Perfect Grave jw-3

by Rick Mofina

  “Sounds like Coop. You’re talking about Coop,” one man said.

  “Dark, intense eyes?”

  “Angry eyes. That’s Coop. Didn’t come down tonight. He’s taking things real hard. Sister Anne is the only one who could get through to him, and her funeral’s going to be right here in the shelter tomorrow. So he’s having a hard time.”

  “You know where he lives, where I can find him?”

  “He stays near the International District. But you’d best keep away from him.”

  Jason took a note. “A mission, hostel? You got an address?”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “I know but it’s important that we talk to him tonight. Please, do you have an address?”

  “Here.” Scarred, ruddy hands reached for Jason’s pad and pen. “I’ll draw you a map, but I would not be messing with him.”

  The man’s sketching was clear and neat. Jason studied it, realizing that although the location was near, getting to Coop’s place would not be easy.

  “Be careful, he doesn’t take kindly to people. Period.”

  “What’s his full name?”

  “Psycho,” one of them chuckled.

  “Shut up! You don’t know him,” a voice from the circle said. “John Cooper. But he likes to be called Coop.”

  “What’s his story? I mean why call him that other name?”

  A long silence passed.

  The glass neck of the bottle flashed and liquid sloshed.

  “You find him and you’ll find out.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  T he International District wasn’t far from Pioneer Square, its southern fringes just north of the stadiums where the Mariners and Seahawks played.

  According to the men at the shelter, Jason would find John Cooper there, near the edge of the International District, at the location marked by the “X” on the map they’d drawn for him.

  He parked his Falcon next to a Dumpster, near a back alley, took stock of his surroundings, then double-checked the map. Hing Hay Park, the boutiques, markets, restaurants, and the slopes of Kobe Terrace, laced with private gardens, were not far. Neither were First Hill with its million-dollar condo views of Seattle’s skyline and Yesler Terrace-the area near Sister Anne’s town house.

  Look in another direction and it was a whole other world.

  Beyond the parking lots, the chain-link fences, and the old site of the homeless encampment, Interstate 5 cut a multilane swath through Seattle, the traffic droning like an ominous chant lifting to the sky. Concrete columns rose to support the freeway, along with vast sloping retaining walls that disappeared from view to meet its underbelly in a darkness deeper than the night.

  “He’s up in there,” Jason nodded to the sloping wall under the overpass. “Let’s go, we don’t have much time before deadline.”

  “Climb up there? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “They said he lives up there, under the overpass.”

  “They also called him Psycho and warned us to leave him alone.”

  Jason said nothing. He was fishing for something in his pocket.

  “Jason, you can’t see anything. It’s so creepy.”

  He tested the batteries of his penlight. They were strong.

  “Stay in the car if you can’t handle it. I don’t have a lot of time.”

  Sirens echoed amid the canyons of Seattle’s glittering skyscrapers as he set out to ascend the vast incline. He didn’t care if Cassie came. He preferred to go alone. He didn’t have time to babysit her.

  Newspapers and fast food take-out bags skipped along, propelled by the rush of the traffic that flowed above and the gusts off Elliott Bay that fingered their way through the city. The stench of urine and bird shit assailed him as he progressed. It was like stepping into the great yawning jaw of some nether region. He used his penlight to find his way to the summit where the narrow beam revealed walls encrusted with multiple coatings of cascading guano, the gagging smell mingling with those of engine exhaust, motor oil, and rubber.

  Pigeons cooed, then several dark things scurried near his feet ahead of him. Claws scraping. He glimpsed tails, matted fur. Rats. It was gross, but Jason was undaunted. He’d faced worse.

  His light caught the fragment of a red blanket beckoning from a crevasselike opening between two large concrete walls. The blanket served as a curtain, suspended from a guano-layered drainage pipe, dripping with foul-smelling water.

  This was it.

  “Mr. Cooper!” Jason raised his voice over the rumble of the traffic. “Jason Wade from the Seattle Mirror! We met at the shelter! Can I have a word with you, sir?”

  No answer. Jason waited then repeated his call, louder the second time.

  Again, no response.

  Cooper was there.

  Physically.

  Mentally, he was in the busy market near the Syrian border beyond Tal Afar. In one hand he held a bottle. The other was tight around the handle of a knife, ready for the attackers.

  Seattle’s traffic above him was roaring like the firefight.

  It would be different this time-this time Coop would kill them all. Button up.

  Save his crew.

  Then they would stop screaming.

  Out front, Jason drew back the blanket.

  It was like the crack at the entrance of a spider’s hole. The smell was powerful. His light reached partway down a narrow corridor lined with blankets, plastic sheeting, a shopping cart, wooden crates. He followed one electrical cord from a utility maintenance outlet to a hotplate, utensils. An assortment of mismatched spoons, forks.

  Knives.

  Jason glimpsed pair after pair of combat boots, shoes, sneakers, jackets, parkas, pants, sweaters, worn woollen socks, tattered shirts. Heaps of toilet paper under plastic sheets, cans of dried goods, beans, soup, stews, boxes of dried cereal. Rations.

  It’s like the guy’s still at war, Jason thought.

  More blanket curtains led to other chambers deeper down.

  A lull in the traffic and Jason heard a bottle swish.

  “Coop! Coop! Can you hear me?”

  Something moved in the blackness beyond the curtain. Jason couldn’t see anything.

  “Get out! Get out!”

  The attackers were coming and coming. Cooper gripped his knife. He could hear Yordan, Bricker, Rose, calling him.

  Coop!

  They were next to him now-getting closer.

  “Get the fuck out!”

  “Coop!” Jason shouted. “Hold on! It’s Jason Wade. We talked, remember? Are you okay? Sir, it’s Jason Wade from the Mirror. You wanted to help me!”

  Help me help me help me.

  Jason’s words seemed to echo before they died in the sudden thunder of traffic hammering overhead, followed by an anguished groan from the other side of a blanket.

  “Reporter?” Coop repeated.

  “Yes, you spoke to me about Sister Anne, you wanted to help me. Remember?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Coop, please, help me.”

  Coop help me.

  Jason could not know how the phrase he’d spoken cut into Cooper.

  “Sir, you wanted me to know about the man.”

  “What?”

  “The man who took the knife from the shelter. The man who argued with Sister Anne before she was murdered.”

  Coop processed the information, his memory flickering back.

  “Did they find that mother?” He shouted. “Because he’s the one-I just know-the way he hurt her.”

  He’s the one.

  Jason felt something tingling at the back of his neck.

  “He’s the one?” Jason repeated. “Did you see something, did you talk to police?”

  “No goddam cops. I never talk to them.”

  “But why do you think-?”

  “Because I goddam heard him talking to Sister. This goof was so angry. Sister took him to the little office to be alone, but I was watching over her. She’s my angel,
and he was making her upset.”

  Jason’s penlight was in his mouth, shining on his pad. He wrote fast before withdrawing it to ask another question.

  “Tell me what you heard, Coop, can you tell me, please?”

  “He wanted something from her.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. She wanted to forgive him but, no, no, he was angry, he didn’t want that from her.”

  “Forgive him for what?”

  “His sins.”

  “What sins?”

  “We all have sins.”

  “Coop. Who’s this man? Tell me about this man.”

  Traffic pounded overhead, reminding Jason that his deadline was coming fast. Damn it. He had no time to get a photographer up here to get a pic of Cooper in tomorrow’s paper. Cooper likely wouldn’t even agree to it.

  “You want to know who this man was?” Coop asked.

  “Yes.”

  “He could be anybody.”

  “I don’t understand. Did you ever see him before, did you know him?”

  “I don’t even know myself, man.”

  An anguished groan and a bottle sloshed.

  “I couldn’t save them.”

  “Who?”

  “Yordan, Bricker, and Rose. My crew. I was their commander. I tried. It happened so fast. I tried to close the hatch but they were on us so fast.”

  Jason didn’t understand.

  “It must’ve been hard for you, Coop.”

  “They’re always talking to me. I can hear ‘em just like we was still there. It’s always the same. Why’d you leave us, Coop? Why? Sister Anne understood. She told me to forgive myself.”

  The bottle swished.

  “But I can’t.”

  “Did you try to get help, Coop?”

  “Nothing can save me now. Sister said she’d forgiven me. She said she’d pray for me. And she did. And for a while there, my crew left me alone. But then they started coming back. Asking me the same thing: Why, Coop? I told them I tried. I swear, I tried to close the hatch! But those mothers just kept coming, kept climbing on us so fast, man I tried. I tried and tried to save them.”

  “I know, Coop,” Jason said. “Tell me about the man.”

  “Once I told Sister I couldn’t take it anymore. I told her to stop. To stop forgiving me, stop praying for me. I wasn’t worth it. I told her that. But she wouldn’t stop.”

  “Coop, please tell me about the man.”

  “No, you tell me, asshole! You tell me, now that she’s gone, gone like Yordan, Bricker, and Rose, they’re all gone and now she’s gone, so you tell me who’s going to pray for me now? I can never be forgiven for what I’ve done!”

  “What do you mean, Coop? What did you do?”

  Traffic hummed but no answer came.

  Slowly, Jason pulled back the curtain and the tiny hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

  Cooper was squatting against the wall, swinging his knife.

  The blade glinting in the weakening light.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  P lease God, tell me what to do.

  Sister Denise was alone in her room crying.

  She’d told no one about what she’d found hidden under the floorboards in the closet of Sister Anne’s room. Of course, her first impulse had been to turn it over to her superior, Sister Vivian, and to tell the others. But for some powerful and inexplicable reason, Denise felt compelled to keep her discovery secret.

  To protect it because no one should see it.

  Maybe this was God’s way of speaking to her. Denise didn’t know. A moral war was raging in her heart. Should she tell someone, or forget that she’d ever found it?

  Throughout the town house she could hear the sisters making last-minute arrangements for the funeral service at the shelter. It would begin in a few hours and they would leave very soon.

  Denise had little time.

  Drying her tears, she locked her door, knelt by her bed, made the sign of the cross, and prayed. Then she reached under her mattress and retrieved the cardboard box she found under the floor in Anne’s room.

  The box had been used to store candles and was about the size of a hardcover book. It was ancient with frayed, deteriorating corners that were held together with adhesive tape yellowed with age. It smelled of wax when she lifted the lid.

  She reached inside and removed the red notebook. It was a number 82, plain, four-star line, with a red hardboard cover. The pages crackled when she opened it to the secrets of Sister Anne Braxton’s life. It was fitting that it was raining when I entered the little church in Paris to make my amputation with my past life. The warm water against my skin was my baptism…

  So began the first entry of Anne’s journal, dated well over twenty years ago. It was written with a fountain pen in Anne’s elegant hand, the revelations of a young woman at the threshold of devoting her life to God.

  In reading on, Denise empathized with how Anne had struggled with the same deep concerns that confront all women who contemplate a religious life. How they must accept that they will never bear children, never marry, never have a family or grandchildren, and are destined to live simply in humility and poverty. Anne seemed resolute in her readiness to embrace the realities of becoming a nun.

  But as Denise read the entries again, she was troubled by the undercurrent that accompanied all of Anne’s thoughts.

  Guilt.

  Although Anne offered no details of past acts, and only alluded to remorse for them, an air of atonement accompanied all of her entries. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

  Denise knew that one from The First Epistle of John, along with the rest of it, which Anne had written at the outset of her journal and throughout. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

  Flipping through the pages and the years of Anne’s life, Denise kept coming back to Anne’s personal torment over something that had happened long ago. Oh heavenly Father, can I ever be forgiven for what I did, for the pain I caused? Although I am not worthy, please forgive me.

  It was a consistent theme of Anne’s writing, one she kept returning to even in the last months of her life. I deeply regret the mistakes I have made and will accept your judgment of me.

  What was it? What had she done? What could she possibly have done that would account for such mental agony?

  It fits now.

  Denise suddenly recalled one of her last conversations she’d had with Sister Anne. They’d gone alone for a Sunday walk near the park. Sister Anne seemed to be tormented by something before she had finally confided to Denise.

  “I believe with all my heart that I will be judged by the sins of my past life and not the religious one I’ve strived to live.” Anne stopped. “And I believe that my judgment could come soon. In the end, I believe God will determine if my struggle to atone was worthy.”

  “Atone for what? I’m not sure I understand, Anne.”

  “When I was young, I did the most horrible thing.”

  “Everyone makes mistakes.”

  “I destroyed lives.”

  “Destroyed lives? What do you mean? Did you break a young man’s heart?”

  Anne looked off.

  “God knows what I did. God, and one other living person. Please, Denise. I’ve said more about this than I’ve ever told anyone. Please, you must keep my confidence. Promise me.”

  “Of course, Anne. But I don’t understand.”

  “If we’re patient, God will reveal all mysteries. After all, He does work in mysterious ways.” Anne hugged her and never spoke of the subject again.

  It was so cryptic. “I destroyed lives.” What did she mean?

  A sudden knock on her door, and Denise’s heart leapt.

  “Are you almost ready, Denise?”

  “See you downstairs in a couple more minutes, Flo.”

  Denise was coming to a decision. The journal was not her property.
Being aware of it, and given all of the tragic circumstances, she must give it to Vivian. Perhaps Denise had hesitated earlier because she’d been upset with Vivian.

  She’d reached a decision.

  Closing the journal, putting it in the box, she took it with her down the hall, where she knocked softly on the door to Anne’s, well, Vivian’s room. It was weird how she insisted on staying there. The others had whispered how they thought it was macabre, but no one dared question Vivian.

  “Who is it?”

  “Denise.”

  “I’ll be downstairs in a minute.”

  “I’d like to talk to you privately.”

  “Can it wait?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Come in then, for a moment.”

  The room still smelled of ammonia, which Denise would now and forever associate with Anne’s murder. Vivian was a portrait of the imposing leader, writing notes for the memorial service.

  “What is it? I have to hurry ahead to meet Father Mercer, he’ll be celebrating the mass today and is going directly to the shelter.”

  “I need to show you what I discovered when I was cleaning.”

  Denise went to the closet, pried out the floorboards, revealed the hole, then passed the box to Vivian, who was perplexed.

  “Anne had hidden this under the floor. It’s her journal.”

  “Journal?”

  Vivian started flipping through it. Slowly at first, then faster as she absorbed its contents.

  “Did you know she’d kept a journal?” Denise asked.

  Vivian shook her head without lifting it from the book.

  “You knew her longer than the rest of us. Do you know what she’s talking about when she says she regrets the mistakes she made in the past?”

  “No, what?” Vivian’s head remained in the book, reading. “No. But what human being doesn’t regret past mistakes?” Finally she lifted her head, her eyes boring into Denise. “Did you tell anyone about this?”

  “No.”

  “Show it to anyone?”

  “No, just you. I thought maybe we might use some of her words at the memorial, then maybe pass it to the detectives.”