The Halo Effect: A Novel

by Anne D. LeClaire

  At one time she could have walked to Lucy’s home blindfolded. They’d practically lived at each other’s houses, but she hadn’t been there since a couple of days after Lucy disappeared, and it was strange to be back. Even the front porch felt different in some way she couldn’t identify, as if the house itself were mourning. There were no cars in the driveway, and no one answered the door when she rang. She sank down on the top step and tried to decide how long she should wait. Now that she was there and had time to think it over, she wondered if she should have come. You overreact, her mother was always saying. You’re such a drama queen, Duane accused. Well, she was not the one who’d been dragged down to the police station, was she?

  A cricket hopped onto the bottom step and landed near her sandal. Her mother would step right on it, wipe it out before it could get into the house and drive everyone nuts with the chirping, but Rain found the sound cheerful. Her grandfather had told her crickets were considered omens of good fortune in China, and for that reason royal households kept them in cages, like pets. She leaned forward, wrapping her arms around her knees, and studied the insect. Such an odd, prehistoric-looking creature. She stared as it hopped off the step and into the grass, and her thoughts turned back to her conversation with Dr. Mallory. We always feel better when we do the right thing. But it was figuring out the right thing that was difficult. And then having the courage to do it. As mad as she was at Duane for his secret with Lucy, she believed him when he said he would never hurt her. He needed her help, and she would start by telling Lucy’s parents everything she could, and she hoped they wouldn’t be angry with her for not coming to them earlier. Courage. Like the writer Isak Dinesen. She would help Duane, she just wasn’t sure what the next step would be.

  The banging of a door startled her. She looked up and saw the man coming out of the house next door. Mr. Hayes. Payton, he had told her that day he had given her a ride, had saved her from Jervis the Pervis. It was clear then what to do. Mr. Hayes was a lawyer. Hadn’t her father said perhaps they should get a lawyer for Duane? That would be a first step. She unwrapped her arms from around her knees and sat up. “Hi,” she called.

  “Hi, Rain. What brings you to the neighborhood?”

  “I’m waiting for Mr. and Mrs. Light. Do you know when they’re coming home?”

  “I would guess they should be back soon,” he said and smiled his killer smile, the one that made her wish she had worn something prettier than her old cutoff jeans and done something with her hair.

  “Oh. Well, maybe I’ll wait then.”

  “I guess it’s been a while since you’ve visited them. I used to see you and Lucy playing badminton in the backyard.”

  “Really?” She was flattered that he remembered. She used to notice him too, playing hoops in the driveway by himself, dribbling the ball up and down the drive, twisting in for layups. She’d always had a tiny crush on him, although that was one secret she’d kept from Lucy.

  “So why do you want to see the Lights?”

  She noticed that the basketball hoop was no longer above the garage door. The window shades were lowered against the heat of the day. “I just remembered something Lucy told me before she—you know—before she was gone. A secret, and I think I should tell them.”

  “Oh?”

  She tucked her feet in close to the step. At least she had shaved her legs. They still shone with the lotion she had smoothed on earlier. “Mr. Hayes—”

  “Payton. Please. This ‘mister’ business makes me feel like my father.”

  “Payton.” The name felt awkward on her lips. “Well, I was wondering if I could ask you something. It’s something about Lucy.”

  “Sure.” He studied her for a minute. “Listen, it’s hot out here. Why don’t you wait at my place? I’ll get you a glass of soda, and you can tell me what’s on your mind.”

  The kitchen was spotless except for a pile of paperwork on the little table. “It’s nice and cooler in here,” she said.

  He checked the refrigerator. “Pepsi all right?”

  “Just water would be great.” Alone with him, she wasn’t sure what to do. Sit? Stand? She nodded toward the papers on the table. “My dad does his bills in our kitchen too.”

  He handed her the glass. “Here you go.”

  “Thanks.” She took a sip.

  “So what is it you wanted to ask me?”

  “What?”

  “About Lucy. What was your question?”

  He came closer to her. The water tasted metallic in her mouth, and she wished he would move back, out of her personal space. “Respect your personal space,” Miss Laurant had told them in health, a mandatory class for all the sophomore girls that was totally stupid with the PE teacher talking about how to prevent getting pregnant, as if anyone over ten didn’t already know stuff like that. Janice Linski had been excused from the class because her parents objected to the sex education part of the course curriculum, but everyone knew it was really because Miss Laurant was lesbian and Janice’s parents protested against things like that. Of course last year the girls who got pregnant had all taken health, which just went to show how epically pointless it was. Miss Laurant had also lectured them about something she called Owning Your Own Power as a Woman. “If something feels wrong, some situation or person, don’t ignore this feeling,” she had said. “Learn to trust yourself. Always trust your instincts.” She had said that often people explained away their gut feelings as foolish. Rain heard the echo of those words now, although she didn’t know why—he hadn’t done anything wrong—but it felt wrong, the way he was looking at her, the way he was standing too close. But he was an ordinary neighbor, for fuck’s sake. A person Lucy used to babysit for, the kind of man her mother would flirt with. Still. There was nothing she could exactly name, but the gut feeling persisted. She regretted coming inside. She set the glass of water on the table and moved back.

  “Can I get you something else?”

  “Could I—could I use your bathroom?”

  He hesitated, his smile slipping for only a moment, and then nodded. “Sure. It’s down that hall. Last door on the left. Right past the bedroom.”

  Once in the powder room, she locked the door, leaned against it. Alone, her fears seemed foolish. She waited a few minutes and then flushed the toilet in case he was listening. She was being a baby. Completely paranoid. She was just not used to being alone with a man. I used to see you playing badminton. So he’d watched them. The thought made her feel funny but in a good kind of way, like when one of the men who sat on the benches by the harbor whistled when she walked by. She turned on the faucet and washed her hands, studied her features in the mirror, her ragged hair, her too-high forehead, trying to see what he might find attractive. Okay, so it was totally wrong to snoop, but she opened the mirrored cabinet, checked the contents, all so ordinary they mocked her fears. A box of Band-Aids, mouthwash and toothpaste—a brand that whitened, she saw and made note to buy some—a container of shaving cream, razor, aftershave. English Leather. She opened the cap, sniffed it. Although she wanted to, she resisted the urge to dab some on her wrists and replaced it on the shelf. She pulled open a drawer on the small vanity and saw a box of tampons, something the wife must have left behind when they got divorced. Or a girlfriend. A man so good-looking must have a girlfriend. She was taking too long, she knew, and he would wonder what she was doing. She closed the drawer and unlocked the door. On her return to the kitchen, she passed the bedroom, paused to take a look. The bed—a king-size bed that practically took up the entire room—was neatly made. She liked that. That he was not messy. Some men, if their wives left them, would let the house go downhill, dust everywhere, dirty dishes in the sink, yellowed sheets on the bed. Her father, for instance, didn’t even know where her mother kept the vacuum. The closet door was partially open, and she saw a row of shirts hanging neatly. She pictured him in the morning cleaning the house and at night making dinner for himself, and she wondered what he liked to eat. And if he drank. Probably som
ething like wine. Imported. She thought of him sitting at a table, imagined herself sitting opposite him, raising her wine glass. There would be candles on the table. Again she wondered if he had a girlfriend. The unease she had felt earlier disappeared. She had been being silly.

  “Hey, Rain? You okay?”

  “Coming,” she called back. Shit. He’d think she’d died or something. She turned to go and caught sight of something on the surface of the bureau. She drew a sharp breath. Of course she was mistaken. It was a trick of light. From across the room it was easy to be mistaken. But as if pulled by a magnetic force, she entered the room, crossed to the bureau, picked up the stone.

  “Looking for something?” He stood in the doorway.

  “Where did you get this?” She held out her hand.

  His mouth twisted in a smile that was not a smile. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you it isn’t polite to snoop around other people’s rooms?”

  “Where did you get this?” she asked again. She held her arm toward him, her palm upheld holding Lucy’s Lucky Strike stone, the stone that contained the tears of the Apache women hiding in a cave. It was a mistake; she saw this at once. She should have pretended nothing was wrong. Rain glanced around the room, but there was no other way out except through the door that he was blocking.

  “Where did I get it?” His voice was high, mimicking. “You’re just like her. Meddling in where it is no concern of yours. You girls should learn to mind your own business.”

  He had changed right in front of her eyes. Turned into someone else. Something ugly. How could she have ever thought he was good-looking? She needed to make him stop talking. If he didn’t tell her any more, she would be able to leave. She forced herself to be calm. Casually, as if it were no more than a beach pebble taken from the shore, she turned and put the stone back on the dresser. “It’s pretty. I was just wondering what kind it was. My grandfather used to know all about the different kinds of stones.”

  It was too late. She understood that at once. He came toward her. Came for her. She stepped back until the bureau pressed against her spine. Her throat closed against a swift and fierce desire. She wanted her mother. Her mother who once could make things right, who had held her when she had nightmares or scraped her knee. But she was alone with no one to protect her. She remembered then a story she had heard on the news about a man, a convicted murderer, who had escaped from prison and had broken into a house looking for drugs. Somewhere in the South it had been. And a woman had been home alone and he had taken her hostage. He was going to kill her, and she had prevented him from doing so by reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

  “Our Father,” Rain began.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  As Father Gervase left Rose Manor, he reflected, as he often did after these visits, about how very much the patients wanted to talk about their pasts, histories that in the telling assumed a surprising vitality and importance, more alive than the present.

  Just this afternoon, after she had taken Communion, Mrs. Carlotto, now blind and confined to bed with the latest in a series of shattered bones, the pelvis this time, had kept him at her bedside talking, stories he had heard before of her days as a nursery school teacher. Staring with cloudy eyes into a place only she could see, she spoke animatedly about her students as if only yesterday she had stood in the classroom writing on the chalkboard. “Memories are all I have left,” she had told him one day. “The thing is, I only remember the good ones.” Father Gervase wondered if that were true, that unpleasant recollections faded. He hoped it was so, although it was his experience that the sins of his past, the disappointments and losses, remained as vivid as ever. The sins of commission and those of omission. It was the sins of omission that troubled him now. He thought of all the parishioners he had failed mightily over the years. And of course he thought of his one profound failure beside which all others faded. To understand forgiveness, his mentor had said, it was first necessary to forgive ourselves. Had he? Was it possible to forgive himself for failing Cecelia? His one big secret sorrow. The secret sorrow the world knows not. Who said that? Longfellow? Yes, he was pretty sure it was Longfellow.

  “Hello, Father.”

  Deep in thought, struggling to recall the poet’s full quote—he had known it once, but that was so true of many things now lost—Father Gervase did not hear the greeting. He limped along, the hip again paining him, his breath short as it was so often now. A half a block later, as often happened when he stopped struggling to pull something up from the depths of memory, the entire line rose up. Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad. And wasn’t it the greatest misunderstandings, he thought, that came from our inability to see the grief hidden in the heart of another, to mistake it for anger or pride or coldness? He knew full well that each person carried a personal history of sorrow locked away in the chambers of the heart, burdens that bent one to their weight. Perhaps there was a homily that could come out of these musings. Something about the loss that was the human condition. Something about whatever our doubts or differences or inability to see into each other’s hearts, our job was to love. But even as he considered these thoughts, they drifted away. He had grown tired of preparing sermons. Of preaching words that changed nothing. He passed the hardware store and saw Harold Weaver come out with a pole to roll up the awning before closing for the day. He continued toward Will Light’s house.

  He would not fail Will again. He had seen the danger the very first time he had gone to Will’s house with the bishop’s request and knew it was not too much to say the man’s soul was at risk.

  As he turned onto Governors Street, he saw in the distance a girl walking from the Lights’ house to the one next door. It took him a moment to place her. The LaBrea girl. She was walking up the steps to the home of the man he had watched flouting the watering restrictions during the worst of the drought. Rain LaBrea, he thought. From the back, she looked so like his sister. Not the hair—cropped so short while Cecelia’s had been long—but the set of her shoulders, her gait, and the sight of her pulled the breath from his lungs. He remembered another day, a summer day much like this one when Cecelia had walked with another boy, climbed into a car while he watched. He hadn’t called to her even though the instinct to had been strong. And later, it didn’t matter how many people told him it wasn’t his fault, that accidents happen and he wasn’t to blame, he knew he should have stopped her from getting into the car. Why hadn’t he? What had held him back? The question that had haunted him to this moment. His job had been to watch out for his sister. And at that he had failed.

  But the LaBrea girl was not his sister. He was overlaying one distant memory onto this instant. He stood on the sidewalk and stared at the house she had disappeared into, paralyzed with indecision. If he followed his instinct and knocked on the door, what would he possibly say? He would risk appearing foolish. A meddling old man. Better to mind his own business.

  And yet. And yet.

  “Do not decide,” Saint Ignatius had preached. “Discern. Discern what God is calling us to do. Follow the holy desire.”

  A wave of dizziness took him, clouding his mind.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  “Our Father,” Rain said.

  The man was talking to her, rambling on and on, and Rain tried not to listen. She forced herself to continue. “Who art in heaven . . .”

  He took a step into the room.

  “Hallowed be thy name.” She forced her voice to be calm, to go slow.

  He took another step forward.

  She moved to one side, her back still against the bureau. She raised a hand to brace herself and felt the stone, Lucy’s Lucky Strike stone. She closed her fingers around it.

  “Thy kingdom come . . .”

  “‘The Lord made of me a sharp-edged sword.’”

  They both turned toward the door. “Father Gervase,” she whispered.

  “‘And concealed me in the shadow of his arms,’”
the priest intoned.

  The man dropped his hands, confused.

  “Let her go,” Father Gervase said.

  For years after, Rain would remember this scene. Standing by the bureau, reciting a prayer she had known since childhood, Lucy’s stone clutched in her hand, the man, Payton Hayes, coming toward her. Father Gervase, so much shorter than the man was, yet standing tall in the door, his hand reaching toward the man, his voice so big. Let her go.

  “Go on, Rain,” Father Gervase said in the voice not his. “Go on now. Leave the house.”

  Hayes froze in indecision.

  “Go,” the priest told her.

  Rain slipped past the man, past Father Gervase, and ran down the hall, her shoulders braced for the hand that would surely grab her any second. She reached the kitchen—the clean and deceiving kitchen—and wrenched open the door.

  She heard the echo of the priest’s voice as she escaped from the room, ran from the house.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  What stopped me?

  His hands. I stared at his hands, needing them to hold the answer I had sought through the past months, wanting to wring the answer from them just as his hands had twisted Lucy’s sweet throat, bloodying her face. They lay, palms up, limp and defenseless in his lap, the skin chapped and reddened from scooping ice cream, wrists so delicate they might have belonged to a ten-year-old. I wanted to deny the truth so obvious before me, pressing down on me, but I couldn’t. He had not murdered our beautiful girl. Once again I was left impotent, helpless with the hard knowledge that I still didn’t know who had killed Lucy, might never know.

  We both sat for a long, immeasurable moment in the silence of the car. I shifted in my seat and the gun pressed against my thigh. Outside, the wind stirred the leaves in the trees. Duane spoke first.

  “I didn’t hurt Lucy,” he said. “I could never hurt her.”