“Ask Lucas,” she said. “He gave me his number. In Pasadena, I think he said. I wrote it down.”
I picked up the notepad beside the bed and tried to decipher my mother’s penciled scrawl. “Does this say St. Arnie’s? Only Lucas would have a church called St. Arnie’s.”
Mother put on her glasses and took the pad from me. “St. Anne’s. Says so very clearly. And Lucas doesn’t have a church. He was defrocked ages ago. I don’t know what this place is.”
There was no area code written down-Pasadena is outside L.A.‘s 213. The second numeral in the phone number Mother had written down could have been either a loopy seven or a half-formed nine. I tried nine, hoped it was local.
“Hotline.” The answering voice sounded young, female. “I’m looking for Lucas Slaughter,” I said.
I think he’s around. I can’t leave the phone to go look for him. He checks for messages.”
“Are you at St. Anne’s?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“Pasadena Avenue at Lacy Street. Lincoln Heights.” The address was only ten minutes away.
I hung up and met my mother’s tranquilized gaze.
“Do you need me?” I asked.
“Don’t be offended, dear, but not at all. Go do what you have to do.”
I wish I knew exactly what that was.” I bent to kiss her. “Call me when you get to Palo Alto. And Mom? Can I borrow some cash?”
“That’s my girl.” She handed me a wad and patted my arm. “Be careful.”
“You, too.” I went to the door. “Give my love to Dad.”
“Margot, dear,” she called. “Max is driving Emily’s old Volvo. He has been patient about it, but he does seem concerned about his own car.”
I laughed. “He should be.”
St. Anne’s turned out to be a 1920s-era woodframe bungalow with a sloppy paint job and wrought iron bars on the windows. A couple of blocks further up the street was the Florence Crittenton Home, a juvenile facility for young mothers and their infants.
The girl who answered the door at St. Anne’s was about Casey’s age, very thin and very pretty. She balanced a toddler on each hip. Somewhere deep inside the house, a baby cried.
“Is Lucas Slaughter here?” I asked the girl.
“Yes, he is,” she said. She turned and yelled over her shoulder, “Luke! Visitor.”
Lucas appeared out of the darkness behind her, drying his hands on a kitchen towel.
“Maggie,” he said, grinning, as he ushered me inside. “Welcome.”
“You live here?” I asked.
“Bite your tongue. The residents are all mothers under the age of eighteen. I don’t come through that door without both a caste-iron jockstrap and a chaperone. How was your head this morning?”
“Leaden,” I said.
“Mine still is. Can’t drink the way I used to. Your detective friend seemed able to hold his own.” Ever Lucas, he broke into a raucous hymn:
There is a fountain filled with blood,
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood,
Lucas took a breath. “Do you remember the second verse?”
“No,” I said.
“I don’t either.” He shook his head. “Come into my office.”
He led me through a living room crammed with mismatched furniture and into a small office with HEAD SHRINK painted on the door. Among the cartoons and notices taped to the door was a counseling sign-in sheet with a pen imprinted Hotel Bonaventure dangling from a length of twine.
“The shrink?” I asked. “Is that you?”
“Yep. Counselor and general dog’s body.” He perched on the corner of a battered desk. “Good to see you, Maggot.”
In spite of his hymn singing, he seemed unusually reserved. Could have been the influence of his place of work, or something else. I didn’t have time to pursue it.
“Lucas, I very much want to see Aleda. But she keeps slipping away from me. Any idea where she is now?”
He frowned. “One of Rod’s staffers was assigned to take care of her, make sure she got the right medical treatment, didn’t take off again. Shit like that.”
“The question was, where is she?”
“I don’t know,” he sighed. “I never had a chance to see her.”
“You told me last night that Rod kept his distance from people in the Movement. Seems to me he’s really stuck out his political neck by helping Aleda this way.”
“Does seem uncharacteristically noble of old Rod,” he smiled wryly. “Still, it’s the best thing. Aleda’s sick, Maggie. She needs a little space out of the public eye to tie up some loose ends. When she’s ready, we’ll all get together.”
“I’m not the public.”
“Don’t get your back up. Remember, Aleda has been in hiding for half her lifetime. She survived by being cautious. You can’t expect her to open up all at once. Give her time.”
A soft knock on the door interrupted.
“Come,” Lucas called.
A teenager with a little curly-haired boy clinging to her neck stepped into the room. She had tears running down her face. “What is it, Nicole?”
“I forgot what you said about how long to cook the spaghetti.” Nicole burst into sobs. “It’s ruined.”
“There’s almost no way you can ruin spaghetti,” he said with saintly calm. “Unless there are flames shooting from the pan. There aren’t, are there?”
“What?” She wiped her nose on the child’s shirttail. “Flames.”
She seemed confused, but she shook her head.
“Wait for me in the kitchen. I’ll be right there.” Lucas pulled a tissue from a jumbo-size box on the desk and handed it to her. “Be careful that Stevie doesn’t get near the stove.”
I started to follow Nicole, but Lucas caught me by the arm and held me back.
“Give her a minute to figure things out by herself,” he said. “When she moves into a place of her own, she’ll have more than spaghetti to worry about.”
I didn’t smell smoke, but I stepped into the hall and sniffed the air, anyway. I could see Nicole through the kitchen door. Lucas looked over my shoulder.
“Mother told me you had left the church, Lucas,” I said. “Is this your church, the church of the here and now?”
He chuckled. “It’s the only one that will have me. I like it just fine, too. Every time I take a pregnant twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl over to Planned Parenthood, I like it better. Damn it, Maggie, those old farts at the diocese in their dark suits and clerical collars don’t have the least idea what the reality is for children like Nicole, babies raising babies. Or two babies or three babies. Let the collars pontificate. I’m making spaghetti.”
“St. Anne’s sounds religious Establishment to me.”
“House used to be a nunnery, teachers at Sacred Heart High School lived here. Emily bought them out years ago.”
“Emily?”
“She raised the financing, anyway. This is one of her pet projects.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. I should have. What I was seeing at St. Anne’s was totally consistent with Emily. Then I remembered a pro-choice sticker on an arrangement of flowers left for Emily at the hospital. And ugly graffiti on her apartment house wall. Controversy was Em’s morning coffee.
Lucas nodded toward the kitchen. “Shall we check on chaos?”
“Sure.” I walked with him. “Did Emily spend time here?”
“Oh yeah. We have a couple of projects in common. We’re both on the board at Planned Parenthood.”
With Stevie on her hip, Nicole was mopping up boiled-over pasta water. Lucas held out his hands and the boy reached up for him, happily transferring his grip from Nicole’s neck to Lucas’s.
Nicole had turned off the heat under the spaghetti pot. I tweezed a long piece out of the water. It was long past al dente, but edible. I found a colander by the sink and drained the pot into it. There was enough to feed a multitude.