Sacred Trust

At nine-thirty that night I dress in jeans and a warm sweater and boots for my trip to Salinas and the coroner’s office. Murphy sleeps soundly in the living room by the hearth.

When I leave, I close and lock all doors carefully, to prevent any further mishaps. In the morning I will talk to Frannie again. Clearly, Murph got out somehow when she was there. Did she simply not notice? Or was she afraid to tell me? I can’t imagine that, though I have to examine the possibility.

At ten-ten I stand alone, looking down at Marti. Her body, on a cold steel autopsy table, has been covered with a sheet to the chin. Even her head, from the hairline back, has been covered, leaving me to wonder what horrors lie beneath the rough white draping. The smell sickens me. A combination of chemicals and death, I imagine, though I’ve never actually been this close to anyone dead before. Thank God, I think, it isn’t what I’ve read about, or seen in the movies, when a body has been left undiscovered for days.

Just seeing my friend like this is bad enough. In death, her skin is smooth and pale; she doesn’t look a day over eighteen. That, and the sterile white sheet, bring to mind our “cells” at the motherhouse, twenty to a dorm room. White sheets hung from a foot or so below the ceiling, separating each cell, or cubicle, giving the appearance of a hospital emergency room. Inside each cell was a bed and a small wooden stand of drawers for our clothes.

“Remember, Marti?” I say softly, my lips curving into a slight smile. “Remember the time you stuck hundreds of veil pins all over my bed?” The pins with their round black heads studded the white bedspread, and I had to remove each and every one before I could lie down and go to sleep that night. It was Marti’s revenge for my having short-sheeted her the night before.

Silly practical jokes, and even sillier because we were eighteen, supposedly grown. At twelve, they might have made sense, but…

“We were still so young at that age,” I whisper. “So naive. When did we stop having fun, Marti? And why?”

Children, some say, are pure spirits when they come in, full of joy. Emotions like fear, sadness and guilt are built into them as they grow. By the age of seven, children are determined, at least by the Catholic Church, to have reached the age of “reason.” That’s when, in effect, they take on the guilt and sins of the world. Each year from then on finds the child growing more serious, taking on more “burdens.”

Marti and I must have been late bloomers. We still had some fun left in us when we went off to Joseph and Mary. Both of us came from families that had loved and supported us, given us every chance to explore our lives and what we thought we wanted to give, as well as get. My mother was, and still is, a seemingly happy-go-lucky Irish woman, a bit plump and not more than five feet tall. My dad, a retired salesman, loves her to distraction. He calls her his little “butterball,” and he takes care of her and protects her as if she were made of glass. That’s because, he says, she’s really “laughing on the outside, crying on the inside,” like the old song. She carries old sorrows, he tells me, that she never shows anyone and won’t talk about, not even to him. My mother’s favorite expression is a cliché, but still true: “Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.”

Marti’s parents, both of them gone nearly twenty years now, were different from mine; a bit distant, though just as supportive. Her mother was a literary genius, hailed in the forties for her innovative style of writing and showered with awards. Her father was an artist, also said to be a genius. They died together, recently, in a plane crash in Central America, on their way to help children who had been orphaned there during a catastrophic storm. The entire world grieved when they died.

I can’t help thinking, now, that at least they weren’t here to see their daughter murdered. Life does have its small blessings.

Behind me, a door opens and closes. I feel a draft on the back of my neck. Big, familiar hands cover my shoulders, and I lean back to rest my head on Ben’s chest.

“I didn’t know if you’d come,” I say.

“I thought you would call me.”

When you had time to cool down, he means.

“I might have,” I say, “but something happened.”

He turns me around, and I see that he’s worried. Deep lines run from cheek to mouth, and his forehead is creased. Poor Ben. From photos I’ve seen he was handsome and carefree at eighteen. He’s still handsome now, at least to me, but it’s as if that snapshot of the eighteen-year-old has been sharpened by a unique new photo process called Life. His forehead is so creased from worry, it will be permanently so by the time he’s fifty, and his eyes have taken on an intense, cautious look.

“What happened?” he asks me. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. It’s Murphy.”

His eyes narrow. “What about Murphy?”

“He got out today. Somebody did something to him.”

“What?”

“They, uh…carved the letter A into his back.” My voice catches. “Into his skin.”

He puts his arms around me, holding me against his chest. “Holy shit. Abby, what the hell is going on?”

“I don’t know.” I push him away, afraid that if I start to lose control, I’ll never get it back. Turning to the autopsy table, I say, “I don’t want to talk about it now, okay? What have they found out about Marti?”

He shoves his hands into his pockets, as if not knowing, now, what to do with his arms.

“It’ll take a while to run certain lab tests,” he says. “But Ted says she didn’t die from the nails in her palms. Death by crucifixion can take days, and whoever killed her apparently didn’t want—”

He breaks off abruptly. “You sure you want to hear this? It can keep for now.”

“No, tell me. I want to know.”

“The ultimate cause of death, at least from what Ted can tell without toxicology results, was blood loss from an injury to the brain.”

“What kind of injury?”

He looks uneasy. “I think I should let Ted tell you about that. Okay?”

“I…okay.”

Again he hesitates. “Abby…those odd tiny wounds on her body. You saw them?”

“Yes, they were all over her front.”

“They’re on her back, too. I guess I told you. Anyway, the coroner says it looks like she was beaten with a whip of some kind. Something with small metal balls on it.”

“Dear God.” I look at Marti and my eyes tear, thinking how much she must have suffered. “Ben, what if she was alive, even with the nails in her palms? She must have been alive while she was being beaten. What if she saw and felt everything?”

I reach out to touch Marti’s cheek. It is cold as an ice floe, and I remind myself that this is only her shell. Marti isn’t here. She won’t be, not anymore.

The absolute finality of her death hits me then. Before this, I have been cushioned to some extent by shock. Now the fact that I will never talk to my friend again, never laugh with her again, that she won’t be at the other end of the phone when I call, or leaving messages on my machine, smacks me in the face like a rock.

Ben puts his hands on my shoulders once more and steadies me while I cry. My tears fall onto the white sheet like so many tiny veil pins, though there is no joke now, no responding laughter, no love.

Ted Wright, the coroner, enters the room. A pale, slight man with intelligent blue eyes, he gives me a careful look.

“I asked Ted to talk to you,” Ben says, “but only if you want him to.”

I dry my face with the back of my hand. “I want him to.”

Ted clears his throat, obviously uneasy. Though he deals with death and mangled bodies on a regular basis, he is a kind man, I know.

“Don’t worry, Ted. I won’t fall apart on you.”

His eyes behind the steel-rimmed glasses are filled with sympathy. “I’ll try to keep it simple,” he says, standing beside me to look down at Marti.

“The first thing, and one that struck me as odd right off, is that certain rituals seem to have been observed. Not only the crucifixion, but the scourging—”

He looks at Ben, who nods and says, “I told her.”

Ted begins again. “I’ve done some reading about this, and the killer seems to have deliberately mimicked the kinds of crucifixion deaths that existed in ancient times, including a scourging with a whip. A flagrum, if you will. Such flagrums were constructed of leather thongs with small lead balls at the end of each thong. It is said Jesus of Nazareth and others condemned to crucifixion were scourged in this manner until they were nearly dead. Only after this were they nailed to a cross.”

He sighs and removes his glasses, wiping them on his sleeve.