Mortal Sin (2 page)

One more thing she and Sarah didn’t agree on. “You’re not fat, sugar,” her aunt had said, “you’re just built like me. Not an ounce of fat on you, just lots of womanly curves. All the Connelly women are built that way.”

Kit didn’t want womanly curves. She longed to be one of those wispy, delicate women like Jennifer Aniston, with a washboard tummy and tiny hands and feet. The kind of woman who disappeared when she turned around sideways. But it wasn’t ever going to happen. At sixteen, she was already five-foot-eight and wore a size nine shoe. A freaking Amazon.

On the other hand, there were certain advantages to being tall and full-figured. With the right clothes, the right makeup, the right hairdo, she could easily pass for eighteen. She could move into the city, get her own apartment, find a job. Maybe in one of the theaters. Cleaning bathrooms, selling popcorn, she didn’t care, as long as it was in the theater. Maybe, if she was lucky, she’d get a chance to audition for some bit part. Maybe, if she was really,
really
lucky, she’d get discovered.

Fueled by the sweet lure of freedom, Kit emptied her backpack onto the bed and took down the locked box she kept hidden in a dark corner of the closet. Inside was the cash she’d been saving. Guilt money. Daddy had dumped her like an unwanted litter of kittens, and his way of dealing with his guilty conscience was to send an elaborate card and a big check every time her birthday or a major holiday rolled around. In a year and a half, he’d called just once, but as long as the checks kept coming, he could continue to delude himself about being a good father. Kit pocketed the money, scrabbled around the bottom of the box and pulled out three joints in a plastic bag. She hid the joints in an inside zipper compartment of the backpack. From her dresser drawer, she scooped up underwear, socks, a few shirts, and shoved them into the bag. She added a couple pair of jeans and the black leather miniskirt Sarah detested, then crammed in her hair gel, her blow-dryer, and all her cosmetics.

Her gaze fell on the framed photo of Momma that sat atop her dresser. Kit crossed the room and picked it up. She’d been so young when Momma died, too young to understand why her mother was there one day and gone the next. Too young to understand Daddy’s perplexing explanation that Momma had gone home to be with Jesus. It had made no sense to a four-year-old who knew without a doubt that Momma would never have gone away and left her, not even to sit by Jesus on his heavenly throne. She’d been certain Daddy was mistaken, that she’d wake up the next morning to find Momma in the kitchen, frying bacon and eggs and humming an old Hank Williams tune.
I’m so lonesome I could cry
__

But Daddy had been right. Momma had never come back. Her mother had been gone for so long now that Kit barely remembered her, except for the silky blond hair and the clear, sweet voice that sang her to sleep every night. After Momma died, nobody ever sang her to sleep again.

She tucked the picture of her mother into the bag, between soft layers of clothing so the glass wouldn’t break, and plucked Freddy from his place of honor beside her pillow. Freddy had started life as a plush stuffed gorilla with thick, luxurious fur and bright black eyes. Now, his one remaining eye had lost its gleam, he had more bald patches than fur, and she was forever cramming his innards back into the split seam in his side.

But to Kit, he was still beautiful. During her years on the road with Daddy, she’d carted Freddy from Montgomery to Richmond, from Richmond to Tupelo, from Tupelo to Beaumont. Every time they’d packed up and moved yet again, he’d been the one solid, familiar thing in her life. They were best friends, forever friends. She couldn’t leave him behind.

She locked the house behind her and stood on the sidewalk, gazing one last time at that ugly blue facade.
Goodbye, good riddance, sayonara, arrivederci
. She would miss this place the way a dog misses fleas.

Only a handful of people rode the T. At this time of day, most everybody was headed in the opposite direction, away from Boston’s office towers and retail stores. As the train shuddered and rocked, she studied the blank, anonymous faces of her fellow passengers. Most of them looked bored and tired. Nobody showed an ounce of enthusiasm. Kit felt sorry for them, sorry because none of them was headed off to adventure and a new life the way she was.

She got off the train at State Street. When she emerged from the station into a cold winter dusk, the smell of roasted nuts hit her full in the face. Kit set down her backpack, pulled a five-dollar bill from her pocket, and bought a bag of peanuts from the vendor. Jostled and shoved by commuters rushing to catch the train, she stood on the sidewalk next to the pushcart and breathed in the ambiance of the city. This was more like it. This was where things happened. This was where she was meant to be.

Exhilarated, she spun around in a circle and bestowed her most dazzling smile on the peanut vendor. The young man returned the smile, and Kit knew, just
knew
, this was the happiest moment of her life. With the bag of peanuts clasped firmly in her hand, she shouldered her backpack, the vendor already forgotten. And without a single backward glance, she skipped away and melted into the bustling crowd.

March 2003

Boston, Massachusetts

The girl wore shiny black fuck-me shoes.

She hovered in a shadowy doorway on Essex Street, at the edge of Chinatown, between a dim sum palace and a fabric store displaying exotic oriental brocades behind its barred windows. Above the five-inch heels, her legs were bare, her dress an electric blue silk that stopped a half inch this side of indecent. Over it she wore a short white fake fur jacket that undoubtedly did little to keep out the cold. Her makeup had been troweled on in an unsuccessful attempt to make her appear sophisticated. Instead, she looked cold and tired and very young.

Clancy had spent the better part of an hour cruising the areas where girls habitually worked the streets: Park Square and Bay Village, Mass Ave and Kenmore Square, what was left of the Combat Zone. The night was bitter cold, and the pickings were slim. By this late hour, most of the working girls had given up the streets in favor of a bed somewhere, anywhere, as long as it was warm. Of the few that remained, most knew him by sight, knew what he was here for, and weren’t interested in what he had to offer.

They weren’t what he was looking for anyway, these girls with their hard faces and their strident voices and, more often than not, needle tracks running up the insides of their arms. It was the younger ones he sought, the vulnerable ones who still had a shred of innocence left, those who hadn’t yet been hardened by the reality of life on the streets. Sometimes it wasn’t too late for them. Sometimes he could still make a difference.

If he could get to them ahead of the predators.

Father Clancy Donovan believed things happened for a reason, and he was certain that God had put her in this particular place on this particular night expressly for him. He double-parked the car, the engine idling. When he opened the door and climbed out, the girl darted back into the shadows. He’d frightened her. It wasn’t standard procedure for a john to approach a working girl. Customers seldom left the safety and anonymity of their cars. In street parlance, that meant one of two things: he was either the law, or somebody out to do her no good.

He approached the doorway with slow, deliberate steps. Rubbing his hands together, he said casually, “Cold out tonight, isn’t it?”

Silence, He wondered if she spoke English. His Cantonese was rusty, but he’d picked up enough of it to get by during his years in the Far East. “I can help you,” he said in a pidgin singsong that sounded alien to his American ears. “Help you to leave the streets. My car is warm. We can sit inside and talk.”

He waited out the silence. Finally, the girl moved away from the wall and took a tentative step toward him and into the light. She was pretty, with a broad Asian face and wary dark eyes. Not a day over fifteen, she probably lived with four or five other girls in a roach-infested one-room apartment where the INS wouldn’t bother to track her down. In heavily accented English, she said, “You a cop?”

“No,” he said, switching back to English. “I’m a priest.
And if you’re ready to leave the streets, I can take you to a safe place.”

She looked him up and down, took in the knit hat and the wool coat, the jeans and the L.L. Bean boots. “You don’t look like no priest I ever seen.”

“Maybe not, but that’s what I am. Are you interested? It’s pretty cold out here.”

Again, she hesitated. “No hanky-panky?”

Sorrow and fury vied for top billing inside him, sorrow because this young girl believed the only thing of value she possessed lay between her legs, and fury because some man had taught her to believe it.

“No,” he said. “No hanky-panky.”

He saw it in the eyes of the little girl concealed behind the painted trollop: hope. Hope that there was something more in life than what she’d already found. She cast a furtive glance to the right, then the left, and took another step forward.

“Okay,” she said. “Then I come with you.”

Once the girl was settled into a clean, warm bed, he left Melody in charge of her. He always assigned a buddy to each new girl who entered Donovan House. It eased the transition, helped them feel less alone as they struggled to put together the pieces of their broken lives.

In the morning, he’d call Kate Miller’s office and set up an appointment for her. Any girl who entered the program was required to have a complete physical, one that included testing for drugs, HIV, and a host of other STDs. Most of them were carrying something when they came in. Most of them were using. But his rules were firm and unbendable: no sex, and no drugs. The first infraction brought a severe warning. With the second infraction, the girl was out the door.

Tough love. He could have used some of that himself when he was young and running wild on the streets of South
Boston. But at his house, there’d been nobody home to enforce any rules. More nights than not, he’d been called down to Rafferty’s at closing time to peel his mother off the bar, take her home, and pour her into bed. It was hard to act like a mother when you were too drunk to walk.

Outside the rectory walls, the wind howled. He poured himself a shot of Scotch, sat on the couch and clicked on the television. At this time of night, there wasn’t much on, mostly infomercials and old sitcoms. He settled on a John Wayne movie. It was either that or a
Leave it to Beaver
marathon on
Nick at Nite
. Elbows braced against his knees, he rolled the glass of Scotch between his palms and stared into its sparkling amber depths.

He spent a long time studying the contents of that glass. His mother’s drinking had ruined her life, had come close to ruining his. Yet here he sat, solitary in the black hours before dawn, slugging Scotch and wondering if he were following in her footsteps. Even if his mother hadn’t been a lush, he still had a lengthy and glorious tradition to live down to. The Irish were fond of their drink, and this wasn’t the first time in his life that the bottle had tempted him. After Meg died, he’d gone on a three-month bender.