The Vision (8 page)

“Many possibilities.” He looked concerned about her.

“I’m not crazy,” she said.

“Did I say you were?”

“We’ve seen a poltergeist in action.”

“I don’t believe in them either,” he said.

“I do. I’ve seen them work before. I was never sure if they were spirits or not. But now I am.”

“Mary—”

“A poltergeist. It came to stop me from seeing the killer’s face.”

Behind them the display shelves toppled and struck the floor with a thunderous crash.

9

Max was not
at home.

Without him Mary felt that the house was a mausoleum. Her footsteps on the hardwood floor seemed louder than usual, the echoes full of sinister voices.

“He called earlier,” Anna Churchill said, as she wiped her hands on her apron. “He asked me to delay dinner half an hour.”

“Why?”

“He said to tell you he wouldn’t be back until eight o’clock because Woolworth’s is open late for Christmas shopping.”

She knew that Max had meant to make her laugh with that message, but she couldn’t even smile. The only thing that would lift her spirits was the sight of him. She didn’t want to be alone.

As she went through the parlor on her way to the mahogany staircase, she felt dwarfed by the heavy European furniture. With the memory of the poltergeist fresh in her mind, she expected each piece of furniture to come to life, and she didn’t know how she would survive if the chairs and sofas and corner cabinets began to rush at her with murderous intent.

The furniture did not move.

Upstairs, in her bathroom, she took a bottle of Valium from the medicine cabinet. She had been able to conceal her nervousness when she was with Emmet and Anna; but now her hands shook so badly that she needed almost a minute to get the safety cap off the container. She poured a glass of cold water, swallowed one of the capsules. One didn’t seem like much. She felt she could use two. Maybe three. “God, no,” she said, and she quickly replaced the cap before temptation got the better of good judgment.

As she was leaving the bathroom, the empty water glass fell to the floor, shattered. Startled, she whirled around. She was sure she hadn’t set the tumbler on the edge of the sink. It had not fallen: Something had knocked it off.

“Max, please come home,” she said softly.

* * *

She waited for
him in the second-floor den, his favorite room, a room crammed full of guns and books. Antique rifles expertly restored and mounted in wall display boxes. Matched sets of Hemingway, Stevenson, Poe, Shaw, Fitzgerald, Dickens. A pair of 1872 No. 3 Colt Derringers in a silk-lined, brass-bound carrying case. Novels by John D. MacDonald, Clavell, Bellow, Woolrich, Levin, Vidal; volumes of nonfiction by Gay Talese, Colin Wilson, Hellman, Toland, Shirer. Shotguns, rifles, revolvers, automatic pistols. Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, James M. Cain, Jessamyn West.

Guns and books were an odd combination, Mary thought. However, next to her, they were the two things that Max liked most.

She tried to read a current bestseller that she had been meaning to begin for weeks, but her mind wandered. She put the book aside, went to Max’s desk, sat down. She took a pen and a writing tablet from the center drawer.

For a while she stared at the blank page. Finally she wrote:

Page 1

Questions:

Why am I having these visions when I don’t seek them out?

Why, suddenly, for the first time, am I able to feel the pain that the victims in the visions feel?

Why hasn’t any other clairvoyant ever felt his visions?

How could the killer in the beauty shop possibly know I was watching?

Why would a poltergeist attempt to keep me from seeing this killer’s face?

What does all of this mean?

Ever since she was a child, through major and minor crises, she had felt that it helped to write down her problems. When they were before her, summarized in a few words, somehow more concrete in ink than in reality, they usually ceased to appear insoluble.

After she finished composing the list, she read each question carefully, first silently and then aloud.

On the next page of the tablet she wrote:
Answers
.

She thought for a few minutes. Then:
I don’t have any answers
.

“Dammit!” she said.

She threw the pen across the room.

* * *

“Harley Barnes speaking.”

“Chief Barnes, this is Mary Bergen.”

“Why, hello. Are you still in town?”

“No. I’m calling from Bel Air.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I’m writing a column about what happened last night, and I had some questions. The man we caught last night . . . what was his name?”

“Can’t you get it with your clairvoyance?”

“I’m afraid not. I can’t see everything I want.”

“Name’s Richard Lingard.”

“A resident of your town, or an outsider?”

“Born and raised here. I knew his dad and mom. He owned a pharmacy.”

“His age?”

“Early thirties, thereabouts.”

“Is he . . . was he married?”

“Divorced years ago. No children, thank God.”

“Are you sure . . . ”

“Sure there aren’t children? Oh, yes. Positive.”

“No. I meant . . . is he . . . really dead?”

“Dead? Of course he’s dead. Didn’t you see him?”

“I just thought . . . Have you found anything unusual about him?”

“Unusual? In what way?”

“Did his neighbors think he was odd in any way?”

“They liked him. Everyone liked him.”

“Was anything strange found in his home?”

“Nothing. He lived like anyone else. It’s frightening how ordinary he was. If Dick Lingard could turn out to be a psychopathic killer, then who can you trust?”

“No one.”

“Mrs. Bergen . . . ” Barnes hesitated. “Did you take the knife?”

“What knife?”

“Lingard’s knife.”

“You can’t find it?”

“It vanished from the scene.”

“Vanished? Does that happen often?”

“Never before to me.”

“I don’t have it.”

“Perhaps your brother picked it up.”

“Alan wouldn’t do that.”

“Or your husband?”

“We’ve worked with the police many times, Chief. We know enough not to make souvenirs out of the evidence.”

“We’ve searched Mrs. Harrington’s place from top to bottom. The knife isn’t there.”

“Maybe Lingard dropped it on the front lawn.”

“We’ve gone over every inch of that, too.”

“He might have dropped it in the gutter when he collapsed against your squad car.”

“Or on the sidewalk. We didn’t search for the knife immediately, like we should have done, and there was a large crowd of spectators. Maybe one of them picked it up. We’ll ask around. I imagine we’ll come across the thing. At least we don’t need it for any trial. Death solved that problem. There’s no way a smart attorney can get Richard Lingard out on the streets again.”

* * *

At seven-thirty the
all-news radio station in Los Angeles carried a story about four young nurses who had been found beaten and stabbed to death in their Anaheim apartment.

Beverly Pulchaski.

Susan Haven.

Linda Proctor.

Marie Sanzini.

Mary didn’t recognize even one of them.

Perplexed, she sat back from the edge of her chair. She recalled the battered face in last night’s vision: the black-haired, blue-eyed woman. She was
certain
she knew that face.

* * *

8:00
P.M.

She met Max at the front door. When he came inside and closed the door, he put his arms around her. His clothes were cold, crisp with the night air, but the warmth of his body pressed through the fabric.

“Six hours of shopping,” she said, “and no packages?”

“I left them to be gift-wrapped. I’ll pick them up tomorrow.”

Grinning, she said, “I didn’t know Woolworth’s did gift-wrapping.”

He kissed her cheek. “Missed you.”

She leaned back in his arms. “Hey, where’s your overcoat? You’ll catch the flu.”

“It got splashed with mud,” he said. “I dropped it off at the dry cleaner’s.”

“How’d it get muddy?”

“I had a flat tire.”

“A Mercedes
wouldn’t
.”

“Ours did. The spot where I had to change it was muddy. I got splashed by a passing car.”

“Did you get his license number? If you did, I’ll—”

“Unfortunately I didn’t,” Max said. “At the time it happened I thought, ‘If I could get the bastard’s number, Mary would find out who he is and thrash him within an inch of his life.’”

“Nobody hurts my Max and gets away with it.”

“I also cut my finger changing the tire,” he said, holding up his right hand. The cuff of the shirtsleeve was soaked with blood, and one finger was bound in a bloody handkerchief. “There’s a sharp metal edge on the jack,” he said.

She took hold of his wrist. “So much blood! Let’s see the cut.”

“It’s nothing.” He pulled his hand away before she could remove the handkerchief. “It’s stopped bleeding.”

“Maybe it needs stitches.”

“It needs pressure, that’s all. It’s a deep cut, but the area’s too small to take stitches. And the sight will ruin your dinner.”

“Let me look. I’m a big girl now. Besides, it has to be properly cleaned and bandaged.”

“I’ll take care of that,” he said. “You go ahead to the table. I’ll join you in a few minutes.”

“You can’t handle it yourself.”

“Of course I can. I wasn’t always married, you know. I lived alone for years.” He kissed her forehead. “Let’s not upset Mrs. Churchill. If we don’t get to the table soon, she’ll be in tears.”

With his good hand he pushed Mary toward the dining room.

“If you bleed to death,” she said, “I’ll never forgive you.”

Laughing, he hurried to the staircase and climbed the steps two at a time to the second floor.

* * *

Dinner was to
Mary’s taste, hearty yet not heavy. They had onion soup, salad, chateaubriand with béarnaise sauce, and strips of zucchini marinated in oil and garlic, then broiled briefly.

Over coffee in the library, drifting on a pool of serenity formed by a second Valium taken just before Max arrived for dinner, she told him about her day: Cauvel, the pain-filled vision, the poltergeist that had kept her from probing the vision for the name and face of the killer. They discussed the radio report of the dead nurses in Anaheim, which he had also heard, and last of all she told him about her conversation with Harley Barnes.

“You’re emphasizing the missing knife,” Max said. “Isn’t Barnes’s explanation credible enough? A spectator
could
have taken it.”

“Could have—but didn’t.”

“Then who did?”

She was beside him on the sofa. She kicked off her shoes, drew one leg under her, delaying until she could summon the right words. This was a delicate situation. If Max was unable to believe what she had to tell him, he would think her at least
slightly
mad.

“These visions are totally different from any I’ve ever known,” she said at last. “Which means the killer, the source of the psychic emanations, is different from any killer I’ve ever tracked before. He isn’t an ordinary man. I’ve been trying to find a theory that will make sense of what’s happened to me since last night, and when I talked with Barnes I found the key. The missing knife is the key. Don’t you see? Richard Lingard has the knife.”

“Lingard? He’s dead. Barnes shot him. Lingard couldn’t have taken his knife anywhere but to a drawer in the morgue.”

“He could have taken it wherever he wanted. Barnes killed Lingard’s body. Lingard’s spirit took the knife.”

Max was amazed. “I don’t believe in ghosts. And even if spirits
do
exist, they don’t have substance, at least not as we think of it. So how could Lingard’s spirit, a thing of no substance, carry off a very substantial knife?”

“A spirit has no substance, but it does have
power
,” she said emphatically. “Two months ago, when you helped me cover that story in Connecticut, you saw a poltergeist in action.”

“What of it?”

“Well, a poltergeist has no apparent substance, yet it tosses around solid objects, doesn’t it?”

Reluctantly he said, “Yes. But I don’t believe a poltergeist is the spirit of a dead person.”

“What else could it be?” Before he responded she said, “Lingard’s spirit carried away the butcher knife. I
know
it.”

He drank his coffee in three long swallows. “Suppose that’s true. Where’s his spirit now?”

“In possession of someone living.”

“What?”

“As soon as Lingard’s body died, his spirit slipped out of it and into someone else.”

Max got up, walked to the bookshelves. He looked at Mary with eyes that studied, weighed, and judged. “In every session with Cauvel, you’ve come closer to remembering what Berton Mitchell did to you.”

“So you think that because I’m on the verge of knowing, I might be seeking escape from the truth, escape in madness.”

“
Can
you face up to what he did?”

“I’ve lived with it for years, even if I have suppressed it.”

“Living with it and accepting it are two different things.”

“If you think I’m a candidate for a padded room, you don’t know me,” she said, irritated in spite of the Valium.

“I don’t think that. But demonic possession?”

“Not demonic. I’m talking about something less grand than that. This is the possession of a living person by the spirit of someone dead.”

His square, almost ugly face was creased with worry. He spread his arms, his hands, palms up, a supplicant bear. “And who is this living person?”

“The man who killed those nurses in Anaheim. He’s possessed by Lingard, and that’s why the psychic emanations he puts out are so different.”

Max returned to the sofa. “I can’t accept it.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

“The poltergeist phenomena in Cauvel’s office . . . You think—”

“That was Lingard,” she said.

“There’s a problem with that theory,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows.

“How could Lingard’s spirit be in two places at once?” he asked. “How could Lingard be in possession of a man who he’s forcing to commit murder—and at the same time be throwing glass dogs around Cauvel’s office?”

“I don’t know. Who’s to say what a ghost can do?”

* * *

At ten o’clock,
Max came to the master bedroom. He had gone downstairs to the library for a novel and had returned carrying a thick volume—not the book he’d been after. “I talked to Dr. Cauvel just now,” he said.