Cursed Read online

  “Can you do something for me?” she said with a sniffle.

  What else can you say to a crying woman? “Anything.”

  “Please call me ‘Tabby.’ Amanda and Nana called me that, and I’m not ready to be just ‘Tabitha.’”

  “Okay, Tabby.”

  Using the nickname drew me closer to her in a strange way, just as I’d felt a wall of defense dropped when she called me “Albert” instead of “Shipway.”

  I reached past her and grabbed the handle of my beer mug. If anything, it tasted colder and sweeter than it had before.

  Some time later, maybe ten minutes, I heard the waitress come by and set down our bill and leave quickly and quietly. I shifted an arm unconsciously and Tabby sat up straight. She gave me a small smile. I held up a napkin and she toweled herself dry.

  A nose blow later, she picked up a French fry and ate it as I would eat a pickle: finger on one end, continuously feeding the mouth while the teeth chewed like a chipmunk. Or maybe a mouse, if a mouse ever ate a pickle.

  When she seemed to be in sufficiently better spirits, when the fries were gone and the coffee near empty, she said, “Thank you.”

  “No problem.” I hated it when people said “No problem.” It always sounded like it definitely was a problem, but they’d get through it despite the inconvenience and burden of your existence.

  When the waitress came by, arms filled with three sloppy pitchers of beer, I flagged her over. “Jack and Coke,” I shouted over the music and hubbub.

  The waitress nodded and was swept along by the tide of people flowing between the bar and the bathroom.

  Tabby looked at me with narrowed eyes.

  I shrugged. “What?”

  “You’re just going to pour amnesia all over yourself, aren’t you? Check out like Amanda always said you did when a problem came along.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said.

  “Don’t mess me with me, Albert. I know about fair and unfair, okay? Having two family members killed in 24 hours kind of falls to the ‘unfair’ side of the scales, don’t you think? And you think a drink is going to help?”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I should have made it a double.”

  “This just makes everything harder, because Nana can’t help us find your wife and Amanda’s baby.”

  I noticed she hadn’t said “your baby.” I couldn’t tell if the omission was intentional or not.

  I tried to think like a cop would, but all I got was blurry, flickering images of television reruns starring Erik Estrada and David Caruso. “Okay. What do we know that we can build on?”

  Tabby seemed relieved to be able to focus on a task. “Their deaths are linked in a way, and that hurts the worst. Whoever killed my sister inevitably killed my grandmother, for the last spell of revenge she cast took all her strength, stopping her old heart.”

  “Is that some law of magic?”

  “It’s actually a three-fold law: what you send out returns to you three times.”

  “Hmm. Sounds sort of like ‘Do unto others and then duck.’”

  My drink came. She sipped coffee and I slugged Jack.

  “Al, who was that in the hall? The man you thought you knew?”

  I wiped sweat from my glass and looked into her blue eyes, and then she became a blur as my mind began to slip and then finally spin out of control, a kaleidoscopic merry-go-round of memories and things that probably hadn’t happened. A gasp, then short cry, escaped my lips, and I’m sure the bar patrons around me thought I was wasted.

  I took hold of the table, a physical effort to steady my dizzying thoughts. I reminded myself that the world was not always what it seemed and that I was part of one of those unsolved mysteries, and that I would need all my strength to steady my mind and nerves to survive.

  If only the stakes were just my sanity, I’d have let it go and polished off the Jack and ordered eight more.

  Like a Weeble wobbling back into place, my mind found its moorings. Tabby came back into view. Her eyes were wide with concern and I saw that she was holding one of my hands.

  “Boy,” I muttered, “they’re never going to let us back into this place.”

  Tabby tried to smile, but she was too serious to fake it. I couldn’t tell if it was her “cop face” or her “grieving Mead” face. “You okay, Al?”

  “I think so. Just your average, run-of-the-mill guy who’s watching everybody around him die while he runs from zombie mice.”

  “I’m sorry. It was my fault.”

  I squeezed her hand in return. “You’ve lost your sister and your grandmother. It’s not your fault.”

  She moved to get up. “Maybe we should be going.”

  I gripped her hand. “No, you need to know about the man I saw.”

  She settled back down in her seat. “Only when you’re ready.”

  I nodded. I was ready. “The man was Gerda’s father.”

  Her face went blank. “I don’t get it.”

  “He’s been dead, Tabby. He’s been dead for nearly fifteen years.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  A hint of fear crossed over her otherwise sullen face, and even the laughter and the Arcade Fire blasting from the speakers didn’t lighten the mood. “You’re kidding.”

  Her voice expressed clearly that she hoped I was kidding, that things were hopefully not getting even stranger.

  “I wish I was. Sure, I could be mistaken, but I swear to God I think that was him. He’s certainly a man I’d never forget, even though I’ve never met him.”

  “You lost me.” And, indeed, she looked absolutely confused.

  I finished the Jack, and cursed under my breath because it hadn’t done a thing for me except steady my hands a little. I belched acid up the back of my throat, and the pain brought me around. I organized my thoughts.

  “You ever heard of Max Richter?”

  “Richter?” I could see the wheels turning in her head, although I’m sure she was thinking of family acquaintances or maybe someone from Amanda’s past.

  “How about the Surgeon of Silicon Valley?” I added.

  “That Max Richter? The serial killer?”

  “The one and only.”

  “But he killed himself in prison ten or fifteen years ago. He was on death row.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You’re kidding. Or are you drunker than you look?”

  “Neither. I’m afraid it even gets more bizarre, more horrible. Her father had killed over forty people over a period of about fifteen years.”

  Tabby sat forward, her grief forgotten, all cop now. “I know. Half the killings were done for Satanic reasons in the early seventies, among groups of people in secret rituals in a basement under the most prestigious church in Hollywood. The members of the Circle of Flames cult included deacons and even the pastor of the church. It would have been one of the biggest scandals to rock Hollywood, except there were a couple of celebrities involved and it got swept under the rug.”

  “That’s an understatement,” I said.

  “I read the case file. The real one, not the four pages in the dirty manila folder they give to reporters and true-crime writers. The victims were all homeless dregs, prostitutes, and junkie porn stars, so nobody really pressed for a serious investigation. That was back before celebrities couldn’t leave their house without a mob of cameras and video crews hoping to get a wardrobe malfunction or drunken stumble, much less something decadent. And, of course, the church had its own reasons not to dig too deeply. But what’s all this got to do with now?”

  “Hopefully, nothing. But with all this magical mumbo jumbo and evil hoodoo going on, I can’t help but get a bad feeling about this.”

  “Are you sure it was him? Not somebody who looked like him?”

  I noticed she’d skipped over the whole “dead” thing, as if it wasn’t a surprise that he was up from the grave and strolling around Fullerton.

  “I’m as certain as I can be.”

  “Where does Gerda fit in
to all of this?”

  I eyed the gleaming rows of bottles doubled in the bar mirror, but they couldn’t save me now. “Gerda’s maiden name was, of course, Richter. In the early seventies, when she was eight or nine years old, her father was one of the High Priests in the Circle of Flames. He would bring her along to the rituals. She had watched as her father ritualistically killed, she guesses, around twenty-five women.”

  Tabitha gasped and shook her head, her hand covering her mouth. Even hardened by a career centered on atrocity and wrong-doing, and accepting a world where magic came to life, she was clearly horrified. “That...that wasn’t in the file.”

  I held the glass in my hand, the cold condensation running between my fingers. Once again, I found myself telling Gerda’s God-awful strange tale. I hadn’t told this story in quite a few years, for it wasn’t exactly something one went around blurting to the neighbors. However, under the circumstances, it was critical to get the story out to Tabitha.

  This honesty stuff was starting to upset my stomach, or maybe all that booze had finally burned a hole through it and drilled into my guts. I went on.

  “The other fifteen or so murders that her father committed were because he was one sick son of a bitch, and on every one of them, he dragged his daughter with him and forced her to watch the whole process. Sometimes she watched from the car, other times he made her hold the tools of the family trade, as if he were teaching her how to build birdhouses or something. I’m sorry for bringing all of this up, Tabby, Lord knows you’ve been through enough, but I think you need to know exactly what we’re dealing with here.”

  She didn’t say anything, no doubt thinking of Amanda and her murder and the pain and horror her sister had gone though before dying. I know I was thinking that right then. Poor Amanda.

  “Nana must have been messing in darker stuff than I realized,” she said, bringing her coffee cup halfway up to her lips and then setting it back down, glancing around frantically. The world around us was almost impossibly normal, raucous, young people on the make, all cares dashed with dancing and drinking.

  I polished off my drink and was about to flag down the waitress again when Tabby slapped down my arm. My elbow thunked the table hard enough to hurt.

  “You’ve got to keep it together, Shipway. Enough.”

  I noticed she only called me “Shipway” when she wanted to shape me up a little, make a man out of the weasel I was trying to be. All that ground I’d made with the “Tabby” must have gone out the window.

  “All right,” I said, licking my lips as Tattoo Boy drank straight from a pitcher like the goon he was.

  “We’ve got to keep moving,” Tabby said. “All this stalling isn’t finding Petey, and, besides, Nana’s curse is still on you.”

  I jerked my feet from the floor, imagining all sorts of little creatures squirming out from under the booths. I’d been so dazed by seeing Richter, and maybe downing a few drinks, that I had forgotten all about the curse. Temporary amnesia had been all too temporary.

  But I figured the mice wouldn’t attack me here in public. It just didn’t seem to work like that. Nana’s curse had been with my “greatest fear,” and my fear hadn’t occurred in a packed bar, the scene of my finest accomplishments in life.

  “All right,” I said. “What next?”

  I was hoping I could buy a few minutes of plotting strategy, and maybe buy one more drink along with them, before I had to venture out in the cool, dark streets.

  Tabby helped by asking something that only a woman would think of, much less bring up under such circumstances. “Why did you marry her, knowing she was damaged goods? Somebody like that is not likely to bake cookies and ferry kids around to soccer games, or whatever it is normal women do.”

  Women who aren’t cops. “Gerda forgot everything the instant she saw it, apparently. A case of self-induced amnesia that helped her survive. What the shrinks called ‘a coping mechanism.’”

  “I could imagine.”

  I had to be careful about this next bit, because I didn’t want to seem like I was disrespecting Amanda. “She was a sweet co-ed when I met her, a psychology major of all things. We clicked pretty easily, and when Thanksgiving came around and I said, ‘So, do we go to my family or yours?,’ she got this faraway look as if I’d just reminded her she’d left clothes at the Laundromat. She told me her parents were divorced and that we should just visit my family. I pressed her, but she clammed up. It wasn’t until six months later that she told me both her parents were dead.”

  “Which wasn’t true.”

  “Not at the time. Her mother had vanished, presumably Victim Number One of the monster that was Max. But Max was in prison when I started dating Gerda, having finally been connected to those series of murders in the San Francisco area. I guess he’d migrated north after the cops let him off for the cult sacrifices.”

  Tabby shot me a look to remind me that she was still on the other side of the blue line. “And you married her before you knew?”

  I didn’t want to talk about the various talents Gerda displayed, many of which might have made me blush if I hadn’t been long past shame of any kind. One of Gerda’s talents, I’d learned in retrospect, was manipulation. All those psychology classes must have paid off, because she moved me around like a pawn on a chessboard, sometimes with her words, sometimes with her body. Maybe I was just weak enough to be the perfect man for the lunatic she turned out to be.

  “The marriage was about as good as any, I guess. A year of honeymoon, and then a few cracks started showing. A little temper, a little forgetfulness, and moments of unexpected cruelty.”

  “Cruelty?” Tabby pushed the cold coffee away. It had probably congealed to sludge by then.

  I gave a forlorn shake of my glass, just to hear the ice tinkle.

  “Once, we were behind this car that hit a dog. She was driving, and I asked her to pull over. I knew the dog was dead, but that’s what you do in those situations, you stand around wishing you could somehow undo it. But she just kept driving as if she hadn’t heard me, and I swear there was even a little smile on her face.”

  The waitress plowed by like a fullback going for the end zone, and this time Tabby practically stood and flagged her down. Not bothering to yell over the crowd, she pointed at my drink and raised two fingers. The waitress understood the universal sign for “probable big tip,” nodded, and hurried on.

  Tabby looked at me. “You get one more drink, Shipway. Make it last.” She sat and huddled closer than she had since we’d taken the booth. “How many years in?”

  “Well, because her parents were dead—or so I thought—I was probably a lot more forgiving and protective than I would have been otherwise. I probably overlooked some signs.”

  The word “signs” now seemed loaded, given the circumstances.

  “But when I married her, I made a commitment—”

  “Stuff it, Shipway. Now you’re losing sympathy points.”

  “Okay, okay. In truth, she was starting to worry me a little, but my career was taking off. You know how the insurance racket is.”

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  Nobody did. Everyone thinks you just send in your payments and hope nothing ever goes wrong, but the claims side of things is big business with lots of opportunity for growth.

  “We just grew apart, the way people do. But one night we were sitting there like a good husband and wife, ignoring each other, when the Richter case came on one of those investigative TV shows. ‘Cold Case’ or ‘Most Wanted’ or something. I’m sure you watch those?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “Does a butcher watch another butcher cut meat on his day off? Do you sit around channel surfing for all those insurance-adjuster shows on cable?”

  There was, of course, no insurance-adjuster shows, but I got her point. The drinks came and I hit mine like a camel losing its hump. So much for making it last. She sipped and sighed, though I couldn’t hear it over Tattoo Boy’s drunken yelling. I continued before I lost my nerve.


  “When that mug shot of Richter flashed across the screen, I glanced up from my newspaper and saw his name beneath his big, ugly face. ‘Richter, just like your maiden name,’ I said, trying to tease and inject some much-needed humor into our relationship. ‘Maybe you’re related.’

  “She went stiff, her eyes open and glazed over. I called out again but she didn’t respond, and it wasn’t until I went over and removed the remote from her clutches that she said anything. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘That was mean.’ She forgave me, and I thought that was that.”

  “And then you found out?”

  “She’d been seeing a shrink, like practically every housewife in Southern California does. But then she started mumbling about memories, and the damage, and I could never get a straight story, and you know how shrinks are. They blabber about doctor-patient privilege while all hell freezes over. But one day three years ago Gerda cracked and told me everything, how she’d been forced to watch the murders, and her father even made her hand over the sacrificial blades during the killings.”

  It was odd but Gerda had told me over drinks at a bar, and here I was telling Tabitha. Or maybe it wasn’t odd at all. Maybe it just meant I spent most of my time in bars, so that’s where most of the weird stuff happened to me.

  “Heavy,” Tabitha said. “That should have gone in the case file. They trimmed that sucker even more than I thought.”

  “He was dead by then. But the body count was left hanging. The police did interview Gerda a few times, but I guess they were happy to close that case and move on.”

  “And leave her with the wreckage?”

  “You know how family is,” I said, noting with regret that my drink was already empty again. So was Tabby’s, but I resisted the urge to flag the waitress again. We needed to get rolling.

  “Yeah.” She gazed off at the neon beer signs.

  “Sorry to be so blunt, but you are very different from Amanda. She was more of the type that would tip-toe around the bush and poke at it with a twig. You use a flamethrower. God, I hope I’m not being inappropriate.”