‘Another legacy of the Folk Mass debacle,’ she whispered back. ‘Some of that St Louis Jesuit crap, written by priests whose mothers were struck in the head with guitars while pregnant with them.’ She raised her eyes to the blue, star-studded sanctuary ceiling and added, ‘May God forgive me for saying so.’
I missed the next half stanza while biting my tongue and concentrating on the stained glass windows in order to keep from laughing.
During the eulogies, I located Shirley and Link sitting with Tessa in a pew near the front, and a block of graying heads that I suspected belonged to the Swing and Sway Seniors since I’d seen their Ford Econovan parked outside. By mid-service I was intimately familiar with the backs of several hundred heads of people I didn’t know, but no Melanie.
Before I knew it, the priest was holding up the host and saying, ‘This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world…’ and we were responding, ‘Lord I am not worthy to receive you…’ and I’d still not located her.
‘Have you seen Melanie?’ I asked Eva as members of the congregation began filing up to the altar rail to receive communion.
‘Is she Catholic?’
‘I’m pretty sure. Of the evangelical persuasion.’
‘If she’s a faithful Catholic, she’ll go up to receive. Keep watching.’
We sang the communion hymn ‘I am the Bread of Life’, repeating the refrain ‘I will raise them up’ so many times I thought I would scream, and still no Melanie.
Not at the rosary service.
Not at the funeral.
I was getting seriously worried.
The Mass ended, we were directed to go in peace, and the congregation recessed silently while a soloist sang the Prayer of St Francis of Asissi, ‘Make Me an Instrument of Peace’, in Spanish, in a clear, high soprano voice that tore at my heart.
Rather than following my family and friends out of the sanctuary, I loitered at the back, listening, all the while studying the photographs of Jay, silently mourning the man who, against all odds, had taught my lead-footed husband how to waltz.
Oh, Señor, hazme un instrumento de Tu Paz…
Porque es:
Dando, que se recibe;
Perdonando, que se es perdonado;
Muriendo, que se resucita a la
Vida Eterna.
It’d been years since I took Spanish, but with what I knew of French, I translated the words silently as she sang:
Lord, make me an instrument of peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is discord, vision.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek to be
Consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved, as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
One day, I thought as I stood there quietly sobbing, we’ll all be gone and forgotten. The HIA monogram on my towels faded, their edges frayed, the terrycloth cut up into squares for polishing whatever passes for cars by then.
As the last notes of the song died away, I was startled out of my reverie by a voice behind me. ‘He was the love of my life, you know.’
I turned to find Kay regarding me with puffy, red-rimmed eyes. Behind her stood a priest. With a light touch of her hand on his surplice, she indicated that he should go ahead without her.
‘The pictures you selected are wonderful,’ I said after the priest had disappeared through the doors that led to the narthex.
A corner of her mouth twitched. ‘Lorraine went a bit overboard, so I had to pare it down a bit from what you saw at the house the other day, but I think it’s representative, don’t you?’
I scanned the photographs, a dozen or so, that were arranged on the table just as they had been at Kramer’s the night before. As then, there were none that featured little Lorraine. Once again, I wondered if Kay had noticed Lorraine’s resemblance to Tessa or if, as Paul kept suggesting, my overactive imagination was running away with me.
I blew my nose, carefully considering my answer. ‘I didn’t know Jay as a youth, so it’d be hard to say, but seeing him looking so happy in these pictures makes me wish I did, and feel even sadder that such a promising career was cut short.’
‘He set his goals very high,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I thought he’d bitten off more than he could chew.’
I froze. Was she talking about Jay’s plan to franchise J & K? His crushing workload? His personal life?
While dabbing at my eyes I studied his widow’s face, looking for clues. It was as if she’d drawn a line in the sand and was waiting – composed, and lethal – for me to cross it.
I knew I’d have to force her hand.
Even though I stood in a church sanctuary only inches from the holy water, the devil made me do it.
I took Kay’s pale, too-cool hand in both of mine, looked straight into her ice-blue eyes and said, ‘By the way, Kay, sometime when you’re not so busy, and all this is over, I need to return Jay’s gym bag to you. From the Hippodrome? Hutch retrieved it simply ages ago and gave it to me, but with all that’s happened, golly, I’m sorry, I simply forgot about it. There’s probably nothing of value in there, but I’d like to get it back to you sometime. At your convenience, of course.’
As I rattled on, I noticed that Kay’s chest had stopped rising and falling – appropriate for a funeral, I suppose – but it told me more or less what I wanted to know. If she had been going about the business of widowhood feeling secure, I sure as hell wanted to give her something to worry about.
I dropped her hand, tossed a cheery, ‘Just give me a call, will you?’ over my shoulder as I turned and headed for the door.
Leaving Kay standing alone amidst the photos of her victim, I fled the church and joined my family who were waiting for me on the sidewalk.
‘Mother! Where have you been?’
I kissed her cheek. ‘Later, Emily.’ With a conspiratorial wink at Eva, I rounded up the stragglers and said, ‘Come with me to the parking lot. There’s somebody there that I’d like you to meet.’
Twenty-Eight
I tried to reach Melanie for two days, texting repeatedly to her cell, but my messages were never returned. No one answered her land line either.
I drove to the Fosher apartment in Laurel, near Fort Meade, but no one was home. Melanie’s silver KIA Rio wasn’t parked in its assigned spot in front of the complex either.
I sat in my car and stewed, listening to Mozart on the radio and staring up at the drapes pulled across Melanie’s living-room window until it occurred to me – at long last – that something might have happened to Don. That he’d been wounded or killed, and that the army had called Melanie away. There had to be some good reason why she wasn’t picking up messages.
If she had to leave so suddenly, though, it was odd that she hadn’t told me. On the other hand, if somebody called me with the terrible news that something had happened to Paul, I might rush out without notifying anyone, too.
Three days later, the Capital reported the body of a woman between the ages of twenty-five and thirty had been found floating in the South River near Church Creek. The identity of the victim was being withheld pending notification of next of kin, but with a cry of anguish, I told Paul I knew it had to be Melanie.
I had to find out for sure.
Plan A was to call Dennis, my long-suffering brother-in-law slash policeman. But talk about not sharing information with anybody, when I called the station, I learned from an associate that he and Connie had taken advantage of an unexpected break in Dennis’s caseload by shouldering their skis and hightailing it off to Vail.