She returned to the kitchen, filled the syringe, and again pressed it into a vein in Sid’s neck. She reached into his pocket and pulled out all the drugs that were there: three more packets of heroin and a plastic bag labeled by marking pen: Demerol. This she ground into a powder in a mortar, mixed with the last of the heroin that she had prepared, and filled the syringe a third time.
Andrea came up behind Rita, holding the syringe in her fist, thumb on the plunger. Rita shifted in her sleep and twisted her head. Andrea retreated to the kitchen: she could not risk Rita’s waking with a scream that would alert the rest of the house.
She entered the hallway through the kitchen and went up the stairs quietly. In their room at the end of the second-floor hallway she found Morgie and Dominic in bed. On the table beside the bed was a silver clip of cash she recognized as her father’s, and a tangle of gold chains. A pendant that was set against the base of the lamp she recognized as Cosmo’s gift to Vittoria on their fifteenth wedding anniversary; Andrea had helped him to pick it out. Her mother’s wedding ring was on Morgie’s right forefinger.
Dominic was on the far side of the bed. His snores filled the room: Andrea hadn’t to be so careful about the noise she made. She plunged the needle into Morgie’s arm, and held her hand tightly over the women’s mouth, digging her nails sharply into her cheeks almost in hope that she would wake. The needle nearly broke as it struck bone, but Andrea persisted until the glass chamber was empty. Morgie never roused out of her drugged sleep.
Sweat gleamed on Andrea’s face as she stood. There was more heroin, and she would inject them all. Pocketing the bills on the bedside table, she went down the hall quietly, and froze as she heard someone—it must be Rita—climbing the stairs. She slipped into the empty bedroom where she had been raped, and held her breath in the darkness there. Rita went into the bedroom where Andrea had seen the couple making love; she heard Rita mumble something to Jack, who replied thickly.
When they were quiet again, Andrea slipped out into the hallway. She hurried past the half-opened door, not daring even to breathe, and descended the stairs again. If she could wait until they all fell asleep again, she could kill Dominic with the last of the heroin, and then there was a bullet each for Rita and Jack. She wished now that she had gone into Jack’s room first; it was he who had instigated the entire business, she was sure of it, and he ought to have died first.
At the foot of the stairs, Andrea checked her reflection in the mirror of the hall stand, and then, seeing Jack’s black knit watchman’s cap dangling on a peg, she snatched it up and pulled it over her hair, completely concealing her blond strands beneath it.
Why am I doing this? she wondered, and smiled at the incongruity of the action.
A board creaked heavily, and Andrea snapped her head up, her hands still on the rolled edge of the watchman’s cap. Rita stared down at her from the top of the stairs, alarm flaring in her eyes.
“Jack! Jack!” Rita called in a thick voice.
Louder footfalls came behind Rita. Andrea did not wait to see him, but ran back down the hall into the kitchen. She yanked open the back door and fled the house.
“Fucking bitch!” Jack’s voice boomed behind her, but Andrea was already running down the fog-shrouded alley. In a few moments more she was back in her car, without having heard footsteps behind her. She turned on the ignition, pulled on the headlights, and headed slowly through the fog toward Boston. At a stoplight she counted the bills she had taken from Morgie’s bedside table—nearly four hundred dollars—and pushed them back into her pocket. She was very much surprised to discover that the package of cash she had received from her parents was still inside the jacket as well. When the light changed, she threw the car into gear and drove on. She slapped hard at the rearview mirror, twisting it so that she could no longer see her own image in it.
Though she had no idea now where she would go or what she would do, she knew one thing for certain: Andrea LoPonti no longer existed.
PART III: The Hammers of Heaven
31
Sister Katherine sat at her small table at the back of the empty classroom. Spread out before her were twenty papers with simple addition problems painstakingly scrawled in the children’s handwriting. Across the top of the desk were three pillboxes containing red, blue, and green stars, corresponding to excellent, good, and needs improvement. It was Katherine’s own idea that the green star should be used instead of the great glaring red check mark that Sister Mercedes had employed for years. “I remember when I was that young—check marks used to make me feel so bad,” Katherine had said to the sister, “let’s just give everybody a star. The ones who ‘need improvement’ will feel bad enough as it is.”
The last paper deserved a green star, but Katherine was hesitant to end her grading in that fashion, and so awarded a blue star instead. She shuffled the papers into a neat pile, lidded the boxes of stars, and turned her gaze to the playground just beyond the tall windows.
It was mid-morning, and Sister Mercedes had taken the twenty students out for free-activity recess. On the swing set three little boys were deliberately swinging in a rhythm that pulled the posts out of the ground; a little boy and little girl were performing a nice set of acrobatics on the jungle gym; two girls on the monkey bars were kicking one another with giggling viciousness, and on the slide a boy and a girl were attempting to come down the shiny tin ramp on their backs, heads toward the ground, with a handful of pine straw thrust under them to cut friction. Sister Mercedes, her head bowed, sat alone on the green bench in the midst of them all; Katherine would have thought that she prayed, or said her rosary, had she not seen the glint of sunlight on Sister Mercedes’s watch carefully thrust out of her sleeve. Sister Mercedes had never hesitated to confide to Sister Katherine her dislike of recess and its concomitant noise; and this was the first day of school after the Thanksgiving vacation. The children had been particularly rambunctious today and kept Sister Mercedes in constant motion through the morning.
Katherine envied Sister Mercedes her full teaching schedule; and it was no comfort to know that Sister Mercedes would gladly have traded places and duties. However, it would not be long before Katherine had classes of her own: after three and a half intensive years of classes at Boston College, she had her bachelor’s degree, and one more semester of advanced courses would secure for her a teacher’s certificate. Conducting her own classroom, Katherine knew, she would be of that much greater use, and—although it was sinful to think it—of much greater effectiveness in her first year than Sister Mercedes had ever been.
Katherine was special in the Hingham convent: set apart first by the drama of her admittance, tangled as it was with her parents’ disapproval, her father’s murder, her mother’s trial and conviction; and with her dedication to the children, her high scores on examinations at Boston College, her willingness to assume the most rigorous tasks of the convent. She seemed never to weary of poring over her studies or volunteering to visit ill parishioners, take gifts of clothing and food to the destitute, or assume house chores that made her hands raw and her body sore. Silent chants of prayer sustained Sister Katherine through these self-imposed ordeals, and in the years of her postulancy at Saint Luke’s she was never once reprimanded. A month after Epiphany, at the beginning of February, she would take her final vows. In a ceremony far less elaborate than the one for her Clothing, Katherine would become officially a Slave of the Immaculate Conception. She was eager for the event, which would take place on her twenty-first birthday. In the convent no notice was taken of these personal holidays, but Katherine suspected that Mother Celestine knew and did not disapprove of the coincidence.
Katherine placed the graded papers on Sister Mercedes’s desk. She retrieved her cape from the cloakroom, dropped her pencils and her stars into her canvas book bag, and opened the door to the playground.
She waved at Sister Mercedes and pointed a
t her wrist, although Katherine wore no watch. Sister Mercedes stood in relief, crossed herself, turned around in a little circle of pleasure, and clapped her hands loudly.
The children all seemed to go limp. Sighing, they dropped from their perches and lined themselves up at the door, some of them timidly waving to Sister Katherine, who crossed the playground heading toward the convent house.
In the entrance hall Katherine draped her cape on a hook and, still carrying her book bag, ascended the wide front staircase. She planned to read for an hour or so in Problems of Early Childhood Development.
“Sister Katherine?” a soft voice called from behind her.
Halfway up the stairs, Katherine turned, resting one hand on the glossy banister that she had polished and oiled the evening before. “Yes, Sister Prudentia?”
“There’s a call for you.”
Sister Katherine smiled and nodded, although she had longed for the hour alone and uninterrupted. It was not unusual for parents of Sister Mercedes’s students to phone at odd hours to consult Katherine on their children’s progress: Sister Mercedes gave the parents short shrift, and Sister Katherine was always patient and encouraging. “I’ll take it on the library extension,” she said.
Sister Prudentia disappeared, and Katherine hoisted her book bag over her shoulder and hurried back down the steps, hoping that the worried mother could be consoled with only a very few well-chosen and softly spoken words.
Sister Katherine found the library empty. She eased the doors shut and dropped her bag onto a table. Bright early December light poured through the double layer of sheers. Sister Katherine settled into the wingback chair next to the telephone and pressed the only extension button that was flashing.
“Yes? This is Sister Katherine.”
She pulled back her veil and loosened the wimple over her ear. The receiver clacked against her earring. Although it was against order policy for any nun to wear adornment of any sort, there were days when Sister Katherine surreptitiously pressed the ruby chip into her lobe again. It wasn’t that she was vain, it was only that she never felt entirely like herself without it.
Sister Katherine hadn’t heard the first response. “Yes?” she repeated pleasantly. “Who is this, please?”
“Kathy?”
Sister Katherine sat up slowly in the chair. “Who is this?” she demanded. The sunlight seemed to hurt her eyes, and she turned away from the window.
“It’s me, Kathy.”
“What?”
“It’s me,” said her mother again.
Katherine said nothing for several moments. “Ma, why are you calling me here? I told you never to call the convent. So why are you calling? Are you sick? Because you can’t expect me to come all the way out to Framingham to see you if you are. I was just there last month, and it’s hard for me to get permission—”
“Oh, Kathy, no, I’m fine! I’m just fine!’
Katherine now heard the giddiness in her mother’s voice. “Why are you calling, Ma?”
“Oh Kathy, I can’t wait to see you!”
“Ma, I said I couldn’t get out to Framingham—”
“I’m not in Framingham any more.”
Sister Katherine was shocked. “Where are you? Where—”
“I’m in Boston,” said her mother. “They’ve let me out.”
Katherine slumped back in the chair. Her mother’s voice became a scatter of incomprehensible speech.
Katherine had visited her mother four times a year at the prison in Framingham. Reverend Mother Celestine would gladly have given the postulant permission and funds for more frequent journeys, but although the visits cheered Anne Dolan, Katherine told her superior that they left her mother depressed for days afterward, and that the prison psychologist had advised against any greater frequency of meetings. Katherine wrote her mother weekly and carefully saved the postcards that she received in vague reply; these she would have thrown away, but that they bore religious images on the recto. Every visit and every letter closed with the command that Anne Dolan was not to telephone the convent upon any pretext whatever. Sister Katherine said that the receiving of personal calls was a severe infraction of convent discipline.
When Sister Katherine informed her that Anne Dolan had been paroled from prison on good behavior, Mother Superior Celestine, astonished, wondered aloud why Sister Katherine had not before mentioned the possibility of release. Sister Katherine explained uneasily that her mother had kept the parole board meetings a secret even from her, and that she too had been greatly surprised.
“But where is she now? Will she return to her home—to Somerville?”
“No,” said Sister Katherine, “she says she’ll never go back there. Right now she’s in a halfway house in Boston, in the South End.”
“On Tremont Street?”
“Yes, that was the address.”
“I know the place,” replied Mother Superior Celestine. “You must go there tomorrow morning.”
“I—”
“Oh, Sister Katherine, your mother will need so much help in this time of readjustment to society. I suppose she’ll stay in the halfway house until she finds work and a place to live. It’s as nice a place as can be expected, but I don’t think your mother will be able to recover fully until she’s well out of there. The place is crowded just now—overcrowded, actually, so we must put on extra effort to take care of your poor mother. When you see her, tell her that all the prayers of the convent go with her.”
“Oh, yes,” murmured Sister Katherine, “of course I will.”
“I worked in the laundry, and I hated it. I sorted everything, then I washed it and ironed it. I sewed on labels, and I had to make sure it got back to the right person. Every time I raise my hands to my face I can smell ammonia and starch—I think I’ll smell ammonia and starch until the day I die, Kathy! They give you fifteen cents an hour and you have to work nine hours a day. That’s one dollar and thirty-five cents a day, I used to figure it up every day, how much I was getting—and it was always one dollar and thirty-five cents. And you work six days a week—that’s eight dollars and ten cents a week. There’s not much you can buy with that. All I can say is, it’s a good thing that I don’t smoke. All my money would have gone to buy cigarettes. I always did what they told me. I never gave ’em any trouble. Some of the women there wanted to drag me in at first, but when they found out my little girl was a nun, they left me alone. So you protected me in there, honey, though you didn’t know it, it was all because of you being a nun that I got out of there so soon!”
Anne Dolan looked shyly up from her hands, which were folded neatly in her lap. “There’s a coffee machine downstairs. You want to me go down and get us some? I’ve got money—when I left, they gave me all the money I had earned in the laundry.” She started to rise, but Sister Katherine waved her back.
“No, Ma, I don’t want anything.”
Anne Dolan nodded distractedly and fell back. They were sitting in a narrow room, in mismatched straight-backed chairs on either side of a small wooden table that had been painted bright red—as if on purpose to clash with the green walls. Katherine’s skirts brushed against the narrow iron cot, and she turned her face away from the meager winter light that found entrance through the dust-streaked window. The radiator beneath hissed and clanked noisily. Anne Dolan wore a too vivid floral print housedress and flat black shoes. Her hair was entirely gray, cut short and unstyled. She wore no makeup and, despite her release from prison, looked as old and as thin as when Katherine had last visited her.
“Did you keep up Jim’s grave, Kathy? I thought about it a lot—every time it rained or snowed, I thought of him out there under the ground.”
Katherine did not even know in what part of the cemetery her father’s grave was located. But she said, “He’s been well taken care of, Ma. What are you
going to do, Ma? Now that you’re out.”
“I have to get a job, and keep it. That’s part of the parole.”
“Maybe you could get a job in a laundry,” suggested Katherine.
“No!” cried her mother, hurt. “I could never do that again. It’d be like I never left Framingham.”
“There’s not much else you know how to do, Ma,” shrugged Katherine.
“Well I had an idea,” said Anne Dolan, brightening. She leaned forward, resting her bony elbows on the scarred table. “It came to me yesterday right after I talked to you.”
Katherine adjusted her robes impatiently. “Please, Ma, get to the point. I have to get back to the convent.”
“That’s just what I was thinking about—the convent.”
“What about it?” Katherine asked warily. “I told you all about it in my letters.”
“That’s what gave me the idea, honey.” Anne Dolan’s voice rose. “You said it’s a big place and told me about how hard you and the sisters have to work. You must get awful tired sometimes, and it might make a lot of sense if you had somebody there to help, you know, like a priest has a housekeeper. It’s a big place, and there’s probably an extra room up at the top of the house, I bet, and I wouldn’t want any money—or maybe just a little—they’d have to pay me minimum wage so it would be legal, but that’s not much, they—”
The coldness in her daughter’s green eyes stopped her excited speech.
“No, Ma,” said Katherine.
“I’d be right there in the house with you, Kathy!” whispered her mother.
“The nuns do all the work in the house. It’s required. It’s done for penance. Outside help isn’t allowed.”
Blood Rubies Page 23