by Dianne Emley
Carrying a sack of groceries in one arm and Kissick’s notebook in the other, Vining entered the house from the garage into the laundry room, setting off the prealarm. She punched the codes to deactivate then realarm the house. She set the groceries on the kitchen sink but held on to the notebook. The small lights that switched on automatically at dusk lit the family room, small dining area, and living room. The house was quiet.
The television in the family room was not on as her grandmother was not there, as she normally was, dozing in the La-Z-Boy. Vining knew as much, not seeing the baby blue Olds in the driveway. She thought Granny was going to stay until she got home and found her absence disconcerting.
Next to the pile of mail on the kitchen table was a small plant. It looked like a tomato seedling with strands of raffia tied into a bow around its terra-cotta pot.
“Em?”
A plastic florist fork stuck into the plant soil held a three-by-five card. On it was a photograph of a husband and wife realtor team and a cheery note.
“Emily…”
Vining walked through the family room and living room. The drapes over the sliding glass doors were open. Vining caught her reflection against the darkness outside. She clicked off the lamp on an end table. Her image disappeared and the city lights came into view.
Emily was probably in her room downstairs, but the quiet emptiness of the house rattled her. She quickly went into her bedroom and stashed the notebook under the bed, not wanting Emily to happen upon the crime scene photos. She turned and headed for Em’s room.
Her cell phone rang. The display said the call was from Emily.
“I’m in the darkroom. I heard you turn off the alarm and now you’re stomping all over the house.”
Vining exhaled. “Hi, sweet pea. Where’s Granny?”
“Her doctor called and said she had an opening. Granny asked if I minded and I said I’d get a ride home with Aubrey’s mom. She went by Trader Joe’s and I bought a California roll that I ate for dinner. I’ve been in the darkroom ever since. I know where the guns and ammo are and how to use them. This place is alarmed like I don’t know what. I’m fine.”
“That’s all you had for dinner? One California roll?”
“Mom, why are you stressing? You didn’t even sleep in your bed last night. Is working on the Frankie Lynde murder doing a number on you or is it something else?”
“I expected Granny to be here, that’s all.”
“Like Granny’s going to protect me.”
“She’s another person in the house. It matters.” Vining realized her voice was strident.
He’s moved on.
Vining took a deep breath.
You’ll draw him out, but not now.
“Mom, I babysit for people. I’m capable of staying by myself. I’m fourteen.”
“Yes, you are. You’re a young lady now. I’ll come down.” She ended the call.
Walking back through the living room, the windows’ black eyes made her feel exposed. She yanked the cord to close the drapes and made busywork straightening the folds. The Lynde investigation wasn’t doing a number on her. Working it energized her. But it was the messenger. Through it she’d learned how deeply T. B. Mann had seeped into her life, how indelibly he had stained it. It could not stand. She refused to live this way.
Returning to her bedroom, she took off her ankle holster and put the Walther under her pillow. It had been her sole companion in bed from the day she was able to get up and load it, out of sight of her caregivers, after she’d returned from the hospital.
In the kitchen, she took off her shoulder holster, removed her Glock .40, and ejected the clip. She hung the empty holster on a hook beside the back door. The gun she put into a cabinet inside an empty box of Count Chocula cereal that resided between Emily’s box of Cheerios and Vining’s full box of Count Chocula. The clip she stashed in a drawer behind tea towels. The other firearms in the house were formally secured. The Walther and the Glock were her working weapons. They had to be nearby in case she needed them.
She went down the stairs off the kitchen to Emily’s floor, which was the former rumpus room. After she and Wes had bought the house, they’d made full use of it, installing a pool table, Wurlitzer jukebox, and wet bar and having friends over most weekends. Sliding glass doors opened onto a concrete slab patio that was perfect for barbecuing. Fun times. Wes wanted the toys when they’d split and she hadn’t objected.
When Emily turned thirteen she laid claim to the space. Wes did a great job of transforming it into a bedroom and workroom for her.
Vining saw that Emily had closed the plantation shutters and was glad. Beyond the patio, the backyard was ragged hillside, surrounded with a chain-link fence marking the property line. The yard was not as secure as Vining would like. The neighbor’s cat often triggered the motion lights. Emily argued for a black Lab, but Vining resisted this new responsibility and expense. Plus pet dogs were unreliable for security as they were easily placated or eliminated. What Vining coveted was the surveillance cameras she saw at Iris Thorne’s house.
Enough, she told herself. T. B. Mann was not coming here for her or Emily. Even if he did, the house was secure.
She recalled Kissick’s words. He may be insane but he’s not stupid.
T. B. Mann’s time would come. She would find him. She would follow the threads that drew him to her, the slender skeins that had transformed into links of a chain, binding her and him forever.
For the moment, her obligation was to Frankie Lynde. Vining owed her nothing less than her best effort.
The light outside the darkroom door was off, meaning it was safe to enter. Vining knocked. A strange, unfamiliar noise came from inside. She drew her ear close to the door to listen.
“Avanti,” Em yelled.
Vining did as instructed.
The small room was illuminated by a red light. Emily was taking wet photographs from the fixing bath and hanging them on a clothesline with plastic clips. She loved her digital camera, but she also loved the craft of working with film and experimenting with different techniques. On her wish list was equipment to develop color photographs, but that was beyond Vining’s budget for the moment. There was always Dad she could lean on. He had proven to be “leanable” in the past. Em knew how to tweak the guilt factor and was not above judiciously doing just that.
“Hey.” Emily did not stop her work.
“Hey back atcha.”
A CD spinning in a player was the source of the strange noise.
“What is that?”
“The recording I made from Frankie Lynde’s hillside. Disappointing. All I’ve heard so far is traffic and crickets. Nothing’s turned up in the photographs either. There’s something that could be orbs in a couple of them, but I think they’re reflections from the streetlights or dust on the lens. They’re hard to verify without an infrared lens or night goggles. Night goggles would be great, but they’re expensive.”
To Vining, the wet photographs showed a vacant hillside at night. “Are these what you call swirls?”
“Orbs,” Emily corrected her. “Swirls are long and squiggly. Orbs are like balls of light. Then there are vortexes that look like funnels, and mists that look like…Well, mist. They all suggest the presence of ghosts. And if you’re lucky enough, you’ll see an actual ghost that appears in the form of a human being.”
She took a stack of photographs from a shelf and sorted through them. The edges were wavy from the home developing process. She pulled out images of a cemetery at night. The darkness was marked with crooked trails of white light, like that left from writing in the night sky with a lit sparkler on the Fourth of July.
“These are swirls.”
“I see.”
Emily found shots of an abandoned house where she’d prodded her father to take her one night. It hadn’t been Wes’s idea of family time, but Emily had loved it.
“These are orbs.” She returned the photographs to the shelf. “I’ll scan the shots of Franki
e’s hillside and e-mail them to the San Gabriel Valley Ghost Hunters Club for an opinion.”
“Thought you weren’t involved with them anymore.”
“They have their uses.” Emily caught the slight upturn at the corners of her mother’s mouth. “This is not a joke, Mom. I wish you’d take it more seriously.”
“You’re right, sweetheart. I shouldn’t make fun of things I don’t understand.”
“You of all people.”
Vining accepted the dig without comment.
Also drying on the clothesline were self-portraits of Emily.
“These are cute.”
Emily raised her upper lip. “Uh, not. I just took them to finish the roll.”
“They’re adorable. Look at this one. I want it for my desk.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. It’s so you.”
“If that’s me…Don’t even…Please.”
Vining hugged her daughter around the shoulders and didn’t press the issue further.
With her mother still holding on to her, Emily inspected a wet photograph she held between rubber tongs and made a noise of dejection.
Vining looked at it, her chin resting atop Emily’s shoulder.
“These are definitely caused by headlights from a car going over the bridge.”
Vining stood straight, letting go of Emily who moved to hang up the photo.
“Darn. I just wish—”
“Shhh.” It came out of Vining’s mouth with an intensity that surprised Emily.
“What?”
Vining held up her hand, ending conversation. She slowly made a fist, as if trying to seize something from the air.
“Mom, what is it?”
Vining searched the ceiling. “It’s gone now.” Her gray eyes went dark. “You didn’t hear that?”
Emily indicated she hadn’t.
Vining darted to the CD player and began punching buttons, frustrated by not getting the result she wanted.
Emily came to help.
“Roll it back a little. Roll it back.” Vining was breathing through her mouth.
“Mom…”
“Emily, play it again. Please.”
Vining realized she was using her no-nonsense voice. It was harsh and inappropriate here. She was scaring her daughter. Her rational mind told her to back off.
Emily skipped the CD back and started it playing again.
Vining raised a trembling hand in the air, as if feeling the sound waves. Her eyes grew wide and her mouth gaped. She covered it with her hand, backing up in the small room until she could go no farther.
“Mom, what is it?” There were tears in the girl’s eyes. “I don’t hear anything except the freeway. Mom…”
But Vining heard. Frankie Lynde was speaking to her in the same coarse whisper from the hillside.
“Wear the pearls,” Frankie Lynde was telling Vining. “He gave them to you. Wear the pearls.”
T W E N T Y - O N E
E MILY FOLLOWED HER MOTHER FROM THE DARKROOM. “MOM, TELL me what’s going on. This is not just about you. I’m the one who sat in your hospital room day after day. I’m the one who almost ended up motherless.”
She choked on the last word. It was too horrible to utter. Dejected, she plopped on the edge of the bed.
Vining sat on an overstuffed chair and stared across the room. She listened to her daughter with odd detachment. So much had happened in the past two days. She was overwhelmed.
“Mom!” Emily wailed. “Don’t do this to me. Please. It’s mean. I can’t stand it.”
Weeping, she slid to the floor and hugged her knees against her chest.
Her daughter’s despair roused Vining from her daze. Because of T. B. Mann, she heard corpses talking. She wouldn’t let him do this to her. She would not. He had failed at taking her life. Now he was working on her mind, making her alienate her daughter, stripping her of everything that mattered. And she was a willing accomplice.
She went to the floor and cradled and rocked her crying daughter, stroking her hair. Her own tears fell.
“I’m sorry, Em. I’m so sorry. The last thing I want is to hurt you. You’re my life.”
The girl’s crying subsided. “Then tell me what’s happening. Don’t tell me it’s nothing. I won’t believe you.”
Vining did not want to burden her daughter with her problems, but her behavior already was. The big unknown was worse than the truth. Maybe she was making too much of how Emily would react.
“Okay, Em. I’ll be straight with you. No more secrets.”
Sniveling, Emily pushed herself up and leaned against the bed.
Vining walked on her hands and knees to grab a box of tissues and returned to sit beside Emily. Her daughter nestled against her neck. She didn’t know where to begin. She’d held back so much.
The poetry magnet. She had described the events that had occurred at 835 El Alisal Road to Emily in broad strokes. She’d considered the magnet a meaningless detail. The crazy antics of a madman. She’d decided her daughter didn’t need more material with which to embellish her nightmares.
She now told Emily about the magnet. She told her about Frankie Lynde’s corpse speaking to her—“I am you. I am not you”—and the panic attack that ensued. She told her about the second panic attack at the Thorne house, and the images inside the gemstone in Frankie’s earring. She concluded with Frankie Lynde’s words on the recording Em had made on the hillside.
“My subconscious is working overtime. That’s all it is. Frankie Lynde is not speaking to me from beyond the grave.”
“Mom, of course she is.”
Vining now regretted saying a thing.
They played the CD again, all of it, and again. At seven minutes in, every single time, Vining heard the admonition about the necklace.
Emily did not. Neither did she discount her mother’s perceptions as hallucinations as Vining did. Emily believed in the afterlife and the stages between. She didn’t need proof from the scientific establishment. She was building her own proof, ghost by ghost.
“What necklace?” Emily pushed herself taller on the floor.
“There’s only one it could be.”
“The one someone sent after the Lonny Velcro incident.”
Lonny Velcro was the man Vining had shot and killed on duty five years before. She and Emily preferred describing it with the more benign word “incident.”
Vining stood and held out her hand to help Emily up. They walked upstairs to Vining’s bedroom. The no-frills room had a view of the city and was furnished with the good, simple pieces she and Wes had bought when they were first married.
She opened the dresser drawer where she kept her few pieces of nice jewelry, pulled out a box and removed the necklace. She displayed it on the bed as if around her neck. It was a strand of pearls with a pendant or slide made of a large pearl surrounded by small stones that looked like diamonds.
Lonny Velcro’s given name had been Lon Veltwandter. In 1972, just out of high school in Sherman, Texas, he and his twin brother, Leon, formed the seminal heavy metal group Volume. Volume went on to sell 140 million records worldwide. The band’s personal excesses became emblematic of the era. The band broke up in the late eighties and the members went their separate ways. Brothers Lonny and Leon did not speak for years.
Ten years later, after divorcing another wife, Lonny left Malibu and bought a gated mansion in Pasadena. He told friends his sedate new city was the Anti-Malibu, Anti-Hollywood. Even though he claimed to have left his rock-and-roll days behind, he often prowled the Los Angeles club scene with an entourage that always included attractive young women. Forty-six years old, rail thin, weathered, and still wearing his trademark long tresses and bandanna, he remained a player.
Volume was to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. All the band’s original members were to play on stage again for the first time since 1988. Story was fences had been mended, axes buried, and there were rumors of a tour and a new album
. Volume’s loyal fans around the world were ecstatic.
That June, Vining passed her fifth anniversary with the PPD. She was on patrol with John Chase, a rookie ten months out of the Academy. At 2:13 on a Sunday morning, she and Chase responded to a call placed by Lonny Velcro, who said a woman had shot herself at his mansion. Vining and Chase arrived to find model and sometime actress Marnie Allegra propped up on an antique church pew in the mansion’s foyer, dead from a gunshot wound through her eye.
Velcro stood in the foyer and calmly explained to the officers how he and Allegra were friends and had met that night by chance at Muse, a Hollywood club. After having a couple of drinks together, they decided to party at his house and she followed him in her car. They were making cocktails in the library off the foyer when Allegra said she was going to use the powder room. A minute later, Velcro heard the gunshot.
Velcro took Vining and Chase into the library and stood behind the bar, showing where he had been when Allegra allegedly shot herself.
“Had Miss Allegra talked about suicide?” Vining asked, not believing his story for a second.
“No, she was fine. Kinda drunk, but fine.”
“Where did she get the gun?”
“It’s mine. I keep it in the commode in the foyer. I like having a weapon near the front door. I’ve had incidents in the past.”
“She knew it was there.”
“Obviously. She took it out and shot herself, didn’t she?”
Vining pressed him. “You’re telling us that out of the blue, this woman goes from having drinks and conversation to committing suicide.”
Chase later reported that Velcro again relayed his version of the events, not appearing the least bit troubled, when Vining interrupted him.
“Chase, you realize he’s full of shit. When women commit suicide, they rarely use guns, especially in the head. That’s basic Academy training.”
“You’re the one who’s full of shit,” Velcro countered. “It happened just the way I said.”