Life to Life: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective Read online

  I said, "He had a record of similar offenses, served a couple of rehabilitation stretches at Camarillo. Guess there was also something about kiddie porn."

  "Yeah, I heard the cops talking about that," Barney said. "That's sick—you know?—that's really sick."

  I sighed and said, "Sick enough to kill, I guess. How do you feel about that?"

  “What can you do with 'em?” Barney replied. "Send 'em to the moon? I figure, what's more important?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "To society. What's more important? Sometimes I get the feeling it's falling apart around us. Used to be, we all knew who the enemy was. And we killed the sons of bitches. Now it seems more and more like nobody really knows what's important and what's not important. Well I think I know. Our kids are important. These sicko sons of bitches are not. It's got to the point we can't afford them. When you can't afford something, what do you do with it?"

  I said, "Get rid of it?”

  He said, "Exactly. These guys are expendable. The kids are not."

  I report this conversation with Barney partly because it is pertinent to the case but mainly because something he said there hit a nerve cell in my brain and produced a minor flash in there. I'll tell you more about that later. Right now I have to stay with the flow and tell you about something that produced a major flash.

  It happened at the fourth stop along Barney's lock-up check. He was telling me, "This is the door to the sanctuary, rear of the auditorium. Reverend Farrel prepares for her sermons in here. She can come and go, see, without going through the auditorium if she don't want to." Then he showed me a surprised look and said, "Hell, it's unlocked."

  He had a hand on his pistol as he warily pushed that door open. Suddenly he made a strangled sound and quickly but quietly backed out of there and pulled the door firmly shut, but not before I could see what he had seen inside that room.

  He'd seen Reverend Annie, that's what, and he'd seen all of Reverend Annie in a bewitching scene not likely to be forgotten in a long lifetime. It's the sort of thing that etches itself into memory; certainly it is etched in mine, though I had but a glimpse.

  A narrow pencil-beam from a small spotlight placed high on the wall was providing the only illumination to that otherwise darkened room. Annie was standing in the spot. She was goldenly naked, a shimmering vision of feminine beauty poised in an attitude of exultant worship with the feet together and stretching upward from the toes almost like a ballerina, back arched gracefully and the chest thrown high, head back as far as it could go and the arms raised and reaching as though she were trying to project herself along that beam of light.

  I don't know how to reconcile the emotional reaction to something that is both and at once so erotically beautiful and so stunningly religious. I just know that it affected Barney in very much the same way it affected me, with an added bonus for him of horrified embarrassment.

  "You told me she was in jail!" he muttered, very upset with me.

  "Last I heard, she was," I muttered back. "The lawyers must have finally..."

  "God! Did you see her? Did you see that?"

  I saw it, yeah, but I was not quite as willing to accept the evidence of the sense perceptions. An extrasensory quiver, back there, had me working along another thread from the loom.

  I left Barney to continue his rounds alone and I beat a path to a pay phone near the gazebo.

  And, yeah, the quiver had it right. Ann Marie Farrel was still in jail.

  Chapter Nineteen: Wonderful World of Awe

  My friend Paul is in his seventies and has spent the bulk of his life as a Catholic brother working with American Indians on reservations in the West. Paul is a gentle soul but you can tell by the sparkle in his eyes that all of life has been an interesting adventure for him; I suspect that he has done a bit of helling around in his time. I mention Paul because he has many interesting stories to tell about the Indians, and one of those will help to illustrate a certain aspect of this case.

  One day on a reservation in Wyoming—this was back in the fifties or sixties—Paul and one of his Indian helpers were on an errand far into an isolated stretch of the reservation. They were bumping along a primitive dirt road in a jeep when over against the mountainside, less than a mile away, they noticed a huge silvery object reflecting the sun and pacing them at an altitude of about 200 feet. Paul describes the object as "big as a house" and he very matter-of- factly refers to it as a flying saucer.

  He stopped the jeep to give all his attention to this object. The object stopped also and "just hung there" for maybe a minute while they looked at it and apparently it looked at them. Then the object "started stunting"—wobbling, fluttering, dancing around with abrupt altitude changes of forty to fifty feet at a time.

  Paul and the Indian sat and watched that exhibition for another minute or so, then suddenly the object tilted on its axis and swooped across the valley toward them at incredible speed to close about half the distance between them before zooming straight up and disappearing behind some clouds.

  Paul looked at the Indian, and the Indian looked at Paul; then the Indian, in characteristic deadpan and flattened voice, said to Paul, "Wonder what is."

  That was the total discussion between Paul and his Indian friend regarding the phenomenon. Paul said if the Indian ever mentioned the incident to anyone else, he wasn't aware of it.

  I tell the story because "wonder what is" covers a lot of phenomena for the unsophisticated mind. Many of us have a very similar way of disposing of inexplicable experience. But strike that word unsophisticated and let's include just about everybody in that coverage. The level of sophistication apparently has little to do with the way we apprehend extraordinary reality, except in an entirely relative sense.

  I have another friend who is a physicist at Cal Tech and this guy is really sharp. He is very much at home with quarks and other esoteric particles. If you ever talk to this guy in a serious vein of thought, you get the idea real quick that he lives in a reality quite different from yours and mine. I was in his lab one day when he was doing some beta-decay studies, using state-of-the-art electronics that, among other exotic things, measures time in ten-millionths of a second and builds analogs of atomic nuclei.

  My friend was searching for antileptons and trying to track their evolution, of all things. There are hypotheses to suggest that all matter in our time-space dimension is composed of nothing but leptons and quarks; that is, they are the basic building blocks of all matter. These are rather imprecise terms, however, since leptons include electrons, muons, electron and muon nutrinos, and their corresponding anti-particles; quarks have been subdivided into four subparticles—up-quarks, down-quarks, strange-quarks, and charmed- quarks—and they carry corresponding antiparticles, too.

  Well, this guy was trying to analog—maybe theoretically, I don't know, but he was trying to build a model of the transformative processes of leptons during beta-decay, and he had some damned sophisticated equipment to help in that. While we were standing there watching the computer graphics, a strange little sine wave appeared and began undulating along the entire model for a period of about ten seconds.

  My friend had bent down for a closer look, then looked back at me when the thing zoomed away, as though to confirm that more than one pair of eyes had witnessed that, then he bent back to the monitor and muttered, "Wonder what the hell that was."

  Wonder what is, yeah. Even this twenty-first-century brain had to insulate itself from the inexplicable. My friend the theoretical physicist went on with his studies as though nothing phenomenal had occurred. To this day he has said absolutely nothing to me about this incident.

  So I put it to you directly, now. How many times during your daily routines have you seen something, or heard something, or in some way experienced something that does not seem to conform to your preconceptions of reality—then disposed of it by the magic words: wonder what is?

  The American Indians, by the way, did not regard their mentally ill as expen
dable or disposable. They considered them possessed by special spirits...and they revered them.

  But my pal Barney had looked at his ex-friend Charlie and muttered to me, "Wonder what is."

  As soon as I confirmed my suspicion that Annie was still securely locked away at Sybil Brand, I beat it back to that sanctuary and let myself in through that same door, which Barney had tactfully left as he'd found it—and it was exactly as I'd last seen it, except that the apparition of Annie was nowhere about. This is a rather large room, easily twenty by thirty feet, with the ceiling beginning maybe twenty feet high at the back wall and sloping down to seven or eight feet at the front.

  My initial impression, with Annie in the beam, was that the spotlight was affixed to the back wall near the ceiling, but it turned out to be part of a track-lighting system running across the ceding near the back wall. I found a ladder in a janitor's closet and went up there to check it out. It was an ordinary GE sealed-beam spotlight like any you'd find in a modern lighting system, so that disposed of any faint suspicion that what Barney and I had seen was no more than a holographic projection.

  While I had the ladder out, I checked the three other lights on that track and found that each had been turned off at the individual switch at the back of the lamp. That was a curiosity because this room had no windows, so it would surely need ample lighting even by day, and the track system was the only source of light in that room. A single pencil-beam could at no time provide satisfactory lighting for a room so large. I turned them all back on and still there were deep shadows covering more than half the area. I decided that the lighting was for dramatic effect more than anything else. Maybe she liked the symbolism of pure white light piercing the darkness in a beamed effect as a play on the Church of the Light. Or maybe it had an inspirational effect for her. Maybe she always prayed that way.

  Certainly there seemed to be no other purpose to this sanctuary. The room was plain of decor and virtually bereft of furniture. A tiny desk and a single cane-bottom chair said it all for six hundred square feet of space. A door in the front wall opened onto the stage of the auditorium. So there was a front door and a back door. There was a bathroom just large enough to hold a toilet and wash basin; no window there, either. And there was the janitor's closet, a narrow enclosure running the length of a side wall. Nothing else was there—not a picture or a tapestry or any other decoration. I inspected every square inch of those walls and tested every ceiling tile; there were no lenses, no microphones, no loudspeakers.

  It was your classic mystery-movie sealed room. Nothing in and nothing out except via the two doors; there was not even an air-conditioning duct.

  I dragged the ladder around and put the lighting back the way I'd found it. Then I put the ladder away and sat down at the little desk and lit a cigarette. And ipso-presto, Reverend Annie reappeared.

  She was in the beam of light, same as before. Unblinking, unmoving, not a sound. But this time she was only about six feet away from me. I had a ringside seat at three-quarter profile. It was spectacular. The male animal part of me was reacting appropriately, totally without shame. The rest of me felt like a peeping Tom but I could not take my eyes away.

  I thought, what the hell, it's just an apparition anyway, no need to get uptight. But then the smoke from my cigarette drifted into the beam just above her head...and the apparition blinked at that.

  So I was already in an oh shit! mode when those arms came down to its side and the apparition turned to regard me with a solemn gaze.

  And this was too real, too solidly three-dimensional. Those eyes were turning me inside out and the figure in the beam was repositioning arms and legs in a modest attempt at cover.

  I had to clear my throat twice before I could force words through it and ask her, "Can you hear me, Ann?"

  She replied, "Yes, I hear you," but the voice was faint and seemingly far away.

  I said, "Sorry for the intrusion. But I'm on the case and I'm at work."

  She said, "Thank you, Ashton. Please help me if you can. I am in a terrible place."

  I was replying to that, "I am going to—" when she flat winked out, like someone throwing a switch on a light; one moment she was there, the next she was not.

  I was thinking bilocation and astral projection and apportation and wraiths and all the other possibilities, but no explanation—at such a time—is sufficient to quieten the butterflies in the belly or to warm the chills that trickle endlessly along the nervous system.

  She had been there, damn it, in all her physical glory. I could even smell her perfume and taste it on my tongue.

  But do you know what I was thinking, at that very moment? I was remembering our first meeting and what she'd said to me on that occasion—and I was remembering the experience at her home earlier that day.

  She had told me that we would meet again—which we did, at Francois's house that same night—and she had said that we would fall in love—which had not seemed too likely, as of that second meeting.

  But it was the memory through George Farrel that was coming in the strongest, the sense of utter adoration—and I realized that this feeling was now as much my own as anyone's.

  Wonder what is.

  Chapter Twenty: There You Go

  So how do you go home and go to bed after an experience like that? I was not really all that tired, anyhow. Besides, I was beginning to get a feel for this case and I simply could not let it go; so at 1:30 a.m., I gathered all my notes and documents together and took them into an all-night restaurant for a breakfast-table review.

  The waitress was cute and appealing but I guess I was the only customer at her station and she wanted to hang out and talk while I was trying to assemble my case. She delivered my coffee with a flourish and said, "There you go." I don't know why everyone in food service delivers it with "there you go." It is one of those expressions that have crept into the language by the backdoor—like "have a nice day"—except that "there you go" does not really mean a damned thing. If they would say, "There; now go," that would mean something, see, and you'd get their drift. But I think what they really mean is, "There; I went and fetched," and I guess maybe you should scratch their ears or their belly as a reward but I have never tried that.

  At any rate, I had the coffee—but I still had the waitress too. She glanced at the papers I had scattered about the table and said, "What are you, a workaholic? Good-looking guy like you should be able to find something more interesting to handle at two o'clock in the morning than paperwork."

  I put down the Xeroxes of David Carver's file and looked her straight in the eye. "Have any suggestions?"

  She was just flirting. She laughed softly and replied, "Well not with me. I'm here 'til seven o'clock."

  I made a sorrowing face and said, "See? That's the way my luck has been running lately."

  She glanced again at the papers and said, "You're not a cop, are you?"

  I said, "Do I look like a cop?"

  She studied me for a moment before replying, "No, I guess not." Her glance flicked along the papers again. "So what're you doing?"

  I told her, "I play with puzzles."

  "Oh."

  "Keeps me out of mischief."

  "Sounds boring. Surely you could find something better to play with."

  I said, "Well, I'm always open to suggestion."

  She laughed again; said, "If you're still footloose and fancy-free at seven o'clock, come on back."

  I said, "Best offer I've had all week. Thanks."

  I went back to my puzzle.

  She continued to hang out. Presently she told me, "My name is Sandra."

  I smiled but did not look up as I replied, "Yeah, I checked out the nameplate. Mine's Ashton."

  She said, "That's an odd name. Kind of sissy, isn't it?"

  I lifted my gaze to hers and told her, "Well, see, it was given to me by a woman."

  Her laugh that time was a bit uncertain but it sent her away. She was back a minute or so later with my eggs and bacon, deli
vered again with the inevitable, "There you go."

  I asked her, "Want me to scratch your belly?"

  She showed me a wicked smile and replied, "Not 'til seven o'clock." She fussed with the table setting and I guess she was looking at the paperwork while she did that because she said, "Oh. Reverend Annie. She's in here a lot."

  I toyed with the plate of food and casually replied, "Guess it's in the neighborhood, eh?"

  "Yeah. We get a lot of those people in here. Specially on my shift. They sit over there at the big corner booth and gab the night away sometimes. I never heard such junk. I mean, auras and out-of-body travel and all that junk."

  I said, "All that Bible junk, eh?"

  She said, indignantly, "That junk isn't in the Bible!"

  I said to her, "Sure it is. What do you think a halo is? And how do you think Jesus appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus?"

  She didn't know what the hell I was talking about, but she said, "Oh well, that was in the old days."

  I said, "Right, right. This is the New Age, isn't it."

  "Sure. You can't do that stuff anymore. And I'd think they would have something more interesting to do with their time than sit around and talk about that junk."

  I said, "Well maybe they like puzzles, too."

  Her eyes flashed to my paperwork. She said, "I think they like sissies, too. Are you one of them?"

  I chuckled. "One of what?"

  "Half of those men are gay. Now don't tell me you're gay, Ashton."

  I said, "I didn't tell you that, Sandra. Which men are you talking about?"

  "Those guys from Reverend Annie's. Are you part of that bunch?"

  I said, "No. But they are my puzzle, you see."

  She said, "I think you're part of the puzzle, handsome. Never mind seven o'clock. I've got something interesting to do."