4 Angel Among Us

by Chaz McGee

Alice shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She never gets out of bed, so I can’t tell you for sure, but she seems pretty damn skinny to me. If there’s a kid in there, it’s starving to death. And she doesn’t act pregnant to me.’

  ‘Romero hasn’t had a kid in four or five prior marriages,’ Maggie admitted. ‘We checked on it. That tells me he’s shooting blanks. Maybe they’re planning to adopt and her pregnancy is a ruse?’

  ‘She could be faking it,’ Calvano agreed reluctantly. ‘Or just sort of misrepresenting it, and as soon as the adoption goes through, they’ll announce it to the papers as their own. They wouldn’t be the first couple in Hollywood to do that.’

  ‘As soon as the adoption goes through?’ Maggie asked. ‘Or as soon as the kidnapping goes through?’

  This time Alice took Calvano’s side. ‘I don’t think she’s involved with any kidnapping,’ Alice said reluctantly. ‘She’s not organized enough. I’m not sure she’s pregnant, but I am sure she is not involved with Arcelia Gallagher’s disappearance. She doesn’t have it together enough to kidnap someone. She couldn’t kidnap her own lunch. Not that she eats lunch.’

  ‘Lamont Carter might have it together enough,’ Maggie pointed out.

  ‘Now, him I would believe,’ Alice admitted. ‘He gives me the willies.’

  This was, of course, the perfect opening for Calvano to make a dirty remark. It was proof that he really did like Alice Fernandez that he held back and instead said, ‘Keep an eye on Carter, will you, Hernandez? And watch your back. The guy could be dangerous.’

  ‘Will do. Call me on my cell if you get anything I need to follow-up on. I’ve got to jump. The old guy needs help in the kitchen.’

  ‘Sheesh, you really like the old guy,’ Calvano said. Was he jealous of the butler? I doubted irrational jealousy was what Alice Fernandez liked about Italian men.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with caring about other people,’ Alice told him and her tone was scathing. ‘You ought to try it sometime.’ She hopped from the car and disappeared into the grove of trees, the white bow on her uniform bobbing up and down like a rabbit’s tail until she disappeared.

  ‘You are so out of your league,’ Maggie told Calvano when she noticed him watching Alice leave. ‘That woman is way too smart to go out with you.’

  ‘So says the woman who not only went out with the number one douche bag in America, but actually married him, too.’

  ‘Touché,’ Maggie said. ‘Speaking of which, wonder who Skip is blaming for his black eye today?’

  They would not get a chance to find out. Alice came running back to the car and this time she was all business. ‘Did you say that Arcelia Gallagher was driving an old black Volvo when she disappeared?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maggie confirmed. ‘It was a 1986 Volvo sedan with gray interior and it has a bumper sticker on it that says something like “Eat Organic” on it.’

  ‘I just found it,’ Alice said. Her voice rose with excitement. ‘I was cutting through the woods, when I saw a corner of its trim catch the sunlight. It’s right off the road, barely in the woods, and someone has piled a whole bunch of branches around it. I’m sure it’s hers.’

  Maggie and Calvano were on it instantly. ‘OK,’ Maggie said. ‘We’ll call it in. But don’t say anything to anyone back at the house. I’m going to have them process the car quietly, understand? I don’t want anyone in that house alerted that we found it. Our best hope for finding Arcelia is for someone to lead us to her – and they’re only going to do that if they think no one is watching them.’

  ‘Understood,’ Alice said. And with that she was off again.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I did not stay to watch the forensic team process Arcelia Gallagher’s car. I knew it would take them a long time to get to it without being seen on the main road. I also knew that their evidence gathering would be even more painstaking than usual. Maggie was after a search warrant for the Delmonte House and she needed irrefutable evidence that someone who lived in the mansion had been in Arcelia’s car to get one. She would not want any mistakes made. I wondered if they would even find anything to justify a warrant. As it was, the car was just over the line on to the neighbor’s property. She had a tough fight ahead. This might be her only shot and she didn’t want to blow it.

  Instead of watching them work, I returned to the mansion to see if I could find out on my own who had taken Arcelia Gallagher and where she was being hidden.

  Alice was in the kitchen preparing a sandwich for the butler’s wife. She put it down in front of the old woman, then sat and encouraged her to lift it to her mouth and take a bite. But as I watched the two women, I felt a current of animosity wind its way into the cheerful kitchen and discovered Lamont Carter standing in the hallway, looking in at them. His eyes narrowed as he watched Alice.

  This was not good. How long had he been standing there and why was he watching Alice? Carter said nothing, however, and stayed hidden from their view. After a moment, he turned and left. I followed him – and just like that, there it was. I could feel traces of Arcelia Gallagher’s hopelessness clinging to him. He had been near her. I was certain of it. Lamont Carter had taken her and I knew why.

  Carter headed for Dakota Wylie’s bedroom. She was propped up against her pillows, groggy from pills, watching herself on television. Carter sat in the chair next to her bed and crossed his legs. His foot jumped up and down as his knee jiggled nervously.

  ‘I don’t like the new maid,’ he told her.

  Dakota blinked her famously blue eyes at him, trying to focus on what he was saying. It took a moment for his words to filter through. When she answered, her voice was slower than usual. ‘Oh, Lonnie, you don’t trust anybody. My room is cleaner than it has been in six months. You’ve got to learn to trust people. You’re so hard.’

  ‘And if I weren’t a hard man, where would you be?’ he asked, his eyes flickering away from her as he unconsciously surveyed the room, taking in its size and height, toting up the value of the insanely expensive furnishings. Yes, possessions meant a lot to him.

  ‘I can’t do this much longer,’ Dakota Wylie said to him. ‘I want Enrique to come home. I miss him.’

  Carter shook his head. ‘You’ve got the worst taste in men, Dixie. The worst.’

  ‘Better to have bad taste than no taste at all. I worry about you, Lonnie. Why are you always alone? Don’t you want someone in your life?’

  ‘I don’t need anyone in my life,’ Carter said. ‘I have you.’ He took her hand and they turned as one to stare at the television screen where a younger Dakota Wylie walked across a fake campus, capturing the hearts of all with her effortless beauty. The two of them together suddenly seemed too much for me to take, but I made myself stay and watch them, lost in their own private world and happily oblivious to anyone’s needs but their own, until Carter stood and announced he had business to attend to. Dakota waved him away, too enraptured with her younger self to pay much attention to his leaving.

  I had felt traces of Arcelia Gallagher’s despair clinging to Lamont Carter, so I knew he must have been near her recently. I had learned that emotions that strong did not simply disappear, they clung to the people who had been there when the emotions were first created. And I was not going to let Carter out of my sight until I found her. He spent the rest of the day in his room, making fruitless phone calls to people on the West Coast, hoping to land a meeting to discuss a new television series for Dakota. It sounded like word had leaked out about her plastic surgery, probably through her husband, I thought to myself, and Carter did not have any luck all afternoon. No one would even take his calls.

  Between each call, he left to check on his client. She spent the entire day in bed, as she had spent so many other days, clutching a pillow to her belly and staring at the television in a dreamy, drug-induced haze while her sitcom played endlessly in the corner of the bedroom. How long had she been like this? I wondered. Weeks? Months? How long could she stay like that without affecting her baby? If she was even pregna
nt.

  Lamont Carter would sit with Dakota for a few minutes each time he checked in, lying to her about what he had arranged during his phone calls. One day he would have to come clean and explain to his client that she had ruined both her face and her livelihood. It was not going to be anytime soon, though, if his lies were any indication.

  Each time Carter left, I followed him back to his room where he would make more unproductive phone calls and occasionally pour himself a drink from the bar in his man cave. He was a strange man. Small and coiled, stronger than he looked at first glance, and completely withdrawn from the world. In his closet, he had rows of nearly identical black shirts and gray slacks lined up, with leather oxfords beneath him. He had a look that clearly meant affluence to him, and one look only. There was little else in his wardrobe.

  As the afternoon wore on, I realized that Alice Hernandez was right: the butler was indeed keeping an eye on Lamont Carter. Several times, when Carter was getting to leave his room, I arrived in the hallway first and spotted the butler disappearing around the corner. I could also feel him outside the door, listening in, and I wondered how much he knew.

  Finally, just as dusk was starting to gather, Carter visited the kitchen and asked the old man for Dakota Wylie’s dinner. ‘She’s extra hungry tonight,’ he told the old man. ‘She’s eating for two, you know?’

  The old man looked skeptical, his eyesight wasn’t so bad that he didn’t know that Dakota Wylie was wasting away to nothing. But he still prepared a tray piled high with sandwiches and fruit. It seemed to be all anyone in the house ever ate. He added a huge glass of milk and returned Carter’s stare by saying, ‘She needs the extra calcium, sir. Especially if she plans to breast feed.’ If he was being sarcastic, he hid it well.

  Carter took the tray from the old man without bothering to thank him and started down the long hall toward the main stairs. Just before he reached the foyer, he darted down a side hallway, pushing his way out of a small door that opened on to a flower garden arranged beneath the library windows. He looked around to see if he was being observed, then pulled a small electric lantern out of a hiding place in a boxwood hedge. Spotting Rodrigo cleaning his gardening tools in the shed, Carter quickly walked across a patch of lawn and darted behind a hedge of tall bushes. He walked faster, lantern and tray in hand.

  Carter had planned well. By the time he turned the corner and started across the main lawn, it was dusk. He was almost invisible in the strange yellowish light that comes when neither the day nor the night prevails. By then, he was moving so fast that the milk had sloshed over on to the tray, leaving little in the glass, but he did not slow his step.

  Halfway across the field, he glanced up at some cherry trees growing to his left. When he was about ten feet from the edge of the lawn next to the trees, he placed the tray on the grass and knelt. He started searching the grass with his hands, seeking something only he knew was there. Even though he had to have been there many times before, it took him nearly a minute to find what he was looking for. Glancing around to see if anyone was observing him, he reached deep into the lush turf and pulled. A square of lawn opened upward to reveal an opening in the earth and the top of a ladder leading beneath the lawn.

  The rumors were true: the house had been a stop on the Underground Railroad. I wondered how Carter had discovered it. Probably by searching for buried gold, I thought. He was the type who would have heard those rumors and believed them.

  But his real pot of gold lay beneath the earth – his only ticket to magazine covers and fat contracts now that Dakota Wylie had ruined her face. Arcelia Gallagher was slumped against the earthen walls of an underground room, the same prison I had seen during my strange vision the night before. She was either half asleep or losing strength. She barely opened her eyes as Lamont Carter climbed down the ladder, the tray of food still balanced on one hand and the lantern looped over the other. He had the arm strength of a chimp and would be a formidable opponent to anyone who tried to take him on.

  There was a plate of food already at her feet, mostly untouched, stiffening and turning brown in the stale air.

  Carter stared at the food before he looked up at her and said, with confident authority, ‘If you don’t eat more, you will kill your baby. Is that what you want? To kill your baby?’

  Arcelia Gallagher glared at him with contempt. ‘I have been tortured by real men,’ she spat at him. ‘I have stood up to men who make you look like the little boy you are.’

  I thought for a moment he might hit her. Instead, Carter placed the tray of food on the dirt floor by her feet and laughed. ‘How does it feel to disappear?’ he asked. ‘How does it feel to know that you will never see the sun again? Look around you, this is your tomb. As soon as the baby is born, you will watch me climb that ladder for the final time and, after that, you will never see me – or the sun – again.’

  She lunged for him, but one wrist was handcuffed to a bolt embedded in a plank shoring up the wall and she could not reach him. ‘They will find you,’ she predicted. ‘They will find you and they will kill you.’

  Carter laughed again. ‘No, “they” won’t find me. “They” won’t find you either. Wake up. The world is convinced your husband is your killer. No one will ever take a look at me.’

  Arcelia Gallagher gasped suddenly and pulled her legs toward her. Carter smiled. ‘Those are labor pains, aren’t they?’ His voice shifted, taking on a heavy southern drawl. ‘I knew the baby was near. It won’t be long now.’

  He leaned in closer to see her better and her legs lashed out with surprising strength. She caught him right in the groin. He tumbled backward, cursing and grabbing at his crotch.

  ‘You will never get my baby. I will kill you if you try,’ she screamed at him.

  He lay in the dirt for a moment, fighting to regain control. Amazingly, he stood calmly and began to brush off his clothes. ‘You shouldn’t have done that. I could have made it easy on you. I could have given you something to dull the pain.’

  He stared at her swollen belly from a safe distance. ‘Now I don’t really care. You can scream as loud as you want, no one can hear you here. And the screaming sure as hell won’t bother me. If you haven’t had the baby by morning, I’ll cut it out of you. Come to think of it, it would be my pleasure.’

  The love I had seen him show Dakota Wylie had disappeared. The hardness that lurked behind his eyes had taken over his whole being. He radiated hatred toward Arcelia Gallagher, toward himself, toward the entire world.

  ‘You can’t expect me to deliver the baby down here,’ Arcelia said. ‘You’re putting its life in danger.’ Even faced with death, all she wanted was to protect her baby’s life.

  ‘Babies are born in squalor every day,’ Carter told her. ‘Don’t you know that babies are born into dirt and filth to parents who don’t give a shit every single minute of every single day? You think that having a baby is special? You think just because you’re going to have one, it makes me want to protect you? Think again. I don’t give a shit if you’re its mother. I don’t even give a shit about the baby. But I need it, so I intend to keep it alive. All it has to do is make it to the house. All you have to do is stay alive until I take it.’

  I felt a sort of buzzing rush across the room, a stinging as if a swarm of bees had flown by. Carter flinched. He had felt it, too. I knew then that the second spirit was here in the underground room with us. Once I realized that, I could feel so much more coming from my fellow traveler: terror, violence, extraordinary pain and a thousand memories of a life left behind all washed over me. I could see his memories as vividly as if they were happening now and I was a part of them.

  I saw a man, tall and broad-shouldered with dark-colored skin helping a young boy fill a sack with fallen apples. I saw the same man looking up at the top of a cabin made of rough-hewn wood and felt his pride that he had built it. I looked through his eyes across the floor of the cabin at a stout woman bent over a pot of bubbling food mounted over a roaring fire burning
deep in a stone hearth. In a handful of seconds, I lived his life with him, feeling joy and pain and sorrow. I saw, once again, his wife and children being taken from him, the pain as fresh as the first time I had felt it. And then I felt his death. I felt the blows raining down on me, the carving of my flesh, the seemingly endless ripping and hacking away at my body. I felt the life drain from me as the world darkened. At last, I felt his stillness and I knew why he had stayed in this place, why he was here keeping Arcelia Gallagher company.

  He had been killed here, in this terrible cavern. This was where his bones lay.

  Carter looked uneasy. He had felt the spirit’s presence, too, as a predator might sense an even bigger predator in the jungle. He backed away from Arcelia Gallagher and nodded toward the food he had just brought. ‘Drink the milk. The baby needs it for the calcium.’

  As he started up the ladder, I followed with a glance back toward Arcelia Gallagher. She slumped back against the wall, eyes closed, her hands resting on her belly. God help her if the contractions truly had begun. Once the baby was born, Carter had no use for her.

  Darkness had fallen in the upper world. The air was cool and filled with the sounds of spring frogs peeping and the hoots of owls setting out for their evening meals. I smelled fresh grass and new life and marveled that it could exist mere feet above such hell.

  Carter replaced the hatch to the cavern and made his way quickly across the lawn. As he reached the edge of the courtyard in the back of the house, he saw the same thing that I saw: the butler standing in one of the kitchen’s French windows, watching Carter hurry back toward the house.

  Carter did not break stride. He walked through the back door, turned the corner into the kitchen and headed straight for the butler. He wrapped one hand around the old man’s neck and pushed him up against the wall, lifting him up off the ground. ‘Mind your own business, old man,’ Carter told him.

  The butler instantly turned red. His toes were barely reaching the ground and his arms flailed for something he could grab on to. Carter was relentless – and so absorbed that he did not notice what was happening behind him.