Before There Were Angels (23 page)

When I thought of
Rafaella as being willing to go to any lengths to get her own way, to impose her will on the world around her, I had better start believing just that, recognize that there really were no limits and that Rafaella had almost certainly killed our beloved Zack merely to take a prized possession away from us, because she almost certainly considered Zack, and Stevie, as possessions rather than as human beings in their own right with a right to their own future, with us or away from us, as they chose.

To kill a family of four to get us where she wanted
us, that was really something. That was deranged. That was psychopathic. That was narcissistic to the extreme. That was Rafaella.

This was
Rafaella.

And she was staring at me, calculating.

I leaped from the bed, all too aware suddenly that I was naked, and not in front of the person I loved being naked with.

“What?” demanded Belle,
irritated. “What is wrong with you?”

“I have just
realized something.”

“What have you just realiz
ed, Luke?”

I should have got out of the
room, I should have grabbed Stevie and George and got out of the house. I should have kept my mouth shut at least until we had all hit the street, but I couldn’t contain myself. “You know exactly what I have just realized, Rafaella.”

“
Rafaella?” Belle glared at me scornfully but all I could see was Rafaella now, not Belle.

“Yes,
Rafaella. You are Rafaella.”

“You’ve gone mad, Luke. Can’t you tell the difference between me and
Rafaella? Do you wish you were back with Rafaella? Go to her, then.”

There wasn’t pleading in her eyes as I would have expected from Belle. There was triumph. Belle was now
Rafaella and there was no getting away from her, no getting back to Belle. I was surrounded.

“How do I get Belle back?” I asked. “Stop playing games,
Rafaella. Why are you always playing games? I’m sorry, but I want Belle not you. I have had all I am ever going to want of you. That is why I left you. I want Belle.”

“So you used me and spat me out?” she challenged me, her fury overwhelming her to the point where she had no choice but to rip off her mask and face me as the person she truly was.

“No, Rafaella, I gave you every chance.
Every
chance. And you took everything you could from me, never giving an inch. My life was not my own, it was yours, exactly the same way as Belle’s life is no longer her own either. You have invaded it, first from the outside, now from the inside. You have killed her. You threatened to kill her, now you have done it, albeit not the way any of us was expecting. And you killed poor Zack too. And the DeGamo family. You are evil, Rafaella, to your core. You are not right. You don’t have archangels or Kumar guiding your every saintly step. I doubt you even have the devil in your soul. There has never been any need. You were evil from the start. All these stories you told about what an adorable and affectionate child you were …” I couldn’t help but notice Belle’s hand slipping under the pillow where Belle’s knife was, “… they weren’t true, were they? They have never been true. You were neither adorable nor affectionate, you were just mean, mean from the very beginning, possessed, not by any external force but by your own force.”

I placed my hand on the door handle
, preparing to remove myself from the bedroom fast when Rafaella lunged at me, as she inevitably would.

“How you blight all our lives, everyone’s lives. You are obsessed with world domination,
Rafaella, or at least of everyone who has the misfortune to inhabit your world.”

Rafaella
was rising from the bed, knife in hand.

“What are you going to do now,
Rafaella, kill me? I’m not sure that you can.”

I pulled the door open, darted around it, and pulled it shut the other side, clinging on to the handle. There was
a thump from the other side - presumably Rafaella burying the knife in the door. She then started heaving at the door to force it open as I braced my knee against the door jamb to get the leverage to keep it shut.

“Stevie,” I screamed. “Stevie, come here, quick.”

The ladder dropped from the attic and he was beside me within less than 30 seconds.

“Phone 911.
Tell them there has been an attempted murder and that I have the murderer trapped in my bedroom.”

He didn’t even question me. He raced straight back into the attic and I heard him talking to the emergency services as the door juddered frantically.

Stevie came back down. “They’ll be here in a minute,” he said.

“Great. Could you get the key to this bedroom from behind the kitchen door?”

“Sure.”

Again, within about thirty seconds he was back. It took about six goes to find the right key as we had never marked them, and then I had to hold the door flat shut to allow the key to turn in the lock, but between us we managed it. I l
et go of the handle and felt my biceps sag in relief.

“What’s happening?”

I paused. How could I possibly convince Stevie of what had just happened. Oh well … “You were right, Stevie, that wasn’t your mom. Rafaella had somehow possessed her.”

At first there was shock on
Stevie’s face as he resisted, then considered, what I had said. Then he collapsed on the floor and started laughing.

“Let me out,”
came Belle’s voice. “Why are you doing this to me? Luke? Stevie? What’s going on?”

Stevie managed to catch his breath. “I can’t wait to see you tell the cops that. A naked ma
n standing outside his bedroom hollering that his wife is somebody else. I’m sure you’re right but I think they’re going to be taking you away somewhere on a 5150 after they hear that story.”

I shrugged. “It can’t be helped. What can be helped is that you must
n’t stay in this house alone with Rafaella, or Belle, or whoever she is now. Can you take George and go to a friend’s house. I can’t leave you here.”

Again he didn’t question me. He climbed up the attic ladder again
and began to get dressed in appropriate haste.

Seconds later the police arrived. I had nothing to cover myself with except a tea towel from the kitchen.

They were two cops I didn’t recognize.

“We got a call to say that you had an attempted murderer trapped in your bedroom …”

“Is there any way you can get hold of either Officer Martinez or Officer Nielsen?” I asked.

The lead cop shook his head. “They are both off-duty at the moment. Why, do you know them?”

“More importantly, they know us. You are not going to believe a word I tell you.”

The other cop smiled, probably at my pathetically clutching the tea towel around my groin. “Try us.”

Chapter
28

I ushered them into the living room.

“Are you sure there is no way we can contact Officers Martinez and Ni
elsen?” I asked.

The second officer laughed caustically. “They have been talking about putting us on twenty-four hour shifts. The City would like that. We have been resisting it. We have families too and not always broken ones.”

That sounded like it was aimed at me.

“OK,” I said. “I’ll tell it how it is.
As I say, you won’t believe me -“

“We’ll come to our own conclusions on that one, Sir,” the first office retorted sharply.

“OK … “ I took a deep breath. “Do you know that there were four murders in this house before we moved in?”

“Oh, it’s
that
house,” the first officer replied immediately.

“Yes, it is
that
house.”

“We all know about this house. Four murders, a suicide, and a bunch
of ghosts and evil entities, and a wife who keeps disappearing and reappearing again. It is all we have been talking about around the station for weeks.”

“I don’t suppose you believe in ghosts …”

“Everyone has seen a ghost or knows somebody else who has,” said the second officer.

“Hmm,” I continued. “The trouble with ghosts is that everyone believes
in them but no one believes they exist.”

The officers made no response to this comment. They waited.

“What I am going to do is to suggest a solution first, then tell you the story.”

They still said nothing.

“The solution is that my son Stevie goes to stay with friends and that you take me away on a 5150. That will leave Belle or Rafaella, or whoever she is, in the house, but that is OK. Neither of us can stay in the house with her. It’s not safe. She will be here but we can decide what to do about that later on. Maybe we deal with the situation or perhaps we abandon the place and move somewhere else …”

Silence.

“The problem is,” I continued, “that the mind of my sweet wife Belle has been taken over by my psychotic ex-wife Rafaella who seems to have mastered astral travel.”

The second officer raised
his eyebrows. “Haven’t they all?”

“My ex-wife certainly has.”

The officers were listening. Whether they were listening intently or derisively it was impossible to tell. All San Fran cops are philosophical by nature, so metaphysics are well within their grasp.

“Tonight I suddenly realiz
ed that Belle, my wife, was in fact Rafaella, my ex-wife, and I challenged her.”

“That would be a scene well worth buying tickets for,” mused the first officer appreciatively.

“Then she attacked me with a knife.” Stevie walked into the room, ready to leave. “Hi, Stevie. Grab George and go. I’ll catch up with you soon.”

“Wait a minute,” said the first officer
. “Was your son a witness to what happened?”

“No,” I assured him hurriedly. “He phoned you and helped me lock the bedroom door but he didn’t see anything that happened prior to that. Off you go, Stevie. It’s getting late.”

“Bye, Dad,” he said. “Good luck.” He grinned at the cops.

Dad?

“Bye, Stevie,” they said and waited for Stevie to leave the house with a visibly reluctant George whose only idea of a walk was one down to the nearest bar.

“Then what happened?” asked the second officer.

“I got out of the bedroom fast before she could meet me. She plunged the knife into the door instead. So now you can take me away. I am guessing that the person behind that door is Belle, that Rafaella will have left her, but it could be Rafaella pretending to be Belle, and that is far too high a risk for me to take. If I were to stay here, she could easily try to kill me again, and that wouldn’t be fair on Belle, never mind me. Belle will be heartbroken when she realizes what she has done, even if she wasn’t responsible for doing it. So, it’s best that I get out of the house too.”

The first officer frowned. “You say that she attacked the back of the door with a knife?”

“Yes, Belle always keeps a knife under her pillow. It has something to do with her ex-husband trying to kill her, or something.”

“You people …” smirked the first officer, seducing the second officer into echoing laughter.
“Was she expecting you to try to kill her too?”

“No,” I said emphatic
ally. “She just felt safer sleeping that way.”

“If we open up the bedroom door, as we are about to, will we see a discernible knife mark on the other side?”

“I’m guessing,” I said. “That is what it sounded like.”

They both got up. “Let’s go and have a look, then,” said the first officer.
“If there is tangible evidence that she tried to stab you with a knife, it doesn’t matter who she is. She is who she is, and she tried to stab you. We don’t need to go into the rest. The psychiatrists and the courts can work that one out. We assume you will press charges.”

I hesitated. “I’ll have to see about that but if you have a reason to take her away with you now, that would be convenient.”

“You could call your son back,” observed the second officer.

“I could,” I agreed. “If she is now Belle, she is going to be very distraught, poor thing, but I need to win a few hours to see if I can fix this mess. Then, if she is really Belle again, maybe we can return to our normal, happy lives. The trouble is that I will never really know whether she
is Belle or not. Rafaella may or may not be intelligent - we’ve discussed that many times - but she is certainly cunning, deadly cunning, as it turns out.”

The first officer smirked again. “We will leave you with that problem, Sir. Let’s go see your wife and examine that door. If your wife admits to having attacked you with a
knife, that will make things very much easier.”

I unlocked the door. Belle was lying on the bed, looking devastated - lost and apprehensive. “What’s going on?” she asked in a small voice.