Sins of the Flesh (19 page)

T
he nuns of the Sacred Heart School for Girls said their first prayers of the day at six a.m.; when Sister Mary Therese Kelly wasn’t present, Mother Perpetua Gonzales discovered she wasn’t anywhere to be found. A thorough search of the convent, school and grounds produced no sign of her. At seven a.m. Mother called the Holloman PD and was put through to Captain Carmine Delmonico.

“I’m coming,” said Carmine. “Don’t touch anything.”

Siren on and messages out to Delia and Donny to join him, Carmine raced through traffic building up to rush hour and reached his destination twenty minutes later.

When Mother Perpetua had taught a six-year-old Carmine to read with enjoyment she had been a skinny little nun not far out of her teens, endowed with a genius for instilling love of learning in kids; a whole career as a primary school teacher had stretched before her. Now that she was into her sixties she was principal of her school and a force to be reckoned with. Vocations had fallen off drastically, so much so that many Catholic schoolteachers these days were laypersons, but Mother Perpetua was still capable of drawing vocations. Once a nun was under the shade of Mother Perpetua’s wing, she seemed to take to the life as if made for it, and its problems, shared, always seemed to have an answer.

Mother Perpetua was waiting outside the convent door, pacing up and down, when Carmine arrived, Delia and Donny in his wake.

“Forensics won’t be long,” said Delia tersely.

“Delia, you take the school buildings. Donny, check under every twig and leaf on the grounds. If you’re done ahead of me, I’ll be with Mother Perpetua.”

It took Carmine many, many minutes to cross the front hall and ascend the lovely old staircase to the rooms on the floor overhead; there was no third storey.

“Are bedroom doors ordinarily closed?” he asked at Sister Mary Therese’s closed door.

“Not unless privacy is required, and that you may imagine why.”

“Had she asked for privacy?”

“Definitely not. That was why we were so surprised this morning.”

Carmine produced a magnifying glass and examined the knob. “The prints are smeared—the last hand on it wore a clammy glove.” He opened the door and went into a large but unostentatious room, a kind of a home, though the bed was single and the furniture unfashionable. A big desk, well lit, shelves of books, a lounge chair facing a TV set, a cork board festooned with pieces of paper. Delia and Donny came in as he summed up a busy, useful, happy life complete to a small shrine to Our Lady.

“I don’t think there’s much here for us, guys,” he said.

Mother Perpetua spoke. “Then come and have breakfast and coffee with us. You must be famished.”

“He remade the bed,” said Delia.

“How old was Sister Mary Therese Kelly?” Carmine asked at the end of an excellent breakfast.

“Thirty-four next May,” said Mother Perpetua. “Most nuns look younger than they are. Conventual life keeps the spirit youthful because our troubles are shared. She was a marvelous teacher of arithmetic.”

“Did she enter straight from high school, Mother?”

“Yes. She took her degree from Albertus Magnus.”

“Her relatives?” Delia asked.

“One brother a parish priest in Cleveland, Ohio, and another an insurance salesman, married, with two children. No sisters.”

“I take it Father Kelly is the head of the family,” Carmine said. “Would you like me to contact him?”

“If it’s at all possible, Carmine, I would prefer to do it?”

“Mother, it’s one job I don’t mind handing over, believe me!” Carmine said fervently.

“Have you any idea what might have happened to her?” Mother asked as she walked them to the front door.

“As yet, no,” Carmine answered, keeping his voice casual. “It’s too early, Mother, and kidnapping seems unlikely—I mean, why her when there were better candidates closer to the stairs? Though I have notified the archbishop, just in case there’s a ransom demand.”

Delia waited until the front door was closed and she, Donny and Carmine were alone. “I very much fear that Sister Therese is dead.”

“Why?” Carmine asked with a premonitory shiver.

“This is Mystery Man—the out-of-towner on the big bike.”

“No one heard a bike,” Donny said.

“Or saw one, I know. But it’s he. I don’t care what you argue to the contrary,” Delia maintained. “What’s more, he’s working to a plan. This chap is a loner, and I’d be willing to bet that he’s not fixated on nuns. Sister Mary Therese is essential.”

Walter had discovered that he could mirror-write as easily as he could write in the ordinary way; it only meant, as he called it now, “shifting gears” to turn a very sharp corner, and—hey presto!—he was through the looking glass. Right and left, side to side, had always confused him, whereas the points on a compass did not; now he reasoned that it had something to do with two different worlds, the linearity of right and left, the circularity of north, east, south, west, and back to north. The trouble was that explanations bored him. If he told Jess, she would insist on hours and hours of dissection and discussion. The I-Walter was not even remotely interested in the Jess-Walters because the Jess-Walters were a mishmash. The I-Walter was the whole entity, and was complete in himself.

He knew what the I-Walter’s purpose was, though sometimes it still came in patches, or was befogged and twisted. That frustration never occurred was the result of a kind of infinite patience that only a lifetime prisoner could endure.

His plan was working, he could see that clearly, and once he had written his mirrored note and read it through, he smiled. Jess was right: when a good feeling invaded him, he was more and more tempted to betray that fact by smiling.
Not
a good idea! The smile vanished immediately. Time to feel the pleasure-thing after it was over and he could confirm that it had worked. There were dangers in too many pathways; events were starting to go too fast. He couldn’t slow down events, but he could set a guard on himself.

“What did you do today, Walter?” Jess asked him at dinner.

He’d lead his mentor somewhere he knew she found alluring. “Remember when I discovered I could write just as well with my left hand as with my right?”

“How could I forget?” Amusement gleamed in her eyes, but not, he knew, a contemptuous emotion; Jess thought the Walter she had created was a wonder of the world. “Don’t tell me you’ve taught yourself something new?”

“No, not new. My toes, remember?”

Her amusement fled. “You mean—?”

“Yes, I can write with my toes now.”

“Right foot, or left foot?”

It was as if he had neatly caught her amusement as it vanished and installed it in his own eyes. “Both.”

“What provoked you to try, Walter?”

“Ari Melos said I had prehensile toes, so I looked up ‘prehensile’ in Webster’s and found out that it means capable of gripping an object. A pencil is an object, so I gripped it in my left toes and wrote.”

“You’re amazing, Walter,” she said hollowly.

“Will you put it in my notes?”

“Of course.”

“I’m tired,” he said. “I think I’ll try to sleep.”

“Since sleep is the state of being you find the hardest, I won’t delay you a moment longer.”

“Do you think I’ll ever be able to control my dreams, Jess?”

“If you could do that, I’d win a Nobel Prize.”

“Is that important?”

“The most important thing that can ever happen to a doctor.”

Jess kept Walter’s notes in her handbag—or rather, kept the meaningful notes there, the ones she didn’t want Walter to see; he read everything on everybody, especially himself. But he had one extraordinary idiosyncrasy, given his amorality: he refused to open or delve into the contents of a woman’s handbag. Jess’s private theory about this put its cause before his thirteenth year, during one of Walter’s brief, infrequent periods in foster care. Whatever the woman who found him rifling her purse had done to him, Jess had no way of knowing, but it had been terrifying enough to survive mania and two hundred hours of neurosurgery.

So Walter would find a few bland lines in his file folder when he had a look, but only her eyes would ever see what she wrote and deposited in her handbag. The many dozens of these slender exercise books had accumulated over the thirty-two months of his post-operative career, and were stored in the basement of her house, some among anonymous thousands.

While Walter slept, Jess filled ten pages of his notebook, then dropped it into her handbag; time now for other patients.

By half after eleven he was inside the wall, topping up his gas tank from a plastic container; tonight he didn’t dare go near a gas station on his way home. Sister Mary Therese had passed out of rigor—not that it made any difference, as he had stored her bent exactly as she would be over the additions to the back of his Harley. At midnight he opened the door to the outside world and wheeled the motorcycle out, frowning at the thought that perhaps two nights in a row might leave a track. But the ground was still wet from storms and short deluges, the grass was actively growing. After he came back tonight he’d have to spend some time outside obliterating the marks of his passage. If anyone found his door, he was over and done with, kaput.

A full mile away he kicked the bike into life and grumbled down 133 a very short distance before turning onto Maple, a long, winding street that traveled across Holloman from its outskirts on Route 133 to downtown, sheltered by the trees after which it was named, his burden draped across the pillion box and panniers no burden at all to a Harley-Davidson. Whenever he saw flashing lights from a patrol car he pulled over into dense shadow and waited; police presence was up tonight, after the nun’s abduction. Once through downtown he headed for East Holloman and a street called East Circle that followed the curve of Holloman Harbor on its east side, providing its houses, each on an overly large allotment, with views both interesting and beautiful. Wardroom scuttlebutt had informed Walter that the most enviable house on East Circle, adorned with a tall, square tower owning a widow’s walk, belonged to Captain Carmine Delmonico, of the Holloman PD. He doubted anyone would remember who dropped the name into that particular chat!

Hank Jones had every reason to be delighted with the address; he had turned up after the Captain had turned in, been welcomed by an ecstatic but relatively noiseless Frankie, who received a yummy snack as reward. Then, in harmony with each other, youth and dog set up Hank for a night at the easel, a portable one, unfolded a card table, and put Hank’s tiered box of paints and brushes down on it. As soon as Hank became more interested in what sat mute on his easel than what sat panting at his feet, Frankie heaved a huge dog-sigh and went back to his basket in the bedroom hallway upstairs—a lonely place with only Carmine for company.

Given the constant police presence, Walter decided to leave the bike under the east pylon of I-95; the west pylon lay at the end of a long span that arced over the factories and Holloman airport. Which left North Holloman Harbor and the Pequot River much closer to the east pylon, built right on the shore.

There was, however, a track worn scant feet above the high tide marker; Sister Mary Therese around his neck, his left hand gripping the wire between her wrists and the butt of his hunting knife, his right hand gripping the wire between her ankles and the butt of his .45, Walter saw the house he was aiming for as soon as he emerged from the blank blackness under the pylon. Ah! Easy! He’d follow a line just up-water from the rear ends of boat sheds—crappy little things that housed rowboats with outboard motors, or canoes, or kayaks—no millionaire craft here!

When Walter moved with intentional silence, it was like listening to the night breathe, so the sleeping dog’s inbuilt alarm never sounded until the first foot put weight on the bottom step leading up to the deck: the dog cried terror with four stiffly upright legs and a cacophony of roaring barks.

The sudden eruption of Frankie’s savage barks enhanced Hank’s profound horror as the apparition rose up in front of him, the Creature from the Black Lagoon with something draped across its shoulders. He couldn’t help himself: Hank screamed.

Brushes, paints and palette flew everywhere as Hank scrambled on all fours along the deck away from the Creature. It threw whatever it was carrying far from it to crash against the easel like a reflexive gesture the moment Frankie began barking and Hank screaming. The noise from the dog rolled thunderously in the quiet night, Hank’s screams adding an eldritch quality of terror. Then something emitted a single roar that was even louder, and became entangled with blue-white pain in Hank’s lower back; the screams turned into howls.

Dog and cop erupted out the door onto the deck together, Carmine in shorts, arm up and Beretta extended. It gave its crashing roars four times, but the intruder had gone and there was at least one casualty on the deck. Frankie had set out in pursuit; a high whistle brought the dog back at once.

Lights came on in other houses, and Fernando Vasquez leaped up the steps, in shorts and brandishing his own side arm.

“Jesus, Carmine!” Fernando said, going to the light switches and throwing the scene into high relief. “Jesus!” he repeated.

“Ambulance, now!”

Sister Mary Therese was sprawled amid the wreckage of an easel; one glance, and Carmine stepped over her to reach Hank, lying in a growing pool of blood, all his mind concentrated on a pain more awful than any he could ever have imagined.

“Try not to move, Hank,” Carmine was saying. “An ambulance is on its way, and you’re not going to bleed to death.”

From somewhere Hank found an answer. “I might wish I had died, I might wish I had! I can’t feel my legs, but the small of my back is agony! Oh, Carmine, help me!”

“I won’t leave your side until the ambulance crew make me, then they’ll be with you. The first thing they’ll do is give you a shot to ease the pain.” Carmine’s eyes met Fernando’s. “I can’t ride with you—I’m a cop needed at the scene of the crime, but as soon as I can I’ll send you Delia. Do you have anyone I should contact, Hank?”