The Ghost of Blackwood Lane Read online

  But running wasn’t the answer. During the beatings, she usually tried to visualize something happy to distract her; this time, all she could think about was Vincent, dead.

  Over and over, she watched him die.

  Watched herself killing him.

  It wasn’t that she was a violent person. The idea of taking someone’s life made her sick to her stomach. But this man, her husband, was going to kill her soon. She had come to accept this. And in response, some part of her had become more animalistic, more desperate to survive. They say that a cornered animal fights the fiercest, and that’s how she felt—trapped, cornered, with only her nails and her attitude keeping her alive.

  Sometime during tonight’s beating, as the punches and slaps had come over and over, along with the yelling and the shouting and the insults and the threats, she had realized that, in the end, it would have to be him or her. And she really didn’t care which—just as long as this all ended.

  Judy paced around her house, pinching her lip with her fingers. She was too deep in thought to notice that, for the first time in a long time, she was standing a little taller.

  Okay, so, she had to die. Or he did.

  Just thinking the words made her feel better.

  How...that was the only question.

  Well, everyone knew that Vincent was flighty. If given the chance to make a really good score, he probably wouldn’t hesitate to skip town.

  But she knew that Vincent was getting involved with the family business again, so it made a lot less sense now for him to score a huge paycheck and disappear. Plus, Tony might start nosing around if he went missing—and any play of hers to “make him disappear” might not stand up to scrutiny.

  She strolled around the house, looking for inspiration.

  The kitchen reminded her that she could leave something on the stove and burn the house down. Could she do that on one of those nights when he came home drunk and passed out on the couch? How drunk would someone have to be to not notice a house on fire?

  In the kitchen, she glanced under the sink—there was enough rat poison under there to kill an army. But she knew that that kind of stuff could be easily discovered by the doctors who would inevitably examine Vincent after...after he was dead.

  Some part of her mind wondered at the fact that she was seriously contemplating killing Vincent, but another part of her mind kept thinking.

  One night he could be coming home drunk, driving too fast on those twists and sharp turns on Blackwood Lane—

  Drunk driving.

  Something turned in her stomach. Maybe that was it. She’d dreamed about it, begged God to let it happen a million times, begged Him to make the car swerve and crash. Maybe she could do it herself. They always said that God helps those who help themselves.

  How she would arrange it, she didn’t know. But at least she had a ghost of a plan. And that made her smile.

  Chapter 16

  Without much in the way of advance planning, Gary and Mike left for Sacramento on Saturday morning.

  They drove in Gary’s Saturn, heading north on the I-5. It would be about a seven-hour drive, plus whatever time they needed for lunch, so they left Mike’s place in the Valley before 5 a.m. It was strange, cruising along the stretches of asphalt while just across the median, there was already a parking lot of headlights trying to get into the city, even on a Saturday. Where did all these people need to be?

  The traffic on the southbound Golden State Freeway was notoriously bad in the early morning, as trucks coming into the city from the north clogged up the roads trying to make their early morning deliveries.

  Gary drove and Mike slept. That was fine with Gary—he needed time to think. Thoughts of the dream were there all the time now, never leaving his conscious mind, and as he cruised along, doing 70 up the long, slow grade known as the Grapevine, he pondered his dream and ignored the lights falling away behind him.

  The dream—he didn’t understand it, couldn’t even begin to explain it, only knew that it disturbed him down to his core. There were no words to describe the terror he felt each time he realized he was again in its grip.

  In his years in L.A., he had explored a few different areas of the occult, starting with getting his palm read one windy autumn night on the Santa Monica Pier and expanding into a pursuit of tarot cards and numerology and crystology, searching for answers. He went to psychics to get his aura read and his tea leaves read and his palms read, and every time he came away with nothing but a lot of mysterious and exceedingly unspecific notions about his future and his past. Funny how they could never pick up on even the simplest things.

  Once, he’d visited a psychic called Redinato at a shabby establishment in Redondo Beach. Gary had sat in front of her, a hokey prop-like crystal ball on the round table between them, and watched as she peered deep into the reflected light of the candles around them. After a few minutes, his impatience got the better of him.

  “See anything in there?” he’d asked, already regretting the visit.

  She continued to rub the milky glass of the orb, peering deep in it. “You...you’ve come from a long way away, haven’t you, boy?”

  He nodded—they always started out like that. Gary wondered if there could be a more generic prediction. Anyone coming from anywhere further than San Pedro could consider that distance far—London or Long Beach, didn’t matter.

  Gary had read up on psychics—he’d been searching for the real thing for so long, but was understandably wary of the charlatans and fakes that the industry produced in great numbers. He knew what common sense told him: the more generic the prediction, the more easily applied to anyone’s circumstances. It was just like the horoscopes in the newspapers—anything specific in them would immediately invalidate them for a vast portion of the populace.

  She continued to peer into the ball. Gary wondered how much of her show was for his amusement and how much of it was just habit.

  She glanced up at him and made a face, then went back to looking. “You’ve had a troubling past, my friend. Lost faces, lost people. There are many things that you have lost along the way. Is that right?”

  Gary Foreman nodded, but hadn’t everyone “lost” people in their lives? Gary had lost his mother a long time ago, and he’d been forced to move away from the town he’d loved. Now he was an outcast in a place he despised, but that didn’t make her insight real.

  “Yes, I lost my mother a long time ago.”

  She nodded, still staring. She adjusted her arms to hold the crystal ball tighter.

  “Yes, I see fire and death, my son. But not in the way you think. And there is much more to this, things that you will learn in time. The name you call yourself now—what is it, boy?”

  He was confused—what did he call himself? She’d seen fire—could that be the death of his mother?

  “My name is Gary, Gary Foreman. Why would I call myself something else?”

  Driving in the car north to Sacramento, Gary remembered the next part as if it had happened yesterday.

  The old gypsy woman had stood suddenly, her robe flowing around her. She’d come around the table, her eyes suddenly wild as she grabbed his arm.

  “You must leave now, boy. There are things that you must see to, events that will only transpire if you start down that path, and quickly.”

  He’d tried to ask her another question, but she had pulled him up from the ratty chair he’d been sitting in with surprising strength. She’d shushed him, shaking her head, and walked him to the door.

  Gary remembered that he’d tried to pay, her but she had refused, shoving his hand away.

  They had gotten to the door and she’d pulled it open for him. He’d started to leave, but she’d grabbed his elbow and stopped him abruptly, her hand gripping his arm so tightly it hurt.

  “Listen, boy,” she’d said. “You must follow your dreams above all. You must follow wherever they lead, and you must not shirk from them. They will be your relief, and your future. Promise me that, boy.�
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  She stared into his eyes, and her eyes seemed to shift and change colors subtly. The sight made him queasy.

  He’d nodded and muttered something about promising, and then she’d backed up and slammed the door in his face.

  That had been last summer. And the old woman’s reaction still scared him. Could she have known that these nightmares were coming? He’d driven down to Redondo a few weeks ago to try and ask her, but she was gone.

  There had also been a tarot card reader in Mission Vallejo that had reacted strangely to him.

  Gary had attended one of those Renaissance Festivals out at Irvine Meadows. The festival had featured jousting tournaments and folks walking around in medieval outfits, chomping on enormous turkey legs.

  The sign on one small tent promised tarot readings, so Gary had entered and paid his money, and the woman had laid out his cards. She’d used a T-Cross field instead of the more traditional circular field. The books he’d read had said that the T-Cross method of laying out the cards was more impressive to paying customers, and although it was generally regarded as less accurate, it was preferred over the circular method. She had set out his cards, slowly turning each over and telling him what they meant. Supposedly the cards were able to tap into each person’s energy field, and the influence of that field would help the cards come out in a way that allowed the reader to ascertain something about the customer’s fortune. It sounded like crap to him, but when you were looking for answers, sometimes you had to go down a few dark alleys.

  The woman was good, reading something important and positive into even the more pessimistic cards.

  She started out lying to him from the very beginning, giving him positive feedback. He knew that the inverted five of Cups, with its picture of a court jester, meant the exact opposite of the regular five of Cups, which represented happiness, but she’d whitewashed it for him.

  But as she continued to slowly turn the cards from her well-worn deck, she grew less and less jovial.

  The Death card came up seventh, and after that, she’d stopped and looked at him intensely, then glanced at the air next to him, as if looking for some invisible companion.

  “What is your name, son?”

  He told her, and she nodded slowly, looking back down at the arrangement of cards on the table before her.

  “I must confess,” she began. “I have not been entirely truthful with you. Reading the cards as often as I do, it is rare that something appears in them that actually requires my attention. Forgive me.”

  Curious, he nodded. “I’ve had several readings, and I’ve studied the meanings of some of the cards. I know that the inverted five of Cups does not signal happiness.”

  She nodded, looking at him.

  After a long, uncomfortable silence, he shifted in his chair. “So, what do they say?”

  She held his gaze for a long moment, long enough for him to notice the distant sounds of tourists laughing outside the tent. She looked down at the cards and, in a sudden motion, swept up the cards, shuffled, and started over.

  Remarkably, several of the same cards appeared again, and in the same place in the formation. She flipped them slowly from the deck, speaking the name of each card now and explaining it, as if she could sense his awareness of her craft. She gave him the unvarnished truth as each faded card appeared before her.

  The last card revealed was the Angel. She sat back, studying them. The woman was young, but in thought, her face appeared much older, concentration creasing her forehead.

  After a minute, she looked back up at him.

  “You are but a shadow of yourself.”

  He didn’t know what to say, but he hadn’t been expecting that.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  She looked at the cards again. “You will need to discover yourself before you can be free. I see your face, and then I see another face behind yours, someone lost to you, a brother or sibling. But your eyes tell me that you are an only child.”

  He nodded, unsure if he should say anything.

  The woman sat back and looked down at the cards. He watched as her hands moved over them slowly.

  “You have been searching in the wrong places,” the woman said, finally, smiling. “Start over, my son. Start at the start.”

  After the reading he had gotten up, his knees shaking. He had left, thanking her, but had no idea what any of it meant.

  For some reason, the psychics and the Tarot readings and the palm readings made him feel better. He had always felt a strange, deep restlessness that was hard to explain, as far back as he could remember.

  The sun was peeking over the eastern mountains of the southern San Joaquin Valley, and Gary smiled. He was making great time, and they might make it to his father’s as early as 1 p.m. Of course, they might hit some traffic in Sacramento, but it would be nothing like the parking lots of Los Angeles.

  This was a good first step, Gary thought. Talking to his father about the dream would help—maybe his father could identify the man’s bloody, shadowed face. Or help explain why everything in the dream seemed so familiar.

  Gary Foreman drove on, heading north.

  ------

  “Gary!”

  His stepmother came down the steps of the house and ran up to the car, barely giving him time to get out before she swept him up into her arms. She was a big woman, and she loved to hug. He didn’t remember anything like this about his real mother—and even though he loved his stepmother, he longed for more knowledge, for any one sensation that could remind him of his mother.

  He enjoyed the hug for a long moment and then disentangled himself, introducing Mike to his stepmother. Mike also received an enormous bear hug, albeit not of the same intensity as his own.

  She finally pulled away and put her arms around both of them, treating them like returning conquerors. “You boys hungry?”

  Mike nodded vigorously—he’d been complaining for almost an hour before Gary had pulled the Saturn to a stop in front of the small ranch house in North Highlands, a suburb north of Sacramento. Gary told them to head inside and offered to get the bags.

  His stepmother and Mike went inside. Gary heard introductions being exchanged before his dad came out onto the porch and slowly made his way down the steps toward the car. He still had the limp from back in O’Fallon, and it made stairs difficult for him. His leg had been broken in three places, Gary remembered sadly. He remembered the trial, and his dad on the stand—

  “Hi, son. Need some help?” John Foreman offered.

  Gary smiled, hugging his father. “I think I’ve got it, Dad. The leg getting worse? You’re moving slower than the last time I saw you.”

  John Foreman looked down at his leg and shook his head. “Not well, son. The doctors said that the hips have gotten bad—they think it’s all my fault. And the years of awkward walking. I don’t use the cane as much as they would like, so now they’re talking hip replacement. They’ve got me on seven different pills, I think.”

  Gary nodded, concerned, and pulled the other suitcase out, closing the trunk behind him. “You’re having surgery?” he asked as they slowly headed for the house. He was carrying both suitcases, and his father was still having trouble keeping up.

  “Well, they don’t know. They want to do one hip and see how it goes before they operate on the other one. I hope it’s soon, though.”

  Gary saw his father grimace as he used the porch rail to pull himself up the steps. Gary stepped up and set the suitcases down before going back and helping his father.

  How many times had his father helped him walk, or helped him along after he’d hurt himself? Gary remembered a particularly bad bike crash that had resulted in a nasty skinned knee. His father had comforted him, cleaning the bleeding wound and bandaging it in the middle of the gravel road where Gary had crashed. Gary still had a scar on his left knee. His mother had been there too, taking care of him, but he couldn’t remember her face. He remembered how his father had doted over him, saying hi
s name over and over to calm him—

  A tight, viselike headache washed over him suddenly, and he let go of his father, now safely on the porch, and grabbed the railing to steady himself.

  “Are you okay, son?” his father asked, eyes tightening.

  Gary brushed it off. “Yeah, I’ve just...I’ve been getting these horrible headaches lately, especially in the last couple of months. Maybe it’s the lack of alcohol,” he said wryly, and saw the disapproving look on his father’s face. His problems with alcohol had been a sore spot between them for years, and his father had actively encouraged him to get control of his drinking.

  As they headed inside, his father leaned closer. “I know it’s difficult, son, but you’re doing the right thing. You can’t let alcohol control your life, or you’ll never be happy.”

  As he followed his father inside, Gary wondered if he would ever make it to happy. At this point, he’d settle for a good night’s sleep.

  ------

  The dinner was a pleasant one, filled with questions from Gary’s parents about life in Los Angeles and from Gary’s stepmother, Denise, about Mike’s many girlfriends. Mike couldn’t help but notice how quiet Gary was. Mike wondered how long it would be before things started coming out—he figured Gary would want to talk privately to his father about the dream he’d been having, but that wasn’t the way things worked out.

  This family was interesting but strange. It almost seemed like there was an undercurrent beneath everything that Gary and his father said, almost as if they were speaking their own coded language. Everything was accompanied with a long pause, or a glance, or a strange phrase.

  Mike kept noticing the way Gary glanced at his dad—there was a lot going on here that Mike wasn’t privy to. He’d known Gary for almost two years and always found him to be exceedingly private. Now, Mike knew where he got it.

  They were busy eating, and Mike was explaining to Denise about his latest architectural project when Gary interrupted and asked his father the question for which he’d driven 500 miles.