For the children.
Whether she wanted it or not, she realized that she was involved now. Not in any way that made sense, but indiscriminately, by pure blind chance, which seemed even less fair. It certainly wasn’t because she and Everett had been friends. For God’s sake, she’d never even liked Everett.
For the children.
Angel sighed. She picked up her mug and looked down at the cold mixture of whiskey and coffee. She started to call Jilly, but hung up before she’d finished dialing the number. She knew what Jilly would say.
Grimacing, she drank what was left in her mug, then left her office in search of an answer.
Macaulay had a squat in the same abandoned tenement where Robbie lived, just a few blocks north of Angel’s office on the edge of the Tombs. Angel squinted at the building, then made her way across the rubble-strewn lot that sided the tenement. The front door was boarded shut, so she went around the side and climbed in through a window the way the building’s illegal inhabitants did. Taking a moment to let her eyes adjust to the dimmer light inside, she listened to the silence that surrounded her. Whoever was here today, was obviously asleep.
She knew Macaulay’s squat was on the top floor, so she found the stairwell by the boarded-up entrance and climbed the two flights to the third floor. She looked in through the doorways as she passed by the rooms, heart aching with what she saw. Squatters, mostly kids, were curled up in sleeping bags, under blankets or in nests of newspaper. What were they going to do when winter came and the coolness of late summer nights dropped below the freezing mark?
Macaulay’s room was at the end of the hall, but he wasn’t in. His squat had a door, unlike most of the other rooms, but it stood ajar. Inside it was tidier than Angel had expected. Clean, too. There was a mattress in one corner with a neatly-folded sleeping bag and pillow on top. Beside it was an oil lamp, sitting on the wooden floor, and a tidy pile of spare clothes. Two crates by the door held a number of water-swelled paperbacks with their covers removed. On another crate stood a Coleman stove, a frying pan and some utensils. Inside the crate was a row of canned goods while a cardboard box beside it served to hold garbage.
And then there were the shoes.
Although Angel didn’t know Macaulay’s shoe size, she doubted that any of them would fit him. She counted fifteen pairs, in all shapes and sizes, from a toddler’s tiny sneakers to a woman’s spike-heeled pumps. They were lined up against the wall in a neat row, a miniature mountain range, rising and falling in height, with Everett’s bizarre boots standing like paired peaks at the end closest to the door.
It was a perfectly innocent sight, but Angel felt sick to her stomach as she stood there looking at them. They were all the shoes of children and women—except for Everett’s. Had Macaulay killed all of their—
“Angel.”
She turned to find him standing in the doorway. With the sun coming through the window, making his blonde hair look like a halo, he might have been describing himself as much as calling her name. Her gaze shifted to the line of shoes along the wall, then back to his face. His blue eyes were guileless.
Angel forwent the amenities.
“These… these shoes… ?” she began.
“Shoes carry the imprint of our souls upon their own,” he replied. He paused, then added, “Get it?”
All she was getting was a severe case of the creeps. What had she been thinking to come here on her own? She hadn’t told anyone where she was going. Her own hightops could be joining that line of shoes, set in place beside Everett’s.
Get out while you can, she told herself, but all she could do was ask, “Did you kill him?”
“Who? Everett?”
Angel nodded.
“Do I look like a killer to you?”
No, he looked as though he was on his way to mass—not to confess, but to sing in the choir. But the shoes, something about the way the shoes stood in their tidy, innocuous line, said differently.
“Why did you take them?”
“You’re thinking they’re souvenirs?”
“I… I don’t know what to think.”
“So don’t,” he said with a shrug, then disconcertingly changed the subject. “Well, it’s a good thing you’re here. I was just going out to look for you.”
“Why?”
“Something terrible’s happened to Robbie.”
The flatness of his voice was completely at odds with his choir-boy appearance. Angel’s gaze dropped to his hands,
but they were empty. She’d been expecting to see him holding Robbie’s shoes.
“What… ?”
“You’d better come see.”
He led the way down to the second floor, on the other side of the building, then stood aside at the open door to Robbie’s room. It was as cluttered as Macaulay’s was tidy, but Angel didn’t notice that as she stepped inside. Her gaze was drawn and riveted to the small body hanging by a rope from the overhead light fixture. It turned slowly, as though Robbie’s death throes were just moments past. On the floor under him, a chair lay on its side.
Angel turned to confront Macaulay, but he was gone. She stepped out into the hallway to find it empty. Part of her wanted to run him down, to shake the angelic smugness from his features, but she made herself go back into Robbie’s room. She righted the chair and stood on it. Taking her pen knife from the back pocket of her jeans, she held Robbie against her as she sawed away at the rope. When the rope finally gave, Robbie’s dead weight proved to be too much for her and he slipped from her arms, landing with a thud on the floor.
She jumped down and straightened his limbs. Forcing a finger between the rope and his neck, she slowly managed to loosen the pressure and remove the rope. Then, though she knew it was too late, though his skin was already cooling, she attempted CPR. While silently counting between breaths, she called for help, but no one stirred in the building around her. Either they were sleeping too soundly, or they just didn’t want to get involved. Or maybe, a macabre part of her mind suggested, Macaulay’s already killed them all. Maybe she hadn’t walked by sleeping runaways and street kids on her way to Macaulay’s room, but by their corpses….
She forced the thought out of her mind, refusing to let it take hold.
She worked until she had no more strength left. Slumping against a nearby wall, she stared at the body, but couldn’t see it for the tears in her eyes.
It was a long time before she could get to her feet. When she left Robbie’s room, she. didn’t go downstairs and leave the building to call the police. She went upstairs, to Macaulay’s room. Every room she passed was empty, the sleeping figures all woken and fled. Macaulay’s room was empty as well. It looked the same as it had earlier, with one difference. The sleeping bag and the clothes were gone. The line of shoes remained.
Angel stared at them for a long time before she picked up Everett’s boots. She carried them with her when she left the building and stopped at the nearest pay phone to call the police.
There was no note, but the coroner ruled it a suicide. But there was still an APB out on Macaulay, and no longer only in connection with Everett’s death. Two of the pairs of shoes found in his squat were identified as belonging to recent murder victims; they could only assume that the rest did as well. The police had never connected the various killings, Lou told Angel later, because the investigations were handled by so many different precincts and, other than the missing footwear, the M.O. in each case was completely different.
Behind his cherubic features, Macaulay proved to have been a monster.
What Angel didn’t understand was Robbie’s suicide. She wouldn’t let it go and finally, after a week of tracking down and talking to various street kids, she began to put together another picture of Macaulay. He wasn’t just a killer; he’d also made a habit of molesting the street kids with whom he kept company. Their sex made no difference—just the younger the better. Coming from his background, Macaulay was a classic case of “today’s victim becoming tomorrow
’s predator”—a theorem put forth by Andrew Vachss, a New York lawyer specializing in juvenile justice and child abuse with whom Angel had been in correspondence.
Even more startling was the realization that Macaulay probably hadn’t killed Everett for whatever his usual reasons were, but because Everett had tried to help Robbie stand up to Macaulay. In a number of recent conversations Angel had with runaways, she discovered that Everett had often given them money he’d panhandled, or shown them safe places to flop for a night.
Why Everett had needed to hide this philanthropic side of himself, no one was ever going to find out, but Angel thought she now knew why Robbie had killed himself: It wasn’t just the shame of being abused—a shame that kept too many victims silent—but because Everett had died trying to protect him. For the sweet soul that Robbie had been, Angel could see how he would be unable to five with himself after what had happened that night.
But the worst was that Macaulay was still free. Two weeks after Everett’s death, he still hadn’t been apprehended. Lou didn’t hold out much hope of finding him.
“A kid like that,” he told Angel over lunch the following Saturday, “he can just disappear into the underbelly of any big city. Unless he gets picked up someplace and they run his sheet, we might never hear from him again.”
Angel couldn’t face the idea of Macaulay in some other city, killing, sexually abusing the runaways on its streets, protected by his cherubic features, his easy smile, his guileless eyes.
“All we can hope,” Lou added, “is that he picks himself the wrong victim next time—someone meaner than he is, someone quicker with a knife—so that when we do hear about him again, he’ll be a number on an ID tag in some morgue.”
“But this business of his taking his victims’ shoes,” Angel said..
“We’ve put it on the wire. By this time, every cop in the country has had their duty sergeant read it to them at roll call.”
And that was it. People were dead. Kids already feeling hopeless carried new scars. She had a dead man visiting her in her dreams, demanding she do she didn’t know what. And Macaulay went free.
Angel couldn’t let it go at that, but there didn’t seem to be anything more that she could do.
All week long, as soon as she goes to sleep, Everett haunts her dreams.
“I know what you were really like,” she tells him. “I know you were trying to help the kids in your own way.”
For the children.
“And I know why Macaulay killed you.”
He stands in the misting’ rain, the need still plain in his eyes, the curious bundle held against his chest. He doesn’t try to approach her anymore. He just stands there, half swallowed in mist and shadow, watching her.
“What I don’t know is what you want from me.”
The rain runs down his cheeks like tears.
“For God’s sake, talk to me.”
But all he says is, “Do it for the children. Not for me. For the children.”
“Do what?”
But then she wakes up.
Angel dropped by Jilly’s studio on that Sunday night. Telling Jilly she just wanted some company, for a long time she simply sat on the Murphy bed and watched Jilly paint.
“It’s driving me insane,” she finally said. “And the worst thing is, I don’t even believe in this crap.”
Jilly looked up from her work and pushed her hair back from her eyes, leaving a steak of Prussian blue on the errant locks.
“Even when you dream about him every night?” she asked.
Angel sighed. “Who knows what I’m dreaming, or why.”
“Everett does,” Jilly said.
“Everett’s dead.”
“True.”
“And he’s not telling.”
Jilly laid down her brush and came over to the bed. Sitting down beside Angel, she put an arm around Angel’s shoulders and gave her a comforting hug.
“This doesn’t have to be scary,” she said.
“Easy for you to say. This is all old hat for you. You like the fact that it’s real.”
“But—”
Angel turned to her. “I don’t want to be part of this other world. I don’t want to be standing at the checkout counter and have to seriously consider which of the headlines are real and which aren’t. I can’t deal with that. I can barely deal with this… this haunting.”
“You don’t have to deal with anything except for Everett,” Jilly told her. “Most people have a very effective defensive system against paranormal experiences. Their minds just automatically find some rational explanation for the unexplainable that allows them to put it aside and carry on with their lives. You’ll be able to do the same thing. Trust me on this.”
“But then I’ll just be denying something that’s real.”
Jilly shrugged. “So?”
“I don’t get it. You’ve been trying to convince me for years that stuff like this is real and now you say just forget it?”
“Not everybody’s equipped to deal with it,” Jilly said. “I just always thought you would be. But I was wrong to keep pushing at you about it.”
“That makes me feel inadequate.”
Jilly shook her head. “Just normal.”
“There’s something to be said for normal,” Angel said.
“It’s comforting,” Jilly agreed. “But you do have to deal with Everett, because it doesn’t look like he’s going to leave you alone until you do.”
Angel nodded slowly. “But do what? He won’t tell me what he wants.” “It happens like that,” Jilly said. “Most times spirits can’t communicate in a straightforward manner, so they have to talk in riddles, or mime, or whatever. I think that’s where all the obliqueness in fairy tales comes from: They’re memories of dealing with real paranormal encounters.”
“That doesn’t help.”
“I know it doesn’t,” Jilly said. She smiled. “Sometimes I think I just talk to hear my own voice.” She looked across her studio to where finished paintings lay stacked against the wall beside her easel, then added thoughtfully, “I think I’ve got an idea.”
Angel gave her a hopeful look.
“When’s the funeral?” Jilly asked.
“Tomorrow. I took up a collection and raised enough so that Everett won’t have to be buried in a pauper’s grave.”
“Well, just make sure Everett’s buried with his boots on,” Jilly told her.
“That’s it?”
Jilly shrugged. “It scared Macaulay enough to take them, didn’t it?”
“I suppose….”
For all she’s learned about his hidden philanthropic nature, she still feels no warmth towards the dead man. Sympathy, yes. Even pity. But no warmth.
The need in his eyes merely replaces the anger they wore in life; it does nothing to negate it.
“You were buried today,” she says. “With your boots on.”
The slow smile on the dead man’s face doesn’t fit well. It seems more a borrowed expression than one his features ever knew. For the first time in over a week, he approaches her again.
“A gift,” he says, offering up the newspaper-wrapped bundle. “For the children.”
For the children.
He’s turned into a broken record, she thinks, stuck on one phrase.
She watches him as he moves into the light. He peels away the soggy newspaper, then holds up Macaulay’s severed head. He grips it by the haloing blonde hair, a monstrous, bloody artifact that he thrusts into her face.
Angel woke screaming. She sat bolt upright, clutching the covers to her chest. She had no idea where she was. Nothing looked right. Furniture loomed up in unfamiliar shapes, the play of shadows was all wrong. When a hand touched her shoulder, she flinched and screamed again, but it was only Jilly.
She remembered then, sleeping over, going to bed, late, late on that Sunday night, each of them taking a side of the Murphy bed.
“It’s okay,” Jilly was telling her. “Everything’s okay.”
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Slowly, Angel felt the tension ease, the fear subside. She turned to Jilly and then had to smile. Jilly had been a street kid once—she was one of Angel’s success stories. Now it seemed it was payback time, their roles reversed.
“What happened?” Jilly asked.
Angel trembled, remembering the awful image that had sent her screaming from her dream. Jilly couldn’t suppress her own shivers as Angel told her about it.
“But at least it’s over,” Jilly said.
“What do you mean?”
“Everett’s paid Macaulay back.”
Angel sighed. “How can you know that?”
“I don’t know it for sure. It just feels right.”
“I wish everything was that simple,” Angel said.
The phone rang in Angel’s office at mid-morning. It was Lou on the other end of the line. “Got some good news for you,” he said. Angel’s pulse went into double-time.
“It’s Macaulay,” she said. “He’s been found, hasn’t he? He’s dead.”
There was a long pause before Lou asked, “Now how the hell did you know that?”
“I didn’t,” Angel replied. “I just hoped that was why you were calling me.”
It didn’t really make anything better. It didn’t bring Robbie back, or take away the pain that Macaulay had inflicted on God knew how many kids. But it helped.
Sometimes her dreams still take her to that street where the neon signs and streetlights turn a misting rain into a carnival of light and shadow.
But the dead man has never returned.
BIRD BONES AND WOOD ASH
It’s a wonder we don’t dissolve
in our own bath water.
—attributed to Pablo Picasso
1
At first, Jaime knows them only as women with the faces of animals: mare and deer, wild boar and bear, raven and toad. And others. So many others. Following her.
They smell like forest loam and open field, like wild apple blossoms and nuts crushed underfoot. Their arms are soft, but their hands are callused and hard, the palms like leather. Where they have been, they leave behind a curious residue of dried blood and rose petals, tiny bird bones and wood ashes.
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