The Judas Child

by Carol O'Connell

  And now the Hubbles had noticed Ali. The moment might have been comic if the child were not so distressed. The parents froze in position, then their hands slowly dropped as they backed away from the child’s bed. Did they look a little sheepish? Yes, they did. Good. Healing was a long process. A young body recovered quickly; the mind must take its own time.

  “This is not what we agreed on.” Ali waved in the general direction of the door to say that the parents must leave the room, and right now. “I’ll speak to you in a few minutes.” After I clean up the damage.

  Marsha Hubble made no protest, for Ali had fought her and beaten her down. The woman quietly followed her husband into the corridor. Ali closed the door, shutting them out to protect Gwen from any more assaults by good intention, from pain in a child’s best interests.

  “Hello, baby.” Ali pulled a chair up to the bed and smiled at the dazed little girl. “I came to say goodbye. I’m going home today. Another doctor will be stopping by to see you this afternoon. I think you’ll like her.” But the parents would not. The child psychiatrist Ali had selected was known for siding with children against parents.

  The girl’s small hand curled around her own. “Before you go—”

  “I’ll talk to them, Gwen.” The concept of a child’s autonomy was always a difficult sell. Eventually, the parents would come to understand the child’s right to own her faith in Sadie Green. “They make mistakes sometimes, but they love you, Gwen—more than anything in the world.”

  “I know. But they want me to change so I can see it their way. My way is better.”

  “I think so too.” And Ali believed this, though it shattered the fundamentals of her profession. She sat back for a moment and regarded this young girl who lent credence to the rumor that all of St. Ursula’s children were a bit strange. There was certainly more to Gwen than her parents supposed. They had defined her as perpetually frightened, but Ali strongly disagreed. Reading psyche was an art, and with an artist’s eye, she had come to admire Gwen. The child had more presence in the world than most adults—and the courage of conviction.

  “Now I’m going to go out in the hall and yell at your parents. I’ll get them back in line, all right?”

  Gwen nodded, but she would not let go of Ali’s hand. “You were there. You know what happened. You saw.”

  “No, baby, I wish I had.” Her own eyes had been fixed on the monster—or as Sadie would say, The Fly, the insect. Over all the long days of healing, Ali had also learned a lot from the late Sadie Green, and she agreed with that valiant child’s estimation of Myles Penny: he had been less of a man than the poor brutalized dog lying under the oak trees.

  Ali had not seen the miracle in the cellar, yet she could not shake the images that Gwen had put into her mind. The pictures were so vivid that, as years passed by, Ali would become less clear about the events of that Christmas night.

  There was not much to pack, for this space had always been austere, without photographs or any personal objects to humanize it. The guard stood behind him, waiting to take the priest to the warden’s office to sign more papers before the final walk through the prison gates. A white-haired trustee in prison garb was dunking a mop in the soapy water of a bucket, appearing anxious to get on with the job of cleaning out Paul Marie’s cell.

  The iron doors in this older section of the prison were not automated. They opened and closed with conventional locks. The guard was idly swinging this one on its hinges. “You should’ve sued the bastards.”

  The old trustee nodded in agreement with the guard as he pushed the mop around the stone floor.

  Paul Marie shook his head. He would rather be freed this morning than wait a year for a new trial. That had been the deal he agreed to, bad as it was: a governor’s full pardon for a promise not to litigate the matter of fifteen years’ false imprisonment. Over his head they hung old charges of assaults on other prisoners—no matter that each bit of violence had been in self-defense.

  The guard opened the iron door and beckoned the priest to follow him. When they were both standing in the corridor, the door slammed shut behind them with the authority of a loud clang, but then it swung open again. “Well, that never happened before,” said the guard, opening the door wide to better examine the hinge and the lock. He closed it once more to complete a solid wall of bars.

  The trustee in the cell was done mopping the floors. He had quickly stripped the sheets from the bed and was about to turn the mattress over. In an accidental, inadvertent test of faith, Paul Marie glanced back through the bars as the mattress was raised. Now he could see through the bed’s iron framework to the floor below.

  His old companion was gone—no shadow, only soap and water and morning light.

  An hour later, when he left the prison’s main building, he was dressed in a priest’s cassock and the same shoes he had worn fifteen years ago. He did not raise his eyes until he was beyond the tall gates. He had long anticipated the first glimpse of sky that was not bounded by walls and covered with nets of woven metal. When he did look up, instead of being overwhelmed by infinite space, he saw low cloud cover and pearl gray light. This fell far short of his imagined scenario of freedom.

  Father Domina was there to greet him with a gentle smile, as though the younger priest had only been gone for a few hours of a single day. Paul Marie’s body became lighter and lighter. At each step in his old shoes, he felt the bulk of his muscles falling away from him as he walked toward the elderly man, the faithful keeper of his old life and ordinary destiny.

  The old man recited a litany of attendant chores and parish calls—the small details of a simple cleric’s life as they rolled toward the village in a hired car. The prison receded to a small gray dot on a flat landscape of vast open fields. The overcast heavens had disappointed him, but the earth did not—so much space, an endless horizon.

  But something was missing, something was lost.

  Father Domina patted his hand and smiled, taking the younger man’s silence for unspeakable joy, missing all the signs of a broken mind—the idiot’s grin, the fixed and staring eyes, the rolling tears.

  Paul Marie slowly shook his head, dismissing the idea that the shadow beneath his bed had been killed by the light. He decided that it had gone elsewhere while the cell door was open.

  Arnie Pyle entered the hospital room before she had finished dressing. He smiled, hoping that Ali would turn around to catch him eyeing her like a peep-show client. And she did. Her blouse hung open, revealing the dark thickened flesh of a crooked suture line. It was not the neatest embroidery job ever done on human skin, but considering the large caliber of the gun and the close range of the shot, he had seen worse. She wasn’t angry to find him staring at her breast, and she did nothing to hide the new scar.

  He whistled the traditional three notes of appreciation for half-dressed women with bullet wounds. “Well, that’s fascinating, Ali. From now on, only wear low cleavage. Advertise it.”

  “Degenerate.” She lowered her face to the work of buttoning her blouse and covering the wound. “Ugly, isn’t it?”

  “The bullet hole? No, Ali. That’s chump change compared to your face.”

  Perverse woman—she laughed; he knew she would laugh.

  “I love your face.” He caressed her cheek on the damaged side. “It’s not symmetrical, but you can’t have everything.”

  “Still curious about it, Arnie?”

  “Always.” He touched her twisted mouth with the tips of his fingers. “If you’re smart you’ll never tell me how it happened. Just keep me enslaved for the rest of my life, going quietly nuts.”

  She didn’t pull back or brush his hand away this time. Finally, he was teaching her to trust him again. One day, he would get the right words out, perhaps today. Within his circle of intimates, she was one of the few who didn’t know how much he cared for her. There were lampposts and bartenders from coast to coast who knew of his capacity for the love of Ali Cray.

  She was finishing the la
st few buttons on her blouse, and in a perplexing sense of embarrassment, or inexplicable chivalry, he turned to the window to give her privacy from his eyes. “So, how’s the Hubble kid doing? She’s got her leg in one piece?”

  “Yes. She’s going home in another week. No complications with her surgery.”

  “But?” He knew Ali well enough to fill in the words she left out. He turned to find her sitting on the edge of the hospital bed, high heels dangling a foot off the floor. What sorrowful eyes. “So the kid is still totally nuts, right?”

  “She only needs some time to heal.” Ali made a game attempt at a smile. “Have you seen Rouge Kendall yet?”

  “Yeah, he picked me up at the airport. He’s waiting in the hospital coffee shop with an armload of roses—long stems, all for you. Must be at least two dozen.”

  “I wish he hadn’t done that.”

  “So do I. It makes me look bad.” But with all that recovered ransom money, Rouge could afford mutant roses with even longer stems. “Want me to get him?”

  “Not yet. I’m going to tell you how my face was scarred.”

  “You don’t have to do that.” And why, after all this time, did he suddenly not wish to know?

  Her smile was wry. “You think you’ve guessed, right?”

  “How couldI—”

  “I always know when you’re lying, even before you open your mouth.” She patted the mattress as an invitation to sit down beside her. “My own parents don’t know this story.”

  So now he would have the secret, but some instinct made him worry that it might cost him the lady. It was the tone of her voice he was reading, that touch of trepidation. And then he realized that they shared this same fear. He sat on the edge of the high hospital bed, his legs swinging free, feet pacing on thin air.

  “I was the invisible child,” she began. “You have to know that before you can understand how it happened. My parents dropped me off at the church on their way to the airport. They were going out to the Midwest for a few days. Dad had a job interview in Nebraska. I was told to go to Uncle Mortimer’s house after choir practice. But the Dodds—my uncle’s housekeeper and valet—they didn’t know I was expected. My uncle forgot to mention me, or maybe he thought it wasn’t necessary.

  “Uncle Mortimer came home late that night, after the Dodds had gone to bed. The next day, he left early for an appointment in the city. I suppose he assumed the Dodds were taking care of me—or he just never gave me a thought. He stayed at his club in Manhattan that night, and the following afternoon he got a call from his valet. My parents were at the house to collect me, and where was I? Well, my uncle had no idea. And where would you even begin to look for an invisible child?”

  “You’re serious? They all misplaced you for two days?”

  “I never made it to the church door. A bag was pulled over my head. There was this smell—something sweet, probably ether, and then I blacked out. When I woke up, I was lying on the floor of a speeding car. There was the monster in the driver’s seat. A black ski mask covered his head, all of it. But I always remembered him with long sharp teeth. Isn’t that strange?”

  Arnie was thinking of the mask recovered from the cellar—the white stitches over the felt mouth—fangs of thread.

  Sometimes Myles Penny had resorted to taunts of, “The strain will kill you if you don’t tell.” Not once had Dr. Mortimer Cray considered this as evidence that his patient wanted to be stopped, for he would not have known what to do with that information, so rigid was the psychiatrist in the keeping of his own commandments.

  Mortimer looked up to the sky beyond the transparent ceiling. Tardy winter had come rushing down upon his glass house, flinging the season everywhere with careless cold winds to rattle the panes, and snow to kill the leaves of every tree and plant outside the protection of his conservatory.

  He thought to ring for Dodd when he felt the first pain in his chest, but his hand trembled over the intercom button as he envisioned a stark white hospital bed, tubes of fluid running in and out of his body, machines humming and clicking, mechanizing his demise.

  He shuffled to a chair and slowly sat down. Turning his head stiffly, he scanned this domain of delicate orchids and rare violets. The shapely yew tree was tall as a goddess and green with new shoots extending beyond the careful pruning of her rounded shape. On the near tables, young plants pushed up through the soil of shallow beds. Within the shelter of his greenhouse and outside of the proper season, he had forced new life into the world in a heresay of pantheism, though Persephone was the deity he loved best.

  It was not the sky growing dim; he knew that. The yew tree was less distinct in form and darker now. The world under glass was an assembly of vague black silhouettes, and one of these shadows was moving toward him. Gentleman that he was, he stood up to receive his anticipated guest, his goddess, the bride of Death.

  His heart beat in an erratic rhythm. The pain began in earnest, spreading outward from his breast. He fell quickly, not folding gracefully into soft arms, but slamming into the stone floor, as though he had been struck down with a force of great anger.

  Though the hospital coffee shop was full, busy and noisy with a multitude of separate conversations and patrons walking to and fro, Arnie Pyle easily spotted Rouge Kendall near the window. The surface of his corner table was covered with a profusion of blooms in bright florist wrapping.

  On the other side of the room, a young waitress stood by the cash register. She ignored the other customers to stare at the handsome policeman in blue jeans. Rouge was deep into the sports section of a newspaper and oblivious to the teenager falling in love with him. At Arnie’s approach, the younger man looked up from his paper with an easygoing smile. “How’s Ali doing?”

  “Not great.” Arnie pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. “She looks a little shaky to me. But they’re letting her go home anyway.”

  The wide window gave him a view down a rolling hill to the streets and houses below. Snow was flying over the rooftops, and he could see smoke rising from almost every chimney. Ant-size youngsters were dragging sleds uphill, and some were already screaming their way down on swift running blades. One rider in a pink snowsuit was actually aiming her sled at a helpless little boy on foot. But Arnie still wanted children.

  Over the past ten days in Washington, he had missed this little town. He hadn’t realized how much until now. He watched as the law-abiding driver of the only car on the main road stopped for the only traffic light in Makers Village.

  Rouge lifted his cup as an invitation. Arnie waved it off. “Nothing for me, thanks. Well, now that you’re rich, I guess you can leave this place.”

  “I don’t think so, Arnie. I just bought a baseball field.”

  “No shit.”

  “Don’t get excited,” said Rouge. “It’s a vacant lot next to the station house. If you come back in the spring, I might let you pull a few weeds on the pitcher’s mound.”

  “You got a deal.” He glanced at the waitress, so lovely with her long blond braid. This might be Gwen Hubble in a few more years, glowing with health and merely boy-crazy, coloring her lips bright red in the chrome reflection of a cash register. He rarely thought of Sadie Green. He had sent her to the back of his mind to keep company with all the other children who had not come home alive.

  “Got all your answers, Arnie?”

  “Yeah, Ali cleared up some loose ends.”

  “Not too many of those left. We identified the last of the bodies from the cellar. Penny must’ve been using the Vickers place for years.” Rouge finished his coffee and signaled the girl for his check. “Now we’re looking at all the summer houses with dirt cellars. Maybe we’ll find the rest of the kids on Ali’s list.”

  The young waitress strode boldly across the room, faking more confidence than she could possibly possess. This was almost painful to watch, for her mouth was freshly painted, and her bright eyes were set on Rouge. She presented herself at the table, small breasts thrust out as far as a trai
ning bra would allow, an offering to the handsome cop. But he only laid a few dollar bills across the check in her hand, then turned his full attention to the chore of folding a newspaper.

  The girl stood there, very still and tightly clutching the money. Her cheeks were a deep crimson flush, as though she were suddenly naked in public. And she was.

  So exposed—nowhere to hide.

  Arnie extracted one long-stemmed rose from Rouge’s bouquet and handed this tribute to the pretty teenager. She smiled, only a little disappointed that it had come from the hand of the wrong man, for a conquest was a conquest.

  And a rose is a rose. Well, not always. Arnie believed that more experienced females used flowers to divine the most embarrassing things about men—their true intentions toward women. But this girl was too young to suspect him of kindness, and he got away with it.

  “Ali has something to tell you.” He sat back in his chair, watching the waitress walk away. He was unwilling to meet Rouge’s eyes. “I know it’s going to be hard on her, so—”

  “It isn’t necessary.” Rouge gathered up his bouquet. “I know.”

  “No, I don’t think so, kid. You might have guessed right about the scar, but there’s more to it.”

  Rouge set the roses down again. “The only thing I don’t know is whether he threw Ali in that ditch before or after the Morrison family crashed their car.”

  Oh, sweet Jesus, he did know. “It was before the accident and after he cut her,” said Arnie. “If the Morrisons hadn’t crashed, no one would’ve found Ali in time. The kid lost that much blood.” Penny had intended a slow death and a lonely one. “But now she—”