Corruption of Faith

by Brenda English

  Ken laughed. “I wanted to do it, Sutton,” he said. “And if you need to talk again, we will. About your sister or anything else you want to discuss.” I knew that last comment was a pointed reference to Chris and his apparent lack of attention, but I let it pass without a response.

  Instead, I thanked Ken again, and we said our good nights. Ken pulled out of the parking lot ahead of me to go home to the house off Rolling Road in Springfield in which he lived alone. I puttered more leisurely back up Duke Street to my apartment building, relaxed from the good food and a few hours with a friend. Yet my doubts about Chris nagged, even through my mellow mood, and Ken’s comments had not reassured me about whether things between Chris and me were okay.

  A little while later I went to bed alone, still grateful to Ken for reaching out to me and wondering what was wrong with Chris. His vagueness on the telephone earlier, the awkwardness of that conversation still puzzled me. Though I knew we each had our own hang-ups about relationships, he had never made me feel uncomfortable before. Telephones aren’t good for reading between the lines of a conversation because you lack all the other nonverbal cues that can say so much—body language, a facial expression, the truth in the eyes, the more subtle tones of voice that the telephone’s electronic mechanism can’t reproduce. There was something Chris wasn’t saying, and I wasn’t getting it.

  How about “Don’t call us; we’ll call you”?

  I didn’t bother to dignify the question with a response. But eventually I fell asleep, wondering if the little pimple on my soul might be right again.

  Tuesday

  Seven

  The break-in at Cara’s apartment was on the News’ metro front the next morning. A police spokesman who was not Peterson had refused to speculate on whether the burglar was also Cara’s killer or on what the motive for the break-in might have been.

  “As far as we can determine, the only thing taken was some jewelry,” the spokesman said. “Other than the timing, we have no evidence yet to connect the break-in to Miss McPhee’s murder, but we haven’t stopped looking.”

  Once I finished the paper and breakfast, I drove down to the post office on Pickett Street to pick up all the mail that had been held while I was out of town. In my car, I sorted through the stack. There wasn’t a lot: a magazine, several bills, a couple of credit-card offers, and an envelope with Amy Reed’s return address in Hilton.

  It must be the copy of Cara’s letter, I thought, remembering Amy’s promise to send it. I tore the envelope open, glanced quickly at Amy’s brief note, and hurriedly read the photocopied page:

  Dear Amy,

  I’m really missing you and Hilton these days. The Washington area is still an exciting place to live—so much to see and do—but I’m learning that the people aren’t always what they seem to be. Not a very Cara-like comment, huh?

  If I sound down, I suppose I am. I’ve just had some disappointments recently, in someone I thought I knew. But clearly I didn’t know them nearly as well as I thought. And I’m arguing with myself over what to do about what I’ve learned. I’ve thought about talking it over with Sutton, but she probably would wonder how I could have been so blind. Her opinion of me means too much for me to want to prove how stupid I was. It’s been pretty hard for me, realizing just how wrong I was about this person, and has made me wonder if moving here was really such a good idea. I’ve even wondered if I should consider coming back to Hilton, especially now. I’d miss Sutton if I left, I know. But the idea of going home has crossed my mind more than once in the last few days. Still, is it a good idea to run away from your problems?

  Enough doom and gloom, however….

  The letter went on from there, for two more paragraphs of questions about Amy and how her pregnancy was progressing, and about people she and Cara knew.

  In spite of the first part of this letter, don’t worry about me, Cara had concluded. I’ll figure it out somehow. Take care of yourself All my love. Cara

  I sat in the post-office parking lot and pondered the message from my sister. What on earth had been going on with her? I wondered.

  She was right; it was a very un-Cara-like letter. She had been one of the most nauseatingly cheerful people I knew. She could always find the good side of almost any situation or person. In all the letters she had written me over the years, before her move to the Washington area, I never had received anything like the letter in my hand. Though I knew she must have had disappointments and heartaches along the way, she almost never let anyone else see them, not even me. Apparently, especially not me.

  What kind of problem would it have taken for her to have written a letter like this? Amy was right: something had been bothering Cara, and bothering her a lot. I reread the letter and read it still again, trying to get a sense of what was hidden behind her words.

  She spoke of being disappointed in someone. My first thought was that it was me. But that didn’t make sense, if she had thought about coming to me to talk about it. Obviously, it was someone else. But who? Cara didn’t have a busy social life, at least not outside the Bread of Life Church and at least not to my knowledge. Although my knowledge where Cara was concerned was appearing to be far more limited than I had realized. Was it someone at the church? I wondered. Had something happened at work that had disturbed her?

  Well, of course something did, Sutton. Where’s your brain? What about that John Brant character?

  I must be in a mental fog, I thought, if it had taken my voice to remind me of that. But the voice was right. It was clear from what Marlee Evans had told me that Cara had not welcomed John Brant’s advances. Having the minister’s son angry with her after she turned him down must not have been very pleasant, especially when she thought so highly of the father.

  Still, I told my voice, I can’t believe that Cara would have considered moving back to Hilton just because of one grabby womanizer. She was pretty and likable; it couldn’t have been the first time she had to fend off an amorous or horny man. If she were uncomfortable enough to quit, she could have gotten another job in the area easily enough; she was an excellent secretary. I just didn’t believe John Brant’s testosterone fits would have been enough to make Cara question her own judgment and run back to Hilton.

  There was something else here, I thought, something more upsetting for Cara than that. Why on earth hadn’t she just told Amy what it was? How bad could it have been?

  Bad enough to get her killed?

  It was the thought that had been lurking in the back of my mind ever since my first reading of the letter. At some level, Cara’s words had set off alarm bells, and my little voice finally had brought the alarm to the surface in words too blunt to ignore. Could Cara’s murder have been something more than a random killing? Was it connected somehow to the disappointment to which her letter so obliquely referred?

  The idea that Cara had been targeted deliberately was not one I had considered seriously until now. The police, after all, seemed convinced that she had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happened to people in and around Washington on a daily basis. But now the question had occurred to me, and now it seemed very important to know the answer.

  What the hell could have happened that would have been threatening enough to someone to cost Cara her life but that she would have kept secret from me?

  If there was something, whatever it was, you know perfectly well why she wouldn’t have told you.

  Yes, I thought, I probably do. I was Cara’s big sister, the one who went out into the world first. And never looked back. Cara had said to me more than once that she wished sometimes she were more like me.

  “You never doubt yourself,” she had explained. “It would never occur to you that there’s anything in the world that you can’t handle. You’re so capable. Nothing scares you.”

  She was wrong, of course, as I had explained to her then. I had doubts, just like anyone else. But as a reporter, I had learned to look confident on the outside, no matter what might be going around inside
my head.

  And she had been wrong that nothing scared me, I thought as I went back inside the post office and used the lobby photocopier to make a copy of the letter for Detective Peterson. This letter scared me, and I didn’t know why.

  On the drive to Cara’s apartment, I paged Peterson. As I pulled into the apartment parking lot my cellular phone rang.

  “I have something I think you need to see,” I told Peterson after he identified himself.

  “Something from your sister’s apartment?”

  “No, a letter. From Cara, to her best friend in Georgia. The friend mentioned it to me at the funeral, because she thought something was wrong, but I just got a copy in the mail this morning.”

  “What does it say?” Peterson wanted to know.

  “Nothing real specific. It’s more the whole tone. You need to read it to see what I mean, but I think something happened with somebody she knew, something that she was worried about.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I just got to her apartment.”

  “I should be able to get over that way before lunch. I’ll want to pick up a copy of the letter from you.”

  “I’ll be here. And I’ve already made a copy for you.” We hung up.

  I got out of the car and walked back up to the rental office to get the key to Cara’s apartment. Charlie the Manager was in and immediately volunteered to go back to the apartment with me to make sure it was safe. I couldn’t imagine that Cara’s killer was there this morning; he had tossed the place pretty thoroughly the first time. But I acquiesced because I thought it probably would be quicker than arguing with Charlie over whether I needed an escort.

  “I think you’ll be okay,” Charlie said as we walked down the sidewalk toward Cara’s building. “I had the lock changed last night after the police finished, just to be sure whoever it was couldn’t get back in, at least not without a lot more trouble this time.” He handed me a new key.

  “I’m sure I’ll be fine,” I told him. Not because the lock was changed, I thought, but because the killer already had whatever he had wanted from the apartment.

  Or he knows by now that whatever he was looking for wasn’t there.

  That comment almost brought me to a halt, not only because of the implications, but also because I couldn’t believe that my mind had been so out to lunch that I hadn’t thought of the possibility until now. But it was a perfectly logical question, especially if one entertained the idea that Cara had not been a random victim. Could the person who wrecked the apartment have been looking for something specific rather than just anything of value? What could Cara possibly have had that was worth killing her over?

  A logical question, perhaps, but I couldn’t find answers that made any sense.

  Once Charlie assured himself that the apartment was empty, he helped me carry the packing boxes up from the car.

  “Now you lock the door behind me,” he said from the doorway, “and if you need anything at all, you just call or come to the office.”

  “Thanks, Charlie,” I said, meaning it. “You’ve been a big help.”

  “Your sister was a nice person,” he said and closed the door. Explanation enough, I thought, especially where Cara was concerned. All her life, her sweetness had motivated people to want to keep her happy, to go out of their way to do things for her. At least until someone had gone out of his way to kill her.

  I walked over and threw the dead bolt on the door to put Charlie’s mind at ease, and then I gathered my wits and my self-control to tackle the jumbled remains of the short life of Cara McPhee.

  A couple of hours later a knock on the door brought me back from a teary memory prompted by the stack of Hilton High Lights, the high school yearbooks Cara had collected. I went to the door and saw through the eyepiece that it was Detective Peterson. Figuring he could pass Charlie’s litmus test if anyone could, I let him in.

  Peterson eyed the boxes I had packed and stacked in the living room. By the time he arrived, I had finished with the sorting and packing in the front room, the kitchen, and the bathroom, and finally was working my way through the bedroom.

  “Anything else missing?” he asked, also taking in my red eyes and nose.

  “Not that I’ve noticed,” I told him, “but of course I might not.”

  “Right. So let’s see the letter you called me about.”

  I went to my purse on the sofa, whose cushions I had restuffed into the covers, and took out the copy I had made for him. I handed it to Peterson and collapsed onto the sofa, suddenly tired from all the bending and packing. Peterson sat down in the side chair, his arms propped on his thighs, and read the letter through once, then again.

  “Not much in the way of details, is there?” he asked when he finally looked up at me.

  “None,” I agreed. “But the whole tone of the letter bothers me a lot. There was something wrong. And now, after thinking about it, I have to wonder why Cara wouldn’t have told Amy, who was her best friend, what it was, even if she had been reluctant to tell me. Could she have been afraid to say more?”

  “Mmm,” Peterson said noncommittally, and studied the letter some more, his forehead wrinkled into a frown of concentration. After a few minutes he folded the letter up.

  “All right if I take this with me?” he asked.

  “Sure, if you think it will help.”

  “I’ll be frank with you, Sutton,” he said, putting the letter into the inner pocket of his jacket. “I really don’t see anything here that gives us a single new thing to go on. Obviously, your sister wasn’t happy, but that happens to a lot of people who move to the area from small towns.”

  “But surely it tells you more than that. Can’t you tell from reading it that she was more than just homesick? Something happened. I know it did.”

  “You may be right, but where’s the evidence? Where are the specifics? We’re following up on every little lead we get, but there’s nothing there to tell us where to look. We’ve talked to the people at the church and here at the apartments more than once. We haven’t found a thing to give us a direction.”

  I gritted my teeth. How do I get through to him? I wondered. How do I make him see what I see there? How do we ever find who killed my sister? I was frustrated, and I don’t handle frustration well. I lost my temper.

  “I’ll tell you where to look for starters,” I said angrily, standing up and starting to pace back and forth. “Why don’t you check out John Brant, the minister’s son at the church where Cara worked. Apparently he couldn’t keep his hands off Cara and wasn’t real happy when she threatened to complain to his father. Maybe he couldn’t take no for an answer. Maybe you should find out just how mad at her he was for turning him down. You’re the police. Isn’t that your job?”

  I regretted the words and the anger as soon as they were out, but it was too late. Peterson’s face already had hardened into lines that told me he was working to control his own temper. He stood up as well, but his demeanor was a lot calmer than mine.

  “I think I should get back to work now,” he said, moving toward the door.

  I realized how stupidly I had behaved and followed him. “Hey, look, I’m sorry,” I said, holding my hands out to either side in a gesture of culpability when Peterson stopped at the door and turned back to face me. “I don’t mean to take it out on you. I know you’re working hard on this. I just can’t accept that we might not ever find out who killed her.”

  Peterson looked down at me. “Just a couple of things,” he said finally, his face and voice expressionless. “Just so you can put your mind at rest, we have checked out John Brant. The Evans woman told us he had the hots for your sister, which made him worth looking at as a possible suspect. But he was at a Fairfax restaurant the night Cara was killed, and the people with him as well as the restaurant staff all back up his story. He may have had a thing for your sister, but he didn’t kill her.”

  “Oh,” I said with the brevity of chagrin and embarrassment.

  “
We also checked out the other people at the church who worked with her, right down to the maintenance staff. Even turned up a record for that Barlow guy. He’s done time for bank robbery and some other things. But Brant vouches for Barlow and says Barlow was at his house for dinner that night. So Barlow’s got an alibi, too. And with the exception of one poor schmuck who worked on the grounds and who turned out to be an illegal alien from Mexico, to which he’s being sent back as we speak, everyone else at the church comes up clean. Right up to Brant himself.”

  I just nodded. What could I say?

  “And finally,” Peterson went on, “you ought to be careful how you play detective. If you are right and your sister was killed deliberately, if something happened that got her into trouble like you think, you could find yourself in the same sort of trouble if you say the wrong thing in front of the wrong people. It’s a bad habit for amateurs to pick up.”

  He walked out the door and down the steps. I watched him through the open door until he reached his car, and then I closed the door and locked it.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!” I said, standing in front of the door and softly banging my head on it.

  Way to go, McPhee! It was my little nemesis. You not only look like a hysterical female, but you managed to piss off the lead detective on your sister’s murder!

  “Thanks for the news bulletin,” I told it. “Now shut up!”

  I turned and walked tiredly back to Cara’s bedroom to finish the packing. My voice was right, of course, if a little late. The damage was already done. I’d have to try to patch things up with Peterson. But I also knew I had no intention of stopping my search. Not now, not when I was convinced that there was meaning in Cara’s letter, meaning that related somehow to her murder. Somebody killed her for a reason. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t John Brant with his narcissistic ego. Or Al Barlow with his prison record and his lousy taste in clothes. But the person was out there. I hoped the police would find him, but I wasn’t going to stop until someone found out who killed her and why, even if I had to do it myself.