The Good Friday Murder (15 page)

Jack took it all in stride, and we finished our lunch and went back to Greenwillow.

We sat in the lounge for a while to talk over what we had.

“If it was Patrick,” I said, “then he left home when the twins were very small and he just came back as a kind of friend.”

“I don't like it,” Jack said. “There was a lot of bitterness in that split. Patrick Talley was no friend.”

“Maybe Alberta had just inherited all that money and he wanted to make sure she wouldn't disinherit him.”

“Possible.”

“Well, it's not the gas man. And it doesn't sound like it's a neighbor. Suppose it was a boyfriend, Jack, someone who wanted to spend time with Alberta without the twins around.”

“If that's the case, he's dead and gone, and we don't have much chance of finding out who he was.”

“You know, I've really done what I set out to do. I've proved to myself that the twins didn't kill their mother. If I play that tape for the Oakwood council, I can't see how they can deny Greenwillow the variance.”

“If you feel that way, we can take a swim in the Sound this afternoon.”

It was a tempting thought on a hot day, but I knew I couldn't just drop the case. “Let's find out what happened after Robert came out of his mother's room.”

Robert had come out for the simplest of reasons: he had to go to the bathroom. Once out, the twins tried to revive their dead mother, moving her, pulling the knife out of her body, talking to her. It was a pitiful tale, two very dependent
children completely at a loss. My heart ached listening to them.

Finally, on Easter Sunday morning, Magda came to their rescue.

“The bell,” James said.

“Did you answer the door?” I asked.

“No. Mama said, ‘Don't answer the door, Robert.' ”

“ ‘Don't answer the door, James.' ”

“Who was at the door?”

“Magda came in.” Robert.

They recounted the few things that happened before Magda separated them. And that, for all intents and purposes, was the end of their life as they knew it.

The one exception was the brief time they were together as they were getting ready to leave the apartment for the police station.

Magda gave James his coat and he put it on. Then, “Mr. O'Connor, Robert's coat is missing.” Robert.

“What?” James.

“His coat is missing. Look in the closet. Somebody took it.” Robert.

“Come on, honey, it's seven o'clock. Would you find something for him to put on so we can get out of here?” James.

“But maybe somebody took it.” Robert.

“And maybe he left it somewhere. I don't have all night.” James.

“Here, Robert, wear your raincoat. That's a good boy.” Robert.

Downstairs, they were put into two police cars, and that was the end. Jack turned off the tape recorder.

“You were good boys,” I said to the twins after a moment.

“Jerry was bad,” James said.

“Yes, I think he was.”

“The witch was bad,” Robert said.

I felt very bad about the witch. I patted Robert's shoulder, but I didn't say anything. I still had a difficult task ahead of me.

By the time we left, it was late afternoon. It was too late for a swim, and anyway, that was kind of a problem for me. I wasn't used to baring quite so much of myself in public. But an Oakwood residents' association owned a piece of beach along a protected cove on the Long Island Sound, and I had inherited Aunt Meg's share along with the house. I hadn't visited it since moving in, but I remembered it as a lovely spot. We drove there, took our shoes off, and walked in the sand.

The beach, as usual, was almost empty. We walked around the half circle of the inlet, stopped for a while at the point, and came back. We had stopped talking by then. We were out of ideas. If it was Patrick, he was dead. If it was a boyfriend, he was dead. Surely we could no longer suspect Paul Antonetti or the mailman or Selma Franklin. I still wanted it to be Patrick, but it seemed less and less likely.

As we walked back along the beach, a woman in a bathing suit came over.

“Are you Christine Bennett?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Hi. I'm Betsy Gore. I was at the council meeting last month. I want you to know I'm with you.”

“Thank you very much.”

“How are you doing?”

“Better than I hoped. I'm really making progress.”

“Wonderful! If you need any help, we're in the book, G-O-R-E.”

I thanked her and we resumed our walk. “That's the third one,” I told Jack.

“Third what?”

“Third person who's talked to me about it since the meeting. The mayor called a week or so ago, and someone from town called last night.”

“You're getting pretty popular. Pretty soon you'll be running for public office.”

“Not a chance.”

“Suppose we have dinner and think about something else for a while.”

“Sounds good.”

We got back to the house about eight-thirty. I had had a glass of wine with dinner and I was feeling relaxed. We had really fought off talking about the Talley murder, which was good for both of us. Our lives and our worlds held a lot of other interesting things, and we enjoyed exploring them.

Jack was thirsty, so we went to the kitchen and I got out some ice and a container of orange juice, but all he wanted was water. He drained the glass and set it on the counter.

“I pulled out a book of poetry after I saw you last week.”

I felt touched. “I hope you liked it.”

“I went back and looked at what those guys wrote three, four hundred years ago. Love and death over and over. Made me feel like very little had changed.”

“Very little has.”

That's when he took me in his arms. It didn't catch me off guard or surprise me in any way. I had known when we walked into the house. I felt I had been waiting for this moment since ten o'clock this morning, putting it on hold for all those hours that we were at Greenwillow, that we spent on the beach and having dinner. But I knew as we kissed that I had made a mistake in judgment; I had withheld something vital about myself, something he had a right to know if we were to continue seeing each other, which I dearly wanted.

“Come with me,” I said softly as our kiss ended, as his hands began touching me more intimately, more passionately, then I could have imagined a month ago. “I have to tell you something.”

“It can wait.”

“No. Please. It's waited too long.”

We went into the living room and sat on Aunt Meg's comfortable sofa, Jack's arm around me. I lifted his hand and kissed it.

“I was a nun until five weeks ago,” I said.

He was quiet for so long that I knew he just couldn't think
of the right thing to say. There wasn't any right thing, and I wanted him to know that.

“That's what your cousin meant at lunch today,” he said finally. “The brown lady.”

“I was a Franciscan. We wore a brown habit. It was obligatory. I don't think Gene was ever sure I was the person underneath all those folds.”

He touched my hair. “It's starting to grow back.”

“A lot of things are starting to happen. I'll feel better if I tell you.”

“I'm listening.”

My mother died when I was fourteen. Because she was both loving and courageous, she arranged formally and informally that I would live with Aunt Meg, Uncle Will, and Gene if and when she died. I had known them all my life, and it was the best place I could think of being, except for my mother's home.

Perhaps because she had doubts or misgivings, she also planted certain seeds in me. She talked glowingly of the life of a nun. We visited St. Stephen's when I was only thirteen. It was like stepping into another world. It was so beautiful, so mystical—all those nuns in their brown habits walking from building to building, the novices with their heads down and their arms crossed and hands concealed in their sleeves. It seemed like the most wonderful life to me.

According to their rules, I couldn't enter till I was eighteen and had finished high school, but it didn't work out that way. Although my life with my aunt and uncle was as good as life could be without my mother, my presence in the house became a problem because of Gene.

My uncle and aunt had learned to cope with Gene's retardation; what was harder was the many physical problems that were visited on him. Sores popped up on his body; breathing difficulties sometimes hospitalized him for days at a time, leaving Meg and Will fearful for his life. When those times came, Aunt Meg would stay overnight with Gene, a practice that had been easy in the past. Now she was leaving a
fourteen-year-old girl, whose mother had recently died, alone in the house, sometimes till Uncle Will returned late in the evening, sometimes overnight if Will was on the road. The anguish this caused her was something awful.

During the year I lived with them, we visited St. Stephen's twice, and I resolved to join the order. I tried to make myself into the kind of person they would want, devout and devoted.

What finally happened was that Gene was hospitalized again after my fifteenth birthday, and complications set it. Suddenly it looked as though he might die or that if he didn't, he would need all kinds of care he hadn't needed before. I could see my aunt's misery, and I began to be afraid I would end up in a foster home, something that terrified me. The day it all happened, it was raining. I came home from school, expecting to find the house empty. Aunt Meg was sitting in the kitchen, crying.

“You know how much I love you, Chris,” she said, and it was as though she'd said the reverse. I just knew I was going to be cast out. “Gene is very sick, honey. Uncle Will is over there now. How would you like to go to St. Stephen's for a while, till Gene is better?”

I was so happy not to be sent away to live with foster parents that I almost laughed. “But I'm not eighteen. They won't take me.”

“I've talked to them, darling. They understand the problem we have with Gene, and they know you want to enter. They said it would be all right.”

We went upstairs and packed all my clothes, summer and winter. By the time we were finished, it was time for dinner. We sat and ate, Aunt Meg reassuring me over and over until I realized it was herself she was reassuring. When dinner was done, we took the bags out to the car in the rain.

To my surprise, I found that there were grocery bags full of things that Aunt Meg had bought earlier in the day, soap and a toothbrush and toothpaste, toilet paper and napkins for my periods. There was a generous month's supply of all the toiletries I would need. The rest of what I needed for the first
year would come out of my dowry, a requirement of the convent.

I don't know how she got us there. The weather got only worse, and between the rain on the windshield and the tears she kept wiping away, I really believed that some divine intervention guided us. It was the darkest night of my life. Even parked near the Mother House, you could hardly see the lights inside.

The door was opened by a rather tall nun who introduced herself as Sister Joseph. I will probably never meet anyone as compassionate and intelligent as she. She had been assigned as my spiritual director; as I grew older, she became my friend. I know that I was so frightened that night that it would be hard to imagine that anything in my life could frighten me more. I had lost my mother, and now I was losing my aunt and uncle. I had romanticized St. Stephen's and longed for the day when I could enter the convent, but now that I was there, years younger than the youngest novice, I wanted to be anywhere else on earth. Somehow Joseph understood.

I could see that Aunt Meg didn't want to leave. She must have been going through an awful turmoil, doubting her decision, wondering whether she couldn't somehow have managed to keep us all together. Joseph gave her coffee, left us alone for a few minutes, and finally encouraged her to leave. I can't even think of that night without crying.

The miracle is that it worked. In a way, I became everybody's darling and I grew to love them back and to love St. Stephen's. Eventually I took the name Edward Frances, after my father and mother. Aunt Meg, God bless her, never abandoned me. She visited, and her home was the only place I visited for many years. The nuns sent me to a Catholic high school in the next town, and then, when I was seventeen, I entered St. Stephen's College. When I graduated with honors and said I wanted to teach, they sent me off to get my master's at a college where I had my own little apartment and learned the little I know of cooking.

It was a wonderful life for many years, the best life I could
have had. The change came when I was in my late twenties. I found that what I loved was the teaching, the students, the reading, not being a nun who did all those things. I watched students graduate and go on, and I knew I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to move on. I found that what I loved in the church was the ritual, all that I had grown up with, that I was comfortable with. I will never be anything but a Catholic, but my faith was no longer the center of my life.

I struggled with all this, wanting to remain faithful to my vows. Eventually I talked to Joseph, and together, we worked it out. When I was absolutely certain, I made my application to be released from my vows. Because we were a pontifical community, I had to write to the Pope. It took nearly a year for my release, and I stayed on till the end of the school year. Because of Aunt Meg's illness, I did a lot of traveling back and forth during that year, but I wanted to be at the college to see my last classes through to the end.

After that, I came to Oakwood.

It had grown dark while I was telling Jack my story. The only light came from the kitchen, the same kitchen where Aunt Meg had told me, fifteen years ago, that I was to go to St. Stephen's that night.

“Gene got better, didn't he?” Jack asked, the first thing he'd said since I'd started.