Walter Mosley - Parishioner

“Did you love your aunt?”

If Xavier had been watching Doris from afar he might have thought a sudden chill breeze had kicked up. The girl began to shiver. Her small hands clenched and her eyes filled with tears that refused to fall. Her left heel was pumping up and down.

He watched her go through this pantomime for two minutes or more before reaching out and taking her two fists into his left hand. Instantly she stopped shaking. She gasped, holding that breath like a practiced swimmer.

When she exhaled the words came out, gushing like waters from a dam.

“I could always tell from the tone of Auntie’s voice what she meant. The words didn’t always mean the same thing, but it was the sound of her voice that told me the story.

“If she said, ‘Let’s go have dinner at the Federal,’ it could be that she just wanted to go out. Sometimes I could tell that she wanted the company. But it might mean that there was a man who wanted to have sex with me. It was always the sound of her voice and not the words she said.

“After you got away …” Doris stopped talking for a moment. She looked up from her hands clasped in his. “We were going to kill you, you know.”

“Yeah,” Xavier said. “I got that idea.”

“You don’t care?”

“That’s what creatures do,” he said.

“After you got away Auntie said that it was bad. She said that you could hurt us and we had to move. I lived my whole life in that house and she said we would leave it behind. She told me to gather my gifts from the men and that she would pack her clothes. She said that I should bring everything down to the vault so that we could hide it in there until things died down and we could send people in to get our stuff.

“But I could tell by the sound of her words that she meant to kill me down there in the vault. There was always a sound that she had. It was the same sound when she told me that Little Mr. Smith was dead, or when we planned to kill the men that Brayton needed to get rid of.

“I told her I’d go down to my room, but instead I got the bat and snuck up into her bedroom. She was still in her slip. She didn’t hear me because her hearing was bad …”

“You don’t have to go on, baby,” Xavier said. “I know what you did.”

“I did love her. She was the only person I ever really knew. I broke the lock on her phone and called the taxi company to come bring me to the hotel. She has-had-an account with the Federal. All I had to do was say that she’d be coming that afternoon. She had already sent her travel bureau on ahead.”

Doris tried to pull her hands away but Xavier held on tight. She bowed her head until it was resting against his shoulder. It was only then that the tears fell from her eyes onto their hands.

She panted and made small animal sounds that Xavier interpreted as despair. He put his right hand on her shoulder and she moved to hug him. It was a fierce embrace, beyond innocence or love. There was strength in her arms-the strength to knock an old woman’s eye right out of its socket.

Xavier let her hold him. He’d walked past many tragedies in his life: dead men and women, sometimes children. He’d sold drugs to addicts who had death in their eyes, and women to men who had no love for women.

“She was going to kill you,” he whispered. “You didn’t have a choice.”

“I loved her,” Doris said.

“I know you did.”

“She loved me.”

“No. Never.”

Doris squeezed his neck hard enough to feel uncomfortable, but Xavier didn’t push her away. He held her close and even, somewhat reluctantly, kissed her cheek.

“I need to show you something, Dodo,” he said after the great long hug.

“What?” she asked, wiping her face against his yellow suit.

He took out the little red journal and showed it to her.

“That’s Auntie Sedra’s book,” she said.

“What does it mean?”

“Whenever we took in an orphan or sent one out she would sit down at the dining room table and write in it.”

“Did you ever ask her what it was she was writing?”

“She said that she was telling the little babies’ stories. You know, where they came from and where they were going-and when.”

“But you can’t read it?”

“I can’t read. I can sign my name and write Auntie’s name. I know some numbers but that’s all. I used to listen to stories on the record player at night. And I can recite a hundred poems that Auntie taught me.”

“You can?”

“Yes.”

“What poems do you know?”

“I know ‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allan Poe.”

“Let’s hear it.”

Doris Milne sat up straight with posture most modern young people never learned. She recited the poem with muted but still dramatic inflection while staring at a point midway in the darkening sky. Passersby turned their heads at the recitation and two older women actually stopped to listen.

Xavier was thinking that the woman-child brought him back to some old time when there was no radio or TV or movie theater. He wondered what was going on in Sedra’s mind when she kept Doris. Was the girl her whore or her daughter, her hand servant or adoptive blood?

When the poem was over the older women walked on and Doris was smiling, satisfied.

“We have to get you someplace safe,” Xavier said.

“Yes,” she agreed.

“I know somewhere out of the city. I could take you there right now.”

“I need to get my things.”

“The hotel might not be safe anymore.”

“I’ve stayed there many times.”

“But Mr. Connors read my note,” Ecks offered. “He might have called the police.”

“I told him that I knew you and that things would be fine,” she said. “Aunt Sedra let him have sex with me sometimes in the summers when we went to the hotel so I could swim.”

“Did you like sex with Mr. Connors?”

“He used to bring me porcelain dolls,” she said. “And he never made me hurt.”

“Used to? You don’t have sex with him anymore?”

“He likes young girls,” she said, as if talking about someone who preferred plum jelly to clotted cream.

The rooms in which Doris and Sedra usually stayed looked down on Wilshire Boulevard not far from downtown. The hotel was old but retrofit for modernity, chic and at the same time stuck-up. All the employees of the Federal had stared at Xavier as Doris led him through the constricted lobby toward the elevators.

“Good evening, Ms. Milne,” a white man in a gold suit said from behind the concierge’s desk.

“Hi, Mr. Connors.”

“You okay?”

“Oh, yes. Everything is fine.”

There was a suitcase on the made bed of the second bedroom in the suite. In the larger room there stood an old Chinese chest with doors lined with shallow drawers. The doors were set on hinges that swung open to reveal a closet filled with the dead woman’s clothes.

“Did you bring this with you?” Xavier asked.

“No. Auntie Sedra always sends it the morning before we come. That’s part of the reason I knew she was going to kill me.”

“Why?”

“Because every time before she had me put my suitcase in the closet space. She told me to pack but she didn’t put my bag in with her clothes.”

Each drawer had a brass keyhole in the center, and every one was locked.

“You got keys for these?” Ecks asked.

“Aunt Sedra always kept them hid.”

Twenty-seven drawers of cheap wood. Xavier smashed them one at a time while Doris went about repacking her suitcase.

Sedra was very organized, like most sociopaths Rule had been acquainted with. There was a drawer filled with platinum jewelry, also ones for gold and silver settings too; a drawer brimming with unset jewels and then separate ones for ruby, emerald, and diamond rings. And there was money: euros, dollars, bearer bonds, and gold coins. In the twenty-fourth drawer there was a folded piece of parchment that was the key to the journal’s code system:!-a, @-b, #-c.… At the bottom of the legend was a line of letters that stood for punctuation marks.