The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors

by Jonathan Santlofer

  “No.” The pain almost bent her over. She was unaware until now of how the story had affected her.

  He nodded. “A grievous sin. Perhaps they still teach the fundaments in divinity school? You’ll have read Augustine on suicide?”

  “I might have missed that day,” Amanda began, struggling to lighten the mood, but his frown reminded her once more that levity was unwelcome. “Yes,” she murmured meekly. “I know that suicide is a sin.”

  His gray eyes held hers for a long moment. Then he turned away. “The peculiar part is that Wally denied that they ever in fact were intimate. He told anyone who would listen. He had stolen Terry away to protect her, not to defile her. That was his word, Miss Seaver. Defile.”

  “Protect her from what?”

  “Nobody believed the poor boy. The baby had his crooked eyebrows.” The thurifer touched his own forehead. “The Taite eyebrows. Very distinctive.” He was on his feet. “Same time tomorrow,” he said, and left her.

  VII

  Amanda dined that night at the home of a younger family in the congregation, Patsy and Lawrence Morrow. Although members of the darker nation, the Morrows lived not along the Gold Coast but in a small, nicely appointed town house in Georgetown. Lawrence was something important at the White House; Patsy was a congressional aide; the children were delightful, and spoiled. Three other couples were at dinner, along with a single man, obviously invited with matchmaking in mind, and just as obviously not interested in Amanda; nor, for that matter, interesting to her.

  He left early, pleading another engagement.

  Over dessert—a slightly soggy tiramisu—Amanda mentioned that she had met Christopher Taite, who had been filling her in on some of the recent history of the church.

  Silence around the table.

  “Which history is that, exactly?” asked Patsy, alarm in her eyes.

  “He didn’t scare you, did he?” murmured somebody else.

  “Are you sure he said Christopher?” demanded a third voice.

  Amanda was taken aback by the chorus of dubiety. She had hoped to discuss the murder from thirty years ago, not the bona fides of her informant.

  “Is there something I should know about him?” she asked.

  “There’s an old Trinity and St. Michael’s tradition,” said Lawrence Morrow, his tone thoughtful. “A new rector shows up. A few days later, Christopher Taite drops by to frighten him. Pardon me. Her. Nobody takes Mr. Taite seriously.”

  “Some people do,” said Patsy, glaring at her husband.

  “Three other rectors left,” Amanda objected. “Did he scare them all away?”

  “They were interim,” said Lawrence, before anyone could get a word in. Plainly he wanted to put an end to the topic. He was a lawyer, and had the lawyer’s precision with sophistry. “They were leaving anyway. Hence the word interim. Whereas you”—he was on his feet, signaling an end to the evening—“you, Mother Seaver, we hope will be around TSM for many decades to come.”

  The use of the honorific was meant to reassure. But as she said her goodbyes, nobody would meet her eyes.

  VIII

  Home was an apartment on Sixteenth Street, backing on Rock Creek Park, but Amanda decided not to return there. Not yet. Instead she drove up to the church. Although the building was shuttered and locked, a light burned, as always, in the spire. Exterior floodlights illuminated the facade on the street side.

  She let herself in through the garden entrance, shut off the alarm, flipped on the lights, headed for her office. She spent a moment examining the dented thurible, then pulled from the shelf two volumes of the church registry, immense leather-lined folios in which, by hand, deaths and births and other significant events were recorded. She found the year that Joshua Bauer had died, then the month, finally the week.

  Sure enough, there was the handwritten entry, in the beautiful script of Granville Dean, in those days the rector. Most of the names of the departed had a cause of death inked alongside, but not Bauer. He had been sixty-one when he passed away. In the margin was a small glyph, also handwritten, a cross, ornately drawn but turned at an angle, like the letter X. The symbol stirred a memory from divinity school.

  The angled cross was called a saltire, or crux decussata: sometimes known as a Saint Andrew’s cross because church tradition held that Andrew, the second Apostle to be called, had been martyred on one. Father Dean had been recording the murder without seeming to, sneaking it past whoever was reading over his shoulder.

  A new rector shows up, Lawrence Morrow had said. A few days later, Christopher Taite drops by to frighten him.

  She flipped the pages. One week later. Two.

  There it was.

  An eighteen-year-old dead “by his own hand.” A further notation: “Not cons. gr.” Amanda recalled the thurifer’s emphasis on the sin. In those days the Episcopal Church must have taken the rules very seriously, or at least this one did. Not consecrated ground, Father Dean’s brief note meant. The dead teenager could not be buried in the churchyard.

  “Christopher Wallace Taite,” the line in the ledger read.

  Known, she was sure, as Wally.

  Three hereditary thurifers named Christopher, and Wally, a suicide at eighteen, who never succeeded to the post. A ne’er-do-well. The black sheep of the family. Unlikely to have been chosen as thurifer of Trinity and St. Michael, even had he lived.

  But the church would not have left the succession to chance. There had to be another candidate: someone in training.

  And the congregation of today, when the national church had long resolved the issue, was unalterably opposed to women as priests.

  Not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offenses.

  Amanda took a flashlight from her desk and stepped out into the hall, then jumped against the wall because she heard the creak of footsteps. But she had locked the door behind her, so it had to be the building settling.

  Right. A hundred-fifty-year-old church built of solid stone, choosing just this moment to settle.

  She listened. No more creaking.

  Amanda took a moment to slow her breathing, reminding herself that the supernatural did not exist. There was only this life, this planet, this existence. The rest was repressive bunk.

  Fortified by her own denials, the priest made her careful way to the end of the hall and opened the heavy wooden door to the churchyard. In the darkness, nothing stirred. She clicked on the flashlight and tried to remember the path. She walked slowly, turning neither to the left nor to the right. The ghosts in the trees were only the night sounds of the material world. The watchful Heavens above were empty space. She recited this mantra, her desperate dying faith, as she reached the Taite family plot.

  There were the headstones.

  Not weighing our merits …

  She played the flashlight beam over the names, one by one. No Christopher Wallace Taite. Of course not. Wally was not buried in consecrated ground.

  But pardoning our offenses.

  The other grave she was looking for: The other one was there.

  For a moment Amanda was dizzy, the world shifting on its axis. She stumbled and found herself on her knees in front of the headstone. She scrambled up again, but her thoughts were whirling in twelve directions at once. Her doggedly materialist faith began to slip from her grasp. Meditate long enough on the Improbable, Professor Gyver used to say, and you will come to accept the Impossible.

  There had been two murders thirty years ago, not one; and the second, not the first, was the church’s dirty secret.

  IX

  At ten the next morning, she sat in the Lady Chapel, the 1928 Book of Common Prayer open on her lap. She was trying to memorize the traditional liturgy so that the deacons would stop looking askance as she read past their fingers. She felt, more than saw, Christopher Taite slip in. He settled beside her, so lightly the loose wooden pew never budged.

  “Are you staying?” he asked without preamble.

  “Staying where?”

  “
Here. At Trinity and St. Michael.” He sat very still in his tie and shirtsleeves. “I would imagine you suspect a conspiracy to force you out.”

  She shut the book, leaving one of the attached ribbons to hold her place. “If I leave,” she said, “you probably won’t visit me anymore.”

  He considered this. “Would you stay if I said I shall continue to visit?”

  “Will you?”

  He tapped a finger against his pale lips. “I doubt it. No. I’ve done my job, I think.”

  “I know what happened thirty years ago,” she said.

  “Please.”

  “Wally wasn’t the father of the baby, was he? It was his uncle. Another Christopher. The hereditary thurifer.” When he said nothing, Amanda continued. “That’s why Wally took Terry away. He was protecting her from one of the most powerful men in the church. And that’s why the church stopped using the incense, isn’t it? Not because Joshua Bauer was killed with the thurible. Because the hereditary thurifer had impregnated a teenager.”

  “She asked to be trained,” he said after a moment. “The church had never had a female thurifer.”

  “But Terry was your first female acolyte.”

  “Yes. And of course the national church was busily fighting about the same time over female priests. The earth was moving under our feet.” He stood up, walked over to the rack of thuribles, pulled out a modest-looking one. “Start small,” he advised. “A thurible of this size will hardly be noticed at first. Remember, the coals are the sin, and the incense is the balm. And the smoke—”

  “The prayers of repentance, rising to Heaven. I remember.”

  “It was a terrible temptation,” he said, still turning the golden vessel this way and that. “It was so terribly wrong, but, as St. Paul says, we are at every moment slaves to Christ or slaves to sin. And the thurifer was, for a time, slave to his sin. To desire. To the needs of the flesh. Theresa Bauer was very beautiful. She and the thurifer worked together closely. Still, he had no excuse for his behavior.”

  “But he let them blame his nephew.” A pause. “Your nephew.”

  “Yes. And then, when Wally killed himself—” He shook his head. “The families eventually learned the truth.” The thurifer’s voice was fainter, as if he was drifting from her. “I have tried to tell each of the interim rectors the story. None would listen. None would believe. Father Bishop succeeded Father Dean. He laughed at me. Father Greely was here for four years after Father Bishop died. He listened now and then, but never took me seriously. Father Dean, however—well, he was a man of true belief. He confessed me, you see. Gave me penance in the orthodox manner.”

  “But that didn’t help.”

  “It was too late. Scripture teaches the existence of the too-late repentance. Our Savior preached to the dead, but the orthodox teaching of the church is that they were not able through repentance to secure salvation. They learned the truth but could not act on it.”

  “That hardly seems fair.”

  “You forget yourself, Mother Seaver. It is not our place to judge the will of God.” He put the thurible back in its place, straightened, and seized her with those grave gray eyes. “You, Mother Seaver, are the seventh rector of Trinity and St. Michael, or, counting back to the beginning of Trinity Church, the eighteenth. The decisions are yours. Will you reflect on all that I have told you?”

  “I will,” she promised, and meant it.

  “Thank you,” he said gravely, and, for the last time, left her.

  X

  She opened the Prayer Book and, for a while, sat alone in the Lady Chapel. She considered visiting whatever Taites were left to check her conclusions, but there was no point; and besides, none of them attended TSM any longer. The rest of the congregation would tell her nothing, and contacting the authorities was out of the question.

  She was the rector. The decisions were hers.

  She decided to take a walk through the grounds of her church. In the bright morning sunlight, the birds sang noisily. Beyond the tumbledown wall, cars shuddered and honked and squealed. She heard playing children. The cemetery was utterly unthreatening. By trial and error she found the little bench, cracked in the middle and overgrown by weeds. The fountain was empty, clogged with years of vegetation. Too bad. She would have enjoyed this place of reflection.

  She picked her way along the unkempt path until she stood in front of the Taite family plot, as she had last night. There was the grave, nearly hidden by brush. The Improbable lay before her, lighting the way to the Impossible. Christopher Standish Taite, aged forty-four, date of his passing a year after Wally’s. No cause of death written in the ledger, no words of affection or praise carved into the tombstone.

  Of course not.

  But beside his name in the ledger Father Dean had inked a small St. Andrew’s Cross.

  Amanda wondered who had killed him. Terry’s family? The other Taites? Some unknown member of the church, determined to equalize the balance? The one thing she knew for sure was that the last hereditary thurifer had not taken his own life, or he would not be buried here. Trinity and St. Michael was a stickler for excluding suicides.

  Odd how one could grow so tangled in theology that justice became inverted. Wally rested in unhallowed ground. His uncle rested here.

  Uneasily.

  Repentant, but not seeking forgiveness; seeking instead to restore Trinity and St. Michael to what it had been before the wave of violence unleashed by his sin.

  Amanda understood what the suffering Christopher Standish Taite did not, that you could move only forward in time. The church could never be what it had been in his lifetime. It could only be something new. But the traditions would help. Of that she was now sure.

  She would have to find Wally’s grave. It should not be that hard. She would find his resting place and pray to God to have mercy on his soul. But that would come later.

  Amanda had carried the thurible from the Lady Chapel. She lit the coals, sprinkled incense from the boat, and murmured a blessing. She censed the graves before her. The cemetery was large, and the work would take her all year. No matter. She knelt in the grass, opened the book Christopher Taite had given her, and began chanting aloud the Litany for the Dead.

  Me & Mr. Rafferty

  LEE CHILD

  I CAN TELL what kind of night it was by where I wake up. If I’ve been good, I’m in bed. If I’ve been bad, I’m on the sofa. Good or bad, you understand, only in the conventional sense of the words. The moral sense. The legal sense. I’m always good in terms of performance. Always careful, always meticulous, always unbeatable. Let’s be clear about that. But let’s just say that some specific nighttime activities stress me more than others, tire me, waste me, leave me vulnerable to sudden collapse as soon as I step back into the sanctuary behind my own front door.

  This morning I wake up on the hallway floor.

  My face is pressed down on the carpet. I can taste its fibers on my lips. I need a cigarette. I open one eye, slowly, and move my eyeball, slowly, left and right, up and down, looking for what I need. But before we go on, let’s be clear: However haltingly you read these words, however generously you interpret the word slowly, however deep and 16-RPM and s-l-o-w your voice, however much you try to get into it, you are certain to be racing, to be galloping insanely fast, to be moving close to the fucking speed of light, compared to what is actually happening in terms of my ocular deployment. The part with the eyelid alone must have taken close to five minutes. The eyeball rotation, four points of the compass, at least five minutes each.

  A bad night.

  I am pretty sure I have a fresh pack of cigarettes on the low table in the living room. I concentrate hard in that direction. I see them. I am disappointed. Not a fresh pack. An almost-fresh pack. A pack, in fact, in the condition I like least: recently unwrapped, the crisp little cardboard lid raised up, and one cigarette missing from the front row. I hate that for two reasons: First, the pack looks violated. Like a dear, dear friend with a front tooth punched ou
t. Ugly. And second, however hard I try to prevent it, the sight sends me spiraling back to grade-school arithmetic: There are twenty cigarettes in a new pack, arranged in three rows, and twenty is not fucking divisible by three. I see a pack like that and instantly I am full of rage and paranoia: The tobacco companies are lying to me. Which, of course, they would. They have an accomplished track record in that department. For forty years I have been paying for twenty, and all along they have been supplying me with eighteen. Eighteen is divisible by three. As is twenty-one, but are you seriously suggesting the tobacco companies would supply more than a person pays for?

  So I lie and pant, but again, let’s be clear: The oldest, tiredest dog you ever saw sighs a hundred million times faster than I was panting. We’re talking glacial inhalations and exhalations. Whole species could spark and evolve and go extinct between each of my morning breaths.

  I had left cigarette butts at the scene. Two of them, Camels, close to but not actually mired in the spreading pool of blood. Deliberately, of course. I know exactly how the game is played. I’m not new to this. The police need the illusion of progress. Not actual progress, necessarily, but they need something to tell reporters, they need smug smiles and video of important things being carried away in small opaque evidence bags. So I play along. It’s in my interests to give them what they need. I give Mr. Rafferty things to smile about, and I’m absolutely sure he knows they’re gifts.

  But they’re useless. A cigarette smoked carefully in dry air retains almost no saliva. No DNA. No fingerprints, either. The paper is wrong, and most of it burns anyway, at a temperature close to two thousand degrees. So the gifts cost me nothing, and they give me the satisfaction of knowing I am playing my part in keeping the whole show on the road.

  I move the fingers of my right hand and make a claw and start to scrabble microscopically against the resistance of the rug. I have future events to plan: getting to my knees, standing upright, stripping, showering, dressing again. A long agenda, and many hours of work. No breakfast, of course. Long ago I decided that respect for minimum standards of propriety forbade eating after killing. I am hungry, make no mistake, but the promised cigarette will help with that. Plus coffee. I will make a pot and drink it all, and compare its thin fluidity to blood. Blood is less viscous than people think, especially when generated in the kind of volume that my work produces. It splashes and spatters and runs and drains. It is spectacular, which is the point: Obviously Mr. Rafferty does not want to work cases that are mundane, or trivial, or merely sordid. Mr. Rafferty wants a large canvas, and a large canvas is what I give him.