This time I walked directly to the front of the church and knelt before the altar. One of the brothers was kneeling there too, saying nothing, in that odd way they had of speaking to God in silence. I too spoke without voice, moving only my lips, as if without some show of effort, I wouldn’t be heard. “Please, God,” I prayed, “give me Cassie back safely. I’m sorry for my selfishness, my self-righteous crap, my lack of convictions, my constant questioning, my absence of gratitude. I’m sorry for my excuses and finger-pointing.” At this point I started to cry, I think. My hands sparkled with tears though I hadn’t felt them fall. “Please, God, give us Cassie back, if not for me, then for my parents, who, unlike me, have never doubted you, have always taken full responsibility for their actions, have never overestimated their importance, and have never been arrogant with the life they were given. Please, God, give us Cassie back.”
When I felt the hand on my head, I turned to see that the brother who had been praying beside me had stood and was facing me. “I’ll pray for all of you,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Without Passport
I MAY NOT HAVE been ready for ordainment the next morning, but, as if anointed and discipled by the Holy Ghost, I spirited straight to Carlyle’s office, bounding through his closed door as his secretary, the pigeon lady, squawked.
“Mila Nazir is dead,” I said by way of introduction to Carlyle, who was standing behind his desk staring into space like an Alzheimer’s victim. He turned his head slowly toward me, knowing something was wrong with my abrupt entrance, but not sure what.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Joan said before closing the door again behind her.
“Marianna.”
“She’s dead, Ken. Emily Barton and now Mila Nazir were murdered like the others. Four Holton students are dead, so stop pretending this school isn’t involved.”
Ken tapped his desk with the fingers of his right hand. “Marianna, let’s be sensible. We can still keep this under control.”
He watched me, gauging my reaction, wondering in those split seconds how far he could let me in. Was my definition of “sensible” the same as his?
He gambled on my poker face and lifted a newspaper from his desk. “A friend of mine at the Journal sent me this copy. The article will be in the evening edition unless we give them some contradictory information more favorable to Holton. Are you with me here or not?”
I walked to him (because he would never come to me) and took the paper from his hand.
The Providence Journal Bulletin
More Holton Students Found Dead
The mutilated body of a Holton coed, who allegedly was asked to take a leave of absence from the school because of sexual harassment by another student, was found two nights ago in Fox Point. An unnamed source from the Holton administration has identified the body as that of Emily Barton. The same source has provided information that Miss Barton was poised to name and bring charges against her alleged harasser, another Holton student. No charges have been filed in connection with Miss Barton’s death.
In addition, a fourth Holton murder was reported, again in the Patterson Park area. Mila Nazir exited the area of the woods at about 7 p.m. last night and was pronounced dead shortly thereafter.
A fifth young woman is missing in connection with this spate of incidents. Cassie Melone, the sister of a Holton administrator, was reported missing from a Cape Cod soccer camp on Friday. Police from Massachusetts and Rhode Island are continuing their search for her.
I looked up at Carlyle. “Who wrote this?”
“Is this true? About your sister?”
“She’s missing, yes.”
“The police have been calling me all morning trying to determine where the Journal got this information.”
“Cassie was with Sherman and Lipton before she went away. They got her drunk to punish me. She went off to camp the next day and we haven’t heard from her since.”
“You will not go near Sherman, or any of the students, until we have more proof.” Ken swiped his fingers over his mouth in a nervous gesture. His hands were shaking.
“Proof of what? I only want to ask him questions. Just talk to him. I need to find my sister. The police will go even if I don’t.”
“The police know nothing of this drinking incident or that she even knows those two students. Leave Sherman alone. If you so much as go near that apartment again, I will have to have you forcibly removed from the campus.”
My head was processing information at megahertz speed. Had Cory Sherman told Carlyle that I’d gone to his apartment? He’d gone to complain about me, and Carlyle was actually taking his side. Or was the informant Jeff Kendall again?
“Does Jeff Kendall report directly to you, Ken? Or is it Mike McCoy? You know all about the drugs and Mila Nazir, don’t you?”
If he’d heard me, and simply wasn’t answering, I had no way of knowing. His eyes were a million miles away, looking off to a potted plant that sentried his doorway and was in dire need of water. It would be dead within a week and Carlyle would never deign to water it.
Sometimes naiveté escapes suddenly like a butterfly that you thought you held firmly by its delicate wings. Very late one night at the Fez, Beth—the Newport debutante, life long Dunes Club member, Mayflower descendant—told Laurie, Shannon, and me, after several pitchers of beer and a Patriots’ loss, about her coming-out party on her sixteenth birthday, when an uninvited guest showed up who turned out to be the daughter her mother had given birth to months before she married Beth’s father. Beth’s butterfly flew away on her sixteenth birthday—and returned as her illegitimate half-sister.
My realization that Dean Kenneth Oberlin Carlyle had the moral fiber of a garden-variety street thug was nothing even remotely akin to Beth’s sweet-sixteen discovery of another sibling, but it was pretty damn close. My butterfly was fluttering desperately up there on Carlyle’s twelve-foot ceiling. So I quickly grounded myself and began ringing the bells that were going off in my brain in rapid succession as questions paired with answers in luminous harmony.
With dire, heavily loaded words, I shattered the glassy symphony. “I do not intend to find my sister slaughtered like a fucking cow so your little drug enterprise can continue unimpeded. This mayhem stops now.”
Carlyle turned white as a sheet. “Don’t be absurd. These murders have nothing to do with Sherman or his petty drug use. You must believe me and drop that angle completely. I cannot have him and this entire college dragged through the mire over your sister’s disappearance. It’s a coincidence for which there must be another explanation.”
“Why do you continue to protect him? For donations? Another wing on the library?”
“Please, Marianna, please. You have no idea what you’re doing. It has taken decades for Holton’s reputation to mature from a small men’s college to a distinguished center of secondary education in a very competitive market. But Holton is not Harvard yet. We can’t survive this kind of negative publicity. I’ve given my life for this school. . . . Even if you hate me, let’s save Holton. You’re a part of our family now.”
I almost felt sorry for him. Sorry that all around him Ken was so drowning in trouble that he had sunk to the level of polishing me up with fatuous concepts of our close-knit little Holton brood—drivel that probably made him sick to his stomach. He no more believed I could be part of Holton’s family than he believed in affirmative action.
I placed the newspaper back on Carlyle’s wraparound desk. It was clean and uncluttered and paperless, so unlike the way one would expect a professor’s desk to look. But then Ken Carlyle wasn’t a real professor. He didn’t teach and grade exams and write on blackboards or use laser pointers on projected images. He had been elevated to an administrative position—he no longer got closer to the students than their data sheets, or “rap sheets” as Rita called them. His main function was fund-raising, damage control, and more fund-raising.
“Just tell me why you hired me, Ken. What the hell were you
thinking by bringing me in?”
“Why aren’t you angry at Piganno? He fired you without an ounce of mercy, yet you stay loyal to him. I thought . . . I thought you could keep things under control here. I assumed the Melinda Hastings murder would eventually lose its steam. An isolated incident, I thought. Catastrophic publicity, yes, but you . . . I thought you could temper the waters until it passed. Yes, you were a cheap publicity stunt. I admit it. But your loyalty is still to him, not me, not this school.”
“What you see isn’t loyalty to Vince Piganno or disloyalty to Holton. It’s an innate sense of morality that I can’t shake. I’m not like you, Ken. And I never will be.”
As I walked away from him and out his door for the last time, he made his final appeal. “Marianna, please stay away from Cory Sherman. His father will sue the school if we make any unfounded allegations against him. And against a civil suit, we have no—”
“Connections,” I finished the sentence for him. “If I were you I wouldn’t be worrying about civil suits. I’d call a criminal lawyer. And fast.”
I WALKED BACK to my office for the last time, pondering its absence of heartwarming snapshots, bouncing dog heads, or personalized leather desk sets. If I never set foot at Holton again, there was nothing to pack up and send me. I had never really moved in.
From nervous energy, I scrolled through my online Rolodex for numbers I might want to take along with me. But when I picked up my phone, I dialed a number never stored in my Holton database—a number I’d committed to heart and memory years ago.
When Beth got on the line her voice was like a songbird waking me up on a new spring day. It was a soothing voice I hadn’t missed until I heard it again.
“Marianna? Are you all right? They won’t let me leave here. I want to see you.”
My voice answered weak and tremulous. “Cassie is missing from camp. I had a horrible fight with her before she left. My parents will literally die if anything’s happened to her. I’m stuck with this one, Beth. I’m really scared and I don’t know what to do.”
“You don’t sound right,” she said.
“I’m sick. My parents are sick. They’re depending on me to bring their baby home, and I should be able to figure this out, but I can’t.”
Beth was silent for a minute, but she remained on the line with me. I didn’t know why I’d called her. Maybe because I was confused. Too much had happened too fast. Carlyle was wrong, there are no coincidences. Somewhere in this mess was the answer to Cassie’s whereabouts, but the connections were blocked; I couldn’t get the clues in the right order. I called Beth because she was methodical in everything she did. Her mind worked that way, from step one to step two. And she was clearheaded, never letting emotions cloud her thinking. Beth had a talent for serving things straight up and unadulterated. She would take a million puzzle pieces and arrange them on a table—colors with like colors, shapes she instinctively knew belonged together—predicting the completed picture without ever having seen it. Where I would race into it headlong, stumbling through a trial-and-error process guided only by gut feelings, Beth could reshuffle my pieces into a different order—the right order—and make sense, because she always stood back, looking at the apparent clutter from a cool distance. Like knowing the ingredients of a recipe she’d never tasted, I was hoping she could sip slowly now for the first time and identify the flavor I was failing to discern.
“Mari?” she said softly.
“Yes, Beth.”
“Has Cassie ever been to Holton? It sounds as if it’s become personal now. Could it be that the Holton murderer is coming after you—by taking Cassie?”
I felt like throwing up. Rita knocked on my door. “Miss Melone, that reporter, Elliot Orenstein, is on the phone for you.”
“Tell him I can’t talk to him right now.”
“I love you,” I said to Beth. “I’ve got to go.” And I hung up.
On my way past her desk, I thanked Rita, knowing that when I left the office that day, I would probably never see her again, and I walked out of the front doors of Langley for the last time.
CHAPTER FORTY
Keeping Your Head on Straight
CARLYLE BEGAN CALLING MY cell phone at regular intervals as I triumphantly disobeyed him and drove directly to the Riverside Park Apartments and buzzed Sherman’s apartment. The voice over the intercom asked who it was.
“Is Cassie Melone up there with you?” I said.
“Who is this?” he asked again.
“Do you have Cassie?”
Whoever it was hung up on me. I buzzed all the others to no avail, then waited patiently on a stone bench outside for another tenant to come home and open the front door. It always worked. It was just a matter of how long it would take. While I waited, my phone rang again with a number I didn’t recognize.
“Hello?” I said. “Hello?”
Silence.
“It’s me, Rod Lipton.”
“Let me up. We need to talk.”
No answer.
“Lipton, where is she? Help me here or I’m going straight to the cops.”
“With what?”
“I recognized you both at that little pot party last night in the park,” I lied. “Who sliced up Mila? You or your roommate?”
“I’m not in the apartment. Meet me. We’ll go to the police together. You bring what you have and I’ll fill in the blanks.”
I still didn’t believe a word he said. Except that he was scared. He had been scared the night he came to my apartment. I could see fear and I could hear it. And I was just as scared as he was.
“We aren’t going to the police. First you tell me where Cassie is.”
“Look, Carlyle doesn’t want us talking to you. This has to be private.”
“He told you that? Not to talk to me?”
“He told both of us not to talk to you. Cory and me. But that’s what I’m going to tell you. Carlyle and Cory and Mila. I’m not involved in it. Can you meet me?”
Now he was making some sense, maybe even telling the truth this time, except of course for his involvement with Sherman’s little candy store. If you live with wolves you either join the pack or get eaten. And once you’ve lain with them, you sense their desperation when afraid; you know their danger and appreciate their ability to turn their hunger on you when the prey gets scarce. Maybe Rod was hungry for protection. “Okay, Rod. Where do you want to meet?”
“Patterson Park. Down by the river.”
“You’re crazy or you think I am. Everyone who goes into that park comes out dead. I’ll meet you in a public place or nowhere.”
I thought I heard him mumble “cocksucker,” but I couldn’t be sure.
“What’s your answer, Rod?”
“Down by the river is the only secluded place in Providence. I can’t let Cory—or Carlyle—see me with you.”
“Calm down. Carlyle isn’t going to send a hit man after you. Pull yourself together and meet me at Tortilla Flats. That’s safe enough.”
He hung up on me. I took that as a no, so I flipped the phone closed and threw it into my bag, looking up as Cory Sherman exited his building and strutted to the street. It was Cory who’d answered his intercom but he was so cocksure of himself he didn’t even look around for me when he left the building.
“Sherman, wait up.” I began walking toward him.
Without looking up, he did a sudden about-face and began walking toward me. Like two gunfighters in a duel to the death, we approached each other swiftly. I intended to walk right up to his snotty little nose and wipe it for him with the back of my hand, but when he finally raised his steely eyes to mine, they were as intransigent as the muzzle of a loaded gun, and I stopped dead.
“Lady, you are in big trouble. Add stalking to your list of offenses. My old man’s got his lawyer working on it now.”
“Where is my sister?”
He shook his head and laughed at me, then turned and walked away as I continued to scream.
“Where’s
my sister? Where’s Cassie?”
Sherman turned around to me but continued walking backwards to his car while he bared his teeth and held an imaginary knife at his wrist, miming a sawing motion so realistic I could almost hear metal against bone.
I ran at him screaming, but he kept laughing at me as I got nearer, then he turned and ran to a silver Porsche parked in the street and peeled away. I dialed the police and got O’Rourke again. “Send a car to Riverside Park Apartments and get into Cory Sherman’s place. He might have my sister there.”
“Do we have a warrant?”
“O’Rourke, just knock on the door for now. If you can’t get in, call Shannon or Laurie at the AG’s. They’ll get the warrant for you. Please, do it now!”
“Sure thing, Miss Melone.”
Good old O’Rourke. To each other, cops were brethren. Prosecutors were awarded the status of poor second cousins, because we were still lawyers after all, but I could torture O’Rourke to within an inch of his pathetic life and he still always came through when I needed him.
Desperate for a better plan, I drove to Patterson Park hoping Rod would show up there. I had nowhere else to go except home to face grieving parents who, though they hadn’t yet admitted it to each other, were probably already making funeral arrangements in the privacy of their own minds. I sat in the car by the river where Emily had first been raped, Mila had fallen dead, and Emily’s mutilated body had been found. My phone rang again.
“I’m here, Rod,” I said without saying hello.
“Miss Melone? It’s Elliot. Is everything all right? I called your office, but no one knows where you are.”
“Elliot, did you plant that Journal story about Cassie?”
“Of course. It was a shot in the dark to stir things up. Did it work? Have you heard from anyone?”
“I think he has her.”
“Sherman? If he’s hurt your sister—”
“Stop it, Elliot! Don’t even suggest that.”
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