The Lost Years

9

It was three o’clock when the funeral car deposited Mariah; her mother, Kathleen; and Rory back home after the luncheon at the Ridgewood Country Club.

As soon as they were inside the house, Rory said soothingly, “Now, Kathleen, you didn’t sleep well last night and you were up very early. Why don’t you get into something comfortable, then you can take a nap or watch television?”

Mariah realized she was holding her breath. Dear God, please don’t let Mom insist on going into the closet in Dad’s study, she thought. But to her relief, her mother willingly accompanied Rory up the stairs to her bedroom.

I honestly don’t know how I could have dealt with another scene right now, Mariah thought. I need some quiet time. I need to think. She waited until she was sure her mother and Rory would be in her mother’s bedroom with the door closed, then she hurried upstairs to her own room. She changed from her skirt and jacket into a cotton sweater, slacks, and sandals, and went back downstairs. She went into the kitchen, made a cup of tea, and carried it into the breakfast room. There she settled into one of the comfortable padded chairs and leaned back with a sigh.

Every bone in my body is aching, she thought as she took a sip of tea and tried to focus on the events of the week. I feel as if everything that happened since I arrived here Monday evening is a blur.

Trying to think unemotionally, she began to relive that evening, starting with the arrival of the police. Mom was in such a state that they sent for an ambulance, she remembered. In the hospital I sat beside her bed all night. She was moaning and crying. I had blood all over my blouse from where I leaned over Dad and put my arms around him. The nurse was good enough to give me one of those cotton jackets the patients wear.

I wonder what happened to my blouse? Usually they hand your clothes back to you in a plastic bag when you leave a hospital, even if they’re soiled. I’m sure that the police kept it as evidence because it had blood on it.

It was just as well Mom wasn’t released until Tuesday evening because that way she didn’t see all of the police activity in the house. It had been declared a crime scene. They took Dad’s study apart. Betty told me that they were dusting everywhere for fingerprints. She said they were dusting all the downstairs windows as well as the doors. The bottom drawer of Dad’s desk, where he kept his gun, was open when I got home Monday night. But that drawer was always locked.

Mariah shook her head at the unwelcome memory that her mother was incredibly skilled at finding keys no matter where they had been hidden. Unwillingly, she thought of the incident last year when her mother had sneaked out of the house stark naked in the middle of the night. It was when the previous weekend caregiver was supposed to be taking care of her but had forgotten to put the alarm on in her mother’s room. It was small consolation to remind herself that the new weekend caregiver was excellent.

But Mom could never have walked into Dad’s study and used the key to open his desk drawer with him sitting there that evening, she thought.

That gun could have been somewhere else for months or even years. I’m sure, or I think I’m sure, that Dad lost interest in going to the shooting range ages ago.

Even the warm cup she was cradling in her fingers could not prevent the chill that washed over Mariah’s body. He used to take Mom to the range with him, she thought. She wanted to see if she’d be any good. That was about ten years ago. He said she was a pretty good shot back then.

Trying to avoid the terrible implication of where that train of thought was going, Mariah forced herself to think about the conversation she’d had with Father Aiden just before they left the club. Dad went to see Father Aiden nine days ago and told him that he thought he had found the letter Jesus may have written to Joseph of Arimathea. Dad claimed he had confirmed the fact that it was the parchment stolen from the Vatican Library in the fourteen hundreds. Who was that expert who saw it? But wait a minute. Father Aiden said that Dad was troubled because one of the experts had been interested only in its financial value. If Father Aiden got it straight, that would mean that Dad showed it to more than one person.

Where is the parchment now? My God, is it here, in Dad’s files? I’ll have to look for it, but what good would that do? I wouldn’t recognize it among all the other parchments he was studying. But if Dad did have it and if Dad intended to return it to the Vatican Library, was it stolen after Dad was shot?

The ringing of the telephone in the kitchen made Mariah jump up and run to answer it. It was Detective Benet. He asked if he and Detective Rodriguez could drop over in the morning at about eleven o’clock and have a talk with Mariah and her mother.

“Of course,” she said.

Mariah realized that the reason she was whispering was because her throat had tightened so much that she could hardly speak the words.