Lovely, Dark and Deep (The Madeline Mann Mysteries)

by Buckley, Julia

  I exchanged a glanced with Abel. If we'd been better acquainted, and the topic of our conversation less serious, I would have asked him to run out in the snow and yell, “Merry Christmas, Bedford Falls!” Rebecca took his coat and left the room.

  He smiled at me, sat down at the table, took a muffin, and enjoyed a large bite. “So you're talking about my Rachel,” he said. “I think I know your father,” he added, surprising me. “He's Karl Mann, right?”

  “Right. You know him from—?”

  “He did some accounting work for my company. I was impressed with his honesty. His integrity. We talked about families. This was a year or two ago. He mentioned you, that you wrote for the paper, and since then I've read your stuff.”

  “What do you know?” I smiled. I always do, when I think of my dad.

  “I feel I have a sense of you. And when Becky called and told me you were coming, I thought maybe this was an opportunity for me.”

  “In what way?”

  "When Rachel died . . . there was so much going on. There was the shock, and the funeral arrangements, and the condolence calls. We needed to be there for Jeremy, we needed to regroup, recover . . . " He looked past me, presumably at the weather.

  Rebecca Yardley bustled back in, and Abel asked her if she knew where his warm sweater was. “The one with the reindeer,” he added.

  “Well, isn't it in your drawer, dear?” she asked, surprised.

  “I didn't see it in there. I thought maybe you were mending that little hole.”

  She murmured something about going to look, and left the room again. I saw that he'd wanted her to leave, that he had something to tell me.

  He sighed, and leaned back in his chair. The cat jumped into his lap, and he petted her absently. “There are things that only dawned on me afterward, after the case was closed, after I could think about her death in a more detached manner. Maybe a whole year had gone by before I started to think. And by then it was too late, really. They were just questions, nothing more. But now that you are looking at things, I feel it's a chance for me to say something that I failed to say then. In a way I feel I failed my daughter, and you might be my chance to make amends.”

  I leaned forward. “I certainly promise to look into any questions you may have.”

  He nodded. “It's hard to know where to start. Rebecca probably told you all the good things. But there was bad, too. Before Rachel went on her retreat, the one that changed her—you heard about that?” I nodded. “She was really struggling with who she was. She was hanging with bad kids, and I suspect doing drugs, and—”

  “Did you check the hamper?” called Rebecca's voice.

  “No!” he yelled.

  “And what else?” I asked.

  “Something I could never prove. And because of that I never told the police. I think there was a man. An older man. I think Rebecca might have been, well, sexually involved with him.” It was painful for him, the memory and the admission. I kept my face expressionless.

  “But even if that were true, you were probably right to assume it had no bearing. She was eighteen then, and she died years later, a reformed woman.”

  “Yes. But something had happened, not long before she died. She wouldn't speak of it to me, but I saw in her eyes that she was working through something. Sometimes I'd catch her almost tearful, but she'd force a smile for me. Oh, I don't know. In some ways she was a private, mysterious girl. She was deep, my Rachel.” Unlike his wife, he was not sentimental in his memories. He looked as though he was struggling with an old problem, but he wasn't near tears.

  “Why did you think there was a man, and not a boy?”

  He smiled. "I thought it was a boy at first. She did all the predictable stuff, got all gussied up before the parties, put on extra special clothes, experimented with her hair.

  That didn't seem strange. But sometimes I'd catch her mailing letters, off by herself, even though we had a whole outgoing pile she could have put them in. And once, I picked up the downstairs phone and heard a man's voice. I apologized into the phone, thinking I'd interrupted a call between my wife and someone from the church. She made a lot of church phone calls, still does. Instead I heard a click, then another click. And then my wife walked into the room." He stared at the purring cat, but his eyes were seeing something more distant. “I asked Rachel about it, and she laughed. Said she'd called her math teacher at home to ask about an assignment, and he'd been unhappy with her.”

  “Did you call the math teacher to verify?”

  “I didn't have to. I knew she was lying.” He shrugged, reminding me of his son.

  “Did you confront her?”

  He sighed. "I thought I'd wait her out. We had a good relationship, despite this little incident. She was a sweet girl, a loving girl, even in her 'bad' days.

  “Then, a few weeks later, she went on the retreat. It seemed like it was no longer a problem. I let myself forget about it.” He looked regretful.

  I tapped my pen on my knee. I hadn't written anything, but I was certainly planning to do so when I got to my car. “What was the math teacher's name?” I asked.

  “Oh, let me see.” He stroked the cat's ears. The cat sat with eyes closed, savoring the moment with obvious pleasure. There was something crusty in the corner of one of its eyes. I wanted to reach over and flick it out. “Watson, that was it. Tom Watson.”

  There are moments in life when you are reminded that everything is related. It seemed almost predictable, suddenly, that because Sally and I had discussed Tommy's career at St. Roselle, he would suddenly come to the forefront in the investigation. I nodded. “I'll be talking to Tommy Watson soon. It's good to know this going in.”

  Abel Yardley let out a sigh—of relief, perhaps, or sadness.

  I heard his wife coming down the stairs. “When was the last time you saw her?”

  He sat up straighter. “A couple of days before she died, she was here, looking through some of her things that she'd left here. She asked her mom for something, I'm trying to remember—”

  “Jeremy's yearbook,” her mother said, coming back into the room. “She'd misplaced hers, and she wanted to look something up.” Rebecca was holding a festive blue sweater with red flecks and a prominent brown knitted reindeer pattern. “It was in the den,” she said. “You probably took it off while you played on the computer.”

  She smiled at her husband. The cat looked at her blandly through squinted eyes.

  I finished the last of my muffin. “I'll get going now, before I get snowed in,” I joked. “I want to thank you for talking to me. I want you to know that everything you told me will be kept in confidence. As I told Jeremy, this isn't anything more than research right now.”

  At the mention of Jeremy's name Abel Yardley broke off eye contact with me. It was just a tiny thing, but I wondered if something was there. “One last thing—would I be able to borrow the yearbook that Rachel had asked for? I'd give it back, of course—”

  Rebecca looked thoughtful. “Does Jeremy have those, Abel, or do we? I think we do. I think it's in the hallway bookcase. You know, Madeline, I have a few of the things she wrote me in her last days, it might give you a sense of what I mean, what a good person, how no one could possibly want to harm her—”

  Her husband was still looking at the floor.

  “I'd like to see them. I'll return them in the same condition, I promise.”

  Rebecca walked out of the room again, returning moments later with her hands full.

  “Did you talk to Rachel the day she died?” I asked.

  Rebecca nodded. “Yes. We had a nice conversation. She was a little sad, but it was because of something I told her, nothing to do with what you're thinking–”

  I looked at her curiously. “It might be.”

  “Well, it's just—at the time—a couple we knew, a couple from our church, had broken up. The Smiths. Rachel asked me a lot of questions, about Mrs. Smith, mostly, how she was feeling, did I think she'd forgive him, all that. It doesn't
matter, because they're dead, too. He got cancer soon after he took up with the other woman, and she died a few years later of a heart attack.”

  She handed me the yearbook and a manila envelope. She slipped them into a bag for me, along with some muffins to go. “You can bring some to your husband,” she said. “You are married, aren't you, a pretty girl like you?”

  I hung my head like a shy eighth grader and said, “I will be in June.”

  The Yardleys congratulated me; Abel even dumped the cat so that he could stand and shake my hand. Snow was obviously resentful, but still squinting.

  “You be careful in that blizzard, now,” Abel Yardley warned, walking me to the door. I promised that I would, thanked them both again, and said that I'd be in touch.

  I dashed to my car, my hood pulled close over my face, and made it inside quickly. The snow was still coming down, but with not quite as much force as before. I started my car and sat in it, letting it warm up as my father had always instructed, and adjusting the heat. I glanced inside the manila envelope. A couple of letters were within, as well as some little notes jotted on stationary that said "From the Desk of Sister Joanna" and was covered with musical notes. A Christmas present from a student if I ever saw one. Jack got that kind of stuff all the time.

  Then I grabbed the yearbook and flipped through it by the pale glow of my interior light. Faces of people smiled up at me from endless flashing squares; I couldn't imagine this having much significance. Jeremy's friends had written all sorts of things within, some of them quite ribald.

  I flipped to the faculty section, where no students tended to sign their names. There was an old post-it note at the bottom of the page, with a notation in red ink: “Check into T's involvement. Fran would know what to do.”

  I stared out the window at the little white flakes that cavorted in the beams of my headlights. Could this have been written by Joanna? Certainly it wasn't addressed to Jeremy, and wasn't written on the book itself.

  Fran? Who was Fran? And how did Rachel/Joanna know her?

  By the time I pulled out of the driveway it had come to me: Fran was obviously Sister Francis, who lived in the convent with Joanna, who saw Joanna on a daily basis, who had stood in the convent doorway and watched Joanna die.

  Chapter Seven

  In my dream I was in church, squirming in the hard pew, my little legs in red tights and black patent leather shoes; a hand clamped on my knees to keep them from swinging. I looked up at my mother's face: her mouth was stern, her eyes less so. “Stop, Madeline,” she said. “Listen to what Father is saying.”

  She left the pew then, and I looked toward the altar, which was receding as though it were on a traveling iceberg. The man in the alb and cassock was faceless at this distance; I sought the cross that should have hung above him and saw only sky.

  Fritz was singing somewhere, his old standby, Amazing Grapes, and I wanted to find him, to tell him to stop goofing around, that Mom said we should listen to the priest. I looked to my right: the pew was long and vacant.

  I turned slowly to my left, and Sister Joanna was there in close-up, her face clear and detailed. “Hello, Madeline,” she said, and I woke with a jolt.

  Dreams are strange; sometimes we wake up with all the emotions we felt in our unconscious state, but we aren't sure why. What I felt was fear, and a touch of something like awe. I also had a strong sense of deja vu. I sat there looking at my bedspread and wondering. The other interesting phenomenon about dreams is that they fade quickly. I was already starting to feel normal again after about five minutes passed, but I understood what Sister Moira had meant when she said that she had only taken away one distinct message from her dream. In her case it was that Joanna was murdered. In my case, it was that I had talked with Joanna before. The fact that this had never happened didn't change the realism of my dream. The discrepancy between what I experienced in the sleeping and waking worlds was making me feel a bit dizzy.

  I sat up, rubbed my eyes, consulted the clock. It was 6:30, and sunlight filtered wanly into the room. I heard Jack talking in the next room; then he came jogging in and began a little dance in his pajamas. “Snowed in, snowed in, I got the call, we're snowed in!” He grabbed his guitar and started playing “School's out.”

  I eyed him, smiling. “You know that you're a shame to your profession?”

  Jack stopped strumming. “They're all dancing, Madeline, don't kid yourself.”

  He advised me to call Bill and find out how passable the route to the Wire was this morning. I did so, and Bill told me to lie low, that plows were still at work, that he'd get back to me around noon.

  I hung up, stretched, and padded to the bathroom to brush my teeth. The feeling from my dream was passing, and I was gaining confidence as I got my bearings in the waking world. I emerged from the bathroom to find Jack giving me his come-hither look.

  There are lots of things in this world that I find sexy: British Accents, Indiana Jones, men who smoke pipes, that guy who sang “Some Enchanted Evening;” but at the top of my list has to be the sight of Jack Shea with a five o'clock shadow. I suddenly wanted him to rub those scratchy cheeks all over me.

  “Come here, snow bunny,” he said.

  “Snow minx,” I corrected, kissing him with my minty-fresh mouth.

  This lasted for an enjoyable minute; then Jack hugged me and started whispering naughty suggestions into my ear. Over his shoulder I saw the manila envelope from Rebecca Yardley. It distracted me.

  “Jack,” I said, remembering my dream, “do you believe in God?”

  Jack's roaming hands paused on my flannel bottom. “This is an interesting moment to ask me that,” he said. “And you know I do.”

  I pulled back enough to look into his face. Ironically, Jack gets sexier when he's a little put out with me. "It's just—you were practicing last night, and then you were working—I didn't really get to tell you . . . . "

  “Tell me what?” he asked, leading me to the edge of the bed, where we both sat down.

  “This Joanna thing.” I suddenly couldn't express what I'd been feeling, the twinges of conscience about my unexamined faith, the very strong vibe that something was amiss in this story of the past, the way my upbringing with a devout family was at odds with my skepticism. Even Jack's faith, I sometimes thought, was just an extension of his natural optimism.

  In a case like Joanna's, though, where some mysterious and transforming experience left her without doubt, I felt a curious mixture of suspicion and envy.

  I tried to explain this to Jack, haltingly, and he suddenly looked more tired than sexy. His body language was an indicator that we were going to be at odds. He stopped me with a raised hand.

  “So now you think Joanna came to you in a dream?”

  “No. No. It was just a dream, and really more like a memory. Like it had happened before. I still think—”

  “Maddy, you're reading too much into this. You tend to do that, you know.”

  I sat, dumbstruck. “That's an unfair assessment,” I said, stung. “Why do you always have to assume that at the root of everything I do is some form of irrationality?”

  “You have a certain history,” he mumbled.

  “Why exactly do you want to marry me, Jack? Aside from our physical relationship—which by definition in our faith makes us sinners, by the way—what is it that you love and respect about me?”

  Jack shook his head, looking longingly at the bed. “This certainly went in the wrong direction. I merely suggested that you might not have examined your own motives, Maddy. And I love you because you're you and there's no one else like you and I wouldn't want anyone but you. I don't consider myself a sinner for loving you, but maybe I have a broader definition of marriage than most. As I see it, you're already my wife in everything but the pageantry.”

  “And the eyes of God,” I added.

  “God sees us for what we are,” Jack said. “Do you think that will change in June?”

  “No,” I admitted.

 
; “Then what are we fighting about?” he asked, his blue eyes clear and focused on mine.

  I shrugged. Jack gets me off my topic, and then I can't always remember what my point was. It merely encourages my reputation in the family as unstable, emotional, and prone to strange outbursts.

  “I don't exactly know any more,” I admitted, rubbing his chest. “And I love you, too.” He smiled, and I saw the quest for sex re-ignite in his eyes. “I'm going to pursue this, you know. I might want your help,” I warned as he pulled me closer. He kissed my Blonde Minx hair and I pressed my ear against his heart; the steady, regular, eternal comfort of his very human heart.

  Later I called Cindy again. I managed to catch her at home, which was rare. I told her about my disagreement with Jack, about his comment, about my dream. It's easier to talk, sometimes, when people are far away.

  “Madeline, you have to admit, this is about a lot of things for you. I mean, it comes down to faith, and you've been struggling with that since high school.”

  “I have?” I asked.

  “Come on, Maddy. It all comes down to your Dad, doesn't it? And your Grandpa. I mean, that year you wrote all that dark poetry, remember? I kept a copy of that one about the lilacs, and how “even in fullest blossom, they are dying a little within.” Or something like that. You were depressed about those flowers in your back yard. You used to bum out the whole English class.”

  “I did?” I asked.

  “I know we never talked about this, because you put up one of those little walls of yours. But we're twenty-seven now, Madeline, I think I can safely say it. Remember when we discussed that Frost poem? It was with Sister Moira, too. She said the last line can be interpreted more than one way, but some see it as a reference to the appeal of suicide. You know, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep?” And you said that the word dark had only negative connotations, that it was, when you thought about it, a dark world. But everyone understood, I mean they knew what you were going through.”