Or so that is what I think.
“Michael, how do you know that?” She looks back to me. “That she had no jacket. I read every piece of reporting on her murder and that was never mentioned.”
Clearly she has grasped the point of the demonstration. But she has looked past that to the story behind the story. This I did not consider. As is her nature she is digging, and all that I have concealed is but a well placed supposition from exposure.
I hand her sweater back and silently ask God to forgive me. “Let’s get out of the cold.”
We are back in the car with the heater on high when I tell her. Everything. From Eric Ray Redmond’s chance confession to the violence I visited upon James Estcek. Somewhere during my confession I start the car and drive away, steering on that sort of autopilot which, somehow, gets the distracted from departure to destination without plowing into a light pole. By the time I pull into her building’s underground garage the tale is told. She is quiet for a moment, and I do not know if she is simply processing what I have shared, or if she is accounting for the wrong I have done.
“Do you want to know why I sent the note to you?” She asks this without looking at me.
“If you want to tell me.”
Now she does look, her eyes glistening. “I didn’t want you to be hurt. Not because of anything I told you.”
I am missing something. “Hurt me how?”
She takes a moment to construct what comes next. “Michael, Katie was not entirely the person you thought she was.”
“What do you mean?” My tone verges on sharp, no pleasantry about it.
Silence greets my question. Perhaps its delivery has brought Chris to the point of reconsideration. She studies my face for a few seconds, her own expression somewhere between pensive and relief. The uncertainty of an unpleasant necessity all about her.
“Do you remember the Hammond Fellowship?” The question is rhetorical. A beginning milepost to place my mind in a relevant time. Eight years ago, now. This is where her words take me. Katie is six months from her undergraduate degree, a driven twenty-two year old already pursuing what came next. That next was the coveted fellowship at the University of Chicago funded by John Thayer Hammond and his wife, Michelle. Receiving word that she was among the dozen chosen from across the nation to receive the honor, well, to say that Katie was pleased would suffice on a surface level. There was no jumping, no screaming, no behaving as though she had just won on Wheel of Fortune. But there was a look on her face as she told our parents. A look beyond satisfaction. That aura of invincibility seen when climbers conquer mountains, or swimmers cross the channel. A quiet elation that, in itself, marks one who sees no obstacle and harbors no doubt.
“I remember.”
“She wanted that fellowship, Michael. And she got it.” Chris stops for a moment, though there is prelude in the quiet after her statement. “She did what she had to to get it.”
‘
…what she had to…
’ What myriad of sordid scenarios could I, or any person, spin from the vagueness of those four words. The reaction on my face, in my eyes, must be enough beyond subtle that Chris goes on before I can challenge her.
“We weren’t that close anymore when she got the fellowship, but we had enough overlap of acquaintances that I heard the whispers.” She never looks away from me. Doesn’t avert her gaze. Just pauses for a moment, as if wishing she did not have to go on. Maybe hoping that I will take the leap and assemble the pieces she has alluded to into the whole. But I do not. I cannot. “Michael, she was having an affair with John Hammond.”
Where she would not, I do turn away, looking back out the windshield toward the steel and concrete stairwell ahead, lights within spilling a sickly yellow brightness down from above.
I can feel Chris staring at me.
“Katie was my best friend since we were six years old in Mrs. Morton’s class.” There is a soft, sad chuckle in her voice, as if the memory, or all the memories of her and my sister exist on some knife’s edge between beloved and hurtful. “I knew her better than anybody.”
I look back to her now, sharply. She notes the defiance about me. How, without a word, I have dismissed as heresy what she is claiming.
“Michael…” She twists in the passenger seat so that the whole of her upper half is facing me. It is a gesture of determination. She is not backing away from her words. “I remember Katie telling me how freaked she was the day you told her you were going to become a priest. She said it blindsided her.” It is just an inch or two, but her body leans toward me. More punctuation of her point. “Did any of your friends know first? Your priest? Anyone?”
The answer need not be spoken. My initial reaction, though understandable, was rooted in the purity with which we view the haloed bonds of family. We want, always and in all things, to believe that family comes before all. Yet what we first ponder alone, we next filter through those beyond the circle which, within, judgment rightly lives in those bound to us by blood.
Chris senses my retreat from the stand I have taken. She reaches out, puts a hand on my arm. I cannot say the touch is gentle. There is weight to it. Assurance.
“I loved Katie, Michael. She was my friend. My
best
friend. For a while.” The hand eases back now, and I look away from the windshield and back to Chris. Her eyes are puddles, some internal dam built by time and distance cracking. “The truth is, at a certain point, I didn’t want to be her friend anymore.”
This is hard for me to hear. It is harder, I suspect, for Chris to admit. To give voice to what she must consider a failing of friendship—on her part, not my sister’s.
She reaches up and drags the sleeve of her coat across her face, sopping up the tears just as they begin to spill. “You’ve got no reason to believe me, Michael. I know tha—”
“I believe you.” The quiet announcement catches her by surprise. Maybe she expected me to defend Katie’s honor, her past, to some nebulous end crafted only to soothe. But I do not. Discovery is not limited to what we see, but also what we are, and the past week has opened my eyes too wide to my own ability…no, my own
willingness
to cross lines. And to justify doing so.
“I’m sorry, Michael.” Her hand extends again and rests on my forearm, settling there so lightly this time it feels alien. Almost intimate.
I shake off the sensation, literally, my head wagging back and forth quickly. She takes the reaction as dismissal of her apology, and I go with that, needing to be out of this moment between us. “There’s nothing to be sorry about.”
She withdraws her touch, the tears just a sheen on her eyes now as she watches me through the sudden silence between us. “What are you thinking?”
My gaze ticks off her, fixing absently on some blemish smudged upon the dash. I focus on the question for a moment, and in doing so pull back from all musings extraneous to why I am truly here, as the car’s clock blazes four a.m. at me in hot blue numbers. Without shifting my gaze back to her I answer Chris.
“Someone left her at that market. Someone drove her there and left her after she was shot.” There is anger in my voice as I do look to Chris now. “Do you happen to know where he lives?”
She hesitates. In her eyes I see beyond the last glint of emotion that worry is rising. That whatever path I have been on in my quest to learn what truth about Katie’s death is still to be known, she has set me on another. One whose end, like that which took me to where I served violence upon James Estcek, may present me with an object of the vengeance I can no longer deny is raging within.
“Chris,” I begin after her silence lingers, “tell me where Congressman Hammond lives.”
Chapter Nineteen
The Divide
Mary. It was her middle name. Katherine Mary Jerome. After the Virgin Mary, my mother would proudly explain early in Katie’s life when introducing her to friends, neighbors, even strangers at the mall who commented, as they often did, on what a beautiful child she was. ‘
This is Katherine Mary, my angel.
’
My angel…
You would find it, though, on no document where Katie herself penned her name. She hated it. Knowing this I instructed the gentleman crafting her headstone to leave it off. For some reason doing that was tremendously difficult, and I recall even now how I struggled with the decision. To a fault, even, ignoring more pressing things that were required to be done between her death and the services which would celebrate her life and passing into the Lord’s embrace. It might have been a shallow attempt at escape from the impossible, I realize now. Some mundane focus to keep me from losing my mind.
I think of that now as I stand outside the townhome on East Division, having, for some reason, been reminded of her full, given name upon waking an hour ago. After walking Chris from the garage to her apartment, I returned to my bed and slept, deeply, until just after noon. It is possible that some fleeting dream led me to the memory. On the drive over I strained to understand why this detail was rising now, but I am beginning to wonder if a part of me now is trying to reconcile all unknowns appended to my sister’s life, a product of what Chris has shared with me. So it has come to me internalizing a process to discover why she hated her middle name.
Katherine Mary Jerome.
The home before me is a red brick beauty just a block from the lake, three floors stepping toward a darkening sky suspended above the world like a shroud between heaven and earth. It is the address Chris gave to me. The home of a stranger to me. Though not to my sister, if the whispers Chris dragged from past to present are not wholly inaccurate.
James Estcek was a stranger to me as well, but not to Katie. I remind myself this as I mount the steps and press the buzzer next to the door. A moment later a voice sounds, tinny and distant, from a speaker near the buzzer.
“May I help you?” a woman says, refined and sharp. It is the sound of someone interrupted. A servant, possibly, whom I have taken off some task of importance. I glance up from the speaker to a small, discrete half dome set into the stony facade, smoked glass hiding a camera behind.
“My name is Michael Jerome. My sister was awarded the Hammond Fellowship some years back.”
Silence for a moment, which, to me, seems out of place. For a servant, at least. That blot of dead air after my words hints at familiarity with what has been heard. A connection. A memory.
“Hello?” I say after the quiet lingers, and for a few seconds again there is nothing until…
“I’ll be down in a moment.”
The conversation ends with an abrupt electronic click, like something out of an old movie where one party hangs up on another. I look up the block as I wait and watch the whitecaps churn toward the shore of the lake, and without any regret a light smile lifts my cheeks, that memory of Katie and me as children running along the shore of our lake warming me. If there can be any good come from the past week’s happenings, it is that all I have buried of her has been irrevocably exhumed from the pit of memory. Whatever she was or wasn’t as we crossed into adulthood, there was that time of abandon and joy.
…was
.
“Hello.”
I turn toward the voice. A woman stands next to the fully open door, not shrinking behind a narrow gap as Moira Estcek had. She is thin and stately, pressed blouse and slacks perfectly tailored, forty-five trying to look thirty—and nearly succeeding. Her hair is brown and short, what length there is tucked behind both ears, and the eyes she has fixed upon me are green and severe. “I’m Michelle Hammond.”
“Hello,” I say, and suddenly the folly of what interaction I might have strikes me, face to face with the wife of the man I have been told was involved with my sister. The man who may have left her alone and dying in a market to avoid a possibly embarrassing revelation of their relationship. What sort of ruse will get me past his gatekeeper spouse so that I can confront him? And what challenge will I present to him? A plea for the truth? A demand for it?
“You’re Katherine’s brother…” It is more than a restatement of my words. It is a confirmation of recollection. Of connection.
“Yes.”
Michelle glances past me as a couple hurries down the sidewalk, dodging fat drops of rain which have begun to fall. “It was terrible what happened to her.”
It is no surprise that she knows of Katie’s death. She and her husband may even have sent flowers to the church, some arrangement lost among the ranks of bouquets that surrounded her casket. And in her gaze, steely though it is, sincerity also lives, lifting her condolences far above the realm of platitudes.
“Yes.” I nod and shift in place, rolling my shoulders, stalling for time in some hope that the perfect next words will come to me. They do not. “I was wondering…would it be possible to speak to your husband?”
The sincerity that had softened her drains fast away, as if never there. Instantly she is rigid. On guard.
“He is in Washington,” she answers, a tinge of obviousness in her voice. In a sense she is right to infer a bit of denseness on my part. John Hammond had just been reelected, and was starting his second term in congress. At the time Katie was awarded the fellowship he was simply a rich telecom magnate with money to burn on scholarships and gold coast townhomes and, it turned out, unseating a four term incumbent.
“I should have realized,” I say.
“What is it that you wish to speak to him about?” Her arms come up from where they have hung casually, hands clasped near her waist, and now cross in front of her chest. Body Language 101 on display.
“Something about my sister.”
There is that hesitation again, this time with her gaze directly on me, not masked beyond some electronic eye under shaded glass. Her stare says what words do not in the silence—I have crossed some line. She wants me gone.
I am not leaving.
“Is there a way I can reach him in Washington?” I ask, pressing the issue. I reach into my coat and remove my notebook, clicking open the pen as I scrawl my cell number on a blank sheet. “Could you contact him and have him call me at this—”