All The Pretty Dead Girls (11 page)

Ginny Marshall was having one of those mornings that made her wish she could just go back to bed.
Or kill myself,
she thought with a rueful grin as she examined herself in the parking lot of the administration building, which housed her office.
Well, better yet, kill Dean Gregory.

It started when her coffeemaker broke while she was in the shower. She came out in her robe, longing for her first cup, only to discover that something was wrong with the damned thing and the pot was smoking on the burner. She threw the whole thing in the trash.

Eyes and mind foggy, she headed downstairs to beg a cup of coffee from her landlady. Mrs. Seibert was a soft-spoken widow in her early seventies who spent, it seemed, most of her life working in the yard or on the phone talking to her grandchildren. She was a great landlady as far as that was concerned—she kept her distance, which was a huge relief to Ginny. When she’d first moved in, she was afraid Mrs. Seibert would be one of those lonely old women who would be pestering her constantly for company. And while the apartment itself wasn’t as big as the town house she’d had in Boston, it was comfortable and cozy.

Unfortunately, on this particular morning, Mrs. Seibert had just gotten off the phone with her oldest granddaughter, who’d just gotten engaged—and Ginny found that her landlady wanted to talk. So Ginny just gritted her teeth and let the older woman pour out her woes and worries about her granddaughter at the same time she poured the coffee. Finally, Ginny was able to make her escape by pretending she’d be late for work.

But more was still to come. After grabbing her briefcase and heading out to the driveway, she discovered her rear driver’s side tire was flat. Irritated and cursing, she changed the tire, getting oil and grease all over her hands and slacks, necessitating a change of clothes. After dropping the flat off at Bud’s Shell, she finally headed out to the college.

All the way there, she kept rehearsing in her head what she would say in her meeting with Dean Gregory.
No other faculty member has to get his or her curriculum approved by the dean, or clear it ahead of time with you. Of course my classes are controversial. Their purpose is to encourage intelligent debate about religion and its history. I do not teach that the Bible is wrong, or that Christianity is wrong, but no one can argue that the Bible hasn’t been edited, and the Christian Church has historically been used by a male-dominated society for political purposes and to pursue agendas that are diametrically opposed to what the Bible actually says and teaches. The Church has been anti-woman almost from its very beginnings—and the Book of Revelation in particular has been used and misused.

And if logic and rationality didn’t work, she could always play the Harvard card.

As the only faculty member who not only had her doctorate from Harvard, but also had been a full tenured professor there, Ginny knew she had some clout. She didn’t like to swing that weight around, but if she had to, she would.

The thought made her smile. She wasn’t big on confrontation in her personal life—nor was she big on “tooting her own horn,” as her agent, Angela Cohen, often pointed out to her. But she would not stand for infringements on her freedom to teach as she saw fit.

Ginny enjoyed the drive out to the college—the smell of the apple orchards, the low-slanting rays of a pink morning sun. Even though it took less than half an hour, there was something almost zenlike for Ginny driving through the countryside. But the calmness that settled her anxiety over Dean Gregory was short-lived.

As she reached the college entrance, Ginny’s eyes widened. All along both sides of the road were police cars with their lights flashing. She could see uniformed men wandering through the woods on the opposite side of the road from the college entrance. There were state police cars along with the Lebanon cops.

“What the hell?” Ginny stepped on the brake, rolling down her window. “What’s going on, Sheriff?”

She liked Miles Holland. He was one of the few people in Lebanon who’d remained friendly to her after that damned article had appeared—and he’d been the one to suggest calling in the FBI when she got the threatening e-mails. “I won’t put up with that kind of bullshit in my town,” he’d told her. “If they’re playing pranks, let ’em think about that when they’re behind bars.”

He smiled as he saw her now. “Morning, Dr. Ginny,” he called, heading toward her car. He always called her “Dr. Ginny,” with a slight teasing sound in his voice that always made her want to giggle a little bit.

“What’s going on?” she asked again.

Miles was at her window now. “Seems like one of your students went missing last night.”

“Missing?” Ginny put the car in park. “From the dorm?” She felt a knot forming in the pit of her stomach.

The sheriff scratched his head as he leaned in her window. “Best as I can piece it together, she never made it back from town last night. We found her bike by the front gate.” He paused. “There was a lot of blood, but no trace of the girl.”

Ginny felt sick. “Who—is she?”

“Name’s Bonnie Warner.”

“Oh, dear God.”

Miles looked in at her. “You know her, Ginny?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. I saw her. Last night.”

“When? Where?”

“At the Yellow Bird. I’d stopped in, and she came in to get a cup of coffee. She was concerned when she saw me, because she shouldn’t have been off campus at that hour.”

“What did you tell her?”

Ginny sighed. “I agreed not to report her. She had been in town, where she tutors a girl. She said she needed the extra money to buy textbooks.”

Miles was nodding. “Yeah. I’ve been over to talk to the girl she was tutoring and her mother. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.”

“I should have insisted I give her a ride.”

Miles looked at her kindly. “She apparently has been making the same bike ride all summer. There was no reason to think last night would be any different.”

Ginny felt her stomach twist. “But apparently it was. You said there was blood…?”

“Ginny, I’ll call you later, or maybe have Perry come by. To get an official statement from you. Is that okay?”

She nodded. Miles called ahead to tell his men to let her car through. Ginny’s head felt light, as if she might faint. Bonnie’s face hovered in front her, her plaintive plea not to report her ringing in Ginny’s ears. She liked Bonnie. The girl had been in her Bible and Women class the previous semester. Bonnie had been a good student, rather quiet, only speaking when called on—but she’d always had a valid point to make when she did speak up. In her term paper, she’d made some excellent points that had surprised Ginny with their thoughtfulness. Bonnie had obviously not only been paying close attention in class, but had done some outside research on her own.

Ginny sat behind the wheel of her car after parking in her designated spot. She couldn’t move. She felt frozen in guilt.
Blood
. There had been blood. That meant something terrible had happened to Bonnie. She might even be dead.

Why didn’t I insist on driving her?

Finally, she was able to get out of the car and make her way into the building. The theology department shared its office area with the history department. All of the professors had small offices off a hallway that jutted out in either direction from a central reception area. Both departments shared a single secretary, Hazel Westwood, who was on the phone when Ginny walked into the office.

“Did you hear, Dr. Marshall?” Hazel’s nasal voice was especially hard to take this morning. “One of the
scholarship
girls is missing.” There was a smug note of triumph in her voice, as if she were trying very hard not to smile.

Ginny glared at her. Though blue-collar herself, Hazel looked down her snub nose at the girls who attended Wilbourne on scholarships, as though they didn’t belong among the high-class princesses on campus. More than once, when Hazel made a snide reference to “scholarship girls,” Ginny had had to bite back a stinging retort.

“Yes,” she told the secretary. “I spoke with Sheriff Holland down at the gate. It’s terrible. I certainly hope she’s all right.”

“She’s probably with a boy.” Hazel laced the words with condescension and contempt. “That’s how those scholarship girls are, you know. You can’t make a sow’s ear into a silk purse, after all.”

Ginny bit her lip and walked to her office. Her voice mail light was blinking. She picked it up.

“Ginny, this is Dean Gregory. As I am sure you are already aware, one of the students is missing, and so I am afraid I’m going to be tied up all day and have to cancel our meeting. We’ll need to revisit this, though, sometime in the future. As you know, we now have a new board of trustees, and they are quite concerned about the curriculum we’re teaching. So at some point soon, we’ll need to have a conversation.”

She set the phone down thoughtfully. She didn’t like the way Gregory said “conversation.”

Gregory’s postponement of their meeting, however, also put off the eventual confrontation she’d have with him over seeing Bonnie Warner at the Yellow Bird. The fact would be noted in the investigation, and Gregory would want to know whether Ginny had planned to report the girl or not.

Ginny closed the door to her office, sat down at her desk, and covered her face with her hands.

What happened to that poor girl?

She realized she was shivering, and that her office was freezing, even though the temperature read seventy-five.

Pierre deSalis never could quite pinpoint the moment when his life went wrong. As he lay in bed listening to all the noise in the small house he shared with his family, he gave up on trying to get back to sleep until they were all out of the house.

Only a few more years and all the kids will be gone,
he said to himself.
If I can make it that long.

Pierre had Sundays and Mondays off from the paper mill. On Sundays, Maddie nagged him out of bed so he could drive them all up to Senandaga for Mass. And during the school year, the noise of the kids getting ready for school woke him up every goddamned Monday morning. So he never got to sleep in. Never.

Pierre buried his head in his pillow and tried to count his blessings. His children were healthy. He had a good job. And if maybe things hadn’t turned out the way he might have wanted when he was first married, he supposed things could be worse. Things could
always
be worse.

They’d been thirteen when they fell in love: a pair of rural farm kids without much future in Richelieu. They used to go on picnics and laugh and tease each other, always planning to move to the States once they were married. Right after high school, they’d tied the knot in the little Catholic chapel in Richelieu in front of their family and friends, and instead of going on a honeymoon, they’d packed everything they owned into an old battered Chevrolet station wagon and moved across the border. Pierre got a job at the paper mill in Senandaga, and Maddie worked at the A&P as a checker. Between them, they scrimped and saved every cent they could. There were no vacations. In several years, they’d had down payment money for a nice little house in Lebanon.

Their little house was a dream come true for them; at the time it seemed big, roomy, and perfect for children. There was a backyard, three bedrooms, and an unfinished basement that could also be converted into bedrooms if the family grew that big. Until that point, they’d been using birth control—a secret kept from their priest—but as soon as they moved into their house, Maddie had stopped taking the pills. Within a year she was carrying their first child, Pierre Jr.

It was a bit of a commute for Pierre every day to the mill, but the house made Maddie happy. Pierre considered the drive a small price to pay for Maddie’s smiles, to hear her singing in the kitchen as she cooked or cleaned. That first pregnancy, she’d glowed and been beautiful—and been so happy.

But Pierre Jr. hadn’t been born healthy. There was something wrong with his blood. They’d had to drain all of his blood, give him transfusions, and it was touch and go for two weeks. Maddie spent almost all of that time in the chapel at St. Agatha’s Hospital, or talking to priests. She wouldn’t talk to Pierre hardly at all. Finally, Father Michaels had told him, “Maddie blames herself for the baby’s sickness.”

Pierre, exhausted from lack of sleep and still worried, just gaped at the priest. “Why?”

Father Michaels had shaken his head. “She thinks God is punishing her for the years of birth control, which you know is a sin, Pierre. I’ve told her God doesn’t work that way, but she’s hard to persuade.”

After the baby came home, everything changed. Maddie filled the house with statues and paintings of the saints. She was always saying the Rosary, watching the baby like a hawk, and many nights slept in the baby’s room on the floor next to the crib. Once, when Pierre complained, Maddie turned on him in a fury. “It’s your fault the baby was sick!” she snapped. “You insisted on me taking those accursed pills!” And she stormed off, leaving Pierre staring after her with horror.

Shortly thereafter, she returned to their bed as though nothing had ever happened.

Then the other children started to come, and it was as though each pregnancy shut something down in Maddie. Every pregnancy drove her further and further toward the Church. They’d never been particularly religious—they went to church on Sunday, that was all—but now Maddie spent two or three mornings a week driving up to Senandaga for Mass. She started putting on weight, and stopped wearing makeup and fixing her hair. Every child after the first was born healthy, which was a relief—and even Pierre Jr., after such a rough beginning, was an extraordinarily healthy child. But if anything, Maddie only became more devout. And when she’d put the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the front yard, Pierre had supported her against the neighbors who wanted them to remove it.

“We’re Catholic,” he’d told Jacob Cobb and his sour-faced wife Bernice when they’d stopped by to ask that the “eyesore” be taken away. “And there’s no law against having the Virgin Mary in our front yard.”

Maybe I should have given in to them then,
he thought as he heard Maddie yelling up the stairs at their youngest to hurry up.
Maybe I should have put my foot down and made her take down all the pictures of bleeding hearts and saints all over the damned house. Maybe sometime I should have told her I wanted a wife and not a nun to live with
After the last child was born, it was a very rare day when Maddie agreed to have sex with him.

Yet Pierre never objected when he came home from work to find a new picture of Jesus or Mary hung somewhere, or when another little statue of a saint appeared on a ledge like magic. Maddie had also lost her sense of humor somewhere along the way, and he couldn’t quite figure out when that happened. In the old days, she’d never complained when he sat up watching a ball game and drinking a few beers, but now she’d purse her lips and furrow her brow in that annoying, disapproving way. How many times did Pierre come across her sitting in the kitchen, eyes closed with her fingers counting off the beads on her rosary?

Damn it, I work hard and if I want a beer while I watch a ball game, I’ll have one! Whatever happened to that pretty young girl who liked a beer every now and then, who loved to laugh and cuddle up to me in the bed at night after the kids were asleep?

None of the boys took to religion the way Maddie wanted. Pierre Jr. had stopped being an altar boy. Michael, their second son, was urged by his mother to join the priesthood.
That’s about as likely as me sprouting wings,
Pierre thought with a smile. Michael had always had an eye for the girls. He was a handsome boy, a star of the football team, and girls were calling him on the phone all the time, much to his mother’s distaste. Frankie, their third son, wasn’t likely to become a priest either. Right now he was reading tracts on Buddhism, which his mother called “paganism.”

But their youngest child, Bernadette, worried Pierre. Thirteen and quiet, she was always reading books about the saints and praying with her mother. Today was Bernadette’s first day of high school, and she and her mother had sat up until nine last night saying the Rosary in order that the Virgin would protect the girl as she started out on a new journey.

“Where is that girl?” Maddie was asking now, bustling around the kitchen as Pierre came down the stairs. “I’ve called her three times.”

“Maybe you both stayed up too late last night praying,” Pierre ventured. Maddie just glared at him.

Pierre sighed, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“Bernadette!” Maddie shouted from the bottom of the stairs. “Are you up?”

There was no answer.

Maddie gripped the banister and began hurrying up the steps. Pierre settled down at the table with his coffee. In seconds, he could hear Maddie’s heavy footsteps across the ceiling down the hall to Bernadette’s room.

Her scream made him stand abruptly, spilling his coffee all over the floor.

Jesus preserve us,
Pierre thought as he ran up the stairs. He could hear Michael and Frankie bounding out of their rooms.

Maddie was standing in Bernadette’s doorway, her mouth open and her hands clasped together so tightly, the knuckles were white.

Pierre peered into the girl’s room. His daughter was lying on her bed, flat on her back, her arms straight out on either side of her.

There was blood on her feet and on her palms.

“Call an ambulance!” Pierre shouted down the hallway to his sons, pushing past his wife and hurrying to his daughter’s bedside.

Bernadette turned her eyes to him. Her face seemed to be bathed in an eerie light.

“Papa.” She smiled at him. “The Holy Mother spoke to me. She came to me.”

“The wounds of our Lord.”

It was Maddie, whispering behind him. Pierre glanced around to see her make the sign of the cross and drop to her knees. “It’s a miracle! Praise Jesus!” She grabbed at her husband’s hand. “Pray with me, Pierre!”

He pulled his hand away from her, and turned to his sons. They were standing in the doorway, their mouths open. “Didn’t you hear me? Call an ambulance!” Still, they just stood there.
“Now!”

Frankie turned and disappeared down the hallway again.

“Is—is Bernie all right?” Michael stuttered.

Pierre couldn’t answer. He turned back to his daughter, placing his hand on her forehead. “How did this happen?” he asked her. “Did you cut yourself?” He forced himself to look at the wounds. They did not appear deep, but the blood was fresh and flowing freely.

“She spoke to me, Papa.” Bernadette’s face was wreathed in smiles. “She told me that I am blessed.”

He grabbed a shirt near the foot of her bed and began wrapping Bernadette’s hand, trying to stop the blood.

“No!” Maddie pushed him away. “Don’t!”

“Are you crazy? She’ll bleed to death!”

Bernadette looked up at him serenely. “No, Papa, it’s a miracle.”

Maddie began mumbling, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you…”
Hail Mary.

In the distance, Pierre heard a siren.

For the first time in a very long time, he started to pray.