Night Visions (7 page)

Watching the Hispanic woman and thinking about the one who walked the length of the church on her knees, Samantha envies the power of their faith. She longs to feel the kind of comfort that must come with such devotion. She wraps her fingers gently around the frog, closes her eyes, and listens to the voices of the choir as if they're speaking her own silent prayer.

 

Truly you have suffered on the cross for mankind…

May we have tasted of you at the hour of our death…

O gentle, loving Jesus, Son of Mary, have mercy upon me…

O gentle, loving Jesus, Son of Mary, have mercy upon me….

DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA
NOVEMBER 15, 1986
7:20 P.M.

A woman wrapped in a black leather jacket and scarf sits in a pew at the back of Saint Peter's Church. Her face appears to shift in the flickering candlelight, and her tired eyes seem to weep without tears. She stares down at the cover of the weekly bulletin. It's a black-and-white print of Caravaggio's
The Crucifixion of Saint Peter.
Peter's face cries out with fear and anguish as three shadowy men lift and push his cross. Humiliated and wretched, he waits for death.

Putting down the picture, she walks slowly to the confessional. A choir is rehearsing Pergolesi's
Stabat Mater.
Violins accompany the somber voices of two women as they sing about a weeping mother who stands beside the cross of her son.
“Stabat Mater dolorosa iuxta crucem lacrimosa…”
She understands the words without knowing what they mean.

“Bless me, Father, for I am a sinner.”

“We're all sinners.”

“Not like me.”

Father Murphy pauses. The music sounds muffled in the confessional. “What do you want to confess?”

“I think I've killed two people.”

“Excuse me?”

“I'm not sure. I don't remember much, but I have visions of things I've done.”

“I don't understand.”

“I can see what I'm about to do and can't stop it, Father.”

“You're wrong.” He leans back, startled. “It can stop right here. If you've hurt someone, we'll get help. We'll go to the police. Together. You can ask God's forgiveness—”

“I need sleep more than forgiveness.”

Father Murphy hears the curtains pulled apart on the other side of the grille, and he opens the confessional door. Quick footsteps. A figure in black darts into the vestibule. He hurries after her.

The small room is dark and smells of the pine trees outside. To his left, a circular stairway leads up to the balcony, and the shadow of a swaying tree appears through a stained-glass window halfway up the wall. A stack of bulletins has been spilled across the floor, leaving dozens of Saint Peters staring up at him.

Maybe it was some sort of prank, he thinks, looking around the empty room.

Suddenly, the music starts again:
“Quando corpus morietur.”
Father Murphy translates the words as he stoops to pick up the bulletins. “When my body dies…”

There is a sound behind him. He turns quickly. Nothing. “…let my soul be granted the glory of Paradise.”

Then a burning in his neck.

She flings herself at him, driving two knives into opposite sides of his neck. Father Murphy falls forward from the force of the attack—one hand clutching a wound, the other pressing against the floor. Before he can look away from the dark green marble beneath him, a blade pierces the back of his right hand. The pain is blinding. He turns his head to the figure crouching beside him, then hears a gust of air as her arm moves quickly, like a door closing.

She arcs her left arm toward the ceiling in one fluid motion, slicing the knife deeply across his throat. She removes the other knife from his impaled hand and rolls him over. She carves a circle into his upper chest.

 

Quando corpus morietur,

fac ut animae donetur

Paradisi gloria.

 

Father Murphy watches the moonlight pass faintly through the stained glass above his head. He doesn't feel the rope knotted around his ankles, nor is he fully aware that his body is being hoisted from the railing of the staircase until he hangs upside down. His hand bleeds onto the green marble and white bulletins, staining Peter's suffering red.

 

Amen. Amen.

Amen. Amen.

 

She must hurry now. Outside, the cool wind stings her cheeks as she runs to her car several blocks away. Her legs feel heavy. Sitting behind the steering wheel, she looks frantically for her keys, but it's too late. Darkness. She collapses into the passenger seat.

NOVEMBER 16, 1986
10:43 A.M.

Her mother is a notorious worrier. Since moving home six weeks ago, Christina has gone out several times and not returned until morning. She never remembers where she has been, and her mother never believes her. When Christina was in high school, her mother once called the police and said three rosaries when her only daughter missed curfew by an hour and thirteen minutes. So it is no surprise that she is waiting at the kitchen table, rosary in hand, when Christina walks through the door.

“Where have you been?” She doesn't wait for an answer. “I was so worried. How can you do this to me? You know I sit up all night, worrying, talking to Mrs. Lehntman on the phone—you remember Mrs. Lehntman—her daughter just got married—and wondering, Should I call the police? Should I look for her? Or should I just find a new daughter!”

“Mama—”

“You think you're not a child anymore. That you can take care of yourself. But you can't. You leave Washington to follow your father and me here, but you won't talk to either of us. You don't talk to any of your friends. You're tired all the time, Christina. I need to know what's wrong.”

“I'm sorry, Mama. This is just something I need to figure out myself.”

“Is it a man?”

“No.”

“A young lady doesn't behave this way.”

“It's not a man.”

“I keep asking myself, What am I supposed to do, and just yesterday I thought of Father Murphy. I'll have her talk to Father Murphy. And then that terrible news—”

“What news?” Looking at her mother's face, Christina realizes that something else is wrong. “What news, Mama?”

“It's been on the TV all morning.” Her mother becomes visibly upset as she gets up and turns on the small black-and-white television in the kitchen. A reporter holding a notepad is speaking in front of a church.

“Father Patrick Murphy was found murdered in the vestibule of Saint Peter's Church in Durham, North Carolina, yesterday evening. Police believe that it happened sometime between seven and eight
P.M
., while Father Murphy was hearing confession. At this time, officials are not releasing any details about the crime, but sources say that the victim's throat was cut and his body bound with rope….”

“He was hung upside down.” Christina speaks in a monotone voice, without being conscious of the words.

“What?”

“I need a shower.”

“You still haven't told me where you were last night.”

“I don't know.”

“Christi—”

“I don't know,” Christina snaps. “I just don't.” She pauses and exhales slowly. “I'm going to take a shower now.”

She goes to her room and opens her journal. She writes about the news report and waking up this morning in her car several blocks from the church. She glances through the earlier pages, comparing this record to other accounts she has pieced together recently. For several months, her amnesia and blackouts have coincided with reports of killings. Her nightmares have become more vivid.

She takes out a folded paper from her pocket. It's this week's bulletin from Saint Peter's Church, crumpled and discolored with brown stains. Christina quickly refolds it and places it in the journal.

For the rest of the day, the image of Saint Peter stays with her. She sees him in the shower, on television, even in the dark when she listens to Bach—which has been less effective every year.

But what keeps her awake now is fear—fear of herself and a future she can't control. The
Goldberg Variations
hum softly in her ears. At most, she will sleep for two or three hours. She listens anyway, waiting and praying, as always, that at any moment she will somehow fall asleep.

O
n the top shelf in her bedroom closet, Samantha keeps a shoe box filled with memories—love letters, Mother's reading glasses, euros from a backpacking trip to Europe, postcards, her first ribbon from a fencing tournament, several photographs. The box feels heavier now than she remembered, but maybe the past is always that way. She places it on the desk and removes the dusty lid, trying to decide whether to put Phebe's frog inside.

A second edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby
sits on top. It was the last gift Frank gave her before moving to Washington. Months before, she'd jokingly called him Gatsby after a fight in which he asked how many lovers she'd had before him, and she wouldn't answer.
Does it really matter? You only need to be with one person to know how to make someone else happy.

Frank wanted to know about her past so he could stop feeling that her kisses were borrowed, learned from someone else for a love he and she didn't share. At least that's what he told her. But Samantha didn't think he really cared about numbers, names,
and reasons that no longer mattered. Like Gatsby, he wanted to erase the past, to believe that true love happened only once—and with one person.

She picks up the novel and notices a faded piece of notebook paper sticking lightly to the back cover. She pulls it off and recognizes the handwriting immediately:
You look beautiful today. I love you.—Alex

Yes, some things she couldn't tell Frank. Everyone has something—a secret place or name—that can open the pain of the past.

For her, it is Alexander.

Samantha was a sophomore in college when she met Alexander. He dazzled her with sophistication and intelligence—a graduate student of history, a connoisseur of wine, an insatiable traveler. Everything about him seemed magical to her. The unexpected touch of his fingertips on the back of her neck. The way he misplaced his glasses two or three times a day. The smell of sweat through his shirts.

Samantha wanted so much to have the love she'd seen in movies that she made excuses for his cruelty. At least, she accepted his excuses for hurting her. He didn't want to be in love, she realized later. He wanted the power of knowing someone loved him. She remembers the first of many nights that she drove to his apartment, a two-room unit attached to the back of a house, and saw the car belonging to his ex-girlfriend parked on the street. All the lights were off. They were inside.

She didn't pound on the door or yell like an infuriated lover. She just left. If she wasn't sure about his infidelities, she could go on believing in their love.

Samantha broke up with him every time it happened, but he was always indignant—claiming innocence, blaming her for jumping to the wrong conclusions, for being unreasonable. In truth, he wanted to see how far he could push her.

Eventually, he ended it, saying he'd never loved her.

That was something Samantha couldn't forgive, even though he had asked her back the next day. He moved away to take a job somewhere on the East Coast, and mostly she doesn't care where. She doesn't want to be with him again. They had only been together for a year. She just wants the ideal that he made her believe in.

When she met Frank, she realized that love could happen more than once. You're just not the same person when it finds you again. With Frank, she had silences and walls to hide behind.

She had Alexander.

 

Samantha decides to leave Phebe's frog on her desk. She replaces the book, balls up the note from Alexander, and closes the box. After seeing the apartment today, she is convinced that the only way to find Catherine and figure out what happened to Phebe is by opening up the past.

She drops Alexander's note into the wastebasket beside the desk and picks up the phone.

 

Frank paces absentmindedly as he tells her about two possible matches for the first victim. Only two recent missing-person reports from the Salt Lake area fit the height, sex, and estimated age of the man found under Catherine's car. J. P. Nelms was a used-car salesman with no family and a long list of creditors interested in finding him. Three weeks ago, he didn't show up for work. Nelms had a reputation for being a heavy drinker, so his boss waited a few days before calling the police. The second man, Gabriel Morgan, had been a Catholic priest for three years. Just over a month ago he had participated in a gay rights demonstration in downtown Salt Lake City. The church had subsequently ordered him to take a leave of absence.

“I'll know for sure tomorrow,” Frank concludes. “The dental records will be here first thing in the morning.”

“That may explain the dinner. If Catherine found out that Morgan was a priest, she may have confided in him, paid for dinner at the end of the evening, even offered to drive him to San Francisco.”

“If that's true, it builds a case against her as the murderer, not the victim. Why drive halfway across the country, buy dinner for someone you've never met, give him a ride to San Francisco, then kill him? It doesn't make sense.”

“Maybe the killer stalked both of them at the restaurant? Or came across them here in the city? We still haven't figured out why she drove to San Francisco.”

Samantha wants Frank to sit, to stop moving. She remembers how he always seemed in motion to her, as if stillness would suffocate him. He's like a shark that can never know sleep. “There's something else.”

“What?”

“Do you think the first victim was hanged upside down before being tied to the car?” Her voice sounds tentative.

Frank stops and looks at her. “Possibly. That could explain the two sets of rope burns on his ankles and wrists.”

“Check this out.” She spins around to the laptop on her desk and opens a color image of Caravaggio's
The Crucifixion of Saint Peter
. “I went to church this morning, Saint Peter's. That's where I made the connection.”

“What connection?”

“After he was condemned to death, Peter asked to be crucified upside down. He didn't feel worthy of dying like Christ.” She pauses, her face lit by the computer screen. “Typically, the condemned were tied to a cross, not nailed like Christ and Peter. And Peter even asked not to be nailed.” She wonders about Frank's expression as he lifts one eyebrow slightly. He looks at her as if she's speaking in tongues. “The first victim was hung by his feet, then tied underneath the car—arms stretched out, feet
bound together, and body upside down relative to the car. An inverted crucifixion. Like Peter. Like Phebe.”

Frank considers the possibility. “But why?”

“Apparently Peter embraced his martyrdom. Crowds of people wanted to free him, but he begged them not to. He wanted to be martyred.”

“Why would anyone—”

“Eternal life. To be assured a place in heaven for all time.”

Frank lowers his eyes and begins pacing again. “But if these crimes are supposed to reenact the crucifixion of Saint Peter, why didn't the killer make the ritual more clear with the first victim? And why leave a recording of the
Goldberg Variations
?”

“I don't know. But you're right. We need to find out more about that piece.” Samantha picks up a pencil on her desk and twirls it between her fingers. “That's why I called Don today—to ask if he could look into a few things for me.”

“Don? Donald Tarnas?”

“Yeah.”

“Don, the history professor, the guy we used to drink with in law school? What does he have to do with any of this?”

She smiles tentatively, switching the pencil from one hand to the other. “He now teaches at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.”

“So?”

“According to the file you showed me, both Catherine and her roommates went to Chapel Hill.” She pauses nervously. “Maybe he could talk to them—”

“For Christ's sake, Sam, you shouldn't be telling anyone about this.”

“Don isn't just anyone. He's our friend and an expert. Catherine's disappearance, Phebe's death, the man under the car are all linked to the
Goldberg Variations
. If we're going to solve this case, we need to know more about that piece.”

Frank looks at the floor, shaking his head.

“Don is the best person to ask,” she continues.

“Fine. Let him do some library research and see what he comes up with. But he doesn't have any legal jurisdiction to interview—”

“And I do? The only reason I have access to any of this is because I'm pretending to work for the Palici Corporation. He can do the same thing. Say he's a consultant for the group.”

“Sure, why not? Maybe he can deputize some grad students while he's at it. You know, for extra credit.”

“No one is going to find out.”

He exhales audibly.

“Frank, we need answers sooner rather than later. Who knows how much time we have before the police find another body?”

“Let me know what Don finds out, and I'll think about the interviews. Okay?”

Samantha nods and places the pencil on the surface of the desk. Frank has been watching, and she can tell that he notices the porcelain frog. She desperately tries to think of ways to justify taking it, but she doesn't want to lie. His eyes have a piercing honesty to them, as if he wants to see the truth in others. She wonders incidentally what they will look like as an old man. Bright and cheerful? Absent and longing? Sad and watery? She sees hints of sadness already.

He doesn't mention the frog.

“So tell me more about your insomnia,” he says.