Angel Fire

by Lisa Unger

  chapter four

  Groggy from a fitful night’s sleep, Lydia walked unsteadily to her kitchen and brewed a pot of Hawaiian Kona coffee. Wrapped in a white terry-cloth cotton robe, she sat down in the window seat and stared out at the Technicolor Santa Fe morning sky, trying not to think about her nightmare and what it meant. When the rich scent of the coffee reached her, she turned her head and surveyed the kitchen. It was a large white room, immaculately clean. The appliances were brand-new, state-of-the-art machines that had barely been used. She was satisfied with how the room looked, everything in order, nothing out of place except for the unruly stack of papers on the kitchen table.

  The creative mind by its nature, Lydia had long ago concluded, is restless and cluttered—constantly shifting in thought and action until it settles on something that can engage it for more than a few moments. She read newspapers that way, skipping from article to article, looking for something interesting, something different. She clipped items if she felt there might be something to look at more closely. They collected in piles around her house that she would sort through later to pick out things that struck a chord with her and then read more thoroughly.

  She had done little but read since she arrived in Santa Fe over four weeks earlier. Mostly local papers, though. Her subscriptions to national newspapers piled up in her office, her e-mail went unchecked. She didn’t feel ready for another story yet. Not yet. Her last article, for New York magazine, had been about a socialite with Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy who was on trial for poisoning three of her four children. It was a long time before anyone suspected her because she had killed one child in Paris, one in Switzerland, and one in New York City. Esmerelda von Buren, known to her friends as “Esmy,” was a most narcissistic and terrifying sociopath. And after dealing with her, her heinous crimes, and the shallow, snobbish world in which she lived, Lydia figured she needed a good two months of doing nothing in Santa Fe before she even thought about writing something new. But some subconscious memory of the articles she had clipped was giving her the buzz, that little edge of excitement she got when she knew something wasn’t quite right, that there was a puzzle in need of solving. And ready or not, she couldn’t resist.

  Gathering the articles in her arms, she carried them into her living room. The room, filled with plants and small, potted trees, was flooded with sunlight. The southern wall was completely glass, below which was a precipitous drop into the valley of the mountains. She had an unobstructed view of the landscape, a sight she considered one of the most beautiful in all the world. She had told Jeffrey once that to wake up and see it in the morning gave her faith in the nature of the universe. No matter how wrong so many things were, no matter what tragedy, what chaos existed, this landscape still remained. He had laughed a little, telling her to stick to journalism and leave the poetry to someone else. But he knew what she meant. There was something peaceful about incorruptible beauty. But right now she barely noticed it. She was inside her head.

  She placed the articles on her stone coffee table, then walked over the bleached wood floor back to the kitchen for a cup of coffee—very light, very sweet. She walked back into the living room, absentmindedly touching the white adobe wall, blemishing the pristine surface with a three-inch smudge of newsprint. She placed the cup on the table beside the clippings but not before spilling a few drops on the elaborately patterned dhurrie rug. She hunted for a cigarette, then a lighter. Finally, she settled on the plush cream chintz sofa and began sorting.

  Like a sculptor searching for form hidden in a lump of clay she flipped through the pieces of newsprint. They must have whispered to her, otherwise she wouldn’t have clipped them. She had found many stories this way, scanning papers and looking for connections other people had missed. She knew it was there, she could feel it.

  As she sifted through the pile, she thought of Jeffrey. It was her dream last night that had brought him into her thoughts. He was so intimately connected in her mind to the murder of her mother. She realized it had been five weeks since they last spoke and she desperately wanted to hear his voice. She missed him like she missed the smell of the ocean, barely noticing until she caught the scent once again, and then it could bring tears to her eyes. She looked at the phone and knew he was thinking of her—waiting every day, in the back of his mind, for her to call, only really thinking of her when he was alone in his office late at night or in bed. But some kind of discipline kept her from calling, some need to see how long she could go without hearing his voice. She despised dependence in herself.

  One of her shrinks had confronted her about her relationship with Jeffrey, commenting on how complicated it seemed to be and asking what he meant to her. It was an insightful question, but she was not about to share her personal feelings with some stupid doctor, in spite of the fact this was probably the point of therapy. It was complicated; she loved him, she needed him in her life. Maybe it was because she had met him when she was so young, or that he had played a rescuer/protector role for her initially, but for a long time she had almost hero-worshiped him. He was everything a man should be: strong, brave, honest, honorable, reliable—everything she aspired to be. She considered him to be an omnipresent, omnipotent force in her life, more than friend, more than brother, just everything. But when he had been shot, about a year earlier, something about the way she felt had shifted within her. The thought of him being gone from her life was unbearable and the fact that he had suddenly been proved as human, that he was fragile and mortal like she was, like her mother, had forced her to recognize that she was and probably always had been in love with him. So, of course, she was compelled to get as far away from him as possible without actually putting him out of her life. Love like that was not safe for anyone.

  She turned her attention to the clippings. In the pile, she found an article about a trend of people abandoning cars in the desert. One old Cadillac was found with its lights still on, a dirty baby doll in the backseat with its head pulled off. The possibilities intrigued Lydia. Another article concerned itself with the high incidence of methamphetamine addiction among local teens. A housewife had died by hanging herself but the article stated that she’d been found wearing “leather accessories” and intimated that rather than suicide, her death may have been “accidental.” I guess “autoerotic asphyxia” and “suburban housewife” don’t go well together in the same sentence, thought Lydia. It was amazing what you could find going on in small towns if you knew what to look for. Lydia was sure there were no idyllic small American towns and probably never had been. Behind the quaint and charming facades of Everytown, U.S.A., there was some ugly rot, some unimaginably twisted lives.

  The articles that attracted Lydia today were notable not just for their strangeness, but by their potential connections to each other and the larger force that might be at work behind them.

  (AUGUST 10)

  BREAK-IN AT SURGICAL-SUPPLY WAREHOUSE:

  Various Instruments in Small Quantities Are Missing

  (AUGUST 15)

  ABANDONED BARN BURNED, ARSON SUSPECTED

  (AUGUST 16)

  TEENAGER MISSING FROM THE CARE OF FOSTER FAMILY

  (AUGUST 21)

  DRUG-ADDICTED COUPLE DISAPPEAR:

  A Long-suffering Victim of Domestic Abuse and Her Husband Missing

  And there was one more story that made the back of her neck tingle.

  Since she’d arrived in Santa Fe, she had been following a story about a little boy with leukemia, the son of a congresswoman, who had lost his German shepherd, Lucky. The dog had run away from the boy’s father during an evening walk near their home in Angel Fire. As the kid lay dying in his hospital bed, he wanted nothing more than his dog back. Of course, this was the kind of tearjerker that the media jumps all over: DYING BOY LOSES HIS BEST FRIEND—WHERE, OH WHERE, HAS MY LITTLE DOG GONE? Tripe. Sadly, the boy died before his dog was found.

  But according to today’s paper, the dog’s body had been found yesterday morning in a church garden, i
ts belly opened from stem to stern. Lucky’s organs had been removed with precision and skill, with a scalpel. When the blind man who lived at the Church of the Holy Name noticed the smell, he went out to the garden to investigate and fell over the dog’s body. Lydia thought about her daily runs past the church, her imaginings last night about the garden, and about her nightmare. A dark chill climbed her spine and she felt a flutter of fear in her belly.

  “Ready or not, here we go again,” she said aloud, without really meaning to.

  Her mother had always called her a dreamer and a storyteller because Lydia was forever concocting tall tales to entertain herself. She had always loved to read and found books much more interesting than the real world. After reading Alice in Wonderland at the age of ten, Lydia had spent hours at the creek in the woods behind her house waiting for a clothed forest animal to lead her to a magical world. After reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lydia had completely disassembled her mother’s armoire looking for the gateway to Narnia.

  Rather than be disappointed by the failure of life to imitate art, she kept a journal, which she filled with her grand adventures. On the pages of her black-and-white-mottled composition book, she slew dragons with a enchanted emery board, stole magic from a warlock and kept it in a compact which she carried in her backpack (using it when necessary to defend the innocent or to clean her bedroom), led a band of orphans by ship to an island where a rich, lonely woman who could love and care for them had been exiled by an evil witch.

  As she grew older, Lydia tired of fairy tales, but not of storytelling. She found she had the ability to perceive certain truths by observing the subtle nuances others failed to notice. She was thirteen when she first realized her ability.

  One day when her mother brought her home early from school because Lydia had the flu, she noticed two cars parked in her neighbor’s driveway. One she recognized as her neighbor’s car but the other she had never seen there before. She felt instantly that something was very wrong.

  She watched out the window of her bedroom. Her neighbors, Taylor and Claire Brown, a young couple who had lived there for over two years, both worked during the day. Claire had become friends with Lydia’s mother.

  “What do you think is going on over there, Mom?”

  “It’s none of our business. Now, I thought you were sick. Get into bed.”

  But soon as her mother left the room, Lydia was back at the window. She saw a petite well-dressed woman leave the house. The woman walked quickly, looking around and glancing at her watch. Five minutes after she drove away, she saw Taylor leave the house. He paused and looked at her mother’s car and then glanced nervously over at Lydia’s house.

  Lydia moved behind the curtain to avoid being seen. Then he, too, got in his car and drove off. Lydia was certain he was having an affair.

  Perhaps it was because when Taylor and Claire had them over for dinner at their house that Sunday, Lydia had noticed they didn’t touch or smile at each other. Perhaps it was because when Claire came over for coffee the week before, Marion and Claire spoke in hushed tones so that Lydia couldn’t hear. Maybe it was because both Taylor and the stranger had seemed anxious and self-conscious when they left. But Lydia was certain of her conclusion.

  “You have to tell her,” she said to her mother.

  “Tell her what? Just because a young couple is having problems doesn’t mean one of them is cheating, Lydia. They’re thinking of selling that house; that easily could have been their real estate agent. These fantasies are going to get you into more trouble than you can handle someday.”

  Lydia insisted. “Then just tell her that you saw a strange woman in her house.”

  “No. I’m not going to cause trouble like that. Shame on you, Lydia. You’re thirteen years old; you have no idea how complicated relationships are. In fact, though you think you’re a genius, you can’t imagine even a fraction of what goes on in the world. Claire and Taylor need to work out their problems on their own—without meddling neighbors.”

  Her mother led her back up to her bedroom and closed the shades. Lydia fumed as Marion tucked her in for the second time. But she was tired and sick and fell asleep.

  When she woke up that evening, she heard the sound of a woman crying. She walked quietly down the carpeted stairs and heard Claire’s voice from the kitchen. Claire had found another woman’s earring in her bed, the last straw in over a year of verbal abuse and suspected infidelity. Claire had packed a bag and was leaving that night to go to her mother’s home just a town away.

  From her perch on the step, she saw her mother through the banister slats, though Claire had her back to Lydia. Her mother raised her eyes from Claire, sensing Lydia’s presence. Marion raised her eyebrows and shrugged sadly, as if to say, You were right. Too bad.

  Lydia would remember this incident as the first of many that taught her a powerful lesson: an object out of place, a furtive gesture, something left unsaid could be indicators of a hidden truth. Most people, wrapped up in their own inner narratives, their own secrets, never noticed the subtleties of dishonesty. But very few things escaped Lydia’s notice.

  She never acknowledged her peculiar ability with any gravity until the death of her mother years later. Until then, it was always a game. Life was a series of little mysteries and Lydia was a detective putting the clues together.

  “Mom, I’m telling you, I’ve seen this guy before. He’s following us,” she told her mother urgently. She was imagining herself in an ABC Afterschool Special.

  “Oh, Lydia, for Christ’s sake, he is not following us.”

  “He was standing in the parking lot watching us and when we drove away, he pulled out after us.”

  Her mother glanced uneasily in the rearview mirror. Lydia was making Marion nervous. She had seen the man and he looked very strange; Marion just thought he was some pervert leering at her daughter. And she had seen him pull out after them. She made a right turn suddenly without signaling. The red car went driving by without even slowing down.

  “Wow, Mom. Good going, you lost him,” Lydia said dramatically.

  Marion looked over at her daughter and they both started laughing. Lydia put the cap back on her blue eyeliner.

  “I got the license-plate number,” she said.

  “Good for you,” said Marion said, playing along. It was a game for her now, too. The threat, real or imagined, was gone.

  But Lydia couldn’t drop it so easily. She was trying to remember where she had seen the man before. She knew she had. It was bothering her, making her feel uneasy.

  She had the same feeling now, as she contemplated the clippings before her, the Santa Fe sun reaching into her window and heating the room like a greenhouse. It seemed like ever since the death of her mother she’d been hunting demons, trying to reveal their faces to the world so they couldn’t walk around masquerading as normal people, surprising innocent women in the night or little children as they slept.

  She turned her mind to the Church of the Holy Name and how she had been there the night before and again in her dreams. What would it mean if all the pieces fit together as she imagined? She felt a tingling of the senses, as if she’d heard a scream in the night that had awakened her from sleep. As if she were lying, paralyzed in the dark, hearing the scream echo in the silence, hoping that it would come again so she could spring into action—but praying that it wouldn’t.

  chapter five

  Her study was the heart of the New Mexico house. It was a large room with a twelve-foot ceiling, decorated in warm browns and rusts, deep plum and evergreen, all the colors she found most soothing. The western wall was lined with shelves from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, each shelf filled with the books she had read and written in her life. She kept them all, could never bear to throw any of them away. The southern wall, like most of the southern walls of the house, was glass, exposing the view she cherished. On the floor, a rich brown wall-to-wall carpet felt like velvet beneath her feet. Beside the glass wall a large sofa an
d over-stuffed chair of sienna Italian leather faced each other. Over the couch she had draped a blanket given to her by a Tibetan monk. Velvet pillows of gold, green, and red picked up the colors of the blanket. Between the chair and table lay a huge wooden door she had purchased from an auction of an eighteenth-century Spanish castle and converted into a coffee table resting on a mahogany base. The wall behind the couch was a clutter of original black-and-white photographs from Alverez Bravo, Ansel Adams, Tara Popick, and a photo of herself taken by Herb Ritts for a profile written for New York magazine. A gothic iron candelabra sat on top of the table. On the floor over the carpet lay a large, elaborately embroidered Oriental rug.

  Her desk, made of a rich, varnished mahogany, was nearly invisible beneath piles of notes, newspapers from around the country, videotapes, and her computer. Her chair was covered in the same Italian leather as the couch. The wall behind her desk was covered with awards she had won over the years, her Pulitzer the centerpiece among them.

  The room, utterly silent, warm, and profoundly comfortable, was a womb. Here she found in turn solace, inspiration, seclusion. She had spent many hours sitting in her leather-bound chair, staring out the window, since she’d had the house built two years ago. She was untouchable here, completely relaxed. The only people who had ever been inside were Jeffrey and her grandparents when they came to visit. It was here she sat, surfing the Web, looking for more information on the items she had clipped from the paper.

  The missing people Lydia had read about in the clippings clearly were not the concern of anyone important. Shawna Fox was a chronic runaway. It seemed like the investigation was half-assed, but the argument she had had with her foster parents led police to assume she had taken off just like she had from her three prior foster homes. The boyfriend, Greg Matthews, insisted vehemently that Shawna never would have left him, but no one seemed to give his opinion much weight. Christine and Harold Wallace were recovering addicts who had been in and out of rehab for most of their adult lives. Their disappearances probably wouldn’t even have been notable if every single thing they owned, including their wallets and car, hadn’t been left behind—and if they hadn’t owed two months rent to their landlord. He was the one who had reported them missing to the police. There were no detailed profiles of any of the victims in any of the papers. The bigger Albuquerque Journal did not even carry a mention of the events, except a small item about the surgical-supply warehouse break-in.