Lifers 37

Larry and Brenda had been on the road for almost three hours when they turned left onto Constitution Drive and then right into Lilac Lane. Although Larry insisted he do all the driving, Brenda was now at the wheel, and had been for the last fifty miles, all of which, Larry spent snoring in the passenger seat.

Slowing the car to an almost undetectable stop, she pulled up outside Celia Brontrose’s address. Again that name rang bells, but where the hell had she heard it before? She new all the psychics the police used, certainly all the ones in Richmond. She’d not heard of her from that walk of life, she was sure of it. But she’d heard her name somewhere, she knew she had. And sooner or later, it would come to her.

Brenda parked the car outside a huge set of steel gates, where the house stood alone on top of a hill. Beyond those gates and down a long drive soldiered by Willow trees, she could only see a small portion of the house. The rest being obscured by large Oak trees. Next to the gate, stood a short, metal post, holding an intercom system. To the left of that, and high up on the stone gatepost, a CCTV camera pointed towards the intercom.

At the end of the road just in front of the car, was an almost sheer drop into Greenview lake, over five-hundred feet below. And the last house Brenda remembers passing coming up the hill, was about a half mile back. The time was 6:40 am she’d leave it until 7:00, and enjoy the view of the lake before waking Larry and calling on Miss Brontrose.

Brenda was happy to be out of the car, just to stretch her legs if nothing else. She was nowhere near as tall as Larry, and for the life of her she couldn’t understand why he’d bought such a small car. She knew small-minded men bought big cars as phallic symbols, so perhaps the opposite applied here?

Looking down onto Greenview Lake, she saw half a dozen boats of varying sizes moored up to different piers, with about the same number out on the water. Above where they were, the sky was grey and overcast, looking towards the West, there was a massive storm raging on the horizon.

On hearing the thud of a car door, she turned on her heels to see Larry lighting a cigarette. ‘Those things will be the death of you,’ she told him.

‘Gotta go sometime, Bren,’ he said, peering through the steel gates. ‘Big place huh?’

‘Yeah, seems Miss Brontrose may have a dollar or two,’ she replied, walking over.

Larry pushed on the gates. ‘How much do you reckon a place like this costs?’ he said, looking up at the stone arch.

‘Couple o’ mil, maybe three.’

Larry scratched his chin and whistled. ‘Now how would a high-roller like Celia Brontrose, come across information about missing girls over a hundred and fifty miles away? And more than a million miles away financially speaking?’

Brenda shrugged. ‘She’s a psychic, remember?’

‘Phuh!’ scoffed Larry. ‘Psychic my ass.’

Why Larry refused to accept the concept of psychics was beyond Brenda. ‘Well how do you explain her knowing about them using chloroform?’

‘Let’s wake her up and find out shall we?’ he said, flicking away his half-smoked cigarette.

He then pushed the intercom button.

After a minute of waiting no one answered, Larry was about to push the button again when a smooth, English accented voice spoke up. ‘Good morning, this is the Brontrose residence, whom may I ask is visiting at such an early hour?’

Larry looked over at Brenda and cleared his throat as he bent closer to the post. ‘A-hem, yes, my name is Lawrence Kessler, I’m a private investigator. And I’m led to believe that Miss Brontrose’ Larry was interrupted by the gate opening. He lifted an eyebrow and looked again at Brenda.

‘Please come up to the house, Mr Kessler. Miss Brontrose has been expecting you,’ said the voice.

‘Oooh, she is good, Larry,’ said Brenda, smiling.

‘Well then, let’s go see how good, eh!’

They climbed back into the car and Larry drove the final two-hundred yards down to the house. Either side of the drive, and just beyond both lines of the willow trees, lay lawns that had been mowed both ways, and looked like they’d been finished off using a pair of manicure scissors. Lilies and daffodils were planted along the drive, in front of the willow trees, and were so uniform; they must have been measured with a micrometre.

As they pulled up to the front door, a red, BMW X5 was parked to their right, and was so clean, it looked to have just rolled out of the showroom.

Brenda stared wide-eyed at the edifice before her. ‘Scratch that two or three mil,’ she said. ‘Gotta be at least five.’

‘Guess there’s a lotta dough in the ... “Psychic game”, huh?’ replied Larry, punctuating the air with his fingers.

The house was a large, white, wooden structure, three stories high with the upper six bedroom windows integrated into the roof. Below them, and leading onto a semi-circled balcony, was another six windows. The front entrance was an eight-foot wide set of dark-green double doors, and situated in the centre of two very large windows.

As they climbed the steps up to the house, a man of about forty-five opened one of the large doors and stepped out on to the porch. He looked to be around five-feet-ten in height, and weighed, Larry guessed, somewhere in the region of 230 lbs. He had short, thinning, dark hair, and a Van-Dyke type growth around his mouth. He wore a black suit, and the shiniest pair of black shoes Larry had ever seen, he looked more like a bodyguard, than he did a butler. They reached the top step where Larry introduced them both, then asked to see Miss Brontrose.

‘Mr Kessler, Miss Wise,’ he said, nodding to each of them in turn. ‘My name is Mason, Please follow me into the morning room.’

The hallway looked almost as big as Brenda’s whole apartment, and had the odour of an old stately home smothered in furniture polish. Three large oil paintings of old men dressed in flamboyant naval uniforms hung on the walls around them, whilst clunking away to one side, and standing like a sentry, was an antique Grandfather clock.

The time it showed was 6:49 am.

‘Please, allow me to take your coats,’ Mason said, as they entered the hallway.

He took Larry’s Jacket and Brenda’s Mac, hanging them on a coat stand behind the front door. In the hallway, under each of the paintings, were three highly polished mahogany doors leading into the heart of the house, one on the left, one in front of them, and another to their right. Mason opened the door to their left, taking them into a large brightly painted room.

Two, floor-to-ceiling windows on the left as they entered, faced east, and if the sky hadn’t been so dull, the sunlight would have lit up the room even more. Again, these walls were adorned with oil paintings, but this time they were landscapes. All of them, views of the lake below and the surrounding hillside, before it was so heavily populated. Although a house every half mile, can hardly be deemed as heavily.

A large open fireplace, containing a fire which hadn’t long been started, dominated the lower part of the far wall. The upper half being occupied by a large brass-framed mirror. Running along the middle portion of the right hand wall, was a highly polished mahogany table, sitting on this were some framed photographs, along with a vase full of freshly picked Lilies, and an old-fashioned, off-white, Bacolite telephone.

‘Miss Brontrose will be down shortly, please take a seat,’ Mason instructed.

‘Thank you,’ they said in unison.

Larry sat in a high-back, deep red, leather chair, and Brenda chose one of the two large, leather sofas.

‘Can I perhaps offer you a beverage while you wait?’

‘Coffee would be good,’ said Larry.

‘And for you, Miss Wise?’

‘Do you have iced tea?’

‘Coming right up.’

‘Say, Mason,’ said Larry, pulling a cigarette from its packet. ‘Do you happen have an ashtray I could use?’

Mason stood with his feet together and his hands clasped in front of him. ‘Miss Brontrose dislikes the odour of cigarettes, Mr Kessler. She would prefer it if you could refrain from smoking whilst you are in the house, please.’ At this, he gave them both a courteous nod, and left through a door at the back of the room.

‘Oooo ... Miss Brontrose dislikes the odour of cigarettes, Mr. Kessler.’

‘Stop it, Larry,’ hissed Brenda.

‘Well it’s only a cigarette for Christ’s sake,’ he said, putting it back into its packet.

‘And some people don’t like their homes reeking of it.’

‘Well my place doesn’t reek of cigarettes.’

‘I wouldn’t know, Larry; you’ve never invited me in.’

Larry rolled his eyes to the ceiling before standing for a wander round. When he reached the long table he stopped to look at the photographs resting on it. There were five in all, three of them black and white photographs, and the others colour. One of the black and white photographs showed a smiling blonde girl who looked to be around sixteen or seventeen years of age, and what might have been her younger sister, of about ten or eleven stood next to her.

On one side of the girls was an elderly gent who Larry guessed to be in his mid-seventies, and on the other side of the girls was an elderly woman in a wheelchair, she looked to be around the same age as the man. They were on a pier by the lake, standing in front of a small sail boat. The caption attached to the frame read,

“The launching of the Marianna, April 1952”

The next black and white photograph showed the same two pretty girls, who now looked no older than twenty years of age, and the younger one about sixteen. This time, the elderly man, who looked much older than he did in the first photograph, possibly in his early nineties, was in the wheelchair. But the elderly woman from the first photograph wasn’t present. Again it showed a sail boat, this one much larger than the last. The caption attached to this frame read,

“The launching of the Marianna II, February 1966”

The third and final black and white photograph showed the Marianna II out on the water. There were no captions attached to the frame, no dates or times. And only one blonde girl was visible on the deck of the boat. The colour photographs were of a party being held in the gardens of the house. No recognizable faces, just a crowd of people at a distance waving to the camera.

At that moment, a Grandfather clock in the corner by the door Mason had exited through, began to strike, half a second later, a clock on the fireplace chimed also, as did the Grandfather clock in the hall.

The time was 7:00 am

Mason came back through the door as the seventh chime died away. ‘Your drinks, sir, miss,’ he said, placing a tray on the table in the middle of the room. ‘Will you be requiring anything else?’

Yeah, thought Larry, walking over to the table. What about that ashtray I asked you for? ‘Say, Mason, those photographs,’ he said, pointing. ‘The ones with the young girls and the boats?’

Mason turned to face him. ‘I’m sorry, sir, they were taken during my predecessor’s term of employment, I have only been here a mere five years myself. I really know very little about them.’ He then bid them good-day and left the room.

Larry went back over to the photographs and called for Brenda to look, to see what she made of them. ‘Tell me, Bren, are they the same people?’ he said, pointing to each photograph in turn.

Brenda studied them closely. ‘Its sure looks like it, but if it is, I want to know what face-crème they’re using.’

‘Do you think the dates could be wrong?’

‘Doubt that, they look like some pretty important moments, one thing you’d be sure of getting right would be dates.’

‘Good Morning, Mr Kessler,’ said a pleasant, clear voice. ‘And you must be, Miss Wise.’

Turning away from the photographs, Brenda and Larry stood upright. Brenda could only stare ... and Larry? He stood with his mouth agape.

‘Miss Brontrose? Miss, Celia Brontrose?’ he asked, incredulous to her appearance.

Celia Brontrose stood six-feet tall and was very slim. She had glistening blonde hair, her face looked soft and smooth, and her high cheek-bones, combined with a minimum of make-up, made her look younger than she actually was. A lot younger. And her eyes were a soft, pale- blue, with brilliantly white whites. They almost didn’t look real.

She wore a pair of white sailing pants, which stopped at the middle of her calves, a light-blue V-neck jumper over a white polo-shirt, and on her feet she wore white plimsolls. She certainly didn’t look eighty-seven years old, or anything like Larry had expected. They greeted each other with a soft handshake.

‘Call me Celia, only Mason is allowed to call me Miss Brontrose, and that’s because he insists on doing so. Please sit, both of you.’

They all sat, Larry again in the high-back leather chair, Brenda and Celia on the same leather sofa. Larry wanted to keep this interview formal. He would stick to calling her Miss Brontrose. Whether she liked it or not.

‘Well, Mr Kessler, what can I do for you?’

Phuh! Psychic my ass. But he needed to be sure. ‘Firstly, Miss Brontrose. Mason said you’d been expecting us, how can that be?’ There, get out of that one, Psychic.

‘I told Mr. Pieroni to call me regardless of whether or not he’d found what he was looking for. As of this moment he hasn’t done so, which means he has either lost my number, or has found himself in some kind of trouble. As he didn’t seem to be the kind of man I would label as ... scatterbrained, shall we say, I suspect the latter would be closer the mark, Mr Kessler. The next logical step of course, would be for his partner to arrive on my doorstep asking questions. Hence you!’

Drumming his fingers on the arm of the chair and pulling at his bottom lip, Larry accepted this explanation, and, at the same time, realised Celia Brontrose would probably match his wit and cynicism, quite easily. He would have to tread with care. Interlocking his fingers he leant in towards the table.

‘Miss Brontrose,’ he continued. ‘You gave some very specific information to my partner, whom, as you’ve no doubt worked out, we too haven’t heard from. I’d like to know exactly what you told him, and how you came by the information regarding the missing girls in the first place?’

‘I told Mr. Pieroni I had a premonition, and, while that wasn’t entirely accurate, it was all he needed to know at the time.’

‘Well please, humour me, Miss Brontrose. This ... premonition,’ he said, immediately discarding such a notion. ‘What exactly did you tell Mr Pieroni?’

‘I told him the name of the town, and a possible location of where he might find the girls.’

‘And that town was?’

‘Martinsville, it’s a small place, Mr Kessler, about two hours south west of here by car.’

‘And the names of the kidnappers, Miss Brontrose, do you know who they are?’ He noticed a shift in her posture, perhaps that question hit a raw nerve?

‘That is a much more difficult question to answer, Mr Kessler. But before I do answer it, I have something you need to see.’

She stood and walked over to a bookcase in the corner opposite the grandfather clock. From which, she retrieved a large green book, she returned placing the book on the table in front of them. On the front cover were written the words,

“Thomas Martins”
“Trials and Experiments in Longevity”

‘This journal was given to me by my brother, Mr Kessler, after that, I never saw him again.’

Larry picked up the journal and started to look through it while Celia unravelled the truth of her past to them both. He flicked over the pages, stopping here and there to take in what he could, but as most of the words either ended with an “ology” or an “ism”, and one he couldn’t possibly read ending in “ismology”, he put it down and just listened to what Celia Brontrose had to say.

‘It was 1936, at the end of February, as I recall,’ she began...