Murder Among the Angels (34 page)

Jerry now joined her in the hall. He was carrying the diary. “What’s that?” he asked, looking at the sampler she held in her hands. He read the words aloud: “‘For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.’”

“It’s called
point tresse
. It’s from the French. The translation is hair embroidery.” She hung the sampler back on its hook above the antique table. “It was embroidered with thread made out of human hair. Kimberly Ferguson’s hair,” she said. “Or maybe it was Liliana Doyle’s hair.”

Jerry stared at her, openmouthed. Then he looked back at the sampler.

Charlotte proceeded to tell him about Cornwall’s reference to
point tresse
, which she had completely missed on her earlier visit, and about his hobby of Victorian braid work.

As she spoke, Jerry wandered down the hall, looking at the other examples of Cornwall’s needlework. “These are all made out of hair?”

When she nodded, he let out a long, low whistle.

Then she led him into the study and showed him the braiding stand, with its many bobbins hanging down over the padded edge, each attached to a strand made up of dozens of human hairs.

Bending over, Jerry lifted the weighted strands up with his hand. When he let them fall, the bobbins clinked together like chimes in the wind. Then he squatted down next to a large sewing basket on the floor next to the braiding stand. Setting down the diary, he opened the lid.

After searching through the contents for a minute, he withdrew a package wrapped in tissue paper, and proceeded to carefully unwrap it. It was a long tress of human hair, light brown in color, combed straight, and neatly tied at the roots with a piece of yellow-and-white-striped grosgrain ribbon.

“The raw material for the next sampler?” Charlotte said solemnly as she looked down at the gleaming tress of brown hair.

Jerry nodded. “Courtesy of Melinda Myer.”

The entire sewing basket, tress of Melinda Myer’s hair included, went into a cardboard box that they found in the basement, along with Cornwall’s diary, and all seven of the framed examples of hair work. They would be delivered to the district attorney, along with the braiding stand with its long strands of hair. After they had finished packing everything up, they headed out to the police car, which was parked in the driveway of the Manse. Jerry carried the cardboard box, and Charlotte carried the braiding stand. As they loaded the evidence into the trunk, they noticed Peter standing on the scaffolding that had been erected above the door to the south transept of the church. He was installing a stained-glass window. An older man was helping him lift the window into its central spot in the triplet of lights.

Seeing Peter, Jerry nodded in his direction. “I want to talk with Peter,” he said. “I’ll just go back and lock up first.” After a moment, he rejoined Charlotte, and they headed in the direction of the cloister that linked the south transept with the Parish Hall.

“Why do you want to talk with him?” she asked, as they headed down the boxwood-lined path. The air was filled with the sharp, astringent scent of the shrub, which some people found offensive, but which Charlotte loved. “To find out how he knew?”

“Something like that,” Jerry responded.

As they approached, Peter stopped and turned to face them. “You’re angry with me,” he said as they paused at the foot of the scaffolding. He stood with one hand gripping a bar of the scaffolding.

“If you knew, why didn’t you tell us?” Jerry said.

“I knew you’d find out sooner or later. I didn’t think it was my role to point the finger. Besides, it wasn’t as if he wasn’t already being punished. As Swedenborg says, our hells are of our own creating.”

“But you might have been the one who was indicted,” Jerry said.

Peter shrugged. “What’s the worst that could have happened to me? That I’d be executed for murder and go on to a better life?”

“No,” Jerry said. “We don’t have the death penalty, yet. You’d have ended up spending your life in a jail cell.” He nodded in the direction of the Ossining Correctional Facility, up the river.

“We all create our own prisons too. Maybe the one you would have put me in would have been better than the one I’m in now.” With that, he turned back to his helper, and they resumed their work.

“Is this the window you were working on the other day?” Charlotte asked.

Peter nodded, and turned around to look at the sun, which had just climbed above the hills that rose behind the church. “You should go in and look at it now. Before the sun gets too high in the sky.”

Taking his advice, Charlotte and Jerry entered the church through the south transept door, and headed down the aisle to the eagle-shaped lectern. Then they turned around to look back up at the window.

The sun shone directly on the window, turning each piece of glass into a glowing jewel. A radiant Lily, her head wreathed in a golden nimbus, floated up to heaven, while her angel companions danced their attendance.

The apricot-colored light that streamed in through the glass was vibrant, timeless, mysterious. Charlotte sucked in her breath at the beauty of it.

“Eerie, isn’t it?” said Jerry. “Lily Louria walking through a field of lilies of the valley and four young women who look exactly like her. I wonder: was she a devil or was she an angel?”

For a moment, they looked up at the window. Then Charlotte said: “I was talking with my stepdaughter, Marsha, about the Lilith legend last night. She’s a college professor,” she explained. “She knows about things like that.”

“What did she say?” he asked.

“She said it dates back to the rejection of the ancient goddess as a result of the ascendancy of the patriarchal gods. To discredit the goddess, you turn her into a vampire, and cast her out. But there’s another interpretation.”

“Which is?”

“That Lilith ascends into heaven and becomes the bride of God himself, not as his vassal, but as his equal; that she becomes the moon to his sun.”

The clouds shifted, and a ray of sun pierced the glass, illuminating the nimbus of the central figure. “Soul mates,” Jerry said.

16

Charlotte didn’t see or hear from Jerry for two weeks. He was too busy dealing with the media. With Cornwall’s arrest, the case had become a media event. A lack of understanding on the part of the press about the technique of Victorian braid work—or maybe just a fondness for alliteration—had led to Cornwall’s being dubbed the “purling pastor,” and there wasn’t a newspaper, newsmagazine, or television news report in the country that hadn’t featured the “purling pastor” case as their lead story at least once, and many went on with it for day after day. It was from the newspapers, not from Jerry, that Charlotte learned that the needlework hanging in the center hall at the Manse hadn’t been Cornwall’s only efforts at Victorian hair work. A further search had turned up several examples of gold-mounted jewelry, including a watch-band and a bracelet with a braided design incorporating the initials L. A., for Lily Archibald. Cornwall had admitted that the hair used for these creations had been cut from the heads of his victims, an admission that was confirmed by chemical analysis. Though the laboratory tests couldn’t confirm to which victim the hair had belonged without a hair sample to compare it to, they did confirm that the hair had belonged to young women, and that it had been dyed red. Laboratory tests also showed that the blood from the stains in the trunk of the pastor’s car and on a blue plaid flannel shirt in his closet (the same one he had worn to prune the roses), matched the blood from the stains on the workbench and floor of the summer house.

When Charlotte read these stories, all she could think about was the families of the victims, particularly the mothers. Several of the articles had included photographs of grieving family members, or comments from them. It would be hard enough for the families to get over the fact that their loved ones had been brutally murdered. But even harder to cope with, it seemed to Charlotte, was the idea that the victims’ hair—the hair that as little girls, their mothers had washed, combed, and lovingly ornamented with bows and barrettes—had been woven by this monster into grisly souvenirs, which, when he looked at them, or wore them, or stroked them, allowed him to reexperience the pleasure of his heinous acts over and over again.

It wasn’t, in fact, until five months after Cornwall’s arrest that Charlotte saw Jerry again. He had called to invite her out to dinner at a new restaurant called Sebastian’s II that had recently opened to rave reviews. Charlotte had had no idea that Sebastian had finally fulfilled his dream of opening a first-class restaurant in Manhattan. She’d been away at her summer cottage in Maine, and had missed the press hoopla. To a city as food conscious as New York, the debut of a new restaurant that aspired to four-star status was a big event. But after Jerry’s call, she had come across several reviews in the newspapers and magazines that had accumulated in her absence hailing Sebastian’s as the hottest newcomer on the restaurant scene, and praising it not only for its outstanding food, but for its intimate atmosphere (for which Connie must have been partly responsible), and its sense of conviviality and ease. It was located on Park Avenue South in the Flatiron District, a neighborhood that was off the beaten track for a four-star restaurant. But it struck Charlotte as a good location: close to Gramercy Park and Greenwich Village, and not far from the lower Manhattan neighborhoods where remodeled factory lofts were now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. There would be little competition: the area was in need of an upscale restaurant.

A cab dropped Charlotte off in front of Sebastian’s II at ten of eight on the evening of a day in early fall whose unseasonably cold temperatures and blustery winds had led to dark speculation about what kind of a winter was in the offing. It was probably on account of the cold that Charlotte noticed the homeless man who had set up housekeeping in a cast-off refrigerator box that lay on its side over a steam grate less than ten feet from the elegant brass-handled door of the restaurant. Though it wasn’t uncommon to find homeless people squatting even on Manhattan’s priciest pieces of real estate, Charlotte was a bit surprised that a restaurant that was still trying to establish its reputation wouldn’t have made arrangements with the police, or even with the homeless man himself, to have him move elsewhere. Like most New Yorkers, Charlotte was desensitized to the plight of the vagrants who made their homes on the city’s sidewalks. For the most part, she barely noticed them, the exception being at this time of year. Like the clouds of starlings who could be seen heading south, the appearance of cardboard boxes and nests of newspapers on the sidewalk steam grates and in unused doorways signaled that a change of seasons was at hand. In a few months, they would be gone, like the starlings, with the exception of the few that wintered over. And, as with the starlings, it was a mystery exactly where they went. Many went to shelters, of course. But it was those who didn’t that she wondered about. It used to be that they took up residence in the Port Authority Bus Terminal or in the steam tunnels under the city, but those refuges for the homeless had long since been “cleaned up.” She suspected that many joined the starlings in their flight to the south.

Under ordinary circumstances, Charlotte would only have taken brief notice of the homeless man on her way into the restaurant, but on this occasion her presence in his company was prolonged by the sight of Jerry rounding the corner from East Twenty-third Street. As she waited for him to join her, she found herself giving closer scrutiny to the man who sat cross-legged under the eave of his cardboard castle, his lowered face concealed by a curtain of dark blond hair. He had only one arm; one sleeve of his dirty army-issue parka hung emptily at his side. Lost in Vietnam? she wondered. In a car crash? A coffee can sat on the pavement in front of him, awaiting donations from conscience-stricken passersby. Like many of the city’s homeless, he talked quietly to himself: a subway mutterer in his secondary habitat. Suddenly, a gust of wind swooped down from the ominous-looking clouds that scudded across the sky, levitating the trash in the gutters, and sending garbage cans spiraling down the sidewalk. After watching Jerry deftly dodge one of these fugitive garbage cans, Charlotte returned her attention to the homeless man, who had risen to his knees to hold the flap of his cardboard house down with his only hand. It was then that she saw his face.

It was a long, pale face with deep-set dark blue eyes, a young face that was still handsome, but was beginning to show the signs of age. Though it was now concealed by a reddish-blond beard, it was nevertheless a face that she knew well: it belonged to Peter De Vries. Noticing the flap of brown that stuck out from under the front of his parka, she realized that he was still wearing the leather apron that had prompted the sobriquet of the Leatherman. The staff that he carried to help him maintain his balance lay at one side of the old sleeping bag that was spread out on the floor of the cardboard box. Seeing him, she remembered what the pamphlet about the Leatherman,
The Road Between Heaven and Hell
, that she had read at the Manse had said about the Leatherman representing the little bit in all of us that would like to escape the constraints of society. Peter’s ties to society had been weak to begin with, but it now looked as if they had been severed altogether.

Now she knew why Sebastian hadn’t asked him to move elsewhere, she thought. He probably ate his meals in the restaurant’s kitchen, as he had at the other Sebastian’s. Maybe Sebastian even let him sleep there. She hoped he had somewhere to sleep other than this steam grate.

Stepping forward, she looked directly at him and said: “Hello, Peter.” She spoke loudly, remembering that his accident had left him hard of hearing in one ear. But although it was clear from the way he tilted his head that he had heard her, he didn’t reply.

After the gust of wind had died away, he resumed his cross-legged position on the sleeping bag, under the shelter of the box flap. As she stood there, Charlotte considered what to do about him. She would have to consult with Sebastian and Connie, who were presumably looking after him. She wondered if they had tried to find a more comfortable place for him. Perhaps Peter preferred his cardboard cave to a warm bed, she thought, remembering what he had said about “creating our own prisons.” But certainly he could use a donation. She was considering how much to give him, and whether to give it directly to him or to Sebastian, when she was joined by Jerry, who greeted her with a hug and a kiss.