27 Blood in the Water by Jane Haddam

Author:Jane Haddam [Haddam, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

TWO

1

For most of her growing up, Eileen Platte had envied her older sister. Eileen Platte had been Eileen O’Brien then, and her older sister had been named Margaret Mary. Margaret Mary was a special name. It was the name of the nun who had seen the Virgin Mary on an altar in her convent and been given the design of the Miraculous Medal to reveal to the world. All the girls at St. Rose of Lima School loved the Miraculous Medal best, because it was the most beautiful of all the medals. There was a picture of the Blessed Virgin on the front of it with her arms outstretched. Rays of light come from her fingertips, and words came from the rays of light: O MARY, CONCEIVED WITHOUT SIN, PRAY FOR US WHO HAVE RECOURSE TO THEE. Neither Eileen nor her sister nor anybody else they knew understood what “recourse” meant, but it didn’t really matter.

Now Eileen stood in the middle of her kitchen, looking down at the long granite counter, and wondering what she had been thinking. She knew what “recourse” meant now, but it seemed to her that it was a trick, and always had been. The Virgin Mother would pray for those of the human family who had a right to ask her to pray for them. If you didn’t have a right to ask—well. You could ask away forever, and none of your prayers would be answered.

It was odd the way things had been, all these weeks since Michael had died. At first, Eileen had barely felt it. There was no body she could look at. There was no funeral. There wasn’t even a death notice in the papers. The whole thing was drifting and unreal, as if she’d dreamed it. Dream was the wrong word, but she didn’t know what else to call it. Sometimes she had nightmares that woke her up screaming. Sometimes she had the same nightmares, but all the emotion was gone. Michael was gone. A policewoman had come to the door and told her that. They had both sat down at the kitchen table. The policewoman had touched her hand, and Eileen had had to force herself not to recoil at the touch. There was something wrong with that policewoman’s hand, she was sure of it. There was flecks of black and green across the knuckles, that looked like they’d been poisoned.

After about a week, Eileen had found herself thinking of it as actual. That wasn’t quite the same thing as real, but it was close. The house was big and silent and empty. Michael was not in his bedroom snoring off a night doing God only knew what. Stephen was not storming around the house, delivering lectures about Michael’s faults and all the awful things that would happen to him if he didn’t straighten up. Stephen was not saying anything, really, and that was the strangest thing of all the things that had happened so far.

Actually, there was one thing Stephen did say, and it mattered.

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