Not so the dead man.
The rain has pressed the unruly thicket of his hair flat against his scalp. His features are expressionless, except for the need in his eyes. He carries a somewhat bulky object in his arms, bundled up in wet newspapers. She can’t quite identify it. She knows what he carries is roundish, about the size of a soccer ball, but that is all. All other details have been swallowed in the play of shadow that the rain has drawn from the neon signs overhead and the streetlight on the corner.
She is not afraid of the dead man, only puzzled. Because she knows him in life. Because she has seen him glowering from the mouths of alleyways, sleeping in doorways. He has never been truly dangerous, despite his appearance to the contrary.
What are you doing here? she wants to ask him. What do you want from me? But her voice betrays her as much as her body, and what issues forth are only sounds, unrecognizable as words.
She wakes just as he begins to hand her what he is carrying.
The dream was very much upon Angel’s mind as she later looked down at the pathetic bundle of rag-covered bones Everett Hoyle’s corpse made at the back of the alley. But since she had always believed that the supernatural belonged only to the realm of fiction, film and the tabloids, she refused to allow the dream to take root in her imagination.
Jilly would call what she had experienced prescience; she thought of it only as an unhappy coincidence, and let it go no further. Instead she focused her attention on the latest addition to the city’s murder-victim statistics.
No one was going to miss Everett, she thought, least of all her. Still, she couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. It was an alien reaction insofar as Everett was concerned.
The streets were filled with angry individuals, but the reasons behind their anger usually made sense: lost homes, lost jobs, lost families. Drink, or drugs. Institutions turning out their chronic psychiatric patients because the government couldn’t afford their care. Victims of neglect or abuse who discovered too late that escaping to a life on the street wasn’t the answer.
But Everett was simply mean-spirited.
He had a face that would make children cry. He wasn’t deformed, he simply wore a look of rage that had frozen his features into a roadmap of constant fury. He stood a cadaverous six-four, which was more than merely intimidating to those from whom he was trying to cadge spare change; it could be downright frightening. With that manner, with his matted shock of dirty grey hair and tattered clothing, he didn’t seem so much a man down on his luck as some fearsome scarecrow that had ripped itself free from its support pole and gone out to make the world around him as unpleasant as he felt himself. Which put him about one step up from those men who had to kill their families before they put the gun in their own mouth and pulled the trigger.
No, Angel corrected herself. Think in the past tense now, because Everett had terrorized his last passerby.
Surprisingly, death had brought a certain calm to his features, smoothing away the worst of the anger that normally masked them. This must be what he looked like when he was sleeping, Angel thought. Except he wasn’t asleep. The blood pooled around his body bore stark testimony to that. She’d already checked for a pulse and found none. Having called the police before she left the office, now it was simply a matter of waiting for them to arrive.
The scene laid out before her held an anomaly that wouldn’t stop nagging her. She took a step closer and studied the body. It was like a puzzle with one piece missing, and it took her a few minutes before she could finally pinpoint what was bothering her. She turned to the young white boy who’d come to her office twenty minutes ago and brought her back to where he’d found the body.
“What happened to his boots, Robbie?” she asked.
Everett’s footwear had been distinctive: threadbare Oxfords transformed into boots by stitching the upper half of a pair of Wellingtons onto the leather of each of the shoes. Olive green with yellow trim on the left; black with red trim on the right. The Oxfords were so old and worn that they were devoid of any recognizable color themselves.
“I guess Macaulay took ‘em,” the boy replied.
“You never said Macaulay was here with you.”
Robbie shrugged.
She waited for him to elaborate, but Robbie simply stood beside her, face washed pale by the streetlight coming in from the mouth of the alley, thin shoulders stooped, one Dr. Marten kicking at the trash underfoot. His dirty-blonde hair was so short it was no more than stubble. He wouldn’t meet her gaze.
Angel sighed. “All right,” she said. “I’ll bite. Why did Macaulay take the boots?”
“Well, you know what the homes are saying, Miz Angel. Man gets nined, you got to take away his shoes or he’s gonna go walkin‘ after he’s dead. He’ll be lookin’ for who took him down, usually, but Everett now—he’s so mean I suppose anybody’d do.”
With all her years of working with street people, dealing with the myriad superstitions that ran rampant through the tenements and squats, Angel thought she’d heard it all. But this was a new one, even on her.
“You don’t believe that, do you?” she asked.
“No, ma’am. But I’d say Macaulay surely do.”
Robbie spoke casually enough, but Angel could tell there was more to what had happened here tonight than he was letting on. He was upset—a natural enough reaction, considering the circumstances. Keeping Everett’s corpse company until the police arrived had upset her as well. But the tension underlying Robbie’s seeming composure spoke of more.
Before she could find just the right way to persuade him to open up to her, one of the sirens that could be heard at all hours of the day or night in this part of the city disengaged itself from the general hubbub of night sounds and became more distinct. Moments later, a cruiser pulled up, blocking the mouth of the alley. The cherry-red lights of its beacons strobed inside the alley, turning the scene into a macabre funhouse. Backlit, the two officers who stepped out of the cruiser took on menacing shapes: shadows, devoid of features.
At Angel’s side, Robbie began to tremble, and she knew she wouldn’t get anything from him now. Hands kept carefully in view, she went to meet the approaching officers.
Angelina Marceau ran a youth distress center on Grasso Street, from which she got her nickname, the Grasso Street Angel. She looked like an angel as well: heart-shaped face surrounded by a cascade of dark curly hair, deep warm eyes, next to no makeup because she didn’t need it with her clear complexion. Her trim figure didn’t sport wings, and she leaned more toward baggy pants, T-shirts and hightops than she did harps and white gowns, but that didn’t matter to those living on the streets of Newford. So far as they were concerned, all she lacked was a visible halo.
Angel wasn’t feeling particularly angelic by the time three A.M. rolled around that night. She sat wearily in her office, gratefully nursing a mug of coffee liberally spiked with a shot of whiskey, which Jilly had handed to her when she walked in the door.
“I appreciate your looking after the place while I was at the precinct,” she said.
“It wasn’t a problem,” Jilly told her. “No one showed up.”
Angel nodded. Word on the street moved fast. If the Grasso Street Angel was at the precinct, no one was going to keep his appointment and take the chance of running into one of the precinct bulls. The only one of her missed appointments that worried her was Patch. She’d spent weeks trying to convince him at least to look into the sponsorship program she administered, only to have this happen when she’d finally gotten him to agree. Patch was so frail now that she didn’t think the boy would survive another beating at the hands of his pimp.
“So how’d it go?” Jilly asked.
It took Angel a moment to focus on what she’d been asked. She took a sip of her coffee, relaxing as the warmth from the whiskey reached her stomach.
“We were lucky,” she said. “It was Lou’s shift. He made sure they went easy on Robbie when they took our statements. They’ve got an APB out
on Macaulay.”
“Robbie. He’s the skinny little peacenik that looks like a skinhead?”
Angel smiled. “That’s one way of putting it. There’s no way he could have killed Everett.”
“How did Everett die?”
“He was stabbed to death—a half-dozen times at least.”
Jilly shivered. “They didn’t find the knife?”
“They didn’t find the weapon and—I find this really odd—they didn’t find Everett’s boots either. Robbie says Macaulay took them so that Everett’s ghost wouldn’t be able to come after anyone.” She shook her head. “I guess they just make them up when they haven’t got anything better to do.”
“Actually, it’s a fairly old belief,” Jilly said.
Angel took another sip of her whiskey-laced coffee to fortify herself against what was to come. For all her fine traits, and her unquestionable gifts as an artist, Jilly had a head filled with what could only charitably be called whimsy. Probably it was because she was an artist and had such a fertile imagination, Angel had eventually decided. Still, whatever the source, Jilly was ready to espouse the oddest theories at the drop of a hat, everything from Victorian-styled fairies living in refuse dumps to Bigfoot wandering through the Tombs.
Angel had learned long ago that arguing against them was a fruitless endeavor, but sometimes she couldn’t help herself.
“Old,” she said, “and true as well, I suppose.”
“It’s possible,” Jilly said, plainly oblivious to Angel’s lack of belief. “I mean, there’s a whole literature of superstition surrounding footwear. The one you’re talking about dates back hundreds of years and is based on the idea that shoes were thought to be connected with the life essence, the soul, of the person to whom they belonged. The shoes of murdered people were often buried separately to prevent hauntings. And sorcerers were known to try to persuade women to give them their left shoes. If the woman did, the sorcerer would have power over her.”
“Sorcerers?” Angel repeated with a cocked eyebrow.
“Think what you want,” Jilly told her, “but it’s been documented in old witch trials.”
“Really?”
“Well, it’s been documented that they were accused of it,” Jilly admitted.
Which wasn’t quite the same thing as being true, Angel thought, but she kept the comment to herself.
Jilly put her feet up on a corner of Angel’s desk and started to pick at the paint that freckled her fingernails. There always were smudges of paint on her clothes, or in her tangled hair. Jilly looked up to find Angel watching her work at the paint and shrugged unselfconsciously, a smile waking sparks of humor in her pale blue eyes that made them seem as electric as sapphires.
“So what’re you going to do?” Jilly asked.
“Do? I’m not going to do anything. I’m a counselor, not a cop.”
“But you could find Macaulay way quicker than the police could.”
Angel nodded in agreement. “But what I do is based on trust—you know that. If I found Macaulay and turned him over to the police, even though it’s just for questioning, who’s going to trust me?”
“I guess.”
“What I am going to do is have another talk with Robbie,” Angel said. “He’s taken all of this very badly.”
“He actually liked Everett?”
Angel shook her head. “I don’t think anyone liked Everett. I think it’s got to do with finding the body. He’s probably never seen a dead man before. I have, and I’m still feeling a little queasy.”
She didn’t mention that Robbie had seemed to be hiding something. That was Robbie’s business, and even if he did share it with her, it would still be up to him who could know about it and who could not. She just prayed that he hadn’t been any more involved in Everett’s death than having stumbled upon the body.
“Actually,” she said after a moment’s hesitation, “there was another weird thing that happened tonight.”
Although she knew she’d regret it, because it was putting a foot into the strange world Jilly inhabited, where fact mixed equally with fantasy, she told Jilly about her dream. As Angel had expected, Jilly accepted what she was told as though it were an everyday occurrence.
“Has this ever happened to you before?” she asked.
Angel shook her head. “And I hope it never happens again. It’s a really creepy feeling.”
Jilly seemed to be only half-listening to her. Her eyes had narrowed thoughtfully. Chewing at her lower lip, she cocked her head and studied the ceiling. Angel didn’t know what Jilly saw up there, but she doubted it was the cracked plaster that anybody else would see.
“I wonder what he wanted from you,” Jilly finally said. Her gaze dropped and focused on Angel’s. “There has to be a reason he sent his spirit to you.”
Angel shook her head. “Haven’t you ever dreamed that someone you know died?”
“Well, sure. But what’s that—”
“And did they turn out to be dead when you woke?”
“No, but—”
“Coincidence,” Angel said. “That’s all it was. Plain and simple coincidence.”
Jilly looked as though she was ready to argue the point, but then she simply shrugged.
“Okay,” she said, swinging her feet down from the desk. “But don’t say you weren’t warned when Everett’s spirit comes back to haunt you again. He wants something from you and the thing with ghosts is they can be patient forever. He’ll keep coming back until you figure out what he wants you to do for him and you do it.”
“Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?”
“I’m serious, Angel.”
Angel smiled. “I’ll remember.”
“I just bet you will,” Jilly said, returning her smile. She stood up. “Well, I’ve got to run. I was in the middle of a new canvas when you called.”
Angel rose to her feet as well. “Thanks for filling in.”
“Like I said, it was no problem. The place was dead.” Jilly grimaced as the word came out of her mouth. “Sorry about that. But at least a building doesn’t have shoes to lose, right?”
After Jilly left, Angel returned to her desk with another spiked coffee. She stared out the window at Grasso Street where the first touch of dawn was turning the shadows to grey, unable to get Everett’s stockinged feet out of her mind. Superimposed over it was an image of Everett in the rain, holding out a shadowed bundle towards her.
One real, one from a dream. Neither made sense, but at least the dream wasn’t supposed to. When it came to Everett’s boots, though…
She disliked the idea of someone believing superstitions almost as much as she did the superstitions themselves. Taking a dead man’s shoes so he wouldn’t come back seeking revenge. It was so patently ludicrous.
But Macaulay had believed enough to take them.
Angel considered Jim Macaulay. At nineteen, he was positively ancient compared to the street kids such as Robbie whose company he kept, though he certainly didn’t look it. His cherubic features made him seem much younger. He’d been in and out of foster homes and juvie hall since he was seven, but the experiences had done little to curb his minor criminal ways, or his good humor. Macaulay always had a smile, even when he was being arrested.
Was he good for Everett’s murder? Nothing in Macau-
lay’s record pointed to it. His crimes were always nonviolent: B&Es, minor drug dealing, trafficking in stolen goods. Nothing to indicate that he’d suddenly upscaled to murder. And where was the motive? Everett had carried nothing of value on his person—probably never had—and everyone knew it. And while it was true he’d been a royal pain in the ass, the street people just ignored him when he got on a rant.
But then why take the boots?
If Macaulay believed the superstition, why would he be afraid of Everett coming after him unless he had killed him?
Too tired to go home, Angel put her head down on the desk and stared out the window. She dozed off, still worrying over t
he problem.
Nothing has changed in her dream.
The rain continues to mist. Everett approaches her again, no less graceful, while she remains trapped in the weight of her flesh. The need is still there in Everett’s eyes, the mysterious bundle still cradled against his chest as he comes up to her. But this time she finds enough of her voice to question him.
Why is he here in her dream?
“For the children,” he says.
It seems such an odd thing for him to say: Everett, who’s never had a kind word for anyone, so far as Angel knows.
“What do you mean?” she asks him.
But then he tries to hand the bundle to her and she wakes up again.
Angel sat up with a start. She was disoriented for a long moment—as much by her surroundings as from the dream— before she recognized the familiar confines of her office and remembered falling asleep at her desk.
She shook her head and rubbed at her tired eyes. Twice in the same night. She had to do something about these hours, but knew she never would.
The repetition of the dream was harder to set aside. She could almost hear Jilly’s voice, I-told-you-so plain in its tone.
Don’t say you weren’t warned when Everett’s spirit comes back to haunt you again.
But it had been just a dream.
He wants something from you, and the thing with ghosts is they can be patient forever.
A disturbing dream. That shadowed bundle Everett kept trying to hand to her and his enigmatic reply, “For the children.”
He’ll keep coming back until you figure out what it is he wants you to do for him and you do it.
She didn’t need this, Angel thought. She didn’t want to become part of Jilly’s world, where the rules of logic were thrown out the door and nothing made sense anymore. But this dream… and Macaulay taking those damn boots….
She remembered Jilly asking her what she was going to do and what her own reply had been. She still didn’t want to get involved. Her job was helping the kids, not playing cop. But the image of the dream-Everett flashed in her mind, the need in his eyes and what he’d said when she’d asked him why he was there in her dream.
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