Something More Than Night (25 page)

The squeak of a cart cut through the thick silence. Anne was somewhere nearby. Molly couldn’t see her, but the dusty air sloshed in time to a trio of heartbeats. Whatever work took place at this library, only three people did it.

Molly doubtless could have found everything she needed online. But in order to appear as if she had a legitimate reason for coming in she used the library’s network to find theological references. Maybe she could learn more about simony and Plenary Indulgences. She also sought books about what used to be called New Age topics to see if her mother’s follies could shed any light on the nature of the Pleroma. She pulled an armload of books from the shelves and took them to a table at a window overlooking the river. But it was warm and quiet in the library, the river peaceful.

She woke some time later—the pattern of sunlight glinting on distant fields had changed—when somebody dropped a stack of books on her table. The clap rattled the table and set Molly bolt upright. The wind of the falling books felt cool against her face. The corner of her mouth and part of her chin were damp. She’d drooled. Lovely. She coughed and sputtered into her sleeve as she ran it across her face.

“I’m sorry. Was I snoring?”

A woman smiled down at her with hard blue eyes. Her round face was framed by short jet-black bangs on top and long lavender ringlets to the sides. Red veins rimmed the whites of her eyes. Molly recognized her by virtue of the long eyelashes; she had looked out through those same eyes when she inhabited Anne’s memory. It hadn’t seemed so voyeuristic until now. Anne wore denim coveralls over a faded t-shirt. Molly took one look and knew this woman had never been a
penitente.
And she had a cute smile.

Still smiling, Anne said, “Go fuck yourself.”

That was less cute. Molly paused in the act of scrubbing the last traces of drool from her face. She blinked. “Huh?”

“How much did they pay you?”

“I’m very confused right now.”

“How stupid do you think I am?” Anne rounded the table to loom over Molly. Molly scooted her chair back. “Did they hire you just to find me and send a report, or do they expect you to badger me until I return?”

Anne’s voice echoed. Molly said, “Can we please calm down here? I think there’s been a mistake.”

“Yes, there has. You go back and tell them that the next time they pull a stunt like this, I’ll change my name.” The jagged-lightning feeling prickled across Molly’s skin again. “I’ll vanish. I’ll make it so difficult to find me that they’ll spend every dime for the rest of their miserable lives in vain. They’ll die never knowing what became of their beloved only daughter.”

Wow. This really was one messed-up family.

“Look,” said Molly. She raised her hands in what she hoped was a conciliatory gesture. “I don’t know your parents, okay? I swear. Whatever your argument with them might be, I promise you I’m not part of it.”

Anne glared at Molly’s pile of books. “So you just happened to wander in, wanting to read up on religion?”

“Pretty much.”

“Nobody ever comes into the library except us.”

“Maybe I live in town but haven’t had a need for the library until now.”

“You’re the first person to come inside for six or seven months. He came in for directions. The woman before him needed to use the bathroom.” Anne looked her up and down. “You’re not from here.”

“Neither are you,” said Molly. “You grew up in Chicago.”

“I knew it. They did send you.” Anne turned back to her cart. Squeaking away into the dusty shadows, she said, “Well, you be sure to tell them they can go straight to the hell they fear so much.”

Molly followed her past a curled and faded paper placard labeled M
ESOAMERICAN
A
RT AND
C
ULTURE
. “Okay, okay. I admit it. I did come in looking for you. But not because of your parents, all right?”

Anne didn’t slow down. “We’ve never met. How could you be looking for me?”

This was ridiculous. Molly jogged ahead, yanked the cart out of Anne’s hands. “Damn it, would you please just listen? I came here because”—
Screw it,
she thought,
I can’t do any worse with the truth than I’ve already managed.
—“I need your help.”

That brought Anne up short. Her ringlets swept past her ears. She blinked when she was startled. If she hadn’t been frothing over with anger it could have been attractive. “Come again?”

Molly glanced around the library, wondering if this was the right place to discuss a murdered priest and Anne’s traumatic Plenary Indulgence. She wasn’t sure how to bring that up without sending Anne through the roof. The guy from the no-longer-a-circulation-desk watched them.

“It’s a little complicated.” Molly checked her lenses for the local time, then asked, “I’ll buy you lunch if you’ll let me tell you about it. Please?”

*   *   *

A few mare’s tail clouds had unfurled across the southern sky. But the day was warm, the breeze cool. Molly ignored the smell from the river, focusing on how the day appeared to her human senses. Another dust devil sent bits of rubbish swirling alongside them like an ephemeral chaperone. Most storefronts along the street had been boarded up, much like the bank. The hardware store, a real estate office, even the movie theater were closed. But the army recruiting office on the corner had become a café.

Molly hadn’t eaten since she died. Her human body would have been ravenous, even weak. She conjured the memory of hunger. She breathed on the dull red spark until it flared anew with the feeling her stomach would crumble upon itself for being so hollow. That would make it easier to share a meal with Anne. Ancient tradition, breaking bread; it fostered connection. How sad that she had to die and become something else in order to appreciate the beauty of this.

Molly asked, “What are you guys doing at the library, anyway?”

“Archiving. We scrounge for scraps to feed the great digital maw.” Anne shrugged. “Not everything made it online before the library system collapsed. The important stuff did, or the stuff deemed important at the time. The major university collections got slurped up early on. But the apocrypha and ephemera, the miscellany of small-town life, never made the transition. Thirty-year-old Little League scores, ads for used tractors, self-published manifestos by the local wackos. We’re combing for bits and pieces to fill in the picture of life in a simpler time.”

“Who cares about some podunk baseball game from decades ago?”

“You’d be surprised how many home movies we’ve converted. All blurry, all shaky, all boring as hell. But we have a grant from the state, so in they go. Along with all the rest of it.”

“What happens when you’re done here?”

“Move somewhere else and start over.”

“But why care about so much worthless crap?” That earned a glare from Anne. Molly shook her head, sighing. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”

Anne paused with her hand on the door to the café. “Everything was important to somebody at one time or another. We’ll forget who we are if we forget who we were.”

She went inside while Molly stood on the sidewalk, digesting that. Anne had already taken a table in the corner by the time Molly caught up with her. There were more people here than at the library, but they were mostly concerned with each other. Oddly, Molly felt more comfortable with the prospects for a private conversation here than at the abandoned library.

“What’s good here?”

“Nothing. But you’re unlikely to get food poisoning as long as you don’t order anything with eggs in it.”

“Oh.”

“Relax. I’m kidding.”

Molly ordered a cup of tomato soup and a BLT. Anne didn’t look at the menu. She ordered an iced tea, a tuna sandwich with mayo and please remember the mustard this time, chips on the side instead of greens, plus an extra pickle, and please remember the extra pickle this time.

“Eat here a lot?”

“It’s the only place to eat unless you feel like driving fifteen miles. You’d know that if you were from around here.” Their waitress brought Anne her iced tea. As she twisted the lemon slice, drizzling juice into the tea, Anne said, “But I already know you’re not. So why do you think I could help you?”

Truth,
Molly reminded herself.

“I understand that you knew Father Santorelli. He, uh, died recently. I’m talking to people from his church to understand him better.”

“Dead, huh? Well, too bad I’m not there to piss on his grave. But I’ll be sure take a pit stop if I’m ever in Chicago again.”

Molly asked, “Why do you hate everybody so much?”

Emotion flitted across Anne’s face too quickly for Molly to read it. But the pH of her perspiration shifted almost imperceptibly toward the alkaline, where ruffled feelings resided. She didn’t, Molly realized, want to be perceived as somebody so angry. A jangly chartreuse thing, the scent of hurt.

Anne said, “Why are you really talking to me? Lots of people attend that church. You went well out of your way to find me.”

Truth.
“I’m in a lot of trouble,” said Molly. She lowered her voice. “There are some people who think I have something that doesn’t belong to me. I don’t, but they don’t believe me. For reasons I don’t understand, the guy who used to have the thing I don’t have was very interested in Father Santorelli and the people who received Plenary Indulgences at his church. If I can understand why, maybe I won’t get my ass kicked again.”

“Wow.” Anne looked around the café, then leaned forward. Also in a lowered voice, she said, “That’s the most confusing lie I’ve ever heard. Am I supposed to believe you’re hiding from the Mafia, or that you’re a spy?”

“I know how it sounds. Maybe I oversimplified a little bit, but the full story is even crazier. You’d be much less likely to believe me if I told you the rest of it. I promise I’m telling you the truth.”

“Crazier, huh? Are you being chased by the Loch Ness Monster?”

Molly said, “Why are you being so difficult?”

Anne said, “Why are you so full of bullshit?”

Molly didn’t want to force the issue as she’d done with the dealer in the lobby of Martin’s building; there was always the danger Anne could stroke out. But she also didn’t want to spend the rest of the day talking in circles like this. She studied Anne more closely, seeking a hook that would win her over. She looked again at the bloodshot eyes. The skin beneath them was dark and papery. Crumbs of a restless night had gathered in the corners of her eyelids. The lids were just a fraction of a second slow to rise after every blink, as though they carried extra weight. Anne’s hand trembled faintly when she lifted her glass of tea; her breathing carried a weary wheeze. Deep in the part of Molly that was still human, something sat up. She asked, “How long have you had trouble sleeping?”

A pulse quickened at the hollow of Anne’s pale throat. To Molly’s disappointment, Anne didn’t make that little blink of surprise this time. She was able to cover her alarm because their food arrived. Anne concentrated on dissecting her sandwich. But Molly knew she had found the hook so she let her take her time. The soup was thin. It had come straight out of a can; the residual buzz of metal tingled across Molly’s tongue. She sipped at it anyway.

While spreading mustard on her sandwich, Anne said, “What makes you think I’m not sleeping?”

“Same thing that tells me your parents forced you to pursue a Plenary Indulgence.”

That did the trick. This time, Anne did blink. She said, “My parents are religious, okay? As in really religious. As in they keep a statue of the Blessed Virgin in the dining room, complete with votive candles.”

“Yikes. For real?”

“Yeah. For really real. And when they found out I was gay, they freaked the fuck out.”

The moment Molly had experienced via Anne’s stolen memory suddenly made sense. “They thought you were damned.”

“Yep.”

“But that’s crazy. Why did you go along with it?”

“Because I couldn’t take the constant badgering. It got so tiresome … I just thought, I don’t know, I thought that if I went along with their stupid ceremony and then kept quiet about my personal life they would draw their own conclusions and leave me alone. But it was so awful. They were so smug when they thought they’d finally won. I’ve never felt so alone as when I was sitting in that church realizing how deeply I’d betrayed myself and knowing they would never give up. But by then it was too late and I was trapped. I hated myself when I realized how foolish I’d been. They would never accept me. They would never even try. I had to cut them out of my life if I didn’t want to be miserable forever.”

In another life, with different parents, Anne’s situation might have been Molly’s. She wanted to dab away the tears forming in Anne’s eyes. She caught herself reaching across the table and turned it into a grab for the pepper shaker. She tipped it over the remains of her soup.

“I’m lucky,” Molly said. She carried the taste of lavender in her mouth, soft as a soap bubble. “My dad was really cool when I came out to him. Mom came around pretty quickly after that.”

Anne shook her head, wafting rancid rue and envy across the table. “Lucky dog.”

“If it helps,” said Molly, “and while we’re sharing family secrets, my brother is a drug addict.”

“No kidding?”

“He’s a really good guy at heart. Martin’s just … He has problems sometimes, you know?”

“What kind of drugs?”

“Just about everything, at one time or another.” Molly thought of the apartment she’d departed a few hours earlier, and the trail of pharmaceutical transmutations she had left behind. She hadn’t recognized most of what she’d seen.

“I’m sorry I was such a bitch at the library.”

“Don’t worry about it. I kinda want to punch your parents now. And I don’t blame you for being upset when a complete stranger shows up and starts prying into your personal history.” Molly shook her head. “I handled this terribly. I didn’t even introduce myself. I’m sorry. Can we start over? My name is Molly.”

“Anne.”

Molly reached across the table. “Nice meeting you.”

Anne looked perplexed for a moment, but apparently decided a handshake was harmless enough. Her hand was soft and warm.