Mercy Street

by Mariah Stewart

  “I knew them well before that,” Sister Rosalie told her. “This is a small school. We start to get to know the kids as freshmen, follow them through their sophomore years, start thinking ahead to what schools might be a good match for each of them. I usually know by mid–sophomore year where everyone will end up.”

  “You must be very good at what you do.”

  “Lots of experience helps. And frankly, if we had more students, I wouldn’t be able to operate like that on my own. But with a limited number of students, I have the luxury of making sure everyone makes the right choice.”

  “These four kids—Jamey, Adam, Ryan, Courtney—they all made the right choices, in your opinion?”

  Sister Rosalie hesitated, then said, “For the most part, yes. Courtney had been accepted at two state universities—Bloomsburg and Millersville—either of which would have been a great fit for her. Then, all of a sudden, out of the blue, she decided she really wanted to go to Penn State, main campus.”

  “You didn’t think that was a good fit for her?”

  “No, I did not. For one thing, it’s too big a school for her. She’d get lost there. Those huge universities aren’t for everyone. Some people thrive. Others can’t handle it. I didn’t think it was the place for her, and frankly, her sudden interest took me completely by surprise.” She made a face. “I wouldn’t have recommended it to her even if she’d wanted to apply back in August, but to apply so late, she had zero chance to get in.”

  “I thought she was a good student.”

  “Courtney was an excellent student, but they get a ridiculous number of applicants who are excellent students, and they fill their spots early with the best kids who apply. As good as Courtney was, there was nothing that stood out about her. She was a good athlete, but she wasn’t great, so she hadn’t been recruited. She would have needed something spectacular to have caught their eye at that late date. Like all-state in field hockey, or winning the state science fair.”

  “Why was she so focused on Penn State?”

  “Who knows? She just came in one day and said that she wanted to apply. I thought it was a waste of money, given that most of their acceptances had already been mailed, but she insisted.”

  “And she never said why?”

  “Just that she wanted to go farther away. That’s the most I ever got out of her. That she wanted to go away.”

  “Any reason for that, that you knew of?” Mallory’s interest was piqued. “Problems at home? A boyfriend, maybe, who was influencing her?”

  “Again, not that I know of. It’s just her and her mother and her sister, and they are really tight. Dad walked out when the sister was about six months old; Mom has done a bang-up job raising both girls. I think Courtney just got the bug, thought she was missing something, and decided Penn State was the place to go. I’ve seen it happen a hundred times, Detective Russo. The kid applies to a number of schools, gets accepted, then decides at the last minute that the one they didn’t apply to is the one they really want to go to. The old grass-is-greener thing. It generally isn’t more than that.”

  Mallory caught the “detective” but didn’t correct her.

  “Was there any change in her behavior over the past year? Had she made friends with a new group of people, or had she lost interest in things she’d previously liked to do?”

  Sister Rosalie thought for a moment, then said, “No, nothing over the past year. Like I said, Courtney comes from a pretty solid background, there’s a good safety net there. This class was really close. Most of the kids have been together since the early grades, if not from kindergarten. She’s had her ups and downs, like all kids do, but nothing really seems to throw her off course.”

  “How about that last week, maybe even that last Friday before they disappeared. Did you see her then?”

  Sister nodded. “I saw her early in the day.”

  “Did she seem upset about anything?”

  “Not that I noticed. Courtney was a pretty laid-back kid.” She paused, then added, “The only time I ever saw her shaken up about anything was that shooting at Hazel’s year before last.”

  Mallory’s head shot up. “Was Courtney working at Hazel’s at the time?”

  “Yes, but she wasn’t in the front of the store when the robbery took place. She said she was on break at the time, in the back, so she wasn’t right there when the boy was shot.”

  “The boy was eighteen,” Mallory recalled. “Hazel’s nephew. There had been a suspect, the case almost went to trial, but the DA pulled it because he didn’t have strong enough evidence, if I recall correctly. I didn’t work that case, but I think I would have remembered Courtney’s name if she’d been a witness.”

  “I don’t think she was. She said she hadn’t heard anything before she heard the gunshots, and she didn’t see anyone in the front of the store when she came out front to investigate, so she couldn’t have testified to anything.”

  “She called it in?”

  “No, a customer who’d dropped down to hide behind a display when he heard the shouting by the register called 911 on his cell when the killer left the store. Courtney said when she came out from the back, the police were already there. I imagine that would shake up a kid, though, knowing how close she came to being the one on the register when the robber came into the store.”

  “It would, yes,” Mallory said thoughtfully. “You said that Courtney had changed after that incident. How so?”

  “She became very quiet for a while, spent more time at home, I think. And that marking period, her grades slipped a little. Nothing terrible, but enough so that I noticed.”

  “You spoke with her about it?”

  “She just said she was having a lot of trouble sleeping, but she was hoping it would pass.”

  “Any chance she might have tried taking something for it?” Mallory asked.

  “If you’re suggesting that she turned to drugs, the answer is no. I told her that her family doctor might be able to help, but she thought she’d be okay. I offered to counsel her—told her she was welcome to come in whenever she felt she needed to talk.”

  “Did she take you up on that?”

  “No. She said she’d work it out on her own, and apparently she did. By the end of the next marking period, her grades were back up, and everything seemed fine.”

  “How about the boys? Anything similar there?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Like I said, these are all good, solid kids. No drugs, as you were suggesting. Someone would have noticed.”

  Mallory raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  “Someone would have noticed, Detective,” Rosalie insisted. “If one of our kids is into something he or she shouldn’t be, we’d have found out about it.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because we always do.” Rosalie smiled. “Yes, over the years we’ve had a few kids veer from the straight and narrow, but we’ve always found out, one way or another.”

  “And you are confident that nothing was going on with any of these kids?”

  “One hundred percent confident.” The counselor folded her hands on the desktop. “I’d bet my life on it.”

  The first thing Mallory did when she got into her car was dial Charlie Wanamaker’s cell phone. She’d hesitated only briefly before deciding to share what she’d learned with him. Something was nagging at her, and she thought that by talking things out she might get a better idea of what that something was.

  His voice mail picked up, and she left a message for him to call her back. She’d been driving for less than a minute when her phone rang.

  “Mallory, hi. It’s Charlie. What’s up?”

  “That was quick—thanks for getting back to me so soon. Listen, I just left Our Lady of Angels after spending the last several hours talking to teachers and a few students and the guidance counselor. I’d like to run something past you. Any chance you could meet me for…” She looked at the clock. It was after seven. “Well, dinner or coffee or a drink or somet
hing?”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t make it tonight.”

  She mentally slapped her forehead. Duh. Friday night. Dinner hour. He probably had a date.

  “Oh, that’s okay. I just thought that while I was on the way home…,” she said, slightly embarrassed.

  “But I’d like to sit down with you and catch up tomorrow. What’s your day look like?”

  “I might have some time.” Like all the time in the world.

  “I have something I have to do first thing,” he told her, “but I don’t know how long I’ll be tied up. Can I give you a call, maybe sometime around noon, one o’clock, see what your schedule is?”

  “Sure. That would be fine. I’ll talk to you then.”

  Mallory disconnected the call and tossed the phone into her bag. Wherever Charlie had been, whatever he’d been doing, he obviously wasn’t alone. In the background, she thought she’d heard the sound of a woman weeping.

  Well, of course he’d have someone in his life. Maybe that’s what brought him back here to the town where he’d grown up, she thought as she drove toward home. Maybe he wanted to…

  To what? Marry his hometown sweetheart? Mallory frowned, realizing that she didn’t know that he wasn’t already married.

  Not for you, she told herself. You’ve done a lot of things in your life, but you’ve never gone after another woman’s man. Now is not the time to start. Use Charlie for the information he can share just as he’s surely going to use you for the same purpose. Find the kids, collect your fee, and skedaddle back on into your own little life.

  Yeah. She nodded as she parked in front of her town house. That’s the plan.

  She turned the key in the front door and walked in just as a message was being recorded on her answering machine. She reached for the phone, then stopped, her hand frozen in midair, when she recognized the voice.

  “Say, I was in court today with an old friend of yours from the DA’s office. Steve Mooney, you remember him? He sure remembers you. Says you used him on more than one occasion to get charges upped or lowered, depending on whatever it was you wanted at the time. Yeah, that Steve Mooney.” Frank Toricelli coughed into the phone. “Anyway, he says to me, So, I see where your favorite girl is gonna be a PI now. Well, I got a lot of favorite girls, your name never made it to that list, so you can imagine my surprise when he tells me, Yeah, I see where Mallory Russo’s name is posted on the list of people who applied for a license.”

  He coughed again rudely into the phone, and she knew he was doing it to be as annoying as possible.

  “So I says, Where’d you see that? And Steve says, They have to post the name of everyone who applies, the list is right outside on the wall. So when my case is over, I go out and look, and sure enough, there it is. Mallory B. Russo. We know what the B stands for, don’t we? Heh, heh. Anyway, I’m thinking how hurt I am, you didn’t put me down as a reference. How ’bout Cal, you put him down?” His laugh was harsh and without humor. “Gonna be some fun, the first time you and I cross paths out there, know what I mean? So I hope you get lots of criminal work, because your ass isn’t going to be worth…”

  “Asshole.” She hit DELETE, wondering why she’d listened for as long as she had.

  Annoyed, Mallory went straight on to the kitchen and tossed her bag on the table. Her grumbling stomach reminded her that it had been hours since she’d eaten, but Toricelli’s message had left her with little appetite. She checked the refrigerator and found a container of yogurt that had expired the previous week and a bottle of iced tea. She plucked a spoon from the dishwasher and sat at the table looking out at the backyard, mindlessly eating the yogurt. Surprised when she found she’d finished it, she went back to the refrigerator for more and found one last container stashed behind the bottle of pomegranate juice that she’d bought because she’d heard it was healthy but had forgotten once she’d stuck it in the fridge.

  She unlocked the back door and walked out onto the tiny patio. The parrot on the deck next door began to squawk.

  “Hello, beautiful,” the parrot called, his customary greeting to any woman. Men, on the other hand, were always greeted with, “Who goes there?”

  “Hello, Leroy,” Mallory called to the bird, whose cage hung over the deck rail and was a mere ten feet from her door. “Did Jacky go out and leave you outside again?”

  “Jacky’s a bad, bad boy!” the parrot said, climbing along the side of his cage as if to engage Mallory in conversation.

  “There are lots of bad boys out there, Leroy.”

  Mallory stepped off the concrete onto the grass and walked to the back of the property. Her town house was located at the very end of the development, the last row of houses before a dense wood. She stopped halfway to the trees and inhaled deeply, recognizing the scent of spring rain and damp earth. The sun was setting over the woods, as it had been the day she’d first seen the house. She’d liked the view enough to make an offer the next day. For the most part, she’d been relatively comfortable here and had never thought twice about her decision to buy it. It was the right size for one person and an occasional guest—should she ever want to have one—and required little maintenance, so all in all she figured it had been a good choice.

  She took a few more deep breaths of fresh air before turning back. It was quiet except for the birds chattering in the hedge that ran past her next-door neighbor’s unit. As the last one in the row, Jacky had a bit of a side yard, a narrow strip of grass between the dark green of the hedge and the white brick outside wall of his house. Sometimes on summer nights, he set up the posts for games of horseshoes, and if her bedroom windows were open, she could hear the metal shoes clanging well into the night. She’d never complained, though the sound had kept her awake on more than one occasion. It reminded her of summer evenings in the house where she’d grown up, when all the boys in the family would play outside after she’d been tucked in, and she’d lay in the dark, listening to their voices and their laughter, envying their camaraderie, knowing that they were separated by more than age and gender.

  “Who’s your daddy?” Leroy squawked merrily at her approach.

  “Ah, now that is one of life’s great mysteries, Leroy,” Mallory said under her breath as she went back inside.

  She made a pot of coffee and, while it brewed, went upstairs to her den and turned on her computer. Opening a new file, she began to type up notes from that day’s interviews. There was little of substance until she got to her meeting with Sister Rosalie, and her fingers began to move over the keyboard more quickly, then she stopped and reread the last two sentences she’d typed.

  Why the change in Courtney’s college choice—significant or not?

  Courtney in Hazel’s during shooting.

  The first, Mallory knew, could very well have been nothing more than a teenager changing her mind.

  But the second set off that buzz in her head. Tomorrow she’d talk to Charlie, have him get a copy of the police file relating to the shooting. While she hated to rely on someone else, hated the thought that she’d be dependent on a man she didn’t know well enough to trust to get information she needed, she was just going to have to live with it.

  For a moment, she wished she were still with the force so that she could sit down and read all the reports herself, talk to the officers who had investigated, read all the witness statements. Then she thought about the harassment she’d endured until her patience wore out and remembered why she’d left.

  “Not for all the money in the world,” she murmured as she read over her notes.

  Her arrangement with Conroy’s newest detective was just going to have to work out. She’d have to watch her own back—she couldn’t depend even on Joe for that, because when it came down to helping her or protecting his department, she knew there’d be no choice—but she could live with that, too. It was just one case, she reminded herself.

  One case, then she would go back to writing her book, and get on with her life.

  ELEVE
N

  Charlie locked his hands behind his head and finished his last set of sit-ups. It was barely six AM, but he’d been awake most of the night. He’d slept—or tried to—in his late brother’s bed, the only one available, and in retrospect Charlie thought he’d have been more comfortable on the sofa. Except for the fact that his mother had sat up half the night watching old movies and infomercials. Twice he’d heard her placing orders over the phone. He couldn’t imagine what she’d been buying.

  Across the hall, his sister was still softly singing the same song she’d been singing since about one. He’d peeked in on her once and found her on the floor, fixated on the spinning arms of a pinwheel, singing “Tiny Dancer” and wiggling her toes. At four, she was still singing, though the pinwheel had been forgotten, her feet tapping up and down on the carpet.

  Charlie rested his head back against the side of the bed, trying to figure out what the hell had happened to his family in the two short years since Dan died.

  Whatever the cause, Charlie couldn’t help but feel he was responsible, at least in part, for his sister’s deterioration and his mother’s drinking problem. He should have come home more frequently and stayed longer than he had. He should have realized how hard his mother was taking Danny’s death. He should have realized that in her state, she wasn’t going to give Jilly the attention she needed. He should have, he should have, he should have…

  He rubbed the back of his neck, overwhelmed by a sense of guilt. His mother had needed help, and he’d failed to see it, choosing to immerse himself in his cases—street shootings of school-aged children, housewives with the backs of their heads bashed in, prostitutes disappearing from their corners, whatever the hot case of the week might have been—which somehow always seemed more important, more urgent, than a weekend trip back home.

  Would he be here now if his mother’s next-door neighbor hadn’t called him? The honest answer was probably not. The truth of it was that he didn’t want to deal with Danny’s death any more now than he had when they’d first been notified. His mother probably didn’t want to deal with it, either, he reminded himself. God knew, in her life, she’d had more to bear than he had. She sure as hell had not had an easy life.