“Oh?”
“Jay asked me to draw up a new will last month.”
“And it’s…signed?”
“A week before he died.”
“Did Angelica know that he’d changed his will?” she asked, trying not to look overly interested.
Phil shrugged. “Beats me.”
If Angelica had, Rita thought as she refilled the orange juice, that would certainly have given her a motive.
The next few blood donors peddled various wild theories—he’d been poisoned by a crazed nurse who was infatuated with him, or it was a mercy killing carried out by a doctor who fancied himself the Jack Kevorkian of Acorn Hollow, or he was murdered by his drug dealer so that he couldn’t reveal the drug dealer’s identity.
“It’s probably someone really upstanding.” Old Mr. Van Dusen looked around furtively and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Like the mayor, or maybe even Jane Sanders.”
“Why would she kill him?”
“Why does she walk on stilts?” he countered. “She’s an odd bird, that one.”
No one, however, thought that Miss Simms could be responsible—even if it turned out that the poison came from her garden.
“Preposterous,” Helen Pettitjohn said, rapping her knuckles on the table. “She wouldn’t hurt a fly. She’s like one of these people who sweeps the sidewalk before she walks on it so as not to kill an ant. What are they? Sikhs? Buddhists?”
“Jains,” Madeleine Thompkins called out across the room, the needle still in her arm. “Donny and I went to India last year and learned all about it. We met a guru who was completely naked and slept on the floor with no pillow.”
“There, you see?” Helen said to Rita. “She’s one of those. But wearing clothes, of course.”
The most unexpected bit of gossip, however, came from Pam Adams, a good friend of Angelica’s and St. Vincent’s most inveterate feminist. She had started so many petitions to pressure the Vatican to ordain women priests (a wonderful idea, Rita thought, but rather like tilting at windmills) that Rita wondered why she didn’t just become an Episcopalian. “Men,” Pam spat out venomously, flopping into a chair at Rita’s table and gulping down some orange juice. “First, Craig cheats on poor Angelica, then Jay goes and dies on her.”
“Well, not on purpose, dear.”
Pam scrunched up her face. “Maybe not, but I’m sure a man killed him. So a man’s responsible. You see? Murderers and pedophiles—they’re almost all men.”
“What do you want to do?” Rita joked. “Kill them all?”
“Not a bad idea,” Pam said darkly, “although I suppose it’s not very Christian of me to say so.” She crossed one pencil-thin leg over another and ran a hand through her short blond hair. “I saw the hooker, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“I saw the hooker in the photo with Craig. Angelica showed me the photo. Then, three weeks ago, I’m in Saratoga Springs for my cousin’s wedding, I pop into a 7-Eleven to get some cigarettes, and –bam!—there she is.”
“Shopping?”
“No, she works there.”
“So she’s not a hooker.”
Pam shrugged. “Well, maybe even hookers have day jobs.”
“Did you say anything to her?”
“Sure. I said, ‘I hope you’re happy, breaking up my friend’s marriage. I hope Craig paid you well.’”
“And how did she react?”
“It was weird. She pretended to be confused. First, she said, ‘Craig? Craig who?’ Then she looked kind of spooked and said, ‘Oh, Craig. Craig didn’t pay me.’ But she emphasized the word ‘Craig’ so I took it to mean that someone else did.”
“And then what?”
“And then she got a call and told her boss some B.S. about her kid being sick and having to go pick him up. And then she just left.”
Rita frowned. If Craig didn’t pay her, who did?
And, more importantly, why?
Chapter Seventeen
When her shift ended at four, Rita made a beeline for the confessional. Kneeling on the hard wood, she pressed her face against the metal grille. “Benedicimi, padre, perché ho peccato.”
She always made her confession it Italian. Somehow, it made her feel more contrite.
“Mi racconti i suoi peccati.”
Father De La Pasqua’s musical voice, which was at once warm and yet appropriately serious, filled the musty space. His accent combined the sweet, lilting cadence of Sicily—where his mother was born—with the rough-edged rasp of Brooklyn.
“You don’t have to be so formal, Padre. We can address each other with ‘tu.’ Sono io, Rita Calabrese.”
On the other side of the grille, there was a sigh. Rita could picture his thick, stubby fingers massaging his graying temples, the way he did when the co-chairs of the church decorating committee got in each other’s cross-hairs. “I know it’s you, Rita. But this is supposed to be anonymous.” He cleared his throat. “Va bene, raccontami i tuoi peccati.”
He emphasized the “tuoi,” presumably for her benefit.
One by one, Rita ticked off her sins. She had racked up quite a long list since her confession last month—having unkind thoughts about Susan and Miss Van Der Hooven, misrepresenting her qualifications to the Morris County Gazette, snooping on Vinnie, trespassing at Coach Stiglitz’s house, and even having a fleeting unchaste thought about Phil Baldassaro (to which Father De La Pasqua remarked, “Ah, yes, I hear that often”).
When Rita interrupted her litany to finally take a breath, Father De La Pasqua gently inquired, “And are you genuinely sorry for all of these sins?”
The question brought Rita up short. “Well, for having unkind thoughts about Susan and Miss Van Der Hooven, yes, although that doesn’t mean I won’t have them again. About Phil Baldassaro, definitely. But stretching the truth got me the job at the paper, and that has been so very interesting, although it has contributed to a mortal sin.”
She heard a gasp.
“Mortal?” he said.
“Yes, now, I’ll get to that in a minute, Padre. But you asked me if I was sorry I snooped on Vinnie and the answer to that is no. I was trying to save him from a murder rap, you see.”
Her confessor’s voice had risen several octaves by now. “Murder? Does this”—he cleared his throat and his voice dropped back down—“does any of this have to do with Jay Stiglitz’s death?”
“Certo, padre.” She sighed. “You see, I hold myself partly responsible because I suspect that he was poisoned by some plants in Miss Simms’s garden, and if I hadn’t written about her garden, maybe the murderer never would have known about the plants, and then maybe Jay would still be alive.”
“Ah. Well that, Rita, is not a mortal sin unless you had foreknowledge that this would happen and the intention for it to happen.”
“Oh, no, Padre,” she reassured him.
“But covering up Vinnie’s involvement would, I’m afraid, be a mortal sin. At least, I think it would. I’m not sure they ever covered that exact case in seminary.”
“Oh, but he wasn’t involved! All he did was hang the coach’s car over the pool.”
The priest chuckled. “Did he? That was a good one”—he cleared his throat—“although wrong, of course.”
“But you can see,” Rita said, “how someone might think the prank and the murder were connected. But they aren’t—Vinnie had nothing to do with it.”
“Bene, bene,” he said, the relief evident in his voice. “In that case, I absolve you of all of these sins.”
Rita recited the Act of Contrition, and he assigned her a rosary as penance. Father De La Pasqua also extracted a pledge to be kinder to Susan and Miss Van Der Hooven, and to stop staring into Phil’s big blue eyes.
“Va’ con Dio, Rita,” he said by way of dismissal.
She heard him rise from a creaky wooden chair.
“Oh, I’m not done, Padre. That was just my confession. Now I need advice.”
“Oh?�
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“If I have a suspicion that Marco is cheating on Susan, do I have an obligation to tell her?”
She recounted the conversation that she had overheard between Marco and Courtney.
“I’m not sure that conversation proves anything,” he said. “Maybe you misinterpreted it.”
Rita marveled at his naivete. Surely, he’d heard enough confessions to know that clandestine meetings in a secluded booth were hardly innocent.
“The person you should speak to is Marco,” he continued. “Confront him directly and as soon as possible. If there’s no affair, there’s no problem—and you’ll have avoided needlessly upsetting Susan. If he is having an affair, appeal to his conscience to either end the affair or call off the wedding.” His voice softened. “But whatever you do, do it with love and compassion. Remember, the spirit is often willing, but the flesh is weak.”
“Grazie, padre.”
“É tutto?”
She could tell from his voice that he hoped that she had finished.
“Ancora una cosa. I have knowledge of a serious crime committed—not a murder, but a serious crime. But the victim has asked me not to go to the police.”
“How old is the victim?”
“Nineteen, but she was seventeen at the time.” Rita shifted uncomfortably on the hard wooden kneeler. “But if I tell no one, those responsible will go free. And they may be committing similar crimes still.”
“Is this crime of a sexual nature?” he inquired delicately.
“Yes, you could say that.”
“That is a very grave dilemma.”
“What would you do?”
“In a way, I’m lucky. The choice is made for me. I can’t reveal anything said to me during confession—not even if it involves a murder. But you are not a priest, so that doesn’t apply. On the other hand—”
“Yes?”
“Some victims tell me the jury trial is worse than the assault.”
They were silent for several minutes. Rita heard the rustle of his cassock, the creak of his chair.
Finally, he said, “Is there any way to bring these crimes to light without involving the victim?”
“Maybe. Maybe if I solve Jay Stiglitz’s murder.”
“Oh. They’re…they’re connected.”
“A football party,” she said, and his silence—his apparent lack of need for a clarifying question—spoke volumes. She suspected at least one football player had confessed to something, at least in some oblique manner.
She stood up to leave.
“Rita,” he said suddenly. “Could you get me the names of all of the boys who have played on the coach’s teams? I think I’ll reach out to them as a spiritual advisor, see if there’s anything troubling them.”
She hesitated. “No matter what they say, you can’t go to the police.”
“No, but I can urge them to.”
Chapter Eighteen
When Sal came home, Rita was in the middle of typing up her story on the Homecoming parade. He made a big show of sniffing the air as the screen door banged shut and he wiped his dirt-caked boots on the mat. “What? No dinner?”
“I’ve been covering the Homecoming parade for the paper, volunteering at the blood drive, and going to confession, so no, no dinner yet,” she snapped. When Rita saw the hurt look in his eyes, she softened. “Why don’t you go shower, shave, and change your clothes? By the time you’re done, I’ll have dinner on the table.”
“The curse of the liberated woman,” he muttered under his breath as he trudged up the stairs.
“What’s that, caro? You’ll cook dinner for me next time?” Rita called after him, her fingers flying furiously over the keyboard.
He growled from the landing, “That’s not what I said.”
A minute later, she heard the shower running and, a minute after that, Sal warbling off-key. Rita smiled and poured herself another cup of coffee. She put a few finishing touches on her article, hit “send,” and hustled to the kitchen.
Dinner consisted of store-bought gnocchi with homemade pesto—ready in ten minutes, thanks to the wonders of modern food processors—and the sugar cookies left over from the blood drive.
“Who made the cookies?” Sal asked suspiciously.
“Some factory, I expect.”
Sal pursed his lips. “At least the pesto was good,” he said sulkily. He stood up and cleared their plates. “Let’s go.”
The glare of stadium lights and the smell of hot dogs seemed to do wonders for Sal’s mood. “Saturday night football with my gal,” he murmured contentedly, pulling her in for a kiss on the forehead. “And I have a good feeling about this one. I think we’re going to win.”
The whole town seemed to be in the stands. Gina and Sharon were chatting up Phil Baldassaro as they waited in line for hot dogs. (Rita greeted her daughter, but piously avoided looking into Phil’s mesmerizing eyes.) Miss Simms and Miss Van Der Hooven were seated in the faculty and staff section, bundled up in purple blankets. Vinnie and Rocco waved from the top bleacher, hurriedly stowing their red Solo cups away under Rita’s watchful gaze, and Marco, to her chagrin, seemed to be introducing Susan to Courtney D’Agostino and her husband. Father De La Pasqua was shaking hands with various parishioners. When Rita caught his eye, he nodded in brief acknowledgment.
Even Angelica was putting in a brave appearance. Dressed in black, she huddled with her family in the back.
Sal took Rita’s hand and led her over to where Rose was seated, a soft pretzel in one hand and a red Solo cup in the other, next to Marion Von Beek and her husband.
“Hello, there, Rita.” Marion had a guilty look on her face as she slid a thermos back into her bag.
Her twin, in contrast, did not look the slightest bit embarrassed. Taking a swig from her cup with great relish, she said, “I was beginning to wonder if you were going to show up. It’s almost kick-off time.”
Rose scooted over, and they sat on the cold, hard metal. Rita gratefully accepted the blanket that Rose offered and slid it under her ample—and now very cold—backside. Rita reached into her bag, pulled out a pair of binoculars, and set them on her lap.
“What are these for?” Rose cracked. “Bird-watching?”
“So I can see the game.”
“That’s what your bifocals are for.”
“I want to see the beads of perspiration,” Rita said through gritted her teeth, “forming above their lips.”
Rose harrumphed, and Rita reflected—not for the first time—that it could be both comforting and infuriating to have a sister who knew her so well. They shared a birthdate, a face (even if Rita’s was more wrinkled, which she blamed on her children), and, sometimes it seemed, a brain. Or part of a brain, anyway. Rose seemed to live in Rita’s conscience, and she had an annoying habit of voicing Rita’s guilty little thoughts out loud, or sometimes just conveying them with a single gesture—a frown, a smirk, a little shake of the head. Sometimes it gave Rita the eerie sensation of talking to herself in the mirror. Only the woman in the mirror was a slightly improved version of herself—a bit more youthful in appearance, twenty pounds slimmer (thanks to the magic of hot yoga), better dressed, and with expertly highlighted blond hair.
Rita was so deep in her silent monologue about the perils of having shared a womb with someone so perceptive that she nearly missed the announcement of a moment of silence to honor Coach Stiglitz. Beside her, Sal bowed his head respectfully. Knowing what she knew now, though, Rita could not bring herself to do the same. She sat through it, stony-faced, thinking of Vinnie’s friend Stephanie. Twisting around in her seat, she looked for her younger son. He was standing with his back to the field.
Sal tapped her knee and shot her a disappointed frown, the way she did when she caught him nodding off at church.
The minute of silence ended, and the two football teams ran onto the field, to wild applause, while the marching band struck up the national anthem. Rita and Sal stood along with everyone else, hands on their hearts, singin
g at the top of their lungs. There was more applause, and then the referee blew the whistle. Rita went back to where Marco was sitting and tapped him on the shoulder. “Come get a hot dog with me.”
His eyes darted from the field to her and back to the field, where the Acorn Hollow Squirrels had just made a first down. “Can’t this wait until half time?”
“No,” she said firmly, “it can’t.”
He shrugged, shot Susan one of those “what-can-I-do-it’s-my-mother” looks, and followed Rita to the far side of the bleachers, by the hot dog stand. “You’ve never eaten a hot dog in your life, ma.”
“And I’m not going to start now, Marco. That was just an excuse to get you alone.”
He ran a hand through his thick dark hair. “What do you need, ma?”
She pulled him away from the hot dog stand and under the bleachers. A slash of harsh artificial light fell across Marco’s face, illuminating his left eye, his long Roman nose, and part of his fleshy lips and five o’clock stubble.
“Tell me the truth,” Rita said. “Are you having an affair with Courtney?”
His eye opened wide, his lips parted. “No.” He stepped away from the slat in the bleachers, and his face disappeared in the shadows.
“I was at the Sunshine Café. I heard you tell Courtney ‘you’ve got to tell him as soon as possible.’”
“Yeah, I said that, but not in connection with any affair.” His voice cut through the darkness, resolute and more than a little angry. “I’m hurt you would even think that. We’re old friends, nothing more.”
“So what were you talking about?”
“I can’t tell you, ma. I wish I could, but I can’t.” He stepped back into the light. His expression was inscrutable. “Can I go back to watching the game now?”
“Of course.”
Rita walked him back to his seat. “Hello, dear,” Rita boomed, squeezing Susan’s arm with relief. As she looked from Susan to Marco and back again, she could almost feel the love between them. How silly I’ve been, she thought.
Susan was beaming. “Gina just told me that you offered to give me cooking lessons!”
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