Katherine slammed down the lock. “Washington Street,” she demanded of the driver, and looked with terror at the grinning face that peered at her through the streaked window.
Katherine was let out on the corner of Washington and Stuart streets. She was glad that she had had the sense not to tell the driver to take her to the public library, for the man—if he followed—would easily have found her there. Heavy wet snow had begun to fall from the slate-gray sky, and Katherine knew that she must get quickly away. It was still possible that the man in the bus station would find her—he might have heard the little she did tell the driver.
She pulled up the hood of her cape and looked about, not certain in which direction to go. Suddenly she realized the full implication of his words: “Little Wenham girl, little Wenham girl . . .” He had thought her Andrea LoPonti in disguise. Katherine shivered and felt weak. She took a deep breath of the cold air and moved down Stuart Street in the direction of Chinatown. At the corner of Harrison Avenue, as she was waiting for the traffic light to change, she remembered the church that was just around the corner. She turned and hurried toward it. There she would be safe.
36
Andrea drove from Jamaica Plain into downtown Boston. On that ride through the fog-shrouded streets the realization had come to her in all its terrible force that she had just murdered two human beings—murdered them in an almost casual fashion. Yet her only regret was that she had left Jack alive. She thought of her house in Weston, and of her parents who lay dead inside it. Brutally to herself, Andrea remembered how she had last seen them: cold, stiff, spattered with blood. The gun that had killed them now tugged in the pocket of her jacket. She parked the Trans-Am on a quiet street in the South End that was labeled Resident Parking Only and walked up Tremont Street until she came to a coffee shop. Here she sat with a cup of coffee that grew cold as she tried to gather her wits and control the shaking of her limbs.
She could not return to Weston, knowing that her parents lay dead in the house. She could not go to Wenham, either: the dormitory would not open for another two days. It was impossible to go to the police before her parents were found, because she would be forced to account for her absence. And it would be improvident to tell of the house in Jamaica Plain before the murders were discovered there. She had come to a hopeless pass.
Andrea, badly confused, wandered Boston all that day. It was with trepidation that she turned every corner, and with terror that she saw any jeep parked or moving in traffic. Although the morning had dissipated the fog, it had brought with it cold air. Nevertheless, Andrea sat on a bench in the Public Gardens and hurriedly devoured the hamburgers she had bought in a McDonald’s near the Common. The afternoon she spent in a sordid cinema on Washington Street: it played a double bill of two fifties horror films, a serial from the forties, and half an hour of trailers. Through it all, Andrea was distracted by the snoring of tramps sleeping in the seats around her and the wail of a trombone from the strip joint that adjoined the theatre.
Although she wasn’t hungry, she returned to the McDonald’s for dinner, and that night she sat through The Empire Strikes Back two and a half times. She had been four days now without a bath, and in that time she had been kidnapped, gang raped, and shot up with heroin—it was no wonder she was stared at in the street.
That night she took a room in a small hotel on lower Washington Street: she was too dishevelled to be admitted to any of the better places; she had no identification for the YWCA, and her plight there would doubtless excite curiosity. She paid in advance with some of the money that had been stolen from her father. The clerk asked for how many hours she wanted the room.
“All night,” she stammered.
He shrugged and handed her the key. “Do you want to leave your name, honey?” he asked. “In case there are any messages, I mean?”
“There won’t be any messages,” said Andrea, entering the rickety elevator. All night long, as she lay fully clothed on the soiled sheets, she listened to doors opened and slammed all along the corridor. On her way to the bathroom she had seen two frowsy women assisting two very drunken men into one bedroom, and a still more drunken man exiting from another.
Finding no cloth or towel in the bathroom, she returned to her room, ripped off a strip of material from the curtains hanging across the single grimy window, returned, and washed herself clean with that. Toward morning she slept a little, but a man with a gimlet eye and a bucket opened her door at nine o’clock and told her she had to get out.
“Who are you?” Andrea whispered.
“Oh,” he leered, “I’m just the chambermaid.”
That morning Andrea purchased a Globe from a machine and, while she drank coffee at a booth in Burger King, read the account of her parents’ deaths.
On the obituary page she found another notice of both her father and her mother, detailing their civic accomplishments. In the column Other Deaths, subdivision “Jamaica Plain,” she hunted in vain for notice of Morgie and Sid. The fact that they had not yet been reported dead made Andrea apprehensive. By all rights their deaths should have been listed—how had Dominic and Rita and Jack kept them secret? Andrea shoved the paper aside with a trembling hand.
At a clothing store on Washington Street, she purchased two new outfits, and next door, at a discount drugstore, she picked up a large selection of toiletries and a cheap suitcase. In a restroom at City Hall she changed into one of the outfits, leaving her much-soiled other clothing on the hook in a stall, retaining only her pea jacket. She applied makeup carefully but sparingly and, in the early afternoon, checked into a Holiday Inn on Huntingdon Avenue.
She wanted time to think. She was almost certain now that she would turn herself in to the police; even if worse came to worst, she could admit to the killings of Morgie and Sid, pleading insanity by reason of drugs and multiple rape. Not even the jury that had convicted Patty Hearst would declare her guilty after she had told her tale. She needed only a little time to get her story straight. She did not yet know whether or not she had best wait until the deaths of Morgie and Sid were made public before she went to the police.
But as she sat alone in the motel room and stared out at the traffic along Huntingdon Avenue three floors below, she could think of nothing but that her parents were dead, and that she was alone in the world. How was she to deal with that? Even if she were to come through all these crowding troubles, there would be nothing of value to her on the other side. There would be no more shopping trips with her mother; her father would never trim another tree. The Society for the Preservation of Weston Antiquities would have to elect a new recording secretary, and the hydrangeas would die of neglect.
Eventually she slept, a heavy, unrestful slumber. When she waked, it was to find that she had merely fallen across the bed. Her feet still rested squarely on the carpet. It was ten o’clock. Andrea walked dazed out of the motel, ate at Brigham’s in Prudential Center, and returned. Having thought of nothing at all, she undressed, turned down the covers of the bed, and fell immediately asleep again.
She rose at noon, roused by the knock of a more respectable chambermaid. She secured the room for another day and decided that she would walk around for a few hours, allow the air to refresh her and clear her mind —and then, if she had convinced herself that nothing was to be irretrievably lost by it, she would turn herself in to the police. She would appear on their steps as Andrea LoPonti, the unfortunate daughter of the upright couple who had been brutally slain in their house in Weston.
“I was kidnapped,” she’d say. “I was taken to this house in Jamaica Plain, and I was raped. I was given drugs, and I’ve been wandering Boston in a daze.”
Andrea had had a lunch of boiled duck on rice in an out-of-the-way Chinese restaurant that seemed to be frequented principally by pimps and nurses. As she walked through the beginning snow toward the center of town, her attention was attracted by
a nun, in full black habit, who was let out of a cab on Stuart Street. There was something familiar about her, and while the traffic light continued against them, Andrea studied her.
It was the nun that Marsha had pointed out on the boardwalk at Nantasket Beach. It was Andrea’s double.
The lights changed, and the nun crossed the street. Backing out of the way into the recessed door of a bank, Andrea watched as she passed.
The nun crossed Harrison Avenue between double-parked cars and mounted the steps of a church. She stopped for a moment at the schedule of services and then went inside. Impulsively, Andrea followed her.
Inside the church, Andrea took a place in the last pew. She watched the nun perform the Stations of the Cross. When the nun had finished, genuflected before the main altar, and started back up the aisle again, Andrea stood in the pew to face her. Andrea knew that she would speak to her. But what she would say, she had no idea.
The nun stopped a few feet away, and the ashen expression on her face convinced Andrea that she too was strongly affected by their resemblance. When Andrea took a single step toward the aisle, the nun all but ran toward the doors. Still acting purely on instinct, and not knowing why it seemed suddenly vital that she speak to this young woman in black robes, Andrea quickly followed her.
Within the dark vestibule, lighted only by a buzzing low-watted bulb in the ceiling, the nun struggled to pull open one of the heavy brassbound front doors. A thin slash of gray light and a dissipating line of snow spilled inside.
Andrea grabbed the nun’s arm, jerked her back into the vestibule, and slammed the door shut.
The nun twisted her arm free and cowered against the door. Her bag slipped over her arm and dropped to the tile floor. She fumbled with the great doorknob behind her.
“The police are looking for you!” the nun hissed.
“How do you know that?” said Andrea. Her voice, to her surprise, sounded normal. It was as if she were responding to a remark made in a classroom.
The nun managed to pull the door open. She jumped forward with the knob in her hand. A blast of snow-laden wind gushed inside and billowed the nun’s cape about her head. Andrea retreated a step.
“How do you know that?” repeated Andrea, more forcefully. The nun’s face shone in the pale daylight. A middle-aged couple slipped through the open door and smiled at the nun. “Thank you,” they said, and hurried through the cold vestibule into the sanctuary.
“Close that door!” cried Andrea.
The nun allowed the door to slam shut.
“Don’t you know who I am?” she said.
“Who you are?” demanded Andrea. “How should I know who you are?”
“I’m your sister.”
Andrea’s mouth dropped open. Her breath was stopped.
“I am your sister,” the nun repeated, her voice almost defiant.
Andrea blinked, and did not conceal the grim smile that began to crease her mouth.
37
Katherine laid her hand next to Andrea’s. “Look at our hands, they’re exactly alike. If our hands are exactly alike, and everything else is the same, then we’ve got to be twin sisters.”
Andrea saw only that her nail polish was chipped, and that the nails of the nun had been bitten almost to the quick.
They sat in the last booth of a narrow restaurant two doors away from the church. Andrea had her back to the entrance; she had removed neither her hat nor her coat. Katherine sat with her right arm pressed firmly against the inside wall, as if for support.
The waitress placed two white porcelain mugs between them. The steaming coffee sloshed over the rims of both cups and splashed the table. Katherine pulled several paper napkins from the holder and began wiping up the liquid. Andrea held the mug in her hands, but did not drink from it.
“Why do you think I’m your sister?”
“We look just alike,” replied Katherine.
“I know that. I’ve seen you before. I saw you on the boardwalk at Nantasket Beach, with some children,” Andrea said, and then added carefully, “but I’ve got other doubles too, you know.”
“Other doubles?” asked Katherine. “Did your other doubles wear earrings just like yours?” asked Sister Katherine softly. She pushed back her wimple and turned her head so that Andrea saw the ruby chip embedded in her left ear.
Andrea began to stammer.
Katherine said: “I’m not supposed to wear this, of course. It’s an infraction of rules. But I’ve had it all my life, and it’s hard to give it up. Now it’s the only thing that’s left of my former life. My father is dead—he was murdered in Somerville.”
“That was you too!” whispered Andrea. “I’ve had this earring all my life too. I’ve always worn it. How—”
“Because we’re sisters, that’s how. We’re twin sisters.”
Katherine told Andrea about the tenement fire in the North End: their mother’s death and the second baby whose body was never found. “These earrings must have belonged to our mother—so she gave one to each of us. And then she died.”
“I don’t know . . .” said Andrea doubtfully.
“You’re my sister,” said Sister Katherine adamantly, “I know you’re my sister. I dreamed about you my whole life. I used to think I was dreaming about myself, but all the time I was just dreaming about you. And in the past few days I’ve been having nightmares . . .”
“What about?” asked Andrea guardedly.
“I don’t know. I can’t remember. But I wake up scared. Why haven’t you gone to the police?”
Andrea looked up startled.
“I read the paper this morning,” said Sister Katherine. “I’m sorry—”
“Thank you,” said Andrea stiffly. “How do you know I haven’t gone to the police?”
“Because if you had, you’d be in Weston now. Your parents are dead, and you’d be in Weston now, seeing about their funerals.”
“I have my reasons,” said Andrea. “I have reasons for not going to the police yet. And listen,” she cried in a menacing whisper, at the same time crushing Sister Katherine’s patent leather shoe with her scuffed boot, “don’t say a word—don’t say a word about seeing me, you hear, nobody knows where I am, and for right now, I don’t want anybody to know.”
“You didn’t have anything to do with . . .” began Sister Katherine tremulously; she was afraid to complete her question.
“Of course I didn’t!” cried Andrea. “I loved Mother and Daddy, I loved them—” She wiped away her angry tears.
“I’m not going to tell anybody,” said Katherine, “but I really think you—”
“I don’t care what you think,” said Andrea. “If you’re really my sister—”
“Don’t you believe me?!”
“Yes!” cried Andrea, “I believe you, whatever you want to tell me, I’ll believe it! But if you’re my sister, then you’re going to help me.”
“How?” stammered Sister Katherine. “I can’t—”
“You said you were in a missionary order, didn’t you, and your mission is to help people, isn’t it, you’ve made vows to help people for the rest of your life, haven’t you?”
“Yes . . .”
“Then you’ll help me, you’ll help your long-lost twin sister.”
“Do you need money? I have a little, I don’t think I have more than—”
“I don’t need any money, but I may need your help with something else, I’ve got to think all this through first, though, I’ve got to think what’s the best thing for me to do.”
“The best thing to do is to go to the police.”
“No it’s not! Not yet anyway. You’re right, and I’m in trouble, and it’s because I think the people that killed Mother and Daddy are going to try to kill me too.”
“Wh
y don’t you just go to the police then? They’ll protect you.”
“No! I can’t do that yet!”
“Why not?”
Andrea turned her head away for a moment, and did not answer.
“Listen,” said Katherine.
“What?”
“After I got off the bus this morning, I was in the station, and this man stopped me, and he thought I was you, he called me ‘little Wenham girl,’and I didn’t realize he was talking about you, I was scared, I—”
Katherine could see the fear in Andrea’s eyes.
“He called you ‘little Wenham girl’?”
“Yes,” said Katherine.
“What’d he look like?”
Katherine gave a description of the man.
“Did he have an accent?”
“Yes.”
“It was Dominic,” said Andrea with despair. “How did you manage to get away from him?”
“I jumped in a taxi, and he didn’t have time to follow me. I thought he was just crazy. I wasn’t thinking about you, he scared me so much.”
“He scares me too,” said Andrea grimly. Then she looked closely into Sister Katherine’s eyes. “I’ve got to see you again.”
“No!” cried Sister Katherine. “I can’t come into Boston any more. I’m being transferred—”
“You’re lying,” said Andrea mildly. “Listen, if you’re really my sister, then you’ll talk with me again, I just want to talk. See me tomorrow, just for a little while, just to talk. Tonight I’m going to think about what to do, I’m going to make my plans, and tomorrow I may need to talk to you, that’s all, just talk.”
“I really can’t come back to Boston again, I got special permission today to—”
“I don’t care about that,” snapped Andrea. “I’ll be in Hingham tomorrow.”
Blood Rubies Page 27