The Judas Child

by Carol O'Connell

  “Ali was only ten years old,” said Rouge. “She doesn’t have anything to apologize for.”

  And how did he put that together?

  The young policeman leaned forward to make his next point very clear. There should be no misunderstanding between them. “My mother is starting a new life in Washington. I don’t want this following her around. It’s over.”

  Arnie put up his hands. “Understood. Nothing in writing, okay? Just tell me how you worked it out. And you can skip all the billboards and neon signs—like why Ali devoted her life to tracking pedophiles.”

  Rouge shrugged to say that this was really very simple. “She was tying my sister into her pattern.” He was apparently crediting Arnie with the intelligence to know that this required a second little girl. But Susan Kendall had died alone—just the one small body bag.

  “Another odd thing,” said Rouge. “Most people see pedophiles as little men.”

  Arnie nodded. All his experience backed up that profile on so many levels.

  Rouge continued, “But Ali—an expert in the field—she always called this one a monster. Not a technical term, is it? Not very accurate, either. I had to wonder about that. Maybe the last time she saw him, he was monster size.”

  “He was a grown-up,” said Arnie. “And she was only ten years old.”

  “Right. And then there’s kids and guilt. If she met up with this man, why didn’t she tell somebody?”

  “She was ashamed.” Arnie stared at his hands, following the reasoning now. According to Ali’s case notes, the Judas child was never sexually molested. So Rouge would know that wasn’t the reason. She was ashamed of what she had done to Susan Kendall. Oh, Ali. Every time he had badgered her about that scar—

  “It’s all child’s play for you, isn’t it?” Emotions under control, Arnie looked up to meet the younger man’s calm hazel eyes. Would Rouge be so understanding if he knew how Ali had called his sister out? Or did he know already? The young cop had everything he needed to work it out. The Judas child was always a best friend to the true target, the little princess. But the Kendall twins had no close friends, only one another. Susan would never have come out at the invitation of Ali Cray—the invisible child who had blended into every wall she leaned against.

  Rouge might only be missing a few details in the lie told to Susan, that her brother had run away from military school, that he was waiting for her at the church. This had been Ali’s work. Oh, the things a little girl would do—just to make a grown man stop whittling on her face with a knife, to end the blood flow, the pain and the panic.

  “Ali wants to see you. She has to—”

  “No, she doesn’t. Here, take my car.” Rouge pushed the keys to his Volvo across the table. “I’ve got a police cruiser picking me up in a few minutes.”

  “You have to see her. She needs to tell you.”

  “No, that’s what she wants, and it’s not going to happen. Give her what she needs, Arnie.” Rouge put the roses into his arms. “Give her these, and tell her they’re from me.”

  Arnie stared at the flowers. They meant something to him, some forgotten thing. He couldn’t recall the words of the sentiment, though his favorite poetry revolved around roses. Their scent was intoxicating; his favorite adjectives revolved around alcohol.

  “I got her a cactus.”

  “Interesting. But I’m sure Ali knew you were lying.” Rouge smiled. Apparently, he also understood the dangers of plants talking to women.

  When Arnie left the coffee shop, he took the stairs because the elevator was too fast. Climbing step by slow step, he tried to recall the text for these roses. Every florist had a cheat sheet for clueless men, a list of the correct blooms and the right colors to say to the fair sex, “Let me back into the house.” For other occasions there were flowers to say, “Hello,” and with a change of color, “Goodbye.” Because Ali was a psychologist, he had always given her a mixed bouquet to confuse her.

  Arnie paused on the landing. A single bloom from Rouge’s bouquet could stand for, “I am jealous,” but that didn’t fit. “I wish you joy” was another line. No, not that one. Rouge was anything but cliché. Arnie opened the stairwell door, still determined to divine their meaning before he carried the flowers to Ali. If there was something subversive in the bouquet, he would dump it.

  When he entered the sterile corridor on Ali’s floor, he dragged his feet all the way toward the door at the end. “Let us be friends” was the last thing he could think of in his floral lexicon. It was a harmless sentiment that would at least not cause her any pain. But now he recalled that only men read the instructions for flowers. Women knew how to operate them without manuals.

  The door to her room was open, and she was still sitting on the edge of the high bed, feet dangling like a child perched on grown-up furniture. The child in stiletto heels slipped down to the floor and walked toward him, looking over his shoulder to the hallway beyond, slow to understand that Rouge was not coming.

  Arnie had botched her errand, the only thing she had ever asked of him. What could he say to ease her disappointment? He held out the bouquet, old reliable mainstay of men in deep trouble with women. “These are from Rouge.”

  Ali accepted the roses and carried them to the better light of the window. He followed close behind, prepared to fling himself on her if she tried to jump from the third-floor balcony—or if she cried. “Rouge said to thank you for the flowers you left on Susan’s grave. A hyacinth and a peony?”

  This startled Ali. Had he screwed up? Had he missed another meaning?

  Cradling the bouquet in one arm, she tore away the wrapping, the better to study the individual blooms, as if each one were the separate word of a very important message.

  Women and their dark art of reading flowers.

  And now the forgotten thing was remembered—the text in the roses, the last line from the cheat sheet, “Let us forget.” Arnie leaned his head against the cool window glass and called himself a fool.

  Of course she had no use for his own fumbling attempts at comfort. She had wanted pain, and lots of it, for this was the stuff of atonement. And it could only come from Rouge Kendall, survivor of the pair that had been ruined, killed by half. But instead of hurting her, Rouge had given Ali something fine and good. Now her arms were flooded with the color of morning sun born out of darkness, symbols of purification by its fire—yellow roses of forgiveness.

  She was smiling, healed and whole. Of course, she still had the scar and a twisted mouth—Rouge was good, but not that good. Yet somehow the prescient young cop had known exactly what Ali needed and precisely when she would be ready to receive it.

  As the locals were fond of saying—all of St. Ursula’s children were strange.

  epilogue

  Winter was late again this year. Perhaps order had not been completely restored to Makers Village; the dust had not yet settled in all the chimneys. He had paced through the month of December, waiting on some event he could not name.

  This Christmas morning was another anniversary of Susan Kendall’s death. Her oldest friend laid a bouquet of snow-white flowers on her grave. Next, Paul Marie stopped by Father Domina’s simple stone marker. The old priest had lingered only long enough to hand over the stewardship of his parish, never doubting that Father Marie would accept.

  The church had been filled on his first Sunday behind the pulpit—a record attendance. One year later, they still came in great numbers, and this mystified him. Surely by now they had found him out as a fraud, one who went through the motions with no feeling or faith. He looked down at the tattoos on the backs of his hands. Perhaps it was only novelty that so intrigued his parishioners. He toyed with the idea of emblazoning his vestment with an elaborate C for convict.

  He said a ritual prayer over Father Domina’s grave. It was only a small spate of words that meant very little to him, and so his mind wandered even as he spoke. What would the old man think if he knew his acolyte had ambitiously evolved into a hypocrite, an agn
ostic and a heretic. In closing the prayer, Father Marie addressed the Lord, Who might exist, in the too familiar form of “You Bastard.” He alternately referred to God as the Great Baby Killer in the sky.

  As he walked away from the old priest’s grave, he still held one bright cluster of flowers. Their colors reminded him of a child’s paint box. He held them up for Sadie’s mother to see from the distance of the gravel path.

  “Aw, they’re beautiful,” said Becca Green as he came closer. She sat on a stone bench, holding her own bizarre bouquet, a loose arrangement of dead blooms, their large heads impaled on wire stems. She clutched them tightly, not yet ready to commit them to the ground.

  “An odd color for sunflowers.” He smiled as he knelt by the brass vase at the base of Sadie’s stone.

  “Gwen gave them to me last Mother’s Day—filling in for Sadie. She couldn’t find anything purple at the florist shop, so she got these. She thought Sadie would’ve bought me sunflowers—so bright and cheerful. Of course, that was before Gwen painted them.” Becca looked down on the dead flowers encased in thick globs of dark purple. “I thought that was so great. I laughed—Harry cried.” And now one stalk dropped to the ground and went unnoticed. “Ah, Gwen, what a practical kid. I thought Sadie might appreciate the joke more than Harry did.”

  Though Gwen Hubble never came near the cemetery, he had seen the child in church every Sunday. She walked without a cane these days, and the bruised look in her eyes was passing off. He had taken this for a sign of healing.

  He remained at Becca’s feet beside the monument, a low piece of slanted marble with a violet cast, engraved with letters of a simple elegant script. He finished arranging his flowers in the brass container and looked up at her. “David Shore doesn’t come anymore?”

  Becca shook her head. “He has a new girlfriend. Sadie had a big heart—when she was alive. I don’t think she would have minded.”

  Over the past year, the priest and Becca Green had wandered into a strange friendship over the graves of children. He had heard all the best Sadie stories. But this was the first time the mother had alluded to death. All their previous talks had centered on the exploits of a very lively child. And Becca had never brought flowers before; that was a service one performed for the dead, and it would have interfered with her deep denial.

  In the months following Sadie’s funeral, there had been so many flowers heaped on this plot of earth, the engraved marble had been hidden from sight. One family had driven a hundred miles to lay a wreath on the grave. And now and then, the priest would encounter policemen walking through the cemetery, their large meaty hands awkwardly clutching small sprays of delicate violets.

  Today the stone was exposed. Becca could read the dates of life and death—if she chose to. But she only stared at her hands, plump and white, folded around the painted flowers. “Gwen came by the house yesterday.”

  “Is she done with the therapist?”

  “Not yet. She still has a lot of strange ideas.”

  “Does it upset you when she visits?”

  “No, I love having her around the house. Oh, I almost forgot.” She rooted deep in her coat pocket and pulled out an envelope. “Harry’s latest batch of baby pictures. Gwen says the kid looks just like Sadie.”

  He sat down on the cold stone bench beside Becca and looked at each photo with great care. Yes, the likeness was there in the large brown eyes and the wide generous mouth of the infant. The mother also bore a resemblance to her many wallet photographs of Sadie.

  When he turned to Becca, she wore a puzzled expression and held the purple sunflowers closer to her breast. “I wish I knew what happened in that cellar.”

  So Gwen had been at her again, attempting to heal her best friend’s mother, driving Becca insane to make her well.

  “The kid does have a good argument.” Becca said this tentatively, as though testing the words in her mouth. “Yesterday, Gwen said—”And now the rest of the dark flowers fell to the ground at her feet. “She said—only Sadie could have known what commands the dog would respond to. I keep thinking about that dummy they found in the cellar, the one Gwen used to train the dog. It all happened just the way she said it did. The holes in the ground, the dead dog—everything. And that bastard was attacked by the dog, wasn’t he? And his knife wound—that was real. Gwen could never—”

  “Becca, let it go.” This woman was in deep trouble, and he was ill equipped to help her. In the church-approved role of advocatus diaboli, he might point out that the mushroom lady’s journals were a more likely source for the dog’s commands, though no such mention was made in any of the newspaper excerpts.

  “Listen!” She grabbed his hand and squeezed it hard. “There’s more. Only Sadie could have told her I was pregnant. I didn’t know for sure myself until that afternoon. Just before Sadie left the house, my doctor called to confirm the test. I didn’t tell Harry until after the funeral. But Gwen knew about the baby before my own husband did—and Marsha Hubble backs that up.”

  Or perhaps at some earlier date, Becca had given away her secret by keeping Sadie waiting on a sidewalk, lingering awhile in front of a store window decorated with cribs and baby clothes. And there was another possibility. “Gwen might have talked to Sadie before she died.”

  Becca shook her head. “Gwen says Sadie wasn’t conscious in the boathouse. That medical examiner, Chainy, he told me she was dead by then. He showed me the report. The blow that knocked her out was the one that killed her. Sadie died the day that freak stole her from me—over a week before they found Gwen.”

  “If Dr. Chainy was right.” He had no great faith in either realm, supernatural or scientific.

  She squeezed his hand again. “So what happened in that cellar?” The wind whipped up around them, collecting the painted flowers and driving them toward the grave. “Where do I put my faith? In a little girl’s crazy story—or a pathologist’s report?”

  “Both things could be true,” he said, raising his voice with this lie, so the wind wouldn’t take it. “Gwen didn’t believe she could survive all alone. So her best friend came back for her. Does it matter where Sadie came from—Gwen’s own mind or that shallow grave?” He lifted Becca’s face to his and winced at the mad hope in the woman’s eyes.

  No—call it faith. Becca needed to believe that Sadie was an ongoing little force of nature before she could let go of her child. Gwen had understood that. Why hadn’t he?

  “It doesn’t matter, Becca. They were so bound to one another, one child couldn’t leave the other behind—”He began to revise his deception, hunting for better words. He had spun so many tales for the parish, this should have been so easy. It was not.

  And Becca Green was not comforted. Bright woman, she knew the sound of lies. Her eyes were decomposing now, giving him a view of the grave and its attendants, things that writhed and slithered, worms of the mind. He had failed her by planting doubt in a child’s ghost story.

  Her face was a work of agony: her mouth opened and closed, as though gasping for air, making strangled sounds. His arms enfolded her, and he held her for a very long time. It had begun to snow, and a hard wind was driving the flakes into his skin, stinging him as he rocked Becca, gently stroking her hair until the ground at his feet was shrouded in swirling white and he had read the words on Sadie’s monument for the hundredth time: “Beloved child.” Snowflakes filled in the graven letters, and he closed his eyes.

  “Sadie can’t be dead.” Her voice was muffled against his coat. She shivered. He held her closer, believing she was only cold. The snow had ceased, but the wind was rising and roaring all around them. The woman in his arms began to shake and thrash in a full-blown seizure. She screamed, and he came undone in his panic. This was his fault; he had brought this upon her. Her pain was cruel, and it was coming all at once—too fast. She could not stand it, and he could think of nothing to ease it or slow it. Her body was quaking so violently he feared that she would fly apart.

  Then the wind ceased abrupt
ly, and she lay exhausted against his chest, a spent storm of a woman. The world was utterly quiet and still as she lifted her wet face from the folds of his coat.

  “How could Sadie be dead?” Louder now, she said, “Tell me how!” One hand formed into a claw and raked through her hair as she moved away from him. “I wake up every single morning, hoping it was all a lying dream. Praying that it never happened—that this damned piece of granite didn’t even exist !”

  She thrust out one angry fist toward the carved stone and then fell silent. Stunned, she slowly turned her head to stare at the surrounding grounds. Her eyes came back to Sadie’s grave.

  The sheltering windbreak of their own bodies had allowed a light cover of snow to accumulate over this one plot of earth, while all the rest had been swept clean—as if the snow had fallen on Sadie’s grave and no other. The priest knew it for a hoax, only an illusion of the elements. The rational explanation was there for anyone to see. Yet Becca’s eyes were shining, entranced and enchanted.

  Paul Marie bowed his head, but not to pray. The woman beside him was smiling now, and he was the one in deep pain. So there they were, two people of radically different faiths, for hers was great and his was small.

  He knew she was finding more ghosts in the weather, as though this fragile white covering of snowflakes might be a grand gesture of sorts—to erase the grave from her sight, hiding solid proof of Sadie’s death, allowing a mother to keep her child alive for one more day—a present for Becca.

  Paul Marie stared at her radiant face, and there he found peace. He would not be the one to say that she was deluded. Maybe there was a God. And perhaps the Almighty had learned a bit of humility, for the priest now saw this unnatural act of deceit by snow as almost human in the frailty of a lie.

  Kathleen Mallory returns in another brilliant

  thriller by Carol O’Connell . . .