The Haunting of James Hastings (20 page)
Read The Haunting of James Hastings Online
Authors: Christopher Ransom
Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Suspense
No, not quite. This dress was older but of the same style, not yellow at all, but faded pink, with green flowers instead of blue. This was the first dress, the one I had bought for Stacey at Anthropologie in the Grove two years ago. Annette’s legs were bare, her skin pale all the way down to the black flats. The shoes were crusted with dried dirt. In her right hand was the missing Glock, aimed at the floor. Her finger was wrapped around the trigger.
Psychological safety. Finger on = safety off.
‘Annette?’
Something was wrong with her body. She looked stiff and bigger, taller.
‘Annette? What are you doing?’
Stacey laughed inside my head.
Guess again, James.
Guess again, James.
Annette turned in a half-circle. Something about her was—
‘Oh, God, no.’
Lucy Arnold had dyed and cut her hair. She had found the gun - or stolen it. Her eyes were glossy black. Her lips were trembling and a loose string of saliva dangled almost to her collarbone.
‘Lucy? What are you - what happened?’
But even as I spoke, I knew. I had hurt her feelings. She had seen me with Annette, carrying on like she didn’t even exist. Underneath Lucy’s sweet and shy veneer there lurked a psychotic, jealous stalker. All of the incongruities made sense now, the puzzle pieces falling into place. The woman Euvaldo Gomez had seen in the house weeks before Annette arrived. The little signs around the house, my underwear folded in the dresser. Lucy could have found the combination to the storage locker.
She’s wearing your dead wife’s clothes. She’s fucking insane.
‘Lucy. I’m sorry, okay? Put the gun down now, please.’
I stepped to the side, my hands raised, and saw our reflections in the giant mirror behind her. The aged glass was hiding something. I could feel it, drawing on me, us, the energy trapped inside the room. Lucy was trembling, her face blank. What had made her scream? What had she seen in the mirror that made her scream?
The red rabbit. The real one, not the painting.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘We’re okay, everything’s fine. Will you hand me the gun?’
No, I hit my head, is all. Annette’s mumbling about the red rabbit got under my skin. The power of suggestion. Stacey is dead.
Deal with Lucy. She is a real person.
‘Lucy Arnold,’ I said, putting some force into it. ‘Officer Arnold, put the gun down.’
She looked down at Stacey’s shoes, as if just now realizing she was wearing them and did not recognize them. The first one simply lay there as she stepped out of it. The second one was stubborn, caught on her heel, until she made a swinging motion with her leg and the shoe slid across the floor, pattering dully against the wall under the settee.
Then she noticed the gun in her hand.
‘You don’t need that. I promise.’
‘Sh-sh-she won’t let me,’ Lucy said. ‘She’ll k-k-ill us both.’ Her expression did not change. Even with the stutter, she sounded as if she were reading the words from a script.
‘No, it’s not real,’ I said. ‘You’re safe. I won’t let anything happen to you.’ I offered my hand and stepped closer to her.
‘She m-m-made me do it . . . came to me in the n-night . . . whispered to me. Stacey’s not dead. She’s in the phone. She’s in my buh-bedroom. Here, she’s here. She’s eating m-me alive.’
Beads of sweat dripped over my brow, stinging my eyes. I took two more steps, hands out, palms up. ‘It’s not real. You just got confused, sweetie.’
Lucy’s body was rigid and the tears leaked down her face. ‘She m-m-akes me wear the clothes. Sh-sh-she said she wants to c-c-come back. I’m sssss-upposed to make her come back.’
‘Put the gun down, Lucy.’
‘She’s very, very mad at y-you.’ Her lips twisted into a snarl and she raised the gun at my face.
I lunged and yelled, ‘Stop!’
She screamed and the gun boomed overhead and Lucy lost all control. She clawed at me as I tried to grab her arms, but she was hysterical and slipped from my grasp. The gun dropped with a clatter, was kicked in the scuffle, and spun across the marble tiles.
‘Leave me alone!’ Lucy ran from the ballroom, shrieking. ‘She won’t leave me alone!’
I stood still for moment, amazed I had not been shot. Her footsteps thudded down the hallway and pounding sounds echoed through the walls, as if she were bouncing side to side like a horse trapped in a burning stable.
‘Lucy!’
I ran after her. By the time I reached the top of the stairs, the front door opened with a bang. I ran down as fast as I could and tripped on the third to last step, my heel slipping on the smooth wood as I went airborne. I hit the last stair ass-first, then the floor, and my tail bone twanged like a hot guitar chord. I rolled over in the foyer as the pain went up my spine. I was trying to stand when I looked up and saw Lucy running blindly down the sidewalk. She exited the frame at an odd angle, hewing west across Euvaldo Gomez’s lawn.
I got to my feet and limped after her. I made it down the porch steps and glanced toward Mr Ennis’s house. Annette was standing beside her green ’69 with the driver’s door open, a paper bag of groceries under one arm, the sunglasses I’d bought her perched on her forehead.
‘What happened?’ she said, watching Lucy trot away, then glancing back at me in dawning horror. ‘James? What did you do?’
‘She’s out of control,’ I yelled without stopping. ‘Call the police! Now!’
Annette’s mouth fell open and I broke west over Euvaldo’s lawn where one of his children, a girl of five or six, was standing in the middle of the grass, pretending to dig with a plastic spade. She threw her spade at me as I ran by and I had the absurd idea that this toddler had buried Stacey’s shoes, or dug them up.
Back on the sidewalk, I spotted Lucy up ahead. She had a half-block advantage as she staggered into the middle of 21st Street. She was limping, her head bobbing.
‘Lucy! Stop!’
She was less than fifty feet from Arlington, the cross street. What time was it? I couldn’t see traffic through the trees and over the parked cars. If it was rush hour everything would be reduced to a crawl and she would be spared. If it was not rush hour, the strays coming off the freeway ramp would be hauling ass, trying to make the light at Venice Boulevard. I gained speed and weaved onto the street. The usual line of cars were bunched almost bumper to bumper, the hundreds of commuters inching in slow surges.
‘James!’ a man yelled behind me.
I recognized the voice as Euvaldo’s, but I did not stop. I was a hundred feet from her. She was weaving down the street like a drugged hitchhiker.
I gained ground. Seventy feet. Fifty. ‘Lucy, stop!’
She was going to run into a wall of parked cars in less than thirty seconds. Then what? Someone would see her. They would have time. Someone would help her—
There was a turn lane on Arlington, a second slot to allow local traffic to exit into the neighborhood. I remembered this only after the black SUV rolling on chrome 22s leaned around the corner at more than thirty miles per hour, tires chirping as it straightened onto our street. The windshield reflected black leaves from the trees overhead. I could not see the driver. Incredibly, the engine revved harder - the driver relieved, as we always were, to finally be off that fucking Ten - before he saw her.
‘No!’ I screamed, rushing forward with my hands thrown up.
The Navigator’s bumper bit into her knees and lifted her legs a millisecond before the grill met her torso and lofted her higher, seemingly juggling her before shoving her forward like a snowplow. The driver stood on the brakes and the SUV nosed down in a crooked skid as Lucy Arnold was thrown off the hood and dragged down with a wet slapping sound. The Navigator’s front left tire crushed her hips, rode onto her torso, and smeared her head into the asphalt, sending a fan of blood and other cranial fluids across my chest and face before all of us came to a halt.
A big black guy with dreads ejected himself from the driver’s side, stumbled a few steps and stared at me. Hermes. He walked to the front of his car, paused and recoiled. He looked at me once more and turned away, his hand automatically putting a cell phone to his ear. He had seen this or something as bad, probably involving bullet or knife wounds. He was already calling his lawyers. He wasn’t the one who called 9-1-1.
Annette did that. She told me I was screaming as I staggered to the destroyed woman’s side, howling my wife’s name as other residents carried me away from her. I tried to run, tripped on the curb and fell into the gutter, crying with my head between my knees as my neighbors surrounded me. I smelled Euvaldo’s cologne and saw Annette’s face floating before me. Women were screaming in the street, and the Gomez children were crying as their mother led them away from what I had done.
I don’t remember the rest of the week.
Trigger once told James that these types of lookalike and security gigs ran hot for a year or two at most, and that he should prepare himself for the day when it shut off entirely, without notice. Ghost’s record sales might nose-dive, forcing staff cuts. He might find someone else who looked like him. He might fade away and become a producer, a clothing magnate, not a performer. He might get shot, overdose, commit suicide. Stacey and James decided that when any of these things happened, they would dive into the parenthood training program: regular sex, healthier lifestyle, painting of the nursery, college savings account.
They were only twenty-eight, James reasoned. They had a few years. Stacey chose some names anyway. She did not care for the crop of currently fashionable unisex names like Alexis, Peyton, Ashton, Jude. She liked simple, early twentieth-century names. She felt it was important to go with something strong yet humble. She chose Edward for a boy, Doris for a girl, and truthfully she wanted both and probably a third. James thought privately that some women nearing thirty develop a fecund Mom-ness about them; a sensuous, earthen, biological emanation that surrounds them like baby powder. He believed Stacey had acquired this aspect while he had his back turned. He would come home from a gig and find her loose and braless in her sweats, her hair a day or two unwashed but sweet, a luster in her cheeks. Her breasts would seem to have swelled a cup size and he would experience an unimagined ache in his chest for want of filling her womb, her days, her life with something more.
He returned from a summer concert festival to learn she had adopted the beagle. Henry kept her company when James was away, and provided her with a new lifestyle. The dog beds, the training, dog parks, walks on the beach. Henry helped Stacey meet new friends, other childless, dog-owning couples and singletons that got used to bumping into her at the big park off of Mulholland Drive.
James hired a fencing contractor, and Henry had his yard. But they still liked to drive over the hill, to the hiking trail off Laurel Canyon. Every other Saturday or Sunday they would pack a small cooler with seltzer, grapes, cheese, crackers, and sometimes a book for James to read to her. He would load Henry into the car and park in the shade at the foot of the path. Stacey would leash Henry and James would throw a Mexican blanket over his shoulder, and they would go up the hill.
The last time they had made this trip, Stacey had been wearing a yellow sundress with roses on it and, in odd contrast, her silver running shoes, a chunky, no-nonsense digital watch and a pair of marksman-yellow tinted Aviators too large around her small face and low cheekbones. Her white hair had grown past her shoulders and as he watched his wife and her dog trotting along, confident, headstrong and not wanting for much but a baby, for the first time James thought,
the girl is gone. She disappeared while I was working and she is a real woman now.
And that was good, the only real evidence he had become a man.
the girl is gone. She disappeared while I was working and she is a real woman now.
And that was good, the only real evidence he had become a man.
The paved trail was a golf cart path too steep for any golf cart to climb. After half a mile of traversing, the pavement turned to dirt, sandy in places, pebble-strewn and rocky in others. James was wheezing behind Stacey and Henry. She had done her time in the Pilates and yoga gulags. This being his final year as Ghost’s double, James was going to flab on Craft Services and road grub, which might have been a problem if Ghost himself were not simultaneously falling apart and bloating in public. The artist had developed a fondness for little brown bottles of magic pills and late night drive-thru fare.
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