by Jane Haddam
Precious Blood
A Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mystery
Jane Haddam
When supper had ended, he took the cup. Again he gave You thanks and praise, gave the cup to his disciples and said: Take this, all of you, and drink from it. This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven.
—from the Order of the Mass, taken from
Matt. 26:27-28, Mark 14:23-25,
Luke 22:19-20, and 1 Cor. 11:25
Blessed be God
Blessed be His holy name
Blessed be Jesus Christ, true God and true man
Blessed be the name of Jesus
Blessed be His most Sacred Heart
Blessed be His most Precious Blood…
—from the Divine Praises
Contents
PROLOGUE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
PART ONE
ONE
1
2
TWO
1
2
3
4
THREE
1
2
FOUR
1
2
3
FIVE
1
2
3
SIX
1
2
3
SEVEN
1
2
3
4
PART TWO
ONE
1
2
3
TWO
1
2
THREE
1
2
3
FOUR
1
2
3
FIVE
1
2
SIX
1
2
3
SEVEN
1
2
PART THREE
ONE
1
2
TWO
1
2
3
THREE
1
2
3
FOUR
1
2
FIVE
1
2
EPILOGUE
1
2
PROLOGUE
Ash Wednesday
Lord, bless these ashes, by which we show that we are dust.
—from the Order of the Mass for Ash Wednesday
[1]
TWENTY YEARS AGO, WHEN Cheryl Cass first left home, there were three bus stations in Colchester, New York: Greyhound, Trailways, and RydeAmerican. Now, after a decade of high-tech prosperity, there was only one. Cheryl got off the 7:15 from Baltimore and wandered into it just as the snow was beginning to fall. It was a cold morning in February, soggy and limp. Cheryl was soggy and limp herself. Her fellow passengers were grimy and defeated. Looking for the phone, Cheryl wound her way between them, ignoring as far as possible all the frightened PFCs and glazed-eyed old women with their clothes packed into grocery bags. Her only luggage was a quilted blue nylon shoulder-strap bag, the kind K Mart sold as “carry-on cases” to people who would never be able to afford to take an airplane. Her only valuable was her wedding ring. It was a wide gold band, heavy and expensive, and she still wore it on the fourth finger of her left hand. When she got nervous, she twisted it. When she realized what she was doing, she started to feel guilty. She had been divorced in Nevada when Jimmy Carter was still president. It was silly to go on marking herself as married, and unavailable. It might even be wrong. Sometimes—when she thought very hard about it, when she made herself concentrate—she thought it might have something to do with the fact that she’d been raised Catholic. Her marriage had been blessed in a church. Divorce or no divorce, in the eyes of the Church she was married still.
She got to the phone just as a fat old man in a muddy trenchcoat was pushing a quarter into the slot. There was another phone on the far side of the waiting room, but she had noticed it was broken when she first came in. Its receiver had been ripped out and its coin box jimmied. She sat down at the end of the plastic bench closest to the fat man and folded her hands in her lap. On the wall in front of her, a polished-looking Greyhound sign had been festooned with red plastic Easter eggs and fuzzy-looking electric blue bunnies. Under her shirt, her breasts were aching where their scars came in contact with her bra. The bra confused her almost as much as her wedding ring did. She’d never had much of a chest, and now she didn’t have any. Why did she bother? She shook her head in a quick jerking motion that made one of the plastic combs pop out of her hair. That was the land of question the nuns were always asking when she was in school, the kind of question that had made her so very angry. There was no answer to it and no hope of finding one.
She got out her cigarettes and lit up. Since she already had cancer, she saw no reason to worry about smoking. It wasn’t anything she could do anything about anyway. She was a slave to her circumstances, just like those people she watched on the Oprah Winfrey show. Those circumstances had been rolling over her now for thirty-six years. They were about to squash her flat. She tried to remember some of it—waitressing jobs and two-room apartments, beers and pizzas, Sunday hangovers and roadhouse Saturday nights—but it had all turned to mush. The only things she recalled with absolute clarity were the days she had spent in the hospital and her wedding.
The fat man was slamming down the receiver on the phone. Cheryl got up and crossed quickly to stand behind him. She didn’t want to lose her chance. He went stomping off in the direction of the men’s room and she put her hand in the pocket of her car coat, fishing for a quarter. When she found it, she went looking for another. She was going to have to call information. It hadn’t occurred to her before, but she didn’t know the number she wanted to dial.
She got the number from a snippy-sounding operator, who punched her into a recording before she’d even stopped talking, and repeated it to herself over and over again until she got it dialed. Her memory had never been very good, and between radiation therapy and painkillers it had gotten worse. She only had three dollars besides the two quarters she had plugged into the phone. The bus ticket had been more expensive than she expected it to be, and she had spent a buck fifty in New York on potato chips and Coke. If she’d dialed the number wrong—or if the information she had was full of it, the way so much of the information she got was—she didn’t know what she’d do.
The phone rang and rang, ten times before it was picked up. Then a tired female voice said,
“St. Agnes Rectory. Mrs. Donovan speaking.”
Cheryl took a deep breath. She hadn’t been afraid before, but now she was. She couldn’t imagine what she was doing here. She looked out the window next to the phone and got a view of State Street that dead-ended at the steps of the cathedral. Then she thought about Judy Eagan and Peg Morrissey and Kathleen Burke, walking past her down those steps after the Cathedral School Mass their sophomore year in high school, walking past her as if they didn’t see her.
The tired female voice broke in on her thoughts, faintly annoyed. “Is there somebody there?” it said. “If there’s somebody there, you ought to speak up.”
Cheryl spoke up. She said, “Excuse me.” Then she took another drag on her cigarette.
“Can I help you with something?” Mrs. Donovan said.
Che
ryl nodded, oblivious to the fact that Mrs. Donovan could not see her. “I’d like to speak to Father Andrew Walsh.”
“Father Andrew Walsh,” Mrs. Donovan repeated. “Are you a parishioner?”
Cheryl knew the right answer to this. It was one of the few things she did know. “I’m not a parishioner of anything right now,” she said. “I think I’d like to be.”
Mrs. Donovan hesitated. “Do you mean you’re thinking of becoming a Catholic?”
“I mean I’m thinking of becoming a Catholic again.”
“Ah.” Mrs. Donovan sighed. “Would it have to be Father Walsh in particular? We have two priests here now. There’s Father Declan Boyd.”
“I’d rather talk to Father Walsh.”
“All right.” Mrs. Donovan didn’t sound happy about it. “Hold on for a minute. I’ll go see if I can find him. It is Ash Wednesday, you know.”
Ash Wednesday. She hadn’t known. She was still stuck back in December somewhere, with the doctors telling her nothing in words of one syllable she couldn’t understand. She looked out the window again and wondered what had happened to them all: Judy Eagan, Peg Morrissey, Kathleen Burke, Tom Dolan, Barry Field, the Charmed Circle of Cathedral CYO. Andy Walsh, of course, was pastor of St. Agnes’s, the parish where they’d all gone to parochial school. She’d found that out from an article in The American Catholic. It was one of the magazines they kept in the waiting room at nuclear medicine.
She was just beginning to worry that the wait would be longer than the three minutes she was allowed, when she heard sounds from the other end of the line. Somebody picked up the phone and dropped it. Somebody else said not to be so clumsy, there was a soufflé in the oven and if he went bashing the phone into the wall it would fall. Then there was breathing on the line and a voice said,
“Yes? This is Father Walsh.”
“Oh,” Cheryl said. She couldn’t have been more relieved if the doctors had told her it had all been a mistake. “Andy.”
“Andy? Who is this, anyway?”
“It’s me. I can’t believe it. I read about you in The American Catholic and I thought I’d come see you, but then I got here and I couldn’t believe I wasn’t wrong. I mean, here I am in Colchester, New York, and I thought I’d mixed it all up and you’d really be in Rome. Or not a priest at all.”
“I’m a priest, all right. But I’m sorry. I can’t seem to place—”
“You don’t know who I am?”
“Maybe if you gave me your name.”
Cheryl giggled. She was suddenly dizzy as hell. If she hadn’t stopped taking the stuff, she would have thought it was her medication.
“Never mind the name,” she told him. “Let me give you a place. Black Rock Park. June 19. I don’t remember nineteen what. It was a long time ago, more than twenty years. Do you remember that?”
The pause on the other end of the line went on and on, on and on, long enough for Cheryl to panic. Maybe this was a different Andrew Walsh, and he didn’t remember. Maybe this was the right Andrew Walsh, and he didn’t want to remember. But Cheryl couldn’t understand that. That day in Black Rock Park had been one of the happiest in her life, topped only by the day that followed it, when she had been married. It was funny how she’d been so happy at her wedding, when she’d known even while she was making her vows that the marriage wasn’t going to last a month.
“Andy?” she said.
“I’m here. Jesus Christ. Black Rock Park.”
“That’s what I said.”
“I can’t believe it. I really can’t believe it. After all this time.”
“Do you remember who I am?”
“I’d have a hard time not.”
“Who am I?”
Cheryl thought she heard Andy Walsh take a long breath of his own. “You,” he said, “are Cheryl Theresa Cass.”
[2]
At 7:45, just as the cathedral bells were doing their dance for the three-quarters hour, Judy Eagan pulled her silver gray Mercedes 200 SEL into the parking lot of the State Street Diner. She killed the motor, pocketed her keys, and checked out her face in the rearview mirror. The smudge of ash on her forehead was enormous: Andy Walsh had been having his fun with her. But then, Andy had been having his fun with everyone at St. Agnes’s six o’clock Mass. He liked, he said, to wake up the old ladies. And he did. His homily this morning had been a long diatribe on the particularly nasty form of anal-retentive psychosis he thought was afflicting the Pope.
Judy got out of the car, flexed her feet—when she wore heels this high, her toes cramped—and checked out the parking lot to make sure Stuart Reeve had arrived before her. He had. His little red Jaguar was parked across two spaces at the far end of the lot, flanked on one side by a Ford Comanche and on the other by a Jeep Wagoneer. Its back windshield was facing her, and through it she could read his latest piece of self-advertisement: STUART REEVE. YOUR MAN IN ALBANY. Judy sighed. Sometimes she thought Stuart had a political death wish—that he wanted to make sure Albany was as far as he ever got. She’d told him and told him not to park across two spaces in places like the State Street. It infuriated the men in the pickup trucks. It made Stuart look like a first-class snot.
Of course, Stuart was a first-class snot.
Judy adjusted the shoulder strap of her black leather Dior bag and took a moment to contemplate the buttressed side of Holy Name Cathedral. Looking at the Cathedral always made her feel better, especially since the Pope had made John O’Bannion a Cardinal as well as an Archbishop. Colchester had come a long way since her childhood, when it had really been nothing but a dying industrial city, gasping its way through an impoverished old age. Now there were computer companies everywhere and branches of Saks and Lord & Taylor right in the middle of town. If you lived in one of the new, expensive townhouses that now marked the border between St. Agnes and Cathedral parish—which Judy did—you could even get The New York Times delivered to your door. It was just too bad the place was halfway up to the St. Lawrence Seaway the way it was. If it had been more centrally located, it might have amounted to something.
Judy pushed through the glass doors into the diner, waved to Mike the counterman, and located Stuart in their usual back booth. He looked like he wished he were wearing a gas mask.
Judy went down to the booth, shrugged off her Calvin Klein cashmere coat, and tossed all $600 of it over the metal hook at the booth’s front end. If she hadn’t been coming to the State Street since she was six years old, she would never have gotten away with it. As it was, Mike and his “working men” tended to think of her fondly as Local Girl Made Good.
She slid onto the bench opposite Stuart and said, “For God’s sake. At least try to look as if you’re enjoying yourself.”
“You got your ashes already,” Stuart said. “I thought we were going to the Cathedral at noon. To get them from the Cardinal.”
“You’re going to the Cathedral at noon. I’m having lunch with Marcia Bremmen. She wants her daughter’s coming-out party catered, and she wants all the food to be pink.”
Stuart stared into his coffee. He had drunk a little of it—at this hour of the morning, he could hardly help himself—but he obviously didn’t want to drink any more. He didn’t want to eat his breakfast, either, which was a big plate of ham and eggs and toast and bacon he had pushed into the middle of the table. Judy wondered if the suit he was wearing was new. She didn’t remember it, but she never paid much attention to Stuart’s suits unless there was something wrong with them. This was a custom gray flannel three piece from Brooks Brothers. Maybe Stuart was having one of his periodic flirtations with rebellion.
“So,” she said, “you’re going to go to the Cathedral, and after you get your ashes you’re going to stand around and talk to some of the old ladies.”
“It’s raining, you know, Judy. The old ladies might not want to stand around and talk.”
“They’ll talk in the vestibule. It matters, Stuart. The old ladies want to think they’re voting for a nice Catholic boy.�
�
“What about the young ladies?”
“The young ladies want their boy to be not too Catholic a Catholic. It’ll be all right, Stuart. You go to the Cathedral for the old ladies, I run St. Agnes’s for the yuppie set. It all works out.”
Stuart shook his head. “I don’t know, Judy. I don’t know why you had to take on St. Agnes’s on top of everything else.”
“I was elected President of the Parish Council.”
“You ran.”
“Yes, I did. Andy Walsh asked me to.”
“You don’t do anything else Father Walsh asks you to do. And I don’t like him. I think he’s dangerous.”
“I think he’s crazy, but that’s beside the point. We’re trying to build an image here. Sort of a Mario Cuomo with class.”
“For God’s sake,” Stuart said, “don’t compare me to Mario Cuomo. He’s such a wop.”
It was at times like these Judy Eagan wished she drank or smoked. Or anything. She needed something to take her mind off the fact that she was going to marry this fatuous ass in less than three months and probably couldn’t get out of it now if she wanted to. Did she want to? She turned to look out the plate glass window at her side, at the block of small stores across the street. The stores were closed and free of all secular Easter decorations. The Cardinal disapproved of displays of pink rabbits and fuzzy baby chicks during Lent, and nobody wanted to offend the Cardinal this close to his home turf.
Judy took a sip of her coffee, closed her eyes, and counted to ten. The problem, of course, was that she did want to marry Stuart. He was a snob, an idiot, and an unreconstructed chauvinist, but he had one thing going for him: he gave great television. Faced with a Minicam, he could talk about a new sewage treatment plant scheduled to be built in Oswego and come off sounding like Jack Kennedy rallying the troops at the Berlin Wall.
At the moment, Stuart was just a minor member of the state legislature, an insignificant cog in the great New York Democratic party machine—but he was popular with the electorate and the media both, and his strange talent had gotten him a lot of air time. Now there was an off-year election coming up and his district’s seat in Congress was vacant. If he got the nomination—which Judy was working overtime to make sure he did—he would win the election. Once he won the election, there would be no stopping him. He was a fool, but he was a presidential fool.
