Of Saints and Shadows (1994) (20 page)

The three were silent for a moment, Peter gazing out the window, Meaghan at Peter and George at his shoes.

“But that’s all another part of the story. I don’t really want to talk about this anymore.” He looked back at Meaghan. “I want you to trust me; in all honesty, I want you to like me. But I really don’t want to talk about this anymore right now.”

George continued to look at his shoes, but from the corner of his eye, he saw Meaghan take Peter’s hand. The moment lasted until it became more than a moment, and then it was broken by the ringing of the phone.

George looked at his watch to see that it was 6:30 in the morning, and Peter picked up the phone on the second ring. He had to step over Janet’s body to get to it, and that drew Meaghan’s attention to the black bag. She curled up a little then, drawing her knees up under her. As Peter listened and grunted in reply to what he heard, George slid over next to Meaghan on the couch and held her hand in his, the same hand that had reached for Peter’s.

“I’m sorry for all of this. We’ll have her out of here soon,” was all he could say, and she looked at him then, grateful.

“Thank you. If you hadn’t been here, I would have thought I’d gone crazy for sure, and I probably could’ve convinced myself of it.”

“Peter called. How could I say no? He knew I was the only one you could talk to, and besides, he was . . .”

George left the word unsaid, but he could see in Meaghan’s eyes that she heard it anyway.

Starving.

Peter hung up the phone. The news was bad, but it confirmed everything in his head.

“Meaghan, you look like you’re doing much better than George or I could have expected with all this. I’m glad. But this thing is far from over. The man who killed Janet is still out there, and he used her to try to kill both of us tonight. It’s obvious he didn’t know of my nature, but surprise only works once. He killed Roger Martin and Dan Benedict, and that was Ted on the phone telling me that the janitor from Martin’s building is dead and a nurse at the hospital also. Ted said it wasn’t pretty.

“We don’t have time to waste. If you hadn’t noticed, the sun’s going to be up very soon, and we’ve got to find this man before he has a chance to come back for us. All three of us need sleep and we’re going to get it between now and eleven, when the hunt begins.

“The man we’re looking for is a priest. Not dressed like a priest—he is a priest. The circumstances of Benedict and the janitor’s deaths confirm for me that what we’re dealing with is a representative of an arm of the Vatican which hasn’t been known to be active in years. This man is a sorcerer.”

He could see both of their mouths begin to open, to question.

“Yes, magic is real, demons are real, and we’ll talk about them later. This man is very powerful and very dangerous, and no, I have no idea if the pope knows about him or not.” He knew Meaghan’s head was spinning, but it would do no good to let up.

“What it comes down to now is not revenge, not solving the crime or the mystery. Those things often involve patience. It comes down to getting him before he gets us. You follow?”

“Yes.”

And he could see that she did. Couldn’t understand it, but could see it.

“Any questions?”

“Plenty, but they’ll wait until morning—until eleven. Even with all this, I don’t think I’ll have any trouble falling asleep. This is as close to an all-nighter as I’ve pulled in years, and certainly the longest night of my life.”

“They can be very long,” Peter agreed.

“What about . . .” Meaghan began, glancing at Janet’s covered corpse before turning away and falling silent.

“You go to bed now,” Peter said. “George will fill you in on the arrangements later today.”

Meaghan stood and walked to the bag. She did not bend to touch it and her eyes did not linger on it. Instead, she looked back at the two men, one old and one infinitely older.

“I loved her,” she said.

And the two men could not help but avert their eyes until she turned again and walked to her bedroom. When the door was closed, they went about their business, though they could hear her sobbing, finally.

After a few minutes the place was quiet.

A LETTER FROM FATHER LIAM MULKERRIN, Representative of the Vatican Historical Council, to His Eminence Cardinal Giancarlo Garbarino, Special Attendant to His Holiness and Chairman of the Vatican Historical Council.

JOE BOUDREAU HAD BEEN COLLECTING books since he was a teenager. He’d started with Ian Fleming, and now, at thirty-two, had become completely enamored with Andrew Vachss’s
Burke
and Walter Mosley’s
Easy Rawlins
, a hell of a long way from Bond. He’d always wanted to be a writer, had even sold a short story in college, but he didn’t have the patience.

So he sold books instead. Sure, he had a college degree. He’d graduated from Boston University with honors, an English major, of course. And then he’d done what he thought he’d always wanted to do (ever since he gave up the notion of being a writer). He taught literature to high-school kids.

He quit that, too.

Yep. Joe Boudreau had earned himself quite a reputation as a quitter. Had taken guitar lessons as a kid. Quit. Played Pop Warner football. Quit that, too. Took a job in high school scooping cones at Baskin-Robbins. You guessed it. Then there was the writing, of course. No questions in his folks’ mind where that would end up, and truth be told, it was sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy for him. His grandparents, his aunts and uncles, his parents, even his second cousins—they all figured Joe for a quitter.

Which of course he was.

So when he started teaching high school, everybody expected him to quit. The first year was great. He had a couple of troublesome kids, but for the most part, they were okay. He had confidence, he had passion, and he had a girlfriend, Martha. On their first date Martha had told him that she’d always said when she was a little girl that she would grow up and become a teacher, and that she would marry a teacher. They were made for each other. She shared his interest in modern writers, not just the classics like so many other bookworms.

But the kids only got worse, or Joe got tired of their disinterest, or of them, or all of the above. Martha was going for her master’s at BC; she wanted to teach college.

Joe quit teaching, and Martha quit Joe. Their moonlit talks about Philip Roth and Robert B. Parker, Michael Herr and William Gibson, their love of Harvard Square, their favorite TV shows, the dog they never got around to buying (his name was Rusty), the favorite ice cream they shared when they couldn’t resist it anymore, none of it mattered. It seemed Martha had put it all behind her like a drunken one-night stand, and all because he’d quit.

Not to mention the fact that she’d fallen for Paul Wilson, a tenured English professor at BC.

From that moment on, though Joe remained slavishly faithful to the family that had always made a big joke out of his lack of motivation, his only real loyalty, his only real passion, his only real friends, were the books. So there, in Harvard Square, where he and “the ex” had enjoyed so many bottles of Italian wine and viewed wonderful films in French that would later be made into terrible American films, there he opened up his own place . . . the Book Store.

And that’s what it was. New and old, used or not, hard or soft, romance, horror, science fiction, mystery, and even those works of fiction with the dubious distinction of being called “mainstream”—he carried them all. But only fiction. What interested him were stories, and if he wasn’t interested in something, he couldn’t sell it to someone else. So no Madonna bios or nudie books, no art books, no how-to books, none of that. Just stories in the Book Store.

He did a booming business. In less than two years, it was the most popular bookstore in Harvard Square, where the only type of retail shop more popular than bookstores were ice-cream shops. (Funny, Joe didn’t cat ice cream anymore.) Now, a full five years after he’d opened the store, he was a legend in the area. He’d never been happier and it had never, but never, occurred to him to quit.

Until today.

He hadn’t even opened the book that lay in the locked drawer behind the cash register, but he’d seen the cover and the look on his cousin’s face, and he didn’t want to look inside. He’d always said he didn’t want anything that wasn’t fiction in the store, and he had hated to make an exception. But the guy was his nana’s nephew, his mother’s cousin, so what was he to say? No, he didn’t want to open that book. But for the first time he’d thought about quitting.

Thank God for the children, then. For that’s what saved him. Nothing gave him more pleasure, especially in light of the guilt he felt for abandoning his former students, than selling books to kids. Teenagers especially, were terribly hard to reach, and Joe took a special pleasure in recommending books to them, or helping them to locate or special-order something.

Today it was a boy he’d never seen, only about twelve years old, sandy blond hair and blue eyes. He might have been the all-American boy of yesteryear, that bizarre myth, but he was not. He was the urban-American boy of today, with torn blue jeans, high-top sneakers, a black concert T-shirt, a ring through his nose, and a skateboard under his arm.

But what he wore wasn’t important.

It was what he said.

“Got any James Bond books?”

Ever the cynic, Joe gave the kid the once-over. No “excuse me,” not even a “hey, mister.” Just the question.

“Sure,” said Joe. “The latest John Gardner is over on the espionage shelf.”

The kid’s eyebrows knitted then, like Joe was an idiot or something.