Meg O'Brien - The Final Kill

“I know you, Ab,” he said irritably. “And I don’t believe you. Dammit, I’m worried about you, and I’m getting tired of you hiding things when you know I’d worry even more!”

“And I’m getting tired of you worrying about me as if I were a child. I can take care of myself!”

“Yeah? Well, I can remember a time when you couldn’t,” he said just as angrily. “You wouldn’t even be alive now if—”

Before he could finish, footsteps sounded from the hallway stairs. Startled, Abby turned to see a blond woman of about thirty, dressed in a trim black pantsuit and white blouse, accompanied by three men.

“We’ve checked out every floor,” she said to Agent Lessing. “No sign of them. Quite a few upset nuns, though.”

“How did you get up there?” Abby said, furious now. “You had no right—

“This says I do,” the woman answered, producing a folded court paper from the inside pocket of her suit jacket. “Kris Kelley, special agent.”

Abby opened and scanned it.

“It’s a search warrant,” Ben said.

“I can see that,” she replied shortly.

There was a buzz, and Agent Lessing pulled a two-way radio out of his pocket. “Lessing,” he said, and listened.

After a few moments he murmured, “Right,” and hung up. Turning to Ben, he said, “They haven’t found anyone on the grounds, either.”

“You’ve actually been searching my property?” Abby said, feeling more than ever violated.

“The warrant covers that, too, Ms. Northrup,” he said. “What you have in your hand there is a copy. You may keep it and check with your lawyer about it, if you like.”

“You seem to have come prepared,” she said, striving to sound calm again. “This must be a very big case—with a very important corpse. Mind telling me who it is?”

“Sorry,” Agent Lessing said, shaking his head.

“Why not? It’ll be all over the news by morning.”

“So you’ll find out then,” he answered.

“Look,” Ben said to Lessing, “we aren’t getting anywhere here. I suggest we go back to the station.”

“Just one more question,” Lessing replied. He turned to Abby. “Where did those women go from here?”

“I have no idea. But as I told Ben, the women who were here aren’t who you’re looking for.”

“Oh?” Lessing smiled. “And how would you know that?”

“Because they were old friends,” she answered coolly. “One is a teacher, a woman in her fifties. She’d brought her niece with her, on a field trip. They were driving through town and stopped to say hello, and I gave them some hot soup and cocoa. We talked a bit, and they went on their way.”

“Old friends, huh? And they just dropped by—all the way out here in Carmel Valley—to say hello in the middle of the night?”

Abby shrugged. “They were tired. They’ve been touring the old missions and needed a pit stop on the way to I-5. As you probably know, there’s not much open in Carmel at night. Besides, everyone who knows me knows that I’m up half the night.”

Ben stared at her for a long moment, as if by doing so she might break and give herself up. But then he said to Lessing, “That’s true. Abby’s a freelance writer. She does her best work at night.”

The agent gave Ben a weary look. “We’re getting nowhere here. Let’s all go back to the station.”

Ben turned to Abby, and for the first time his voice was soft. “Ab? You’ll be all right?”

Too little, too late, she thought bitterly. He’d betrayed her, and he wasn’t getting off that easily. “Of course I’ll be all right,” she said irritably, “once all of you people get out of here and I can get to bed.”

“I…I’ll see you in a little while,” he said.

“No. It’s almost three in the morning. I’ll call you. Later.”

He looked taken aback. Shaking his head, he led the way out of the foyer and onto the front drive. The female agent lagged behind. Just before she went through the doorway, she said to Abby, “I’ve heard about you. A couple of years ago, wasn’t it? You must be pretty tough, to have gone through all that and come out unscathed.”

Unscathed? Abby thought. Hardly.

But that was the point, she realized suddenly. The woman somehow knows there are things about me that haven’t healed, and that I don’t always act wisely, but out of leftover emotions—good and bad.

“What are you, some kind of shrink?” Abby said.

“No. Just someone who admires the work you’re doing. There have been times—” She broke off and looked toward the front door, where the men were gathered around the cars.

“You were saying?” Abby prompted.

“Nothing. Gotta run,” the woman said. “Looks like everyone’s leaving.”

Abby locked up and stood at a front window, watching till every car had gone down the twisting, oleander-lined driveway to Carmel Valley Road. There they turned right, heading back into town. Finally. The FBI woman’s words kept repeating themselves in her mind. To have gone through all that…come out unscathed…

How does a woman end up unscathed, Abby thought, when she’s so brutally raped she’ll never be able to carry a child? How does she even end up close to being what other people call “normal”?

And the rape was only the beginning. What followed had nearly killed her, just as Ben had said. If he hadn’t been there…

Which didn’t excuse his betrayal tonight.

Glancing at her watch, she decided to wait ten minutes before going up and releasing Alicia and Jancy, just to be safe. In the meantime, she looked for Helen, wanting to thank her for her help. When she didn’t answer the knock on her door, Abby quietly opened it to make sure her old friend was all right, but glancing around, she saw that Helen wasn’t there.

The room was small, no more than a “cell,” as the nuns in former times had called their ascetic cubicles. Most had held little more than a bed, a chest of drawers and a crucifix. Though Helen could have had the biggest, nicest bedroom in the house, this was what she’d asked for, and Abby had built this room to her specifications.

“I can’t sleep if there’s too much space around me,” Helen had muttered. “Or too much clutter, for that matter. Those young sisters and the others can have their big, pretty rooms with their flowered curtains and sheets. To my mind, that’s all nonsense.”

Sister Helen had been Abby’s teacher in high school, and though Abby had feared her at the time, she’d come to love her as an adult. The job of answering the bell that announced nighttime visitors was actually a perk. Because of the arthritis in both her hips and knees, it had been painful for Helen to climb the stairs every night. This way, she could remain on the first floor at all times.

The elderly nun would be aghast, of course, to think she had special privileges, or if she knew that Abby and the other women had come up with this solution to ease her discomfort. Helen was from the old school of Catholics. She believed in suffering and in “offering it up” in exchange for more stars in her crown in heaven.

Abby was no longer a practicing Catholic, despite the year she and her best friend, Marti, had spent in a convent at the age of eighteen. She didn’t know if “offering it up” toward a better future in heaven was still a viable plan, but to each his own.

Come to think of it, she and Marti had both followed a different drummer. Going off to become nuns right out of high school seemed to be a wacky thing to have done later on. But they’d honestly had some idea that to do so would better the world. When they didn’t turn out to be the greatest of nuns, they left, went to college and became journalists.