia, Mrs. Moore,” Van Allen said. “You could have told us about that, too.”

“An arrest what?”

“Don’t play games with us, Rebecca,” Alice said. “It will only make things worse.”

“You can’t get away with anything and I’m still waiting,” Van Allen repeated.

Rebecca shook her head, grappling with her emotions. Her eyes went to the space on the wall where the message had appeared under the yellow paint.

YOU ARE IN DANGER.

Surrounded by the police, Rebecca did a second take on the cryptic message.

Then the cold blast touched her, also. But it had a different effect. It settled her.

“Tell us what you know, Rebecca,” Alice said Rebecca turned and looked at the two detectives. She now knew what had made the polygraph needle jump.

“You won’t believe me,” Rebecca said.

“I’ve been a cop in this city for two decades, Mrs. Moore,” Van Allen said. “I’ll believe anything.” He paused. “So try me.”

“There’s a supernatural presence in this house,” Rebecca said. “And he took my children.”

There was a leaden moment in the room when everything seemed to stand still. A long, long pause, as Van Allen fought off a sinking sensation. Then, “How’s that again?” Van Allen asked.

“A ghost,” Rebecca said. “There’s a ghost who abducted my children.”

Completely deadpan.

“A ghost of what, Mrs. Van Allen?”

“I think it’s the spirit of someone I knew. Maybe in another life. I don’t know. Somehow I know this man, and he has my children.”

“Are you saying that your children are dead, Rebecca?” Double A asked.

“All I know is that this house is haunted. There’s a spirit. It often appears in this room. The children saw it several times before they disappeared.”

Van Allen speaking: “And you’ve
seen
it?”

Rebecca answering: “Yes.”

Involuntarily, in a corner of his mind that he didn’t like to visit, Van Allen saw the contents of his desktop being swept away. He saw it again and again and again. He wasn’t sure how long he stood there seeing it but he was eventually aware of Double A nudging him.

“Ed?” she asked. “Ed? You okay?”

“Yeah. Right,” he said, snapping back to time present. “And why do you think the ghost has the children, Mrs. Moore?” he asked.

“It’s the only explanation,” she said. “And he told me.”

“He ‘
told
‘ you.”

“He told me. A few nights ago.”

“Can I talk to him, too?” Van Allen asked.

“Maybe. I suspect he’s here right now. Watching us.”

“Maybe you could make him materialize,” Van Allen said. Rebecca waited for a moment, hoping the ghost would make itself known. It didn’t.

“I can’t bring him forth,” Rebecca said. “It’s not something I can control.”

But by now Van Allen was on a softer approach. “You’d better arrange it with him fast, Mrs. Moore, because without speaking to this ghost…”

Out of Rebecca’s line of vision, Double A gave Van Allen a cryptic look.

“Ronny. He spelled it out,” Rebecca said. “On the children’s blackboard. Follow me.” She led them to Patrick’s room. She walked them to a small blackboard and picked it up.

“A few nights before the children disappeared, they told me that he had put his name on this board. But he did it with scrambled letters. Then they had rearranged them. They found the letters that spelled ‘Ronny,’ so that’s what they called him.”

Van Allen looked at the alphabetical jumble and the circled letters linked together that had been unscrambled to spell the spirit’s name.

Alice Aldrich and Van Allen exchanged another glance as she spoke. When Rebecca looked up from the blackboard, she caught the glance.

Van Allen blew out a long dispirited breath. “So what you’re telling me, Mrs. Moore,” he said, “is that a ghost named Ronny came into this house and abducted your children. That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

“I’m afraid it is,” she said.

“And that’s what you call this ghost, huh?” Van Allen asked. “Ronny, huh? Like the former president who lived out her for all those years. Reagan.”

“The kids call him Ronny. I think his name is Billy.”

Van Allen felt a twinge at the name. “Why do you think that?”

Rebecca shrugged. “I just do.”

“Billy. Like your husband, huh?”

Rebecca shook her head. “Bill hates the name Billy. He
never
wants to be called that, I never wanted to call him that. Bill and Billy are two separate things,” Rebecca was nodding as if she were on lithium.

Van Allen looked at her and then looked at his partner.

“See that you don’t leave the area, Mrs. Moore,” he said tersely. “And tell your husband we’ll be speaking to him tomorrow.”

He cast her a withering look and signaled to Double A that it was time to leave. Rationally, he had had quite enough of this charade. He was ready to come back to this house with a steam shovel if it was necessary to uncover the bodies of Karen and Patrick Moore. Logic told him that. And the vision of his desktop being cleared away in front of him was pulling him in a different direction.

The two detectives got into their car. Alice buckled into her seat belt. Van Allen didn’t.

“What the hell was going on in there?” Alice asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You looked like you were having a stroke or something.”

“I was… I don’t know,” Van Allen said. “Hell, I don’t know what to think. There’s some weird crap going on here, that’s all I know.”

“Weird like what?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know, Alice. Nothing makes any sense any more. It’s not just here, it’s everything.”

“Two children are missing, Ed.”

“Yeah. I got that part. Thanks.”

There was a long pause. Then Alice said. “You need some time off?’

He thought about it.

He glanced at his partner and then looked angrily at the house at 2136 Topango Gardens.

“Maybe,” he said. “God knows I need something. Sometimes nothing makes sense anymore, all the things you believe, always took for fact. Truth isn’t truth anymore. The whole world is upside down. Know what I mean?”

“You smoking weed again?”

“No!” After several seconds, he added. “I just been doing a lot of thinking. Okay?”

“How do you account for it?” Alice asked sullenly. “These people just moved here from the East. And already they’re homicidal maniacs.” She shook her head.

“Yeah. Only in California,” he muttered. “Let’s get out of here.”

He slid the key in the car’s ignition and felt the engine turn over.

Edmund Van Allen angrily returned home at eleven o’clock, a rational real-world mood back upon him. How could he sustain anymore the illusion that Rebecca Moore had not done something to her own children?

Why hadn’t he slapped a lie detector on both of the Moores in the first moments of the investigation? How could he have ignored for so long the basic fact that the children had never left that house? They were buried somewhere within. That left the Moores as the sole comprehensible culprits.

And how, faced with his accusations, could Rebecca Moore even hope that he, as a rational policeman, could believe any of that supernatural mumbo-jumbo.

And yet, and yet…

He sat at the desk in his den and put on another Grateful Dead tape. Galveston, August 1989. He listened as Jerry Garcia’s bumblebee-style guitar riffs calmed him.

“Ripple.”

Yeah, Jerry, Van Allen mused, calming a little more. An unseen hand making ripples in the water. Fine in a philosophical sense. Okay in a poetic sense. But Van Allen still rejected the supernatural in the case of Rebecca Moore.

“Ripple.”

Yeah. There was also crappy wine by the same name, if he recalled. A cheap drunk for people who hadn’t sunk to getting bombed on hair tonic.

Van Allen opened up the Mont Blanc pen that lay across his desk set. The cherished heirloom from his father. The tactile security of the pen eased him.

He went to his refrigerator and found a bottle of beer. He took a swig or two then put the beer on his desk. He left the den for a moment to get some notepaper. He came back and sat down. At his desk, he finished some notes on the Moore case. Then he closed the file.

He reached for the beer. Jerry Garcia sang. The bottle was empty.

He froze. Oh, yeah? What is that all about? He knew the bottle had been full when he had pulled it from the refrigerator. He had taken only a couple of swigs. But had he
drained
it?