Rich cooking aromas in the kitchen, the sound of a TV, children’s uplifted voices, and Ismelda calling: Ma’am? — but quickly she slipped away upstairs, before the children could rush at her. She showered as she hadn’t in the hotel. She soaped every part of her body, she was giddy with relief. She had a lover! He hadn’t given her his number, vaguely he’d promised to call her the following week. No one knew, no one had come to harm, the family was safe. Bruises and red welts had already begun to show on her body as if a coarser skin were pushing through, her husband would never notice.
She hurried downstairs, she was kneeling with the children. Hugging the little girl, the little boy. Mommy? Mom-my? In two arms she hugged them, what did they have to show her? Easter eggs? So many? Yes, they were beautiful but hadn’t Ismelda understood that Mommy wanted her to wait, they would make the eggs together? She spoke sharply to Ismelda at the stove, Ismelda didn’t seem to hear, it was a maddening trait of hers, seeming not to hear so her employers had to raise their voices, invariably you sounded like a bully, a fool, raising your voice to a Filipino woman scarcely five feet tall, staring at you with hurt eyes. And the children were clamoring at her, suddenly she wished them gone, all of them gone, banished from her so that she could think of her lover. I am a murderer she thought. I am the one. Her children crowded her, adoring.
The Vigil
by Terence Faherty
Copyright © 2006 Terence Faherty
Art by Mark Evans
Last year Terence Faherty’s story “The Widow of Slane” (EQMM 3/4-04) was nominated for the Edgar and Anthony awards and won the Macavity Award. The story, featuring P.I. Owen Keane, belongs to one of three series the author maintains. His latest book, In a Teapot, is set in the 1940s Hollywood of series character Scott Elliott, and here’s the latest in his Star Republic series...
That my editor’s parents loved Christmas was reflected in the name they gave their only child: Emanuel Noel. Their son’s feelings for the holiday might be deduced from his having used only his first two initials and his last name all his adult life: E.N. Boxleiter.
Those of us who worked for him at an Indianapolis daily called the Star Republic didn’t have to guess about Boxleiter’s opinion of Christmas. We were used to his temper growing shorter as December’s days did, used to him delegating anything to do with the holiday, used to his annual attempts to tone down and dry out the office Christmas parties, attempts that were frustrated by the family that owned the paper.
So I was a little surprised when Boxleiter called me into his office early one Christmas Eve and told me he had a special Christmas assignment for me.
“It’s that little girl who’s praying for the miracle roof. You know the one.”
I did. The little girl’s name was Tina Vasquez. She was a third-grader at St. Mary’s Catholic School, which belonged to an old parish of the same name located on the east side of downtown Indianapolis. Tina was the darling of the media for the second year in a row. Video of her kneeling before a statue of the Blessed Virgin in old St. Mary’s was running on local television stations almost every night. Sometimes she was alone, sometimes she was flanked by classmates, all of the girls dressed as they had for their First Communion ceremony, in white dresses and white veils.
They were praying for a Christmas present, and a large one: a new roof for the old church, a miracle roof, as Boxleiter had called it. It would have been an impossible long shot, except that, exactly one Christmas earlier, Tina had prayed up an entire automobile single-handed.
Or maybe not single-handed, since the Star Republic had played a small part. The pastor of St. Mary’s had called in the story. The priest had explained that Tina was the only child of a single mother and that the two of them were just getting by on welfare. The mother had a chance for a good job, but she needed a car. So Tina had begun a marathon prayer session before a statue of Mary, praying for a Christmas miracle.
And she’d gotten one. We’d run Tina’s picture and story two days before Christmas. On Christmas morning, the Vasquez family had awakened to find a late-model Saturn parked outside their double, its title and keys in their mailbox. The local television stations had made it one of the most videotaped cars in Indiana. The Star Republic, the paper that had launched the story, hadn’t published so much as a black-and-white photo.
“I was afraid last year that we’d created a monster,” Boxleiter was saying. “That’s why I killed the follow-up story, not that it did any good. Here the kid is, back again, praying away. St. Mary’s has already received thousands of dollars in contributions. At the rate the money’s coming in, they’ll be able to shingle that roof in five-dollar bills.”
I asked what was wrong with that.
“Nothing, if it’s all legitimate. If it’s a scam, it’s our fault for getting it started. I want you to check it out.”
There didn’t seem to me to be much to check out. The money was going directly to the parish, so the Vasquez family couldn’t be profiting.
When I pointed that out to Boxleiter, he snapped, “Even if this year’s money is going to a church, next year’s money might not. Some soppy idiot gives a car away, and who knows where it will lead?”
To get an additional rise out of him and to pay him back a little for sending me out into the cold on the day of the office Christmas parties, I asked if he was sure the Saturn hadn’t come from the Blessed Virgin.
He waved me out of his office. “Prove it did,” he said, “and you can have my Christmas bonus.”
The drive to St. Mary’s was so short my car heater never had a chance to heat. The church was one of downtown Indy’s most beautiful, a happy marriage of French Gothic architecture and Indiana limestone. As I parked in its shadow, I was struck for the hundredth time by the irony that the poorest parishes always had the oldest churches, the ones with the highest maintenance tabs. Luckily for St. Mary’s, it also had Tina Vasquez.
She was hard at it, a little girl in a white dress, her long brown hair partially hidden by a gauzy white veil. She was flanked by a girl and a boy, the boy in a white shirt and dark blue dress pants, surely the school uniform. Several other children sat in nearby pews with their parents, awaiting their shifts.
Tina knelt with a perfectly straight back, her tiny hands together but not interlocked. The day was overcast, and the church underlit. As a result, most of the light on Tina’s face came from banks of flickering candles before the statue of the Virgin. The candlelight emphasized the girl’s dominant feature, her very large, very dark eyes. Those eyes were fixed on the statue before her, which had Mary, in her traditional blue and white, standing on a blue globe that was covered in golden stars.
I’d walked all the way up the center aisle of the church, almost to the altar, so I could view the little girl’s face as unobtrusively as possible. That wasn’t unobtrusive enough for the priest, who intercepted me and asked me my business. When I showed him my press card, he ushered me into the sacristy, a little room off the altar, apologizing as we went.