The Judas Child

by Carol O'Connell

He walked into the foyer, and then climbed the grand staircase toward the floors they no longer used. She trailed him as far as the balustrade, and shook her head in disbelief as she watched him on the landing. He was pulling the weather stripping away from Susan’s door.

  Gwen Hubble was not quite awake, but fighting her way to a conscious thought. She struggled to rise, then fell back on the cot, exhausted, as though her small body were made of far heavier stuff than a ten-year-old’s flesh and bone. She lay still for a moment, gathering strength to try again. Her eyes focused on the dim illumination of a plastic night-light in the wall plug.

  When her mind had cleared a bit, she found it easier to sit up.

  There was another tray on the small table by her cot. The last time, it had held a glass of orange juice and an egg. Not enough food. Now she was looking at half a cup of cocoa and a tiny roll. Not enough.

  With dull fixation, she stared at the glow of light on the ceramic tiles. The surrounding space was as large as her father’s master bathroom. And the tub in this room was also an antique, with four clawed lion’s paws for feet. The toilet seemed a long way off; the night-light was only a tiny spark of reflection on its porcelain.

  The urge to urinate was stronger than hunger. She pushed back the bedding and touched a rough wool surface with her bare feet.

  Where were her socks?

  On the first day, she had only missed her red parka, and the next morning—this morning?—her shoes were gone. Her hand went to the chain around her neck and closed on the amulet that Sadie Green had given her, a good luck charm with the engraved image of an all-seeing eye. So she still had that. Ah, but her braid had come undone in the night.

  Is it night?

  She tried to stand too quickly and her head ached. Slowly, she stood up and walked toward the toilet, unsteady on her legs. As she passed close to the door, she tried the knob, not really expecting it to open this time either.

  Why is this happening?

  That thought was too hard to hold on to, and she let it slide away as she went through the automatic actions of raising the toilet lid, tearing paper sheets from the roller and carefully setting the squares around the rim of the wooden seat, her ingrained protocol for strange bathrooms, and last, the flush.

  Now that her eyes had adjusted to the poor light, she could see more detail in the room. There was no mirror above the sink. She hadn’t noticed that the last time. She did remember the massive piece of furniture against the far wall. An armoire in a bathroom?

  The hamper was new to her, wasn’t it? She stared at it now. It was like the pull-out hampers in her own house, built into the wall. But this one had a long chain looping once through its handle and twice around the towel bar mounted next to it. The chain was padlocked.

  Why? What’s in the hamper? The question died away almost as soon as she had formed it.

  She was so hungry.

  Returning to the narrow cot, she stared down at the tray on the table. This morning when she ate the egg, she had fallen asleep immediately. At least she thought the first meal had been in the morning—if she could only rely on the formula of juice and an egg as breakfast food. Now she was looking at the miserly dinner roll and the cocoa. Gwen was starting to form another concept, a connection of food and sleep. But then she drifted on to thoughts of her best friend. Where was Sadie, and how was she?

  Gwen ate the small roll. Not enough food. Her stomach growled. It was work to hold on to a single idea. She stared at the cocoa in her cup. Again, she made the connection of food and sleep. Food? Or drink? She walked back to the sink and poured the cocoa down the drain, running water in the basin to clean away the dark splatters.

  When Gwen came back to the cot, she was facing the hamper and its padlocked chain. She walked toward it, moving very slowly—so drowsy. It was like having the flu—or her brain might be filled with cotton wadding; the child gave equal weight to both possibilities. She touched the handle of the hamper, then her legs failed her and she was sinking to her knees.

  So it was not the cocoa that made her sleep; she had guessed wrong. Her face pressed into the rough wool of a small oval rug. And though she lay sprawled on the floor, there was one moment of fright that came with the sensation of falling, the idea that the tiled surface might not be solid, that the rules of the universe no longer applied to her.

  Her eyes closed.

  Late on the night of her daughter’s death, all those years ago, Ellen Kendall had opened the door of Rouge’s bedroom and found her small son rolled into a ball studded with auburn cowlicks, tiny fingers and pajama feet. His eyes had snapped open. Uncurling swiftly, he had flung out his arms and legs, a child unfurled, as though opening his breast to make an easy target for whatever had come for him in the dark. Realizing that it was only his frightened mother on the threshold, his face had flooded with disappointment. And Ellen knew her ten-year-old son wanted to die, to go with his sister—into the ground. On the following day, she had placed her surviving child in the care of a psychiatrist, not believing that she could keep Rouge alive by herself. What good had she been to Susan?

  And then she had poured herself into a bottle—no meager feat; Ellen had not become a drunk in one day.

  Now, years of sobriety later, she stood at Susan’s door and stared at the walls for a moment, mildly startled by what time had done to her daughter’s bedroom. Over the past fifteen years, the once bright wall paint had settled down to a calm pale pink.

  Rouge sat tailor-fashion on a dusty braided rug woven with threads of every color, all of them muted now. Ghosty white sheets draped the furniture, and a gray film lay over every inch of the exposed floorboards. He was digging through a large cardboard box of Susan’s personal effects.

  Ellen crept silently into the room. Her son paid no attention to her, he was so engrossed in an old yearbook from St. Ursula’s Academy.

  Why must he do this to himself—to her?

  She wanted to cry, but her voice was surprisingly normal when she spoke to him. “Need some help? Are you looking for something of—”

  “I met a woman tonight.” He set one book down and opened a volume for another year. “She knew us when we were nine or ten. But I don’t remember her name. I thought there might be a picture in here.”

  Ellen was on guard now, and worried. The us and we had lingered in Rouge’s sentences for more than a year after his twin’s death. And now the words were back again, like ghosts in his mouth.

  “Could you describe the woman, Rouge?”

  He selected another volume from the stack of school annuals. All of them dated back to the years before Susan was murdered. “She has wide-set eyes anda—”Suddenly, he slammed one of the books. “She’s not here. She didn’t go to St. Ursula’s.” He pushed the books to one side and raked both hands through his hair.

  Ellen knelt down on the rug beside him. “Do you know anything about her people? What her father did for a living—her mother?”

  “No.” He threw up his hands, defeated. “She said her family left town when she was in the fifth grade.” And now one fist pounded the floor, and the stack of yearbooks toppled over.

  She knew he hadn’t slept since yesterday, but this was more than fatigue. His frustration helped her to gauge how much he’d had to drink. This tone only entered his voice when he wasn’t thinking clearly, when intoxication was an obstacle to an idea. Normally, his mind worked much faster than hers, and better. Perhaps this was why he stopped at Dame’s Tavern every night, to slow down that beautiful fleet brain.

  “At least you know she didn’t go to St. Ursula’s. That’s something.” In her younger days as a reporter, she had chased people down without much more information. So the child had moved away when she was a fifth-grader. There was only one public elementary school in town, and there would be group portraits on record. Ah, but wait—she had her own photographs.

  Ellen reached out and opened the lower drawer of Susan’s bureau. She rested one hand on her daughter’s scrapbook. “
Rouge? This woman you met? Maybe she was in the children’s choir. That was a mix of kids from both schools.” She pulled out the scrapbook and flipped through the pages, looking for the yearly snapshots of the choir field trips.

  “The choir—right. She remembered my scar.” Now he was shoulder to shoulder with her. He put out his hand to stop the falling pages at one large photograph. “That one. Was it taken the year I cut my finger?”

  “Cut? You almost cut it off, Rouge.” She looked down at the three rows of children, kneeling and standing, all holding their ice skates and grinning for the camera. She pointed to the first girl in the front row. “Now that’s Meg Tomlin, the fire chief’s daughter. She moved to Coopers-town when she got married three years ago. And that’s Jenny Adler. You remember her from St. Ursula’s? She graduated from MIT and went to work for a company in Tokyo.”

  He was staring at her face—all curiosity now. She understood. Rouge was wondering how a housebound recluse like herself would know of these events in the world outside.

  “Well, babe, the family may not own any of the newspapers anymore, but I do read them. You’d be surprised what I know.”

  “You still have any of your old sources?”

  “Oh, I’m sure I do.” And apparently, all the old friends had turned out for her. There were a number of similarities between her daughter’s kidnapping and the recent theft of two more children from St. Ursula’s, yet there was no mention of Susan in the newspapers or the television coverage. But that protection wouldn’t last if these girls turned up dead on Christmas morning.

  Her son was staring at her, momentarily distracted from the scrapbook. “Mom, what do you know about the lieutenant governor?”

  “Marsha Hubble? She comes from a long line of politicians, but I’d swear she’s clean. That’s despite proximity to a mobbed-up senator.”

  “And the puppet governor?”

  “Alleged puppet, dear. He’s been trying to unload Hubble for the past year. My theory is that she doesn’t play nicely with major campaign contributors of the cockroach persuasion.”

  Rouge bowed his head over the scrapbook, but his eyes were looking inward. Ellen knew she was losing him again. She pointed to a child in the middle row of the photograph. “Look here. This girl has wide-set eyes, but I have no idea who she is. Damn, after all my showboating.”

  She turned the photograph over to read the names of all the children. The list, penned in her own hand, was one name short. The child with the wide-set eyes was the only member of the choir she could not account for. “Sorry, Rouge. I can’t remember her.”

  “She has a scar. Here.” He ran one finger down his right cheek in a jagged line. “Do you remember any other accidents with kids?”

  “No, and something like that would’ve been a standout.” She flipped the page. “Now you’re not in this photo. It was taken after you went off to military school. And there she is again, just behind Susan, see? No scars on her face. So the accident probably happened after she left town.”

  She knew her son was drifting away again, sailing off on that familiar sea that fit so neatly in a whiskey glass. Ellen could smell it, almost taste it. But she could hardly lecture Rouge on booze. She had only stopped drinking after the crowning humiliation of her teenage son finding her dead drunk on the bathroom floor. “Rouge? You said she left town when she was in the fifth grade?”

  He stared at the page and nodded.

  “The schools are closed for Christmas vacation, but you could try the church. Father Domina might have kept the old attendance books. Could be worth a shot.” She ruffled his hair to get his attention. “I could help you. Tomorrow morning?”

  “Can’t. I have to work the first shift tomorrow.” Rouge stood up and dusted off his jeans. “They’re putting me on a plainclothes detail.” He was scanning the titles on the small bookshelf by the bed. “What happened to Susan’s diary?”

  “The police took it away. I don’t know if they ever returned it or not. We could check the other boxes in the attic if you like?” She turned back to the photograph of the choir. “It’s odd I can’t place this child.”

  Or perhaps it wasn’t. Apart from the eyes there was nothing remarkable about the little girl. She was in the middle range of everything—not the smallest or even the most plain.

  Rouge pulled a dust sheet away from the desk. A silver bracelet was lying on the faded green blotter. This was Susan’s last birthday gift from her father. Rouge picked it up. “I thought Dad said she lost this?”

  Lost it? Perhaps they should talk more about Susan’s death. What else might he have misunderstood in those days when his father was locked away in the study, when his mother lived in a bottle seven days out of seven. Or maybe the bracelet had been lost instead of stolen—and later found, not seized as evidence.

  “Those last few months, your sister was always losing something at choir practice.” And Ellen had found that strange. The children had always been so careful with their possessions. At the time, she had blamed the separation of the twins for the odd changes in her daughter’s behavior.

  Sometimes, late at night, Ellen played a morbid game of “What if ?” What if she had stood up to her husband and kept the twins in the same school? Then Rouge would have been with Susan on the day she was stolen. The twins had gone everywhere together, needing no one else’s company or conversation. Would Susan have lived, or would both of them have perished?

  She stared at the silver bracelet as Rouge slipped it into her hand. When had she seen it last? At the trial? Yes, the bracelet had been used as evidence. The police must have returned it to her husband. She imagined Bradly Kendall quietly walking into this room and carefully setting the small bit of jewelry on his daughter’s desk. And perhaps Brad had sat down on the bed and cried because the bracelet’s circle was so tiny it broke his heart.

  Ellen closed her hand over the piece of silver. “The police said this was found in the priest’s room.”

  “You mean Paul Marie’s room.” Rouge’s correction was unemotional, but pointed. Considering her son’s quiet ways, this was almost an argument. She had forgotten how much it irritated him when she referred to the child killer as a priest.

  But each time she thought of Paul Marie, she saw the trappings of the church, cassock and collar. The man had been so young when she last saw him, barely into his twenties when he stood beside the elder priest at Communion. Nothing interesting had been written on his face yet, no lines of character or personality. Some people had thought him very handsome, she remembered that much, but there had been nothing else to distinguish him. He had been such an ordinary man, uninspired in his sermons and merely adequate as a choirmaster.

  But the children loved him.

  Ellen’s hands flew up to cover her burning face, as if this thought had been spoken aloud—as though she had just told an obscene joke in church.

  three

  “I like it.” The appreciation seemed genuine as he admired her jagged scar and the twisted mouth of bright red.

  Ali Cray remembered this priest as a tall man, but slight, almost delicate. The aesthetic’s face had been paler then, ethereal, framed by dark hair and black vestment. When she was ten years old and Paul Marie was in his early twenties, his large, lustrous brown eyes had peered out from a portrait of Lord Byron on a dog-eared page of her poetry text.

  Fifteen years older now, the bound man on the other side of the table was well muscled; broad shoulders strained at the seams of his blue denim shirt; and there was a hardness to his face. The chains on his hands and feet did nothing to diminish him, but made him seem even more powerful, held in check only by his manacles. He filled the whole room with his presence.

  Ali Cray felt her own personality being crowded up against the wall when he looked at her. Gone were the poet’s eyes; Good night, Byron.

  Lowering her head, she stared at the pages on her clipboard, though she knew each line of print by heart. Her gaze drifted across the table to the jailhouse ta
ttoos on his hands. It was a common trait of the convict, this mutilation of the flesh with pinpricks and ink to while away the days. But his were not typical markings. On the back of the right hand was an S, and on his left was an E; both were wrought in the style of ornate capitals from illuminated manuscripts.

  She looked up at his face, his faint smile.

  “The letters stand for sin eater,” he said. “A euphemism for sucking on penises. I was forced to do a lot of that while I was in the general prison population.”

  “In this prison, all sex offenders are segregated,” she said, as though she had caught him in a lie.

  “A clerical error—according to the warden. My paperwork was fouled up.”

  Not likely. She knew that someone would have to use influence or quite a bit of money for a mistake of that magnitude; it was nearly a death sentence for a child molester. Susan’s father could have arranged it. When Bradly Kendall was alive, he had had the necessary political connections and wealth. “But your lawyer would have—”

  “He never believed I was innocent. That’s why the little bastard dragged his feet for two years.” Paul Marie shrugged, as though this gross betrayal really mattered very little to him. “The lawyer knew what was being done to me. I think it fit his own sense of rough justice.”

  “I gather the Church believed in you. You were never defrocked.”

  The prisoner leaned forward, and Ali leaned back.

  “The Church has a shortage of priests. I wouldn’t be released from my vows for murdering a little girl. It’s not as if I advocated birth control.”

  Ali looked down at her clipboard again and made a quick note at the bottom of one sheet. She didn’t look at him when she asked, “Did you go on functioning as a priest?”

  “Yes—those first two years. I heard confessions and meted out penance.”

  Paul Marie’s voice had lost all the gentle tones. She couldn’t take much more of this changeling phenomenon. It was like a little death.