by Linda Ladd
“Yes, of course, I saw various cars stop in front of his place from time to time. I never paid much mind to it, though. I suspect he might be more apt to have a boyfriend.”
Bud said, “He’s gay?”
“Well, I’ve seen him prancing around and acting rather like a fop. Conclude what you may, young man.”
Bud said, “Does that mean gay?”
I said, “A fop is an effeminate man, Bud. Mrs. Talbott, did you ever see men or women going in and out of Mr. Classon’s house?”
“They call that a fop, really? You’re kiddin’ me,” Bud said. He laughed.
Mrs. Talbott shook her head. “No, none that I could identify, if that’s what you mean. But I do know, and for a fact, that he thinks he’s an angel come to earth to help others.”
My hand froze the teacup at my mouth in the middle of a sip. I swallowed the warm, fragrant tea then said, “I’m sorry?”
“You heard me right. He thinks he’s a real angel—the Bible’s full of male angels, you know. Most of them, actually, I think, are male.”
Bud said, “So he came right out and told you he was an angel?”
Mrs. Talbott sipped daintily and dabbed the corner of her mouth with a lace-edged white linen napkin. “No, but I saw as much on his website.”
“He’s got a website?”
“That’s what I just said, isn’t it? Mercy, you young folks. I was the Camdenton librarian hereabouts for almost thirty-five years. I’m retired now, of course, but I am completely computer literate. I Googled him once, just out of curiosity, you understand. He’s got his own website called callupanangel. com. Which is quite corny, if you ask me. Silly, even. Really.” She gave a little offended sniff.
“He has a few angels around his house, too.” Sometimes I am prone to understatement.
“It’s truly a rip-off, my dear. You see, he purports to be able to converse with angels on his clients’ behalf. He calls them angel readings, and he has a chatroom, and everything.”
Bud laughed, then realized by Mrs. Talbott’s glower that she wasn’t joking around. He said, “You’re kiddin’.”
“No, young man, I assure you that I am not. If I remember correctly, he said online that he does not speak directly with his client’s angels, but that he has his own personal guardian angels who speak to other people’s angels for him, then he relays the message to the gullible nincompoops who fall for his nonsense.”
Bud said, “And he’s paid a hefty fee for these angelgrams, I take it?”
“Of course. I believe he quoted a price of $80 for a full reading. He’ll take cash or any of the major credit cards, and he says he speaks to Uriel, Michael, and Gabriel. They’re all archangels in the Bible, in case you’ve forgotten your Sunday school lessons. I taught Sunday school to little ones for near forty years.”
Very few of my foster parents had taken me to Sunday school, so I said, “Is this website still up and running?”
“I suspect so. It was linked to that school where he works.”
Bud and I exchanged a significant look. We do that sometimes. “What school is that, ma’am?”
“The Dome of the Cave Academy for the Gifted. Have you heard of it?”
I had heard of it, vaguely. “It’s nondenominational, if I remember correctly? A boarding school for troubled young teens, right?”
“Yeah, bright kids, supposedly. It’s northwest of here, way out in the woods,” Bud said. “I was up there once on a call.”
“Really?” That surprised me.
“Yeah. A kid ran away, but it didn’t amount to nothin’. It turned out he’d caught a bus home to Paducah, Kentucky, and his parents called and informed the school he’d made it home safely. It’s a pretty cool campus, almost like a prep school.”
“Yes, that’s where you need to go to find out all about Simon Classon, I suspect. The people out there will know him much better than I. Actually, I always considered him sort of a lunatic. Imagine anybody giving him eighty hard-earned dollars to contact angels. Silliest thing I ever heard of.”
I said, “What does he look like? I guess you wouldn’t have a picture of him, by any chance?”
“No, I don’t. But they’ve got one up on the first page of his website. He’s fairly handsome, I suppose. Stocky man, who doesn’t take care of himself the way he should. I saw him smoking out at the mailbox on several occasions. Held his cigarette in one of those long white cigarette holders my mother used back in the 1920s. I suppose he’s probably in his thirties, maybe even forties, with that dishwater shade of blond hair. Sometimes he dyes it red or black. It’s red right now, I think. He fixes it in sort of a pageboy style, I guess you’d call it. Talks all the time, mile a minute, at least he did with me. Never let a person get a word in edgewise. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was one of those junkie types you see on CSI.”
“Did you ever see him take drugs or sell them to anyone?”
“No, but I doubt he’d do such a thing out in the street for everyone to see, now would he? No, but he’s a big phony, going on with all that angel cockamamie stuff. I bet deep down he’s a devil in disguise. He probably has 666 tattooed on his scalp.”
Bud said, “Like Damian did, huh?”
Edith was really warming up to Bud now. “Do you like those Omen films, young man?”
“Yeah. I like the part where Lee Remick crashes over the banister. She played the mom, right?”
Mrs. Talbott nodded. “I liked that part, too. And when the priest got impaled on the iron cross in the churchyard, that was quite remarkable.”
I interrupted the Ebert and Roeper review and got us back on track. “Do you have any reason to suspect that he’s a bad person, ma’am? Maybe into drugs himself?” I thought comparing Classon to Lucifer was a bit out of the mainstream, as far as casual remarks go.
“I saw him throw rocks at my cat once. Snuffles was just sitting on my wheelbarrow watching him. She’s dead now, poor kitty, but I had the dear little thing for years and years. I don’t trust anybody who mistreats animals. And I can assure you that the archangels wouldn’t frequent a chatroom with somebody who throws rocks at cats.”
Well, there you go. I thanked her kindly, and we finished our green tea before we headed back to Angel Land to see if Shaggy the Great had uncovered any evidence for us. Tonight I’d go calling on the angels via Classon’s website, and tomorrow we’d visit the ones holed up at the Dome of the Cave Academy for the Gifted, whatever the hell that turned out to be.
The Angel Gabriel
The little boy trapped inside the grave stopped crying as his tormenters ran away. Eyes wide and frightened, he squinted up into the sun until a figure blocked out the bright glare, dropping a cool, dark shadow across his face. He could see the person above him had golden hair the sun turned into a shining halo. The angels had finally come for his family, and he was terrified. Then he saw an arm reach down to him and a deep voice said, “Grab hold, and I’ll pull you outta there.”
Grasping the proffered hand with both his own, he held on tightly as his savior lifted him upward as if he weighed nothing. When he was out in the sun again, he scrambled to his knees and stared up at the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen. The angel’s hair was pure gold, silky, and long enough to brush his shoulders. He wore all white, and his eyes were blue and clear and smiling. It was an angel, he thought, thunderstruck, come to earth to escort his family to heaven. Maybe if he begged, the angel would take him, too.
“Are you really the Angel Gabriel, the one from my Sunday school lessons?” he asked, too scared to speak above a whisper.
Then the Angel Gabriel laughed like a regular person. He knelt down on one knee and wiped the dirt off the boy’s cheeks with his white tunic. “Hell, no, those brats just call me that ’cause I’m the preacher’s son and have all this blond hair. You can call me Gabriel, though, if you want to.”
“But you’re wearing all white like the angels do, and you look just like the pictures of angels.”
&nb
sp; “Thanks, kid, but I’m no angel, believe me. And these ain’t angel robes, either. You’re that orphan kid, aren’t you? I just got back from my karate class in town or I would’ve been here for your mom and dad’s funeral. I saw what those guys did to you. Now don’t you worry about them no more, you hear? They’re a bunch of punks.”
He hadn’t thought about being an orphan, but that’s what he was. He wondered if the angel thought he was ugly. “You don’t think I’m ugly, not even with this?” He pointed to his head injury.
“Nope. You think I am?”
“No. You look like an angel.”
“Don’t worry about those kids anymore. I’m gonna be your best friend from now on. And if you stick close to me, we’ll show those jerks what they get if they mess with us. Deal?”
The boy stared up at his bright savior and wondered how old he was. Fifteen, sixteen, maybe, about the same age as Betsy, his babysitter back in Pittsburgh. “You sure do look like the angels in my Bible. You sure you’re not the one coming to get daddy and momma and Katie?”
“Nah, they already came for them anyways. Probably when they were out on the highway when they got killed. Whisked them up to heaven in the blink of an eye. That’s what the Bible says happens. And I heard the angels always snatch their souls out of their bodies right before the crash so they don’t have to suffer much pain.”
“Really? I don’t remember much about the crash. I remember waking up in the hospital, though.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t need to be worrying about it no more. The Bible’s a cool book to read. My dad made me study it since I was littler than you. I’ll teach you lots of things, now that you’re my special friend. Want to come out in the woods and see my secret hideout? Nobody else’s ever been out there but me, but I’ll show it to you, if you promise to God you’ll never, ever tell another soul about it. I bet your grandma’ll let me show you around and take you back home later, before it gets dark. Yeah, let’s do that. But you gotta promise you’ll be my friend and never tell my secrets, not even to my dad or your grandma. You promise?”
“I promise. I’ll never tell anybody anything about you. You’ll be my special friend, too.”
“Good deal. C’mon, let’s tell your grandma where we’re going, then I’ll show you some really cool things.”
Looking up at the beautiful, blond-haired boy, he felt certain this being was divine, really the Angel Gabriel who just wasn’t allowed to tell anyone who he was. He’d saved him from the bullies, and from being buried in the grave, hadn’t he? He had to be the Angel Gabriel, and the angel wanted him as his special friend. For the first time since his family had died, he smiled and felt hope.
FOUR
It was well after eleven before I got back to the sheriff’s office where I’d left my black Ford Explorer. That made me more than a couple of hours late for my date with Black, but he probably wouldn’t mind. He was a busy man himself, and he’d gotten used to my irregular hours and understood that my job took precedence over our hanky-panky. Maybe if I got out a big red handkerchief and waved it back and forth, I could distract Black from my late arrival. We’d agreed to meet at my place at nine, and he didn’t have a key so he was probably standing outside, freezing and mad as a hornet. I wondered where Bud would say “mad as a hornet” came from? Oh, great, now I was doing it.
The snow was floating straight down in huge white flakes in the smoky beams of my headlights. So beautiful and clean, cloaking the world in peace and quiet like the Christmas card I got the other day from my car insurance agent. But that was only an illusion. Crimes were happening all around Lake of the Ozarks, even now on this cold, snowy night. Silent and stealthy, violence in the purple shadows, and in one of those terrible, dark places Simon Classon was probably in some very big trouble.
Shaggy and the rest of the forensics team hadn’t turned up much yet in the way of evidence but they were taking samples of blood and hair back to the lab and would let me know as soon as they had some results. I’d already contacted the Dome of the Cave Academy for the Gifted, a.k.a. the dumbest name I’d ever heard of in my life, and it was closed, of course. But I finally got the custodian on my cell, some guy named Willie Vines, who gave me the phone number of the school’s director, a Dr. G. Richard Johnstone. Mr. Director was at home in his house on campus and seemed genuinely surprised to hear about Classon’s disappearance. He said Classon had been on vacation for the last week so no one had thought much about his absence. Said he was the resident angelologist on staff and taught classes on the hierarchy of angels, seraphim, and cherubim. Bud said it sounded like a class about sea urchins to him.
In any case, Johnstone appeared suitably concerned, promised they’d search the school thoroughly, and called back twenty minutes later with word there was no trace of their chief angelologist anywhere on campus. At that point, we decided there was little more we could do until tomorrow, not with a heavy snowfall settling in over the lake.
So it was closing in on the midnight hour when I turned into the gravel road that led down to my tiny A-frame house. My friend Harve Lester has let me live there rent free for the last few years because we’d been partners in the LAPD back in the good old days before he got hit with a bullet and paralyzed from the waist down. Something I try not to think about too much because it was my fault. He lives in an old house he inherited from his grandmother about a quarter of a mile up the road from me, and as I passed it, I saw him sitting in the window. Sometimes he watched for me like that, just to make sure I made it home safely. He waved his arm, and I flashed my lights in answer. If I wasn’t so late meeting Black, I’d stop and have a Heineken with him.
A couple of minutes later, I rounded the last curve on the road and caught sight of my house. I stomped the brakes so hard my Explorer did a sideways skid off the snow-slick road and knocked snow off a whole row of bushes. I blinked and stared through the wet snow plopping against my windshield. I wiped the inside of the glass with my hand and looked some more. Wait a minute, whoa, and what the hell? Then I saw Black come out of the huge, glassed-in front porch on my house and start striding down the road toward me. Only thing is, I don’t have a huge, glassed-in front porch on my house. At least I didn’t that morning when I left.
Black was wearing Levi’s and a black cashmere sweater under a brown suede coat and heavy black leather snow boots that he’d picked up the last time he went skiing in Gstaad. That’s in Switzerland. I know because I asked him. He’s usually wearing expensive suits hand-tailored in Hong Kong and made out of rare yak hair or something, but it was snowing tonight so he dressed down for our date. He motioned for me to drive into the attached garage beside the huge, glassed-in front porch. I hadn’t had the garage this morning, either.
I pulled my SUV inside, killed the engine, and then Black was there, opening the door for me. Did I mention that, despite all his wealth and fancy clothes, he was gentlemanly that way?
“Merry Christmas, Morgan.” He had started calling me that because he disliked the habit I had of calling him Black. Sometimes he called me Claire, usually when we were in bed and pretty breathless.
“Who said you could do all this to my house?” Ungracious, true, but I was pretty damned shocked.
“Harve did. Said you’d love it but he wasn’t sure you’d appreciate the surprise part.”
“Well, I hate surprises.”
“I like them. Come on, let me show you what I’ve done.” Then he saw the puffy bruise on my cheek. “What the hell happened to your face?”
“Nothing. Just ran into a criminal type.”
“Good God, Claire, it’s your first day back.”
“Yeah, bad things happen.”
“How did it happen? Has a doctor looked at it?”
“Forget it. It’s nothing, just a little bump.” Then I climbed out of the car, looked around the garage, and cleverly changed the subject, “You’re awfully smug about remodeling my entire house without my permission.”
Black merely smil
ed and took my hand. “You’re going to love it, trust me.”
He led me to a white door that I suspected led into the new huge, glassed-in front room. When he hit a button beside the door, the garage door slid down behind us with a low, efficient purr. Hey, this meant no more scraping ice off windows in subzero weather, hallelujah and praise the Lord. I was suddenly a heck of a lot more gracious. I smiled, too, and to my embarrassment, felt a bit giddy.
“How in the world did you get all this done so fast? Jeez, I left here at seven this morning.”
“Yes, it’s amazing, all right, what you can accomplish with twenty carpenters, five electricians, and four plumbers, and a significant cash bonus to get the job done. Besides, you’ve been promising to get me a key to the front door and you haven’t done it. So I got a front door I already have a key to.”
“Okay, I admit it. This is pretty cool.”
Black smiled. I smiled. We were a smiley couple tonight. My smile faded a little. The book I got him was going to look pretty damn lame, even if I put a big red bow on it. I could hear it now: What’d Black get you for Christmas, Claire? He remodeled my house and gave me a big glassed-in room with a garage and everything. What’d you get him? A book. My stomach dropped a bit. Black, on the other hand, was in his element.
“Close your eyes.”
“C’mon, Black, give me a break here. You know I don’t like playing games.”
“Humor me.”
I shut my eyes and let him lead me into his megasurprise. The filthy rich and their games, what’s a poor girl to do?
“Okay, open your eyes and behold paradise.”
I opened them and beheld paradise. “Good grief, Black.”
The room was bigger than it looked from outside. Completely furnished, completely decorated down to the appropriate law enforcement and NRA gun magazines that I liked to read, and burning vanilla candles, and all in a single day, too. Beige carpet, brown suede sectional, a crackling fireplace, and oh, happy days, a hot tub, partitioned off with French doors, the kind that had little miniblinds inside the glass. Oh, man, did I ever love those doors with the miniblinds inside the glass. Dozens of candles were lit all around and the ones on the ledge behind the hot tub framed a view of my private cove through a curtain of gently falling snowflakes.