Lovely, Dark, and Deep (21 page)

“Fritz. When I came here one summer, to interview Sister Iris, she showed me the fish in the pond. And she showed me how one of the rocks was hollow. Or she tried to—”

I looked around desperately, and saw only a small metal crucifix inserted into a stand on the edge of the pond. I pulled it out and started bashing the ice. “The thing was, the fish all swam around it. They swam around it, and I know that Sister Joanna was tending the Mary Fountain when she was killed, and she had taken a bag of cocaine away from her brother—”

Fritz's face looked pearl white in the light of the headlamps. “Coke?”

“And when Mom said the hall was clogged, nothing could get through, it finally reminded me—the fish couldn't get through, it's not that they refused, it's that they couldn't.” I continued to pound away, chipping the ice above the rock that I hoped was the one I was looking for. A few layers down the ice was softer; it wasn't such a cold night. I chipped and hacked with my metal cross, trying to use the feet, and not the head, of Jesus.

“I don't get it—you're saying there's coke hidden in that pond?”

“It's the only explanation. It's been missing ever since. Ever since,” I repeated, digging my hand into the ice until it was numb.

“This must be Sister Moira,” he said.

I thought he meant that someone was walking toward us. I was concentrating so hard I didn't realize he'd seen a car until I heard the door closing, softly.
Snick
. Not a slam, just a quiet closing, like you'd do if a baby slept in the back seat.

My numb hand, feeling and looking a bit like a potato, reached inside a hollow rock, under layers and layers of ice. “I feel it,” I said excitedly. “I feel it! I've got it!” I pulled it out and held it up, like a doctor delivers a child. It was a regular Ziploc bag, not too much the worse for wear considering the amount of time which had elapsed. Within was a large amount of white powder, frozen into a chunk but also apparently unscathed.

“Madeline,” said my brother, who never calls me Madeline.

“Fritz, I–”

“I'll take that, Madeline,” said a voice behind us. Fritz had seen him, of course, but I'd kept my eyes on the dark ice. Now I turned, slowly.

Mr. Taglieri stood there smiling. “You've solved a little puzzle for me. I looked in the pond at the time, of course, but I didn't know about the hollow rock.”

I felt nothing but cold. Even my brain felt cold. I forced out a question. “Are you saying you killed her?”

He looked insulted. “Of course I didn't kill her. I loved her. She was the only girl—” he shook his head. “Just give me the bag. We won't say any more about it. Come on, Madeline, you understand. You have sympathy for veterans, you know how it was for us. How it is.”

I shook my head. “I'm sure your comrades would be insulted to hear you use that as an excuse for dealing to kids.”

“They're not kids. They're young adults. They have to learn to make choices. They have that luxury. I was eighteen when I went to Vietnam, and I didn't have a choice. I never forced anyone to do anything.”

“You're lame, man,” Fritz said angrily. “I thought you were a great teacher.”

“I am a great teacher,” Taglieri said. “This has nothing to do with it. It's just a little hobby. Which I've stopped, by the way. But you're holding a lot of money in your hands, there, hon, and I may as well cash it in. I won't do it anywhere near Webley, okay?”

I looked at my hands. I was holding a bag of cocaine in my left hand and a crucifix in my right. Always, religion juxtaposed with vice. “You should have just let me turn it in,” I said. “I would never have been able to prove it was you.”

“I thought about it,” he said. “I didn't even know what you were up to, but I could tell after you spoke to Sally that something was happening. So I followed you. I sent Maria back with the others and I came after you. When I saw you turn in here, I knew.”

Fritz stepped in front of me. “Well, you can't have it,” he said. “And you'll have to fight both of us to get it.”

He laughed. “Come on, kids, it's getting cold out here. Just give me the bag. What if I promise not to sell it at all?”

“I wouldn't believe you,” I said.

Another car was coming down the winding driveway. “See, the sisters are coming home,” Fritz told him. “Make like the wind and blow.” Fritz seemed to fancy himself a hard-boiled dick all of a sudden.

Taglieri looked a bit desperate now. “Listen, I don't even want the coke. I just want the bag for sentimental value.”

I stared at him. “What?”

“Give me the bag; it's not about the drugs,” he said.

Fritz and I both looked at the bag. It was plastic. It was worth a couple of cents.

Distantly, I thought I heard another
snick
.

“Go ahead, Madeline, dump out the coke,” Fritz said. “If it's not about the drugs, then dump them out; let's see if he's telling the truth.”

“Tell me what's going on,” I said, confused. A light snow had started falling on our strange tableau. The flakes were barely visible at first, then suddenly fat. I thought of the beginning of Charlie Brown's Christmas. Chubby flakes, like cartoons. Some of them landed wetly on my face, then turned to water and ran down my cheek like tears.

“Listen,” Taglieri said. “I told you I loved her, okay? I loved her. And I always hoped she'd come to her senses and leave here,” he looked scornfully around him. “And come back to me. And then she died. And I didn't get to say goodbye. That was the last thing she touched,” he said, pointing with a trembling finger. “I want it. She never knew, never knew that car was coming when she held that bag in her hands. She always was a secretive girl, I'm not surprised, God—” he wiped at his eyes. It seemed like genuine emotion. I was reminded of Tom, in
The Great Gatsby
, when he cries for Myrtle, who is killed by the car. Tom grieved for her, his mistress, never acknowledging his own part in the tragedy, although of course it wasn't Tom who killed her. It wasn't even Gatsby, the man Tom thought responsible.

It wasn't Gatsby who had killed her, but only Nick knew the truth. And Sister Francis had known, too.

“Oh God,” I cried out. “Tag, did your wife know about you and Rachel?”

He stared at me. “What—why are you—”

“It wasn't Gatsby who was driving the car,” I said softly. “It was Daisy.”

Chapter Fourteen

“What are you
suggesting?” he asked dully, but I could tell he was thinking.

“Before Joanna died, she was asking questions, a lot of questions, probably about you. She thought you might be dealing. She was very disillusioned. Might she have spoken with your wife? Might your wife have guessed about the two of you?”

“No,” he said.

“Because Joanna asked her mother,” I said with a sudden realization. “A lot of questions about fidelity, and did the woman ever forgive the man, or the person he had an affair with. It was on her conscience. She was feeling bad, and I'll bet she was feeling bad about your wife.”

“Maria doesn't know anything about it. She didn't know then and she doesn't now. Let me have—”

“Did she get in any car accidents around that time?”

He was getting angry. “Give me the bag and let me get out of here. My wife has never been in a car accident, except for one fender bend—”

“Around the time Joanna died?” I asked.

Fritz watched, fascinated. Taglieri wilted visibly. He opened his mouth, but said nothing.

We heard footsteps approaching, muffled footsteps made quiet by snow. “Yes, it was around that time,” said a woman's voice. I turned toward it, but was blinded by the headlights of my car.

“Mrs. Taglieri?” I asked.

“Maria, for God's sake, get out of here,” her husband said.

She stepped closer, out of the glare of the headlights, but still in silhouette. “I did know about my husband and that girl. That woman who everyone worshiped as a saint when she died. No one knew she was a common slut.”

“She was a girl,” I said. “A teenaged girl. It was your husband who had the greater responsibility, the greater—sin.”

“Yes,” said the voice, “my husband.” She stepped closer to us, and we all saw her gun at the same time. It was large, that was all I knew. I pulled my brother closer to me, and in a sudden moment of grace I understood the love of Christ. I felt, in that instant, that it would be a privilege to die if I could save Fritz. I stepped in front of him. In a flash I envisioned him as a little boy, red-haired and mischievous, pouring out my mother's spices and using the jars to store sand. I'd stood before him, guarding him against my mother's wrath, just as I felt the need to guard him now. He put his arms around my waist, automatically. I think Fritz felt somehow immune to the danger. He watched over my shoulder, a head taller than I.

“That's my gun,” said John Taglieri as he watched his wife raise it up.

“I knew that the girl had feelings for my husband,” said Maria Taglieri calmly. “She hinted as much when she spoke to me about the drugs. And I read them in her journal after I—after she died.”

“So you killed her?” I asked.

“I didn't plan to. I came out here to confront her, because I'd thought about it, and realized the truth. And I saw her there, and I was just . . . consumed, by—I don't know. I just stepped on the accelerator. It felt so good, in that moment.”

“Because you had decided she had once loved your husband?” I said. I wanted to keep her talking. I was trying to buy time, but I wasn't sure why.

“What I didn't know until now,” Maria Taglieri said icily, “was that my husband had feelings for
her
.”

“Maria,” he cried, an instant before a loud POP resounded through the cold air.

John Taglieri fell backwards. I heard his head make a thudding sound on the snow-covered cement. I winced and looked at his wife, who stood still holding the gun. Her eyes were closed. There was motion behind her, a blur of white. And then another blur. And another. I squinted through the steadily growing snow. The sisters from the convent were coming out to see what the noise was. I felt relief as a rush of warmth through me. We were safe.

The white shapes were coming closer, taking on a form . . .

I said, shakily, “Mrs. Taglieri, we have company. The noise has awakened the sisters. You have the murder of two nuns on your soul, and perhaps the murder of your husband. Are you a religious woman? How much blood do you want on your hands?”

She faced me; I could barely see her features in the darkness. The gun seemed to shake in her hands. I stood my ground, pressed against my brother. Like me, Fritz seemed suspended; he made no sound. I was aware of no conscious feeling, not even fear. The eerie scene held me mesmerized. The snowflakes landed fatly on her gun and had begun to cover Tag as he lay like a log on the driveway. I thought I saw Maria smile. After a cold, white eternity she lowered her gun with an almost serene expression. “This is enough,” she said.

Fritz pushed me aside and rushed toward her to take the weapon.

He took it away somewhere, then returned to us. John lay unmoving on the ground; his wife stood unmoving above him.

“Let's go to the convent and call an ambulance,” I turned to say to one of the sisters. They were gone. “I guess they're one step ahead of me. You okay with her, Fritz?”

Fritz nodded, a curious expression on his face. I ran to the door, threw down the cocaine and the cross, and knocked with the huge knocker until Sister Moira stood on the threshold, looking half asleep.

“Did the others tell you? Are they calling the police?” I asked.

“What others?” she said.

“The other nuns. I saw them a moment ago. Mr. Taglieri has been shot, by his wife. She killed Sister Joanna. My brother is holding her. We need to call the police, an ambulance,” I babbled.

She stepped to the side and motioned me in. I ran to the phone and called 911, and found Sister Moira watching me. “Madeline,” she said quietly when I hung up, “I have something to tell you. I am the only sister here tonight. Father Fahey and I thought it best to relocate the others until this was cleared up. What with Sister Francis's death, and—”

“What do you mean? I saw—” When I thought back, I wasn't sure what I'd seen. Could it have been snowflakes, or perhaps my own need for a rescuer that caused me to see those white shapes? “Well, never mind; I'm just seeing things, but the police are on their way.”

“Madeline.” She looked at me with glowing eyes; even her skin seemed translucent. The light was playing tricks on me this evening. “You saw her. It was Joanna, I know it. I think I knew this all along, that she would come at the end.”

“Oh.” I didn't know what to say, how to tell her I didn't believe in ghosts. “Well, I need to get outside.” I felt suddenly sad, burdened by guilt and disappointment, perhaps, that Sister Moira wasn't right.

She followed me, smiling. Nothing I said was going to dissuade her. At the door was the bag of cocaine, and the cross with which I'd pounded my way through to the ice, and to the truth. I left the drugs there for the police, but I took up the cross. I walked to the pond, where I put it into its rightful place.

Chapter Fifteen

The police came
and took our statements. Fritz was in his element. He'd been in on a bust; he'd seen a murderess, watched a crime committed, brought someone to justice. And, I had to admit, he showed a great deal of character. We held each other's hands while we talked to the police, and I escaped at one point to use my cell phone to call Jack, and to tell him that we'd be home soon. He sounded disappointed and wanted to know where I was. I knew it would be hard to explain, why I'd chosen the convent over him, after that beautiful song, that lovely tribute. And in all honesty, it probably could have waited until the next day. Fritz saw me struggling and took the phone from me; he said, “Jack, I'm with Madeline. She just did something really cool, man, you'll be very proud of her. Just like she's proud of you. Yeah, we'll talk to you later.” He hung up, and I gave him a grateful glance.

We heard the police Mirandizing Maria Taglieri. Her husband had been taken away, alive, but we weren't sure if he would stay that way. Maria, despite her legal warnings, couldn't seem to stop talking, now that she had all this attention. “I always loved him,” she said to the cop who was cuffing her hands. “I loved him more than life itself, but I warned him when we married never to betray me. And I thought he hadn't; I thought he'd been tempted by a seductress and resisted her.”