Angel Fire

by Lisa Unger

  Pain and rage radiated off Bernard Hugo in pulsating waves that moved through Juno like electricity. But his voice was measured, like a metronome, and as cold as liquid nitrogen. Juno sensed it was best to stay silent, feeling that the sound of his voice would be like a match to a fuse.

  “When a predator stalks its prey, creeps through the woods or the grass, in that second before the chase begins, the prey always has a final moment of realization—an awareness that has crept into its eyes, its sensitive nose lifted suddenly to the wind, an inner silence of delicate ears straining for sound, of lean, taut muscles tensing for flight. Humans assume that a scent caught, in the last minute, on the wind, warns the prey. But I think it’s something else. A disturbance in psychic energy, a spiritual knowledge that one has entered the last moments of life on this earth, a mental connection with the creature who will have the final impact on one’s existence. Do you think that’s true?”

  Juno sat, knowing it would be futile and ridiculous for a blind man to run. He wasn’t afraid to die, if it came to that. “Who are you and what do you want from me?”

  “Who am I? Don’t you even know me? You, the murderer of my son, don’t even know my name?”

  “I have never hurt anyone in my life.”

  “You claim to be a holy man and a healer. And you are nothing but a liar. You are false to God, like all of them. But you are the worst of all.” His voice was rising and he was moving closer to Juno. “At least the others were false only to themselves. But you fooled everyone. In the end, when my son lay dying, your prayers meant nothing. You were no closer to God than anyone else.”

  “Have you killed all these people because I am not a healer, because I was not able to heal your son? I tried—God knows, I would have done anything to be what people thought I was.”

  “And all this time,” Bernard continued, unhearing, “I have been under your nose, stealing the dirty sheep from your diseased flock and offering their purified hearts back to God. I am His warrior, His angel of death. All was taken from me so that I could do the Lord’s work. And you never even knew me. Your uncle knew me as Vince. Vince A. Gemiennes—the name God gave me.”

  “So you think that by killing those innocent people, you have given your son’s death meaning?”

  “They had no right,” he yelled, almost shrieking. “They had no right to live when my son, as pure and good as an angel of God, died. There must have been a reason God wanted him to come home, there must have been a reason that I suffered so much pain.”

  “God forgive you, Bernard, for what you have done, for your misguided acts.”

  “ ‘And I will strike down upon thee with furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy. And you will know My name is the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon thee.’ ”

  Juno heard the scratch and flare of a match being lit.

  “I only wish you could see what I have planned for you.”

  And the heavy sigh of flame to gasoline was the last thing he heard before he felt the radiating pain of a blunt strike to the base of his neck, and then there was nothing.

  Lydia parked her car a few hundred yards from the Church of the Holy Name and sprinted the rest of the way, to keep the element of surprise on her side. She didn’t know how she was certain that Bernard Hugo and Juno were in the church together, but there was not a doubt in her mind. Then as she got closer, she caught the scent of fire.

  She ran up the front steps and pushed with all her strength on the wrought-iron handles of the heavy wooden doors. She ducked down beneath the black clouds of smoke billowing out of the open doors. She pulled up her sweatshirt, covering her mouth and her nose. Shouting for Juno, she saw him lying on the altar, surrounded by flames. Above him loomed Bernard Hugo.

  “What are you doing, Hugo?” she yelled, as she removed the Glock from the pouch at her waist.

  When he heard her, he spun around.

  As she moved in closer, she could see that Juno was spread out on a cross laid across the altar and that Hugo was preparing to nail his wrists and crossed ankles to the wood with a gigantic hammer.

  “Stay where you are, Lydia. You were only to bear witness to the end. You came too early,” he said, looking at her with disapproval.

  “I can’t let you do this. Stop right now or I’m going to fire.”

  He ignored her and lifted the hammer above his head, preparing to strike an iron nail through Juno’s left hand, the flames rising around him. She fired a round from her gun and Bernard Hugo fell to the ground in a lump.

  She ran up the aisle to Juno and shook him, trying to rouse him.

  “Juno, please,” she begged. But he was deeply unconscious. She dropped the gun, put her hands under his arms, and had begun to drag him to the door, her throat already constricting from the smoke, when she felt someone grab her by her hair. Bernard Hugo pulled her head back violently until it rested on his shoulder. She could just see his eyes and was overcome by his vile breath. She saw the gleam of his scalpel, and thought of the gun she had carelessly dropped to the floor.

  “I’ve been waiting for you, bitch,” he hissed.

  “I’ve been waiting for you, too,” she answered. She dropped Juno and thrust her elbow back into Hugo’s abdomen with all her strength. As he doubled forward, he brought the scalpel into her thigh and pulled up. She felt the searing pain and screamed but it was somewhere outside of her as she reached, unthinking, and wrested the instrument from her leg. He had missed the artery that he doubtless had been aiming for, but still, blood sprayed from her wound. She edged away from him, struggling to her feet, the scalpel in her hand.

  “Come on, you fuck, I’ll send you to see Robbie,” she said as he moved toward her. In one swift motion, he had her wrist in a hard grip she couldn’t escape, and he squeezed until her hand involuntarily opened and the scalpel dropped to the floor. With her free hand she grabbed his shirt and pulled him in and hit the bridge of his nose with the top of her head. He staggered back, stunned, blood pouring from his nostrils. She scampered for the scalpel and brought it around just as he was on top of her again. She jabbed it forcefully into his eye, though she’d been aiming for his jugular. He roared with pain and fell back twitching. She didn’t think it was in deep enough to have touched his frontal lobe. She only hoped the pain was enough to keep him unconscious. She grabbed the Glock from the altar where she’d dropped it and waited. He did not move. The flames were all around her now, licking up to the ceiling.

  She shoved the gun in the waistband of her pants and reached again for Juno, her leg beginning to throb, a feeling of lightheadedness overtaking her. The only thing she wanted more than to kill Bernard Hugo, was for Juno to live. She fought dizziness and the ardent desire to go back and put a bullet through Hugo’s brain, as she dragged Juno toward the door.

  She looked behind her to see if the door was blocked by flames and when she turned to look at Hugo again, he was gone.

  “Fuck!” she yelled, panic and anger doing battle in her mind.

  She struggled to move faster, Juno seeming heavier by the second. The door was ten feet away.

  He came at her horribly through the smoke, the scalpel jutting from his eye, bellowing in rage and pain. She deftly moved to one side and he stampeded past her, tripping over Juno and falling, the scalpel driving farther into his head.

  And she was on him, gun drawn. She flipped him over and straddled him, one knee on each of his arms. She stuck the barrel of the gun in his mouth. He was not dead. He struggled for breath, his nose broken and his mouth full of steel. She tried not to smile. She didn’t think anymore about the fire or the debris beginning to fall around them.

  “You miserable, cocksucking psychopath,” she said. She had forgotten about the flames, about Juno lying unconscious. It was only her and him. The room seemed to wail with sound and fill with light. Everything warped and slowed around her. The only thing she knew in that moment was rage. It was a rage that had been born the day her mother died, and had dwelled within
her, growing like a parasite all these years. Today, she realized, was the fifteenth anniversary of her mother’s death. And this thing inside her had devoured every happiness that was ever offered to her, had sucked every possible moment of peace and joy from her heart. And it had led to her being here, straddling a monster in a burning church, holding a gun to his mouth. If she pulled the trigger, she would put an end to him and the havoc he’d visited upon her, and have revenge for his victims. But what would she be, then? Would she destroy the worm that was eating away at her inside or would she become what she most feared and hated?

  “That’s enough, Lydia.”

  And she looked up to see her mother standing before her. She looked for Juno and he was gone.

  “You came home early because I got caught smoking,” Lydia said, sobbing and thrusting the gun harder into Hugo’s mouth. “He killed you because I did something wrong.”

  “He was waiting for her, Lydia. If it hadn’t been that afternoon, it would have been another time. It had nothing to do with you or what you did. Jed McIntyre was sick and so is Bernard Hugo.”

  But then it wasn’t her mother at all, it was Jeffrey. Morrow stood behind him, and the flames were almost out. And she could see the flashing lights from police cars and fire engines through the thinning smoke.

  “I want this to be over now,” she said, coughing from the smoke.

  “Just give me the gun, baby. You stopped him. This is finished and we can go home.”

  She let the gun drop to the floor and Jeffrey came to her and lifted her away from Bernard Hugo. He carried her from the church to the ambulance waiting outside.

  epilogue

  Six months later—Hanalei Bay, Kauai, Hawaii

  When the bright morning sun and roosters wake Lydia from sleep here it takes her a few moments to remember where she is. She looks out the window to see mystical green mountains rising from a crystalline ocean, the mist rolling in as if from heaven. And sometimes it takes her longer to remember who she is. It’s like that here, where perfect, temperate days run together and the sound of the ocean and Jeffrey’s breathing beside her are a lullaby. Lydia Strong made it through fifteen years without knowing peace. Now that she has found it, she can’t imagine how she survived.

  Recovery has been slow for Lydia. Her physical wounds healed quickly. But the issues she’d been forced to deal with surrounding the death of her mother had left her feeling fragile and hollowed out. Jeffrey strongly urged her, as he had so many times, to seek counseling. But she was not one for head-shrinking. So he had brought her here, to this magical place where rainbows and geckos worked a spell on her. The pain, and the guilt, and the grief, and the loss, and the fear didn’t disappear, exactly, but became more like rough textures in the fabric of her life. Part of her but not all of her.

  She’d spoken to Juno and he was recovering, moving on in spite of his grief. Father Luis Claro’s body had been found in the back of Bernard Hugo’s minivan and was buried behind the church. The repairs to the damage from the fire are almost complete. And another priest will come to take over the congregation. Juno will stay on as caretaker, and continue to play his guitar. He’s found a way to reconcile all that he now knows with the faith he has always had in God.

  “I’m not sure what brought us together, Lydia. But it was something larger than us, wasn’t it? We are both better for what happened here. We learned from each other. And things have happened that neither of us can explain. It’s as you said. That’s the space where faith resides,” Juno had said.

  Bernard Hugo lies in a coma in a state hospital, breathing on his own. Lydia is trying to find out how much it costs to keep him there. It’s a detail she wants for her book. If he ever awakens, he will face charges on five counts of murder, among other things. She doesn’t hate him. It’s hard to hate someone you understand so well.

  Jed McIntyre had dwelled in a place of similar pain—different in its nuances and outcome. But similar in that they both sought a kind of justice. Jed sought vengeance for himself. Bernard wanted justice for his son. His logic was faulty and full of holes, of course, and maybe only an excuse to satisfy an urge to kill.

  She imagines him teetering on the edge of psychosis most of his adult life, his dark urges caged by medication and maybe even by the happiness of his life. Then the loss of his son had released the beast inside.

  She understands him perfectly. Lydia believes that all human action can be understood, if people are honest about their own hearts. The urge to rage in pain, to lash out and destroy, even to kill—she knows it well.

  Benny Savroy remains unable to discuss his involvement with Bernard Hugo, any mention of the events bringing on a seizure. According to Simon Morrow, the DA is reluctant to bring charges, though physical evidence puts Benny at the Lopez dump site and his fingerprints were found in Hugo’s minivan. It seems unlikely that someone so developmentally challenged could have been involved on any level that would make him culpable, but stranger things have happened.

  Simon Morrow got all the credit for the investigation, in the local press and with the FBI. Lydia and Jeffrey kept their end of the bargain and let him have it. After all, he did eventually solve the puzzle, just one step behind Lydia. He seemed to walk a little taller after the press conference. And she doesn’t begrudge him that. Compared to some of the other people she has met in her life, he isn’t that bad after all. Besides, Lydia will have the final word when her book comes out. And she does like to have the final word.

  Lydia thinks about Greg sometimes. He came to visit her at St. Vincent’s as she recovered, and looked some sad combination of relieved and haunted. Recovering himself, from the head wound inflicted upon him by Bernard Hugo, Greg had been pale and thin the last time Lydia sat with him. With Hugo unable to confess or provide details, Greg will always have to guess about Shawna’s final hours. Lydia wonders if he will ever find peace. She prays that he will.

  Jed McIntyre still sends his letter every month. But Lydia no longer receives them, having asked her publisher to destroy them when they arrive.

  And Lydia is in love with Jeffrey. She no longer tries to hide it from anyone, not even from herself. Sitting on the lanai, watching the small, calm waves roll in and out of Hanalei Bay, she is starting to become acquainted with happiness.

  A classified envelope arrived in the mail for Jeffrey today, delivered by a hippie on a beat-up red bicycle. He’s frowning as he leafs through the pages. And Lydia has been in front of the computer for hours, putting the finishing touches on the book she’ll call Angel Fire. Bernard Hugo had one prayer answered, at least. He’ll have his book.

  And as she sits out on the lanai drinking a whiskey sour that evening, Jeffrey comes to join her. The sunset is just finished, the sky still orange and black like a sleeping tiger. He takes the glass from her hand and sips from it, then hands it back to her. He notices that she isn’t smoking but says nothing.

  “I guess we’ll need to head back to New York next week. Something has come up.”

  “All right. I have to turn in my manuscript anyway. Besides, there’s something I want to look into. Your place or mine?”

  He smiles. He had been reluctant to bring it up, unwilling to break the spell they’d been under here.

  He’d wondered whether they would stay together for a while or if she’d be off on another story when she was feeling more like herself again. Either way, it would have been okay. Because he is home for her now and that is all that ever mattered.

  Acknowledgments

  There are so many people that have had a part in the writing and publishing of this book. And for each of them I feel a unique and heartfelt gratitude:

  To Heather Mikesell, in everything I have written since I met you, I have counted on your keen insight, eagle eye, and unwavering support—but have never taken it for granted.

  To Carolyn Nichols, for taking the time to look at my homeless manuscript and see beneath the flaws to something better, and for bringing it to the attentio
n of literary agents.

  To Elaine Markson, my agent, for taking me on, and shopping this book with unflagging enthusiasm, finding the best possible home for it, and for enduring my neuroses with endless patience.

  To Kelley Ragland, my talented and inspiring editor, who made this book better than I ever thought it could be, who, with careful guidance led me to my own voice, taking me beyond being a writer to becoming an author.

  To Marion Chartoff, Tara Popick, and Judy Wong, who always believed that this day would come, even when I strayed far from my dreams.

  an excerpt from

  darkness, my old friend

  by Lisa Unger

  coming in August 2011

  chapter one

  Jones Cooper feared death. The dread of it woke him in the night, sat him bolt upright and drew all the breath from his lungs, narrowed his esophagus, had him rasping in the dark. It turned all the normal shadows of the bedroom that he shared with his wife into a legion of ghouls and intruders waiting with silent and malicious intent. When? How? Heart attack. Cancer. Freak accident. Would it come for him quickly? Would it slowly waste and dehumanize him? What, if anything, would await him?

  He was not a man of faith. Nor was he a man without a stain on his conscience. He did not believe in a benevolent universe of light and love. He could not lean upon those crutches as so many did; everyone, it seemed, had some way to protect himself against the specter of his certain end. Everyone except him.

  His wife, Maggie, had grown tired of the 2:00 a.m. terrors. At first she was beside him, comforting him: Just breathe, Jones. Relax. It’s okay. But even she, ever-patient shrink that she was, had started sleeping in the guest room or on the couch, even sometimes in their son’s room, empty since Ricky had left for Georgetown in September.