Finally, when she had achieved a relatively relaxed state of mind and body, she stared at the board in front of her and said, “Are you ready to give us answers?”
The indicator didn’t move.
“Are you ready to give us answers?”
Nothing.
“Are you ready to give us answers?”
Under their fingers, as if it were suddenly embodied with a life energy of its own, the indicator glided to that part of the board marked YES.
“Good,” she said. “We are in pursuit of a man who has killed at least eight people in the last few days. Is he still here in King’s Point?”
The indicator swept around the board, returned to YES.
She asked, “Is King’s Point this man’s home-town?”
NO.
“Where does he come from?”
ALL OUR YESTERDAYS.
“Make sense to anyone?” Lou asked.
Refining the question, trying to be more specific, Mary asked, “Where does the killer
live?”
Letter by letter: BEAUTIFUL.
“Beautiful?” Lou asked. “Is that in answer to your question, Mary?”
“A town named Beautiful?” she asked.
The trivet didn’t move.
“Where does the killer live?” she asked again.
The trivet picked out seventeen letters.
Lou wrote them down as they were given, and when the indicator ceased to move, he said, “It says, ‘THE AIR IS BEAUTIFUL.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”
The air at Mary’s back seemed suddenly colder, as if an icy breath had been expelled against the nape of her neck. The answers the Ouija board gave were less direct and more perplexing than usual. Supposedly the Ouija messages came from her, from deep in her subconscious mind. Ordinarily she believed that was true. But not now. Tonight she felt another presence, an unseen presence looming over her.
“We’re getting sidetracked,” Max said impatiently. He looked at the trivet. “Where is the killer staying in King’s Point?”
The indicator slid back and forth, then quickly moved from one letter to another.
Lou copied them down, but the word was so simple that Mary didn’t need to ask what had been recorded: HOTEL.
“Which hotel?” Max asked.
The indicator didn’t move.
“Which hotel?”
Again, it spelled HOTEL.
Lou said, “Try something else.”
Mary said, “The man we’re after has killed women with a knife. Where did he get that knife?”
“That’s not important,” Max said.
The trivet moved: LINGARD.
“You made it spell that,” Max said.
“I don’t believe I did.”
“Then why did you ask it such a question? We don’t really have to know where the knife came from.”
“I wanted to see what it would say.”
Max studied her with piercing gray eyes.
She looked away from him, consulted her notebook and addressed the board again. “Did I ever know a girl by the name of Beverly Pulchaski?”
SHE IS DEAD.
“Did I ever know her?”
SHE IS DEAD.
“Did I know a girl named Susan Haven?”
SHE IS DEAD.
Cold breath on the neck again.
She shuddered.
“Did I ever know Linda Proctor?”
SHE IS DEAD.
“Did I know Marie Sanzini?”
SHE IS DEAD.
Mary sighed. The muscles in her arms and shoulders flexed repeatedly, involuntarily. It was a struggle to stay sufficiently relaxed to allow the Ouija indicator to function. Already she was weary.
Lou said, “Who were those women?”
She said, “The nurses who were murdered in Anaheim. When I first foresaw their deaths, I had the notion that I knew or at least had met one of them. But if I ever did, I can’t remember where or when it was.”
“Probably because you don’t want to remember,” Max said.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because maybe if you remembered, we’d know who the killer was. And maybe you don’t want to know that.”
“Don’t be absurd, Max. I want to know very much.”
“Even if the killer’s connected somehow to Berton Mitchell and the wings? Even if, by finding the killer, you’re forced to remember what you’ve spent your life forgetting?”
She stared at him and licked her lips. “I’m feeling something right now that I never thought I’d feel.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m scared of you, Max.”
There was an unearthly quiet in the house. The three of them seemed suspended in time.
Max spoke softly, but his voice filled the room. “You’re scared of me because you think I’m going to force you to face up to what happened twenty-four years ago.”
“Is that all it is?”
“What else?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
Max asked the board another question, but he did not take his wintry gray eyes from her. “Did Mary know Rochelle Drake?”
SHE IS DEAD.
“I know she’s dead,” Max said irritably, still watching Mary, suffocating her with his attention, pinning her with his gaze. “But did Mary ever know her?”
DEAD.
“Who’s Rochelle Drake?” Lou asked.
Mary took the opportunity to look away from Max. Her mouth was dry. Her heart was beating much too fast.
To Lou, Max said, “Rochelle Drake was the girl who was killed in that Santa Ana beauty salon a few days ago. I swear I’ve heard the name before. Haven’t you?”
“Can’t say I have,” Lou said.
“Well, I’m positive I heard the name before Percy Osterman used it in the morgue. I don’t think I ever met the girl. But I heard the name. I can’t imagine where.”
Mary said, “Well, I don’t remember her. I would have recognized her at the morgue if I’d ever seen her before.”
Suddenly, beneath their hands, the trivet began to move in wide, aimless circles.
“What the hell?” Max said, surprised.
Lou said, “No one asked it a question.”
Mary allowed her hands to float freely with the indicator as it moved less erratically and with increasing purpose. Her thoughts were too muddled at the moment, and she was too frightened to have the wit to decipher the chain of letters as it grew. Finally the trivet stopped. She took her hands from it at once
;
they ached with the strain of forced relaxation.
Lou said, “It’s a name.” He held up the note pad for them to see.
P-A-T-R-I-C-I-A-S-P-O-O-N-E-R.
Patricia Spooner?
Mary thought. She stared at the name in disbelief.
She felt as if a snake of ice lay at the center of her, its crystalline tongue flicking rapidly, its sinuous body radiating cold like the coils of a freezer.
“Who’s Patricia Spooner?” Max asked.
“Means nothing to me,” Lou said.
“I ... knew her,” Mary said stiffly.
“When?” Max asked.
“Eleven... twelve years ago.”
“You’ve never mentioned her.”
“She was a good friend at UCLA.”
“A college friend?”
“Yes. A very pretty girl.”
“Why does her name come up now?”
“I don’t have any idea.”
“It came from your subconscious.”
“No. I’m not controlling the trivet.”
“Nonsense,” Max said.
“There’s someone... something here with us.”
“Maybe the board just gave us the name of the next victim,” Lou said, to avert a quarrel. “Have you kept in touch with this Patricia Spooner? Maybe we should call her and see if she’s okay.”
Max said, “Should we call Patricia Spooner? Mary?”
“She’s dead,” Mary said.
Lou said, “Oh, my God. Then the man we’re after’s already killed her?”
She had difficulty speaking. “Patty... Patty’s been... dead... dead almost... eleven years.”
Although the room was not warm, Lou was perspiring. He wiped his aristocratic face with his broad, thick-fingered, big-knuckled hand. He looked as pale as she felt. “How? Mary, how did Patty Spooner die?”
Mary shivered and closed her eyes. She opened them at once because the memories behind them were too ugly, too brutal. “She was... murdered.”
The dead, Mary thought, don’t stay dead. Not forever. Not even for long. They rise up from their graves. The ground doesn’t hold them. Remorse doesn’t hold them. Neither grief nor acceptance, neither fear nor forgetfulness holds them. Nothing holds them. They come back. Berton Mitchell. Barry Mitchell. Virginia Mitchell. My mother. My father. And now Patty Spooner. Oh, God, don’t let them come back. I’ve been haunted by the dead most of my life. I’ve had enough!
“Murdered,” Lou said quietly, almost as if in shock.
Mary said, “There was a church. Patty and I sometimes went to Mass together. I was a practicing Catholic then. It was a lovely church. It had a very large, hand-carved wooden altar that was made in Poland and shipped over here in the early nineteen hundreds. The church was open all the time, night and day. Patty liked to go and sit in the front pew when no one else was there. Late at night. Her mother had died of a heart condition a few years before. She was always lighting candles for her mother. Patty was very devout. She... she died there.”
“In the church?” Lou asked.
Max was watching her intently. He put a hand on her shoulder
;
vibrations, more emotional than physical, neither good nor bad but powerful, exploded through her from the point of contact.
Max said, “Who killed her?”
“They never found him.”
Lou leaned across the table. His eyebrows were drawn together, his face pinched. “She was your good friend. Didn’t you use your psychic talent to see the killer’s face, his name?”
“I tried,” Mary said faintly. “I got a few things. Bits and pieces of images. But it was one of those cases when my power didn’t help much. She was strangled with a priest’s white silk stole. I got terrible emanations from it. Wicked, evil vibrations. No clear pictures. Just formless images. The church was filled with them. Like... invisible clouds of evil. The killer had damaged the altar ... urinated on it.”
Lou got up so abruptly that he knocked over his chair, but he didn’t appear to notice it. He stood with one hand on his head as if attempting to force back an unsettling idea. “It’s madness.
What are we up against?
Is it possible that the man we’re trying to find here in King’s Point is the same man who killed your friend?”
“His style is the same, isn’t it?” Max said.
“So damned brutal,” Lou said. “And with the religious angle. The roots of these recent killings might go back at least eleven years. Perhaps a lot further than that.”
Mary saw what he meant, though curiously, until this moment, she had never seen a connection between Patty’s death and any other.
Sensing the effect Lou’s revelation had upon her, Max squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. Sometimes he didn’t seem to know his own strength
;
his grip was slightly painful.
Agitated as she had never seen him, moving quickly and jerkily, Lou went into the kitchen and got a twelve-ounce tumbler from the cabinet beside the refrigerator. He picked up a bottle of Wild Turkey that was on the counter by the sink, and he poured about four ounces for himself. Glass in hand, he came back and stood in the dining room archway. “It gets more complicated all the time. How many other people has this man killed that we don’t even know about? Over the years, how many other unsolved murders was he responsible for?” Lou swallowed some bourbon. “This creature, whoever and whatever he is—and I’m increasingly disposed to think of him as a
thing
—has been prowling about, raping, killing, completely unchecked, unhindered for at least eleven years. It scares the hell out of me.”
A peal of thunder punctuated his last few words. It reverberated in the window glass. The Christmas night rainstorm was on the way, as forecast.
Max glanced at the plastic trivet. “Let’s ask the board how many victims there have been.”
She almost objected. My arms ache, she almost said. Too tired for more of that. Exhausted. Drained.
But she knew that fear was the real reason she didn’t want to begin questioning the Ouija board again. She was afraid of what it might tell them.
If she surrendered to her fear so easily, she would never learn to rely on herself. And although she found the possibility disturbing, she had an ever-growing feeling that soon she would find herself in greater danger, against which Max could not or would not offer her protection.
She put her hands on the trivet, and so did Max.
Lou put his overturned chair on its feet. He sat down and picked up his pencil.
She spoke to the Ouija board. “Are you prepared to answer more questions?”
YES.
Thunder rumbled over King’s Point. The bulbs in the hanging lamp above the table flickered, nearly went out, then glowed brightly again.
“The man who killed Rochelle Drake has murdered other people, too. How many has he illed?”
35.
Lou said, “My God! He’s a regular Jack the Ripper.”
“Jack the Ripper didn’t kill that many,” Max said. “The board’s wrong. It has to be. Ask it again, Mary.”
Her voice wavered as she repeated the question. 35.
The hanging lamp flickered and went out. “Power failure,” Lou said.
Mary said, “I don’t want to sit in the dark.”
“If it lasts more than a minute,” Lou said, “I’ll go get candles from the hall closet.”
An incredible barrage of lightning pulsed outside the windows. The sharp bursts of blue-white light created a series of choppy, stroboscopic images: Lou reaching in a half dozen seemingly disconnected movements for his glass of bourbon
;
Max turning his head toward her as if he were a character on a motion picture screen, with the film slipping and stuttering in the projector.
Then the lightning passed
;
the darkness was complete
;
the thunder receded to a distant growl. Rain should have followed that display, but it didn’t
;
the sky held back the deluge.