Lovely, Dark, and Deep (2 page)

After Sister Moira recovered from what appeared to be a heart attack, Fritz was sent down to the office, indignant that he never received applause for his theatrical debut. Poor Sister Moira tried to transition into a grammar lesson, flecks of red still dotting her long white habit.

“Fritz is fine,” I told her now. “He works at Barnes and Noble, but his dream is to make it big with his band.” I purposely didn't mention the name of Fritz's group, The Grinning Bishops.

Sister Moira smiled. “Well, God bless him,” she said. “You Mann children were always so talented. Look how far your good writing has taken you, and Gerhard—I imagine he has a job in the math field?”

Gerhard had always won the high school math contests. “He works for a computer company. He hopes to open his own someday,” I said. I noted that she seemed a bit restless, as though she might have an appointment elsewhere, and yet she continued to ask me questions about my family. Finally I changed the subject.

“I didn't recognize you at first,” I admitted. “You look different—with hair.” I hadn't meant it to sound as rude as it did; luckily she laughed.

“Oh, yes, I'm getting vain in my old age. What do you think?” she asked, fluffing her short gray cut.

“I like it,” I said truthfully. What I had never realized was that Sister Moira was an attractive woman. She had lovely skin, and her blue eyes were framed by naturally dark lashes and only a few more lines than when I'd known her as a high school girl.

“Madeline,” she said thoughtfully as she paid her bill. “I really have been thinking of you. I read your pieces, you see, in the
Wire
. All the work you did about exposing the mayor's behavior, and catching Logan Lanford's killer.”

I didn't actually "catch" the person in question; actually she shot me, but I wasn't going to quibble about that now. I raised my eyebrows at Sister Moira, wondering where this was leading.

“And I was thinking,” she continued, “that maybe you were the person I should contact about something that's been bothering me . . . . and then here you were, right in front of me. The Lord makes His ways known, Madeline.”

“Yes,” I agreed diplomatically. Angie was back, and beckoning me to the chair.

Sister Moira noticed this. “I won't keep you now, Madeline, but I'd like you to meet with me if you would. Let's see, tomorrow's Sunday, that's no good. Monday?”

“Do you mean you want me to investigate something?” I joked.

“Yes, dear.” She looked almost cheerful as she tied a rain scarf over her neat hair and pulled a trench coat from the nearby coat rack. She pulled on her coat, lowered her voice, and said, “Your experience makes me think—remember Sister Joanna?” she asked.

I stared, uncomprehending. "But Sister Joanna was— "

“Not here, dear. Let's meet Monday, and I'll tell you about it.” She squeezed my arm. “I already feel a weight has been lifted.” With a quick wave and a promise to call me, she stepped out into the unfriendly January afternoon.

Shocked by her revelation, I returned to my squeaking chair, ready to submit to Angie's ministrations and begin my transformation into a Blonde Minx.

My
fiancé Jack picked me up in his new car, a blue Volvo. He'd bought it in honor of our upcoming nuptials; it was sporty, but had a good safety record for any babies that we might one day place in the back seat. Jack thought ahead.

“Hey, sexy,” Jack said as I opened the door and hopped in. “Nice hair.”

I leaned over for a brief kiss. Jack is very kissable, due in part to his clean-cut, boy-next-door appearance, and part to the one dimple that appears in his left cheek with the least provocation. “I'm a blonde minx,” I said.

“Really?” Jack asked. “What is a minx? A little animal?”

“No, that's mink,” I corrected, strapping in. “I'm a minx. You know, like a naughty girl.”

“Mmmm,” Jack said appreciatively, playing with the radio dial.

“So where's lunch?” I asked as we pulled away from the curb to the spunky rebellion of Joan Jett's 'Bad Reputation.' “Somewhere romantic?”

“Well, as romantic as it can be with your brother there,” Jack answered with an apologetic smile.

“Fritz or Gerhard?” I asked.

Jack just looked at me. Of course. I didn't need to ask which of my brothers would be inviting himself to lunch with us, probably in the hopes that it would be free.

“Fritz,” I concluded.

“Yeah. He's been hanging around at our apartment for a couple hours. He says he has news, but he's waiting for you.”

“Fine. I have news for him, too. Remember Sister Moira MacShane, my high school English teacher?”

“Sure. The one who sang Shakespeare?”

“Yes.” I smiled at the memory. Sister Moira, in order to help us remember certain rhyming couplets, would put them to music. I still knew them all, and sometimes sang them to Jack just to annoy him. “She was getting her hair cut. I think she thinks there was something fishy about Sister Joanna's death.”

Jack drove silently for a while, his eyebrows up near his hairline. Everyone in Webley knew about Sister Joanna. She'd been a popular teacher at St. Roselle, and the music director of St. Catherine Church. More than a decade earlier, when I was a junior in high school, she'd been struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver right in front of the convent. Her death had raised a firestorm of controversy in Webley, first because the police had not caught the driver in question, and second, because residential speed limits in our town had been a cause of contention with the citizens for years. A large crowd had gathered for her funeral. Flowers and candles were placed at the “Mary Fountain,” the little statue surrounded by a pond that Sister Joanna had tended in her lifetime, and before which she was praying when she died. People marched for a week afterward, demanding justice for Sister Joanna and every other pedestrian who'd been hurt by speed limits that were too high.

It was a moot point, really, because whoever had killed Sister Joanna had been speeding and most probably drunk. The speed limits were duly lowered, however, and today on a residential Webley street one must keep to a sedate twenty miles an hour.

“She thinks Joanna was murdered?” Jack finally asked.

“Well, she implied as much—hey, I thought you said Fritz was in our apartment!” I yelled, as Jack pulled up in front of The Old School, our affectionate term for Mr. Altschul's place. Altschul means "Old School" in German.

“I left him there, I swear,” Jack said. We were both talking in the agonized tones of people who had contributed to the escape of a panther.

Fritz was standing in the front yard of the Victorian three-flat that Jack and I called home. When we met, Jack had lived on the third floor, and I on the second. Now we'd consolidated our stuff in my second-floor apartment, and Mr. Altschul, our landlord, had rented the top apartment to a young accountant.

“Oh, no, he's bothering Mr. Altschul!” I yelled as Jack parked the car. Fritz was, in fact, talking to our landlord as the latter shoveled nonexistent snow off of his pristine walk. Mr. Altschul was in his seventies and fit as a forty-year-old. He was always working on the house and grounds, and when he couldn't find a job he created one, as he was doing now, scraping the shovel across the practically snowless pavement while he listened to Fritz, who wore only a striped wool scarf for warmth over his jeans and flannel shirt.

I ran up the driveway to hear the end of my little brother's spiel. “So, you might want to give it a listen, then maybe you can talk it up among your friends,” Fritz was saying. He was holding out a cd that he and his band, The Grinning Bishops, had made a couple of months before. Fritz and his band had received some lucky publicity as a result of my run-in with a murderer, and a local businessman had sponsored them to create a cd. It had actually sold quite a few copies locally and was doing even better as an I-tunes download, but Fritz enjoyed marketing them personally—even, apparently, to seventy-five-year-old German men.

“Fritz!” I yelled. “Mr. Altschul is busy! He doesn't need you harassing him with your—”

“It's fine,” said Mr. Altschul, leaning the shovel against the house and taking the cd. “I like music. It's good, yah?” he asked Fritz, punching him jovially in the arm with his free hand.

“Whoa,” said Fritz, rubbing the area. I'm pretty sure Mr. Altschul could take him.

Fritz thanked my landlord in a dignified manner and turned toward the car with me. “That totally hurt,” he said under his breath.

“We'll put some ice on it, honey,” I said, tightening his scarf at the throat.

In ten minutes we were all seated at The Spaghetti Bowl, a popular Webley restaurant. The pain of Fritz's wound had worn off, and he explained that he was trying to market the cd to all age brackets in an attempt to increase word-of-mouth sales. “Your landlord is the oldest dude I know,” Fritz said, looking at his menu. “So I figured I'd leave one with him.”

I shook my head. Hopefully Mr. Altschul hadn't experienced too much of a shock when he read the title:
Holy Rollers
.

After we ordered, I told Fritz about running into Sister Moira. “She said she wants to talk to me about Sister Joanna,” I said mysteriously.

“About who murdered her, you mean?” asked Fritz, munching a breadstick. He had grown a goatee to match his red mustache, and it gave him a slightly satanic appearance, somehow enhanced by the crumbs dangling from the lowest hairs.

“What do you mean, who murdered her?” I asked.

“How do you even remember?” Jack asked. “Weren't you about ten when it happened?”

“I was in eighth grade,” my brother said defensively. “And we all thought it looked suspicious at the time. We even told Sister Albertus that things looked fishy, and she told us to hush, and made us kneel and say a prayer for forgiveness.” Fritz still looked indignant at the memory.

“But why did you think she was murdered?” I asked, still curious.

“Because kids are melodramatic,” Jack answered, perusing his menu.

Fritz regarded us both, then began to pretend he was smoking his breadstick and blowing imaginary (and annoying) smoke rings at the ceiling. “Madman, Jack, I think you're both living in what we call a fool's paradise,” he said, contemplating his nonexistent smoke. “When you look at what happened to Sister Joanna—and yes, thanks to Sister Albertus I am still bitter enough to recall the facts—you see several signs that point to murderer rather than anonymous drunkard. First: the hit and run happened in a circular drive in front of the convent. How many drunk drivers would end up in a circular drive? Second: Sister Joanna was struck, in the dusk—I think it was dusk—even though she was to the
side
of the driveway. Third: Sister Joanna had connections to the mob.”

He smirked at his own lame joke.

“Shut up, Fritz,” I said. “And how do you know the first two things?”

“Would you like me to shut up, or answer you?” Fritz asked. “Your contradictory demands are giving me a headache. Hey, that's a great idea for a song,” he said, grabbing a napkin and pulling a pen out of his jean jacket pocket.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that Fritz is almost twenty-five years old. “What rhymes with demands, Madman? Hands, glands—oh yeah, this will be good.” Fritz began scribbling.

The Madman thing, by the way, is a nickname Fritz and my other brother came up with when we were younger—partly because my name is Madeline Mann, and partly because of my sometimes unpredictable behavior.

“He's right about one thing,” Jack said, seeing that my hands were curling into the strangle position. “There were a lot of questions at the time about how a drunk driver ended up in such a secluded spot—a spot that sober people might have trouble finding.”

“Was there an investigation?” I asked.

“I assume so. Doesn't there have to be? Plus it was under such public scrutiny, I'm sure they looked into it in great detail. But then it sort of disappeared, didn't it? I haven't heard her name since—what was it? 2001?”

“Yeah, man. The year I graduated.” Fritz wiped at an imaginary tear. Most things with Fritz are imaginary, including his girlfriends and his success as a songwriter.

I felt a little guilty that I didn't remember more about Sister Joanna's death. I'd been almost seventeen at the time; I'd been a student at the very school where she taught. Yet somehow I didn't remember much. Even when I tried.

“So, you haven't asked about my news,” Fritz said, dismissing the potential murder as no longer worth his conversation.

I wasn't biting, so Jack asked, “What is your news, Fritz?”

Fritz grinned at us. Our pasta arrived on steaming plates and the waitress set our food before us. When she had arranged everything to her satisfaction, she left, and Fritz said, “I know about Gerhard's girl.”

“Who is she?” I asked immediately. My brother Gerhard had been dating a mystery woman for more than three months, and even Fritz, who shared an apartment with Gerhard, hadn't been canny enough to get a glimpse of her. “Spill, Fritz.”

“Get this: she's a mom,” he said.

“What do you mean, a mom?”

“I mean, she has a kid. I'm at the mall last night, dropping some cd's off at the music store, and I see Gerhard with this little tiny girl.”

“How tiny?” I asked.

“Like, I don't know. Two or something. Little enough for Gerhard the Weak to be holding her like a bag of groceries.”

Jack snorted, but said nothing.

Fritz continued, waving his hand to cool his spaghetti. He tired of this, apparently, and grabbed a dispenser of parmesan cheese, shaking the majority of the contents onto his noodles. “I'm about to go up to him to ask what the deal is when this woman walks up, and Gerhard kisses her. And they all walk off together. Which explains the mystery,” Fritz said, winding cheese-covered spaghetti onto his fork. “He's afraid of freaking out Mom.”

“That's not true. Mom would—” I stopped. I wasn't sure how my mother would feel about Gerhard dating a woman who had a child. Gerhard was a grown man, after all. He was twenty-nine years old now, two years older than I, and certainly capable of making his own decisions. And yet we all cowered in certain situations that involved seeking my mother's approval. “I think you're underestimating Mom,” I finished.