“Don’t worry Mom, you’ve got plenty of personality left. But yeah, you adjusted − you had to. Whoever’s sicker or sadder always has more power. Dad probably doesn’t even realise how much you’ve had to give up.”
Beth broke off her reply as her husband walked on to the porch.
“What are my two favourite girls up to?” he asked, clearly making an effort.
“Oh, Sarah’s been telling me how she just loves being single and solving everybody else’s problems.”
“Our daughter is like Henry David Thoreau. The only thing she loves more than solitude is having us here to listen to her talk about it.”
Reaching up, Sarah squeezed the big hand resting on her shoulder. “You might be right. But, at this point, a little solitude would be a sweet relief.” She turned to look up at him. “Dad, can I ask you something?”
Gaze zigzagging from daughter to husband, Beth set aside the pillow and stood up fast. “Dinner’s almost . . .”
Sarah kept going. “When you’re really depressed, would you be capable of killing somebody?”
A long pause, as he considered her question. “It would be hard to muster the energy. At the very beginning maybe, when it’s just waves crashing over my head every now and then. But not once it’s sunk me.”
“Would you be capable of faking it, acting so confident nobody could tell you were depressed?”
He looked at his wife, his eyes sad. “If I could, I would have done that my entire life.”
*
“Good night, gentlemen,” Francis said, speaking with enough dignity for High Table. He carried his empty dessert plate to the kitchen and headed for the staircase, each footfall measured and heavy.
“We should set up a bedroom on the ground floor for him,” Colin told Jimmy. “The stairs are getting to be too much.”
“So’s reality. He told Graham he wanted to pray with him.”
“Tell me you’re joking.”
“Nope. Graham told me this afternoon. He asked if he’d be within his rights if he told the old man to go to hell. I was tempted to say yes.”
At least Francis had picked Graham, who could handle it. But Colin couldn’t risk the old priest spouting his dark nonsense to anybody else. “Do you think it’s all coming back? Everything he went through?”
“Or it’s just that he’s losing control. He can’t hear pins drop anymore, let alone the angels’ dance steps. On the computer, he blows everything up to three hundred per cent. Age is humbling. And Francis has never liked to be humbled.”
“Aye, true enough. But how’s that making him want to pray with Graham?”
Jimmy shrugged. “Graham’s the unknown. He’s the least controllable. Besides, there’s nothing else that’s in Francis’s power to do.”
“I need to talk to him.”
“Better you than me.”
Colin climbed to the third floor and knocked on Francis’s door. A chair scraped, and Colin heard slow footsteps. The door opened.
“Ah, Father McAvoy. I hadn’t had time to miss you yet.”
“Can I come in for a minute?”
“Certainly.” Francis waved him to a chair and went back to his desk. Colin saw his fingers, slender and liver-spotted, slide an envelope under a book before he turned and asked, “What’s on your mind, Father?”
“Graham mentioned that you’d offered to pray with him.”
“And you object to that?”
“I’d rather we wait for the boys to ask, when it comes to prayer or spiritual direction. They’re not all devout Catholics, you know.”
“It’s not Graham’s soul I’m worried about. It’s the other boys’.”
“Francis, are you serious? Look, I know what you went through. But the world’s changed. Our religion’s changed.”
“And you think Satan’s taken a holiday?”
“I don’t think Satan even exists.”
Francis took off his glasses and polished them with the hem of his bedspread. For a minute he looked like the teacher Colin remembered, thoughtful and troubled, a light of intelligence in his eyes. Then they darkened. “How do you explain the suffering of the innocent, then? Because I’ll not lay that at God’s feet.”
“Maybe it’s just a broken world.”
Francis leaned forward. “But who broke it?”
This was like walking head-on into a dust storm. “I’m not even sure which boy you think was Satan, Philip or Graham.”
“You’ve misunderstood. I’m not saying one of those boys was Satan. I’m talking about a diabolical energy that can invade any of our lives. Read Pope Francis. He’s very clear. Once someone is open to evil, there’s a raw, hungry energy that can . . . take over. Call it darkness if you prefer. But whatever word you use, that evil is in this school right now, and if you intend to lead these boys toward God, you must do a better job of guarding their souls.”
Colin’s mouth clenched like a racehorse refusing the bit. “Just stay away from Graham, okay? And how’s your class load? It’s not too much, is it? I know we ask a lot of you.”
It was patronising, and Frances knew it. “I’m not feeble yet.”
“You’re the finest teacher we have. I just meant − it’s a new school. We’re all stretched thin.”
“There are different kinds of stress, Father McAvoy. Teaching at a new school hardly ranks among them. It’s what you’ve brought upon us that’s untenable.”
Colin shoved his hands in his pockets and felt a seam rip. “Good night, Francis.” He stepped into the hall, walked to the other end, and tapped on Jimmy’s door.
“Yo.” Jimmy pulled out his earbuds, and the staticky blare of hiphop came into the room.
I’ve got to listen to some new music, Colin thought. Soon I’ll be just as far out of it as Francis. “I told him to lay off,” he said, keeping his voice low. “He thinks he’s fighting the devil all over again.”
“You do realise that he’s the one who’s possessed?”
Colin nodded. “By an idea.”
“And by fear.”
Turning to go, Colin hesitated. “Do you believe in Satan?”
Jimmy shrugged. “In the end it’s just word games. We’re all guessing, and we make up names for what we think we see.”
*
Sarah stood on the grass behind the milkhouse, breathing in enough cool night air to clear her head, while Simon sniffed the damp ground, reconstructing the squirrels’ day. Then she took a hot bath and slid under the heavy comforter, too tired to read and too tense to sleep. Staring up at the round ceiling, she let her mind wander. Her brain had always had a weird trick of producing images, unbidden, whenever she shut her eyes and let go. A picture would come, a person or creature that immediately morphed into another image and then another. When she tried to describe it, friends looked at her oddly. But she liked having her own private laser show − holograms from the subconscious, the fantastic forms bright and often beautiful . . .
Tonight, though, the show was nightmarish. She saw Adriana peeling off her perfect face and tossing it into the river with a sideways cast, like she was skimming rocks. It landed in a boat rowed by Father Charron, who was struggling for balance as he tugged on a heavy rope, pulling Satan along behind him. And then Satan was Graham, and he stopped kicking and drowned, arms at his sides, expression unchanged as his face sank below the water.
Shuddering, Sarah yanked her mind back to reality and it slid to Haiti, a memory almost as bizarre as her imaginings. Walking through the old cemetery at twilight, she’d seen its yellow, pink and lavender monuments glowing in the dusk, the painted stones pretty as Easter eggs. Beneath them, scattered bones shone white against the dark earth. Most people could only afford to rent the plots, Joseph told her, and if they fell behind on their payments, the custodian dug up their loved ones’ skeletons. Weaving through the crooked markers, she stepped so carefully over a bleached tibia that she missed seeing a man in a dark shirt an
d trousers kneeling at a fresh grave.
She turned to leave, to give him privacy. “My wife,” he said, in Kreyol slow enough that she could translate. “She died of the cholera.”
“I’m so sorry,” Sarah said.
His mouth pressed tight. “She did not love me.”
“You can’t know that.”
He tamped a bit of mossy sod into place with his shoe, then kicked it out again. “Everyone in Milot knew it. Everyone but me.”
Betrayal could make you want to kill. So could the chance that some deep shame would be exposed to the world.
Just what was Philip’s mashup about?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sarah texted Colin − “What was on mashup???” − then fired up her laptop. If a stranger hadn’t broken into Matteo Academy, that left a pretty small cast of possible suspects. Start with the least likely. How about the boy’s own father?
What came up first for Northrup Grant was a slew of Catholic charity boards. Sifting through the trustee biographies, she found his company. Skycraft. It wasn’t just aviation. According to its website, the company operated drones − rented them out to small police departments and private customers. The site’s tone was sombre, discreet, professional. It promised more thorough searches than law enforcement could provide, round-the-clock security monitoring, live aerial feeds of special events, mapping and aerial photography, package delivery to remote locations.
She pasted the information into a file and moved on to Steven, whose Facebook page was spattered with Russian salt thrones, Rococo mirrors, clay icons from Bhutan, and Irish potato mashers made of 5,000-year-old bog wood. She reached for her phone.
“Jasmin? Hey, it’s Sarah. How’s the art world?”
“Sarah! Thanks again for that story. It saved the Trova collection from getting broken up and scattered to the winds.”
Jasmin Ahmed worked for Selkirk’s auction house. If young Steven was as much of a prodigy as his friends said, she’d know him. “I was talking with a young man who seems to know his stuff, but I wanted to check him out just in case.” Sarah started to describe Steven.
Jasmin cut in. “If Steven Portel’s telling you what something’s worth, do whatever he tells you to do.”
“So he really is a savant?”
“He can date most art objects within a few years.”
“That’s uncanny.”
“Especially in somebody that young and naive. He’s just beginning to realise the power he holds.”
Thanking Jasmin, Sarah hung up fast. Ian Rossert had just texted her, asking her to meet him for lunch at noon at O’Connell’s. That meant an hour’s drive to the city, which left her 10 minutes to get ready. It had to be important for Ian to be this spontaneous.
*
By the time she arrived he’d found a booth. She stepped up on the wooden platform and slid along the hard pew to face him. “So, do you have a theory for me?”
“Let’s wait till we’re settled.”
No option rivalled the O’Connell’s burger; ordering was easy. They decided to split an order of deep-fried mushrooms. “And a Guinness for me,” Ian said, “and a − what do you want to drink, Sarah?”
“Oh, lemonade’s fine.”
“Bring her a black-and-tan,” he said. When the waitress left, he reached over and covered Sarah’s hand with his. “You’re going to need it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sean killed himself last night.”
Her eyes filled with tears, and she slid her hand away and started shredding her paper napkin, blindly tearing off one narrow strip at a time. He waited.
“So what does this mean?” she asked finally. “Was he mentally ill or just guilty?”
“He left a note.”
The pub was a blur of dark wood booths and ruddy faces, glasses sliding on trays, snatches of friendly argument. “What did it say?”
“That he was sorry. He said his mom was on his case about homework and smoking pot, and he wanted her dead.”
The waitress set their beers down, and Sarah took a big gulp. “It makes no sense, Ian. His dad, his teachers − everybody said he was a sweet, gentle kid until he started smoking pot and hearing voices. He never showed any symptoms of schizophrenia in prison?”
“Not a one. Looks like we were both wrong.”
“And now he’s dead.” She gathered the sodden napkin shreds into a little pile. “I’m starting to think adolescence itself is a sickness.”
He nodded. “No sense of mortality or consequence, impulses coming from every direction, moods changing without warning. It’s a wonder any of us make it through.”
“If Sean deliberately killed his mother after years of loving her, does that make him a psychopath after all?”
“I still don’t think so. What happened was clearly a psychotic break. There was no violence before that day, none after. No signs of cold calculation or cruelty for its own sake.”
When their burgers arrived they lightened the conversation, talking about Ian’s bee-keeping hobby and a judge’s scandalous divorce. As soon as he’d swallowed his last bite, Sarah said, “Do me a favour. Run through, one more time, the traits linked to psychopaths.”
“Shallow emotions. Hardly any fear. High stress tolerance, low arousal. Plenty of ego and superficial charm.” He spun the empty beer bottle between his palms. “It’s never clean, Sarah. Nobody fits all the pigeonholes. And a lot of perfectly normal kids fit quite a few of them. Is the boy you’re worried about glib, grandiose, easily bored, in need of thrills? What’s his general mood?”
“Confident. Arrogant, with breaks where something else shows through. Not happy, that’d be the wrong word. More like not-sad. Impervious.”
“How is he with animals?”
She smiled. “Fine, if we can go by my dog. Do they always start out by hurting animals? I’ve been wondering if that’s urban legend.”
“I once had a kid who slowly cut off the tip of a dog’s tail.”
“God. Didn’t the poor dog yelp?”
“Probably. It was during the day, and no-one was around. But when I say slowly, I don’t mean stretching out a single session. He cut a tiny bit more every week, as soon as the previous cut had healed. It became a ritual for him − he looked forward to it like Christmas.”
The greasy mushrooms churned in her stomach, acid sluicing over them. She was still trying to find a response when the waitress brought the check.
“Next time we have lunch,” she said, sliding her credit card from her wallet, “we’re talking about the Cards’ chance for the playoffs.”
“You hate baseball.”
“Not as much as I hate this.”
*
On the way back to Matteo, Sarah called Kat. “Remember Sean?”
That was all she had to say. “What happened?”
“He killed himself in prison. Took the thin nylon rope in his laundry bag and rigged it so it would strangle him when he lay back on his cot.”
“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry.”
“When they took him off the anti-psychotics, I kept waiting for symptoms. But he was fine. I thought maybe prison was so structured there wasn’t anything to trigger an episode.”
“What did the doctors say?”
“Ian had said all along that it could have been a temporary psychosis, brought on just by adolescent depression and too much pot. To me, that just seemed too hard to believe.” She sighed. “Now I guess we’re back to the prosecutor’s version, a mean kid who’s too messed up to think straight and decides to kill his mother.”
“Maybe not mean, just messed up.”
“Don’t do that,” Sarah snapped. “That’s what I do. I imagine the gentlest possible scenario, and I cut people far too much slack.” She blew through a red light and slammed on her brakes in the middle of the intersection, just as the camera clicked. “Shit. That’s a $100 ticket.”
“Maybe they’ll m
iss it. And listen, cut yourself a little slack. There’s nothing wrong with hope.”
Except that it got in the way of the truth. And Sarah had a sick feeling she’d just done the same thing all over again.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Navigating upstairs after the last class, Sarah saw, through a blurred thicket of male arms and legs, Adriana coming down the stairs toward her, moving sedately as boys crowded past muttering “’Scuse me.” Sarah thrust a hand up in a wave. “Adriana! Through with classes?”
As she drew closer, a faint fragrance floated toward Sarah, separating itself from the smog of male sweat, synthetic sports jerseys, and cheap, fruity shampoo. She recognised it right away − her dad used to make a joke of buying extra Joy for Beth, who he said already had ‘way too much serotonin’. The classic perfume had suited Sarah’s bubbly mother; on Adriana it smelled like wishful thinking.
Sarah pivoted and walked downstairs with her, wanting a chance to pry. “Have you been teaching since college?”
“Just about. I worked for the Shakespeare Festival for a year, then taught at my alma mater, Nerinx Hall.”
Sarah grinned. “I went to Incarnate Word. We beat you in volleyball.”
“Not in field hockey,” Adriana flashed back.
So she could be fun. This refined, sombre woman must have been someone quite different at seventeen. She’d awakened from a horrific accident and sent away the man she love. And then she’d had to cope with the confusion of unearned beauty, a face presented like a consolation prize. A face that drew men too quickly, for all the wrong reasons. Already oversensitive, she’d recoiled, buried her personality alive.
“I’ve got to go prep for the winter of Richard’s discontent,” she said now.
“That would suit my mood.” As she said it, she realised how true it was. She went back to the milkhouse, climbed to the loft and crawled back into bed. Knees bent, toes tucked under Simon’s curled warmth, she lay on her back and thought bleak thoughts. Sean hadn’t had schizophrenia. She’d reached too eagerly for that explanation. The truth was, he’d been sane for years − so sane he found his guilt unbearable.
A Circumstance of Blood Page 16