Like companions they lay side by side. Like companions who are strangers, thrown together in the same wreck. For a long time she could not move. Her eyelids fluttered weakly, she could not see. Sensation had obliterated her, in the aftermath of sensation there was nothing. Her heartbeat, that had madly accelerated, was slowed now, almost imperceptible. A match had flared into flame, the flame had touched her, exploded inside her, now the flame was extinguished, her body was numbed, she could barely lift her head. The soles of her bare feet seemed to burn as if she’d been walking on hot sand. She spoke to the man, she was helpless not to speak, hearing with a kind of pitying astonishment the hopeless words in a voice barely audible I love you. It was something of a plea, an argument, yet there was no one with whom to argue, the man seemed not to hear as if sparing her.
She lay as if beneath the surface of shallow water. Sun played upon the water, that was warm, unthreatening. She could not drown in this water, it would protect her. She was drifting into a stuporous sleep. Mommy? Mom-my? the little girl was looking for her, though Mommy stood before her, squatted before her, the little girl stared through her, the little boy, the boy whose name she’d forgotten for the moment, he was looking for her, anxious, Mommy where are you? — she’d become a wraith, they could not see her. Someone touched her as if accidentally, in his abrupt way the man was rising from the bed, walking away. He was barefoot, he moved with a negligent ease, no more self-conscious than if he were alone in the hotel room. Weakly she spoke to him, he did not seem to hear. She heard faucets, a toilet flushing. At last she forced herself to move. Her limbs that were paralyzed, broken. Something warmly sticky as blood between her thighs, on her belly.
He went away from her, he wanted her gone. While she was in the bathroom running water, the hottest water she could bear, staring at her dilated eyes in the steamy mirror, she heard him on a telephone. His easy laugh, the murmur of his voice. A man among men he seemed to her, unknowable.
She left him. He wanted her gone, she understood and so she left him. Hey: He gripped her chin, kissed her mouth as you might kiss the forehead of a plain child. At the elevator she turned back, the door to 2133 had shut. In the rapidly descending glass cubicle she wiped at her eyes, angry fists in her eyes. She had restored the damage to her mascara, her eye makeup, now it was damaged again, a teary ruin. Her body wept for him, a seepage between her legs. She thought, I am soiled, fouled. I am a woman who deserves harm.
She left the hotel quickly, the revolving door seemed to sweep her out. She imagined faint muffled laughter in her wake but heard only a doorman invisible to her calling after her in a voice of scornful familiarity “Good evening, ma’am!”
Evening! She wouldn’t be home until nearly seven o’clock.
On the expressway, wind buffeted the station wagon. Other vehicles veered in their lanes. She was too distracted to be frightened. Fumbling to call Ismelda on her cell phone but the battery had run low. She was thinking, If the children have been hurt! It was not a rational thought yet she was thinking if The Babysitter had taken them, this was punishment she deserved.
The Babysitter was an abductor and killer of children in the suburbs north of the city, he’d never been identified, arrested. He had taken nine children in all but he had not taken a child in several years, it was believed that he’d moved away, or was in prison, or had died. He was called The Babysitter for his methodical way of bathing the bodies of his small victims after raping and strangling them, positioning them in secluded places like parks, a golf course, a churchyard, he’d taken time to launder and even iron their clothing which he folded neatly and left beside them. Always their arms were crossed over their narrow pale chests, their eyes were shut, in such peaceful positions they resembled mannequins and not children who had died terrible deaths, it was said you could not see the ligature marks on their throats until you knelt beside them. The Babysitter had not abducted a child from the suburb in which she lived for at least a decade and yet she was thinking almost calmly If he has taken them, I will have to accept it.
The house was made of fieldstone, mortar, brick that had been painted a thin weathered white. Most of the house had been built in the mid nineteenth century, on a large tract of land which was now reduced to three acres, the minimum for property owners in the township. She was relieved to see the warmly lit windows through the trees, of course nothing had happened, they were waiting for her to return and that was all. Her husband had a dinner engagement, he wouldn’t be back until the children were in bed. Yet relief flooded her, seeing her husband’s car wasn’t in the garage. She’d had her revenge, then! She would love her husband less desperately now, she knew herself equal to him.
Rich cooking aromas in the kitchen, the sound of a TV, children’s uplifted voices, and Ismelda calling: Ma’am? — but quickly she slipped away upstairs, before the children could rush at her. She showered as she hadn’t in the hotel. She soaped every part of her body, she was giddy with relief. She had a lover! He hadn’t given her his number, vaguely he’d promised to call her the following week. No one knew, no one had come to harm, the family was safe. Bruises and red welts had already begun to show on her body as if a coarser skin were pushing through, her husband would never notice.
She hurried downstairs, she was kneeling with the children. Hugging the little girl, the little boy. Mommy? Mom-my? In two arms she hugged them, what did they have to show her? Easter eggs? So many? Yes, they were beautiful but hadn’t Ismelda understood that Mommy wanted her to wait, they would make the eggs together? She spoke sharply to Ismelda at the stove, Ismelda didn’t seem to hear, it was a maddening trait of hers, seeming not to hear so her employers had to raise their voices, invariably you sounded like a bully, a fool, raising your voice to a Filipino woman scarcely five feet tall, staring at you with hurt eyes. And the children were clamoring at her, suddenly she wished them gone, all of them gone, banished from her so that she could think of her lover. I am a murderer she thought. I am the one. Her children crowded her, adoring.
The Vigil
by Terence Faherty
Copyright © 2006 Terence Faherty
Art by Mark Evans
Last year Terence Faherty’s story “The Widow of Slane” (EQMM 3/4-04) was nominated for the Edgar and Anthony awards and won the Macavity Award. The story, featuring P.I. Owen Keane, belongs to one of three series the author maintains. His latest book, In a Teapot, is set in the 1940s Hollywood of series character Scott Elliott, and here’s the latest in his Star Republic series...
❖
That my editor’s parents loved Christmas was reflected in the name they gave their only child: Emanuel Noel. Their son’s feelings for the holiday might be deduced from his having used only his first two initials and his last name all his adult life: E.N. Boxleiter.
Those of us who worked for him at an Indianapolis daily called the Star Republic didn’t have to guess about Boxleiter’s opinion of Christmas. We were used to his temper growing shorter as December’s days did, used to him delegating anything to do with the holiday, used to his annual attempts to tone down and dry out the office Christmas parties, attempts that were frustrated by the family that owned the paper.
So I was a little surprised when Boxleiter called me into his office early one Christmas Eve and told me he had a special Christmas assignment for me.
“It’s that little girl who’s praying for the miracle roof. You know the one.”
I did. The little girl’s name was Tina Vasquez. She was a third-grader at St. Mary’s Catholic School, which belonged to an old parish of the same name located on the east side of downtown Indianapolis. Tina was the darling of the media for the second year in a row. Video of her kneeling before a statue of the Blessed Virgin in old St. Mary’s was running on local television stations almost every night. Sometimes she was alone, sometimes she was flanked by classmates, all of the girls dressed as they had for their First Communion ceremony, in white dresses and white veils.
They were prayin
g for a Christmas present, and a large one: a new roof for the old church, a miracle roof, as Boxleiter had called it. It would have been an impossible long shot, except that, exactly one Christmas earlier, Tina had prayed up an entire automobile single-handed.
Or maybe not single-handed, since the Star Republic had played a small part. The pastor of St. Mary’s had called in the story. The priest had explained that Tina was the only child of a single mother and that the two of them were just getting by on welfare. The mother had a chance for a good job, but she needed a car. So Tina had begun a marathon prayer session before a statue of Mary, praying for a Christmas miracle.
And she’d gotten one. We’d run Tina’s picture and story two days before Christmas. On Christmas morning, the Vasquez family had awakened to find a late-model Saturn parked outside their double, its title and keys in their mailbox. The local television stations had made it one of the most videotaped cars in Indiana. The Star Republic, the paper that had launched the story, hadn’t published so much as a black-and-white photo.
“I was afraid last year that we’d created a monster,” Boxleiter was saying. “That’s why I killed the follow-up story, not that it did any good. Here the kid is, back again, praying away. St. Mary’s has already received thousands of dollars in contributions. At the rate the money’s coming in, they’ll be able to shingle that roof in five-dollar bills.”
I asked what was wrong with that.
“Nothing, if it’s all legitimate. If it’s a scam, it’s our fault for getting it started. I want you to check it out.”
There didn’t seem to me to be much to check out. The money was going directly to the parish, so the Vasquez family couldn’t be profiting.
When I pointed that out to Boxleiter, he snapped, “Even if this year’s money is going to a church, next year’s money might not. Some soppy idiot gives a car away, and who knows where it will lead?”
To get an additional rise out of him and to pay him back a little for sending me out into the cold on the day of the office Christmas parties, I asked if he was sure the Saturn hadn’t come from the Blessed Virgin.
He waved me out of his office. “Prove it did,” he said, “and you can have my Christmas bonus.”
The drive to St. Mary’s was so short my car heater never had a chance to heat. The church was one of downtown Indy’s most beautiful, a happy marriage of French Gothic architecture and Indiana limestone. As I parked in its shadow, I was struck for the hundredth time by the irony that the poorest parishes always had the oldest churches, the ones with the highest maintenance tabs. Luckily for St. Mary’s, it also had Tina Vasquez.
She was hard at it, a little girl in a white dress, her long brown hair partially hidden by a gauzy white veil. She was flanked by a girl and a boy, the boy in a white shirt and dark blue dress pants, surely the school uniform. Several other children sat in nearby pews with their parents, awaiting their shifts.
Tina knelt with a perfectly straight back, her tiny hands together but not interlocked. The day was overcast, and the church underlit. As a result, most of the light on Tina’s face came from banks of flickering candles before the statue of the Virgin. The candlelight emphasized the girl’s dominant feature, her very large, very dark eyes. Those eyes were fixed on the statue before her, which had Mary, in her traditional blue and white, standing on a blue globe that was covered in golden stars.
I’d walked all the way up the center aisle of the church, almost to the altar, so I could view the little girl’s face as unobtrusively as possible. That wasn’t unobtrusive enough for the priest, who intercepted me and asked me my business. When I showed him my press card, he ushered me into the sacristy, a little room off the altar, apologizing as we went.
“I’m sorry if I was rude, but we’ve been getting a lot of gawkers, thanks to the television coverage. This morning, a woman actually tried to get Tina’s autograph.”
I thought of pointing out that the parish was also getting a new roof thanks to the television coverage. Instead I asked how close they were to their goal.
“We’re almost there,” the priest, whose name was Marcelli, said. He was a young man with large, out-of-focus eyes and a tendency to draw certain words out as though he were chanting them. “It’s quite remarkable. We’re expecting an extra-large crowd for tonight’s midnight Mass, because Tina will be ending her vigil then. The collection should put us over the top.”
I asked him how long he had known the Vasquez family.
“I baptized Tina. It was just after I was assigned here to St. Mary’s. Tina’s mother, Marguerite, is a sweet woman, but she’s had more than her share of problems. It’s the old story, I’m afraid. She fell in love with a guy who promised her the world and only came through with a baby. After he’d gotten her pregnant, the guy, Tony Donica, hung around for a while. He and Marguerite lived together and there was talk of them getting married. Then Donica found another young woman who believed his line. They ran off together to Las Vegas. Something happened out there, an accident or something; I’m not sure of the details. And I know you didn’t come here to listen to old gossip.”
His unfocused eyes grew slightly sharper. “Exactly why have you come? I have to say that I’ve been a little disappointed with the Star Republic. I was the one who called the story in to you last year. You ran a nice little article about Tina before Christmas, but nothing after the car arrived. And nothing so far this year. I was sure you’d forsaken us.”
I paraphrased Boxleiter’s concerns about the potential for abuse in the phenomenon the Star Republic had gotten started.
“You needn’t be worried,” the priest assured me. “This is the last year for the vigil. Tina and her mother both told me that. Tina only did it this year as a thank-you for the car. The Blessed Virgin came through for Tina last year, so Tina wanted to do something in return. A new roof for Our Lady’s church is a pretty big something, but that’s the kind of special kid she is.”
I asked Marcelli if he really believed the car had come from the Virgin.
He laughed. “Not directly. I know it was some kind soul who read your paper’s article and felt a welling up of Christmas spirit. But who’s to say what caused that spirit to well up? Tina believes it was the intercession of Mary, and so do I.”
He suddenly took me by the arm. “Listen. The thing for you to do is to meet Marguerite. That will put your mind at rest. She’s just down the hall in the room the Altar Rosary Society uses. Her mother-in-law, Tina’s grandmother, is there, too. I know there was no marriage so there can’t really be a mother-in-law, but Marguerite calls Mrs. Donica that, so I do, too.”
He led me down a hallway whose wooden floor not only creaked but also cracked and popped. The women in the Altar Rosary room couldn’t help but be aware of our approach. There were two of them, seated at a card table that held coffee cups and a plate of Christmas cookies. The younger one, Marguerite, was a future portrait of Tina. She had the girl’s dark eyes and slightly upturned nose, though the effect of the eyes was diminished by a much fuller face. The older woman’s face was very spare, and her eyes were narrowed by a sceptical, put-upon expression. I hated to think of Tina ever looking at the world in that sharp, cynical way.
After he’d introduced us, Father Marcelli excused himself and left. The awkwardness that followed wasn’t lifted by the grandmother’s opening remark.
“So, your newspaper is finally interested in Tina again now that it’s sure she’ll make it. You didn’t have the faith to come a week ago even.”
I pointed out that we’d had faith enough to run the original story about Tina, and that led us into a discussion of the prior Christmas’s miracle, the car. Marguerite gave me the whole story again, speaking without a trace of the older woman’s accent. Her voice did get husky, though, when she mentioned Tina’s father. Oddly, Donica’s own mother was much less sentimental.
“That one,” she all but sneered. “He’d be alive today if he’d married you like he should have and stayed with you
like he should have. He had a good job at the Methodist Hospital. He could have supported you and Tina. But no. He runs away to Las Vegas with some fat blonde, drives drunk, and gets them both killed.”
Mrs. Donica made the sign of the cross when she mentioned her son’s fatal accident. She’d performed the same ritual earlier in her tirade, when she’d used the words “he’d be alive today.”
Marguerite calmly ignored the older woman. “The car turned everything around for us. You should have seen it shining in the sun on Christmas morning. So pretty. When I found the title and the keys in my mailbox, I couldn’t believe it. I cried and cried. Thanks to my little Saturn, I have a good job. Tina and I have our own place and our own life.”
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 6. Whole No. 778, June 2006 Page 2
