Rabid (9 page)

Leila peered into the cages. One black mouse staggered in its shoebox-sized plastic cage, slammed its head into the clear plastic wall, and swayed, stunned. “What in the hell is wrong with that poor thing?”

“Nothing.” Nothing that she nor anyone should know about until he was good and ready to tell the world. “Tonight?”

“All right.”

Conroy’s neck loosened enough to nod. His fingers climbed up the lean meat of Leila’s thigh. “I could give you a ride.”

Leila shook her head and her hands rose in the air, warding off evil eyes. “Malcolm from Lugar lab drove up after you dropped me off Monday. His headlights almost hit your car, and that black midlife crisis-mobile of yours is too damned distinctive.”

“Midlife crisis-mobile?”

“The Porsche. Come on, Conroy. Surely you lead a more examined life than that.” Leila left him sitting in the mouse room, contemplating.

~~~~~

Bev clutched her jacket around her and hurried from the music room to the library. January mist drifted through the lines of plaid skirts and navy blue slacks and into the unbuttoned front of her coat. The cathedral nosed out of the winter fog ahead of her.

She knocked on the library door.

The priest’s muffled voice said, “Yes?”

She bustled in.

Father Dante was slumped in his chair. His hands covered his face.

“Father, are you all right?”

She dumped her soggy sheet music on her blue chair and stood beside him. If Conroy or one of her girlfriends had been slumped over so, she would have put her arms around them, but a priest, how could she comfort a beleaguered priest? Priests moved in the company and grace of God, beyond her fumbling. She patted his shoulder with a tentative, arrhythmic tapping.

Under his black shirt, his shoulders were rounded with muscle.

He rubbed his face. He stood and reached toward her arm but his hand stopped in midair and pointed to her arm. “Why you are wearing the long sleeves?”

“It’s January.” She tugged a sleeve over her wrist self-consciously.

His hand hovered inches away from her face. “And the collar, it is high on your neck?”

She sat on the other chair. “The music room is chilly.”

Father Dante’s hand dropped away, but he leaned closer, like when a man angles for a kiss but doesn’t know whether the woman will acquiesce, and he whispered, “Did he hit you?”

“What?” Conroy hadn’t hit her. Conroy had never hit her. “No.
No.
He didn’t. He
wouldn’t
.”

Father Dante watched and seemed satisfied. His hands came together on his chest and his fingers formed a sort of cage. “You see most of the children in this school?”

“I substitute often.” She crossed her ankles, lady-like, as behooved her with a priest, especially a young priest who still looked like a man. “Sister Benedicta has health problems.”

Father Dante leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees. His fidgets reminded Bev of her daughters’ machinations to delay admitting petty guilt. “Do you know of any children who were initially good students here, happy children, who became sullen and angry?”

Bev couldn’t stop her wide eyes from blinking. She had learned the symptoms of sexual abuse in her primary education courses in college. “That couldn’t happen
here
.”

Father Dante sighed.

“You mean like someone’s uncle? One of the parents?”

“No.” He pulled his hand through his black hair, raking it away from his eyes.

“That new janitor? The soccer coach?”

“No, Mrs. Sloan.”

The rumormongers had stalwartly avoided that particular accusation about Father Nicolai’s disappearance. Diocese politics, the school’s deplorable standardized testing scores, poor box embezzlement,
whiskey priest
, sacrilegious snacking on consecrated Host, Alzheimer’s, selling the Host to Satanists, those things had been mentioned, but molesting children was the sort of thing that happened in other places.

Bev folded her hands in her lap primly. “That’s patently ridiculous. Father Nicolai was one of the
nicest
men I’ve ever known.”

“I’m sure he was.”

“All of us just walk right into the rectory, without knocking, without yoo-hoo-ing. His sermons are about the transparent lives we lead, how God sees into out hearts and loves us. And about how we need to be compassionate, reach out to others, live with open hearts. He’s so
compassionate
.”

“Yes.” He drew a hand through the black curls fringing his face. “Pedophiles are some of the
nicest
people I’ve ever known. They have a special rapport with children. Absolutely
charming
.”

Bev would be able to tell if someone was a pedophile. She could tell if a person was gay or straight. Father Dante had watched the women’s sections of the choir, and he had opened his posture, hesitantly, toward Laura Dietrich. He was straight but restrained.

She would
know
if Father Nicolai was a child molester. “I don’t believe it.”

“Most,” Father Dante glanced at the white-painted ceiling, “of these kinds of people,” he sighed, still staring up, “are
efficient
at concealing their crimes. They induce guilt in the children, or shroud the abuse as a game, or utilize their clerical authority. Two months ago, when the allegations about Father Nicolai reached Roma, a priest was sent here to watch and intervene.”

Father Domingo had appeared two months ago, ostensibly to update the school’s benighted curriculum that had caused the free-falling test scores, and both he and Father Nicolai had left last week. “Was he reassigned to some other parish?”

“No. Nicolai is in Italia, in a place where there are no children. I need to know if there are any other children who you think might display these behavior patterns. I am here to counsel them, to try to help them. That’s why they sent a psychiatrist.”

Oh, Lord. Father Dante had asked to see Laura. Laura had choked when Bev called her last night. “He hurt Luke, didn’t he?”

Father Dante leaned back in his chair, and his eyes slid away from her.

“Luke Dietrich. You saw Laura after choir practice. She’s been taking Luke to all kinds of doctors for his ADHD, but he hasn’t gotten any better, and it came on
suddenly
last year.”

Father Dante stared at the blue carpeting. “I cannot speak about any particular child. I cannot confirm or deny anything about any particular child. It would invade their privacy. Surely, they deserve their privacy.”

Bev’s chest caved in at the thought of anyone hurting Luke. “Oh, God.”

If that man had touched her daughters, she would, she would, and violence welled up. “My girls, did he hurt them?”

Father Dante said, quietly, “When I talked to your daughters a few days ago, I did not see anything to concern me. I asked them about rumors in the school.”

“What did they say?”

Father Dante paused, seemed to consider, and said, “The children had a system to not go to Father Nicolai’s office alone, to go in pairs or groups, especially junior high boys, or to have Sister Mary Theresa waiting outside, but it didn’t always work.”

Her daughters had been in danger, and they knew they were in danger, and they hadn’t told her. They had found a way to defend themselves from rape. “Was it just boys?”

“Nicolai appears to be a primary pedophile. He was attracted to children. Their gender was not as important as their age, between ten and thirteen,” he said. “I trust you will not say anything about this.”

Bev nodded.

“Because some families will want to keep this private.”

Father Nicolai was her friend. Bev would have known.

Bev’s eyes were so dry they felt burned.

“I just can’t believe it.”

~~~~~

Bev picked up her email later that afternoon:

Dearest Beverly,

I have to work late tonight, so I won’t be home for dinner. I’ve attached the proof.

Love,

Conroy

Fwd: an apology

> I can’t see you anymore. > It was all a mistake. I love my wife. You know that.

> I apologize if I hurt > you, if I let you believe that our relationship was anything other than what it was, or if you > believed so anyway. 

Conroy

~~~~~

Conroy waited in his Porsche outside Leila’s apartment building. The kung pao and mu shus were stinking up his car but he couldn’t roll down the window because the rain would ruin the leather seats.

Something knocked on his window and he jumped. Outside, Leila was so rained-on that frigid water streamed from her long, black hair and dragged her clothes against her shoulders. She motioned him toward her apartment building. Her mincing shadow dodged through the foggy January rain. She unlocked the building’s door and flung it back.

The paper bag crackled in his hands as he followed her. Her elevator closed its doors before he caught up.

His elevator beat hers to the twelfth floor, so he ambled down the hall, rolling and unrolling the top of the bag. She strode past and unlocked the deadbolt on her door.

Inside, Conroy set the bag on her dining table. A freaky blue chandelier above the table looked like a church stained-glass window and threw spider shadows on the walls’ blue and green molding and ceiling medallions. The funky, faux plasterwork looked like the Palace of Versailles had relocated to New Hamilton.

Leila peeled off her soaked clothes and tossed them in the kitchen sink. Her black hair trailed water behind her. “Meth,” she called. The old dog sauntered over, all black fur and muscle, claws scritching on the hardwood floor. It stood up beside her and sniffed her breath, nuzzling but not licking.

Leila said, “Good boy. Go lie down,” and he ambled away, doubtless to sleep again.

“How’d you get so wet?” Conroy asked.

“It’s raining, and I walked home.” she called from her tiny bathroom, past the rows of closets that held her silvery and black clothes. Once, while she was showering, he had stroked the crotch of a pair of black pants with a red matador sash and she had worn the pants the next day, unsuspecting. He had been turned on all day, imagining his fingers in those pants.

She came out of the bathroom nude and fingerwalked through the clothes in her closet. Her body was lithe, even angular over her collarbones and pelvis. Her hair, usually sleek and black as a beaded curtain against his face, had tightened into slick spirals.

Conroy stood behind her and pressed his body on her chilly skin. The ice of her passed through his damp clothes. Shivery goose flesh peppered her arms and torso, and looking down from behind her, her nipples poked out hard. He thumbed one.

She wiggled her cold ass against him but otherwise didn’t comment, just touched the shoulders of her clothes in the long closet, deciding.