Twist of Faith

by Ellen J Green

  The key figure in this story was Claire, and Claire was an enigma. Born in Philadelphia at Pennsylvania Hospital, 1969. He was able to get that from a friend from the Division of Vital Records. Ross and Anais listed their address as 933 North Fourth Street in the Northern Liberties section of the city. Marie was born two years later. Same hospital. Same address. Anais jumped the US ship for an unknown reason and headed to France in 1974 with the two girls in tow. Poof. No records of the Saunders girls until Claire reappears in 1992. Twenty-three. Living in Brooklyn. Working as an editor for Vogue magazine.

  Claire told Ava she’d been adopted as a baby. Found at a church in Westmont, New Jersey. That was the story. That would make Claire twenty-four when she adopted Ava. Odd for a young single woman to adopt a baby out of the blue—a baby abandoned almost a hundred miles from where she was living. And Claire’s life in Brooklyn continued after the supposed adoption, as it always had—same apartment, same job. Until Ava was three. Then total disruption.

  Claire’s trackable life disappeared at that point because she didn’t have any employment. Getting financial records would be hard, but it seemed that Claire, from that point forward, was funded completely by Anais. It was obvious that Claire and Ava were on the run. From what? He kept flashing to the image of the Owenses’ house in Chestnut Hill. The double murder. The only thread of connection he could come up with was that Loyal Owens had been working in Pennsauken, New Jersey, in 1993. For a Camden County design company that manufactured cabinets and kitchen fittings, not even five miles from Westmont, where Ava was supposedly abandoned.

  Deep in his gut, he started to think that pursuing a biological connection between Ava and the Owenses was the wrong track. There was another thread that connected the two, there had to be, and when he found it, it would be simple and obvious. It always was. He stared down at the name on his blotter. Ross Saunders. “It’s you. I know it is. But how? And why?” He tapped his finger on the name several times. “Saunders and Owens,” he said aloud.

  “What’s going on?” Juliette appeared at his office door. He hadn’t even heard her come in.

  Russell shook his head. “Just piecing together something for a case.”

  “Listen, don’t forget we have a meeting with the wedding planner tomorrow at ten.” She half turned away. “And I was sort of playing with the guest list and seating arrangements, even though it’s a little early. I just can’t help it. I have Joan and Jennifer sitting at different tables right now. But their daughters are in the same class at Saint Joan of Arc and want to sit—”

  Russell’s head snapped up. “What did you say?”

  Juliette frowned. “What’d I say?”

  He looked down at Ross’s date of birth and then Loyal’s. Born within four months of one another. “Same class at Saint Joan of Arc,” he mumbled. Maybe the two men went to the same school. Grew up in the same neighborhood. He pushed back in his chair, hand on his chin. All he had on Loyal Owens was the autopsy and investigation reports. Very little background information. “So stupid.” He didn’t realize he’d said it out loud.

  “Not really, Russell, the seating is everything if we want people to have a good time.”

  Russell stood up and brushed past her. “No, it’s fine. I’ll be there for your thing tomorrow morning. Gotta go.” He kissed her cheek lightly.

  “What—?” She didn’t get to finish the sentence. He was down the steps and gone.

  Twenty-five minutes later he was heading down Route 70 toward Ava’s house. He needed to pass all this back and forth with her. Dig at her brain for lost or missing info. See if she’d found anything interesting in that closet. Maybe canvass Saunders’s old neighborhood. And he really wanted to see her again.

  CHAPTER 20

  The neighborhood had changed so much over the past twenty years, it was difficult for him to remember what it had looked like before. He sat on the steps of what used to be a bar right off of Kensington and Allegheny. It was boarded up now, the windows covered with pieces of plywood, the door striped with yellow “Caution” tape. A big neon-pink sheet of paper was attached, screaming Condemned. He watched the people walking past—so much more diverse than when he’d lived here. It had been mostly Irish, Germans, and Poles, with some pockets of Jews and Hispanics. Now the community was gone, leaving drug addicts and transients in its wake. The families with the kids playing stickball in the streets had been replaced by filth and crime.

  The Market–Frankford elevated train rattled above him, drowning out all sound for a few minutes. When he was growing up, that noise had blended so that he hardly noticed it. He could see the El train from his bedroom window, and the thunder of that train had lulled him to sleep. There used to be a string of businesses up and down Kensington Avenue, not far from where he was sitting. When he was a kid, before his mother got cancer and died, she would drag him along with her pull shopping cart to get groceries. The butcher shop was here. The small grocer. There was even a fresh-fish truck. Now it was all gone. Trash and empty dope bags littered the street, along with the occasional dirty needle or used condom. Filthy.

  He stood up and started walking. He often wondered how things would be different if he could do it over again. If he woke up one morning and he was back in his apartment around the corner, with his father. If he’d never met his friends that night after confirmation but instead headed home to his corner bedroom, his comic books, and the sounds of Aunt Constance and his father watching TV and getting drunk downstairs.

  He passed Saint Francis de Sales Church and stopped. His boots wouldn’t move. He stared at the side door, memories spilling out so fast he couldn’t catch them all. Only shadows of the past. Of Sister Alice whipping Loyal’s knuckles with a ruler because she thought he was blowing his nose on his sleeve. When Bill told the nun that Jenny had no underwear on. He felt bad about that after, because he knew she had a crummy house—parents that didn’t wash her clothes or feed her. But all the same, the nun lifted Jenny’s skirt and whacked her bare bottom in front of everyone. He closed his eyes for a second. The bare bottom. He needed to keep moving. He saw a flash of Loyal. Loyal and Ross. Their bare asses as they pissed off the Tacony–Palmyra Bridge one sticky hot summer night after freshman year. Then Father Callahan in his robes—that soft, patronizing voice in his ear. He’d tried to push that man’s face out of his mind for many years. Sometimes the eyes would come to him. Sometimes the mouth, but never his entire face. His body started to shake and he started to run.

  The cold air both sobered and numbed him. He needed to get home. But the images followed him, of Ross and Loyal pissing into the night after they’d climbed the bridge. He wouldn’t go with them. Were they laughing or crying? He couldn’t tell. He heard the sounds from above and waited to see if their bodies would drop into the cold river. But the only things that fell were their streams of urine. Relief poured over him when he saw them climb down, alive and intact. But the redness in their eyes told him they’d both been crying.

  He passed a liquor store and picked up a fifth of Jameson for old times’ sake before boarding the El train at the Allegheny station. He was feeling old; the aches in his bones were slowing him down. He’d celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday the month before. Time was catching up with him. Sometimes, he would open his eyes in the morning and wonder if it was worth it, finding Ava. Getting rid of her. He was getting on, and even if things exploded now, how many more years did he have? How bad could it be? But it wasn’t a logical thing. He had a drive. All or nothing. Loose ends drove him on. That and a deep hatred in his gut toward that whole family, but especially toward Ross.

  The train jerked to a stop. He was at the end of the line. He trudged down the steps to the Frankford Transportation Center. He looked around, undecided if he should walk the seven blocks home or try and find a cab. It was getting dark outside. There were jostling crowds elbowing to get on the buses. He felt achy. Like he was getting sick. His throat felt tight and he was sure he had a fever. After ten minu
tes, he located a taxi and resigned himself to pay the five dollars plus tip for the luxury of not walking in the cold.

  The little row home he was renting was dark. He stood outside after the cab had left, just watching. The neighbor, Mrs. Engles, had a light that went on automatically when it got dark. It was like a spotlight. Glaring, blinding, and horrible. It kept him awake some nights. His complaints were met with the sound of her screeching voice, so he gave up. Tonight was the only time he could remember it not going on. He glanced at her house, hoping nothing had happened to her. The sky was dense gray; the sun had gone down, just a sliver of color to the west, so it was only when he was right in front of his door that he noticed it was open just a crack.

  He whipped his head around so fast he almost dropped his bottle of Jameson. The street was empty. Quiet. He pushed the door all the way open and stepped in slowly. The only sound he heard was the air going through his dry throat into his lungs. He forgot feeling feverish. Every nerve tingled electric through his body. He stood there for a full five minutes. Just listening. But there was no sound. Not even Mrs. Engles yelling at her dog, banging the walls, or slamming pots and pans. That would have been a symphony to his ears right now.

  He flicked on the light. The room was small and dumpy. But it was the same as when he’d left it. He took a tour, room by room, hitting the lights, then checking the closets. Nothing was amiss. No one was here. Maybe he’d just forgotten to lock the door? He went to the kitchen and took out a highball glass, dropping two ice cubes into the bottom, then pouring in the whiskey till it reached the top. He rubbed his throat. It hurt so much the first gulp felt like a torch being shoved in his mouth, but the second wasn’t bad. The third, just smooth whiskey. He wandered to the couch and flopped on it. Maybe he’d just sleep here tonight. He was too tired and too sick to go upstairs.

  Just before his eyes fluttered shut, he saw the little Polaroid photograph of a front door, propped neatly against a picture frame.

  CHAPTER 21

  I sat on the floor and spread Claire’s life around me. Boxes and boxes of photograph albums, loose pictures tied with rubber bands and string. Clothing, cut glass, mementos, artwork. Her father’s life was in the closet too. Claire had acquired his things after he’d died. A multitude of boxes, photographs, scrapbooks, letters, his army uniforms.

  I stared into his dark eyes. This was the first time I’d seen a good photograph of him as a younger man. Anais had kept a few pictures in an ancient blue album on a bookshelf in her living room. As a kid I would pull it out and pore over it. It was mostly the ones of her as a child in Vietnam that fascinated me. The beautiful dresses, the oriental flowers, the French architecture. She’d sit with me for hours telling stories about her parents, their house in Hanoi, the food, the balls, the travel. Halong Bay and Hong Kong seemed so exotic. By the time we’d gotten to the end of the book and the appearance of “the man with the black hair,” as I’d always called him, Grand-Mère Anais’s face would change, the corners of her mouth would go down, and she would inevitably shut the book on my fingers and say, “Puis tout a changé. La fin.” And then everything changed, the end.

  The ruin of French colonization in Southeast Asia and her meeting Ross Saunders had coincided, so that Anais couldn’t separate them anymore. She viewed them both as the beginning of the destruction of her formerly grand lifestyle. And then everything changed summed it up for her.

  But I had these photographs now and they were vivid. His face, his features, his smile, his awkward glances, stiff poses, it was all here, and I was really seeing him as a young man for the first time. Claire hadn’t been completely estranged from her father. Like I’d explained to Russell, I’d met him a couple times. Briefly. And both of those occasions were odd. Odd in the sense that the two didn’t seem to have any affection for one another, but their meetings were meaningful and intense—a half hour of words passing back and forth, and then they were both on their way.

  I was around five during the first encounter. He’d never communicated with me, no birthday cards or acknowledgment of my existence, no greetings of any sort before that. Claire took me with her to a restaurant in Pittsburgh, explaining that we had to see a man, that it wouldn’t take long. When I asked, “What man?” she said I’d never met him before. She never said he was my grandfather. The ride on the funicular stayed with me far longer than the meeting with the man with black hair. He was older, his hair now gray, so I never connected him to the man in Anais’s book, not until much later. But even so, at first glance, I knew him. I’d met him before somewhere. And Claire was lying about it.

  The second meeting was more recent. It was toward the end of my junior year of high school, when we were living in Willow Grove, a suburb outside of Philadelphia. Claire and I were walking down Chestnut Street on a particularly squally fall day. The tiny part of my face that wasn’t covered in a scarf felt as if it were being sliced away by horizontal rain. I turned to Claire to say something and there he was, in front of us. Time had chiseled away at him, but I recognized him instantly. Claire looked startled, but composed herself quickly. He pulled her into a little pizza shop, very animated about something. I found a seat in the corner and played with the saltshaker, pretending I couldn’t hear anything they were saying, until they abruptly got up and separated ways. Someone important to both of them had died. Claire’s face had turned the color of the egg-white omelet she’d had for breakfast. We packed up and headed to Ann Arbor, Michigan, a month later. That might have been the last conversation Claire ever had with her father. I never saw them together again. He died just before my senior year of college, suddenly.

  Now I was looking at him again. Even as a child he had deep-set, worried eyes. Catholic-school photos filled with small uniform-clad boys. The dark-haired boy turned into the dark-haired man. Tall, broad shouldered, more confident. Then handsomely dressed in his army uniform. Then a backdrop of lush Vietnam appeared. Beautiful beaches. A few were taken in the streets of Saigon, then a more formal one, Anais and him dressed up, going out for the evening. I picked up the photograph. Happy, naive Anais. Smiling. His arm was around her—young forbidden love. Anais didn’t look like she was about to say And then everything changed in any of these pictures. There was no hint of the impending dangers of the American War looming that I could see. It was just a pretty, smiling young woman and her date, against an unbelievably beautiful backdrop.

  At the bottom of the box was a stack of smaller photographs tied together with string. Polaroids. Though yellowed and worn with time, I knew they were the same size and shape as the photograph of the Owenses’ house. Polaroids taken with the same grainy black-and-white film. I hesitated for a minute and then flipped through them. Photographs of trees. All of them.

  I set them aside and pulled out another book. These photographs were of Ross’s life. His parents holding him as an infant. I turned the page. Standing with his mother in front of a church in what I assumed was Philadelphia. Ross was around ten years old, in a suit. His mother wore a hat. Both were smiling. The next page was filled with scenes from the beach. The Jersey Shore. My mind was starting to wander and my stomach growled. I flipped the page. Staring back at me was a teenaged Ross. High school, maybe. The boy next to him, arm tossed over Ross’s shoulder, I absolutely knew, was the man who had stopped to ask directions when I was in front of Loyal’s house that day. I’d seen the man in the car for only a moment and a half, but there he was. The same probing eyes jumped out at me from fifty years earlier.

  I stood up and paced, pulling my hair back from my face with my fists. I stopped and picked up the book again. He was following me that day. He’d been tracking me. I started to sweat. He stared into the camera, confident, cocky, so sure of himself, though even as a teenager he was ugly. Pug-like. The next photograph on the page was of four boys. All dressed in robes. Altar boys? Ross was there, along with Pug Man and two others. They were posed in front of the church, not smiling.

  My cell phone was lying on the
table. Cherbourg was six hours ahead—still early enough for Anais to be up. She was strictly a landline woman. I’d tried to set her up with a cell phone a few years ago for emergencies. Une urgence? Quelle urgence? she’d sputtered. I finally gave up and left her muttering in angry French about Americans and their ridiculous ways. It was pointless to remind her the French had cell phones too.

  I dialed her number and waited for the numerous clicks and the connection to her line. Her phone rang. And rang. No answering machine either. “Damn it, Grand-Maman Anais. This is an emergency. I need to ask you an important question.” The sound of Beethoven overhead made me hang up the phone.

  CHAPTER 22

  He rubbed his eyes and sat up. He was so sure the Polaroid was of Claire’s house, the front of her house, that someone had killed her and made it look like an accident. So when he stared down at the photograph, it took a few minutes to realize what he was looking at. It wasn’t Claire’s house at all. It was his own front door, partially open. Crappy, unfocused. The words Two other woes are yet to come. Revelation 6:6 were printed underneath. While he had been on the stoop of the bar in his old neighborhood, reminiscing about the past, someone had been here, ready to kill him, ready to take a picture of his front door with their sick little camera. His hands started shaking and he thought he might vomit.

  He dropped the photograph onto the table and whirled around. It was dark, quiet. Not even the glare from Mrs. Engles’s bulb. Mrs. Engles? He went outside and peered next door. Absolute stillness. He tiptoed to her front window. If there was anything worth seeing inside, the grime smeared across the glass prevented it. He wanted to knock and make sure she was all right, or at least ask if she’d seen who’d broken into his house, but he was afraid. And the truth was, he really didn’t want to know if she was all right. If he had to get out of here quick, he didn’t need another body on his conscience.