Corruption of Faith

by Brenda English

  Once upon a time, this distancing ability also had gotten me through the trauma of a divorce, when Jack Brooks, the Tallahassee city planner to whom I was married for two years, decided after the fact that he hated what I did for a living. He had tried to get me to change careers, complaining that I spent too much time at the paper and that he thought the other reporters were a bunch of immature, oversexed, budding alcoholics.

  “Well, at least they’re not anal-retentive, uptight assholes who want to completely control everything and everyone around them like some kind of dictator,” I had shouted back at him. That was when he had walked out and filed for divorce, and I had retreated behind my reporter’s wall to keep the pain from immobilizing me.

  Now I found this ability to step outside my feelings kicking in to keep me sane and calm as I listened to Peterson’s story of insanity and violence, as he told me how my sister had died.

  Cara’s body had been found earlier that morning, Peterson said, when an assistant manager had arrived to open the Continental Bank branch office off South Backlick Road. She had noticed Cara slumped against the driver’sside window of her blue Ford Escort, which was parked on the far side of the parking lot, also out of the ATM camera’s range. The woman said she first thought Cara must have fallen asleep waiting for the bank to open, but as she got out of her own car to go inside, something about the scene just felt wrong.

  “She walked over to your sister’s car to tap on the window, and that was when she saw the blood,” Peterson said. “She went around to the other side of the car and saw your sister had a head wound. She said she banged on the window, but your sister didn’t respond, and the car doors were locked. So the woman ran inside the bank and called 911.”

  Still another picture of Cara flashed through my mind to join those I already had seen: Cara with a bullet in her brain, with blood running down her face, her brown eyes, so like my own, open in death and reflecting the overwhelming fear of her last moments. In my job, I had seen more than once what guns do to people, seen it up close and personal. I had no illusions to shield me from the wreckage the bullet must have caused as it entered and exited Cara’s head. My stomach cramped up in aversion. The all-too-human part of my mind was continuing to shout its refusal that this could be happening, had happened. It wanted me to voice its shouts, to shatter the air with them.

  No, Sutton, no, I told myself, digging my fingernails into the palms of my hands. Don’t let it in, don’t feel it yet. Hold on, hold on. You have to hear it all and get out of here before you give in to it. It was a reaction that was as ingrained in my psyche as an instinct. I worked in a business where you didn’t let other people see your weaker moments. Many of the people reporters cover, from the politicians to police, can smell weakness, loss of nerve, fear. I had drummed it into myself until it became reflex: Don’t be intimidated. Don’t be afraid. And for God’s sake, whatever you do, don’t cry! Even now, in one of the worst personal situations I ever had faced, my reaction was to want to find a private place to feel my pain and lick my wounds, to let no one see me in a moment of what might be interpreted as weakness. It made no sense, especially in these circumstances, I knew, but there it was.

  Peterson was saying Cara had been shot once in the head, apparently at point-blank range, as she sat in the car.

  “We don’t know where the killer hooked up with her, whether he accosted her in the parking lot of the bank or whether she was abducted from someplace else and taken there,” he said. “She took two hundred and fifty dollars, the maximum withdrawal, out of her account at eleven-eighteen P.M., according to the time stamp on the ATM video. Less than a minute later the video mike picked up a sound that we’re sure was the gunshot.”

  I felt myself flinch at the word gunshot, hearing the sound of the gun’s blast echoing inside my own head. Oh God, I was thinking, why Cara? Sweet, gentle Cara, who would never willingly hurt anyone. Cara, who worked as a secretary at the Bread of Life Church in West Springfield, where she had found a religious home after moving up from Georgia last year. Cara, who worried about my soul because I had no church and no desire for one. She was the sweet one, the mediator, the one who took people with a huge grain of salt, always giving them the benefit of the doubt. I was the judgmental one, impatient with stupidity, possessor of a wicked tongue that could flay skin and that took no prisoners. There was a whole list of people who might want to shoot me. But who could ever want to hurt Cara?

  Cara had never been a fighter. Christ, she must have been paralyzed with fear at the sight of the gun! What must have gone through her mind? Don’t go down that road, Sutton, not yet. Start to imagine that, I knew, and it would be all over for my self-control.

  “There are some questions I need to ask you about your sister,” Peterson was saying as I brought my mind back to the present once again. I nodded an okay.

  Rob put a hand back on my shoulder.

  “I can come back when you’re done,” he said, not wanting to intrude.

  “No,” I told him, and heard an uncharacteristic note of panic in my voice, “please stay.” He agreed and went around to sit in the battered leather swivel chair behind his desk. Apparently part of my mind thought Rob’s presence, coupled with my horror at the idea of breaking down in front of him, would help me stay in control.

  An evidence team was already at Cara’s Springfield apartment, Peterson said, looking for any signs that she might have been abducted from there. He explained that the police had gotten her address from her driver’s license, found among the contents of her purse that the killer had left scattered inside the car. My name and place of employment the police had learned from the application Cara had completed when she rented the apartment and had put me down as an emergency contact. But, Peterson said, he needed to know other things as well: where Cara worked, who her friends were, what she did when she wasn’t at work. I told him what I knew of the current details of my sister’s life. Peterson reached into an inner jacket pocket and took out a small notebook and pen, with which he started to take sporadic notes as I talked, my mind taking me back through the months since Cara had arrived in Springfield, and even to the years leading up to her move.

  Cara had come to the Washington area a year ago, I explained, from Hilton, the small southeast Georgia town where we grew up. Our parents had died in a car accident when Cara was nineteen and just beginning her sophomore year in college. I was twenty-five and had moved to Tallahassee only six months before their deaths. Four months after the accident Cara left college and went back to Hilton, to the friends she had known for years. Nothing I had said was enough to change her mind. She hated college and she wanted to go home, she said, and so she had.

  Back in Hilton, Cara had a couple of secretarial jobs and became very involved in the Hilton Baptist Church that we had attended as children. I was convinced that Cara’s embracing of religion was a reaction to our parents’ death, her mechanism for coping with their loss, but the appeal it held for her had not passed as her grief had ebbed.

  Fourteen months ago Cara had called me one night to say she was considering moving to the Washington area and wanted to know what I thought of the idea. It had taken me by surprise, but Cara explained that she had been thinking about leaving Hilton for some time to move to a larger city, where the jobs and salaries would be better. And, she said, there was another reason. I remembered how she had sounded on the phone that night.

  “We’re the only family we have, Sutton,” she had told me in a plaintive voice. “It’s hard enough missing Mom and Dad. I can’t do anything about that, but I’m tired of missing you, too.”

  So Cara came to Washington. Within a few weeks she found the independent Bread of Life Church, became a member, and soon after got a job as one of its two secretaries. She was happy and busy, and I was glad she had made the move. In spite of our schedules (mostly in spite of mine), we talked on the phone every few days, and on weekends we usually found a few hours to spend together, shopping or going out to dinner or
just doing laundry, sharing the things we had in common. But there was a lot about each of our lives that was not part of the other’s.

  The difference in our ages meant we had grown up with different sets of friends in Hilton. The differences in our temperaments had sent us in very divergent career directions. Her church, one of the central underpinnings of Cara’s adult life, held no appeal for me. Yet we felt close to each other. Our lack of siblings or other close relatives and the traumatic loss of both our parents had drawn us together as adults in ways that we had not shared as children. And we genuinely liked each other, something that common blood doesn’t always guarantee. So we shared our separate bits of gossip from Hilton, and we shared our very different lives with each other in conversations that originated from our genuine interest in the other’s well-being.

  As far as I knew, the rest of Cara’s social life revolved around church activities. She had mentioned a handful of dates with a couple of men she had met at the church, but I knew from our conversations that the men remained casual acquaintances. I didn’t know the men she had dated, except by the first names that I passed along to Peterson, or anyone else from the church. I never had succumbed to Cara’s requests to attend services with her, so I couldn’t tell Peterson anything else about Cara’s dates or colleagues from personal knowledge. But she never had been anything but positive in her descriptions of the people in that other part of her life. If there had been any serious relationship there, I told Peterson, I was certain I would have known. And I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt Cara, at least not anyone who knew her. She just wasn’t the kind of person against whom people held grudges or resentments. And her personality, unlike my own, was not one that tended to irritate people, certainly not to the point of murder.

  “I have to ask this question, Ms. McPhee, just as a routine procedure,” Peterson said, almost apologetically. “Where were you last night?”

  When I realized why he was asking, I recoiled in horror and anger. “You can’t possibly think that I…?”

  “No, Sutton,” Rob interjected to keep me from jumping down Peterson’s throat, “but he has to ask.”

  I swallowed back the hot words that boiled up in my brain. “I was covering a Fairfax County School Board budget hearing,” I told Peterson. “I was there from seven P.M. until twelve-thirty this morning, when the damned thing finally ended!”

  “When did you see or talk to your sister last?” Peterson wanted to know.

  “Yesterday. I talked to her on the phone yesterday afternoon. The last time I saw her was about a week ago.”

  “Was there anything at all unusual about either conversation?”

  “Nothing,” I told him. “I called her yesterday to see if she wanted to get something to eat after work. We both had been busy with other things over the weekend, and so we hadn’t gotten together. But Cara said she couldn’t get away for dinner last night, that she had a project she was finishing up for the church and probably had several more hours to go on iti I offered to bring her a sandwich, but she said if she stopped to eat with me, she would just have to stay that much later to finish.”

  “That might explain why she was at the ATM so late,” Peterson said, his pen pausing above the notebook as he thought through a possible order of events.

  “Except that that isn’t her bank, and it’s nowhere near the church or her apartment,” I told him, convinced Cara would not have gone so far out of her way for money when there were other bank branches much closer to her office and her apartment. “I can’t imagine why she would have gone all the way out there at that time of night.”

  “Which probably means the person who killed her abducted her somewhere else and took her to that bank branch deliberately,” Peterson said, proposing an alternate theory that made more sense. “It’s an industrial-and-office-park area that’s pretty deserted late at night. He probably could count on no one else being around as a witness. If she was working late, it’s possible someone else from the church was around and knows what time she left. Maybe even saw whether she left with someone.”

  “Oh God, the church,” I said, my irritation with Peterson’s questioning of my whereabouts apparently having kicked my brain into some semblance of rational thought. “I have to let them know what’s happened! Cara said she would make up for the late night by coming in at lunch today. The church staff won’t even have missed her yet.”

  “I’m going over there from here,” Peterson responded. “Would you like me to tell them for you?”

  “Thank you,” I said, relieved at having that ordeal taken off my shoulders. How could I possibly tell Cara’s friends over the cold circuits of a telephone line that she was dead, murdered?

  “I think you’ve answered my questions for now,” Peterson was saying as he tore a single sheet out of his notebook, closed it, and put it back in his jacket. “The one other thing we need you to do at the moment is to let us get a set of fingerprints from you. Call this number and ask for Sergeant Costas. He’ll make arrangements for you to come in.” He handed me the sheet of notepaper on which he had written a telephone number.

  “We’ll need to be able to eliminate your fingerprints from any that we find on your sister’s car or in her apartment,” he explained. “And I’ll give you my card so you know how to reach me if anything occurs to you that you think might be helpful to the investigation. We’ll let you know if anything significant turns up, but feel free to call me anytime you want an update.”

  “Detective?” I asked, reaching for the piece of paper, my voice tentative with the question that I had to ask.

  “Yes?”

  “Where is… Cara now?”

  “She was taken to the Northern Virginia Medical Examiner’s offices out on Braddock Road,” Peterson said.

  “Could I see her?”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Peterson asked. “You understand what happened to her, what it would have done?”

  I nodded.

  Peterson took the business card he had promised from his outside pocket, jotted something on the back, and held it out to me.

  “That’s their telephone number,” he explained. “If you really want to do this, give them a call. They’ll also let you know what you have to do to have your sister’s body released when the autopsy is completed.”

  My throat muscles spasmed again at the prospect. I took the card and nodded at him mutely. My sister’s body, I thought, unable to get my brain around the idea that she was now a “body.” Not Cara any longer.

  Peterson got up to leave, and Rob, who had sat through our conversation in silence, stood and walked over to open the door. Peterson stopped in front of me.

  “Again, I’m sorry about your sister, Ms. McPhee,” he said.

  I managed to squeeze out a “Thank you.”

  Rob went out the door behind Peterson and walked him out of the newsroom. I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the window behind me. How would I survive this? I asked myself. It was too much, too much after everything else.

  My mind went back again, back seven years to the afternoon in Tallahassee that I got the phone call from Mattie Patterson, our next-door neighbor in Hilton, to say my mother and father had been killed in a traffic accident. I had cried almost nonstop from the moment Mattie told me until she pulled into our driveway early that evening after having picked me up at the Savannah airport.

  “Sutton,” she had said, turning off the car and reaching over to grasp my hand, “I know how hard this is for you. It’s a terrible, terrible thing, and the pain must feel unbearable. But you’re going to have to reach down deep inside yourself and find that strong center that I know you have. Your sister Cara is in a very bad way, and she’s going to need you to be strong, to get you both through the next few days. There’s a lot you’re going to have to deal with—decisions to make, legal details, funeral arrangements—and you’re the only one to do it. And you’re going to have to be the parent for your sister for a while, too. D
o you think you can do all that?”

  I had looked across at Mattie through the tears, at her familiar, friendly face, and I knew she was right. I had been so immersed in my own pain that I hadn’t really thought about how even more devastated nineteen-year-old Cara must be. I thought about my mother and how she had always been our strength as we grew up. I knew that if she were there, she would tell me I was strong enough to survive this, just as she had always told me I would be more than a match for life, no matter what.

  I had nodded at Mattie in agreement, had wiped my eyes and blown my nose, and had gotten out of the car to go find my sister. Mattie was right. There had been times over the two weeks that followed when I had worried about Cara’s resilience and whether she would recover enough to function. Eventually, as some of the initial pain ebbed, she had become stronger. She went back to school, and I went home to Tallahassee and my job.

  My own antidote for the pain had been to stay busy at work and to spend as much time as possible with Jack, with whom I was in love. Gradually, I was able to put the heartache of losing my parents into a separate chamber of my mind, where I was aware of its presence but where it stayed unless I decided to let it come out. But for Cara, the pain of their deaths had remained acutely present in her consciousness, interfering with her ability to focus on school, and so she eventually had retreated back to Hilton, to the friends and places she had known all her life, seeking the familiar while she healed.