Fear the Darkness: A Thriller (7 page)

I spotted Mallory, who hadn’t spotted us. Her sights were on the man we had met at St. Martin’s, the one with the ponytail, which was now at interesting odds with his smart blazer and dress slacks. She laughed at something he said, and even from a distance I could almost see her blush. Then she stumbled on the uneven ground and he gripped her arm to steady her, bringing her closer. Good tactic, I thought. Mallory was in rare form tonight. I dropped my guard.

Mallory saw me next, said something I assumed was dismissive to the man, and met Carlo and me halfway. She moved confidently in a prairie skirt, white blouse unbuttoned to there and no further, and a low-slung southwestern belt that hid her lack of waist. I marveled that an outfit like that could still look like it came from Ralph Lauren.

I nodded in the direction of Ponytail Man and said, “I take it you’ve met Adrian Franklin.”

“Just now. He said he remembered seeing me at church,” she said, with a Mae West roll of her eyes. But she had more critical things on her mind than her casual flirting. She put one arm around me and one around Carlo, kissing the cheek on either side of hers. But she didn’t draw away immediately, and I thought I knew her well enough to see when she was upset and putting on a show. I didn’t have to wait long for the reason.

“I’m so relieved you’re here,” she whispered before finishing the hug and pulling back, her voice breathy with tension. “I’ve made a horrid mistake, and I need you to save me from myself.” She cocked her head back at the table behind her. “Don’t stare, but you see the couple sitting with the Manwarings? Those are the Neilsens.” Feeling like I was operating undercover again, I gave the table a quick glance.

On one side slumped Father Manwaring, looking defeated, and the woman Mallory had indicated was his wife. Lulu was in white linen, very upright yet fading into the background beside her husband, who wasn’t even trying. I had seen her around the church but had not connected her to Elias.

Across the table and leaning back, which was as far away as they could get from the Manwarings without falling off their chairs, was an extremely uncomfortable-looking couple Mallory identified as the Neilsens. “I thought it would be a good thing to get us together in neutral territory, make peace,” Mallory said, smiling while only her voice wrung its hands.

“How was I supposed to know she’s still stark raving?” Anyone else would hear the usual low social chatter. Only I could hear her shouting. “I can’t tell you everything right now because they’ll know we’re talking about them. Come.”

“I can’t wait,” I said, but let Mallory take my hand, link her other arm through Carlo’s, and guide us to what early indications promised to be a damn bad evening.

We were introduced around the table.
Darlings this is Carlo and Brigid DiForenza you know Father Elias but I don’t know if you’ve met Lulu yet and Tim Neilsen, Dr. Neilsen, and Jacquie.

While Mallory did the intros, I took a look at the Neilsens. Tim was slight but muscular with a receding hairline that didn’t look so obvious because he was blond and pale, his scalp and hair blending together so you couldn’t be sure which was which. I wondered if his angry mouth looked that way all the time or just when he was trapped with people he didn’t like.

Jacquie told me more. The sight of her flashed me back to the abused women’s shelter. Her dress drooped to reveal the top edge of her bra, something that a woman usually cares enough to avoid. Her teeth looked a little filmy as if she hadn’t bothered to brush them for the evening, or maybe since the day before. Her hair was dyed blue-black. Odd that someone so uncaring about looks and personal hygiene would touch up her roots.

My heart went out to her, and then I put it back as I had with the lost woman at the shelter. I had known too many people who had lost loved ones, including myself, and I didn’t think I could take any more of someone else’s pain. Just not right this minute.

Mallory fled on the pretext of getting us wine, and Carlo and I were left to take seats pinning us between the quiet Manwarings and the wary Neilsens.

Carlo and I tried the usual prepackaged topics, which were met with a few murmurs before silence resumed. I was making plans to later bitch-slap Mallory for abandoning us to this group when Carlo opened with the usual How Long Have You Lived in Tucson gambit.

This worked a little better by enabling Carlo to speak to the Neilsens apart from the Manwarings without appearing rude. Tim talked about how Jacquie had grown up here but that he had moved to Tucson to join a medical practice, where he met his future bride. Here he picked up her hand and kissed it. I noticed her hand did not respond to the kiss, but she did murmur little agreeing sounds, ah and mm, that played behind his words like backup in a singing group.

Carlo mentioned we had our niece staying with us and that she might be interested in medical school. That was a lie of sorts, and I admired it. Tim said he knew some people and gave Carlo his card. I glanced and saw the “Internal Medicine” under his name. Then I remembered Mallory had said something about him being her husband’s physician.

“What do you do?” Tim asked, the only other standard question that hadn’t been asked.

“I’m retired from the U of A, philosophy,” Carlo said. “Brigid here, she’s the one with the interesting profession.”

I hate when he does that. “It’s only interesting to Carlo. I used to be in federal law enforcement. Copyright infringement investigations.”

They would have nodded blandly and moved on, but Carlo wouldn’t drop it. “Brigid is being modest. She was a special agent for the FBI. She foiled evildoers.” That widened eyes around the table. “Now she does private investigations.”

“Private…” was the first word Jacquie had uttered since we sat down. She fixed me with one of those stares, eyes all out on you while mind all inward. As if she wasn’t aware of our attention to her, Jacquie picked up her evening bag from her lap, took out a pen, and wrote something on the back of Tim’s business card that lay on the table between us. Tim scowled as he watched her but apparently could not object.

Then she stood up and leaned over the table, bracing herself on her hands. Her hands were flat on the table. Tim put one of his over hers but she didn’t relax them, didn’t invite his fingers to curl around hers. She smiled a too-wide smile. “How are your children, Lulu?” Jacquie asked, the lack of a conversational segue apparent to us all, which, if her voice hadn’t been so strident and her grin so wide, would still have made her sound a little crazy.

Lulu murmured that her children were doing well, thank you. The “well” came out as whispered regret.

“Amanda still in school?” Jacquie said it with a glare, as if she was accusing Amanda of torturing small animals.

Yes.

“And Ken. Peter was something of a bully, Joey said. But I liked Ken.” The words were darting pretty steadily from her mouth now that she had begun. “Is the youth group still active, Lulu? Are you still in charge?”

Yes, they were planning a kickball … but Lulu’s words trailed off as she realized there were no right ones to speak, that anything she would say would have the sound of a slap. So she stopped trying to talk altogether and stopped trying to look anything but miserable.

I thought Lulu was going to apologize, for something, for Jacquie’s grief, for her own children still being alive. Jacquie turned to me with a look that said
Do you see?
but I didn’t see at all.

“I’m so … sorry,” she said, all her anger collapsing into itself, though her apology was seemingly directed at only Carlo and me. “I … just … can’t … do this. I … thought I … could do it.”

Lulu turned her head as if she couldn’t face Jacquie’s ache. This was the moment that Mallory, ever positive that no situation couldn’t be improved by wine, approached with a bottle in each hand. “I would have gone for the champagne but it would have given you all head…” she trailed off as she saw Tim and Jacquie standing while the rest of us sat.

“I’m so sorry we can’t stay,” Tim said. “Please give Owen my best. I’ll stop by next week to see him.”

“But,” Mallory said.

Tim lifted a finger that appeared to press Mallory’s lips closed from across the table. “I thought it would be good for her, for us, but I think we both made a mistake.”

Mallory put the bottles down and started to come around to the Neilsens’ side of the table, but then stopped. Tim reached out his hand and shook Carlo’s politely, and Elias’s as well, while Lulu kept her hands in her lap and looked stricken. Jacquie made her little murmuring sounds, an “ah-ha” and a “hmmm,” but now they sounded like tiny verbal uppercuts to someone’s jaw.

Without saying good-bye to Mallory or the Manwarings, Jacquie said once more, “I can’t,” then turned and walked across the lawn, Tim making her lean against him as she stumbled either because of unaccustomed heels or because her knees were buckling as she walked.

I picked up Tim’s business card that had been left on the table and turned it over. On the back, along with a phone number, Jacquie had written
Help me
.

Ten

Still standing, Mallory watched them go off a little way, then without a word poured wine in our glasses to a level that she would usually disparage. She lifted hers, and when we lifted ours, wondering what the most appropriate Mallory toast could possibly be at a moment like this, she said with a shake of her head as well as the hand that held the glass, “Fuck.”

It was rude and unfeeling, but I tell you, in that moment it felt like a perfect prayer, and it felt as if we had permission to be real. Lulu gave a mirthless laugh, took a slug of wine, and dropped her face into her free hand in the first sincere gesture I’d seen at the table. Elias raised his glass a little higher and followed suit with a sad “My heart is breaking for her.”

Mallory fell back into her chair rather than simply sitting down and said, “I’m so sorry. I’m just so sorry. Why didn’t I realize? I’m an utter monster.”

“They accepted the invitation, Mallory,” I said. “They couldn’t even foresee what the effect would be. She wasn’t ready.”

They took turns telling me, with the Manwarings able to offer much more than Mallory could. Whether it was Christian concern or good old-fashioned gossip didn’t matter to me. I watched Elias and Lulu bat the facts back and forth as we listened and Mallory spurred them on as the need arose, apparently grateful that at least the conversation was flowing.

“Their son, Joe, died about six months ago. It was horrible.”

I thought of another person I knew who’d lost his child, and I knew that six months, six years, was nothing. But except for Carlo, I still kept thoughts like that to myself rather than have to answer questions about how I knew all that, about the details.

“Accident. Drowning. Pool.”

“Suicide.”

“Which?” asked Mallory. “I heard both rumors, never knew what they finally decided.”

“No, it was that thing they do with sex.”

Lulu said, “No, that’s just another rumor. If you ever talk to Jacquie again don’t even hint that you heard that. At the funeral she overheard someone say he was found with his pants unzipped and she went ballistic right there in front of everyone.”

“In denial,” Elias said.

“But why are they upset with you?” Mallory asked. “I thought they left the church because of some crisis of faith, and I thought I could do some—”

“It’s a whole other issue,” Lulu started.

“Denial,” Elias repeated. “Tim Neilsen is a goddamn homophobe.” He held out his glass to Mallory for a refill.

Lulu seemed relieved to be able to tell the story, and I wondered how many more times it would take before she could let it go for good. “I help out by being the youth group director. The kids get comfortable with me. Joe confided that he wanted to tell his father he was gay.”

“Stepfather.”

“But Joe was so little when they married it’s almost as if. I shouldn’t have encouraged him to come out. It wasn’t my business to do that.”

“We have two kids, a boy and a girl, one in high school, one in college,” Elias said to us. “Amanda came out two years ago. It was nothing. You already know, you know?” Cocking his head in Lulu’s direction, he asked, “Why would she think the Neilsens would be any different?”

Lulu said, “Tim and Jacquie, Tim especially, they were in serious denial about Joe being gay.”

“This day and age?” I said. “I could see it maybe being an issue in Prescott or Yuma, but Tucson? It’s a university town, for Pete’s sake. Tucson is”—I lowered my voice the way people do when they say “herpes”—“liberal.”

Mallory nodded. “Seems like everyone here is either LGBT or writing a book. Aren’t you writing a book, darling?” she asked Carlo.

Carlo’s attention had been on a shnoodle that wandered up and sniffed his trousers, but he smiled his assent, not finding it necessary to express an opinion when there already seemed to be plenty about. That’s how Carlo is.

“Doesn’t matter where he lives, or whether he’s Joe’s biological father, Tim’s a goddamn homophobe,” Elias repeated. “Jackass.”

“Oh, you’re just upset because they withdrew their pledge,” Lulu said to Elias, with a sharpness in her tone that indicated she didn’t drink daily. Then to me, “Joe seemed to trust me enough to talk to me. I suggested he tell them, and he did.”

I merely repeated, “This day and age?”

Lulu nodded. “The Neilsens were so conservative they switched churches.”

“St. Bede’s. I hope they’re happy there,” Elias said, but even those mild words came out sounding more like
They should eat shit and die.

I glanced at Mallory, who was sipping thoughtfully. She had tried to be a peacemaker between the Neilsens and the Manwarings the way that Lulu had tried to help Joe and his family. Everyone but me should mind their own business, was my opinion.

“So you didn’t know this?” I asked her.

Mallory shook her head. “We were friends through the church. You know how that is.”

I handed the business card to Carlo, who said, “Brigid, you should call her. Maybe you can help somehow.”