The Judas Child

by Carol O'Connell

  Gwen’s mother was a strong woman, pushy as hell, and Rouge admired that. This politician would do anything to get her child back, and she didn’t care if the voters took her for a world-class bitch.

  Rouge lifted his glass to the screen. Go, Marsha, go.

  The images changed, and Sadie’s mother, Becca Green, was eliciting more sympathy with her simple cloth coat and her plain broad face. The camera cut to a shot of this crying woman, clutching a microphone and imploring everyone to help find her little girl.

  It was just as well the television’s volume had been turned off. Rouge didn’t need to hear those words ever again. His own mother had said them all, fifteen years ago, in a futile public begging for his sister’s life.

  The moment he thought of Susan, something moved in the mirror on the other side of the mahogany bar. He caught sight of his dead twin’s hazel eyes peeking out from behind a line of bottles.

  Fool. Of course they were his own eyes and not Susan’s—only a reflection, nothing more. Yet he moved to a stool farther down the bar and away from the mirror. Now, between Rouge and the back wall of dark wood, a large pyramid of stacked wineglasses replicated his pale face in a honeycomb of small distorted images; his short hair elongated around the curving bulb of every glass. And so, twenty little girls with shoulder-length auburn tresses moved their faces in tandem with Rouge as he swiveled his stool around to scan the room.

  Most of the tables were empty. Two women sat near the front window. One was a blonde, and the other was blonder. They both played catch-eyes with him, looking up and then dropping veils of thick mascara.

  Another woman interested him more, but this one had no face yet. As she moved across the floor, her slender hips rolled to a soft rock tune from the jukebox. Sleek chestnut hair hung down to her shoulders, making a straight line across the back of a creamy silk blouse. Her long black skirt ended a few inches above a pair of high heels.

  All the heads of the Susans in the wineglasses were nodding in appreciation. Rouge loved high heels.

  The woman sat down at a nearby table and showed him the curve of her left cheek, but no more. The slit of her skirt fell open to expose a long leg, a knee and a bit of thigh.

  Thank you, God.

  And she was wearing her own skin—no tinted stretch of nylon between his eyes and the white flesh—an ocular feast in winter. One high heel dangled at the end of her foot. The shoe fell to the floor, exposing unpolished, naked toes.

  Well, that’s it.

  He planned to give himself up without the customary token resistance. She could come and get him anytime she liked.

  The woman turned around to stare at him, and he couldn’t look away. Only two things could fascinate so; extreme beauty was one. But he was looking at the most grotesque face he had ever seen a woman wear in public. A jagged line ran down her right cheek in an angry red scar, twisting her lips up on one side and forcing her to smile with half her mouth.

  As she took in his reaction, the other side of her mouth also tilted up. Her pale gray eyes were unnaturally far apart, and the eyebrows were thick and dark, nearly meeting above a small, straight nose, her only perfect feature.

  She rose gracefully and walked to the bar. “Hello, Vanity,” she said, sliding onto the stool next to his.

  “Pardon?”

  “Well, you are vain, aren’t you?” She leaned toward him. “You’re a beautiful man, and you know it.”

  He liked the soft voice, but her eyes unnerved him. A neat trick of eye shadow made them seem even farther apart, set off to each side of her head, with a bird’s peripheral vision to encompass the whole room. Yet now she was focused on him; it was hypnotic and disorienting.

  When she spoke, the scar elongated and contracted. She leaned closer, forcing him to look only at her eyes, and he found some humor there.

  “It must be comforting,” she said, “to be in love with yourself. No fear of rejection—ever. You might be a coward. Who would know?” She sat well back on her stool, and now her lips were pulled up on only one side.

  At first, he didn’t know which end of her mouth to believe, and then he decided she must be laughing at him. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  She only nodded, and that was just a formality. He knew she had been expecting this as her due. He gathered that the scar had not interfered with the basic relationship of man to woman—the man still had to pay.

  “I’ll have what you’re having.” She passed his glass under her nose, testing the bouquet. “Cheap scotch and tap water.”

  Well, she was getting more interesting by the minute. He put up one hand to the bartender, pointed to his own drink and then to the woman beside him. While they waited for her glass to arrive, he never even tried to avoid looking at her scar. She seemed not to mind this, only smiling, indulging him, as if she were allowing a free peep show of her nude body.

  The woman had clearly mastered the art of makeup. Above the high collar of her blouse, the skin was colored with glowing good health from bottles of flesh and tubes of roses. But she had done nothing to minimize the mutilation of her face—quite the opposite; she wore fire-engine-red lipstick on her twisted mouth. When he understood this as defiance, he liked her better.

  He was staring at the scar when he asked, “How did you get that?”

  Her eyebrows arched and a small delicate laugh came out in a surprised puff of air. Now she was as patronizing as any woman confronted by a small child, a dog, or a man. “That nasty wound on your ring finger? You got that when you were nine years old.” She lightly touched the back of his hand. “You had an accident during a skating party for the children’s choir. But I’ll never tell anyone. The history belongs to you.”

  His own scar was not visible beneath the heavy gold ring, a legacy from his late father. “We’ve never met. So how—”

  “Are you sure about that, Rouge? I remember you.” She sipped her drink slowly and drove him crazy for all the seconds that slipped by before she said, “You broke a lot of hearts when you went away. Did you like the military school better than St. Ursula’s?”

  She couldn’t have attended St. Ursula’s Academy. He shook his head. “I would have remembered you.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, with the vague implication that he was only half bright, and thus she did not expect much from him.

  Women were so good at this.

  She touched her damaged right cheek. “You never saw this.” When she turned to look up at the television set, the scar was hidden on the other side of her profile.

  Rouge’s own photograph was framed in the bright screen above the bar. The woman and her scar turned back to him. “So you’re the crack cop who broke the case of the purple bicycle.”

  Was there sarcasm in her voice? Definitely. “No, that was another cop.” He might be falling in love, and perhaps the feeling would last for another round of drinks. “I only happened by in time to carry the bike back to the station.”

  “A coincidence? You were just in the right place at the right time?”

  He shrugged. It was hardly a coincidence. He always checked Miss Fowler’s place on his way home from Dame’s Tavern—every night of the week. Since his ex-piano teacher lived on the main street, he could go nowhere in Makers Village without passing her house.

  “Well, Rouge, I guess the cameras liked you best. Oh, there you are again.” She pointed at the screen. “I saw that piece of film this morning. You do the stoic silent routine very well.”

  Yeah, he might be falling in love with the left side of her.

  “Still—quite a coincidence,” she said. “Your sister was killed by a kidnapper, and now you catch one.”

  He pulled back as though she had pointed a gun at his face. “He’s not a kidnapper—he’s a bike thief. And the kids are runaways.” Or that was the State Police Department’s line to the press. Was this woman—

  “Gwen’s mother doesn’t seem to agree,” she said, pointing to a shot of the lieutenant governor descending the
stairs and bearing down on the spokesman for the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. “And your sister was snatched right before Christmas vacation, too. That would have been a few months after you were sent away to military school.”

  He turned to the pyramid of wineglasses and the twenty small portraits of Susan, each one a study in shock. “The man who killed my sister is in jail. Are you a reporter?” The State Police investigators had made a point of telling the village cops not to talk to the press.

  “And all three kids went to the same private school.” She drained her glass.

  Please stop.

  “There’s no connection between my sister and those runaways. Are you a—”

  “No, I’m not a reporter.” She held her glass up to the bartender and raised one eyebrow to ask him for a refill. She was watching the television when she said, “But I do read the papers. Those two little girls were the same age as Susan.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “You wouldn’t remember it, Rouge. My family moved out of town when I was in the fifth grade.” Gwen Hubble’s photograph filled the television screen. “That kid is from a family as rich as yours used to be.”

  “Are you with the feds?”

  “Your sister was pretty too. Just like Gwen—a little princess. One more coincidence and we may have the makings of a damn miracle.” She turned to face him now. “No, I’m not FBI. Just spending the holidays with my uncle. Interesting old man—a devout atheist. His only religious ideation is the growing suspicion that there are no random events. Are you sure the priest killed your sister?”

  That last bomb of hers was almost thrown away as an afterthought.

  “The bastard did it.” There was no acrimony in this, only the dry recitation of information he had memorized along with tables of weights and measures. He simply preferred “bastard” to “priest.”

  “All the evidence was circumstantial,” she said, as if she were merely speculating on whether it would rain or snow. “No ransom money was ever found.”

  “He killed her.” Rouge’s voice was calm as he reiterated this simple fact of life—of death. “Now who are you?”

  She only looked at him with grave disappointment, as though she had found him wanting. “I have to go to the ladies’ room.”

  He watched her walk off toward the rest rooms at the back of the bar. The small Susans in the wineglasses expressed vague confusion, heads moving slowly from side to side. How could he have met this woman and not remembered her? He played a waiting game, calling up images of all his old classmates, and she was not among them.

  The military school had been a short-lived experiment in separating him from his twin. After Susan died and he had been reinstated at St. Ursula’s Academy, the same faces had greeted him and passed through the years with him. His return to the school had been yet another experiment, offering the comfort of familiar surroundings to offset the novelty of a dead sister.

  When twenty minutes had passed by, he was still waiting for the woman to return from the ladies’ room.

  Now how bright is that?

  He stayed long enough to down another drink, not wanting to believe that he had been dumped.

  More stupidity.

  Rouge put his money on the bar and went outside. The sky had grown dark in the past few hours. Winking colored lights were strung in the bare branches of the trees along the curb, and every shop window was cluttered with garish decorations and pricey gifts. The architecture of the village storefronts had not been altered in this century. However, the holiday season had changed: two of the town’s children were missing—but commerce stopped for no one. The street was clogged by slow-moving traffic, and the sidewalks were alive with the hustle of Christmas shoppers, trotting from store to store with bulky packages, with determination, resolve and speed.

  Only Rouge Kendall was standing still. Though he knew the brunette was long gone, he looked into the passing faces of every female with long dark hair.

  Fool.

  He decided to go home and speak to no more women. His mother was always on his side, and so he did not count her in their camp.

  Her daughter’s dead body had been found on December 25th, and there had not been another Christmas tree in Ellen Kendall’s house for fifteen years. This evening, she stared at the television set and watched the two frantic mothers of missing children. Her own text was overriding the announcer’s words:

  Merry Christmas, ladies—only six more shopping days for the ultimate gift. Just a little something from hell to kill your holiday forever, a little body, cold and still—one for each of you.

  Ellen had a bottle of pills that would kill these dark ideas, but she didn’t care for the side effects: the feeling of walking through a morass and struggling only to frame a thought of what she would have for dinner.

  She switched off the television set, and her own reflected image filled the darkened glass—portrait of a lean woman with good bone structure and badly in need of a drink. With a better mirror, she knew she would look a decade older than her fifty-six years, with hair more gray than brown. Drink had done that for her, though now she kept no alcohol in the house.

  But that had not been her own idea. Rouge had taken all the bottles away when he was only sixteen years old and practicing to be the man of the house—a full three years before his father died.

  How prescient. But then, he had been an unusual boy at every age.

  When she heard the car pull into the circular driveway, she crossed the wide room to the front window and parted the drapes. The old Volvo sat in front of the house. The engine had been turned off, but Rouge gave no sign of leaving the car. He was sitting behind the wheel and staring up toward the gables. Was he looking at his sister’s dark window? They never spoke of her anymore, but the dead child was always a stronger presence this close to Christmas. It was the season of the trinity: mother, son and Susan’s ghost.

  Ellen Kendall had spent the entire morning steeped in memories of that endless wait for her daughter’s ransom note. All this afternoon had been spent imagining Susan’s small body in the snowbank, where she had been thrown away when there was no more life in her. And just now, Ellen was reliving the funeral.

  Rouge had been so quiet on the day they had laid his sister in the ground. Ellen had admired her solid little man, only ten years old, yet so poised, so calm. And then she had noticed that one of the boy’s arms was held out from his body at an odd angle. She was seeing it all over again—the small cupped hand, his fingers curled around another hand that was not there. As his sister’s coffin was lowered into the ground, he had turned to the empty space beside him. His face registered shock for the first time that day, and Ellen knew her small son had expected to see someone standing next to him, someone with his young eyes and hair the color of his own. The boy had pitched forward in a faint. He would have fallen on the coffin if his father had not reached out one hand to snatch their only remaining child away from the open grave.

  Back in the present again, Ellen stared out the window. Her son was still sitting behind the wheel of the car.

  And a merry Christmas to you, Rouge. Are you thinking of murder?

  He might have something more mundane on his mind. Perhaps he was wondering how to pay the property taxes and the upkeep on this huge house. It was miles too big for the two remaining Kendalls. They had closed off the upper floors to save on utility bills, but still the maintenance was costly. Once, she had suggested moving to a smaller home. This had made Rouge angry. In the days following that discussion, the silence between them had been hurtful, for she knew how hard her son worked to keep this place for her. But it was only for his sake that she remained here and lived through each new day of sad reminders. Painful endurance was the twisted gift they gave to one another, each with the best intentions.

  The art collection and most of the antiques had been sold. She liked the house better now that it was less cluttered. The psychiatric care and his father’s heart transplant, the ransom
and more money for the detective—all had taken their toll on the publishing fortune her late husband’s family had amassed over many generations.

  Ellen listened to the opening and closing of the front door, and then her son’s footsteps crossing the marble tiles. The foyer, obscene in its size, ate up monstrous amounts of heat. She had wanted to use the back door of the house so they could seal it off, but her son had told her they would not camp out in their own home.

  When had Rouge become the head of the household?

  Long ago.

  She and her late husband had made him into a little man before he was full-grown—an unwitting piece of cruelty. They had not been any comfort to their surviving child, only passing by his room, walking through the mechanics of a life, speaking automatic phrases of “good morning” and “good night.”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  She turned to see Rouge stroll into the parlor, and in a trick of the lamplight, his shadow seemed to walk beside him as an independent creature.

  “Hello, dear.” Did that sound too cheerful? Was it forced and artificial? Yes. “I can have dinner ready in twenty minutes.”

  “Fine,” he said, kissing her cheek.

  And wasn’t that small act a bit too perfunctory? Did Rouge seem more distracted than usual?

  Ellen sensed his pain or something akin to it. A sickness? She felt an impulse, some vestige of the mother she used to be in the days when she had two living children. Her hand was rising to touch his forehead, to test for a fever, when he turned away from her.