He tells her that she met Libby three times at a hospital, first in late November and twice in December. He says that Evangeline was either sick or injured — the entries in Libby’s planner switched from meet to visit the first two times, and to pick up on the third. He tells her gently that it would be relatively easy for the police to check on the circumstances of these hospitalizations. He tells her that Libby booked the flight and paid for it four days after pick up EV from hosp.
Evangeline is gripping the armrests of her chair so hard that her knuckles jut sharp and white through the skin of her hands.
Saenz draws the clothes out of the plastic bag they came in. “These are yours,” he says, laying them on the table and pushing them across to her. “You stayed with her after you were discharged from the hospital. You left them to dry in the guest bathroom when you flew off to GenSan.”
She reaches out and touches them.
“He found them,” Saenz tells her quietly, sadly. “It made him angry.”
“He couldn’t have,” she protests, confirming his theory without even realizing it. “How could he... Oh, God.” There it is, the horror of it, coming to her now in all its unforgiving clarity. “I called him. She told me not to, but I thought it would... calm him down.”
“And you told him where you were staying,” the priest says.
Evangeline de Vera, breaking Libby’s rules. “Oh, God. Was it because of me? Was it my fault?”
The two men don’t answer. To Evangeline, that’s answer enough.
Libby always makes it a point to lock herself away on New Year’s Eve, because she can’t stand the noise and the smoke. It’s easier to do it in the Lagro house, up on a hill, and even though the neighbors will be setting off fireworks and drinking and generally making fools of themselves, their homes are far enough apart that she doesn’t really have to suffer through any of it. She plans her own private celebration with a tub of Magnolia ice cream in the fridge and a few action films on DVD.
She is about to lock the gate when the car drives up. As the man steps out, she immediately knows who he is and why he is here.
Libby knows that it isn’t wise to engage him; he’s calm now but she senses his anger, it’s coming off him in waves. Quickly she estimates how long it’s been since Evangeline’s plane took off. Twelve hours, that’s enough time if she follows instructions.
But she hasn’t, which is why he’s here. And Libby thinks she might be able to buy Evangeline a little more time, so she shakes his hand, invites him in for coffee and some of those rosquillos that a colleague at the bank brought her from Cebu.
Before they go into the house, she steals a look at the night sky. Between the New Year’s Eve fireworks and the smoke now hanging heavy over the city, she can’t see a single star.
The police have learned that Hann Hyun-jun fled the country less than a week after Libby Delgado’s murder. They’ve matched samples of his hair and fingerprints from the condo unit he’d shared with Evangeline to the samples found in Libby’s house. But there’s little that can be done other than to get Interpol to put out a red notice for him and wait. He has money, though, and he could go anywhere. Rueda tells Saenz there’s no way to predict how soon, or if, he will ever be found.
The priest continues to reconstruct Libby Delgado out of Evangeline de Vera’s recollections, out of the connections that are now emerging from their association. They web out into the lives of other women — Fanny Jamora, Astrid Samaniego, Lisa Marie Borja... The list spans eight years, five cities, thirteen lives — nineteen if he counts the children. She took it all on herself, led by some impulse that even now eludes him.
She’s left him with little to go on, and there’s no family history to be found anywhere in the silent house on Caridad Street. But Saenz is patient, he wants to know — to understand her life and the magnitude of what she’s done.
Professor Atienza meets him at the Starbucks café at the huge new SM Fairview mall along Quirino Avenue. She insists on buying him coffee (his usual double-shot espresso, not helping the insomnia) and chooses for herself the sweetest, richest concoction on the menu, three hundred tablespoons of sugar and a half-pound of whipped cream. “Life is short,” she declares. She giggles like a schoolgirl, guilty and defiant at the same time.
It’s different when they’re settled at a table; they sit in silence for several minutes, as if bracing themselves for what’s to come. “You knew, didn’t you?” he finally asks. “When you came to my office. You knew who was staying at the pension house in GenSan.”
Tears well up in her eyes, and she fiercely blinks them away.
“I didn’t know who. But I knew why.”
Saenz leans forward, his pale, fine-boned hands clasped together between his knees. In his mind, Libby’s eyes slowly lose their anger, her face relaxing into the easy, barely-there smile in the photographs that are not on his mobile phone.
“Tell me,” he says.
The Professor’s Wife
by Jose Dalisay
Diliman
Somebody died in this car I’m driving. That’s why I got it so cheap. I mean, new Ford Escapes don’t go for less than a million pesos, and even discounting a few years’ use — five years, to be exact, and fifty-two thousand kilometers on the odometer — I’d have valued this 4x2 XLS at around 530,000, maybe even a bit more in those used-car lots that have sprung up everywhere around Metro Manila, near the malls to catch the dads’ eyes while the moms shop. But 365,000? That’s a steal. That’s robbery. Unless you figure all the scrubbing it took to get the blood off the upholstery in the back, right behind me where the professor’s head would have been, the blood bubbling out of his mouth and his nostrils and who knows what other cavities. His wife’s lap would have caught some if not most of the blood, but I could just imagine that head, that whole upper frame of his, jerking up and down like some broken insect, spewing blood and mucus all over the car seat. Of course I didn’t really see any blood when I looked — not that I looked too closely — because the seats sported new beige velour covers when I got the car, and I couldn’t smell anything either because the wife — Lalaine, that’s her name, I keep calling her Mrs. Sanvictores, or Ma’am Lalaine, never just “Lalaine” to her face or in the professor’s presence — had sprayed a canful of acrid-sweet lemon air-freshener into the interior.
How did I learn about the way the professor died? From Lalaine, of course, she was there, cradling his bony head on her ample lap where he might have, would have, lain the same birdlike head — I remember how, when he nodded in class, it almost seemed like he was pecking, the way his nose would dip forward and then pull back — some other time, any other time. Heck, I’ll admit, I would have too with half a chance, and given how I’d sometimes steal a glance at that lap — and, oh, at other parts of Mrs. Sanvictores, or Lalaine. It wasn’t my fault; it was the professor himself who invited me into his house, their house, to discuss his research on the origins of the coffee industry on Sibutu Island — and I didn’t even know he had a wife, or a young wife to be exact, a hot young wife who must have been thirty years his junior, and maybe just ten years older than I was, if even that much.
The second I met Lalaine, as she bent over to hand me a glass of pineapple juice and all kinds of good things began to spill out of the front of her low-cut blouse, I nearly fainted from the sight and the whiff of Shalimar or whatever they name those perfumes that remind you of rustling silk and moonlight. The truth is, she wasn’t what you would call particularly pretty — her cheekbones seemed set a bit too high and the sides of her face tapered down so sharply into her nubbin of a chin that you could’ve said she looked like a caricature, especially with those full wide lips. She was a walking, bobbing exaggeration of a woman, or womanhood itself, that’s what I always thought. Her skin was so white and creamy that the large brown mole that sat on the hump of her left breast looked even larger and browner than it probably was.