by Lynn Bohart
It was six o’clock when Giorgio pulled into his driveway. Leaves and twigs blanketed the yard, a sure sign he would have to drag out the rakes and trash bags sooner than he’d planned. Perhaps Tony was old enough to help this year. He remembered his own father carefully raking the leaves into piles. Then, when he would leave to gather up the bags, Giorgio and Rocky would take flying leaps into the piles, rolling around with shrieks of laughter. Giorgio could still hear his father’s gruff voice.
“Here, here! You two stop that! Go inside and help your mother.”
The first year after his father died, Giorgio talked his mother into paying someone else to rake the yard rather than raking alone.
The rich smell of lasagna met them when they entered the house. Grosvner pulled at the leash, heading for the kitchen as if he’d been in the house a hundred times before. A shrill cry surprised them both as Tony and Marie came bounding down the stairs.
“Is he ours?” Marie bubbled.
“What’s his name?” Tony wanted to know.
Within seconds, the children and the dog were a jumble of arms, legs, ears, and snout. Grosvner couldn’t get enough of them. His tongue sought every inch of exposed flesh while they attempted to wrap arms around his wriggling body. Giorgio stood back watching approvingly.
“What’s the matter with his back,” Marie asked, her pretty face twisted into a sneer.
“I think he had some warts, and the vet burned them off. He’ll be fine.”
“Oh!” his daughter exclaimed, happy to engage herself with the dog again.
Slowly, Giorgio became aware of someone standing at his elbow and turned to find Angie, her dark gaze directed at the dog. She dangled a long, sharp knife by her side.
“I hope that knife’s not for me,” he joked.
With barely a glance of acknowledgement, she turned and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving an icy chill behind.
Chapter Seventeen
By seven-thirty, the family sat in the living room with the television blaring, but only Giorgio pretended to watch it. The children played on the floor with Grosvner while Angie sat at a desk in the corner paying bills. She hadn’t said much during dinner and the subject of the baby hadn’t come up. Right now her graceful brows were clenched just above her nose, something she did whenever she concentrated on a task. Giorgio flicked the remote control impatiently, all the time stealing glances at his wife. The newspaper lay unopened by his side.
“Look, Dad! Watch this.”
Tony sat on his knees above Grosvner who lay prone on the floor with his eyes closed.
Giorgio glanced at the dog with little enthusiasm.
“What is it?”
“He plays dead.”
“He did it on his own,” Marie interjected. “Tony just said bang and he dropped down like he was dead!”
She clapped her hands and Grosvner came to life, wiggling his way into her lap.
“You guys should get ready for bed. Which one of you wants to take a bath first?”
“I’ll go,” Tony said. “C’mon, Grosvner!”
The children raced out of the room with the dog hot on their heels. Giorgio watched the canine heft his way up the stairs in lumbering pursuit. He smiled in spite of his black mood until a quiet voice interrupted his thoughts.
“A small bottle of perfume or a little necklace would have been more appropriate.”
Angie stood looking down on him, her eyes devoid of their normal luster. The light at the desk had been turned off and her bills put away.
“What d’you mean?” Her reprimands confused him. They always had.
“You missed Marie singing in the choir. The dog doesn’t make up for that. And it doesn’t make up for your boorish behavior this morning.”
She turned to leave but he stood and grabbed her hand.
“Angie, I’m sorry. I told you, I got the dog for you. I thought it would make you happy.”
She pulled her hand away before turning back.
“You don’t get it, do you Joe? I don’t care about the dog. What I care about is that you don’t want this baby.”
With that, she left the room. He was about to go after her when the phone rang. It was Swan calling with the preliminary report from the coroner. Giorgio listened, torn between the information he needed to solve a murder and the retreating image of his wife.
“Mallery Olsen was strangled sometime between four and nine o’clock last night,” Swan reported. “There was no evidence of a struggle, but Chloral Hydrate was found in her system along with a small amount of alcohol.”
Giorgio’s interest was piqued. Chloral Hydrate was a knock out drug.
“What about the ligature mark?”
“According to the coroner, her assailant had to be several inches taller and strangled her from behind. A small bone in her neck was actually fractured.”
“Nothing under her fingernails?”
“Like I said - no signs of a struggle.”
“Okay, thanks. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Giorgio hung up and went to the refrigerator for a glass of milk. The fact that Mallery Olsen’s assailant was much taller wasn’t surprising. She probably didn’t stand much over five feet tall. The narcotic found in her bloodstream proved more interesting.
The children’s laughter floated down from the floor above, and he threw the dirty glass in the dishwasher and climbed the stairs. When he opened the bathroom door, a suffocating burst of steam enveloped him. The wrangling bodies of Marie and Tony were barely visible, draped over a stoic Grosvner standing in the middle of the bath tub. Although soapsuds covered his back and slid down one ear, the dog seemed sublimely happy. Water blanketed the tiled floor as Tony and Marie busily worked at rinsing him. Grosvner turned towards Giorgio, his rear end moving from side to side with the rhythmic motion of his tail. His eyes said it all. He was home.
Giorgio knew he should scold the kids for making such a mess, but instead told them to skip their own baths and dry off the dog. He found Angie already in bed with the lights out, images of the intimate night before fading like so many high school memories. Since Angie never retired before ten o’clock, he recognized this for the message it was. He returned to the bathroom where Tony was working on Grosvner with a plush towel while Marie wiped up the floor. Always neat and tidy that Marie. Just like her mother.
“Good enough. You kids get in bed.”
“But Dad, it’s too early,” Tony groaned.
“Close enough. You have school tomorrow.”
“Who gets Grosvner?”
Always the equalizer that Tony. Everything had to be fair and Giorgio anticipated future struggles over the dog.
“I do. I have to go back to work. I’ll take him with me.”
Tony threw a disappointed look over his shoulder and finished rubbing down the dog. With a scowl, he gave Grosvner a hug and disappeared down the hallway. Five minutes later, Giorgio was kissing the kids good night. Grosvner accompanied him, licking each small hand.
“Is Mama mad?”
Marie was tucked beneath her pink butterfly comforter with only those brown eyes to tell him she suspected more than she should. The question made him pause as he reached for the light.
“I think she’s just tired.”
“I don’t think she likes the dog.”
She turned over and disappeared into balloons of colorful, tufted cotton. He looked at the spray of honey brown hair across her pillow thinking she wasn’t much younger than Angie when they first met. Angie was eleven. He was twelve. The two had met at a church social when they reached for the same meatball on the buffet table. The coincidence made them giggle helplessly until they were forced to hide themselves in a corner. They spent the rest of the evening talking about baseball. Soon, they began walking to school and doing their homework together. They were inseparable, at least until Giorgio was old enough to date. Then, whenever Giorgio called, Angie was busy. Giorgio spent most of his teens confused about Angie. Yet, when his
father was killed at a police standoff when he was sixteen, Angie sat with him all night after the funeral looking through family picture albums, allowing him to sort through a mixture of sadness and anger. She was the one person who had never made him feel inadequate or foolish.
Six months after his father’s death, Giorgio’s mother extracted a promise that he would enter the priesthood after college. Begrudgingly, he allowed her to believe in that dream until he was eighteen and getting ready to select a seminary school. Instead, he decided to become a policeman like his father. He made a special trip to Angie’s apartment to tell her and was shocked when she ran from the room crying. It would be ten years before she confessed she shared his mother’s fear of losing him the way he’d lost his father. Thinking back to that moment, he realized Angie’s sensitivity balanced his lack of it. Now, when she needed him most, he’d failed her, and it was eating him up.
He turned off Marie’s light and closed the door. Stealing only a quick glance at the master bedroom, he descended the stairs, checked to make sure Grosvner was dry enough to venture outside, and decided to head back to the monastery. Perhaps by the time he returned, Angie would be in a deep sleep and he could slip into bed unnoticed.
He parked down the hill from the retreat center and left Grosvner in the car while he trudged up the drive in a growing mist. Several cars were parked at the front entrance, including a stretch limo decorated with white streamers. They’d released all but the back hallway and closet earlier in the day, allowing a scheduled event to take place. Looking at the gathering fog, it seemed like an odd night to be getting married, especially on the heels of a murder.
Giorgio cut through the staff parking lot in the direction of the flower garden thinking he’d map the grounds at night in an attempt to see things as the killer had. He climbed the short path and stopped near an ivy-covered trellis to look back at the building, noting again how little light there was around the grounds. Only a low wattage bulb hung above the kitchen door and the short walkway lamps that marked the path around the building were practically useless. None of the other paths were lit. The mass of trees, bushes and statues that filled the gardens and planters obscured everything, a fact probably not lost on the killer.
When Giorgio reached the top of the hill, the dim lights from the two cottages were barely visible on the eastside of the property. He glanced down to the main building wondering if the light over the back door had been purposely eliminated the night of the murder. He used an intersecting path to cross over the top of the hillside, moving towards the abbot’s cottage. The path wound around a vegetable garden and a sagging, dilapidated shed that resembled Quasimodo in the dark. The foothills just beyond the vegetable garden had been blotted out as if someone had drawn a black curtain across the façade.
Giorgio stuffed his hands into his pockets. Why was he here? Did he think he would actually learn something relevant to the case, or was he really just avoiding Angie? He stood gazing into the shadows trying to focus on the murder. If the body had been disguised somehow, the killer may have been able to bring her through the lobby and then down the back hallway to the back door without raising questions. That would mean Poindexter could have been telling the truth when he said he saw someone moving along the outside path towards the kitchen. From the second story window however, it would have been impossible to identify anything more than a human shadow. In this scenario though, the killer would have had to slip past the bartenders twice − once on the way up to Olsen’s room and once on the way down. Giorgio couldn’t think of any way to disguise a dead body without calling attention to it, yet no one had seen anything suspicious.
The soft thud of a door closing interrupted his thoughts, and he squinted into the mist. A dark shadow flitted across his field of vision. Was this another monk catching a smoke? A second noise made him snap his head to his right. Emerging from the kitchen, he caught the fleeting glimpse of a second figure heading into the garden. Had he caught two individuals sneaking out at the same time? What were the odds of that?
His peripheral vision picked up the first shadow moving up the hill in the direction of the flower garden. If the two figures were planning to meet, he wanted to be there when they did. He and cut down the hill at a right angle as quietly as possible hoping the music from inside the building would cover his descent. The ground sloped sharply, so that twice he almost met with disaster. He’d just tucked himself safely behind the shrine at the north end of the garden when the soft creak of a gate at the south end made him turn in that direction. Someone had entered the garden. Before he could move, a shadowy figure appeared from behind a tree to his left, gliding through the bushes in his direction. Giorgio was situated to one side of the shrine, near a gate in the wall. He quickly backed behind a tree. The figure appeared out of the mist and silently disappeared through the gate, his face obscured by a monk’s hood.
Giorgio moved to the gate with caution. He was right behind the shrine now and didn’t dare go through the gate. There was a large, open lawn just in front of the shrine, which would leave him without cover. Instead, he planted his feet in a small ditch and leaned against the short cement wall while he listened. Harsh whispers reached him from the other side of the shrine, but the music eliminated any hope of decoding what was spoken. He was just about to chance a closer inspection when the robed figure suddenly reappeared, forcing him to melt into the shadows. The figure stepped through the gate, leaving the path again and striking out through the undergrowth.
Making a quick decision, Giorgio fell in behind the retreating figure of the monk, assuming the second individual was one of the caterers. Keeping to a safe distance, he followed the monk down the hill. The monk paused at the back door, making Giorgio duck behind the statue of the Virgin Mary. Peeking through her elbow, he could just make out the shoulders of the dark figure. The monk turned in his direction as if listening. A moment later, the monk stepped into the building.
Giorgio was at the door an instant later. Although the door had to be fifty years old, the knob turned without sound, a point he’d failed to notice that afternoon. He slipped inside the empty stairwell shutting out the penetrating mist. Giorgio darted over to the staircase and glanced up to the top stairs leading to the monks’ quarters. He stopped to listen, trying to discern which way the illusive figure might have gone. There was only silence. He poked his head into the richly carpeted hallway that led to the chapel and then circled back into the stairwell to peer down the back hallway. Neither hallway offered the visage of a retreating figure.
Returning to the back door, he paused, feeling he’d lost his edge. How could someone disappear so quickly? The bell tower began to chime the hour filling the small enclosure with a jarring clang. By the time Giorgio detected the soft rustle of cloth behind him, it was too late. Something smashed the back of his skull, sending a searing pain through to his eyeballs. His knees buckled and he collapsed onto the cold cement floor. As darkness invaded his mind, he was only barely aware of a door scraping closed somewhere behind him.
Chapter Eighteen
The unearthly shadows of four hooded men circled a splashing fountain like witches circling a simmering brew. A young boy stood off to the side, his face veiled in shadow. Giorgio crouched before the boy, his gun ready to fire, but there were no bullets housed in the chamber. As he shook the gun wondering where the bullets had gone, a guttural wail pierced the darkness, scattering the hooded men like beetles. The horrifying sound trailed off and the boy’s image evaporated.
Suddenly, something wet slid across the back of his hand making him recoil as if a rat had skittered across his skin. He tried to open his eyes, but they were glued shut. Then, a gruff voice said, “Let’s get him off the ground.” Rough hands pulled him to his feet and moved him forward. All he could do was shuffle helplessly along. Finally, a light appeared through the darkness.
“Put him on the sofa,” the same voice said.
Red material swam into view, and his body sagged down. S
omeone lifted his feet allowing his head to fall back onto a soft pillow. Something wet slid across his cheek, and he opened one eyelid, flinching when a black mass appeared only inches from his face. There was a high-pitched whine, and then his arm was buffeted as if someone wanted to stuff something underneath it. Eventually, someone placed a cool towel under his head where he felt a painful knot on his scalp.
“How are you feeling?” Father Damian’s voice finally cut through the haze of pain.
Giorgio lifted both eyelids this time, but it was a moment before he recognized the monk who peered down at him. A young, anxious monk stood behind him and Grosvner’s head under his forearm, leaving patches of drool on his leather jacket.
“Like Hell!” Giorgio groused, squinting at the bright light.
The pained expression on the abbot’s face made Giorgio rephrase his response.
“Like a building fell on me.”
“You need to relax. I’m afraid you’ve been injured.”
Giorgio managed a quizzical look. “I think you mean attacked.”
Father Damian exchanged a glance with the other monk, his generous brows scrunched in confusion. “I’m not sure what you mean. Who would attack you?”
Giorgio was beginning to regain full consciousness and lifted himself up, dislodging Grosvner’s head.
“That’s what I’d like to know,” he choked out, holding his hand to the back of his head. His head was throbbing, making his skull vibrate. “I was hit from behind, by something very hard.”
Father Damian’s face betrayed his confusion. Giorgio was quick to explain.