Charisma Read online

  “I’ve been all right.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “It’s true.”

  “You look all right, but I know what it’s like out there. We all do. Are you at least going to let me make you dinner?”

  “If you want.”

  “I want. The gang had dinner out but I’ve got pot roast left over from yesterday. Why don’t you sit down and take off your coat?”

  “I want to give you something first.”

  She had been standing at the refrigerator door, looking through the food, her back to him. Now she turned around, curious and a little wary. So many of the things people wanted to give her these days were stolen. She’d gotten out of the habit of looking on gifts as unalloyed joy.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out the rosary—which was not stolen, but might as well have been. Its amber beads looked even more amber in the yellow light from the overhead lamp.

  Theresa blinked and said, “Oh. It’s lovely. It’s really lovely.”

  “You don’t think it was stupid, bringing a rosary to a nun?”

  “No. Of course not. I’m not a nun anymore.”

  “I know,” he said.

  6

  This was his charism, the light that illuminated his life. He felt it as heat. He felt the kitchen as heat, too, with hot air pumping through its radiators and bright blue-based flames flickering up around the kettle. There was a large magnetic cross tacked on to the old-fashioned refrigerator door: Father Tom’s doing. There was a picture of Our Lady of Fatima on the breadbox: Theresa’s. He still thought of her as Sister, but he was trying not to.

  She had sat down at the kitchen table. She was fingering the rosary, running it through her hands, looking at each and every bead. It was as if she’d never seen a rosary before. The heat was suddenly more than he could bear, a fire. It licked up from the pale green squares of linoleum on the floor and ran across the soles of his feet.

  He thought of Sister Mary Mathilde and the book she had carried under her arm. He had tried and tried to see the title of it, but the spine was always wrong way round. She disappeared down hallways with her veil flapping across her back, hiding it. He wondered what she had thought of him when he had finally gone out of her life.

  7

  Theresa got out of her chair and went back across the room, back to the refrigerator. She was holding the rosary balled up in her right hand, her middle finger threaded through it. She was a small, compact woman with the muscular thighs of a field hockey player. She moved as if she expected a puck to smash into her knees at any moment.

  Without the veil, her gray wiry hair was tangled and dry. She ran her hands through it and said, “I wish you’d come back. Everybody wishes you’d come back. We talk about you all the time.”

  “I can’t come back.”

  “Anyone can come back. Especially you. We’re so shorthanded and you were always so good about things.”

  “I made a mess of everything I touched. You remember.”

  “I remember the time you fixed the boiler. Minus twenty degrees with the wind chill and we had no heat.”

  “You needed a new boiler.”

  “We still haven’t got one.”

  “Then you need a new mechanic.”

  “You’re not a mechanic. You’re just—talented.”

  “Is that what it is?”

  “You weren’t taught to do those things. You just knew.”

  “I just used common sense. Anybody would have known if they’d used common sense. You people just don’t have any.”

  Theresa laughed. “They breed it out of us in convents and seminaries. It’s the first principle of religious formation.”

  Is that why she had left her order, because they hadn’t let her use her common sense?

  He watched her turn away from him, pivoting on a single heel.

  8

  This was his charism, the light that made him what he had not started out to be. When it was in him, he could come down to the Congo without fear. He could walk anywhere in the envelope of its protection.

  He listened to the wind rising outside, beginning to batter at the windows and rattle the door. It reminded him of the wind Moses had heard when he first knew the voice of God.

  9

  When Theresa finally had her back to him, he took out the knife.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  1

  ONE WEEK AND ONE day after Susan Murphy came home, on Tuesday, December 10, there was a story about her brother Dan in the New Haven Register. In a way, there had been stories about Dan in the Register ever since she left the convent. The Billy Hare investigation was a media event. It had made the local news on all three network affiliates and both cable channels. The Register had run with it because it had the advantage of being able to print what television was afraid to show: pictures of a child dead and bloody in the snow; fragments of bone and a face made into marble by the cold of a morgue. This story was different because it was about Dan himself instead of Dan-as-spur-in-the-behinds-of-a-compliant-police-department. From the headings, she could tell the Register was trying to establish Dan as a champion of child protection. It made a lot of references to the Domeneck case.

  The story was on page one of the living section, and the living section had been left lying face out on the kitchen table. Susan paused to look at a picture of Dan that must have been taken at his law-school graduation—Yale, of course, because he wanted to go into politics and needed to show some loyalty to the state of Connecticut to do it—and then drifted across the kitchen in search of the tea kettle. The kitchen was cold, but that didn’t bother her. This kitchen was always cold. Like a lot of kitchens in a lot of houses on Edge Hill Road, it was a vast place designed to allow half a dozen servants to work at once. The stove, the refrigerator, and the sink each commanded their own room-size corners. The fourth corner was free of cabinets and held a heavy round oakwood table, large enough to seat ten. The nineteenth century had never heard of the thirteen-foot work triangle.

  Outside, it was cold and dark, only six o’clock in the morning. Through the windows over the sink, she could see the trees that ran in two neat rows on either side of their lawn, leaving the center clear. The trees were covered with snow that seemed to have congealed on them. It was the worst weather she could remember in this part of the country at this time of year, and it both depressed and annoyed her. The depression was simple: she had always imagined herself coming home in the spring, as if the freedom she would feel on leaving the constraints of convent life would be reflected in the weather. The annoyance was harder to figure. It had something to do with the fact that constant onslaughts of snow and ice made her feel trapped.

  She found the kettle behind a pile of bread pans Andy had used to make Anadama loaf, filled it at the tap, and put it on to boil. She had come downstairs without shoes—jeans and a turtleneck, knee-socks and one of Andy’s plaid flannel shirts, but no shoes—and as she stood at the cupboard next to the stove it began to bother her. She had a lot of reflexes left over from seventeen years at Saint Michael’s and places like it. She got up at five no matter when she went to bed, and she was on her feet and halfway through the Litany of the Holy Names of Jesus before she knew what she was doing. Worse, she found it almost impossible to talk at meals. It had been so long since she was allowed to, she’d forgotten how. Lately, Dan and Andy had been looking at her as if she were diseased—brain damaged, maybe, the way people got on too much booze and dope. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time someone in this house had been brain damaged as the result of an addiction, although she didn’t think she was. Religion wasn’t that kind of an addiction.

  (Right.)

  She got out a cup, a saucer, a spoon, a tea ball, and the tea. The tea was an expensive blend, ordered from Fortnum and Mason in London. The spoon was from her mother’s second-best set of silver. The cup and saucer looked like they’d been picked up on sale in Sears.

  She stuffed
the tea ball full of tea and threw it in the yellow teapot she’d unearthed her first night home. Then the kitchen door swung open, and she turned around to find herself face to face with Dan.

  “Good grief,” she said. “You look like the man in the Arrow Shirt ad.”

  Dan flicked a finger at the lapel of his suit, which was gray and lightweight wool, as if he were setting out for the office in summer. All his suits were like that. He had them made to order at J. Press.

  “I’ve got a press conference at nine,” he said. “Did you see the paper? I left it out for you.”

  “I saw it. I haven’t read it yet.” Actually, she had no intention of reading it. The idea of a child murdered turned her stomach. The fact that it had happened right down there, at the bottom of this street, made it worse. Edge Hill Road was always full of children. They were one of the things the neighborhood specialized in, like Chanel suits and Bentleys.

  The idea of Dan making his career out of this kind of thing revolted her even more, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. She didn’t think he’d have the faintest idea what she was talking about.

  “I really just got up,” she said. “I mean, I’ve been awake but I just got down. The two of you moved everything while I was away.”

  “The cleaning lady moved it. She doesn’t think. She just puts things away the first place she finds room for them.”

  “Whatever.” The kettle was whistling. Susan got up to take it off. “I just feel like I’m stumbling through an obstacle course around here sometimes. I’ll get used to it.”

  Dan dropped into one of the kitchen chairs and picked up the paper. His face creased, running little lines like fleshy shelves across his forehead. “All this publicity and it’s going to go to waste,” he said. “It’s a shame, isn’t it?”

  “Why will it go to waste?”

  “Because in about three days it’s going to disappear,” Dan said. “The media are going to figure out what’s happening and then it won’t be happening. As far as they’re concerned, anyway.”

  “I don’t understand.” Susan brought the teapot to the table and set it down. “Why wouldn’t they go on with it? They’ve made such a fuss about it already. It seems like just their kind of thing.”

  Dan gave her a funny look, funny-cynical. It was an expression of his she especially disliked. “They think the kid’s a kid,” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means they think they’ve got a nice little ordinary nine-year-old with a bullet in the back of his head. What they’ve really got is a hooker.”

  Susan blinked. “A hooker? Do you mean a prostitute?”

  “Of course.”

  “That nine-year-old child was a prostitute?”

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t just keep saying ‘of course,’ ” Susan said. “How could a nine-year-old boy be a prostitute? Who would he prostitute himself to?”

  “Men.” Dan folded the paper and slapped it back onto the table. “You really have been in a convent. Billy Hare prostituted himself to men, to pederasts. He’d been doing it since he was six or seven years old. His parents were a pair of prize junkies. They managed to bring him into the world clean. He was their asset. One day they probably got tapped out completely and sold him off.”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus Christ,” Susan said.

  She felt as if she’d just inhaled a lungful of natural gas, but Dan was going on, pouring himself a cup of tea from her pot, reaching for the sugar bowl at the center of the table. She didn’t remember him getting up to get the cup, but he must have. She couldn’t understand why he didn’t sound upset. It was as if he dealt with this sort of thing every day.

  “That’s why the media are going to lose interest,” he was saying. “Murder in the middle class is news. Murder in the underclass is invisible. Especially if it’s politically sensitive.”

  “ ‘Politically sensitive.’ ”

  “I don’t mean the governor’s running a meat shop,” Dan said patiently. “I mean the whole thing gets into areas the press doesn’t want to deal with. You ever hear of a man named Father Thomas Burne?”

  Father Thomas Burne. The name rolled around in Susan’s head and finally poked a hole through the fog it was in. She had heard of Father Thomas Burne.

  “I think we used to get brochures for his place at Saint Michael’s,” she said. “Requests for money and food. Damien House. A place for runaway children.”

  “What they’re mostly running away from is pimps.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, Susan, I’m sure. And I personally think Tom Burne is a saint. The problem is, every time they give him air time he starts talking about pornography, and every time he starts talking about pornography he starts talking about censorship. And that—”

  “What does censorship have to do with turning children into prostitutes?”

  Dan smiled. “Go down to Congress Avenue and take a look at the pornography he’s talking about.”

  “Pornography about children.”

  “Of course.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Probably not. The legality of it isn’t the problem here. The existence of it is the problem here.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No,” Dan said, “I don’t suppose you do.”

  “What about all those investigative reporters I’ve heard about? Wouldn’t they be interested?”

  “I don’t know that either, Susan. They haven’t been so far. And Tom Burne has certainly tried. Hard.”

  “Obviously not hard enough.”

  “As hard as anyone could. Look, I’m sorry. All right? I keep forgetting how long you’ve been away and what kind of an environment you’ve been in. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I don’t care if you upset me.” Actually, she wasn’t upset anymore. The fog was gone, and so was her nausea. In their place was a hard little clicking computer, making calculations.

  She looked into the clear brown water of her tea. It was getting cold. She ought to drink it. She just wished she could remember pouring it.

  “This Damien House,” she said, “is it here in New Haven?”

  “Off Congress Avenue on Amora Street.”

  “Do you know if Father Burne is a diocesan priest or from an order?”

  “No.” Dan was amused. “Does that matter?”

  “It might.”

  “I’ll find out for you if you want to know.” He got out of his chair and stretched. “Just do me a favor, if you don’t mind. Don’t go wandering down to Amora without a police escort. One of Burne’s people was murdered in the kitchen down there less than a week ago. That didn’t make much splash either. Maybe the press doesn’t like the feel of Father Tom Burne.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the office. It may be seven o’clock in the morning, but I do want to be out of the district attorney’s office one of these days. That takes work.” He straightened his suit jacket and tucked his shirt a little more neatly under his belt. “Do me a bigger favor,” he said. “There are a pile of invitations cluttering up the mantel in the living room, all of them for you. Answer a couple of them in the affirmative.”

  “It’s a lot earlier than seven o’clock in the morning.”

  He made a face at her. “There’s a dinner party at the Hanrahans’ next Friday night at eight. Go out to Lord and Taylor or one of those places and buy yourself a dress. Katie Hanrahan thinks you’ve spent the last seventeen years growing mustaches and a butt.”

  “Have I?”

  “You look like Mother, Susan. You always did.”

  He turned around and walked out through the kitchen’s swinging door, letting it swing back after him, like a wave.

  Susan finished her tea, poured herself another cup, then went searching around in the breast pocket of Andy’s shirt for her cigarettes. She lit one and coughed. She wasn’t sure why she was smoking again. Cigarettes tasted terrible and they made her ch
est ache. Maybe it was some kind of reaction to leaving the convent.

  After a while, her cigarette grew a long column of ash and she had to get up. The ashtray was tucked away in the cupboard with the teacups and the bowls.

  2

  Andy didn’t wake until quarter to ten. When he came down, she was waiting for him, not in the kitchen but in the foyer. He had to pass through that after he came down the stairs. She had exchanged his flannel shirt for a plain green sweater. It had been hard to find. Most of the sweaters in the drawers of the cedar chests upstairs were either her own from her days at boarding school—and therefore too small—or her mother’s. Her mother’s looked much too rich. She might be going crazy, but she wasn’t going stupid yet.

  Andy stopped at the bottom of the stairs when he saw her and raised his eyebrows. He was good at it, and Susan laughed. He had always been her favorite brother. Unlike Dan, he was short and stocky and powerful, a throwback to ancestors who had come over on the boat and never expected to have any money. And he was fun. Dan was always so serious all the time, so driven. He would go to the Hanrahans’ dinner party, but that was probably because Dec Hanrahan was a power in the Democratic State Committee. He would buy her a beautiful dress, but only so that she could look good for a purpose. Andy was a float.

  Andy crossed the foyer to her, an oversize leprechaun under the shower of rainbows sent out by the prisms on the chandelier.

  “What’s the matter? Has the Catholic representative of the Puritan Ethic made you so crazy you want to go back to the convent already?”

  Susan laughed. “He left at six forty-five. He had a press conference at nine.”

  “That’s our Danny. Two hours to rehearse the six words it takes to make a sound byte.”

  “Maybe you ought to take some time to rehearse something. Don’t you ever do anything, Andy?”