Cemetery of Angels (21 page)

Suddenly Rebecca jumped as if her body had been hit with electricity. She stared at the wall of the room, upon which were the two posters that had made the crinkling sound. Beneath them, almost subliminally, there were big bold letters on the wall.

She was incredulous. Her heart raced. She had painted this wall herself, and…

“But, no!”

This was the wall that had seemingly painted itself. This was the wall that she didn’t recall applying the paint to, but which was covered when she returned to the room.

She stared. There was a message on the wall beneath the yellow paint, as if it were trying to come forth, even though she had painted it over.

Yet this, too, was impossible. Her husband had put a heavy white primer on the walls. There was no way that any old marking should seep through. Her heart continued to flutter. Rebecca went to the wall. She placed a hand against it. The wall felt the way it always had. The paint was dry, the wall firm and secure.

But there was a large
ER
protruding from beneath one side of a baseball poster. Rebecca stepped back and realized that there was a large
I
between the posters. And when she looked to her left she saw the letters
YO
to the left of the first poster.

“Look for the message.”
She had found one.

Her heart continued to kick. The poster on the left was of the New York City Ballet. The poster on the right featured Many Ramirez of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

A message. It was nearly two in the morning, but Rebecca was going to read a message from God knew where. She pushed a chair to the wall, stood on it, and took down the posters. Baseball drifted to the floor first, followed closely by ballet.

Then Rebecca stepped back and stared at once at the message before her. Big block letters. A big loud message. Unmistakable, or so she thought as she read:

YOU ARE IN DANGER

Rebecca recoiled from what was in front of her. She backed her way toward the door to the yellow room, but stopped short of leaving. There was something so riveting about the message on the wall that she couldn’t take her eyes off it.

She found a club chair and let herself drop into it. And she stared and stared and stared at the subliminal lettering on the wall. The more she stared at it, the better the message emerged.

It was like a beacon:

YOU ARE IN DANGER

Somewhere over the next few hours, however, she must have closed her eyes. Must have, because the next thing she knew it was morning, and Patrick was gently shaking her sleeve to wake her.

Rebecca came quickly to consciousness, though her eyes burned with fatigue. She assured Patrick that she was fine, and then sent him to get cleaned up for breakfast.

Rebecca stood and looked at the wall again. No more big bold letters. But the message,
YOU ARE IN DANGER,
was embedded somewhere else now.

It was in her mind, to stay.

“Nonsense. There’s nothing there,” Bill Moore said.

With their children already departed for school, Bill Moore stood in the yellow room with his wife. She showed him again the space on the wall where the letters had appeared. The two posters still lay on the floor.

“Bill,” she said softly, trying to maintain her patience. “I know what I saw.”

Moore, dressed for work, sipped coffee from a cup.

“No,” he said. “You know what you think you saw.”

“Bill…”

“Becca, you got up from a dream. You walked out here. You were half asleep. Your dream continued.” He paused. “Did you take an
Ambien
?” he asked.

“Three quarters of one.” He shook his head.

“There you go. You’re under stress to start with, and then that stuff keys you off. People go out nude on Wilshire Boulevard to direct traffic on
Ambien
. And you think it’s strange that you wander into the next room and hear ghost voices?” She shuddered.

“Why did you call them that? ‘Ghost voices’?”

“A figure of speech. It’s the term that came to mind.” He glanced at his watch. A few more minutes of this nonsense, he figured, and he’d be late for work.

“I heard a real voice,” Rebecca protested. “Someone, something, called to me. I came into this room looking for a message and the message was right there!” In her frustration, she gesticulated wildly, indicating the place on the wall that was now blank. “I know what I saw!”

“Becca,” he said softly, “let’s face reality. You had a bad dream and got up. You’re on those funny pills. You came into this room and dreamed the rest.” She sat on the kids’ play chest.

“It wasn’t a dream,” she said. He sipped his coffee.

“The only other explanation is that you never woke up.”

“Bill, Patrick will tell you. He found me in this room when he got up this morning. I was in that chair.”

“I know,” her husband said. “So maybe we add sleep walking to your problems.”

She reclined, her back against the wall as she sat on the chest. She stared at her husband.

“You don’t believe me at all, do you?”

“I believe you’re a very, very disturbed woman, Becca. And God knows I understand where it’s coming from. But this has been going on for several months.”

“I thought at least you’d be sympathetic. But you’re not.”

He stood next to her, looking down. She was starting to feel much hostility from a man who had taken a vow to love and cherish her.

“I
am
sympathetic,” Bill said. “But I’d be more sympathetic if I thought you were actually trying to help yourself.”

“And you don’t think I’m trying to?”

“Frankly?” he asked. “No.”

She felt like throwing something at him. She was scared and hurt. She wanted to call her mother and tell her everything, but didn’t have the courage.

Bill went into the master bedroom. Not knowing what else to do, she followed.

Her husband finished his coffee and set the cup down on her dresser. The dirty cup would be hers to take downstairs and wash. She resented it.

“When do you see Dr. Einhorn again?” he asked.

“Two days from now.”

“Tell him about this,” Bill said. “Let’s see what he says.”

“If his reaction is any different, I’m sure you’ll say he’s mistaken,” Rebecca said.

Bill Moore started to pull his jacket on. He shot his wife a look in response.

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” he finally said. “But now that you bring the subject up, it has crossed my mind that Einhorn could be some sort of typical Southern California quack,” he said. “What do you think his relationship is with that three-hundred-pound fairy whom he uses as a receptionist, for example?”

“That’s aside from the point!”

“All right. Well, here’s a more germane point: The pint sized Freud doesn’t seem to be helping you all that much.”

“I’ve only been there three times,” Rebecca insisted. She folded her arms in front of her and turned her gaze away from her husband. She did not need this right now.

“First in a series of three hundred?” The argumentative tone of his voice was accelerating rapidly. “I think he’s making you a little nuttier,” he said. “Know that?”

“Thanks!” she shot back.

“Are you going to be a lifer with the shrinks? You know, the one problem with this LA area is that everything in the country with loose marbles seems to have rolled into the country’s southwest corner. The other day, for example, I was at a traffic light. I look to my right and here, right next to me, on a motorized unicycle, are these two…”

Furious, upset, she cut him off.

“Bill! I don’t want to hear about it!”

He held the thought, whatever it had been, however entertaining. A few seconds passed. Both husband and wife cooled down.

“Okay, okay,” he said, relenting. “I’m sorry. I’m tense about some stuff, myself. God knows whether McLaughlin will ever get this architectural stuff off the ground.”

“I thought it was going well,” she said.

“It is, it is. It’s just difficult, okay?”

She sat on the edge of the bed. He leaned over and gave her a short hug. It was a brief one, without passion, and was over almost before it began. It was as if, she felt, a stranger had given it to her. She almost found herself recoiling from his touch. The first time ever, but she was that angry and disappointed with him.

“Let’s see what Herr Einhorn says,” he said, relenting slightly. “But I do think you have to work at this harder. Not indulge your own imagination.”

“Yeah,” she said. Her tone was as absent as his touch. And he knew it. But he let it go.

“I’ll probably be late tonight,” he said. “Don’t wait with dinner. Call me during the day if you have a problem.”

“Sure,” she said again. He gave her a quick kiss and left the room. She found herself staring at his coffee cup.

She listened as he went downstairs and out of the house. When she heard his car pull out of the drive, she picked up the cup and flung it madly through the bathroom door. It shattered, leaving a dark mark on the porcelain of the shower stall. And Rebecca began to cry as she knew she would now have to touch up the tiling, just to cover the tracks of her temper.

She did find one sympathetic party later that afternoon, however. Melissa came by, a loyal new friend with a willing ear. Conversation followed. Eventually, Rebecca described for Melissa the events of the previous evening.

“I want to see it,” Melissa said. “Show me the wall where the writing was. I’m fascinated by this whole thing,” she said. “I have to see the exact spot.”

They walked upstairs together. Rebecca took Melissa to the yellow room. The two women stood before the freshly painted wall. No message, or even any sign of one. And Rebecca’s friend seemed almost merry about the event.

“It makes perfect sense,” Melissa finally said, nodding as if in approval.

“What does?” Rebecca asked.

“If the writing had appeared and remained on the wall, you would be safe to think nothing of it,” Melissa said. “It would have been old seepage brought to the surface by the chemistry of the fresh paint. But the fact that it appeared and then disappeared? Why, then it’s obvious, isn’t it? Isn’t everything very clear to you by now? The dreams. The noises. The feelings in this room, honey? A message?”

Melissa smiled. She was incandescently pretty when she smiled like that.

“Come on, Becca,” Melissa continued. “You’re fighting back your own orgasm. Let things go. Believe what your eyes and ears and brains are telling you.”

“And what is that?’

“You got a ghost, honey. This is so cool! You got a friendly spirit in this place and your friendly spirit is here to help you. Go with it, baby. Communicate with it. But whatever you do, don’t fight it off because they only come forth when they have a good reason. And ghosts get their feelings hurt real fast.”

Melissa continued to consider the point, eyeing the spot on the wall where the message had reportedly come and gone. Rebecca wanted to say that this was ridiculous, that belief in spirits went against everything she had ever believed. But she wasn’t able to say that.

“I told you once before,” Melissa Ford said, “this is a very fertile area for spirits. Sometime, not now, I’ll tell you some wonderful stories, okay. Just don’t be scared. There’s no reason to be scared.”

Rebecca pressed her hands to her face for a moment and expelled a long sigh of relief. At least someone believed her. At least she had someone to confide in.

Her relief was tempered somewhat by the thought that even if she was crazy, maybe Melissa was just as nuts. Who knew, for example, exactly where Melissa was coming from with all her graveyard and supernatural fascination?

Then Melissa broke that mood, too, when they wandered into the master bedroom. Looking into the bathroom, Melissa spotted the fresh mark in the shower stall where the airborne coffee cup had shattered.

“Looks like you had a tough morning,” Melissa said, a sly grin crossed her face. “Husband problems? Or should I mind my own business?” Rebecca nodded.

“Husband problems,” Rebecca said.

“Sex? He doesn’t think he’s getting enough?”

“Melissa… Don’t go there, please?”

“Who threw something? You or him?”

“I did.” Rebecca broke a smile. “After he left for work.” They both began to laugh.

“Got some spare tiles?” Melissa finally asked. “I’ll help you touch up.”

Rebecca nodded. Touching up would only take a few minutes. But Rebecca and Melissa did it together. And Rebecca thanked fate that she had at least one trusted friend in this strange new place.

Ed Van Allen sat down at a table in the research annex of the Los Angeles public library and felt — not for the first time — like a first-class jerk. It was, however, the first time that he had ever filed call slips for this particular section of the library’s holdings: the LoBrutto Paranormal Research Collection.

He waited, wondering among other things who the LoBrutto guy was who had donated all this bizarre stuff to the city’s reading public.

And then Van Allen waited some more.

Several minutes after he first sat down, he watched a short, slight woman with a tight bun of gray hair approach his table. Her name tag identified her. Her name was Mildred Canary, she was a “Mrs.,” and her title was assistant reference librarian. Best of all, she was cradling an assortment of books in her thin arms.

“Here we are, sir,” she said breathlessly as she arrived. She set four books upon the table. All of the volumes were old. None had jackets. One was very slim and all were aging. None of this was available on the internet: Van Allen had checked.

Mildred Canary arranged the books in front of him so that he could see the titles on their spines.

“Detective Van Allen. File request number 132. Am I correct?” she asked.

“You are,” he answered.

“These are your research requests,” she continued, looking them over. “Or at least this is what’s available.”

Mildred spoke in a meticulously intense, quasi-hushed voice that she must have learned while picking up her master’s degree in library science from Berkeley. Where else could she have learned to talk like that? Where else, Van Allen wondered, could every librarian in California have learned it? Her tones and her diction added distinction if not a decibel level to each syllable she softly barked.