Ash Wednesday (15 page)

Carmela’s career seemed to be going smoothly, insofar as Amos understood it. At first, he had found it improbable that people would entrust their money to this beautiful young woman. Beauty can seem an alternative to brains, but Carmela had both.

“It’s a shame you can’t control Jason’s finances.”

Her reaction surprised him. The veneer of the professional woman seemed to drop away, to be replaced by the sadness of a woman separated from her husband. “How is he doing?”

“Don’t you ever see him?”

“I don’t dare.”

“Dare?”

The thought that Jason Burke represented a fatal attraction to Carmela surprised Amos at first, but, of course, they had been married. They were still married.

Amos said, “You really should see him.”

It was the kind of unsolicited advice he almost never gave.

Carmela Rush—for professional purposes she had resumed her maiden name—shared offices in Schaumburg with two other financial advisors. They called themselves the Avanti Group, the name suggested by Augie Liberati, who had also been the one to invite Carmela to join forces with Andrew Baxter and himself.

“A partnership?”

“Limited. We will share rent, insurance, utilities, office help. From then on it’s to each his own.”

“So what’s the advantage?”

“You’ll pay a lot less for rent. We can pool quite a bit of equipment. Of course, if economizing means nothing to you …”

Carmela joined the Avanti Group, armed with the experience she had acquired working for someone else. Baxter was the oldest member of the group, a retired economics professor who had decided to try practicing what he had preached. He had an annoying habit of explaining how he operated as if he were giving a lecture, but that had
been a one-time event and Carmela came to like him and his fat, nagging wife. Their kids were grown and gone, and Mrs. Baxter took to dropping in unannounced as if to surprise an office orgy in progress.

This was Augie’s interpretation. “I know the type.”

“Your wife?”

“I’m not married. You?”

She had been aware of him trying to get a good look at her rings. Her wedding ring was not on the appropriate finger. That was in her apartment, left behind like her married name when she came to the office.

“Once bitten, twice shy,” she said.

“Ah.”

That had been meant as information as well as a warning. She had remained faithful to Jason, only saying it that way made it sound like a chore. Carmela felt that the years with Jason had cured her forever of the mating impulse. Now she just wanted to make money, lots of it, for her clients, for herself. Her goal was to have more money than her mother-in-law; why she didn’t know. Still, one needed investment goals. That was the creed she preached to her clients and thus had to practice herself.

Augie had taken classes from Baxter in the long ago, as Augie put it, but now their roles seemed reversed. Gradually Baxter shed his theories and took his cue from the swashbuckling approach of Augie. As far as Carmela was concerned, they were both too deep in hedge funds, their clients as well as themselves. To her the whole thing looked like a bubble bound to burst, and she steered between the Scylla of excessive caution and the Charybdis of moderate speculation.

Augie dipped his chin and looked at her over his glasses. “I’d ask you to explain that to me, but I’m afraid you would.”

“The Strait of Messina. The
Aeneid
.”

“Where did you go to school?”

“Loyola.”

“You’re Catholic?” He brightened as he asked the question.

“Once.”

“That’s all it takes.”

“Are you?”

“Only on Sundays.”

The three of them sometimes had lunch together, when they didn’t have something brought in. Augie preferred eating out. He worked like a Trojan mornings and then liked long liquid lunches in which he could savor the accomplishments of the morning. From time to time, Carmela accepted his invitation to come along.

“Dutch,” she said.

“I voted for the other guy.”

He had to explain that to her. She kept the lunches to the minimum because she didn’t like to drink in midday and because the lunches were too much fun. In another world she could have liked Augie, a lot, but she was in this world, a disillusioned wife who blamed the troubles of her marriage on her mother-in-law. The way Helen babied Jason was disgusting, and he claimed not to know what Carmela was talking about when she brought it up. The fact that it was still going on, Helen paying off Jason’s gambling debts, setting him up in one enterprise after another, kept the flame of Carmela’s resentment bright.

“My husband drank,” she explained once when she had to refuse Augie’s repeated offer that he join her in a drink during lunch.

“Your husband?”

“It’s a long story. And it’s all over.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

“I’m sure Jason does, too.”

“Jason.”

“My husband.”

“Your former husband.”

“Former human being would be more like it.”

Eventually, to lighten the burden of Jason’s guilt, Carmela told Augie about her mother-in-law. She talked too much. When she mentioned Florence’s death and Nathaniel’s insistence that he had killed her, Augie’s eyes widened.

“In Fox River?”

She nodded. She might just as well have a drink, the way she was babbling.

“O’Hara,” Augie said, searching for the name. “Bourke.” Then he had it. “Burke.”

“That’s right.”

“I have a sister in Fox River,” he said.

“Lots of people do.”

From his sister he got all the details. Carmela liked that better than being the one to tell him the whole sordid story. His sister was married to a Pianone.

“The
Pianones?”

He laughed. “That’s how they think of themselves.”

Did he know their reputation in Fox River? “What’s your sister like?”

“You should meet her.”

They left it at that.

When Nathaniel was released from prison, Augie knew of it before she did.

She was delighted. “I used to visit him, in Joliet. Once a month. He is the sweetest man in the world.”

“I resent that.”

That kind of kidding was becoming a habit. A warning signal. Carmela resolved to see less of Augie, but she saw him every business day whether she liked it not, and she couldn’t help liking him. She promised herself to be careful. For a week she worked with such intensity that even she marveled at the results.
Eat your heart
out, Helen
, she would say to herself. Sometimes she thought her plan was to make a bundle, resettle in Fox River, and be a standing rebuke to Helen.

“The poor woman,” Nathaniel had said when she expressed this thought during one of her visits to Joliet.

“How can you say that?”

“Who better? Carmela, look at her life. Surely you don’t think she’s happy.”

“Why shouldn’t she be?”

“She was unlucky in love,” Nathaniel said.

“But she was married.”

“That’s what I mean. She had hoped to marry someone else.”

“Who?”

“Me.”

“Nathaniel! Are you serious?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Tell me.”

So he told her of his courting days, visiting the house with the two lovely sisters, Helen the elder, Florence the younger. He himself hadn’t been sure which one he was after.

“What decided it?”

“My appendix.”

He had had an appendicitis attack, during a visit when only Florence was there. She took him in charge, called an ambulance, and waited through the operation, not telling her family where she was. In the recovery room, she sat beside him, holding his hand. It seemed destiny.

“We were engaged before I was released from the hospital.”

“That’s romantic!”

“Yes. And ours was a wonderful marriage, as you must have noticed.”

She had. She had thought more than once that if only she and Jason could be like Nathaniel and Florence everything would be right. But Nathaniel didn’t drink, he didn’t gamble, and he had no mother to smother him with a protective love that prevented him from growing up. Helen, of course, had become his implacable enemy, something she could barely conceal at family gatherings. She had married Burke, had Jason, buried Burke, and been left with no one but Jason to care for and no one but Nathaniel to hate.

The downside of Nathaniel’s release was that Carmela no longer saw him. Joliet had been a neutral site, but she couldn’t show up in Fox River without running the risk of seeing Jason and his mother. Particularly his mother. When she telephoned Nathaniel, he told her of the St. Hilary center and Helen’s constant attendance.

“You should stay away from there, Nathaniel.”

“I like it. And my parole officer approves.”

His parole officer. During those years that Nathaniel had been in Joliet, Carmela’s conviction that he was innocent of Florence’s death strengthened.

He discouraged talk about it. “The important thing is that Florence received the last sacraments and died in the peace of God.”

Hearing him say that, she wished desperately that she could share his simple faith.

Her main source of news of Nathaniel—and Jason—was now Madeline. Poor Madeline. She still had a crush on Jason, making light of it by saying that he was her cousin, for heaven’s sake. Carmela learned of the Foot Doctor, of the sign on Jason’s office—
DOCTOR IS IN
—and it was too good not to pass on to Augie.

“Is he a podiatrist?”

“No!”

“A pedophile?”

“You’re awful.”

“Hey, I like mature women.”

Was that what she was? Sometimes she felt like the foolish girl she had been when she became infatuated with Jason.

Then she did a stupid thing. She went to see Nathaniel. It was a weekday, so he was at the St. Hilary center. She drove there. She parked, wondering if she dared go in and ask for him, and then she saw him sitting on a bench. She got out of the car and went to him, just sitting beside him on the bench. He turned, and his reaction seemed all the justification she needed to be there.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked him.

“Reading.”

“Can’t you read inside?”

“It’s better out here. Quieter.”

They had such a nice reunion after what, months, just chattering away on the bench, happy as larks until Madeline came along.

“Carmela!”

“Hello, Madeline.”

Madeline sat on Nathaniel’s other side. He asked, “Is Helen inside?”

“I won’t tell.”

“Tell what?” Carmela demanded.

“About you two lovebirds cuddling here on a bench in sixty-degree weather.”

Nathaniel chortled at this, but Carmela thought she detected an edge in Madeline’s voice.

“Are you going to visit Jason, too?”

“Not this time.”

Carmela had given Nathaniel one of her cards, showing off, and Madeline saw it.

“Can I see that?”

Nathaniel handed it to her.

“Could I have one?”

Carmela opened her purse and got out another and gave it to Madeline. She should have remembered what a snitch Madeline was. Two days later Jason showed up at the offices of the Avanti Group and asked if his wife was in.

Ever since Ash Wednesday, Marie Murkin had been brooding over the way she had treated Nathaniel Green when Father Dowling had brought him over for lunch. At the time, she had thought that, apart from his annoyingly Christian behavior that contrasted so pointedly with her own, Father Dowling just didn’t understand what Nathaniel Green had done. Done and then admitted he had done, been tried, convicted, and all the rest. Forgive and forget? What kind of world would it be if murderers rubbed shoulders with the rest of us?

As Lent progressed and Marie got used to fasting and abstinence, these practices began to exert their intended result. She consulted her soul, she examined her conscience. She did not like what she saw. As matters went on as they had at the parish center, with the shunning of Nathaniel Green, Marie had the upsetting thought that she was as bad as Helen Burke.

This muddied her motives, of course. Helen had always rubbed Marie the wrong way. When Florence was dying and Nathaniel was at his side, Helen had been an infrequent presence at the hospital,
in and out, just a pro forma visit. Of course, she had never liked Florence.