Crooked Heart

by Cristina Sumners

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Copyright Page

  WITH LOVE AND GRATITUDE

  TO MY SUPERLATIVE PARENTS

  —ALL THREE OF THEM

  A crooked heart shall be far from me;

  I will not know evil.

  Those who act deceitfully shall not dwell in my house,

  And those who tell lies shall not continue in my sight.

  —Psalm 101: 4, 7

  From The Book of Common Prayer

  of the Episcopal Church

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would still be a stack of dog-eared pages in the back of my closet were it not for my amazing agent, Linda Roghaar, who took me from query letter to three-book contract in sixty-three days. Linda, remind me to thank you adequately when my head stops spinning.

  Linda delivered me into the hands of a bevy of stunningly competent folks at Bantam Dell, to all of whom I am grateful (what a joy it is to work with people who know what they’re doing). Above all I must thank Kate Miciak, whose enthusiasm for Crooked Heart exceeded my wildest expectations, and whose sage, funny, and utterly merciless editing has been both revelation and blessing.

  In the embarrassing number of years between the first draft of this novel and the seventh (I think it was, but I may have lost count), which is what Linda and Kate saw, many people read the manuscript and kindly told me what was wrong with it. They were mostly right. Thanks to them, an amateurish effort gradually metamorphosed into Something Worth Publishing. They are the proverbial too-many-to-name, but I’d assuredly get struck by lightning and rot in hell if I didn’t mention Barrie Van Dycke, Lyle Meyer, and Susan Herner.

  Buckets of gratitude must be poured over my splendid husband Colin and my wonderful son Tim, who managed to put up with having a Writer in the house, which I can assure you, if you’ve never had to do it, is a pain in the lower parts of the anatomy.

  Finally, I herewith fulfill a promise a quarter of a century old: Thanks to Bill. He knows who he is.

  CHAPTER 1

  i

  She knelt on the floor beside the body. Not to see if it was dead—she knew that already—but because something terrible inside her drew her down for a closer look.

  The blood had stopped flowing. It lay in perfect stillness on the white tile floor, a glistening scarlet halo around the upper torso of the dead woman. The dress was white, too—or had been before the knife went through it. The knife now lay on the floor beside the body, oddly inconspicuous amid a gory miscellany of flatware and small utensils; every implement was as wet and as red as if it had been dipped in crimson paint.

  The door of the dishwasher hung limp on broken hinges, pointing downward toward the body as if in mute apology. Three of the four small plates in the lower rack had slid from their places and lay in an untidy stack, facedown, where the cutlery rack had been before it had fallen to the floor. Like everything else within arm’s reach, the rack and the plates in it were liberally splashed with blood.

  She looked at the body, at the blood, at the knife. She thought she ought to feel something—anger, pity, remorse, anything—but no feeling came. Nothing except a fine buzzing that hummed in her ears and danced all over her body, as though an electric current ran through her skin. She did not seem to be able to move.

  For how many minutes she remained kneeling, numbly gazing at the dead woman, she did not know.

  Neither did she know how long he had been standing in the doorway to the hall. She had not heard him come. His presence had crept into her senses gradually, through the buzzing, until there came a moment when she knew, unsurprised, that he was there.

  She tried to look up, but she did not want to see his face; her eyes instead found his hands, and that somehow was worse.

  He started to say something, but only a voiceless whisper came. He stopped, cleared his throat, tried again, and this time spoke. But what she heard was a thin, pinched travesty of his voice, the ghost of his voice.

  It said, “Do you have any of the blood on you?”

  For some reason the pedestrian practicality of the question offended her. The flicker of anger broke through the buzzing paralysis, or at least loosened it slightly. He was cool? So would she be.

  “There’s a little on my skirt.”

  “Stand up before there’s more of it.”

  She stood up. Too suddenly, for the room heaved; she put out a hand to steady herself.

  “Don’t touch that!” he cried.

  She snatched her hand back from the countertop, half-expecting to see a bloody handprint on the white surface. Like Lady Macbeth! she thought wildly. Then reason reasserted itself. “Don’t be absurd. My fingerprints are all over this kitchen. All over the house.”

  He made a motion in the air in front of his face, as though to clear something away. “Of course,” he said. “I— Yes, of course.”

  There was a silence. She could no longer look at the body now that he was there.

  “I think you had better leave,” he said.

  “Yes,” she replied, still not meeting his eyes. “Yes, I believe it’s time.” She moved stiffly, carefully, toward the back door.

  ii

  Julia Robinson softly opened the door to her daughter’s bedroom and looked in. She saw tumbled covers on an empty bed, and an empty chair by the window. Startled, she stepped into the room and said sharply, “Tita?” There was no one there. Julia turned and walked quickly down the hall to the bathroom. The door was open, the room empty. “Tita?” she called back down the hall, louder this time. No answer.

  She hurried toward a narrow door, flung it open, and fairly shouted “Tita!” as she ran up a flight of uncarpeted stairs. The attic was a wide, low space tucked under the eaves, with four dormer windows peeking out at the treetops, one on each side of the house. Julia moved swiftly past stacks of cardboard boxes, an ancient set of golf clubs, and a standing rack of off-season clothes swaddled in plastic bags. She arrived at the area around the dormer at the back of the house, where a space had been cleared and a tiny, shabby living room created. A child’s dresser supported a rag doll—obviously long retired—and an array of seashells; a sagging bookshelf held the annals of Narnia and Oz; beside an armchair of faded maroon stood a floor lamp in the dated trendiness of the sixties. In mingled exasperation and relief Julia looked down upon her daughter, asleep in the armchair.

  Elizabeth Robinson, once and forever nicknamed Tita by a fond aunt, was ten years old. She had very short ginger hair, an elfin face lightly freckled, and a slowly abating case of the flu. She very rarely did what she had been told not to do, and for a moment her mother was completely puzzled. Then she saw the ballpoint pen resting in
the slack fingers of Tita’s right hand, and she understood. There on the floor, where it had fallen, was the spiral notebook, opened and folded back; the heading on the exposed page was from the attic. Below was half a page of neatly written lines, the first of which began with the notation 1:04 Monday. Julia glanced at her watch. It was 1:47.

  She felt a rush of guilt; she should have checked on Tita earlier; the child had been here most of an hour. Well, at least she’d remembered to turn on the little space heater. Julia switched the heater off and gathered her daughter in her arms, murmuring in a voice too low to wake her, “Come along, Chiquita, back to bed, whooo! You’re getting heavy, in another year or two I won’t be able to do this, mmmm, that’ll be a shame, won’t it. . . . It’ll be a bigger shame if you’ve made yourself worse. . . . Next time when your silly mother says you can sit by the window with your notebook, she will be sure to specify your bedroom window. . . .”

  iii

  He sat on the floor, feet drawn up, head between his knees, arms wrapped tightly around his legs. He was on the floor because his legs had refused to support him another moment; he had his head between his knees so that he did not have to see.

  Every few minutes his stomach revolted, but he had already vomited, painfully and thoroughly, in the hall, and now the spasms were only dry heaves. He waited until they stopped, and then he waited some more. It felt like an hour; it might have been four minutes. Finally, the fear of discovery grew greater than the horror of the task, and he began, with the help of the doorjamb, to struggle to his feet.

  He found that his teeth were chattering, and he clenched them. It seemed to strain every muscle in his face and neck, but the chattering stopped, and from that minuscule victory he drew a feather’s weight of courage. Still holding the doorframe, he bent to pick up the sheets he had dropped.

  Clutching them hard against his chest, he forced himself to look at the disaster that lay on the floor, splashed like a crimson insult across a space heretofore impeccably white. It was vulgar, melodramatic, remote from anything she would have done or worn in life, an alien intrusion on her style. After the eternity of minutes he had had to get used to it, it still did not seem real.

  The blood had grown darker and was beginning to thicken. If it dried, it would be harder to clean up. He moved his stiff legs and slowly approached the body. He pulled a single sheet out of the bundle of pale colors he carried and dropped it into the pool of blood beside the corpse. His hand hovered over the dishwasher rack that had come to rest almost on top of the wound in her back; he needed to push it back onto the door of the dishwasher, then close the door to get it out of the way. Simple enough, if only he could get his fingers to overcome their revulsion and actually touch the sticky red surfaces of metal and rubber. Before he could summon the will for it, an unwelcome thought came to him. Getting the dishwasher out of the way would be easy enough—he could do that in two seconds with one hand. But what about the body?

  He would get blood all over himself.

  He tried to think. Something like cunning, unfamiliar to him, stole across his mind. He stepped back to the kitchen table, laid the remaining sheets on it, and began to take off his clothes.

  When he had stripped completely, laying his clothes across the table and his shoes under a chair, he again picked up the sheets and returned to the body. Without giving himself time to think about it, he reached for the dishwasher rack, shoved it back onto the sagging door, lifted the door, and closed it.

  He knelt on the sheet he’d already dropped onto the pool of blood. His mind, which seemed no longer to belong to him, kept noticing color. The sheet he knelt on was a paisley print, a delicate blue and pink over which the dull red was slowly creeping. He dropped its mate over the blood on the other side of the body. The sheets ruined the color scheme, he thought absurdly, then wondered if this judicious detachment was what is called shock. The red and white might have been overly dramatic for her, but the darkening paisley transformed the scene into a common, ugly mess. How she would have hated it! He took a third sheet—flowers, this one, the color of peaches—and began to wrap it around the still-supple corpse.

  She was as warm as a living soul. It would have been easier for him if she had been stiff and cold. As it was, the feel of her was too familiar, the flesh soft under his touch, as it had always been.

  He slipped his arm under her waist and gently rolled her over onto her back. He was unprepared for her face.

  Her eyes were open. Blood smeared her right cheek and temple where she had lain in it; blood was drying in her hair and in her eyelashes. He cried aloud and dropped her. Her left arm fell across his thighs, just brushing his penis.

  Two things happened in two consecutive split instants: in the first, his body’s attempt at the unthinking, primeval reaction; in the second, his mind’s shrill veto. In a rush of horrified, irrational modesty he struck at her arm with the back of his hand, trying to knock it away without touching it, as one would a spider crawling across one’s bare skin. He caught his breath on a sob, smothering panic with reserves of will he did not know he possessed, and continued his work with the sheets.

  When at last she was completely enveloped, arms wrapped to her sides, dreadful face covered, he slid his right arm under her shoulders and his left under her knees and stood up. He took a step.

  Memory, sudden as pain, struck his mind and slid into his heart like an oiled knife. With brutal Proustian clarity the hotel room materialized before him; he was naked; he was carrying her to the bed; she was laughing. He could feel the carpet beneath his bare feet, hear the Fifth Avenue traffic muted through the window.

  He sank to his knees, pulled the awkward cloth-wrapped figure into a hopeless embrace, pressed his face against it, and wept.

  CHAPTER 2

  It was the frequently expressed opinion of the Rev. Dr. Kathryn Koerney that committee meetings were among the prime works of the Devil. She based this assertion on the ancient and orthodox doctrine that the Devil’s chief mission is not (as is popularly believed) to make people wicked, but to make people miserable. On that criterion alone, she maintained, committees ranked right up there with income taxes and Pledge Week on PBS; when asked to serve on one, her invariable reply was “Life’s too short.”

  When asked, however, to select, cast, direct, and produce a medieval mystery play for the church’s annual patronal festival, Kathryn had fallen upon the assignment with glad cries of joy. It wasn’t until six weeks later that they told her that as head of the Play Committee (“An entirely fictive body,” she protested in vain), her presence was required at all meetings of the Festival Planning Committee.

  The first of these was inching past the midpoint of its second hour. Kathryn had made out her grocery list, written a letter to her mother, outlined a lecture for the next day, and invented four really compelling reasons why she couldn’t possibly make it to any of the subsequent meetings. At this point, however, she was passing from boredom to spiritual crisis, as she slid into one of her periodic fits of despair; these were normally characterized by thoughts such as The Church is never going to be anything more than a club for dinosaurs and any priest with a grain of self-respect would abandon her priesthood and take up a more honorable profession, like prostitution or maybe gunrunning.

  Miss (never Ms.) Amalie Prescott, with the faint but unmistakable condescension that the traditional female displays when explaining to a man one of those Things That Men Don’t Understand, was entirely failing to make her point to Mr. Carson Strothers; Mr. Strothers, with the saintly patience and gentle amusement that marks the traditional male who is listening to a woman Go On and On the Way Women Do, was utterly failing to convince Miss Amalie that he understood her point but disagreed with it anyway. Kathryn was aggravated with both of them, less for the time they were wasting than for their dull-witted smugness; neither had the wit to see that the other’s attitude was an insult. Then the thought struck her that she was listening to the present Junior Warden and a former Sen
ior Warden of the vestry. She made a note on a loose sheet of paper and slid it eight inches along the table to her right.

  Tom Holder, who had been put in charge of security for the upcoming festivity on the unarguable grounds that he happened to be Chief of Police, looked down at the note. It said: Is it true that in order to be elected to the vestry of this church, your income in millions per year must exceed your I.Q.?

  Tom strangled a laugh and wrote back, i’m on the vestry of this church, thank you!!!

  Kathryn replied, still on paper, whoops.

  You’d have known that, Tom wrote, if you ever came to vestry meetings.

  Kathryn reclaimed the paper and wrote, I am paid by the seminary, I thank God, and not by this congregation. That means that around this church I do what interests me and I don’t what doesn’t.

  Tom loved it when she made weird sentences.

  He responded, I think you ought to come to vestry anyway.

  Give me 1 good reason. Give me 1 mediocre reason, even.

  To keep me from being bored to death.

  Kathryn’s eyes widened; the compliment was unexpected. For the first time in the exchange, she glanced at Tom’s face. His bland gaze was focused on Amalie Prescott as though he were actually listening to her. Kathryn looked again at the note.

  It pleased her. She had always liked Tom Holder. The questions he had asked in her adult Sunday school class the previous year had revealed areas of ignorance but never a trace of stupidity; moreover, he possessed that rarest of gifts, an open mind. She suspected he must be very good at his job, and to be good at one’s job was one of the surest ways of earning Kathryn’s admiration.

  The admiration, apparently, was mutual. That was gratifying, but in an unaccustomed fit of discretion Kathryn resisted the urge to return the compliment, and wrote only: I’ll give it my fullest consideration.

  As this was the Rector’s favorite way of saying “Not a chance,” it drew a smile from Tom. However, he was also visited—belatedly—by a spirit of discretion, and decided it would be wise to let the exchange lapse.