VC03 - Mortal Grace (8 page)

In the narrow lead-ribbed window beside the front door a man in a black tipped-back cowboy hat was shading his eyes, trying to see inside.

She opened the door. “Can I help you?”

“Where’s Talia?” The voice rasped like sandpaper on a blackboard.

“I’m sorry, you have the wrong address.”

White eyelashes arched toward an unbarbered blond hairline. “Redheaded kid. Pigtails. Skinny.”

She recognized the description, but she felt no dishonesty in keeping her face blank. “I’m sorry. There’s no Talia here.”

“Talks with a stutter.” Two dead teeth dead-centered in a peace-making smile. “I just want to take her home.”

“Could you come back during office hours? There’s no one who can help you now.”

His blue eyes narrowed. “You’re alone?”

Don’t let him know that
, instinct whispered. “Come back tomorrow.”

His face hardened like a hatchet ready to strike. “You better stay the hell out of things that don’t concern you.”

This man is crazy
, Bonnie realized.
Or else he’s on drugs. Maybe both.

“Think about it, my woman. I can get you. I can get you anytime I want. Think about it.”

Bonnie was thinking about it, not liking the thought. She pushed the door shut. She waited for the sound of his next move.

The cowboy hat appeared again in the window.

She pulled the curtain, blotting him out.

I’m not going to let it bother me. He’s on drugs. It wasn’t a threat. It was drug grandiosity. All addicts are grandiose.

The idea refocused her. She walked with a calm, unhurried pace back to her office. She picked up the roofer’s letter again. With a yellow highlighter she marked his estimate for new copper gutters. He had replaced those gutters eighteen months earlier—she’d have to challenge him.

Quiet had settled on the rectory. There was only the up-and-down throb of traffic on the street, so wavelike in its constancy that she could scarcely distinguish it from silence.

Next she reviewed a bill from the firm that rented folding chairs and china for the Thursday soup kitchen.

Maybe we should buy those chairs.
She did a quick calculation on a scratch pad.
With this government, we’re going to be feeding the homeless through the end of the century.

A sharp little arrow of awareness cut in. She lifted her head. Had something dropped on a floorboard, had a foot stepped somewhere?

She listened for an echo in her memory. It eluded her.

Imagination, she decided.

But then it came again. The same unidentifiable sound. Definitely indoors.

A cold, dull premonition closed in on her brain directly behind the eyes.

The air conditioner’s turned too high
, she told herself.
The room is cold. It’s got me imagining things.

She rose and crossed to the window. Above the garden wall the dark stalagmites of the skyline thrust clear and sharp against the evening sky. She snapped off the air conditioner.

Another layer of stillness dropped. The room seemed smaller.

She heard a faint creaking, the light whispering sound of something sliding against wood. Something on the other side of the hallway.

She went to the door.

The hallway was dim and shadowed. She narrowed her eyes. Through the half-open door to the dining room she could see a figure crouched down near the floor, mixing something in a small bowl.

She took three silent steps forward. Her breathing felt too short, far too rapid.

She saw it was not the man in the black cowboy hat. No hat at all. Someone else, a boy with pale brown hair.

She spoke with a courage that was not completely genuine. “Who are you?”

He straightened up. Gray eyes swung around. “I’m Tod, ma’am.”

She detected no menace in the voice, in the gaze, in the fine-boned, slightly angular presence. “What are you doing here, Tod?”

“The baseboard’s cracked, ma’am.” His left hand pushed soft floppy brown bangs away from an unlined forehead. The right hand held a palette knife edged with a glistening plasterlike substance. “I’m smoothing it out.”

“Who asked you to smooth it out?”

The eyes were perplexed, as though she had unjustly accused him. “Father Joe, ma’am. He’s paying me five dollars an hour.”

The explanation made sense. It was just like Father Joe to hire a teenager to do odd jobs around the rectory. It was just like him, too, to forget to tell her. “How long have you been here?”

“Since two o’clock. I finished three walls.”

“I didn’t hear you.”

“I was here yesterday too. I tried not to disturb you, ma’am.” There was something childish about the proud way he was looking at her. “Could I ask you something, ma’am? You’re a priest, too, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Would you be able to talk to a friend of mine?”

“I’d be glad to. I’m here every weekday from ten to six. Sometimes later.”

“Her name’s Nell.” The corners of a smile etched themselves gently in the boy’s pale face. “She’s afraid to come here.”

“Why?”

“She’ll be down on West Street. Four-oh-eight West Street, just north of Tenth Street. A little bar by the docks—the Sea Shell. If you go there any time after eight, you’ll find her.”

“It’s eight now.”

“Then she’s waiting for you. Just take a table by yourself. Give her a chance to see that you’re…” He broke off.

“That I’m what?”

“Friendly. As soon as she sees that, she’ll come over.”

“I have other plans tonight, I can’t.”

He was silent. There was a quality about his disappointment that was strangely open, strangely innocent. She felt something, she wasn’t sure what—apology, as if this were her fault.

“Why don’t you ask your friend to meet me another time.”

“Nell,” he said softly. “My friend’s name is Nell.”

The front doorbell dingdonged twice. Bonnie and her brother dined together twice a month, and tonight was her brother’s turn to pick the restaurant. “That’s my date,” she said. “I’ve got to go.”

The boy crouched down again and went back to daubing plaster on the baseboard.

She stared at him. “I said I’ve got to go.”

The boy never took his eyes off his work. “Nice meeting you.”

“You don’t understand. I have to lock up. You have to go too.”

The bell dingdonged a third time, impatient now.

“I’ll lock up,” the boy said.

“I can’t give you the keys.”

“Father Joe gave me the keys.”

The moment embarrassed her. She felt ridiculous with all her assumptions and prejudices. If the boy had keys, he was all right. Father Joe wouldn’t have trusted him otherwise.

“The upper lock sticks,” she said. It was her way of saying excuse me.

He smiled. His eyes were half-closed. She could no longer see the gray.

“I know,” he said.

Outside, her brother Ben was waiting for her with a taxi. “We’re going to a Thai place.” His voice was fast and excited, as though he had saved up a hundred things to tell her since their last dinner. “Got a terrific write-up in the
Times
yesterday. Especially the crab marinated in cilantro.” Though well into his thirties, Ben had the dark, enthusiastic eyes of a man ten years younger. “I was lucky to reserve a table.”

Bonnie smiled, but there was an uncomfortable undertow to her thoughts, an uneasiness whose center she could not exactly locate.

Outside the cab window, the long summer twilight was dying and darkness was coming. Streetlights and store signs flickered along Lexington.

“Hope you’re in the mood for green tea sorbet,” Ben was saying.

“We’re going to have to put it off,” she blurted suddenly. “Would you mind horribly?”

In the charged silence of the cab, Billie Holliday was singing “Lover, Come Back to Me.”

“Aren’t you feeling well?” Ben said.

“I’m fine.”

His eyes fixed on her, large and caring and questioning. “What’s the matter?”

“There’s someone waiting for me. A young girl.”

“A friend?”

“I don’t know her, but it sounds like an emergency.”

She tried to explain. Ben was the perfect listener, as always, catching every implication, quick to nod, quick to frown. Quick to pull her up short.

“But you don’t know anything about these two people,” he said.

“Except that Father Joe trusts the boy.”

Ben caught her point. He nodded. “Okay. Do what you have to. The crab cilantro will keep.”

“Driver.” She leaned forward. “Would you take us to West Street. Four-oh-eight.”

TEN

T
HE CAB SWUNG WEST.
As Christopher Street brought them to the river, Ben whistled. On the corner of Weehawken, a six-story walk-up had the streaked dark smoky color of braised spareribs. Fire escapes and gutters dangled like caught kites. Amputated furniture parts straddled the window ledges.

“Looks like a force-five hurricane swept through,” Ben said, “and no one’s gotten around to rebuilding.”

The cab turned north onto West Street and slowed. The driver threw a dubious glance across his shoulder. “You said four-oh-eight, lady?”

Number 408 was a six-story tenement, gutted from the third story up. The first two floors were intact and even had glass in the windows. The sign over the door was hand-lettered in red paint, and the hand had not been able to make up its mind between print and script:
SEA SHELL
. Two words with elaborate Gothic S’s.

Ben shot his sister a glance of brotherly concern. “Shouldn’t I come with you?”

“Thanks.” Bonnie kissed him good night. “I can handle it.”

She almost gagged when she stepped through the door of the Sea Shell. The air had a choking smell of cigarettes and hamburgers and whiskey and beer. The L-shaped interior was dimly lit. Smoke drifted through cones of light from imitation Tiffany lamps.

Bonnie took a table. A heavily built man with no hair came from behind the bar and asked what she’d like. She ordered a ginger ale.

An old Frank Sinatra record was playing on the jukebox. She glanced around her.

Men who looked like truck drivers sat in threes and fours. She saw two or three blowsy, heavyset women. Male laughter came in bursts that were almost cruel. In a corner, a man in a plaid work shirt dueled with a pinball machine, driving it into conniptions of bells and lights.

He saw Bonnie watching his triumph and came sauntering over. “Hi. Buy you a drink?”

“Thanks—I’m waiting for someone.”

“Have it your way.” He shrugged and went back to the pinball machine.

Bonnie noticed a girl sitting in shadow at a corner table. She had pale blond hair and anorectic arms poking out from a loose green tank top. Her hands were playing nervously with a can of Diet Slice. She was observing everything Bonnie did and quietly taking it in.

Bonnie felt something tense in her chest.
That’s Nell. That has to be Nell.
She risked a smile.
See, I don’t bite.

The girl’s eyelids lifted slightly. Her head was pulled down into her shoulders, as though she was afraid someone might strike her. There was a long moment when she glanced directly at Bonnie. The glance stretched out, became a questioning look. Slowly, the teeth pushed down on the strained, pale lips. A smile crept out across the face.

Bonnie nodded.

The girl got up from her table. She moved with the fragility of a little animal made of glass.

“I couldn’t let you wait here alone.” It was Ben, dropping into the chair beside her. “The cabbie says this is a terrible place. They had a shooting last month.”

The girl stopped two tables away. Her eyes flicked guardedly to Ben and then back to Bonnie. For a moment she stood wondering and staring. Her irises were green, just a shade darker than mint. Abruptly, she turned and ran to the door.

“We’ve scared her away,” Bonnie said.

Ben looked confused. “Who?”

“The girl I was supposed to meet. I’m sorry, Ben—I have a feeling I’d better do this alone.”

She hurried outside, hoping he wouldn’t follow.

Six lanes of traffic blurred past on West Street, but the sidewalk was eerily unpeopled. She scanned the curb, looking for movement.

How far could she have gone in ten seconds?

Most of the parked cars were missing hubcaps, license plates, headlights—anything and everything recyclable and resalable. Several had been set afire and burned out. A Mazda hatchback was still burning.

Out in the traffic, brakes yelped and angry voices shouted, “Whatsamatta? Wanna get killed?”

A girl in a tank top was weaving jerkily through the cars. Bonnie waited for the red light to change to green, then plunged after her.

The river side of the highway looked like an abandoned car lot. The girl was threading her way through the wrecks. Half of them had been pressed into service for sex, shooting drugs, puking.

A blue-and-white police car slowed to aim its searchlight at a man urinating in the gas tank of a green Chevy. “Hey, you,” a cop shouted. “Keep moving!”

Bonnie was afraid she’d lost the girl. Her eye explored beyond the wrecked cars. A dock jutted dark black into the rippling gunmetal-blue of the Hudson. Boom boxes blasted rap. Shadows moved along the dock, and as Bonnie approached, she caught glinting outlines of druggies hungry to score, voguing wannabes in high drag, and gay and straight males and females cruising for sex.

The girl was sitting on the low cement wall, her arms crossed over the tank top that barely covered her adolescent breasts.

“Excuse me. Are you Nell?”

Weary young eyes stared at Bonnie. The expression was calm, nothing showing.

“I’m Bonnie. Your friend Tod said you wanted to talk to me.”

“I didn’t want to talk to you.” The voice had a childlike petulance, an accent that might have been from New England. “It was his idea.”

“Why do you suppose he had that idea?”

The girl kept her face blank; closed. Her left arm flexed and she drew a crumpled pack of Marlboros from a fold in her tank top. Keyed-up fingers tapped a cigarette loose, coaxed flame from a blue Bic lighter. A dirt-edged Band-Aid capped the tip of the index finger. She inhaled deeply, held the smoke in her lungs, finally blew out a fine gray ribbon that twisted up toward the moon.