Onyx Webb: Book Three

by Diandra Archer

  Other than Mary Ann.

  Half a year earlier he’d given the combination to Mary Ann so she could lock up. Could Mary Ann have robbed him? Rocky thought about how strapped for cash Mary Ann had been. And how she had the extra mouth to feed with the baby. And how livid she’d become when Rocky made her start dancing.

  “God damn, that bitch!” Rocky screamed, throwing the half-finished bottle of vodka, shattering the mirror behind the bar. Fat Sal might well come after him, but not before he paid a little visit to Mary Ann.

  Mary Ann was awakened a few minutes after noon by the sound of someone banging on the apartment door. It turned out to be the postman with a large box with no return address but was postmarked three days earlier in Orlando, Florida.

  “What do you think is in it?” Stan Lee asked.

  “I don’t know, sweetie,” Mary Ann said, working a pair of scissors through the packing tape along the top of the box. When she opened it, her heart stopped. The box was filled with wrapped gifts, but not just any wrap. Birthday wrap.

  Today was Stan Lee’s tenth birthday.

  “What’s in the box, Mom?” Stan Lee asked, nudging Mary Ann aside. Looking in the box, his eyes went wide. “Are they all for me?”

  “I think so,” Mary Ann said, wiping away a tear. “Why don’t you pull them out, and we’ll take a look.”

  Stan Lee took the gifts out of the box, one at a time, and set them on the table. There were six boxes in all, five of them with Stan Lee’s name written on them. The sixth box was smaller than the others, wrapped in solid red paper, with Mary Ann’s name on it.

  “Hey, there’s one for you, too,” Stan Lee said. “Open it!”

  Mary Ann took the small box and peeled away the red wrapping paper and saw what looked like a jewelry box. She carefully lifted the lid and let out a gasp. It was a heart-shaped necklace encrusted with diamonds.

  “I’ll bet it’s from Declan,” Stan Lee said.

  “I think you’re right,” Mary Ann said.

  “Do you want me to help you put it on?”

  “Would you?” Mary Ann said.

  Mary Ann went to the mirror and placed the necklace around her neck, and Stan Lee helped her secure the clasp from behind. It was truly beautiful, and more stunning than any piece of jewelry Mary Ann had ever seen.

  “Can I open my gifts now?” Stan Lee asked.

  “Yes,” Mary Ann said, wiping her eyes. “But use the scissors so we can save the wrapping paper. And be careful, they’re sharp.”

  Stan Lee got the scissors from the counter and used them to carefully cut along the taped edge of the birthday wrap. “Scrabble!” Stan Lee shouted. “And Superman comic books!”

  “Not so loud, okay?” Mary Ann said, glancing over at the small bed in the corner of the room where Bruce was sound asleep. “I know you’re excited, but you’ll wake your brother.”

  Stan Lee grabbed the next box and was just about to open it, but—once again—there was someone pounding on the door. “Maybe it’s the postman with more gifts?” Stan Lee said, racing across the room to the front door of the apartment.

  But it wasn’t the postman.

  It was Rocky Dredge.

  Mary Ann could tell immediately that Rocky was drunk. She’d noticed Rocky had been drinking more and more as of late, but she’d never seen him like this—out of control, wild-eyed, barely able to stand.

  “There she is,” Rocky said, his words slurred, and his face distorted in rage, pushing past Stan Lee into the apartment and then stopped dead in his tracks when he saw the stack of birthday gifts on the table. “Oh, it looks like a party? I don’t remember being invited.”

  “It’s my son’s tenth birthday,” Mary Ann said, not sure she even needed to explain. “What are you doing here, Rocky?”

  “What am I doing here?” Rocky asked. “Better question is where did you get the money for all these gifts? Huh, Vanilla? That’s the real question.”

  Mary Ann took a step forward and said, “Get out of here, Rocky. You’re drunk.”

  Rocky lowered his eyes and saw the diamond necklace. “You bitch,” Rocky said. “You did do it! You stole my money. Don’t lie to me!”

  “What money? What are you—” Mary Ann said as Rocky lunged forward and grabbed at the diamond necklace, coming away with nothing but air. “Stop, Rocky! What’s wrong with you?” Rocky lunged forward again, this time wrapping his hand around the necklace.

  “Don’t, it’s from Declan!” Stan Lee yelled, racing across the room and pushing Rocky as hard as he could, but to no effect. Rocky reached down with his free hand and sent the ten-year- old backward onto the floor.

  Without thought for the consequences, Mary Ann reached out and slapped Rocky hard across the face. Less than a second later—in a moment of blind, uncontrolled rage that he would have no recollection of later—Rocky threw a bone-crushing punch that connected with the left side of her face.

  The blow was brutal. But it was the corner of the coffee table that did the real damage as she went down.

  Rocky stood there, panting like a prizefighter, looking down on Mary Ann lying motionless on the floor. Had he just done that?

  Shit, she wasn’t moving.

  “Mary Ann? Come on, get up, girl.”

  Rocky took a step forward, not noticing Stan Lee was crawling across the floor toward him with scissors in hand.

  A moment later, Rocky felt a stab of searing pain coarse through him. “God damn it!” Rocky screamed, his sense of rage returning as he looked down and saw the scissors protruding from his thigh, blood already seeping down his pant leg.

  “You little shit!” Rocky screamed as he pulled the scissors out of his leg. Then, as if kicking a football, Rocky’s foot connected with the side of Stan Lee’s head, sending him backward and coming to rest, sprawled out and unconscious, on his mother’s legs.

  Rocky darted from the apartment, not even noticing he still had the bloody scissors in one hand and Mary Ann’s diamond necklace in the other.

  Only two people were at Mary Ann Mungehr’s graveside when the plain wooden casket was lowered into the ground at Mt. Carmel Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois.

  The first was Dimitri Tsakoff, the maître d’ who’d given Mary Ann her first waitressing job at the Chez Paree ten years earlier.

  The second person was Tommy.

  Tommy knew Mt. Carmel well since a number of mobsters were buried there, including Al Capone and Frank Nitti, the man whose suicide Tommy had exploited to worm his way into The Outfit a quarter-century earlier.

  “She was a good kid, this one,” Dimitri said. “Do they have any idea who did this terrible thing?”

  Tommy shook his head. “No, no one knows nothin’.” Which was a lie.

  The evening news aired a story saying a woman had been beaten to death in her apartment near Ashland and West George Street. No one in the building had seen or heard anything, and the woman’s son could remember nothing after the postman had arrived with a box of gifts.

  The news story did not mention the victim by name, but Tommy knew they were talking about Mary Ann.

  “Do you know what they did with the boys?” Tommy asked.

  “Taken to the orphanage out at Dunning,” Dimitri said. “Unthinkable, young boys growing up in an orphanage. It isn’t right.”

  Tommy suddenly felt ill, not only from the thought of the boys being taken to an orphanage, but also from the gnawing suspicion that the second boy—the younger one, Bruce—was Declan’s child.

  A child Declan didn’t even know he had.

  “I’ll check on the kids,” Tommy said. “Who paid for the casket and the plot?”

  Dimitri did not answer.

  Tommy pulled a roll of bills from his pocket, peeled off several hundred-dollar bills and held it out to Dimitri.

  “That is not necessary,” Dimitri said. “Mary Ann was special. I knew it the first time I met her, and—now this? Putting her in the ground in a decent casket was the least I could do.”
>
  “And helping you pay for it is the least I can do,” Tommy said, holding the money in his outstretched hand until Dimitri finally gave in and took it.

  “Do me a favor. Don’t tell anyone you saw me here, okay,” Tommy said.

  “Why would I?” Dimitri asked. “I don’t even know who you are.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Crimson Cove, Oregon

  August 9, 1941

  Onyx stood at the far end of the hallway, watching as the night nurse finished her rounds—just as she had the night she escaped the hospital several years earlier. This time, however, she was sneaking in rather than out.

  In addition to Onyx’s heightened senses of sight, hearing, and smell—which she’d come to understand were critical to her survival—she’d also developed an additional sense.

  A sixth sense.

  In the same way animals can sense fear, Onyx discovered she had an acute ability to sense when a person was nearing death, which is why she was thirty feet from Room 3B.

  For the last few days, Onyx had come to the hospital to check on the status of eighty-five-year-old Ben Greenwald, who Onyx knew was dying. Soon. The man was bed-ridden and in extreme pain that no one could do anything about. No one but her, that was.

  Ben’s life, if you could call it that now, was nothing more than waiting for the end to come—an end the man had prayed for every night for the past several weeks. He wanted desperately for it to be over.

  And then there was Onyx—virtually transparent now, clinging to what precious little energy she still had—wanting just as desperately for it to never end.

  So, Onyx was there to help the man move along, to facilitate a trade in which both she and Ben Greenwald got what they wanted. Ben got to leave, and she got to stay.

  An hour passed, and Onyx found herself waiting patiently at the end of the hall for the nurse to exit the room.

  When the nurse finally left, Onyx wasted no time slipping into Ben Greenwald’s room unnoticed, seeing the man she was going to take for the first time—bearing witness to the final moments of the man’s life—a man who’d been lucky enough to reach the age of eighty-five, and unlucky enough to now be suffering the loss of virtually everything and everyone important to him because he had.

  Ben Greenwald had done his best to fight off the ravages of time, but in the end his best was no match—having gone to bed one night thinking of himself as young, and waking up the next morning to find every part of his body betraying him.

  All the vegetables he’d eaten as a child had not shielded the man’s bones from becoming brittle or his skin from losing its elasticity.

  Nor could all the exercise in the world change the fact that Ben Greenwald had been born with a genetic profile that brought on diabetes once he hit fifty, facilitating the need for doctors to amputate his left leg just below the knee.

  Nor had all the crossword puzzles spared his mind from extended bouts of memory loss.

  Onyx had gone into the room unnoticed by the nurse, but not by Ben Greenwald, who looked up immediately when her ghostly gray image floated in and hung near the doorway.

  “Are you an angel?” Ben asked.

  “Of sorts,” Onyx said.

  “And you’ve come to take me home?”

  “Yes, with your permission,” Onyx responded.

  “Permission?” Ben Greenwald said with a smile of gratitude and relief. “I’ve been waiting.”

  Onyx had finished with what she came to do, having dispatched Ben Greenwald to the other side in less than a minute. Now came the hard part.

  Slipping past the nurse in a transparent vapor state was easy. Being able to leave the hospital undetected—now that the energy she’d taken made her appear like any other living person—was entirely another matter.

  Onyx stood near the door, waiting for the precise moment the nurse finished her rounds on the third floor and got into the elevator. Once the elevator doors closed behind the nurse, Onyx stepped into the hall and went down the stairway to the first floor and out the exit door into the darkness of night.

  While Onyx had made a point of staying clear of the lighthouse so as not to be seen by the teenage kids who had turned her home into a weekend hangout, she felt the urge to go there.

  To her surprise, both the lighthouse and caretaker’s house were dark—the doors nailed shut and windows boarded up—with “Do Not Enter by Order of Crimson Cove PD” signs posted.

  Hell Daniels had done this, Onyx thought. Thank you, Sheriff. Then Onyx had another thought.

  Looking around her, Onyx searched the darkness until she found what she was looking for.

  A hammer.

  Ulrich had been notoriously bad when it came to returning his tools. Had Onyx wished to, she could have found another ten tools lying about.

  The hammer was dirty and covered with rust, but it would do the job nonetheless.

  Onyx climbed the stairs to the lighthouse door and used the claw end to begin pulling the nails from the weathered wood. The nails were stronger than she expected, or maybe she was weaker. In any case, it took her several minutes to remove the boards and enter the lower landing of the lighthouse.

  Onyx looked around at the destruction brought about by the hooligans, most of which consisted of broken furniture, discarded bottles, and obscene messages painted on the walls.

  And her paintings were gone.

  All of them.

  She would have cried, but ghosts cannot make tears.

  Onyx left the lighthouse and made her way to the caretaker’s house and used the hammer to pry the front door open, finding far less damage inside than expected.

  Other than the bedroom area that was destroyed in the fire, of course.

  Onyx walked down the hallway to the bathroom, surprised to find the tub she used to extinguish the flames on her face and arm still halfway full of water.

  Onyx reached in and grabbed the small metal chain, releasing the rubber stopper, and watched the water run from the tub.

  Then she looked in the mirror.

  It had been three and a half years since Onyx stumbled from the hospital—badly burned, dehydrated, and delirious, one day shy of her fortieth birthday—only to then find herself being ripped apart, limb from limb, by the wolves. How very strange to see her perfect image looking back at her.

  No scars.

  No crow’s feet at the corner of her eyes. The small lines at the corners of her mouth gone as if rubbed off with a pencil eraser.

  No physical imperfections whatsoever.

  In a few weeks, she’d be on the prowl again, looking for another life to take. And if she wanted to stay among the living badly enough, it was something she’d have to do forever.

  Perfect forever. Thirty-nine forever.

  Dead forever.

  This was the closest thing to being alive Onyx could expect. But life is a hard thing to let go of.

  Even if you’re dead.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Jefferson, Missouri

  July 21, 2010

  “You saw it, right?” Nathaniel said from the bed on the third floor of Mercy Jefferson Hospital, about ten miles from the Open Arms Orphanage where he’d been brutalized by an invisible force wielding a stick the night before. “Don’t deny it, Olympia.”

  Olympia looked down at Nathaniel and said nothing. She knew what she’d seen—she just wasn’t sure how much of it she wanted to admit to.

  Not yet at least.

  “Come on, Olympia,” Nathaniel said. “Take your damn skeptic’s hat off for a moment and just try being my friend.”

  “Oh, no,” Olympia said wagging her finger in the air. “Don’t you dare go there, I ran up a flight of creepy-ass, cobweb covered stairs and saved your scrawny gay ass from—”

  “From what?” Nathaniel prompted. “Say it.”

  Olympia crossed her arms and went silent again, recalling the events of the previous evening—still a jumbled mess in her exhausted mind.

  Olympia had
sat there on the floor, her arm wrapped around Nathaniel’s shaking, bloody shoulders—keeping everyone away—for the twenty minutes it had taken the ambulance to arrive.

  After shining a light in his eyes and taking his vitals, the paramedics helped Nathaniel to his feet and gently stripped the bloody shirt from his body.

  Olympia still couldn’t believe what she had seen.

  Almost every inch of Nathaniel’s back, shoulders, and arms were covered in a patchwork of raised, bloody welts.

  “How did this happen?” the paramedic had asked.

  It was a great question—she just didn’t know the answer.

  “If you’re willing to admit what you saw, Olympia, we’ve got the greatest paranormal story ever,” Nathaniel said, pulling her back to present day. “Our ratings will—”

  “They know what you did,” Olympia said.

  “What? What do you mean?” Nathaniel said.

  “Nicky told them everything, Nathaniel,” Olympia said.

  Nathaniel closed his eyes and released a long breath. “That little asshole,” Nathaniel hissed.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Olympia snapped. “Don’t go blamin’ the guy you slipped $200 to sneak off and pretend to be a ghost by knocking on a wall. Seriously, Nathaniel, of all the dumb stunts you’ve ever pulled, this one takes the cake. What in the hell were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking we couldn’t afford another failure, that’s what,” Nathaniel said. “After what happened in Savannah? I just wanted something to go right for once.”

  “Well, nice job with that,” Olympia said. “Because of what you did, no one is going to believe you.”

  “But you believe me, right?” Nathaniel asked. “You were there—you saw it with your own two eyes—that stick hitting me again and again. I didn’t pay anyone to do that. All you have to do is go on camera and tell what you saw.”

  “Oh, like anyone will believe me?” Olympia said.

  “Of course they will.”