The Judas Child (44 page)

She hadn’t really expected a response. Soon she would have to call Charlie Croft and tell him to let William Penny go. There was no solid reason to hold him, no evidence of anything but gross misconduct with the wives of vulnerable patients. And Proper William was going to get away with that. Charlie Croft would never use the information. The chief would want to avoid any trouble over the improper arrest or the search of William’s house and clinic.

Ali quickly tamped the dirt down around the stem of the plant and then reached for another one. Her uncle was still fussing over the same blue pot, and seemed not to notice that she worked alongside of him.

“Can’t you tell me anything that will keep a child alive? You know he’s killed one of them, but what about the other girl?”

“She’s already dead.” The blue pot was not yet half full. “The little princess always dies early on Christmas morning—according to your own research, Ali. I doubt there was ever a variation in that routine.”

Oddly enough, she took this as a positive thing, a sign of communication. He had just confirmed the pattern. She picked up another pot, not wanting to lose control of herself while he was in the talking mode. “Why does he do it?” Was he even listening to her now? He seemed so distracted. “Uncle Mortimer? Why is he doing this? What’s it about?”

“What is it ever about? A raging, demanding, unrelenting God is always in the details somewhere. The child is only an object, or perhaps a vehicle. He never considers the inside of her, the fear and pain. All the sadism is directed at me. He wants me to suffer, and I do. I was never in control. He was.”

“He’s a religious fanatic? Is that what you’re—”

“Common people rise, the extraordinary sink, all because of the same incident, Ali.” He had filled the pot now, but kept adding dirt until it overflowed. “Remember, the priest was once a rather ordinary man. You know that’s true—if you haven’t colored all your old memories of him. He might’ve been your soul mate when you were a child, so shy, so soft-spoken, invisible really—just like you. But now? Well, you’ve seen him.” The spoon scraped the rim of the pot. He jabbed it into the dirt, again and again.

“You’re not saying Father Paul—”

“Rather extraordinary now, isn’t he, Ali? But it’s not just him. Everything is out of balance. It’s all up in the air, suspended in cosmic dust.”

“What? Uncle Mortimer, you have to help me out here. I’m still not the smartest—”

“And you’re part of it too, Ali. Look at what you’ve done with your life. Logically—” He held up the measuring spoon and examined it, as though he had never seen one before. Then he drove it into the pot, scraping the ceramic sides with a gritty noise. “Well, logic has flown, hasn’t it? Perhaps it’s more a sense of balance, or proportion —an eye for symmetry. He’s waiting for the balance to be restored. It’s already changing. Rouge Kendall is on the rise, seeking his level. The priest will be diminished soon.”

“And what about me, Uncle Mortimer? Will I disappear again? Blend into some wall, out of sight? Where is all this prophecy coming from? I know you don’t believe in psychics, and you’re not a religious man.”

He ignored her to stare at the garden beyond the panes of glass. “And where is the snow, my dear? There has never been a single winter without two feet of snow this late in December. At this altitude, there’s—Well, where
is
the snow?”

“Excuse me.”

Ali turned to see Rouge standing at the end of the table.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said. “I need to speak with you. Alone.”

Had he found out about William Penny’s arrest? Not likely. The schism between state and local police had placed Rouge on the other side of Chief Croft’s boundary line. William Penny would be secreted in some back room, while the chief made use of his prisoner’s house keys. She did not want to keep this from Rouge, but a child was in danger, time was precious, and Chief Croft should not have to pay for empathy with the loss of his job.

Her uncle was still fixated on his snowless garden when she followed Rouge through the side door and into the main house. The foyer was larger than a modest two-story home. The high ceiling, an architect’s flight of fancy, was structured around a curving grand staircase. Beyond the wood railing of the upper gallery, men and women in uniforms passed in and out of the doorways of second-floor rooms.

“There’s something I want to show you.” Rouge led her to the small door set into the massive structure of the staircase. “Sorry about the damage. We got all the keys to the house from the valet. But none of them worked on this lock. I asked your uncle for the key, but I don’t think he heard me.”

She looked at the scraped and dented metal where it had been forced with tools.

Rouge’s hand was on the knob, hesitating. “The night we met in Dame’s Tavern, you told me your uncle was an atheist. Then in the hospital room, you said it again. But you accused him of using the priest as a confessor.”

“The contradiction bothers you? That business with the priest had nothing to do with my uncle’s religious beliefs. He could ethically give the burden of knowledge to a priest. It was a ploy for the—”

Rouge opened the door, taking her words and her breath away. Once, this had been a large storage room with shelving, trunks and boxes, and a small ordinary window set into the back wall. Now the clutter had been removed; the window had been enlarged, reshaped with a religious arch, and repaned with stained glass depicting symbols of a mythological creature, Persephone, goddess of spring.

Other symbols in the wall murals came from Christianity —lambs and doves, metaphors of a trinity, and a hundred replications of the cross hung on every bit of clear wall space. But the carved objects on pedestals were images of fawns with flutes and other animals with human characteristics. Her eyes traveled over the fresco on the longest wall; it followed the sweeping curve of the exterior staircase. The mural was amateurish, and she recognized the style. Her uncle had dabbled in art as a younger man. Her father owned several canvases from those early years—but nothing like this.

The entire wall was flooded with Old Testament images. The centerpiece was the depiction of God from the Sistine Chapel, but the face was distorted, enraged. It was a portrait of the old God, Whom Uncle Mortimer had once described as angry and petulant, demanding blood, inflicting sores on the faithful, turning his children to pillars of salt when they displeased him. Moses was among the minions and wearing the horns Michelangelo had given him. Other horned images abounded in and about bright bursts of painted flames. Snatches of imagery from the third panel of Bosch’s
Millennium
triptych showed the torments of the damned, the tortures of the flesh. The most hellish scenes were the most recent and as yet unfinished. She could see the pencil marks on the wall, outlines of figures not yet filled in with color, with light and shadow.

The work was not a masterpiece, but very labor-intensive. She knew it must have taken years to do this.

Among the animal objects were small statues of a woman, a gentle goddess of renewal, who shared this space with a deity of destruction. All the pantheistic elements of nature had been overpowered by the work on the walls.

She could smell the stale odors from incense pots. The many candles about the room had melted down to nubs. There was further evidence of ritual in the cat-o’-nine-tails upon the altar, a tool of self-flagellation.

Rouge Kendall was watching her with great patience, making no sound, nor any movement to hurry her. She picked her words carefully, for she well understood whom she was dealing with, and she would not underestimate him.

“I’d say it began with the aspects of nature, the goddess of spring.” She stood before the stained-glass window. “It’s an elegant gesture, most likely a whim and rather harmless—given his love for plants. This might have been a meditation room, a quiet place to lock out the world and think, or just to find some peace. He’s always handled the most bizarre cases. It’s not surprising that he would need a retreat.”

She turned to face the massive curving wall. “And then the Old Testament God moved in and overgrew the space. That’s probably when the room became a shrine—the altar, the candles.” She averted her eyes from the whip. “That made the room dark and violent. No peace anymore.”

“He’s insane, isn’t he, Ali?”

“It represents a crisis point in his philosophy.” She turned away from Rouge, surprising herself with the calm in her voice. “It shows the pressure of concealing the murderer. This is what it’s done to him. He doesn’t see himself as a willing conspirator, and he can’t recognize his own agony as a sign of wrongdoing. In the Old Testament, the faithful were punished along with the sinners. I’m sure you recognized the images from—”

She knew he had already analyzed this room with his better brain, and now she wondered if she had done half as well.

“Take it a little further, Ali. What if he sees the pain as punishment, and not as a test of faith? How does he
really
see himself? Righteous man or sinner?”

“You suspect him of—” She looked at the wall again. What was Rouge finding in the same pictures? “He sees himself as a very moral man. This is what it cost him to keep a secret, to keep to his own code of ethics.”

Rouge did not seem convinced. He was standing near the altar and staring at the whip of many thongs—ancient method of penance. He was drawing his own conclusions.

She joined him at the altar. “It would have been easier for him to tell. You can see that, can’t you? It’s not that he didn’t want to. But his personal code is so rigid.”

There was nothing to be read in Rouge’s face. Even when they were children in the choir, she had been unable to discern the thoughts of either Kendall twin. In her mind, this survivor of the pair was still one of the strange students of St. Ursula’s, and she would always be in awe of him.

“Rouge? Will you let me talk to my uncle before you tell the others about this?”

He nodded, saying nothing, probably waiting for a more direct answer to his original question, the one he had posed when they entered the room.

“Yes,” she said. “He’s insane.”

 

Ali returned to the conservatory to find her uncle working over the same blue pot, churning up the dirt, digging and digging with his measuring spoon.

She touched his shoulder very gently. He only nodded to say he was aware of her. “Uncle Mortimer? You said
he
wanted you to suffer. Were you talking about a patient, or God?”

He continued to dig in the blue pot, churning up the dirt, directing all of his attention to it, yet unaware of the damage he was doing to the delicate roots.

“Please stop.” She put one hand on his, but the digging went on. “Uncle Mortimer, we have to talk. I’ve seen the shrine.”

No reaction, only the gritty noises of the spoon scraping the sides of the pot as he churned up the dirt. She was becoming a small girl again, accustomed to being ignored.

“This is important to me. If you could just give me some small thing, anything. I believe Gwen Hubble might still be alive.”

He continued to ignore her, finding the dirt in the pot more fascinating. She was becoming Sally again, the invisible child, nothing so grand as anything that grew in Uncle Mortimer’s greenhouse. The adults in her memory were walking past her, holding conversations in the air above her head as she became smaller and smaller.

One finger drifted up to touch the scar on her face. Then her hand shot straight out in anger and sent the blue pot crashing to the floor.

Mortimer stared at her with no surprise in his eyes. He seemed only tired when he looked down at the ceramic fragments and the dirt on the stone tiles at his feet.

And now she also looked down at the breakage and saw the glint of gold among the clots of dark brown soil. She knelt down on the floor beside the debris and spread the dirt with her hands to uncover a tiny ring. She held it up to the light and found the initials she was looking for,
S.R.

She whispered, “Sarah Ryan, ten years old.” Now she uncovered the religious medal. “Mary Wyatt, ten years old.” Other small things appeared under her probing hands, and she could put a child’s name to each one of them. She almost missed the delicate ankle chain attached to an engraved oval of gold. “
AIMM
?”

 

The rain had stopped. They moved under the trees where the plant misters could not reach them with the sprays of water. Gwen held the flashlight while Sadie made a long reach to prod the dog’s body with a broomstick. “I think he’s dead.”

“No,” said Gwen. “You’ll know when he’s dead.” This was the voice of experience with generations of white mice and hamsters. The first time she found a mouse lying on the floor of his cage, she had known this was not sleep, even though she had never seen death before. There was no mistaking one thing for the other. Death was not a mere lack of animation, but a subtraction from the world.

“This dog is still here, I know he is.” Gwen rolled off the plastic sheet spread beneath the tree. She crept toward the animal on her hands and knees. The last pill was wearing off, and she was feeling more pain now.

“Gwen, no!”

The child stopped and laid her head on her arms, exhausted from this small effort. She knew Sadie was right. If the dog suddenly revived, she would not be able to get out of his way. He was a smart enough animal to play dead, waiting on his advantage.

Her leg ached. It was getting more useless by the hour. She lifted her head again and trained the flashlight on the animal, studying him from this safe distance beyond the reach of his chain. His wound was a small one, only a dark hole and a stream of blood.

The dog moved, and she dropped the flashlight. She picked it up again and shined it on his face. He cried with a human sound. The dog must also be in great pain. “Maybe we could give him some pills? We could bury them in dog food and—”