I maneuvered myself to the head of the bed and found my watch. One o’clock-in the afternoon, given that the gray March light still seeped in through the dirty window. The single bar of the space heater did no more than take an edge from the cold room. I lay back down, pulling the army blanket up to my nose.
My mother died when I was in my teens. Like many people who lose a parent young, I believed it was my fault, some failing on my part, that had made her leave. All the times I’d upset her, racing into trouble with my cousin Boom-Boom … If I had come home on time, practiced my music as she so often begged me … and on mornings-afternoons-like this, awakening in pain brought on by one more headlong plunge into danger, my heart twisted again. My mind told me differently, told me of the cancer that went unchecked, untreated, for too many years-like many immigrant women, she would not let a doctor, especially a man, examine her in her private spaces; the bleeding that went on and on after a miscarriage couldn’t overcome her revulsion against exposure.
I shut my eyes to keep from looking at the crucifix. It was two feet high, with thorns and blood no less vivid for being covered in dust. I should have put it in the linen closet with the one from Benjamin’s room.
I knew I would feel better if I took a bath and started stretching my muscles, but the routine felt old and dreary to me-sore joints, stretch, recoverin order to overtax my body another time. It’d started as a teenager when I’d gone cold into a basketball game, suffered the next day, and followed Coach McFarlane’s advice on stretches and warm-ups. In the years since, I’d had too many job-related injuries, too many days when I’d woken up feeling as sore as though I really had been run over by a giant golf cart. The thought of beginning again with heat and exercise only annoyed me. What was I pushing myself for, anyway? So I could keep racing around town looking for crooks and murderers that no one wanted me to find?
In the interview with Kylie Ballantine that I’d read at the library-was it only two days ago?-she’d said when she was twenty she could take a three-week vacation and be back in shape after one day’s hard work, but that she’d reached an age where missing a single day took three weeks of conditioning to recover. And so she worked out every day. My heroine.
I pushed myself upright once more and stumbled into the bathroom. I began doing the things I knew I needed to do to recover-not easily, since the guest bathroom (to give the chipped, stained fittings and cracked walls a fancy name) had no heat. At least it made me move fast. I jogged back to the narrow bedroom, which felt downright cozy in contrast. I put the two
army blankets on the floor and spent half an hour stretching out my legs and arms. I must have torn a muscle in my left trapezius, from the knife stabs it gave me when I extended my arms, but when I finished I thought my legs would carry me along.
I couldn’t bear the thought of last night’s torn and filthy clothes, but my suit was in the trunk of my own car out in New Solway. I put on the stained, rank sweatshirt and tried not to think about it.
On my way downstairs, I looked in on Benjamin. He was still asleep.
I found Father Lou in his study, working on his Sunday homily. He grunted when he heard me come in, but kept typing until he finished a passage. He used an old Royal electric, banging away with two fingers. I did leg lifts while I waited to keep the circulation going.
“Kid still sleeping?” Father Lou said, when he finally looked up. “Listened to the noon news. Guess he’s the Arab they lost out in DuPage. You think he’s a terrorist?”
I made a face. “I don’t think so, but I can’t say I know what signs to look for.”
The priest wheezed hoarsely-his idea of laughter. “Neither does the FBI. Don’t imagine a county sheriff is any smarter than the Bureau. What’s the boy’s story?”
“I don’t know how or why, but Catherine Bayard-the young woman who got shot last night-scooped him up and took him out to this deserted mansion near her grandparents’ country estate.” I explained who the Bayards were, and how I’d come to be involved in the situation.
“Romeo and Juliet,” Father Lou echoed my own image. “They in love? They making love?”
I shrugged. “Benjamin has pretty strong feelings for her, but she-1 think with her it was quixotism-wanting to follow in her grandfather’s footsteps. Catherine lives in a larger milieu than Benjamin, with school and horses and an important family; he had only her to think about for three weeks or however long it’s been. But-she didn’t tell her grandmother what she was doing, and I’ve seen her with her granny-they’re pretty close. So I don’t know what she feels for him personally. Maybe he’s exotic, Egyptian, a bluecollar youth. For some rich kids, crossing so many boundaries of race and class can seem daring, even exalting.”