Precious Blood(95)

She rummaged around in the big shopping bag the Tiffany people had given her to carry all her things in and came up with some cigarettes. She’d bought them, too, a whole carton, on her march down Bellewether Street. She opened the pack, extracted a cigarette, and lit up with a match from the “personalized” book in the ashtray. Stuart frowned at her and said,

“I wish you wouldn’t smoke. You didn’t when I first met you. And it annoys people.”

“I know. There seem to be a lot of people who’ve taken up antismoking as a substitute for religion.”

“I’m just saying that the people who smoke won’t care if you don’t, but the people who don’t will care if you do.”

Judy took a deep drag and sighed. Out there, she thought, are a million different people with a million different obsessions. Stamp out smoking. Stamp out high-cholesterol foods. Stamp out everybody’s definition of “feminism” or “racism” or “sexual morality” or “gross obscenity” except my own. Peg had told her once that having a real religion made sense. It balanced you, and you needed it, like one of the four basic food groups. Try to do without, and you found yourself replacing it with something else: politics or ambition, self-righteous intolerance of one land or another. It was the kind of thing Judy had listened to without paying attention. She had never had much respect for Peg as a philosopher. Now she thought she might have been wrong.

She took a sip of her drink, a drag on her cigarette, and looked through the haze of smoke she’d created around Stuart. He was still being vapid, and earnest, and encouraging. He still thought he was going to convince her that all this was a blessing in disguise.

“Do you know what was strange?” she said. “What Gregor Demarkian asked me. That was strange.”

“What did he ask you?”

“He wanted to know about my sophomore year in high school. Except the way he put it was, ‘the year before that incident happened in Black Rock Park.’”

“Black Rock Park,” Stuart repeated, and Judy was annoyed. There was still nothing, no panic, no fear, no worry, nothing.

“He asked me,” she said, “who was going out with Cheryl Cass that year before—before the animal thing happened. And I told him. Andy went out with her. And Barry Field went out with her. And half the football team probably went out with her, because she was that kind of person.”

“Who is Cheryl Cass?”

“She was the woman who was supposed to have committed suicide in an alley out near the cathedral Ash Wednesday week. I’m sure you saw her on television.”

“Maybe. What does she have to do with you?”

A drag on the cigarette, a sip of the drink: delaying tactics. She had to fight down the impulse to tell him everything, all about the LSD and the Black Mass and Black Rock Park—not because she wanted sympathy from him, she’d never get it, but because she wanted to believe him capable of some strong emotion, any strong emotion. She wanted to convince herself he was alive.

She tried a roundabout route. “There is,” she told him, “the simple fact that I was going out with Andy Walsh my junior year in high school, and Andy Walsh dumped me good and proper for a shot at Cheryl Cass. Cheryl Cass died of nicotine poisoning, Stuart. Maybe they’re beginning to think it wasn’t suicide at all.”

Stuart considered this gravely, slowly, deliberately, wearing his best Hard Issues, Hard Questions, Hard Answers face. Then he smiled and said happily,

“That’s nonsense. It all happened twenty years ago. They’d never prove you murdered somebody for a motive like that.”





[2]


When Declan Boyd rang the doorbell at St. Agnes’s Convent, Sister Scholastica was still on the phone to Barry Field, making sympathetic noises and soothing clucks, trying to pay attention to what he was saying and having no luck at all. He had had a visit from Gregor Demarkian and John Smith, and it had frightened him. They’d asked him a lot of questions about Cheryl Cass. They’d asked him more about what he had and had not seen from his pew at Holy Thursday Mass. They’d questioned him—“forever” as he put it—about his movements on this day. Scholastica was not surprised at that. She had been asked to write down the names of everybody she knew to have been at the convent or anywhere else in the courtyard all day. Barry Field’s had been one of the names she had written down.

“Gregor Demarkian,” Barry said, “kept going on and on about my being up at the altar. I’m sorry, I don’t mean that. He isn’t the kind to go on and on. But he kept asking me about it.”