Fear the Darkness: A Thriller (6 page)
“Yes,” Mallory said, pulling in her upper lip. “They do.”
Speaking of children, “Well, it’s sort of moot with Gemma-Kate in the house. I have to be more modest.”
“Quelle horreur.”
“It’s actually not as bad as I thought it would be. She’s getting on well with Carlo. And she’s a really good cook. She’s teaching me.”
Funny how in retrospect that exchange sounded so ominous. Everything became so ominous.
Mallory said, “Does she always make inappropriate comments like the one about the Pugs eating your face?”
“Did she say my face? I don’t remember. Anyway, it’s an occupational hazard in a cop family. You toughen up. Not much in the way of empathy.”
That, too.
At one time a thriving parish, St. Martin’s sat on twelve acres of prime land on La Cholla, next to a golf course. The style was mission adobe, the church itself standing out stark white against the land that had been allowed to stay natural, dotted with creosote, prickly pear, and cholla. At most, a hundred people would attend the later service in which Father Elias Manwaring, potluck portly, delivered those rambling sermons that made you want to stand up from your pew and shout, “Shut the fuck up, already!” But overall he was a pretty good man, and I had never before had as much time to stop thinking as I did in the church.
After the service we all filed out to shake Manwaring’s mushy hand and be rewarded with his receiving-line smile. For Carlo the smile was always a little more genuine, like for a comrade in arms. Manwaring leaned into Carlo, saying something I couldn’t hear. Then we went with a couple dozen of the hard-core parishioners to a separate parish hall for coffee and kuchen.
Carlo looked around at the entrance until he spotted a guy with a ponytail, bald on top so it looked like his hair was sliding off at a glacial pace. “Visitor,” Carlo said. “Elias wants me to connect.” Carlo took my hand and pulled me to the coffee table, where the guy stood meekly in line, looking like a church wallflower. Fifty-something. Nice shirt, but it felt like a veneer over a surface that needs sanding. An earring, and a bit of military tattoo peeking out from beneath a rolled-up shirtsleeve, markings of a bad boy gone to seed, or tired out and looking for Jesus.
Carlo put out his hand and the guy took it. “Hi. Carlo DiForenza, and my wife, Brigid. Sorry for the line. The banana cake with chocolate morsels trumps greeting a guest.”
The man took Carlo’s hand, but his eyes and smile were all for me, and in that moment the ponytail and the earring and the tattoo became as sexy as they must have been in 1973, on the kind of guy all the girls have the hots for precisely because our parents warned us about
boys like him
without telling us why.
“No one can beat a good banana cake,” he said. It might have been naughty, but you couldn’t see that in his expression.
“I have to hand it to you, it’s hard to walk into a group where you don’t know anyone,” Carlo said. “Shopping?”
The man looked blank.
“For a church,” Carlo said.
He took down the blazing grin and let one corner of his mouth go up in a more self-deprecating smile. “Yeah, I guess you could say I am. Haven’t done this for a long time. I just moved here.”
“Where from?” I asked.
“Florida.”
“Me, too. Broward County area.”
“Oh, well, they say when you’re south of Orlando you’re in the North again. More diverse. I’m Alachua County,” he said. “An actual cracker.”
“That’s up near Gainesville,” I told Carlo.
“I had a restaurant there for years.” His eyes filmed over and he blinked some sadness away, nearly. “I’m sorry, I lost my wife seven and a half months ago, and she was in charge of the manners in the family. Adrian Franklin.”
Carlo’s pastoral instinct switched on and he shared his own widowerhood. I already knew about that part, so I left him to it, my glance first lighting on Mallory, who lifted her eyebrows appreciatively. I’d introduce her later if she hadn’t already moved in on him, but for now I slipped what they call “the fellowshipping,” cut the line for the coffee, and looked around for Gemma-Kate.
The parish hall had tall windows along one wall where you could look out onto the property. From there you saw a labyrinth made out of rocks carefully laid in circles leading to a cross in the center, and further away, to the right, part of another adobe structure, just walls without a roof. I had never gone out there.
The labyrinth was where I saw her. With the bustle and chatter behind me I stood at the window, sipping my coffee and watching Gemma-Kate walk the labyrinth. She seemed out of place out there, and alone. In a church setting, alone always seems sad.
“I sent my son out,” said a voice that reminded me of a squirrel, fast and perky.
I turned to see a woman, on the short side like me, but much younger. “Hi, I’m Ruth. That’s my son, Peter.”
I turned back to the window and watched Peter Salazar walk out to the labyrinth.
“I met him. He took Gemma-Kate for a night hike.” I felt a little smug, knowing something she didn’t about the kids. Is that how parents are?
For her part, Ruth covered up her surprise by changing the subject. “We’ve been coming to the church about three years,” she said. “They have a youth group. I thought Peter should be with more Christian children. There’s the Manwaring boy, over there, Ken.” I turned to look out of politeness and spotted a lumpish and sullen boy who would be the right age and same body type as Elias. Ruth hadn’t taken a breath, “There aren’t too many children, though. They need to bring in more youth. Nice to have a girl here. We have more boys than girls.”
“I think—”
“There you go. See, he’s walking the labyrinth with your daughter. I knew she must be your daughter because of the way you watch her. A late-in-life child. Those can be the best. We’ve had some trouble with Peter. But not too bad, considering. The things kids get into these days, I mean.”
I noted that Ruth did not appear to need me to participate in a conversation, so while she chattered on about the church and Peter and herself and her husband who didn’t attend and wasn’t that too bad but with God’s grace you never knew, I watched Gemma-Kate and Peter walk the labyrinth. Not together; the way the path was laid out had them passing close and then drawing away from each other, passing and drawing away, not looking at one another, like a meditative pas de deux. At this distance I couldn’t even see them speaking.
“You religious?” Peter asked.
“No, just bored,” Gemma-Kate answered. “What’s this thing for?”
“It’s called a labyrinth. It’s stupid. There’s only one way in and out. What’s the good of it?”
“Maybe it doesn’t want you to have to make choices. Maybe it doesn’t want you to think. There, I got to the center.” She pointed to a white adobe wall across the yard. “What’s that?”
“I’ll show you. Come on.”
Mallory came up to say she had to get home to Owen, and spotted Gemma-Kate and Peter. “Isn’t that cute,” she said as Ruth and I turned to her. “No, don’t bother to thank me. Carlo said to tell you he’s ready to go, too.”
Ruth fastened on to Mallory while my friend tried to disengage from her in the social form of unpeeling Saran Wrap. I helped by asking her to let Carlo know we’d be staying just a little longer. Then, in the hopes that Ruth would stop talking, I pretended to watch the kids out the window, though they had walked away from the labyrinth in the direction of the small white adobe structure and I couldn’t see them anymore.
Peter said, “This is called a columbarium. See all the marble squares? There’s a person under each one. Ashes, I mean.”
“I went to the cemetery when they buried my mother, but she was Catholic so Dad didn’t cremate her,” Gemma-Kate said. “I think I’d rather be cremated. Did you know any of the people here?”
“This one over here. See, Joseph Neilsen. I was here when they put his ashes under that tile. They were in a little metal thing that looked like my dad’s martini shaker.”
Gemma-Kate did the math. “Fourteen years old. How did he die?”
“He drowned.”
“That’s a weird way to go here. You don’t even have any water in the rivers.”
“He had a pool.”
“Did he, like, hit his head or something?”
Peter shrugged but didn’t answer. “Nobody really liked him. He was sort of a jerk. We talked about it a lot at first, but it happened a while ago.”
“Now I remember,” Gemma-Kate said. “I heard my aunt’s friend talking about it at the house.”
“What did she say?”
Gemma-Kate turned at the sound of her name. Her aunt was coming up the path but hadn’t reached the wall yet, was waving to her. She waved back and told Peter she had to go.
On the drive home Gemma-Kate sat in the backseat, texting.
“Who you on with, GK? Peter already?”
“It’s Dad.”
“Tell him I said hi. I’ll call him.”
Early that week Carlo took Gemma-Kate for a tour of the University of Arizona, where he introduced her to the head of the Biology Department and they toured the labs. This was heady stuff for Gemma-Kate, who had only had access to what she could learn from books and the Internet. On return they walked in through the garage door singing Gilbert and Sullivan, but knowing I’m uncomfortable with music, Carlo shushed Gemma-Kate before the door closed.
Over lunch Gemma-Kate told me about the day while Carlo watched her, beaming with the delight a teacher has in discovering the one student who gets it.
“I saw a fly wing under an electron microscope. And I listened to Uncle Father talk with the Biology Department chair, Dr. Brogdon. They’re going to give a series of joint lectures on science and religion. Did you know that ancient philosophy began with questions about the physical world instead of the spiritual world, Aunt Brigid? The word ‘atom’ was originally coined by pre-Socratic philosophers.”
I nodded as if everybody knew that, more distracted by how Gemma-Kate might have ended up with “Uncle Father.” It sounded vaguely like something from
South Park.
* * *
In the late afternoon that same day, Carlo and I got dressed up and gave Gemma-Kate directions for the Pugs, which amounted to just letting them out in the backyard if they asked. She asked if Peter could come over and looked sullen when I said I wasn’t comfortable with that just yet, but she didn’t argue. Then we drove the relatively short distance down Oracle to the Hilton El Conquistador for Puttin’ On the Dog, benefiting the Arizona Humane Society.
My impression for the first couple of years I’d lived here was that Tucson was where strip malls came to die. Mallory set me straight on that. “It’s not Manhattan,” she would say, “but it’s not Green Acres, either.”
Now, my career put me often enough in the path of the rich that I could appreciate the taste of Montrachet, the texture of Thai raw silk, the kick of superior cocaine, and the value of a de Kooning, but I don’t envy rich people. I’m just glad I’m alive.
I mean that literally. When you’ve been shot at, gotten stabbed in the spleen with a nail file, fallen off a horse, gotten rabies vaccine after being bitten by a rabid Rottweiler, and offered yourself as bait to a sexual serial killer, that’s not an idle cliché. I really am glad I’m still alive.
I paused at the entrance to the gathering, just past an arching trellis covered with fake ivy. Staying alive had always been a matter of staying aware. Aware even now, I thought about how the only wire I was wearing was an underwire, and I was not carrying. I looked around to see if I could figure out who was. It wasn’t like I was expecting a bloodbath or anything. It’s just that public gatherings like this make me a little tense. They’re so uncontrolled, so many strangers, so many unknowns. And I was all too aware of what could happen. So I scoped out the place, did a quick threat assessment.
Among the older guests, some beaded tops, some silk, maybe a dozen tuxedos, none with bulges in either of the places a man hides something. Among the younger, a preponderance of black linen, dress shirts, no ties. I felt just right in a sleeveless navy blue maxi dress and lime green drape, which would provide a little warmth when the late afternoon sun lost its heat.
Most people stood holding champagne flutes and small plates, while the round tables covered with white cloths that puddled on the ground were largely left alone. The rule at one of these things is, if you sit down you’re a loser, the opposite of musical chairs. Local restaurants had tents, and the smells of garlic, sweet and sour sauce, and curry competed for attention. A small combo played cool jazz, which is to say the kind without a tune that you couldn’t hum if you tried. A waiter wearing a tux and a papier-mâché hound’s head passed perilously close with a silver tray holding champagne goblets. You could tell he couldn’t see very well.
“They don’t even know how to be pretentious,” I said to Carlo.
“Don’t be a snob,” he said. “You have to allow Tucson its pretensions. It doesn’t have that many.”
I estimated three hundred people, three fifty tops, not counting the animals, which were mostly dogs except for a miniature pink pig on a leash of the same color.
That man over there, khaki shorts and sandals at a formal affair. Is it because this is Tucson and anything goes, or does he clearly not belong? He’s standing alone, looking isolated. Is he nervous?
I felt unexpected fingers around the back of my neck, a little tug. The nerve sparked, and I jumped a little, my muscles galvanized for action.
“Sorry to startle you,” Carlo said, “but stop working, O’Hari.”
Carlos knows me almost better than anyone ever has. Sometimes it feels like he knows things about me I don’t even know, as if I’ve unzipped my skin. It’s not a totally unpleasing sensation.
Partly because of this, and partly because I had been slowly sharing more and more about my past lately, he knew that I had been instinctively doing a threat assessment at the entryway to a fund-raiser. And him calling me O’Hari, an Irish version of Mata Hari, always stopped me from taking myself too seriously.