The Son, The Sudarium Trilogy - Book Two (13 page)

2:31

“Sally! Sally!
Sally!!!!”

The voice came from afar, gaining strength as it wafted down the stairs, ever closer, so that by the time it reached Sally’s ears, it was a bellow. She seemed to recognize it as the voice of, what was her name? Miz? …
Miz O
… yes, that was it. It was the voice of Miz O, calling her…

Sally lost her train of thought.

… calling her somewhere …

“Sally! Sally!”

Upstairs,
that was where the voice was coming from. The woman, whose name was Miz O, was calling her upstairs. And in an instant, Sally was in the room. Miz O was having another one of her hysterical outbursts, but Sally was able to watch with surprising detachment, as if between her and the screaming woman, there was a veil. The cries coming from the woman’s mouth were fainter here in the bedroom than they had been downstairs and then they ceased all together, although the woman’s lips kept moving, so she was still screaming, but like the heroine of a silent movie, producing no sound.

Sally found herself being pulled back from the foot of the bed, her legs barely brushing the floor, and then sucked out the bedroom window into the treetops. She’d never noticed there were so many trees around Miz O’s house before. But here she was, all of a sudden, in an ocean of green, an ocean of leaves. Waves and waves of leaves that tossed her back and forth, not unpleasantly (it was more a rocking motion), that moved her slowly until she was in front of the yellow house diagonally across the street from Miz O’s. She had the impression she knew this house, although she had never been in it. She didn’t even know who lived there. Still, the house was familiar to her. It was the house that was mentioned in the diary she’d been reading when she’d heard her name being called and she’d floated up the stairs. You could see the house from Miz O’s bedroom. And now here she was, brushing up against the windows. Was Miz O watching? She would want to know what was inside.

It was proving all too confusing for Sally. Miz O’s silent screaming and a yellow house – or was it white and the yellow just came from the setting sun? One thing was certain: The setting sun meant that her shift was over. Time to go home. Time to cook dinner for her son Hugo. Hugo would be waiting. Hugo would be hungry. Mustn’t keep Hugo waiting. With a great effort, she forced her body downward, so that her feet touched the sidewalk in front of the yellow house. The bus was waiting at the corner. The bus that would take her home where she would cook dinner for Hugo. As she headed toward the line of waiting passengers, she heard the cries again.

“Sally! Sally!
Sally!!!”

The faster she walked down the street toward the bus, the less progress she made. In fact, she was moving backwards, backwards to Miz O’s house. Some force was drawing her back from where she’d come, back where she no longer wanted to be. She wanted to be with Hugo, but the screaming voice – “Sally, Sally!” – defused her will and sapped her strength. She summoned up one last burst of energy to break free, but it was fruitless. In what seemed like a split second, she was drawn back into the house, her whole body throbbing with pain.

Sally opened her eyes.

It took her a moment to realize that her head was on the kitchen table. She tried to lift it, but the weight was too great. Just moments before, she had felt light as a feather, but not now. With superhuman effort, she managed to raise her head a few inches above the table. Her eyes focused on the photograph of a handsome young man. She had a dim recollection that she had been looking at photographs, before this fantastic journey. But there were spots on the photographs now that she didn’t remember. Or was it her eyes, playing tricks with her? She touched one of the spots with her fingertip and it smudged. So they were spots! Spots of blood. Her blood! As her grip tightened on one of the photographs, the memory of the last few seconds came back to her, crystal clear.

“Sally!” Again the voice from upstairs.

Just as she opened her mouth to reply, she felt a thud at the back of her head and a new flood of pain. She lost consciousness and once again was light and free and floating above the kitchen table, littered with photographs.

Maria lowered the iron skillet and calmly walked to the kitchen sink, where she put it under the spigot and washed away the traces of blood. Then she wiped it dry with a towel and hung it over the stove, where it was part of a matched set. She rinsed out a sponge and turned her attention to the kitchen table, when she heard the ring of an unfamiliar telephone. It took a while for her to figure out that the ringing was coming from a pocket in Sally’s housedress. Her cell phone!

Maria took the cell phone out and looked at the caller ID. “Hugo,” it read. The son! Maria had forgotten there was a son. This was going to be more complicated than she had thought. But not that complicated. She examined the blood on the back of Sally’s head and concluded that her death could easily be made to look like an accident. Sally was no longer a spring chicken and accidents happened all the time to older people. They fell, for example. Maria went to the cellar door and opened it. The stairs were steep. If the light bulb had burned out and Sally had tried to navigate the cellar stairs in the dark … well, the conclusion was obvious.

Maria flicked the light switch and the stairs were immediately flooded with light. Calmly she unscrewed the light bulb, shook it hard enough to break the filament, and then screwed it back in the socket. Then she righted Sally’s slumped-over body in the kitchen chair, and using the chair, as if it were a wheelbarrow, maneuvered the woman to the head of the stairs. There she tilted the chair until the body slid off and tumbled downward. It landed with a dull thump. From her vantage point, the body looked to Maria more like rag doll than a person. She felt no compassion. If the woman hadn’t been a meddler none of this would have been necessary. But sometimes curiosity killed more than the cat.

Maria arranged the photographs and notebooks in a neat pile, sponged the blood off the table, and put the chair back in its normal position. She left the cellar door open, because, of course, Sally would not have closed it behind her before falling. A quick survey of the kitchen told her all was in order.

“Sally!”

Maria ignored the voice and gathered up the photographs and notebooks, before looking at her watch. It read 2 p.m. She would return in four hours for her usual shift. And the first thing she would discover would be the body. Such a pity. Sally seemed a good enough person. But sometimes even good persons got in the way.

Sally’s broken body lay at the foot of the stairs, but already her spirit was drifting away. “Poor Hugo,” she thought. “Having to hear this about his mother!” She wanted to tell him that she was fine, but he would learn the gruesome news from the police – maybe there would even be mention on the local TV news – and he would think only of the pain she had suffered. But this wasn’t the end of the story. How could she let Hugo know that? For the first time distress entered her spirit which, up to now, had only felt elation. No, her life was not over. She had to let Hugo know that all was well. But she also had to find the young man in the photographs. She had to warn him.

And with that, she felt the wind rushing though her, sweeping her upward. Now the house was gone and then the neighborhood and the town. The warmth of the sun receded, as she rose higher and higher and the wind turned colder and colder. Nothing was identifiable any more. She no longer thought about her son or the young man in the photographs. There was only a deep, deep blue, and the wind, both lifting and engulfing her, filling her with a soaring freedom and power she had never thought possible before.

At ten minutes past six, Maria walked through the kitchen door. As a matter of principle, she was always ten minutes late. It was her way of making Sally and Miz O believe the job held little importance for her. Today would be no different.

“Sally? Sally!” she called out, as she usually did. “I’m here.” All business, Maria removed her coat and hung it on a hook by the kitchen door, then put her handbag on the counter. There was no cleaning up to do – she’d done all that in the afternoon - so she washed her hands and dried them on a dishtowel. It was important to maintain the appearances of routine. She’d call the Home Nursing office in a little while to report Sally’s absence. Then she’d wait a few minutes more and call back with the news that Sally seemed to have had a horrible accident and fallen down the cellar stairs.

“Help me! Someone please help me!”

The faint cry frightened Maria as much as anything had in her life. Her heart rose up in her throat and her vision momentarily went blurry. Sally couldn’t have survived the fall. The consequences were unthinkable. Maria allowed herself to approach the open door and glance down the stairs. The crumpled body hadn’t moved.

“Help me.”

She realized the voice was coming from the second floor. Breathing a sigh of relief, she called out, “Be right there, Ma’am.”

She dashed up the stairs, preparing herself for Miz O’s complaints. But when she walked through the bedroom door, she was startled to find the bed was empty.

“Ma’am?” she called out.

“Here,” came the reply from the foot of the bed, where Miz O lay sprawled on the floor.

“My God!,” said Maria. “What are you doing there?”

“Dying!” snapped the old woman. “I haven’t had a bite of food or a drop of water all day. Where’s Sally?”

“Sally’s left. Didn’t she say ‘goodbye’?”

“Not to me!”

“How long has she been gone?”

“I don’t know, you fool! I was sleeping, like I always do, when I was awoken by a premonition that something bad had happened.”

“Oh, I’m sure nothing bad has happened. Maybe she had an emergency with her son and didn’t want to wake you.”

“Not about her, you idiot. A premonition about me. I knew at once what it was. And I was right. She stole from me!”

“Stole? What do you mean?”

“Stole! Robbed! What do you think I mean! Look!” The woman lifted herself far enough off the floor to point to the trunk at the foot of the bed. The lid was up and all the contents were gone.

Maria continued to act puzzled. But Miz. O had just cleared up one mystery for her. When she’d taken the photographs and the notebooks home with her that afternoon, she couldn’t help wondering how Sally had gotten hold of them. It had never occurred to her that there might be anything in the locked trunk in Miz O’s bedroom, except “my trousseau,” as the old lady put it with a coquetry ludicrous in one so decrepit.

“She has everything! My whole life! We have to find her. She must be working for them. What a fool I’ve been to trust her. Another mistake. No wonder I have been punished all these years.”

Maria tried to look sympathetic. “What did she take? What was in the trunk?”

Suddenly, the woman’s face changed and her eyes, cold and hard, bored into Maria. “Why are
you
so curious?”

“You said something was stolen. I’m just trying to help.”

Again the suspicious stare. “Are you? Well, if you want to help, why don’t you start by getting me back into my bed!” The old woman made an ineffectual effort to pull herself into a sitting position, while Maria stood back and watched.

“Help me, you fool! That’s what you’re paid for!”

“Perhaps we should contact Claudia, if you think something valuable has been stolen.”

Miz O fell back to the floor, but her voice was unwavering. “Claudia is not to be bothered.”

“Wouldn’t she like to know what’s happened? Where is she? I can call her for you.”

“I said to leave Claudia out of this. I don’t need her. I can take care of myself.”

“It doesn’t look like that to me. The emergency contact number we have for her is no longer in service.”

The old lady’s eyes grew narrow with suspicion. “How would you know that? Have you already tried to call her?”

The woman had no strength in her body, but her eyes blazed with anger. Maria squirmed under the onslaught of so much fury. “No, I haven’t—-“

“That was an emergency number. To be called
in an emergency
only! Why would you try to contact her beforehand? What was so important that you had to talk to her about? There has been no emergency that I am aware of!”

“Well, there is now,” Maria retorted. “And company policy demands that the emergency contact be informed.”

“Well, I don’t know where she is.” The sullen answer signaled the unlikelihood of any cooperation.

“How am I supposed to reach her then?”

“I told you. I don’t have the faintest idea. Besides I don’t need her,” barked Miz O, stubbornly.

“Yes, you do!” Maria knelt on the floor beside the old woman, grabbed her by the shoulders and started shaking her. “Tell me where she is!”

“I just want to get back in my bed. Help me.”

Maria rose up and stood over the woman threateningly. “I thought you said you could take care of yourself!”

The screaming began instantly, powerful and shrill coming from such a wasted body. “SALLY! HELP! SOMEONE HELP ME! SALLY!” She was like a child again, beyond control, caught up in the full force of a tantrum. With the back of her hand, Maria whacked the old woman across the face, silencing her. Blood oozed between the withered lips, and the head cracked up against the side of the bed. Silence settled over the bedroom.