Life to Life Page 8

  If I'd had to take one or the other, though, I'd probably have taken reincarnation because the theory itself does harmonize so beautifully with natural science and what we know—or think we know—about life on Earth and man kind in general. Reincarnation—metempsychosis, as it is also known—provides the balancing complement to the theory of evolution. Or, as some thinkers would prefer to think of it, evolution validates reincarnation and vice versa.

  So, see, I've never really had a coherent belief-system in place inside my head or else I would not have this inconsistency of thought. I say on the one hand that I cannot accept a disorderly universe while on the other hand rejecting ideas that promote orderliness of the phenomenal world. I don't like the idea that we can talk with the dead, yet I have long believed that the personality survives death in some manner or other. Reincarnation theory provides, among other things, a rational explanation of what happens after death. Most reincarnationists believe, moreover, that there is a waiting period between incarnations while the soul or whatever is preparing for the next life—so this tends to support the whole spiritualistic concept of spirit guides and direct communications between the living and the dead.

  I know, see. I have known these things for quite a long time, at least in the intellectual sense. It's my belly that just does not want to go along, and it was my belly that put me at Janulski's throat instead of taking a long, careful look at the experience—and maybe then going for his throat. Because even if I fully accepted spirit communications and all that, it is a field tailor-made for charlatans, and their numbers are legion. In fact, there are obviously more charlatans than mystics in spiritualism. So I don't buy just anyone who comes down the pike. In fact I had not bought anyone at that time, even though I'd encountered a few whom I could not readily debunk. Reasonable skepticism should move a guy just so far, though. Mine had moved me too far too fast in the matter of Janulski and his mediums.

  But, see—what really moved me was not as much skepticism as the feeling of trespass into a highly sensitive personal area. Trespass, that is, with intent to hoodwink and deceive. Here too, though, my reaction was not consistent with the experience. The whole thing had been conducted in broad daylight and with absolutely no apparent means of introducing theatrical special effects. I saw and heard with my own eyes and ears; I was very positively impressed that it was an authentic experience, while it was happening. It was only in afterthought that I felt the need to reject it.

  At the bottom line, then, I have had to accept the unhappy conclusion that I reacted the way I did against Janulski because I almost desperately wanted the experience to be a valid one. I had to prove it. So something in my gut—or something in the way I work—fired me up and sent me via rage to prove it in the only way available: by trying and failing to disprove it.

  Well, let me tell you, I shook down Annie's private office —where I had the earlier conversation with Janulski—and found no electronics whatever. Just for the record, one of my Pentagon specialties was electronic countermeasures; I know where to look and how to look for electronic eavesdropping devices.

  I had already begun to feel a bit sheepish even before the completion of that search. Janulski had followed me from the conference room and was standing just inside the office in a grimly quiet watch of my activities. The three mediums and two other ladies were hovering about just outside. The sweep required only about two minutes. I stepped past Janulski, told him, "Okay, so I'm a jerk," and went out to apologize to the mediums.

  They already knew I was a jerk but apparently they did not know what had set me off. Rachel graciously accepted my apology and pointedly told me, "We are merely channels, you know. We provide the machinery on this side, and that's all. We don't even know what has been divulged unless we listen to the tape or read a transcript."

  Ted shook my hand and waved off the apology. "People often get upset," he said, dismissing the entire incident.

  Hilda merely smiled and walked away.

  That left Janulski. He carefully closed the door to Annie's office as he said to me, as though none of it had happened, "We can check the tape if you're foggy on any of the details. But since we got a tutorial this time we have to have a double verification—that is, two independent tran-scriptions for comparison—before I can even touch that tape. So it will be a few minutes."

  We walked outside and sat in the gazebo so I could have a smoke. I asked him, "You put a lot of stock in these tutorials?"

  He replied, "Wouldn't we be terribly foolish not to?"

  I said, "I guess it would depend on the source."

  He said, "Good point. But we feel very secure about that."

  I wondered, "What if it's coming from a mother ship in earth orbit?"

  He shrugged and said, "It would have to be a very large mother. How many people would you say pass each day from this planet?"

  I shrugged, too, and replied, "Look at how far we've come ourselves already with micro-technology. Maybe they could store a whole soul on a chip no bigger than a single human cell. Call it up and play it back anytime they want to, just like we do in a computer."

  He said, "You'll go to any length, won't you, to deny that you met your father today."

  I sighed and told him, "Looks that way, doesn't it."

  He said, "He seemed like a nice man. I can tell you that he has reached a very exalted level over there. I have never seen that particular effect before. I mean, the way he became manifest. We never get more than vocal effects. But he came in visually both times."

  "When was the other time?"

  "He came in that way last night during a routine contact with my regular guides. Told me that he was taking a special interest in our project during this time of stress and that he would advise me directly from time to time. He also mentioned you, and I had the impression that there had been a father-son thing between you in another incarnation. But really, Ashton, there's no mistaking what he was talking about today. Believe me, it shocked me as much as it did you. But I can understand why you'd—I mean, the way you felt about it and all. That would have been really too bald of me, wouldn't it, if I could have set up something like that. Honestly, I wouldn't know how to do it."

  I said, "Guess I wouldn't either. Why couldn't he hear me when I spoke to him?"

  "Gosh that was strange, wasn't it. Come to think of it, he didn't give me a chance to speak to him last night either."

  I suggested, "It was like a television broadcast, wasn't it. You know like these hookups they're beaming from a remote location to a studio."

  Janulski thought about that for a moment before replying, "Well no, because he could see us. He just couldn't hear us."

  I said, "So one of the audio links was down. Could we ask Rachel about that? How she did that relay?'

  "Rachel didn't do that," he told me. "It was the guide on the other side using Rachel. She knows less about it than we do."

  I said, "She doesn't know much, then."

  Janulski chuckled soberly. "You're still a bit shocked. When you stop to think about it, you'll realize that we know all we need to know. That's the way this works. It doesn't matter, Ashton, if it's coming from a mother ship or Alpha Centauri or Cleveland. What matters is that we are receiving help from someone a lot smarter than we are. Call it whatever you like. But good heavens, don't disregard it just because you can't figure out how you're getting it."

  I replied, "Oh, I'm not going to disregard it." I pulled the notepad out of my pocket and stared at my jottings. "This is a tutorial, eh?"

  "Yes. Of course, we have to decipher it."

  "Sounds like epigrams. Most of it, anyway."

  "The really important teachings come that way. Don't ask why, that's simply the way it's done." He shrugged and showed me a tired smile. "Maybe that's the only way they can get it cleared for transmission."

  I smiled back, told him, "Dear old Dad didn't seem to have that problem. He gave me a literal message."

  “Selma came home today? That's what you mea
n?”

  "That's the one, yeah."

  "We get those from time to time. It's not so literal."

  "What does it mean?"

  The smile grew tireder. He scratched his face, looked at the ground, and told me, "I don't know who Selma was on earth, Ashton. But you must. It simply means that somebody died."

  I knew that, yeah. I knew that.

  Chapter Fourteen: A Resolving Focus

  Selma came home, yes, but it was Clara Boone who had officially died shortly after I dropped her at her home that morning. She'd suffered a severe stroke—apparently the result of "thrombus of the internal carotid artery"—and died minutes after calmly notifying a 911 operator that she was in difficulty. The paramedics found her front door invitingly open and Clara dead on the couch when they arrived. They transported the body to County General for an official DOA enroute to the morgue. A card in her purse pointed authorities toward a local attorney as the person to notify in the event of death but they had not been able to contact him. I gave them my name and number and asked that I be informed as to the ultimate disposition of the body, then I went to Eagle Rock.

  Clara's house was locked but there were no police seals so I defeated the locks and went on inside. It looked pretty much as I had visualized it in there—gracious and tidy but very small, really—about a twelve-by-fifteen living room, tiny dining nook with access to a cement patio, kitchen, a single bedroom, simple bathroom with just room enough for toilet, basin, and tub; laundry porch off the kitchen.

  I poked about, not really knowing what I was looking for but hoping to find another tie to Reverend Annie and the Church of Light situation. It was a bit uncomfortable going through Clara's personal things. I'd barely known her, sure, but still there is that feeling of trespass when you're sifting through the pitiful remnants of a life. Buried in a dresser drawer beneath sweet-smelling but very old lingerie was a savings bank passbook showing a balance of less than five thousand dollars. There'd been no deposits during the life span of that passbook—a period of several years—but monthly withdrawals in small amounts. She'd probably lived as simply as possible; there was evidence enough of that all around me.

  This was a maiden lady; seventy-five years on the planet and never married. Apparently she left no family whatever. In a moldy and tattered photo album on a bedside table I found a photostat of her birth certificate, a few yellowed mementos of her school days, about forty faded snapshots with illegible captions but obviously taken a very long time ago and showing men with handlebar mustaches and stiffly corseted ladies. Then there were another twenty or so from a later era—thirties, obviously—each showing a dazzlingly beautiful and glamorous Clara in various costumes and usually with a man but never the same one. These looked very much like promotional stills from old movies.

  I hit pay dirt at about mid-album. It was into the forties. Clara was more mature but still alluringly beautiful. Ten full pages of the album were covered front and back with small box-camera type snapshots, each one depicting Clara and the same handsome young man in affectionate poses. I was sure it was Clara in each of these but I would not have tumbled for sure to the guy except for the blown-up eight-by-ten that came at the end of that sequence. It was a beach setting and I could tell by the background that the photo was taken at Malibu and I could even narrow it closer than that. The houses shown behind the subjects were homes at the Malibu Colony. And Clara had told me...

  But the guy...

  There was simply no doubt about it. It was the same guy that appeared in the preceding dozens of snapshots.

  And that guy was a younger and handsomer but still unmistakable Francois Mirabel.

  Did I say pay dirt?

  My mistake. I should have said bonanza because I was looking, remember, for ties. And because the five pages following that eight-by-ten were filled with pictures of Francois and another woman whom I did not recognize. And although the earlier photos of Francois and Clara were obviously all taken at nearly the same time, this series was spread over a number of years. Quite a number of years, because I watched the growth of a child in that series of old pictures. It was a girl child and she joined the couple in those photos as a toddler. The series ended with her at about ten. Another series picked up at that point but carried the mother and child only into the child's midteens. And there was simply no doubt that this was young Reverend Annie.

  A bonanza, yeah, with my friend Francois tied a hell of a lot closer than I would ever have guessed. It occurred to me, in that realization, that the man was probably in very grave danger. Because it seemed that everyone with ties to Annie was dying.

  I hit the Century Towers at just a few minutes past five o'clock and found Francois all alone in his offices. He was having a business conference with Rome and handling the fast Italian patter with no show of difficulty. I helped myself to some water on the rocks and stood at the window looking at nothing, trying to draw the pieces of my brain together for some kind of a coherent picture of this dizzying case.

  First of all...what case?

  I had known from that first visit to Church of the Light that I was involved in something and that it had come to me—not vice versa. I had felt the tingle that raises my hackles even before that meeting with David Carver on the night that Milhaul died; the tingle had come from Annie, not from Carver—yet Carver tingled me too in reverse fashion and set me up for the late-night visit by Bruce Janulski and the urgent summons by one of the world's richest men, Francois Mirabel.

  Everyone was pushing a case at me—even Annie, in that first meeting when she told me that we would meet again and that we would fall in love; this immediately after publicly declaring over and over that she had been a target for murder and then privately telling me that she had known in advance that I would save her. Apparently Francois had contacted me at Annie's behest. A couple of hours later she was telling me to get lost.

  Francois was treating her like a prize investment and insisting that I protect that investment while also hinting that his interest in Annie went a bit deeper than that.

  Janulski apparently thought of her as a saint and would murmur no hint of criticism despite the strange circumstances that brought them together in the first place. And the summons brought to me by Janulski originated, he claimed, in another world, and he even brought me greetings and later confrontation with an exalted spirit claiming to be the father I had never known.

  Then, shit, there was Clara who killed Carver and exposed me to Selma. Clara, best friend of Maybelle who turns out to be Annie's mother; Clara, who a very long time ago was beautiful and glamorous enough to be in pictures and spent a weekend with someone at the exclusive Malibu Colony and came away with dozens of snapshots but apparently nothing else and obviously went into total eclipse behind Maybelle and Maybelle's daughter—so eclipsed, it seemed, that she remained a maiden all her life but maintained close ties with Maybelle who also seems to have gone into eclipse at some point very long ago; Clara, whose death today was announced from another world by Dear Old Dad to send me back to Eagle Rock and a tattered photo album.

  What case? Surely not the same one that sent David Carver to his death and Paul Stewart raging to the D.A. for murder indictments on a string of deaths stretching backward in time for fifteen years or so and Reverend Annie to Sybil Brand Institute for Women. Surely not the same one that brought the suicide of a despondent homosexual youth, or the police shooting death of an ex-con child molester, or the accidental asphyxiation death of Annie's own mother.

  Carver had thought of Annie as a black widow—a nasty critter that devours its mates—and now Stewart seemed to share that view and wanted to pin a number of psychic projection murders on her, as well.

  Janulski called her a saint and a spiritual force whom the entire physical universe was girding to crush.

  Clara—dear Clara—had referred to her as simply "that girl" but in a decidedly critical tone. Francois and Annie herself seemed to believe that she was in some sort of real danger other th
an that posed by the police interest in her—and, I presumed, other than some malevolent counterforce from the resistant universe.

  So what was the case I was working?

  I did not have the faintest goddamn idea.

  I set my water-rocks on the bar, ambled over to Mirabel's desk and disconnected his telephone with Rome still dickering, opened Clara's photo album in front of him and said, "What the hell is this, Francois?"

  He looked at the album for about one second then snapped his eyes at me. "Wherever did you get this?"

  I snapped right back at him and said, "No dice. Me first. What is it?"

  He sighed, looked back to the album, leafed through a few pages, sighed again. "How insignificantly the years pass by. But I was quite handsome once, no?"

  I said, "Look again, pal. And not just at yourself. Look at the world around you. Who do you see?"

  "Her name was Maizey," he replied softly. "We were very much in love. But it was not to be."

  "The kid, Francois."

  "The chief reason it was not to be," he said. "I could not marry. A wife, in Paris. Catholic, naturally. Maizey wanted a father for her child." He sighed heavily. "So she found one.

  I flipped to the next series of snapshots, the ones featuring only mother and child.

  "Same kid?" I asked.

  He glanced at the album then did a double take, eyes crackling into the revelation suggested there.

  "Holy Mother," he whispered.

  "Holy child," I corrected him. "So what the hell is this, Francois?"

  He was too stunned to reply. I had finally seen the guy with absolutely nothing to dissimulate.

  But there was no joy in that observation. Because my case had just slipped into focus, though through a glass darkly. And it scared hell out of me.