Ghost Country (44 page)

Jacqui and Nanette broke free from their captors and ran to Luisa’s side, chafing her hands, trying to feel her pulse. Harriet tried to go to Mara, but found herself unable to move or even think of what to do next.

Rafe hovered over Luisa, wondering if he should help her to her feet. There wasn’t anything wrong with her, there couldn’t be,
she was just playacting, as women liked to do, all those times his wife or Cynthia had howled the rafters down pretending they were hurt when there wasn’t anything the matter. He leaned down to pat her on the back and tell her what he always said to his daughter: sit up, stop making yourself important—I’ll get you some water; you go to bed for a while.

“Don’t touch her again,” Hector snapped, shoving Rafe away. “You have hurt her very badly. Harriet! Find a phone and call the police, call an ambulance.”

His voice, sharp, authoritative, doctor to staff, jolted Harriet into motion. Phone, Leave the church through the vestry, no way to fight through the crowded nave. She’d find a phone in the offices back there.

“And you,” Hector said to the youth who’d been Luisa’s captor, “see that Lowrie doesn’t leave the church before the police get here,”

Emerson was sputtering at Hector, demanding to know what right he had to give orders in such a place. Hector ignored him, and knelt next to Luisa on the chancel steps.

In a gentler voice Hector also told Jacqui and Nanette not to touch Luisa. “If her neck is broken we don’t want to move her: let’s wait for an ambulance crew.”

Dr. Stonds joined Hector on the stairs. “Young man, I doubt you know anything more about head and neck injuries than you do about mental disorders. Move to one side.”

To his chagrin Hector found himself instinctively giving way to the neurosurgeon. Stonds took Hector’s place next to Luisa and laid two fingers on her throat. As he’d thought: no pulse.

The accident was still so new that everyone around Stonds was jabbering, demanding information. Even his younger granddaughter had edged closer to him—to Luisa—and inquired, not of her grandfather, an authority on the brain and spinal cord, but of the insolent young doctor: Is she dead? Mara asked timidly, The question echoed by Sylvia Lenore, by Patsy Wanachs and
Mrs. Thirkell, by a dozen others who were pushing in on Stonds and Luisa. Dr. Stonds angrily ordered them back: he was not having disorder in his operating sphere. Mrs. Ephers tried to enforce his command, but no one heeded her.

Sex and death, Starr’s body, Luisa’s broken neck, a heady combination. Tom Caynard is going to be sorry he decided not to come, Jared said to his buddies, forgetting that he himself had tried to avoid the meeting.

Above them Don Sandstrom greedily put it on tape, irritated with his cameraman for not being able to get a clear shot of Luisa through the crowd. But now what—oh, this was good, very good, Starr was coming into the foreground of the picture. Tight on her, he told his cameraman: she’s the center of the story.

Starr grabbed Dr. Stonds’s shoulders and shoved him out of the way. “Dr. Tammuz, kindly remember—” he started to say, and then saw her face and fell silent.

Starr’s expression was so fierce that Jared and his friends stopped their excited jokes. The cameraman flinched at the sight and moved the lens away. The Bulls T-shirt, torn by the men as they dragged her from the gallery, opened to show her breasts as she bent over Luisa. There was nothing erotic about them, Hector realized. They seemed instead to be boulders that might grind him to dust; he felt himself choking under their weight.

Starr scooped up the diva as easily as if she were a kitten and laid her on the communion table. Hector tried to stop her: you mustn’t move someone with a broken neck. Pastor Emerson blurted out a rebuke for using the Lord’s table.

Starr elbowed both men out of her way. She ran long fingers around Luisa’s neck and head, grunting softly. Starr leaned over Luisa and kissed her, deeply, on the mouth, and then the forehead. The diva stretched like a baby waking from a nap and opened her eyes.

Those nearest heard Luisa laugh and say, “Starr. You didn’t forget me after all.”

Jacqui clutched Nanette. “Praise Jesus, oh, praise, Him, she’s speaking.”

Rafe turned scornfully to Hector. “See: she’s not dead after all, you damned busybody.”

Starr turned to stare at him. Rafe tried to stare back, but the reflection in those flat black eyes was too appalling. He saw himself, not very big, trying always to make himself bigger by forcing everyone else to be small. He tried to blink and look away and found himself gasping for air. He wanted to cry for help, but his voice, his instrument of power in the cattle futures pit, had disappeared. Cynthia! Jared! Why didn’t they come to help him? Or that Jewish doctor, so sympathetic over the stupid homeless women … Dr. Stonds, couldn’t the high-and-mighty Dr. Stonds notice a man in genuine need? He’d come fast enough when that stupid cunt, mocking Rafe’s service, pretended to be hurt. Damned arrogant bastard.

But Luisa’s recovery had unsettled Dr. Stonds. He’d been sure she was dead, no pulse, that angle of the head. He couldn’t be losing his judgment, not on something so basic. He looked at his hands. They could not have lied to him. It must have been Mara; the brat had staged the whole performance just to make a fool of him in public.

Anger swelled within him, amplified by the mounting roar from the congregation. They were watching him, mocking him. It was Mara, and that creature she’d picked up, that Starr. She’d even turned his sweet Harriet on him, the things Harriet had said to him last night, she never would turn on him or her own, only under the influence of that damned goblin, that changeling. He’d show Mara who was boss, march her out of the church, into a straitjacket.

Everyone in church was on their feet now, trying to see what was happening. Those in front saw Abraham Stonds reach for his granddaughter, pin her arms behind her. One man called to his neighbors to help out the doctor: A bunch of old women and preachers can’t handle that Starr by themselves—feeling her body
in his own hands, blood pounding in his temples, around him faces glowing with the same desire, pushing into the aisles: yes, let’s help out the doctor.

Those in the back of the nave could only see the shadows that the altar candles cast on the back wall. In the shadow play Starr seemed to be a great horned beast, a wild cow. A witch. Kissing a woman in church … Mother of harlots … Pastor Emerson said eradicate … In the Bible … suffer a witch …

They poured into the side aisles. A few timid hands tried to hold them back, but were knocked away. If you side with witches you are a witch, one youth shouted.

The tide roared up the chancel stairs. Pastor Emerson tried to restrain them but was brushed aside, a piece of driftwood in a raging sea. A dozen hands grabbed the great gold candlesticks and heaved them at Starr. Mara broke away from Grandfather. She took Starr’s arm and tried to drag her to safety, but frenzied fingers tore her from Starr’s side, threw her and Jacqui and Luisa to the floor. Manic fists punched Hector in the eyes and mouth, shoving him away from Starr.

The cameraman caught what he could, but bad light, bad angle, could see the backs of the mob on top of Starr but not what they were doing.

Oh, yes, again, smash again, the bone turns to pulp beneath the skin, yes, she’s a slug, a reptile. Crush, smash, destroy her. On the wall the shadows danced. The candlesticks were giant maces rising and falling until the cow’s head collapsed and disappeared onto the floor.

M
ARA LAY IN
Harriet’s bed, her head on her sister’s lap. After weeks of sleeping on the ground it felt strange to be in a bed again, especially her sister’s, in the room where she had often sneaked uninvited. With her eyes shut Mara tried to believe she was still on the beach and that it was Starr’s head, with hair wilder than her own had ever been, above her. Her lips twisted in a painful smile at herself: for nineteen years she had tried to become Harriet. Now she wanted Harriet to become Starr. No, not that. What she wanted was the vile slaughter at the church never to have happened. She wanted to be home as she was, with Harriet tenderly holding her, and for Starr to be wandering the city someplace where Mara might come upon her.

She clutched Starr’s red T-shirt closer to herself. Everything in the room was pale, from her sister’s white-gold hair, to the ivory walls and drapes needing a spectroscope to find out they had lavender or pink in them. As Starr was the most urgently alive person Mara had ever met, it was perhaps right that the only color in the room be the Bulls shirt Starr had on when she died.

Harriet stroked the shaved head in her lap. It was sprouting little black curls now, like sea moss. Mara wasn’t quite asleep, but Harriet
had nothing to do but stroke her head, and let her sister sleep or not as she would. For the first time in the twenty-six years since she’d moved into this room she was on no schedule, awaiting no event.

When Harriet brought her sister back to Graham Street, Mara was still sobbing out her grief and horror at Starr’s murder. Harriet herself was moving in a marble trance, not crying or thinking. Like an automaton she took off her bloodstained dress, put on a robe, ran water in the tub. As Mara needed to hold on to Starr’s shirt, Harriet needed to hold on to Mara. While she was undressing her sister, bathing her, running shampoo through the tiny new curls, Harriet wouldn’t collapse.

By the time Mara climbed from the tub she was quieter. She looked at the large wet patch down the front of Harriet’s ivory dressing gown and said she would dry herself, she was ruining Harriet’s robe.

“It doesn’t matter,” Harriet said, thinking first of the blast from Mephers for being so careless: good silk, didn’t you pay three hundred dollars for that, telling me it would last forever? and then how ridiculous it was, to care about a dressing gown after seeing—her body shook at the memory of what she’d seen, and she gathered Mara more tightly to herself.

After she had gone into Pastor Emerson’s office to call an ambulance for Luisa, she ran outside to wait. She was rattled, but alert enough to prop the vestry door open with a book so she wouldn’t be locked out. While she waited, immobile in anxiety, she could hear the rising roar from the mob inside. Mara, what are you doing? Reckless little sister taking on Rafe, his bullying son and all those engorged men? Why isn’t the ambulance here, why don’t they come, looking at her watch, only three minutes? Two days was what it felt like, starting back inside the building to call again when the paramedics pulled up.

“Over here,” she cried as they trotted toward the main entrance with their stretcher. “You’ll never get to her through the front of the church.”

They didn’t hear her. She had to run across the grass to intercept them, to tell them a jerky confused story of Luisa—a bad accident, maybe broken neck, angry crowd.

The medics were used to panicked people: rich white woman, probably seeing her first crisis—if someone had fallen in church probably all the old ladies were fainting and thought they needed an ambulance. The medics patted Harriet soothingly and followed her into the building. Through the vestry they could make out the clangor: screams, shouts, maniacal laughter. Their indulgent contempt of Harriet’s alarm died; they moved cautiously to the chancel entrance.

They couldn’t at first make sense of what they were confronting. A ritual of some kind—backs and arms lunging up and down in a massive parody of a dance. But there was a smell, of blood, of singed hair, and an unholy noise, like the baying of a thousand hounds. This was a mob, worse than any they’d ever seen on the streets. The paramedics backed hastily out of the church and dashed to their ambulance to summon police in riot gear.

They ran past the minister, not seeing him slumped in one of the carved stalls behind the altar. His lips were moving soundlessly in his waxy-green face. Harriet spotted him as she looked about in terror, hoping for a sight of Mara or Hector.

“Pastor Emerson.” She flung herself at the minister, “What’s happening? My sister—”

He didn’t respond. She shook him, and he stared at her uncomprehendingly. Harriet gave a despairing cry and launched herself into the pack. When the police arrived with bullhorns and billy clubs, she was still at the edge of the mob, unable to push through to her sister.

The paramedics had let the vestry door slam behind them when they ran off to call for help; they had to bring the police in through the great doors at the front. The cops felt silly, walking down the aisles of a cathedralsized church with riot gear on, but when they saw the ferocity of the mob they were glad for their helmets and
face screens. They called for order through their bullhorns but no one paid any heed.

The police started wrestling people on the fringes of the melee to the ground, snapping on plastic riot cuffs at random, moving deeper into the fray. Patsy Wanachs and Mrs. Thirkell stared at each other on the floor in their cuffs before looking away in shame.

As police thinned out the crowd and the noise died down, those at the heart of the riot grew quieter. Men and women looked at each other, saw glistening eyes and slobbering mouths, and backed away in disgust.

The paramedics, who’d been hovering in the rear of the nave, made their way unhindered to the top of the chancel steps. Starr lay in front of the communion table, her face a bloody mass. The great black horns of hair were gone, pulled out in clumps, leaving her scalp patchy with blood.

Jared Lowrie stood near the body, holding a black tuft in his left hand. When a cop went to put cuffs on him, Jared was smirking. He jerked his body away in indignation.

“What did I do? Why don’t you go after the real ringleader, that Mara Stonds down there?”

The officer, wrestling the cuffs over Jared’s wrists, came away with a handful of wet hair. He stared from it to Starr’s lacerated scalp and threw up on Jared’s arm.

Hector and Mara were cradling Starr. Hector’s own face was covered with blood from the blows he’d taken at the start of the riot. His right eye was swollen shut, but he didn’t seem to realize it.