Life to Life: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (12 page)

Francois was treating her like a prize
investment and insisting that I protect that investment while also
hinting that his interest in Annie went a bit deeper than that.

Janulski apparently
thought of her as a saint and would murmur no hint of criticism
despite the strange circumstances that brought them together in
the first place. And the summons brought to me by Janulski
originated, he claimed, in another world, and he even brought me
greetings and later confrontation with an exalted spirit claiming
to be the father I had never known.

Then, shit, there was Clara who killed
Carver and exposed me to Selma. Clara, best friend of Maybelle who
turns out to be Annie's mother; Clara, who a very long time ago was
beautiful and glamorous enough to be in pictures and spent a
weekend with someone at the exclusive Malibu Colony and came away
with dozens of snapshots but apparently nothing else and obviously
went into total eclipse behind Maybelle and Maybelle's daughter—so
eclipsed, it seemed, that she remained a maiden all her life but
maintained close ties with Maybelle who also seems to have gone
into eclipse at some point very long ago; Clara, whose death today
was announced from another world by Dear Old Dad to send me back to
Eagle Rock and a tattered photo album.

What
case? Surely not the same one that sent David Carver to his
death and Paul Stewart raging to the D.A. for murder indictments on
a string of deaths stretching backward in time for fifteen years or
so and Reverend Annie to Sybil Brand Institute for Women. Surely
not the same one that brought the suicide of a despondent
homosexual youth, or the police shooting death of an ex-con child
molester, or the accidental asphyxiation death of Annie's own
mother.

Carver had thought of Annie as a black
widow—a nasty critter that devours its mates—and now Stewart seemed
to share that view and wanted to pin a number of psychic
projection murders on her, as well.

Janulski called her a saint and a spiritual
force whom the entire physical universe was girding to crush.

Clara—dear Clara—had
referred to her as simply "that girl" but in a decidedly critical
tone. Francois and Annie herself seemed to believe that she was in
some sort of real danger other than that posed by the police
interest in her—and, I presumed, other than some malevolent
counterforce from the resistant universe.

So what was the case I was working?

I did not have the faintest goddamn
idea.

I set my water-rocks on the bar, ambled over
to Mirabel's desk and disconnected his telephone with Rome still
dickering, opened Clara's photo album in front of him and said,
"What the hell is this, Francois?"

He looked at the album for about one second
then snapped his eyes at me. "Wherever did you get this?"

I snapped right back at him and said, "No
dice. Me first. What is it?"

He sighed, looked back to the album, leafed
through a few pages, sighed again. "How insignificantly the years
pass by. But I was quite handsome once, no?"

I said, "Look again, pal. And not just at
yourself. Look at the world around you. Who do you see?"

"Her name was Maizey," he replied softly.
"We were very much in love. But it was not to be."

"The kid, Francois."

"The chief reason it was
not to be," he said. "I could not marry. A wife, in Paris.
Catholic, naturally. Maizey wanted a father for her child." He
sighed heavily. "So she found one.

I flipped to the next series of snapshots,
the ones featuring only mother and child.

"Same kid?" I asked.

He glanced at the album then did a double
take, eyes crackling into the revelation suggested there.

"Holy Mother," he whispered.

"Holy child," I corrected
him. "So what the hell is this, Francois?"

He was too stunned to reply. I had finally
seen the guy with absolutely nothing to dissimulate.

But there was no joy in that observation.
Because my case had just slipped into focus, though through a glass
darkly. And it scared hell out of me.

Chapter Fifteen: To Dream Like An
Angel

Francois absolutely closed
the book on that photo album and refused further comment on that
period of his life. He was like a man stunned and bemused, wanting
only to be left alone. I did elicit from him the information that
Annie would have to spend at least the night in jail; the judge had
set over until the next day the question of bail and apparently the
attorneys had exhausted every avenue in the attempt to gain her
immediate release.

So I began to wonder about the D.A.'s case
and how much more was there beyond the meager chain of
circumstantial evidence sketched for me by Paul Stewart. It seemed
to me that there had to be some hard core of a case to establish
some reasonable presumption of guilt if Mirabel's legal clout could
not shake her loose.

I tried to impress upon Francois—without
coming right out and saying it—the strong possibility that he
himself could be in mortal danger, but he was entirely noncommittal
and apparently consumed by his own thoughts so I went away and left
him with them. And since I could not get to the lady directly, I
decided to go for an indirect approach to the truth about
Annie.

It was frenzy time on the
L.A. freeway scene so I struck a surface path through the hills via
Beverly Glen and chugged over to Van Nuys the hard way. The
twenty-mile drive consumed most of an hour—which was
okay because I needed the thinking time and did
not know for sure just what I hoped to find over there
anyway.

I went on past the Church
of Light Center and found the neighborhood where Annie began her
life with George Farrel, her latest late husband. It was one of
those typical Southern California tracts that were built on the GI
Bill during the fifties to house the burgeoning postwar population
and now kindly referred to by realtors as mature neighborhoods.
Nothing pretentious about these homes but by and large they came on
roomier lots than those produced by the land booms of the sixties
and seventies when developers could not resist the temptation to
squeeze a hundred homes onto a plot better fitted to seventy. That
whole big valley had been mostly farmlands just a few decades back.
Now it was endless bedrooms stretching the city into infinity and
perpetuating its sprawl through the natural activities
therein.

This particular collection
of bedrooms, though—mature for sure—had no doubt largely ceased to
figure into the population explosion, the natural activities now
chiefly confined to sleeping. I cruised it once slowly just to get
the feel then circled back and pulled into the driveway of the
Farrel homestead. It was that soft time of the evening when the
declining sun is providing more light than heat, when the denizens
are cycling down their air conditioners and opening windows and
patio doors and beginning to feel neighborly.

One of those was eyeing me openly from the
next yard as I stepped out of the Maserati. She had cotton-puff
hair and deeply tanned skin, wore faded denim cutoffs and a
wrinkled T-shirt with no bra beneath, held a small gardening tool
in each hand. About sixty, give or take a few years; a plank-
owner, no doubt, in this neighborhood. I noticed a Neighborhood
Watch sign in a window, and she was dutifully checking me out.

So I showed her a friendly smile and called
over, "Hi, Phyllis."

She took about two steps forward before
advising me, "I'm not Phyllis. I'm Helen."

I made an apologetic face and said,
"Oh!—right!—Helen!—sorry—but it's been awhile, hasn't it. How've
you been?"

I was already walking away
which was okay with Helen because she couldn't place me anyway. I
shot a glance over the shoulder as I turned the corner of the
garage; she had given up already and was attacking a flower bed at
the property line. I was in luck because the garage shielded
Farrel's front door from Helen's view and that door proved a bit
more resistant than Clara's had been. Took me nearly a minute to
get inside.

It was uncomfortably warm and close in there
with the windows and draperies all closed and the air conditioner
turned off. I opened the place up and let in some fresh air then
just prowled the rooms and opened myself up to whatever might be
waiting there for me.

It was a nice home—expensively furnished and
tastefully decorated—three bedrooms and den, two baths, nice modem
kitchen that obviously had recently been remodeled and updated,
fairly large living room with a dining ell. Had a baby grand piano,
large-screen TV and VCR, nice stereo system. Several framed
eight-by-ten photos on the piano showed Annie with a kindly looking
white-haired man; these were wedding pictures and both appeared
very happy about that.

Two of the bedrooms had obviously not been
used for anything but overflow storage for quite a while. Beds in
each were made up with only a spread over the bare mattress—not
even any pillows—and odds and ends of stuff were stacked about in
open boxes.

The other bedroom was as
obviously Annie's and George's but did not show much more use than
the others except that the closet was stuffed with clothing—both
men's and women's—and the bed was rather carelessly made and piled
with pillows. But that room was speaking to me and the feeling was
rather sad.

I shook back a shiver and
went on into the master bath. The tub in which George had suffered
his fatal fall was glass-enclosed and had handrails built into the
wall above it. I stayed in there for about thirty seconds, just
getting the feel, then I returned and sat on Annie's bed for maybe
a minute and gazed back through the open doorway into the bath,
inviting the flow. Nothing flowed so I went to the kitchen and got
a drink of water, stared mindlessly out the window onto the
backyard for a while until I felt something begin to move
me.

I just stood back and let
it happen. It moved me to the backdoor and into the yard. A
concrete-block wall made it private and someone had once obviously
enjoyed working back here. It was showing neglect now but the
flower beds had been well planned and artistically planted, woven
very nicely among a dozen or so dwarf fruit trees that were now
heavily laden with oranges and lemons.

It moved me to one of the
dwarf oranges. It knelt me down and dug my fingers into the earth
and put a frown on my face at what was encountered there, then it
picked an orange and peeled it and popped a section into my mouth.
The orange was sweet and juicy though a bit pulpy; I found myself
making a mental note to talk to the gardener about the soil as I
went back inside and washed my hands at the kitchen
sink.

Then I heard music and
realized that Ann was playing the piano. I went quietly to the door
and listened from a distance so I would not disturb her at play;
she was doing "Ebbtide," my favorite, and putting in the special
little wave ripples that I loved so with the left hand. God, she
was so beautiful and especially at the piano; I stood there for
several minutes watching and listening. There was a lump in my
throat and an ache in the heart as I turned away and went to the
bedroom and undressed. I felt very sad and terribly depressed but
I was not sure why. It was time for my bath but I did not want to
disturb Ann at play so I went on alone and closed the bathroom door
tightly so she would not hear the water and leave the
piano.

I got the water adjusted
just right and sprinkled in the salts, then went back into the
bedroom for another quick listen because I could not hear her with
the water running and the door closed. She had moved from "Ebbtide"
into "Autumn Leaves" and so beautifully, but "Autumn Leaves" always
made me sad so I did not linger but returned quickly to my bath and
stepped into the tub.

The damned glass doors—they were great for
showering but too damned confining during a comforting soak in the
tub. I stood there debating for a moment whether to slide the door
closed or leave it open but I began to feel dizzy and wondered if
maybe I should just get back out and forget the bath for now.

I turned off the water and heard Ann calling
me and I knew that something was terribly wrong. I could not turn
around to get out of the tub. Something was terribly wrong and Ann
was calling.

Ann... God!... Ann honey!
Everything was black. I was plunging through space. Then something
hit my head and the pain was sickening, nauseating. I was losing
consciousness. Ann—
dear
God—Ann
...!

I came out of it sitting on the edge of
Annie's bed stark naked. I could hear water running in the
bathroom. I struggled to my feet and went in there to turn it off.
Just in time, too, because the tub was almost overflowing.

For a confused moment, there, I expected to
hear "Autumn Leaves" coming from the living room...but of course
there was nobody there now to play that piano.

I put on my clothes, closed that house back
the way I'd found it, and quickly went away from there.

Maybe I had found no truth about Annie.

But I knew like all the angels in heaven
that George Farrel had adored her.

Chapter Sixteen: In a Different Light

She was born Ann Marie
Mathison. Father Tony was an expert horseman, movie stuntman, and
sometimes actor who was killed by one of his stunts during the
filming of a western when she was only two months old.