Death of the Black-Haired Girl (21 page)

“I’m concerned for the father,” Jo said, keeping an eye on the rain. “He’s elderly and now he’s alone. A widower. Retired policeman. No other kids. A bitter, bitter man. Drinks. He’s lost to the living world soon.”

“Did he know she’d had an abortion?”

“She never did have one. That’s what she told me, and I certainly believed her.”

“Funny,” said Mary.

“You could kind of tell it in the piece she wrote. That it was by someone outside the process.”

“How strange,” Mary said. “I thought that as well.” She smiled faintly. “I thought, What a vain creature. How little she knows.”

“I understand the bishop down on Long Island doesn’t want to put Maud’s ashes in the crypt—in the niche, whatever—with her mother. It would just be a favor, a neat thing to do. But he wants her father to commission a formal Mass of interment. In other words, come crawling and they’ll take her home.”

They sat on the table at opposite ends under the ugly whining light.

“Oh, the bishop’s an old skunk, isn’t he?” Mary said. “Wants her father to remember his daughter as a pagan and a sinner and a disgrace to her mother. With whom she will never be reunited. But he can’t pretend to cut a Christian soul off from her salvation. Over a piece written by an adolescent in a college newspaper.”

“He’s probably incapable of thinking it through that far, Mary. Who knows what he believes? Who knows who he is? What kind of people become bishops anymore?”

Jo got up and switched off the ceiling light, to kill its glare and turn off its noise.

“Quite all right,” Mary said, “some of them.”

“Really? If you say so. But you’re a very tolerant person.”

“Oh, dear,” said Mary Pick. “I’ve never been told that before.”

Jo sat and watched her elegant friend.

“I want to ask you something. I have to ask it. But I’m afraid you won’t be my friend anymore after I do.”

“Oh, my,” Mary said. “Let’s see.”

“How can you align yourself—a person like you—how can you ally yourself with such terrorizing by such people?”

“I can’t, because I don’t. I am not an activist or an agitator. I can only tell you why I couldn’t have had an abortion. Why I think people shouldn’t do it. But you’ll know all about that.”

“Yes.”

“If anyone asks me,” Mary said, “I’ll say don’t do it. There are people who don’t believe human life starts at conception. I can’t prove them wrong. We are taught that the universe is beautiful. We believe it is good. We believe its phenomena reflect a perfection beyond our understanding but that we can partly experience. Sort of. Man—I should say humankind, shouldn’t I?—is also sacred. Reflecting that being we know as God. Matter, stuff, quickened to human life, is therefore sacred. At the moment, we are taught this quickening happens on conception.”

“At the moment.”

“We don’t argue, do we, because this is dogma, isn’t it?” Mary said. “That is the inspired teaching at the present time. Faith. A being sacred in that way is not to be destroyed at will. Cannot be judged worthy of destruction for individual or general human advantage. That’s the Church’s teaching and that’s the faith one practices.”

“And everyone else has to practice it too?”

“I hold sacred what is declared sacred. The law of the state cannot justify abortion. It isn’t the law of the state that makes human life sacred. It can’t determine what is mortal sin or blasphemy. It can’t punish spiritual crimes. It can’t presume to speak for God.”

“I never thought you felt any other way, Mary.”

Mary looked at her watch. “Got to make dinner for Deano. Ask me if he hates being called Deano. Plucked it from an inspired moment.”

“Wish I’d been there.”

“Right,” said Mary Pick. “You’re never there. No one’s ever there when I’m inspired.”

Jo walked to the door and they looked through the glass at the rain. Mary borrowed an umbrella from Jo’s enormous stash of forgotten ones.

“Not to worry, Josephine,” Mary Pick said, her hand on the knob. “We’ll get things put right for Maud’s father. The church . . . thing.”

“Hey, Mary? Did you think Maud’s piece was good? Religion aside, sort of?”

“Religion aside? A writer lost to us there. I’m going to pray for her. I like to pray that all will be well in spite of things. You know, ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ In spite of it all. You should try it, really. Why not?”

“I’ll leave it to you. I’m glad you liked her piece.”

“I didn’t say I liked it.”

“But you thought it was good.”

“Oh, yes! Time loves language, you know. Forgives the writer, the poet says. And here we are.” She gestured in the direction of the college’s well-known library. “Books everywhere. We do too.”

A
CCORDING TO THE
afternoon timetable, Stack had to change trains at what had been a derelict station in Connecticut he had not seen in a few years. His last time through it had been a crack scene, a rat-haunted vault of pissy shadows. It had been improved somewhat since the downtown bombings. Maybe, he thought, one thing had to do with the other. Graffiti had been painted over. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling were as yet unvandalized, but the ticket counter was closed and the only person in the station with him was a suspiciously sleepy teenager in a hoodie. Stack went over and looked at him—a police impulse. The boy’s eyes were half closed. The kid never reacted, and it was as though he were trying to hide in plain sight.

Stack, in his best wool pants and rather shabby sport jacket, walked tilted against the weight of the semi-automatic pistol he had taken to carrying. New York cops had been issued Glocks while Stack was in the job. Glocks, which replaced the old revolvers, were fearsome, fateful pieces, and they could set a running man into an airborne spin. It was a weapon to display on a twenty-first-century coat of arms, Stack thought. If there was a piece of weaponry used to claim the streets, it would be the Glock, exploding into random fusillades. A carelessly drawn breath might set it blazing. A gun with a mind of its own, in the world that had come to be after 9/11—heavy, hard to use, ready to take out half the room in seconds. They had become popular. Prestigious weapons, they tempted bozos toward casual display.

The Glock had led to a pandemic of bizarre shootings. Things happened inexplicably, the gun creating absurd occurrences on the streets. He had not packed it since leaving the job, and it felt strange.

On the next train to the college Stack had his choice of seats. At New Haven he rose to change again and walked across the refurbished station’s interior. By Maud’s time they had cleaned it up, as befitted the classy young passengers who used it. Of whom Maud had been one. From New Haven a slow local train tunneled through the hills and up the river to Amesbury.

J
O WAS IN THE OFFICE
, closing it down for the holiday break. Amid the spreading tremors of accusation and fear that attended Maud’s death, she’d been giving the semblance of advice to students preparing to return transformed to their families. The home folks would be welcoming conditions as various as bird flu, drug addiction, kundalini yoga, and Salafism, and offering returnees a few unexpected variations on the lives they’d left behind. In short, it was a tough time anyway, compounding the elements of Christmas, the kids’ ages and so on. Mercifully for the college, the repercussions, for the most part, didn’t have to be acted out on college property.

Jo was almost finished with the mailings when an old man came through the street door upstairs and descended to her office.

“Miss Carr?” the old man asked. Jo smiled. “I’m Eddie Stack. I used to be Maud’s father.”

His way of putting it cut off her polite greeting.

“You’ll always be her father, Mr. Stack. Through eternity.”

“We talked on the phone,” Stack said. “You and me. The night before she died.”

She told him to sit down and took a place opposite him.

“I took her to the hospital that night because she was so upset. But she got away from me. You mustn’t say you used to be her father, Mr. Stack.”

She rose and shook his hand across the desk.

“Whatever you say,” he told her.

“I’ve told you how desolate we’ve been here. It makes such an awful Christmas.”

“Yeah,” Stack said. “It’s too bad. I see they got the streets in town decorated. I came up from Long Island.”

“We miss her so much,” Jo said. Stack was trembling a little. She wondered whether he had been drinking, and for how long.

“I know they liked her here. I heard.”

She could only take it for bitterness, and what could she say? That Maud was admired and loved here in ways with which she could not cope, before her time. That Maud herself had loved it here, that it was the fullness of life to her. That it almost certainly would have been fine in the end with a little luck and a little less of God’s appalling mercy.

“But you got her now, right?” Stack said. “You got her from me.”

She looked into the man’s ruined, unforgiving face. We lost you your pretty one. Forgive us!

“Mr. Stack,” she said. “I was going to call you today. You spoke about putting Maud with her mother? I understand that the church is making . . . difficulties?”

Stack writhed in his chair, and the scornful smile he gave her made her cringe as if she herself were the Church and the college and the self-indulgent faculty, all proclaiming their false love, their greed, their treachery.

“Well, look, Mr. Stack. One of our folks here is very active in the Church. And she’s arranged an interment for Maud with her mother at the earliest convenient time. And there’ll be a priest. A ceremony, if you require.”

“So you people,” Stack said, “you people up here, you can do anything, right?”

“No, sir,” Jo said. “We can’t. But we are people who care. Many of us.”

Stack sat silently for a moment, not looking at Jo. Then he stood up, walked to the window and watched the people above him in the street. A few students remained around the campus, selling their textbooks at the only independent store left in town, buying souvenirs for their friends and family.

“I don’t want a religious ceremony,” Stack said. “The priests can shove it. I want to put the kid with her mother.”

“We’ll do it, Mr. Stack. This week. In Advent.”

“I heard about this youth down south said he killed Maud,” Stack said.

“That was a false confession. A nutcase.”

“Yeah, I know. What about this Brookman? Some people say he pushed her in front of the car. The professor who seduced her. The ex-con.”

“No, sir. Can I call you Ed? It was another crazy rumor. The witnesses, almost all the witnesses, say he was trying to save her.”

“He was never arrested. Never charged. Is that because he works here?”

“There was nothing to charge him with, Ed.”

“That right?”

“I’m sure he didn’t hurt her. She was his beautiful prize student.”

He said nothing, only looked at her as though to ask how she could think being beautiful and prized could keep someone safe.

“I’m glad she can be with her mother,” Stack said then. “I don’t need any ceremony. She wouldn’t want it.”

“Whatever you want,” Jo said. “Whenever.” It became apparent to her that he was very ill. He took an inhaler out of his jacket pocket and breathed from it. She asked if he had asthma. Emphysema, he said. Severe.

“You know what I’d like?” Stack said. “I’d like to see the street where it happened.”

“Really?” Jo asked. She did not care for the idea.

“Yeah, I’d like to see the place.”

It was not clear to Jo whether Stack knew that Maud had been struck in front of the Brookman house. In any case, his wanting to see it made her distinctly uneasy.

“Can you direct me? Jo Carr? That your name?”

“Call me Jo, Ed.”

“Yeah,” he said, “sure.”

“I can show you the street if you want to see it.”

She led him out of the office and toward the muddy Common, edged in banks of soiled melted snow. The first of the homeless people had assembled for lunch, lined up along the spiked fence of First Presbyterian’s churchyard. Its carillon was sounding the Rose Carol.

Jo walked him around the Common and then started down Amity Street to Walnut and the hockey rink.

“You don’t have to come with me, Miss Carr. Just show me the way.”

“I don’t mind,” Jo said.

“I don’t want you to come.”

“Well,” she said, “it’s two blocks from here. If you turn left at the rink. On the right side of the street. Midway.” He nodded his thanks and she watched him walk in the direction of the rink. He had bought a cheap drugstore cane that morning to support himself on the part of his journey that would have to be covered on foot. He did not really lean on it as he walked—rather, he swung it in front of him at shin level, almost like a blind man. Still, in his weakened state his progress was slow. Watching him, she wanted to call him back, interrupt whatever he thought he was doing.

“Ed!”

He turned slowly, reacting to his first name.

“You know where to find me, Ed!”

“Sure thing.”

Back in the office, Jo found her end-of-term caretaking bogged down in petty details and worrisome distractions. The distraction that worried her most was the conversation she had just had with Edward Stack. That he had come to the college at all was disturbing, and she avoided the question of his visit during their exchange. Finally it worried her enough to phone Salmone at the police station and mention that she had seen Stack. She called Salmone rather than college security because she knew he had spent time with Stack in the NYPD. She also had a question for the lieutenant, the answer to which she hoped would allow her to rest easier.

“He asked me to direct him to the scene of his daughter’s death,” she said when she had Salmone on the line. “It seemed a reasonable thing. I guess I didn’t put it all together in that moment. It being the Brookmans’ house.”

“Was he threatening? Was he agitated?”

“I didn’t think so.”

“Had he been drinking?”

“It occurred to me. I thought he might have been, but he wasn’t acting very intoxicated and there wasn’t a detectable booze aura there.” A little cagey was how she thought of him later.