True Believers(168)

“I don’t think so,” Christopher said. “It sounds like Anne Marie, don’t you think? I don’t mean that our father was fair when he set his sons up with trust funds and didn’t do the same for his daughters, but you and Emma and Myra never thought you had to kill to make up for it.”

“He also said that nobody ever really committed murder for religion,” Bennis said. “No, I know what you’re going to say. I said it, too. But he meant this kind of murder. Anne Marie’s kind of murder. And the ones he’s investigating now. So I’ve been thinking about it, you know. I’ve been thinking about his case, because I guess it stops me from thinking about Anne Marie. And something occurred to me.”

“What?”

“Well, that there’s only one person I can think of, of all the people he’s told me about, that would fit the description. And it seems stupid to think so, because, you know, I don’t know most of those people. I’ve never met them. But in this case there only seems to be one, but nothing he’s said has given me any indication that he suspects that person. And I was wondering, you know, if some people have some kind of cosmic purpose, if they’re fated—”

“Bennis?”

“Oh, hear me out, for once.”

“You’re an agnostic and a skeptic. You don’t believe in fate,” Christopher said.

“I believe that I don’t want her to die,” Bennis said. “Anne Marie, I mean. I don’t want them to execute her. I don’t want them to execute anybody, but I especially don’t want them to execute her, because she’s my sister, and I don’t care if she’s a psychopath. Does that make any sense?”

“It makes about as much sense as anything else you’ve ever said. And we’re at Cavanaugh Street. Let’s get out of the cab.”

“Right,” Bennis said.

Cavanaugh Street looked ready for Valentine’s Day. Donna’s house was decorated to death. Even Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church had its front door wrapped in ribbons and bows. The cab had stopped on the curb outside her own apartment. Across the street, Lida’s house was lit up in every window.

Bennis got out onto the sidewalk and let Christopher pay for the cab. When he was out, too, she crossed the street to Lida’s side and waited for him to come after her.

“I don’t want her to die,” she said, and then she buried her head in his chest the way she had once wished she was able to do with their father. It was, she thought, crazy the way that had turned out. Engine House, where they had all grown up, and their mother, and their father, and each day crazier than the last. Now she thought that she was going to freeze here on Cavanaugh Street. She would turn absolutely solid, and when she did they could put her body up on display in a public park.

“I don’t want her to die,” she said again.

Christopher put his hand on her head and stroked her hair.





3


It was the anticlimax that bothered Dan Burdock, the feeling that he had been wound up and raised up and pumped full of excitement, only to have it end at … nothing. For more than a day now, he had been primed and ready, so tense with knowing what was about to happen that he had sometimes found it hard to breathe. For a single short hour out on the street, he had nearly been flying. The cold had meant nothing to him. His feet hadn’t seemed to touch the ground. He wondered now what it was that he had expected. Maybe he had thought that the exorcism would be real, that Roy really had the devil harbored in his soul and this rite would bring it out, into the open, complete with horns and tail and pitchfork. That said something he didn’t much like about how he really felt about the Roman Catholic Church—and, for that matter, how he felt about Roy. Aaron would say that he had a secret attraction, but Dan knew it wasn’t true. Aaron thought everybody had a secret attraction to everybody else, or at least that all homosexuals did, and that all men were probably homosexuals. Dan knew something about the fascination with disgust. Looking at Roy was like looking at a body on an autopsy table, or those pictures of the body parts in Jeffrey Dahmer’s freezer that had shown up in one of the tabloids the week after Dahmer’s trial. Sometimes you had to look at those things and make yourself feel them, just to make yourself believe that they were real.

Now he looked out over the choir balcony onto the body of the church, just as he had on the night before Scott Boardman’s funeral, and found himself thinking the same kinds of thoughts. Granite and marble were difficult to maintain, and expensive, but they were worth it. They made this place a house of God in the only way that had ever made sense to him. The high ceilings, the soaring arches, the delicate carved latticework, the stained glass—Roy was wrong, and so were all those low-church Protestants, who thought you could only approach God through poverty of mind and body. Poverty of mind and body was epidemic in this world. If you were going to approach God, you had to approach him through majesty.