The Haunting of Anna McAlister
Page 10
Anna opened every window in the house and turned on every light. She would occasionally look out a back window at the shadowy outline of the dumpster in the alley. She had to fight against an almost overpowering urge to go and just check to make sure the trash bag was still inside. Instead, she lit fragrant candles and put on an old CD of Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew”.
Anna sat back in her living room with a cup of hazelnut coffee and simply enjoyed her house again. She thought about Jeffrey and Duncan and felt guilty about feeling so good at the moment. The thought that her music boxes were responsible was starting to be replaced by logic-inspired denial, and recalled newspaper articles on PMS.
“The imagination and hormones just don’t mix,” she said out loud as she tried to calculate when she was due for her next period.
The air in Anna’s home was now fresh and clean. She was amazed at just how stale, musty and barely breathable it had become.
Anna got up and walked to the kitchen to refill her cup. As she did she put her hand in her jeans pocket and felt a paper. She pulled it out and saw that it was the same piece of paper that she had drawn and written on at Jeffrey’s apartment after Duncan died.
She looked at the French words written in flowery hand writing, and the beautifully drawn portrait of a woman. “Tom was right,” Anna said. She crinkled the paper into a ball and threw in into the garbage can next to her sink. “I must have just gotten lucky with the drawing. That’s all.”
Anna tried to walk away, but the thoughts of that paper just wouldn’t go away. “Oh what the hell.” She took the paper from the trash and flattened it out as best she could against the kitchen table. Anna found a pen and writing pad, and tried to copy the handwriting and the drawing. She couldn’t come close on either.
Anna then remembered something about the original writing experience. “Okay, have it your way.”
She closed her eyes as she had at Jeffrey’s. She tried to relax the muscles in her hand so they would put up no resistance. A moment later her hand did start to move. Anna felt the pen gently gliding over the paper faster and faster. The old fear raced through Anna’s body. She opened her eyes and looked down at a dangle of lines on the paper that roughly resembled a spider web constructed by a very drunk spider.
Anna started to laugh. Hormones and imagination, she thought. Horinations, imagimones. She continued to laugh until she pulled her hand away from the paper, and it was instantly yanked back.
She started to write. She tried to stop. She couldn’t. She watched herself writing the words “Aidez-moi.” over and over again in the same space. She followed the lines perfectly each time she wrote it. Anna felt her hand pressing harder until the tip of the pen started ripping the paper. Still she pressed harder until the words were being carved into the wood of the table. Anna tried to pull her hand away, but the pen pushed deeper into the wood until the tip broke off and the plastic casing splintered.
Ink flowed freely over Anna’s hand, but she hardly noticed. Anna focused on the loud bang she had heard from the alley. Looking through her kitchen widow, Anna could see that the lid to the dumpster had been thrown wide open.
Chapter 13
“I have to go to Paris.” Anna was sitting on her front porch steps when Tom arrived a few minutes later. Her right hand was covered with ink, and her hair and clothing appeared to be caked with dirt. “Want to come?”
Tom sat down next to her. “Sure, but I drive.”
* * *
As soon as he had heard her message on his machine, Tom drove as fast as he could to Anna’s house. He ignored the speed limit, and ran two stop signs and a red light along the way. He had the strangest feeling that she was about to do something that at first he thought of as stupid, and then thought of as being deeply wrong. Something told him he had to stop her. He didn’t think of asking what that something was.
* * *
Anna and Tom sat staring out at the night for a few minutes. Tom eventually broke the silence with a very casual, “So, what else is new?”
At first Anna giggled, then Anna laughed. She laughed so hard that her bottom slipped from the top step and landed on the one below it with an audible thud.
Tom laughed too. “Paris, huh? You’re kidding, right?”
Anna stopped laughing. “No, I’m not.” Anna looked straight ahead. “If I want to stop what’s happening, I have to do it there.”
“Why? How do you know that?”
“I just do.”
Anna told Tom all that had happened between the time she dismissed him from the hospital to the moment the pen exploded in her hand.
“You threw the music boxes away?” For the first time Tom sounded scared.
“Yeah,” Anna took a deep breath. “For awhile.”
* * *
Anna thought of how she had walked back to the dumpster after she had seen that its lid was open. She remembered how each step toward the alley seemed to take at least a minute to complete.
It was almost totally dark when Anna had gotten up from her table and started her journey, but she had no trouble seeing the dumpster clearly before her. When Anna finally reached her goal and looked over the rim, she had to shield her eyes from the light. While night had covered the outside world, it was as bright as noon on the sunniest of days inside the dumpster. Anna wasn’t surprised, or shocked. She would not be distracted from what she knew she needed to do.
Except for the bag that Anna had so recently thrown in, the dumpster was empty. Anna had to jump up and balance on the rim on her stomach in order to reach it. When she grabbed hold of the black plastic, she almost fell forward into the dumpster. Instead she was able to regain her teetering balance and yank the bag out.
When Anna pulled back, her momentum caused her to fall from the dumpster and crash to the alley cement on her back. The bag followed her and landed on top of her stomach and chest. For a moment, a very brief moment, Anna couldn’t throw it off. It was as if the bag, or its contents, were clutching her. Squeezing her. Crushing her. But, the feeling didn’t last long enough to qualify as anything more than a probable muscle spasm brought on by the fall.
Quickly jumping to her feet, Anna threw the bag over her shoulder. Like an evil Santa Claus delivering cursed toys, Anna carried it back toward her yard. She walked slowly, turning only when she heard a loud bang behind her. It looked as though the dumpster’s lid had slammed shut. Anna couldn’t be completely sure because she could barely make out the dumpster’s outline in the moon-less night.
* * *
“You said you threw them away for awhile?” Tom asked, impatiently pulling Anna out of a world only she could see. “Where are the music boxes now?”
* * *
Anna closed her eyes. When she did, she could once again feel how hard the music boxes had felt against her back. With each step they would jab into her flesh between her right shoulder blade and her spine. Each jab felt different than the others. But, they all hit at the exact same spot on her back. It was almost as if the music boxes were taking turns.
Once in her own back yard, Ann threw the garbage bag on to the ground and walked directly to her garage. It took her only a few seconds to find what she was looking for.
Anna had purchased the shovel two summers back when she had decided to go organic and grow her own vegetables. Her commitment to the cause remained firm until she told Jeffrey of her plans.
“I tried gardening once,” he had said. “But I just couldn’t deal with the manure and worms.”
Anna had called him a sissy, and assured him that she would have no such trouble. She hadn’t thought of that shovel again until today.
Anna dug a hole in her back yard over four feet long and at least two feet deep. She pushed the shove into the ground with all her might and dug quickly. She focused on every shovel full of dirt she dug out and piled next to the deepening hole.
Finally Anna stepped back, satisfied that she had dug deeply enough into the earth for her purposes. Then she dug for
ten minutes more.
Anna got the oak case in which the music boxes had arrived from her house, and returned each one to its’ space inside. She wanted at least their burial to be proper. The case fit snugly into the grave. It took only a few minutes for Anna to cover it with the mound of loose dirt and walk away. As she did she heard the muffled sounds of a waltz coming from the ground.
* * *
Anna opened her eyes and looked at Tom. “They’re where they belong,” she said. “With the dead.”
* * *
Instead of meeting with Detective Malmann at 8 o’clock Monday morning, Anna and Tom were on a plane to Paris.
* * *
Jeffrey’s condition had improved dramatically. One doctor labeled the change miraculous. As closely as Anna could determine, his return to near perfect health started at about the time she finished burying the music boxes. The wound on his arm had started to heal at a rate that defied logic or medical science. The deep cuts on his finger and thumb were gone. Several of the doctors were already racing to be the first to publish on this case now known simply as Jeffrey.
When Anna visited the hospital on Sunday morning she was surprised to see that Jeffrey had been moved out of the ICU into a private room. Upon her arrival at intensive care, she panicked when she saw the empty bed where Jeffrey had been the night before. A nurse quickly relieved her fears.
“You’re a friend of Mr. Robinson, aren’t you?’
Anna nodded.
“Good news, great news. He’s in a private room. He’s doing wonderfully.”
Anna wiped away the tears that had filled her eyes. “Is he conscious?”
“Conscious?” The nurse laughed. “We can’t shut him up.”
* * *
“Well it’s about time you got here?” Jeffrey huffed as soon as Anna ran into room 315. “You’ve already missed breakfast. You know, oatmeal waits for no one.”
Anna hugged Jeffrey tightly, noticing that he now had only a single IV attached to his right arm, and that the bag read glucose. It was the IV the hospital attached to most patients just in case they needed some sort of medication quickly. To Anna, it meant that Jeffrey was no longer in any immediate danger. “Oh, Jeffrey,” she sobbed and couldn’t stop.
Jeffrey’s left arm was heavily bandaged, but he was now able to move it freely. He patted Anna on the shoulder. “Hey, girlfriend, I’m the one in the hospital, remember?”
“I’m sorry,” Anna pulled away. “I was just so scared. I mean with Duncan and the razor and . . .”
“What do you mean?” Jeffrey looked sad and confused. “Duncan’s dead.”
“Don’t you remember? What do you think happened to you? What do you remember?”
“Nothing, just like I told that Detective what’s his name an hour ago. I went to sleep, and when I woke up I had all these tubes in me.”
Anna waited for the joke. She was surprised when it didn’t come.
“All I know is that my arm hurts like crazy, and I don’t really remember why.” Jeffrey paused. “And, yes, I do get the tube joke. It was just too easy . . . even for me.”
Anna avoided telling Jeffrey what he had told her. Finally, just before leaving she said, “Jeffrey, I have to tell you that Tom and I are going to Paris tomorrow.”
“I know,” Jeffrey said, looking directly into Anna’s eyes.
“It’s the only way to stop all this.”
Anna started to explain but stopped when Jeffrey once again said, “I know.”
“Is there anything you need before I go?”
“A new life would be nice,” Jeffrey said a bit too seriously.
“I’ll see if they have one in Duty Free in Paris, but I can’t make any promises. Is there anything else?”
“Or pushpins. If I can’t have a new life, at least I can have pushpins.”
“Okay,” Anna admitted. “Now I’m confused.”
Jeffrey pointed to a pile of cards that some of his friends had already delivered. “You know how my friends are about cards. If one of those guys doesn’t see his card up as soon as he visits, it’s bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch. If I pin them all up on the wall, no one can complain.”
“Got it,” Anna smiled. “I’ll be right back.”
Jeffrey was asleep when Anna returned with a box of multi-colored pushpins. She put them on the stand next to his bed, and kissed him goodbye.
* * *
Anna looked away from the window and watched the stewardess struggling with an overloaded drink cart. She always insisted on the window seat in the plane, but this time staring down at the land becoming ocean scared her.
If whatever it was that she was going to Paris to stop wanted her dead, this was a great opportunity to do it. Planes crash all the time, don’t they? Pilot error covered a lot of sins. When it came to determining the cause of a crash, a friend of Anna’s who worked at an airport told her that “pilot error” was a polite way of saying “we have no fucking idea what happened.”
Anna forced herself to remember the words her dad had once said about flying. They always helped her if she became jittery on a plane. She had been only 6 or 7 years old and was taking her first flight when she asked, “Daddy, what if we crash?”
Anna could still see her dad shrugging his shoulders and saying, “I’m not worried.”
“Why not, Daddy.”
“It’s not my plane.”
Anna smiled at the memory and reached under the seat in front of her for her briefcase. She pulled out the guidebook of Paris she and Tom and purchased after making the reservations, and paying an ungodly rate to fly the next day. For at least the 7th time since buying the book, Anna looked up the Hotel Baronette.
“This grand hotel, the largest and most fashionable on the left bank, was constructed in 1902 under the direction of renowned architect Pierre Deseron. Most of its 287 rooms were refurbished in 1958, and the entire building was overhauled and air conditioning added in 1986.”
Anna had been surprised that the Hotel Baronette was still open, and even more surprised when she called the front desk. The person there spoke almost perfect English, although at first she denied speaking any at all. After making Anna stumble along, speaking her strange combination of French, Spanish, English and Pig Latin, the desk clerk pretended to put someone else on the line. Now, her English was actually better than Anna’s. The reservation was made quickly, with Anna silently swearing to take a class in French.
“This magnificent 5 story hotel has long been one of the most ‘in’ addresses in all of Paris, and has in the past included several glamorous resident apartments on the fifth floor.”
The article went on to outline the types of rooms the hotel had to offer, their features and rates. It discussed the hotel’s three restaurants and bar, which it said were often frequented by the artistic elite of Paris and visiting foreign dignitaries from every continent. Finally the tour guide’s description ended with a single paragraph about the hotel’s history. This was the part of the story that Anna had now memorized word for word.
“Long a favorite of aristocrats and artists, this hotel has a history as colorful as the plush red velvet curtains that hang from it’s two story lobby windows. During World War I it is believed that Mata Hari often entertained her guests in one of its suites. In World War II it was commandeered to serve as headquarters for the dreaded German Gestapo and SS. Its history is laced with scandal and intrigue. For those easily frightened by bumpsin the night, the Hotel Baronette is said to be quite haunted.”
Chapter 14
Despite her fears, the cab ride from Orly airport into Paris was one of the most thrilling experiences of Anna’s life. She had traveled to London once, Mexico a few times and Canada quite often. She enjoyed all her trips, but this was different. This was Paris. The first sight of the Eiffel Tower from the expressway filled her with so much excitement that it bordered on erotic.
“Look, Tom. Look!” Anna pointed. “The Eiffel Tower. The real Eiffel Tower.”
“Yes,” Anna said. “I mean, oui.”
“The first time you visit Paris is like the first time you make love.”
Anna remembered Stanley Katz and the back seat of his big brother’s Dodge. They had parked in the darkness behind a closed factory off a street called Wyoming on Detroit’s west side. “I hope it’s better than that,” she laughed.
“No, no, no,” The driver returned the laughter as if he were reading Anna’s thoughts. “You do not understand. I do not mean that it’s like the first time you had sex. It’s like the first time you truly made love.”
Anna smiled and looked out the cab window. She was so enthralled with every view that she didn’t notice Tom was silent and staring straight ahead.
The driver knew the shortest route to the Hotel Baronette, but decided on his own to give his American riders a fare-raising mini tour of Paris.
As he drove, Anna’s feeling of excitation changed from the thrill of seeing something new to the kind of comfort that is bred by familiarity. Anna felt as if she had come home.
That feeling intensified ten fold when the cab turned a corner and the driver pointed to a large, beautifully designed, stone building. “There it is, La Hotel Baronette. Tres belle, no?”
Anna looked at the hotel through the cab windshield. It was a view she just knew she had seen many times before. She felt as though she recognized every detail of the building from the ornate windows at street level to the gargoyles that lined the roof.
When the cab stopped Anna, quickly opened the door and jumped out. She stared up at the hotel. She felt somehow embraced.
* * *
Anna first started to feel a little dizzy as they approached the hotel door. When they walked in, they were greeted by a bellhop. Anna saw his face change before her into one she knew, or had known, well. That was when her world went black.
When Anna opened her eyes she was lying on a bed in a small hotel room. Tom and the house doctor were at her side. The doctor was closing a small container of smelling salts.