by Fred DeVecca
“Think hard, Mooney.”
“I don’t do anything hard, Raven.”
“Except drink, Mooney.” I took another swig and passed the bottle to him.
We sat there together for a while, passing the bottle back and forth, and he began to come back to earth.
Finally I said, “So, the only thing I’m not sure of now is how much of this was just the universe happening randomly. Did you simply stumble upon a soul who had all these similar obsessions and decide to frame him, or did you plan it all, fake everything?”
He laughed. “What’s the difference?”
“I don’t know.”
“No, Raven, I didn’t make any of it up. It’s the truth. You’re just like me.”
“Who was Amy? Victoria didn’t have a sister.”
He bowed his head in acknowledgment. “Okay, I staged that. I’m a director, Raven, I had to stage something. That’s what I do. I put on shows.”
“Who was she?”
“Just another one of my gals.”
“Red hair. Name ends in ‘A’?”
“Yep. Portia.”
“Why?”
“Just to get you digging around. To get your attention. To get you running around looking for redheaded girls whose names end in ‘A.’ ”
“To get the police interested in me. To deflect them from being interested in you.”
He slapped his thigh. “That’s about it. I know how to hook you, Raven. And unhook me. And that’s what I did.”
“You did it. Then you undid it. You got me arrested. Then you got me un-arrested. What the hell’s up with that, anyway?”
“Just a demonstration.” His smile was smug.
“A demonstration of what?”
“A demonstration that I can do anything. Any fucking thing I want. I can screw you and unscrew you. And I just may screw you again.”
“Again?”
“No one likes me very much, but it’s still against the law to kill me. Know what I mean?”
“No one knows we’re up here, Mooney. No one knows I’m here with you. I mean, if you were to die or something tonight.”
“I make movies, Raven. I put on shows. You know what that means? It means I create whole universes. I make stories happen in those universes. I love stories. I come into some shit town like this and create a whole new world out of it. And I’ll move on and create another one in the next little town. A better one.”
“You’re God, Mooney, aren’t you?”
“We’re all God, Raven. That’s what you’re all about, isn’t it?”
“God is in all of us, Mooney. Even you.”
Then he stood up. The wind was so strong, it even mussed his hair, which was heavy and wet from the water streaming up into it. I rose and stood next to him. I had to look up to see his eyes.
He handed the bottle to me and I drank up. It was nearly empty now.
I looked him straight in the eyes. It was like seeing my own eyes reflected back at me. We were both perched precariously on the highest and most slippery rocks in the entire falls. I could have reached out and barely touched him and he would have fallen in.
I didn’t do it though.
“Things change quickly, Mooney. In a day. In a minute. In an instant. That’s all it takes sometimes, to change everything.”
“Like the day you woke up and could see.”
“Half see. But yeah.”
“On Lavender Street.”
“Yeah. That’s where it was.”
“I know everything about you, Raven. Every damn thing. I know you’re about to push me into this damn river.”
“No, I’m not,” I said too quickly. “I can’t do that.”
“Can’t you?” He was wearing a devilish grin.
“No, I can’t.”
He paused. He was thinking.
Finally he said, “Yeah, you can’t push me. You know why?”
“Well, I’m pretty sure I do. It has something to do with general morality and love for humankind. Man and God and love. Or something like that. But why don’t you tell me? Clearly you’ve got your own theories.”
“Raven, you know that’s all bullshit, don’t you? You can’t push me because you’re afraid. You’re afraid to do anything. You’re chicken, Raven.”
I thought this over.
As I was thinking, he pushed me. He pushed me. Not sure why this surprised me, but it was the last thing I expected.
Did he, though? He touched me, but did he push me?
I didn’t fall. He was drunk and run-down. He didn’t have much strength, and by then it was getting dark. He couldn’t see me well and he didn’t hit me squarely.
But I slipped a little and then I was right there on the edge, off balance. I reached out to grab him by the arm to steady myself.
So I was there with him and holding his arm and he was squirming like a two-year-old kid throwing a tantrum and we were both slipping around on the wet rock.
Then he stopped fighting and looked at me. “We’re both the same guy, Raven. We’re all the same. The only difference between you and me is that you’re chicken and I’m not.”
“No. You kill people. I don’t.”
“Don’t you?”
And then he started clucking under his breath. He did this bwak-bwak-bwak chicken cackling sound. He was doing it quietly and I could barely hear it through the growling of the river all around us. Bwak-bwak-bwak-bwak-bwak.
I reacted. It was blind rage. In an instant, morality meant nothing to me. I was ready to kill him. I could reach out and push him. No one would know. Mooney would be gone and the world would be better for it.
He looked at me. He looked right through me. He could see my heart and my soul. He knew who I was, better than anybody had ever known—even me.
The rage boiled over, and the killer inside a peaceful man took over.
He knew then that he had won. His eyes met mine. His eyes were meeting mine as he leaned over and was standing right on the slippery edge of the rock.
“I’m going to save your ass again, Raven. You don’t have to do it. I’ll do it for you. I’m already going to hell. You, Raven, you might still be able to avoid it.”
That’s when he jumped.
He was gone and I was alone on the rock. I didn’t see him bubble under in the foam and I couldn’t see him down there in the river either.
But he was gone.
Maybe for the last time, Mooney was gone.
Chapter Sixty-Four
Let it Go
Mooney had gone into the river before and lived to tell the story. They had fished him out before, alive.
That didn’t happen this time. Days went by. Then weeks. His cleaning woman had reported him missing. And now he was presumed dead. I had not told anyone about our final encounter. No one would have believed I had nothing to do with it after everything I had been through.
Life seemed normal, and normal was good.
I was running the theater and hanging out with Clara. Sarah was around a lot, but she was off doing stuff with her friends too. She seemed happy.
I walked Marlowe up the Hill of Tears frequently. Mooney’s house remained empty. Soon grass and weeds began to take over and the place started going to seed.
One day the grass was mowed and the weeds cut and the place spruced up. Then a “For Sale” sign appeared. Two weeks later, a “Sold” banner was splashed across the sign.
I walked by every day with Marlowe. After a short while, the sign was gone and there was a gray Honda SUV parked in the driveway. Eventually, I saw a couple of young kids running around the yard, playing on bicycles.
One day, as I was making my rounds in town, I stopped in to see Loomis and asked him if he knew what was happening there.
“A young family bought the place. They’re theater people. They’re going to do something theatrical with the big place. Not sure what. Put on shows there maybe. Nice folks.”
“What happened to Mooney?”
“Nobod
y knows. He could be a suspect in Pasternak’s death. So they searched. Everywhere. But they came up empty. No trace. Now they’re assuming he’s dead. Maybe he got flushed away in the river somehow. Ya think?”
“Yeah. Maybe. Probably.”
“That’s my best guess too. How would that happen though? Any ideas?”
I remained silent, and Loomis went on, “Not my problem. It’s up to the feds and I’m just glad to be rid of him.”
“Me too.”
“But they haven’t fished any bodies out of the river in weeks now. And for that, I thank you. Life is back to normal again.”
I didn’t know what he was insinuating, but it wasn’t a subject I wanted to pursue. Instead I said, “Mooney must have been around to sell the house.”
“No. He never owned it.”
“He told me he did.”
“He lied. Surprised?”
“Nope.”
“Me neither. His production company bought it from Snyder, not Mooney. He wasn’t even the principal owner of that company. Most everything was in his Uncle Lyle’s name and Lyle just up and sold it to these nice people. Couldn’t have worked out better.”
I had dinner at Clara’s that night. It was one of those rare nights that Sarah ate with us.
After dinner, Clara asked me if I wanted to go for a walk. I said no and she took off on her own. I wanted to talk to Sarah.
She was doing the dishes and she turned around to look at me, hands still dripping with suds.
“I heard from Julie,” she reported.
I must have looked a little surprised.
“Yeah, I did. She emails me now. Pretty much every day.”
“Oh yeah? That’s good. So what’s up in the Big Easy?”
“Not much. It’s not like she’s in New Orleans anyway. She never leaves the monastery.”
“I know.”
“She thinks she saw Mooney though.”
“What?” I was staggered. “When?”
“Just the other day. She was walking around the courtyard one night with the moon shining. When she got to that big gate, she looked out and saw somebody she thought might be Mooney. Just walking around down the street.”
“Was she sure?”
“No. Not at all. It was foggy, misty, and it could have been some other tall guy. But that’s what she thought. I told her she was crazy.”
“Mooney’s dead,” I said. “He has to be.”
“Well, if he died,” Sarah said, “maybe somehow it’s been undone.”
“Impossible,” I said.
She gave me a sharp look but didn’t ask for clarification. “Whatever. She thinks she saw him. But now he’s gone. This time I really think it’s forever. I just don’t feel him around anymore. Do you?”
I shook my head.
So that was it. It was over. It was all over.
And that’s what Sarah said to me. “It’s over, Frankie. And we gotta let it go. You gotta let it go.”
I tried. I tried like hell.
Chapter Sixty-Five
Closing the Door
In Matthew 10:28, it says “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.”
I studied that line a lot when I was in the monastery. Maybe Julie was studying it right now in that same place.
A body can be killed but the soul lives on. Mostly I had thought of this as a positive thing—a good soul lives on even after the body is gone.
But it works the other way too. An evil body can be killed, but the evil lives on. It can be reborn into another body, or it can hover there in the ether—a haunting, dark, cancerous mist.
That night, I took Marlowe for a walk. We went into town, walked by the river, down to the falls.
There he was. He had that same black watch cap pulled down over his forehead. His hair was shaggy and longer and tied into a small ponytail and his scraggly beard was back. He looked exactly like he had that first day I ran into him on the streets, so long ago.
He was walking along the slippery rocks at the top, just where the water began spewing down over the gullies and pools.
He was slumped over. I could tell it was him by the way he held himself. And by his aura too. It reeked of him and it was scary and I pulled Marlowe to go in the other direction.
Was it him, though? It was foggy, misty, and it could have been some other tall guy.
Or it could have been nobody. It could have been just my imagination running away with me.
We took a few steps up Deerfield Street. Then I just had to look back.
But he was gone. There was no figure walking along the slippery rocks, or anyplace else.
I knew it wasn’t him. Mooney was gone. He was dead. This was the dregs of the wicked sins he had perpetrated during his time here on earth. This was vile, malignant corruption being conjured up deceptively before my half-useful vision. This was the un-killed soul haunting me, as it likely would for the rest of my life.
The vision Julie had recently seen wasn’t him either. She had the same tendency as I to see and sense vibrations and auras.
The evil body was dead, but we who remained among the living had a job to do and that was to avoid the spell of the evil soul that would remain in our midst forever.
We had an obligation to go on living good lives to counteract all the bad out there in the cosmos.
Marlowe and I turned around and began walking again. This time, we didn’t stop and look back. We crossed the Iron Bridge and trudged back up the Hill of Tears until we were safely back in our yard.
Only then did I turn around and look back. All I saw then was the slope going back down the Hill of Tears and the tiny village sitting there peacefully at its bottom with the river winding through it like veins to a heart.
I threw some sticks for Marlowe. He chased after them happily.
I looked down the Hill of Tears one more time to be sure I did not see Mooney.
I didn’t see him and we went inside and closed the door.
* * *
Photo by Susan Gesmer
Fred DeVecca was born in Philadelphia and raised in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He has a BA in English Literature from Wilkes University and attended film school at Maine Media Workshops & College in Rockport, Maine.
Fred has been a screenwriter, photographer, and freelance writer, mostly in the sports and arts & entertainment fields, for twenty-five years. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield, MA), Hampshire Gazette (Northampton, MA), Valley Advocate (Amherst, MA), Greenfield Recorder (MA), Shelburne Falls & West County Independent, Preview Massachusetts (Northampton), Leisure Weekly (Keene, NH), and Baseball Underground. An essay on hardboiled detective fiction and a segment from his (unpublished) novel Act of Contrition appeared in the Scottish online mystery magazine Noir Originals in 2004.
He has written, produced, directed, edited, and acted in four films of his own and has worked on several more as production assistant, location scout, set decorator, grip/electric, and assistant director. From 1996 to 1998 he was a producer at TV6 Greenfield (MA) Community TV.
Fred has been a member of the Marlboro Morris Men since the mid-1980s, and since 1999, he has managed Pothole Pictures, a non-profit, community-run movie theater.
He is active on Facebook and Twitter.
Fred lives in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts.
For more information, go to www.freddevecca.com.