An Imperfect Miracle (22 page)
When I got near the steps I looked over at Carlos, but he was sitting behind the counter staring out the window and seemed kind of lost. I felt sorry for him, but I didn't know what I could say to make him feel better. Then I knelt down on the bottom step. I even took away the purple pillow just to show Mary that this prayer of mine was so important that I was willing to bruise up my knees a little. I decided to say the prayer out loud too, since it had worked so well in getting Chewy back. The words hit my brain all of a sudden, like it was a miracle or something.
“I don't really care if Father Tom or Pastor Mike or both of them together killed Runyon or not. And I don't care either that they acted sort of sneaky when they got the town to turn you into a shrine. And I'm not even all that mad anymore that they didn't tell me about it. I'd just like them out of jail as soon as you and God can work something out. I'm not asking so much on account of them either, although they're both really nice guys, but because of my mom and because of you. I figure that Father Tom and Pastor Mike can put up with staying in jail until some jury lets them off. Or even if the jury sends them to prison, they'll probably still end up going to heaven, because you're a lot more forgiving than we humans are. But I'm worried about my mom going all to pieces in the meantime. She's already lost one husband, and Mom's not too steady sometimes, at least that's how it seems to me. And I'm worried about all the folks who believe in you being disappointed when your shrine closes up. They'll just bulldoze you into the ground, and what will have been the point of it all?”
Then I took a deep breath to get my courage up for the hard part.
“Now I know I'm not the greatest kid in the world, but I'm asking you to listen to me anyway, even if you don't think what I'm asking is the right thing to do, because I know you've got your own ideas. We're not as strong as you are, after all, and we need a little extra help sometimes.”
I tried to think if I needed to say anything else, but nothing came to me. I thought about crossing myself like the Catholics do, but Mary would have known I was just faking it. I looked over at Chewy lying beside me and wondered if she had anything she wanted to say to Mary, but Chewy smacked her lips some and seemed satisfied.
I kind of moped over to where Carlos was standing behind the counter. Carlos was whimpering a little now, and I decided he was just sad for having been so short with me the day before. I told him not to worry about it and headed for the exit. But he grabbed me by the arm and held me still, and his grip was a lot stronger than I would have expected from such a little old guy. Then he wiped the water out of his eyes with his other hand and said that he needed to tell me something. He said that people would soon be saying mean and untrue things about Mary, but that I shouldn't pay any attention to it.
“It'll all be on account of me.” Then he smiled just a little. “I heard you praying just now. It was a fine prayer too, but you don't need to worry anymore. Things will work out just fine.”
All of a sudden he gave me a big hug and said he loved me. I thought about saying that I loved him too, but I was too embarrassed on account of Mr. Santelli being so close by. After Carlos scrubbed the last of the tears off his face, he shot me a big toothy smile and sent me home.
Just as I was walking out the door, Carlos called out after me. He said that he knew Mary only had three tears now and that her mouth was beginning to open up a little, almost like she was getting ready to laugh. He said he didn't have anything to do with it either and that it was a sign of something, a miracle, he said, but that he didn't know what it meant exactly. He said he was taking it serious though and that I should too.
When I stepped outside I caught the little drunk listening in through the front window. I wondered what he was up to, but I was so beat and worn down from all the praying that I went straight home and crawled right into bed.
The local newspaper printed the whole letter that the little drunk, his full name turned out to be John Smith, sent to the cops along with the big silver cross he claimed he stole from Carlos, the one Smith killed Runyon with. Mom saw it at work and bought the paper right away and read the letter to me when we were sitting next to each other on the couch after supper. I told her I could read it by myself, but I guess she wasn't taking any chances.
The letter was kind of long and had a lot of fancy Catholic-sounding words in it like confession and penance and stuff, which I guess the little guy had picked up from hanging around Carlos and Father Tom so much. But the main points were pretty simple and straightforward according to Mom.
This little Smith guy said that Runyon showed up on Main Street one night drunk and fuming that somebody had been stealing from him. He was mad too that he couldn't go where he wanted on account of some stupid judge, and that a crazy mutt had even bit him for no good reason. Then Runyon saw the shrine and got ticked off at Mary because he blamed her for all the bars closing down.
Smith said he'd come back to the shrine that night to polish up the crosses like he often did to help out Carlos, and that Runyon stomped in and said that he was going to scrape that ugly face of hers right off the wall. Smith said he told him to back off, but that Runyon just pushed him away and started going for Mary with a butcher's knife he'd brought along.
The little guy said that he just couldn't allow it, Mary being the Mother of God and all. So he took the silver cross off from around his neck, the one he'd swiped from Carlos, and bashed the bottom end of it right into the side of Runyon's skull. Runyon died on the spot, and after praying for Runyon's soul a little, Smith stole a car and drove his body out to the edge of town and dumped him. He said he would have taken him farther out, maybe even a ways up the interstate, but that he got scared hauling a dead body around.
Then he cleaned up all the blood at the shrine, buried the butcher's knife out in the woods, drove the car into a junkyard on the other side of town, and finally walked back to his little room in the basement of St. Sebastian's like nothing had happened. He said it was a good thing that Carlos had talked the town out of putting in those security cameras over at the shrine, or he'd have been a dead duck for sure.
He said he decided against telling the cops what he'd done because he didn't know if he had a right to kill Runyon for trying to scrape Mary's face off the concrete. He said he didn't think a jury in Millridge would have sent him off to prison for it, but since he used to be a thief and a general reprobate himself he wasn't taking any chances. Plus, he thought that because Runyon was such a derelict, the cops wouldn't work too hard trying to find the killer, and that he didn't have to worry about some innocent person going to jail for it.
When Father Tom was arrested the little fellow told himself, at least according to what he wrote in his letter, that no jury in Millridge would ever find such a good man to be guilty of such a terrible crime, and he decided to stay quiet. He thought the same thing when Pastor Mike got picked up. Then as he was walking past the shrine one day he heard a young boy's prayer, and the prayer shamed him so much that he decided to come clean. He didn't mention me as the boy he'd heard praying, because I guess he didn't want to embarrass me. I almost told Mom that I was the kid he was writing about. But at the last second I decided I better not risk it, Mom being so nutty at times and hard to predict.
The little drunk wrote that even though he was confessing to the murder, he didn't see why he had to turn himself in. He said that the Good Lord had told him through Mary that He'd be the one to do the punishing for killing Runyon if there was any punishment to be given out. He didn't say exactly how Mary had passed him along the Lord's message, but I knew by then that Mary had plenty of ways to get her point across.
The cops started a big manhunt for him right away. But he must have been a sneaky little guy because they finally decided that he'd disappeared without a trace, and after a month or so they gave up. I heard some TV reporter saying that nobody disappeared without a trace, especially not these days with the Internet and cell phone cameras and GPS trackers and everything. I figured that Mary must have stepped in to hide him somewhere. She probably figured that since she'd already gone to the trouble of saving him once, there was no point letting him sink now.
It didn't strike me as quite right though that this Smith fellow was able to haul Runyon's body all by himself out into the woods behind our church. There were so many trees and bushes and old stumps that I knew he couldn't have driven Runyon's body all the way in his car. Naturally I thought of a big strong fellow like Father Tom as somebody who might have given him a hand, or maybe even Carlos, because like I told you Carlos had a pretty solid grip for such a little guy.
I didn't understand either why the drunk would have swiped Carlos's silver cross, because I was pretty sure Carlos would have given him one if he'd just asked. And if he'd stolen it like he claimed, why would he have been wearing it around his neck where anybody, including Carlos, could have seen it? And why would Runyon want to scrape Mary's face off the wall in the first place, since she'd been his meal ticket ever since he began blackmailing Carlos and Father Tom? Of course, I knew from being around Dad that people sometimes do crazy things when they're plastered.
I even wondered for a while if the letter the little drunk wrote would have been more accurate if he had put Carlos's name in place of his. That would have explained why Carlos had gotten so weepy after listening to my prayer at the shrine, and why he thought people would be mad at Mary on account of him. Maybe the little drunk had decided to take the heat for the murder to save his friend Carlos. But I didn't see how I could ever go about proving a wild story like that. Plus, the last thing I wanted was for Carlos to get tossed into jail too.
I understood why Father Tom was taking the blame for the murder though, figuring like he always did that it was the charitable thing to do. But why Father Tom wouldn't have said something when Pastor Mike got arrested, I didn't know, unless he blamed Pastor Mike for thinking up the whole Mary business in the first place and wanted to get back at him. Of course, I was just guessing, and I never said anything to anybody about any of this, not even to Mom.
There was so much sympathy for Father Tom after he got out of jail that business picked up right away at the shrine and over at St. Sebastian's too. Father Tom said that they'd need to build on an addition, like at our church, just to hold all the new members. I figured Father Tom wouldn't have any problem raising the money either, what with Mary packing them in again. Mom sure was happy when they let Pastor Mike out of jail and kept saying “praise the Lord” for weeks after. The cops said that the bloodstains and hair on the silver cross were the same as Runyon's and that it had to be the murder weapon. After that the town was pretty nice to all of us, because Mom said that the mayor was worried about getting sued.
The town even bought us all dinner at a fancy steak house down near Pittsburgh. I ordered a twelve-ounce New York strip, which Mom said I'd never be able to eat. She said I should have gotten the kid's steak instead. But Pastor Mike and Father Tom and Carlos all told her to go easy on me, and this time she actually listened for a change. That was when I decided that there was hope for Mom after all.
It wasn't long before the town council got together and hired a new guy to run the shrine. His name was Roger Baker, and he used to head up the sales department of a big company until he got religion. They hired a businessman like Mr. Baker for the job because they claimed that the shrine could bring in even more money if it was operated a little better. They said that the shrine was the town's big cash cow now, and that they had to protect their investment.
Father Tom didn't much like the idea of hiring Mr. Baker to replace Carlos. But Carlos said he didn't mind getting canned because he was a little tired of peddling crosses and rosary beads and overpriced pictures to rich old ladies. He said that he wanted to help out more at St. Sebastian's with what he called “the Lord's true work of serving the poor and needy.”
Now why Carlos didn't put up more of a fight about losing his job struck me as a little strange, since up until then the shrine had been his whole life. Mr. Santelli told me later that “the mayor must have had something on Carlos,” and that was why Carlos gave in so easy. But Mr. Santelli was such a grumpy old guy that I didn't know whether to believe him or not.
A few days after the letter came out, that nosy newspaper reporter down in Pittsburgh came up to snoop around again. He said that a little no account drunk like John Smith, assuming that was even his real name, could never have pulled off such a slick crime on his own. He claimed that Carlos and maybe even Father Tom must have been in on the murder too. He even wrote a big long article saying that if two shady characters like them were lying about the murder, they were probably lying about everything else. By that he was talking about the shrine and how it was all just a “sophisticated scheme,” as he called it, to cheat poor people out of their hard-earned money.
The problem was that the reporter really didn't have any proof. The public got so mad that the newspaper had to take everything back, which I heard ended up costing the reporter his job. But the Mary-haters, as Carlos called them, still weren't through. Some fancy college professors even came to town and gave a talk on how people who went to see her were just a bunch of hayseeds looking for an easy way out of their problems. They claimed to have done a study where they followed some of the people around who were supposedly healed by Mary, and that they all went back to being sick in just a few days. But if those professors were anything like Mr. Grimes, for instance, who ended up doing thirty to life, it was hard to know whether to believe them or not.
Now about those stuffy professors, I didn't go to their talk myself, but some of Mom's nurse friends did and they said it was pretty boring. The only good part was when some old guy with bad teeth who claimed Mary had healed him from Parkinson's disease barged in about halfway through and started hollering at the top of his lungs that it was all a lie what they were saying. I was glad that Mom had been wrong about him and that the healing hadn't worn off yet, since he seemed like a pretty decent old fellow.
But no matter how hard the newspapers and the professors and the Mr. Grimeses of the world tried to scare people off, more and more pilgrims were lining up to see Mary all the time. Mr. Baker said it was because of all the publicity, and that there was no such thing as bad publicity. He said that with all the new business, the shrine was planning on buying up all the property on both sides of Main Street for two whole blocks.
He said they were going to tear everything down so they could put in nice shops and restaurants and a hotel and a big museum to Mary, and even a fancy office building for all the shrine's employees. He said that the shrine would have to start hiring a boatload of new people too, what with all the pilgrims pouring in from all over the world for healings and other favors. And with all those new jobs, pretty soon the town actually started growing again.
One day I was sitting in school daydreaming like usual when it hit me that I'd never thanked Mary in person for helping to spring Father Tom and Pastor Mike out of jail. I was so ashamed of myself that I snuck out of the cafeteria at lunchtime to go see her, because I didn't think I could hold out all afternoon.
It turned out to be Mr. Santelli's last day selling tickets at the shrine. Mr. Baker said he didn't like the idea of a guy manning the ticket counter who only had three fingers on his right hand. He said visitors might be asking themselves if Mary was such a hotshot, how come she didn't grow him his two fingers back? So Mr. Santelli was getting moved into the shrine's bookkeeping and tax department, which he said he liked a lot better anyway because the hours were more regular. Plus, he didn't have to put up anymore with all “those screaming nut cases,” as he liked to call some of the noisier pilgrims.
After I showed Mr. Santelli my pass I went up to say hello to Mary and to thank her. But even from way far back I could see this great big toothy grin on her face. And when I got closer I noticed that her tears were all gone, every last one of them. It looked to me like she was getting ready to bust out laughing, and I wondered if anybody else had seen the changes.
I ran back and told Mr. Santelli, and he came right over. He couldn't hardly believe it either and said that I was probably the first person to have seen her new face. He said that Mary must have had a soft spot for me to keep picking me to show all these signs and wonders to. That made me feel kind of good, since like I told you Mr. Santelli was a pretty rough old guy and didn't go around handing out compliments too easy.
You should have heard all the fussing and fuming after that. Some people, mostly outsiders, since according to Mom the townsfolk had kind of gotten used to their taxes going down, were howling that Mary's new face just proved that the shrine was nothing but a big swindle and publicity stunt all along. Mr. Baker, who was loving all the attention, kept the story going by hiring a chemist from some big university to come in and take a look at her. The chemist said in this long report, which I don't think anybody ever really read, that the changes to her face had something to do with how the concrete had gotten weak and brittle from all those years of sitting out in the rain. But that was about all he could say really, and nobody ended up caring too much what he thought.
Mr. Baker said they were going to keep “Weeping Lady” in the shrine's name for a while even though Mary wasn't crying anymore, just to “cause a little stir,” he said. Then a few months later they held a big contest over the Internet to see who could come up with the best new name for the shrine. Thousands of people entered, maybe millions, for all I knew, and they ended up settling on “The Blessed Virgin of Millridge,” which I thought was kind of hokey. But Mr. Baker said that hokey was what people were looking for these days, and they could always hold another contest later on if they ever got tired of it.
