“The TV lady.” Babette took her hand off the screen and asked the woman, “Why are you selling us for money?”
“That’s nonsense and you know it.” The mother superior saw the AMBER Alert scrolling across the bottom of the screen, beneath the photos of the girls. She couldn’t believe what she was reading.
“...for trafficking in children for the purposes of sexual exploitation and servitude...Petit and Xavier are also being sought for questioning in the deaths of nuns killed in yesterday’s explosion at a northern Illinois convent...”
“Lies!” The abbess reached to turn off the set.
Babette knocked the woman’s arm down. “Leave it.”
The alert started scrolling across the screen again, and the nun couldn’t stand reading it a second time. She stumbled into the bathroom, and closed and locked the door. The trio of people who’d appeared at the convent was obviously behind it all. They’d somehow found out about the girls and their gift and were trying to capture the children for the government’s own evil purposes. But she wasn’t going to let anyone else touch them. The triplets belonged to her.
“Be strong,” she said to the mirror, and hooked her hands over the edge of the sink. The woman staring back at her was an ugly stranger. No veil. Disheveled hair. Hollow cheeks and sunken eyes.
The abbess stripped off her habit, stepped into the shower stall and pulled the curtain closed. Near scalding, and she was glad. Better to melt away the creature she’d spied in the mirror. Holding her face up to the hot water, she savored the cleansing, purifying pain. But the self-punishment wasn’t enough to burn away the image of those foul lies scrolling across the television screen, for everyone to see and believe.
“...for trafficking in children for the purposes of sexual exploitation and servitude...”
As she stood under the water, she began sobbing. She rested her hand against the wall to steady herself. Keep herself from collapsing.
“...being sought for questioning in the deaths of nuns killed in yesterday’s explosion at a northern Illinois convent...”
Petit lifted his head and caught a glimpse of the girl in front of the TV. Didn’t think anything of it. Putting his head back down, he curled into a tighter ball on the floor. The two sleeping sisters rolled over in unison.
Frozen in front of the television, Babette pressed both palms flat against the screen. “It’s me.”
Temples throbbing, MacLeod woke with a sizeable hangover. His roommate was was stretched out on his back, as still and stiff as a dead man in a coffin. With his starched white tee shirt and dark pajama bottoms, Khoury even slept like a priest. MacLeod was in no hurry to rouse him. They’d all been up working into the early hours of the morning.
MacLeod put on a hotel bathrobe and padded into the loo. After emptying his bladder, he filled his sour mouth with cold water and swished. Splashed more water on his face and attempted to drag a comb through his tangled mop. Gave up, tied the mess behind his head and went back into the bedroom.
The wastebasket between the beds was filled with tiny, empty bottles as well as innumerable wrappers from assorted sweets. The sight of the refuse did not help his upset stomach. Using the pot in the room, he made himself a cup of American coffee. Sipped and wrinkled his nose. Wretched stuff, but at least it was hot. He took another sip. Not hot enough. He set the cup down. Even though he’d quit, he longed for a morning fag.
Remote in hand, the Scot stood in front of the television. Keeping the volume low so as not to disturb his holiness, MacLeod surfed until photos of the three girls were on display. Pretty little things, all curls and dimples. Look at them.
Look at them.
MacLeod wondered if it would work. He’d never attempted it with a telly before. What harm could come of trying? Checking on the priest, he saw not a twitch of movement. Satisfied he wouldn’t be caught, the Scot reached out and put his hand over the screen, over the face of the chubby middle child, and closed his eyes.
A shriek as shrill as a police siren filled the small motel room.
“He’s watching me!”
Kicking off his blanket, Petit scrambled to his feet. Adeline and Cecelia sat up in bed, one covering her ears with her hands and the other screaming nearly as loudly as her sister. The mother superior ran out of the bathroom wearing a towel. “What is it?”
Babette’s palms were flat against the television screen. “He’s watching me!”
“Oh, for goodness sake,” said the nun, pulling the wrap tighter around her narrow body. “Turn it off.”
Petit gave a fleeting, embarrassed look at the woman and went over to the television. “No one can watch you through the TV, Missy,” he said, and put his fingers on the controls.
A spark shot out from Petit’s hand and his body flew, slamming against the nightstand between the two beds and crumpling onto the floor.
The abbess ran toward the girl with her hands out. “Babette! Get away from that!”
Before she even touched the set, the woman was knocked backwards by a bolt from the box, her body hurled against the wall.
As if glued there, Babette’s small hands stayed pressed against the screen. “He’s watching me!”
Her sisters burrowed under the blankets, crying hysterically.
“Stop watching me!” Babette screamed to the TV.
Smoke rose from the top of the set and sparks flew out from the rear, crackling and popping like a cap gun. Overhead, the room’s fire alarm screeched. Naked and on her hands and knees, with wet hair hanging down the front of her face, the abbess crawled across the floor. A boney swamp creature inching toward the shrieking girl.
“Stop it!” Babette yelled to the television. “Stop!”
Petit gripped the edge of the nightstand and tried to stand, but folded back onto the floor with a grunt.
Khoury sat up and saw MacLeod standing in front of the television in a bathrobe. The priest checked the clock radio on his nightstand. “Patrick, we’d better get dressed.”
The Scot didn’t answer or move.
The nightstand phone rang and Khoury reached over to pick it up.
Rossi: “Got a call from Camp. A cop in northern Indiana was killed yesterday. Flipped his squad while pursuing a speeder.”
Khoury threw off his covers and sat on the edge of the bed. Rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “Why do you think it’s related to the girls?”
“They found something at the scene, near the wreck. A kid’s drawing of a heart.”
“Interesting.” Khoury switched the phone to his other ear and yawned. “But I don’t see how that...”
“The picture was ripped down the middle.” She paused. “The body, or what was left of it...”
She was shaken. What could shake this steely woman? “Yes, Sam?”
“His chest was torn open and his heart was split in half.”
“Did he have a chance to radio anything in before it happened? Did he have a video camera on his police car? What did his show?”
She laughed dryly. “You’re starting to sound like me.”
“I apologize if I seemed cold.”
“No, no. I meant it in a good way. Those are good questions. The squad was fried. It caught fire. But it’s them, Ryan. I know it is.”
Khoury stood up. “So they’re headed east. Why? What’s east?”
“I’ve got an idea.”
The priest eyed MacLeod, a statue in front of the television. Khoury took two steps toward the Scot and looked around his figure. He had his hand on the screen. “Patrick?”
“What’s wrong?” asked Rossi.
“Patrick!” The priest dropped the phone and ran.
What he saw as he came up behind MacLeod made Khoury stop breathing. Filling the screen was the face of one of the triplets. The middle of the girl’s face was covered by MacLeod’s hand, but Khoury could see her eyes and her mouth. Khoury couldn’t hear anything, it seemed as if the child was looking directly at MacLeod - and screaming at him.
; “Patrick! Get back!” the priest yelled, and put his hand on the Scot’s shoulder.
An electrical charge raced from Khoury’s right hand, coursed through his torso and came out his left foot. The priest could sense his foot burning and vibrating, but he couldn’t let go of MacLeod’s shoulder. Beneath his right hand, he could feel the Scot’s body convulsing.
Someone pounded on the door.
“Ryan! Patrick!”
Khoury tried to open his mouth to yell, but his jaw felt wired shut. At the same time he could feel something warm filling his mouth and trickling down the side of his face. His teeth were clamped down on his tongue. He could smell something burning and wondered if it was his own hair and flesh or MacLeod’s.
The door slammed open and Rossi ran into the room. Out of the corner of his eye, Khoury could see her reach for him. He wanted to warn her....
The front of the television exploded, knocking Babette flat and spraying her with glass.
Grimacing with every movement, Petit crawled over to the fallen child. Blood trickled out of her nostrils and the corners of her mouth. He put his hands to her neck and checked for a pulse. Nothing. He picked up her hand, warm but limp. Felt around. Dropped it. Tried the other wrist. Still nothing.
The abbess pushed him aside. “Get away.”
“She’s gone,” Petit said.
“Shut up.” As she bent over and sealed her mouth over the child’s, the nun looked like a white Halloween skeleton sucking the life from a rag doll.
He didn’t know how much time passed while the woman worked on the girl. Five minutes? Five hours? He grabbed the nun’s bare arm while trying not to stare at the rest of her nakedness. “Give it up. Let her go. She’s gone.”
“No!” She yanked her boney arm out of his grasp.
He stepped back and watched in horror as the nude woman continued to try to resurrect the child. Babette’s chest rose and fell with the nun’s breaths, but did nothing on its own.
Adeline and Cecelia sat on the edge of their bed, whimpering with their arms twined around each other.
“Make her stop,” one of them wailed.
“Stop the noise,” said the other.
He got on a chair and yanked the smoke alarm off the ceiling. At least he could hear himself think. But he couldn’t think. He could only watch.
During the CPR attempt, the blood that had been trickling out of the girl’s nose and lips became one large circle. A matching stain was stenciled on the woman’s face. The mother superior brushed Babette’s hair back with her hand, spreading a red smear across the little forehead. More red splattered the girl’s pink top, blotting out the swimming mermaid that decorated the front.
Red and pink. Red and pink. Red. Pink. As he lost himself in the surreal scene on the floor, the colors swirled together and swam in front of his eyes. Red and pink mermaids, dancing and singing like in that movie the girls watched back at the convent. “Under the sea...”
A knock at the door rousted Petit from his red and pink trance.
“What the hell is going on in there?”
As Petit went over to the door, he spotted his gun nesting in the blankets he’d dropped.
More pounding. “You got a fire? Folks next to you said they heard the alarm go off.”
Petit picked up the revolver, tucked it into the waist of his jeans and pulled down his shirt. “Sorry,” he yelled to the door. “I lit a smoke.”
“No smoking!” bellowed the gravely voice on the other side.
“Yeah, yeah. I put it out. Sorry. Sorry.”
A pause. Then a demand. “Let me in. I want to make sure everything’s kosher in there.”
Petit grimaced at the grotesque scene on the floor. About as far from kosher as you could get. “Not right now. Come back.”
“Why?”
He told a half-truth. “We’re...we’re naked, for Christ’s sake.”
“Smells worse than cigs.”
“It...it was some reefer. Stinky, cheap shit.”
“Goddammit.”
“I flushed it, okay? Just...just give us some privacy.” Petit thought hard. “I’ll slip you a twenty on our way out, for your trouble.”
A long pause. “Forty.”
On the floor, the naked woman sat back on her heels and released a sob.
“Forty,” Petit said. “Go away.”
“You got some kinky crap going on in there?”
Petit rubbed the back of his neck. If the guy had a clue. “Sixty, okay?”
Low laughter on the other side of the door. “I knew it. You young, longhaired punks. Hippies. Bet you got a whore in there, don’t you? Dope and whores.”
“Go the hell away or I ain’t giving you a dime.”
“You done any damage to the room, you’re gonna pay for it, boy. Either that, or I call the goddamn cops. Goddamn hippies, busting up shit.”
Petit glanced at the television set, a cube of charcoal with the screen blown out. “Didn’t break nothing,” he told the door.
“Sixty - and a couple of them joints.”
“Okay, okay. Get lost.”
Reaching under his shirt, Petit put his hand over the butt of his gun. Ear turned to the door, he waited. When he was sure the guy was gone, he pulled down the shirt and turned around to deal with the bigger problem. Problems.
He couldn’t stand the nun’s nakedness a second longer. Petit pulled a spread off the bed and draped it over her shoulders.
She ignored the gesture, and the blanket slipped off her body as she rocked the child in her lap. “No, no, no.”
“She’s gone.”
The mother superior looked up at him with bloodshot eyes and that red-smeared mouth. “Noooo.”
He squatted down. “Give her to me.”
The nun brushed a strand of hair off the girl’s bloody forehead. “I loved her.”
“She knew that.” He lifted the child out of the nun’s arms and took her over to the empty bed. The small body was heavy in its lifelessness, but retained some heat. A sack of warm sand. He set her down so her head was on the pillow. Poor thing was a mess, but he didn’t have the nerve to touch her face.
The nun went over to the two girls on the end of the bed. Picked one up by her shoulders and shook her. “Fix her, Adeline!”
“You’re hurting me!” the girl cried.
Cecelia fell back against the headboard and hugged a pillow. “Let go of her!”
The abbess shook Adeline again. “Heal your sister!”
“She can’t!” yelled Cecelia.
The nun released Adeline and went over to Cecelia. Pulled the pillow shield out of the cringing child’s arms. “Then you do it!”
“We can’t draw each other. Only Baab can do that!”
“How do you know?”
“I just do!”
“Try!”
“No!”
The abbess drew her arm back. “Try or I’ll...”
“Hit her and I’ll hit you,” Petit promised.
Slowly, the mother superior brought her arm down. Cecelia scooted down to the end of the bed to join her sister. “I hate you!” she yelled at the nun.
“Lower your voices or that mean man’s gonna break down the door,” Petit said to the girls. Then to the nun: “Get some clothes on.”
As if she’d been unaware of her nakedness, the nun’s eyes flitted down to her own figure. She ran into the bathroom and closed the door.
Crazy bitch better pull herself together, thought Petit. They needed to figure out how to handle this. Worse than being accused of kidnapping, they could get labeled as child killers. He had no idea why the set had exploded, but suspected the dead girl had been doing something to it. Healing a cartoon character, maybe? Trying to reassemble a crushed Wile E. Coyote? The cops would really believe that story.
Clambering off their bed, Cecelia and Adeline went over to their sister, each taking one side of the mattress. Adeline reached over and poked her sister’s arm repeatedly. “Wake up, silly...Come on
...Quit faking.”
Petit went up to the girl and pulled her arm down. “That’s enough, Missy.”
“She’s not dead,” said Cecelia, looking across the bed at Petit and Adeline. “I know she’s not. She’s a little kid. Little kids don’t die. Old people die.”
He tried to come up with something comforting that they might understand. “She’s asleep.”
“It’s morning,” said Adeline.
“I know it is, Missy, but she went to sleep anyways, and she’s not waking up.”
Cecelia’s face scrunch. She was winding up for a cry.
“But it’s okay,” Petit said, and pulled the bed sheet over Babette’s face. “She doesn’t hurt. She’s in heaven with her folks. Her parents. They’re all together now.”
“They weren’t my real dad and mom.”
Petit blinked. Who said that?
Babette threw off the sheet and sat up.
The bathroom door popped open and the nun – finally fully clothed - saw Babette sitting up in bed. Mother Magdalen started to teeter and grabbed the doorframe for support.
The corpse dragged a hand across her mouth and blinked at the blood on her hand. “Mister P?”
“Yeah, Missy?” he asked, his voice quivering. His body shaking. What was she?
“I’m hungry.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
MacLeod woke with a worse hangover than the one that had started his morning. This time he wasn’t even in bed nursing his headache; he was on the floor staring up at the ceiling. Deplorable state of affairs. He got up on his elbows and groaned.
“Take it easy, big guy.”
“Aye.” The room was spinning. He dropped back down and Rossi’s face came into view, upside down. She was kneeling at his head. “What happened, Sam?”
“You tell us.”
It was the priest’s voice. MacLeod got up on his elbows again. “A little assistance if you please, mates.”
Rossi and Khoury each took an arm and helped MacLeod stand. “Let’s hear it,” said Rossi.
MacLeod propped himself on the edge of the mattress and messaged his temples with his fingertips. “Mother of God and all the saints in heaven.”
The Devil's Own Crayons Page 29