Sacred Trust Read online

  I stare at him, wondering how I ever got to be part of this ravenous mass of vultures called “the press.”

  “I have to go, Billy.”

  “I mean, if you were that close,” he insists, tossing the cigarette to the ground, “you must have some idea where she’s been. And what she’s been up to.”

  Anger seeps into my zombie-like state. It is, perhaps, the first glimmer of reality setting in.

  “Dammit, Billy, drop it! I don’t know!”

  Turning back, I see that the small group of men surrounding Marti has begun to disperse. Ben is still there, talking to the sheriff and Ted Wright, the coroner, and a body bag is being zipped over the bruised and battered torso of my friend. A sharp pain hits me in the gut as her once-beautiful face disappears inside the black plastic. Tears flood my eyes.

  Ben looks at me and strides through the mud in my direction, his jeans and running shoes becoming splattered with thick brown goo. He puts a comforting arm around my shoulders, and I lean on him only slightly, more aware now of the media and what might show up in the evening news.

  “Will Jeffrey be home tonight?” he asks quietly.

  I shake my head. “He’s in Washington.”

  “My place?” Ben asks even more quietly. “In an hour?”

  I hesitate, nodding toward the coroner’s van, into which Marti is being loaded now. “Don’t you have work to do?”

  “The sheriff’s in charge out here. And there’ll be a countywide task force.” He looks at his watch. “I have a couple of hours.”

  Once, I would have gone with Ben out of reckless abandon, even revenge. What’s sauce for the goose. I was still angry with Jeffrey then. Now my husband and I barely talk. We live under the same roof out of expediency, pretending at marriage while leading vastly separate lives.

  My only thought at the moment, therefore, is to feel Ben’s arms around me. To slip between his cool, familiar sheets and forget.

  Thank God for Ben, the safe one, I think. In all the madness of Jeffrey’s unfaithfulness, Ben has been here, a good friend, steadfast as the day is long. He’s the one I can trust not to betray me. Ever.

  “I want to see her again,” I say, my voice thick with sorrow. “I never really said goodbye.”

  “I’m sure that can be arranged.” Ben stands behind me, his arms wrapped around my waist, the two of us staring out his living-room window at the leaden sea.

  “Where is she now?”

  “She’ll be at the coroner’s office for a while,” he says. “An autopsy, you know.”

  I shiver. The coroner will take his bloody knives and saws and cut into my friend. He will break her breastbone to get at her heart and carve out her stomach to get—

  “Can I see her before they do all that?”

  “I’ll check, okay?”

  He lifts my hair, planting a light kiss on the back of my neck before going to the telephone in the kitchen. Across the breakfast bar I see him pace as he talks, the long cord wrapping around his slightly thickening waist. Though Ben is tall, and was gangly as a teenager, his fortieth year has found him with what most charitably might be called love handles. I’ve always liked them; they give me a secure feeling, something to hold on to when the world goes topsy-turvy all around.

  I can hear the kinds of grunts he usually makes when talking with others in law enforcement. Right, yeah, sure, fine. They seem to have their own language, an abbreviated one for talking on police radios that carries over into everyday life.

  Coming back, he says, “Tonight, around ten. They should have her…she should be all right for you to see her by then.”

  He is trying to be careful, but I know what he means: my friend won’t be in pieces. At least, she won’t look that way.

  “Hey, hey,” he says softly, pulling me into his arms. “It’ll be all right. I’ll go with you.”

  Gratefully, I put my arms around his neck and stand on tiptoe to kiss him. One hand pulls me toward him while another pushes my blouse aside and covers my breast, squeezing it so hard I can almost feel pain. I am instantly aroused, everything in me screaming to know that I, at least, still live and breathe.

  After that, he needn’t do a thing. I am all over him, my passion swinging from tender to nearly vicious, and he allows me that, knowing the anger and hopelessness that sit in my heart, the utter futility and rage.

  Spent, we lie naked side by side in Ben’s king-size bed. A tall, wide window frames a Carmel Highlands scene that has been painted by ninety percent of the artists in town: charcoal cliffs, emerald pines and hillsides dotted with seven-figure homes. Beyond them lies a cerulean sea with wild waves crashing.

  Ben’s home is simple, a bachelor’s hideaway. The view, however, can take one’s breath away.

  Ben sighs and stretches. “That was quite a work-out, lady.”

  “You know it.”

  “Feeling better?” He pulls me to him.

  “Well, I haven’t got much energy left for anger.” A cloud crosses my mind. “Not right now, anyway.”

  He turns on his side to face me. “You’re thinking of tonight. You don’t have to do it, you know.”

  “See her? Yes, I do.”

  “What can it accomplish?”

  “I can say goodbye.”

  “I thought you did that out on the hill.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  He takes my hand, which lies on the pillow between us. “You want to talk about it?”

  I start to shake my head, then pause. If there were ever anyone I could tell about Marti, it would be Ben. And I need to get it out, all those old memories, the pictures of those days that have been surging through my mind since I saw her hanging there.

  “It started out as one of those silly schoolgirl crushes,” I say, licking my bone-dry lips. “Marti and I went to the same high school, Mary Star of the Sea in Santa Rosa. It was an all-girl school, and neither one of us was self-confident enough to flirt with boys. So when they came over from St. John’s, say, for sports events or dances, we both sort of stayed in the background while the other girls fell all over them.

  “Marti was into journalism, and so was I. We worked on the school newspaper together and became friends. Marti was the brighter star, however. She was the one who championed all the causes, from ending global war to preserving the planet. She wrote articles for the paper, gave speeches and marched for peace. I pretty much tagged along behind.”

  I pause. How to tell the rest of it? Even to me it isn’t clear how everything happened, right to this day. “In our senior year,” I continue, “we talked about what we wanted to do with our lives. The nuns were pushing us to become nuns, of course—they always did in the Catholic schools. But it wasn’t till our senior year that either of us considered it seriously. We knew we wanted to give our lives to a larger cause, so to speak. We just didn’t know what.”

  Licking my lips again, I swallow against the bile rising in my throat, the morning’s breakfast of scrambled eggs tasting like copper now. “The thing is, neither of us felt inspired by what was going on in the world. The eighties were almost upon us, and we could see the writing on the wall. The self-indulgence, the materialism. And there was…oh, I don’t know, a coldness about the world. It was getting too big, and it seemed that people had stopped caring about people. We felt—foolishly, of course—that everything that was ever going to happen had already come and gone. The two big wars, Vietnam, the hippie era. More than anything, we figured the world was going to pot, no pun intended, and we didn’t want to be part of it.”

  I brush my hair back from my forehead, which is still damp from the exertion of making love. “So we were running away, I guess, more than anything else. And there was one nun—Sister Helen—who kept urging us to enter the order she was in. She had us cleaning out votive candles in the school chapel and pressing altar cloths. You name it, we got caught up in it. ‘Serving the Lord’ came to look so much better than making our way in a world we didn’t feel much a part of, an
yway.”

  “In other words, you found an acceptable way to drop out?” Ben says gently. With one big, rough finger, he strokes my arm.

  “Something like that. Marti, of course, was always more outgoing than I. But she was also idealistic. Giving her life to God was the ultimate sacrifice, the noblest of all goals. She felt she could make more of a difference from within the walls of a convent than from without. Through prayer, and so on.”

  I look at Ben, wondering if he thinks the two of us ridiculous. But he isn’t smiling that odd little smile, the way he will sometimes when he’s thinking something critical and doesn’t want to say it.

  “Go on,” he urges.

  “Well, come September, we both entered the novitiate at Joseph and Mary Motherhouse, up in Santa Rosa. It was great fun at first, an adventure like none we’d ever had—wearing the black postulant’s uniform and veil, getting up at dawn and praying in the chapel, even scrubbing floors. We loved every minute of it. But then one of the nuns caught us alone together, just talking, you know, and she reported us to the novice mistress. Joseph and Mary was behind the times, and the rules hadn’t been loosened up after ’62 and Vatican II, the way they were in some motherhouses. Special friendships, the novice mistress informed us, led to trouble—in other words, lesbian relationships. They were therefore verboten. We were ordered not to see each other anymore, and in fact were allowed only to spend time with other postulants in groups of three or more. There was never a moment when we could simply be alone and talk.”

  “That must have been tough,” Ben says, “after being so close through high school.”

  “It was awful. Maybe it was the forbidden aspect of it. Or just plain loneliness, like being away at camp for the first time. All I know is, the more they told us we couldn’t see each other, the more we suddenly had to. We even broke one of the strictest rules, that of all-night silence, to meet in the choir loft when everyone else was asleep. Then one night, our friendship, just as the novice mistress had warned, became something else. We didn’t do much, just held each other’s hands and kissed now and then. Neither one of us had sex in high school, we were both virgins, but the more time we spent alone together, the more this…this feeling grew between us. The funny thing was, it all seemed so perfectly natural. And it didn’t take much more than a kiss to make us happy. I remember Marti’s lips…”

  I pause, blushing.

  “What?” Ben urges me, smiling. “What about Marti’s lips?”

  My blush deepens. “Oh…they were harder than I thought they’d be. More like a man’s lips, you know?”

  He takes my chin in his hands and kisses me, long and hard. “More like this, you mean?”

  When he doesn’t stop, and in fact lays his body completely over mine, I pull back for a breath, laughing. “Wait a minute. Don’t tell me you’re jealous.”

  He raises his eyebrows in an exaggerated expression. “Jealous? Me?”

  “You.” I poke him lightly on the nose with my finger. “You’re the one who wanted me to tell you.”

  He sobers and falls back, lying on his side again. “I meant that. Tell all.”

  I sit and reach for the glass of ice water I brought earlier to the bedside table. The ice is melted, and the water tastes like chlorine. But it wets my lips, which helps. Seeing Marti drained of blood, my own seemed to drain away as well. That was hours ago, but inside I still feel like old parchment that has begun to crumble. Even making love with Ben has not changed that, only added a touch of moisture, a small ray of hope that one day I might be myself again.

  “Marti,” I remember with a small smile, “was usually the instigator when it came to breaking the rules. She was the brave one. When some of the other girls wanted to sneak out during recreation at night and go to the woods to smoke, Marti was right there with them. In the lead, in fact. Sometimes I tailed along just so I wouldn’t seem too square. Not that I smoked, never liked it even then. The thrill of breaking the rules was enough for me.”

  I reach up, adjusting the pillows behind me so I can sit. “Finally, when we’d been caught far too often, and the usual penance of prostrating ourselves on the chapel floor for twenty minutes while reciting umpteen Hail Mary’s didn’t work, they got Sister Helen to come from the high school to talk to us. Besides being our teacher in high school, she was our sponsor into the convent, and she was livid when she found out what we’d been doing. Sister Helen was a nun from the old school, and she still wore her long black habit in 1980, even though most nuns in active orders were in civilian dress by then. She said she had worked too long and hard to receive her habit and wasn’t about to give it up.”

  “And did she give you a whuppin’?” Ben asks, stretching out on his back with his hands laced behind his head. “Or a whack on the knuckles with a ruler? That’s what my teachers at St. Thomas’s used to do.”

  “Neither,” I say, turning to rest my head on his shoulder, my fingers by habit stroking the wiry brown hairs on his chest. His arm comes around my shoulders and pulls me close. “She just told us in no uncertain terms how disappointed she was in us. She said if we’d had any respect for our vocations, we never would have behaved so abominably, and in fact she was convinced now that we didn’t even have vocations and shouldn’t become nuns at all.”

  “Ouch. What did you and Marti say?”

  “Not much. But Sister Helen was right, and we knew it. We didn’t even have to talk about it. The next day we met in the hallway outside the novice mistress’s office and went in there together to tell her we were leaving.”

  “How did the good Sister Helen take that?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw her again. I went home for a few weeks, then moved down to Berkeley, to college. Marti went East to school. We kept in touch, but I think both of us felt bad, like we’d wrecked our one chance to do anything really great, or at least selfless, in the world.”

  I pause, thinking. “On hindsight, we may not have wanted to see each other for a while for fear we’d be reminded of our failure. I know that personally it took me a long time after that to get back into the world, so to speak.”

  “But you and Marti have been in touch over the years.”

  “Yes. That year in the convent faded, and we got back together.”

  I see his look. “As friends,” I emphasize. “In fact…”

  “What?”

  I shake my head. “Just an old memory, that’s all.” Maybe when Marti has been gone longer, I can tell him about her baby.

  Sighing again, I reach for the glass of water and drink deeply.

  “So, are you shocked?” I ask Ben.

  “That you had a schoolgirl crush on Marti Bright? No, those things happen. It’s more like I’m intrigued.”

  I throw my pillow at him. “You men! You love the idea of women being together, don’t you?”

  I have meant only to tease him. But a shadow falls over his face, and I remember too late that I’ve hit a sore spot.

  Darcy, Ben’s ex, had a wild affair with the owner of the Seahurst Art Gallery in Carmel, Daisy Trent. When Daisy ran off with several artists’ money and Darcy ran after her, all the way to Paris, Ben was left to pick up the pieces. The scandal was in the papers for months, and Ben—for some reason he’s never felt it necessary to explain—made reparation to the artists for the money Daisy, his ex-wife’s lover, stole. This all occurred before I met him, and he doesn’t like talking about it.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “That’s okay.” But the playful mood is gone.

  After a moment I wonder aloud where Marti’s funeral will be and who will arrange it.

  “She didn’t have family?” Ben asks.

  “A brother, as I remember. They weren’t close.”

  The phone rings next to the bed. Ben lets it ring, but then the machine comes on and a male voice says tersely, “Ben, it’s Arnie. It’s important. Pick up.”

  Ben groans and reaches for the receiver. Grunting a hello, he listens. At one point he fr
owns and looks over at me.

  “What is it?” I ask when he hangs up. Arnie, I know, is a fellow cop on the Carmel P.D., and a friend.

  He hesitates.

  “Ben?”

  “Uh, Arnie talked to Sheriff MacElroy. He says it looks like Marti was dragged from a car to that place where they found her. There are signs of a struggle in the brush off to the side. Marti—or someone—scrawled a name in the dirt there.”

  I sit up, and for some reason I can’t explain except that I feel suddenly exposed, I hold the sheet against me, covering my nakedness. “Really? What name?”

  Instead of answering, he gives me a funny look. “Abby, when was the last time you saw Marti?”

  “I don’t know, months ago.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Sure. Around three months ago. August, I think.”

  “She lived in New York City, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know why she was here?”

  I shake my head, perplexed. “She was doing a magazine piece about the homeless, and I think she was talking to people at the rape crisis center in Seaside. Why?”

  “You saw her frequently when she was here?”

  “A few times.”

  “Did you and she have an argument?”

  I stare at him, turning cold. “Ben, what the hell is going on?”

  He slides out of bed and begins to dress. A wall seems to build itself between us. “I tried to reach you several times early this morning before I finally got hold of you, Abby. Where were you?”

  “Out walking Murphy along Scenic,” I say, becoming angry now at his tone. “Why?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Ben, why are you suddenly sounding like a cop?”

  Dragging a dark green blazer out of the closet, he puts it on over khaki pants, then a tie. When he stands before me again he is all-business. The wall is complete. “Abby, I’ve been working Homicide fifteen years. There are certain patterns you come to look for. And when someone who’s being murdered scrawls a name in the dirt…Look, I’m not saying it’s always the case. But one thing we’re taught as cops is that it’s most likely to be the name of her killer.”