“And you decided it should be me?”
“Yours was the name that came to mind.” He topped his own glass.
The knock on the car door startled both of us. Blackmoor rolled down the window. A tall woman dressed in a white Juliet gown leaned forward to speak with him. With her heart-shaped face and braided dark hair, she reminded me of those doe-eyed beauties Errol Flynn had wooed in all the movies where he’d worn tights. “Excuse me, Dane,” she said, “but they’re ready for you now.”
He waved her off. “So what do you say?” he asked, turning back to me. “If this thing turns ugly, as I suspect it will, do you want to come along for the ride?”
“I’ll think it over.”
Blackmoor opened the door and unfolded himself out of the car. He moved like a cat. A big, dangerous cat. “Next time, come to the Mill,” he said, referring to his Bucks County studio.
I went for the handle on my side, but the sculpture of the old lady was blocking my exit. My dress caught as I lurched into the opposite seat. When I finally emerged from the car, I was once again feeling dizzy and faint.
Dane Blackmoor was nowhere in sight.
TWO
“Why can’t I go down to Columbia with you?” Temple wanted to know. “I’m all better.” People always said she took after me, but I thought she was the spitting image of Andy. Which was okay. By the end of our marriage, Andy’s looks were the only thing I still liked about him.
I zipped up the tote and sat on the edge of the bed. “You have school. There’s no one down there to take care of you, and besides, I’ll be working. I’m going to need all my concentration.”
“I wouldn’t be a bother.”
“Next time.”
“You always say that,” Temple countered.
I pulled her onto my lap. “It won’t be long before I’m home for good.” That was something else I always said.
Temple swung her legs off the floor, and snuggled against my shoulder—not an easy feat for either of us. She’d grown another inch since the Turner trial, and her body felt strange. Long and angular in some places, soft and round in others. Still, I tried to hold her as though she were four and not fourteen.
“It was on A Current Affair that Heather Locklear’s going to play Susan Trevett,” she said.
“You know I don’t like you watching those kinds of shows.” I gently pushed her to her feet. I was tired of talking about the Holy Ghost, about Susan Trevett and Jefferson Turner. Jack had been right. For me, that book was as good as over. A flicker of Dane Blackmoor’s face passed through my mind. Dane Blackmoor, looking scared.
“Come on, we’ve got three whole hours before I have to leave,” I said, giving Temple a playful slap on the behind. “Let’s see how much junk food we can eat.”
I took a whole stack of mail to read on the plane. Halfway down the pile was a plain envelope, square and white, addressed in a haphazard assortment of capital and small-case letters to Miss Garner Quinn, PERSONAL, no return address.
His name, he said, was Peter Michael Salvatore. Twelve years ago he and his mother had spent a summer in Myrna, North Carolina, right down the road from where Jefferson Turner lived. My father, wrote Peter, left us in March. I saw him at breakfast. We had oatmeal with butter and sugar. I spilt my milk and some got on his suit. For a long time I thought he didn’t come back because I spilled that milk on him. My mother never said anything. She cried a lot. Then one day she told me we were going on a trip to visit our relations down South. We went by Greyhound from Newark to Raleigh. My mother’s cousin met us in his pickup truck and we drove the rest of the way to Myrna.
Up to this point in the letter, Salvatore’s handwriting was small and precise. Now, with every handwritten page, front and back, it became bigger, sprawling from one margin to the next so that sometimes only three or four words fit on a line.
He’d met Jeff on his first day there, Peter wrote, and over the next few months, the two boys spent every waking hour together. His mother, he said, still cried all the time. The trailer where they were staying was very cramped, and he missed his friends back home. Jeff lived with his mom, just as he did. His dad had left him, too. He was popular with the kids and very friendly; but Peter added, he too was a lost soul.
The words lost soul were underlined three times, in thick, inky slashes.
The two boys spent most of their time, the letter went on, out by the railroad tracks or with the creatures Jeff kept in cages near the barn. Here Peter Salvatore began to digress—I always wanted to be a priest, he wrote, I felt I had a calling from God. He had been an altar boy, he said, and he went to parochial school. Peter Salvatore changed to flowing script—Cardinal John Henry Newman, who I’m sure you know is now a Saint, Miss Quinn, tells us if we don’t like being in church we won’t like being in heaven. I will love heaven, Miss Quinn, he assured me, because I have always loved everything about church.
That was why, Peter continued, his mother had made him the priest’s robe in the first place. And that was how he and Jeff came to celebrate those funeral masses, after twilight, on the edge of Jeff’s grandaddy’s fields, so many summers ago.
In the beginning—Peter wrote in his fast, wild hand—he hadn’t known. He’d thought that the little birds, the rabbits, and the cats simply died. Everybody dumped off their sick animals at the Turner place so Jeff could look after them. He said he’d just assumed they were a lot sicker than anyone figured.
Then one morning, he came up behind his friend, catching him unawares. Jeff stood halfway inside the cage where he kept the birds, his body bent in concentration. When Peter called him, he turned, and it was then that Salvatore saw.
Jefferson Turner was choking the life out of a small sparrow. Breaking its neck in his big farmboy hand. He didn’t blink an eye, Peter wrote, just smiled and said, “Looks like we got another burial tonight.” Then he put the dead thing into my hand and walked away.
The letter became difficult to read, as though the writer’s brain were spilling thoughts directly onto the page without the benefit of a hand to neatly contain them. Sentences were disjointed, entire words left out; the ones that remained jumped off the page like a message in Morse code.
Salvatore began talking about a salesman named George, and how George had condemned his mother’s soul to damnation—“ A wife must not separate from her husband. But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband.” Unmarried was also underlined three times. However George fit into the picture, it was clear from the rest of the letter that Peter and his mother had left Myrna that September.
I have sinned, Miss Quinn, Peter Michael Salvatore wrote. He made a long list of his transgressions, using terms ranging from the biblical (“coveting”) to the colorful (“jacking off”). Two words were offset by asterisks:
* LUST *
* GRAVEN IMAGES *
To further emphasize them, he’d circled these words with a red marker.
From the abrupt change in the penmanship, I guessed that Salvatore had stopped at this point, adding the last paragraph later. There, in a small, carefully controlled hand, he wrote:
I know who you are. I read that you are doing a book on Jefferson Turner. I believe you are a woman of Truth, and a Catholic. I tell you about the Monster that is Jeff, so I might be sent for perpetual Atonement and Penitence in Purgatory instead of perishing in the mouth of Hell forever.
Peter Michael Salvatore
At the bottom of the page, there were several postscripts.
P.S., Peter wrote. The newspapers are wrong about the nickname. I was the first one to call him Bird, after the sparrow. He added, P.P.S.: Even after I knew, we buried a cat and two dogs.
In the right-hand corner, Salvatore had printed JMJ, which I remembered from my parochial school days as standing for Jesus-Mary-Joseph; and then, perhaps as an afterthought, were these neatly printed words:
I still think of him as my friend.
The return address was on the bot
tom of the page. Whatever had happened to Salvatore in the years since his childhood encounter with Bird Turner was anybody’s guess. At the time of writing this letter, he was living in a seminary.
Over the aircraft intercom the captain said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are beginning our approach…” but I tuned him out. I was thinking about Peter Salvatore and how, with a scribbled JMJ and some hand-sewn vestments, he had reopened a book I thought I’d shut for good.
THREE
I sat in my usual seat in the courtroom. Everything appeared much the same as it had only forty-eight hours before. But, in my eyes, everything was different.
“If what you’re saying is true”—Nick Shawde’s voice boomed—“how is it you described Jeff Turner’s van in such detail?”
Susan Trevett Cox shifted in the witness chair. “I wish I could tell you that, sir,” she said softly. “Everything happened so fast. The detectives kept asking for details, and somehow this van popped into my head. Maybe I’d seen it in the parking lot at Annalee’s, or driving around town, and with all the pressure, it just came out, the description, before I even had time to think.”
“And yet, you did later identify Jeff Turner as your assailant?”
“Yeah,” Susan sighed. “Like I said, I was real messed up. My heart was hardened with sin.”
Ask her why she said he spoke in Latin, Nick, I thought to myself. Ask her how come they found greasepaint on the sleeve of her blouse. Things that had bothered me, tiny inconsistencies softened over time, once again nagged at me.
Shawde walked slowly toward the jury. “So you’re telling us that Jefferson Turner is innocent of the heinous crime of which he’s been accused?”
“Absolutely, positively.” Susan’s blond head bobbed, her voice as confident as it had been on that sweltering hot day a year before, when she’d first picked Jeff Turner out of the police lineup.
“I wish I could remember,” Jeff told me, earnestly. “If you want me to say I do, I will, if it’ll help you.”
I don’t want you to help me, I thought, I want you to help yourself. I said, “I only want you to tell me the truth.”
“I’m tellin’ the truth.” He sounded hurt now. The guard glanced over in our direction.
“Like I said,” he went on, “I vaguely picture a lady and a boy living in Teeny Lloyd’s trailer. I might’ve been about twelve or thirteen, I don’t know. But as for the priest stuff, and the funerals, that’s something that this Salvatore kid must’ve dreamed up himself, in his head.”
“Why do you think he’d make up something like that?”
“I don’t know,” he sighed. “My whole life I always brought home strays. Not only the four-legged kind, either, you know what I’m saying? I guess I felt sorry for the sort of people other folks made fun of. So I talked to ’em, treated ’em friendly. Which kinda made me their hero.” He flushed, visibly embarrassed.
“But some of ’em were so lonely and mixed up, they started on imagining things. That I was their best friend, or their brother, or their sweetheart—and if I tried to set ’em straight, even if I was as gentle as could be about it, why, they’d like to turn on me.” He paused, looking straight into my eyes. “That’s what I think must’ve happened with this Peter Salva-whatever-his-name-was, don’t you?”
I said I didn’t know, but I was going to find out.
“I’m trying to reach a Peter Salvatore,” I said, trying to remember what they called young men who weren’t yet priests. “I believe he’s a student at “St. Anthony’s.”
“Can you hold, please, while I switch you?” The operator didn’t wait for a response.
“Father Podalski speaking.” I repeated that I was trying to call Peter Salvatore. “Are you a member of the family?” Father Podalski asked.
“No, Father. My name is Garner Quinn. Mr. Salvatore wrote me a letter with regard to a book I’m writing. I hoped to be able to talk to him in person.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.” I flashed back to the Catholic schooling of my childhood, wondering if Podalski had images of me as a lipglossed temptress trying to lure chaste young men out from cloistered walls.
“If he’s in class”—or fasting or praying or putting on his hair shirt, I thought, irreverently—“I could call back at a more convenient time.”
“There is no convenient time for Peter Salvatore,” the man said with unpriestly candor. “The young man is dead.”
When I called Jack that night, he sounded skeptical. “The guy was obviously one bead short of a rosary,” he said.
I cradled the phone on my shoulder and walked over to the closet. The dark suit would do. I took it off the hotel hanger and draped it over a chair. “Maybe. But this isn’t the kind of loose end I can afford to leave hanging.”
“You want me to drive over to the seminary and check it out?” I heard the eagerness in his voice.
“Actually, I want you to book a flight to Columbia. Shawde’s calling his expert witnesses tomorrow. I need you here.” I was relieved when he didn’t point out that it would have made more sense for him to go to St. Anthony’s, a mere two-hour drive from the beach house. It didn’t matter that my plan would mean a lot of extra travel for both of us. I wanted to handle the Salvatore situation myself.
“You know what to do. Keep your eyes and ears open. Pay attention to people. Not just what they say, but how they say it. Facts we can verify later, from the court report. There’s a room already reserved for you.” I threw a shirt and a pair of jeans into my leather satchel. “I should be back tomorrow night. Wednesday at the latest.”
Before putting me on with Temple, he said, “By the way, a guy named Roberto called. Wanted to set up an appointment with you to go out and see Dane Blackmoor’s studio at someplace called the Mill.”
“I can’t think about that now,” I told him. According to the latest television reports, attorney Diana Gold had failed in her attempt to block investigators from X-raying several of her client’s sculptures that had been completed around the same time as Lady Sitting. The noose was tightening around Blackmoor’s neck.
It was the only good piece of news I’d had all day.
FOUR
They’d found him hanging from one of the rafters in the choir loft, Monsignor Fahy said.
He reminded me of the priests I’d known as a girl—white-haired, apple-cheeked men with nicotine stains on their teeth and fingers, and a worldly knowledge of sports and entertainment.
“I saw your film,” he said as we shook hands. “The one about the Mariah trial.” He looked crushed when I told him I hadn’t written the screenplay, visited the set, or met any of the actors. “Ah, well,” he sighed, “but surely there’ll be other murders.” Then he caught himself, and laughed, his eyes telegraphing something more than simple ingenuousness.
He insisted I join him in a cup of tea, talking as we sipped about the history of the seminary, and how it had changed. When he was a lad, he said—using the word as an index to date himself to a gentler age—every good Catholic mother had one son who was marked as a designated hitter for God. Back then, St. Anthony’s had been teeming with fresh-faced, strapping young men—boys who played football, and missed kissing girls; boys who were proud and humble, idealistic about the vocation to which they’d been called.
“It’s different today,” he said, offering a plate of scones. When I refused, he spent a moment choosing the largest, most perfect, with the air of someone who doesn’t take the tactile pleasures afforded him lightly.
“We have twelve now, all told. Next year the Diocese is moving us to ‘newer facilities’ near the university.” He shook his head. “The heating bill in an old monstrosity like this can kill you, of course, and then there are the grounds—”
The monsignor winked. “But I’ve always felt it was easier to find God up here than in some Formica-and-chrome classroom where you’ve got to take the crucifix down after your lesson so as not to offend the next teacher.”
He lit up
a cigarette. “Peter Salvatore,” he exhaled, watching the smoke rise.
“Yes.” I had the feeling I was back at catechism. That this priest was going to teach me something important.
“He was one of the troubled ones,” Fahy said. “You could see it right off.” He swiveled around in his chair, looking out the window at the carefully tended garden below. “In the old days, he wouldn’t have made it through the door.”
The monsignor shrugged. “Peter was right on the edge, all the way, I’d say. When his mother died two months back, well, that was the turning point.”
“He had a breakdown?”
“Not a breakdown, exactly. If anything he became more wound up—reading and studying all night. At the chapel every spare moment. He acted like a boy who”—he paused, as though the thought were coming to him for the first time—“who had a lot to do, and only a little while to do it in.”
I waited, studying his profile, backlit by the slanting sun. After a moment, the monsignor continued. “We were going to dismiss him at the end of term,” he said quietly. “The words used, I believe, are that an initiate is not ‘suited for communal life.’”
Again he turned away, with a deprecatory little laugh. I wondered what he was feeling.
“The boy left a note. We released it to the police, of course.”
“Can you tell me the gist of it?”
“It was a bit rambling. He talked of his mother, who’d divorced and remarried outside of the church. Said her soul had been damned. He wrote that he’d confessed his sins to God, to a priest, and to ‘an Avenging Angel of Truth’ who would proclaim them to the world.” The monsignor looked at me, his fleecy eyebrows hiked high. “I believe that may be you.”
I uncrossed my legs, trying as hard as I could to look like an angel of anything. “Was there anything else?”
“Not that I can remember,” said the old priest. “Except for the pictures.”
“The pictures?”
“Drawings,” he told me. “All over the bottom of the page.”
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