Cemetery of Angels (13 page)

Rebecca thought about it.

“Not entirely,” she said.

“Why? You think you have a ghost?”

Rebecca cringed and shuddered. That was exactly what she thought, her deepest darkest fear and suddenly Melissa, quasi-kook that she was, had thrown it right out there in front of her.

“I don’t know what I have, Melissa,” Rebecca said, gathering herself quickly, “but I hear noises, smell strange stenches and get bad feelings here sometimes. So I’ll admit it. I’m scared. I am completely thoroughly and horribly scared. All right?”

Melissa’s mood changed like a tide. She became best friend and sister all at once. “Okay, honey, look,” she said. “There’s nothing here. Come on. Let’s not screw up the party. But we’ll do a room to room search,” Melissa said, “until you’re satisfied.’ How’s that?”

“It’s a deal.”

They walked together from room to room. Melissa held Rebecca’s hand, not in a creepy way but supportively. Each chamber was dark and quiet. Karen’s room, Patrick’s room. The master bedroom. No one. Nothing. Tranquility. Peace on earth.

“Let’s go downstairs,” Melissa finally said. “Can we do that?”

Rebecca nodded.

They crossed the hallway. Rebecca had an urge to tell Melissa about the incident in Connecticut, the horrible abduction in Fairfield. Rebecca felt she could trust her new friend. And she felt that it would allow Melissa to understand her better.

Instead, however, she kept quiet.

They walked down the steps together, Rebecca going first. The party was still going well. Bill had replenished the food table, and Karen had joined Patrick in the den. The kids were playing video games and entertaining their new friends.

Melissa went over to Claire and sat down next to her. Jim Doleman had been chatting Claire up, but somehow felt awkward as soon as Melissa arrived. A moment later, he excused himself.

Rebecca found her husband. Bill put an arm around her, and she felt like the perfect hostess. No incidents, no awkward moments; she had survived the investigation of the turret room, had walked the entire upstairs with a buddy and now felt as if she had made two dozen new friends.

Hey, she told herself, settling finally, not bad.

“What’s going on?” Bill asked.

“Nothing’s going on.”

“I watched you go upstairs. You looked like there was a problem.”

“I thought I heard someone.”

“Someone where?”

“Upstairs.”

He looked concerned and glanced toward the steps. Things like this could always set him off. The old paranoia of an amateur college druggie, always waiting for the narks to come in. “And?” he asked. A certain jitteriness pervaded his tone. “Was there anyone?”

“No. Of course not,” she said.

“Why didn’t you let
me
look?”

“I didn’t want to bother you.”

“Next time,” he said, “bother me, okay? I don’t like the idea of someone wandering around upstairs.”

He looked back toward the steps. And she could see that he was actually annoyed. She sighed again. If she had interrupted him with Nadia, he would have accused her of causing a jealous scene. In some situations with Bill, she couldn’t win.

“Honey, there wasn’t anyone there,” she explained. “It was just a door scraping in the turret room.”

“Next time, let me find out,” he said.

“Bill, what’s wrong with you today?”

“Must have been our buddy ‘Ronny Sinbilt,’” he said after a moment’s pause.

“Something about that isn’t funny,” Rebecca said.

He thought back to her abduction, and how jittery she’d been since. She was just starting to calm down.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that.” He hugged her. “I’m sorry. I really am, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. They kissed.

“Who’s ‘Ronny Whatever’?” Melissa asked later.

“Some imaginary playmate that our kids see. Or think they see.”

“Where? Here?” Melissa asked, curious as a brace of cats. For the first time, Rebecca was annoyed.

“There’s no one up there,” Rebecca said. “No one when you just looked, and no one when Karen and Patrick think they see someone. Okay?” Melissa thought about it.

“Okay. Maybe you
do
have a ghost,” she said. “Maybe even a pair of ghosts. That happens sometimes when…”

“Melissa! This is my home! I have to live here! I don’t think this is funny,” Rebecca snapped. Melissa was calm and answered evenly.

“I didn’t mean it to be funny. L.A. is one of the most fertile ghost haunts in the United States. Why, didn’t you know?”

“I don’t believe in such things!” Rebecca said tersely. “And I would appreciate your not putting such thoughts back in the air. In fact, I have to tell you this. Some of this death and cemetery stuff that you’ve been going on and on about is giving me the creeps! All right? I’ve pretty much had my fill of it!”

“I’m sorry. It’s not meant to scare you,” Melissa explained. “It should reassure you. Death can be a very cozy situation. Death…”

“Melissa!” she said even more boldly. “I like you. You’re my best friend here. But sometimes you have to respect the fact that you and I might be on different wavelengths. Okay? I really don’t feel comfortable with all this death and dying and graveyard stuff. So let’s drop it. Please?” Melissa knew that a raw nerve had been touched. She was anxious to get away from it. She backed off.

“Oh. Sorry,” she said with a shrug. “I really am.

“I know I live adjacent to a graveyard, and I’m okay with that,” Rebecca said, calming. “But we don’t have to bring the graveyard into my home. Do we?”

Melissa looked almost crestfallen. But then she perked.

“No, we don’t. Of course, honey. Not if you’re uncomfortable with it. Again, I’m really sorry. Okay? Forgive me? I don’t want to be an enemy.” Rebecca sighed again.

“Okay.” She relaxed.

“My apology is accepted?” Melissa asked.

“Of course it is.”

“You want to be reassured? I’ll reassure you,” Melissa said. “Let’s backtrack. We just looked around upstairs. That upstairs is ‘M.T. Period.’ Nothing there. Niente. Nada. No spirits. No ghosts. Zippo.”

“Thanks. That’s much better. Right.” She looked at her friend.

“I’m sorry I snapped. I’ve been edgy.”

“Hey, honey,” Melissa said, “it’s not a problem.”

Aside from that final incident, the party was a success. Essie Lewisohn even turned up, handing out her business card to anyone who would take one, even if they already had six at home. Essie also buttonholed Bill and Rebecca individually, asking if her long lost red reading glasses had ever turned up. They hadn’t. Essie sighed. The red ones had been her favorite pair, she said.

The party broke up about 10:00 P.M. Karen and Patrick went straight to bed. Bill helped Rebecca with the cleanup. Then he surprised his wife.

“I’m horny as a bull moose,” he said near 11:00 P.M. They were still downstairs, listening to music in the living room. She set down the magazine she was reading and looked accusingly at him.

“Probably from looking at Claire all night,” she said with more than a dash of irritation.

“I’m looking at you right now, Rebecca,” he said.

“Did Claire turn you on?” she asked.

“No. But you did. When you went upstairs, I fantasized that you were meeting another man and were going to make love with him. And Melissa was your lookout.”

“Bill!”

When she walked past him a moment later, his hand settled on her wrist. She struggled at first then laughed.

“I want you right now,” he said. “Right
here
and right
now
.”

She drew the new blinds in the den and felt a little of the old excitement that she used to like when her lover wanted her. She let Bill undress her and they christened the new sofa by making love upon it.

Alone in an airy apartment in a quiet neighborhood of Pasadena, Detective Edmund Van Allen sank into a comfortable chair in front of a television. He hoisted his feet onto the coffee table in his living room, pushed his shoes off, and let them drop. The shoes hit the carpeted floor with a couple of hearty bachelor quarter’s clunks.

With one hand he squeezed open the cap on a brown bottle of his favorite elixir, Henry Weinhard beer. His other hand played with the remote control of the television. “Beer and television”, he thought to himself. Those were the staples of a newly single man’s existence. Well, he told himself, it could be much, much worse. After all those years on the LAPD he had seen many men stagger through middle age with far more undesirable baggage than his own.

It was quarter past eleven on a Tuesday evening in mid-October. Van Allen was waiting for the sports. He wanted to see how the Lakers had performed that night. Never mind that it was still the exhibition season. A win was a win and a loss was a loss.

As he waited for sports, he was able to indulge in one of the few other small pleasures he felt was left to a single white man of Northern European heritage: A big artery clogging roast beef sandwich with Russian dressing. It was a behemoth of a sandwich, half a pound in weight and about five inches tall. Big, soft, chewy bread with dressing running down the side. This was the type of guy-food concoction that his ex-wife Margaret had always hated.

She hadn’t just hated the sandwich; she had hated the idea that he would eat such a thing. Ten years into their marriage, back in the mid-eighties, something had snapped inside lovely Margaret’s brain, and she had become a vegetarian.

Something had snapped. Well, that was Ed Van Allen’s spin. Why else would an otherwise sane human being become a convert to moose food? Of course, she had called it “eating smart,” with all the sanctimoniousness that the phrase could carry.

Worse, Margaret had not just become a passive lettuce eater. Oh, no. She had become a proselytizing one, always seeking converts to the bloodless world of groats and sprouts and curd. The daily menu had been the first fissure in their marriage. Other firefights followed, as inevitably as the rise and fall of Pacific tides.

The television news faded from the television screen and disappeared in favor of a commercial from a Mitsubishi dealer in Long Beach who said he would sell any customer a car without running a credit check.

Ed Van Allen sighed again. He could remember a more orderly time in the Southland when you at least had to have a job and the inclination to repay in order to get a car loan. Times had changed.

His thoughts drifted again. Sometimes he wondered if Margaret would ever come back. Or if she would get tired of this New Age horsecrap. Sometimes, like now, Van Allen longed for a time ten years earlier when he was forty-two years old and had just made detective second grade. He still lived with a doting wife in a comfortable house ten blocks from his current apartment. His children were still young and a young Kobe Bryant controlled both the Lakers floorboards.

Van Allen settled back. Tonight, at least, the beer was cold and the sandwich was excellent. There was even a nice clump of macaroni salad on the side, along with a kosher pickle the size of a peewee football. Sometimes, in small ways, life could be good.

Of course, paradise can never last. Sports finally came on the tube.

The Lakers had lost 92-86 to the Nets in New Jersey. The parvenu Nets for Heaven’s sake! Sometimes, in small ways such as these, life stank.

Then there were the larger issues in his life.

Ed Van Allen had served more than a quarter century in the Los Angeles Police Department. He had suffered through the carnival of the Nicole Simpson-Ron Goldman slayings and the Rodney King mess. He had heard all the jokes about the LAPD changing its motto from
To Protect and Serve
to
We Treat You Like a King
. Over the course of twenty-five years, he had seen too much and forgotten none of it. And nothing in that quarter century had done anything to convince him of the ultimate goodness of mankind.

Quite the contrary had happened. And recently, this line of thought had joined a growing list of things bothering him. If he really pressed the point, he feared that deep down he really knew the reason for his disquietude.

Lately, also without quite knowing why, a general edginess had set upon him. Mercury seemed to be in a permanent retrograde. He attributed all this to an unpleasant anniversary. It had been on the first of the preceding October that he and his wife, after several unpleasant years, had terminated the marriage that had occupied two decades.

Their children were grown. His daughter Celia was currently selling pottery and cohabiting with a twice-divorced man twelve years older than she in Eugene, Oregon. The last time Van Allen had seen Celia, she looked as if she were dressed like a nun.

His son Jason was doing better. Jason was at the University of California at Santa Clara. There he manifested healthy male traits: he chased coeds and played baseball. To his father’s pleasure, he was doing well with both.

So it wasn’t exactly as if a family unit had been put asunder. But at an age when the prospects of a pipe and slippers and some simple uncomplaining female companionship had seemed like a welcome vision at the end of each day, Margaret had started talking about her independence.

Her life. Her freedom. Her resentments. For years he groaned every time the subject arose. Who had put these ideas in her head? What magazines had she gotten hold of? What militant feminist tract had she taken to heart?

Eventually, all of this culminated in her desire for a divorce.

“Maybe I’ll go back to school,” she had once said to him at the lawyer’s office.

“To learn what?”

“There you go. Belittling me,” she said. “Suggesting that I’m dumb.”

“I didn’t suggest anything,” he had answered. “I asked what you wanted to study.”

She had turned toward her lawyer.

“This is the type of thing I’m talking about,” she told her mouthpiece. “This is what I’ve been putting up with all these years. Any new idea, he rejects.”

“What new idea?” he had demanded. “I don’t hate new ideas. What are we talking about? Education for women? Divorce? These are new ideas?”

Her lawyer, a guy named Rob Swain, nodded indulgently and assured her that he couldn’t have agreed more. She must have suffered horribly over eighteen years of holy matrimony, Swain suggested silkily. Mental torture. A prison without walls, he said.