Cemetery of Angels (12 page)

“If Francine wins and collects the full amount,” a man named Jim Doleman interjected, “it will raise the cost of the average avocado two cents per fruit for the next two years.” This set off a wave of laughter, even though Doleman, a CPA, wasn’t kidding.

“I do a lot of female nudes right now,” Francine continued. “It’s a lot more pleasant. I’m trying to get Melissa to pose for me.”

“I haven’t given in yet,” Melissa said with a laugh, over hearing. “And probably won’t.”

“What about you, Rebecca?” Francine asked.

“Me, what?”

“Have you ever been photographed nude? As an adult.”

“Not my thing!” Rebecca said.

“Your husband would love it. Surprise him,” Francine suggested.

“He can surprise me in the shower any time he wants. He doesn’t need a photo.”

“That’s what you think.” Rebecca excused herself to meet other guests.

There was a bearded man, stout and fiftyish. He was the other person attached to a university, aside from Melissa and her girlfriend. Rebecca went to him.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Rebecca Moore. I’m your new neighbor.” The man’s face creased into a smile above a trim gray beard.

“Maurice Lerner,” he said. “I’m in the house four doors down, opposite side of the street.”

Ah, Rebecca thought. The psychiatrist whom Melissa had mentioned. An author and fully tenured professor in the UCLA psych department.

“Is there a Mrs.?” Rebecca asked.

“Not anymore. My wife passed away four years ago.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “She hasn’t left the neighborhood.” It took Rebecca a second, but then his allusion registered.

“Oh. The cemetery?” she asked.

“Cemetery of Angels,” he said evenly. “And my angel is there already. Right over the wall.”

“What are you talking about?” Rebecca asked. “I thought there were no new burials there since World War Two.” Dr. Lerner blinked once.

“Officially, no. There aren’t,” he said. “But I didn’t want my wife to be distant. So I just went in there one night with her urn. She was cremated, you see. I just buried her in the field behind the tombstones.” He paused. “I’m probably not the only one to do something like that. Security is non-existent in that yard. Just an old Chicano man during the day. I suspect my Deborah is happy where I put her.”

He said this in an even, cheerful voice.

“May I get you a drink?” Rebecca asked.

“A cold beer would suit me fine. Anything but Coors.”

“We have plenty,” she answered. “Heineken, Corona and Samuel Adams.”

“Corona would be fine,” Dr. Lerner said. “And I wouldn’t have come if you didn’t have beer.”

The widower, it turned out, was also a practicing M.D. and a lecturer in hypno-therapy. He was joined that evening by a Doctor Lim, a friend in the same field, with whom Dr. Lerner had a tennis match every Sunday.

One of the bankers came over and engaged the doctors in conversation. It was just about then that Rebecca heard a heavy noise from overhead.

Something like a chair scraping. Or a heavy footstep. Her pulse rate quickened. That room again. Ronny’s room.

She looked around for Bill and didn’t see him. Her heartbeat eased. It had to be her husband upstairs, she told herself. She wondered what he had gone upstairs for and, for that matter, what he was doing in the turret room, which remained empty.

Consciously, she turned her attention back to her duties as the new hostess in the neighborhood. A half a dozen of the invitees brought their children. Two of the boys who came over were teenagers and quickly departed with their parents’ blessing, skateboards and all. Rebecca and Bill were glad to have met them, but equally glad to get them out of the house. They went back over to Jim Doleman’s house to shoot some hoops at a basket above the garage door.

Karen and Patrick came out as big winners. They were, in fact, in their glory. There were two boys about Patrick’s age and a girl about Karen’s. Rebecca watched from a distance and was tickled to death when the kids hit it off so well. She began to think that there was some justice in the world, and that sometimes things worked out with a perfect geometry.

There was one African American family, Ronald Johnson and his wife, who called herself Mandy. Ron Johnson was a Princeton graduate and no one’s fool. He was barely a day over thirty and was already a vice president in charge of some marketing department with one of the film studios. He was a gracious, well-spoken man, with the build of an Ivy League athlete. His wife was equally charming. She’d gone to Bryn Mawr and majored in Twentieth century French literature.

“If I ever have a question about Sartre,” Rebecca said, “now I know whom to call.”

Mandy Johnson laughed. Terry Hopkins struck up a conversation with Claire, and Rebecca took the opportunity to straighten the hors d’oeuvres table and put out some fresh ice for the booze and soft drinks. She scanned the room, checking on everyone, trying not to catch anyone’s eye in particular. Not right then.

Then she heard another noise from upstairs.

She looked up. Directly over her head. Same thing. It sounded like a chair scraping. Or sudden set of distressed footfalls. “What…?” she found herself thinking. She realized she was again looking up at the same spot in the ceiling, the spot just under the floor to the turret room. “What gives?” she thought. “Who is up there?”

Bill, showing off the house? She wondered. She hoped. Was he up there making his usual boasts and promises about what he was going to do with the upper floors?

She was sure it was Bill. Then, a moment later, her eye wandered across the room and caught her husband sitting on the sofa engaged in a tight conversation with Marty Gross’s wife. Nadia’s skirt had somehow worked its way three quarters of the way up her thighs as she was sitting on the sofa, and if Rebecca weren’t so even minded, she might have been annoyed.

“Hell!” she thought. She
was
annoyed. She smoldered at Nadia, who was flirting shamelessly with her husband. Rebecca decided to ignore it. But she also made a mental note not to extend full friendship to wives in the neighborhood who made a point of flashing legs and anything else of interest to other women’s husbands. What was Nadia trying to prove, anyway? That she could still seduce a man? Then again, Rebecca reasoned, she could probably ignore it if Nadia’s own husband could. Then she wondered just where flirtation ended with Nadia and where back porch seduction began.

Then idly, but with horror, Rebecca wondered how much of that was going on in the neighborhood. Was spouse swapping “in” or “out” on this block?

She suppressed a smile. So far, she hadn’t seen anyone who would even tempt her.

Then Rebecca had a second distraction. She noticed that Karen was across the room, too, holding court with Katie Ross. That made Rebecca curious. She went to the den and saw Patrick sitting at the television with one of his new friends.

“Hello?” she thought. So no family member was upstairs? Rebecca walked slowly back to the spot where she had heard the noise. She stood still and cocked her head.

And then she heard the mystery sound a third time.

“Okay!” she muttered to herself. “Time to investigate.”

“Becca?” A woman’s voice asked. The voice was near to her. Rebecca turned. It was Melissa standing only two feet away. Something funny in her eyes, a sense of the perverse, maybe, that Rebecca had not noticed before.

“Hi,” Rebecca answered. She kept moving.

“What’s going on?” Melissa asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You look like something’s bothering you. Maybe just a little, but I can see it’s on your mind.”

“One of my more aggressive guests seems to be upstairs,” Rebecca said with annoyance. Melissa glanced around.

“How do you know? Who’s missing?”

“Melissa, I don’t even know everyone who’s here, much less who’s disappeared. All I know is I heard something three times and no one has come downstairs.”

“That’s LA for you.” Melissa smirked and raised a mischievous eyebrow. “Your guests have found a spare bedroom. Must be something in the air.”

“Then they’re doing it on the floor, because that room is not furnished yet.”

“As I said, ‘that’s LA for you.’”

“I am
not
amused,” Rebecca said. “Call me a ‘bluenose’ if you want, but I think guests can control their libidos in my home, all right?”

“Sure.”

“Follow me while I lead the strays back to the corral.”

“Sure thing.” Melissa giggled conspiratorially and followed.

“Ask me whatever you were going to ask me,” Rebecca said. “Just come with me.”

They went through the living room, where Rebecca noted that the hors d’oeuvres were running low. Time to replenish the plates when she came back downstairs, she told herself. Maybe she could enlist Melissa’s help.

“Thursday would be good for me, by the way,” Melissa said.

“Good for what?”

“To continue your tour. Remember? Hot spots and cemeteries.”

“Oh. That’s right. Come on along.”

They climbed the stairs together. The hall was dark as they arrived at the top of the steps. The light was off. Rebecca was sure that she had turned it on. So who was walking around in the dark?

“No one’s up here,” Melissa said. “It’s dark, honey.” Rebecca stood in place at the top of the steps.

“I heard something.”

“Like what?”

“A chair scraping. Or footsteps.”

“Whoever it was must have come downstairs.”

“We would have passed them.” Melissa answered.

“So who walks around in the dark? Which California wacko?”

Rebecca made her first move. She turned the light on. A warm glow bathed the landing and central hall.

“Where were the footsteps?” Melissa asked.

Rebecca nodded toward the turret room, the kids’ future playroom.

Ronny’s room.

“Let’s have a look,” Rebecca said.

The two women walked together, Rebecca more apprehensive than her friend. The door to the room was open. It loomed large in front of her and a funny light glowed within it. She saw a movement, but within another moment knew it was her own shadow.

She reached the room and stepped in. That sour odor accosted her. Then she quickly flicked on the light. The overhead bulb illuminated the room.

Harsh. A bare bulb. Rebecca’s eyes covered the whole chamber in a flash. No one there. Nothing. Or so it appeared.

Melissa read the look of concern on her friend’s face. Then Rebecca saw the closet door move, and the worried look turned to fear. The door had moved. Just a little, as if someone or something had nudged it — just a whisper.

“Uh, oh,” Rebecca said.

“What?”

“The closet door.” Rebecca’s voice was barely above a whisper. She raised an unsteady hand and pointed. “It just moved.”

Melissa looked at it. “No way,” she said. “Come on.”

“Melissa, I
saw
it.”

“What are you telling me? Someone’s hiding in the closet?” Rebecca made a gesture.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Don’t you know, it’s a California tradition.”

“What is?”

“You get invited as a couple to a new neighbor’s house. Then you sneak upstairs and go to a closet and copulate. It’s known as ‘California closet sex,’ and after you’ve lived here for a few months, you and Bill can come over to my place and do it.”

Rebecca stared at her. Melissa continued.

“The polite thing to do, honey, is ignore them until both of them or at least the woman, assuming there’s only one woman, has her orgasm.”

“What are you talking about?”
Rebecca said.

“What I’m saying to you, Becca, is that I’m joking, okay? And this is a lot of bull,” Melissa said. “There’s no one in that closet.”

“I’m going to go get Bill.”

“And have him laughing at you all night, right?” Melissa said. “Yeah, sure. Make a nutcase of yourself. You’re going to go get no one.”

“Melissa!”

“Watch me,” Melissa said. “I’ll open your door for you.”

“Melissa, don’t do it! I’m scared!”

“No nerve, no glory,” Melissa said.

“Melissa, no!”

Melissa crossed the room. Slowly. As if she were creeping up on the door. As if she were going to throw it open and expose fornicating lovers.

Or something much worse.

Rebecca continued to suffer horrible feelings. Nasty vibrations. Something terrible was beyond that threshold! She knew it. “Melissa, please!” she said.

Melissa made a Girl Scout type of gesture. She stood outside the closet door. Her hand went slowly to the knob. Then her hand was firmly upon it. Rebecca felt her heart pounding. Her hands rose toward her face as if she couldn’t bear to look.

Then Melissa yanked.

The door flew open. For a nano-second, Rebecca thought she saw a flickering image, black and white, bright then dark, like an old film reel gone berserk. Then that transformed into something dark. But then that was gone, too, and all she had left was a shadow. Melissa’s shadow: the sole occupant of the closet.

“You got one great imagination, East Coast girl,” said Melissa. “¡Nada!”

Rebecca exuded a massive sigh of relief. She calmed herself.

“I know I heard something,” she said softly.

“Yeah,” her friend answered.

Melissa remained in the closet. With a foot, she poked at the walls and corners within it. “No secret passages, Becca,” Melissa said. “No false floor and — she reached a long gangly aim upward toward the ceiling of the closet — no escape hatch out the top like an elevator.”

Melissa stepped out of the closet. She glanced to the window, which was partially open. A little breeze stirred.

“There’s your culprit right there,” Melissa said. “Mom Nature. Don’t you know not to mess with Mom Nature? She’ll kick your butt if you do.”

“I know I heard something,” Rebecca said.

“A scraping and a bang. Something like that?”

“Yes. Three times.”

Melissa pushed the closet door shut. It scraped the floor as it moved. It banged when it closed. Then the door latch gave way and the door opened again.

“Presumably, with the help of the breeze, it could have repeated that motion into the next millennium,” Melissa said. She looked at her friend. “Still not happy?”