by Jane Haddam
Donna Moradanyan took three eggs and a big brick of cheddar cheese and put them on the counter. Then she reached for the frying pan in the dish rack.
“I got another phone call. Last night.”
“From the police?”
“No,” Donna said. “From Russ.” Tommy felt the air in the room get thick, like the ether people thought filled up outer space before they knew better. He was almost afraid to move. No wonder his mother was banging around. He was lucky she wasn’t exploding.
“I thought you didn’t talk to Russ,” he said carefully.
“I don’t. He leaves messages on the machine. He saw you on television.”
“Great.”
“You’re a minor. They’re supposed to keep your identity confidential. But you were in some picture. He knew who you were as soon as he saw you.”
“Did he have something to say?”
“Only that you shouldn’t talk to the police alone, and that it’s against the law for them to question you without a parent or a guardian present. He’s still a lawyer, no matter what he’s done.”
“He is that.”
Donna got a bowl down from the overhead cabinet next to the sink and started breaking eggs into it. “And there were some other things.”
“You could stop him from calling if you wanted to,” Tommy said. “I’m sure there’s some way to put your number on some kind of list of numbers he isn’t allowed to contact. You don’t have to listen to him lecture you about—”
“I wish I knew what it was about,” Donna said. “It sounds so crazy, I nearly go insane myself, except it’s not crazy. It’s not schizophrenia or delusions or any of that kind of thing. America’s going to have a civil war, there’s going to be blood in the streets, we have to protect ourselves or we’ll all be dead or worse. What is all that supposed to mean?”
“He’s spending too much time on the Internet.”
“Last night, he wanted us to go to France,” Donna said. “He said we should pack up and go to France because the French would never back down. The French would always insist on being French, so when everything blows up, they’ll fight. And then he started apologizing to me. He kept saying that he knew we needed money, a lot of money, without money we would never be safe, and he was sorry he’d done it all the wrong way, he should have been more careful. More careful! At what? Tommy, we have money, we’re not short on money, we never were. Things got tight, yes, because Russ liked to pay for everything himself, he pushed himself into corners trying not to use any of my income, but that’s not the same thing. And if there was the kind of civil war he’s talking about, you’d have to be Bill Gates to be safe from it. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
“I think we all got the part where it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Then I think about you,” Donna said. “There’s your biological father. He’s an irresponsible jerk. Then there’s Russ, who’s gone, I don’t know, something. I keep telling myself you have plenty of role models. Gregor. Father Tibor. Even Ed George. But I can’t see my way to the end of it.”
“You should make that omelet and I should eat it.” Tommy pointed at the bowl. “Then I can go down to this police station and make my statement. Then I can go over to the Demarkians and hang out with Javier.”
“He killed two people,” Donna said. “He shot Gregor in the face.”
“And I still love him and so do you.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“I don’t want me to, either,” Tommy said. “But here it is, and I don’t see what we’re supposed to do about it. Father Tibor offered to loan me the money for the bus the next time I want to go up to see him.”
“Okay,” Donna said. “I guess that’s better than hitchhiking.”
“Yeah, well. I wasn’t really all that happy with the hitchhiking. It can get kind of weird.”
“What?”
“Omelet,” Tommy said.
2
Sister Margaret Mary had never felt at home anywhere until she entered the convent, but once she did she found she was at home in convents everywhere. She loved the silence, the lack of that endless white noise that filled every place else people were gathered—televisions, radios, YouTube videos, vacuous conversations about nothing in particular. She loved the absolute respect for individual space. Nuns and religious sisters did not speak unless they absolutely had to. They did not intrude into another sister’s silence except in cases of emergency. It worked, what they were taught in the novitiate. If you could learn to practice silence, silence inside yourself as well as silence in public speech, you could sometimes hear the soft, still voice of God.
Sister Margaret Mary did not feel at home out in the neighborhoods, no matter what neighborhood she was in, but there were times she had to be there. Years and years ago, nuns had maintained a practice of never going out alone. Marching along side by side together, in full habits with long veils and their hands tucked up under their demi-capes, they were almost as untouchable as they were back at the house. Their veils were mounted on headdresses that kept the fabric well back away from their faces. They still had demi-capes, but nobody ever thought to fold their hands up under them. Pope John XXIII had said the religious should go out and meet the world. Sister Margaret Mary understood the point. She even agreed with it. She just wasn’t all that happy to carry it out.
Today she was making a round of the parish. This was important. The success of the school depended on good relations with the people of the community, and this was a difficult community to maintain good relations with. There were issues here that could not be spoken about directly, and yet had to be clearly understood. ICE. Child Protective Services. The police. So many of these people had come from countries that were shot through with force and violence. Gangs patrolled the streets. What little police presence there was being paid off by the gangs. Army squadrons marched in formation to no obvious purpose. Sometimes they stopped and snatched children right out of their own houses—the boys to fight in the hills, the girls for reasons no one would talk about.
The situation here was better. Sister Margaret Mary was sure of that. Still, the situation here wasn’t really good.
The first place she stopped was a bodega just a block and a half from the church. It had a name, but she didn’t understand enough Spanish to understand which of the words on the sign it was. She went through the plate-glass door into the overheated, crowded space. There were dozens of packets of Latin American junk food on all the counters. There were glass cases of soda against the walls. There were straw dolls in garish colors hanging from the ceiling on strings.
The woman behind the glass counter was heavyset and exhausted. Everything about her was gray except her hair. That had been dyed a blond so platinum, it was almost white.
“Hola,” Sister Margaret Mary said.
The woman grunted something that might have been hola, too, but might also have been a curse word. Twenty or thirty years ago, the people in this neighborhood all came from either Mexico or Puerto Rico. They spoke a form of Spanish Sister Margaret Mary still would not have understood, but would have heard enough of, often enough, to sort of get. These people came from Central America. Their dialects were so strange, they made no sense to Sister Margaret Mary at all.
Sister Margaret Mary pulled her bag off her shoulder and put it down on the counter. She reached in and brought out a packet marked “Jessinia.” Sister Margaret Mary had no idea if that was correctly spelled or not. She had not been able to get the woman to say.
She opened up the packet and revealed a set of six church candles, each with a cross embossed on its side.
“I’m sorry it took me so long to get here today,” she said. “There’s been all that fuss because of the trouble down the block. I talked to Isidra Allende this morning, and she told me there are still police all over the building. And the apartment is still blocked off. And, of course, it’s the woman who lives in the apartment who was the one they found on the road the other
night. The papers are saying all kinds of things.”
Jessinia picked up the candles.
“Gracias,” she said, staring straight over Sister Margaret Mary’s shoulder toward the front of the store.
“Oh, that’s no problem,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “We just got six boxes of them shipped out from the motherhouse. I think it’s a lovely custom, putting prayer candles in children’s rooms. It’s such a simple way to remind them that God is watching over them. We forget that God is watching over us.”
Nothing. Jessinia’s face was impassive. Her eyes were staring into the distance. She could have been the only person in the room.
“Well,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “Are you sure you have everything you need? We have new holders, too. Some of them are very pretty. We have Our Lady of Guadalupe. And the Sacred Heart. We even have some with the Miraculous Medal.”
Nothing. Not a sound. Maybe she should bring some of the holders the next time she came around. She could bring a selection. Jessinia had a granddaughter in the Cadette Scouts. Sister Margaret Mary could ask her.
“Well,” Sister Margaret Mary said.
Then she gave up. When she walked along the streets and listened to the people around her, they were always animated and always talking. When she tried to talk to them herself, they were made of stone.
She went back onto the street and headed up the block. She had prayer cards for the woman who ran the fruit stand, whose name she had never been able to establish. The prayer cards were all of Our Lady of Guadalupe. She had a catalog of First Holy Communion dresses to drop off at the tiny dress shop that usually specialized in tight dresses with short skirts and lots of glitter. Some of the women were collecting a fund to make sure all the girls taking First Holy Communion had traditional white dresses and veils.
There was a lot to do, and they were making at least some progress. A year ago, she wouldn’t have been able to make even this much contact.
Even so, she was moving much more slowly than she had been when she left the convent this morning. It was like trying to push a pebble up a hill with her nose. There was movement, but there was not significant movement.
She was coming around the corner on her way to the fruit stand, not paying attention to her surroundings, not even practicing inner silence, when she saw the van. For a few seconds, she didn’t recognize it for what it was. She had put a call in to Gregor Demarkian yesterday, to tell him about the van that had been driving through the streets in front of the school the night Marta Warkowski was dumped, but he hadn’t gotten back to her. That wasn’t surprising, since the murder had happened since then.
And this van made no sense. Why would the people who dumped Marta Warkowski bring their van back into this neighborhood? It wasn’t just Sister Margaret Mary who had seen it that night. Father Kasparian and the boy had seen it, too. And wouldn’t the police have already checked out all the black vans in the vicinity? Wasn’t that the first thing they would do?
She stood for a few seconds on the sidewalk, staring at it. She knew nothing about vans. She knew nothing about cars, either. Make. Model.
She got up closer to it, then went around the back. Its license plate was from New Jersey. That wasn’t unusual in Philadelphia. She reached into her bag and came up with the tiny notebook she always intended to use in the neighborhood, but never used at all. She wrote down the license plate number and then—not sure what information would be needed—wrote down everything else. The van was a Ford. It had once been sold by Willie’s World of Wheels in Newark.
For the first and the last time in her life, Sister Margaret Mary wished that nuns were allowed to carry smart phones.
3
Marta Warkowski was in a room.
She did not think it was a room she was familiar with. She could not see it, because she could not force her eyes to open. Sometimes she could force her arms to move, or her legs, but not very often or very far. Sometimes she thought she only imagined she could make things move. The room smelled funny. Most of the time it was quiet, and empty. Every once in a while, people would crowd in and talk.
“It was very helpful,” a woman’s voice said at one point. “She has been here before. That means we have records. Records tell us a lot about what we need to know.”
“Do they tell us anything we need to know?” a man’s voice asked.
The woman was moving back and forth, very quickly. “I don’t know what you need to know. They give us her medical history. That makes a great deal of difference to anything we do for her…”
“Was there anything unusual in that medical history?”
The woman seemed to be moving around something on wheels. “You ought to be glad you’re on official business. There are HIPPA laws these days. There are rules about who we can give out that kind of information to.”
“Is there anything unusual about her medical history?” This was a man’s voice, too, but not the same man who had been talking before.
The woman picked up Marta’s arm. Marta knew it was the woman because of the smoothness of the hands. Then Marta felt the cold metal of the stethoscope and the plastic cuff encircling her biceps. The woman was taking her blood pressure.
“It’s not her medical history that’s unusual, if you ask me,” the woman said. “She doesn’t have type two diabetes, which is atypical for someone of her age and ethnicity. And weight. But that’s the kind of thing that happens. She’s not in very good shape, and she’s not in very good health, but no, nothing too far out of the ordinary.”
“That’s not much help.” First man again.
“We did go down and check all the records as soon as you got us an identification,” the woman said. “It’s the other things that give me pause.”
“You mean that she doesn’t have a driver’s license?” Second man again.
“She does have a state ID,” the woman said. “I agree it’s not very common these days for someone to be without a driver’s license, especially if they were born here and there are no difficulties with documentation. But that isn’t it. It’s the money.”
“There are difficulties about money?” Second man yet again.
“No, no,” the woman said. “That’s the point. She’s seventy-two years old. She’s got Medicare and nothing else. No gap insurance. Nothing. And even so, there are no problems with money.”
The blood pressure cuff hurt. It began to deflate and hurt less. Marta felt herself relax. She hadn’t realized she was tense.
“We get hundreds of patients in the same position every month,” the woman said. “We get thousands every year. And we know how it works. They come in. They get treated. They get a bill. It’s like the bill never happened. Unless it’s a very large bill, we eventually just stop asking.”
“What happens if it’s a very large bill?” The first man was back.
“Well,” the woman said, “if the patient is dying, we’ll make a claim against the estate. If the patient isn’t dying, we’ll get more aggressive about the billing, but we really aren’t trying to ruin people or force them out of their homes or any of that kind of thing. What we want is for them to meet with a social worker. There are a lot of resources out there to help pay your medical bills if you know how to navigate the system. The biggest mistake most people make is that they don’t navigate anything. They get paralyzed and freeze up and don’t do anything.”
“And she didn’t do that?” First man again. “She worked with the social workers?”
“Nope,” the woman said. “She just paid her bills.”
There was an oddly long pause. Then the second man said, “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“I mean just what I said,” the woman said. “She just paid her bills. Every one of them. Within thirty days. Like she was paying off her cable bill. It takes insurance companies longer to pay than that.”
“I take it they were relatively small bills?” the first man said.
“It depends on what you mean by small,” th
e woman said. “About eight years ago, she broke her left leg falling down stairs in an ice storm. We kept her overnight for observation even though it wasn’t that serious a problem. The notes say everybody was worried about her general physical condition. Like I said. Not in very good condition.”
“And?” One word. Not enough to tell which man.
“And,” the woman said, “her part of the bill was just under five thousand dollars, and she paid it. In thirty days. Just like everything else. Just like the time she had a bill for a hundred and seventy-four dollars when she came in for a blood test.”
“Ah,” the second man said. “She must have been spending down her savings.”
“Maybe,” the woman said, “but it must be one hell of a savings account. Four years ago she got rushed in here with a bad gallbladder that had gone so toxic, they thought she was going to die. She was here for two weeks. The bill was five solid pages long, and that wouldn’t include separate bills from the surgeons and all the other support people. The bill was over twenty-six thousand dollars.”
“And she paid it?” the first man said. “In thirty days?”
“You got it,” the woman said. “No social workers. No negotiations. Nothing. And we do negotiate. We expect people to negotiate. This is a Catholic hospital. We have a dozen or more funds set up to help people with things like this. But there’s absolutely nothing in the records. She was here. She went home. She paid her bill.”
“Well,” the first man said. “It’s hard to know what to make of all that.”
“I explained all this to your Mr. Demarkian,” the woman said. “I sent him down to talk to the people in administration. I know I should have all the access to all the information. I’m the case manager. But the more I looked into this, the stranger it got. Do you know what else I checked into?”
“What?” One word again. Marta wanted to scream.
“When she went home from the gallbladder thing, she had a home health aide,” the woman said. “For three more solid weeks. Used the best agency we deal with. I called them just to find out.”
