True Believers(142)

The truth, she thought, as she got the coffee things out of the cupboards in the kitchen, was that lately all sex had started to disgust her—an offshoot of the onset of menopause, maybe, except that she’d heard that menopause had exactly the opposite effect. Her hands were shaking, but she wasn’t frightened. She could hear Ian moving around upstairs, but he didn’t threaten her. She kept trying to get a handle on her emotions and couldn’t. She wasn’t sad. She wasn’t upset. She wasn’t scared. She wasn’t anxious. Even that deep pit of envy that she carried everywhere at the center of her heart had disappeared, dissolved in the acid of a rage so righteous and so complete that it was burning it up.

That’s it, Edith thought. I’m angry.

Then she put the kettle on to boil and turned around to face the door that led into the dining room. He was coming, very slowly, as if he needed to let her know that nothing she did and nothing she said could make him hurry. She could hear his shoes, first on carpet and then on hardwood. He had taken the time to get dressed. She could hear him breathing. That was not as calm.

When he came through the door, he had a gun—and Edith found, to her surprise, that she had half expected that. She knew nothing about guns. This one looked big, and black, and could be held in one hand. Names flitted through her head—Smith & Wesson; Colt—but they meant nothing to her. She had all the lights on in the kitchen, but she could have looked out the bank of windows over the sink and seen those other lights, over at St. Anselm’s.

“If it’s really true,” Ian said, “that I killed at least three people, I don’t think you should be trying to threaten me when you aren’t even armed.”

“I didn’t threaten you.”

“I think you did.”

Edith giggled. “I saw what you did,” she said, “and I know who you are.”

“It isn’t funny, Edie.”

“I think it is.”

“I can’t have you going around the city of Philadelphia telling people I added four extra names to the victims’ list on the pedophilia case.”

“And pocketed the cash.”

“They’ll assume I pocketed the cash, Edie. They’ll assume that.”

“They’ll be right.”

Ian did something to the gun—cocked it, Edith thought it was called. She wasn’t sure. It was odd how she could be so little afraid of this thing. If it were loaded, it would be more than capable of killing her. She was sure it was loaded. She really didn’t care.

“I thought you’d get away with it, when this started,” she said. “I thought you were smart enough for that. But I was wrong. There’s no way you can get away with it. And now I don’t really want you to. So that’s that.”

“I could shoot you right here.”

“You won’t.”

“You’re the one who thinks I’ve killed three people.” Edith turned her head to the side and looked through the windows at the lights coming from St. Anselm’s. Four, she thought. That’s what that is over there. That would be four. She crossed her arms over her chest and looked back at Ian. She had gotten to him, finally. He was not only posturing, now. He was furious, almost as furious as she was, furious enough so that his hands were shaking, and the gun was jiggling up and down.

“I don’t understand why you thought you could get away with it,” she said. “Coming in here, and taking what you wanted for free.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It doesn’t matter what I’m talking about,” she said.

Ian raised the gun higher in the air, and steadied his hands.

Edith turned her back on him.





2


Roy Phipps knew, as soon as he saw the lights coming from the courtyard at St. Anselm’s, that there had been another one. He knew it the way some people know that rain is coming by the pains in their joints. Of course, he sent Fred down the street anyway—he had to send Fred, if only to save Fred’s pride—but when he had the few details that could be learned by eavesdropping at the edges of the crowd, he knew nothing more than what he had already divined. It was funny, the way it worked out. If he had been a different sort of man, with a different sort of background, he might have become a psychic. He thought he would have been a good one. It was all one, really, ESP, speaking in tongues, transubstantiation, being slain in the spirit. It was all magic, only some of it, like the gifts of the Holy Spirit, was white, and some of it, like the Catholic Mass, was black as pitch. Except that Roy didn’t much like calling the Evil Things “black.” No matter what else he was, he had never been an instinctively racist man. He would have welcomed black members into his church, if any had been interested in joining, but none ever were. The real divisions in the world were not between black and white, but between good and evil. He had always known which side was evil—but no, that wasn’t true. For a few short years, at Princeton and later in graduate school, he hadn’t known, and what he remembered of that time was an agony of confusion so great he had sometimes woken in the night in a panic, thinking that his head was about to split open. But it was funny the way that worked, too. He had seen it as soon as he had gone to the seminary, which was why he hadn’t stayed, and why he hadn’t allowed himself to be ordained in any of the small denominations that would have had him. Nothing that you allowed to become part of you ever really left you. He ministered to Fred, but he did it in a J. Press suit. He preached to men with dirt ground into the creases on their hands, but his own hands were as soft and clean and well kept as any New York banker’s.