Strange Highways (10 page)

The front of the church beyond the sanctuary railing remained shrouded in shadows. Nevertheless, Joey could see that everything sacred had been removed, including all the statuary and the great crucifix that had graced the wall behind the altar.

Occasionally, as a boy, he had traveled with the priest from Asherville to Coal Valley, to serve when the local altar boys were ill or were for some other reason unavailable, so he was familiar with the appearance of St. Thomas’s prior to its deconsecration. Carved by a villager in the latter part of the previous century, the twelve-foot-high crucifix had been a rough piece of work, but Joey had been fascinated by it, for it had possessed a power that he’d never seen in more professionally carved and polished versions.

When his gaze settled from the blank wall where the crucifix had been, he saw a pale and shapeless mound on the elevated altar platform. A soft radiance seemed to issue from it, but he knew that was only a trick of reflection—and his imagination.

They walked cautiously along the center aisle, checking the pews to the left and right, where someone could have been crouching out of sight, waiting to spring at them. The church was small, capable of seating approximately two hundred people, but this night there was neither a single worshiper nor a beast among the pews.

When Joey opened the gate in the sanctuary railing, the hip squealed.

Celeste hesitated, then preceded him into the sanctuary. She was riveted by the pale mound on the altar platform, but she didn’t direct tie flashlight at it, evidently preferring, as he did, to delay the inevitable revelation.

As the low gate creaked shut behind him, Joey glanced back into the nave. No one had entered behind them.

Directly ahead was the choir enclosure. The chairs, the music stands, and the organ had all been hauled away.

They followed the ambulatory to the left, around the choir. Though they tried to tread lightly, their footfalls on the oak floor echoed hollowly through the empty church.

On the wall beside the door to the sacristy were more switches. Joey flicked them, and the sanctuary filled with sour light no brighter than that in the nave.

He motioned for Celeste to slip past the closed door, and when she was out of the way, he kicked it open as he had seen cops do in countless movies, rushed across the threshold, and swung the crowbar with all his might, right to left and back again, on the assumption that someone was waiting for him there. He hoped to surprise and cripple the bastard with a preemptive blow, but the length of iron cut the empty air with a
whoosh.

Enough light spilled past him from the sanctuary to confirm that the sacristy was deserted. The outer door was standing open when he entered, but a gust of cold wind threw it shut.

“He’s already gone,” Joey told Celeste, who stood rigid with fear in the inner doorway.

They returned to the sanctuary, followed the ambulatory to the presbytery, and stopped at the foot of the three altar steps.

Joey’s heart slammed in his breast.

Beside him, Celeste made a soft, plaintive sound—not a gasp of horror but a murmur of compassion, regret, despair. “Ah, no.”

The high altar, with its hand-carved antependium, was gone.

Only the altar platform remained.

The mound that they had seen from the nave was neither as pale nor as shapeless as it had appeared to be when the sanctuary lights had been off. Portions of the fetally curled corpse were visible through the heavy-gauge, rumpled plastic. Her face was concealed, but a limp flag of blond hair trailed out of a gap in the folds of the tarp.

This was no precognitive vision.

Not an hallucination either.

Not merely a memory.

This time the body was real.

Nevertheless, the events of the past twenty-four hours had left Joey in doubt about what was real and what was not. He distrusted his own senses enough to seek confirmation from Celeste: “You see it too, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“The body?”

“Yes.”

He touched the thick plastic. It crackled under his fingers.

One slender, alabaster arm was exposed. The hand was cupped, and a nail hole marked the center. The fingernails were torn and caked with blood.

Although he
knew
that the blonde was dead, in his heart Joey harbored a fragile and irrational hope that the eyes in the jar were not hers, that a thread of life still sewed her to this world, and that she might yet be resuscitated. He dropped to his knees on the top altar step and put his fingertips against her wrist, seeking at least a feeble pulse.

He found no pulse, but the contact with her cold flesh jolted him as if he’d grasped a live electrical wire, and he was shocked into another memory that had been long suppressed:

… only wanting to help, carrying the two suitcases through the icy rain to the back of the car, putting them down on the gravel driveway to unlock the trunk. He raises the lid, and the small bulb inside the trunk is as dim as a half-melted votive candle in a ruby-dark glass. The light is tinted red, in fact, because the bulb is smeared with blood. The hot-copper stench of fresh blood virtually steams from that cramped space, making him gag. She is there. She is there. She is completely and totally there—so utterly unexpected that she might have been mistaken for an hallucination, but instead she is more solid than granite, more real than a punch in the face. Naked but swaddled in a semitransparent tarp. Face hidden by her long blond hair and by smears of blood on the inner surface of the plastic. One bare arm is free of the shroud, and the delicate hand is turned with the palm up, revealing a cruel wound. She seems to reach out beseechingly to him, seeking the mercy that she has found nowhere else in the night. His heart swells so terribly with each apocalyptic beat that it cramps his lungs and prevents him from drawing a breath. As the iron treads of thunder roll across the mountains, he hopes that lightning will strike him, that he will join the blonde in death, because trying to carry on with life after this discovery will be too hard, too painful, joyless, and pointless. Then someone speaks behind him, barely louder than the susurrant song of the rain and wind: “Joey.” If he’s not permitted to die here, right now, in this storm, then he prays to God to be struck deaf, to be blinded, to be freed from the obligations of a witness. “Joey, Joey.” Such sadness in the voice. He turns from the battered corpse. In the nebulous blood-tinted light, he faces tragedy, faces the ruination of four lives in addition to that of the woman in the car trunk—his own, his mother’s, his father’s, his brother’s. “I only wanted to help,” he tells P.J. “I only wanted to help.”

Joey exhaled explosively, then inhaled with a shudder. “It’s my brother. He killed her.”

11

THERE WERE RATS IN THE CHURCH. TWO FAT ONES SCUTTLED ALONG THE back of the sanctuary, squeaking, briefly casting elongated shadows, vanishing into a hole in the wall.

“Your brother? P.J.?” Celeste said in disbelief.

Although she had been
five
years behind P.J. in school, she knew who he was. Everyone in Asherville and all the surrounding villages had known P.J. Shannon even before he’d become a world-famous author. As a sophomore at County High, he had become the youngest quarterback in the history of the football team, a star player who had led his teammates to the divisional championship—and then he had done it twice again, in his junior and senior years. He was a straight-A student, valedictorian of his graduating class, humble in spite of his natural gifts and achievements, a real people-loving guy, handsome, charming, funny.

And the most difficult thing to reconcile with the body in the trunk: P.J. was kind. He gave a lot of time to charitable activities at Our Lady of Sorrows. When a friend was ill, P.J. was always first in attendance with a small gift and get-well wishes. If a friend was in trouble, P.J. was at his side to provide whatever help he could. Unlike many other jocks, P.J. wasn’t cliquish—he was as likely to be found hanging out with the skinny, myopic president of the chess club as with members of the varsity team, and he had no tolerance for the nerd baiting and other cruelties in which popular, good-looking kids sometimes indulged.

P.J. had been the best brother in the world.

But he was also a brutal killer.

Joey couldn’t reconcile those two facts. It would’ve been easy to go mad trying.

Remaining on his knees on the top altar step, Joey released the dead woman’s cold wrist. From the touch of her flesh, in a manner almost mystical, he’d received a dreadful and shattering revelation. He could have been no more profoundly affected if he had, instead, just now
seen
a Eucharist transformed from a wafer of unleavened bread into the sacred flesh of God.

“P.J. was home on a visit from New York City that weekend,” he told Celeste. “After college he’d landed a job as an editorial assistant at a major publishing house, figuring to work there until he could get a foot in the door of the film business. We’d had a lot of fun together on Saturday, the whole family. But after Mass on Sunday morning, P.J. was out all day, seeing old friends from high school to talk about the glory days, and driving around a little to enjoy the fall foliage. ‘Taking a long, lazy nostalgia bath,’ he called it. At least that was what he said he’d been doing.”

Celeste turned her back to the altar platform and stood facing the nave, either because she could no longer tolerate the sight of the dead woman or because she feared that P.J. would creep back into the church and take them unaware.

“We usually had Sunday supper at five o’clock, but Mom held it up for him, and he didn’t get home till six,” Joey said, “well after dark. He apologized, shamefaced, said he’d been having so much fun with his old friends, he’d lost track of time. All through dinner he was so
on
, spinning out jokes, full of energy, as if being in his old stomping grounds had given him a big kick and revitalized him.”

Joey folded the loose flap of the plastic tarp over the dead woman’s bare arm. There was something obscene about her punctured hand being exposed on the altar, even if St. Thomas’s had been deconsecrated.

Celeste waited silently for him to continue.

“Looking back on it,” he said, “maybe there was a weird manic quality about him that evening … a
dark
energy. Right after dinner, he rushed down to his room in the basement to finish packing, then brought up his suitcases and put them by the back door. He was eager to get going, because the weather was bad and he had a long drive back to New York, wasn’t likely to get there until two in the morning at the earliest. But Dad didn’t want to see him leave. God, he loved P.J. so much. Dad brought out his scrapbooks about all those high-school and college football triumphs, wanted to reminisce. And P.J. gives me this wink, like to say,
Hell, what’s another half hour matter if it makes him happy?
He and Dad went into the living room to sit on the sofa and look through the scrapbooks, and I decided I could save P.J. some time later by putting his suitcases in the trunk of his car. His keys were right there on the kitchen counter.”

Celeste said, “I’m so sorry, Joey. I’m so, so sorry.”

He hadn’t become desensitized to the sight of the murdered woman in the bloodstained plastic tarp. The thought of what she’d suffered was enough to make him sick to his stomach, weigh down his heart with anguish, and thicken his voice with grief, even though he didn’t know who she was. But he could not get up and turn his back on her. For the moment he felt that his rightful place was on his knees at her side, that she deserved no less than his attention and his tears. Tonight, he needed to be the witness for her that he had failed to be twenty years ago.

How strange that he had repressed all memory of her for two decades—yet now, in this replay of that worst night of his life, she had been dead only a few hours.

Whether by twenty years or by a few hours, however, he was too late to save her.

“The rain had let up a little,” he continued, “so I didn’t even bother to put on my hooded windbreaker. Just snatched the keys off the counter, grabbed both suitcases, and took them out to his car. It was parked behind mine at the end of the driveway, in back of the house. I guess maybe Mom must’ve said something to P.J., I don’t know, but somehow he realized what was happening, what I was doing, and he left Dad with the scrapbooks to come after me, stop me. But he didn’t get to me in time.”

… a thin but bitterly cold rain, the blood-filtered light from the trunk bulbs and P.J. standing there as if the whole world hasn’t just fallen apart, and Joey saying again, “I only wanted to help.”

P.J. is wide-eyed, and for an instant Joey wants desperately to believe that his brother is also seeing the woman in the trunk for the first time, that he is shocked and has no idea how she got in there. But P.J. says, “Joey, listen, it isn’t what you think. I know it looks bad, but it isn’t what you think.”

“Oh, Jesus, P.J. Oh, God!”

P.J. glances toward the house, which is only fifty or sixty feet away, to be sure that neither of their parents has come out onto the back porch. “I can explain this, Joey. Give me a chance here, don’t go bugshit on me, give me a chance.”

“She’s dead, she’s dead.”

“I know.”

“All cut up.”

“Easy, easy. It’s okay.”

“What’ve you done? Mother of God, P.J., what’ve you done?”

P.J. crowds close, corners him against the back of the car. “I haven’t done anything. Not anything I should rot in jail for.”

“Why, P.J. ? No. Don’t even try. You can’t … there can’t be a why, there can’t be a reason that makes any sense. She’s dead in there, dead and all bloody in there.”

“Keep your voice down, kid. Get hold of yourself.” P.J. grips his brother by the shoulders, and amazingly Joey isn’t repelled by the contact. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t touch her.”

“She’s there, P.J., you can’t say she isn’t there.”