The Son, The Sudarium Trilogy - Book Two (21 page)

He kept clicking. The cliffs above the Playa de Poo appeared, where the two of them had clutched one another on the edge of the dizzying void. Then the tumble in the grass, when they’d first kissed. Click. A close up of him. Click. Him again, but he couldn’t identify the location. She was obviously taking pictures, when he was unaware. Click. He was back in Oviedo. In the plaza the day of his arrival. He was looking up at the cathedral tower. He paused, confused. How was that possible? He hadn’t met Claudia yet. Had she captured him in the picture by sheer chance?

His heart began to beat faster. There he was outside the hotel in Oviedo. And then in the airport terminal in Madrid. His vision blurred and he had to look twice before he could make out the next photo. It was of the Plaza de Armas.
In Mexico
! His mind grasped futilely for an explanation. But picture after picture now showed him in Queretaro. Talking with Dr. Johanson and Judith. Eating at the Hotel Santa Rosa. How could that possibly be, unless Claudia had been in Mexico all that time, too? Unless Claudia was one of them.

His parents’ warning came back to him, loud and ominous. “Disassociate yourself immediately,” they had said.

Mano grabbed for his backpack and tossed Claudia’s camera in it. Then he threw some bills on the restaurant table and took off in the opposite direction that Claudia had gone. The waiter was yelling after him and holding Claudia’s backpack up in the air, thinking Mano had left it behind.

Ignoring him, Mano ducked into the shade of the colonnade and did exactly what his parents had ordered. He disappeared.

2:42

“The shop’s okay,” Jimmy reported, after he’d managed to fight his way through the crowd and slip through the front door. “Someone sprayed-painted graffiti on the front door, though.”

“What’s it say?” Hannah asked.

“Like a Thief in the Night!!!”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s a quote from Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians about the second coming. He says that the Lord shall come ‘Like a thief in the night.’ Meaning no one will be ready when the final destruction begins. It will be too late to save ourselves.”

“How terrible!”

“Just another crackpot. Don’t think about it,” Jimmy reassured her. “I painted over it. That’s why I took so long.” He had always tried to shield his family from the violence that was never too far away in this land. He didn’t want them to be afraid. He would be afraid for them.

The ringing of the telephone broke the mood. Normally, Hannah had to plead for someone to pick up the phone. Now everybody automatically ran to the answering machine and listened for the message, hoping it would be a call from Mano, although so far it had been an unending series of cranks with their doomsday messages, not unlike the one that had just appeared on the door of the shop. The answering machine clicked on, inviting the caller in Spanish to leave a message. Then a beep, followed by the fumbling voice of someone who wasn’t sure if he’d dialed the right number. “Um…Jimmy? … Is this the house of James Wilde…It’s his brother calling. His brother, Billy…”

Jimmy grabbed the receiver off the hook. “Billy! It’s Jimmy. You got the right number. We’ve just been screening calls lately… How are things?”

“Fine, fine. And you? How’s the family?”

“Everybody’s fine here, too. Thanks for asking.”

“Look, Jimmy. I don’t want to beat around the bush. Is Manning there with you?”

“No. Not right now. Why?”

“Will he be back soon? I need to talk to him.”

“To be honest, Billy, I don’t know when he’ll return. What’s so urgent?”

Hannah put her ear closer to Jimmy’s in an attempt to hear what was being said. “What’s he want?” she whispered to her husband. Jimmy held up a hand, as a signal for quiet.

“Well, is he there in Mexico with you?” Billy asked.

“No…He’s traveling.”

“Where exactly?”

“I’m really not sure.”

“Oh, boy!” Billy sighed. “Then we have a problem!”

Jimmy gestured for Little Jimmy to bring him a chair. Something told him this was news he didn’t want to hear standing up. “So exactly what’s up, Billy?”

Billy explained about the fire across the street and the three charred female corpses, two of them nurses apparently, that had been found in the ashes. “One of them had a photograph of Manning clutched in her hand.”

“Manning? Are you sure it was him?”

“Positive.”

“How did it get there?”

“That’s what I’d like to know. It’s a crime scene, Jimmy. And one of the few clues right now is a photograph of your son. That’s why I gotta find him.”

“What are the police planning to do?”

Billy took in a deep breath. This conversation was proving harder than he had expected. It was his little brother he was talking to, after all, not some deadbeat suspect. “Nothing for the time being. Look, Jimmy. I have the picture. No one knows about it, but me. I could get myself busted for altering a crime scene. That’s why I was hoping Manning would have some explanation. Because, frankly, this is the sort of thing crazed killers do, Jimmy. Leave their signature behind.”

The words burned, as if they’d been stamped on his brain with a branding iron. “Are you suggesting my son is a killer?”

“Calm down, Jimmy. All I want to know is why would a nurse in Lowell, Massachusetts die with a picture of your son in her hand?”

“You’re asking me the impossible. Who are these people anyway?”

“The house belonged to a sick old lady who needed care 24 hours a day. Mrs. Anderson. Olga Anderson. She lived kitty corner across the street from us. You met the daughter, Claudia.”

“I did?”

“At ma’s funeral, last year. Pretty girl. Blond. I saw you talking to her.”

Jimmy had to search his memory. There had been so many mourners at the funeral that he hadn’t seen in years. It was the first time he’d ventured back to the States after fleeing to Mexico. There were quite a few young people present - mostly friends of his nieces and nephews making the obligatory appearance. But now he remembered. She was quite striking-looking, it was true. And he recalled the awkward conversation they’d had. The girl kept pressing him for information about where he lived. “Everyone seems so happy to see you,” she’d said. “I guess you’ve been away for a while.” Jimmy had made up some story about traveling a lot and having lived in many different countries.

“Which ones?” she said brightly.

“Too many to count.”

“You were a priest once, correct?” she’d asked, looking him directly in the eyes. That was one subject not even his closest relatives brought up.

“Yes, very briefly,” he had replied, thanked her for coming and then excused himself. But he remembered that for the rest of the day, every time he caught sight of her, she was watching him intensely.

The funeral, Winona St., the crush of his mother’s friends, it was all coming back into focus. “So tell me more about these people across the street.”

“Not a whole helluva lot to tell. The mother had been sick these past few years. Very religious. Apparently went to church every day before she became bedridden. Used to sit in the back of the church and mutter strange things. She once cried out something about the devil being among us. People talked about that for months.”

“And the daughter? This Claudia? How is she taking it?”

“Don’t know. We haven’t seen her on the street for quite a while. In fact, the funeral was probably the last time. We were unable to locate her at first. But then the station got a call from her yesterday, worried because she couldn’t get through to her mother. She should be arriving today. Apparently, she was traveling in Europe.”

All at once a premonition gripped Jimmy. Johanson had talked to him in the shop of a beautiful young woman, pursuing Mano. What were his words? “She does not have his best interests at heart.”

“Where in Europe?”

“I think they said Spain,” Billy replied.

“Spain! Of course! Where else?” Jimmy said, half to himself.

Billy interrupted his speculations. “Listen, Jimmy. There have been too many secrets in this family of ours for too many years. I’ve never pried before. I figured your life was your own. But this is not just about you and Hannah and Manning. A picture of
my
nephew has been found at the scene of what may be a murder just across the street. Probably a triple murder. Perhaps it’s time you let me in on a few things.”

Jimmy glanced at Teresa and Little Jimmy. Their faces were drained of all color. “You guys, your mother and I going to finish up this conversation in the bedroom.”

Hannah closed the bedroom door behind them and picked up the extension phone.

“Billy? We’re both on. Okay, no more secrets.”

After they hung up, Jimmy walked out into the garden and gazed up at the clear blue sky over the blindingly white walls of the house. The sky was what he’d always liked best about Querétaro. Its vastness. So much bigger than the puny earth it covered. To look at the Querétaro sky was to believe all was well with the world. But now he felt as if he were treading quicksand and no longer knew where solid ground lay.

Hannah came up beside him. “I was about to tell you when the phone rang that while you were out, I called Teri. In Fall River.”

“She’s still there? Why Teri?”

“I thought Mano might need someplace safe, someplace where we knew we could find him.”

“What did she say?”

“That he’d be welcome.”

Jimmy shook his head ruefully. “That’s kind of her. But it doesn’t look like Massachusetts is the best place for him right now.”

“I already had Teresa e-mail him the address.”

“Why didn’t you wait until I got back?”

“You were gone so long and, I don’t know, it was so comforting talking to Teri again. Once I hung up, I just told Teresa to do it.” She bit her lower lip to keep from crying. Like a child caught red-handed. “I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s okay, it’s okay. We’ll just send Mano another message right away, telling him to avoid Teri’s place for the time being, in the event he ever picks these messages up.”

“It’s too late. He already has.”

“You got word from him? What’s did he say?”

“Nothing. Just two words: ‘Got it.’ He didn’t even sign his name.”

2:43

The cabdriver pulled off the interstate and entered a labyrinth of drab streets, linking the lower-class neighborhoods of Fall River, when Mano saw the sign glowing through the evening drizzle. It was a throwback to another era. The Blue Dawn Diner, it announced in letters that had once been cobalt blue, but which time had long since stripped of their color. The rays of a rising sun flashed regularly to attract the passing motorist, but time had taken its toll here, as well. The sun now looked like the eye of a winking chorus girl, with absurdly long lashes.

“Stop,” Mano called out to the driver. “You can let me out here in the parking lot.”

“You’re still a ways from Leverette Street.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve changed my mind.”

“Your call, buddy.”

Mano paid the driver and looked up at the sign with wonder in his eyes. Then he walked around the parking lot, before putting his backpack down and studied the diner itself. It was just as his mother had described it to him. Inside, a couple of brown-uniformed waitresses scurried about to take care of the evening crowd. He tried to imagine his mother as one of them, a girl of 19, younger than he was right now. Just a week ago, he learned that the decision that had brought him into the world had been made in a back booth of this diner, when his mother had seen a newspaper ad, looking for surrogate mothers. Her parents had been long dead and she said she’d felt trapped in Fall River, living with her aunt and uncle. Becoming a surrogate mother was a way out. But there was more to it than that. She felt “guided” – that was the exact word she’d used, “guided”- by the newspaper ad. She’d be helping a couple to have a family, while she herself would be gaining her freedom. Ironically, it hadn’t turned out that way, but the innocent decision had shaped the rest of her life.

It was hard to reconcile the image of a young, lost girl with the strong confident woman she’d become. Standing in the rain, letting his thoughts drift, he wondered if she ever had moments of regret.

The spring nights were still chilly in this part of the country. He pulled his jacket around him, walked closer and peered through one of the windows. It was like an Edward Hopper painting come to life. In a universe of fast-food emporiums, it was difficult to believe these places still existed. The clatter of silverware and the buzz of conversation came through the windows. How much longer before it would become a thing of the past? Torn down for something newer, more impersonal, institutionalized. He realized the Blue Dawn Diner meant more to him than the Camara Santa and stirred more feelings in his soul that the holy cloth itself. This place was attached to someone he loved, someone who had loved him in ways he was just beginning to understand. It was, in its way, a relic, halfway to oblivion. But no one would protect it, as they had the Camara Santa, or claim that its utensils, the pots and pans and dishes, were anything but disposable junk. Sooner than later, it would be no more.

“Manning?”

He turned sharply, as if someone had jolted him out of a dream. Framed in the doorway was a middle-aged waitress with red hair piled on top of her head. “I saw you out there and something told me you just might be Manning Wilde. Am I right?”

Mano didn’t know whether to answer the lady or run from her.

“I’m Teri. Teri Rizzo. Your mother’s friend.”

“Oh, hello.”

“Well, you’re not going to stand out there in the wet, like a duck, are you? Why don’t you come in and get dried off. You hungry? I’ll bet you’re hungry. Great big thing like you. Let me rustle up something for you to eat.”

There were only a few customers left, dawdling over their coffee and postponing the moment when they had to go back out in the rain. Teri showed Mano to a booth in the back, told him to take off his jacket and shake the water off it and she’d be back “in a jiff” with the hamburger special.

“Thank you,” he said, tentatively.

“Oh, there’s nothing special about it. Don’t want to mislead you. But it’s warm and it’ll stick to your insides.” And off she raced to the kitchen, as if she were in competition with a stopwatch.

So this was Teri, he thought!

There were only two customers left, when she was finally able to sit down in the booth with him. “The last time I saw you, you were two weeks old. You’ve put on weight since then. Don’t worry. So have I! It was the last time I saw your parents, too. I always wished I was able to track them down, pay a visit, wherever they were. But they were pretty good at covering their tracks and, you know, there was always another hamburger special on the grill. Well, what do they say? You wait long enough and the mountain will come to Mohammed!”

“Thanks for having me, Teri. I appreciate the hospitality.”

“My place ain’t no palace. Wait til you see it, before you thank me. But I don’t think it will occur to anyone to look for you there.”

“Hamburger’s good,” he said, finishing it off.

“No it isn’t. It’s the same old crap we’ve been serving here for twenty-five years. But folks seem to come back for more.”

Mano grew serious. “Did you know them back them, Teri? These crazy people? The ones who tricked my mother?”

Teri gave it some thought. “I’m not sure ‘know them’ is how I’d put it. What do you call people you’ve never had a conversation with, but who tried to kill you? Twice! Psycho acquaintances? I never knew the full extent of it until your mother called. Hannah, wow! She’s something, all right.” She let out a sigh of admiration, combined with a raspy laugh. “Probably the most interesting person I’ve ever known.” She was quiet for a moment as she took in Mano, “But I got a feeling you might be taking over that crown real soon.”

She glanced over his shoulder at a couple that was getting up from the table. “Thank God, they’re finally leaving. We can go in a few minutes. Let me just cart these dishes to the kitchen.” She paused. “You know we bussed a lot of dishes in our day, your mother and me.”

When she returned from the kitchen, she’d put a coat over her uniform. “Your jacket all dried out now? Gawd, your mother’d never forgive me if you came down with a cold.” She flicked out the overhead lights. And for an instant, in the dimness, Mano could see the young woman Teri had been.

Teri busied herself in the kitchen, washing up dishes that had sat in the sink for a couple of days, while Mano talked to his parents on the telephone. There wasn’t a lot of space in the cramped second floor apartment, but Teri figured that the rattle of dishes and the splash of running water would at least give Mano the illusion that she wasn’t eavesdropping. “What a thing to happen!” she thought. After all these years to have Hannah’s grown-up child in her own home. And, the funny thing was it couldn’t have seemed more natural. As if she were a neighbor who’d watched him grow up. All the years in-between had been erased by Hannah’s phone call. Time! Go figure, she mumbled to herself, as she scraped dried egg from a frying pan.

He was pacing the living room. Bits and pieces of conversation reached the kitchen. “I’ll go see him, Dad. I promise,” she heard Mano say. Then after a long pause, “Well it doesn’t seem wise for me to be anywhere right now, does it?” Another long pause. “But I
want
to go to Lowell. So tell Uncle Billy I’ll see him tomorrow.”

Teri was wiping her hands on an apron, when Mano hung up the phone and came into the kitchen. “Well,” she said. “That ought to take care of the dishes for at least a week. Would you like something? Coffee, tea, diet prune juice? I know, I’ve got some leftover chocolate cake to die for. Better you should eat it than me, although I could probably be persuaded to join you.”

“They told me I can’t go home,” Mano said plainly. He had the look of a little boy who’d just lost his mother in the supermarket. “All I wanted to do was go home.”

“Aw, honey, it’s just until all this fuss dies down,” Teri said as cheerfully as she could.

“But what if it never stops? What if it’s one thing after another? Nobody seems to know how many of these people are out there. And if something like what my father just described could happen in Lowell, then anything can happen anywhere. It will never stop.”

He felt the black planet descending on him again, only this time he feared he wouldn’t wake up in time and it would actually crush him.

Teri placed the chocolate cake in front of him. “Hon, everything peters out eventually. Scandal. Triumph. Disaster. I mean, people have very short attention spans.”

“Not when it comes to this story. It hasn’t gone away for two thousand years.”

Teri didn’t have an answer to that. They’d talked about the “crazy people,” but this was the first mention, she realized, of their beliefs.

“Come on, don’t let that chocolate cake go to waste,” was all she could muster.

“My Dad said there is an Internet site. Have you seen it?”

“Yes. That’s how I knew right away it was you outside the diner.” No sooner had she spoken than she cursed inwardly herself for saying the wrong thing. The exposure was what frightened him. “What I mean is, knowing there was a possibility you might be visiting, I watched it a couple of times. So I’d recognize you. It’s just a lot of malarkey.”

“May I see it please?”

Jimmy had already described it to him, but the shock of seeing his own face linked to the prophetic words
HE WALKS THE EARTH
cut his breath short. This was everything the priest in Oviedo had warned him about. He knew immediately that Claudia had taken the photographs. He felt nauseous. Teri recognized his pain, but she suppressed the instinct to reach out and hold his hand.

Before turning off the computer, Mano noticed a link at the bottom of the site. Up popped an article from a local paper in Oviedo, La Nueva Espana. It featured a photograph of him in the cathedral. Would every sighting of him be recorded on the Internet, from now on? Would his life ever be his own? Just to the right of him in the photograph, mostly cropped out, was Claudia. He recognized her white blouse and the rings on her hand and was surprised to find how much he missed her. Or at least the feeling of freedom he had felt in her company. He clicked off the computer and pushed aside the uneaten piece of cake.

“Tell me about them,” he said to Teri.

“I told you. I hardly knew those people. They were ruthless.”

“No, my parents. What were they like back then? Before all this began.”

“Well, it’s been a long time, Where to start?” She gestured for him to sit down at the kitchen table, while she gathered her thoughts. “Hannah was…always different, her own person. She just didn’t know it. Hell, I didn’t know it, either. She didn’t have many friends. Looking back, I’d say I was the only one. I was always trying to get her to fix herself up. Put on make-up. You know, girly things. But she wasn’t interested. It seems kind of silly now. Stupid and inconsequential.” Instinctively, her hand went to her own face. “I still probably use too much of that crap myself. But as it turned out, Hannah always knew what was right for herself - the decision to have you, then the decision to save you from … them. I’ve never met another person so unwavering in the belief of what she was doing. These were huge, life-changing decisions. And she was making them all by herself. There sure as hell was no roadmap for where she was going, but she always knew which fork in the road to take. And I can get lost just going to the supermarket! I was worried for her constantly, panicked is more like it …I just
look
like Superwoman.”

Mano smiled. Teri was resolutely middle-aged, with all the wrinkles and sags to go with it, but it was easy for him to imagine a time when she turned the heads of the truckers in the Blue Dawn Diner.

“And my father?”

“Father Jimmy? Him I didn’t know as well. Mostly through your mother’s eyes. The first time she told me about him, I knew what she was feeling, although she denied it. Truth is, she probably didn’t realize it herself. But when she mentioned his name, she glowed. Your father was her first and only love. Not many can say that.”

The words hung in the kitchen, while Teri blinked away the mist in her eyes. “There was just one time when I was alone with Jimmy. He and I were sitting in his car, trying to figure out how to rescue your mother from the clutches of these people. They’d kidnapped her. Well, it was you they wanted, even though you weren’t going to be born for another few days. As we waited for the right moment, we talked. I asked him if he was sure we were doing the right thing. And he said ‘yes’ with complete certainty. ‘God will guide us.’ But he said it more like he was talking to himself, as if he were listening to some inner voice. Of course, I had no inkling of his plan for you and Hannah. I asked him if a priest should even be involved in this sort of thing. I mean, maybe we should have been calling the police. And he said, no, that he had discussed it all with the monsignor in his church. What was his name? Gallagher! Monsignor Gallagher. Hannah used to tell me about him, too. I can’t believe I remembered him. I’m like an Alzheimer patient. Damned if I can tell you what happened last Friday, but I can recall every detail from twenty years ago.”

She pondered the implications of her observation. “Makes me wonder if anything important happened yesterday! But if so I suppose somebody would have bothered to inform me!” She threw off the thought with a laugh. “Anyway, I was surprised that the monsignor knew as much as he did. But Jimmy explained, ‘He’s my confessor. I tell him everything.’ Then he said something that I’ve never forgotten. Just before Jimmy left to get Hannah, the monsignor said to him, ‘Most of us lead very ordinary lives, but you have been called upon to do something of significance.’ Between us, I think that ‘something of significance’ turned out to be very different from what Monsignor Gallagher envisioned. But you know, sometimes people put you on the right track without knowing it. And that’s what the monsignor did for your father. He gave him the conviction to do what he did.