But now she was suddenly not so sure. She knew that killing was a mortal sin and wondered if God’s apparent acceptance of her penance and prayers was really just the first stage in a punishment that would strip from her all that she loved and cherished. If, because of all this, if she lost Joel now, or the children, or even their home and fortune, it would be far more devastating than if she’d never known such love and contentment. God demanded justice as well as he dispensed mercy. The Church taught that there was no sin that God would not forgive, and that the failure to believe that was the worst sin of all-despair. God’s mercy was infinite. But the key to any claim to that mercy was confession. And she could not confess.
She could never confess.
And that truth, she believed, stood to damn her for eternity.
A regular here, she went to her usual back pew and knelt, making the sign of the cross, then bringing her hands together and bowing her head.
But no prayers would come. Her mind kept returning to the lies she had told Joel just last night; the lies she’d been living now for so long; the truths that were even worse.
The padded wooden rail on which she knelt had a gap in the middle of the pew, and after only a minute of attempting to pray she moved down and again went to her knees, but directly onto that gap now, putting all of her weight onto it, offering up the pain even as it shot up her leg and became nearly unbearable.
“Please, God. Please, please forgive me. I am so, so sorry.”
She raised her head and through tearful eyes tried to focus on the crucifix above the altar far away up front, on the suffering of Christ.
But Christ had never done what she’d done. Christ knew that God’s mercy would save him.
After the events of the past few days she no longer harbored that hope for herself.
14
Not two hundred yards away from where Maya suffered and tried to pray, Wyatt Hunt turned another page in the yearbook, thinking that private investigators in the future would have an easy time of it. All they’d have to do with kids who were going to school now would be call up their MySpace or Facebook accounts, and they’d have a blow-by-blow account of everything their subjects had done from about sixth grade on.
Maya Townshend, though, at thirty-two, was just a bit too old for that approach. So Hunt was reduced to searching for clues in the hard copy of her college years. Of course, first he’d Googled her and her husband, and though there had been three thousand or so hits, the majority of them by far concerned Joel’s business and their philanthropy. For such a politically connected couple there was very little about either local or national politics, nor were they particularly active in San Francisco’s high society. Hits for Bay Beans West appeared a whopping four times-all of the stories variants on the Little Local Coffee Shop That Could standing up to the Starbucks giant and making it work.
Not a whiff of marijuana or, indeed, troubles of any kind.
On a whim Hunt had done a search for Dylan Vogler, and the coffee shop manager had come up completely empty except for references to his death recently-one of the country’s very few invisible men, Hunt thought.
Maybe Craig Chiurco, he thought, checking the criminal data-banks, would have more luck.
His next stop was the library at USF, where he started on the 1994 yearbook and found the standard posed picture of Maya Fisk looking about fifteen-fresh-faced, perfect hair, big smile. She was one of her class’s representatives in student government her freshman year, on the debate and IM soccer teams, active in music and theater, appearing in two student productions. She was also a cheerleader. Sophomore year was basically freshman year redux.
The change must have occurred late in her sophomore year or in the succeeding summer, because her picture as a junior was so different from the others as to be nearly unrecognizable. Though the hair color had turned light and the style more untamed, the main change from Hunt’s perspective was the facial expression. In place of the adolescent with the sunny smile of the previous two years, now a young woman stared defiantly at the camera with a bored smirk. Seeking another view of this chameleon, Hunt turned to the club and team pages, but here again something drastic had changed-Maya had stopped taking part in extracurricular activities.
In her senior year her photo placed her more closely with the girl from her first two years-she wore a passive toothless smile and she’d combed her still-light hair-but it was a more formal portrait than the others had been. And again, she’d joined nothing.
Pretty much striking out with the yearbooks, Hunt turned to the microfiches of the student newspaper, the Foghorn, for the first couple of years, when Maya was still active, and might have appeared in some captioned photographs with other students. In this he was luckier right away. Here was Maya, in her freshman year, mugging for the camera with three other cheerleader friends at a pep rally. Hunt took down all the names. And three others that he found captioned throughout the rest of her freshman year. Obviously, at the beginning, Maya had been a popular and involved student.
She’d costarred in Othello her sophomore year, and there was a picture of her with her leading man, a handsome African-American kid named Levon Preslee. In an accompanying story entitled “It’s in the Genes,” Hunt read about Maya’s introduction to acting and to the theater through her aunt, the truly famous actress Tess Granat, who’d by that time been the star of sixteen movies and had appeared in four leads on Broadway.
Hunt sat back, intrigued by the connection about which he’d previously been unaware. He’d seen some of Granat’s films before, he was sure, but he couldn’t remember any titles. Or whatever happened to her. Probably the same thing that had happened to so many former talented beauties who lost enough of their looks to become undesirable and uncastable in Hollywood.
Or had she died? Some tragedy?
The name tickled a vague memory of that, but he just couldn’t remember for sure. In any event there was no mention in the article that Granat had played any kind of a day-to-day role in Maya’s life back then, but she was another someone who may have known what the young woman was like or what she had done in those days, and he wrote her name in his notepad.
Sure, he thought, if she was even alive, he’d just call up the once-famous movie star in Hollywood or wherever she was and chat about old times. That was going to happen. Not.
But the afternoon, after all, had not been a total loss. When he was finished, he had nine names of people Maya’s age who had known her in college.
It was someplace to start.
Back in his office downtown Hunt realized that having nine names to work with was all well and good, but seven of them were women, and this made it likely that some of them, like Maya, had changed their last names since college. Meanwhile, he had Levon Preslee and one other male, Jimi d’Amico, and Levon was listed in the San Francisco phone book.
Hunt called the number, got the young man’s answering machine, left a message, and decided that it was time he got Tamara working with him on this tedious business. There were several d’Amicos in San Francisco, and Hunt and Tamara called all of them, hoping to find a Jimi, but since it was the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, between them they managed to talk to only one human being, who didn’t know a Jimi.
They left more messages.
As he thought it would be, finding even one of the women turned out to be a chore. He and Tamara were hoping that one of the last names would reveal at least a set of parents who might be inclined to pass Hunt’s name along to one of their daughters, but this was going to involve quite a few phone calls and, again, messages, messages, messages.
By four-fifteen they’d been at the whole business for better than three hours when Hunt punched up the twenty-third telephone number under Peterson and a woman’s voice answered.