by John Saul
Not only was the boy a potential stain on the school’s record, but he weighed heavily on the old priest’s soul as well.
Then, as he remembered what Sister Mary David had told him about Sofia Capelli, a tiny seed of hope sprouted in his heart.
Perhaps he should try one more time.
Yes, of course!
He should try. He would try! He could do it, he knew he could.
And if he succeeded, it wouldn’t be Jeffrey Holmes’s soul he had redeemed.
It would be his own.
CHAPTER 34
AS THE SUMMONS sounded, Abdul Kahadija filed into the prayer room along with the rest of the men who had finished their ablutions and were milling about in the mosque courtyard.
He knew he should center his thoughts on God and the praise he was about to bestow, but he was here, at this salah, for a dual purpose, and until he found the face that he sought in the crowd, he would not be able to concentrate.
Inside the cavernous prayer room, all the men lined up in rows in front of the imam, and as Abdul looked to his left, he spotted the man he came to find.
Peace flooded through him. Allah knew his mission, and as always, would show him the way.
Abdul stood straight and strong, the validity of his mission confirmed by the very presence of the worshipper to his left. He closed his eyes and let his adoration of Allah consume him.
When the morning prayers had finished, Abdul maneuvered through the crowd until he neared the man with whom he intended to speak after they had all filed silently out of the prayer room.
His heart hammered and his palms grew greasy with sweat as he rehearsed yet again what he would say. If he came across too strong or if his demeanor or appearance was anything other than that which Allah demanded of him, he would be refused.
The stakes were enormously high.
Abdul followed the man into the crowded courtyard, where the silence of the prayer room gave way to the boisterous noise of friends greeting friends.
The man left the mosque, Abdul close behind. In the parking lot, Abdul, keeping a respectful distance, finally spoke. “Excuse me, my brother,” he said.
The man stopped, and Abdul found himself facing a stocky man in his early sixties, with graying hair and a square jaw.
Abdul’s breath left him, his mouth became dry and he found it difficult to talk. He cleared his throat and began. “I am Abdul Kahadija, and I am new to the Boston area.” He paused, then asked the question he had mulled for weeks. “I wonder if you can tell me where I could buy some weed killer for my garden?”
The man’s face remained expressionless, but his brown eyes bored deep into Abdul’s, who tried not to flinch under the probing gaze. “Weed killer,” the man spoke slowly. “Or is it a pesticide that you need?”
Abdul inwardly rejoiced. The man had understood his question! “Perhaps a pesticide would better solve my gardening problems.”
“Where is this garden?” the man asked quietly.
“I toil in the garden of Allah,” Abdul responded.
“Then you must see Nameer,” the man said. “He cultivates a similar garden path.”
“Thank you, friend,” Abdul said. “Where might I find Nameer?”
“He owns a nursery on the south side. If your quest is pure, you shall find him.”
“May the blessings of Allah be on you and on your family,” Abdul said.
“And on yours,” the older man said as he pulled the white crocheted kufi off his head and beeped his car unlocked. “Tell me what you grow in this garden of yours.”
Abdul’s face flushed hot. This was a question he had not anticipated, but an answer came to him in a flash. “Easter lilies,” he declared.
The man considered this, then smiled broadly, showing straight white teeth in a pleasant face.
Abdul’s nervousness dissolved, and he felt his own smile take its place. “Great big Roman Easter lilies,” he said again, and they both laughed.
“Insha-allah,” the man said.
“Insha-allah,” Abdul replied.
CHAPTER 35
RYAN EMERGED FROM the boys’ dormitory, into a warm spring afternoon without a cloud in the sky, made even more perfect by the fact that it was Saturday.
He’d survived his first week of classes at St. Isaac’s.
And even better, Melody Hunt was waiting for him, just as he’d hoped she would. He set his overnight bag down and dropped onto the bench next to her. All around them were people Ryan was starting to recognize, but this morning they all looked different, clad in their regular clothes rather than the blue-and-white uniforms he’d already grown used to seeing, and when one of his classmates suddenly appeared in exactly the kind of low-slung baggy pants and oversize shirt that Frankie Alito always wore, he felt a twinge of panic and had to remind himself that he was still at St. Isaac’s, and not back at Dickinson.
“Aren’t you going to take all your laundry for your mom to do?” Melody asked, eyeing the overnight bag that was far too small to contain anything more than a change of clothes.
“Nah. I’ll do it Sunday night,” Ryan replied, then cocked his head and eyed her with a look he hoped was seductive. “And while they’re drying, you can teach me more Catholic History.”
“You didn’t get an ‘A’ from Father Sebastian just because of me,” Melody said, blushing slightly, but not moving away at all. “You’re the one who did the studying.”
“And you’re the one who told me what to study.”
Melody scuffed her tennis shoe against the cement pathway as if not quite sure how to respond, then settled for just changing the subject. “So what do you think of St. Isaac’s, now that you’ve been here almost a week?”
“Not too bad,” Ryan said, giving up the attempt at a seductive look in favor of a wry grin. “At least I haven’t been beaten up yet.”
“And your face looks a lot better than it did on Monday.” She hesitated, then: “Not that it looked that bad even then.”
Ryan tried to fight the blush he felt rising in his cheeks. Maybe the seductive look had worked after all. “And my ribs are healing, too.”
Melody looked around the rapidly emptying courtyard, with more kids leaving every second. “It’s going to be boring around here all weekend with you gone,” she said with a wistful tone that made Ryan’s heart beat a little faster.
“Why don’t you go home, too?” Ryan asked.
“My family lives too far west.” Melody shrugged, but Ryan could see she wasn’t as nonchalant as she was trying to sound. “But at least they’d like me to come home. Sofia’s mom lives right here in Boston, like a mile away or something. But she married some rich guy who doesn’t want Sofia around, so she can’t go home, either.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah, she only goes home on Christmas Day. Seems like the only ones who have to stay here are either troublemakers or inconveniences.”
Ryan told himself he didn’t fit into either category, but even as he tried to convince himself of the truth of his thought, it didn’t quite ring true. But why not? The fight—if you could even call getting beaten up a “fight”—hadn’t been his fault, and if his mother didn’t want him at home for the weekend, why was she coming to pick him up? But, of course, he knew why he was wondering if maybe he at least fit into the “inconvenient” category.
Tom Kelly.
Who Ryan hoped wouldn’t be with his mother when she came to pick him up in—he glanced at his watch—two minutes. “Uh-oh,” he said, suddenly wishing he had another hour or two with Melody. “Gotta go or I’m going to be late to meet my mom.”
“Okay,” Melody said, and once more Ryan heard that wistful note. “Call me when you get back, okay?”
“Okay,” he said, tapping her back. “See you tomorrow.”
An elderly, bent woman with a wrapped birthday present in the basket of her walker was fumbling with the door to Father Laughlin’s outer office when Ryan got there, and he held it open for her as she slowl
y made her way through.
His mother was already inside, talking to Father Laughlin, and she smiled happily when she saw him.
“Hi, honey,” she said, putting her arm around him. “Father Laughlin was just telling me how well you’re doing, and I was just telling him that we’re going out to dinner to celebrate your first week here.”
“Have a good time, Ryan,” Father Laughlin said. “Just don’t forget to come back tomorrow.”
Before Ryan could say anything at all, the old woman with the walker suddenly spoke. “Where’s Jeffrey?”
“Mrs. Holmes?” Father Laughlin began. “How nice to—”
“I want to see my grandson,” the old woman broke in. “It’s his birthday!”
Father Laughlin glanced at Teri, one of his eyebrows lifting slightly as he took one of the old woman’s hands in his. “Why don’t you come into my office?” he suggested, gently trying to guide the old woman through the inner door.
Mrs. Holmes jerked her hand away from the priest and peered up at him suspiciously. “Do I know you? I just want to see my grandson.”
Father Laughlin tilted his head closer to hers and laid a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Do you remember coming to talk with us about Jeffrey after Thanksgiving?” he asked, his voice soft.
The old woman pulled away once more, backing up slightly, then glared up at Father Laughlin. “I want to see my grandson!” she demanded.
With a deep breath and another helpless glance toward Teri McIntyre, Father Laughlin gently but firmly took the old woman’s elbow and ushered her into his office. “Let’s talk in here, Mrs. Holmes, all right?”
It was as if she hadn’t even heard him. “Why isn’t he here?” she shrilled. “Where is he? What have you done with him?”
Father Laughlin’s response was lost as he smiled sadly at Teri and Ryan, spread his hands in supplication of their understanding of the situation, and quietly closed his office door.
Teri stood transfixed, staring at Father Laughlin’s closed door.
“C’mon, Mom,” Ryan coaxed, but even as he spoke, he knew she wasn’t listening to him. Indeed, he could almost hear her thinking about Monday morning, when they’d met Kip Adamson’s parents on the front steps of St. Isaac’s.
Finally, though, she turned, her brow furrowed deeply, and followed him outside.
The car was parked in the loading zone at the bottom of the steps.
And Tom Kelly was in the driver’s seat.
Suddenly, the rest of the afternoon was going to be a chore, and now, instead of having dinner in St. Isaac’s dining hall with Melody Hunt, he was going to have to sit in some restaurant with Tom Kelly.
Still, it was just dinner, and then he and his mother would go home and he’d have the rest of the evening and most of tomorrow with his mother.
He could tolerate an afternoon and one dinner with Tom.
He opened the front passenger door for his mother, but before getting in, she took a last look at the old gothic building behind them, and drew her sweater closer around her neck even though the afternoon was warm. She laid a light hand on Ryan’s arm. “What happened to that woman’s grandson?” she asked, her eyes searching his own.
Ryan glanced up at the front door, and for just a moment he remembered the screams he’d thought he heard on Monday night. Then he shrugged off both the memory and his mother’s hand.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody knows.”
CHAPTER 36
SOFIA CAPELLI WAS in the science laboratory, finishing her regular Saturday job of cleaning out all the cages where the frogs and rats and rabbits—all the animals that were used for lab experiments—were kept. It never took more than an hour, and Sofia didn’t really mind it, except for the frogs, whose skin always felt slimy. Today, though, even the frogs didn’t bother her. She was actually holding one of them in the palm of her hand, cupping her fingers around it. The frog sat absolutely still, as if it knew that she could kill it in an instant. It stared up at her, and Sofia fixed her eyes on those of the small creature in her hand, and as their gazes held, Sofia suddenly felt as if the frog knew her—knew what was in her mind.
And didn’t just know her.
It hated her, too.
And she knew why.
It had been watching.
For weeks, it—and all the other frogs in the terrarium—had been watching as every day someone came and snatched one of them from its home and took it to a lab table and jabbed a slim blade into the base of its spinal cord before cutting its skin open to examine and toy with the organs inside.
It didn’t hurt them, of course. Or at least that’s what Sister Agnes had said.
But now Sofia knew that the frog in her hand had been watching, and as she gazed down at it she felt its hatred radiating outward like a million tiny needles, jabbing at her as painfully as the blades that had been used on the others of its kind.
Kill it, a voice inside her instructed. Kill it before it kills you.
Obeying the voice—and not even aware of what she was doing—Sofia closed her fingers, and the frog’s fragile bones snapped under their pressure. Its guts swirled inside its skin, then spewed out through both its mouth and its anus.
The voice inside her sighed contentedly.
Sofia opened her hand and stared at the shapeless mass that now lay where only moments ago a living frog had been, then she dropped it into the wastebasket.
What had she done?
And why?
Feeling suddenly nauseated, Sofia turned away from the terrarium, cleaned out the rat cages, then turned her attention to the rabbits. Two fully grown ones, one black and one white, were lying side by side, sleeping as their litter nursed on the white one’s teats. There were six in the litter, one black, one white, the rest in various patterns of both black and white.
Just as Sister Agnes had predicted when she’d first brought in the adult pair.
And now there they were, all nursing contentedly on their mother’s teats.
All of them except one.
The little white one, who was staring through the mesh of the cage, its tiny pink eyes fixed on Sofia.
Sofia opened the cage, grasped the baby rabbit by its ears, and took it out. “Don’t do that,” she whispered as she left the science lab and started back toward her room. “Don’t stare at me that way.”
The tiny rabbit, as if sensing exactly what was to come, trembled in her hands with terror, and its very trembling made the voice in Sofia’s head sigh in anticipation.
The dark cloud of depression that had gathered over Melody got darker by the moment. The weekend loomed interminably long with Ryan gone, which was ridiculous, considering that only a week ago she hadn’t even known him. And now, here she was, missing him terribly and with nobody even to talk about him with.
Until Tuesday night, she would have talked to Sofia, but after she’d come back from the infirmary, everything about her had changed, and even though she kept insisting she was “just fine,” Melody knew she wasn’t.
She was completely different.
And no longer someone Melody could talk to.
So she’d just do something else—anything to fill the time until tomorrow afternoon when Ryan got back.
She’d do her laundry. And study.
Great.
Sighing heavily, she stood up from the bench and started back to the dorm. The courtyard was almost empty, and the girls’ dormitory was bereft of its weekday babble of a hundred girls all trying to get to different places at the same time. Her footsteps sounded oddly loud as she walked down the hall, but when she got to the door to her room, she paused.
There was another sound, even louder than her own footsteps, and it was coming from inside her room.
It was a squeal.
A squeal as if something were in terrible pain.
Sofia sat on her desk chair. In her lap was the baby rabbit, staring up at her, its eyes wide, too terrified now even to attempt to escape. Not that it
could have even if it hadn’t been paralyzed by fear, for one or the other of Sofia’s hands never let go of it.
Sofia herself was barely aware of what was happening. It was as if she were no longer quite inside her own body, but somewhere else—somewhere in a strange foggy place where she could observe what was happening, could feel the small furry creature in her hands, even feel its heart pounding, but could do nothing about it except watch through the strange mist.
And there was something else, too. Something inside her body and her mind that she could hear and feel, but not control. It was as if something had taken over, controlling her body and her mind, telling her what to do as she herself—the part of her that was the real Sofia—stood aside, reduced to nothing more than an observer.
And now, as she watched, her hands moved from the rabbit’s throat to its foreleg.
She held it in both hands, like a long willow twig.
She pressed her thumbs against the bone, and applied pressure.
But the bone didn’t bend like a willow twig would have. It snapped like a brittle straw at the end of summer.
It snapped, and the rabbit screamed.
She could put it down now, and it wouldn’t run away. How could it, with all four of its legs broken?
But she couldn’t put it down, not yet. The voice—the demon—the thing—inside her wouldn’t let her. No, there was more to be done, more pain to be inflicted on the tiny creature, more—
The door behind her opened, and she heard a gasp. Sofia turned to see Melody Hunt staring at her.
“My god,” Melody whispered, her face going ashen as she stared at the whimpering animal in Sofia’s hands. “What are you doing?”
Sofia stood up and turned to face Melody, whose own eyes weren’t even looking at her, but were fixed instead on the panicked and broken rabbit in her hands. As Melody watched, Sofia gripped one of the bunny’s broken rear legs and twisted it hard.
