I read the story again, and again. At last I folded it back up and returned it to Annie.
“I don’t understand.” I gazed up at Angelica’s desk, the bulging red eyes of her little carven garuda. “How did Magda Kurtz get away?”
Annie slapped my arm with the newspaper. “You idiot! She didn’t. Don’t you get it? It’s a setup—all those other people died, just so there’d be an alibi for why Magda Kurtz is missing!”
“No.”
“Yes! Sweeney, you have have to listen to me—I know about this stuff, I’ve seen it all before.”
I said nothing, just stared at the desk. Angelica’s sea urchin, Angelica’s neat stack of marbleized stationery. A little Art Nouveau perfume flask, its blue crystal stopper shaped like a dolphin. Angelica’s scent. Angelica and Oliver…
“…told her when we met that…”
My head pounded, there was a roaring in my ears that nearly drowned out Annie’s voice.
“…Benandanti, the whole thing all over again, your scholars and people like Oliver—that’s who killed Lisa.”
“Lisa?” Groggily I got to my feet. “Who’s Lisa? I thought we were talking about Magda Kurtz—”
Annie smacked me again with the newspaper. “My cousin. Aren’t you listening?”
“Ouch! Well, yeah, but—” I rubbed my arm and wished I didn’t feel like throwing up. “Your cousin? Jeez, Annie, this is all a little too weird for me…”
“No shit, Sherlock! But that’s what happens when you crash the wrong party.” She strode back to her own desk and pulled open a drawer. I had a glimpse of papers rolled up with rubber bands, sheet music, some old magazines. Then, very carefully, she withdrew from the mess of pages a manila envelope and gave it to me.
“Okay, look at this—be careful, it’s starting to fall apart.”
I peered warily into the envelope and pulled out a wadded newspaper clipping. When I pried it open flecks of yellowed paper spilled down the front of my T-shirt.
I saw a small, badly reproduced yearbook photo of a misty-eyed girl smiling into the distance, her long straight hair parted in the middle and barely brushing her shoulders. Around her neck glinted a tiny cross on a chain.
“Lisa Harmon,” said Annie bitterly. “Lisa Nobody, now. My cousin.”
“Your cousin.”
She nodded, and carefully I smoothed out the page.
Surprise, Nebraska April 11—19-year-old Lisa Marie Harmon, home from college on spring break, was found dead in her parents’ house here Friday evening after apparently taking a deadly overdose of sleeping pills. Grief-stricken relatives and friends expressed shock, stating that the popular student had never been involved with drugs and had “every reason to live.”
Harmon was a sophomore at the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine in Washington, D.C., where she was studying Comparative Religion and Music Therapy. Parents and guidance counselors at Raymond Jollie High School remembered a girl who was treasurer of the SERVE Club and played guitar at folk masses at Our Lady of Good Hope.
But a high school friend of Harmon’s, who refused to be identified, alleged that at college the former A-student had gotten involved with “some kind of coven.” University officials, however, denied all charges of occult activity at the school. A fellow student there recalled another girl, one who had taken to dabbling in narcotics and who over the course of several months had repeatedly sought help from the school’s counseling program.
This afternoon, relatives from across the county gathered to mourn and…
I stared at the girl in the yearbook photo, then glanced at Annie. There was the same determined chin and dark eyes, though the pixie smile was conspicuously absent from Annie’s face.
“I’m sorry, Annie. When did it—”
“Two years ago.”
I continued to stare stupidly at the page. Finally Annie took it back. I coughed and turned to look out the window. Beneath a cloudless twilit sky the Shrine’s dome glowed blue as the heart of a flame, and the golden stars painted upon it seemed to flicker and burn. At the foot of one of its narrow stairways a boy and a girl sat with their arms around each other and stared up at the gleaming monolith. A terrible longing swept over me: to be that girl; to have Oliver be that boy; to have that huge and lovely presence overseeing my life…
Behind me a drawer slammed shut, and Annie thumped onto her bed. I sighed and left the window to join her, moving her Snoopy pillow out of the way.
“Really, Annie. I’m sorry about your cousin.” I patted her back awkwardly, wondering when Angelica would return, and if Oliver would be with her. “It—it must have been horrible for you.”
She drew her knees up to her chin. “It’s a fucking lie, is what it is. Lisa didn’t kill herself. She was a saint, she would never kill herself. And she would never take any kind of drugs. You know what they found in her room when she died?”
I shook my head.
“Dilaudid. You know what that is? No? Well, it sure isn’t sleeping pills—
“Dilaudid is like, synthetic heroin. Now you tell me how an altar girl in Nebraska gets her hands on that. The local police had never even seen it before—they had to bring in someone from the hospital in Lincoln to identify it. And Lisa was doing this stuff?” Her voice rose incredulously. “No way.”
“But then—”
But then why are you telling me this? I thought. Instead I leaned back on her pillow and asked, “But then how did it happen? How did she die?”
“They killed her. Them. Professor Warnick and his pals.”
I groaned. “Oh, come on—”
“They did. They planted it there. In the house, in her room. I don’t know how they got that shit into her, but they did.” Her brown eyes had gone quite wild. “Look, I know this sounds crazy, Sweeney, but it’s true. With Lisa it was just like with you. She made these friends, Molyneux scholars, they’d been chosen for that secret society of theirs. Then she and Frank started sleeping together and I guess he must have violated some vow of silence or something, because somebody decided she got too close. She told me about it when she was home at Christmas. All this weird shit…”
“What kind of weird shit?”
“Oh, man, things you wouldn’t believe! Visions and witchcraft, all this stuff about the Second Coming—”
“The Second Coming?”
“You know,” Annie said impatiently. “Like that poem. Weird things being reborn—”
“I know what it is! But—you really think Professor Warnick—”
“They got rid of Magda Kurtz, didn’t they? And Warnick didn’t do it alone. He had the Benandanti.” When I said nothing, she added disdainfully, “The Good Walkers. Those Who Do Well.”