Fear the Darkness: A Thriller (3 page)

I hoisted myself out of one of those armchairs just low enough to throw off your center of gravity so you have to use your arms to stand up. I followed the chicken-liver-and-lasagna smell to the dining room. The Early American table was laden with potluck containers courtesy of the cops’ wives. I spread some of a drying nut-covered cheddar cheese ball on a munchkin-sized piece of pumpernickel and ate it. We all have our own way of mourning.

Gemma-Kate had been working on a glass of tonic that may or may not have had vodka in it. I hadn’t noticed her pouring, and she didn’t seem tipsy. She joined me at the dining room table and started to pick at the sliced deli meats, unrolling a slice of roast beef, laying a piece of yellow cheese on it, lining three green olives in the center, and rolling it back up again. Methodical. I took another sip from my drink with the precision of an anesthesiologist, just enough to keep the pain away without slipping into whisky remorse.

“All older people,” I said to Gemma-Kate, watching her slowly chew the roll she had constructed. “None of your friends, Gemma-Kate?”

My father, Fergus, heard me from across the room. He has uncanny hearing for such an old man, maybe from all those years as a beat cop, staying on alert for someone behind him. “We’re not the kind of people who have friends, are we, Cupkate?” He didn’t say it as criticism of either the family as a whole or Gemma-Kate individually. He sounded like it was a point of pride, the old bastard. It was true that Dad didn’t make friends. He was one of those people whose main topic of conversation was recounting how he had told somebody off. As children we took him seriously and, when we were bad, feared his glare. Seeing him slumped with his frown set like a bow in his face, I wondered if anyone else ever had. He had as much power to frighten me now as a cartoon witch. But for the sake of peace I kept pretending he could.

Gemma-Kate ignored him. She took another bite of the roll and swallowed. “I pictured you taller,” she said to me.

“I used to be,” I said. When she didn’t seem to get the joke I said, “Plus last time I saw you, you were shorter.” Sizing her up as well, I thought how appropriate the nickname Cupkate was. She was small like the rest of the Quinn family, nowhere near a whole cake.

She finished her cold-cuts-and-olive roll and wiped her fingers across the top of a nearby stack of black cocktail napkins. I spread another piece of pumpernickel, this time with what Mom would have called liver mishmash, and turned my attention back to the living room. I didn’t think Todd was nervous, but the sweating made him appear so as he started to speak about his wife’s final days.

“Marylin had a downturn recently, what would you say, Mom, last year or so?”

“Gemma-Kate was so good with her,” Mom said. “She’s a good little nurse with invalids. Marylin never had one bedsore.”

Todd nodded. “I would come home from work and find GK reading to her. But Marylin was declining faster than before, and we were starting to talk about hospice care.”

While he spoke Gemma-Kate looked past the group, through the jalousie windows of the living room, as if she was seeing something just on the other side of the glass that none of the rest of us could see. I couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked like she had heard the drama of her mother’s death so many times she’d lost the feeling for it. The word that came to mind was “controlled.”

“And then she died,” Todd said. “It seemed to take so long, years, and then in the final days it went fast.” He swallowed.

There was a sudden silence. Filling the void, Carlo came up with some church-speak. “It’s tragic for those who have to keep living, but there’s an uncanny realization that comes to the dying. They understand the process. We have to let them go.”

Gemma-Kate brought her steady gaze back to the room and let it rest on Carlo. “Aunt Brigid says you used to be a Catholic priest.”

Carlo said, “That’s right, or partly. I left the active ministry nearly thirty years ago. But technically once you’re ordained you can’t stop being a priest.”

“But you can get married.”

“Well, actually you can’t.”

“But you did.”

“Yes. I did.”

Todd may have feared Gemma-Kate was going to ask next if that meant Carlo and I were living in sin. That was probably Todd’s opinion. God only knows what he would think if he knew we’d been married by a justice of the peace. He sweat a little more, and then cut short anything else Gemma-Kate might say by jumping to the topic he had in mind. “Gemma-Kate didn’t want to go off to school while her mother was so sick. But Marylin was hoping Gemma-Kate could stay with you and Carlo for a few months before she starts the biochemistry program at the University of Arizona.”

I’d been waiting for this, and I’m going to fess up that I wasn’t happy about it. After growing up the eldest child in an alcoholic cop family, and spending my entire career as an FBI agent, I would still give my life for a child, but found I had little in common with them, never having been one myself. Plus I had finally begun to enjoy the world I had been serving and protecting. After a period of adjustment I finally felt I was getting the hang of marriage, and hesitated doing anything at all that might upset the equilibrium. When I made the promise to Marylin I hadn’t expected I’d be keeping it this soon. I hesitated.

Carlo, on the other hand, didn’t hesitate for a moment. “Of course,” he said, smiling at me, expecting me to be pleased that he was supportive of my family. “That would be fine with us. We have a spare room.”

Todd went on as if he hadn’t known it would be that easy and needed to say everything he had planned. “It’s been so hard on GK for so many years,” he said, gesturing to the girl, who was staring passively out the window again while her life was being decided for her. “Not much of a mother around, and”—he ducked his head in a confessional manner—“not much of a father either. You know how the business goes.”

“Todd, I already—” I started.

“It was Gemma-Kate’s idea. Hers and her mother’s,” he said. “They talked about it before she … That it would be good to go to a school someplace, completely different. Staying with you will allow her to establish Arizona residency so she doesn’t have to pay out of state.”

I had ceased listening by this point, and had only begun to marvel that he managed to restrain himself from yelling for this long. But Mom finally put him out of his misery by stopping him. “They said yes,” she said, with an impatient jerk of her hand, and stood up without trouble. Mom could hold her liquor better than any of us. “Brigid, come help me put some of this food away.”

I did as I was told. I may have received awards and honors from presidents. I may have been in life-threatening situations so many times I stopped feeling life-threatened. I may have busted some of the most heinous villains in FBI history, but no matter how old I got, here I was just the oldest girl. So I obediently got the Tupperware tops from the kitchen and fastened them over the containers on the table.

Mom and I talked a little while we worked. She hadn’t gotten the memo that we were being delicate with each other. Either that or she could only last at it so long.

“How are things in Arizona?” she asked.

“Good. Really good, Mom.”

“Carlo tells us you left the Church,” she said.

For all the care I was taking, rather than explain how similar the Episcopal church we were attending was to Roman Catholicism, I felt myself the first to go
crack.
“I was never in
the Church,
Mom.”

Well, that was effective. She pushed trembling lips together into what I think they call a moue. It made all the old smoking lines radiate out, though she had given up the habit some decades before. “You received First Holy Communion,” she said. “You had a little white veil and white Mary Janes.”

I put my arms around her and gave her a hug, something I had learned not from anyone in my family but from Carlo. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

I felt her pliable aging skin get a little more taut over her bones, probably rejecting not me but the unfamiliar contact of another body. Out of mercy I let her go.

I could tell she forgave me by her change in tack. “Who’s watching your dogs?”

“A friend.”

“You have a friend?”

I didn’t answer, and it only took me a moment to get back into peace-loving Brigid mode as I scrubbed the plastic tablecloth and got caught up in musings and family small talk. We all stayed safe until Todd dropped the three of us off at the Fort Lauderdale airport two days later.

*   *   *

This was Gemma-Kate’s first plane ride ever. On the Dallas-to-Tucson leg she got sick, and there were some adolescent histrionics as she scrambled from the window seat over Carlo and me to run down the aisle to the head. But when she came back looking more subdued and pale I got her some ginger ale and a blanket, no small feat in coach, and let her fall asleep on my shoulder while I watched the New Mexico mountains plod past below us.

Too bad, she was missing her first look at mountains, too.

I softened, always a sucker for the small and weak. But also there was Marylin. Part of engaging with the world was helping your family, keeping your promises. Besides, Gemma-Kate could probably use a change. She’d practically been her mother’s caregiver all those years. Couldn’t be a good way for a kid to grow up. “Devastated,” Mom had said about her at the funeral, a word she must have picked up from those news reports about natural disasters. But my brother said, “She’s a tough one, that girl. Tough little kid.” Apparently that’s the highest praise one Quinn can give another. Tough.

I could do this. I was tough. I may be small and have prematurely white hair, but I’m as psychologically and physically fit as you can be at my age. And as I’ve explained, I can disarm a grown man before he could say … anything.

How can I put this?

Next to somebody like me, Chuck Norris is just a wuss. How hard could it be to be a good aunt?

Three

Cops will tell you the absolute worst sound in the world is
click.
That’s the sound a gun makes when it jams. But in relationships, I learned that
click
is good. It’s what happens when, in the course of an exchange of two or three sentences, you know you’re going to be friends or lovers.

I clicked with Carlo DiForenza like that, during a class I took from him at the university right after I retired and just before he did. Before I married Carlo two years ago, my name was Brigid Quinn. I had devoted my whole life to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, being pimped around the country posing as a prostitute, a drug runner, a human trafficker. I did it for much longer than is considered psychologically healthy. You don’t make any friends working undercover. The only people you meet are the kind of people you don’t want to be friends with.

Just as I had to learn to be a wife later in life, I had to learn to be a friend. Mallory Hollinger and I met at St. Martin’s in the Fields. Besides being more truthful, going to church was the only other condition that Carlo asked of me, and because I had had some bad experiences with the Catholic church, we compromised on Episcopalian. I didn’t realize how close it was until our first Sunday service.

The main difference was that just before the procession down the aisle, a voice at the back of the church said, “Please silence your cell phones at this time.” That was the signal for everyone to stand for a hymn—all the verses.

Another difference was that the congregation didn’t rush out during the final hymn—again, all verses—to try to beat each other out of the parking lot; instead they went to what they called “coffee hour.” Anything that includes coffee is a good thing. I had gone to the table where the silver urn was to get my share of the beloved brew, and when I came back to where I’d left Carlo standing alone, I noticed a woman talking to him.

She was a big woman, though I wouldn’t say fat, more majestic. What made me take notice was her height, and the way she blended her laughter into Carlo’s. As I got closer I noticed she had a thin scar, hardly noticeable, on her left cheek. And her upper lip was a little bigger than the lower. She was thrusting that lip at Carlo like a horse smelling a sugar cube. With a disagreeable flutter I thought what a good-looking couple they made, an advertisement for an erectile dysfunction drug.

I laughed at myself and shook off the thought.

“Here’s your coffee, honey,” I said, and handed it to him, then turned to the woman. “Hi. I’m Brigid,” I said, smiling, pleased that I had regained my security enough to not sound like I was guarding my prom date. She stuck out her hand and shook mine with a surer grip than your average female boomer. The thing about Mallory Hollinger wasn’t that she was knock-down gorgeous. Quite the contrary. She just acted like nobody had ever told her she couldn’t have any man in the room.

She said, “Mallory Hollinger. Your husband and I were just talking about the similarities between the Catholic and Episcopal churches.”

“Except that people are dressed better than usual, I couldn’t tell the difference,” I said.

“Hardly any difference, darling,” Mallory said, turning toward me and lowering her voice into intimacy that excluded Carlo. “We’re just Catholic Light—more money, less pope.”

And then we were friends.
Click.
Never having had a friend before outside of the Bureau, I hadn’t realized it happens so quickly.

Essentially, we shared the same wicked humor, a distaste for piousness, and a taste for luxuries large and small. Mallory was me, minus the occasional angst.

Mallory had kept our two dogs while we were in Florida and was at the house to greet us with Indian food, my favorite. The Pugs jumped me and I fell to the floor, indulging them with lavish rubbings and kissings, then calming one of them down from a seizure of delight that made him snock uncontrollably.

“Who’s your mommy, you ugly dogs?” Mallory said to them, while kissing Carlo on both cheeks. It’s the kind of thing I would have found pretentious in practically anyone but this woman, who brought off the gesture like she had been born to it.