Death of the Black-Haired Girl (11 page)

She had been at the desk with her uneasiness for a few minutes when the bell at the street door rang. Lone women—everyone—tended to proceed with caution around the college after dark. There were frequent buses and group safety routes. Jo went up the half flight of stairs to the street level and, looking through the solid glass doors at the building’s main entrance, saw him on the sidewalk outside. A tall, thin man in his fifties with a scarred face stood in the lighted doorway. He was wearing a black beret, which he was stuffing into his overcoat pocket as he reached for the doorbell again. All the other offices in her building had closed and the street was winter dark. When he saw her through the glass door his eyes came alight. She let him in and gave him a chair in the office.

“I thought I saw you at the hospital the other day,” she told him.

“Indeed you did. And I saw you, Josephine.”

“Don’t call me Josephine, by the way. Makes me feel like I’m married to Napoleon.”

“Jo, is it?”

“Yes. Do we know each other?” How strange it would be, she thought, if this were the man she remembered.

He gave her face a long study. From his coat pocket he took a printout of one of the pictures from
Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation
and a copy of the
Gazette
with Maud’s article and picture.

“I thought there might be a chaplain’s office. Then I checked the Newman Center. They directed me.”

“I’m a layperson now. I withdrew almost thirty years ago. I’m on the counseling staff.”

“Did you counsel Maud Stack?”

“That’s confidential.”

The man shrugged.

“She didn’t seek counseling,” Jo told him.

“Is she pregnant?”

Quite without meaning to, Jo gave him a look of disgust.

“None of my business?”

“I know you’d like to make it your business. Fortunately it’s not, and you know it.”

The man before her bore an uncanny resemblance to the one known as the Mourner. He had been the most extreme of those who embraced the option for the poor, the most avid defender of violent methods. He required approval, and more than approval he required power, moral and tactical. His way of exercising power was to become the fiercest of the revolution’s priests. He took great risks with the government’s death squads.

Like the Mourner, this man was long-faced, an inch or so over six feet, broad-shouldered but slender. He must have gone through repeated attacks of one kind of tropical fever or another that had left his skin discolored. His eyes were peculiar: swollen and mottled with flashes of unnatural light, outsize pupils, lids like flaking dirty lace. White men who lived in the lowlands under the montaña sometimes took on a look like that in the Mourner’s eyes. Once his eyes had fascinated, with the power to halt a breath or a word. She could hardly believe she had not seen him before. But it was not possible, she thought. Everyone said the Mourner was dead.

This man’s hair was white, trimmed closely and unevenly, possibly over a towel and a bathroom sink, but the effect suited him. The story was he had been badly beaten by the security police of several nations. Somehow the Mourner had got himself a reputation as a faith healer in one of the neighboring republics, a country traditionally hostile to the one whose regime he had been fighting to overthrow. Its security apparatus left him alone and he had begun to dabble in semi-miraculous cures. Jo had met him once at a conference at the Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas. At that time he was already a man to be feared.

After the movement collapsed and his excommunication was complete, he stayed in South America and became famous as a wilderness mystic who restored health to the lame, the halt, the virtually deceased. He took a beautiful mistress, choosing with brazen effrontery the daughter of a local hacendado, a brutal man whom he had appeared to cure of syphilis with indigenous potions and hypnotic spells. When the girl became pregnant he engaged the practice of abortion in a fearsome crusade, equipped with Genesis, Deuteronomy and a litany of terrifying curses committing sinners to the eternal service of Satan. His reputation extended to the tabloids of the capital in features read aloud beside shepherds’ camps, in bandit caves and on river-borne canoes. His eyes were terrible, the eyes of a man of sorrows.

“Why did you come to this campus?” she asked the man before her.

“To visit Maud Stack. And to address her spiritual adviser. Someone needs to tell her that sometimes what we do when we’re adolescents haunts us the rest of our lives. She may pay for it.”

“Is that a threat, Father?”

He said nothing.

“In about half a minute,” Jo said, “I’m going to call security. There’s a surveillance camera in the hall outside.”

“The least you could have done was raise objections. For the kid’s own good. The thing she put in your newspaper! The blasphemy of it, Jo. So clever and so naive.”

“I call that a threat,” Jo said, but she made no move. She thought all at once of the raptor snake fixing its prey with a stare.

He treated her to his world-embracing smile. The smile that must have frozen the hearts of peasants when he arrived with his messages from the army of the people. The inquisitor of the proletariat come to show its suspected enemies the instruments. Quiet-spoken, with his educated diction and gentle clerical manner, he must have left the designated criminal element paralyzed with fear. And with remorse as well, overcome with repentance for whatever it was they were supposed to have done, ready to confess all night long to anyone ready to listen. Sometimes it took even longer before they could be made to comprehend what guilt was. In the end, everyone learned.

“Are you afraid of me, Jo?”

“I don’t know why you came here. I need you to leave this office.”

“I came to bear witness to murder and the mockery of Almighty God. To remind you of your duty.”

“And I’m reminding you that you’re trespassing here. You have no legitimate business on this campus and I’m letting our security know that you’re threatening our students and staff.”

“I’m not threatening anyone.”

“Threatening our students and staff,” Jo repeated. “I don’t believe I caught your name. Father, is it?” She looked over the desk at him, pencil poised on a memo sheet.

“Just call me one of the mourners.”

When she dialed campus security, he left quickly. The security chief was a middle-aged former national park policeman named Philip Polhemus. He arrived five minutes later accompanied by one of the young female officers. The college’s police people wore military-style uniforms again after a decade or so of affecting comfortably academic blazers.

“We’re keeping an eye open for him, Dr. Carr,” Polhemus told her. “We’ll make the city police aware of him. No clerical garb, right?”

“No clerical garb. He’s shabby but clean-shaven.”

“Let us know if you see him again and we’ll escort him off campus. If he comes back we’ll arrest him. Can you give us a description?”

“I’m sending you guys a memo,” Jo told him. “He wouldn’t give me a name.”

In the memo to Polhemus she included his calling himself a mourner. It troubled her to invoke the words.

“G
OOD LORD!” SHELBY SAID
when she opened the dorm room door to Maud. “I can’t believe you came back. How did you get here? Are you all right?”

“I walked from the station.”

Shell took a step back and watched Maud drag her duffel in and collapse on their peeling leather couch.

“I got to tell you, baby, y’all look kind of drekko. I mean to say you’re looking tired,” she added.

“Yes.”

“There’s a sort of to-do, you know. Like we’re getting death threats here. I mean,” Shell said, “just like ordinary death threats like people get sometimes, the world being what it is. But still—death threats. Threats of death.”

“I believe you, Shell. I don’t think I give a shit.”

“You know what? Miss Carr in the counseling office asked me to call her when you got back. If you got back. Or when, rather.”

“The hell with her.”

Shell folded her arms and looked at the door Maud had come through.

“I’m gonna call her. I’ll take you to see her.”

“Screw her,” Maud shouted. “Fuck her. She’s just gonna bitch about the thing.”

“No, no. We need help. We need somebody to help us and she knows the scene. Like whether you should stay or go. What we should do.”

“No!”

“Who do you want to talk to, sweetheart? Cops or deans or somebody? She’s a smart, practical person, hear? You want to call her!”

It was after six in the evening when Jo got back to her office following Shell’s call. On her desk she spread out the photographs that Maud had selected to accompany her article, the ones the
Gazette
had prudently declined to run. It took great effort to get past Maud’s cruelty and folly in choosing them. The girl’s mother had died before she had gone off to college. Her father had been called to the 9/11 scene. But the pictures Maud had proposed to impose on her enemies were so distressing—the gargoyle-faced, doomed little things described in medical Greek that sounded like science fiction. Welcomed to the breathing world like things under the spell of a bad fairy at the conception. The only consolation was that the worst of them soon died. Years before, in a school taught by nuns, Jo had heard a story about deformed creatures whose humanity was in question. It was an object of disputation whether these humanoid beings had souls. In case they did, it was said, Mother Church covered that angle, engaging an order of sisters to administer unimaginable measures of care to them. It was foolish, Jo thought, for people to expend their ignorant moralizing babble on this obscene and ugly quarter of theodicy.

But in fact Jo sympathized with Maud’s calling the fanatics on their iconography. It was particularly strong-minded to pay them back in kind with the very sort of photos they liked to flourish. Not resisting the mockery had been the mistake. It took these privileged kids forever to see that not everyone inhabited the space they did. Hearing Shelby and Maud at the street door, Jo swept up the pictures and put them in a drawer.

Maud was wearing a plastic anorak against the intermittent rain. When Maud swept the hood off, Jo saw that her hair was unwashed, which was unusual. Her eyes were swollen, she looked generally untended, and she had alcohol on her breath.

“Want me to wait?” Shelby asked them.

Jo thought about it for a moment and sent Shell home.

“You’re a good girl, Miss Magoffin. A good friend. Go home and go to sleep.”

“You got us something of a perfect storm,” Jo told Maud when Shelby was gone. “Where have you been hiding?”

“I didn’t ask to see you. Shell said you wanted me here.”

Maud sat down in the armchair in front of Jo’s desk and wiped her face with one of the always available tissues on it.

“Would you not stare at me?” she said.

“Sorry. I bet you’ve been drinking a whole lot. Would you see a doctor up the hill for me?”

“I’m all right.”

“Let’s go up anyway. I’ll drive you.”

Maud shrugged.

Jo was friendly with a resident named Jeff Margolis, who she thought might be on duty that night. She called, and he was.

“Jeff, you very busy? It’s Jo. I want to bring someone up to see you. I was hoping you could check her out and we could do the paperwork later. She’s not injured that I can see but she’s been drinking—probably a lot. She’s well known around here.”

Margolis asked Jo if it was Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan. He pretended to believe that both were students at the college.

“I get ’em all mixed up,” he said.

“I want to rest here a minute,” Maud said to Jo.

“Promise you’ll come with me?”

Maud nodded.

“Does your father know where you are?”

Another shrug.

“Can I call him?”

“Sure,” Maud said. She let Jo trouble to look up the number. The man who answered sounded ill, and older than Jo would have expected. Jo told him where his daughter was and that she seemed all right.

Without further comment or perceptible emotion, the man thanked Jo for calling. Neither Maud nor her father chose to speak to each other on the phone.

Maud seemed steady as they walked up the block to the space where Jo had parked her Taurus. Jo brought the tissues along and put the box on the car seat between them.

“Why did you want to see me?” Maud asked as they drove. “Shell said you did.”

“I thought because we got to know one another a few years ago we might have something to talk about.”

“Like what?”

“Like how are you? Like what’s going on with you?”

“Is this free? Like do I have to pay for you to do this?”

“I think it’s covered, Maud.”

“Did you want to talk about the thing I wrote?”

Jo laughed a little. “It was very forthright.”

“I wanted it to be forthright.”

“It made a lot of people very angry, of course.”

“They don’t know what they’re angry about. They’re tools.”

“They’re angry at having their faith ridiculed.”

Maud turned to face her.

“There’s not much wrong with the world that doesn’t come from it having too many people in it.”

“But Maud, the world
is
people.”

“I thought it was mostly water.”

“You’re a wise guy,” Jo said after a moment. “You’re very angry yourself, right?”

Maud said nothing.

“When I was your age, I was very angry too.”

“You were?” Maud said. “Hey, really? That’s interesting.”

“If you want to persuade people—I presume that’s what you want—don’t tell them they’re fools.”

“So who are they to put out all this intimidation? They’re just looking for other people to push around.”

“I have no beef with your opinion,” Jo told her. “I basically share it. Did you think I was going to scold you for what you thought?”

“Isn’t this what you’re doing? Why are we having this conversation?”

“Two reasons, Maud. I want to see if you’re all right, for one.”

“I’m fine.”

“Yeah? I don’t think so.”