Angel Fire

by Lisa Unger

  But a cold dawning was moving over him. Then Juno remembered a day long ago on the playground behind the church. In a downward spiral of thought, he remembered Jimmy taunting him one day when they were children, making fun of his parents, saying that they had died in some horrible way. He remembered his conversation with his uncle. And then he remembered nothing else about the incident. It was a blank wall in his mind that he could not pass through. He remembered his uncle’s words: “Jimmy has told you something and I have told you something. You must look into your heart and decide what you believe. If someone told you that God did not exist, would you believe them?”

  He could not remember what he had decided that day. He could not remember thinking about what had happened to his parents ever again. He knew he had sewn his uncle’s story of his parents into his soul, like a jewel in the seam of a coat. The knowledge of it, though he never saw it or touched it or thought of it after that day, was a secret treasure that he owned, one that defined him. Now it was as if he’d ripped open the seam and found not a gem, but a lump of clay.

  As he sat in the pew, Juno’s knowledge of himself and his life turned to quicksand. He was afraid to speak as Lydia approached him. He was afraid he would not recognize the sound of his own voice. She sat beside him and placed her hand on his.

  “I know how you are feeling right now. And what I am about to tell you is not going to comfort you,” she said softly.

  He nodded.

  “Outside, the wall is splattered with blood. A lot of blood. It appears as if the garden has been disturbed as well. In a few minutes, we are going to start digging there. And I am not sure what we’ll find, but …”

  He just nodded again and held up his hand. Eventually, he mustered his voice and whispered, “Do you know what happened to my parents?”

  “Your parents?” she asked, after a pause, hoping he hadn’t lost his mind. “Do you mean your uncle, Juno?”

  “No. I mean my parents. Do you know what happened to them?”

  “Yes …” she said, unsure where he was leading.

  “Will you tell me?”

  “Are you saying you don’t know?”

  “Yes.”

  “What have you thought all these years?” she asked, incredulous.

  “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. Or you’d think I’m insane.”

  “Try me.”

  In the lilting voice one would use to tell a fairy tale to a child, Juno told Lydia the story he had believed all his life.

  “My mother was a beautiful angel held prisoner by an aging wizard. For sixteen years, he kept her hidden in a dovecote at the top of a tower with a hundred steps. Her hair was as black as the bottom of the ocean and her eyes as blue as ice. And the wizard loved her in his own twisted way. But because she was stolen from God Himself, he hid her among the doves. He fed her only the finest fruit and honey.

  “Serena, my mother, was not unhappy. She loved the company of the birds and the wizard was kind to her. And she had been in the tower for so long that she considered it her home. She had no desire for freedom, she could barely conceive of what that would mean. The wizard told her the world was a dark and dangerous place, and he kept her there to protect her from the evil forces that would surely try to harm her. She was grateful.

  “In the evenings when the moon was full, Serena would sing for the doves. Beautiful songs in an angel’s voice that would carry over the trees and up to the stars. One of these nights, a handsome young shepherd, named Manuel, was walking home from tending his sheep when he heard Serena’s song. He followed the sound of her voice and saw her in the window at the top of the tower. Instantly, he fell in love.

  “He called to her. But she was frightened and backed away from the window. He walked around the tower, looking for the door, and finally found it but it was locked.

  “He stood there awhile calling to her. But she did not reappear. Despairing, he sat against a tree and tried to figure out a way to make her open the door. Soon he fell asleep. Later that evening, he was awakened by the sound of someone walking through the woods. Quickly he hid himself and watched as the old wizard pulled a golden key from a chain around his neck and opened the door. The shepherd heard the wizard lock the door from the inside. He decided this might be his only chance to get into the tower. So he picked up the heaviest, biggest rock he could manage and stood by the door, waiting for the wizard.

  “When the wizard emerged, the shepherd hit him on his head with the rock and the wizard fell unconscious.

  “Manuel ran as fast as he could to the top of the tower, where he found Serena sleeping on a bed of dove feathers and gold dust. He sat beside her to admire her beauty, his heart aching with love for her. When she woke and saw his kind and handsome face, she, too, fell instantly in love with him.

  “ ‘Come away with me, Serena. I am only a poor shepherd but I will love and care for you all your life,’ he said.

  “She said she would and he kissed her passionately. It was a kiss so full of love, that a baby was made and appeared beside Serena on her bed. They called him Juno, and that was me. Overjoyed, the young lovers carried me from the tower. But when they stepped outside, the wizard was waiting for them. Enraged, he pulled a sword from its sheath at his side and ran my father through, killing him instantly. My mother was stricken with grief and wailed with all the pain of her broken heart. It was a cry so loud that God Himself heard it and recognized it as the voice of His lost angel.

  “He appeared to her and the wizard as a blinding light. He cast the wizard straight to hell. Then He spoke to my mother.

  “ ‘Weep not, my lost little angel, I have come to take you and Manuel home.’

  “She saw Manuel’s soul rise from his body into the light and soon she was beside him. They were going to God.

  “ ‘But what of our child?’ they asked.

  “ ‘He has a life to live before he can join us. He has many things to do on Earth. One day, you will all be together again.’

  “And I was blinded by the light of God.”

  Lydia didn’t say anything, trying to understand what kind of person you had to be to believe a fairy tale all your life. How innocent, how trusting, how pure he had to be never to imagine that his uncle had lied. What kind of world did he imagine, where the mystical existed so believably? “And you believed this until when?”

  “I think until just now. You must think I am an idiot. Someone like you, always searching for the truth. I have hid from it all my life in this little church. The world is nothing like I have believed it to be. I think on some level, I knew. But I just never examined it. I didn’t want to know the truth.”

  “God, why would you? The world can be a twisted, fucked-up place. What a gift you had all these years, to live like you have. You had something that I’m not sure even exists anymore. Pure faith.”

  “Blind faith. If everything you believe in is a lie, then you’re a fool, not a saint.”

  She marveled at the change in him. The monklike demeanor he had held was gone, and an ordinary man, angry, confused, and grief-stricken, sat beside her, clutching her hand. He’d lost his glow of inner peace. And she grieved for that loss, almost more than for his other losses.

  “Just because your uncle told you a story meant to protect you doesn’t mean that everything he taught you was false. Plenty of people who are not fools have faith—faith in God, faith in the basic goodness of human nature. You don’t have to give those things up.”

  “What about you, Lydia? What do you have faith in?”

  She searched her mind, wanting to come up with something to satisfy them both. But she didn’t know. She didn’t want to say what she’d realized in that moment, that she had been searching for faith in him. She’d started to convince herself that he could heal the pain she had been carrying inside her since the death of her mother, that he held the truth that could set her free. It was that search that had been drawing her to him.

  “Because you see the truth,” he s
aid, when she didn’t speak, “you don’t need faith.”

  “Because I see the truth, I need it even more; faith that there is something larger, something better than what we see. There are people who believe you healed them. What about that?”

  “I never healed anyone. People lied to themselves. And I was starting to believe it, too. They were searching, just like you were. For something larger, something that could fix the injustice of suffering. They let themselves believe a fairy tale. Just like I did.”

  “But I saw you in my dreams,” she said.

  “I can’t explain that, Lydia.”

  “And that’s the space that faith occupies. In things we can’t explain and can’t understand.”

  Now he sat silent, trying to grasp at the fading concept of himself and his world. He wondered who he would be, now that everything he had known was slipping away. “So, do you know what happened to them?”

  “Yes. Do you want me to tell you?”

  “Yes.”

  As carefully as she could, she relayed the fate of Serena and Manuel Alonzo, giving him the whole truth as she had learned it from archived articles from the newspaper. She felt he deserved that. “Your parents were poor, living here in the barrio of Santa Fe. Your father worked in construction and your mother was a nurse’s aide at Santa Fe General Hospital. They married very young and it was an abusive relationship. Your father beat your mother, Juno.

  “When she found out she was pregnant, she became afraid for your life. She was afraid you would not survive the beatings. She was too afraid to divorce him or leave him, fearing that he would find and kill her anyway. So she killed your father, set their house on fire while he was passed out from drinking.

  “She went to trial and was found guilty. She gave birth to you in prison and died in labor.”

  Lydia told the story in all its earthly ugliness. And when she was done, she told him about Bernard Hugo and what they had discovered. And Juno wept, feeling grief and pain for the first time in his life. She sat beside him with her hand on his back and nodded to the officer standing by the door, who had stood waiting for her signal to start digging up the garden. Lydia was certain it was here they would find the victims’ hearts. She wasn’t sure why Hugo had buried them here, she wasn’t sure what his message was, but she had a vague sense now of the way the killer’s mind worked, of his essence. And though she didn’t know what his ultimate goal was, she knew he intended to have vengeance against Juno for not saving his son. The only thing she really didn’t understand was why he chose the victims he did. Was it just a matter of opportunity? Were they just unlucky enough to fly into his radar?

  “Juno,” Lydia said gently, a thought occurring to her suddenly.

  He had lifted his head from his hands and seemed to be staring off at the altar, lost in his grief. He came back to himself when she spoke to him.

  “Did any of the victims ever come to you for counsel? Did you heal any of them, Juno?”

  He seemed to deflate even further as he considered her question, and realized the implications of the answer he was about to give. In that moment he truly had lost everything he believed to be true.

  “I’ve seen all of them,” he said softly. “Christine and Harold came to me a year ago to help them overcome their addictions. Shawna came to me to help her with her anger. And Maria, she came to me when a doctor found a lump in her breast.”

  “And what happened with each of them?”

  “Christine and Harold seemed to have beaten their addictions when they disappeared. Shawna became involved in the church and that seemed to give her some peace. When Maria’s tumor was removed, after her visit, it was found to be benign. She claimed that before she had seen me, she was sure she was about to die from breast cancer, and that as I played my guitar, she could feel the cancer leaving her. She was quite vocal about it.”

  “So you helped all of them. In ways, you healed all of them. That should mean something to you, Juno. Each of their lives was better for your interaction with them, whether it was divine or not.”

  “Lydia,” he said, “if your question implies what I think it does, then all of their lives were ended because of their interaction with me.”

  “No, Juno, all of their lives ended because of their interaction with Bernard Hugo. Don’t confuse that. Do not take that on. You acted in a way that was true to yourself and true to your belief in God.”

  “So did Bernard Hugo.”

  chapter twenty-three

  Lydia sat in the doorway and watched as the police began to overturn the garden, removing the flowers first and then raking through the dirt carefully, trying not to damage what might be found, if anything. A headache had started to settle behind her eyes, the events of the day bearing down like a weight on her brain. She kept trying to move the images of Juno weeping and of Bernard Hugo’s chamber of horrors from her mind so she could focus on what their next move should be. But all she could do was watch, wondering what or who they would find buried in the garden. She thought she knew.

  The flowers were piled on the ground like corpses and Lydia found herself mesmerized by the rhythmic sound of the raking in the dirt. The sun was hot and the officers were sweating heavily in their efforts. There was no other sound except the wind and the occasional car driving by. Lydia stared at the statue of Madonna and Child and wondered what those stone eyes had borne witness to, as she heard a rake make contact with a hard surface beneath the dirt. As if answering some kind of macabre cue, Medical Examiner Henry Wizner appeared at the garden gate.

  It seemed as if time slowed as the police officers moved out of the way and Wizner knelt by the garden, opening his black bag. He removed surgical gloves, a small paintbrush, and a spade. With the brush he carefully whisked away the dirt to reveal a small glass circle, around which he carefully dug with the spade. Lydia moved over closer to him as he reached with his gloved hand and pulled a glass mason jar from the earth. Inside, floating in a clear liquid Lydia could only assume was formaldehyde, was a human heart.

  “It’s time to go, Juno,” Lydia said, approaching Juno from behind. He sat where she had left him an hour earlier, barely having moved.

  “What did you find?”

  “Maybe we should talk about this another day.”

  “My uncle?”

  “No.”

  Juno just nodded.

  “Why don’t you come back to my house?” she offered. “You can stay there as long as you need to.”

  “I need time alone. I need to be somewhere familiar.” He answered slowly, his voice as slight and far away as he seemed to be. “I need to try to understand everything that has happened here.”

  “I can’t let you stay here, Juno. You are part of his plan and he’ll be coming for you.”

  “And for you.”

  “Yes, I think so. But don’t worry about me. Where do you want to go?”

  On the way back to the Hugo house, she brought him to the home of Mrs. Turvey, the woman who had tutored him as a child. She was old but hearty; she took him in her arms and he seemed to find comfort there.

  “Lydia,” he called to her as she walked away from him, “take care. Don’t do anything foolish.”

  His voice had an odd strength to it and she turned to face him.

  “Don’t worry about me, Juno. Just take care of yourself.”

  Now Lydia walked around Bernard Hugo’s home and tried to get a sense of him. It was difficult. A few tattered items of clothing hung in the master-bedroom closet; the bed had just one dirty, rumpled top sheet; no photographs sat on the bedside table or hung on the wall. Downstairs there was only a worn recliner and a card table. There was nothing in the refrigerator, except a carry-out bag from the Blue Moon Café and a few cans of Budweiser.

  The bag was evidence and she called it to the attention of one of the officers scanning the small, nearly empty house. Lydia wondered if Maria Lopez had handed him that bag, and how many times he’d gone to the café before he’d killed her. He wa
s as alone and disconnected as his victims.

  She walked back upstairs to look at the “operating room.” It was so eerie to see her image, her articles, her book covers on the wall of a maniac’s death chamber.

  Chief Morrow was on his cellular phone giving a description of Bernard Hugo to the state police, who would then distribute it to neighboring states. “You guys are going to make sure the area airports, and train and bus stations are covered?” she heard him ask. “Right … right.… Well, the only place I can think of might be Colorado. His wife is there. No, I don’t recall her maiden name but I can get it. I’ll get back to you.”

  Lydia walked over to the table. It looked so cold, so cruel. The table, the implements, as well as the rest of the room, were immaculately clean now. But she imagined the table covered with blood, imagined Shawna lying on it, her chest sliced opened, and she shivered. Lydia wondered if the killer wanted to see her there, too.

  Jeffrey walked up behind her and she jumped a little.

  “I’m sure he’s on the run,” he said to her, with too much conviction, as though he were trying to reassure himself as much as her. “He’s not going to get far.”

  “He’s not done yet.”

  “There’s no way he can get to you or to Juno. I’m not letting you out of my sight. And there are two detectives parked in front of the Turvey house to protect Juno. It’s over, he must see that.”

  Lydia just nodded. She knew with a cool certainty that Bernard Hugo was somewhere close by, waiting, that he wasn’t done with whatever he had set out to do. Jeffrey placed an intimate hand on her hip and she leaned into him. She felt her face flush as the warmth of his presence washed over her. It was such a new feeling, to feel personally happy, even though the sight that faced her was grim.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Horrible and wonderful,” she answered. “Horrible about this, wonderful about … everything else.”