Life to Life: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (15 page)

McSweeney had worked for the center as a
maintenance engineer and general handyman for about two months
before his death. Some of the jobs had to be scheduled so as not to
interfere with the center's activities—that is, after midnight—so
Barney had been in direct contact with him from time to time.

"Okay guy, I thought," he told me. "Didn't
say much, but there really wasn't that much to be said between us
anyhow. I wouldn't have thought of him as a weirdo. Just quiet,
that's all."

I said, "Well, yeah, bent
doesn't mean broken. It's just that his particular bend is usually
very damaging to young lives. How'd you feel about Annie turning
him in?"

Barney shrugged and
replied, "What else could she do? Can't have a guy like that
messing around a place like this. And some of these guys, I guess,
get real crazy. How 'bout this guy awhile back, tortured all those
little kids and chopped 'em up? You never know. But I was really
surprised about Charlie. Still can't picture him charging a cop,
going after him with a hammer."

"That what he did?"

"Way I got it, yeah. Or so the cop said,
after he emptied his revolver into him."

I said, "Witnesses?"

"Not to the shooting, no.
Guess they'd gone to his house to make the arrest. But there were
witnesses to the other thing. Way I got it, he walks in there stark
naked and starts playing with the kids. Can you beat that? In broad
daylight. Guy must have flipped out or something."

I said, "He had a record
of similar offenses, served a couple of rehabilitation stretches at
Camarillo. Guess there was also something about kiddie
porn."

"Yeah, I heard the cops talking about that,"
Barney said. "That's sick—you know?—that's really sick."

I sighed and said, "Sick enough to kill, I
guess. How do you feel about that?"

“
What can you do with
'em?” Barney replied. "Send 'em to the moon? I figure, what's more
important?"

"What do you mean?"

"To society. What's more
important? Sometimes I get the feeling it's falling apart around
us. Used to be, we all knew who the enemy was. And we killed the
sons of bitches. Now it seems more and more like nobody really
knows what's important and what's not important. Well I think I
know. Our kids are important. These sicko sons of bitches are not.
It's got to the point we can't afford them. When you can't afford
something, what do you do with it?"

I said, "Get rid of
it?”

He said, "Exactly. These
guys are expendable. The kids are not."

I report this conversation
with Barney partly because it is pertinent to the case but mainly
because something he said there hit a nerve cell in my brain and
produced a minor flash in there. I'll tell you more about that
later. Right now I have to stay with the flow and tell you about
something that produced a major flash.

It happened at the fourth
stop along Barney's lock-up check. He was telling me, "This is the
door to the sanctuary, rear of the auditorium. Reverend Farrel
prepares for her sermons in here. She can come and go, see,
without going through the auditorium if she don't want to." Then he
showed me a surprised look and said, "Hell, it's
unlocked."

He had a hand on his pistol as he warily
pushed that door open. Suddenly he made a strangled sound and
quickly but quietly backed out of there and pulled the door firmly
shut, but not before I could see what he had seen inside that
room.

He'd seen Reverend Annie, that's what, and
he'd seen all of Reverend Annie in a bewitching scene not likely to
be forgotten in a long lifetime. It's the sort of thing that etches
itself into memory; certainly it is etched in mine, though I had
but a glimpse.

A narrow pencil-beam from
a small spotlight placed high on the wall was providing the only
illumination to that otherwise darkened room. Annie was standing in
the spot. She was goldenly naked, a shimmering vision of feminine
beauty poised in an attitude of exultant worship with the feet
together and stretching upward from the toes almost like a
ballerina, back arched gracefully and the chest thrown high, head
back as far as it could go and the arms raised and reaching as
though she were trying to project herself along that beam of
light.

I don't know how to
reconcile the emotional reaction to something that is both and at
once so erotically beautiful and so stunningly
religious.
I just know that it
affected Barney in very much the same way it affected me, with an
added bonus for him of horrified embarrassment.

"You told me she was in jail!" he muttered,
very upset with me.

"Last I heard, she was," I muttered back.
"The lawyers must have finally..."

"God! Did you see her? Did
you
see
that?"

I saw it, yeah, but I was
not quite as willing to accept the evidence of the sense
perceptions. An
extra
sensory quiver, back there, had me working along another
thread from the loom.

I left Barney to continue his rounds alone
and I beat a path to a pay phone near the gazebo.

And, yeah, the quiver had
it right. Ann Marie Farrel was still in jail.

Chapter
Nineteen: Wonderful World of Awe

My friend Paul is in his
seventies and has spent the bulk of his life as a Catholic brother
working with American Indians on reservations in the West. Paul is
a gentle soul but you can tell by the sparkle in his eyes that all
of life has been an interesting adventure for him; I suspect that
he has done a bit of helling around in his time. I mention Paul
because he has many interesting stories to tell about the Indians,
and one of those will help to illustrate a certain aspect of this
case.

One day on a reservation
in Wyoming—this was back in the fifties or sixties—Paul and one of
his Indian helpers were on an errand far into an isolated stretch
of the reservation. They were bumping along a primitive dirt road
in a jeep when over against the mountainside, less than a mile
away, they noticed a huge silvery object reflecting the sun and
pacing them at an altitude of about 200 feet. Paul describes the
object as "big as a house" and he very matter-of- factly refers to
it as a flying saucer.

He stopped the jeep to give all his
attention to this object. The object stopped also and "just hung
there" for maybe a minute while they looked at it and apparently it
looked at them. Then the object "started stunting"—wobbling,
fluttering, dancing around with abrupt altitude changes of forty
to fifty feet at a time.

Paul and the Indian sat and watched that
exhibition for another minute or so, then suddenly the object
tilted on its axis and swooped across the valley toward them at
incredible speed to close about half the distance between them
before zooming straight up and disappearing behind some
clouds.

Paul looked at the Indian, and the Indian
looked at Paul; then the Indian, in characteristic deadpan and
flattened voice, said to Paul, "Wonder what is."

That was the total
discussion between Paul and his Indian friend regarding the
phenomenon. Paul said if the Indian ever mentioned the incident to
anyone else, he wasn't aware of it.

I tell the story because
"wonder what is" covers a lot of phenomena for the unsophisticated
mind. Many of us have a very similar way of disposing of
inexplicable experience. But strike that word
unsophisticated
and let's include
just about everybody in that coverage. The level of sophistication
apparently has little to do with the way we apprehend extraordinary
reality, except in an entirely relative sense.

I have another friend who
is a physicist at Cal Tech and this guy is really sharp. He is very
much at home with quarks and other esoteric particles. If you ever
talk to this guy in a serious vein of thought, you get the idea
real quick that he lives in a reality quite different from yours
and mine. I was in his lab one day when he was doing some
beta-decay studies, using state-of-the-art electronics that, among
other exotic things, measures time in ten-millionths of a second
and builds analogs of atomic nuclei.

My friend was searching
for antileptons and trying to track their
evolution,
of all things. There are
hypotheses to suggest that all matter in our time-space dimension
is composed of nothing but leptons and quarks; that is, they are
the basic building blocks of all matter. These are rather
imprecise terms, however, since leptons include electrons, muons,
electron and muon nutrinos, and their corresponding anti-particles;
quarks have been subdivided into four subparticles—up-quarks,
down-quarks, strange-quarks, and charmed- quarks—and they carry
corresponding antiparticles, too.

Well, this guy was trying to analog—maybe
theoretically, I don't know, but he was trying to build a model of
the transformative processes of leptons during beta-decay, and he
had some damned sophisticated equipment to help in that. While we
were standing there watching the computer graphics, a strange
little sine wave appeared and began undulating along the entire
model for a period of about ten seconds.

My friend had bent down
for a closer look, then looked back at me when the thing zoomed
away, as though to confirm that more than one pair of eyes had
witnessed that, then he bent back to the monitor and muttered,
"Wonder what the hell that was."

Wonder what is, yeah. Even
this twenty-first-century brain had to insulate itself from the
inexplicable. My friend the theoretical physicist went on with his
studies as though nothing phenomenal had occurred. To this day he
has said absolutely nothing to me about this incident.

So I put it to you directly, now. How many
times during your daily routines have you seen something, or heard
something, or in some way experienced something that does not seem
to conform to your preconceptions of reality—then disposed of it by
the magic words: wonder what is?

The American Indians, by
the way, did not regard their mentally ill as expendable or
disposable. They considered them possessed by special spirits...and
they revered them.

But my pal Barney had looked at his
ex-friend Charlie and muttered to me, "Wonder what is."

As soon as I confirmed my
suspicion that Annie was still securely locked away at Sybil Brand,
I beat it back to that sanctuary and let myself in through that
same door, which Barney had tactfully left as he'd found it—and it
was exactly as I'd last seen it, except that the apparition of
Annie was nowhere about. This is a rather large room, easily twenty
by thirty feet, with the ceiling beginning maybe twenty feet high
at the back wall and sloping down to seven or eight feet at the
front.

My initial impression,
with Annie in the beam, was that the spotlight was affixed to the
back wall near the ceiling, but it turned out to be part of a
track-lighting system running across the ceding near the back wall.
I found a ladder in a janitor's closet and went up there to check
it out. It was an ordinary GE sealed-beam spotlight like any you'd
find in a modern lighting system, so that disposed of any faint
suspicion that what Barney and I had seen was no more than a
holographic projection.

While I had the ladder out, I checked the
three other lights on that track and found that each had been
turned off at the individual switch at the back of the lamp. That
was a curiosity because this room had no windows, so it would
surely need ample lighting even by day, and the track system was
the only source of light in that room. A single pencil-beam could
at no time provide satisfactory lighting for a room so large. I
turned them all back on and still there were deep shadows covering
more than half the area. I decided that the lighting was for
dramatic effect more than anything else. Maybe she liked the
symbolism of pure white light piercing the darkness in a beamed
effect as a play on the Church of the Light. Or maybe it had an
inspirational effect for her. Maybe she always prayed that way.

Certainly there seemed to be no other
purpose to this sanctuary. The room was plain of decor and
virtually bereft of furniture. A tiny desk and a single cane-bottom
chair said it all for six hundred square feet of space. A door in
the front wall opened onto the stage of the auditorium. So there
was a front door and a back door. There was a bathroom just large
enough to hold a toilet and wash basin; no window there, either.
And there was the janitor's closet, a narrow enclosure running the
length of a side wall. Nothing else was there—not a picture or a
tapestry or any other decoration. I inspected every square inch of
those walls and tested every ceiling tile; there were no lenses, no
microphones, no loudspeakers.

It was your classic mystery-movie sealed
room. Nothing in and nothing out except via the two doors; there
was not even an air-conditioning duct.

I dragged the ladder
around and put the lighting back the way I'd found it. Then I put
the ladder away and sat down at the little desk and lit a
cigarette. And ipso-presto, Reverend Annie reappeared.

She was in the beam of
light, same as before. Unblinking, unmoving, not a sound. But this
time she was only about six feet away from me. I had a ringside
seat at three-quarter profile. It was spectacular. The male animal
part of me was reacting appropriately, totally without shame. The
rest of me felt like a peeping Tom but I could not take my eyes
away.