Corruption of Faith

by Brenda English

  “What does that mean?” I had asked her.

  “You know what it means, Sutton,” she had answered. “It means I don’t think he’s the type to ever get really serious about your relationship, to want to get married and tie himself down.”

  “You could be right,” I had told her, “but did it ever occur to you that the feeling might be mutual, that I might not want it to be any more serious than it is either?”

  “After growing up around Mom and Dad, how could you not want what they had?” Cara had asked, cocking her head to look at me as if she really had been surprised by my disavowal of a more serious interest in Chris.

  “After my little error in judgment with Jack, how could I want to go through that again?” I had countered.

  “Well, all men aren’t like Jack,” she had responded defensively.

  “Thank you, Ann Landers,” I had told her, laughing, “but enough of them are that I don’t much like the odds.”

  “That’s not my point anyway,” Cara had complained, but smiling, too. “My point was that I just don’t like to see Chris using you when he… when he…”

  “When he has no intention of making an honest woman out of me?” I had finished for her. “Don’t you think that concept is a little dated?”

  Cara had looked sheepish, but I also noticed that her mouth had set along stubborn lines that Mom had called her Sutton look.

  “Make fun of me if you want,” she had said, “but you know I’m right about him.”

  I relented from my teasing and hugged her. “Even if you are,” I had told her, “it’s okay because it’s a relationship of consensual adult usage.”

  But Cara hadn’t been placated quite so easily.

  “That sounds really cold, Sutton,” she had concluded, shaking her head.

  Her words had come back to me, in light of Chris’s puzzling absence.

  Chris never had been terribly demonstrative in public, a fact that I thought probably was the result of what he described as a very propriety-conscious family in the suburban Chicago social set. It hadn’t bothered me, however, because he was as demonstrative as I could have wished in private. And that was why his unexpected remoteness now did bother me. I wasn’t hoping for some public display of affection, but I had thought he would reach out to comfort me as I struggled with my pain. I didn’t understand his behavior, why he hadn’t called me at home and spoken with me directly.

  But a long list of things I had to take care of had been waiting for my attention in the morning, a list that hadn’t seemed to be getting any shorter. Now, as I stood here in the Georgia morning, I had put my concerns about Chris on hold because I had a sister to bury.

  There had been no question but that I would take Cara’s body home to Hilton to lie next to our parents, here in the cemetery that belonged to the Hilton Baptist Church. I knew it was what Cara would have wanted, even though she had moved to Virginia and a new church. And it was what my parents would have wanted.

  Because Cara no longer was a member of the Hilton church, having transferred her membership to the Bread of Life Church, I had decided to hold only graveside services and to keep them as simple as possible. I had declined to hold receiving hours at the funeral home the night before or to subject Cara’s body to a “viewing,” a practice I thought was somewhat morbid under the best of circumstances and that would have been gruesome in these. But even when the graveside services here in Hilton were over and done with, the ceremonies of mourning wouldn’t be over for me. I also had agreed to a memorial service at the Bread of Life Church.

  The evening after Cara’s body was found, I had begun receiving phone calls and messages from members of the congregation at the Virginia church, all telling me how sorry they were about Cara’s death and how much they had liked her. As one of the church secretaries, Cara apparently had interacted with, and impressed, quite a few people there. The Reverend Daniel Brant, the church’s minister and Cara’s boss, had called to tell me that they would like to hold a memorial service for Cara once I returned from Georgia. His call was followed by one from Mariée Evans, the other church secretary and Cara’s coworker, whose voice I knew from my calls to Cara at work. We set the memorial service for the following Saturday, one week after the funeral in Hilton, and agreed to meet on Monday morning after I returned from Georgia to make the arrangements. I didn’t know how I was going to get through one service in Georgia, much less a second one back in Springfield. But those people were Cara’s friends, too, and they deserved a chance to say good-bye.

  I looked across the newly dug soil of Cara’s grave to those of my parents. Did they blame me? I wondered as the Reverend Lumley Mann, minister of the Hilton Baptist Church, began his graveside remarks. Could they see me from wherever they were now? Did they hold me responsible for Cara’s murder because I had encouraged her in her plan to move to the Washington area? Some big sister I had turned out to be, I thought. I never should have told her to come. I should have told her to stay in Hilton, where she knew who people really were because she had known them all her life, knew whom to trust, whom to avoid. I’m sorry, Mom and Dad, I thought, so sorry. But there was only silence from where they lay, encased in concrete and granite.

  Around the three graves were gathered so many of the other people who had loved Cara all her life. School friends, teachers, neighbors, a handful of distant cousins who were my only remaining relatives but who I barely remembered. Many of these people also had stood in this spot seven years before to say good-bye to Wheeler and Mary Sue McPhee, killed when the driver of a tractor-trailer suffered a heart attack and lost control of his rig one afternoon on I-16 between Savannah and Statesboro, leaving their two daughters orphaned. Now those faces watched me again, with concern and pity. Poor Sutton. First her parents; now her sister. First an orphan; now completely alone. Beside me on my right was Mattie Patterson, our lifelong next-door neighbor in Hilton, who held my hand tightly all through the service and who probably knew better than almost anyone here what this day was costing me. On my left was Amy Reed, Cara’s best girlhood friend. They, too, looked at me in grief and concern and pity.

  But I don’t do pity. Since learning of Cara’s death, my chief emotion, when I could let myself lower the barriers to it, had been grief. As I saw the pity in the faces around me at the grave, I was overcome with a new feeling, a growing rage, not at these people, but at the man who had killed my sister and put the looks of pity on those faces. I had been far too numb and far too busy to think clearly about him yet. But the fury that now blasted me had, I realized, been building inside me for all this time. No longer masked by all the other things with which I had to contend, the anger now poured out like a dark, thick, foul smoke and threatened to suffocate me.

  “It can be so difficult in times such as this for us to understand how God could allow such a tragedy,” Reverend Mann was saying, “to understand what His plan for us could possibly be, to see how we must learn to trust in God and to forgive, just as God forgives us.”

  Forgiveness would be a long time coming to my heart, if ever, I thought angrily. Now I understood the furious impulse that drove people to take revenge when their loved ones were harmed. At that moment there was nothing I wouldn’t have done to have just a few minutes alone with Cara’s murderer and with the gun he had used to kill her.

  At the sound of Ellen Byerly’s lovely voice, lifting above the group of mourners in an a capella rendition of one of the hymns Cara loved, I managed to bring my anger under tenuous control. Ellen, who was a few years older than I, was the town’s first choice for any occasion that required a song, from weddings to funerals, and her true alto voice made musical accompaniment a complement to her singing, not a requirement. I heard a great deal of sniffing and some soft sobs as Ellen sang, but I sat dry-eyed and stone-faced, listening to lyrics that talked about the joy of knowing Jesus. Those words, I knew, explained a part of the reason why Cara attended church and I didn’t. I had found religion, as taught by my Baptist church
, to be a thing of repression and control, of censure and condemnation, of fear and the threats of hellfire. Cara, on the other hand, had seen it as a thing of love and joy, of promise and salvation. What repelled me comforted her.

  Ellen’s voice lifted again in the second verse, and I closed my eyes and offered an awkward prayer to whatever was, a prayer that Cara had not been disappointed, that somewhere Cara still existed, basking in the joy she had believed waited for her. There was none here for me.

  Ellen’s voice faded from the hymn’s final notes, and Reverend Mann began to lead the mourners in the Lord’s Prayer. When he finished, I stood at the graveside, shaking the hands of the people who filed slowly by, and promised myself, promised Cara and my parents, that one way or another I would find out who killed her. There could never be justice. Only giving Cara back her life, untainted by the violence done to her, would be justice. But there could be retribution. I intended to see to it.

  Four

  I no longer had a home in Hilton, so after the graveside services, everyone went to Amy Reed’s house for a reception. When our parents were killed, Cara and I had agreed to sell the big white 1920s house in which we had grown up, playing in the enormous green backyard of its half-acre lot, putting in hundreds of hours in the wooden swing that hung in one corner of the wraparound porch. Selling that house broke both our hearts all over again, but it seemed to be the only choice we had. I was in Tallahassee building my reporting career far away from Hilton, and Cara had three more years of college ahead of her and no income. While there was a small estate from our parents’ death, the house still had a sizable mortgage on it, and there was no way we could maintain the house or live in it. So we had cried bitter tears together and put it on the market. Now, as I had no suitable place to hold the expected funeral reception, Amy had volunteered her own home for it.

  “I really appreciate your generosity,” I told Amy in her sunny yellow kitchen, where she had gone to replenish a tray of sandwiches, and I had gone to escape for a few minutes from all the condolences. The house, which Amy and her husband, Ray, an accountant, had bought and renovated, was from the same era as my childhood home and only six blocks away. Walking through its high-ceilinged rooms and its lush yard, where Amy had planted roses and camellias and rambling beds of annuals and perennials, filled me with a sharp longing for my parents and sister.

  Amy, who was six months’ pregnant with her first baby, stopped her sandwich making and hugged me, tears welling in her hazel eyes.

  “Cara was like my sister, too,” she said. “I’d have done anything for her, but I never thought I’d be doing this.”

  I hugged her back in silence, my throat too tight to speak.

  “Have the police turned up anything more?” Amy asked as she released me, tucked her short, honey-colored hair behind her ears, and went back to the bowl of chicken salad and the loaf of whole-wheat bread spread out on a large section of butcher block set into the white laminated countertop.

  “They say not,” I answered thickly, still recovering control of my voice. I sat down on one of the square-topped oak kitchen stools to watch her work for a few minutes and to ease off my black high-heeled dress shoes. “I’ve talked with the lead detective every day, but there’s nothing new. It’s like she was invisible between the church and the bank. They haven’t turned up a single witness. They haven’t been able to connect it to any other ATM robberies in the area, and the guy was smart enough not to be photographed on the ATM camera. If he picked her at random, I don’t know how they’ll ever find him. And I have to think that’s what he did, because I don’t know how anyone who knew Cara could want to kill her.”

  Amy spread the chicken salad on the bread and sliced it into triangular sandwiches in quick, efficient motions, but her face was thoughtful. Then she paused with her knife in the bowl of chicken.

  “Was everything okay with Cara?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s just…” Amy hesitated, as if deciding how to word her answer.

  “I had a letter from her,” she said finally, putting the knife down on the cutting board and picking up a dish towel to wipe her hands. “It came the day before she died. She didn’t really say anything specific in it, but the whole tone of the letter left me thinking that something was wrong.”

  “Wrong how?” I asked.

  Amy frowned, trying to articulate her reaction to the letter. She put her left hand on her growing stomach in a protective gesture and leaned her right hip against the counter.

  “Well, she talked about missing all of us here in Hilton,” she said finally, “and that sometimes she got homesick for it. It just sounded sort of unhappy in general. But I remember one thing she said. She said she had had some disappointments recently, that people weren’t always what they seemed, and she wasn’t sure what to do about it.”

  “Did she explain what she meant by that?” I asked, wondering, of course, if Cara had somehow been disappointed in me. Had I disappointed her by being too busy with work to spend more time with her than I did? Was she sorry she had moved all the way to Washington to be where I was?

  “No,” Amy answered, “but I remember thinking that she was even more upset by whatever it was than she was saying.”

  “Do you still have the letter? Could I see it?”

  “Oh, sure.” Amy nodded, smiling gently at me, and went back to making sandwiches. “I’ll get it for you before you leave.”

  Later, when the formalities were finished, when the last of the guests had gone, when the dishes were washed and Amy’s house was restored to its usual order, I was preparing to leave to catch my flight back to Washington. Amy looked briefly for the letter but couldn’t find it.

  “It’s here somewhere,” she said apologetically, looking up from a stack of bills and papers she had just thumbed through on the desk in her family room. “I know I’ll find it as soon as you drive away. Do you want me to put a copy in the mail?”

  I told her that would be fine. I gathered up my things and walked with Ray and Amy out to my rental car, where they hugged me fiercely and I thanked them for all they had done. Later, as I drove east along I-16 toward the Savannah airport, I wondered what exactly Cara had said in the letter and what had made her so unhappy—but that she hadn’t mentioned to me. How could she have been unhappy without my knowing? I wondered. How long had she been unhappy, and what had caused it? And how could I have missed it? Was I so self-involved, so caught up in my own things that I had completely missed something serious enough to make her think about moving back to Hilton? Apparently, if Amy remembered the letter’s contents accurately, the answer was yes.

  It was after eleven P.M. when I finally pulled my white 1976 VW Beetle convertible into the parking lot at my apartment building in Alexandria. The sixteen-story building rises out of what is known in the area as Condo Canyon, an extensive tract of tall condominiums and apartment buildings, shopping malls and commercial strips that cluster along western Duke Street at its intersection with I-395 and make up Alexandria’s West End. The area, built up mostly in the sixties and seventies, is the antithesis of historic Old Town Alexandria, whose eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture sits at the other end of Duke Street, on the banks of the Potomac River. From my fourteenth-floor nonhistorical apartment, I have a stunning view of northern Virginia, its heavily treed hills disguising much of the incredible urban sprawl that stretches for at least thirty miles south and west of the nation’s capital.

  I lugged my garment bag in from the far corner of the parking lot and through the chrome-and-glass sparkle of the building’s lobby. As I waited tiredly for an elevator to descend from the upper floors, I wondered what tomorrow would be like. Getting up, having a leisurely breakfast, reading the Sunday papers, doing all my usual things, a normal day—except that my sister was dead. Rather than teary, the thought left me feeling numb and exhausted.

  And where was Chris? All through the trip to Georgia, the funeral, and the recept
ion, I felt his absence, his silence. But he hadn’t called again. I had checked both my office voice mail and the answering machine in my apartment daily, and there had been nothing. I had even called his answering machine and left Amy’s name and telephone number where I could be reached. I was surprised and disappointed at his lack of contact during my ordeal. I couldn’t expect him to shorten his business trip to come back and be with me, I supposed. Cara wasn’t his relative, after all. But he was supposed to have finished his meetings on Friday, the day before Cara’s funeral. And I didn’t think hoping for a phone call was asking too much. The more I thought about it, the more my head ached with fatigue. If I can just make it upstairs to the bed, I thought, I’ll figure it all out tomorrow.

  My apartment, once I reached it, had the lifeless stillness that rooms take on when they haven’t been occupied in several days. There was no dog or cat to greet me, my schedule being far too erratic to provide predictably for the needs of living creatures. There was only the quiet, the unmoving air, the inertness of a room where no consciousness dwells. Like a body from which the soul has gone, I thought morosely, then gave myself a mental kick.

  Don’t start thinking that way now, my little voice said. I’ve been gentle under the circumstances, but you’ve got to keep it together.

  My voice was right, I thought (although I really hated it anytime I had to admit that). Don’t think. Sleep. Be a real Southern belle. Deal with it all tomorrow.

  I passed by the doorway to my small galley kitchen and barely noted the other rooms on my way through them to my bedroom. Ordinarily when I come home to my apartment, I let myself in with anticipation of the recurring pleasure I take in the way it looks. The three-quarter-length windows that extend without interruption along the entire western wall of the living room, dining area, and guest bedroom, the neutral oatmeal-colored carpeting, and the clean lines, bold colors, and uncluttered surfaces of my eclectic mix of contemporary and traditional furniture always help soothe my jangled nerves and slow down the wheels of my brain. This time, however, all of that barely registered in my need to get to the bedroom, to put down my baggage—both literal and emotional—and to lie down and give myself up to sleep.