Fearing that they might lean over the counter or come to the end of it to shine their flashlights along the service area, I eased into a space once occupied by an under-the-counter refrigerator or other piece of equipment, into cobwebs that clung like a veil to my face and tickled my nostrils toward a sneeze.
As I wiped the veil away and imagined poisonous spiders, the woman asked, “What was the body count, Wolfgang? I mean in this store alone?”
Wolfgang had a voice perhaps roughened by countless packs of cigarettes and more than a little whiskey taken neat and therefore scalding. “Four, including a pregnant woman.”
I had thought they must have found the door through which I’d forced entry, the tools that I’d left behind. But they didn’t seem to be searching for anyone; evidently they had entered the mall by a route different from mine.
The second man had a soft voice, naturally mellifluous but too honeyed, as though he must be so practiced in deceit that even when he was in the company of his closest comrades and speaking from the heart, he could not change his tone to match the circumstances. “Mother and child taken together. Such admirable efficiency. Two for the price of just one bullet.”
“When I said four,” Wolfgang replied with a note of impatient correction, “I wasn’t, of course, counting the unborn.”
“Incunabula,” the woman said, which meant nothing to me. “It wasn’t in the newspaper count of nineteen. Why would you think it had been, Jonathan?”
Rather than reply, the corrected efficiency expert, Jonathan, changed the subject. “Who were the other three?”
Wolfgang said, “There was a young father and his daughter …”
I had known them. Rob Norwich was a high-school English teacher who sometimes had Saturday breakfast with his daughter, Emily, at the Pico Mundo Grille. He loved my hash browns. His wife had died of cancer when Emily was only four.
“How old was the child?” the woman asked.
“Six,” Wolfgang replied, adding a sort of sigh to the end of the word, making two syllables of it.
I wondered who these people were, for what purpose they had found their way into the mall. Perhaps they were merely three more of those legions whose patronage made hits of torture-porn horror movies, on vacation and eager to satisfy their morbid curiosity by touring mass-murder sites. Or maybe they were not as innocent as that.
“Just six,” the woman said, as if relishing the number. “Varner would’ve been well rewarded for that one.”
Simon Varner, the bad cop, the gunman on that day.
Wolfgang had all the facts. “Her father’s face was blown away.”
Jonathan said, “Any chance the coroner determined which of those two was shot first, Daddy’s girl or Daddy himself?”
“The father. They say the daughter held on for about half an hour.”
“So she saw him shot in the face,” the woman said, and seemed to take smug satisfaction in that depressing fact.
One of the flashlight beams traveled up the long list of ice-cream flavors on the back wall, which I could still see from the nook in which I hid, and at the top it came to rest for a moment on COCONUT CHERRY CHOCOLATE CHUNK.
“Victim four,” said Wolfgang, “was Bronwen Llewellyn. Twenty years old. The store manager.”
My lost girl. She disliked the name Bronwen. Everyone called her Stormy.
Wolfgang said, “She was a good-looking bitch. They showed her photo on TV more than any of the others because she was hot.”
The beam traveled across the flavor list, to the wall and down, lingering for a moment on a pattern of blood spray that once had been scarlet but was now the color of rust.
“Is this Bronwen Llewellyn important?” asked Jonathan. “Is she why we’ve come here?”
“She’s one reason.” The light moved away from the bloodstains. “Ideally, she’d be buried somewhere, we could dig her up, use the corpse to mess with his mind. But she was cremated and never buried.”
In addition to seeing the spirits of the dead, I have a gift that Stormy called psychic magnetism. If I drive around or bicycle, or walk, all the while thinking about someone—a name, a face—I will sooner than later be drawn to them. Or they to me. I didn’t know these three people, wasn’t thinking about them before they arrived; nevertheless, here they were. This might have been unconscious psychic magnetism—or mere chance.
“Who has her ashes?” the woman asked.
“I don’t know. Several possibilities.”
Their footsteps retreated from the ice-cream shop, and distance dimmed the lights they carried.
I came out of hiding, rose to my feet, and hurried to the gate at the end of the counter. Regardless of the risks, I needed to know more about those people.
REVEALED ONLY AS SHADOWY FORMS WIELDING swords of light, the trio moved leisurely toward the north end of the mall, pausing to fence with the darkness and illuminate one point of interest or another.
I dared not switch on my flashlight. Their conversation gave me some cover, but if I followed blindly in their wake, I was likely to step on something that would make enough noise to attract their attention.
My dilemma was resolved when a hand laid on my shoulder made me turn my head, whereupon I came face-to-face with a softly glowing man who had no face. Eyeless sockets regarded me from a mask of bullet-torn flesh and shattered bone.
After so many years of supernatural experience, I was by then immune to the sudden fear that others would have experienced at the unexpected touch of a hand in the dark. Likewise, the hideous face—or the absence of one—inspired no fright, but instead sadness and pity.
I could assume only that here stood the spirit of Rob Norwich, who had died in the ice-cream shop almost two years earlier, the father of six-year-old Emily, who had also died. If the child had moved on from this world, her father had not.
Never before had a spirit appeared radiant to me, and I thought he manifested in this manner so that, by accompanying me, he might serve as a lamp to reveal the way. Aglow or not, he could be seen only by me, and the light that he emitted, although it revealed the floor around us, most likely also remained invisible to Wolfgang and Jonathan, and to the nameless woman.
His face in death resolved into the countenance he possessed when alive, the wounds closing up. Rob had been thirty-two, with receding blond hair, pleasant features, and eyes the soft green of cactus skin.
He cocked his head as if to inquire whether I understood his purpose, and I nodded to confirm that I did and that I trusted him. The dead don’t talk. I don’t know why.
Quickly he led me to the nearby escalator, which was powerless now, only a staircase of grooved steel treads that angled over the dry formation that had once been the koi pond. I followed him up to the second floor, for the moment heading away from the creepy trio that interested me.
I feared that the escalator, so long out of service, would creak or clatter underfoot. The treads were firm, however, and they weren’t littered with debris.
At the top, I followed Rob Norwich to the right and then north, keeping away from the storefronts, staying near the railing beyond which, had there been more light, I could have looked down into the ground-level promenade. Here and there lay scatterings of trash, but guided by the spirit’s radiance, I was able to step over or around the debris without making a sound.
On