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Chapter Seven

TRACY HARRIS WAS a sight for sore eyes when he saw her smiling face at John Wayne Airport when he exited the plane at the US Airways’ arrival gate. She was wearing a red and white summer dress, the skirt hugging her shapely hips and her auburn hair bounced freely on her shoulders. She swept him up in a hug and kiss that made Vince’s skin tingle. Her lips tasted like strawberries. Vince had never expected to be so smitten with Tracy, but smitten he was. Tracy was a godsend.

“So how was the trip?” she asked, taking his hand in hers as they headed toward the baggage claim area.

“Exhausting,” he said. “You don’t know how glad I am to be home.”

He told her all about it as they stood at the baggage claim area waiting for his luggage. She listened patiently. He didn’t know whether he should tell her about his conversation with Reverend Powell and he almost let it slip out, but stopped himself before it could become fatal. Better not bombard her with too much at once. “That’s so terrible, all that happening at once,” she said as he stepped up to the conveyer belt and lifted his tan suitcase up and double-checked to make sure it was his; it was. “It’s also sad. That poor woman.”

“Lillian or my mother?”

Tracy playfully socked him in the arm. “Both, silly! I can’t believe you would say a thing like that! Your mother was murdered horribly! I know you were… well, estranged from her and all, but—”

“I know,” Vince said, dragging his suitcase along, the little wheels clacking along the tarmac. Tracy and Vince exited the terminal, heading down the airport toward the parking structure. “It is awful, the way she died. You should have seen it.”

“Did you see the body?”

“No.” Vince shook his head. “But I saw the room she was killed in. It was pretty gross.”

“Do the police have any idea why whoever killed her would, you know… do all that to her when robbery was the only apparent motive?”

“No, they don’t.” They were silent as they walked through the parking garage, holding hands, Vince dragging his suitcase along. It was a warm day, but it was a touch cooler in the shade of the parking garage. The sky was a clear blue, unusual for a summer day in Southern California, but there was a nice offshore breeze and that helped blow some of the smog away. Vince could actually see the San Gabriel Mountains fifty miles to the north. On a normal summer day it would be so smoggy, the air so still, that you couldn’t even see them.

They reached Tracy’s car, a black BMW, and Tracy disengaged the car’s alarm system and opened the trunk with the remote. Vince helped lift the trunk up and was just about to hoist the suitcase into it when he heard a clink of keys. “Oops,” Tracy said, her other hand fumbling with her purse, a small black pouch that hung by thin straps from her right shoulder. “I’m always so clumsy.”

“Poor baby,” Vince said as he bent down to scoop up the keys, hearing a sharp ping! strike the metal of the open trunk and the tinkling of glass and feeling the whoosh of air over his head.

“What the…?” Vince stood half-bent over, hands clutching Tracy’s fallen keys, wondering what had just happened. He saw Tracy turn her head slowly toward the cars across the lot, a look of puzzlement on her face, and then he stood up, not knowing at first what to make of the small hole that had been punched through the hood of the BMW and the shattered glass of the car’s rear windshield until there was another pinging sound that winged past his left ear, followed by the sound of more shattering glass, and now his stomach leaped in his throat as he looked out and saw a man crouched behind a car four rows over, and his eyes opened wide in surprise and fear as the man raised the weapon in his hands and rose to his feet and Vince dove for Tracy, yelling “Get down!”, the momentum of his body shoving her to the concrete just as the man let loose with a volley of rounds from a semi-automatic rifle, a rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of shells that were now flying with deadly accuracy toward them, blowing holes in the BMW, breaking windows, and as he pushed Tracy ahead of him down the side of her car toward the next row, the bullets seemed to follow them, sending up showers of glass in their wake and his heart was beating so fast, and the noise of the shots was so loud, that he couldn’t hear himself screaming, “Get down, get the fuck down!”

Tracy was crawling on her hands and knees, scraping them on the concrete, and Vince was yelling for her to “Move, fucking move, goddamnit!” and now there was a brief reprieve, as if the gunfire had suddenly died without warning. They darted out in front of a car cruising down the aisle, and all around them were the sounds of cars and people, some exiting the airport, some opening trunks to stow away luggage, and those in the immediate vicinity were all now standing with numb shock, looking at Vince and Tracy as they scrambled madly in a half-crouched position, weaving their way between parked cars as their assailant made one more try, this time having obviously come out of his hiding place to pursue them. They heard his footsteps running down the parking lot, then felt and heard the rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of automatic gunfire spray up concrete and glass as it showered around them, and then it suddenly stopped, only to be replaced by the sound of running feet, the slam of a car door and the squeal of tires as a vehicle raced out of the parking lot, and now there were a lot of excited voices but Vince didn’t know the danger was over. He was pushing Tracy under a parked car, telling her, “We’ve got to hide, get under there!”, and by the time the police came Vince knew that the immediate danger was over.

WHEN THE AIRPORT police officers helped Tracy out from under the Datsun they had crawled under, she started to cry. Vince’s heart was still pounding, and he still felt in fight-or-flight motion—he wanted to get the hell out of there now! But when he saw Tracy’s composure, that beautiful face crumpled in tears, his heart melted and he immediately went to her. She threw her arms around him, sobbing against his neck. “Wh-wh-why! Why was he shooting at us like that?”

Vince could only hold her, comfortable now that the danger seemed to be over. There were two or three cops with them, and he could hear police sirens growing louder as more raced to the scene. “I don’t know,” he said, holding her in his arms. “I don’t know, Tracy. I don’t know.” He closed his eyes, trying to retrace their steps, to recall the face of the man that had suddenly popped out of nowhere and tried to kill him. His mind flashed backed on that first single shot that had gone through the trunk of the BMW and smashed the rear windshield. If he hadn’t bent down to retrieve Tracy’s keys he might be dead now.

There was no question about it. Vince had been the target of this assault.

The next few hours passed quickly. They were questioned briefly by the airport police and then the Irvine Police Department. Detectives came and scurried about, retrieving shell casings and examining the damage. In addition to the tremendous damage to Tracy’s BMW, thirteen other vehicles had been hit, three of them severely. Some of the owners of those vehicles began showing up during the preliminary investigation, and they were made to wait behind the yellow crime scene tape that had been strung up until it was complete. In the meantime, after an initial questioning by Irvine Homicide detectives, they were whisked away to the police station.

They rode to the station in the same squad car and Tracy clutched his hand during the entire trip. He could tell she was deeply disturbed by what had happened. She stopped crying, but her eyes were dark, her brow furrowed with lines of worry. She kept telling him over and over that she just couldn’t believe what’d happened. He stroked her hand and told her he couldn’t believe it either. He tried to comfort her as best as he could, but the more he tried, the more scared and confused he became.

Once at the station, they were led to separate rooms. The room Vince was led in was small and barren, with a single table and two chairs. Unlike crime dramas on television, there were no two-way mirrors. He mentioned this to the detective that accompanied him in the room. The detective, a burly man in his forties with dark hair smirked. “Well, you aren’t a suspect, Vince. Just a witness. We save those rooms for guys like the ones that shot at you and your girlfriend.”

Vince guessed Tracy was in a similar room being questioned too, so the best thing to do was cooperate and try to remember as many of the details as he could. The detective began by asking him what happened, telling him to take his time, to try to remember as much of the incident as possible. Vince thought hard and went slowly, starting with how he and Tracy were walking through the parking garage to their car, how she’d dropped her keys and he’d bent down to retrieve them and that first shot came zinging at him. The detective nodded. “Count yourself lucky, Mr. Walters. Count yourself very lucky.”

Vince nodded and continued. He told the detective that the gunman had fired at least two single shots at them, but once they started running he’d let loose with automatic fire. The detective nodded, jotting notes down in a small spiral notebook. He told the detective how scared he was, how strong the instinct of flight had been, and that he was fairly positive the gunman popped out of his hiding place to pursue them briefly. Then the gunfire stopped and he thought he heard running feet just as he and Tracy slipped under a car, but he didn’t know where the gunman was running. He thought he was running toward them, and that’s what propelled him to keep him and Tracy moving. The next thing he remembered was the first police officers arriving on the scene.

The detective asked him to repeat the story one more time. Then he asked Vince if he’d gotten a look at the gunman. Vince shook his head.

“Do you know why you might have been the target, Mr. Walters?”

Vince sighed. “No. Until lately, nothing like this has ever happened to me.”

“What do you mean, ‘until lately’?”

Figuring they were going to find out sooner or later, Vince told the detective about the trip he’d just returned from and the details of the murder of his mother. The detective looked real interested in this and jotted down notes. He asked Vince the name of the Police Chief in Lititz. “And they don’t have any suspects yet in your mother’s murder?”

Vince shook his head. “No.”

“And you say that the detectives in Pennsylvania think it’s a robbery gone bad?”

“That’s what they think.”

“What do you think?”

Vince shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Will you excuse me for a moment?” Vince nodded, and the detective left the room for a few minutes. Vince sat silently, his mind twisting and turning, going over the events of the last few days. It was obvious somebody had targeted his mother; it hadn’t been a robbery gone bad. Somebody had wanted her dead and now they wanted him dead as well.

The detective returned ten minutes later. “Just got off the phone with the Lititz P.D., and told them what just happened to you. They tell me that all indications in their investigation points to a robbery. I asked a detective there, a guy I believe you spoke with named Jacobs, if he had any reasons to believe that what happened with you today might be related to your mother’s murder and he told me probably not. Just the same, I think we’re going to check things out on our end just to be sure. Why don’t you tell me a little about your mother?”

For the next two hours, Vince told the detective—Rob Staley—everything he knew about his mother’s murder, how she’d lived as a religious recluse. After awhile, another detective joined them. Detective Staley asked Vince if his mother had any enemies. “As far as I know she didn’t,” he said, telling him what he’d told the detectives in Lititz. When he was finished they started over again, taking him through the last few days. Vince didn’t alter his story in any way, nor did recurring narratives bring to light anything he might have forgotten.

Detective Staley mustered a smile. “Sorry this all seems so rigorous, but we do this for several reasons. Sometimes talking about what happened can bring certain things back that the subconscious has buried. You remember more when you relive it.”

“Sorry.” Vince shrugged.

“Don’t worry about it. Sometimes it takes a few days. If you remember anything later, be sure to call me.” He handed Vince his card. Vince pocketed it quickly.

There was a knock on the door and the detective whom Vince wasn’t introduced to answered it. After conferring for a few minutes with somebody outside, he motioned to Detective Staley, who rose and joined him. Both men exited and closed the door, but Vince could tell they were standing right outside the door. Probably comparing notes, he thought. I wonder if they think we have anything to do with this. Vince thought it weird that he was thinking this way. He had always been a law-abiding citizen. Why would the police consider him a suspect in anything? Especially in what happened today at the airport? He and Tracy had clearly been the victims.

After a few minutes, Detective Staley and his unknown partner returned. “Tracy’s outside waiting for you. Her car’s been towed so we can continue our investigation into what happened, but your luggage was retrieved. I’ve got an officer lined up to drive you home.”

Vince rose to his feet and held out his hand. “Thanks. And I’m sorry I wasn’t much help.”

“You were a great help,” Detective Staley said. “Just get in touch with us if you remember any more details. And, between you and me, if I were you I’d get out of town for a few days. It’s obvious somebody has a grudge against you and until we can ascertain otherwise, it’s probably best that you lay low. Do you have any place you can stay for awhile?”

Vince shrugged. “I guess I can see if Tracy can put me up.”

“We’ll have you driven to her place then,” Detective Staley said. He clapped Vince on the back as he escorted him out. “And we’ll have your house checked out as well. I can’t guarantee you twenty-four hour police protection, but I can make sure you aren’t being followed to Ms. Harris’s place and that your place isn’t under surveillance.”

“Thanks.”

Tracy was talking on her cellular phone in the lobby. That worried look hadn’t left her face. Her eyes met his as he entered the lobby. “I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later.” Then she hit a button and folded the phone up. “Hi,” she said. She tried to smile.

“Hi yourself.” He kissed her. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” She nodded. “That was my mom,” she said, indicating the phone as she deposited it in her purse. “I… she gets worried about me and I had to tell her what happened.”

“And worry her even more?” Despite the gravity of the situation, Vince couldn’t help but try to keep the tone light.

It worked. Tracy smiled. It seemed to lift her spirits a little. “I… I guess I just had to talk about it, you know? I had to tell somebody what happened, and that I was okay. It made me feel better.”

“I’m sure it did.” He took her in his arms again, holding her close to him. It felt good holding her. He felt the presence of somebody behind him and turned around. It was a uniformed officer, a young man in his mid-twenties with a black crew cut and piercing brown eyes. “You’re our ride home?”

“I’m Officer Ruiz,” the cop said. They shook hands and detective Staley approached them, dragging Vince’s luggage. Vince thanked him, taking the handle. “I’m taking you to Ms. Harris’s place, right?”

The officer stowed the luggage in the trunk and drove calmly while Vince and Tracy sat in the back seat, listening to the squawks of the police radio. “There’s an unmarked car following us to make sure we aren’t being tailed,” Officer Ruiz said as they headed down the 55 Freeway to Newport Beach.

“How long will I have to be in hiding?” Vince wondered aloud. He traded a glance with Tracy, who still looked worried.

“Hopefully not for long,” Officer Ruiz answered.

Tracy Harris lived in a gated community of luxury town-homes. She punched in the code in the security gate, and Officer Ruiz drove through the complex according to her directions. He parked in the guest parking area near her town home and Officer Ruiz opened the trunk. He escorted them to Tracy’s town-home and stood at sentry duty as she unlocked the front door. “I can check the place out if you want.”

Tracy nodded her approval, and Officer Ruiz searched it quickly. He emerged from upstairs a moment later. “You’re fine.” He nodded at Vince. “You have detective Staley’s card?”

“Yeah.”

“Does he know where to reach you?”

“His partner has my phone number,” Tracy said.

“Good. Anything happens, you know how to reach us.”

When Officer Ruiz was gone, Tracy went to Vince. He held her for a moment. “I can’t believe what happened.”

“Neither can I.”

They moved to the sofa. Vince stretched out, suddenly feeling the weariness in his bones. Tracy couldn’t seem to stop touching him, as if she realized she’d almost lost him and that keeping in contact with him physically would keep him there with her forever. It was something Vince could understand and he welcomed it. “Did they question you?” he asked.

They compared notes as they sat on the sofa. Tracy had been questioned as strenuously as Vince had. No, she couldn’t tell them why somebody would want them dead. “I thought he was shooting at both of us,” Tracy said, holding his hand. “But the more I think about it, the more it seems that—”

“I was the target.”

Tracy nodded. She looked fearful again. “Why would someone want to kill you, baby?”

“I don’t know.” And now, for the first time since the horrifying event, Vince almost did break down. He felt himself beginning to collapse emotionally and Tracy sensed it. She took him in her arms and kissed him, holding him, offering soothing words of comfort to him. Vince clung to her, wanting to lose himself in her.

He found her lips and kissed her, tenderly, softly. She kissed him back, her green eyes deep and reflective. He looked into those eyes and he could feel himself getting lost in their depths, and then she kissed him again and this time he did get lost.

He didn’t know how long they sat on the couch in each other’s arms; it might have been minutes, it might have been hours. Tracy broke the kiss, a look of yearning on her face. She rose to her feet, pulling him up. Then she led him to the stairs.

Once in her bedroom she pushed him playfully onto the queen-sized waterbed. “Wait there for a minute.” She disappeared in the bathroom.

She emerged in black lingerie that was so tantalizing that he practically got hard right there. The brassiere pushed her breasts up provocatively. Her panties were black and slinky, the stockings clung to her legs like they’d been dipped in ink. “Well? What do you think?”

“I’m… speechless,” Vince said. Tracy smiled at him and he felt his heart thudding in his chest. The sexual tension between them had been building over the past week or so, and it was now finally leading to this.

He went into it with as equal a passion as she, kissing her tenderly, hungrily. His skin tingled as her fingernails traced down his chest to his belly, exploding in feathery sensations as she ran kisses down his belly. He leaned back, his mind reeling as she fumbled with the buckle of his slacks. And it was at that moment when panic set in and he thought this moment would be doomed to failure.

As she took him in her mouth, his penis withered like a shriveled stalk until she finally stopped and looked at him with those remarkable green eyes. The minute they’d started with foreplay he began thinking that, one, this was the first time he had made love to another woman since Laura’s death and, two, for all he knew, whoever had tried to kill him could be setting them in their sights now. Tracy seemed to read his thoughts. “You need to relax,” she said, moving over him and pushing him back down on the bed gently. She straddled him, running her hands softly along his chest. “Just relax,” she whispered. “Everything is all right. It’s over now. We’re safe. I’ll take care of you.” She whispered this over and over until he closed his eyes, listening to the sound of her voice, feeling her fingernails tracing across his chest lightly, creating a tingly feeling.

She got out of bed and headed to the bathroom again. When she came back she was holding a red candle. She placed it on the bureau and lit it. Then she joined him back in bed. “Turn over on your stomach.”

He complied, and with the cinnamon scent of the candle perfuming the room, she gave him a long, slow massage. Her expert hands kneaded the tension out of his muscles. When she’d worked over his entire body, she told him to flip over on his back. He complied. She massaged him from head to toe, avoiding the genitals, telling him to just lay back and relax, drift in the pleasures of the flesh, empty your mind.

He closed his eyes, the candle creating a waft of scent that was both pleasurable and relaxing. In no time he found himself floating in ecstasy. He felt so good that he barely noticed when she started on the blowjob again.

He stayed hard. And when he’d maintained his erection for three minutes she stopped working him with her mouth and mounted him. He felt himself slipping into her warmth effortlessly. She moaned, moving over him, and he lay back, enamored by the scents, the sensations, the sounds. He stayed hard and as her passion grew wild he began to meet it. When his orgasm came it was with sweet release, plunging him into further depths of pleasure.

They lay in each other’s arms as it ebbed. Vince cupped Tracy’s face in his hands and kissed her deeply. “You are so beautiful,” he said.

“No, you’re beautiful,” she said, grinning.

Vince could feel his heart racing in his ribcage. “That was so intense,” he said. “I think my chest is going to explode.”

“Gave you a run for your money, eh?”

“You can say that again,” Vince said, sitting up against the headboard. Sweat dotted his chest.

“There’s more where that came from,” she said. She kissed him. “But for now, how about a break? Let’s talk. Tell me more about the trip.”

They started talking about what happened to them at the airport. Tracy seemed to be dealing with it better. They both wondered aloud why somebody would want to have him killed, and Vince voiced his own opinions. “I didn’t tell the police because I thought it was crazy,” he said. “But… I keep thinking that… suppose the same people that killed my mother also want me dead?”

“Why would you think that?” Tracy asked. She was holding his hand as they lay in bed. “What makes you think your mother was even… well, targeted for murder?”

“I don’t know.” Vince shook his head, trying to think of the right way to approach this. “Reverend Powell wants me to come back in a few weeks to help him get to the bottom of this. What this is, I don’t know. We had a long talk after the wake was over. And he didn’t have much more to tell me than Lillian did. But he gave me his impressions on what he first thought about my mother and when he originally met us.”

“And that was?”

“He thought that Mom was running from something,” Vince said, reflecting on that long night of conversation that had kept him up late last night. “Mom never actually came right out and said this, but whenever anybody brought up a question as to what she did before she became a Christian, or what our past lives were like, she evaded the subject entirely. Didn’t even attempt to answer it, much less lie about it. Just evaded it. Changed the subject. And the way she did it was, I suppose, not so subtle. Reverend Powell said he got the strong impression that whatever life we led before mom joined the church was shameful to her. But something so shameful that it pales in comparison to what most people would consider shameful.”

“Don’t most born-agains think that about their past lives?” Tracy asked.

“Yes, in a way,” Vince said. “The shame comes from the sudden knowledge that you’ve led your life without walking with the Lord, and that you lived the kind of life that He would find displeasing. You have lived a life that has offended Him and because the act of being Born-Again is more or less an act of becoming aware of the order of the universe as spoken through God—that He has created us because He loves us, that He offered His only son Jesus Christ up for sacrifice to redeem us—reinforces a sense of… sorrow I guess is the best way I can put it. You feel sorry to God for having lived in such ignorance and sin. And part of that shame comes from the fact that you are so overwhelmingly happy to be saved that you’re ashamed that you’d ever lived the life of a heretic.”

Tracy’s green eyes seemed to glimmer as she grinned. “I can’t believe you were actually a born-again!”

“You say that as if I were once a leper,” he exclaimed, an embarrassed smile on his face.

“It just doesn’t seem like you,” she said. She snuggled against him. “You’re just so… not like that.”

They laughed and kissed again. And they didn’t resume their conversation. Instead, they made love again.

After climax and a brief resting period where they lay in bed, basking in the afterglow of their pleasure, Tracy got out of bed and went to the bathroom. Vince sat up, noting for the first time that the hours had breezed by. It was dark outside now. He rested against the headboard and let his mind drift.

His thoughts returned to the discussion he had with Hank Powell after the wake. They’d talked about plans for Vince to return to Lititz to assist him in investigating the mysterious box that Hank assured him he would find. “I didn’t find it last night,” he’d said, “but I’ll find it soon. I’ll find it if I have to dig up that whole backyard.”

Reverend Powell had appeared nervous and fearful the whole time they’d talked after the wake. He’d appeared nervous, twitchy, and he kept glancing around the room, as if he were afraid their conversation was being overheard. Everybody had left the wake three hours before, so Vince didn’t know where the man’s nervousness came from. He thought of asking him but decided not to. Might just make him more nervous.

Something about that nervousness bothered Vince.

He voiced this to Tracy as she came back into the bedroom. “He was probably just shaken up about facing two deaths in the space of only a few days.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Vince nodded. He really hadn’t stopped to consider how the deaths were affecting Reverend Powell’s sanity. Maggie Walters and Lillian Withers had been very close to him. Reverend Powell’s nervousness, his almost stark fear, could be interpreted as a subconscious way of dealing with their deaths.

Tracy grabbed his hand and tugged him gently. “Want to take a shower?” she asked playfully.

He grinned at her, Reverend Powell, the mysteries of his mother’s past, and his own brush with death forgotten for now. “Of course. Lead the way, my fair maiden.”

And as they continued with their lovemaking in the shower, Vince never thought that Tracy would be able to divert his mind from the horrible events of the past week, much less turn his mind away from Laura. But she did.

HE IS IN a large room in a huge mansion.

The room is dark and he’s seated on a table set low to the floor, which appears to be a cold, polished wood. The room is bare save for the impression of paintings on the walls. A large chandelier hangs from the ceiling over the room, the glass beads trailing down like drops of dew from a heavily misted forest. The lights of the chandelier are off, but the room is illuminated by dozens of glowing candles. The candles are black and white. He sits on the table in the center of the room as the air grows warm. It is then that he is aware of the shapes grouped around the walls.

They move forward, surrounding him slowly. They are dressed in black flowing robes and hoods. They step forward slightly but remain in shadow. The air in the room intensifies, grows leaden. And then the chanting starts.

He snapped awake and blinked, the sounds and smells of the dream fading away as consciousness set in. He shook his head to clear his fogged mind, then glanced to his left. Tracy was lying on her side, her back turned to him, her legs drawn up slightly. He glanced at the digital clock on the stand by his side of the bed. It was 3:35 a.m.

He leaned back into the pillows and sighed. The dream had not only come back, it was more intense now, more real. Shortly after Laura’s death, he’d revealed both the dreams to a therapist he saw for grief counseling. The therapist had been very interested in them. After Vince told him the whole dream, Dr. Smith asked him if he felt any blame for Laura’s death. Vince had mulled this over. He’d told Dr. Smith that consciously he didn’t blame himself for her death, but it hurt him just to think about it. Dr. Smith suggested that this particular dream might be his subconscious’s way of heaping the blame on himself. The toddler in the dream represents how he feels now—alone, childlike, fragile in the face of grief. And the people in the room represent his friends and associates. They appear the way they do—a throwback to the hippie era—because he feels different from other people. Laura’s death has made him feel this way, and the unseen man who grabs him and holds the knife to his throat represents self-destruction as a result of guilt. “We need to explore this further,” Dr. Smith said that first day when Vince spilled the beans about the dream. “If we can get past these feelings your subconscious is holding, you should be able to relax more and go on with your life.”

The dreams ceased shortly after this, and he began to go on with his life, even though he still missed Laura. Now he looked down at Tracy’s sleeping form, snuggled naked into the pillow. He snuggled next to her, spooning his body against hers. His pelvis moved against her rump and she made a sighing sound in her sleep. He kissed one bare shoulder, then lay down beside her, waiting for sleep to overtake him again.

The more he thought about the dreams, the more it felt like they were actual events, dredged up by his subconscious mind. He remembered fragments of his life in California. Some of the people in the Hippie Dream appeared to be people that used to drop in on his parents when they were living in California. He tried to remember the events of his past, but the most he could come up with were scattered images; the time they lived somewhere in a suburb (was it LA? Orange County? Wherever it was, it was Southern California) and he went to school, his mother worked as a secretary, and his dad wore a suit and tie when he went to work. His dad was gone on business trips a lot. He had played with some of the kids in the neighborhood. His mom visited with some of the people in the neighborhood—two of them stuck out prominently in his mind. A woman named Gladys and her husband, and their son, a boy who was a few years older than Vince. Was his name Mark? Frank? Alex? He couldn’t remember. Whoever he was, the older boy was rough, but played with him and looked out for him. There was a girl they sometimes played with, her parents being friends of Vince’s. He remembered her name perfectly. Nellie.

And before then? He really didn’t remember.

If the events of his dream were real, if they’d happened to him a long time ago when he was three or four years old as the dream suggested, he would have blocked it out of his memory. An experience like this would have been traumatizing. And if it had happened, then somebody really tried to kill him when he was a toddler. But why? If the people they were with were hippies, could the would-be killer have been on drugs?

Could this be the reason they’d left California so abruptly? Had his mother angered a cult of hippies?

He reflected on the images written in blood on the bedroom walls of his mother’s house… strangely occult-like in design. He thought of the dreams.

He thought about the attempt on his own life.

Vince turned over on his back, staring at the ceiling. These questions and hundreds of others gnawed at him. He knew he wouldn’t be able to rest until he did some investigating of his own and found out exactly why he and his mother had pulled up stakes so suddenly and moved out of California. And the only way to do that was to try to contact the people he only had a faint memory of. But without last names he was sunk.

When he finally drifted to sleep he went down deep and he had no dreams.