The First Cut (23 page)

Enough, she told herself. T. B. Mann was not coming here for her or Emily. Even if he did, the house was secure.

She recalled Kissick’s words. He may be insane but he’s not stupid.

T. B. Mann’s time would come. She would find him. She would follow the threads that drew him to her, the slender skeins that had transformed into links of a chain, binding her and him forever.

For the moment, her obligation was to Frankie Lynde. Vining owed her nothing less than her best effort.

The light outside the darkroom door was off, meaning it was safe to enter. Vining knocked. A strange, unfamiliar noise came from inside. She drew her ear close to the door to listen.

“Avanti,”
Em yelled.

Vining did as instructed.

The small room was illuminated by a red light. Emily was taking wet photographs from the fixing bath and hanging them on a clothesline with plastic clips. She loved her digital camera, but she also loved the craft of working with film and experimenting with different techniques. On her wish list was equipment to develop color photographs, but that was beyond Vining’s budget for the moment. There was always Dad she could lean on. He had proven to be “leanable” in the past. Em knew how to tweak the guilt factor and was not above judiciously doing just that.

“Hey.” Emily did not stop her work.

“Hey back atcha.”

A CD spinning in a player was the source of the strange noise.

“What is that?”

“The recording I made from Frankie Lynde’s hillside. Disappointing. All I’ve heard so far is traffic and crickets. Nothing’s turned up in the photographs either. There’s something that could be orbs in a couple of them, but I think they’re reflections from the streetlights or dust on the lens. They’re hard to verify without an infrared lens or night goggles. Night goggles would be great, but they’re expensive.”

To Vining, the wet photographs showed a vacant hillside at night. “Are these what you call swirls?”

“Orbs,” Emily corrected her. “Swirls are long and squiggly. Orbs are like balls of light. Then there are vortexes that look like funnels, and mists that look like…Well, mist. They all suggest the presence of ghosts. And if you’re lucky enough, you’ll see an actual ghost that appears in the form of a human being.”

She took a stack of photographs from a shelf and sorted through them. The edges were wavy from the home developing process. She pulled out images of a cemetery at night. The darkness was marked with crooked trails of white light, like that left from writing in the night sky with a lit sparkler on the Fourth of July.

“These are swirls.”

“I see.”

Emily found shots of an abandoned house where she’d prodded her father to take her one night. It hadn’t been Wes’s idea of family time, but Emily had loved it.

“These are orbs.” She returned the photographs to the shelf. “I’ll scan the shots of Frankie’s hillside and e-mail them to the San Gabriel Valley Ghost Hunters Club for an opinion.”

“Thought you weren’t involved with them anymore.”

“They have their uses.” Emily caught the slight upturn at the corners of her mother’s mouth. “This is not a joke, Mom. I wish you’d take it more seriously.”

“You’re right, sweetheart. I shouldn’t make fun of things I don’t understand.”

“You of all people.”

Vining accepted the dig without comment.

Also drying on the clothesline were self-portraits of Emily.

“These are cute.”

Emily raised her upper lip. “Uh, not. I just took them to finish the roll.”

“They’re adorable. Look at this one. I want it for my desk.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. It’s so you.”

“If that’s me…Don’t even…Please.”

Vining hugged her daughter around the shoulders and didn’t press the issue further.

With her mother still holding on to her, Emily inspected a wet photograph she held between rubber tongs and made a noise of dejection.

Vining looked at it, her chin resting atop Emily’s shoulder.

“These are definitely caused by headlights from a car going over the bridge.”

Vining stood straight, letting go of Emily who moved to hang up the photo.

“Darn. I just wish—”

“Shhh.” It came out of Vining’s mouth with an intensity that surprised Emily.

“What?”

Vining held up her hand, ending conversation. She slowly made a fist, as if trying to seize something from the air.

“Mom, what is it?”

Vining searched the ceiling. “It’s gone now.” Her gray eyes went dark. “You didn’t hear that?”

Emily indicated she hadn’t.

Vining darted to the CD player and began punching buttons, frustrated by not getting the result she wanted.

Emily came to help.

“Roll it back a little. Roll it back.” Vining was breathing through her mouth.

“Mom…”

“Emily, play it again. Please.”

Vining realized she was using her no-nonsense voice. It was harsh and inappropriate here. She was scaring her daughter. Her rational mind told her to back off.

Emily skipped the CD back and started it playing again.

Vining raised a trembling hand in the air, as if feeling the sound waves. Her eyes grew wide and her mouth gaped. She covered it with her hand, backing up in the small room until she could go no farther.

“Mom, what is it?” There were tears in the girl’s eyes. “I don’t hear anything except the freeway. Mom…”

But Vining heard. Frankie Lynde was speaking to her in the same coarse whisper from the hillside.

“Wear the pearls,” Frankie Lynde was telling Vining. “He gave them to you. Wear the pearls.”

T W E N T Y - O N E

E
MILY FOLLOWED HER MOTHER FROM THE DARKROOM. “MOM, TELL
me what’s going on. This is not just about you.
I’m
the one who sat in your hospital room day after day.
I’m
the one who almost ended up motherless.”

She choked on the last word. It was too horrible to utter. Dejected, she plopped on the edge of the bed.

Vining sat on an overstuffed chair and stared across the room. She listened to her daughter with odd detachment. So much had happened in the past two days. She was overwhelmed.

“Mom!” Emily wailed. “Don’t do this to me.
Please.
It’s mean. I can’t stand it.”

Weeping, she slid to the floor and hugged her knees against her chest.

Her daughter’s despair roused Vining from her daze. Because of T. B. Mann, she heard corpses talking. She wouldn’t let him do this to her. She would not. He had failed at taking her life. Now he was working on her mind, making her alienate her daughter, stripping her of everything that mattered. And she was a willing accomplice.

She went to the floor and cradled and rocked her crying daughter, stroking her hair. Her own tears fell.

“I’m sorry, Em. I’m so sorry. The last thing I want is to hurt you. You’re my life.”

The girl’s crying subsided. “Then tell me what’s happening. Don’t tell me it’s nothing. I won’t believe you.”

Vining did not want to burden her daughter with her problems, but her behavior already was. The big unknown was worse than the truth. Maybe she was making too much of how Emily would react.

“Okay, Em. I’ll be straight with you. No more secrets.”

Sniveling, Emily pushed herself up and leaned against the bed.

Vining walked on her hands and knees to grab a box of tissues and returned to sit beside Emily. Her daughter nestled against her neck. She didn’t know where to begin. She’d held back so much.

The poetry magnet. She had described the events that had occurred at 835 El Alisal Road to Emily in broad strokes. She’d considered the magnet a meaningless detail. The crazy antics of a madman. She’d decided her daughter didn’t need more material with which to embellish her nightmares.

She now told Emily about the magnet. She told her about Frankie Lynde’s corpse speaking to her—“I am you. I am not you”—and the panic attack that ensued. She told her about the second panic attack at the Thorne house, and the images inside the gemstone in Frankie’s earring. She concluded with Frankie Lynde’s words on the recording Em had made on the hillside.

“My subconscious is working overtime. That’s all it is. Frankie Lynde is not speaking to me from beyond the grave.”

“Mom, of course she is.”

Vining now regretted saying a thing.

They played the CD again, all of it, and again. At seven minutes in, every single time, Vining heard the admonition about the necklace.

Emily did not. Neither did she discount her mother’s perceptions as hallucinations as Vining did. Emily believed in the afterlife and the stages between. She didn’t need proof from the scientific establishment. She was building her own proof, ghost by ghost.

“What necklace?” Emily pushed herself taller on the floor.

“There’s only one it could be.”

“The one someone sent after the Lonny Velcro incident.”

Lonny Velcro was the man Vining had shot and killed on duty five years before. She and Emily preferred describing it with the more benign word “incident.”

Vining stood and held out her hand to help Emily up. They walked upstairs to Vining’s bedroom. The no-frills room had a view of the city and was furnished with the good, simple pieces she and Wes had bought when they were first married.

She opened the dresser drawer where she kept her few pieces of nice jewelry, pulled out a box and removed the necklace. She displayed it on the bed as if around her neck. It was a strand of pearls with a pendant or slide made of a large pearl surrounded by small stones that looked like diamonds.

Lonny Velcro’s given name had been Lon Veltwandter. In 1972, just out of high school in Sherman, Texas, he and his twin brother, Leon, formed the seminal heavy metal group Volume. Volume went on to sell 140 million records worldwide. The band’s personal excesses became emblematic of the era. The band broke up in the late eighties and the members went their separate ways. Brothers Lonny and Leon did not speak for years.

Ten years later, after divorcing another wife, Lonny left Malibu and bought a gated mansion in Pasadena. He told friends his sedate new city was the Anti-Malibu, Anti-Hollywood. Even though he claimed to have left his rock-and-roll days behind, he often prowled the Los Angeles club scene with an entourage that always included attractive young women. Forty-six years old, rail thin, weathered, and still wearing his trademark long tresses and bandanna, he remained a player.

Volume was to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. All the band’s original members were to play on stage again for the first time since 1988. Story was fences had been mended, axes buried, and there were rumors of a tour and a new album. Volume’s loyal fans around the world were ecstatic.

That June, Vining passed her fifth anniversary with the PPD. She was on patrol with John Chase, a rookie ten months out of the Academy. At 2:13 on a Sunday morning, she and Chase responded to a call placed by Lonny Velcro, who said a woman had shot herself at his mansion. Vining and Chase arrived to find model and sometime actress Marnie Allegra propped up on an antique church pew in the mansion’s foyer, dead from a gunshot wound through her eye.

Velcro stood in the foyer and calmly explained to the officers how he and Allegra were friends and had met that night by chance at Muse, a Hollywood club. After having a couple of drinks together, they decided to party at his house and she followed him in her car. They were making cocktails in the library off the foyer when Allegra said she was going to use the powder room. A minute later, Velcro heard the gunshot.

Velcro took Vining and Chase into the library and stood behind the bar, showing where he had been when Allegra allegedly shot herself.

“Had Miss Allegra talked about suicide?” Vining asked, not believing his story for a second.

“No, she was fine. Kinda drunk, but fine.”

“Where did she get the gun?”

“It’s mine. I keep it in the commode in the foyer. I like having a weapon near the front door. I’ve had incidents in the past.”

“She knew it was there.”

“Obviously. She took it out and shot herself, didn’t she?”

Vining pressed him. “You’re telling us that out of the blue, this woman goes from having drinks and conversation to committing suicide.”

Chase later reported that Velcro again relayed his version of the events, not appearing the least bit troubled, when Vining interrupted him.

“Chase, you realize he’s full of shit. When women commit suicide, they rarely use guns, especially in the head. That’s basic Academy training.”

“You’re the one who’s full of shit,” Velcro countered. “It happened just the way I said.”

Vining laughed at him. “You’re a piece of work. You killed her and because you’re rich and famous, you think you’ll get away with it.”

“Who the fuck are you to talk to me like that?” Velcro said.

Vining crooked her fingers, calling Velcro from behind the bar. “Step into the center of the room, sir.”

“I’m calling my attorney.”

“You can call from the station. You’re under arrest.” Vining loosened her gun in its holster.

“I don’t think so. I’m calling him now.”

There was the sound of a buzzer.

“Probably your backup at the gate,” Velcro said. “The intercom’s by the front door. Get it while I make a phone call.”

Vining jerked her head to tell Chase to go.

Chase estimated he had left the room for barely a minute when he heard a gunshot. He buzzed the gate open and ran to the library to find Vining leaning over Velcro who was bleeding out onto the carpet from a chest wound. Vining told Chase that as soon as he’d left, Velcro said he was getting a phone from behind the bar but instead pulled a gun.

A .45 was on the carpet in Velcro’s open palm. Investigators would later discover that the weapon was unregistered, the serial numbers expertly removed. Velcro had a small amount of gunshot residue on his right hand that was consistent with his handling a gun.

Pasadena Police Department’s internal investigation declared the shooting within policy guidelines. PPD’s chief engaged the FBI to review the case, seeking to squelch suggestions of bias. The FBI also declared the shooting in policy, but that did nothing to stop the civil lawsuit against the city.