Chapter 7
“No…”
“We are going to get married next week. It won’t be a wedding. It will be a civil matrimony, but matrimony nonetheless.”
He ran to her, held her by both arms, shaking her without knowing it, and yelled, “You can’t marry Lorenzo Liebermann. You love me! You’ve always loved me and you always will!” He tried to kiss her but she pushed him away, so rough that his body landed on the sofa and he nearly broke his lower back.
“I don’t love you anymore. You destroyed that love when you walked away from me. I understood that this was impossible, and no matter how many years would pass, we wouldn’t be able to fix what had been broken.”
“Please, angel let me touch your heart,” he said, crying bitterly and on his knees.
“I am not what they call an angel. I am a human being.”
“You’ve got angel blood.”
“I don’t know why they call them angels, honestly. They may be good beings, but I doubt they’re as good as angels.”
Suddenly, someone rang the bell. Jake just got up and just stood there while Shirley walked to the door and opened it. He didn’t dare to sit down because he knew that Shirley would tell him to get up. Shirley was glad to see her new best friend, Celine.
Shirley gave Celine a big hug. “How are you, Celine? How’s Alice doing?”
Celine was Alice’s cousin who had been living in San Francisco for three years and all of a sudden, two years before, Alice moved back to the town that she was born in because it didn’t go well for her in San Francisco. Alice couldn’t get a job after graduating from high school because of shoplifting charges that she’d had in the past, she couldn’t enroll even in community college because she thought that everyone hated her, and she thought that things would be better in Charleston, so she and her parents moved back there. However, Alice never said goodbye to Shirley. “Alice is doing very well,” said Celine.
“Why hasn’t she called me or emailed me? She doesn’t love me anymore?”
Celine went ahead and turned around, walked around the sofa and sat down. “She told me not to tell you. She made me promise not to tell you, but…”
“Tell me what, Celine? What happened?”
“Alice hates you because she knows that you and Lorenzo are engaged, and Lorenzo, according to her, is the true love of her life. All these years she’d been trying to conquer him and have a serious relationship with him, but he would turn her down continually, and she thinks that it’s your fault because he’s been turning her down all this time and all of a sudden, he’s engaged to you.”
“Is that why Alice hasn’t emailed me in months?” asked Shirley, gasping. “She was my best friend!”
Now Jake understood that it was impossible for him to be with Shirley, but he loved her truly and defending her from Alice was the only way that he thought of showing it at that very moment. “I don’t understand,” he said, and Shirley and Celine turned their faces to look at him. “She moved away three years ago and left Lorenzo behind… she shouldn’t give a damn about who Lorenzo is sharing his life with right now.”
“If she was in love with him why didn’t she tell me?”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference, Shirley,” said Celine. “Lorenzo would never be with her. Besides, your relationship didn’t start until a few months ago, I mean when she was enamoring him, you and Lorenzo didn’t even look at one another with lust. You were never together.”
“I’ve always thought that there was something wrong with Alice.”
“What do you mean, Jacob?” said Celine.
“I mean that I’ve always thought that she wasn’t normal, that she had mental problems.”
“You’re trying to say that Alice is psychotic?”
“Yes, Celine,” said Shirley, crying, “she is psychotic. I know. I’ve put it all together now. She’s always acted strangely. She would always give me bad advice. Mom always told me not to be friends with her. Stupid me, I didn’t listen.”
“No, no, no,” said Jake as he took her in his arms, “you’re not stupid. Don’t say that.”
Crying, Shirley said, “I always listened to my parents, but when they told me to stay away from Alice, I didn’t listen. Only God knows all the horrible things she’s done. If she was capable of obsessing over a guy that she left behind, only God knows what else she’s done. Maybe she’s killed people and gotten away with it and I don’t even know about it. Here I am wondering why she lost contact with me…”
All of a sudden, Lyle went in and said, “You’re right,” and everyone turned around and looked at him, shocked, as his wings slipped inside his back once again, “she is psychotic and she did kill people and get away with it, three people to be exact, and she did that when she was still a teenager.”
“Oh, my God,” said Shirley, covering her face with her hands.
“However, we can’t bring her to justice yet because we have no proof.”
Charleston, VA
Alice wasn’t in college. She graduated high school and instantly became a stripper and a prostitute. She would dance for her customers totally naked, and then, if a customer wanted her in his bed, he would have her in a private room inside the strip-club for huge amounts of money. Sometimes she would make $1,000 a night. She was very good at what she was doing. It was understandable why she would end up like this. Her parents would always give more love and attention to her little sister than they would give to her. Her little sister was in a car accident with her big cousin, Marcia, and she had become brain damaged. The damage was irreparable. Marcia couldn’t walk and she could hardly talk. However, Marcia could write and she could type. Her motor skills were good, except in her legs. Marcia was totally the opposite of Alice. She was intelligent, she was a straight-A student, she was a good person, and she was driven. She was the pride of her parents.
After a long night of work, Alice thought of Lorenzo as she entered her bedroom to take a shower, put her pajamas on, and go to sleep. She went to her nightstand and dialed Lorenzo’s phone number in her phone.
Lorenzo was finishing up his homework from college. This was his last year in college, and he was studying film to become a film writer and director when he graduated. He was anxious to graduate and start a new life, to give Shirley everything that she deserved. However, he was about to receive a very nasty surprise. His phone rang. He stopped doing what he was doing and answered the phone. “Hello.”
“Hello, Lorenzo. Remember me?”
“What do you want, Alice?”
“You haven’t heard from me in five years and that’s how you greet me?”
“I asked you a question. What do you want?”
“I found out about your relationship with Shirley. You’re going to get married.”
“Yes, we are.”
“No, you’re not,” Alice said. “I’m not going to let it happen.”
Lorenzo laughed and said, “What are you going to do?”
She hung up.
Lorenzo hung up and got back to solving his advanced calculus problems. Suddenly, the phone rang again. He stopped doing what he was doing once more and answered that phone call. “Alice, I don’t want you to…”
Lyle interrupted him. “Lorenzo, it’s not Alice, it’s Lyle.”
“I’m sorry, Lyle.”
“It’s ok. I called to warn you. Alice is a psychopath.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Alice has a plan to kill my sister.”
“He wants to kill Shirley? How do you know that?”
“I know it, man. I just know it.”
“What can we do to stop her?”
“We can kill her, Lorenzo.”
“I know that we can, but we shouldn’t. We’d go to jail.”
However, whatever it was that Lorenzo and Lyle could do to stop Alice from hurting Shirley, it would be too late for them to execute that plan, as, since Alice couldn’t travel to San Francisco, she hired some friends of her to strike at Shirley tonight after the dark, because they knew that Shirley had to go to a friend’s house to help her move to another house. Even though it was late, Claire enlisted Shirley’s help to move her things to her new house because Shirley could do it very quickly. Alice now knew of everything that Shirley had to do during the day because Shirley’s neighbor from across the street, who was also a dear friend of Shirley’s, was keeping Alice informed of Shirley’s schedule. Orchid felt badly about what she was doing, but Alice was paying her $1,000 a month just for informing her of Shirley’s activities, and Orchid was doing this because she needed the money desperately, as she and her husband were both working and even so they didn’t have any money to pay their bills. They had credit-card bills to pay and they would always be short of money to pay their utility bills. With the $1,000 that Orchid would receive, that was enough for her to pay her utility bills and have a little money left over to put on her and her husband’s savings account. Her power was $160, her satellite-TV service was $99, her phone service, which included high-speed-Internet, twenty-four additional features and long-distance calling was $150, and her water bill was $200. The total was $609 per month, and the rest, they would put it in the bank. However, Orchid’s husband, Ike, he thought that Alice was just sending his wife that money just because she felt like it; just to help her out. He had no idea that Orchid was doing something in return, something terrible.
That night, just when Shirley had just left her house to go to Claire’s house, three thugs were waiting for her at the stop sign in the corner before leaving her street, Candy Street. They got in front of her car and started pounding on her windshield. Terrified, even though she knew that this was not a good idea, Shirley put her driver’s window down to ask the guys what they wanted with her. Maybe they wanted to rob her. That wasn’t so. As soon as she put her window down, the guy reached for her door handle and opened the door without Shirley’s approval, and covering her mouth with his hand and a handkerchief soaked with isopropyl alcohol just so that she couldn’t scream, they dragged her out of the car and put her in the backseat of their van.
Shirley was asleep in the back of the van. The men were taking her to an abandoned warehouse, where they were instructed to rape her continually until she would die. As well as Alice knew Shirley, she didn’t know that she had supernatural powers. Minutes later, the men and Shirley arrived at the abandoned warehouse. Jose was waiting for them anxiously. He had also been instructed to torture Shirley. The men carried Shirley out of the van. Jose didn’t know who Shirley was. He just knew that she was a former friend of Alice’s who Alice despised and wanted dead. Alice didn’t give Jose, the head of this mob, details about Shirley because as soon as he knew who her family was, he would let her go unharmed.
Hours later, Shirley woke up to a dim light and four men surrounding her. She started crying. She knew what was coming to her. She knew that Alice would put an end to her life without laying a hand on her, and she would torture her in the process. It didn’t matter to the men if she would see them or not because she would die minutes after her worst horror were over. She looked at these 270-pound, six-foot-tall men with utter horror. She knew this was the end.
“Who are you?” she asked.
Her tears moved Jose. He had never committed a crime. He was just the oldest of a group of friends, whose members had never done anything like this before. Jose just decided not to grab a strand of Shirley’s hair and just take her away. After all, all that Alice wanted was Shirley out of her way so that she could be with Lorenzo, but since Alice was a psychopath, she wanted Shirley dead. She wanted Shirley to suffer. Jose decided that it wasn’t worth it to risk his life and his future for a nutcase like Alice. He knew that he and his friends would get caught, even if more than fifty years passed by. He knew that criminals would always get caught. He knew about dangerous criminals that had gotten caught sixty and sometimes even eighty years after committing these heinous crimes. He knew of a 100-year-old woman who had killed her parents at fifteen, and she’d gotten away with it until her 100th birthday. That woman spent the last nine months of her life in prison. He didn’t want that to happen to him. He was twenty-two. His life had just begun. He hadn’t gotten married or become a father yet, although he’d been with many women. He had fallen in love with this woman and he wanted to marry her and start a family with her, far away from the man that Alice so desperately wanted. “Let her go,” he said, shocking the men.
“What did you say, Joe?” said Jon.
“I said let her go.”
“We can’t do that, Joe. We got paid to do this.”
“It’s not worth it. I am the head of this group, and if I decide to let her go, it’s got to be done. That's it."
“Are you crazy, Joe?”
“I’m taking her away, Jon. Alice wants her far away from her beloved Lorenzo, and that’s what she’s going to get.”
“Alice wants her dead, Jose.”
“I’ve decided not to kill her.”
“You know you’re going to pay for this with your very life, right?”
“I’m not going to die. I employed a very simple way of defending myself. I’ve got a group of angels waiting for me at home. They go with me wherever I go. They’re not going to let anything happen to me. They’re like my bodyguards, except I don’t pay them for what they do. They do it because they love me.” Jose laughed.
“I can’t believe you, Jose.”
Jose carried Shirley in his arms and said, “I’m not like Alice,” and left the warehouse.
Alice’s men were not going to stand there with their arms crossed across their chests. Jon immediately called Alice from his cell phone. Alice was getting ready to do another show, a show that would earn her $3,000 for tonight, plus $1,000 from a customer that was waiting to have his moment of pleasure with her. Suddenly, her phone rang. She thought that her men would tell her that Shirley was being tortured and that they would put Shirley on the phone for her to hear Shirley screaming and crying. She answered the phone. “Hello.”
“I’ve got bad news,” said Jon.
“You didn’t do it.”
“We tried. We cornered her, put her to sleep, kidnapped her, and brought her to this warehouse. It was Jose who ruined everything.”
“Don’t tell me that loser let her go.”
“He did more than that. He took her away.”
Alice screamed. “He did what?”
Alice’s customers were screaming for her on the stage. They were desperate because she couldn’t come out.
“He took her with him. He says that he wants her for himself. He thinks that it’s enough for him to enamor Shirley and keep her far away from Lorenzo.”
“That’s not enough! She has to die!”
“I don’t think we can do anything against her now. He has aliens by his side. They can just grab them, spread their wings, fly and take them anywhere! He has aliens that guard him. They don’t let anyone approach him. He’s well protected. I think that if we get close to him, we’ll die!”
“He could be anywhere. He could’ve been taken anywhere,” said Alice, crying, “but as soon as I find him, no alien in this world would be able to protect him from me. He will pay for betraying me,” she vowed.
Meanwhile, Jose was already on a plane to Spain. The angels had flown him to the airport and provided him with the money that he needed to get seven tickets to Spain, as five angels were guarding him, angels that had been released from TOTU only a few hours before. They met Jose and figured that he was a good person and that he would provide them with shelter and food. He took them in and they’d been living with Jose ever since. The only thing that they had to do to keep what they now had, forever, was take care of Jose, make sure that nothing horrible would happen to him and they were doing that extremely well.
Several hours later, Jose, Shirley and their companions arrived at the international airport of Spain. They had no luggage, so they just took a taxi cab to the nearest hotel, where they would stay while they bought a house. With the money that they had been given to buy a house, clothes and a car, they would buy a mansion and a luxury car in Spain; thus they had received $350,000 altogether, as the money that was given to aliens could only increase because the Tears facilities and enterprises, they had a net fortune of $900 million dollars and although the sum given to each angel would be different, one angel could receive no less than $50,000 to fulfill his or her needs. Besides that, the money that TOTS, TOTM and TOTU was giving to the angels; millions of those dollars were coming from the powerful Manning family.
Lorenzo received a phone call that day, a phone call that would change his life forever. Celine didn’t know exactly where Shirley was. No one knew. All that she knew was that Shirley had run away with another man because she was afraid of Alice. She had to tell Lorenzo. Lorenzo finally answered the phone.
“Hello.”
“Lorenzo, this is Celine.”
“How are you doing, Celine?”
“Not so well. I got bad news for you.”
“What happened? Is it about Shirley? Why hasn’t she called me? What happened to her? Did she disappear?”
“Lorenzo, Lorenzo, listen to me. No, she didn’t disappear. She hasn’t called you because she couldn’t call you. She left the city, and possibly the country with another man, a man she’d just met while…”
“What?”
“Lorenzo, listen to me.”
“She ran away with a total stranger? Why?” he screamed. “I thought that she loved me.” He broke down crying. “I really thought that she…” He got weak in the knees and sat on the ground, right by the clock tower in the college campus. “Oh, my God….”
“Would you please listen to me?” she screamed and then lowered her voice. She was on her fifteen minute break from class, and she decided to use these fifteen minutes to talk to Lorenzo and try to give him the explanation he deserved, and that only Shirley was supposed to give him, but she couldn’t because for her own good, Jose forbade her to be in contact with Lorenzo in any way. No letters, no phone calls, no email, no text message… no nothing. For Shirley’s own good, she had to completely forget about Lorenzo and literally live her life as if she’d never even met him. Jose didn’t want to control Shirley’s life because he’d just met her. He was doing this because she wanted to protect Shirley and he knew that once that Shirley had contact with Lorenzo in any way, Alice would know where she was, find her and kill her. “Shirley was kidnapped the night before last night. Alice hired several men to kidnap her and rape her and kill her. I know this because someone from the neighborhood told me everything, some kind of psychic, I don’t know. The truth is that I was searching for the truth behind what happened to Shirley and someone recommended this psychic to me. I asked one question that was all, ‘What happened to Shirley Thompson, my best friend?’ and she told me everything. She told me that when Shirley and her abductors arrived at that abandoned warehouse, they were ready to torture her and all of a sudden, the head of the group, the mob or whatever, he decided not to hurt Shirley. He decided to take her away, so he did, but it is unknown where he took her. We’ll probably never know.”
“This story sounds too fantastic and out of this world to be true,” said Lorenzo, losing his cool.
“It is true, Lorenzo!”
“How can you trust in a psychic, a charlatan? Don’t you know that psychics that all those people are fake, that they tell you all this bologna to take your money? How much did he or she charge you, huh?”
“He didn’t charge me.”
“Oh, it was a he,” said Lorenzo and laughed. “And he didn’t take a penny from you.”
“No, he didn’t, Lorenzo,” said Celine, crying. “I don’t know what that living thing really is. I’m just calling him a psychic, a medium, because he knows what happened to people when people disappear like that…”
He interrupted her. “That’s bull droppings.”
“I just told you the truth. If you want to disbelieve it, that’s fine. People believe what they want to believe. The truth is that Shirley left you because she’s afraid of Alice. She probably wants you to marry Alice and be happy with her, and that’s why she got out of Alice’s way. Bye, Lorenzo. I’m sorry that I wasted my time on you.” She hung up.
Perplexed, Lorenzo went to Shirley’s neighborhood to find out if this living thing, this medium, existed, and whether he had fooled Celine or if Celine had just made this story up to justify the fact that Shirley ran away with another man. All around the neighborhood, he asked if there was an angel living there. To protect the angels that were living there with their families, people refused to talk and shut the door in Lorenzo’s face. That was until the man himself, without letting Lorenzo know or figure out in any way where he lived, he approached Lorenzo.
“Are you looking for me?” he asked.
“Perhaps,” said Lorenzo, smiling at him as he walked closer to him. “Are you the medium?”
“In reality, compared to other living things of my species, I’m nothing special,” said Edward. “We all are mediums, it’s just that some of us choose to use that supernatural power we have within us, and some of us choose not to use it because we’re afraid of what humans might do if they find out we have that ability.”
“So they have it but they don’t use it.”
“Some of them don’t even know if they have it. That power is dormant inside of them. It’s like humans, they have a sixth sense and they never use it because they don’t know how to. They don’t know what to do with it.”
“Then it is true. We do have a sixth sense,” said Lorenzo, astonished.
“Yes, you do.”
“Will you show me how to use mine?”
Edward just looked him warmly in the eyes.
“I’m serious. I want you to show me how to use my sixth sense so I can tell whether you’re lying or telling the truth.”
“You need that with humans, but you won’t need that with us. You’ll always know that we’re telling you the truth.”
“Oh, really…?”
“Yes, really…”
“So, my fiancée didn’t leave me for another man because she felt like it. She was kidnapped and one of her kidnappers chose to take her away with him far, very far away from me, to a destination that no one knows. Is that right?”
“Yes,” said Edward. “That’s right.”
“How do I know that’s the truth?”
Edward just walked away from him. “People believe what they want to believe,” he said, repeating Celine’s words.
Astonished, Lorenzo ran after him and yelled, “Wait! Wait! How do you know Celine said that to me?”
Edward just smiled and walked away once again.
“Wait!” yelled Lorenzo.
To escape Lorenzo, Edward spread his wings and flew away, to the supermarket, to a fast-food restaurant, anywhere, anywhere away from Lorenzo.
Lorenzo just fell on his knees and started to cry. Suddenly he yelled, “Shirley!!” very loudly and extended in the last vocals on the name.
Hours later, Lorenzo woke up in a hospital room. Surprised and not knowing exactly where he was, he got up and started walking around the room. His nurse was on her way to her room and when she saw him going around the room though the door, she went in and did the best to calm him down.
“Hi, Lorenzo,” she said.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“You’re in a psychiatric hospital.”
“Psychiatric…” he said and started crying once again.
“Lorenzo…”
He interrupted her. “What am I doing in a loony bin?” he exclaimed.
“Sit down, will you?” she said, guiding him to the bed and helping him sit down on it. She had her injection to put him to sleep just in case he became violent. She sat down with him. “Let me explain. Someone from the neighborhood in Candy Street called 911. The woman told the 911 operator that you were crying and screaming a woman’s name.”
He interrupted her once again. “Shirley.”
“Yes, Shirley,” said the nurse. “Minutes later, you were taken to the local hospital. According to doctors, you were having visual and auditory hallucinations. It got so bad that you mistook a nurse for Shirley and you yelled at her, ‘Why did you leave me? Why did you leave me?’ and finally you wrapped your hands around her neck and choked her. They had to tie you down, hands and feet, and sedate you. Then, when you got here, you woke up, I suppose, and here you are. You got here… let’s see…” she said looking at her wristwatch. “…Around what, a half an hour ago?”
“They found out about what happened to you and they’re on their way here.”
“Am I allowed visitors the first day?”
“Under these circumstances the doctor granted special permission for you to have visitors, but only your closest family members can visit you today, no one else.”
“Am I ever going to get out of here?”
“You are going to be here for seventy-two hours. That means