Cemetery of Angels 2014 Edition: The Ghost Stories of Noel Hynd # 2

by Noel Hynd

  “You’re missing my point,” Chandler said. “I’m not saying this incident on Tremont Lane didn’t happen,” Chandler said. “But no one can prove that it did happen.”

  Bill Moore looked baffled.

  “Suppose your wife had an accident, Mr. Moore,” Chandler said, in a kindly tone. “Suppose she’d scraped and dented your new van. Suppose she was afraid to tell you what had happened. So she makes it appear that something different transpired. Suppose she made it look like an attempted abduction. A possible carjacking or kidnapping.”

  Bill Moore responded with a stunned silence.

  The detective was ready for Rebecca’s husband to go ballistic over the suggestion that his wife had been lying. But Moore almost looked relieved.

  “Let me get this straight,” Moore said. “You’re saying what?”

  “I’m offering a theory. You’re free to reject it, accept it, or think about it.”

  Bill Moore was already thinking about it.

  “You think Rebecca might have filed a false police report? And you theorize that she may have done this because she might have damaged the car herself? And she was afraid to tell me the truth?”

  Chandler shrugged. Then he nodded. “It’s a theory that works with the evidence.”

  Bill Moore pondered it for a few seconds. Then,

  “If Rebecca had been in an accident,” Bill Moore said, “all I would have cared about was her safety. We have car insurance just for something like this.”

  “Maybe you should tell her that,” the policeman said softly.

  “She should know it already,” Moore answered.

  “Maybe you should remind her,” Chandler suggested. Another moment passed. Moore watched a couple of high school girls walk into a music store. Chandler watched Moore watch the girls.

  “So,” Moore said, thinking as he spoke, and choosing his words carefully, “you can’t find any evidence of anyone trying to harm my wife. No tire tracks. No witnesses. No one who saw the Lincoln in the parking lot. No one who heard one car hit another. No spent bullets in the woods.” He paused. “Absolutely nothing. Is that it?”

  “Nothing at all,” Chandler affirmed. “But, as I said, it’s not surprising that there were no witnesses, considering the time and the place. The bullets allegedly fired would have been the best documentation that an incident took place. But we had another snowfall soon thereafter, remember? And another few inches of fresh snow after that. Looking for bullets under those circumstances would be like looking for a needle in six haystacks.” He paused and brought home his point. “People still find arrowheads in these woods. The arrowheads have been lying around for a hundred and fifty years.”

  “So you think Rebecca made the whole story up?” Moore asked.

  “I can’t come say that,” Chandler said. “Nor do I want to suggest that to my chief of detectives,” he said. “I only offered you a theory. I’m willing to keep the case open and leave it where it is. But it only gets more attention if a similar incident occurs or if we find new evidence.” Bill Moore nodded.

  “I hear you,” he said. He seemed to ponder the matter seriously. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “it wouldn’t break my heart if the investigation went inactive. Maybe it would be best that way.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Sergeant Chandler said.

  “There’s always the chance that you’re correct. That Rebecca had some mental problem. Like you said, no matter how hard you look, you can’t find anything.”

  “She’s seeing a doctor now?” Chandler asked. “A psychiatrist?”

  “Dr. Miller over in Southport. One of the best in the area.” Chandler nodded. “Have a good talk about the situation with your wife, sir. If you need to get to get back to me, you know the number. “

  “I’ll have a heart-to-heart tonight with Rebecca,” Moore said. “And I’ll call you tomorrow.” Sergeant Chandler said that would be fine.

  Chapter 3

  The Moores had their talk that night after the children had gone to bed. But it wasn’t the talk that Sergeant Chandler had suggested.

  Instead, Bill Moore asked his wife how she would feel about moving. It was an idea that they had entertained in the past. Now it loomed more logical than ever.

  They were both sick of winters and the misery that usually accompanied them. They were tired of chipping cars out of ice, plowing driveways, and struggling across sleet slicked roads to take Patrick and Karen to school.

  “Maybe a change would be better for all of us,” Bill Moore said.

  “What prompts this?” Rebecca asked.

  “We’ve lived here too long,” he said. “The financing fell through for my own business today. But I still have the opportunity with Jack McLaughlin.”

  “In California,” she mused. In the past, she had rejected the idea. Now it seemed much more tenable.

  “Jack needs a part timer in his office. He’s been after me for years. Maybe now is finally the time.” He paused. “And then there was the ‘incident’,” he said.

  “The man? In the car?” she said.

  He nodded.

  “You’ve been tense as a frightened cat ever since that day, Rebecca. I’d love to see you out of here. I don’t think you’ll ever feel safe in this place again.” She pondered it.

  “Los Angeles, huh? Earthquakes. Riots. Floods. Smog.”

  “Millions of people are comfortable there,” Bill Moore said. “There are suburbs if you don’t want to be in LA proper.”

  She thought about it. On their honeymoon they had traveled the West Coast, driving from San Diego all the way up to the Napa Valley, three memorable weeks of sunshine, wine, great restaurants, beaches, and lovemaking. Now he was reminding her that every day could be like that. Sort of. He took her hand.

  “I will try as best I can,” he said, “to make this the best move of our lives together. That’s a promise, Becca.” Half a minute passed. She examined her thoughts, her fears, and her hopes.

  “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 stor
y.

  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.

  Chapter 4

  “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 wa
sn’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.