The Orphans of Race Point: A Novel

by Patry Francis

  “I’ve never known a cab driver to worry about speed. You’re illegal, aren’t you?”

  The man regarded him broodingly in the rearview mirror. “You INS?”

  “I’m just a guy who needed to be somewhere an hour ago. Please, I’m desperate, brother. I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “Filho da puta,” the man muttered, clearly not expecting Gus to understand.

  “That’s me, the original filho da puta,” Gus shot back. Again, the driver shot him a suspicious look. Gus hoped he didn’t recognize him from the Portuguese mass. The speedometer shot up to eighty.

  At the Pink Dolphin, Gus reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out the handful of cash that Ava had pressed on him the night before. It was still sodden from his trek through the rain, but the driver stuffed the money quickly in his pocket.

  “You have a nice day now, you hear,” he said, smiling at the man he had just called a son of a whore. “You need a ride out of here, you call, okay? Ask for Marco.”

  “Thanks, but I can walk to the rectory from here,” Gus said, made guileless by relief. Ava’s BMW was still there. The only other vehicle in the sandy parking area was a pickup truck, parked askew in front of the office.

  “The rectory?” Marco repeated, nodding, as if he understood the meaning of both the threat and the lavish tip. “Don’t worry, Father. I keep your secret, you keep mine.”

  Gus smiled as the cab drove away. He knew how it must appear. He could already hear Marco telling his friends: and the filho da puta was a priest. Perhaps he would applaud his machismo. Even Hallie might take his absence as proof that he had lied about his feelings for Ava the night before. Not only had he fallen for her, but his obsession had trumped his promise to stay with Nick.

  Though Gus sometimes passed the Pink Dolphin in his daily runs, he’d never really looked at it. A gaudy dolphin painted pink, its mouth open in a perverse smile, adorned the front. The building itself was salt-scarred, windswept, badly in need of paint—or demolition.

  All the shades in room 4B were drawn. There didn’t appear to be a 4A. Gus rapped firmly on the door but got no response. When he tried it, he was surprised to find it unlocked.

  “Ava?” he called tentatively as he went inside. Again there was no answer, but he felt heartened by a strip of light under the bathroom door. The shower was running.

  He knocked to let her know that he was there. “It’s me—Gus,” he said.

  The only answer was the pounding of the water. It sounded like a cascade of small blows. Maybe she hadn’t heard him. Gus turned on the light and took in the desolate room. Ava’s keys were on the bureau beside a cold cup of coffee, the rainbowed cream on its surface indicating it had been there for hours. Seeing no sign of her purse or the phone she had used to call him earlier, he looked at his watch as he sat tentatively on the edge of the bed. Everything about the scene felt wrong, starting with the unlocked door.

  A minute later, the shower was still running. His watch read eleven thirty-five. The exact moment when he began to suspect he had arrived too late: Ava Cilento was already dead.

  “Ava!” he yelled, banging his fists against the locked door. “Are you in there?” But the room, the entire motel, indeed the whole curling peninsula resounded with emptiness. He kicked open the door, and encountered nothing but the vacancy he felt in his bones. No Ava, but no grisly scene, either. He almost laughed aloud at his garish, film-noir-inspired imaginings. Then he noticed a woman’s top lying on the floor.

  The garment was sheer and lacy, unlike the modest sweaters he’d seen her in before. But when he stooped to pick it up, the scent recalled her presence. He tossed the top in the corner and looked around. He picked up her keys from the bureau, willing the inanimate objects to speak.

  Wanting to call her, he flipped open his cell phone before he remembered she had never given him her number. He threw it on the bed in frustration. Searching for something he couldn’t name, Gus began to open and slam shut drawers and closets. All were empty. The noise of his footsteps stomping through the small space, the vigorous banging of doors and drawers, his curses felt like an assault on the deep silence he had struggled to create for himself. The hours of centering prayer and contemplation on the beach.

  Through the back window of the motel room, he saw a cluster of cottages that would remain deserted until the season. Had she spotted Robert’s car in the lot outside and escaped through the window? Could she be hiding in one of those empty cottages? But when he tried the window, he found it sealed with disuse.

  Then something on the mirror above the bureau caught his eye. It was small, minuscule, like the drop of blood that beaded in the corner of her mouth when she bit her lip the first night he met her. This, too, appeared to be blood—a smear about the size of a fingernail. It could have been the result of a paper cut, it was so small. But the second Gus touched it, he suspected the worst.

  His first thought was to go to the office and ask the manager if he had seen someone else enter the unit—or had some idea as to where Ava had gone. But the office was at the opposite end of the building, and its shades were closed as forbiddingly as those in 4B. It was unlikely the manager had witnessed anything; and if Gus introduced himself, he would be the one who was identified at the scene. Realizing how thoroughly he had painted the scene with evidence of his guilt, he decided against it. What he needed to do was go to the rectory and think things through. To replace the damning silence of the motel room with Jack’s voice, and maybe even put in a call to Lunes Oliveira.

  He imagined Lunes mocking him with his down-home common sense. One drop of blood does not make a murder scene, Little Cod. Don’t get carried away.

  And then he noticed a large rectangular square of carpet beside the bed that was stained darker than the rest. Four neat compressions in the rug indicated that the bed had been moved recently.

  He had only pushed it about a foot to the side when he saw another inky splotch. It was the sickening dark red he knew it would be, and it was still wet. Forcefully, he pulled the bed away from the wall, exposing the horrific design. Behind the place where the headboard had been, the wall was also splotched with blood.

  As he stared at the soaked carpet and the bloody wall, he finally remembered what he had done after his mother died, and why he had blotted that hour so completely from memory. He knew because there, in room 4B, he lived those hours all over again. He recalled the utter darkness of the closet, the soft material of his mother’s dresses that brushed against his face, assaulting him with her rosewater scent. Attempting to make himself disappear, he had curled his body into itself. But no matter how tightly he closed his eyes, he couldn’t escape the narrow stripe of light under the door. The light that illuminated his mother’s lifeless body. The dryness in his throat that he might have previously identified as thirst, it had demanded nothing of him beyond the shutting down of the senses, the heart’s stubborn beating.

  And he understood why he had sealed all these details from memory long ago: because instinctively, at nine, and more clearly at thirty-one, the hours now condensed into a few short minutes, he understood that the place he had gone that day was the darkest and most terrifying one imaginable.

  When Gus shook off his stillness this second time, he was not a nine-year-old boy in his pajamas, but a grown man, and his mind was oddly clear. He considered straightening up the room and returning it to the state it had been in when he first entered it. Then he thought of all the fingerprints he had already left throughout the unit and decided it was hopeless. Besides, wouldn’t cleaning up ultimately make him appear even more guilty? Instead of trying, he walked out, leaving the door open for the police.

  It had begun to rain again, a downpour that prodded Gus up the hill and toward the rectory. Soon he was running—motivated not just by the lashing rain, but by something inside himself that had always found freedom in movement. By the time he reached the third mile, he felt that he could go on forever. He stopped briefly in to
wn and called the police.

  “Ava Cilento has been murdered in the Pink Dolphin Motel,” he said, his voice flat with exhaustion. “You need to talk to her husband immediately.” Then he directed them to the ostentatious house on the water.

  He thought of the child he knew only from her photograph. Mila. For now, at least, she was safe with Ava’s friend, but how long would her father allow her to remain there? Gus shuddered as he imagined her alone in the house with the man who had killed her mother.

  At the sound of his entrance, the dogs tumbled down the stairs of the rectory and welcomed him with a cacophony of joyous yelps and barks. Gus was crouching to receive their exuberant licks and wriggling nudges when he heard Jack’s desk chair being pushed back in the office. He stood up as the pastor walked into the foyer. Almost simultaneously, Sandra appeared in the doorway that led to the kitchen.

  “Gus,” Jack said, and nodded gravely. He appeared tired, and his old-fashioned white collar was slightly askew. Sandra stood in the doorway, forebodingly silent.

  Then Julia came down the stairs. “Papa Gus! I’m so glad you’re home. We were—” But she left her sentence incomplete as she raced past her mother and reached up to hug him.

  “Thanks, Jules. I’m happy to be home, too.”

  “I’d suggest a shower, but I’m not sure you have time for that,” Jack said, taking in his wet clothes. “The cops have already been here once.”

  In spite of the warning, Gus did shower, sloughing off the rain and sweat, hoping in the process to wash off the gloom of Nick’s illness, and the grief that was already in Hallie’s eyes, to pummel away the desolation of the motel, and the memory of the dark stain on the carpet he had found there. By the time he rejoined them in the living room, his essentially hopeful nature had already begun to war with the facts . . . Maybe there was another explanation . . . Maybe Ava had come to the motel with a weapon . . . There was no proof, after all, that the blood was hers. Maybe she’d finally fought back . . .

  Jack, Sandra, and Julia were lined up stiffly on the couch. Gus smiled sadly. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do next,” he announced, still standing in the center of the room. “But I wanted to make sure it was okay for the dogs to stay here if I go away for a while. Otherwise, I know a couple of people in the parish who might be willing to take them.”

  “You’re worried about dogs at a time like this?” Jack interrupted. “And what exactly do you mean by ‘go away’? You really intend to go on the lam? For God’s sake, Gus, you’ve got to be the most inept criminal I’ve ever met.”

  “How many criminals do you know, Jack?” Gus sunk into a chair opposite the three of them. He sighed, feeling the despondency return. What had he been thinking? Ava was too weak, both physically and psychologically, to fight back—or even to manage the artful cleanup he had witnessed.

  “Too many,” Jack said, struggling to rise from the couch. “And, unfortunately, they all seem to live with me.”

  Sandra cleared her throat. “Excuse me, Monsignor! The law ain’t messed with me in at least seven years.”

  “See what I mean!” The old pastor’s eyebrows shot up. “Julia and I are the only ones who are clean around here.” He went to his liquor cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Jameson, shaking his head as he filled a tumbler with strong drink. “Sixty-nine years old and I’ve never had a drink before four o’clock. Even at a wedding. The stuff took down too much of my family.”

  Gus got up and poured himself a shot. “If you can break your rule, I guess I can break mine.” He hadn’t tasted hard liquor since the night of his high school prom.

  “Dammit, Gus,” the old priest said gruffly. “You’re the closest thing to a son this old goat is ever going to have.”

  “If you had been my father, Jack, my whole life would have been different.”

  Gus moved to embrace him, but, as always, the old priest roughly shook him off. “And for that reason alone, I’m glad I’m not. Codfish’s boy turned out pretty damn good, if you ask me.”

  “Until now.”

  “This accusation doesn’t mean anything, Gus,” Jack scoffed. “It’s how you handle it that’s important.”

  “And we all know what a great job Gus has done with that,” Sandra interjected. She got up and paced the room nervously. “I hate to interrupt this touching scene, but in case you guys haven’t noticed, we got ourselves an issue here.”

  “Could you really be sent to jail, Father Gus?” Tears sprang into Julia’s eyes.

  Gus looked from one fear-stricken face to the other, then downed the rest of his shot.

  “What on God’s earth made you go to her house, Gus?” Jack asked.

  Sandra continued to pace, her heels clicking rhythmically as she drew a narrow circle around him. “When you’re talkin’ philosophy, theology, contemplation, all that—you’re a brilliant man, Gus. But when it comes to practical shit—I hate to say it—”

  “Stop, Mami,” Julia interrupted. “Let Gus talk—all of you.”

  “It’s worse than you think,” Gus admitted. “A whole lot worse than forcing my way into her house or breaking bail.”

  The clock on the mantle had never ticked so loudly as it did in the minute when they waited for him to continue speaking.

  “Ava asked me to meet her at the Pink Dolphin this morning, but when I got there, she was gone. Then I started looking around and—” He was about to describe the dark-red blood he’d found beneath the bed and the chilling sight of the mattress when he looked into Julia’s face and decided to exclude the details. “There was no body, but the amount of blood . . . It looks bad.”

  Jack’s weathered face collapsed in compassion. “Oh, God—the poor woman. And there was a child, too, wasn’t there?”

  Gus nodded, thinking of the photograph of Mila Cilento in his pocket. He was haunted by her serious eyes, the way her head tilted slightly to one side as her hand gripped a pigtail.

  But Sandra was sharply focussed on Gus. “And you’re going to be the prime suspect. That’s what you’re telling us here, isn’t it, Papa Gus?”

  “If I’d signed my name with her blood, I couldn’t have incriminated myself more.”

  “Gus, you didn’t—” Jack’s blue eyes were boyishly wide as he ran a hand through his brush of white hair.

  “How could you even think that?” Sandra asked in an outraged voice. But then she spun toward Gus, her hands landing artfully on skinny hips. “Jesus Christ, Gus, answer the question. You didn’t kill her, did you?”

  “Mami!” Julia yelled.

  “Sandra, there’s no need to take the Lord’s name in vain!” Jack bellowed at the same moment.

  “I’m sorry, Father Jack, but if ever there was a time to get a little pissed with the man on the wall there, it’s now,” Sandra said, cocking her head toward the ever-present crucifix.

  Gus pounded the coffee table to get their attention. “Excuse me, but does anyone want to hear my answer?”

  “See! Papa Gus was about to tell us he didn’t do it,” Julia said. Then her voice grew small. “Weren’t you, Gus?”

  As Gus took a long, deep breath, the ticking of the clock again grew pronounced.

  “The way things look, not many people are likely to believe me—even my friends in the parish,” he said, looking up at them. “But it’s important to me that you three do. No matter what you hear, remember what I’m telling you. I never had an affair with Ava Cilento. I never hit her, or hurt her in any way. And I didn’t kill her, either. But someone did. The amount of blood in that motel room left no question.”

  While Julia glared in vindication at the two adults, Sandra sputtered, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Gus, I knew you didn’t do it. I was only asking because Jack wanted to know.”

  “We’ve all got murder in us,” Jack said. “It’s just one of the nasty skills we humans come equipped with. We can get angry or passionate or just blind enough to kill.”

  “And we can lie, too. So how do you know I’m not exercisin
g that particular human skill?” Gus said.

  “Because I’ve seen you do it before,” Jack smiled. “I know how you act when you lie.” He got up and refilled both his and Gus’s glasses. “And because I know you.”

  “This is what I mean about common sense,” Sandra interrupted. “Give either of you some two-line reading and you can pull more meaning out of it than I can find in the whole Bible, but when it comes to regular life . . . I mean, how’s it gonna look when the cops show up to arrest you and you’re dead drunk? You and your fine pastor both?”

  “We’re not drunk yet, Sandra, but we could probably use some snacks to absorb the alcohol,” Jack said.

  “You hear that? Las mujeres have just been sent to la cocina,” Sandra said in the mixture of English and Spanish she used when she was angry. “Come on, Julia.”

  “Have we got an avocado?” Julia asked, following behind her mother as she headed toward the kitchen. “Whenever I’m stressed, I crave guacamole.”

  Gus and Jack sipped their whiskey in troubled silence while mother and daughter moved around the kitchen. They were both relieved when Julia appeared with a platter of fragrant nachos, followed by Sandra carrying a bowl of guacamole. Gus realized he hadn’t eaten anything since the night before.

  The mood remained subdued as the four of them pretended to focus on their food, each privately listening for the car in the driveway, the footsteps on the walkway, a knock at the door. Happiness, Gus thought, was never so sweet as when it was threatened.

  “If you all don’t mind, I think I’m going to lie down for a while,” he said when he had finished his nachos. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.” He kissed each of them on the forehead before he left the room.

  Though Jack usually complained loudly when Gus expressed his easy Portuguese affection, he said nothing this time.

  Gus carried his plate to the kitchen and went upstairs, trailed by the dogs. The room was dark, like the motel room had been, but these shadows were familiar and hospitable. The dogs, grateful for Gus’s return, settled into their familiar spots, Jane on her mat on the floor, and Stella curled against his body while he lay on his back and waited. The whole house was sealed in an unfamiliar silence, as if the other occupants had also withdrawn to their rooms to wait for the official voices, the rush of wind from the outside that would change everything.