by Jane Haddam
“Meera?” Her mother’s voice was floaty and high.
“Mai,” Meera said.
“I tried to call you at home, but you weren’t there. And then I tried to call you at your work, but you weren’t there, either. I didn’t know what to do?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong!” Meera’s mother sounded triumphant. “I thought there must be, but here you are. So nothing is wrong!”
“Okay.” The ibuprofen was doing her no good at all. There was a sledgehammer going off inside her head. “Maimai, listen. I have a flu. I am feeling very ill.”
“You should drink—”
“I did, already, before I left the apartment. And before I went to bed last night. But I’m still very ill, and I don’t understand—”
“It was on the CBS. I listened on the Internet.”
Meera tried to sort this out. “You were listening to CBS on the Internet,” she said. This made a sort of sense. Her mother had bookmarked a local CBS news site. She checked it on and off to find out what was going on in Philadelphia and what the weather was and that kind of thing.
“It was that woman in the garbage bag,” her mother said. “They didn’t say who she was. They didn’t show a picture. Somebody put a woman in a garbage bag and threw her away on the street. It could have been you.”
Compared to Mumbai, there was not really a lot of crime in Philadelphia. Meera’s mother acted as if the crime in Mumbai didn’t count.
“Maimai,” Meera said. “It wasn’t me. And things happen. Things happen everywhere. And I am at work.”
“Yes, yes. I will go away now that I know nothing is wrong. I only had to know that you were safe.”
“I am safe.”
“Yes, yes. And you are ill. You should leave work and spend the day in bed.”
“I’ve got too much work to do.”
“Yes, yes.”
And then the phone went dead. Just like that.
Meera began to boot up her computer. A woman in a garbage bag. There must be something on the news. Hadn’t there been a picture of this woman? That would not necessarily have stopped Maimai. She would think the picture was distorted, or just plain wrong.
There was movement in the doorway, just outside her vision. Meera looked up. Rita was standing there, but she didn’t come in this time. She didn’t knock, either. This was fortunate for Meera’s head.
“Miss Agerwal?” Rita said.
“I am sorry,” Meera said. “I think I feel less well than I thought I did.”
“You don’t look well,” Rita said. “But there’s something out here we thought you’d better see.”
“What is it?”
“We don’t know.”
Fine. Wonderful. Exactly what she needed. Meera made herself stand up.
When she got into the bullpen, what she saw was all the girls standing around—nothing. They were just standing in a little circle and staring at the floor.
Meera went up to them and looked at the floor herself. There was something on the carpet, a jagged-edged splotch about three inches across, brownish red and thick looking.
“It’s sticky,” one of the girls said, pointing a toe at it. “It’s sort of like paste.”
“Karen almost fell in it,” one of the other girls said.
Meera made herself get down in a crouch to look at it. Her headache had suddenly receded. Her fever and chills had reduced itself to chills alone. It wasn’t just that it was three inches across. It was thick, thick enough so that it had not been completely absorbed by the carpet. It was deep.
Meera made herself stand up. “It looks like hot chocolate. Have any of you been drinking hot chocolate?”
“No, we haven’t,” Rita said. “And that wasn’t here when we left last night, either. Somebody would have noticed.”
“Maybe it was one of the cleaning staff then,” Meera said.
“It doesn’t look like hot chocolate to me,” one of the girls said.
“I think somebody threw up,” said another one.
Meera put a hand against a desk to steady herself. “Call maintenance and get it cleaned up,” she said. “We can’t stand around staring at it all day. Tell them they’re probably going to need some carpet shampoo.”
“Yes, Miss Agerwal.”
“Yes, Miss Agerwal.”
“Yes, Miss Agerwal.”
Meera went back into her office and shut the door behind her.
Now that she wasn’t staring at the thing, the regular sick was coming back. She felt shaky and unsure of her ability to stand. That might be the flu. She went to her desk and sat down again. The computer was up and running. She got on the Internet and typed in the web address of the only local news station she could think of.
She didn’t know if she should call Cary Alder about this, or not.
2
There were times when Sister Margaret Mary longed for the days before the convent reforms of Vatican II—even though she hadn’t been alive back then, and even though she didn’t think she could have survived in a wimple. In the old days, the convent had been a threshold. No newspapers or magazines had crossed its threshold. Radios and televisions existed, but hidden away out of sight except for emergencies. The Maryknolls were considered very progressive because they had allowed their sisters to listen to FDR’s fireside chats. A very old nun who had been at the motherhouse when Margaret Mary was a novice had told the story of being a novice herself on the day the mother superior had appeared in recreation with a television set and they had all sat down to listen to the news of the Kennedy assassination.
These days you had to work very hard to keep a lid on all the media, but there was no way to avoid it entirely. Sister Margaret Mary did what she could by insisting that no sister look at anything until after morning Mass, and no sister spend more than half an hour a day on the Internet. Sisters had to spend more time than that on computers, of course. Here, like everywhere else, everything was done on computers. Grades. Papers. Forms to be filled out and sent to the archdiocese and the superintendent of schools and the health department. It saved paper and storage space, but it gave Sister Margaret Mary eyestrain.
Sister Margaret Mary was polishing the brass candy bowl on the long coffee table in the convent’s front parlor when Sisters Rosalie and Jacob came running in from outside, worked up beyond recognition and completely out of breath. There were a lot of sisters in this convent, but still not enough to cover all the bases. Everybody pitched in to do housework on the days when school was not in session. Sister Margaret Mary put down the chamois cloth and looked up to see what the fuss was about. Sisters Rosalie and Jacob were very young, and they were also very flustered.
“Sisters,” Margaret Mary said. “Decorum.”
The wimple might have been a pain to negotiate, but an old-fashioned habit did slow everything down.
Sister Jacob was waving a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer in the air. “We’ve got to call the police,” she said. “Right this minute.”
“The police?”
“Sister, we really do have to call the police,” Rosalie said. “This woman is unconscious and she didn’t have any identification on her and we know who she is. Well, we sort of know who she is. I mean, somebody here must—”
Sister Margaret Mary got up and took the newspaper out of Sister Jacob’s hand. The relevant headline was easy to spot. It appeared over the masthead in a banner with a picture on one side and the words DO YOU KNOW THIS WOMAN? across the top of the page. Sister Margaret Mary stared at the picture for a moment. Then she began to read the text. She had to turn to an inside page to finish it.
“She does look familiar, doesn’t she?” she said.
Sister Peter came into the parlor, carrying a vase of wildflowers. She was not running. “What’s all this?” she asked, putting the vase down on the mantel of the fireplace.
“We have to call the police,” Sister Jacob announced again.
Margaret Mary passed the pap
er to Sister Peter. “Remember all the noise last night? The sirens and all the rest of it?”
“I remember thinking somebody had been murdered,” Sister Peter said. “Was somebody?”
“Not exactly. As far as I can figure out from the story, a garbage bag fell out of the back of a truck and there was a woman in it, but she wasn’t dead. Look at the picture on the front.”
Sister Peter looked. “Oh,” she said.
“She lives in the parish,” Sister Rosalie said. “I’ve seen her a dozen times. And I’ve seen her in church at Forty Hours’ Devotion.”
“I’ve seen her at Mass,” Sister Jacob said. “The four o’clock English Mass. She’s a daily communicant.”
Margaret Mary nodded. “I’ve seen her too. I’ve never talked to her.”
“I’ve never talked to her either,” Rosalie said. “But Father Alvarez must have. If she’s a daily communicant, she must go to confession at least sometimes. He must have talked to her at least in confession.”
“He can’t go running around telling people what he heard in confession,” Jacob said.
“Of course he can’t,” Rosalie said. “I just meant that if she comes to confession, he probably knows who she is. What her name is. I know she doesn’t have to tell him her name in confession, but still, if you go then you have a relationship with the priest and a lot of people do tell their names in confession and talk to the priest just like they’d talk to anybody.”
“She was in a garbage bag,” Jacob said. “They put her in a garbage bag and dumped her on the street. Nobody knows who she is. We’ve got to call the police and tell them what we know.”
Margaret Mary sat down in the big armchair next to the fireplace. Then she reached out and took the paper from Sister Peter. “All right,” she said. “First things first. Let’s get everybody else in here and see if any of us knows her name, or where she lives, or who she knows. I’ve seen her, but I can’t remember ever seeing her with anybody.”
“I can’t either,” Sister Peter said. “But they’re right. I see her around all the time. Forty Hours’ Devotion. Stations of the Cross on Good Friday.”
“Let’s show this around and see what we come up with,” Margaret Mary said. “Then we can show it to Father Alvarez, if he hasn’t seen it already. He’s head of the parish. He’s got to be the one to decide who to call.” She looked at the paper again. “There has to be a number in here to call to give information. They always do that.”
Sister Peter looked at Rosalie and Jacob. “Why don’t the two of you go round up the troops and bring them here. And don’t run everywhere. Decorum, like Sister Superior said.”
Rosalie and Jacob looked at each other. Then they rushed out of the room together, full-tilt boogie.
Sisters Margaret Mary and Peter looked at each other and shook their heads. Margaret Mary deposited the paper on the coffee table. “Tell me I’m not crazy to think we were better trained in our day.”
“We’re just getting old, that’s all,” Sister Peter said. “I’m just grateful we’re getting the vocations. Right now, I want you to pay attention to this. You didn’t read that article very well.”
“I didn’t? What did I miss?”
“It’s not what you missed. It’s what you mistook. Go back and look at it if you don’t believe me. She didn’t fall off a truck. She fell out of the back of a black van.”
Sister Margaret Mary sat bolt upright. “What?”
“A black van, Sister. It’s right there.”
“The same black van? Could it possibly be the same black van?”
“I only saw your black van for a second,” Sister Peter said. “And I didn’t see the van she fell out of and neither did you. But I think you’d better mention it.”
Sister Margaret Mary thought she would have done better to get the license plate last night, but she hadn’t thought of it.
3
The call came in at nine thirty. Tibor Kasparian knew who it was as soon as he heard it ring. He almost thought about not answering. His kitchen table was piled high with the endless paperwork that was the inevitable result of dealing with one government agency after another. The entire world was going digital and paperless, but government agencies would never leave it at that. Once you got on a computer and filled out the forms online, you had to print them all out and submit them again in “hard copy.” Tibor remembered when “hard copy” meant a newspaper story about something serious, like a world war. He also remembered when a world war was the worst thing he was worried about.
He picked up after five rings and then answered, reflexively, in Armenian. Then he cleared his throat and tried again.
“I am here, Russell. You are out of your schedule.”
Russell was breathing heavily. He was a young man, but ever since he’d gone to prison he seemed to be always out of breath.
“They all know Tommy was here yesterday. They think something’s up.”
“Is it?”
“I don’t know. He tried to call me yesterday.”
I should have gone to the Ararat, Tibor thought. It would never occur to Russ to call him at the Ararat. Russ might call his cell phone, but probably not. Tibor didn’t understand why, but prisons hated the very idea of cell phones. Prisoners were not allowed to have them, and calling out to them caused all kinds of problems.
Tibor got his coffee from where he had left it on the kitchen table and took it over to his living room couch. The apartment was enormous, but it was still an open floor plan. He got some books off the couch and sat down.
“What did he call you about?” he asked. “What did he have to say?”
“I don’t know,” Russ said. “He called after lockdown. We aren’t allowed to get calls then.”
“What time was it?”
“I don’t know that either. They didn’t come and tell me about it. They just notified me this morning. I suppose I could have asked them. I didn’t. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, Russell. I don’t know why I asked that. I don’t think it matters.”
“They would have asked him if it was some kind of an emergency. I guess it wasn’t.”
One of the books he had moved out of the way was a James Patterson novel he couldn’t remember buying. The other was Augustine’s Confessions.
“Tibor?” Russ said. “What happened last night?”
“Tcha,” Tibor said.
“It could just be him following up after yesterday,” Russ said. “But I don’t believe it. Lockdown is at ten. If he called later than that and from home, there had to be something up. If Donna’d found out about it, she’d have gone berserk.”
“Tcha,” Tibor said again. Then he sucked in enough air to inflate a balloon and tried to give a concise summary of the something that had happened. The news would have gotten to Russ eventually, even if Tommy had not called. It would have been in a newspaper or on a television program or on the Internet. It would just have taken longer.
Russ listened to the whole thing without asking questions. Then he said, “Jesus.”
“It was not as bad as it sounds,” Tibor said. “I’m just very tired and not speaking well. The woman was not dead. It was not a murder.”
“Is she dead now?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s the kind of thing where somebody ends up dead,” Russ said. “Why wasn’t it you who went out and looked at her? Why did you send Tommy?”
“I didn’t send Tommy, Russell. It was a fast thing. One moment we were walking on the sidewalk and then there were the sounds of a car coming too fast. Tommy pushed me out of the way and the car hit a lamp pole. I am speaking badly again.”
“So, who was this woman? Who is she? The woman in the garbage bag.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know her name or anything?”
“Nobody knows anything,” Tibor said. “I called Krekor, and he came. Tommy called 911. Then we all stood around while other people came and people went and peo
ple stood around. She didn’t have a handbag. The police looked through her pockets and her clothes and the bag and did not find any identification. Nobody knows who she is.”
“A white woman? A black woman? An Asian?”
“Does it matter?”
“It does for purposes of identification.”
“From what I could see, she was a white woman. She could have been Spanish. The place where we were was on the edge of a Spanish neighborhood.”
“I can’t stay on the phone much longer. They only give us three to five minutes.”
“It was an accident, Russell. It had nothing to do with us. It was an accident we were there. I don’t think you have to worry about Tommy being in trouble.”
“Jesus,” Russell said again. Then he sighed. “When I got here, I thought it was me. Because of the way things were. The way they happened. I thought I was the only one, cut off from everything and everybody, cut off from all connections. But it isn’t just me. Everybody here is like that. Almost everybody.”
“I think that is normal, Russell.”
“There’s nothing normal about it. It’s insane, trying to live like that. I don’t mean being locked up. I mean not knowing what’s going on, not knowing what’s happening to—people. There are guys in here, they don’t have anybody. No wives. No girlfriends. No children. I mean, they have them, but they don’t really have them. There’s no real connection. Even their mothers don’t come to visit.”
“It is a sad thing, Russell, yes.”
“I was never like that.”
“No, Russell, you were not.”
“I don’t want to wake up three months from now and find out Tommy’s in juvie and nobody told me anything about it. They haven’t shut down any of those places. We’re still running for-profit juvenile detention centers in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”
“Russell—”
“Never mind,” Russell said. “I’ve got to get off. But I meant what I said. I don’t want to wake up three months from now and find out God knows what has been going on and nobody’s told me about it. Don’t do that to me, Tibor. No matter what you think of the rest of it. Don’t do that to me—”