Before There Were Angels (12 page)

‘The trouble with evil is that it comes in a heavy disguise, but you haven’t worn that disguise in front of me. You haven’t seen the need to
. Well, we will see, Rafaella, we will see, and one day everyone will see.’

OK, so you think I have gone off the deep end too, hating an ex-wife
‘just because’, but you too will see, or maybe not. Rafaella always did get away with everything.

*  *  *

I was roaring by this point. Everything about Rafaella and my marriage was coming back to me, memories I had suppressed since meeting Belle because why rehearse the bad times when you are living the good ones?

We weren’
t living the good ones anymore because of Zack’s death and everything Rafaella was doing to mess with us - the death threats, the computer hacking, the viruses, the INS intervention, the bad mouthing to my clients (she had got hold of a list and written to every single one of my clients telling them what a cheating sonofabitch I was and how I was stealing money from a company she owned fifty per cent of, and driving it into bankruptcy, so watch out!) - and maybe all of that was down to Rafaella. Something told me that Rafaella had played a part in Zack’s murder; I didn’t know how, I even less knew why Rafaella would go to the extreme of torturing and killing a twelve year old boy, but I knew in my bones that she was capable of it, that she was capable of almost anything to get her own way, to have the last, the definitive, word.

So I remembered …

There was the time she hurled my cell phone out of the window because I was talking to a friend, Mike, for twenty  minutes and therefore not available to help her move a chest of drawers she had decided on the instant should be the other side of our bedroom. I hardly ever spoke to my friends while I lived with Rafaella because she resented, sometimes violently, any relationship I conducted with anyone other than her.

Then there was the time she so infuriated me with her criticisms that I got out of the car forty miles from home and had to hitchhike back in the pouring rain because there was no public transport, only to be met by ‘stupid moron’ triumphal
ism on my return and another shit storm.

Once she threw an Oil of Olay bottle at me in the bath, which smashed, dropping glass all around me in the water. That was because she thought I was having an affair with a client who was actually
a lesbian and about three hundred pounds.

Rafaella
continually went on about my time management skills, or lack of them, saying that she could do everything I did in terms of work in about a quarter of the time I took. How she could have known that when she had never once helped me in my work, nor even had a job while we were together, was beside the point. She had surmised I was wasting lots of time talking to people - which I think is called ‘management’ - and that I was only doing it to avoid spending time with her.

And the endless arguments over everything, between us and with virtually everybody else we met. We all misunderstood her, we were all being mean to her,
we were all denying her truth, enough to justify her scorched earth outbursts and to drive a less sane person to schizophrenia, a destination I became increasingly convinced that she had already reached.

Oh, and
all the feigned illnesses: liver cancer, pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, Hodgkin’s, MS, Parkinson’s. Over a five year period they all came, they lingered and, miraculously, they went away again …

*  *  *

Now was a good time to get into action to find Rafaella. I was ready for her. She usually took the initiative, turning everything over to her agenda, but not this time. This time I was all too ready to plunge into her.

Except … wouldn’t it be more discrete t
o use my own call center? I had a software support business and therefore a large call center? They could find her and I wouldn’t have to deal with her at all.

Call me a coward, if you will, but when you are dealing with
Rafaella, cowardice is a synonym for self-protection.

*  *  *

Belle and I spent the day speculating as to the identity of this newcomer in our lives - Stevie’s tail. Was she Martha DeGamo, was she a plain clothes detective, was she someone who had lost a son of her own and adopted him as a substitute? All our speculations were as far-fetched, except maybe the detective, as they were futile. We simply had no idea of who she was, and we had no way of knowing. What we did know was that Stevie might be at risk, and that really scared both of us.

And there were still those annual accounts for me to do.

*  *  *

I went back to the school to escort Stevie home, albeit from a distance. At schools out, Stevie came down the steps and beckoned me over.

“Luke, Rich asked me to come over to his house. Is that OK?”

“How are you going to get home?”

“The same as always, on the bus.”

I pondered the idea. It wasn’t really my decision to make. I wasn’t his father. “I
’ll give your mom a call and check, okay?”

“OK.”

Belle didn’t answer her cell phone after three attempts. This was going to have to be my call.

“OK, Stevie, you go to Rich’s
and have a good time. Call us if you want us to come and get you.”

“I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me. He
y, did you see that woman today?”

“Yes, we did. We both did.”

“And …?”

“We don’t know. She disappeared. We have spent the day trying to work out who she is.”

“Stop her and talk to her.”

“We might have done but, as I say, she disappeared after you went into the school.”

Stevie smiled. “Maybe she’s my guardian angel. That would be kind of cool.”

“
She’s a little bit short on wings.”

“Mayb
e they don’t have wings anymore. They could have evolved like Great Whites did.”

“I think we’ll check her out all the same.
The odds on her being a guardian angel seem a bit long to rely on.”

“OK, Luke. See you later.”

*  *  *

When I got back home, Belle was in the kitchen preparing food. “Where’s Stevie?” she asked anxiously.

“He’s gone off with his friend - Rich.”

“Rich who?”

“I didn’t ask. Sorry. I tried to call you but you didn’t answer.”

“I was probably in the bathtub.”

“Sorry, I made a snap decision which should have been yours, but Stevie seemed all excited about going back with Rich and he has his cell phone. I know we are very frightened for him right now but we won’t be doing him any favors treating him like he is in the witness protection program.”

Belle came over to me, hugged and kissed me. “You made the right decision, Luke. You always make
the right decisions. I know Stevie isn’t yours but you have to treat him as if he is. I’ll always back you on any decision you make. I’ll know you made the right one.”

She didn’t say that it was the decision she would have made, though.

By midnight,
we had gone to bed and I was kicking myself, and expecting Belle to kick me. Stevie still wasn’t home, he hadn’t called and he wasn’t answering his cell phone.

“I wish we had this Rich’s home number,” Belle said.

“I’m sorry. I should have thought of that.”

Belle stroked my hair. “It’s not a problem. He
’ll be home soon or he’ll call.”

Sure enough five minutes later the front door
rattled and Stevie came racing up the stairs.

“Whoa,” he called from outside our bedroom door. “Who is she?”

“Who is who?” we called back.

“The lady
with the red hair.”

“
What lady with red hair?” I asked.

“The one who has
just disappeared into my room.” Stevie entered our room. “Is she a friend of yours?”

“We don’t know who you mean,” Belle replied indulgently. “There is no-one else in the house
, sweetie.”

“She was definitely
a someone. A hottie. A serious milf.”

“Oh nice
,” said Belle rolling her eyes.

“Oh, come on, Mom. You’re a
milf yourself, at least that’s what they all say at school. I’m now living in a house with two milfs. That’ll make me sound cool.”

“Except that there is no-one else here, unless …”

“Unless you saw Jess DeGamo, Stevie. I’m not sure having a milf ghost is quite the same thing.”

Stevie turned around and stared
down the landing. “Are you saying she was a ghost? She looked all there to me. Is she the same one as you saw, do you think, Luke?”

“Either that or she is an intruder.”

“And she’s in my room?”

“Check under the bed. That’s where I found her last time. Do you want me to do it?”

“Please.” His face darkened. “If she is a ghost, why can’t she have been Zack. I wouldn’t be afraid of Zack.” He flung himself across the room and dived into Belle’s arms. “I miss Zack so much. Why can’t he be a ghost? We would have the best time together, scaring everyone. Zack would love it.”

I laughed. “I wouldn’t put it past him.” My comment was met with stony silence from both Belle and Stevie. “I would love to have Zack back as a ghost too,” I added, but it wasn’t a successful recovery.

Stevie pulled away from Belle. He had tears pouring down his cheeks. “I’m gonna sleep in the attic from now on,” he said. “That way, if Zack comes looking for me, he’ll know where to find me.”

Chapter 17

I couldn’t resist checking Stevie’s room, which was, of course, still full of Zack’s stuff. Stevie wanted Zack all around him even if he couldn’t be there in person. And everything they had fitted both of them, so why throw anything out, right?

I had seen the
woman with the red hair before - Jess DeGamo, I was presuming - I had even been nose-to-nose with her, so I was much less hesitant to meet her than I had been the first time.

What I didn’t expect -
who would? - was that she would come rushing at me as I approached the door to Stevie’s room. She looked terrified, reckless in her haste. Her blue eyes were wide open, her bracelets were dangling, and she had that archetypal stutter-slide to her feet that all slim women have when they are running in elevated heels.

She didn’t seem to notice me standing there, frozen mid-stride, but I swear I smelt her perfume as she
wafted past me, something chic - Prada, Gucci, Gaultier?

She ran
down the stairs to the ground floor and she was gone, eliciting a kind of startled snort from George as she crossed his path.

I was expecting to see Martha
DeGamo chasing her but Martha was not dead so far as I knew, so she would be unlikely to be a ghost. Still, perhaps scenes from the past don’t require anybody to be dead. Maybe they are ethereal images operating on the Tivo principle.

Anyway, Martha did not appear and I was by now much more frightened of Martha than I was of Jess who seemed to be a cute, pretty, perfectly normal victim on the wrong end of a
sadistic vendetta who accidentally and inadvertently intersected our lives with no harm ensuing to us.

If I entered Stevie’s room, would I find Martha?

That thought gave me pause. I didn’t want to meet Martha as a person, nor did I want to meet her as some kind of shade, gun in hand, eyes glaring, ready to beat down anyone in her path. However, I would at least discover whether she was the woman following Stevie to and from school.

I eased the door open slowly, my back flat to the landing wall as if bullets were about to fly past me. There was only
silence. I inched into the doorway and felt for the light switch.

I was half-expecting a hand to grab me but, instead, I just couldn’t find the light switch. Surely
it was to the left of the door?

I caught it with the back of my hand and the light snapped on.

The room seemed normal, much as I assumed Stevie had left it, much as any twelve year old would have left it, even a pair of twelve year olds.

I suddenly felt a pang for Zack and a profou
nd sense that he was gone forever. Why would a child hang himself? Who would hang a child? It still seemed impossible, and the hole of his absence felt impossibly deep and irrecoverable.

I am not a partic
ularly emotional man but, for a millisecond, his loss stabbed me hard.

“Hello, Luke.”

There she was, in her standard pose, poised like a boxer limbering out from the corner of a ring, ready to evade the first punch.

I had never been scared of
Rafaella, not physically scared of her, only cowed, ground down, exhausted and sometimes - often - desperate.