The Drop Zone
Page 25
Dear Peterson,
I have never written a letter like this. I have never felt such tenderness, and, at the same time, I have never experienced such violence. My heart has been torn over you, and I am as confused and split apart now as in any other time in my life. I am Humpty Dumpy all over again, and I pray God will put me back together.
Our lives are so different, so at odds. We shared a traumatic experience, and I have come to realize we share little else. A girl’s violent and tragic death bound us to one another these few months, but that is not a secure basis for a deep personal relationship.
I needed to put that experience behind me. If I am to make the most of my life, I needed to settle that horrifying night in the Broken Promise. That is why I went to Elbow Harbour to visit Molly Gornish’s parents. I believed it was the only way I could come to terms with a teenage girl bleeding to death in my arms. I believed it was the only way I could reconcile a grief that seemed irreconcilable.
Her parents were heartbroken by their daughter’s death, yet unforgiving about the murder she had committed. They refused to accept Molly’s mental health as cause for killing the priest at St. Jude’s. Her mother said Molly often had fits of wild behaviour. And yet her mother could not accept the poor girl’s mental state as cause for her daughter’s strange behaviour. Several times, their priest caught Molly in church playing with candles before the statue of the Blessed Virgin and crying about having her period. They punished Molly each time Father Garrity brought her home.
My efforts to console them were rejected, and I returned even less settled than before I had left, still stricken with a private grief and deep sense of guilt that I cannot explain.
After much contemplation and professional encouragement, I am returning to the convent and placing my life, once again, in the hands of the Lord.
We never exchanged expressions of love, but I can assure you that I will always hold you dear to my heart.
Anna
PS. The photos of Elbow Harbour are for you. I thought you would want to see where Molly grew up. Several are of the new church the community built. The old one caught fire more than two years ago and burned down. They salvaged the statue of the Blessed Virgin from the ashes, and that has been a source of village pride. Father Garrity guided me through the church. He was so proud of the statue and of the stone floor the village men cut from a nearby quarry. I thought it all so beautiful and wanted to share it with you. Knowing more about the girl who died in our arms offered me some consolation. I hope it offers some comfort to you.
Peterson drained the Coke and squirmed for something stronger. He thumbed through the photos to one that pictured Elbow Harbour as a village of wood-frame houses with blistered paint in a rainbow of colours. There was a shot of the newly built church and one of a four-room schoolhouse. Another depicted an outcrop of rock in the foreground and a path dipping to where four houses crouched beneath a stony bluff. One of these houses was featured in another photo. It had dark blue paint peeling from the clapboard siding. A man and woman he took to be Molly’s parents were standing behind a weathered picket fence in front of this house.
He spread out all the photos. Glanced at them. Reread Anna’s letter. Glanced back at the photos. He pounded the table then pushed himself away, hobbled to the front window and looked out onto the street. He realized it was Saturday as soon as he saw his neighbour teaching his youngest, a six-year-old girl, how to ride a bicycle. He watched the girl wobble unsteadily on the bike, while her father gripped the back of the seat.
Peterson rubbed his face. A nagging impression. Something about the photos. Something familiar. Something he had seen before.
The little girl fell off the bike, and her father helped her up, encouraging her to get back on.
Peterson turned from the window. Twisting on his bum leg. Feeling pain shoot up to his spine. He stood still until it passed, then returned to the table and leaned over the photos. One of them caught his eye at once — an interior of the new church featuring the statue of the Blessed Virgin.
Seeing that statue had him gripping the table edge for support. The statue’s face and hands were black from when the previous church had burned to the ground. In her right hand the Blessed Virgin was holding the world. In her left was a rod of flowering lilies carved in ivory, the top of which was the letter P over a cross — a Chi-Rho.
His thoughts went back to St. Jude’s Church and the dead priest in the sacristy and the blood pooled before the blackened statue of the Blessed Virgin. He remembered the rag doll placed at the statue’s feet as an offering. He was deep in that memory when his cell phone rang. He fumbled for it in his pocket, got it on the third ring.
He saw the same shabby room. Heard the same silence. Felt the same remorse. Begged again for his daughter to say something, anything. But there was no response; just the ambient sound in that fleabag room on the other side of the continent.
He listened harder and detected her breathing. As he listened, his eyes strayed back to the photo of the Blessed Virgin. Then he looked at the photo of an old priest standing at the transept gesturing broadly as if showing off his church to the camera. Grey hair. Stooped shoulders.
Peterson fingered this photo aside, revealing a photo of the stone floor before the charred statue of the Blessed Virgin. He jerked his eyes back to the one of the old priest. He cradled the phone with his shoulder and listened to his daughter’s silence as he grouped together the photos of priest, floor, and statue. He focused on the burned statue holding the flowering rod of lilies with the Chi-Rho on top. Then, as he had done the night of the murder in St. Jude’s church, he shifted his gaze from the Blessed Virgin to the stone floor. He leaned closer and saw that bright speckled stones had been shaped into stars and inlaid in a circle around a single Greek letter — Alpha.
He looked back and forth from the circle of stars and the letter Alpha set in the stone floor to the old priest and blackened statue. Two churches, he thought, two priests, the past and present confused in Molly’s disturbed mind. Then he gathered the photos and set them aside as he realized the motive for her ritual and for her outrage at St. Jude’s was tangled in gibberish and in madness.
Then his daughter hung up, and his mind emptied.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the late B.J. Grant for always nudging me in the right direction, to Patrick Murphy for his encouragement, to Karen for her patience, to Cpl. Mike Sims and Dr. Gary Carson for their insights, to Dinah Forbes and Laura Pastore for the spit and polish (errors are all my own), to the hundreds of overheard conversations on public transit, and to the railway car knocker who was coupling air hoses between freight cars when he said to me — life is a crap shoot.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bob Kroll has been writing professionally for more than thirty-five years. His work includes books, stage plays, radio dramas, TV documentaries, as well as historical docu-dramas for Canadian and American museums. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
library and archives canada cataloguing in publication
Kroll, Robert E., 1947–, author
The drop zone : a T.J. Peterson mystery / Bob Kroll
Issued in print and electronic formats
978-1-77090-725-6 (epub)
ISBN 978-1-77041-244-6 (pbk.)
978-1-77090-724-9 (pdf)
I. Title.
PS8621.R644D76 2015 C813’.6 C2014-907598-7 C2014-907599-5
The publication of the Drop Zone has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and by the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,793 individual artists and 1,076 organizations in 232 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation.