When Tom reached her, he brushed a kiss against her hair. “You smell wonderful.”
Her silly heart flip-flopped in her chest.
“Sorry I’m late,” Anne said, knowing she needed to get a grip and fast. She was way too old and experienced to be getting this soft and mushy over a man. “After squaring things with the child care people, I had to go to court to have my clerk draw up the papers. Here’s your official custody order for Tommy. You sign at the bottom.”
Tom took the papers she held out and flashed her a smile that melted the polish off her toenails. He rested his arm lightly across her shoulders.
“I have a baptism now. Come with me?”
“Sure,” she said, perfectly aware that he could have asked her to a funeral and she would have skipped to the site singing. As long as he was going to be there.
You’re getting carried away. Don’t be a fool.
It was that wise voice inside her. But Anne just didn’t feel like listening to it today.
She sat with Tommy on her lap while Tom performed the ceremony. The smiling new mother held her tiny baby girl, just a fragile swirl of dark hair surrounded by a froth of pink dress. The father stood beside them, a look of pride on his face that Anne hadn’t seen in a long time on someone that young.
The rain came down in torrents outside, but inside the church it was calm and quiet. Soft light poured through the tall, stained-glass windows. Dark pools filled the corners. Candlelight warmed the baptismal font, and Tom’s rich voice recited the ceremonial words as he anointed the baby’s head with sparkling drops of water.
Anne was filled with a sense of peace as she witnessed this ancient ceremony. These were the scenes she would never see in her job as a judge. The joy of exuberant preteen singing. The faces of happy parents as they gave thanks for the precious life they had brought into the world.
And the look in Tom’s eyes, so calm, content and full of purpose.
I’m not just a man, Anne. I’m a priest.
And this was part of his being a priest. This celebration of life—and gratitude for it.
The cell phone in her shoulder bag rang, an ugly cacophony in the presence of such peace. Anne was beginning to understand what Tom meant about intrusions. She cradled Tommy in her arms as she hurried into the parish hall to take the call.
“It’s Fred,” her friend’s voice said after Anne answered.
“Hi, Fred. I’m sorry about last night. I—”
“Anne, forget about last night. I have something to show you. Can you come down to the station?”
“Now?” Anne asked, not missing the very serious tone of her friend’s voice.
“Right now, Anne.”
She knew that Fred wouldn’t be so insistent unless it was something really important.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Good. And, Anne, come alone.”
Before she could ask why, Anne heard a loud click, then the dial tone.
CHAPTER SIX
“I
F
H
UNTER
FOUND
out I was sharing this with you, he’d have my hide,” Fred told Anne. “He issued us a warning this morning. No one is to discuss this case. Nothing about that green van chasing her has been given to the press.”
They were at the Cheshire State Troopers Barracks in a back office with the door closed and locked. Fred had hustled Anne inside the moment she had arrived.
“Why the secrecy?” Anne asked.
“Hunter thinks it could be tied to one of his ongoing investigations. He always gets this way when a case has even the slightest connection to Cooper’s Corner. He’s sent all the physical evidence to the crime lab in Sudbury.”
“You said over the phone you had something to show me?” Anne asked.
“First, you need to read the autopsy report,” Fred said, handing it to Anne across the desk. “We have to get through these quickly. I only have a few minutes before I have to get them back into the file.”
Anne took the report from Fred’s hands and scanned the entries. “Lindy died from massive head trauma,” she murmured. “Not surprising, from what you described of the accident.”
“Keep going,” Fred said.
Anne nodded and bent over the report. The notations on the autopsy record confirmed that Lindy had recently given birth. When Anne looked at the statistics and discovered that the dead woman had been five-eight and yet weighed only a hundred and ten pounds, it didn’t surprise her to also read that Lindy had very little breast milk.
But something else did surprise Anne. She read that information aloud.
“Evidence of several old fractures on her ribs, two on her arms, several on both legs, one to her collarbone, and an old concussion to the right temporal lobe. Fred, this sounds like an abused woman.”
“Make that girl and you’ve got it right,” Fred said.
“Girl?” Anne repeated as her head shot up.
Fred slipped another document across the table toward Anne. “She was Lindy Olson, a sixteen-year-old Boston runaway. Her mother reported her missing eighteen months ago, when she was only fourteen and a half. Told the police she didn’t care if the brat ever came home. Claimed she was nothing but trouble.”
Anne looked at the missing person’s report in her hands, at the picture of the tall, slim young girl with the lovely heart-shaped face, long curly red hair and sad dark eyes. Sorrow surged through her, laced with sharp anger. “No wonder Lindy ran away. What kind of mother could feel that way about her own child?”
“The kind that never should have been a mother,” Fred said. “She’s as worthless as the bastard that got the kid pregnant.”
The bastard that got the kid pregnant!
Anne had been so caught up in the other revelations that she had momentarily missed that message entirely. Now the full force of what she had just learned hit her—and hit her hard.
“Anne?” Fred’s voice seemed to come from far away. “Anne, what’s wrong?”
It was only through a supreme effort of will that she forced herself to face her friend. “I have to go.”
“You’re as white as a sheet.”
“I...I’m suddenly not feeling too well.”
Pushing herself to her feet, she walked stiff-legged toward the door. Fred was at her side in an instant, grabbing her arm. “Anne, sit down before you fall down.”
Anne forced herself to take a deep breath. She placed her hand on Fred’s arm. “No, all I need is a little air. You’d best get those reports back before they’re missed. I’ll call you later.”
As she fled the brick building, Anne could feel Fred’s eyes on her. She didn’t bother to open her umbrella as she sloshed through the slanting gray rain toward her car in the parking lot. She pulled open the Camry’s door, slid behind the wheel and slammed the door shut. But when she tried to put the key into the ignition, her hand was shaking so badly she couldn’t.
She dropped the key on the seat and rested her wet head against the steering wheel. As she shut her eyes against the rain battering the windshield, she wished she could shut out the battering pain of her thoughts.
So this was what Tom had been hiding. Dear God.
An hour ago the world had been such a clean, sweet place—full of children’s happy voices and parental pride and a man she had begun to believe in.
Now it felt as though lice were crawling on her very soul.
She never would have imagined this of Tom. Never. She thought she had seen inside him these last few days, and what she had seen was a man of heart and kindness. Even now, despite the evidence Fred had shown her, a part of Anne still couldn’t accept that Tom would do such a thing.
His words came back to her, kept repeating over and over in her mind.
I’m not just a man, Anne. I’m a priest. I stand by my vows.
Anne vividly remembered his kiss of the night before. He had wanted her. And he had to have known from her response that she had been willing. But he had restrained himself. He had shown her he could be trusted. Could the man he’d revealed himself to be last night really have impregnated a fifteen-year-old girl?
It just didn’t make sense. Anne knew she was missing something here—something critical. She had to find out what it was. And there was only one person with the answer.
Straightening in her seat, she picked up her key and inserted it into the ignition.
* * *
T
OM
LOOKED
AT
the clock for the third time in the last ten minutes. It had been nearly two hours since Anne’s abrupt departure. The only thing she had told him was that she had to see Fred.
With decreasing success he tried to keep his mind on his counseling session with a young couple who wanted to be married. They were both nineteen, still living with their parents. The husband-to-be planned to attend college in the fall but had no idea what he wanted to major in. His intended bride was going to get a job if she could find one she liked. They didn’t want to start a family for at least five years, yet neither had given any thought to birth control. They were another tragic divorce statistic in the making if he didn’t get them to see how unprepared they were for marriage.
When Tom glanced out the window and saw Anne’s silver Camry pull into the church’s parking lot, he breathed a sigh of relief.
Quickly he scooted the young couple out the back door, telling them to return only after they had completed the household financial report and birth control plan he’d given them as homework.
Tom opened the front door before Anne had a chance to ring the bell.
“We need to talk,” she said as she moved past him into the room. The sharpness of her voice could have cracked a Brazil nut.
Every muscle in his body tensed. Tommy started to fuss in the baby sling that kept him snug against Tom’s chest.
“Then we’d best do it in the kitchen so I can feed the baby,” Tom said, leading the way.
Anne stood by the sink, as silent as stone, while Tom prepared the formula and Tommy’s fussing escalated into a cry. Tom knew that whatever Anne had learned from Fred was at the root of this dramatic change in her. He had a pretty good idea what it was.
Tommy refused the nipple several times before Tom got him to take it. When the baby finally settled down to feed, Tom looked up from his seat at the table and waited for Anne to begin.
Her face had become a stoic mask, her eyes chips of gray slate. “Did you know Lindy had a birthday last week?” she asked.
Tom shook his head and waited.
“She was sixteen,” Anne said, and the words hung in the air like a rope around his neck.
Tom exhaled a heavy breath. “I never knew how old she was.”
“Is that supposed to be some kind of excuse?” Anne’s voice was suddenly so cold—so very, very cold.
“No. Just a statement of fact. Please sit down, Anne.”
“I’ll remain standing, thank you.”
“Will you listen to what I have to say?”
“If I weren’t willing to listen, you’d be talking to Scott Hunter right now.”
So she was here to give him a chance to explain, despite what she had learned and what she must think of him. That had taken some faith on her part. Hope filled Tom’s heart—the first hope he had felt since opening the door a few minutes before.
Tommy stopped feeding, thrust the bottle aside and began to cry. Tom burped him and the little formula he had consumed came right up.
The baby had been difficult ever since Tom had picked him up from Maureen Cooper the night before—almost as though he was still mad at Tom for leaving him for those few hours. Now his crying rapidly escalated into a scream.
“Let me try,” Anne offered, stepping forward.
Tom handed her the baby and she snuggled him gently against her chest. Tommy’s cries subsided. He stared up at her, his big blue eyes wide. Anne smiled at him and slipped onto a nearby chair. “Give me the bottle,” she said, her voice suddenly soft as she held out her hand, continuing to smile down at the baby.
When Tom passed the bottle to her and she offered it to the baby, Tommy took it without hesitation. As Tom watched her work her magic with the child, he felt an ache to hold them both within his arms.
“I believe you were about to explain yourself,” Anne said, still not looking at him.
Tom knew she was keeping her voice soft for the baby’s sake. He got up and poured himself a cup of instant coffee. It tasted terrible and scalded his tongue. But it was strong and wet, and his mouth suddenly felt very dry.
“It’s hard to know where to start,” Tom said.
“The beginning,” Anne responded softly, still looking at the child.
“I received my religious education at the General Theological Seminary in New York City,” Tom began. “My first assignment was a parish in Boston.”
He could see it now in his mind’s eye, the transition from the quiet Chelsea oasis of cloistered lawns and flower gardens within redbrick buildings to the bustling working-class district of Boston teeming with traffic and the loud cacophony of all its untidy humanity.
“The rector of the parish was a scholarly man and a masterful fund-raiser,” Tom said. “He set out to teach me all he knew. But it was the homeless, the drug addicts, the prostitutes, the mentally ill—society’s shamed and discarded, who showed up to eat the food we set out each day in the soup kitchen—who taught me the most. From them I learned the power of compassion.”
Anne heard Tom’s sincere gratitude for those lessons woven deep within his words. Her eyes rose to his.
“Then, one day, a boy—no more than eleven—stood in line with the rest,” Tom said. “The scared look in his eyes immediately told me he was a runaway.”
He paused. Even now he could still see the boy’s face clearly—too clearly.
“I sat with him while he ate, asked him if I could help,” Tom continued. “He was leery at first. After a while he relaxed a bit and told me his name was Kyle. He also told me that no matter what I said or did, he wasn’t going home.”
“Why?” Anne asked.
“There were cigarette burns on his arms. Someone at home was using him as an ashtray.”
Tom saw the sharp sadness flash through Anne’s eyes. “What did you do?” she asked.
“I took Kyle home with me. Eventually, he told me the whole story. I got his okay to report his abusive stepfather to the police. I promised Kyle they’d take the guy away. The police arrested the stepfather. Kyle’s mother came to the church to pick him up, all teary-eyed and thankful to have her son safely back.”
“So it ended well,” Anne said.
“No, his stepfather made bail and beat Kyle to death with a baseball bat.”
Anne flinched.
“The next runaway who came to the soup kitchen was a girl of thirteen,” Tom said. “Her pimp dropped her off.”
He went on to describe the girl with the big brown eyes and bruises covering both her arms. It hadn’t been easy for Tom to win her trust. When he heard about her nightmare of a childhood, it chilled his heart. He worked hard to convince her that she had options other than prostitution. He promised he would see her safely to a state-run boardinghouse, and eventually she let him take her there. A week later Tom found out that she’d died from a drug overdose. The drugs had been supplied by another girl at the boardinghouse.
A shudder ran through Anne’s shoulders as she heard the fate of the girl. Tom hadn’t wanted to shock her or cause her pain, but he was afraid he had just done both.
“Anne, I’m only telling you about these children in order to explain why I wasn’t so eager to return the next runaways I found to their families or to the state.”
Anne nodded but said nothing.
“It seemed like every other week after that, I’d see a new one in the soup kitchen,” he continued. “I wanted to find a safe place for them to stay. So I convinced one of my parishioners to donate an old warehouse. It wasn’t much to look at but it had light, heat and plumbing.”
Tom’s shelter for runaways gradually took shape in Anne’s mind as he described how he and the kids had haunted garage sales and convinced people to donate discarded appliances and furniture and even power tools. He’d taught the runaways basic carpentry skills, and in no time they had built separate bedrooms for themselves. Their sense of pride in what they had accomplished transformed them, as well as their living space. The five runaways he began with soon burgeoned into twenty-two.
“I promised them that if they kept away from drugs, alcohol, gangs and prostitution, they were welcome,” Tom said. “I even got my parishioners to employ them in odd jobs so they’d have a little pocket money.”
“You weren’t afraid they’d use it to buy drugs?” Anne asked.
“Having a job where they learned responsibility and earned money from honest labor was emancipating for them—and a strong contributor to a sense of self-worth. A kid needs a strong sense of self-worth to stay away from drugs.”
“What about school?” Anne pressed.
“I did some basic remedial math and reading with the ones who needed it, but mostly what the kids wanted and needed was the sense of belonging they got when we sat down at the table together every night.”