Corruption of Faith

by Brenda English

  Now Cara was dead, too. How can I stand it? I wondered. The pain was a physical ache around my heart, excruciating enough to stop my breath. The only answer I could find was to put the pain into that room with my parents’ death, to wall it off enough that I could get through the rest of the day, or even the next hour. Someone had killed my sister, and I couldn’t change that. But there was no one to deal with the details of her death except me, and I wouldn’t be able to do it if I fell apart. Nor, I knew, would I be able to think straight enough to help find the person who killed her. And it was that thought that gave me the strength I needed to pull myself together. Someone had killed her. Someone would answer for it. No matter what I had to do, I would have answers about why my sister died.

  As I had done that day years before, sitting in the car in my parents’ driveway with Mattie, I took a deep breath and wiped my eyes. I got up from the chair and left Rob’s office, to go back out to my desk, where the first paragraphs of the school-board story still glowed patiently on my computer screen. I sat down and started to type, with a clarity of thought and a grim coldness of purpose that surprised me.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” a voice asked softly over my shoulder a couple of minutes later. It was Rob.

  “Finishing this story,” I told him without looking up as he walked around to stand in front of me. “Nobody else can do it but me. But do you think you can send someone else to the Arlington hearing this afternoon?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” he agreed. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that he looked as if he wanted to say more, but I kept typing, the reporter still in charge of my brain for the moment, still holding on to anything that would let the rest of my mind pretend my world had not just changed forever.

  “When you’re done,” Rob said eventually, “come back to my office. If you’re really going to the medical examiner’s office, I’m going with you.”

  “Thanks, Rob, but you don’t have to do that,” I said, looking up, my hands finally pausing on the keyboard, where, I realized, they were shaking.

  “Yes,” he said, in a voice that brooked no argument. “I do.”

  As I typed I could feel the other eyes in the newsroom on me. Many reporters have internal barometers for when the atmosphere in a room changes, and it must have been clear to anyone paying attention that something of importance had happened with the stranger in Rob’s office. And if it wasn’t, the look on my face when I came out would have told them so.

  As Rob reached his office after walking away from my desk, I noticed that Ken intercepted him. They had a brief, low conversation, during which they both looked at me with concerned faces. Ken asked Rob something, and I thought I heard Rob say, “Let her be for right now.”

  I can’t believe I’m sitting here listening to them discuss me, I thought as I filled the computer screen with the words I pieced together from my school-board-meeting notes.

  Ken went back to his desk, but moments later a notice of an E-mail message flashed on my screen. I saved the story and went into the E-mail system to find a brief note from Ken.

  I’m sorry about your sister, he had written, apparently figuring—and correctly—that I could handle a written message better than conversation at the moment. If I can do anything at all to help, please let me know.

  I messaged back Thank you without looking in his direction. I didn’t think I could deal with what I would see in his eyes, the reality that Cara was dead.

  Three hours later, as I stood at a restroom sink in the building that housed the Northern Virginia Medical Examiner’s offices, I knew Rob had been right to come with me. I leaned on the sink with my left hand. My right hand held a cold, wet paper towel to the back of my neck. My head was down, my eyes closed, my breathing rapid and shallow. My nose was running, and my mouth was filled with the sour taste of bile because I had spent the last five minutes in one of the stalls, throwing up.

  I raised my head to the mirror over the sink to see just how bad it was before going back out to where Rob patiently waited for me. My face was pale and clammy looking. My dark brown hair, which I usually wore in a loose French braid, was in disarray, the escaping tendrils around my face and on my neck now damp from my efforts with the wet paper towels. My eyes looked enormous, shell-shocked, the pupils dilated almost to the edges of the warm brown retinas, the whites now red from unshed tears and the recent ordeal over the toilet. In the color of my eyes and hair, in the planes of my face, I saw faint echoes of another face, of my sister’s face, my sister whose body now lay down the hall in a room full of death.

  Rob had stayed with me, quietly supportive, even at the viewing window, even as a woman on the staff had lifted a sheet from Cara’s face. I moved closer to the window, resting my forehead against it in surrender to the truth that faced me on the other side. I stared at the body before me, now empty of any animating force that had ever filled it, a waxy-looking shell, utterly still, utterly without life. The ugly wound just over her left eye, which Peterson had said was inflicted at point-blank range, and the even larger exit wound that I knew must lie hidden from my eyes, on the back of her head, would become the stuff of oppressive dreams that later would wake me at night, sweating and crying, from my brain’s home videos of what Cara’s death must have been like.

  As I looked at Cara’s face I reached up to put the fingertips of my right hand against the window’s glass, an unconscious gesture of reaching out to ease my sister’s hurt.

  As the glass broke the movement I think I must have sagged slightly toward the window. I know that Rob put a firm arm around me. His touch brought me back, reminding me that I still had questions to ask, papers to sign, details of death with which to deal.

  “It is her, isn’t it?” Rob asked, the tone of his voice foretelling the inevitability of my answer. Throughout the nearly silent trip out from the District, I had hoped against hope that somehow there had been a mistake, that it wasn’t Cara, that it was someone else, that somehow the police had made a terrible error. Now even that tiniest, improbable hope had long since fled.

  “Yes,” I said tiredly, “it’s her. It’s Cara.”

  And then I had headed for the rest room.

  Another hour later, when I had made it home to the solitude of my apartment, I realized I probably should call Chris Wiley and let him know what had happened. Chris was my—what? I didn’t know what to call him. We had been dating for eight months, sleeping together on a semiregular basis for six. We cared for each other, but neither of us had yet used the L-word or suggested combining households. Our relationship had apparently reached some sort of equilibrium where it was. We went out three or four times a month, depending on our schedules. Afterward, we went back to one apartment or the other to spend the night. The next morning, whichever of us was the visitor would dress and leave to go back home. We talked on the phone once or twice a week. So what was that? Was that a lover? A significant other? A friend? None of the labels seemed quite right.

  Chris was a thirty-four-year-old attorney, a specialist in international tax law with a prestigious law firm headquartered in Old Town Alexandria. We had met at the wedding of a mutual friend, an attorney for the National Education Association who had gone to Georgetown Law with Chris. I think we were attracted to each other because we both seemed so uncomfortable in the midst of the celebration. I was still gun-shy and licking my wounds from my divorce of a year before, so weddings touched a raw nerve for me. And when we began talking, Chris confessed that weddings made him nervous because not only the single women in the room but also the married women who wanted to change the status of their single friends always seemed to be giving him the once-over as marriage material. I had laughed at his description of his plight but had no doubt that it was true.

  Chris Wiley would have been considered a catch by most women. He was tall—six-foot-two—and athletic, his body hardened by regular gym workouts and racquetball. He had black hair and green eyes, the result of some sort of wild
Celtic genes, and he was very bright and very good at his job, meaning he also had a healthy income. So what was not to like?

  I had sympathized with his dilemma that day at the wedding reception, explaining that I was divorced and regaling him with my own frustrations at the disastrous matchmaking efforts of my still-married friends who just couldn’t believe I was happy single and who thought they knew just the guy I should meet. Chris said he had come close to marriage once, right after law school, to a woman he knew through the suburban Chicago country club to which his parents belonged. He and the woman had dated all through college and his law-school years, and the marriage was expected by both his family and hers. He had called it off two months before the wedding, however, when, after a day of picking out china with his fiancée, he had awakened in a nightmare sweat.

  “I couldn’t remember what the nightmare was about,” Chris explained, “but I woke up absolutely terrified that the rest of my life was going to be spent worrying about things like whether I was eating off the correct china pattern.”

  I laughed some more, and we had struck up the camaraderie of strangers who are both scarred veterans of the romance wars. So the fact that our own relationship seemed to have plateaued well before anything like talk of marriage didn’t strike me as surprising—or a problem.

  Chris was out of town on one of his frequent business trips. Today was Tuesday, and he wasn’t due back until Saturday. But I knew he checked his answering machine daily, so I called his apartment and left an awkward message about what had happened and saying that I wanted him to know where I was in case I already had gone to Georgia for the funeral by the time he got back to Washington.

  “I really miss you,” I told him, hoping my voice on the tape wouldn’t sound as piteous as it did in my own ear. “I sure could use your shoulder right now. I’ll let you know when I have funeral arrangements made, in case there’s any way you could get away to help me get through this thing. Please call me when you have a minute.”

  I hung up, confident that I would hear from him as soon as he got the message. Then I went to bed, where I lay awake half the night contemplating the prospect of having to bury my sister.

  Saturday

  Three

  A funeral in the rain would have been a cliché, but at least it would have been fitting. As it was, we buried Cara on a soft, warm south Georgia Saturday morning in May, with the sun out in a cloudless sky that arched over a cemetery lawn of emerald green. The cemetery sat at the edge of a pine forest that sloped down a hill to a small creek hidden in the trees. The sounds of the water flowing through the creek, still high at this time of year from spring rains, carried up to where I sat in the first of several rows of putty-colored metal folding chairs. As people gathered around the grave a breeze lifted around us, moving the strands of hair that had escaped onto the back of my neck and rustling through the tall pines with a uniquely susurrant whisper, a sound I could identify anywhere. As a child, I had believed that sound was the pine trees talking to each other as I walked below, small and wondering. Now the air in the cemetery was filled with the soft conversations of the trees and people, and my heart was in a hole at least as deep and dark as the one into which Cara’s casket was about to be lowered.

  I had spent the last four days running from one loose end that needed tying up to the next. My nights I had spent crying until, here at Cara’s grave, I had no tears left to shed for the moment.

  I had spoken daily with Detective Peterson on the phone, but he had little to tell me. Cara’s murder had made the news, of course. I had even managed to give Rudy Black, the reporter temporarily covering the vacant Fairfax County Police beat, a quote for the story he had to write for the News. But without a suspect, public and press interest in Cara’s murder soon waned. On the first day, it was one of the lead news stories on television and in the papers. By the third day, when no apparent progress had been made toward an arrest, it had dropped almost completely off everyone’s radar screens. There were far too many other crime stories happening every single day in the District of Columbia and its suburbs for the apparently random shooting of one young woman in a robbery to remain a news priority.

  The police had issued a plea for any witnesses to Cara’s abduction or to the events at the bank, but none had come forth. In an unexpectedly compassionate gesture, the News’ corporate headquarters in Chicago had offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the case, but so far there had been no takers. Detective Peterson had found no one else who had been at the church as late as Cara that night, no one who might have seen the man who took her. The last withdrawal from the Continental Bank ATM before Cara arrived was some half an hour earlier. No one else stopped at the ATM throughout that night or the next morning before the assistant manager had found Cara’s body. Apparently the only witnesses to Cara’s cash withdrawal and murder were the ATM video camera—and her killer.

  Peterson had shown me the video. I had insisted on seeing it, thinking I might notice something, anything, that would provide a clue as to what had happened, to the identity of the person who had done this thing. Afterward, the videotape’s images were burned into my mind. There was Cara, still dressed up from work, obviously terrified as she walked into camera range. She kept looking back and forth from the camera lens to someone or something at her left, the direction from which a muffled but distinctly male voice told her what to do. As she followed his instructions Cara would glance up at the camera, her eyes pleading for the help she knew would not come. Once she withdrew the money, the voice summoned her back out of camera range. Silence followed. Fifty-three seconds of silence, according to the videotape. A lifetime according to my brain, which knew what was coming. Long before the distinctive sound of the gunshot, my nerves were drawn out to their limit, in a silent shriek for the suspense to end.

  Peterson stopped the tape after the shot. The gunman never appeared in camera range, he explained, and the only other sounds to be heard were a couple of minutes later. He said his experts thought it was the sound of Cara’s car doors being closed, probably after her killer locked them for some unexplained reason of his own.

  It left me devastated, watching Cara’s terror, seeing the knowledge in her eyes that she very possibly was about to die. I saw nothing on the tape that gave me any insights to share with the police. All it did was add the reality of the videotape images to the fiercely painful movie that played out continually in my head.

  I also had daily conversations with Rudy. He told me the same thing Peterson had, that the police had next to nothing to go on. I worried about each day that passed, fearing that it reduced their chances of finding the man who killed Cara.

  At the moment I had no choice but to rely on the police to find him because my days were filled with my grieving and with the seemingly endless details of death that had to be dealt with: getting copies of the death certificate, calling my attorney about the legal requirements, making long-distance funeral arrangements, getting Cara’s body to the funeral home in Hilton, notifying Cara’s hometown friends that she had been murdered.

  And there were the phone calls from well-meaning colleagues at the News. At least a dozen of them called to express their sympathy and to offer their help if I needed it. A few, such as Rob and Ken, called each day just to make sure I was still sane and functioning. But the person from whom I needed to hear the most was the one who didn’t call. Each day, as I went from one errand to run, from one paper to sign to the next, I spent time wondering what was going on with Chris.

  When both Rob and Ken asked if I would be okay going to Georgia alone, I had assured them that I would, that people I had known all my life would be waiting there for me and that I was hoping Chris would be able to get down there as well. But by the time I had flown out of Washington National Airport on Friday afternoon, Chris finally had called exactly once. Surprisingly, he had called my work number, even though it was 11:30 at night and he knew I most likely was at home, and he had left a message
on my voice mail. The message was brief: he was sorry to hear about Cara. The two times he had met her, she had seemed like a nice person. He knew it must be hard for me. Getting to the funeral wasn’t going to be possible. He would call me once he was back in town.

  That’s it? my voice had asked when I hung up the phone in my kitchen from where I had called the office to check my voice mail. That’s the best the guy you’re sleeping with can do when your sister gets murdered?

  I’d been wondering just how much longer my little friend could stay quiet. Tactful silence was so uncharacteristic for it.

  Leave Chris alone, I told it. A lot of people get tongue-tied when they have to talk about someone dying. He isn’t the only person who hasn’t known what to say to me.

  You’d think he could force himself to be a little more supportive, considering what he’s getting in return.

  “Screw you,” I said aloud.

  No, you, my voice retorted, which is exactly my point.

  And I had to admit later, as I lay alone and in tears in bed that night, that maybe my voice did have a small point.

  I hadn’t expected Chris to feel Cara’s death the way I had. He and my sister probably had spent all of three hours together since I had known Chris, the sum total of two dinners out early in our relationship when I had invited Cara to join us because I knew she didn’t have Saturday-night plans of her own.

  They had gotten along well enough, talking and laughing comfortably with each other. But Cara remarked to me several days after the second get-together that while she liked Chris, she hoped he wasn’t going to disappoint me eventually.