In the Still of the Night (7 page)

That afternoon saw the first run of the minibus Kate had arranged for. She shepherded the youngsters onto it herself, a noisy lot, and only at the last minute discovered that José was not among them. It was Annabelle who gave her the clue as to where he might be. Kate sent the bus on and went back into the school building. Sure enough, beneath a closed toilet door in the boys’ room, a pair of nearly new sneakers were to be seen.

“José, it’s Mrs. Knowles. The others have gone. I’ll take you home myself if you like.”

Silence.

“José?”

“No.”

“No what?”

“No,
gracias.
”

“They’ll close up the building soon. The custodian will make you leave.”

He came out then. “I not go home,” he said.

“Let’s talk about it,” Kate said.

They went back to the classroom and Kate turned on the lights she had extinguished when they’d left. Dan was right. It was a dreary place, especially without the children. Kate sat on the table, positioning herself between him and the door. The boy stood, his hands folded over his fly.

“Is it your brother?” Kate asked gently.

“What you know?” His eyes challenged her.

“I know he hurts you badly sometimes.”

She decided that was not what he had feared she might know. She waited.

“You no tell the
padre?
” he said finally.

“Why would I tell him?”

“Because … because, you know.”

Kate did not follow up. She was remembering his one question Sunday:
Why you not go to communion?
“What did happen to you, José?”

His eyes grew large and round as he began to tell her. “The big old building near my house? The doors … boom, boom, boom, boom …” He gestured a row of doors such as sometimes line the street where a building is being demolished. “The windows broke.”

Kate nodded. She could visualize the building and knew its approximate location. A new housing project was about to get under way on that whole block.

“My brother, I see him meet his girl, so I no get on the school bus. I follow them. I no come to school today. They go in this building. I go in and listen. Where they go? Then I hear them. I know what they doing.
Si?
”

“Go on,” Kate said.

“Then she scream. Terrible, and Raffie swear. He call her bad names. She no scream no more, and pretty soon I hear Raffie come running. I hide so he don’t see me, but he no look. He run out. So I run out too. Across the street he look back and see me. When he catches me, he hit me. He say I get hit worse if I tell. I promise to no tell, but he hit me more.” José pointed to his lip. “First I go home and hide in basement. Then I go upstairs. Raffie no there. I watch TV till I come here.”

“José, do you know the girl?”

“She Rafael’s girlfriend.”

“Do you know her name?”

He shook his head, but Kate suspected that he did.

Whether it was the right moment or the wrong one, it was the moment at which Morrissey appeared in the doorway. She put one last question to the boy before acknowledging the priest’s presence. “Have you seen the girl since?”

José did not answer. He was staring at the priest defiantly.

Kate looked ’round. “Good afternoon, Father.”

Morrissey, who had approached the room without making a sound, had been listening outside the door. Without responding to Kate’s greeting, he said, “Don’t you think we should go and see if she’s still there, José?”

“I no want to go there, Father.”

“But suppose the police say you have to go?” The priest took a few tentative steps into the room.

“I don’t know where. I forget,” José said.

Morrissey repeated Kate’s question: “Did you ever see the girl again?”

José made a break for the door. Kate almost intercepted him, but Morrissey caught her arm and held her until the boy was gone.

“You have no right to interfere,” Kate said. “This is my place.”

“So we’re talking about rights now. I didn’t know they went with a relationship like ours. Kate, that boy was lying to you. He’s got you in the palm of his hand and he knows it. You must not get us involved.”

“I had no intention of getting us involved.”

“You don’t know what he’ll say he saw or who he’ll say it to. Suppose he says he’s seen us together in some compromising place or situation?”

“But he hasn’t, and who would believe him?”

“You’d be surprised. I didn’t strike him, but that’s his story, and I think you, for one, bought it.”

Kate thought of José’s brother; what he’d do to “the
gringo
priest.” He had been told something certainly.

“He’s a good liar, Kate.”

“A better one than you or me? And is that what’s important now? We should forget the girl. Is that it? Even if she’s lying half-dead in some wreck of a building?”

“Frankly, I don’t think there is a girl.”

“Do you care?”

“If I thought there was a girl, yes. Then I’d say we should find a telephone right now and call the police.”

Kate thought about it. “Do you think that’s what he wanted me to do?”

“Oh, no.” Morrissey gave a small, dry laugh. “It’s what he’s afraid I’ll do. Kate, ask yourself: Why did he come to you with this story?”

“You tell me,” she said.

Morrissey thought for a long moment about what he would say. “I’ll give it a shot,” he said. “He’s made up a story—a street story, common as dirt, as close as he could come to telling you what’s in his mind.”

“About us?” Kate said, incredulous.

“You asked me to tell you, and now you’ll listen to the whole thing. I can’t say what triggered his imagination, but he knew from the moment he saw our hands touch when I took the scissors from you that there was something going on between us.” Morrissey threw up his hands. “Maybe he’s warning you—danger ahead! I don’t know.”

“Don’t be angry, Dan.”

“I’m not angry. I’m ashamed, if you want to know.”

Ashamed, Kate thought, another word for guilt.

“I was a child just like him,” Morrissey went on. “In adolescence I grew in prurience. My father tried to beat it out of me. Instead he beat it in. I fled to the priesthood. I thought it was my penance. It was my salvation.”

Kate slipped down from the table and offered her hands, caution be damned. He shook his head, smiled a little and left her. She heard the click of the tunnel door.

She sat again for a few minutes, thinking.

Had their affair been inevitable, a kind of Satanic justice to be satisfied after all these years? And if it was over, was he free now of the demon guilt forever? It was not in the nature of man. Or woman. She thought of the phantom face that had seemed to pursue her, to accuse her. No. That was not its mission. It followed, sometimes with a rhythmic beat, like the Hound of Heaven.

She left the school and went into the church by the side door, the only one left open at that hour of the day. The high-intensity lights were focused on the Crucifixion mural, the artist himself straddling a plank in the scaffolding as he worked overtime. He was almost finished. With the Lord’s face and one of the women’s restored, Melodosi was studying his work on the other Mary. Even before he looked down at her, Kate knew his half-familiar face to be that of the phantom she had chosen to pursue her.

She moved on to a pew in a darkened place. It had been a long time since she had prayed with her heart and mind, and on her knees. A simple prayer:
Lord, I need help.
She left the church determined to go to the police with José’s story, but when she reached the street, she saw two nuns waiting to be admitted at the St. Ambrose convent door. She got to them in time to enter the building with them, and very shortly Sister Josephine Reilly came to her in the parlor. As soon as the nun saw who it was, she said, “I know, it’s about José Mercado again.”

“I just have a question,” Kate said. “Was he absent from school this morning?”

“No,” the young nun said. “As soon as I saw him in first class, I sent him to the infirmary, but bad luck that it was, the nurse was out today. I cleaned him up a bit myself between classes.”

“Did he tell you what happened to him?”

The nun gave a great rolling shrug. “I think he said his brother beat him up—was it for talking back to their mother? Who knows with José?”

Who knows indeed, Kate thought.

A week passed before she heard from Morrissey. He called to say he was going upstate to the Trappist monastery on retreat. “Kate …” She could hear the deep intake of breath.

“You don’t need to say anything, Dan.”

“I’m grateful to you for understanding.”

“And I to you, Father Morrissey.”

O
VER THE RING OF
the doorbell came the cry, “Help me, Julie … Let me in!”

Julie, out of bed before she was rightly awake, pulled on her robe and ran, barefoot, to the front of the shop. It was half-past one in the morning. She unbolted the door and opened it on the latch. Her upstairs neighbor, Rose Rodriguez, was shivering in a silvery dress that glowed in the stark Manhattan street light. Julie let her in, then bolted the door and lighted a lamp.

“I don’t know where Juanita is. She’s not in her bed. I thought maybe she comes to you?”

Julie shook her head. “Sit down while I get my slippers.”

The chair creaked with its burden. In the years Julie Hayes had occupied the shop, the ground floor apartment on West 44th Street, Mrs. Rodriguez had put on weight. Her one child, Juanita, had grown from a string bean to puberty with a sudden promising beauty.

Mrs. Rodriguez pointed at the row of dolls when Julie returned. They sat on a table, their backs against the wall. “They are Juanita’s, no?”

“We’ve been mending them,” Julie said. “Now tell me what’s with Juanita?”

“It’s boys. I know it’s boys.”

You ought to know,
Julie thought. It was apparent Mrs. Rodriguez had just returned from an evening out. Her husband wouldn’t know about it. Juanita would. Julie was not a great hater, but she would have been hard put to find a kind word for the woman now twisting off the flashy rings from her fingers. “Where do you think she is? Let’s start with that.”

“She wants to go to her friend Elena’s for supper. I say okay, but you be home by nine o’clock. The whole holiday weekend and she hasn’t done her homework.”

“
Did
she come home?”

“Julie …” The woman’s face became a mask of contrition. “She has a very good father but not so good mother. You know?”

Julie ignored the ploy for sympathy. “Isn’t it possible she tried to call you? To ask if she could stay overnight? And then stayed anyway when she couldn’t reach you?”

“She knows better. Papa will not give permission. He will kill me….” The woman began to sob.

“Stop that!” Julie shouted. “Let’s call her friend’s house right now.”

“You know her number, Julie?”

“Don’t you?”

“I don’t even know her name except Elena.”

“Then you can’t do anything till morning. I can call the police….”

“No. No police. They come and ask questions.”

“Yeah.”

Mrs. Rodriguez brushed away green tears. Her mascara was running. “You are right. She stays with Elena, I think. That’s what I tell Papa if he looks and sees she’s not in her bed. A wild man.”

“First thing in the morning, call the school. Ask for the principal. Whoever you get, find out Elena’s last name, her phone number….”

The woman laid her hand on Julie’s. “Please, will you call? Say it’s for me, Señora Rodriguez. Say I don’t speak very good English. That’s the truth, no?”

“Mrs. Rodriguez …”

“Please, you call me Rose. We are friends, no?”

Julie could not go back to sleep. She listened for Juanita’s father to come home from work, a tired, bemused man who moonlighted on a second job while his wife moonlighted in her fashion. Juanita had grown up a silent, angry child who beat her dolls and pulled off their arms and legs. Now she and Julie were putting them together again with glue and heavy thread, a Christmas project for the really poor. It had taken Julie a long time to make her smile, then laugh, to make her see the dolls as little Juanitas. A lot of her own angry childhood had gone into the making.

Mr. Rodriguez came home. Julie waited for the explosion, the reverberations of which would run through the building. But none came. The woman would have persuaded him the child was asleep in her bed. Julie sat up and phoned the local precinct. The only complaints involving children were drug-related: downtown bookings, parents contacted.

“How about the prostitutes—any young ones?” The wildest possibility.

“They’re all young—and as old as Magdalene,” the desk sergeant said. Then: “This wasn’t a sweep night, Julie.”

Nothing came of inquiries to the local hospitals.

Julie lay back and thought about when she had last seen the youngster. Late afternoon yesterday. Probably when she was coming home to ask permission to go to Elena’s. What was she wearing besides the red, white, and green streamers? Julie couldn’t remember. The Italian colors were for the Columbus Day Street Fair. Nor could she remember Juanita’s ever mentioning Elena. She was only beginning to make friends. So, thank God for Elena. Sleep finally came.

The girl opened her eyes. She seemed to be dreaming of waking up, but she had to be still asleep. She was lying in a huge, strange bed under a blanket with her clothes on. The room was dark except for a patch of gray light in the ceiling. Curled up on her side, her thumb in her mouth, she stared at the light. It looked more like a sheet floating up there, but the flickering lights of a plane appeared and moved quickly out of sight again. She heard the roar go away. It was a skylight in the ceiling, something she had seen only in a movie.

She tried to wake up. She bit her thumb, and when it hurt she knew that she was already awake. Then she remembered what had happened to her before the sleep: the woman and a man in the dirty lobby of an old theater where she had gone to see the puppets. At the fair the woman had told her about them and promised to show her how they worked. She had wanted to learn how to make puppets and how to make them act. The woman said she was a natural. She and Julie might even use the dolls and make their own puppet show. But there weren’t any puppets, and she knew the minute the door had closed behind her that she should never, never have gone there. The woman grabbed her and covered her mouth when she started to scream; the man held her legs and roped them together, then knocked them out from under her, sat on her, pinned her arm down, and must have stuck a needle in her. The place in the hollow of her arm hurt now when she touched it. She distinctly heard him say, “Five minutes.” She tried to scratch and bite. The man swore at her and the woman said, “For Christ’s sake, Danny, do you want her looking like a battered child?” Her memory stopped right there. Now the important thing was she had to go to the bathroom.