Broken Dream (Dark Angel)

  ‘Why are we doing this?’ Grace wanted to know. ‘Even Macy wouldn’t be crazy enough to come out here in these conditions.’

  The multicoloured Christmas lights in the trees winked. I followed where they led – towards a silver glow outside the gates which hung with thick icicles almost a metre long. Looking up at Carlsbad, I saw that the peak was hidden by thick grey cloud and that great swirls of snow were blowing in from the west.

  ‘What can you see?’ Holly asked me.

  ‘A light. I connect it with my good angels. We have to follow it.’

  We walked through the gates out of the hotel grounds, our feet crunching over the frozen crust of snow, a wind howling in our ears.

  ‘Where? I can’t see any frickin’ light,’ Holly protested. ‘We’re being tricked here; led by the nose until we get lost.’

  ‘It’s like searching for Adam all over again,’ Grace sighed. ‘Only this time I don’t think we get a good outcome.’

  The wind blew and the snow fell, silent and white, soft and cold, covering our footprints. The silver light beckoned me on.

  ‘Tania, maybe Holly’s right.’ Grace overtook me. ‘We didn’t fall for the dark angels’ fake dungeon and tunnel trick, so now they create this new illusion – the “good angel light” – because they totally know you’ll follow it.’

  ‘You two don’t see it?’ I asked her and I pointed to where the light was leading – up towards the ski lift terminal.

  ‘No, but I do see a light switched on inside the terminal,’ Grace replied.

  ‘Not that. I’m talking about more of a silver glow.’ It was the glow that had surrounded Maia when she first explained to me the battle for power between good and evil, the light that accompanied the armies of good angels when they came to do battle against evil and darkness. Zenaida, my mourning dove, had brought the same soft, pure light out of a clear blue sky. She’d perched in the aspens at the end of my garden and told me who she was – my guardian spirit who would always be there for me. And now Adam, with his own pure spirit and a child’s wisdom was leading us to Macy.

  As I began to run up the mountain, the snow crust beneath me gave way and I sank to my waist. I struggled out of the drift and on up the hill.

  The electric light in the terminal went off then on again and the chairlift motor started to whir.

  ‘You were right, Grace. There’s definitely someone in there,’ Holly cried.

  An empty gondola left the terminal and started up the mountain, hardly visible through the thick snow. A second followed – still empty. Holly had reached the foot of the steps leading up on to the platform when Owen appeared at the top.

  ‘Where’s Macy?’ Holly yelled. She took the metal steps two at a time, closely followed by Grace. But I could see what they couldn’t – a third gondola emerging from the terminal, containing a small, slight figure dressed in a bright-red cloak. Macy. It jerked, hesitated then carried her up the mountain out of our reach.

  Owen laughed as he stopped Grace and Holly from entering the terminal. He kicked out and landed his foot against Holly’s shoulder, forcing her backwards into Grace. Together they slid down the steps.

  ‘Macy!’ I yelled her name, got no response. The red figure in the ski lift was turned away from me, gazing up at the white blizzard howling down from Carlsbad peak. The covered chair swung and tilted dangerously. ‘Macy!’

  Now she heard me and turned.

  ‘It’s me – Tania. Stay in your seat. I’ll follow you up the mountain on foot!’

  She took no notice. Instead, she unlatched the safety bar, and as the gondola swung wildly in the wind, she released the catch, lifted the bar and stood up.

  ‘Macy, don’t!’ I cried.

  She stood and spread her arms. The carmine cloak billowed, the chair tilted to one side.

  ‘Sit down!’ I begged. My voice was lost in the howling wind.

  The red costume looked like a splash of spilled paint on white canvas as she kept her arms spread wide and tilted forward. She waved her arms like a kid pretending to fly then stepped out of the gondola into the whirling snowflakes.

  She plummeted to the ground.

  I struggled up the slope and was the first to reach her where she lay on her back, arms flung wide. Her body and legs were twisted like the torso and limbs of a discarded puppet when a child has finished playing. Her eyes were still open.

  ‘Tania, did you see?’ she breathed, a smile playing on her lips.

  ‘Don’t talk. Don’t move,’ I begged.

  Snowflakes settled on her white face, eyeliner and mascara streaked her cheeks. ‘I flew through the air,’ she whispered. ‘Truly, I did.’

  I was there holding her hand when she closed her eyes. ‘Yes,’ I murmured.

  No more breath. No more broken dreams. Macy was dead.

  16

  ‘I couldn’t stop her.’ Owen kept his story short and not very sweet. ‘I don’t know what cocktail of drugs and alcohol she’d been taking, but she was out of her mind on something. Dude, she was crazy.’

  He told everyone how hard he’d tried to talk Macy out of going outside. ‘She wouldn’t listen. She was wearing the stupid cloak and the mask, said she could fly through the air. I told her no way.’

  ‘Did you actually try to stop her?’ Holly asked, her face conveying disbelief.

  We were gathered in the main hotel lobby. Macy’s broken body had been carried down from the mountain and taken to the medical centre behind the spa and pool, waiting to be driven to the mortuary in Mayfield once the weather broke. Larry and Ryan were part of a large group, plus Rocky and his girlfriend Lisette, Gwen, Charlie and Angela – everyone except Natalia and Jack congregated in the lobby once the news broke.

  ‘I tried everything I knew to straighten her out, but the second I turned my back she was gone – no jacket, nothing except the costume – running like a crazy girl out into the snow.’

  ‘Owen, it’s OK,’ Charlie said. ‘You’re not to blame.’

  ‘You’re a big, strong guy. You could have restrained her,’ Holly argued, but she was quickly overruled.

  ‘Charlie’s right,’ Larry decided. ‘This was traumatic for you, Owen. Even though you two only just met, you obviously had feelings for her. I guess we all should have realized how unstable she was. We didn’t pay enough attention.’

  ‘What about you, Tania?’ Charlie turned the spotlight on me. ‘You knew her better than anyone. Did you ever imagine she was irrational enough to do something like this?’

  I shook my head. ‘Macy was a big personality but I never thought she was crazy.’

  ‘So Owen’s right – substance abuse is involved and the autopsy will identify the exact cause.’ Ryan James cut to the chase. ‘Amber, do we have a contact number for Macy? Who should be informed?’

  No one, I wanted to tell them. Macy was alone in the world. But the words sounded too stark and final so I kept my mouth shut.

  There was an uneasy silence as the receptionist checked her records. ‘Macy has family in Idaho,’ she reported. ‘An address and phone number for Mr and Mrs Osmond.’

  ‘No, that’s not right.’ Now I was forced to explain about Macy’s recent family history. ‘Macy hasn’t seen her dad since she was eight years old and her mom passed earlier this year. She died of cancer.’

  ‘Call the number,’ Ryan told Amber with steely determination.

  She dialled and we waited for what seemed like an age for someone to pick up the phone.

  ‘Mrs Osmond?’ Amber began. ‘Am I speaking to Macy Osmond’s mom?’ There was a short pause while Amber listened then spoke what is every parent’s worst nightmare. ‘Mrs Osmond, I’m calling you from the Carlsbad Lodge in Colorado. I’m afraid I have very bad news.’

  Nowheresville turned out to be Darwen, Idaho, so at least Macy hadn’t lied about the state. But everything else was pure fabrication.

  For a start, both her parents were alive and well.

  It turned out that two months
earlier Macy stole her mom’s credit card and ran away from home, school and an entire family of mother and father, three grandparents, one sister, an aunt and two cousins all living together in a small town off the beaten track. Her mother reported her missing, the police traced her usage of ATMs and card payments through her home state then in New York. Her phone company provided records of calls and texts. It wasn’t long before they tracked down the runaway to her expensive Fifth Avenue hotel.

  Her mom flew up to New York on the fifteenth of December, just a couple of days before Orlando and I ran into her in Central Park. Mrs Osmond had pleaded with her and begged her daughter to come home. Macy had told her no, she was already enrolled on a course at a film school and she loved New York – no way was she going back to hicksville.

  ‘None of what she told me was true.’ This was the stark fact I was left with after Macy died. Everything shifted and settled into unfamiliar patterns, reshaping the grief I felt over her loss. ‘The life she described – her mom’s driving phobia, the cancer diagnosis – was total fantasy.’

  ‘So why not cancel the credit card?’ logical Grace asked. ‘The Osmonds must have known that without money Macy would have had to go home.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ Holly pointed out a few ways Macy could have survived without her mom’s card – none of them strictly legal, all of them dangerous. ‘I guess that’s what the family was afraid of. That’s why they had to go on funding her.’

  ‘You know, Tania, back there when I first met Macy I didn’t like the girl,’ Holly confessed. ‘She didn’t seem like a good person for you to hang out with.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Grace admitted. ‘I wasn’t certain but deep down inside I thought maybe she came from the wrong side – from the dark angels. Something about the way you two met – just before the mugging, when all the bad stuff started to happen.’

  ‘Too much of a coincidence,’ Holly said. ‘She drops her bag and draws Orlando away, leaving you all alone. It could’ve been a conspiracy.’

  I shook my head and sighed. ‘Well, it turns out you were both wrong. And so was I. To me she seemed genuine. Sucker that I am, I believed her when she told me she was in contact with her mom through a medium.’

  ‘And you felt sorry about all the bad stuff she said had happened,’ Grace realized. ‘Me too, once I got over my suspicions. I thought the red hair, the piercings, the mascara could all be ways to cover up the big hurt of losing her mom.’

  ‘In a way they still were,’ Holly said. ‘It was just a different kind of hurt. There’s a label for fantasists like Macy – bipolar. But then again, Grace, what do I know? You’re the one who’s training to be a shrink.’

  ‘And she still died out there on the mountain because of it,’ I murmured. Nothing took away from the tragedy of Macy falling into the hands of the dark angels or the guilt I felt that I hadn’t been able to help her, or the fear that squeezed my heart.

  By dusk the snowstorm blew itself out. The clouds lifted and the white peak of Carlsbad glittered under a full moon and a million van Gogh stars.

  Orlando! I stared at the sky and it felt like a hole had been carved out in my chest in the place where my heart should be. I remembered that once, long ago, there had been a special, loving place for Orlando and me under the starry night sky.

  Later, down in the bar, life-stranded-by-a-snowstorm-in-a-five-star-hotel went on as before. Owen served drinks to Charlie, Orlando and Gwen. Ryan and Larry talked schedules and money. After she put the kids to bed, Natalia came down to join them.

  ‘It’s like Macy never existed,’ Grace said sadly.

  Holly and I agreed. ‘One thing we can say for sure is that Owen doesn’t miss her,’ Holly muttered.

  ‘Plus, he’s going to get away with murder,’ I added. ‘We know he brainwashed Macy to do what she did, but no one will believe us.’

  ‘They didn’t see the look on his face when he appeared at the top of those steps,’ Holly reminded us.

  ‘Or hear him laugh, or watch him lash out at us.’ Grace swirled the Coke in the bottom of her glass.

  ‘Who could we tell?’ Holly wondered out loud. ‘Ryan? Larry? Charlie? No, there’s no one here we can trust. And now that the dark angels don’t have Macy to spy on us, who are they planning to use in her place?’

  ‘Maybe they won’t even bother to find out what we know about Gwen,’ I suggested. ‘They believe they’ve got way more power than we do, and Macy’s death proves it. Besides, they only have to hang on for another twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Until the party?’

  ‘Yes. Then it’s end game.’

  Orlando, why won’t you listen to me? My inner voice grew stronger and louder. Please believe me. Leave Gwen and come back to me.

  His back was turned and I gazed at his broad shoulders, the curl of his dark hair on the nape of his neck as I forecast the next day’s events.

  ‘There will be a dance, some kind of ceremony or ritual to smooth the way for Orlando. Gwen will be the temptress. She’ll look spectacular. He won’t be able to resist.’ I was surprised how calm I sounded as I said this – maybe it was exhaustion and the shock of what had happened to Macy. Anyway, my words floated across the table without drawing any reassurances from Holly and Grace, and meanwhile we all saw Jack stride into the crowded room.

  ‘Uh oh.’ Grace saw him head straight for the bar, lean across it and demand a drink from Owen.

  Owen raised his eyebrows and turned to Charlie to check with him if it was OK to serve Jack. Jack took angry exception to the delay.

  ‘What does it have to do with him!’ he yelled, so loud that Larry and Ryan broke off their conversation with Natalia and the whole room fell silent. ‘What is he – my nanny?’

  While everyone else froze, something brought me to my feet and took me across the room to where Jack stood. I did it without thinking, only feeling that I needed to protect him.

  ‘Whisky!’ Jack lunged and tried to snatch the bottle of Jack Daniels from Owen. I held him back. Owen flashed me a menacing look and I sensed the army at his side made up of a thousand lost souls.

  The mirror behind the bar melts and morphs into an enormous wall of water cascading over a rock face, down into a dark whirlpool that threatens to drag me under.

  I blinked, fought the dark vision and reopened my eyes.

  With a cynical grin Owen let Jack take the bottle. Charlie did nothing, only watched me and my reaction as Jack raised the whisky to his lips.

  ‘Jack, don’t,’ I protested. Further along the bar, Ryan had broken away from Larry and Natalia and was heading our way. ‘You don’t need this,’ I told Jack. ‘You’re not drinking any more, remember.’

  Suddenly, from out of nowhere, Jarrold and Weller had shown up. Weller smiled and raised his glass to Jack, drank his shot then slid the empty glass across the bar for a refill. Again I glimpsed the waterfall, the whirlpool and souls being dragged into a dark vortex.

  Jack still had the bottle raised to his lips. His head was tilted back and he looked at me from under hooded lids.

  ‘You take that drink and you lose it all,’ I reminded him. Kids, career – everything.

  He could smell the alcohol, practically taste it by the time Ryan arrived. But still he hadn’t downed a drop.

  ‘That’s it, you crossed the line,’ the movie mogul declared. He spoke with total authority, confident that no sane person would dare to cross him. ‘You already had your final warning, Jack.’

  Slowly Jack lowered the bottle without taking a drink.

  ‘He didn’t cross it,’ I argued. ‘OK so he thought about it but he didn’t actually do it.’

  Ryan made a gesture to bat me away with the back of his hand. ‘I saw you with my own eyes, Jack. And you do this in front of your wife. You break a promise to me, to Larry, to her—’

  ‘He didn’t!’ I insisted.

  Ryan shook his head. ‘We finish this movie without you, Jack,’ he said, firmly closing the book once and for all. ‘Y
ou’re off the payroll. Consider yourself fired.’

  Rocky Seaton was the only person in the bar who came across to Jack. All the others – the hangers-on, the good-time drinking buddies, the girls he’d slept with – every single one turned their backs.

  ‘You know what you need to do, Jack? You need to speak with your lawyers,’ Rocky advised quietly. ‘Get them to check the small print.’

  For the longest time Jack didn’t reply. It looked to me like he was going to go for the Jack Daniels after all, but then he pulled back. ‘Hey, man, if you want to keep your job with Ryan you don’t want to be seen talking to me,’ he warned with a show of bravado that didn’t hide his inner panic. The bottle still stood on the bar within easy reach.

  ‘OK, so Ryan owns Starlite, but in terms of your actual contract there’s still a good chance the organization can’t fire you for no good reason,’ Rocky said.

  ‘How many reasons do they need?’ Charlie muttered – his first comment of the evening. He’d split away from Gwen and Orlando and now he picked up the bottle and thrust it into Rocky’s face. ‘You know as well as anyone here how many times Jack failed to show up, how often he forgot his lines and fell over in front of the camera.’

  Rocky kept calm and outstared Charlie. ‘Jack gets fired, so do you,’ he pointed out. ‘Remember, Jack is the goose who lays your golden egg. So if I were you, Charlie, I’d be out there fighting to have him reinstated.’

  As Charlie laughed and brushed him off, Rocky blocked him with a grand-standing, in-your-face speech intended to draw maximum attention. ‘And just in case you figure you can fill the shoes of the movie actor who’s been nominated for three best-actor Oscars and won one for his role in Reluctant Hero, the highest-grossing movie of the decade, I’m here to tell you, no way.’ Rocky paused to enjoy Charlie’s building fury, then he went on. ‘The fact is, Jack has as much acting talent in his little finger as you, Charlie Speke, have in your entire over-pumped, fake-tanned, surgically enhanced body.’