Again (4 page)

He got up, left the room to go downstairs to the kitchen. Along the wall over the stairs hung photos of Ruth (the Big Bambino), Mantle, DiMaggio. These were relics from his father who’d walked out on him and his mother when David was just ten, almost a full year before the fire. They were saved because they had been in the garage instead of the attic.

This was the house he had built for his mother almost three years ago. But just before the move, she’d decided she wanted to stay in her old home instead. The same home they had moved into after the Victorian was destroyed. This one was a Queen Anne built on a lot he purchased in the historic Oak Park district. He had tried to recreate what he had taken from her those many years ago. Walnut woodwork in the front hall, parquet floors, stained glass windows. In the living room, a marble fireplace. Outside a wraparound porch and Palladian windows mimicked the destroyed home. He hadn’t even blinked at the expense of building in a historic district; it nearly broke him, but he had thought it worthwhile if it could recompense his past sins.

But his mother had looked at him and said, “This is your house. There’s something about you in this place. I can’t take it away from you.”

No amount of pleading would make her see reason. She was dead wrong. This wasn’t
his
place. He couldn’t care less about turn-of-the-century homes big enough for a whole family. He would’ve much preferred a large apartment on North Michigan, sparsely decorated, airy with good lighting. Here, the mixture of rustic and Victorian furniture he had chosen for her matched the architecture of the home.

Still, he couldn’t bring himself to put it on the market. Slowly, steadily it’d become the place he looked forward to coming home to every evening after a grueling day. He had even started a garden out back.

Rick had teased him about his “bachelor pad,” telling him it was a great setting for a coke party. Or a good fucking Roman orgy with babes straddled over the French-style love seat. He told Dave that maybe he could grow some weed out back, sell it out of the garage. Dave usually laughed with him, sheepishly embarrassed that the house was actually domesticating him.

In the kitchen floor plan, he had deliberately left out a storeroom. Instead, a large pantry stood just off the hallway.

David walked to the faucet, ran the water cold, got a glass, downed it in a few gulps. He felt hot, sweaty, as though he had just been through a strenuous workout—or a prolonged lovemaking session.

He needed a woman. Karen had been gone only two months and already he was falling to pieces. Women might be able to go without for weeks on end, but men were different. He was, anyway.

He ran the water again, downed a second glass, but his thirst wouldn’t go away.

Water wasn’t what he needed.

What he needed was a good fuck. Then maybe things would get back to normal.

J
ennifer DiMello sat at the breakfast table in Mrs. Carvelli’s kitchen. Small, country-styled with maple cabinets and granite counters, it was a cozy, homey place to sit and talk. Just outside the window, she spied a robin wandering along the branches of a sickly looking elm. She figured Dutch elm disease and wondered why Mrs. Carvelli hadn’t had it cut down.

“Here you go.” Mrs. Carvelli placed a mug of coffee on the table in front of Jennifer. Jennifer studied the older woman as she sat down across from her with her own cup. Early fifties, dark brown hair, lightly graying, with a youthful face that had strong features, but not overwhelming. From the picture in the living room, her son had the masculine version of his mother’s Roman nose, broad forehead, and full lips; however, his eyes were green to Mrs. Carvelli’s brown. Mrs. Carvelli had a beauty that had settled nicely with age, as well as sophistication by the look of the tailored light blue blouse and darker blue slacks. Diamond studs glinted in her earlobes.

“Thanks for coming over.” Mrs. Carvelli’s voice was soft, throaty, probably from cigarettes. Jennifer spotted an ashtray on the counter near the coffee machine.

Jennifer lifted her mug to take a sip, pondering what Mrs. Carvelli had just told her about her visions. And her dilemma. “So you never told him you’re a seer?”

Mrs. Carvelli shook her head. “No. Though he probably has some inkling but knowing David, he’s scrunched it all down into that little box in his subconscious where he keeps things he doesn’t want to deal with.” Mrs. Carvelli cocked her head as she looked at the young woman, and Jennifer had the unsettling feeling she was being “read.” “I ever tell you about the fire that destroyed my home years ago?”

Jennifer paused her upraised cup. “No, you never told me. What happened?”

“David. I picked up a few impressions from him after it happened. One of the few times I was able to get something after the fact. It was an accident. His friend Terry’s shenanigans. David was always letting that boy pull him by the nose. Of course, I didn’t tell him I knew because he was already feeling lousy, and there’s only so much guilt a kid can handle. Besides, he learned a lesson that day, something I couldn’t teach him. Still, I’ve been waiting all these years for him to say
something
about it. He never has.”

Mrs. Carvelli paused contemplatively, took a sip of coffee. “I saw his friend, Terry, drowning in a forest preserve. Soon as I realized it was a premonition, I tried to call his mother, but I couldn’t reach them. After it happened, I broke the news to David but I never let on that I knew beforehand. Over the years, there were other things, things I tried to prevent. I kept them to myself because at the time it didn’t seem important to upset David’s life. Not that he would’ve listened. He’s so much like his father in many ways. Being a stone cold skeptic is one of them. That’s why I’ve pulled you into this little drama. I’ve been picking up some disturbing things from him lately. I can’t talk to him about them because I don’t know exactly what’s going on. I was hoping you might sense something.”

“I’ll try, but you know I only see past events, not the future.”

Mrs. Carvelli stared bemusedly into her coffee cup as though reading tea dregs. “I think that your visions will be of more help than mine. Jennifer, I’ve never seen him like this before. And when I say ‘seen’, I mean his aura. It’s been red lately. Violent red, like blood. David’s usually a green. Sometimes orange. Hardly ever red. I’ve only seen him this color twice in his life, and never this deep a shade. The first time was the night his father walked out on us and told David he wasn’t coming back. That nearly destroyed my son. The other time was the day I told him about Terry. But it’s not just his aura that’s bothering me. There are other things too. I’ve been picking up some strange visions from him, images I can’t quite pin down, but there’s almost a violence to them. It’s frightening me.”

Jennifer sat quiet for a moment, took another sip of coffee. She didn’t know about the color of auras or what they meant. She was a psychometrist, a “feeler,” sensing impressions and emotions through things people touched. Past impressions, past emotions, never the future. As long as she could remember, she’d had this gift. When she was just seven years old, Jennifer found her friend Emily’s necklace lying on the ground near the girl’s house a couple of doors away. Emily had been missing for a week. As soon as Jennifer picked up the tiny heart chain, images invaded her mind—Mr. Jakins, his eyes strange, unfocused, his head sweaty; Emily frightened, crying and bleeding. She’d told her mother that Mr. Jakins had hurt Emily, but her mother scolded her for making up lies about their neighbor. No one ever found Emily. When Mr. Jakins finally moved away a year later, Jennifer had been relieved. She was never comfortable around him after the necklace, never comfortable with the way he looked at her and the other children, even though a lot of the kids liked him because he let them use his backyard pool.

Growing up, Jennifer realized that many of the smiling neighbors waving to her hid a lot of sordid sins behind those smiles. By the time Jennifer became a teenager, she knew whom to avoid, whom never to be alone with.

She never told anyone about her gift, not even her parents. But the kids at school must have sensed something about her because they taunted her with “witch bitch” and other cruel names. Jennifer suffered in silence until the day she met Mrs. Carvelli. An old friend of her mother’s, Mrs. Carvelli visited their home one day when Jennifer was just fifteen. And that day changed everything. Jennifer said hello to the woman and hadn’t said much else. She hadn’t needed to. Mrs. Carvelli looked at the young girl and recognized something in her. Jennifer never knew how. Maybe the woman had read her aura that day. Or maybe she saw something from Jennifer’s future. Whatever it was, Mrs. Carvelli had taken the teenage girl aside and told her they had to talk.

That was nearly fifteen years ago. Mrs. Carvelli had kept in touch with the young psychic. But this was the first time the woman ever asked for help. Although she had never met David, Jennifer was glad to help because Mrs. Carvelli had done an extraordinary thing for a young girl not sure of herself or her gift. She had made her feel OK about herself.

“I don’t pick up auras,” Jennifer said, “but I felt something when I touched the tie clip you gave me. It was strange.”

“What?” Mrs. Carvelli leaned forward, a mother’s worry and a psychic’s curiosity playing on her face. She hadn’t asked before, maybe not ready to know then. Now she was.

Jennifer stared into her cup, not wanting to meet the fervor in those brown eyes. The coffee was black the way she liked. Dark enough to reflect her face up at her. The reflection looked fifteen all over again, but she hadn’t been that age for a long time.

“Jen, stop stalling. Tell me.” Jennifer was used to the commands. Mrs. Carvelli—Jen could never seem to call the woman by her given name, Carmen—didn’t like people who dawdled.

The young woman looked up. “I see your son, but it’s not his face I’m envisioning. Not like he looks in the picture in the living room. Or rather, when I look at the picture, it’s another face superimposed over his. Yet it’s him. I’m sure of it.”

Mrs. Carvelli leaned back, her expression unreadable, and Jennifer wondered if she had said too much.

“I know that sounds strange…” she started.

The older woman quickly shook her head, her eyes fixed in concentration as though trying to catch something fleeting through her mind. She got up from the chair, scraping it along the linoleum, opened a drawer at the counter and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She reached for the matches, lit the cigarette, and drew in a long pull before she finally spoke.

“No, Jen, it doesn’t sound strange. As a matter of fact, it sounds just about right…just about right.”

Feeler and seer both looked out the window at the same time, peering at the sickly elm, their thoughts running along the same disturbing line.

New York—June 1879

Standing in the parlor, Joseph Luce stared at the painting of his mother that hung to the right of his own above the fireplace. His father’s portrait took space on the left. Below, lining the gilded mantel, sat various curios his father had collected on his many excursions around the world. Three silver monkeys, posed to see, speak, and hear no evil, sat next to an African mask made of rich ebony. This abutted a bronze statue of Buddha that hailed from the Orient. On the other end was a Navajo peace pipe. Center place among the assortment was the cherished miniature replica of Windsor Castle made entirely of gold, presented last year to his father by Queen Victoria during his tenure as honorary emissary for President Hayes. William Luce prided himself on acquiring things, including the woman who later became his wife, the beautiful and winsome debutante, Anne Spaulding, granddaughter of a shipping magnate. She had been displayed, as were his father’s other collectibles, as a testament to his extraordinariness.

The triad of gilt-edged paintings hung also as a statement—of power, elegance, and privilege—his father and mother embodying the former, he, the latter. In her portrait, his mother holds her hands solemnly in her lap, her expression one she probably thought at the time was demure and noble. But the painter had caught a steel in her eyes, a hardness that Joseph had similarly observed occasionally in the eyes of felons just released back into the populace, a determination never to be confined again. Gone was the young girl whose vivacity had been dulled and whittled away by the time Joseph was born into this world.

That his mother had enjoyed her life of splendor and luxury Joseph had ignorantly assumed. Yet, given the comforts that even her peers silently begrudged her, being tethered to a man who did not love her must have felt like a prison she could only escape through death. Ten years had passed this very day, ten years since he and his father had found her lying in her bed, the evidence of her departure an empty bottle of laudanum sitting on the bedstand beside her.

The years of his mother’s barely expressed disappointments and frustrations sometimes came back to him in snatches, reminiscences that he quickly forced away. He and his father had entered their conspiracy of silence long ago, mentioning her only with reservation, and only when necessary. As for the rest of the world, thanks to his father’s station in society (as well as a few tactically greased palms), his mother’s death had been ruled a bad heart simply giving out. The word “suicide” would never be paired with her name.

As horrible as finding her body had been, Joseph could not forget the look of peace on her face nor that small smile that had played at her lips. An escapee finally fleeing her prison—and its warden.

William Luce stared down from his portrait, much like Zeus in an eternal frieze of displeasure. The cruelty in his face was unequivocal, the glint in his eyes reproof against a world that fell short of his measure—a world that included his own wife and son. Especially a son whom he considered a profligate unworthy of the family name.

Joseph walked over to the liquor cabinet, reached for the decanter of brandy. He poured a full snifter, emptied it in three long swigs, refilled it to the brim. It was all of ten o’clock in the morning, too early for drink. Had his father been home, he would have lambasted his son for his self-indulgence. But his father was on a trip to New Jersey to settle some matter with one of his steel refineries. Always business.

Joseph was free to enjoy his father’s supply of liquor and cigars, the only pleasures the man allowed himself. As far as he knew, his father had never even taken a mistress, an arrangement that was more common than not in their circle. Maybe life would have been better for his mother had he done so, had his father indulged himself even just a bit, allowing imperfection to nick his self-defined veneer. Joseph knew his father’s fidelity was due more to his tight thriftiness and self-image as a man of temperance than any real regard for his wife or vows. Women, mistresses, cost money, money that could be better spent being reinvested in his numerous financial enterprises.

Joseph sat on the divan in front of the fireplace, concentrating on the woman who had not only escaped a husband but who had abandoned her son, as well. He knew one day that he would take a wife. It was his duty as heir. Also, his father wanted to make sure there would be a generation born who would be worthier of his money and name than the present successor. But as Joseph stared at Anne Luce’s set gaze, he knew that he could never marry a woman he held in such disregard as his father had held his mother. Theirs had been a marriage with rarely an exchange of kind words. Anne’s attempts at intimate conversations and loving embraces had been met only with dark silences that delivered more pain than any physical blow ever could. Even as a young boy, he had picked up this tacit hostility and had wondered about it, thinking then that this was what marriage was about.

Looking up at his mother, Joseph vowed that he would only marry for love and not merely for duty—or to acquire a possession to display on his arm. He would love his wife, dearly, madly, completely. He would adore her, worship her so that she would never leave him. The one who finally won his heart would be his forever. Even death would not part them.