by Dias, Jason
“Why is that?”
“Because I killed those two people last night.”
Case closed. Open and shut. The priest took those boys and did something bad enough we never found the bodies. She killed the priest. Nothing left to do but figure out why. “All right. We’ll need to drive down to the station. Get that statement on record. That OK with you?”
She smiled. “I would be more comfortable doing it here.”
Irregular. The rear doors didn’t open from inside, though, so she wasn’t going anywhere. I could record her statement now and make her repeat it later. So long as she wanted to talk, I was listening. I had an old-school tape recorder in the glove box, same vintage as the car. “You mind if I tape you, then?”
She smiled again. When I pushed RECORD, she started talking. “It began in Paris in the year seventeen-fifty-eight.”
“OK. But I thought we were talking about murder in twenty-seventeen.”
“If you will indulge an old woman.”
She didn’t look old. She looked mid-twenties. But she looked different tonight from last night. Faded; worn. Dimmer. Her eyes, though, were black hollows, barely there. No eye-shine.
It hit me then: the feeling of wrongness I’d had with her before. Ay’s breath had fogged in front of her in the below-freezing air. Ysabeau’s had not. No fog, no air, no breath. No shadow. No reason for that to come back to me now in the warm, dark car. But there it was. “What are you?”
“Paris, seventeen-fifty-eight. I was in love with a man. I was twenty-four and he just a little older. He worked at a local seminary. Wore the collar. Taught young men, boys, how to love their God and preach his word.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Hush. Listen, and you will.”
She reached forward and touched me on the forehead, right in the middle, never mind the mesh screen. Her hand went through it as if it weren’t there. Her finger felt cold on my skin – dead cold. All my questions dropped out of my mind I slumped against the seat. No capacity to anything but listen.
“He was beautiful. Dark hair, brown eyes, skin like no other man. His father was a minor noble, his mother an African beauty from the colonies. He spoke French with an endearing, outlandish accent, like a pirate.
“I was a maid. I met him when he stayed late one night to work. He was illuminating a Bible in his free time with ink and quills and tiny brushes. I went into his office, surprised to see him, and watched him work for the length of one bell. He never saw me. It was a month before I managed the courage to talk to him. He fell in love with me before he knew what he was doing. That was not to be.”
Strength returned slowly. With it, panic. I tried to speak and only slurred, an ugly, angry noise.
“You are a strong one. Well. I do not wish to take your strength away again. You might not recover. But perhaps you might like to sleep. Perhaps you will dream of me. You poor woman. You have been awake so long now, working so hard, and all of it is my fault. Sleep now.”
She kept talking. I stopped understanding. She was right: I was deathly tired. My eyes slipped shut and the panic receded. The dream came back right away, vivid, dark, smelly and loud. Paris: seventeen fifty-eight.
Her brown dress covered her from neck to ankles. A shawl in the same color concealed her hair. Her nose poked out the front, red with the cold. She hurried through a bitter rain that would soon turn to snow. Her hands, bright from freezing and red from working, clutched the instruments of a maid’s trade: mop and broom, bucket, feather duster. Her hands trembled with fear, and with the cold.
Ysabeau scuttled along the roadway. Dirt and worse slopped up over her shoes. The hem of her dress picked up filth from the roadway. She ducked into the next building in line. A priest held the door for her, his brown sack-cloth robe almost matching her dress. He kept his eyes downcast. She set to work right away, tidying up the cloak room as she dried off. She cleaned her shoes before proceeding deeper into the building.
Her first stop: impressive library. Blond oak harbored glass panes; books resided behind the glass. Leather spines and gold leaf abounded. Ysabeau polished the glass and dusted the wood, working with steady industry. But she kept glancing back at the door.
Her beau came into the library after everyone else had left for the night. He found her working. He spoke to her. In French, but the tone sounded kind. She looked at the floor, cheeks red. When she spoke back in response to a question, she was quiet and demure. Not him she feared, then.
“That is the moment.” I heard the voice in my mind more than in my ear, but I fancied I could feel a warm breath on my face. “I fell in love with him when he noticed I was cold and tired. He asked me if I might like a sip of brandy to fortify me. I told him, non, merci mais non. Of course he saw how I blushed and he went away, afraid to make me uncomfortable.”
He went to an office on the same floor. He worked with a magnifying glass and a tiny paintbrush on a piece of vellum. It stood, clipped to an easel, at eye level. The priest worked at a giant letter A. Ysabeau came to watch, hiding in the doorway. He was worth watching. About my height, with curly dark hair and smooth, rich skin. He wore a long frock that gave him a waist, accentuating broad shoulders and narrow hips. He focused on his painting with an intense stare that would send shivers through my body if turned onto me.
“This is how it was. I would clean, then I would watch him work into the night. Sometimes the Bishop would come and I would hide in my work. The Bishop was… unkind.”
I remembered that my body reclined in a car in a parking lot in the middle of winter. Incapacitated in an enclosed space with a woman whose body could ignore basic physical laws.
“Ooh, hush. So strong a will. How can I ever show you what happened if you fight all the time? Watch this, then.”
The scene changed. I watched as the magnificent young man embraced Ysabeau. She sat on the edge of the desk. In her excitement, she knocked over the easel. The vellum sheet slushed to the ground, ignored. The man stepped up between her knees. Pushed up her skirts. Passionate kisses, mouths open. I could almost feel the heat of their bodies. He hiked up his own frock. Buttocks thrusted as they coupled, the sounds of their passion filling the holy place of study.
“It was a sin. He broke his vows. To be celibate, to devote all of his love to God. Such a small thing, really, to make love to a woman. We made love many times. I would clean the library and the schoolroom. I would spy on him until he caught me. And then we would make love. He said he would marry me but I would not allow it: he would have to leave the Church in that case. Sin compounded sin as he lied to them, to his superiors, pretending to uphold his oaths.”
The scene changed again. Ysabeau, asleep in a dark room with three other women. The door cracked open, flinders raining onto the bare wood floor. The four women, all huddled together in a pile of blankets on one straw mattress, screamed and panicked. Two soldiers strode into the room. An old priest, short and gaunt, entered behind them, holding high an oil lamp. White hair wisped around his temples. His scalp boasted liver-spots and his nose was crooked.
“That one,” he said.
The soldiers dragged Ysabeau out of the pile in her nightgown. She screamed, holding her nightcap against her scalp. Her belly betrayed a pregnancy at least three months along.
“Ysabeau Jean-Baptiste. You are remanded into the custody of L’Hotel Dieu until the delivery of your child. Such child will be given over to the Church upon delivery and you will then face charges of collusion against the Church and conspiring to seduce one of the clergy. These men will escort you.”
They dragged her out of the room, faces blank, ignoring her cries and protests. The other three women shrank back against the wall.
They took her away. Through early-morning streets, before the city had awakened. They passed shopkeepers and tradesmen preparing for the work of the day. The priest led the way, the soldiers behind and to either side of her. A building sat on its own parcel of land. It looked institutional and
at the same time palatial.
The priest stopped short of entering the grounds. “Hotel Dieu. Here you will stay for the next four months.”
That made her further along than she looked.
Inside, nurses in white uniforms took over. Ysabeau had run out of voice to scream with by then. Three women told her to undress. She obliged, fumbling at the rags she wore, letting them slide one by one to the ground. Her pronounced belly contrasted with the half-starved state of her limbs and chest. Pale, bony, veins prominent. Her body hairs all stood on end; her tiny nipples were so hard they must have been painful.
The nurses threw cold water over her and scrubbed at her with brooms. Her skin reddened with both the cold and the rough treatment. Then they dressed her in white pajamas with blue arrows all over them.
The place stank of urine, cabbage and blood. They herded a now dry Ysabeau onto a ward populated by women in similar condition.
“You are confined,” said one of the nurses. Overweight in a place where food was scarce, she was tall, too, and imposing in her white dress and pink apron and bonnet. “We will care for you until you have your baby. Then we will care for the baby. You can go at that time. Everyone knows what those clothes mean; if you escape, whoever finds you will return you to this place. These women were all careless.” The nine other women all pretended not to listen, looking at their sewing or out the barred window at the courtyard below. “Prostitutes, mostly, but a few little ladies hoping to avoid embarrassment. Which one you are, they did not tell me. I care not. You behave and we care for you. You do not, and we give you to the nuns upstairs. They will know what to do.”
Ysabeau decided. She went to a wooden chair and sat primly in her pajamas. A sewing box occupied a table in the middle of the room. She started to rummage in there, a signal that she meant to cooperate. The nurses backed away to go about their work.
“It is time to awaken now.”
I did.
Sunlight wafted through the windscreen. My teeth chattered even as daylight slowly warmed the frigid car. Of course I was alone in there. No ghostly, mind-controlling passengers.
The car started easily. Legal or not, I left it running while I went into the 7-11 for more coffee. Nobody stole it. By the time I returned, the blower moved vaguely warm air around the cabin. Coffee, heat and the light of day each worked to banish the nightmares incurred due to exhaustion and weird real-life events.
Slowly.
Each part of the dream had been exceptionally vivid. That first stop in Paris: it had smelled, clanked and shaken. So real. The visit from Ysabeau cannot have been real but it felt that way. I could almost feel her finger on my forehead, the movement of the car on its springs as it took on her weight. The second visit to Paris as a disembodied point of view, drifting along behind events. The stink of the hospital. Everything so bright and real.
All just nightmares.
The tape had stopped and rewound itself. I pushed PLAY. There was the sound of my voice, querulous, and nothing else. She wasn’t there.
I raised Burt on the phone.
“You have something?” she said by way of greeting.
“Frostbite and a sour gut from too much coffee. Never saw her. Anyone else make contact overnight?”
“You know as much as I do. I haven’t even left the house yet. You don’t usually call me with nothing, Sanchez. What’s on your mind?”
I took a deep breath. I’d never lied or even held back before, not with Burt. I’d called to say what happened: I fell asleep. It was understandable. She’d razz me for it a little and we’d move on with life.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just a bad feeling on this one. Guess I’ll take a headshot of victim number one and walk it around the missing kids’ church. See if anyone can place him there in uniform.”
“Negative. Go home. Sleep at least four hours. I’ll put Eads on it.”
“Eads? Are you sure she’s ready for it?”
She sighed. “She’s a grown-ass woman, Sanchez. Not too much to waving a photo around. You make Detective and start thinking you’re the only competent human on the planet. Home. Rest. Now.”
I felt doubly bad now. I’d had plenty of sleep. But orders are orders.
Home remained as I’d left it. Dishes rotted in the sink. The bed hadn’t been made since I’d moved in. Laundry gathered dust in the hamper at the end of the bed. A good person would have attended to one of these chores. I fell into the unmade bed, barely stopping to kick off my shoes. Turns out a couple of hours dozing in the freezing car overnight did not qualify as quality rest after all.
Dreamless sleep. A ringing phone woke me four hours later; I felt as if no time had passed at all, as if I had been dead for that span of time.
Day
“You up?” Burt.
“Yes.”
“Eads obtained definitive confirmation,” she said. “Your priest was up at St. Mary’s in full regalia, never mind retirement. Looks open and shut.”
My thinking exactly. “Just need to find bodies. Low priority from a safety standpoint but parents will want closure. Political fallout?”
“Not going there, Sanchez.”
“Roger that.” I tied my shoes while I talked. “That from on high?”
“Does it need to be?”
“Guess not. I’ll be there in twenty.”
I was just a foot-soldier in the war on crime. No politician. No crusader. I solved one crime at a time within the confines of a flawed system. But someone out there was a crusader. I feared there would be more victims here at home, and that they would start to crop up around the country. All that extended above my pay grade, so I took some coffee to go and headed back to the office.
The 7-11 waited on the way. I drove by slowly, eyeballing the place. I couldn’t say what I expected. The sun sat high in the sky. The usual variety of criminal and pseudo-criminal elements lurked around the place as in any poor neighborhood, but no emo ladies. I hadn’t honestly expected any. Just a conditioned reaction.
Ay pulled her feet down off the desk as I came in, pointed to a file folder. I sat and opened it up.
Medical reports. Autopsy, tox screen, patient history. Only the first couple of pages interested me out of the nearly two hundred in the file. Jolene wrote medicalese: a specific kind of jargon you learn to navigate if you’re around it enough. “This the only one?”
“Yeah. Just the priest so far. The secretary must be in progress.”
Or maybe Jolene was just writing her up now.
“Broken neck?” Ay said.
“No. Technically, that means a fracture of one or more of the cervical vertebrae. Disarticulation.”
“Like when you rip off a limb?”
“Yeah. An internal decapitation: the spinal cord severed by a severe twisting motion. None of the vertebrae are broken but everything else is. A nasty torsion injury.”
“Like a combat move in a bad movie.”
“On steroids,” I said. “Blood loss, cause unknown. Not like Jo to admit she doesn’t know how something happened. Must be why this took so long. She seems to have gone over every inch of skin, and then ran saline solution through the circulatory system without finding an egress point.”
“What?”
“Well, did you ever patch a bicycle tire?”
“No.”
“Square one, then. You have a flat. Take the tire off and partially inflate the tube. Stick it underwater a bit at a time.”
“And look for the bubbles.”
I shut the file and rubbed my temples. “No bubbles, no flat. Except we have a flat. Someone took all the air out without puncturing the tube.”
Ay sat back in her chair, sympathetically mimicking my position. “Maybe how isn’t so important as who. I mean, how is a clue to who, but we put together incomplete pictures all the time. When you find who, the rest usually comes together. We have the why, which is the most important thing.”
“Shit.” She was right. And wrong. “We don’t have the wh
y. Burt isn’t going to like this.”
“Why not?”
“We’re going to have to go interstate to understand the why. We have some of it. This guy was a pederast. He messed around with somebody’s kid. I bet he left him alive. We catch lots of pervs because they diddle around but they leave witnesses. They go to prison, and that’s no fun. And they don’t reform. They learn not to leave witnesses.”
“So what?”
“So that was working for him. Doesn’t seem that anyone here knew about him yet. We need to find out who in New York City knew about this guy. Who were his victims. I’ll start making phone calls.”
“Maybe there’s a local end to work, too. I can discretely contact some officials here. Look, we already know that the church knew. We need to know what they knew.”
I nodded, already partway into dialing the New York State Attorneys General office. If they had an investigation, maybe I could peek at the files. If they didn’t, they’d know who did.
An hour later, I had a notepad full of nothing. Bupkis, as they said out in NYC. No investigation, no leads. They never heard of Sidney Carrington. Not so much as a driving license. “I got nothing,” I said. “How’d you do?”
“Stonewall. Diocese declined to comment. Wouldn’t confirm or deny he was a former employee. I mean, I have bank records with deposits from them to him. They won’t say word one, though.”
“Damn.” More temple-rubbing. “This is going to hurt.”
“Why?”
“I have an in.”
“So? Oh. Oh no.”
“That’s right. My ex-husband.”
“You don’t have to do that. God, if you asked me to talk to my ex about anything at all… never mind if his faith happened to be his work. I have an idea. You literally don’t have to do it. Give me his number, I’ll do it. I can name-check you.”
“Won’t work. He’ll toe the party line. I’m going to have to make it personal.”
Ay looked really pale, probably thinking about her own previous love.