by Noel Hynd
“Hardball him,” Moore said. “Tell him you don’t think I’ll budge.”
“He’ll still try to move you up some,” Essie warned.
“No matter what I offered, he’d try to move me.”
“I’ll call you back,” she said.
Ted Nickels sat on the offer for two overnights. He said he’d talked to the inheritors of the estate. He could make a deal for $710,000, he had said. But only if the paperwork were handled quickly.
Bill and Rebecca Moore agreed. Essie called Ted Nickels back and told him that he had just sold a house.
The Moores’ home in Connecticut sold two weeks later at the end of July. Rebecca made immediate plans for the move from East Coast to West. She made sure that their belongings and furniture would be packed properly, and she hired the movers with the best reputation for a coast-to-coast trip. Her mother came east again from Illinois, helped her, and stayed with her during times when her husband went to California to initiate work with McLaughlin & Company.
While on the West Coast, Bill Moore also oversaw his mortgage application. It was approved by the first Friday in August.
Essie Lewisohn was more than helpful. She bullied Ted Nickels into letting the Moores have access to the property they were purchasing in advance of the closing date. Thus Rebecca and Bill, in a subsequent visit west, were able to enter the house, measure rooms more accurately, and make decisions on what furniture would go where and what they would need to buy.
One afternoon, Essie came over to see how they were doing. They were doing fine, as it turned out, though Rebecca was engaged in a battle with the fourth bedroom on the second floor, the one which had the reluctant doorknob.
“The turret room,” as she now called it, in reference to the architectural quirk that gave the room its odd shape. And she could not get the smell to depart that room, although strangely enough, the odor seemed to come and go on its own.
Perhaps because of weather. Perhaps because of humidity.
What bothered her most was that the odor was reminiscent of a dead animal, as if some household pest had gotten lodged in a wall and was decomposing. Why, she wondered, didn’t it just go away, once and for all, rather than recurring?
Rebecca was working with a spray disinfectant the afternoon Essie came by. And Bill was measuring the turret room, making plans to take out a plasterboard wall that had formed a small storage area in front of the real wall.
“By the way,” Essie said in passing, glancing at the window. “Those burial grounds behind you? I’ll tell you something interesting. “
Both the Moores stopped to listen. “What’s that?” Bill asked.
“I told you it was called San Angelo Cemetery. But that’s only the proper name. The people in the neighborhood have their own name for it. It’s had its own name for many years. Generations, I think.”
“Don’t spare me,” Bill said. “What do they call it? I just bought this house. I suppose it’s called ‘Graveyard of the Walking Dead’ or ‘Land of the Chainsaw Zombies,’ or something that will keep my children awake all night.”
“Nothing of the sort,” Essie said. “In fact, the name that’s used is rather quaint, I think. Very reassuring.” Bill and Rebecca Moore waited. “They call it, ‘Cemetery of Angels,’” Essie said.” Isn’t that nice?”
“‘Angels’? From ‘San Angelo’?” Rebecca asked.
Essie pursed her lips and made a mystified expression. “I have no idea how it acquired that name,” she confessed. “But I think it sounds rather poetic, don’t you?”
“Just what we need,” Bill said, his sarcasm surfacing. “A poetic graveyard nearby. In case a houseguest drops dead suddenly.”
“Cute remark,” Essie said. Then she bade them goodbye.
“‘Cemetery of Angels,’” Bill said, repeating the phrase.
Rebecca shrugged. It was poetic. She already felt a certain kinship with her backyard burial plot.
Bill walked to a second story window and looked across the brick wall behind his new property. His eyes were upon the cemetery.
“What do you think of that?” he asked his wife.
“Like Essie said,” Rebecca answered, “poetic.”
There was just one other disconcerting note. After the purchase of the property was complete, on a hot afternoon in late August, Bill Moore drove over to the house without his wife. He took with him some carpentry tools.
Bill was still intrigued with the “turret” room on the second floor. There was one wall in the room, which was nothing more than a plasterboard partition that had formed a storage area. If the plasterboard were taken out, the room would be four feet wider. So why not rip it out?
Bill went into the turret room and set down his tools in the middle of the floor.
He walked from one wall to another, picturing how the area could become a playroom. He examined the wall that separated this from the open section on the other side. There was nothing supportive about the wall. It was nothing more than a weak room divider, installed perhaps about seventy years ago, he guessed, judging by the building materials. He took his sledgehammer to it, took a swing, and punched through it. A huge section gave way. A second swing knocked out even a larger piece.
He was starting to enjoy this now. Blasting away with the hammer, he followed with blow after blow, taking the wall down quickly.
Then he suddenly stopped.
Midway into his work, he was sure that he had heard a voice. A low murmuring again, much like he had heard in this room once before. And there was something androgynous about the voice. It was high-pitched and shrill. Almost musical.
Had he really heard it, he wondered. He froze and listened.
Nothing now. Not even a sound outside. Nothing at all.
Some places had strange acoustics, he knew, and some places trapped distant sounds in ways science could never explain. Bill figured that this was just such a quirky place. In any case, several seconds after being certain that he heard something, he convinced himself that he couldn’t possibly have.
He took down the rest of the wall and stepped back, savoring a sense of accomplishment. He gathered his tools and went downstairs, then outside to his waiting car. He heard nothing more. And within another few minutes, for the time being at least, he had forgotten all about it.
Chapter 6
The Moores’ household possessions came to California via a pair of moving vans.
The first van arrived on the day of the legal closing for the property, the twenty-fifth of August. The second moving van arrived the day before school started on the last Tuesday in August. It was only then that the living room furniture from the East came into the house in addition to a new print sofa they had purchased locally, and so the Moores finally had a dining table and chairs. On the same day, the Moores purchased a new Toyota Camry to go with the Chevrolet that they had driven coast to coast. The Dodge Caravan, and the memories that went with it, they had sold.
Five-year old Karen found two friends her own age on the same block, three doors away to one side and five doors away to the other. Karen was the quieter, more shy and less assured of Rebecca’s two children, and Rebecca was elated that her daughter had made friends so easily. Patrick, older and more gregarious, would never have had problems. So he easily found a friend, too, a boy one month older than he, who lived next door, and the owner of the bike that his parents had seen in the neighboring yard.
A certain geometry of personal relationships began to formulate, assert itself as the Moore family eased into their new neighborhood. The angles and lines began to make sense for Bill Moore, too. He spent much of the first week away from his new home. He was constantly over in Brentwood with Jack McLaughlin at McLaughlin’s architectural depot. Some nights when he came home, he seemed tired and distant. Moody. Almost surly. On other evenings, he was enthusiastic and full of vigor. Some nights, as a husband, he was the same way, tired and distant. He treated his children similarly. Some nights there were bedtime stories
that were playful and energetic and ran much too late. Other nights it seemed like Bill could not have cared less.
In the midst of a second marriage, Rebecca was used to such inconsistencies from men in general and her husband’s in particular. She would have loved it if life weren’t like that, but life was. So she grudgingly conceded that his behavior would probably always be like that. Perhaps it was all part of Bill’s past. Or her past. Or, for that matter, the combination of the two. Her first husband, the father of her two children, had been an artist named Thayer Sullivan. A brooding wannabe genius from North Carolina, he had created massive and occasionally brilliant abstracts on canvases too big to be carried out of studios. He had been eight years older than she. As his work got better, as his creations became more striking, he became depressed about his failure to be immediately recognized by the fickle world of art criticism. Subsequently, his work took a catastrophic artistic journey from light into darkness. Where once there had been euphoria there was next a condemned and boxed-in feeling. Rebecca recognized Thayer’s sense of spiritual exhaustion, but was unable to reach through it.
One day, when they lived together in San Antonio, the police came to Rebecca’s home. It was about six months after Karen had been born. The police arrived directly from the Alamo Motel and Motor Lodge, where, earlier that morning, Thayer Sullivan had hanged himself after entertaining a prostitute.
His way of getting back at the world.
Rebecca had met Bill Moore less than a year later, late in 2006, when she was still trying to put her own life back together. Bill (never “Billy”) had just pushed past thirty. In him, Rebecca saw or thought she saw a brilliant but previously unmanageable son of a well-to-do family.
In a private school in Richmond in his teens, Moore had learned to smoke pot, set off cherry bombs in trash cans, drive a car without a license, and play cards for money. At an Ivy League university, he learned more colorful bad habits: how to spend vast amounts of money, create a thriving dealership in soft drugs, acquire unwholesome friends, spout Marx and Mao just to annoy the campus Republicans, and hang around with off-campus high school girls.
None of this, however, ever affected his grades. He landed in a first rate architectural school and cruised through there, too, graduating with honors and two arrests for disorderly conduct.
After the intensity and self-absorption of Thayer Sullivan, Rebecca looked upon Bill’s mildly evil past with fondness. He amused her. He embodied the nerve and outrageousness that she had always wished for herself. Or, at least, between his good and bad moods he did. Eventually, Rebecca and Bill became lovers and within seven months of the time they had met, they presented themselves to a justice of the peace one night almost on a whim in Columbia, Maryland, and married.
Bill Moore promised his new wife he would clean up his raucous act and behave. She, in turn, became something of his keeper while he was her lifetime reclamation project. As he lurched into his thirties, he gave every indication of reforming. He even finally became serious about his profession.
After all those years of schooling, after breaking the hearts of his parents and assorted girlfriends from good Northeastern families, he gave the outward manifestations of being interested in becoming an architect. Accordingly, they moved to Connecticut, pooled their money, and bought a small house. Which didn’t mean that their marriage didn’t have its rough edges. The free spiritedness of his past was held against him by potential employers, though he always seemed to find just enough freelance work to pay bills. He was given to disappearances on “business” trips, ostensibly to ferret out assignments in other cities, of which he provided few details. He occasionally became moody, and they fought sometimes for a day or two at a time. And his mood swings could fluctuate wildly. And yet, only one aspect of Bill’s behavior really troubled her.
She sometimes wondered if her husband’s moods were chemically affected. That is, had he messed his brain up somewhere along the line with some druggie concoction that he’d cooked up? She couldn’t remember Bill being moody and inconsistent like this when she had first met him. But then again, that was when she was more than overanxious to find a new mate, and was willing to overlook much. Sometimes those years before Bill, that part of her life, seemed so distant as to be another lifetime.
Of course, a worse thought was upon her, too.
Was Bill still dabbling in chemicals? Not in the house, of course. He didn’t or wouldn’t do that. But off with Jack McLaughlin, his old druggie pal?
She hoped that this was just a bit of paranoia that had troubled her since she cringed to even think of it the incident in Fairfield. But she wondered.
Labor Day weekend came.
The Moores went off to one of the beaches south of Malibu to spend the day. They had seen a few of their neighbors go by and had managed a few brief words of greeting. There was a young woman with gorgeous black hair who lived in one house and drove a ten-year-old yellow Mustang convertible with the California plate, HOTCHICK. There were several men who donned suits every morning and set out for jobs that looked to be professional and in the straight world. There were several wives who appeared to have careers and an equal number of women who stayed home and managed their children and households.
But during the day, the neighborhood was quiet. Most residents seemed to be out. A handful of the people in the neighborhood, however, kept irregular hours. The neighborhood looked to be what Bill called “upper middleclass California composite,” meaning young to middle-aged adults bent on successful careers, whatever they were.
Though they had met the other parents on the street, no one had reached out to befriend them. This unsettled Rebecca more than Bill. But she wasn’t yet ready to admit that it bothered her.
“It’s okay,” Rebecca said late one evening. “Let’s get the house in order first. Our social life will follow.”
“I second that thought,” Bill said.
They sat before their fireplace in the living room. It was still warm in September and the windows were open to allow a breeze.
“On the other hand, maybe we should have a party,” Rebecca suggested. Bill looked up from a laptop.
“Try that one again?” he asked.
“Maybe we should have a party,” she said. “It’s an idea I’ve been playing with.”
“A party?” he asked. “With people?”
“Yes. That’s how it usually works. Something informal. Just drinks and hors d’oeuvres. For everyone on the block. We’ll get to know everyone at once.”
This was one of Bill’s sullen nights. He said nothing. He only looked at her, turning over the idea in his head.
“It’s just an idea I’ve been playing with,” she repeated. He surprised her.
“Might be a good idea,” he said. “We’ll get to know everybody at once.”
Another minute passed.
“Should we do it?” she asked.
“Sure.”
She smiled. She leaned over and kissed Bill on the side of the face. “Great idea you had,” he said.
New friendships were all over the place, waiting to be made. The kids had made an interesting one, too. Or so they reported. They had an imaginary friend, as children often do.
Imaginary, as opposed to the real flesh-and-blood friends that they were making in school. Imaginary, as opposed to the many friends they had back in Connecticut.
He was a man, the kids said, and he came by every couple of nights to make sure they were safe.
“What?! How’s that again?” Rebecca asked the first time she heard of this.
“He lives in the turret room,” Karen said. Rebecca looked at her children. And unfortunately an image of the horrible man in the parking lot was before her.
“Oh, he does, does he?” she asked. Both kids smirked. This first came up, Rebecca would remember, about a week after Labor Day. She was in the living room with Patrick and Karen. It was just before bedtime.
“What are you guys talking about?” she asked.
“Ronny,” Patrick said.
“Ronny Sinbilt,” Karen giggled. The kids shared a magnificently childish laugh, as if they were the private participants in an off color joke that was too funny for words.
“Come on,” Rebecca insisted. “Share it with me, guys.”
“Ronny looks in on us to make sure we’re safe,” Karen said. “After you and Daddy go downstairs.”
“Uh huh,” Rebecca said. “And how do you know that’s what he’s doing?”
“He told us,” Karen said.
“We asked him who he was and that’s what he said he was doing,” Patrick answered. Bill came into the living room from the kitchen, tuning curiously into the conversation.
“And you’ve both seen him?” Rebecca asked. “This same dude?”
The kids nodded in unison. Patrick said that he had seen him first.
“But then I saw him real soon after that,” Karen added. Bill listened to this and looked from boy to girl and then back again.
“Uh, huh. Right,” he said.
“And he’s a big guy? Like an adult?” Rebecca pressed. The kids agreed that he was a nice man with shaggy brown hair, dark pants, and a white shirt. There was disagreement about the rest of his description, however, but they did agree that he lived in the turret room.
“How do you know he lives there?”
“That’s where he comes from,” Patrick said.
“And that’s where he goes to,” Karen said.
“And doesn’t the smell bother him?”
They shook their beautiful young heads. Rebecca always marveled at how gorgeous, fresh, and fair her two young ones were.
“Oh, no,” Patrick said.
“I asked him that,” Karen added, “and he says he likes that bad smell.”
More laughter. Both kids. Ronny or anyone actually liking that sour acrid stench was a real thigh slapper.
“And, uh,” Rebecca asked, feeling her way along, “Ronny visits every night?”
The children looked at each other.
“Not every night,” her son said, hedging slightly. “Only sometimes.”