Ghost Country (45 page)

Behind him Jacqui, Nanette, and Luisa crawled out from beneath the stone communion table where they’d ridden out the fury of the storm. Near them, not with them but safe also, were Dr. Stonds and Mrs. Ephers, Rafe and Cynthia.

“Jesus, have mercy,” Jacqui whispered, kneeling next to Hector.

Harriet pushed through the remnants of the horde to reach her sister. “Oh, Mara, oh, Beebie, my precious baby, I’m so sorry.”

She sat next to her sister and embraced her, trying not to flinch
from the torn flesh in Mara’s lap, Mara wouldn’t let go of Starr’s head, but she leaned against Harriet and began to weep.

A police sergeant came up with the paramedics. He tried to question the group around Starr, but no one was able to respond. Dr. Stonds muttered something about Mara, girl a troublemaker from the day she was born, while Mrs. Ephers nodded in savage approval; Harriet raised her head to protest, then realized Grandfather was speaking so incoherently the police weren’t paying attention to him.

Don Sandstrom suddenly loomed behind the paramedics, his mike in hand. He thrust it in Mara’s face, and saw to his delight that the woman holding her was the lawyer for the hotel, the mediagenic Harriet Stonds. Usually so calm you felt you needed an icebreaker to talk to her, today looking like the tail end of a tornado.

“Ms. Stonds, Were you present at this horrendous event as a representative of your law firm?”

Harriet looked up involuntarily, her eyes almost black with anguish. “Were you here? You filmed all this and did nothing to stop it? Did you think you were a spectator at a game that you couldn’t put down your camera to call for help?”

Her lips were so thick she could barely frame words. She leaned forward to hold her sister more closely. Don backed away from the chancel. Tight-ass broad, always on her high horse about something. He had footage of her covered in blood, see how she liked having that all over the five o’clock news. He gathered his crew together—no point in staying for the rest of the cleanup. They’d get statements from the cops back at the station.

The paramedics gently removed Starr from Mara’s and Hector’s arms. The crimson Bulls shirt, now wet with blood, came away in Mara’s hands.

“What will you do with her?” Mara whispered to the medics.

“We’ll take her to Midwest Hospital,” one of them said. “And, buddy”—to Hector—“you’d better come along, get someone to patch up your face. Your cheekbone’s broken, by the looks of it.”

“Does that mean she’s not dead?” Jacqui asked. “If you’re taking her to the hospital and all?”

The medics paused in embarrassment.

“No.” Hector winced as he became aware of the pain in his face. “She’s quite dead. They have to get a death certificate from the hospital before they take her to the morgue.”

“Is one of you next of kin?” the medics asked him.

Harriet braced herself for Mara’s claim that Starr was her mother, but it was Luisa who spoke. “I’m her sister.”

One of the medics turned to Luisa for details, and the diva, as fluent as though she were reciting from a score, provided them with a last name and an address for Starr. No autopsy, Jacqui said, we don’t want them cutting on her. Nonetheless, she has to go to the morgue, the medics explained: the law. You can claim the body for burial next week. The police can give you a case number for her.

As the medics started to load Hector onto a stretcher Dr. Stonds stood, dusting his knees. “I’m Abraham Stonds, head of neurosurgery at Midwest. There’s an old woman here with a bad heart who ought to be looked at before this young man. He’s perfectly able to walk. She needs the stretcher.” Dr. Stonds’s voice was once more firm, authoritative.

The medics turned to Mrs. Ephers: heart attacks were something they were used to, adept at treating. They’d take her out, hook her up to an EKG, oxygen, phone for another stretcher unit for Hector. Dr. Stonds was annoyed at their coddling of Dr. Tammuz, ought to know better than to try to hog medical care when an old woman was in need, did he understand the oath he’d sworn?

Harriet turned her head aside. How like Grandfather. He’d seen acquaintances of sixty years slavering like jackals at a kill, but he was blotting that out, trying to pretend that if anything serious had happened it was Hector or Mara’s fault.

She drew Mara tighter to her, walked with her behind Starr’s stretcher. Jacqui and Nanette were in attendance, as well as a weeping LaBelle, who’d hidden under the side stalls near the altar and
emerged only when her friends started to leave. Luisa climbed into the back of the ambulance and waited for Starr.

Harriet held Mara’s hand while her sister knelt to kiss Starr’s bloody lips, held on to Mara while she herself bent to embrace Hector, pressing a piece of paper with her home number scribbled on it into his hand. “Call me when they finish with you, I’ll drive over to get you.”

“And Hilda?” Grandfather demanded from the rear of Mephers’s ambulance. “You are going to let the woman who was more to you than a mother take off for the hospital without so much as a glance, while you lavish attention on the very people who caused her so much distress?”

Mephers more to her than a mother? Perhaps. At least, within her lights. Harriet gave her sister to Jacqui for a moment and went to climb into the ambulance, where Mephers lay attached to monitors, her heart as steady as a clock pendulum.

Mephers kept her eyes shut, turned her head to avoid Harriet’s lips. “You’re making your bed, Harriet Stonds. Be sure it’s the one you want to lie on.”

Harriet climbed back out of the ambulance and took Mara with her to the mausoleum on Graham Street. By and by little sister slept.

N
O ONE KNOWS
exactly what happened at the Orleans Street Church this morning,” Don Sandstrom said. “There’s no doubt that the grape juice the church uses for communion had turned into wine, but whether this was the prank of an alcoholic singer and a disturbed teenager who were hiding out in the church, or the demonic intervention of the homeless woman Starr, as some church members believe, we will probably never know.”

Becca Minsky, with her dog Dusty and a nest of stuffed animals around her, was watching the six o’clock news in her bedroom. Ever since the police beat up Judith Ohana at the wall last night, Becca had been frantic to get into Chicago. What did she propose to do in the city, Harry demanded: get herself beaten up as well?

Becca couldn’t say what she wanted—to be a hero, to rescue Luisa, to be part of the excitement of the city. Karen and Harry decided they’d better not leave their daughter alone for a minute. In the middle of the night, when Becca tiptoed out of her room an hour after her parents went to bed, she stumbled into one of the security guards from her father’s scrap metal yard. She’d known the man her whole life, but neither her cajoling nor her tears brought
her anything but a visit from her father, and the news that she was not to leave the house.

If her father couldn’t trust her, Becca snapped, if he had to spy on her, hire guards to look after her, then Becca wasn’t going to come out of her room until school started.

If you think I’m bringing you your meals on a tray, young lady, think again, Karen said, appearing behind Harry in the hall, so Becca turned up her nose and announced grandly she was on a hunger strike. After skipping breakfast and lunch, she was wondering if fasting was really necessary, but she forgot her hunger when she turned on the news. Footage of Luisa flung against the side of the communion table, a close-up to show the thickness of the stone; Becca was tumbling out of bed to scream for Karen, Luisa’s been killed, when her aunt sat up and smiled, embraced Starr. Becca stopped in her doorway, her fingers in her mouth. While she watched, all hell broke loose on the screen.

“After the bodies were pulled apart, there was one death, that of the aphasiac woman Starr, and numerous injuries, the most serious to Hector Tammuz, the idealistic young doctor who’s been dedicating himself to these homeless women.” The screen briefly showed Hector swathed in bandages in his hospital bed.

“An important question remains: what happened moments before the mob converged on Starr? Was Luisa Montcrief’s neck broken, as Dr. Tammuz believes? Or had she merely collapsed, as neurosurgery chief Dr. Abraham Stonds claims? We were unable to talk to Dr. Tammuz: he is recovering from surgery to rebuild his broken left cheek, but Dr. Stonds assures Channel 13 that Luisa Montcrief was faking her injuries, as part of the same scam that led her to pretend to interpret the dead woman Starr’s various grunts.”

Sandstrom had gone to the hospital to get Hector and Stonds on tape, and been disappointed that the young man was too groggy from anesthesia to speak. He’d been lucky in one respect: Monsignor Mulvaney was in Dr. Stonds’s office. The archdiocese had sent the priest over to find out if the creature Starr had really
raised a woman from the dead. It would place the church in an intolerable quandary if they had to assign miraculous powers to an aphasiac nymphomaniac; Mulvaney was counting on Stonds’s assurance that Luisa had either been acting, or collapsed in a drunken stupor.

Stonds and Mulvaney actually went with Dr. Hanaper to Hector’s bedside to order him not to make irresponsible statements to the media. Stonds in particular was furious at the idea of that damned young resident making it look as though he, Abraham Stonds, couldn’t tell if a woman was alive or dead.

Sandstrom, paddling happily in their wake, secured footage of Hector’s swaddled face, and a promise from Monsignor Mulvaney to participate in a panel discussion, “The Woman Starr: Saint or Psychopath?”

When Sandstrom’s unctuous pronouncements were replaced by a trio of children singing in a wheat field, Becca ran down to the kitchen. Karen was frying chicken in the hopes of tempting her daughter out of bed.

“It was awful, Mom. They didn’t say whether Aunt Luisa got hurt in the riot. Why were they doing it? Because they thought Mara put wine in their grape juice?”

She looked and sounded young and scared. Not the tragedy queen of the last few weeks, but the child she still partly was.

Karen pulled her close. “I don’t know, sweetie. I don’t know what makes people act like that. It’s very scary, isn’t it?”

Becca clung to her mother. “Was Aunt Luisa—they didn’t show her, didn’t say …”

“She’s in the hospital. Someone called from there—she listed you as her next of kin. The doctors want to check her head and neck, to make sure she doesn’t have any fractures from her fall in that church.” Karen hesitated. “After dinner we’ll go down and visit her. But that doesn’t mean she’s coming home with us, right?”

Becca hesitated, then nodded agreement into her mother’s breast. She had tried to look after Luisa and look what happened.
The lawyer from First Freedoms, that nice Ms. Ohana, got beaten up by the cops. Then the mob in that church, Luisa hurled to the ground, Starr killed—at the moment the adult world seemed too frightening to take on. In the future, oh, in the future she would be strong, a valiant fighter, living up to the promise of her combat boots. But for now she was content to subside into childhood again, and let Karen soothe her with murmured phrases and fried chicken.

Upstairs Don Sandstrom spoke to Becca’s empty bedroom. “In a related story, the wall outside the garage of the Hotel Pleiades on Lower Wacker Drive collapsed this afternoon. Structural engineers believe that the weight of the steel scaffolding, which the hotel put up to try to keep the wall from crumbling, actually hastened its destruction.

“This wall has been the focus of much of the activity surrounding the dead woman Starr. Miracle seekers from as far away as the Philippines flocked here looking for cures. It was here that police rounded people up last night in a sometimes violent confrontation. Despite the excessive zeal displayed in moving visitors away, police action undoubtedly saved many lives, as large chunks of concrete fell in the area where miracle seekers had congregated. Pleiades Hotel president Gian Palmetto, who was inspecting the garage at the time, was struck on the head by a pipe from the scaffolding; he is in Midwest Hospital with serious injuries.”

The screen showed footage of the entrance to the garage. The facing had broken away from the wall; tile and masonry lay in jagged hills along the sidewalk and spilled into the street. Work lights, set up so that crews could begin clearing the rubble, cast grotesque shadows: the spikes from the scaffolding poked out like writhing limbs, so that anxious viewers thought hundreds of bodies were buried in the debris. Calls came into the station all night long from distressed relatives in Perth and Peoria, Perth Amboy and Pretoria, wanting to make sure their own mothers or friends hadn’t been injured in the wall’s collapse.

Don Sandstrom had never been happier: every overseas call meant so many more viewers he could point to in his résumé. His agent assured him that NBC was days away from an offer in their New York bureau. He briefly dipped his head to thank whatever providence had brought Starr to Chicago: she’d made his career.

His mother had given him a child’s version of the
Iliad
for his eighth birthday; he read for himself how the bravest of all the Trojans was killed, his body dragged around the city. We named you for him, Hector, his mother said, so that he grew up expecting to meet a bloody end. The dream recurred at any failure, whether small—a loss at a cross-country meet, failure to get into Johns Hopkins—or great, as when Madeleine Carter killed herself.