Precious Blood(92)

“Do you think he was telling the truth?”

“I have no way of knowing. I do know she was letting him sleep with her no more than a month later. Tom caught them in the act in the coat closet behind the gymnasium during some dance or other. I don’t know what Tom was doing there. He was supposed to be suspended from all extracurricular activities until he got his grades up. His grades were terrible.”

“Strange, isn’t it? Considering how scholarly he turned out.”

“He is scholarly,” Scholastica said. “It’s not just the way he comes off. When he got to the seminary he must really have gotten himself together. Or the Cardinal put him together, though Tom went all the way out to the Midwest somewhere, so I can’t see how that would be true. For most of high school he was the Cardinal’s despair. He messed up so badly, he didn’t even graduate with the rest of us.”

“When did he graduate?”

“A year late, I think. I was in the convent by then. I went in the fall after my high school graduation. We all did things we wouldn’t have expected ourselves to, after what happened in Black Rock Park. Barry left the Church. Judy got feminism the way some people get religion. And Peg—if you’d asked me back in high school who was the least likely person to turn into a Good Catholic Housewife, I’d have said Peg. In those days, she wanted to be a dancer and go to live in Paris.”

“Go back to Black Rock Park,” Gregor said.

“Yes. I will. You have to understand, you probably do understand, Andy was never satisfied to create an ordinary fuss. It would have been bad enough if he slept with Cheryl and just told the rest of us about it. He wouldn’t let it rest there. He started to—bring her to things. Not school functions, you understand. That would have been too public, even for Andy. He started to bring her to our private parties, to the beach, to the places where we used to go only with each other.”

“How did Miss Cass feel about that?”

“She was overjoyed.” Scholastica looked pained. “I think she thought it was finally happening for her. She was going to have friends, and they were going to be the very best friends. The people who ran everything.”

“Nobody thought to—try to change her mind?”

“We did everything we could to change her mind. We still didn’t speak to her. At some of those parties, we didn’t speak to Andy, either. She just didn’t get it. She wasn’t very bright.”

“Maybe she got it but didn’t want to let it show.”

“Maybe. That’s worse, isn’t it? Oh, Lord. Well. Andy finally got tired of the whole thing and was about to give it up. That would have been that, except that at same time Barry and I broke up. I’ll be honest. I broke up with Barry. Tom was showing more than his usual interest and I thought Tom was better looking and I was sixteen. Barry was very hurt, so he started going out with Cheryl. It was the same game all over again, different actors. In fact, it was the start of a ping-pong match. First Barry would have her. Then Andy would have her. Then Barry would have her. Back and forth. Back and forth.”

“But not for proms,” Gregor said.

“No. The six of us went to both proms, Cathedral Boys’ and Cathedral Girls’, together that year. As always.”

“Was it your lavaliere that was found at Black Rock Park?”

“My lavaliere is at my mother’s house. She remarried after my father died and moved down to Westchester.”

“Never mind,” Gregor said. “I’m sorry. I thought I saw where this was going.”

“You do see where this is going.” Scholastica reached into the cigarette pack and extracted another, lit it, and dropped her spent match in the ashtray. Smoke curled up around her head like a halo. “We were the ones at Black Rock Park. Barry and Tom and Andy, Judy and Peg and I. And Cheryl Cass. Andy brought Cheryl Cass. It was his turn at the ping-pong table that time.”

“Sister, excuse me for saying this, but I can’t imagine you slitting the throat of a cat. Or letting it be slit.”

“I didn’t do either. We weren’t there when that happened—I mean Judy and Peg and I weren’t. It was late and almost dark by then, and we’d gone home.”

“Because it was late and almost dark?”

“No. Because Andy and Barry were gang-banging Cheryl Cass on Black Rock itself, right in full view of everybody.”

“Not Tom Dolan?”

“Not that I saw. He might have got his later. I don’t know. But don’t think it was rape. It wasn’t. Cheryl offered.”

“In so many words?”