Before There Were Angels (4 page)

He needn’t have worried.
Once you have owned an Old English Sheepdog for a few weeks, you realize that wherever else in the household budget you are capable of cutting costs, his food and booze budget had better be taken out of the equation and inflation-proofed, otherwise you will have a very grumpy dog.

So I
limped to the fridge, grabbed another bottle of Fat Tire, flipped the cap and poured the contents into George’s bowl, watching to see what would happen next.

Nothing happened next, except that George lapped it clean and demanded a refill, which he got.

Crisis over.

… u
ntil dinner, when he was otherwise occupied and failed to spot that I had poured him his Bombay Blue Sapphire gin and tonic and therefore failed to attack it immediately, and by the time that he was finally ready for his cocktail he discovered that it was gone - his bowl was dry - provoking another outraged bark.

“What’s
going on with you, George?” I asked him. “Why are you knocking back drinks like you have just returned from rehab?”

He shot me an annoyed
look and gave me a nudge.
Just get on with it.

I
nitially we did not realize that a third party was involved but we did wonder why George only had one bowl at a time while we stood over him but invariably two if we walked away, and there was never any problem with his Chateaubriand steak.

It was only after a few days of other inexplicable occurrences
, literally emerging from the woodwork, that it dawned on us that George might have been the first victim among us, one who could suffer but not explicitly explain his suffering beyond a mournful expression and an outraged bark.

Poor George.

Then poor us.

Chapter 7

The next week I flew out to Phoenix to pick up more furniture that Belle had bought in a fire sale as she left her husband Robert, thinking she might
need it one day. The apartment in San Francisco had been too small to accommodate any of it but the Victorian was just right.

It was disconcerting to be travelling without Belle and the boys, and indeed without George, but I soon got into lone warrior ‘I
can do this’ mode and you can’t go far wrong in leaving San Francisco airport and arriving in Phoenix by air, nor was reaching the Crowne Plaza in Phoenix difficult either as there was a shuttle straight there. Thanks to Priceline, a room in the Crowne Plaza was only costing me $75 for the night.

So I lazed
around in the pool, grabbed some beers and a snack at the bar, and talked by phone to Belle for an hour about how much I missed her and the boys and how the weather in Phoenix had probably not changed since she used to live there, about the time Sarah Palin decided to move to Arizona. Belle already had a tendency to call Arizona an armpit for its harassment of black and Latino drivers under the stop and search laws, but when Sarah Palin arrived it was now officially, as far as Belle was concerned, an asshole state, which could not be said of California, the ultimate land of the free and home of the liberal-minded.

Belle had arranged for her friend Tony to help me empty her storage unit into the U-Haul truck, so I gave him a call and confirmed I would be at the storage place by nine. It turned out that Tony may not have been such a
good friend after all, or he may have just been a practical joker with a tasteless sense of humor, because he brought her ex-husband Robert with him, claiming he had always wanted to know what furniture Belle had bought, an odd thing for a man like Robert to be interested in.

What he really wanted to do,
obviously, was to check me out, and see face-to-face what the better man looked like, a process during which he went from gloweringly hostile, to resigned, to vindictive towards Belle. He couldn’t reasonably hit me because I had met Belle long after she had left him but he managed to smash several pieces of furniture hard against the door frames on the way out.

“So how are my
boys?” he asked.

“Great,” I
replied. “I love them. They’re wonderful kids, great to be around.”

Robert almost snarled at some combination of my loving his children and my effete British use of
the English language. “Wonderful,” he repeated in mocking tones.

“They are,” I assured him, deadpan.

“I should call them more.”

“You are free to phone them anytime.”

“And you are living in a house?”

“Yep, a Victorian.”

“Belle hates houses.”

“She likes Victorians, especially haunted Victorians.”

“It’s haunted?”

“Not sure yet but G
eorge seems to think so.”

“The dog?”

“Yes.”

“He’s
still alive? That’s a surprise.”

“I think he’ll stay alive as
long as he has a reason to live which, as you know, involves overpriced meat, beer, whisky and gin.”

“We never gave him that crap.”

I was going to comment that George had moved up in the world but I had no particular need to be hit.

“Belle, she still crazy?”

“Crazy?”

“Yeah, crazy, loco or whatever.”

“She doesn’t strike me as being crazy.” I should not have been getting into this conversation but I was interested in Belle’s past, even from a totally biased perspective.

“All tho
se ghosts and shit.”

“Oh yeah, that might be s
lightly crazy but it’s harmless-crazy.”

Robert stared me hard in the face. “She does it all herself.”

“She certainly didn’t drink up George’s beer from his bowl. If she did, she’s even crazier than you think she is.”

He shook his head. “She’s pretty crazy.
Doesn’t take responsibility for anything. Bad things happen and it’s always the ghosts’ fault.”

“Like what?”

“You’ll see.”

It took about an hour and a half to load the U-Haul. I offered
to buy Tony and Robert a cup of coffee but they said they were going out for some beers and did I want to come? I didn’t put it past Robert to 911 me if I had even one drink, so I excused myself and started off on the long drive home.

*  *  *

I stopped over in Bakersfield in a motel that could be said to have lacked all modern conveniences. It had a dead cat floating in a thick layer of green slime at the bottom of an otherwise empty pool and there was a distinct slope to the bed in a room the hotel refused to let me change as it claimed to be fully booked. When I stepped into the shower, I saw raw sewage coming up the drain, forcing me to jump out again and slide the few inches into the opposing wall.

Then the cell phone rang. It was Belle and in a panic.

“Stevie’s been pushed down the stairs.”

“By who
?” I asked, assuming that if he had died or been badly injured, Belle would have told me that first.

Belle ignored my question. “He
’s OK but he’s shocked. He’s crying and he never cries.”

“How horrible for him.
Who pushed him? Zack?”

“No, Zack was up in the attic.”

“So who pushed him? George?”

“No, George w
as downstairs lying in his favorite spot on the dining room table. I made a turkey for your homecoming but it’s gone now. I’m sorry, baby.” Ignoring the loss of my latest meal at George’s jaws, I returned to the subject of Stevie.

“How was he pushed
, then?” I didn’t dare ask if Belle had pushed him.

“He doesn’t know. He was standing at the top of the stairs shouting at Zack and something pushed him hard down the stairs.”

“Did he fall all the way down?”

“No, he managed to grab the bannister a couple of steps down
, so he only bruised his knee and hand slightly, but he is really upset.”

I didn’t know what to say. The most likely explanation was both obvious and far-fetched.

“He thinks he was attacked by a ghost,” Belle added.

“It’
s one explanation, I suppose.”

“Can you think of a better one?”

“Not off-hand, unless he simply slipped and made up the bit about being pushed.”

“Stev
ie doesn’t lie.”

“Sorry, I should have said ‘imagined’.”

“You think he imagined that he was pushed.”

“If you went out onto the street now and told ten people the story, I would guess nine of them would suggest that he imagined it, which is not necessarily what happened.”

“And the tenth?”

“The tenth would say it could be some kind of paranormal ph
enomenon, that we have a person-hurling poltergeist, or something. What do you think?”

“I’m with the tenth person.”

“So am I.”

“Really?”

“Really. I think that place is haunted. I am just surprised that a ghost could be that physical.”

“Poltergeists can be.”

“True, or possibly true.”

“Run along and don’t stand at the top of the stairs again. Sorry, I was talking to Stevie. How did things go?”

“Robert turned up.”

“You’re joking. Tony invited him along?”

“Yes.”

“The evil little douchebag.
How was Robert?”

“Aggressive.”

“He would be. You get everything out of there?”

“Yep, it is all
parked outside my luxury hotel.”

“Where are you?”

“Bakersfield.”

“A luxury hotel in Bakersfield?”

“Yep, all the usual, plus a sloping bed, green slime, raw sewage and a dead cat.”

“Poor baby
.”

“I’ll be better in the morning.”

Which wasn’t exactly true. By morning I was covered in a thousand bed bug bites.

It would be good to get home,
even with a homicidal ghost lurking at the top of the stairs.

*  *  *

By the time I got home, my bed bug bumps had gone and Zack was jumping up and down at the top of the stairs, screaming, “Go on, push me, you freak. Push me.”

The ghost must have been tempted,
oh he really must have been
, but Zack continued to jump away without anyone attempting to toss him down in one throw, straight to the bottom without hitting a single step. I could imagine the shock on his face, which would be funny, but I could also imagine him smashing his head in or breaking his back, and neither of those options would have been good, so I just wished he would stop jumping. Instead, Stevie joined him so that I couldn’t even hear what Belle first said to me.

“Sorry?”

Belle grimaced. “Welcome home, my hero,” she shrieked. “I missed you so much.”

“Hero, hero, hero, hero,” the twins chanted.

“Losers, losers, losers, losers,” I chanted back.

“
Awww, are you too scared to come and join us?” Stevie challenged me.

“No.”

“Then get up here.”

“I will if you help me empty the truck and bring everything in.”

“How much are you paying?” Zack demanded, putting his hand on Stevie’s arm to shut him up. He was in charge of these negotiations.

I went for a pre-emptive bid.
“Fifty dollars each.”

“I love English people
,” Zack crowed. “They’re such pussies about money.”

“Is that a yes, then?”

“Hell, yeah,” they shouted as they raced down the stairs.

“I’m excited,” said Belle. “I’ve never seen any of the things I bought in the sale, except the bed I bought in New Orleans.”

“The bed you bought in New Orleans …” I repeated slowly and suspiciously.

“Yes, the one I bought ten years ago. Robert hated it.”

“Why would he have hated it?”

“Well, it had a history …”

“A violent history, I presume.”

“Y-e-s!
Of course.”

“Somebody died in the bed?”

“Yes, she was stabbed repeatedly. Her blood is still on the headboard. Nobody can get it off.”

“
Urghh!” groaned the kids.

“So this is going to be the twins
’ bed?” I suggested.

“No way!” they decided. “Gross.
No way.”

“Just so as I don’t have to move it twice.”

“We’re helping you,” said Zack.

“For fifty dollars each,” chimed in Stevie.

“We could make it an even hundred,” suggested Zack.

“Fifty it is or I do it all myself, which I can do. I loaded it all myself.”