She reached out to the desk phone and dialed the priest’s number. And she knew from the weary “hello” that she had awakened him.
Well, tough.
“Father Brenner, what’s the religious penalty for defiling a corpse?”
“You woke me for that?”
“It was my mother’s corpse. This is under the seal of the confessional, right? You can’t tell?”
“Oh, God. Yes, if you wish. Kathy, is this real?”
“Oh, Father, it’s as real as it ever gets. Let’s say I lost my mind. Maybe it was all that blood, and the way she died. I had to leave her, but I couldn’t leave. But it was too dangerous to stay. I had to go, to run and right now. So I took a little bit of my mother with me-her brain.”
And now she looked down at her fingernails, examining the polish for chips. “So, Father, what’s the penalty for that?”
“How old were you, Kathy?”
“I was almost seven.”
“The church doesn’t expect a small child to reason out morality when the child is half crazed and in fear of its life. You must have-”
“Let’s say I wasn’t a child. Suppose I was a normal, moral person.”
“All right, let’s use our imaginations.”
She could hardly miss the sarcasm in his voice, and the creep of skepticism. “Rabbi Kaplan won’t like it when he finds out you’re doing his act.”
“He steals my jokes. Well, I suppose we share them. We shared you once. We talked about you behind your back, and we worried over you. We split up the prayers. Less work. I liked that.”
Time for a little side trip to hell, Father.
“The killer used an axe on my mother. He hit her over and over again. There was blood everywhere. It was like a slaughterhouse. I can still smell the blood, Father. She was crawling toward me, holding out her hand. She thought I was going to save her. But I didn’t. I ran away.”
“You were only a child.”
His voice was strained, he was buying it-all of it.
“What’s the penalty, Father?”
The beep came from the cellular phone in her pocket. She hung up on the priest with no goodbye, and pulled out the cellular phone, lifting it to her ear. “Mallory here,” she said, and listened to the stone silence on the other end.
“Mallory,” a voice whispered at last. “Your house is on fire.” It was only a whisper-familiar though.
Blakely’s voice.
She stood in the front yard of the old house and watched the firemen wetting down the rafters of the attic, black charred ribs smoking and steaming under the arching waterfall from the hose.
“It was arson,” the fire chief was saying, though she barely heard him. “The guy didn’t even try to cover his tracks. We found the gas cans in the yard. Any idea who’d want to do this to you?”
“No,” she lied.
“Don’t bullshit me, Mallory. It’s like somebody went out of his way to leave you a message. Now is this connected to an ongoing case or not?”
She didn’t answer him, seemed not to see him anymore. Her eyes were fixed on the husk of the old house, her home. All gone now.
The fire chief leaned into her face and moved his hands across her eyes. She made no response. He drew away from her and turned to the man next to him. “There’s a doctor’s house three doors down the street. Go get him.”
She stood alone on the lawn, as firemen, going to and fro, made a wide circle around her. She stared at the ruins and rocked back and forth in a cage of solid hatred for a thing she could not put a name to. It was such a large beast, it threatened to become the whole earth.
Somewhere behind her, another siren was screaming up to the house. Now a car door was slamming, footsteps running.
The house was gone, that solid anchor to the world, all gone. She was airy and light, and in danger of being drawn up with the smoke. It was the sudden tight wrap of Riker’s arms about her that kept her bound to the earth. She was engulfed in rough tweed and the familiar scents of cigarettes, cheap spot remover and beer.
“So you went after Blakely,” said Riker, holding her close and watching the smoke twisting up to the sky. “Now how did I know that?”
Charles opened the door to Riker and Mallory. She walked past him, through the foyer to the couch in the front room. Charles turned to Riker. “Is she all right? Does she need a doctor? Henrietta’s just up the stairs.”
“No, she’s okay. I just didn’t feel right letting the kid go back to her condo. Some bastard trashed it. So put her up for the night, and don’t ask her any questions. If she cries in front of you, she’ll never forgive you for it.” Riker handed Charles her duffel bag. “I gotta go, Charles. Somebody has to look after Andrew Bliss.”
“There must be something else I can do.”
“If you really want to do something for the kid, send Mrs. Ortega over to clean up the place before Mallory goes home again.”
“You know the old house in Brooklyn was her real home.”
“Yeah, well, the condo’s all she’s got left now. Good night, Charles.”
Mallory was sitting on the couch when he returned to his front room to lay the duffel bag at her feet. “I’ve made up the bed in the spare room.”
Seconds crawled by before she seemed aware that he had spoken to her. She looked down at the duffel bag by her feet as though it had appeared there by magic.
“Are you all right?”
She nodded.
Clearly, she was not all right. He detected the signs of shock in her eyes, which had gone to soft focus, staring inward and not liking what she saw there. He hunkered down before her and gently turned her face to his.
“Would you like me to call Henrietta Ramsharan?”
“I don’t need a shrink.” Her words were slow to come out.
“But Henrietta is also an M.D., you know. She could give you something to help you sleep.”
“I don’t need her.”
She turned away from him to say that she didn’t need him, either. But when he took hold of her arm and guided her body up to a standing position, she allowed it. He carried her duffel to the back room and opened the door for her. Every stick of cherrywood and oaken furniture and even the patchwork quilt and the heavy velvet drapes could be dated to the early 1800s. The bedding of the antique four-poster was turned down, awaiting this child of the late twentieth century.
She looked so tired and worn. Without her energy and easy confidence, she seemed to have lost some of her size, and he worried over this.
Well, perhaps with rest, she would grow.
On the Upper East Side, a priest was turning in his bed, periodically rising to lean on one elbow and stare at the phone by his bed, wondering where she was and how she was. Finally, he tired of willing the telephone to ring, and Father Brenner burrowed deep into his blankets. Then came the misstep at the border of sleep, the foot kicking out into air, prelude to the long dark free fall into dreams.
In the first gray light of an indecent hour, the telephone did ring, awakening him. He knew it was her. It had to be. No one else would do this to an elderly priest. His first feeling was relief, and then he prepared himself to be disgruntled and short with her. Eyes stuck fast with sleep glue, he reached out one blind hand to grasp the receiver and hold it to his pillowed head.
“All right, what is it now?”
The only response was a stutter of breath brushing up against his ear, soft as moth wings. In the strange twilight state between waking and sleeping, only half shaken from dreams, he truly believed he detected the sound of rolling tears.
Now a small voice whispered that ancient complaint of the lost child, “I want to go home.”
CHAPTER 7
It was Henrietta Ramsharan’s day off from the psychiatric clinic. Today the doctor wore a pink sweatshirt, faded jeans and bare feet. Waves of dark hair, salted with white strands, hung down her back as she sat across the kitchen table from her landlord and friend. Charles Butler was not wearing a tie with his suit this morning, and she recognized this as his idea of casual dress.