Cemetery of Angels (4 page)

“I think,’ she said, “I could finally buy this idea.”

“And,” Bill Moore said, “Mr. Shaved Head would never turn up again.” Her eyes found his.

“You’re trying to tell me that you’re doing this for me?” she asked. “It’s for both of us. Or for that matter, all four of us. We’re in our thirties. If we cash out here with the house, we’ll have enough money. If we don’t like California, we’ll kiss it good bye after a year or two.” Another few moments of thought.

“Okay. I just bought the idea,” she said. He kissed her. He never mentioned Sergeant Chandler’s final spin on the Tremont Lane incident.

In the weeks that followed, the Moores did some cosmetic fix-ups on their home, and then put the house on the market. They set a reasonable price and hoped for a quick sale.

Bill flew to California and back to secure his position in his former college roommate’s architecture firm. While he was away, Rebecca and the children stayed with friends. And the more she considered the move, the more receptive she was to the idea. Once a week, she saw the psychiatrist. Dr. Miller thought that a change of scene might help ease her residual fears. Miller also offered the name and address of another man in California, a Dr. Henry Einhom, to whom she could speak if she felt she wanted to continue seeing a professional. Rebecca put Dr. Einhorn’s name in her laptop.

Meanwhile, the investigation of her abduction receded. Sergeant Chandler thought about the incident repeatedly. It was like a tune that stays involuntary upon one’s mind early in a day and of which one can’t rid oneself. There was something about the case, Chandler kept thinking, that wasn’t quite right. But he couldn’t figure out what it was. Someday, he vowed, he’d take a walk in those woods again and see if he could get lucky and find an arrowhead. Or a bullet.

But, now given to nightmares and daydreams, Rebecca Moore kept seeing the face of the man who had attacked her. Somehow she knew that he had been there to kill her. And she sensed all along that the police were skeptical about her story.

But she
knew
that there had been a beastlike man bent on killing her. What she didn’t know was why. In her mind, the incident kept replaying like a film projector stuck for eternity on the same reel. She searched for clues and for meaning. And hundreds of times a day, in her mind, she saw the horrible face of her assailant, always accompanied by the notion that someday, possibly out of nowhere, he would re-appear.

“I think you might like this,” Esther Lewisohn, the real estate lady, whispered in a mildly conspiratorial voice. She stood on the porch of a neglected seven-decade-old Queen Anne house.

Mrs. Lewisohn was a pleasantly pushy woman with a crown of platinum hair that gave her the final three inches of a five foot four stature. She specialized in private homes in West LA, Beverly Hills, and the better neighborhoods contiguous to both. She had done well over the last twenty years, much better than she had done as a math teacher in the New York City public school system in the first two decades of her working life.

She fished through her purse, pushing aside two open soft packs of Marlboros and three in progress packs of sugar-free gum. Then she found the right key. “I think,” she said, “this might be exactly what you’re looking for.”

With those words and all the rosy promises contained therein, Esther smiled to her customers who had flown in from the East, Bill and Rebecca Moore. Then she held aloft the key that she had picked up from the lawyer’s office half an hour earlier.

“Something told me,” she said in a salty, chipper tone. “Some little inner voice that Essie always listens to, that’s what told me. It said that you should see this house right away, Mr. and Mrs. Moore. Let’s see if Essie is right.”

Then she turned the key in the drop bolt lock to the front door at 2136 Topango Gardens. It was the sixth house the Moores had seen on that warm afternoon in early July. Real estate overkill was starting to set in for the day and Essie knew it.

The drop bolt fought her. But then the rusty innards of the locking mechanism gave a little shudder. As Essie persistently jiggled the key with her arthritic sixty-two-year-old fingers, she could feel something like a small pulsation.

Then the key moved grudgingly clockwise and the tiny tumblers gave way within.

The resistance expired, like little grasping fingers losing their grip.

“There!” Esther said. “We’re going to be the first people to see this house since it came on the market yesterday. Judge it not for what it is. Judge it for what it can be.”

Bill Moore grunted something noncommittal. His wife, Rebecca, was more optimistic.

Esther reached to the doorknob and turned it.

The front door of 2136 Topango Gardens gave a few inches, accompanied by a hesitant creak. Then the real estate broker pushed the door and it, like the lock, abandoned its fight.

“No lock can keep me and the Moores out of this house,” Essie proclaimed. Bill and Rebecca Moore watched as daylight flooded onto the bare floorboards that had waited beyond the front door. Bold sunlight, reflected off an untidy front lawn of brown grass, attacked the shrouded darkness within the building.

Two unsettled worlds collided: a conflict in an unfathomable, misunderstood universe where time did not exist. Somewhere within the house, something stirred from a long, dark narcosis of sleep. A blast of tomb-scented mustiness, a hostile cold from an undisturbed basement, an anti-valentine from another world, rose from God-knows-where to confront the intruders. But no human could see it. Not yet.

“There,” Essie said, opening the door on the faded dwelling in West Los Angeles. “Maybe this is a place you can call home. But as I warned you, you must use your imagination. This is a wonderful house. It has a soul. But it’s been sadly neglected.” She paused. “Well, Mr. Moore, you’re an architect. You can see that for yourself.”

Essie recoiled from the mustiness of the place. An aroma of stale agedness accosted them. It gripped them the way fog grips a city, and then brushed past them. They thought they could feel something cold as it wafted by. Essie stepped forward.

“Wow! What was that?” she muttered. Bill and Rebecca followed.

“What was what?” Rebecca answered.

“Nothing. The lady who lived here for many years passed away just before Christmas of last year,” Essie said, leading them in. “Judith Dickinson was her name. Lovely woman. I’m sorry she’s dead. Well, actually,” she added with a wink, “I’m not sorry because I’m going to do her a favor and sell her house to some nice people.”

Mrs. Lewisohn flicked a light switch, but the power was down.

“This building has been tied up with the estate lawyers since then,” she said disgustedly. “I’ve been wanting to put it on the market ever since Mrs. Dickinson died. But of course I got no cooperation from ‘Nickels, The Lawyer.’”

“Who?” Bill Moore asked, glancing around the front hall and moving behind Essie toward the living room.

“Nickels, The Lawyer,” Essie said. “His real name is Ted Nickels. But ‘Nickels The Lawyer’ is what I call him.” She mouthed his name with growing venom, as if she had been dealing with a Bensonhurst wise guy: Vinnie “The Hammer” or Patty “The Torch.’”

Nickels The Lawyer.

She paused for a moment. There was a resonance of the Grand Concourse in her pattern of speech.

“Lawyers,” she said disgustedly. “I hate lawyers. My late husband was a lawyer. Nickels is a cheapskate. That’s the problem. They’re all cheapskates. Democrats and cheapskates. Tell me how I can show a house without electricity? How can my customers see?” Essie wrote herself a note. “How can I sell real estate in darkness?” she pleaded.

The Moores smiled, their only response to Essie’s rhetorical flights.

“If the electricity’s a problem we could come back” Rebecca Moore offered.

“Not a chance,” Essie said. “I wouldn’t waste your time. Ignore the electricity. It’s bright outside. We’ll open doors. We’ll pull up shades. I’ll light a torch. We’ll start a religion. You’ll be able to see perfectly. Let me show you the house.”

Bill and Rebecca Moore already knew a few things. They knew, for example, what their eyes had told them on arrival.

For starters, this particular house was the eyesore of an otherwise genteel block. It was a rambling, wooden dissolute Queen Anne seven-eighths dead, not from old age but from neglect, and it was looking for a final shot at resuscitation. It was the most downtrodden building in a neighborhood of gorgeously restored Spanish, Victorian, and Queen Anne homes nestled among the generous trees and plush lawns.

Its entrance featured seventeen uneven flagstones traversing an untidy front lawn, which was brown with dead grass. There should have been nineteen flagstones, but two near the sidewalk had either been stolen or had walked off by themselves. There was also a front porch that sagged painfully, the one upon which they had stood to enter. Upon it, stood the skeleton of a torn apart cane rocker.

And beside the front door there was a sign that read, rather wistfully, “FOR SALE.” The sign had been put there by the late Mrs. Dickinson. She had actually never wanted to sell the place, Essie explained as they walked through, but she had enjoyed the company of people coming to the door to inquire.

The sign had also been there for a while, though only a fraction of the time as the house. Like the paint on the wood of the dwelling, the sign was faded and peeling.

Mrs. Dickinson had lived with nine cats, the aroma of which kept the visiting time of callers at a minimum. Even Nickels, the cheapskate lawyer, had agreed to invest a few bucks to have the joint fumigated after Mrs. Dickinson’s earthly departure.

On the ground floor there were some boarded front windows. And on both sides were their companion pieces: windows with glass so filthy that they looked tinted. Broken green shades hung unevenly on the inside of each. As the Moores discovered when Essie gave them their tour, the windows looked even dirtier from the inside.

Strangely enough, the house wasn’t really a monstrosity. It only looked like one. But initially it didn’t look promising, either. In fact, Bill Moore’s first impression was one of menace. What made it worse was that as Bill Moore stood in the living room, and as Essie set down her notebook and her glasses on a small table — the sole remaining piece of furniture in the living room — he could have sworn he heard a voice.

Or a thought. Somewhere.

Who are these intruders?

But then the women came back from the kitchen.

“You know, Bill,” Rebecca said, “like Mrs. Lewisohn said, if you use your imagination…”

“It will take a lot of imagination,” Bill Moore said. “And a lot of money. And a lot of scraping and painting. Which doesn’t rule it out.”

“I know,” Rebecca answered.

“I’m just being practical,” he said.

“Of course. As always.” Essie gave him a smile. She loved it when married people bickered gently in front of her.

“Take a look at the backyard, honey,” Rebecca said. “You can see it through the kitchen.”

“Nice?” Bill asked.

“I could picture Karen and Patrick playing there,” she said. “Once we get it cleaned up.” Her raised eyebrow, connoting interest by her for the first time, was met by a similar gesture from him.

Essie smiled.

“You young people just wait till you see the whole house,” Essie continued, forging ahead. “Then you can compare notes. Or we all can talk. Whatever you wish.”

Bill nodded. As Essie turned away, Rebecca blew him a little kiss. He watched carefully. His wife was starting to like the place.

Essie led them upstairs. The steps groaned under their shoes.

Bill, with his architect’s eye, inspected each step as they trod. Old wood, he noted. Probably the original stairs. Might have to be replaced, might need some support, he judged. But the staircase felt structurally sound. Interesting. And someone had used excellent wood when the house had first been built. Interesting again.

He was further intrigued when he came to the second floor landing. There had been a bathroom on the first floor. There was a second bathroom, plus a half on the second floor. The porcelain was aged in all three baths and would have to be torn out, and the half bathroom would have to be expanded. The walls were filthy. And the cats must have had the run of one of the four bedrooms, because he still caught a strong whiff of something unpleasant coming from somewhere.

But again, this was cosmetics.

Bill put his hand on the doorknob to the fourth bedroom and couldn’t make it move. It was as if there were some force on the other side holding it. Bill Moore was startled for a moment, because the knob almost seemed to have a life of its own. It pulled back against his hand. He was certain. And again, Bill cocked his head. It was almost as if he could hear someone murmuring in a low disquieting voice. Not that he could make out the words. He stood still. Yes, indeed! He had heard something! Was he experiencing some strange current of sound? Was there a radio on somewhere? Perhaps in a neighbor’s house. He was tuned into something that sounded like the low rumble of an electronic voice in a distant room. He listened for another two seconds, his hand still upon the stubborn doorknob. Yes, again! He was certain that he was hearing a…

“Trouble with the door?” Essie asked, appearing merrily next to him. “It happens with the weather. We get a Santa Ana blowing this time of the year. Even with the dry wind, there’s just enough humidity, and sooner or later the doors and drawers start sticking. It’s part of the price Californians pay for all the sunshine.”

Essie put a hand on the knob, pressed it downward and then, with decades of experience selling homes jerked the knob and twisted it. She gave the door a sharp uppercut shot with her knee. The knob released.

“There!” she snorted.

The door opened onto a corner bedroom, square on one side, rounded on the other. The chamber was badly dilapidated, but otherwise it was a splendid little room.

Rebecca followed her husband and poked her head in.

“This is so cozy,” she said. “The kids will fight over it.”