The Moonlit Mind: A Tale of Suspense Read online

  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.”

  10

  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.”

  “It seems such a waste.”

  “Nothing is wasted,” she assures him, “if even the sight of it gives you pleasure.”

  This is a different cart than usual. There is no bed tray. The top of the cart itself swivels over the bed, conveniently presenting all these delicious items within easy reach.

  After adjusting her uniform blouse, Arula sits on the edge of the bed, grabs one of his feet, which is under the blankets, and gives it an affectionate squeeze. “You’re a fine and thoughtful boy, worrying about wasting things.”

  Although his memories of the past evening remain shapes in a fog, Crispin remembers something from the previous afternoon. “Why did you bathe Mirabell in milk and rose petals?”

  Only after he asks the question does he remember that he knows of this event because he and Harley were eavesdropping.

  Arula neither frowns nor pauses in surprise, but answers as if no one keeps secrets in Theron Hall. “In the very, very best European families, there are traditional beauty regimens that girls as young as six are expected to follow.”

  “We’re not European,” Crispin mutters.

  “You’re Crispin Gregorio now, and you certainly are European, at least by marriage. Remember, the family lives only occasionally in Theron Hall and has houses all over the world. Your mother wants to be sure you assimilate well and know how to live in any country in which you find yourself.”

  “I don’t want to take a bath in milk and roses.”

  Arula laughs sweetly and squeezes his foot again. “And you won’t. That’s just for girls, you silly thing.”

  Nibbling grudgingly on a croissant, Crispin says, “I’ll bet girls don’t like it, either.”

  “Mirabell loved it. Girls like to be pampered.”

  “I’m going to ask her, and I’ll bet she didn’t like it.”

  “By all means, ask her the first time she calls from France.”

  Confused, Crispin says, “What do you mean — France?”

  “Well, if you weren’t such a terrible sleepyhead, you’d know. We’ll all be going to France in October. This morning, Minos and Mrs. Frigg flew to Paris to prepare the house there, and Mirabell went with them.”

  The filling of almond paste in the croissant, which has been sweet, suddenly seems bitter. He puts down the pastry.

  “Why would Mirabell go to France before the rest of us?”

  “There’s no bedroom in the Paris house suitable for a little girl,” Arula explains. “Mr. Gregorio wants his daughter to be as happy as possible. He’s authorized the expenditure of whatever is necessary to give her the most wonderful bedroom suite that she can imagine. She needs to be there to make choices.”

  “That doesn’t sound right,” Crispin says.

  “What doesn’t?”

  He frowns. “I don’t know.”

  Her hand moves up his leg, and she squeezes his knee through the blanket. “Oh, it’s right as rain. Mr. Gregorio is a generous man.”

  “What about me and Harley? Where are we gonna sleep when we get there?”

  “The Paris house already has bedrooms suitable for boys. You’ll be quite happy with yours.”

  He has been sitting up to the breakfast selection. He slumps back against the mound of pillows. “I don’t want to go to Paris.”

  “Nonsense. It’s one of the greatest cities in the world. You want to see the Eiffel Tower, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “I s
wear,” Arula declares, letting go of his knee and rising from the bed, “you must have taken a grumpy pill this morning. Dear boy, France is going to be a grand adventure. You’ll love every minute of it.”

  “I don’t speak French.”

  “You don’t have to. All over the world, everyone who works for Mr. Gregorio speaks perfect English as well as other languages. When you leave the house in Paris, there will always be a companion with you to translate. Now eat something for breakfast, child. I’ll be back to collect everything later.”

  When he’s alone, Crispin pushes the cart aside, flings back the covers, and gets out of bed. He restlessly walks the room, stopping repeatedly at the windows to gaze out at the city.

  Having remembered spying on his mother, Mirabell, and Proserpina in the sewing room, the boy knows there is something else that he has forgotten. It eludes him.

  Finally, he recalls Nanny Sayo visiting him and his brother briefly during dinner to report that their sister had a migraine and would eat in her room after the headache passed.

  Don’t worry. Mirabell will be fine. But you must not bother her tonight.

  He remembers going to bed before nine o’clock. He wasn’t sleepy. When Nanny checked on him, he pretended to be deep in dreams. After she left, he had watched the bedside clock count down to nine-thirty.

  He remembers nothing after that. Nothing. So he must not have been as awake as he thought. He must have gone to sleep, after all.

  In the bathroom, he turns the water in the shower as hot as he can stand it. He steps into the large cubicle, closes the door behind him, and inhales deeply of the billowing steam.

  The soap produces a rich lather. He always uses a washcloth to soap himself, but suddenly he realizes that he is using his hands instead. For reasons he can’t quite put into words, he is embarrassed to be touching himself in this fashion, and he resorts to the washcloth, as usual.

  The shampoo makes an even richer lather than does the soap, and as he washes his hair, he closes his eyes because sometimes the suds sting them. As always, the shampoo smells vaguely of carnations, but after a moment the scent changes to that of lemons.

  This fragrance is so extraordinarily intense and so unexpected that reflexively Crispin opens his eyes, and as he does he thinks he hears someone speak his name.

  The water drumming-splashing on the marble floor, the constant slish-slish-slish of it echoing back and forth off the three glass walls, creates such a screen of noise that he wouldn’t hear someone speak unless the speaker shouted or was in the shower with him. This voice is not a shout, but a murmur.

  The sting of shampoo blurs his vision, and the whirling steam further hampers him, but as he turns in place, squinting at the bathroom beyond the glass walls of the shower, he glimpses a hazy figure, someone watching him. Shocked by this intrusion on his privacy, he wipes at his eyes with both hands, sluicing the suds from his lashes. When his vision clears, no one is watching him, after all. He is alone in the bathroom, and the visitor must have been a figment of his imagination, a trick of light and steam.

  Dried off, dressed, he is suddenly famished. He eats the fresh strawberries and cream, the English muffin, the croissant, and the sticky bun with pecans. He drinks most of the hot chocolate, taking his time, savoring every sip.

  He’s fifteen minutes late for lessons in the library, but Mr. Mordred never expects punctuality.

  Harley has news. “Mirabell called from Paris!”

  Crispin shakes his head dismissively. “She can’t be in Paris already.”

  “Well, she is,” Harley insists.

  “They left very early,” Mr. Mordred says, “but in fact they aren’t there yet. Mirabell called from Mr. Gregorio’s private jet, somewhere above the Atlantic.”

  “She’s on a jet!” Harley says, thrilled by the idea. “She says it’s super-great.”

  “Are you sure it was Mirabell?” Crispin asks his brother.

  “Of course it was.”

  “How do you know — just because she said so?”

  “It was her. I know Mirabell.”

  Harley is seven and gullible. Crispin is nine and feels that he is not just two years more mature than his little brother, but three or four, or ten. “Why didn’t she call me?”

  “ ’Cause she wanted to talk to me,” Harley says with pride.

  “She’d want to talk to me, too.”

  “But you were snoring your head off or stuffing your face or something,” Harley says.

  “I’m sure she’ll want to talk to you the next time she calls,” Mr. Mordred assures Crispin. “Now what should we do to start? Should I read you a story or teach you some arithmetic?”

  Harley doesn’t hesitate to consider. “Read! Read us a story!”

  As Mr. Mordred chooses from several books, Crispin stares at the horsefly birthmark on his left temple. He thought he saw it move just a little. But it isn’t moving now.

  11

  Over dinner, December 3, the eve of Crispin’s thirteenth birthday …

  Amity Onawa, formerly Daisy Jean Sims, also the Phantom of Broderick’s, has put a plate of little tea cakes on the table for dessert. They are flavorful but not too rich.

  The dog begs, receives half a cake, and lies down to sleep.

  With her black hair, compelling blue eyes, and knowing attitude, the girl looks like a Gypsy about to read someone’s fortune by the glimmering candlelight.

  “So, Crispin Gregorio.”

  “That’s not my name.”

  “Crispin Hazlett.”

  “That’s the name my mother used.”

  “And you never did?”

  “I did but not now.”

  “Why not?”

  “I never knew any man named Hazlett.”

  “So it’s what — just Crispin?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Travel light, huh?”

  “One name’s enough.”

  “So, Crispin, what do you want for your birthday dinner tomorrow night?”

  “Whatever. I don’t care.”

  “Got a walk-in refrigerator full of stuff. And for Christmas, they have an entire special department of delicacies down on the second floor.”

  “Anything. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Everything matters,” she disagrees.

  He shrugs.

  Cocking her head, Amity asks, “Still got your deck of cards?”

  “Same deck,” he confirms. “Bought the night me and Harley met.”

  “You still do with it what you used to do?”

  “That’s all it’s for.”

  “Did you turn up the four sixes yet, one after the other?”

  “Not yet.”

  She shakes her head. “You’re a strange one, boy.”

  Smiling, he says, “Not just me.”

  With the small bankroll and the eight gold coins that she had when she fled from that house of murder, Amity lived many months on the streets. She dressed tough, acted tough, and over time she became tough.…

  In that year, she learns many things, one of which is how to fabricate a life. Any kind of dope is available, and fake but high-quality ID is no more difficult to score than pot or coke. She has no interest in drugs, but she is determined to make Amity Onawa as real as Daisy Jean Sims once was.

  In time the police conclude that the missing Daisy must be dead, and she is dead to Amity, as well. Dwelling on memories of her former life is too painful to endure — and dangerous. Her psychic moment with the scissors sometimes recurs in dreams, and she remains convinced that any contact with relatives or even old friends will be the death of her and them.

  After six months of sleeping in a bedroll — in parks, in church basements, under bridges — she uses a bogus but convincing driver’s license and Social Security card to rent a tiny studio apartment with a half-kitchen and a minuscule bath. She needs to shower every day and to wear fresh clothes if she is to find a job and keep it.

  In the current topsy-turvy world, jobs
are scarce; and if you know how to game the system, the dole pays better than work. Most street types she’s met are grifters, and their favorite mark is one program or another of the Department of Health and Human Services, from which they finesse more than a single income stream.

  Amity, however, is a wide-awake girl. She knows that dependency is another word for slavery. Besides, in the long run, counting on Uncle Sam to see you through is like expecting to find sure footing across a sea of quicksand.

  On her first job, she spends three hours a day cleaning and chopping vegetables in a joint serving pretty good Mediterranean food, followed by three hours of busing lunch-hour tables. Soon she is promoted. She makes and plates salads and performs a host of other culinary chores.

  When she applies for an opening at Eleanor’s in Broderick’s Department Store, she is hired at once. She is only fifteen, but her ID says that she’s six months short of her eighteenth birthday. After her time on the streets, she has an air of been-there, and she can look anyone in the eye longer than they can meet her stare.

  In time she comes to see that Broderick’s potentially offers more than a job. It can be also a home, and more than a home, a haven.

  Each employee has a personal locker with a combination dial in either the men’s or women’s change room on the ground floor. Here she keeps her purse and, in cold and inclement weather, her coat, scarf, gloves, rubber boots. Many keep their bag lunches in their lockers, but as a benefit of being on the staff of Eleanor’s, Amity receives her lunch free in the kitchen at the end of the noon rush.

  Over several days, Amity brings a complete array of toiletries to stash in her locker. A hair dryer. A few T-shirts and sweaters. Two pairs of jeans. Socks, underwear. She keeps everything folded and out of sight in a couple of carryalls, so that when she opens her locker in front of others, it doesn’t look like a closet.

  Each day, at the end of her shift, she appears to leave, but she in fact deceives. She knows scores of places in this immense building where she can hide until Broderick’s closes for the night and the last departing guard has set the perimeter alarm.

  The first-arriving employees — stockroom guys, guards, cleaning crew, and some front-office types — clock in at 7:30 A.M. to prepare for a 10:00 opening. But for the ten previous hours, Amity has the department store to herself. Ten hours of blissful solitude and security. On Sundays and holidays, of course, this magnificent temple to disposable income is hers alone all day and night.