Sister Mary Barbed-wire had been the Catholic equivalent of a Baptist hellfire preacher, always harping on the awful punishments awaiting sinners, all the horrors the God of Love would inflict upon those who disappointed Him. Everlasting suffering for missing mass on Sunday, or failing to make your Easter duty. Little Gia bought the whole package, living in terror of dying with a mortal sin on her soul.
Luckily Our Lady of Hope hadn't had a high school; that allowed Gia to escape to the secular den of iniquity known as the public school system. But she'd still remained a practicing Catholic, attending CCD classes and CYO dances.
Sometime during the eighties, however, she drifted away and never returned. Not that she stopped believing in God. She couldn't buy into atheism, or even agnosticism. God existed, she was sure. She was also pretty sure He didn't care much about what went on here. Maybe He watched, but He certainly didn't act.
To her child's eyes the Old Testament God had appeared stern and imposing; now He seemed like a cranky, petulant adolescent with poor impulse control, creating cataclysms, sending plagues, striking down an entire nation's first-born males. She found the New Testament God much more appealing, but somewhere along the way the whole redemption and damnation thing had stopped making sense to her. You didn't ask to be born but once you were you had to toe the belief line or spend eternity suffering in hell. Easy to believe back in the Old Testament days when He burned bushes, parted seas, and sent commandments on stone tablets. But these days God had become remote, no longer weighing in on human affairs, yet still demanding faith. It didn't seem fair.
Of course, if You're God, You don't have to be fair. You hold all the marbles. What You say goes.
Still…
Gia had tried to come back to the church after Vicky was born. A child should have some moral foundation to build on, and the church seemed a tried and true place to start. In the back of her mind too had been the idea that if Gia returned to the fold, God would protect Vicky.
But Gia couldn't make it work. And it was terrifyingly obvious that God did not protect children. They died from brain tumors and leukemias and other cancers, from being run over, shot, electrocuted, dropped from buildings, incinerated in house fires, and in other uncountable, unimaginable ways. Clearly innocence was not enough to earn God's protection.
So where was God?
Did the Born Agains have it right? Jesus was their personal savior who watched their every move and answered their prayers? They prayed to Jesus that their old jalopy would start on a cold morning and if it did they praised Him and gave Him thanks for the rest of the day. Gia couldn't get comfortable with a view of God that turned the Creator of the Universe into some sort of cosmic errand boy for His True Believers. Children were starving, Tara Portmans were being abducted and murdered, political prisoners were being tortured, wives were being abused, but God ignored their pleas for relief in order to answer the True Believers' prayers for good weather on the day of the church picnic. Did that make sense?
Yet when she considered the Born Agains she knew—only a few, but good people who seemed to practice what they preached—and saw their serenity, their inner peace, she envied them. They could say, "Let go, let God," with a true, unshakable confidence that God would take care of them and everything would work out in the end. Gia wanted that tranquility for herself, craved it, but the ability—perhaps the hubris—to believe she mattered to the Creator of the Universe and could have His ear remained beyond her.
At the other extreme was the God who ignited the Big Bang, then turned His back and walked away, never to be seen again.
Gia sensed the truth lay somewhere between. But where?
And where did Tara Portman fit in all this? Had she come back on her own, or had she been sent back? And why? Why did Gia feel this connection to her?
Gia sighed and rose. Whatever the reasons, she wasn't going to find them here.
She stepped out into the bright afternoon sunshine and headed home. When she reached Sutton Square she ran into Rosa, the Silverman's maid. Their townhouse was two doors down from Gia.
"Did that policeman find you?" Rosa said. She had a broad face and a thick body, and was dressed in her after-work street clothes.
Gia's heart froze. "What policeman?"
"The one who knock on your door little while 'go."
Oh, God! Vicky! Something's happened!
She fumbled in her bag for her keys. "What did he say? What did he want?"
"He ask if you home. He ask if you leave you little girl home alone when you go out."
"What?" She found the keys, singled out the one for the front door. "Did he say why he wanted to know?"
"No. I tol' him no, never. I say little miss away at camp. He ask what camp, I say I don' know."
Gia's knees weakened with relief. For a moment there she'd thought the camp had sent a cop to deliver terrible news about Vicky. But if he hadn't even known she was away…
Wait a minute. What was he doing here then? Why was a cop asking about Vicky?
"Rosa, are you sure he was a cop?"
"Oh sure. He have cop car and…" She moved her hands up and down the front of her body. "You know…"
"Uniform?"
"Uh-huh! Tha's it. All blue. He was cop, yes."
"Did you happen to see his badge number?"
The maid shook her head. "No. I no think to look." She narrowed her eyes. "Now that I think, I don' remember seeing no badge."
"Did he mention me or Vicky by name?"
"No… I don' thin' so."
"Thank you, Rosa." Gia missed her first try on inserting the key, made it on the second. "I'm going to look into this."
Once inside the first thing Gia did was call the camp. No, they hadn't called the NYPD. Vicky and everyone else at the camp were fine.
Next call, her local precinct, the Seventeenth. No, they hadn't had any calls to send someone over to Sutton Square. He might have come from another precinct, but no one could say why.
Gia hung up, relieved that Vicky was safe, but unsettled by anyone, cop or not, asking about her daughter.
Had he been an impostor? No, Rosa had said he'd arrived in a cop car.
Gia thought of Tara Portman. What if Tara had been picked up by a police car? A cop saying her mother had been hurt and he'd take her to her. Vicky would fall for that. Any kid would.
Whoever the cop was, he hadn't learned anything other than the fact that Vicky was away at camp. And he didn't know which camp because Rosa couldn't tell him.
She wanted to call Jack, but what could he do? He was the last person on earth to have an inside line into what the NYPD might be up to.
All she could do was pray that—
Gia frowned. Pray… that was what you did when trouble came knocking. Even if you'd lost your faith, old habits died hard.
She'd pray that it was all a mix-up and the cop had the wrong address.
That would do until Jack got home.
13
"Let me see if I've got this sequence down right," Lyle said.
They had just about all the paneling stripped from the wall now, and were working on the bracing studs. They still hadn't found any loose stones. Every one so far had been mortared tight to its neighbors.
Something about these stones gave Jack the creeps. They gave off an alien vibe that made him want to cover them again, hide them from human sight. They didn't belong here, and it almost seemed they knew it and wanted to be back where they'd come from—Romania, wasn't it? The ones that had had their cross inlays ripped out were the worst. The empty pockets looked like dead eye sockets, staring at him.