Rabid (60 page)

On fourteen days in succession, N forced John to reenact the Stations of the Cross in the nude, and N sodomized or was fellated by John in each position as was suggested by the pose while John recited aloud the prayer for each station (intermittently, in the latter case). Father Samual entered the library on the seventh day (Christ’s second fall), while John was on his hands and knees on the floor and N was sodomizing him.

S surveyed the situation, turned, and closed the door behind him. John says he distinctly remembers the click of Samual locking the library door.

Even if that were the first time that S had evidence of N’s abuse, if he had intervened, he would have spared John another consecutive week of abuse and occasional abuse during the following six months until N was removed by the IEA and CDF.

The thirteenth station, Christ’s death on the cross, still terrifies John and included overtones of autoeroticism and necrophilia.

Samual’s complicity has been established on numerous occasions.

Dante closed the folder and locked it in his desk drawer.

It was a cool May evening in the middle of a rugged, week-long cold snap, but he decided to change into his jogging clothes in the rectory and run at least seven miles, perhaps ten, and then avail himself to the bottles of liquor in the lower drawer of his nightstand, so he could sleep tonight.

In the months since that Leila in the bar had pried open his head and asked so innocently, so deviously,
why,
he had become a priest if he was such a Lothario, insomnia and nightmares alternately denied him rest.

If he didn’t dream of viewing the children’s abuse through a stained glass window that wouldn’t yield when he pounded on it, he dreamed of reliving his ordination from above, silently screaming, trying to stop himself.

Dante was crossing the church when he recognized Bev’s hourglass figure kneeling before the statue of the Virgin Mary.

She sported two free, uncast arms.

It had been twelve weeks since that terrible night.

“Hello! Bev!” he called. His own hoarse voice jarred him.

She looked up from the Rosary that dangled between her palms.

Dante walked over. He held out his hand, palm up. “Let me see.”

Bev raised her skinny, withered, wrinkled arm. Dante held her weightless limb. A red, twisted scar snaked around her wrist. He asked, “Does it still hurt?”

“It’s okay. I took a pill.”

“I suppose you won’t get many more of those, now that your arm is out of the cast.”

“The orthopedic doctor said to call him if I needed more, if the pain is persistent.”

Dante pulled his hand away slowly, and she let her arm drop.

~~~~~

Bev didn’t like it when people inspected her scars, even this new one on her hand. The scar on her wrist stung like a needle scratch when the onyx Rosary beads swept across it.

Dante’s long legs twisted as he sat on the floor beside her. “How is it?”

“My hand is weak, clumsy, and numb on one side of the pinky finger, but it works.” The rosary wound so tightly around her fingers that her nail beds were alternately white and crimson. She loosened her grip.

Dante leaned against the wall that formed the side of the Virgin’s niche. He drew his knees up and rested his elbows on them, his side toward Bev, and looked out over the church. “I remember when you ran in here, my first day.”

Bev nodded and spilled the Rosary chain from one hand to the other. In her left hand, the beads felt hard and cold and tingled along the side of her palm. Her strong right hand hardly registered their light substance.

“I was so jet-lagged,” he said, “and I had been drinking on the plane, trying to sleep, and I was tired. Samual said that he had to leave and would I take confession for him, and I pictured a nice room, a couple of chairs, and he showed me to the antique torture chamber, not used since the Middle Ages. And then you ran into the confessional.”

Bev ducked her head. She must have seemed crazed. Even now, madness howled outside her foggy walls.

“And you said you felt abandoned by God, and I didn’t know what you meant, but I did my best, considering that a drunken, jet-lagged headache was beating in my brains.”

Bev leaned over so her legs curled to the side—her knees groaned as she released her weight—and propped herself up on her strong, right arm. She said, “I wish I could change everything. I never would have unpacked his suitcase. I would have assumed some sort of accident had happened at the airport. Or I would have left him then, taken the girls, hidden, scrubbed toilets to support us.” She spun the Rosary beads in the air with her weak hand.

“That sounds like remorse to me,” Dante said. “I think you could confess.”

“It’s still not right, not time, something,” Bev said. “Before, when I’ve needed to confess, I’ve known and hated the sin for its own sake. There’s a blank smear over that night, like a half-dry oil painting someone scraped a trowel over.” Her cheeks warmed, and she cleared her throat.

His long fingers dangled off the ends of his arms, elbows resting on his knees. “How often are you taking the pills?”

“Every four hours or so. The places where the bones are knit together are sore, like the new bone hasn’t hardened yet.”

“Narcotics can have many effects on the brain.”

“I’m not seeing pink elephants.”

He inclined his head and tugged at the curls with his fingers, straightening his hair. “Or in your case, perhaps the lack of pink elephants.”

Bev looked away and down the long hall of the church. “I don’t like that.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about the brain and the soul, lately, and where our soul resides. I think you should wean yourself off the pills. It might not be your soul that can’t find God. It might be a psychopharmacological interaction of the drug with your brain.”

Bev leaned back on her arm and coiled the Rosary beads around her hand. “And what would that mean for God, if a pill can block the Omnipresent, the Omniscient, the Omnipotent?”

He shrugged. “Maybe that is the reason that most religions have rules about alcohol and other mind-altering drugs. Maybe our connection through our brains with God is tenuous.”

“The pills keep me from worrying about things.” Bev waved her benumbed fingers in the air, dispersing worrisome thoughts, like nerve damage and murder and prison and widowhood and orphaned children.

“Don’t take the pills anymore, please.”

Bev dragged her finger through the black rosary beads, dragging them scraping across the floor, into an
X
or an
8
. She swirled them into a vortex. “All right.”

~~~~~

Chapter Nineteen

“Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury.” District Attorney George Grossberg turned to face the jury but remained in profile for the blazing lights and cameras behind the rows of spectators. “We are here in this courtroom because Dr. Conroy Robert Sloan was murdered, because a doctor in good standing in this community was fatally stabbed with a knife, and because the forensic evidence supports that his wife, Beverly Maria Sloan, stabbed him.

“Now, she says that she didn’t do it, and she might even testify that she didn’t, that it was an accident or a mistake, but we don’t think it was. She had been abusing him for years and that night, she killed him. He had bruises on his ribs, his arms, and a fresh bruise on his left eye. One of his elbow ligaments was torn.

“You’re going to hear from the defense that the doctor was cheating on his wife, but we’re not here to judge the victim. The fact that he was cheating on her and that he had left her
that very night
was her motive for killing him.

“She went over to his apartment enraged, intending to kill him, and she hit him in the face and then she took one of the steak knives from the set he had just bought, and her fingerprints were on that knife, and she stabbed him through the heart with so much anger and rage and hate that just one blow killed him.

“Thank you.”

~~~~~

Bev clasped her hands together as her defense attorney, Heath Sheldon, rose from the table and walked over to the jury box.

Her healing wrist sent fresh spikes up her arm.

She had been off the pills for a week now, and Dante had said that her liver should metabolize all the chemicals soon. She had not managed to quit them in May, or June, but now they were gone, though the fuzziness would have been welcome when the prosecutor said that she went to the apartment intending to kill Conroy.

The quiet, glowing presence of God would have been welcome.

Hopefully, her liver would hurry up and deconstruct the chemicals so she could hear God again, even though she thought that God’s absence didn’t have anything to do with those green pills that the orthopedic doctor had so readily dashed off scrips for.

~~~~~

Behind her, in the audience seats, Dante leaned over and rested his hot face on his hands. Because he was to be called as a witness, he shouldn’t be in the courtroom, but the court had allowed him to stay because he was Bev’s spiritual advisor and because it was assumed that nothing could affect his testimony because he was a priest, and therefore he had some mystical access to absolute truth and possessed perfect morals.

~~~~~

In the jury box, four men and eight women watched Heath Sheldon approach.

To Tom Agosin, the defense lawyer seemed primped and slick, a superficial man with a shallow case. He hoped Beverly Sloan had more to offer than just this snake oil-selling lawyer.

Gabriela Rossetti couldn’t imagine being so angry at someone as to strike them. She had never struck her children, and they were fine, gentle teens now. Even through screaming fights with her ex-husband, she never entertained the thought of hitting him.

Margaux Dominic remembered that her own steak knives needed sharpening. She had a dinner party for the members of her husband’s law firm coming up soon, and they were planning to grill steaks for them and portabella mushrooms for the junior partner, the short redheaded woman, who was a vegan.

~~~~~

Heath Sheldon smiled at Margaux, Gabriela, Tom, and the nine other jury members he had selected during
voir dire
.

Potential jurors who had looked him in the eyes and smiled at him, these people he had kept.

The prosecutors used up their challenges on Catholics and health care workers, probably at the behest of some overpaid, useless jury consultant.

No one knew what went on in the jury room, whether the interactions were more closely akin to the gestalt of a hive mind or the sociopathy of a crazed, looting mob.

His perfect jury was one who liked him and so might completely ignore the facts.

Heath smiled brilliantly, twinkling through the inadequate defense he was about to put on. If Beverly Sloan hadn’t done it, this defense would have been easier. He hoped to mitigate the sentence and not look too idiotic in front of the cameras.