Lovely, Dark, and Deep (7 page)

Sandra seemed to have recovered from the coincidence much better than I had, and went to retrieve one of her father's cards from her purse. Gerhard suddenly loomed over me, probably ready to make a sermon in the "what do you mean by upsetting my girl" vein, so I took the easy way out.

“Gerhard,” I said, “that girl is in love with you, and the sooner you both acknowledge it, the better for us all.” His mouth was still open, but he didn't speak. His face displayed the following emotions, in order: surprise, joy, determination. Without saying a word to me, he marched toward my bedroom, wherein waited Sandra and her purse.

Jack appeared behind me. “Can I have a little KP help?” he asked.

I turned toward him. “Maybe. Can I have a little kiss?”

Jack obliged me with one, sliding his arms around my waist.

“I'd like to tell you some more stuff, about Sister Joanna. I'm sorry I didn't before,” I said quietly. “That was lame, as Fritz would say.”

“It was. If you don't trust me—”

“You know I do,” I said crossly. “I just have these instinctive responses that betray my real feelings.” I saw that my mother, across the room, was looking approvingly at our little hugging session. I sensed, though, that Jack needed something more.

“Excuse me, everyone,” I called out. Fritz, my parents, and Veronica looked up at me. “I'd like to publicly apologize to Jack Shea for earlier transgressions, and to say that I'd trust him with my life.”

Everyone beamed at this goofy pronouncement, and my father yelled, “You are trusting him with your life. You're marrying him, aren't you?”

The merry sounds continued then, and Jack smiled and led the way back into the kitchen. I found myself wishing, though, that my father hadn't presented marriage in quite that way.

After Gerhard and Sandra took a very sleepy Veronica out the door, Fritz and my parents decided that they, too, should leave. Jack and I walked them down to our tiny parking lot, and chatted with them for a while in the cold. My undying attraction to my fiance can best be demonstrated by the fact that, while we stood talking in the thirty degree weather, I focused on the condensed breath Jack left on the air, and found it sexy.

My mother finally told us we would all catch our deaths, and that we should go upstairs, and got into her car. My father gallantly shut the door for her and kissed me quickly before he ran around to his. Fritz slid into the back; he had bummed a ride from my parents. I waved at my family as they drove away.

“Look at the stars,” said Jack. I gazed upward. There were many, and they were intensely bright in the cold darkness. “Aren't they beautiful?” he asked, putting his arm around me.

I nodded. “But it's not fair about stars. They look like a million glamorous diamonds, but they're just gaseous, flaming rocks. There's nothing romantic about them, in reality.”

Jack laughed. “My little cynic. They're beautiful no matter what they are. And the beauty isn't an illusion, Madeline. You have to leave room in your life for little miracles.”

I was getting tired of people saying this to me. “I'm sleepy,” I said, though I wasn't. I just didn't want to look at those miraculous stars any more.

We went inside. Jack's hand, though gloveless, was warm. Jack was always warm.

Inside,
while Jack got on pajamas, I called Cindy. Cindy is my best friend. She lives in Colorado, where she works at a battered women's shelter. Cindy went to grade school with me (Saint Mary of the Angels) and to high school at Saint Roselle, and even one year of college at Saint Fred's before she transferred to Colorado State. We knew everything about each other, going way back. We shared a history. A very Catholic history.

I called her and told her about Sister Moira, about her suspicions, about Sister Francis, and Rick Astor.

“Wow,” she said. “Gosh, that brings up old pain, talking about Sister Joanna.”

Cindy had been in the choir, had known Joanna well, unlike me. Still, I knew I should remember some of Cindy's grief at the time, and yet I didn't. I told her this.

“Well, you had a lot going on back then, Madeline. And you never really talked about it to anyone—”

“But what do you think about this Joanna thing? I mean, does it seem crazy?”

Cindy sighed. “I don't know. I see violence a lot, Madeline, and worse yet it's violence in the name of love. So it's not hard for me to believe that anyone would murder anyone else. And yet, having known Sister Joanna, it seems surreal.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Cindy's voice took on its old, comfortable, joking tone. “Listen, after the wedding, when are you going to come see me? We'll hike in the Rockies and sing The Happy Wanderer. Your mom always loved that song. Remember? Fal de ree, Fal de rah! Fal de REE, Fal de ra ha ha ha ha ha fal de REE!”

I laughed with her, the juvenile laughter that made us eternal schoolgirls. Then she surprised me. “Hey, next time we talk we'll go back to that other subject, okay?”

I shrugged, even though she couldn't see me. “It's not a deep psychological thing. I just had some issues, I suppose.”

“It's on the agenda. I've got to go; I'm on the help line tonight.”

I thought of all the women out there who might need to call Cindy and tell her they weren't safe. I felt a sudden wave of sadness. “You go, girl. Fal de ree.”

“Fal de rah.”

Friendship has a language all its own, and so does love. I went to Jack, and told him what I'd told Cindy: the story of Sister Moira's haunted dream.

Chapter Four

Tuesday morning we
had no time to rehash our ghostly nun conversation from the night before. I saw Jack grab his guitar along with his briefcase. “Why the axe?” I asked as he bolted down a glass of orange juice. Jack was perpetually in a hurry before school.

“I'm going to practice a little after work, with Juan O'Leary.” Juan was one of Jack's senior students. As might be guessed, he had an Irish father and a Latino mother, and they'd compromised on his name. I'd met Juan a couple of times when I went to Webley High to visit Jack. He was a typical wise-guy teenager, but he was an undeniably talented musician. A natural, Jack said. Sometimes he and Jack liked to play together. “We're going to try and put something together for the coffee house.”

Jack had been talked into playing some coffee house sessions at a new restaurant in town called The Sneaky Moon. His friend Martin was the manager of the place. Jack hid it well, but I could tell he was really excited. I was excited for him, and I knew that he and Juan would make quite an impression.

“Well, that's fun,” I said. “Can you spare time for a make-out session?” I joked, pursing my lips.

“No. But one smooch, I always have time for,” Jack responded. He leaned in to kiss me, his guitar case smacking against my legs. Then he jogged to the door. “Gotta run,” he said, and he was gone. I heard him thumping down the steps and then stowing all of his equipment in his car.

I looked out the kitchen window in time to see Jack driving off. I sighed with the morning regret of the truly lazy, until I remembered that I needed to call Rick Astor. I jogged to my purse and retrieved the business card Sandra had given me, then dialed the number of the cell phone. Sandra had told me the night before that her dad's office was in Chicago, but he only had to go there sporadically, and did a lot of his writing at home.

“Hello?” said a man's voice after three rings.

“Hello, is this Rick Astor?” I asked.

“This is Rick.” He sounded busy. I could hear keys tapping in the background.

“My name is Madeline Mann. I write for the Webley
Wire
. Your daughter Sandra is dating my brother Gerhard—”

Rick's voice warmed considerably. “You're Gerhard's sister? Well, well. I've read your stuff, Madeline. It's good. The stuff on the mayor was priceless. I'm glad to see you back in the game after your little incident at the festival.” I think for the rest of my life most people would perceive me as “that girl who got shot at the festival.” It's inaccurate, anyway; I got shot down the street and merely bled and fainted at the festival.

Astor was still talking in my ear. “I guess I hadn't realized Gerhard was your brother, even though the name's the same. Gerhard hasn't told me much family stuff. I think I intimidate him.” There was a bit of laughter in his voice. “He's a great kid. He's good for my daughter.”

“Yes,” I agreed. For some reason I had a sudden image of Gerhard, about nine years old, the soul of patience, helping me learn to tell time:
Don't cry, Maddy, lots of people have trouble figuring it out. Look, see how I move the hands? This is five, this is ten . . .
I smiled into the phone. “He'll be good for your granddaughter, too. I wondered if you had time for me to ask you a few questions about an old investigation of yours.” I took a breath. “The Sister Joanna story.”

To my surprise, Rick began to laugh. “Sister Joanna, eh? I knew it would come back to bite us in the ass.”

“Excuse me?” I asked primly.

“Who's opening this up?”

“I guess I am. At the request of an individual, I am looking into the incident again. Ten years cold.”

“I don't suppose you want to reveal the individual?” he asked.

“Not really, no.” I held my breath.

“Well fine, Madeline, I can talk for a minute. There's not a lot to say, really.”

“I'm wondering what made you suspicious.”

“In retrospect I'm not really sure what the first thing was. I just had a—”

“Vibe?” I asked, knowing that word well.

“Yeah. Didn't seem right, somehow, and it was all so surreal, those silent nuns and the secluded convent. But the minute I asked some questions, that priest appeared at my side and told me to get lost.”

“Father Fahey?”

“He's the one. Kind of a power complex on that guy. Maybe he wants to be Pope someday. Anyway, that didn't bother me. Lots of people tell you to get lost, you know that.”

I sure did.

“So I pursued it for a while, but my boss, Dan Parkin, finally said stop. Fahey had called him.”

“Didn't he want to know if you were right?”

"Parkin didn't have the guts your boss does. And he also didn't have a clue what investigative journalism really was. He wanted to do a non-threatening little neighborhood paper about flower shows and high school honors. He didn't want to step on any toes, especially not holy toes." Astor's voice was half bitter, half amused.

“Sandra says you got fired over this.”

Rick chuckled. “Poor Sandy; it was hard on her then. She was only sixteen or so, and it was embarrassing for her, I think; plus she felt protective of me. It was partly due to her that I was suspicious.”

“Huh?” I said, very unprofessionally.

“Sandy knew the boy, Sister Joanna's brother. Jeremy. She didn't go to St. Roselle High, but the boy lived near us, and Sandy knew him. She was the one who told me that the boy was involved in drugs, and that the sister had been too.”

“Wait—Sister Joanna was involved with drugs?” I asked.

“No, not Sister Joanna. Before she was a nun she was a girl, and that girl, way back when, according to the gossip my daughter heard on our little street, had been taking drugs. It's not fact, it's rumor, but it might have been something I looked into, if I'd been given a chance to pursue it.”

“Still, what she did as a girl probably had no bearing on a hit and run some ten years later.”

“A person's past—especially an unholy past of a holy person—is always one of the first things on my list. Sometimes it's been relevant, sometimes it hasn't, but I've never regretted digging.”

“Right,” I said, jotting down “drugs, motive? Past has secrets" on my pad. “So after you got fired—”

“I actually was given the choice to walk or give in, and I walked. It wasn't just the Joanna thing, it was my boss. We didn't get along. It was time, and I had some other opportunities I wanted to pursue. I figured I'd look into the Joanna thing while I hunted for work, and sell the story freelance. But as luck would have it, I had another job two days later, and I had to let the Joanna investigation go. So I'm glad to hear you're picking it up. Good luck to you, hon.”

“If I come up with more questions, Mr. Astor—”

“The name's Rick. You give me a call.”

I thanked him, said goodbye, and heard a click.

I sat thoughtfully for a moment, looking at my pad, and then jotted down several names: Jeremy Yardley, Mr. and Mrs. Abel Yardley, Father Thomas Fahey. That would be enough to get started, I mused.

I went to the office and spent the morning making calls, writing, and doing an interview for a personality profile piece. A Webley woman had started her own web-business advising people what to wear. Her clients were professionals who were sartorially impaired, and she suggested ensembles, week by week, and sent them these schedules online, for a fee. She was doing quite well. In the interview I asked how she would describe my style of dress, and she said “casual, yet elegant.” I liked that. I was a blonde minx, casual, yet elegant. I was slowly piecing together a profile of myself.

Back at the office I shared my information with Bill and Sally, and they ruminated on it for a while. Finally Bill said, “Well, go ahead, Madeline. It's certainly an interesting idea; just don't fall behind with your other deadlines, if you can manage it.”

Sally shook her head at me. “It's a shame you have to bother those poor ol' nuns,” she said. “Then again, they don't get much excitement. Rock their world for a while, hon.” She grinned, typing away.

I sighed and glanced at a stack of papers that needed editing: Sharon, one of our computer entry clerks, was typing ads for an upcoming St. Valentine issue. Webleyites were able to publish personal ads in a special section, for their thrilled loved ones to read on that special day. Sharon was entering them in the computer as she got them, so that she wasn't inundated on February 6
th
, the deadline for these ads. Then she left them for me to proofread. Today's first submission said, “You have my heart. Be gentle.” I sneered at it, thinking that some people needed to get a dictionary of cliches before they wrote these. After about twenty love ads I was feeling nauseous, but I decided to finish the pile. The last one caught my eye, and I almost fainted when I read the words.
Dearest Sandra, Make me the happiest man in the world and say you'll marry me. G.