The Moonlit Mind (Novella): A Tale of Suspense (7 page)

His fear for Mirabell erupts into terror, and the fear that he previously did not feel for himself at last squeezes his heart.

He flees from his parents’ bedroom suite with no sense of how he might find and help his sister. He sprints along the hallway to the north stairs and spirals down.

By the time he reaches the ground floor, the thought driving him is that someone in the house will want to help him, that they are not all in league against him and his siblings. If not the chief butler, Minos, perhaps the junior butler, Ned. If neither of them, then maybe one of the housekeepers. Not Proserpina! Perhaps the head housekeeper, Mrs. Frigg. Someone will want to help him, one of those who always has a smile for him, who treats him with respect.

Not until weeks later does it occur to Crispin that in his mad search for a confidant and defender, he never thinks to leave the house and seek help from someone in the street, perhaps even from a policeman. He seems almost to be under a spell that prevents him from considering the world beyond Theron Hall.

Gasping for breath, frantic, he can find no one on the ground floor, not in any of the public rooms, not in the kitchen. No one
seems to be at work, yet the rooms in the servants’ wing are all deserted, the doors standing open as if everyone on the staff left together in response to some urgent call or alarm.

Intuition pulls him to the south stairs and down the winding treads to the basement, clutching at the decorative bronze railing for support. The door at the bottom of the stairs won’t open.

In the vast basement is a room with a steel door that’s always locked. He has previously been told that it is a fireproof vault in which are stored irreplaceable heirlooms of great value.

But never before has the main door to the rest of the basement been locked. He tries the lever handle again, with no success.

Beyond the door, from a distance, muffled voices rise and fall in time with one another. Chanting. Crispin isn’t able to make out the words, but the rhythm is ominous.

Although the voices are those of adults, as he presses his body against the door in an attempt to force it open, Crispin whispers,
“Mirabell?”

Another door lies at the bottom of the
north
stairs, a second entrance to the basement. Perhaps that will not be locked. And the elevator serves all floors.

When Crispin turns to climb the stairs, the cook, Merripen, is immediately behind him. Merripen wears a long black silk bathrobe and holds a stainless-steel thermos bottle, the top of which he has unscrewed.

The third of December, three years and four months later …

In the largely dark fourth-floor restaurant at the top of the department store, Crispin and the girl sit in a booth, facing each other by candlelight.

Before his arrival, she made chicken-breast sandwiches with provolone cheese, aioli, and watercress. With the sandwiches, she serves potato chips and little pickles that she calls cornichons.

She is sixteen but appears to be at least eighteen. She works at looking older.

During the past few years, Crispin has spoken to so few people that he wouldn’t be surprised if he lost the will or even the ability to speak to anyone. But he is comfortable with this girl.

“Hey, boy,” she says.

“Hey.”

“You been okay?”

“I get along.”

“They looking for you?”

“Always will be.”

“Your dog’s still sweet.”

Harley was lying under the table, on her feet.

“He smells good, too,” she says.

“We get pretty regular baths, one way or another.”

“He find you any money lately?”

“He led me to this parking garage one night.”

“Old Harley looking for some wheels?”

“He wanted to bed down there. I found out why.”

“Is there usually money in parking garages?”

“There was this time. Three in the morning, some guys meet to trade something.”

“We can figure out what.”

“They don’t know me and Harley are there.”

“Which is why you’re still here.”

“They get into an argument.”

“Bullets fly.”

“A few. Must be a cop in the area. Suddenly there’s a siren.”

“So they split?”

“They split so fast they’re peeling rubber. And they don’t stop to pick up all they spilled when the shooting started.”

“Some of which was money,” she guesses.

“Enough was.”

She sighs. “It’s always nice and quiet here in Broderick’s.”

Her birth name is Daisy Jean Sims. Now she is known to the world as Amity Onawa.

Two years before, her hair was long and blond, eyes sapphire-blue. Her eyes are still blue, but her hair is short and black.

In a more ordinary time, she had a father, a mother, and a younger brother named Michael. One night they were all murdered in their beds.…

On the night, the baby-faced murderer spares only her. Without her knowledge, he has for some time been watching her from afar.

Vestmented with her family’s blood, he switches on her bedside lamp and wakes her with the eerily tender request that she put on a dress that he has purchased just for her. A modest dress with a
Peter Pan collar and a midcalf skirt. Also a pair of white ankle socks, saddle shoes, and a lace mantilla.

She understands, without being told, that he wants her to wear these things so that he can tear them off her.

Shaking as much with grief as with terror, she does as he asks, which includes changing in her small walk-in closet to ensure that the thrill of anticipation will not be diminished for him by seeing her naked before the moment that he violently disrobes her.

Because she is a handy girl who mends her own clothes, she keeps sewing supplies in a closet drawer. When she presents herself attired as he desires, she surprises him with a pair of scissors.

The wound she inflicts is far from fatal, but he staggers and falls, giving her a chance to run. Dressed as if for church followed by a sock hop, she escapes, aware that he’s getting to his feet and cursing.

If not for what happens when she’s holding the scissors with the blades sunk in the killer, she would scream into the night and seek help from neighbors. But in that instant when she and the psychopath are linked by blood and steel, she has a flash vision of herself perhaps a year older, in a house that belongs to her aunt and uncle, both of them on the floor, their faces disarranged by bullets. She sees herself, too, on her knees in that carnage, begging for her life as this same lunatic presents her with a fresh costume that he wants her to wear.

Mind, heart, and soul, she knows that this premonition is true, that the police will not catch him, that continuing to be Daisy Jean Sims will be the death of her and the death of still more people whom she loves.

Racing down the front-porch steps, the mantilla flying off her head, she does the last thing the killer will expect: runs not away from the house but instead around it. Occasionally her father sits on the back porch to have a beer before bed. He isn’t much of a drinking man, and if he has two, he sometimes forgets to lock the door when he retires for the night. Sure enough, it’s unlocked, ajar, suggesting that the killer entered the house this way.

She crosses the kitchen and warily peers into the downstairs hall. At the farther end of the house, the psychopath leaves by the front door.

Now she proves that her mettle is second to none. Shuddering with terror, wrenched by grief, she makes her way to her parents’ bedroom, where in the company of the beloved dead, she locates her father’s wallet and her mother’s purse, taking what money they contain. Like many people in these uncertain times, her parents have purchased some gold coins, which are kept under the false bottom of a desk drawer in the den. She takes those eight Canadian Maple Leafs as well, and then returns to her bedroom.

Either she is half insane and reckless with anguish, therefore not thinking clearly, or she is thinking more clearly than she has ever thought before. She won’t know which is true for a long time to come.

She puts the coins and most of the money in a small suitcase and quickly packs jeans, sweaters. Because her all-white and dated outfit might call attention to her, she shrugs into a raincoat. Carrying the suitcase with her left hand, she has the fortitude to stoop and pick up the bloody scissors with her right, holding them ready in the event that the killer has been unwise enough to linger.

She leaves by the back door, crosses the deep rear yard, hurries alongside the garage and through a gate into an alleyway.

The moon that night is a crescent and appears to be as sharp as the Italian kitchen knife that her mother calls a mezzaluna.

Thirty minutes later, in a deserted bus-station bathroom, Daisy Jean Sims chops her long hair short. She changes into blue jeans, a sweater, a pair of running shoes.

She purchases hair dye and a few other items at an all-night supermarket. Before dawn, alone in a public restroom in Statler Park, she transforms blond to raven.

The slaughter at the Sims house is not discovered until two-fifteen that afternoon. Judging by his bloody handprints and a single shoe print, police believe the killer is a tall man with unusually large hands, physically formidable. Because his prints are found, as well, in Daisy’s room, and because the girl is missing, the assumption is made that she has been kidnapped.

Trusting that her shaggy black hair will, for the moment, serve as an adequate disguise, she visits the main city library both with the hope that its quiet will settle her nerves and with the intention to do some research.

First she reads about predictive clairvoyance, but those who have written on the subject generally treat it as mere fantasy or as a possibility that has validity only because it might be predicted by some more liberal interpretations of Jungian psychological theory, whatever the hell that might be. There’s a third group that writes with gosh-wow enthusiasm that seems to be a cheesy attempt to sell books to the gullible.

She knows that what she foresaw when she plunged the scissors into the killer was neither a fantasy nor a Jungian whatever. It was the most intense and truest experience of her life. If she lives as Daisy Jean Sims, she will be found, she will be killed, and people she loves will die with her.

After putting aside the books on clairvoyance, she researches names, the history and the meaning of them. Without being able to explain to herself
why
, she believes that she must choose her new name with care, that the right name will make her safe, that the wrong name will leave her vulnerable.

By the time the library closes, she decides to rename herself Amity Onawa. Amity, from the Latin
amicitia
, means “friendship.” Onawa, a North American Indian word, means “wide awake girl.”

In her new and terrible loneliness, the name Amity—friendship—speaks to what she hopes to give and receive. And after the hideous experiences of the night just passed, she seems to have come out of a lifelong half sleep; she is now as wide awake as any girl has ever been, wide awake to the fact that the world is more dangerous and far stranger than she had previously realized.

She is one month past her fourteenth birthday.

She has not yet wept for her parents or her brother. Those tears will not come for another three weeks, and then they will be a flood.

Now, more than two years later …

Amity, who also calls herself the Phantom of the Broderick, sits in a restaurant booth with Crispin, eating a tasty chicken sandwich and drinking a Coke. She is sixteen. He is twelve and counting down. At their age, four years is a chasm, but it’s bridged
by their shared awareness that the world is a more mysterious place than most people wish to acknowledge.

Amity asks, “You still sometimes hear a voice saying you can undo what was done, save them both?”

“Sometimes. Been hearing it since I was nine. Almost thirteen now. Still don’t know what it means.”

“Birthday boy,” she says. “Tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah.”

“The big thirteen,” she says.

“Glad to be here.”

Under the table, Harley chuffs.

“
Lucky
thirteen,” she says.

Crispin nods. “It better be.”

July 27, three years and four months earlier …

Crispin wakes at 11:31, blinking at the digital clock, not sure if it’s nearly midnight or noon. Daylight behind the draperies solves that puzzle.

He doesn’t remember going to bed. In fact, he doesn’t remember much of anything after the previous evening’s dinner of tortilla soup and chicken nachos.

As he sits up against the headboard, trying to clear his mind, someone knocks on the door.

He says, “Come in,” and the maid named Arula enters pushing a breakfast cart, as if she intuited that he would sleep later than ever before and would wake precisely at this time.

The kitchen has sent up enough of Crispin’s favorites for three breakfasts. A silver pot of hot chocolate, from the spout of which rises a fragrant steam. A buttered English muffin. A chocolate-chip muffin and an almond croissant. A generous bowl of fresh strawberries with brown sugar and a little pitcher of cream. A fat sticky bun crusted in pecans. In the warming drawer of the cart, if he should want them, are banana pancakes with maple syrup on the side.

In her own way, Arula is as pretty as the other housemaids—it’s amazing how pretty they all are—and always friendly. As she opens the draperies to let in the morning light, she tells him that the day is warm, the bluebirds this year are bluer than they have ever been, and Mr. Mordred will be convening class today only from one o’clock until four, in the library.

Surveying the offerings on the breakfast cart, Crispin feels slow-witted, fuzzy-minded. Although he has never been a moody boy, he is for some reason out of sorts. He complains that he can’t eat so much. “You’ll have to give part of it to Harley or someone.”

Returning to the bed, Arula says, “Pish-posh, dear boy. These are your favorite things, and your brother has his own. Eat what you want, and we’ll throw away the rest. You’re a good boy, you deserve to have choices.”