CHAPTER 21
Money greeted Suzanne as she turned onto the tree-lined driveway that led to a grand, three-story Federal-style mansion. She parked her car, walked to the front door and rang the bell. A boy of about ten years old with wide violet eyes opened it.
“Hello?” Suzanne said, not knowing what else to say.
The boy turned his head back into the house. “Mom!” he called out and ran up the stairs, leaving the front door wide-open. A woman came down the hall with a towel in her hand. She wore a white men’s-style shirt and jeans. Black streaks covered the shirt. Her red hair was pulled back in a ponytail and a dark smudge of dirt adorned her cheek like a bruise.
“Andrew obviously doesn’t have a future as a doorman,” the woman said, smiling at Suzanne.
“He’s got good lungs though. Maybe an announcer?”
“Possibly. How can I help you?” the woman asked.
Suzanne exhaled heavily and searched for the words. She decided to simply go with the truth and see where it got her.
“My name is Suzanne Kanter. I’m a reporter. And I’m investigating your brother. Will you answer some questions?”
Elizabeth’s hands tightened on the towel. According to Suzanne’s records, Elizabeth was a mere forty-eight, although her face looked far younger, the veins in her hands aged her far beyond those years.
“Come to the greenhouse,” Elizabeth finally said. “The boys never go in there. We’ll be able to talk in private.”
Once inside the greenhouse, Elizabeth handed Suzanne a trowel and together they planted tiny seedlings in large clay pots.
“Investigating my brother?” Elizabeth asked. “Do I even want to know why?”
“He’s up for bishop of the diocese. The youngest priest by ten years on the short list.”
Elizabeth only snorted a laugh as she stabbed her trowel into the black dirt.
“I got an anonymous tip about him,” Suzanne continued. “The list of names for the priests on the short list. His name had an asterisk beside it and a note that said there was possible conflict of interest. It’s not much, I know. But I get the feeling he’s got secrets. Maybe dangerous ones.”
“My brother has secrets on top of secrets. He has secrets he might not even know he has.” Elizabeth picked up a seedling, peeled off a few leaves and set it in a hole in the dirt. “Why do you think I would know them?”
“Kingsley Edge…he told me to ask you if I wanted to know about Father Stearns. I thought about talking to Claire. She seems interesting.”
Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “You won’t get anything from Claire. She’s in love with our brother. Has been all our life. He absolutely hung the moon to her. When she pictures God, he looks like our brother.”
“That sounds…unhealthy.”
“Not unhealthy. Just excessive. She didn’t grow up with him the way I did. I’m not saying he’s a bad person. He’s not. He’s almost as worthy of her adoration as she thinks he is.”
“But only almost?” Suzanne prompted.
Elizabeth exhaled and sat her trowel aside.
“Ms. Kanter—”
“You can call me Suzanne.”
“Suzanne…when you tell me you’re investigating my brother, a Catholic priest, I have to assume you’re looking for evidence of sexual abuse. Yes?”
Suzanne didn’t demur. “Yes. It’s really the only thing that concerns me.”
“Hits close to home, does it?”
Opening her mouth, Suzanne paused before closing it again.
“Yes. My brother was a victim. He killed himself a few years ago. I think that’s why whoever sent that tip picked me. They knew I wouldn’t stop looking until I found the truth.”
“Oh, God, the truth. There’s nothing in the world more misleading than the truth. The truth, Ms. Kanter—Suzanne—is that I know my brother. I know who he is. I know what he is. And I told him years ago that if he ever followed in our father’s footsteps, if he ever harmed a child, if he ever took advantage of anyone in his congregation…well, I would make sure he shared our father’s fate. And I wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep over it.”
Elizabeth picked up the trowel again and stabbed it deep into the dirt far harder the necessary.
Staring, Suzanne couldn’t quite believe what she’d heard. Did Elizabeth Stearns just confess to murdering her father? No…surely not. She must not have meant it quite like that. Suzanne swallowed as she picked up another seedling and carefully cleaned the roots.
Elizabeth looked up at Suzanne. A silence hung high and heavy between them. Both women waited… Elizabeth broke first.
“I was eight years old when our father came to my room the first time.”
Suzanne inhaled sharply and covered her mouth with her dirt-blackened hand.
“I’m so…”
“Sorry, yes. I know. Everyone’s sorry. Especially my late father currently burning in hell. He’s very sorry now.”
“You were only eight years old. Did your brother know about it?”
Elizabeth shook her head.
“No. Father sent him away to some boarding school in England. Wanted his only son to have a proper British education like the one he’d had. Thankfully my brother got kicked out of his proper English boarding school and sent back to us. Otherwise my father’s attentions to me would have gone on for years longer than they did.”
“Kicked out? What happened?”
Elizabeth laughed a cold, mirthless laugh.
“When you met my brother the first time, were you afraid of him?”
“The first time?” Suzanne laughed coldly. “I’m still afraid of him.”
“Yes, well, he’s always been like that. Always. As a boy at this school… I don’t know. I’ve only heard snippets of the story. English boarding schools were notorious back then. The older boys, the prefects or whatever they were called, would use the younger boys.”
From the way Elizabeth pronounced the word use, Suzanne didn’t have to ask her to clarify.
“What happened?”
“One of these prefects apparently made the mistake of taking an interest in my brother when he was only about ten. He was asleep in his dormitory bed when the older boy came for him. But my brother was expecting him. Light sleeper. The older boy spent six weeks in the hospital before dying of an infection brought on by his injuries.”
Suzanne gasped and nearly dropped the seedling in her hands.
“Father Stearns killed a boy?”
“Boy? I suppose. The older boy was fifteen. And had a reputation for being the worst of the offenders at the school. The school knew that. No one pressed charges against my brother. They covered it all up and sent him back home to us.”
Suzanne walked away from the table, from the dark earth and the tender seedlings. Father Stearns as a boy of only ten had beaten and subsequently killed a fifteen-year-old boy at his school….
“I remember overhearing our father telling my mother the story. That monster was proud of my brother. Ten years old and my brother beats into a coma a boy five years older and fifty pounds heavier. Proud. My father the rapist, proud of his son for killing a pedophile. Oh, the irony. I’ll tell you more if you promise you can handle it, if you promise it’s off the record. I have two sons. I don’t want this nightmare to touch another generation.”
Suzanne turned back around although she instantly regretted it.
“There’s more?”
Elizabeth raised her chin in a kind of defiance, nearly daring Suzanne to tell her to stop or to walk away. And she would have…should have. But she couldn’t.
“Tell me,” Suzanne said.
Elizabeth picked up the watering can, refilled it and started making a circuit of the greenhouse.
“I was hiding outside my father’s office when I heard him tell my mother that story, the story of my brother the light sleeper, my brother who’d nearly killed a boy with his bare hands. And then my brother came home. I hadn’t seen him in two years.”
“What was it like? Seeing him again after all that time?”
“Strange. Awkward. He didn’t seem like my brother to me. He was only eleven, a year younger than me, but seemed so much older. He was such a beautiful bastard even then. And so quiet, unapproachable. He scared the hell out of me. I thought he could kill me the way he did that boy. In fact—” Elizabeth paused for a breath “—I hoped he would.”
The August evening heat in the greenhouse was so oppressive Suzanne thought she might faint from it. But when Elizabeth spoke those last four words, she felt cold chills run through her body.
“What did you do?” Suzanne asked. Something told her that was the right question to ask. Not “What happened?” or “What do you mean?” For clearly Elizabeth had done something.
Elizabeth lifted the watering can and sprinkled a large white rose.
“For days after my brother returned from England, I had my father’s words ringing in my ears…his son Marcus…light sleeper…nearly killed the boy who’d touched him…”
Suzanne’s stomach started to plummet.
“I…” Elizabeth’s voice faltered for the first time. “Mother and Father were gone. Away on some business trip of his. I went into my brother’s bedroom at night. He was sleeping. I pulled the covers back….”
Suzanne watched as Elizabeth’s eyes went blank and empty as if her mind had left the present and traveled far back into the past.
“Beautiful bastard,” Elizabeth said again. “I think that was the first time in my life I remember feeling attracted to someone. I couldn’t stop myself from touching his face. Well, you’ve met him. You must know what it’s like to be around him, to be drawn to him….”
“What did you do?” Suzanne repeated the question.
Elizabeth sighed, almost wistfully. When she spoke again it was in a hollow, faraway voice. The sun had started to set and shadows crept into the greenhouse.
“I wonder…” Elizabeth began and paused. “I wonder what it was like for my brother to wake up and find himself inside his own sister.”
“Oh, God.” Suzanne blurted out the words as she shoved both her hands hard into her stomach to steady herself.
“I kept waiting…” Elizabeth continued. “I thought any minute he’d turn on me, beat me, kill me like he had that boy at his school. But that’s not what happened. That wasn’t it at all.”
A wave of nausea passed through Suzanne. She gripped the table and breathed through her nose, praying the sickness would pass. Father Stearns…at age eleven…had been raped by his own older sister.
“I wanted him to kill me as he had that boy in England. That’s why it happened the first night.”
Suzanne stood up straight again.
“The first night? It happened more than once?”
Elizabeth slowly nodded. “I told you, Mother and Father were gone. We had the house to ourselves. No supervision. We’d both been so badly damaged we didn’t even realize what we were doing was wrong.”
Something in Elizabeth’s voice betrayed the awful truth that she hadn’t even come close to the end of the story. Suzanne wanted to turn her head and vomit, wanted to take everything she’d heard, everything she now pictured in her head, and retch until every horrible image—the young boy’s body responding in his sleep, the sister’s desperate gambit to find peace in death, the realization that they’d gone too far to go back—burned itself out of her mind. But Suzanne knew as long as she lived she would have Elizabeth’s words emblazoned into her memory forever.
She could never go back. So she had to go on.
“What happened next?” Suzanne asked, not wanting but needing to know. “How did it end?”
“Father, of course. Mother and Father were gone for a month in Europe on his business affairs. I think he’d wanted to take me with them, but Mother…she must have started to catch on to his interest in me. She insisted they go alone. A second honeymoon. Meanwhile my brother and I engaged in acts so depraved that I can’t even remember participating in them. I see them happening—” Elizabeth closed her eyes and raised her hand “—out there. As if someone else did them, and I merely watched. You should know I was as guilty as he. More so, really. I started it. He was the virgin until me. But even at that young age, he did have an impressive imagination.”
Suzanne swallowed the bile in the back of her throat as Elizabeth opened her eyes and lowered her hand.
“We were together in father’s library. One of our favorite spots. Mother and Father came home from their trip a day earlier than we’d expected. Mother went straight to bed in exhaustion. Father went to his office to work. He found us…together.”
Elizabeth stopped talking for a moment. Gazing through the glass walls of the greenhouse, she studied the sinking sun. Suzanne couldn’t begin to guess at her thoughts, and prayed she’d never know what Father Stearns’s sister saw in her memory.
“I’ve never seen such fury,” Elizabeth finally spoke. “Such rage. Father didn’t even look human. My brother and I call him a monster. We don’t do so lightly. He became a bestial thing that day. He pulled my brother off of me and threw him into the wall. I’ll never forget the blood on the wallpaper—red on yellow. And he pushed me to the floor onto my stomach. He was speaking, but for the life of me I can’t remember what he said. I don’t want to remember.”
“I’m glad you don’t,” Suzanne whispered.
“He started to rape me, to re-mark his territory I suppose. I think he thought he’d knocked my brother unconscious. But then I heard a thud. Most beautiful sound I’d ever heard in my life.”
“What was it?”
“My brother hitting my father with a fireplace poker. Didn’t knock him out, unfortunately. But it did stop him long enough for me to pull myself out from underneath him. Father’s rage then went even beyond what I’d seen before. He grabbed my brother and threw him to the ground. With the poker he broke my brother’s forearm. I heard it snap.”
Suzanne covered her face with a hand. She found a lone bench and sat on it, unable to stand anymore.
“Father grabbed my brother by his broken arm and dragged him up into a sitting position. Tied him to a chair. My brother’s arm…it just dangled…so lifelessly. I remember thinking—it’s stupid—but I actually thought, ‘Oh, no. He’ll never play piano again.’ Madness, the things that come to mind in moments like that. Never play piano again? Father was going to kill him.”
“Kill him?” Suzanne knew she sounded like an idiot, parroting questions back at Elizabeth. But the shock and sickness had taken away her powers of speech, rendering her nearly mute with horror.
“I remember him saying that. ‘You’re dead, Marcus. You’re dead…’ Once he had my brother tied to the chair, he came after me again. Wanted my brother to watch while he raped me. But I couldn’t let that happen. The rape, fine. Of course. Happened before. But I couldn’t let him kill my brother. I loved him. In a sick, damaged, broken way…I did love him. We were all we each other had. So I picked up the fireplace poker, and with everything in me, I slammed it into my father’s head. And, my God, he went down hard. So hard and so fast, I laughed. I think it was the laugh that got my mother’s attention. I just couldn’t stop laughing….”
“Your mother, she found you?”
Elizabeth nodded. “She burst into the library, saw her daughter nearly naked and bleeding, my brother barely breathing and tied to a chair, and Father a pile of bloody monster on the floor. She couldn’t deny anymore what had been going on under her nose. She got me and my brother out of the house. Took him to the hospital and dropped him off—”
“Dropped him off? She just dropped him off?”
“He wasn’t her son. She’d always hated him a little. She could have turned a blind eye to an affair, even one that produced a bastard. But to force her to treat him like a son? She never forgave Father for that. If only that had been the worst of his sins.”
“If only…”
“So she dropped off my brother at the hospital and fled with me. She divorced Father after. That was the sixties. She couldn’t bear to let our dirty laundry out in public. So no charges were pressed and they divided the assets up equally. And the assets were and are considerable. Even after dividing everything in half, they both were extremely wealthy people.”
“What happened to your brother?” Suzanne asked, although she knew part of the answer. “He was sent to school, right?”
Elizabeth nodded. “I suppose once Father came to, he remembered my brother was his only son and heir. But he refused to have my brother around, so it was off to school. St. Ignatius Academy, I think it was called. Some Jesuit boarding school for boys up in Maine. Middle of nowhere. Barely accessible even in good weather.”
“Sounds like a prison.”
“Something like that. I think Father was afraid of my brother, afraid of possible retribution. He was wrong to be, of course. My brother is no murderer. My father feared the wrong child.”
Suzanne heard a smile of satisfaction in Elizabeth’s voice.
She didn’t speak. Although young, Suzanne had been a journalist long enough to know that she often got the truth only when she stopped asking questions.
“I’m glad he went to St. Ignatius,” Elizabeth continued. “He was happy there, apparently. Converted to Catholicism. Learned a dozen or more languages from all the priests who taught there. Met that Kingsley.”
Suzanne smiled because she knew Elizabeth expected her to.
“And Kingsley’s sister, right?” Suzanne prompted.
“Oh, yes. My brother’s wife. Never met her. I found out about the marriage only after the girl had died. He did it for the money, of course.”
“The money?”
“The trust fund. My brother and I had trust funds set up by our parents. We received a huge sum at age twenty-five or sooner if…”
“If you got married.”
Elizabeth nodded.
“I think my brother just wanted to help Kingsley and his sister stay together in the States. They were both penniless, really. Didn’t end well, as you know. Which I suppose is for the best. My brother was destined for the priesthood.”
“He does seem to have found his calling.”
“It’s a lovely thing, having a priest for a brother. It’s quite nice to have someone in the family who can absolve all your sins and is bound to keep your secrets even from the laws of man. My brother…he has had to absolve me for so much.”
Elizabeth turned her violet eyes on Suzanne. In them Suzanne saw the truth, heard the truth, finally understood the truth.
Elizabeth Stearns had killed her father. And her brother knew it.
And to Suzanne, a priest who had absolved his own sister of the sin of murder and kept her confession secret even from the police…
“That sounds like a conflict of interest to me,” Suzanne said. “A brother hearing his sister’s confession.”
“I suppose it is. But perhaps you have your answer now.”
“Perhaps I do.” Suzanne rose off the bench on unsteady feet. She had to get out of there now. She knew what she had to do, who she had to see, what she had to say. And she needed to do it tonight. “I need to go. Thank you for your time.”
“Of course. Anything for my brother. I hope you understand him a bit better now. If you’re looking for a sex-offender priest, you won’t find him at Sacred Heart. My brother knows better than that. He’d have to answer to me.”
Suzanne gave Elizabeth a tight smile.
“No, I’m sure you’re right. After what happened to my brother, I can certainly sympathize with what you feel and with what—” Suzanne choose her words carefully “—with what you did. I’m glad your brother absolved you. If it makes you feel any better, I would have absolved you too. If I believed in that.”
Elizabeth picked up her trowel again and started digging once more in the dirt, this time with a much gentler touch.
“I’ll show myself out. I promise all of this was off the record.”
“Thank you, Ms. Kanter. Please have a safe trip home.”
Suzanne started for the door but paused before she touched the knob.
“You don’t call him Marcus?” Suzanne asked. “Your brother I mean. That’s what you call him—my brother. Why is that?”
“He hates the name Marcus. It’s our father’s name.”
“Thank you. I was just curious. Good night.”
Suzanne reached once more for the doorknob and stopped.
“I think I understand something you don’t,” Suzanne said as she remembered something Elizabeth had said earlier. “About your brother not waking up the way you thought he would.”
Elizabeth only stared at her and said nothing.
“You wanted him to wake up that night and kill you as he did that boy who attacked him in his sleep at school. But he didn’t. Because he was sleeping heavily. And he was sleeping heavily because he was home. And he thought he was safe.”
Even in the low light Suzanne could see Elizabeth’s eyes harden like two glinting amethysts.
“He should have known better than that. No one is ever safe.”