The trees absorb his echo.
“I DON’T LIKE THIS GAME!” Baby Pauly leaps onto Anthony’s back, tightening his arms. “STOP! YOU KILLED HER!”
Anthony twists Baby Pauly’s wrist, batting him away.
Jesus and the hundred virgin martyrs weep and sing.
Amen, concludes the heavenly choir. It is done; you’re one of us!
Who will put her back together? No such thing, the choir sings.
“THE MAILMAN IS COMING!” Baby Pauly catches sight of a blue uniform. “THE MAILMAN WILL SAVE US!”
“Shit!” Anthony closes the little girl’s coat and pulls up his zipper.
The girl watches from above, floating with the angels. She suffers from below, shattered and mostly dead. She will never be whole again. The beautiful separate floating girl slides down from the trees into the little broken body on the forest floor.
Kneeling in the parking lot of Our Lady Queen of Sorrows, Cee-Cee screams. Her voice startles everyone standing there watching.
The lady holds her hands and comforts her. It is clear that Cee-Cee will spend the rest of her life trying to piece herself together; that will be her task. Tears slide down her face.
“I like my version better,” Cee-Cee says.
All around, everyone is still watching. She can hear them breathe.
A few Sisters fall to their knees, crossing themselves and bowing.
“Do you see that light?” someone whispers.
The lady soothes Cee-Cee with caresses so sweet she is almost consoled.
“Peace, my little flower,” the lady says. “You are like a path to the blind. You are loving and pure. Your life is the prayer.”
The lady tells Cee-Cee three secrets.
Six children who live very far away will someday transmit the lady’s messages for the rest of their lives. This is God’s plan for saving the world, she says.
That’s the plan? Cee-Cee says.
The lady nods. To touch every heart. To have the whole world believe in miracles, pray for peace and follow the light. Love is simple, but it is not easy. The sign flashing above the lady’s head is a long word that Cee-Cee doesn’t know, Medjugorje.
Cee-Cee feels sorry for the six children, who don't have any idea what's about to hit them, but also she feels a little spark of envy.
Probably no one will listen to them anyway.
She feels sorry for a world that’s so dumb.
The lady has to leave, she says, and kisses Cee-Cee good-bye.
Cee-Cee stands and stumbles inside the circle of Sisters and cops. She is struck by a head-splitting vision that lodges at the base of her skull: all the missing girls in New York State piled up, tied down, cowering, whimpering, shouting, scratching.
Cee-Cee’s blood pressure drops.
She has to hope the lady knows what she’s doing, because Cee-Cee cannot possibly find them all.
Al now circles the Pinto, calling for reinforcements. Everyone turns to watch him. The car doors are wide open on both sides, a June bug about to take flight.
“Check for explosives,” Vinnie calls across the parking lot to his partner.
Al opens the hatch and searches. “Nothing here!”
“Confess your crimes, Mother General!” Sister Edward shouts. “Repent your sins! What exactly are you up to? I demand to know.”
“Shut up!” Vinnie’s captive bursts out unexpectedly. Vinnie can feel her fury. “If Mother Amanda is guilty, it’s only of helping girls like me—girls nobody cares about until after we disappear.”
Twisting into a sort of half gainer, Vinnie’s captive manages to free herself at last. She shoves him away and heads for the tall grass in a full-out sprint.
“Halt!” Vinnie aims his weapon into the sky and fires off a round of ammunition.
In the distance, sirens sound. Everyone freezes, waiting for bullets to fall from heaven.
After the State police round up all the children in the parking lot, Mary Margaret’s parents show up, steaming mad.
“Jesus!” Mary Margaret’s stepfather says. “What happened here?”
“They arrested the Sisters,” Roadie says. “It took the State police and a S.W.A.T. team to get them all in handcuffs."
“Good God. What for?”
Roadie shrugs.
A state cop steps in and answers the question: “Conspiracy, kidnapping, and four counts of endangering a minor.”
Cee-Cee and Roadie watch Blanche drive Norbert Sasso away. Through the window, he waves at Cee-Cee, and she waves back. You can tell by the way Blanche hightails it out of the parking lot that Norbert is in big trouble.
Unable to reach Frank and Glory, the cops discuss what to do with Cee-Cee and Roadie. Someone suggests calling protective services, but Mrs. Cortina pipes up, “We’ll take the Bianco children home with us.”
Her husband groans and shakes his head.
“You can take us to All Saints,” Roadie says. “That’s where our family is.”
“Get in the car—all of you!” Mary Margaret’s stepfather says before addressing the cop: “I’ll take these children to their parents.”
In the back seat, Roadie and Cee-Cee sit with Mary Margaret, who seems exhausted.
“Did you see them dragging the Sisters away?” Mary Margaret says. “All this time they’ve been recruiting girls and teaching them to be soldiers in some kind of underground army!”
“Not exactly,” Cee-Cee says. “But close.”
“They have bombs, don’t they? They’re going to burn things down!”
“No.”
Mary Margaret looks disappointed. Her baby brother dozes safely in the crook of her arm, diaper wet and sagging.
Driving like a maniac, Mr. Cortina turns around at every stoplight to yell at them: “I don’t know what the hell you kids are thinking, pulling a stunt like that, disappearing with the baby!”
In the passenger seat, Mary Margaret’s mother smiles oddly, humming softly. “Ooh, Russ! I love this song! Turn it up!”
“I should haul the lot of you off to prison myself!”
Roadie leans forward to take the brunt of it. “Sorry, sir.”
“The lady had a message for you,” Cee-Cee says.
Roadie looks around the car. “For me?”
Cee-Cee nods: “She says one day the world will say God despises you and God wants you dead, but it isn’t true, so don’t believe it. God loves you most of all. ”
Roadie’s eyes are big. “Me?”
“Hey, that’s Luke!” Mary Margaret says, reciting the passage by heart. “Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake—Sister Edward drills that crap into our heads.”
Cee-Cee adds her own message: “Also, Roadie: Don’t be such a coward.”
Roadie bites his nail, turning to face out the window without answering.
Mary Margaret leans back against the seat, looking out the window on her side. “What about me? What’s my message?”
Cee-Cee puts her head on Mary Margaret’s shoulder. “Can’t tell you yet.”
“Later?” she says, hopeful.
“Maybe.”
Mary Margaret squeezes the baby closer to her. “What about Tiger? Isn’t anyone going to save him?”
“Already done.”
Mary Margaret whispers urgently. “We have to keep him away from that lunatic.”
Cee-Cee runs her hand across the sleeping baby’s head. He smells like urine. “Your stepfather’s not the problem, Mary Margaret.”
They both watch Mrs. Cortina sing with the radio: “We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun…”
Mary Margaret sinks back into her seat. “No way.”
“Sister Amanda says we each get a hundred mothers to care for us,” Cee-Cee tells her. “Imagine that—a hundred each.”
Mary Margaret closes her eyes. “Sister Amanda is going to jail.”
&n
bsp; They ride in silence the rest of the way, hurtling down Main Street toward Baby Pauly—as if the past never happened, as if the future were merely an eye blink away.
In the Romeville holding tank at the police station, Amanda paces. She will either be sent upstate, or released to Father Giuseppe, who is contacting the church lawyers in Albany. He was her first and only phone call.
“We’ve been discovered,” she said into the phone.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “Where are you?”
“Jail with most of the other Sisters. It’s kind of a long story. The girls from Canada got spooked and spilled the beans.”
Despite the seriousness of the situation and the fact that this pretty much means the end of his bid for Archbishop, Father Giuseppe laughs. “Okay, sit tight. We’ll have you back home by midnight.”
Amanda walks in circles around her cellmates, mostly the other Sisters and a couple of prostitutes from Geneva, New York.
“How far, Mother General,” Sister Edward hisses from a bench on the other side of the cell, “how far you have strayed.”
Sister Eugene growls. “Saving children in the name of peace is hardly straying, Edward! At least she tried to save someone.”
Sister Pius sticks her face through the bars. “Not just someone. How about dozens of girls all up and down the East Coast? Many from right here in Romeville who would probably otherwise be dead by now! How many people can say that? Who have you saved, Sister Edward?”
“She stole those girls!” Sister Edward says. “Your Mother General is no better than the Romeville Snatcher…Maybe that’s exactly who she is! A kidnapper and liar!”
There is frightening silence; the Sisters shuffle closer together.
“I never retrieved a single girl,” Amanda says. “They came to me for help.”
Sister Edward rolls her eyes. “That’s not what your little protégé said. That’s not what the police say.”
If in the end what Amanda has done is indeed wrong, she will confess and repent and be redeemed. It is all any of God’s shepherds ever needs to do: admit to doing wrong, avoid doing it again.
“I have only followed my heart,” she says, the final word on the matter.
The outer office of the police station is abuzz with activity. Processing the night’s arrests, Vinnie fills out papers at his desk.
“You’ll probably get a medal,” Al says. “Cracking a ring of underground radicals trafficking in children. Wow!”
Al has become a believer. To him, it’s as if Vinnie has been investigating anti-government nuns all along, just pretending to fumble around with small-potatoes missing-person cases.
Al spreads the new version of their story around the precinct.
“The FBI guys are pissed,” he says. “They’ve been following those Sisters for years, trying to pin all sorts of crimes on them: two Nixon assassination attempts, a Kissinger kidnapping plot, a plan to bomb the Library of Congress.”
“There’ll be a team of church lawyers from Albany,” Vinnie says. “Bail will be posted and they’ll probably get off scot-free. Anyway, I don’t know about all that. There were no explosives.”
“One of the Feds said he found gasoline and rags in the church’s garage.” Al smiles. “They call that shit a Molotov cocktail.”
“Every garage has rags and gasoline. It’ll be hard to get charges to stick.”
Vinnie is worried about his own personal nun: Sister Edward. He let her get arrested along with the rest for appearance’s sake, but he’s made certain she will be the first one released. Lucky for Vinnie, Al hasn’t mentioned the business of his mistaking the young girl in the Pinto for Eileena Brice Iaccamo.
Shortly after it became clear that neither Miranda was actually the one he was trying to save, they simply let the girls go. The two of them ran off into the fields near the school. No use getting innocent teenagers involved, no use having to deal with the mess of mistaken identity and false arrest. Anyway, there weren’t enough restraints to go around for all the arrests they needed to make.
“I don’t know,” Vinnie says. “An officer can get fired for discharging his weapon without cause.”
“It was a warning. Besides, no one got hurt. They’ll go easy on you…you’re a hero!”
Vinnie’s not so sure. A panel will have to consider the matter of where his warning shot landed. Weird thing is, no one seems to have found any bullet casings on the first sweep of the church’s grounds.
Vinnie wonders if maybe the tide has turned for him.
It’s not often a person’s life gets turned around, whether by fate or God—whatever you want to call stupid blind luck that alternately ruins or redeems lives. You’re in the wrong life at the wrong time, and presto! you get a second chance. Years later, looking back, Vinnie will see how everything conspired to open the doors of his future happiness.
“Lucky bastard,” Al says, reading his mind.
“I guess.”
“Some of those nuns said they saw a light in the sky,” Al says. “You know, when the Bianco girl was choking.”
“Yeah?”
“You didn’t see anything, did you?”
Vinnie had seen lightning in the clouds. “Nope.”
Al points to a bench where Liam Iaccamo, unwilling witness to the entire evening, sits slouched, half asleep. “What about him?”
“We sent everyone else home.”
Al shrugs.
Vinnie looks at the sleeping kid, then away. “Free to go.”
Al shakes the boy. “Go on home now! Party’s over!”
Liam Iaccamo sits up abruptly. Startled, he looks around, sees Vinnie across the room.
“Hey!” His voice cracks. “Hey, Officer, you know that girl you caught?”
Vinnie grunts, struggling with the typewriter; he’s never been very good with machines. He’s only got an hour to process the night’s arrests.
“She wasn’t even my sister, asshole!”
Eventually Vinnie will close the Iaccamo file for good. Permanent status: case unsolved.
Standing outside the police station, Sister Edward has no regrets.
A person has to do what’s right, even if it means betraying a friend, or a Sister. While they are in jail, the story comes out piecemeal: underground safe rooms, secret night runs to snatch children out of their homes and send them to orphanages in Canada.
How was Edward to know that the Mother General’s bombs were actually abused children? They’d left her completely in the dark, the only one. When they release her, a sarcastic guard steers her around her police officer in the hallway. Watch out, Sister…you don’t want to bump into Super Cop.
She is hoping to get a moment to speak him.
“You better scat,” he tells her. “The others are on their way out too. I’ll find you when I get out of here.”
Sister Edward hurries into the parking lot, uncertain where to go. There’s the diner where she met with agents from the Federal Bureau. There are churches that would take her in for a night or two before word gets out about the arrest. She has a cousin in Buffalo, but no money for the train.
Outside, her young FBI agent waits in an unmarked car with tinted windows. He unlocks the door and she gets in the passenger seat.
“You shouldn’t have told anyone about the bombs,” he says. “FBI business is confidential.”
“What bombs?” Sister Edward should be thanked, not scolded. “Besides, the police have as much right to arrest a criminal as you do.”
The young agent sighs, then shows Sister Edward a photograph of his wife and kids. “It’s lousy spying on people all day.”
Through the foggy glass Sister Edward watches Christ’s Most Precious Wounds as they are released into the custody of Father Giuseppe. She feels a twinge of jealousy as he hugs each one of them.
“I’ve always been an outsider,” she says, watching several Il Duce cabs whisk them away in groups of three. “A loner.”
Finally the Mother General emerges from the stat
ion. She gets in the back of a cab with Brother Joe and Father Giuseppe. Sister Edward imagines the three of them will go back to the Manse and have a glass of wine.
The FBI agent slams his hands on the dashboard. “I knew they’d let her go.”
“She probably knows I was the leak.”
“Put it this way, Sister: I wouldn’t go back to Our Lady tonight if I were you.”
“My given name is Kathleen McDunna.” Sister Edward wonders how hard it is to get a driver’s license. She sighs. “I guess you might as well call me Kathleen.”
“Okay, then. Kathleen.”
“How long can you stay here with me?” Sister Edward doesn’t know how late police officers work.
She doesn’t know anything.
It turns out the FBI agent has hours to sit in the dark car with her, drinking coffee from a thermos and nursing his pride. They turn off the engine.
“So he’s your boyfriend, this cop?”
“How should I know?”
Years later, after Kathleen McDunna marries Vincent Golluscio and bears four children, she calls this her first night on Earth. She tells the bedtime story dozens of times for each of her eleven grandchildren, so that they will tell their children, and their children’s children.
The story always ends the same: And that’s how your grandfather became the finest plumber in all of Romeville.
Outside All Saints Rehabilitation Center, Cee-Cee makes up her mind. She tells Roadie what she plans to do when they get up to room 404.
Roadie stares at her. “They’ll kill him.”
Cee-Cee twists her lips and shakes her head. “That’s what you think.”
Inside the hospital it’s an entirely different climate: stale, sealed air and nothing but the vague smell of decay. The change in the atmosphere is uncomfortable, almost more than Roadie and Cee-Cee can bear.
They hold their breath, staying silent in the lobby and all the way up the elevator.
They walk down the fourth floor corridor until they get to Baby Pauly’s white curtain. They pull it aside and find Frank, Moonie, Glory, and Anthony standing around the bed.
Everyone turns and looks.
“Where have you been?” Frank says.
“Cee-Cee, what are you doing here?” Glory says.
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