The Moonlit Mind (Novella): A Tale of Suspense Read online

  Crispin carries with him an expired credit card that he found years earlier in a trash can. He slips it in the gap between door and jamb, puts pressure on the beveled latch bolt, and forces it out of the striker plate. The door opens inward.

  If a guard in the security room happens to be looking at a monitor that provides a view from the camera above the large bay doors, Crispin will find himself in trouble or at least chased out.

  But that never happens. A year previously, the Phantom of Broderick’s explained to him that during shopping hours, security guards charged with monitoring the store’s numerous cameras will be focused 99 percent of the time on store interiors, looking for shoplifters.

  Once through the door, Crispin relies on the wise dog to guide him.

  With the last of the day’s outgoing shipments completed by 5:00 P.M. and the final store-stock deliveries made by 6:00, the employees in shipping-and-receiving have all gone home, with the exception of the department’s assistant manager—Denny Plummer—who works from noon until closing time at 9:00.

  If a dozen employees were busy in this area, Crispin would have little hope of slipping secretly into Broderick’s to stay the night. But with only Denny Plummer to avoid, he can rely on the dog’s keen sense of smell to locate the assistant manager and evade him.

  A third of the huge garage contains a fleet of Broderick’s delivery vans in various sizes. In another third, crates of new merchandise stacked on pallets wait to be opened. The final third is unused.

  In better economic times, the fleet of trucks numbered twice what it does now, the new merchandise was piled higher, and every inch of this space was needed. In those golden days, a night shift of stock boys replenished the store’s racks and shelves. In the current doldrums, no night shift is necessary. All restocking occurs during store hours. After closing time, one person remains in Broderick’s: the Phantom.

  Harley leads Crispin on a serpentine route among the trucks and crates, to the service stairs, which lead up to a distribution room from which new merchandise is wheeled on carts to far points of the department store. A freight elevator is also available, but for the boy, the stairs are safer.

  At this hour, the distribution room on the ground floor is deserted. With the shipping-and-receiving crew gone for the day, this space is dark except for a single light above the wide door that leads to the ground floor of the store.

  Among the many carts and unopened cartons are numerous places where a boy and his dog can hunker down and hide. They shelter here until 9:32, when every speaker in the public-address system echoes with the machine voice of the security package, sternly announcing, “Perimeter control armed.”

  This means that the last employee, a guard, has left by the door through which Crispin earlier entered from the alleyway. He has set the alarm for the night. Every exterior door and window is wired, and if any is breached, the police will be summoned.

  In better days, Broderick’s maintained a four-man team of guards during the night. They were pink-slipped years previously. Without night watchmen, the store management for a while considered updating their security with motion detectors, but in the end that was another expense they could not justify in this new downsized America.

  Until the store reopens on Monday morning, Crispin and Harley can go anywhere in its four sales floors without triggering an alarm. When Broderick’s is closed, the only security cameras that continue to record are those covering doors and operable windows, so no one will know that they were here.

  In spite of high electricity costs, aisle lights are left on all night on the ground floor. The police stop by a few times each shift to peer through the display windows, to be certain that the alarm hasn’t been thwarted and that no bad guys are running amok inside.

  Crispin unsnaps the leash from Harley’s collar, and they leave the distribution room. They take the public elevator to the fourth floor.

  Up here are three departments—kitchenware, home furnishings, and bedding—plus Eleanor’s, which is a restaurant named after the wife of the store’s founder. Eleanor’s is more than a coffee shop, less than a fine-dining establishment. Open six days a week, it is popular with the ladies’-luncheon crowd and with those who enjoy tea and pastries in the late afternoon. Dinner is not served—at least not with the knowledge of management.

  The restaurant is to the left of the public elevators. The pair of beveled-glass French doors, which should be closed and locked, stand open.

  Past the hostess station, the dining room is dimly lit by the ambient glow of the great city, which enters by tall, west-facing windows. Beyond the tables, in one of the booths, a few candles in red-glass vessels flicker pleasantly.

  Crispin is expected. With his disposable cell phone, he has called ahead to ask if he might be welcome for two nights. The phone comes with a limited number of minutes, but that is of no concern to him; the only number he ever calls is hers.

  This side of the hostess station, in the open doorway, stands the Phantom of Broderick’s.

  8

  July 26, memorial day for Saints Anne and Joachim, memorial night, three years and four months earlier …

  Nine-year-old Crispin in his sister’s empty closet is pierced by a sharp fear, not fear for himself—not yet—but for Mirabell.

  Crispin, help me!

  He doesn’t hear the voice again, but he remembers it clearly.

  Something is terribly wrong, and it can’t be put right by one of Mr. Mordred’s jokes or by a kiss from Nanny Sayo.

  At the thought of Nanny, the intense flavor of lemon candy fills his mouth. An impossible flood of saliva forces him to swallow once, twice, three times, and still a string of spittle escapes, drools down his chin. He wipes it away with a sleeve of his pajamas.

  They have lived in Theron Hall for six weeks, and suddenly those days seem to have passed mostly in a haze. Looking back, he has only a vague sense of what happened on which day, as if time has no fixed meaning in this house.

  They have gone to bed and risen according to their desires. They have eaten only what they wish. Every toy they’ve wanted—and many they never requested—have been provided for them. They have been entertained rather than schooled, and their tutor with the horsefly birthmark has indulged them at every turn, always excusing and even encouraging their laziness. They have never left the house. In their three separate rooms, they are gradually being isolated, one from the other, as they already have been isolated from the outside world.

  None of that is how things ought to be. Crispin sees now that the past six weeks have been like a dream through which they have been drawn as though responding to invisible strings attached to all their limbs.

  Crispin, help me!

  The sense of being in a dream only intensifies as Crispin finds himself at the door to Clarette and Giles’s bedroom suite without realizing that he has left Mirabell’s room.

  His mother and his new father have made it clear that they value their privacy and that their quarters are strictly off-limits. Until now, Crispin has never tried their door. He assumes that it must be locked, but it is not.

  Stained-glass and blown-glass lamps pour out honeyed light so rich that he can almost taste it, and the velvet shadows remind him of a place he cannot name or quite remember, a place that somehow came before everything he’s ever known.

  Of all the grand spaces in Theron Hall, this is the grandest of them all. The dazzling and intricate pattern in the colorful Persian carpet seems to pull gently at his bare feet with every step that he takes, as though it might draw him down into it, into not just the threads that constitute it, but into it and also through it, as if it might be a secret gate to another world more real than this one. The draperies are so soft and hang in such elegant folds, the colors are so appealing, the fringe and tassels are so plush, that no vista he might see through the windows behind them could compete. Here is the furniture of some greater royalty than mere kings, and an ornate mirror of such compelling depth that when Crispi
n stares past his reflection, the room appears too vast to be contained within Theron Hall, dwindling to infinity.

  He is overwhelmed by opulence, on the verge of vertigo, when once more he focuses on the velvet shadows in the corners, which remind him of some place he can’t remember, a place that came before everything he’s ever known. But this time some alien voice inside his head, with words he’s never heard before yet understands, reveals to him that the perfection of these shadows are the darkness of his mother’s womb, from which he was born. If he wishes to step into a corner and allow these shadows to fold around him, if he will wait here for his mother, upon her return she will take him back into herself, and he will know again the peace of being part of her and eventually of being uncreated.

  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.

  9

  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.