STUFFED FULL with Du-par’s biscuits and bacon, Lovely sits and threads the coiled roll of microfilm into the sprockets of the library’s brand-spanking-new microfilm reader in the empty viewing room, clicks on the screen light, and manually spins through a year’s worth of L.A. Times back issues while the fan comes up to speed.
The Los Angeles downtown Central Library news archive is a cellar gallery of narrow aisles lined with tall galvanized drawers filled with microfilm and floor-to-ceiling shelves thick with acid-free portfolios of yellowing newsprint going back half a century. It smells of printer’s ink and dust and mold, and Lovely had to wait for a while at the check-in desk until the ancient clerk librarian, with his precious few threads of carefully oiled hair swerved up over a melon of skull, shuffled out with a box of film.
On the hooded screen, headlines blur. He leans in. Photos, text, banner ads, comics, sports. A time machine. Lovely works the wheel, in no hurry, settling, reading, noting the dates, back and forth until he finds the crime story he’s looking for, the one Isla had clipped and saved in her diary: the abduction of Sarah Blohm.
Time spins, words smear, weeks pass. A follow-up story. Still missing, no leads.
Spin.
One final item. A full page, banner headline, sidebar, and time itself frozen in grainy halftones, men standing awkward around a shape under a sheet in the Mojave.
“Gruesome discovery” . . . “loving parents” . . . “her mother Agnes” . . . “grief-struck neighbors in Pacoima” . . . “she never had an unkind word for anyone.”
Lovely scans the story, not so much reading as absorbing. It’s not very original, the ending is hopelessly clichéd, but that doesn’t make it any less sorrowful.
—
CHICKENS IN THE YARD of a small, paint-desperate clapboard farmhouse scatter like refugees as the Morris pulls through the chain-link gate. A boy in short pants looks up from the puddle he’s been slapping with a willow stick. His eyes are like two holes drilled in his angular face, watching Lovely climb out of his car.
“What kinda crate is that?” the boy brays, high and reedy. Lovely makes him for just shy of seven.
“It’s called a Morris,” Lovely says.
“That’s English,” the boy says. “The grille badge shows an ox fording the River Isis.”
Lovely’s impressed. “Is that right?”
“River Isis. That’s in Oxford, England. World’s best university. Someday I’m gonna go there and learn to row.”
A bright-eyed, skeletal woman, younger than she looks, pink skin hanging in folds from her bones, comes through a screen door, wiping her hands on her apron. “You’re going to go get cleaned up, boy.”
“He’s got a car from England.”
“Gilbert Blohm . . .”
“Yes, ma’am.” The boy stabs his stick in the puddle and runs inside.
The woman shades her eyes and squints. “You get lost?”
“Mrs. Blohm?”
“Agnes.”
Touching the brim of his hat, “My name is Lovely. I’m sorry for the intrusion, but I guess you don’t have a phone.”
The woman laughs, without pleasure. “I guess we’re not Rockefellers is what.”
The woman and the boy live fifty minutes north of the city off a two-lane blacktop lined with almond trees and billboards advertising BEAUTIFUL NEW HOMES! that don’t exist. Lovely’s Morris had hustled past several scraped and graded grids of raw earth awaiting sewer and water, snaked through Kagel Canyon, and finally found the bumpy dirt-road driveway that wound into a dusty glen overhung with oak and Santa Lucia fir.
He explains that he’s come to talk about Sarah. He tells her that she can say no and send him packing, but he notices she hasn’t heard much after he said her daughter’s name. It’s like the wind has been knocked out of her. She turns her back on him, to thumb at something from the corners of her eyes, and takes a deep breath and then waves for Lovely to follow her unsteady gait inside.
“For an instant I thought you was here to tell me they found the monster who done it” is the first thing she says when she has him seated at the kitchen table, Lovely having politely declined an iced tea refreshment, thank you. He watches as Agnes seems determined to find something in the room to keep her busy, and distracted, finally settling on a single dish she washes up and then keeps drying, over and over, while they talk. “They never will, though, will they? That’s what I think.”
Lovely tells her, “Sometimes there’s patterns to what these guys do. They have habits, rituals—police can connect the dots, and—”
“You mean he’ll have to kill another girl.”
“Or try.”
“See, I wouldn’t want that. Even if it meant . . . No, nobody else. Nobody else. When you lose someone you love . . .” She looks at him directly, earnestly, all the raw emotions bared by his visit, which he regrets now. “Do you know how that feels, to lose someone, Mr. Lovely?”
He does. Lovely says nothing. There’s a long pause. The chickens. The wind. Tears want to gather in Agnes’s eyes, but none come. Maybe there’s none left. Lovely knows how that feels, too.
“It was wrong to let her go to Los Angeles. I couldn’t ever say no to her. She was all goodness and light.”
“Did she tell you about how things were going?”
“Called. Every Tuesday.” She reads Lovely’s confusion, “My neighbors, the Woolseys”—she gestures off in a direction that could be correct—“they have a two-party line with the Chapmans, and there was a pay phone where Sarah was staying.”
“Did she talk about who she met, who she was seeing, friends—”
“She always made friends easily.”
“She ever mention a friend named Isla?”
“I don’t remember. No.” Agnes sinks awkwardly into a chair across the table from Lovely, folds her palsied hands on the table in front of her, as if she’s praying for him, and Lovely understands now: she’s dying.
Agnes can see that he’s figured it out. She smiles sadly, revealing yellow, broken teeth and swollen gums. “I got the cancer,” she says without emotion. “Six months is my pill-pusher’s best guess.”
Lovely is silent for a moment. “I’m sorry.”
With a wave of her hand she dismisses it. “You didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Husband?”
“Bastard drank himself to death over our girl. No thought for our Bert. Son of a bitch.”
For some reason Lovely asks what will happen to the boy, and Agnes shrugs, helpless. “I got no relatives. The Woolseys are, God, in their eighties or sure, they’d pitch in. Chapmans can’t support the brood they have.” She smooths her hair with both hands and sits back, chin up, looking down on Lovely like some deposed, exiled royal. “I don’t know. County Home. I don’t know. I can’t bear to think it through just yet. Why?”
Lovely has burrowed so far into this he doesn’t know how to turn around and get out. “Seems like a good kid, is all. I’m sorry.” He shifts, uncomfortable.
“You keep saying that,” Agnes observes. “Maybe if you told me why you’re interested in Sarah we could move this along and you can go back where you’re not so sorry.”
“Missing persons,” Lovely lies. “This woman named Isla, she had news stories about Sarah clipped and folded in her personal journal; I thought maybe they’d met.”
Agnes nods. “Maybe. Can’t say yay or nay. Missing persons?”
Well. “Dead,” Lovely admits, then. “Somebody killed her,” he clarifies.
Tears flood Agnes’s rheumy eyes. “Now I’m sorry,” she says, and bursts out laughing, a dry heaving expulsion of air and bitter irony. Lovely lets her get calm and blot her eyes on her apron. “Oh, shoot,” she says finally. “Shit. Shoot.”
“Sarah have a job waiting? Or was it Hollywood that brought her to the city?”
“Oh, Lord. No. No. Sarah was very spiritual. She became enamored of this preacher on the television and went to Los Angeles to be a bicycle altar girl at the drive-in Church of the Cosmic Evolution.”
The words hammer Lovely so hard he’s not sure he even heard them. He looks away and accidentally locks eyes with the little boy hiding in the quiet of the hallway, just peering around a wall’s edge. Green guileless eyes. He reminds Lovely of something he’s lost on his long journey.
Hope?
“God.” Agnes, her voice thin, husky, falters through the rest of a prepared speech, practiced, oft-delivered, but unsparing, “I thought God would protect her, but turns out it’s an astral—no, how did Sarah explain it?—an astrophysics-based belief, science and numbers and such, I don’t know. And so God was turned the other way when my little doll got taken, and . . .” No tears this time, but their absence somehow makes it worse. Whispering, “He wrote me a beautiful note, though.”
“Who did?”
Clears her throat. She looks like she’s slowly collapsing in on herself, second by second, a vanishing act. “The preacher.” Again she’s able to muster that unhappy, gracious smile. “Reverend Drummond. Just the most beautiful thing you’ve ever read, full of God’s goodness, sorrow, and regret.”
—
GRIM OVERCAST had chased him all the way back from the outer valley, but an incandescent sunset had momentarily erupted under the clouds and pinked the Angeles Crest when Lovely parked above the Arroyo Seco one more time, on the fire road. He had nosed off into the weeds, where, from the front seat of the Morris, he could peer down through the fence at the Aerojet barn.
Now night falls fast on the Colorado Street Bridge; the globes flick on and glow. Farther south, dreamlike at this distance, the peculiar Oz of downtown Los Angeles, scattering of Bunker Hill lights powdered by night mist, City Hall tower jutting blond, nothing taller, into a luminous mocha starless sky. Headlights strafe the bridge railings. Someone’s big Bel Air wagon hurries into Pasadena on whispering whitewall tires.
The quiet is harshed by crickets. Drummond’s Ford, parked out in front of the barn, has been there since Lovely arrived long before the appointed time. Lovely doesn’t expect this to unfold the way Atlee Drummond has promised; in the spook life, his guiding principle had always been that there was the strategy you went in with, and then there was what actually would happen.
No light from the lab. But after a moment Drummond comes out, a shadow, and looks around. Nervous.
Lovely checks his watch.
It’s time.
Drummond, anxiously pacing the car park, lifts his eyes as Lovely comes skating down out of the sage. Dust swirls. Security lights drop white curtains along the barn side.
“I was worried you wouldn’t come.”
Lovely assures the preacher he wouldn’t miss this for all the world.
A primer of Drummond’s plan: “He thinks we’re meeting to talk about my surrendering to the authorities. You’ll stay out of sight, but close enough to hear. I’ll get him talking. He loves to hear himself talk.” Drummond flicks on a flashlight and leads the way back inside the lab door he’s left gaping. “There’s a Dictaphone I can turn on, maybe it’ll pick up our conversation.
“He shot her in here.” By the time Lovely catches up with him, Drummond is crouching down, his flashlight beam aimed at the unfinished hardwood floor. He pushes back a scrap of rug. Faint stains, but this is a working lab, they could be from anything.
“Why?”
“She tried to get more money out of him,” Drummond says.
More?
“He paid her ten grand to take care of the pregnancy, but she got greedy, came back, and asked him to expand the hush fund. Considerably.”
Lovely can’t let this go unchallenged. “Greed was not one of Isla’s vices.”
“How do you know?” The preacher flicks the flashlight beam into Lovely’s face, suspiciously, momentarily blinding him, then darts it out the door, into the darkness. “He’ll be here soon. You better hide.”
“If you don’t start telling me the truth,” Lovely says, “I can’t help you.”
“Truth?” Drummond laughs. “What do any of us know about the truth? What does the truth even matter in a world where we can be vaporized in an eyeblink? The truth is, we are nothing. Atoms gathered temporarily, in space and time, destined to be released again, a scuff on the shine of eternity.”
“It matters to me,” Lovely says. “That’s all I got. I can’t answer for the universe. I don’t want to.”
Lights out. Click. Lovely can barely see. “Drummond?” He hears feet scuff across the floor. Tracks what he thinks is Drummond’s shadow in the shadows, but it could be wishful thinking.
“I’m thirsty,” Drummond says, unconvincingly, from nowhere near where Lovely is looking.
Then there is the sound of water running. Of footsteps scraping floor. But no disruption of that splatter of water streaming into the steel sink basin, no rustle of clothing as man hunches over the tap. No sharp intake of breath as he drinks. Lovely closes his eyes and then opens them again, trying to locate Drummond, pretty sure he knows where the preacher’s going now. “I talked to Agnes Blohm today. She said you wrote her a very touching note, after the discovery of her daughter’s body.”
Nothing from Drummond. But there is a faint ticking sound: the clock? Lovely feels a dull buzz of adrenaline, but his mind is still catching up with his intuition.
“Sarah Blohm. Name ring a bell?”
Nothing from Drummond. Time slows: the ticking of the clock, slows. A rattle of metal. “She was one of your girls, Drummond. Did you kill her?” Lovely takes a quiet step backward, toward the door behind him. “Or was it Lamoureux? Was he backing your church so he’d have pick of the litter?”
Not a clock. A timer.
Now Lovely hears a palpable panic of clatter from the back of the lab. An eruption of light, in which: Drummond, at the rear door, his flashlight aimed at the deadbolt, fingers frantically throwing the latch back and forth, dumbfounded that the door doesn’t—won’t—open for him—
—tick tick—
—Habakkuk 2:3. Though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come—
—tick—
—Drummond glances back at Lovely with an expression of desperation, then utter surprise—and helplessness—horror—perhaps even contrition—
—Daniel 11:27. The two kings, with their hearts bent on evil, will sit at the same table and lie to each other, but to no avail, because an end will still come at the appointed time—
—tick tick—
—and Lovely pivots and plants and throws himself toward the front door, letting gravity carry him just that much faster through the gap, shouldering it open wide, stumbling out onto the gravel driveway, falling, curling, covering, hands over and behind his head, because—
—tick tick DING.
The flash of fire beats the first thundering concussion to Lovely by a fraction of a second. It doesn’t seem likely that there could be anything louder; a dust of window glass spews, pulverized, a hot wind lifts and skids him pinwheeling farther out across the yard, thrown clear, while, inside, debris and the hellfire leap toward shattering beakers of chemicals and spilling vats of rocket test fuel, igniting all of it, everything, and causing the barn to explode in a hurricane of wood and metal and glass, and the pyrotechnics of secret fuels and molten metals cyclone around Lovely like mad Chinese fireworks.
Time stops. He can hear his heartbeat. He can hear his father’s Sunday school scripture: Zephaniah 3:8. The whole world will be consumed by the fire of my jealous anger. He can hear the high-hat cymbal at the Fall-Out switch and scuff and Lily’s high, clear voice singing the opening stanza of “C’est Si Bon,” and it’s in whatever key that fierce ringing in Lovely’s ears is in, and, yes, he’s still breathing, still intact, he’s been here before, always in the wake of some dreadful nonsense in which he played the fool’s role—Dresden, Berlin, Shandong, Damascus, Seoul, Tehran—watching the drift of civilization’s crimson embers and impossible indigo spitfires from the smoldering rubble, and Lovely sits up in mustard weed and the smoke sifting stillness of the Arroyo Seco, brushing cinders off his shredded suit, dazed.
Lucky, as he’s been told many times, to be alive.