Mending the Moon (12 page)

Carl gives William the number of a colleague, a good criminal attorney. “Just in case,” he says. “I hope to God you won't need this.”

Friday afternoon, the FBI calls. The Cabo police contacted the attaché in Mexico City, who has formally requested FBI assistance.

Friday evening, the FBI visits. They ask for a DNA sample: strictly routine, they're collecting DNA samples from everyone who was at the resort then, and of course there's nothing to worry about if he had nothing to do with the crime.

Percy begins to cry. They ask why he left the resort when everyone was asked to stay, and he says he panicked. He was scared. He wanted to come home. That's all.

This time, Anna doesn't believe him. This time, the words sound too rehearsed, although the tears clearly aren't.

“Percy,” William says, “give them a sample.”

Anna will remember how Percy looked at his father and then at her, pleading, and she will think later that this is when she knew, knew for sure even though she wouldn't let herself know, because why would he balk if he were innocent?

He gives them the sample, a cheek swab. How could he not give it?

“How long,” William asks, clearing his throat, “will the test take?”

Five to ten days, the agents say. Strictly routine. If you think of anything we need to know, call us. They give Percy their card. They leave.

Anna and William go to bed. When they wake up the next morning, Saturday, Percy and the dog are out. It's still raining. Percy comes back more quickly this time, without Starbucks.

Life becomes an echo of normal again, except that Percy wakes up unusually early every day. When he's not home, Anna pores over news stories about Melinda Soto. She learns that Melinda was a librarian who led book groups and loved to garden and had a son, just a little younger than Percy, adopted from Guatemala. She learns that Melinda was active in her church, was an avid amateur geologist and astronomer, volunteered at the local food bank. She stares at photographs of Melinda, an angular woman with long blond hair, graying at the roots, and many laugh lines. In the photos she's wearing jeans, fleece, hand-knit sweaters. She looks like a Seattleite, a liberal tree-hugger, someone who could be one of their neighbors.

William doesn't want to know anything about Melinda. He buries himself in work. When Percy's home, he doesn't want to know anything about Melinda, either, and the expression of panic and anguish that contorts his face whenever Anna even mentions Melinda's name only deepens Anna's dread and certainty.

Later, Anna will wonder why Percy didn't flee. She will go back over those days as carefully as a detective combing a crime scene, looking for shreds of evidence. She will remember small kindnesses on Percy's part, an uncharacteristic “I love you” as she got into the car one day. She will remember that he didn't work on his B-school essay, which had obsessed him before he left for Mexico. She will remember that he spent hours lying on the living room floor, his head pillowed on Bart's stomach, and that several times she caught him standing in the center of a room or hallway, staring into space.

She will ask herself what she could, or should, have known, and what she could, or should, have done.

The Saturday morning of Melinda Soto's funeral, a week and a day after Percy's return home, Anna wakes up at dawn. For once, it isn't raining. She rises, careful not to wake William, and goes into the kitchen to make coffee. She wonders if she will catch Percy still at home, for once.

Percy isn't in the house. Bart isn't in the house. The leash is off its hook.

Anna, with a sigh, pours her coffee and sits down in the kitchen to wait for him. This will be a longer walk, since the weather's better.

When William wakes up an hour later, Percy isn't back.

An hour after that, he still isn't back.

At lunchtime, he isn't back.

At one o'clock, a young woman who introduces herself as Karen rings their doorbell. Karen has a long braid and a flowered backpack, and Bart is with her. The dog was tied to a tree at Clarke Beach, Karen says. The dog was howling. I saw him there and then a few hours later he was still there, and I thought something was wrong. This is the right address on the tags, right? This is your dog?

At five o'clock, the police will find Percy's body in the water, pockets weighted with stones.

There is no note. There are no explanations. But the DNA is a match, and Melinda Soto's murder is officially solved.

*   *   *

An American. Another American. Dear Lord, how is Jeremy going to deal with this? For his sake, Rosemary wishes the murderer had been any other nationality: Mexican, Swedish, Canadian. But she can't make it so by wishing.

Crouched in her pew, she weeps: for Melinda, for the monster who killed Melinda and has now, according to Officer Zebrowski, killed himself, for the monster's family and friends—she can't imagine what they must be going through—and for Walter, who is mixed in with all her tears. Whatever else she cries for now, she also cries for him.

She knows that if she let herself, she could cry for days. But she has a job to do, one that has always steadied her. And so when the time comes for communion, she dries her tears, puts aside her grief, and carefully carries the chalice to her station at the rear of the sanctuary. Glen Arbuthnot, a priest from another parish, is serving the bread.

For all the bickering and petty politics and other nonsense that happens in every parish, Rosemary has always seen the church as a refuge, as a ship sheltering its passengers from the storms outside, taking on any castaway willing to grab the life buoys tossed from the deck. She can't count how often she's heard the cliché comparing the Episcopal Church to a stool with three legs: Scripture, Tradition, and Reason. It's a boring metaphor. Stools aren't very dynamic. They don't go anywhere.

Ships go on voyages. They navigate storms and reefs, witness dawns and sunsets and schools of leaping dolphins. They seek safe harbors, but always set out into the wide, wild world again, for what use is a ship that only stays at dock? They hail other vessels, exchange news, help crews who need supplies or directions. They rove and rescue.

Tradition is the body of the boat. Scripture is its sails, a patchwork of translations and commentaries. Reason is the captain at the wheel, guiding the tiller; Christ is the compass. Of course the boat is a sailboat, not a motorboat, for it has to travel where the Spirit blows. But without reason at the helm, it will founder.

Of all the planks forming the hull and decks, the sacraments are the most enduring and important, whatever sandings and new coats of paint or varnish they receive over the years. Rosemary has watched Prayer Books come and go, has listened to debates over the merits of Rite I versus Rite II, has endured contemporary services featuring kazoos and bongo drums. But Communion is constant: the Body and Blood, the gift of inclusion, the food for the journey.

She smells the bread now, and smiles. Other parishes serve wafers, which Hen calls “fish food,” but St. Phil's prides itself on real bread, homemade by parishioners. The wine is homemade, too, and packs more than the usual punch. Rosemary hopes no one expected grape juice.

A surprising number of people come to her station; many are strangers. Maybe Hen's speech about universal welcome found some takers. “Here is the Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.” Rosemary loves saying the phrase, loves looking people in the eyes while they either drink from the chalice or dip their bread into it. She tries to see each of them as Christ. Usually it works.

There are, of course, the standard technical difficulties. Some people won't take the chalice themselves, which means that Rosemary has to raise it to their mouths and tip it. Other people intinct but then lose half their bread in the wine, which becomes a sea of bobbing purple crumbs. Hen keeps a spoon at the altar to fish breadcrumbs out of the chalice, but that's yards away. And because this is a funeral, most of the women wear lipstick, which leaves smudges on the rim of the chalice. Chalice bearers carry linen napkins—the technical name is a purificator, but to Rosemary that sounds too much like a futuristic food processor—and are trained to serve, wipe the rim, rotate the chalice a few degrees, and serve again. But today the napkin isn't cutting it. She needs steel wool.

The experience doesn't feel very sacred.

Nor do most of the faces in front of her reflect the gentle vulnerability she usually sees. Sunday communion is an unhurried affair, and Rosemary can usually exchange eye contact and smiles with the people she serves, who often squeeze her hand or whisper “thank you” after their Amen. She loves serving people she loves.

This is more like serving at McDonald's. Her fingers are sore from scrubbing away lipstick, and she desperately needs more wine on top of the breadcrumbs. She sees a deacon circulating to the stations with a pitcher, refilling chalices, but Rosemary's station is last. The line of people in front of her seems distracted and impatient. They don't look at her when they take the wine. Some take it like medicine, or punishment. Too few say Amen.

Two women in line are talking, a hissed conversation. Rosemary can only make out a few words. “Glad he's dead, the bastard … kill him myself.” She glances at Glen, whose face is stony. A moment later, his expression softens again as he serves the next person in line.

“This is the Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven.”

The whisperers creep forward, their conversation more audible now. “That drunk was on the right track,” one of them says. “Jeremy should sue the parents. Civil damages. Get something, anyway.”

Al Antonuccio, who's on the vestry, is in front of them in line. He and Rosemary exchange a glance, and then he turns to the woman behind him. “Excuse me, ladies, but Eucharist is a sacred occasion even when it's not happening at a funeral. Would you mind saving your conversation for later?”

They glower at him, but stop talking. Al steps forward, receives the bread from Glen, and then intincts in Rosemary's chalice. The first woman is receiving the bread. As Al moves away from the communion station, her friend mutters to his back, “Fuck you.”

The first woman, standing in front of Rosemary now, stifles a laugh. She's probably one of the people who laughed at the intruder, too. Rosemary gapes, frozen, almost too shocked to be angry. The woman looks at her, shrugs, dips her bread in the chalice before Rosemary has gathered her wits enough to say anything, and strolls away.

Ms. Fuck You is standing in front of Glen, who frowns down at her. Rosemary watches, fascinated. Will he refuse to serve her?

She's heard clergy discuss the matter. Is there ever a situation when it's appropriate for a priest to withhold the sacrament? Most of the priests she knows—a liberal lot, to be sure—take Hen's approach to the subject. Jesus fed Judas; therefore we feed everyone.

Rosemary heard a story once about a priest in the south, during the 1960s, who one Sunday refused to serve any parishioners who belonged to the local all-white country club. He did it only once, to make a point, and returned to serving everyone the following Sunday. Rosemary has always wondered if any of his parishioners left the country club as a result, or if they only said nasty things about him when they gathered for golf or tennis. He was lucky his vestry didn't fire him.

She watches Glen and Ms. Fuck You. You have to serve her, Glen. Hen said so: this isn't your parish. And anyway, if you don't, MFU won't understand. She'll think it's because she cursed, and not because she was nasty or litigious or vengeful or immature or whatever your reasons are, and they might be something else entirely, except I'm pretty sure that the f-word isn't one of them. If you don't serve her, she's not going to get it. It will be wasted protest. And she's presumably a mourner, although I've never seen her before and have no idea how she knew Melinda. Library, probably.

Glen has evidently been chugging along on the same train of thought, or one on parallel tracks, because he emits a barely audible sigh and holds out a piece of bread. “This is the Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven.”

Ms. Fuck You takes it, and intincts, and goes to rejoin her friend. Rosemary can't tell from watching her if she feels any remorse or not.

*   *   *

Jeremy can't wait to get out of the sanctuary. Half an hour ago, he would have said it was actually kind of fun to listen to people talk about Mom during the service, especially when he knew her side of the story. She was incredibly annoyed by the woman with the zucchini, and he'd heard her making off-color jokes with VB on the phone. “I think she keeps them in her underwear drawer. She's obsessed with size.”

But the minute the cop made his announcement, all Jeremy wanted to do was race into the parish hall, or outside, and check the news on his iPhone. Percy Clark, the cop said. Another guest at the resort. Positive DNA match, and now he's drowned himself.

Percy Clark? Is this the Percy Mom talked to at the pool, the
CC
fan? Postcard Percy? It can't be the same guy, can it? But how many people named Percy could have been at the resort?

He wants to check his phone; he sees plenty of other people checking theirs. He wants to call the cops and get the full story. He wants to hit something. But instead he's trapped next to Hen in the back of the sanctuary, receiving condolences.

He's tired and hungry and hot, and he really needs to drink something and sit down, and he doesn't know most of these people. Nobody knows what to say. He doesn't know which are worse: the ones who look mournful, wring his hand, and whimper, “I'm so sorry for your loss,” or the ones who didn't get up to the mike and want to tell him long stories about his mother, or the ones—all men—who punch his arm and say, “Hey! The bastard's dead! Fantastic!” as if their favorite football team has just taken home a trophy.