Orphans of Wonderland (22 page)

“A doctor needs to look at that,” Bea said, standing. “And you got a huge gash over your eye this frickin' long.” She demonstrated by pulling her thumb and index finger as far away from each other as she could. “I packed it with Neosporin and put a big-ass Band-Aid over it, but you need stitches. Lots of 'em.”

“Thanks.” Joel struggled up into a sitting position, his legs still stretched out before him on the couch and covered with the blanket. “Where are my clothes?”

“Your shirt was ripped and soaked with blood,” she explained. “I threw it out. I tried washing your coat off by hand, but it's still stained. It's hanging on the back of one of the kitchen chairs. There's also another shirt out there on the table. Lonnie left a few things in the closet from when we were… Anyway… It should fit all right.”

“I'm sorry for showing up like this, but I had nowhere else to go.”

Bea folded her arms across her chest. “Do I want to know what happened?”

“No, you don't.”

“Hon, you need to see a doctor. For real.”

Joel swung his legs around to the floor. “I won't be here long, I—”

“Where the hell you think you're goin'? You're not in any condition to go anywhere tonight. Stay right there. Unless you gotta take a squirt. Do you? Do you gotta take a squirt?”

“No, Bea, I don't
gotta take a squirt
.”

“Don't you make fun of the way I talk, you fuckin' prick.” She waved a reprimanding hot-pink fingernail at him. “I been playing nursemaid since your stupid ass got here, okay?”

“Sorry.”

“You should be. Go showing up at my door lookin' like you got mauled by a goddamn lion, for Christ's sake. Scared the shit out of me. I'm still scared. Nobody else is gonna show up lookin' to finish the job, right?”

“There's no reason for anyone to look for me here,” he said, head pounding.

“When's the last time you had somethin' to eat?”

“I can't remember.”

“Well, I made chicken soup,” she said softly. “Because I'm frickin' awesome.”

“I don't know if I can hold anything down at this point, I—”

“You're gonna have some because it's good for you.” Bea headed for the kitchen. “And because if you don't, I'm gonna stab you in your other arm.”

Rain sprayed the windows, startling him. With a sigh, Joel tried to move his injured shoulder. The numbness was gone, replaced with a horrible ache, and while he couldn't move the arm before at all, he'd since regained limited mobility. But the pain in his shoulder was still nearly unbearable.

Bea appeared with a small folding table in one hand and a steaming, oversize mug of soup in the other. She put the table down and opened it before him, then set his soup atop it. She left again and returned with a paper napkin, a tablespoon, a bottle of water and three aspirin.

He downed the aspirin and drank nearly the entire bottle of water in one attempt. Then he tried the soup. It was delicious. “Thank you,” he said.

“You're welcome. Can I get you anythin' else?”

“No, this is great.” He sipped more broth.

Bea sat on the arm of the couch and lit a cigarette. “So you get run over by a truck or what?”

Rather than answer, Joel had more soup.

“Did the person who killed Lonnie do this to you?” she pressed.

“I don't know.”

Bea reached down to the end table and scooped up a small, black plastic ashtray. “Yeah you do,” she said. “After all this, you could at least tell me the truth. Think I deserve that much, no?”

Joel put the spoon down and wiped his mouth. “I don't want you to get hurt, all right? The less you know, the better. Once you have knowledge of certain things, you're responsible for it. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, I speak English and I'm not a moron.”

He collected his thoughts. “I was almost killed tonight. Someone saved my life. If it weren't for that, I'd be rotting in a ditch somewhere right now. I don't want any of that darkness anywhere near you.”

“Thanks, 'cause I'm not already scared out of my mind or anythin'.” She took an angry draw on her Camel. “Like I need any of this shit.”

“I know, and I'm sorry. I'll be gone in the morning.”

“Story of my frickin' life. Am I ever gonna know what happened?”

Joel reached over and put a hand on hers. “It's better that you don't.”

She nodded but wouldn't look at him.

“If anything happened to you because of me, I'd never forgive myself,” he told her. “Once I'm gone, forget all this. Go on with your life. Be happy. If anyone comes around—and I mean
anyone
—you don't know me and we've never talked. You've never even met me, got it?”

She exhaled a stream of smoke and gave a quick nod. “What about you?”

“I don't know.” He took up his spoon and had another mouthful of soup. “Maybe I'll make it, maybe I won't, but I have to end this. I don't have a choice.”

“There's no other way?”

“Not anymore. I'm in too deep.”

“You got somebody back home that cares about you.”

“You think I don't know that? She's my whole world.”

“And you're hers, right? You need to remember that. She's your wife. Somethin' happens to you, what's she supposed to do?”

It was a good question, but one Joel didn't have an answer for.

“You got to be there for her,” Bea said. “Don't leave her alone, Joel. It's an awful thing to be alone. Makes you feel like you could disappear or die and wouldn't nobody notice or care.”

“I'd care, Bea.”

“Don't be a retard.” She winked at him, then rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” he said, managing a slight smile. “I know what you mean.”

“Eat your fuckin' soup, you pain in my ass.”

“Yes, ma'am.” He had another swallow of soup as Bea's two calico cats appeared as if from nowhere. One jumped up on the back of the couch while the other curled up in his lap. Across the room, in a window, the black-and-white cat sat watching the rainy night.

A thudding sound emanated up through the floor from the apartment below, then fell silent. Bea kept smoking and pretended not to hear it, but Joel could see the fear in her eyes. “You don't have any ties here, do you?” he asked her.

“Not anymore.”

“You said you have a daughter in Connecticut.”

“Yeah, and my grandbabies.”

“You should leave the city, Bea. Go there and live. Leave all this behind.”

She crushed her cigarette butt out in the ashtray. “Been thinking about it.”

“You need to get away from this building.”

“You mean Lonnie's apartment.”

He nodded.

She clutched the ashtray with both hands. “What's down there?”

“I don't know.”

“But there is somethin'.”

“Yes.”

She cleared her throat and tried to appear calm, but her terror was rising and it showed. “Is it Lonnie?” she asked in a loud whisper.

Joel didn't answer right away. “No. It's not anything even close to Lonnie.”

“Somethin' else I don't want to know, right?”

This time he didn't answer at all.

“Is it gonna come out of there?” she asked.

He thought about the same things moving around in Pete Fernandez's cottage. They hadn't left the house even though he and Pete were right outside. Maybe they couldn't. “I think they might be…confined.”

“Does it want to hurt me?”

“Just stay out of there.” He pushed the soup aside and sat back. “Get away from it. Get away from all this. Go be with your family. There's nothing good here, Bea.”

She put the ashtray down and picked up one of the cats. Petting it gently, she held it close to her chest. “Makes you wonder if there's any good left anywhere.”

“There's more than we know.”

“Says the guy somebody almost killed tonight.”

Kavon's face flashed before Joel's eyes, a face full of confusion as his neck popped and shattered and he fell away, swallowed in darkness and rain.
So much violence
, he thought. The cackling homeless man reappeared in his mind, alive and gulping down stew one minute and dead with his brains sprayed all over him the next.

Almost
killed.

Even then, amid all the horror, Joel knew the likely identity of the phantom. He just couldn't bring himself to acknowledge it, then or now. It all felt like a blur, a nightmare where nothing made sense, yet everything fit together as if it did.

“That's why evil lives in the dark,” he said quietly. “The rest belongs to us.”

Without saying a word, Bea sat next to him on the couch. Still holding and petting the cat, she slowly let her head come to rest on Joel's good shoulder.

And together, they waited out the night.

Chapter Twenty-Two

By morning the rain had turned to snow. Joel left Bea asleep and snoring softly on the couch, her cats cuddled up all around her. A fresh shirt and his coat were in the kitchen, just as she'd said. It felt odd putting on something that had belonged to Lonnie, but he distracted himself by inspecting his coat. One shoulder had a tear and bloody hole in it, and though a good deal of blood had dried or been washed clean, quite a bit was still evident. He threw it on anyway, went back to the living room and, ignoring the pain throughout his body, bent down and gently kissed Bea on the forehead. She stirred and moaned but didn't come awake.

Downstairs, Lonnie's apartment was quiet. Joel stepped out into the cold morning air. Big, fluffy flakes fell slowly and steadily, draping the still and quiet city in a beautiful shroud of white, the morning light causing it to glisten like it had been sprinkled with tiny diamonds. He found his car where he'd left it, two blocks away. Nobody followed him, and the streets were empty, the snow still fresh and undisturbed, as if the entire neighborhood was still asleep. Perhaps it was.

He drove toward New Bedford, and the cemetery waiting for him there. He'd put it off long enough, but it was time. There would be no more chances.

Although it was located in the middle of the city, Saint Joseph's Cemetery covered more than fifty acres and sat atop a large hill surrounded by pine trees. Ornate wrought-iron gates opened onto a paved path that the led up the hill and to a sea of headstones, tombs and mausoleums for as far as the eye could see.

Joel slowly followed the narrow avenues, doing his best to remember the exact spot he'd come looking for, and within a short time was able to find it. He sat there a moment with the engine running and watched snow fall across the graves.

So beautiful,
he thought,
even amid all these monuments to death
.

His mother's body had been cremated, per her wishes, the ashes scattered in the Atlantic Ocean, but Joel often wished she'd been buried instead. Whenever he wanted to visit his mother's memory, he'd go to the ocean and watch the waves. There was something so vast and impersonal about it though. He envied those who had a more specific spot to grieve. A spot like this, where one could stand before a headstone, something tangible and directly related to the person one missed.

Somewhere in this cemetery they'd buried Lonnie, but he hadn't come here for that. One day perhaps he'd return and visit it, just not today. Not now. Not yet.

Joel got out of the car and walked toward a headstone bookended by a small pair of granite angels, winged cherubs kneeling on either side of the grave, stone faces forlorn and tortured, one's tiny hands folded in desperate prayer, the other's reaching skyward as if for mercy or aid.

He walked closer, through the flurries, until the name etched on the stone came into clearer focus: CYNTHIA MARIA MELLO, followed by the dates of her birth and death.

Heart sinking, he moved closer and realized that although a good portion of the headstone was obscured by snow, there was a second name etched into it as well. The large stone sat before three plots, one containing Cindy's remains and two more for her parents. A second grave had been filled since Joel had last been here.

He crouched a few feet from the family plot and read what he could of the stone. Cindy's father had died five years ago. Joel wrestled with his emotions, that poor man's tormented face forever burned into his memory, his soul possessed by crippling sorrow beyond comprehension. Somewhere in the back of Joel's mind, he'd convinced himself that one day he'd make things right and at least help bring Cindy's daughter's killers to justice. He'd believed his book would help facilitate just that. Instead it had become a joke, and now fate had beaten him to the punch. Joel could only hope the man's questions had been answered, and that, wherever he was, he'd been reunited with the daughter he so adored.

You have to see, you—you have to see who my little girl was
.

Joel closed his eyes and was greeted by the VHS version of Cindy Mello as a little girl, tromping through wet beach sand and building sandcastles with her dad.

My…my baby…

“I'm sorry,” he said, his voice quiet but carrying in the boundless silence, riding the breeze through the nearby trees. “To both of you, I'm sorry.”

“You did your best.”

Joel whirled around to find a woman dressed in black standing behind him. Her head was bowed and wrapped in a black scarf tied beneath her chin, and she'd aged a great deal, but he recognized her nonetheless. “Mrs. Mello…”

“I didn't mean to startle you,” she said, still possessing a slight accent.

“It's all right, I—I didn't hear you coming is all.” He took a tentative step toward her. “I didn't expect to see you here.”

“I come every day.” Her dark bloodshot eyes, saddled with heavy black bags, looked beyond him to the graves containing her husband and daughter. “Even if just for a little while.”

If they became widowed, many traditional Portuguese women wore black for seven years, or sometimes for the remainder of their lives. Particularly common among older women, it was a tradition Cindy's mother apparently adhered to, as her dress, stockings, shoes and even her pocketbook were black. Joel looked around for her car, but his was the only one in sight. Had she walked from the street below? Why would she do such a thing, particularly in this weather?

“They've brought you back,” she said through a sigh.

“They?”

Rather than answer, she reached into her purse and removed a set of rosary beads. “That's why you're here.”

“A friend of mine was killed.”

She looked at him with sorrowful eyes but had no response.

“I came back to see what I could do to help,” he went on. “I wanted to visit your daughter's grave because I wanted to talk to Cindy. I wanted to tell her I was sorry.”

“Cindy's not here.” She gazed out at the rows of stones. “None of them are.”

“I know, but…”

“It was a horrible time.”

“No one involved was ever the same.”

“You did your best,” she said, her fingers nervously running across the beads from one to the next, then back again. “We always believed that. My husband, until the day he died, believed you were a good and decent man who truly cared about our daughter and what was done to her.”

It took everything Joel had to hold back tears. “Thank you, Mrs. Mello.”

“You told the truth, but people only want to hear truth for so long. Then, like all truth, it becomes…muddled…infected…and people no longer have any interest in it. They prefer lies.”

The snow kept falling all around them, graceful and alive.

“It was a terrible thing they did to our little girl. And a terrible thing they did to the rest of us afterward. You told the truth, as you knew it, about who hurt our daughter and why they did it. And people laughed.” Her bottom lip quivered. “They
laughed
. They laugh at God; why should we expect they wouldn't do the same to us? Lucifer's tail slowly wraps around them, his wings close over their eyes, and they don't even realize it's happening. They're too busy laughing.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“A group of people took my daughter, tied her to an altar in a Catholic church, cut her open and played with what they found inside. Painted the walls and statues with satanic symbols and prayers and desecrated everything holy in that building with my baby's blood and bodily fluids. They took the eyes out of her head…my little girl's beautiful eyes…and had sex with her corpse.” Her hands, shaking now, continued to work the beads, but she shed no tears. “They were doing the Devil's work when they murdered my Cynthia, Mr. Walker. The
Devil's
work, just like you wrote. And people laughed. They still laugh, even all these years later.”

“Where was God that night, Mrs. Mello?” Joel said before he could stop the words from escaping him. “Where was God when they were slaughtering your precious child?”

Where was He when that black car took us?

“The Devil was in that church that night,” she told him. “But God was there too, holding Cynthia in his arms and crying along with her. Crying for all of us, Mr. Walker,
all
of us. While we laugh, He cries.”

“But He's
God
. Why didn't He
do
something?”

“He did,” she said. “He comforted my baby, took away all her pain and fear even in the midst of pure evil, and loved her more than she ever thought possible. Not just that night, but forever. What's more powerful than that? God's not an action-movie hero, Mr. Walker. He's something much greater, so much so we can't even begin to understand it. There is no hate there, no violence, anger or judgment. Only love. Love beyond anything we can imagine. All the rest are the weaknesses, the sins and the excuses of man.”

Joel wiped snow from his face with a shaking hand of his own. “I have those things inside me, Mrs. Mello…violence and anger…rage.”

“Do you think I'm unfamiliar with those things?”

“No, ma'am. But there are people who have hurt me too, and those I love. Not the same people who hurt your family, but they're just as evil. That's why I came here. I wanted to tell Cindy I was sorry and to ask for her permission to hurt these people. I don't have a choice anymore, it's about survival now, but I want—
need
—her to tell me it's all right…even if it's only in my head.”

“Why do you need this from her?”

“Because she was good. She was special. That's why they chose her.”

“And what makes you think this permission is hers to grant?”

“I know it's unfair of me to even ask, but I'm no action-movie hero either, Mrs. Mello. I'm just a flawed and damaged man, a husband, a small-town reporter.”

“You're a frightened child trying to find your way in the dark.” She continued running the beads through her fingers. “We all are.”

“They're trying to kill me, Mrs. Mello.”

“You wrote in your book that the coroner stated Cindy fought back against her attackers with everything she had, that she fought them tooth and nail before they finally killed her.”

“That's right.”

“Then fight, Mr. Walker. With everything
you
have.”

It wasn't Cindy's blessing, but it was enough.

“They brought you back here,” she told him, her eyes wandering across his bruised, battered and swollen face, and the remnants of bloodstains on his coat. “They brought you back here to die.”

“Who?”

She looked to the trees along the ridge above the headstones.

Joel followed her stare.

Things moved between the trees, but he couldn't make out what they were or if they were even there at all. Small, dark forms, he thought, moving slowly but just barely discernible—visible through the curtains of snow, then gone—or was it only a trick of the light? Like the entities before, and yet this time there was something more. They seemed oddly familiar this time. He'd seen them before, not only in Lonnie's apartment and Pete Fernandez's cottage.

Joel had seen them in his dreams.

He turned back to Mrs. Mello. She was gone. He was alone in the cemetery, the freshly fallen snow all around him undisturbed but for his own footprints.

Profound silence filled the cold air.

Stumbling forward, he took a second look at the Mello family headstone, this time dropping to his knees, then frantically wiping away the remainder of the snow blocking its face.

Cindy's mother's name and dates appeared before him.

She'd been dead more than two years.