Dear Old Dead(84)
Suddenly, Eamon Donleavy spun around and slammed the door of Michael Pride’s office shut. It was too much for him, it really was. All the things he had tried so hard to hold back from himself for years were coming at him in waves. Just when he thought he was going to have a chance to breathe, they hit him again. No, Eamon thought, not them. Never them. Just it. One single sentence. Four short words. Enough to kill him as surely as strychnine had killed Charles and Rosalie van Straadt.
Oh, Christ, Eamon thought, doubling over, nauseated, in so much pain he felt as if he had needles in his bones.
Oh Christ, oh Christ, oh Christ.
I love this man.
2
EVERY PERSON IN RESIDENCE at the Sojourner Truth Health Center for more than two weeks on a nonmedical matter was supposed to take housekeeping duty if they were asked, and since Julie Enderson had been resident at the center for months now, she was often asked. She was asked especially often because the nuns knew she was reliable. Housekeeping duty was one of those things that was very important in the aggregate but not very important piece by piece. Seeing that the laundry was folded and put away in the linen closets, dusting the stair railings and the furniture in the common rooms, making sure the flatware was properly sorted—if any one of those things hadn’t managed to get done on any one particular day, it wouldn’t have mattered, but if all of them had been consistently left unfinished, the whole place would have gone to pot. Julie Enderson knew about places going to pot. Her mother had had a kind of genius for them, so that any apartment Steeva Enderson so much as looked at instantly became a repository of litter and peeling paint. Julie didn’t mind cleaning. The really important cleaning—meaning what had to be done in the west building in the medical facilities—was taken care of by a professional service. The service protected the center from the kind of nasty surprises health inspectors could bring. Julie was assigned only those duties directly relating either to the east building itself, or to the cafeteria and basement of the west building. Even the west building offices were taken care of by the service. In practice, Julie was assigned to sort clothes in the laundry and to sort flatware. Those two things could be accomplished while studying. Julie didn’t mind that either. She wanted the time for studying. She wanted to study and study and study until her brain fell out of her head. She was convinced that if she worked as hard as she could and then harder, she would get beyond the place where she saw worms and maggots in the mirror. She would get home.
Today, she was sitting on a high stool at the table in the laundry, folding pillowcases. It was six thirty in the evening, hours after All That had happened, but she was still shaken. She had her history book open to the start of the chapter on the abolitionist movement. She had even read a paragraph or two. She hadn’t been able to retain anything. It was a good thing the qualifying test for the academy wasn’t due to be held for another month. The way things had been going around here, Julie was surprised she had been able to concentrate at all. She looked at the photograph of Harriet Beecher Stowe and the reprint of the illustration from the original Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The illustration showed a tiny black girl on her knees, praying to heaven in agony. It was not the first nineteenth-century illustration Julie had seen that had black people in it. All such illustrations made her wonder. Maybe black people had changed between the time these illustrations were drawn and now. Maybe black people were different. Certainly no black person Julie had ever met looked anything at all like the black people in these pictures.
Julie took a yellow pillowcase out of the pile, folded it, and put it on the stack of yellow pillowcases. She took out a blue one, folded it, and put it on the stack of blue pillowcases. Folding pillowcases was a terrible thing to do when you couldn’t study. The nuns didn’t believe in watching television, so there was only one set in the east building, in the common room upstairs. Julie hadn’t thought to bring a novel or a magazine. She didn’t have the money for novels or magazines anyway. She put another folded yellow pillowcase on the stack of yellow pillowcases and listened, hard. The laundry room was in the basement of the east building. Julie was down here by herself. There was nothing for her to hear but the sound of herself folding pillowcases and the soft scurry of rats and mice in the walls. The nuns tried and tried, but it was no use. This was New York. If you had a basement, you had rats and mice in the walls. Period.
Julie had folded five more pillowcases before she heard the sounds of footsteps on the basement stairs. The pile of pillowcases was half transformed into folded piles. Most of what was left was Julie’s least favorite color, white. She slipped off the stool and went to the door of the laundry room. There were definitely footsteps on the stairs. The rest of the basement looked dark and empty. Julie reminded herself that the door to the basement was locked. It locked automatically and could not be left unlocked without resort to burglar’s tools. The lock had been fine when Julie had used Sister Kenna’s keys to come downstairs. She stood in the doorway and looked at the dimly lighted sweep of stairway going up. She saw a man’s good brown shoes come into sight and then the crease on a pair of pants. For a second, Julie couldn’t remember who, connected to the center, could be dressed like that—except maybe for Charles van Straadt, and Charles van Straadt was dead. She ran a terrible movie through her head that had to do with ghosts in drag and corpses walking in the night, and then the rest of the man came into view, and she saw that it was Gregor Demarkian. Julie Enderson half relaxed, although she told herself she had relaxed completely. The truth of it was, Julie Enderson would never in her life feel entirely comfortable being alone in a room with a man. Any man. Even the Risen Christ himself.