A Circumstance of Blood

by Jeannette Batz Cooperman

  “I brought him the heroin. Want to arrest me?”

  “So you’re Story?”

  She paled. “Who told you my name?”

  “Don’t worry. I’m a reporter, not a cop, and I’m not even writing about this. I met Philip and liked him. I’m trying to figure out what happened.”

  Story’s eyes filled with tears. “I liked him too. We were kind of soulmates, you know?”

  “I’m glad. He needed somebody to connect with.”

  Story pressed a button, and the passenger door unlocked. As Sarah settled herself inside, she heard the lock click. “I’m going to drive around,” Story said. “I’ll drop you off when we’re done.”

  Or you’ll take me to your heroin supplier and tell him I know too much, Sarah thought, checking for the button that would unlock her door. A loud buzzer sounded.

  “Hel-lo? Fasten your seatbelt,” Story said.

  Sarah fumbled with the belt, while Story gunned the engine.

  “So what do you want to know?” she asked. “Because this is so not my problem.”

  “Why Philip wanted extra-strong heroin for starters.”

  A shrug. “He said something about an exchange. I figured he was trading up.”

  “Was he bothered about anything, scared of anybody wanting to hurt him?”

  “Philip?” She laughed. “He might’ve had enemies, but that wouldn’t have scared him. He told me, ‘Don’t give other people power over your thoughts.’”

  Advice Sarah wished someone had given her at that age. She asked if Philip had talked about his video project, or about college.

  “We didn’t talk about mundane stuff,” Story said with disdain. “He told me about his dreams. We talked about what made us happy or pissed us off.” She braked fast, and Sarah glanced over her shoulder to make sure nobody was about to rear-end them. “He even told me the thing about his dad.”

  Sarah’s brain jolted into high gear. There was a note of triumph in Story’s voice − this was her proof that Philip had confided in her. But whatever he’d said was bothering her.

  “What about his dad?”

  Story chewed her lip, then dug out a tube of lip gloss. All the bad-girl defiance had vanished and when she looked at Sarah her eyes were wide as a child’s. “They had a fight. Philip’s dad was doing things in his business that Philip thought was wrong.”

  “Like what?”

  “Privacy stuff. He ran drones. He was hiring them out to spy on people.”

  “Industrial espionage, that sort of thing?”

  “More like who was sleeping with the boss’s wife. He’d follow people with the drones, use their cell phones for GPS. Philip said it was unethical. They started screaming at each other, which was insanely weird because his dad, like, never shows emotion.”

  As offhandedly as she could, Sarah said, “We should tell the police they fought, just in case it’s relevant.”

  “No way!” Story shrieked, steering the car over to the shoulder and slamming to a stop. “You promised! They’ll put me in jail for possession. Or send me back to Briarwood, which is worse. You can’t.” She started to cry, loud angry sobs Sarah was willing to bet she could produce on cue.

  “I didn’t say I’d give them your name,” Sarah pointed out. “I’m used to covering for sources. And there’s no reason to connect that information with drugs. It’ll just be an anonymous tip.”

  The sobs stopped. “You swear?”

  “I swear.”

  “Okay. Because that’s when he found out.”

  “Found out what?”

  “Philip yelled at his dad. He said he was ashamed to have him for a father. And then his dad yelled, “I’m not your father.’”

  *

  After the memorial service, everyone was invited to a reception in the parish hall. Earnest, sweet women, the sort who find time for everyone but themselves, had helped Mrs. Dalton bake, and the boys had set up long metal tables and folding chairs. Sarah ducked in, downed a piece of lemon layer cake to calm her nerves and slipped out the side door. The mysterious letter was somewhere in Charron’s room, and he’d be occupied with Philip’s relatives for at least an hour.

  On the school’s terrazzo floor, her footfalls rang hollow. The place felt deserted, as though all life had been sucked up to heaven in the rapture and these rooms were what was left. Lightly, she ran up to the third floor.

  As she stepped into the hall something squeaked. A door opening? She stood motionless, hoping it was just floorboards protesting her weight. Ten seconds of dead quiet. Reassured, she wiped a film of sweat from her clammy forehead and crossed the hall on tiptoe. Squeezing the doorknob, she gave it a half turn and slipped inside Charron’s room.

  His bed was made, but rumpled, with only a rough brown blanket for warmth. The sight of olive-green paisley pyjamas carefully folded at the bottom of the bed stabbed her with shame. What was she doing, spying on a dignified old scholar’s most intimate belongings? She turned away and stood in front of the old Davenport desk, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots resting against the ledge of its slanted, hinged top. We’ve got knots of our own to untie, she reminded herself, lifting the book.

  The envelope was still there.

  And it was addressed to Philip Grant.

  She’d promised herself that if the letter was sealed, she wouldn’t open it. But when she picked it up, her finger rubbed against a serrated edge. Reaching between the slit edges, she drew out a thin, typed sheet.

  Dear Mr. Grant,

  I don’t normally answer such inquiries, but you put your question in a way that was hard to ignore. And so I will endeavour to answer, as long as you promise to keep this reply confidential.

  I have thought about this for seventy years now. And no, I do not think I was ‘possessed’. I think the Jesuits tried, in good conscience, to help me, and they interpreted my words and actions − which I do not remember − as possession. After years of reflection and psychotherapy, and in the freedom given me by the death of my parents and aunt and uncle, I have to say that I think it more likely that my aunt perhaps made some sort of sexual overture I could not acknowledge. I was a very sheltered Lutheran boy of fourteen, and she was an open-minded spiritualist who’d had, from what I could overhear of my parents’ whispers, several lovers. She slept in my room when she came to stay. Who knows what might have happened? I do know I would have felt great shame, especially if I participated. And that might account for my complete inability to recall the events of that year.

  I trust you to hold this answer in confidence. I hope it assists you in your own search for truth. Mine has lasted far too long.

  Sincerely,

  Roland

  So Philip had found the boy who was exorcised and written to him. Unbelievably, he’d written back. Philip must have shown the letter to Charron. Of course he would have − it proved his point. Secrets did damage. Had Philip given the letter to Charron to keep, or had Charron taken it to make sure no-one else ever read it?

  The letter was easily dismissed. What rational man would want to think he’d been possessed by Satan? It needn’t have changed Charron’s mind. But how badly had it shaken him?

  *

  Car doors slammed in the distance, and voices carried from the parking lot. The mourners’ return. Sarah hurried downstairs and reached Colin’s office just as he was unlocking the door. He drew her inside, shut the door and leaned against it. “I lost it with Graham,” he blurted.

  There went her big news about Northrup Grant not being Philip’s father and Charron having the letter − more progress in two hours than they’d made in the past two days. Judging from Colin’s face, all that would have to wait.

  “I told him I was still trying to figure out whether he’d tried to kill his mother,” Colin said tonelessly. “And he slammed back.”

  “How?”

  Colin turned away, and his voice was muffled. “He said, ‘Where were you when your mom died?�
��”

  “Colin, your mother had pancreatic cancer,” Sarah said gently. “It’s not your fault you didn’t get there in time.”

  “It wasn’t the cancer that killed her.” He looked up, his eyes as bleak as a boarded-up house. “She swallowed a bottle of pain pills.”

  Sarah hadn’t expected this. “You mean on purpose?”

  “Yes. On purpose.”

  “Did she leave you a note?”

  He stood, not meeting her eyes. “No.”

  And that, she thought, was the worst of it.

  “She knew I was on my way. Her doctor said she’d asked for stronger painkillers so she could be ‘more like herself’ while I was there. She’d even laid stuff out for me − my old robe, a book she wanted me to read.” His face contorted. When he spoke again, Sarah could barely hear him. “Just two more hours, but she couldn’t wait. They counted afterward, and six of the pills were gone. She was so thin by then, it didn’t take much.” At that the sobs came. Blindly he made his way to a chair and sank into it, his body turned sideways, like he’d hide if he could. Sarah stood behind him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, keeping her cheek against his dark hair until grief relaxed its grip. “At least it wasn’t painful,” he managed, blowing his nose hard with the tissue she handed him. “She just stopped breathing.”

  With only two hours until her son arrived? It made no sense. Colin had been carrying this around for three years and he still couldn’t fathom it.

  Sarah combed her memory for everything she knew about Nell McAvoy. She’d worked at the maltings in Port Ellen − Colin had described the musty and sharp smells, the clamour, the old barrels she’d bring home. His father worked there too, until he drank his way to an early death. Nell just kept working, scrimping so she could send her son to Juilliard. When he switched gears and entered the seminary she’d been even happier. She wrote him cheery letters about life on the island − he’d shown Sarah one in college, and it was full of sweet-hearted gossip. Nell hoping that each little Islay crisis or scandal would turn out to be for the best. She worried about Colin’s sinus infections, fussed at him to eat more vegetables, clipped cartoons from The Scotsman for him.

  How could any child reconcile that much love with suicide? Her death had created a loneliness in Colin; Sarah had seen that when he came back. Now she wondered if he even wanted that loneliness to lift. It was all he had left of his mother.

  *

  Wailing to Sarah like a bairn had left Colin drained, calmer than he’d been in weeks. He was answering emails in a numbed state of efficiency when he heard the phone in the outer office ring. On a Sunday? He picked up.

  “Father McAvoy? This is Juliet Grant. Philip’s mother.” She’d been poised until she reached her son’s name, but it came out wet with tears.

  “Mrs. Grant.” He cleared his throat. “I cannot begin to tell you how sorry . . .”

  “Please don’t waste your time being kind. It doesn’t help.”

  He remembered thinking the same thing in Edinburgh. Not only didn’t it help, it stung like alcohol in a cut. People who’d never even known his mother pretending they felt more than they did − it was patronising as hell. The problem, he saw now, was that there was very little you could say.

  “You’re back then?” he asked.

  “Just now. I checked into an airport hotel.”

  “Your husband . . .” He knew he’d screwed up before the second syllable landed, but he forged ahead, “came by yesterday evening to pick up Philip’s belongings.”

  “Ex-husband,” she corrected, her voice dull. “And I want Philip’s things.”

  “Surely you two will . . .”

  “He’s not Philip’s father.”

  “But . . .”

  “You didn’t know that did you?” Juliet continued with a harsh laugh. “North worships propriety; he’d never let it slip. I was pregnant with another man’s child. North was the noble young knight who married me to save my reputation.” Her mockery − of him, of herself − was so bitter Colin could almost taste it. “I could never live up to his Camelot,” she said. “And then I stopped wanting to try.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The glass window in the police department’s lobby was so smudged Sarah could barely see through it. “Is Lieutenant Morganstern in?” she asked, her voice ringing in the empty lobby. It was nine on a Monday morning − even crime had slept in. An impassive officer with kinky grey hair suggested she sit, then disappeared through a door. A minute later he returned, beckoned her forward and led her down a narrow corridor with dingy grey walls and linoleum that looked like head cheese. Ugliness, Sarah decided, was a form of intimidation.

  Seated behind a beige metal desk, Morganstern looked up over her glasses. “Sorry to bother you,” Sarah blurted. “But there was something I thought you should know.” She described Philip’s fight with his father, keeping her source vague so it would sound like one of the boys had told her. “So Philip wasn’t his father’s biological son. I thought that was interesting.”

  “And you say they fought about it?”

  “Not exactly. It came out when they were fighting about Grant’s company, the surveillance work he was doing. Philip didn’t think it was ethical.”

  Morganstern smiled. “Oh to have the ethics of a seventeen-year-old. I’ll bet that didn’t play well, though. Mr. Grant seems rather tightly wrapped.”

  “And rigid,” Sarah added. “Any word on the Matteo Ricci map?”

  As Morganstern reached for a file folder, Sarah casually glanced at the desk’s surface. On top of a stack of notebooks she saw a sealed plastic bag stickered with an evidence label, and inside it a tiny, oblong device of brushed stainless steel. The digital recorder Steven had set up in Philip’s room?

  “The map hasn’t shown up at any auctions,” Morganstern was saying, holding up the latest report. “Now that they’re all online, it’s easy to keep tabs.”

  Instead of returning the printout to its folder, she laid it on top of the evidence bag, neatly obscuring its contents.

  *

  Back at Matteo, Sarah dropped her purse and hooked a jubilant Simon to his lead. This time she was the one who needed the walk, just to clear her head. Her goal had only been to dangle another possibility, so Colin’s motive didn’t stand out in sharp relief. But Morganstern was right about Grant. Working in a covert high-security industry, marrying another man’s woman, devoting his free time to the Church − he’d built himself an emotional safehouse. And then, to have his integrity attacked by the boy he’d raised as his son. A boy who didn’t even carry his blood, and whose weirdness shamed him.

  Near the bottom of the hill Sarah met Adriana, who usually walked up to school. At dinner, she’d described her house as a ‘faux-English, vine-covered cottage in one of the cut-rate cul de sacs’, which made Sarah like her even more. If Adriana had fallen in love with a murderer, it might shatter her for good.

  “Come have coffee with me,” Sarah called on impulse.

  Adriana hesitated. “I was going to prep . . .”

  “When’s your next class?”

  “Not until after lunch.”

  “Then come on. You’ll still have plenty of time to prep.”

  “I probably don’t even need to,” Adriana admitted, turning around. “I know Richard II by heart.”

  They greeted Jane, and when Sarah had her double shot with hazelnut and iced currant scone and Adriana a mug of coffee and a plain croissant, they sat by the wood stove. Taking a big bite of flaky croissant, Adriana wiped butter from her lips with the back of two fingers. There was something of the rebellious debutante about her, a woman secretly biding her time until she could break a few rules in public. No wonder she and Jimmy were good friends. The Cadigan family had always fancied itself a Midwestern version of the Kennedy clan, and they made their expectations clear. One of Jimmy’s brother was now a state senator, the other a lawyer. The men of the family ribbed ea
ch other with old stories from the playing fields − football, law, politics − and their holiday parties had the jocular, slightly forced feel of a second-rate country club. The single time Sarah was invited she’d gone home with a splitting headache.

  Which reminded her. “The day you subbed for Jimmy, how bad was his grandfather? I didn’t want to upset him by asking.”

  “He must be close to the end. His nurse had to take that day off for some family thing, and Jimmy said he wanted to be sure to be there.”

  “That was good of him. His grandfather hasn’t always been kind.”

  More tactful than Sarah, Adriana let the comment pass. For a while, they sipped their coffee in silence, the only noise the fire crackling inside the stove’s cast-iron belly. When the silence started to feel awkward, Sarah asked casually, “How was your weekend? Did you get to spend time with North?” Shortening the name came hard − Northrup Grant was too thin lipped and precise a man to treat breezily. But she wanted to match Adriana’s habit.

  “Nearly all weekend. He’s coming apart at the seams.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  Adriana nodded. “But he relies on those seams.” She folded her arms and squeezed herself tight. “They hold everything in place. A few stitches pop, God knows what’ll fly out.”

  Her eyebrows flew up, and Sarah had to laugh. “Yet you love him.”

  One of those lit-up smiles. “I do. Under that Captain Kirk exterior, he’s funny and thoughtful and utterly reliable. It’s such a weird time, though, it’s hard to feel normal about any of it.” With a sudden urgency, she unclasped the purse she’d kept on her lap the entire time. Sarah, who shucked coat and belongings instantly, could never understand that nervous desire for encumbrance. Shaking one large, chalky green pill from a silver case, Adriana tossed it back with the last of her coffee. “Had to go back to the oxycontin,” she explained. “I keep getting these shooting pains in my cheek. I guess the scar tissue’s pressing on nerves.”