Meg O'Brien - Sacred Trust

Ted’s glance slides from me to Ben. “You should take her home, now,” he says. “Abby, again, I am very, very sorry. Try to get some rest. Put this out of your mind for a while.”

“Put it out of my mind? Ted, how can I? Who would have done this to Marti?”

“I can’t answer that, I’m afraid. Your friend was a well-known personality in her field. People like that sometimes make strange enemies.”

I can’t imagine Marti ever having made an enemy.

I turn to Ben, anger taking over. “How long, do you think, before you get this monster?”

“I don’t know, Ab. Carmel—the council, city administrator, angry residents—everyone wants this solved, and quickly. The task force is working on it already, including the sheriff’s department, the police departments of every city on the Peninsula, and of course—”

He breaks off. The Secret Service, he was going to say. But he didn’t, and I’m guessing that’s because Ted is here. Ben is supposed to keep the Secret Service’s involvement quiet, apparently.

“I can promise you one thing,” he says, his expression grim as he looks down at my friend. “I’ll do everything I can to find out who did this, Abby.”

I let him lead me to the door, but midway there I turn back.

“Ted, you didn’t say. Was Marti…was she raped?”

He shakes his head. “I’ve found no evidence of sexual attack, Abby. No, everything about this points, as I said, to an execution-style killing. It was the style that counted, I’d guess—perhaps the shock value of the terribleness of it, not the actual cause of death.”

I leave Ben outside in the parking lot, climbing into the Explorer and again promising to find Marti’s killer. It is a comforting promise, though I fear that’s all it is. I wonder how long it will be before they start questioning me again.

We haven’t talked further about the name “Abby” at the crime scene, or the letter A carved into Murphy’s back. If that seems odd, I attribute it to Ben’s haste to get back to the station and the case.

At home, I tend to Murphy first, cutting open a capsule of vitamin E and rubbing it gently into the wound on his back to hasten the healing. Still feeling numb, I double-check doors and windows, making sure they’re all locked. Taking a cup of hot chocolate upstairs, I undress for bed, putting on a pair of warm pajamas. Murphy plants himself outside my door, as usual, at the top of the steps. After a few minutes I call him in with me, patting the bed and urging him to lie beside me. Careful not to touch the sore spot beneath his fur, I position my arm around him, seeking to comfort us both while we fall asleep. He licks my hand and looks at me with eyes that seem full of questions for which I have no answers. Sighing, he lies back down.

First thing in the morning I call the vet and he tells me to bring Murphy in at one. I settle him down on a blanket by the fire, fix myself some breakfast, do the dishes, throw some clothes in the wash and sweep the side patio. Then I call Frannie to let her know Murphy’s been found, and tell her what was done to him. She is horrified, and we commiserate about that a few minutes. Finally I call Ben to find out if they’ve made any progress on the case and if there’s any word about Marti’s funeral. The one thing I forgot to ask Ted was how soon he’d be releasing her body. Ben isn’t in, and the woman at the desk assures me she’ll have him call me as soon as she hears from him.

After that I don’t know what to do with myself. All this activity has had only one purpose—to keep me from brooding about Marti. It can’t help things to sit and mourn. Yet, what’s the alternative? To head out on a white charger? I would give anything to be able to avenge my friend’s death. If I knew who killed her, I would probably, at this moment, do him in with my own bare hands. I just don’t know where to begin.

If only she had talked to me about her life more recently, if only I had made more of an effort to be with her, to find out what was going on with her. If only, if only, if only. Could I have done more?

I turn to writing to get my mind off things. It doesn’t seem to help. At the computer in my study, I try to come up with next week’s column, but my mind won’t work. I feel as if I’m sleepwalking, and finally give up struggling for the witticisms my readers have begun to expect, all the funny and sometimes caustic observations about life in Carmel that residents and tourists alike seem to enjoy. Instead, I toy with the keyboard, typing out Marti’s name and then the letter A, over and over, like some kid scrawling her boyfriend’s last name after hers in a geography workbook: Annie Smith. Annie Smith Jones. Mrs. David Jones. Everywoman’s dream…to get that ring, marry that man.

In this case, the occasion is not a wedding but a funeral. Though what the difference is, I swear I don’t know. For me, they both seem related to death or dying.

Well, then, write a piece about weddings.

I write that down and follow it by wondering if old memories still cling to the fabric of our wedding gowns. If I were to go up in the attic and put mine on, would I feel the happiness I felt on my wedding day?

I remember an old movie with someone who donned an antique wedding gown, which took her back to another time when she was someone young and in love.

I stare at the screen and wonder why Marti never married. Was it because of the baby? Did she feel it wouldn’t be fair to have a happy married life, having given up the child that could (or should) have been a part of it? The “should” would be Marti’s; she would think that way, not I.

And so I’m back to “Shining Bright” again. Finally I close this exercise in futility and open my journal file, which I keep under the word Dervish in a hidden document that only someone wise in the ways of computers could find. The path is so obscure as to be Chinese in nature, the point being to keep it from Jeffrey’s prying eyes.

Which can’t be as hard as I make it out to be. Jeffrey doesn’t understand much about computers; he has secretaries for that. Assistants, really, but he won’t call them assistants or even allow them to classify themselves as such on a résumé. To do so would dilute, he has said quite openly, his own position of power.

When the file comes up I see that my last journal entry was six months ago, just after I caught Jeffrey with the bimbo. Since then, I haven’t had the heart to put my life down in black and white. My feelings have been too embarrassing, even humiliating.

When I was a child, I used to pray, “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Later on, in my twenties, I fell hopelessly in love with someone for three years, and took to this writing of journals. Absolutely everything went into them, every foolish, futile longing. When it was over I had a corrugated Seagram’s carton three feet by three, bulging with spiral-bound notebooks from the drugstore that were filled with largely unreadable ramblings, scrawled in blue ink from a ballpoint pen. For years, I toted this damn box with me every time I moved, like a turtle unwilling to shed its shell. I’d go zooming down a freeway with this stupid thing in my trunk, scared to death I’d be killed by some idiot suffering road rage and my survivors would end up reading all that dross. I couldn’t let go of the dross, however, neither the journals nor the man. Thus my nightly prayer became, “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my journals to take.”

Now I know that there are more ways of dying than one can conceive. Further, there are days when there is no Lord, or at least he’s checked out for the day.

Jeffrey came along after that three-year journal-writing madness, on one of those Lordless days. My heart still had a hole in it, and my car still had that box in its trunk. I just didn’t think about it so much anymore, thoughtlessly shoving it aside to make room for groceries every Friday night. Then I met Jeffrey. And a whole new literary era began.