Murder Makes a Pilgrimage (33 page)

The plane ride home was long and, by comparison with the week’s events, uneventful. Hours dropped away, and a quiet settled over the passengers as the giant jet flew on.

Mary Helen was exhausted. As exhausted, surely, as those medieval
peregrinos
who had walked to Santiago from France or Italy in their thick-soled shoes and floppy hats. Everything ached. She closed her eyes in the hope that the steady hum of the plane’s engines would lull her to sleep. No matter how hard she tried, she could not switch off her mind. Lisa’s purple, swollen face appeared without warning. Bootsie’s manic screams echoed and reechoed in her ears.

Late yesterday afternoon, with a few phone calls, Ángel Serrano had arranged for Pepe’s
peregrinos
to bypass Madrid and take a direct flight to San Francisco from Santiago de Compostela.

He and María José were at the airport to see them off. The mayor of Santiago de Compostela sent lovely parchment certificates with Ángel for each of them. Mary Helen examined hers closely and was pleased to see that it declared her officially
una peregrina de San Francisco
.

The ancient city put on its best face for their departure. Low Celtic green hills rolled six deep toward a horizon of steel blue sky. A brilliant October sun made poetry of every flower and leaf it touched. The cathedral towers shimmered in the distance.

María José, her magenta hair aflame in the morning light, clung to the arm of Héctor Luna from
La Voca de Galicia
. “I have really enjoyed meeting you, Sisters,” María José said with a broad, white-toothed smile. “This was the most exciting week of my life. I will never forget it.”

“And what will you do now?” Eileen asked. “Continue with the tourist business or, perhaps, try for the police force?”

Ángel Serrano’s face visibly blanched.

“Oh, no, Sister,” María José said, “I think that I may try journalism. Héctor tells me that journalists have lots of interesting adventures and that they must be fiercely independent.” Her dark, dancing eyes fastened on Héctor’s face, and from the look on it, it was obvious that whatever white magic María José practiced was working on him.

“That may be a very good job for you,” Eileen said kindly. “At least it is worth a try.”

The
comisario
had grasped Mary Helen’s hand with his large, warm one. “Good show, Sister!” he said. His dark eyes twinkled, and a smile lit up his cherubic face. “Thank you so much for everything and,
por favor
, don’t come back again.”

At first Mary Helen thought she’d misunderstood. But from the jaunty way he hurried her up the steps to the waiting plane, she was sure she hadn’t.

Bootsie, clearly as “nutty as a fruitcake,” to use Bud
Bowman’s appraisal, was taken aboard and settled in the first-class cabin of the plane long before the rest of them arrived. Mary Helen assumed that an officer of the American Embassy was accompanying her. She figured that Roger must be up in front, too, since he was not in their section of the plane.

She wondered what must be going through his mind.

“You can’t sleep either, old dear?” Eileen cut into her daydreaming in that statement-questioning way of hers.

“No,” Mary Helen said. “I was thinking about everything that’s happened. And I can’t help feeling sad. I am always confounded by how our actions affect one another. We truly are one body,” she mused, more to herself than to Eileen. “In this case one person’s sickness caused another’s madness and a third person’s death. How does that song go that Sister Anne sings?”

So my pain is pain for you, In your joy is my joy, too. We are all one Body . . . .

Mary Helen’s rather tuneless humming was drowned out by the droning of the engines.

“Right you are, old dear.” Eileen was only half listening. “You and St. Paul and John Donne, to mention a few.

“I’m glad the
comisario
arranged a direct flight,” Eileen continued. “I dread seeing poor Bootsie again. We would, you know, if we changed planes in Madrid.”

“Me, too!” Cora had overheard. “I knew all along there was something different about her.”

“Too uptight. She needs to relax, get some exercise,” Rita Fong chimed in from her seat, and Cora and she began to discuss the danger signals they both had noticed in the unfortunate Bootsie DeAngelo.

“Hindsight is twenty-twenty.” Neil Fong rose from his seat and walked toward the water cooler.

“How are you two doing?” The voice startled Mary Helen. Pepe Nunez, ever the tour guide, hung over the seat. His smile was just as polished as it had been a week ago, his manner just as suave, but somehow there was a small touch of maturity in those flashing dark eyes that Mary Helen hadn’t noticed before.

His curly black hair was tousled, and he held tightly to Heidi’s hand. Heidi’s face radiated so much happiness that she was almost pretty.

“Well, look at you two.” The words slipped out of Mary Helen’s mouth before she thought.

Heidi’s high giggle tinkled through the tourist cabin of the plane. “We’ve discovered that we have a lot in common,” she said, and snapped her chewing gum.

Mary Helen hesitated to ask what. Fortunately Eileen filled up the uncomfortable pause. “Isn’t that grand?” she said. “I guess it truly is an ill wind that turns none to good.”

Heidi, obviously unable to make the connection between having things in common and ill winds, stared so blankly at her that Eileen focused her attention on Pepe. “After what’s happened to you on this trip, you must feel like a seasoned tour guide.” She smiled up at the handsome face. “Did Pulmantur offer you a permanent position?”

“
Sí
, Sister”—Pepe beamed—“but I turned it down. I think I will look into law enforcement.”

Mary Helen hoped her face didn’t show her shock. She wondered how Uncle Carlos Fraga would react.

“Comisario Serrano did such an excellent job with this case I think it is something I’d like to do. You know, stop crime, arrest the guilty.” Pepe smiled at an adoring Heidi.
“Besides, that policeman is traveling first class! I got a stewardess to let me sit up there for a while on the way over, and it was great.”

Eleven hours after the plane left Spain, it touched down in San Francisco. Through the magic of time zones it was still early evening.

“The
año santo
tour members are to debark immediately by the front exit,” an attendant apparently following orders announced over the intercom.

Mary Helen struggled up into the aisle. Under the suspicious and unconcealed stares of the rest of the passengers the tour group silently filed out, returning as they had begun, gathered like Canterbury’s pilgrims “together in a flock.”

As they exited the plane, Mary Helen half expected to hear “Godspeed and blessed martyr reward you,” instead of “Thank you for flying Iberia.”

She scanned the waiting room. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the rumpled, balding figure of Inspector Gallagher. He was talking to several airport policemen and undoubtedly waiting for the DeAngelos to be led from the plane.

After a moment Gallagher spotted her and gave her a thumbs-up.

“Where’s Kate?” Mary Helen mouthed.

“Measles!” Gallagher mouthed back, and scratched at his stomach and face to make sure she understood.

“Here we are!” Sister Therese’s high-pitched voice sang out through the terminal. Beside her Sister Anne held a large Welcome Home sign. Sister Cecilia, looking quite “uncollege-presidentish,” wore a enormous sombrero.

With everyone talking at once and, to Mary Helen’s relief, with no one talking about a murder on their pilgrimage,
age, they drove back to Mount St. Francis College. Amazingly the media had not yet picked up the story.

After much chatter, dessert, gifts, and more chatter, the convent settled into a peace-filled night silence. Exhausted but still unable to sleep, Sister Mary Helen slipped into a back pew in the convent chapel. Only the sanctuary lamp lit the darkness. Its flickering shadows danced across the marble floor. A soothing aroma of incense and candle wax filled the oratory.

In the stillness the events of the last eight days tumbled in upon Mary Helen. It seemed impossible that so much had happened in so short a time. She had made a Holy Year pilgrimage halfway around the world, discovered a murder and a murderer, and nearly been a victim herself. Then suddenly she was back home.

“Lord, how could you have allowed so much to happen to me?” she asked, and with a jolt remembered that today was the feast of the Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila.

Once after a particularly hectic week St. Teresa was said to have prayed, “Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few.”

There is, of course, no record of God’s answer to Teresa. Nor did Mary Helen get one either. Instead she sat and let the peace and silence wash over her like healing water.

“Let nothing disturb you, /Let nothing affright you,” Teresa had written to calm medieval Castilians. Now, centuries later, those same words calmed Mary Helen:

All things pass,
God is unchanging.
Patience obtains all.
Whoever has God,
Needs nothing else,
God alone suffices.

“Tomorrow, Lord,” Mary Helen prayed in earnest, “when Cecilia gets the first call from the media, which she most assuredly will, grant me Teresa’s serenity.

“And,” she said as a much-needed afterthought, “with Teresa’s serenity, Lord, send me a touch of deafness. I’m not sure which I’ll need more!”