Precious Blood(79)

“Well, I figured that, Barry. You used to be an altar boy. You’d know what it was like around here on Good Friday.”

“Not as bad as Holy Thursday,” Barry said. “Never mind that for a minute. Tell me one thing. What were you doing the year after Black Rock Park?”

There was silence again on the line, and Barry recognized his mistake. He should have asked her what she was doing senior year. Only the implicated would think of it as “the year after Black Rock Park.” He sent up a prayer that his phone wasn’t being tapped, by Mark Candor, the IRS, or anybody else.

When Kath’s voice came back on the line, it was hard to read, but at least it didn’t sound annoyed. “I suppose I was doing what everybody else was doing,” she said. “Going to school, doing more work than usual, pretending to like boys I didn’t like too much so that I had someone to ask to my senior prom. I mean, you and I, all of us, weren’t—”

“Speaking to each other,” Barry said. “I know. Are you sure that was what the rest of us were doing? Going to school, I mean? What about Cheryl Cass?”

“Oh.” Kath sighed. “Well. I don’t know about Cheryl Cass. I hardly saw Judy and Peg. I think Cheryl might have dropped out of school that year.”

“What about Andy and Tom?”

“I didn’t see Andy or Tom for years after that. Not till I came back here to St. Agnes’s, if you want to know the truth.”

“Not even to say hello to, or walking around town on the other side of the street?”

“Not to say hello to, no. I may have seen one of them walking on the street. I don’t remember.”

“Did you see the last talk show Andy did for me?”

Kath let out a low, throaty chuckle. It made Barry smile. It reminded him of the way she used to laugh when he asked her how she was doing in Latin.

“I didn’t,” she said, “but everybody else did. Declan Boyd came rushing over here on the very heels of the sign-off signal and gave me what must have been a word-for-word. It took long enough.”

“I don’t think it was a word-for-word.”

“I don’t either, in all honesty. Dec isn’t that well organized. Mentally.”

“I don’t think it was a word-for-word, because if it had been, you’d be thinking the same thing I am.”

“Which is?”

Barry hesitated. He could tell her right out what he was thinking. She would listen to him and she would take him seriously, as she always had. But he didn’t think that was the best way.

“Look,” he said, “do you have some time right about now, so I could come over and show you the tape?”

“Barry, that tape must be an hour long.”

“What I want you to hear of it is about ten minutes. Less, really, except you’ve got to see the context.”

“Barry, it’s Good Friday.”

“I know, I know. Don’t you have a little time, really, because it’s right around lunch? You must get some time for lunch.”

“Of course I get some time for lunch.”

“Please?”

There was more silence on the line. Barry held his breath again, because he thought she was going to turn him down. It was Good Friday. She probably had to get her students to Mass and Confession and Stations of the Cross before she sent them home. The Lord only knew what church they were going to get to all that in, since St. Agnes’s had to be closed.

Kath cleared her throat and said. “All right. For ten or fifteen minutes. But it has to be now, Barry, right now, because—”

“I know all about because. I’m leaving here right away.”

“Come running.”

Kath hung up. Barry looked at the receiver for a moment, and then hung up, too. He felt suddenly much lighter than he had before, as if he had been facing a disaster and that disaster had been averted. As a metaphor it made no sense, because he had so obviously been sure of Kath’s agreement all along. He had a tape of the show sitting on his desk next to the El Greco, all cued up and ready to go.

He put it in his pocket and headed on out.





[2]


It was one o’clock, and Judy Eagan was acutely aware that she was not where she ought to be. She was not, to be exact, in the kitchen of the Chesswell Borden House, making sure Mrs. Hamilton Cordell’s lunch for thirty was going just as planned. Judy Eagan knew everything there was to know about building up a successful catering business. Long ago, she had codified this knowledge into a set of inflexible and unbreakable rules. The first of these was that she should always oversee in person any job being done for a Really Important Client. Mrs. Hamilton Cordell was a Really Important Client. She had money, brainlessness, a passionate commitment to sloth, and—most important—a ludicrous and misinformed attachment to social climbing. She gave lunches for thirty, dinners for fifty, and midnight dancing receptions for a thousand and one. (“Just like that Arabian nights, Judy dear, isn’t that clever?”) Next year, her two oldest daughters, twins, would be eighteen. Mrs. Cordell was determined to give them a debutante season, even if she had to invent it herself. That was exactly what she was doing. Her planned parties had begun to stretch into infinity, to get more and more elaborate and more and more expensive. If Judy wanted to keep herself in Tiffany perfume, she ought to be standing over the Duck Genovese, making sure her set-up girls had put baby blue frills on the duck legs instead of the usual pink ones, because Mrs. Hamilton Cordell could not stand pink.