“Ah.” She closed her eyes and her rawboned fingers began to tell the beads of the rosary. A moment later, Sigrid saw tears seep from beneath those wrinkled lids.
“Mrs. Zajdowicz. Barbara,” she said gently. “Were they your sister’s babies?”
The old woman nodded. Her eyes opened. “Sister. Sorry. So sorry, Sister. Father… bless me, Father, for she has sinned-” She crossed herself with her left hand and her words became unintelligible.
“Who sinned, Barbara?” Sigrid asked urgently. “Angelika? What happened to Angelika’s babies?”
“Died,” Barbara Zajdowicz said, enunciating as clearly as she could. “Wrong… but we… couldn’t let… anyone know. Gregor. He kill her.”
“Your brother Gregor killed the babies?”
Mrs. Zajdowicz twitched her rosary beads impatiently. “No. Gregor. Such shame… on family. We said… woman troubles. Gregor… stayed downstairs.”
“You’re saying Gregor would have killed Angelika if he’d known she was pregnant? So you kept it from him? How?”
“She… fat like me.”
Too much newsprint had been devoted to stories of large women suddenly surprised to find themselves giving birth for Sigrid to doubt that a sister built like Mrs. Zajdowicz could have gotten away with illicit pregnancy.
“Who was the father?” Sigrid asked. “Was it your husband? Karol?”
“Karol… he cried… babies for you, he said. But every time… died.”
Her words were still badly slurred, but Sigrid was becoming used to her speech patterns.
“How did the babies die, Barbara?”
“Sin… she sinned… Karol…”
“Did Angelika kill her own babies?” Sigrid asked.
“They should been… mine! Not… Angelika’s.” Her rheumy blue eyes glared out at Sigrid, then they filled with tears. “Poor… little babies. So little. The shame… Sister-”
She held out her rosary to Sigrid. “Pray me, Sister,” she pleaded and Sigrid wasn’t sure if Mrs. Zajdowicz had confused her with Angelika or a nun, since she was dressed today in navy slacks and a boxy black jacket.
“Who put those babies in the attic?” Sigrid asked. “You or Angelika?”
“Pray me, Sister,” Mrs. Zajdowicz wept. “Pray me.”
Sigrid looked around helplessly, then saw the call bell on the wall beside the woman’s bed. She went over and pushed it. While she waited, she took a shiny white card from her purse and gently pressed it against Barbara’s fingers; first the left hand, then her curled right hand. After the card was carefully tucked into her notebook, she sat holding the sobbing woman’s hands until the nurse came.
“What’s going on?” said Rusty Guillory, when Sigrid emerged. He had managed a couple of hasty pictures of the distrait Barbara Zajdowicz before the nurse closed the door again. “Didja give her a heart attack or something?”
A small crowd had gathered in that section of the corridor and as Sigrid’s eyes fell upon Mr. Hogarty, the plump little man looked embarrassed and scuttled away.
“Hey, wait a minute!” called Guillory. “We didn’t finish.”
“Yes, you did,” said Sigrid. “Come on, Guillory. Give it a rest.”
“Then give me a statement,” he countered. “What’d she tell you?”
“She’s confused and unhappy,” Sigrid told him. “She’s had several strokes, her speech is badly slurred and her mind’s not very clear.”
“But you got something out of her. I know you, Lieutenant.”
Sigrid looked at the circle of avid faces that ringed them. Resigned, she said, “Put your coat on and let’s go. You want to make your deadline, don’t you?”
They walked through the now-buzzing corridor. “It’s not much of a story and we’ll probably never know what really happened,” she warned.
“That’s okay,” Guillory said cynically. “Feel free to speculate. I’m going to.”
“She and her husband lived there with her unmarried sister Angelika and their bachelor brother Gregor. She says the babies were Angelika’s and that they all died at birth. That’s all I could get out of her.”
“Was it incest, adultery, or good old-fashioned fornication?” Guillory went right to the tabloid heart of things.
“She says her brother would have killed Angelika if he’d known she was bringing shame on the family name,” Sigrid said. “I believe her.”
“What about the husband?” he persisted.
“I can’t go on record about that. She wasn’t clear enough.”
“So who killed the babies?”
“Fifty years ago, no prenatal care, unattended birth, they could have just died,” said Sigrid. “Why does it always have to be murder?”
“Murder sells more papers. You know that, Lieutenant. Besides, didn’t the M.E.’s office say the mummified one was born alive?”
“But there’s still nothing to say it wasn’t a natural death.” She pushed open an outer door and walked toward the parking lot. Despite the noontime sun, the wind was biting.
“So who put them in the attic?” asked Guillory, looking at his watch. “Santa Claus?”
Sigrid shrugged. “Sorry, Guillory. I’m all out of speculations.”
Rusty Guillory slung his camera case inside the car. “If I make the next ferry, I’ll just squeeze in under the next deadline. Need a lift?”
“No, thanks, I have a car.”
She waited until Guillory’s car was out of the lot before walking back to the dark-clad man who lingered indecisively near an evergreen tree beside the gate. “Father Francis, isn’t it?”
“Yes. They say you’re a police officer.”
“Lieutenant Harald,” she said, reaching into her shoulder bag for her gold shield.
“They say you’re here because of those poor baby skeletons found over in New York. That it was Barbara Zajdowicz’s old house?”
“Yes.”
The priest was perhaps half an inch shorter than she and his troubled eyes were nearly level with hers.
“Father Francis, did she ever discuss this with you? About her sister? Or the infants?”
He drew back. “I can’t answer that.”
“I’m not asking you to break the sanctity of confession,” Sigrid assured him. “I meant outside confession.”
He hesitated. “I really never talked with her until after her first stroke. You have to understand, Lieutenant. Strokes, Alzheimer’s, hardening of the arteries-sometimes it’s hard for them to keep in touch with reality. Or for me to know where fantasy begins. Everything’s so different today. People have babies out of wedlock all the time-actresses, singers, career women-no one hides it anymore. Sometimes we forget what it was like fifty years ago.”
“Some things haven’t changed though, have they, Father Francis?” Sigrid said. “Things like jealousy and spite?”
“No,” he sighed.
“She killed them, didn’t she? They weren’t born dead, no matter what she told Angelika.”
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant.” He moved away. “I can’t talk to you about this.”
Back at the office, Sigrid gave Bernie Peters the card she’d used to take Barbara Zajdowicz’s fingerprints. Peters stopped talking about his daughter’s newly reimplanted front tooth and developed the latents with special emphasis on the old woman’s right fingers, which he then compared to the prints found on the old newspapers.
At a little after two, he brought them into Sigrid’s office, where she was going over the case with Lowry’s records.
“We wouldn’t go to court without finding more characteristics,” he said, “but see the double bifurcation at one o’clock on both of these latents and the delta at high noon?”
Sigrid looked through the magnifying glass and agreed they seemed identical. “So what do we have? Evidence that in 1938, Barbara Zajdowicz put one of the bodies in that attic trunk. A woman who’s now eighty-seven, mentally confused, and confined to a wheelchair.” She sighed. “Write it up as soon as you can, Peters, and we’ll send it along to the DA’s office. Let them decide what to do about it.”