“Eat something.” This was what his mother had always said to him when he had been through another day of torture among normal children with average-size noses and intelligence. Food conveyed nurture and caring, and it was all he could think of to comfort her.
Darlene picked up her fork and absently stirred the peas into the cranberry sauce. “I was half crazy wondering what would happen to my boy when I went to prison.” The peas swirled round and round in the red sauce, faster and faster. “Every single day, I thought Tom would arrest me. I even tried to tell him once – when I thought I couldn’t stand it another minute.”
The fork slipped and the peas scattered, some to the floor, and one flew to the next table. “But I didn’t tell. Who would have looked after Ira?”
Two people seated nearby stared at the single pea and a dot of cranberry sauce at the center of their table.
Darlene abandoned the vegetables. Peas were too difficult. She picked up the cellophane package with the cake inside. “How did you know, Charles?”
“This is the hospital where Cass ordered Ira’s blood tests. When you brought him in with his broken hands, a red flag showed up on the computer for the previous entry – when Ira was only six. The doctor would have asked you if he’d completed the treatment for syphilis. The computer entry was sparse and he would have wanted a patient history – standard procedure.”
“It was the desk nurse, not a doctor.” Her hands worked over the cake wrapper, trying to tear it open and failing to find the weakness in the cellophane seal. “I didn’t know what that woman was talking about. I said it was a mistake. Ira had been tested for hepatitis that year, not syphilis.”
Charles wondered if it would be rude to assist Darlene with the cake wrapper, to imply that she couldn’t -
“Well, it made no damn sense at all. So the nurse took me down to the basement where they stored the old health department files for St. Jude Parish.”
The cake wrapper was impenetrable. She stabbed it with one finger, forgetting she had no nails left to tear it. “We found one file to match Ira’s computer number. There were no names, only dates and statistics for tests on a boy of six – Ira – another boy thirteen, and a nineteen-year-old. The file clerk told the nurse they were all in that same folder because the doctor – Cass Shelley – was backtracking the infection.”
“Jimmy Simms was the thirteen-year-old.”
“I guessed that. And Babe had turned nineteen that year. Everybody in town knew about his syphilis party. It was a legend. And then there was the faith-healing. Ira was never the same after that. So I thought he’d raped my boy. What was I supposed to think? And he did smash Ira’s hands. I had good reason to believe it, didn’t I?”
“You don’t seem quite so sure of it now.”
“After I killed him…” Not wanting to meet his eyes, she stared down at the insoluble problem of the cellophane bag. “I mean, later that night, I realized my husband must have known about Ira’s syphilis. They have to notify the parents, don’t they? And that would’ve explained his quarreling with Cass. Maybe she accused him of raping his own son.”
Her wedding ring fell off and lay on the table. He wondered how much weight she had lost. He longed to open the wrapper for her, to feed her.
“Had to have happened that way,” she said, twisting the package in her hand, mashing the cake. “Ira’s clean now. So, at least my husband had the grace to get the boy treated before he wrapped his car around that telephone pole.”
“So now you believe you killed the wrong man?”
“I heard Ira tell you his father threw the first rock. Well, that’s proof, isn’t it? Cass was going to tell, so my husband – ” Her hands were resting on the table, covering the cellophane package, too tired to fight with it anymore.
“Your husband didn’t hurt Ira,” said Charles, covering one of her hands with his own. “But I believe he was told that Cass had accused him. Something similar was done to Deputy Travis. Malcolm read him Cass’s letter, and Travis thought she was accusing him of raping a boy in custody – Jimmy, I suppose. When Travis was dying, he said Cass was going to ruin him with science. He was innocent of course, but just the accusation meant ruin. The rock was put into his hand – the idea was put into his mind.”
Look at the damage Darlene had done with a rock and a single maddening idea. But Travis had only stoned the dog. “Actually, there was a letter on file from the hospital lab. It was a negative report on your husband’s blood test.”
“That was the letter Malcolm read from?”
“I believe so. The date matches up with the stoning. Mallory found a copy of it in the hospital files. There was another letter on file, addressed to your husband – the same negative report on his tests. But by the time it was mailed out to him, Cass was dead.”
“That’s why he killed himself.”
Suicide never made sense. But Darlene wanted the world to be orderly for a few minutes. She was coming undone, and this was a small thing to ask.
“Yes,” he said, “Your husband and Cass probably argued when she asked him for a blood sample. He would have been outraged. He was innocent, but she needed to eliminate him as a suspect. So Cass had the results in her hand when she went after the real child molester that day, and she was angry.”
“Then it was Babe. Mal was shielding his brother with that letter.”
“There’s no way to know for sure.”
“Who else could it have been!” Her eyes were suddenly wide and startled, disbelieving that shrill scream could have come from her own mouth. The people at the nearest table left it, upsetting a chair in their haste to be gone. The abandoned chair rocked and teetered on its hind legs and then crashed to the floor.
“Babe had the disease before the others did!” Her voice was louder now and carrying across the cafeteria. Her hands splayed out in the air as if to call the words back and hush them down. All around them, conversations ceased, and the newspapers of solitary patrons went flat on the tables.
Her lips pressed together. She was in control again, but just barely. “I know Babe was the nineteen-year-old in that file. His was the oldest stage of syphilis. The nurse told me so.”
And so it must be true. A man had died because of her faith in hard science.
“That chronology, by itself, proves nothing about who gave it to whom.”
The cellophane package lay by her hand. The wrapping showed no signs of wear, but the cake was badly smashed. She renewed her struggles with it for a moment, and then gave up. “If only Ira could have told me.”
“Children are the best of conspirators,” said Charles. “They’re so easily frightened, they rarely tell. Jimmy never told, and neither did Babe when it was his turn to be abused.”
“Babe?”
“He had a very late stage of syphilis according to the autopsy. But there was no way for a pathologist to pin the date of infection with only a dead body to work with. The coroner didn’t have the history of convulsions, the weakness in the legs, fits of temper, delusions of grandeur – it was all there.”
Malcolm had supplied some of the symptoms in his impersonation of Babe on the stage. “The unsteady gait made everyone think that Babe was stoned on drugs. And I’m sure he was on some kind of painkiller. He would have been in a lot of pain near the end of his life. Those symptoms don’t usually appear until a man is nearly fifty.” And with all the wear on Babe, mind and body, that might have been his true age when he died at the calendar’s measure of thirty-six years. “So Babe must have been a child himself when he contracted the disease.”
“How could that happen? Somebody would have known.” And then she froze. For she had not known about Ira, had she? Did Jimmy Simms’s parents know what had been done to their child?