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“It’s Father John, Edie,” he said, running his hand lightly over her
forehead and pushing back the damp, golden hair. Her forehead felt
feverish. He glanced about the room. A column of daylight fell past the
edge of the blanket over two cardboard boxes pushed against the wall,
filled with books and papers. Another box with items of clothing
spilling over the sides stood in the corner. Next to the box was a half-
opened door. He could see the white corner of a bathtub.
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
The girl let out a breathy moan that sounded as if it had taken all of
her strength. He smoothed her hair above her forehead, then went into
the bathroom. There were two frayed pink towels tossed over the rim of
the bathtub, and he gathered them up and carried them back to the bed.
He folded the towels and laid them over the length of the girl’s arms,
pressing gently. Her eyes fluttered open, then closed again. She moved
slightly. On the bedspread under her hip, he spotted the glint of a small
razor blade.
He went back into the bathroom. In the little cabinet beneath the
sink, he found a small towel, which he soaked in cold water and
wrung out. Folding the towel, he carried it back to the bed and laid it
on the girl’s forehead. “I’m going to get help,” he said, leaning over
the girl.
She moaned again and rolled her head. Her lips began to move, as if
she were struggling to give shape to the words stuck in her throat. “He’s
dead,” she whispered.
“God, what’s happened now?”
Father John looked around. The woman from the Victorian stood in
the doorway, the flaps of her rubber boots hanging out. She gave the
door a shove, clacking the knob against the wall.
“Stay with her,” he said.
“Stay with her? What’s going on?”
“I’m going to call an ambulance.”
“Somebody try to kill her?”
Father John took the towel from the girl’s head. The cloth was hot
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and sticky. “You can help by soaking this in cold water.” He thrust the
towel into the woman’s hand. “I’ll be back.”
For a moment, he thought she wasn’t going to move out of the door-
way. She looked like a prison guard, bundled in the brown jacket
snapped up to her chin, holding out the towel as if he’d handed her a
dead animal. She stared up at him, her mouth forming a perfect O.
“The bathroom’s in there.” He nodded toward the other door.
Finally, pulling her mouth into a tight line, the woman moved past
him, the jacket rustling as she walked. He could hear the water running
as he headed across the front room. No sign of a phone. He searched the
alcove that passed for a kitchen. There it was, almost hidden under a
stack of plastic bags. He punched in 911 and counted the rings. Three.
Four. “Come on,” he said out loud. Finally, the operator’s voice. He
gave his name and said that a woman had cut her arms and needed an
ambulance.
“Where is she, Father?” There was a calm steadiness in the voice.
He crossed the living room and stepped outside. God, there were no
numbers on the house. He told the operator that he was on Pershing
Boulevard, behind the Victorian on the corner.
“We’re on the way,” the operator said.
He pushed the off button, set the phone on the bookcase, and went
back to the bedroom. The woman handed him the cold towel. “What
happened to her?” she said, waving at the girl on the bed.
He ignored the question and set the towel on the girl’s forehead.
Then he ran his hand over the top of her head. Her hair felt moist, but
she seemed cooler. “The ambulance is on the way,” he told her.
The blue eyes fluttered open. “Let me die,” she whispered.
“What’d she do? Try to kill herself?”
“Could you get a glass of water?”
“Not until you tell me what happened.”
“She needs water, Mrs. . . .”
“Teters.”
“You’ll find a glass in the kitchen.” He waited until the woman had
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backed through the door. Then, keeping his voice low and calm, he said,
“I’m sorry about Trent.”
The girl’s eyes snapped shut. A thin line of tears ran back into her hair.
He took a corner of the towel and patted at the moisture. “Try to be
strong,” he said. “Try to live. You have Trent’s baby.” He hoped that
was still true.
The woman came back into the room and handed him a plastic glass
of water. “You don’t have to tell me that she tried to kill herself,” she
said, her eyes fixed on the towels swaddling the girl’s arms. “I can see
what she done. Cut herself up again.”
“What are you saying?” From somewhere in the distance came the
wail of a siren.
“Oh, she tried this trick last fall. That young man, Jason, found her.
Had the ambulance here. Whole neighborhood was out gawking.”
Father John slipped one hand under the girl’s head and lifted it off the
pillows. Holdingthe plastic glass to her mouth, he said, “Try to sip a lit-
tle water.” He tipped the glass until she was able to draw in some water.
Then, twistingout of his hand, she burrowed back into the pillows.
“You ask me,” the woman said, “cutting yourself up is a mortal sin.
That’s what I learned in Catholic school. A mortal sin to defile your
body, the temple of the Holy Spirit.”
The clang of the siren came closer, bricks of noise battering the little
house. “Would you mind going outside and directing the ambulance
here?”
“It seems to me that anybody who . . .”
“Please, Mrs. Teters,” he said.
The woman swung back through the doorway, the galoshes slapping
as she walked across the living room.
The wailing noise cut off, and in another moment, two men and a
woman, all in blue uniforms, pushed into the bedroom. One of the men
was carrying a canvas stretcher rolled between two poles.
“You Father O’Malley?” asked the other man. He looked about
twenty years old, slender with blond curly hair.
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Father John nodded. Then he told them that the girl was Edie Brad-
bury, that she’d slashed her arms with a razor, that she was conscious.
And she was pregnant. He backed away as the medics closed in on the
bed, lifting the towels on her arms and putting them back into place.
The blond man looked back at him. “We’ll have to take her to River-
ton Memorial,” he said. “Want to ride along?”
Father John said that he would follow the ambulance. He walked
back into the living room and waited. Through the open door, he could
see the small groups of people forming out front, Mrs. Teters making
her way from one group to the other, pointing toward the ambulance
parked in the drive, waving toward the house. Other people were hurry-
ing down the sidewalk, crossing the street around a couple of pickups
that had slowed in front, drivers gawking at the house.
It was a few moments before the medics emerged from the bedroom,
carrying the stretcher with the small body nearly lost under blankets. He
followed them outside, closing the door behind him. The crowd was
larger now, like tumbleweeds bunched together on the sidewalk. An el-
derly woman with thin gray hair pulled the fronts of a red sweater
around herself and came toward him. “Is she gonna be okay?” she asked.
He said he hoped so.
“I live across the street.” The woman nodded at a tan duplex nearly
hidden behind a row of bushes. “Sure don’t like to see trouble come to
young people.”
A guffaw erupted from the crowd. “She brought it on herself, you
ask me.” It was Mrs. Teters’ voice.
The ambulance had started backing out of the drive and into the
street. There was the sound of gears crunching. Then the ambulance
burst forward, siren screaming.
Father John started for the pickup, cutting around the crowd that
still blocked the sidewalk. He slid behind the steering wheel, pulled a U-
turn, and followed the ambulance toward Federal Boulevard.
* * *
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“YOU MUST BE Father O’Malley.” The woman standing in the doorway
at the end of the corridor was probably still in her thirties, slim and
beautiful with finely sculptured features and dark, intelligent eyes.
Father John got up from the hard plastic chair where he’d been sit-
ting for almost an hour. The emergency waiting room was familiar: the
worn chrome and plastic chairs lining the walls, magazines thumbed
through and wrinkled, tossed onto small tables, green vinyl floor gleam-
ing under the fluorescent ceiling light. Dear Lord, he’d been here so
many times.
“I’m Eleanor Henderson, ER physician,” the woman said. She held
out a hand with clear nails at the tips of long, graceful-looking fingers.
Her grip was surprisingly strong. “We have Edie Bradbury stabilized,
but she lost a lot of blood. She’s lucky she hasn’t lost the baby.” She
paused. “It’s possible that she might abort. I think it’s best to keep her
here for a day or two. In cases like this . . .” She paused again, and drew
in her lower lip. “There’s always the danger that the patient may keep
trying until she succeeds. She’s conscious, if you’d like to see her for a
few minutes.”
Father John followed the doctor down the corridor past a series of
closed doors. Oblongs of white light washed over the beige walls and
gleamed along the floor. A faint antiseptic odor hung in the air.
The doctor stopped and nudged open a door on the right. “You’ll
find her in there,” she said.
Through the slim crack, Father John could see the foot of a gurney.
He pushed the door back and stepped into a bright room barely large
enough to accommodate the gurney and a bank of steel cabinets on the
opposite wall. The contours of the slim figure made a slight distur-
bance in the white blanket draped over the gurney. The girl lay still,
arms at her sides on top of the blanket, rows of gauze bandages running
from her wrists to her shoulders. Dangling from a steel pole above the
gurney was a clear plastic bag half full of liquid attached to a plastic
tube that disappeared past the edge of the bandages near the girl’s el-
bow. There was a skeletal look about her face. She kept her eyes closed,
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but he had the sense that she was awake, and that, past fluttering eyelids,
she’d seen him enter the room.
“How are you feeling?” he said, touching her hand. Her fingers had
dug into the folds of the blanket.
It was a moment before the lips started to move, almost an involun-
tary reflex, he thought, around whatever words were trying to emerge.
“Why’d you come?” she managed.
“I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“To the house.”
He understood then. Edie Bradbury hadn’t expected anyone to stop
by the house and find her in time.
“I’m glad I did.” Her hand felt like a chunk of ice beneath his palm.
“You should’ve let me alone. I don’t want to live anymore.”
He was quiet a moment. Then he said, “What do you think Trent
wants?”
“What?” Her eyes flew open, and she stared up at him with such a
mixture of grief and surprise that he had to force himself not to turn away.
“Trent loved you,” he said. “Don’t you think he’d want you to go
on? He’d want you to live. Try not to forget that.”
The girl shifted her gaze away and stared upward into the light glar-
ing through the plastic panels that covered the ceiling. “My baby?” she
said, directing the question to the light.
“You didn’t lose your baby, Edie.” The girl’s hand twitched beneath
his own. It was a moment before he realized that she was crying. A faint
sheen of moisture glistened at her temples.
“He killed Trent.” She spoke so softly that Father John had to lean
over to catch the words.
“Who, Edie? Who killed him?”
She stared up at him, eyes wide and bright with fear. “Jason said he
was gonna make Trent pay, that he was nothing but an Indian. He went
and shot him, so I wouldn’t have him anymore. I wouldn’t have nobody
but Jason.”
Father John started to say that she must tell Detective Burton what
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she’d just told him, then stopped himself. He knew by the fear burning
in her eyes that she would never implicate Jason Rizzo in the homicides.
“Is there anyone I can call for you?” She was shaking her head, but
he pushed on. “How about your parents? Brothers? Sisters?”
“My father, or whatever you want me to call him, took off so long
ago, I don’t remember what he looked like,” she said, the words coming
in a rushed whisper. “And Mom . . .” The girl tried for a laugh that
sounded like a small hiccup. “Soon’s I turned fifteen, her boyfriend told
her to tell me to get lost, so that’s what she did. So it was just me and
Trent and the baby. Now it’s just me.”
“And your baby.”
“It’s not gonna be enough, Father.” She was sobbing now, a skim of
moisture running over her temples and glistening on her cheeks.
“If you like,” he said, “you can come to the mission. There’s a
guest house . . .”
“Sorry, Father.” The doctor slipped past the door. “We have a room
ready for her now.”
He pressed the girl’s hand a moment, trying to impart as much reas-
surance as he could, and said that he’d be back tomorrow. Then he made
his way past the doctor and the two attendants who had crowded into
the room and headed back down the corridor.
As Father John walked into the waiting room, a large man spun
around, blocking the path to the exit. He looked about thirty, with short
reddish brown hair and a black mustache that curled upward toward
flushed cheeks. He had on a black leather jacket that hung over the waist
of his blue jeans and sported silver chains draped in a half-circle over the
top of the sleeves and silver studs on the wide collar folded back over
half of his chest.
“You the priest?” He hooked his hands onto his hips.
“Who are you?” Father John said. So this was Jason Rizzo, he was
thinking.
“I’m here for Edie, okay? You got a problem with that?”
“What do you want?” Out of the corner of his eye, Father John saw
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the woman behind the counter on the left get out of her chair and step
backward until she’d disappeared past the edge of a cabinet.
“How come they let you see her, and they won’t let me? You must be
special, that it? You being the Indian priest around here. Guess people
like to lick your boots.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to see you,” Father John said.
“That what she told you?” The man started tossing his head, a horse
fighting the reins.
Father John ignored the question. “How’d you know she was here?”
“I got friends. Neighbor lady gave me the news when I stopped by
the house. I hear Edie’s Indian sleazebag got himself shot. Few less red-
skins around here, and that’s okay by me. She should’ve listened to me.
I warned her not to take up with Indians.” He was shaking his head,
emitting a strangled noise, like a half-laugh. “What’s she thinking? That
I’m gonna tolerate that kind of disrespect?”
Somewhere behind them, a door squealed on its hinges. Father John
glanced around. A burly guard in dark blue trousers and a light blue
shirt, holstered gun riding on his hip, walked over and stopped next to
Jason Rizzo. “You’re gonna have to leave,” he said.
Rizzo’s lip curled back into his mustache. “You ain’t got no cause.”
“Let’s go.” The guard took hold of the man’s arm and, turning him
around, walked him toward the exit. Leaning forward, he yanked open
the glass door and waited until the other man had sauntered past.
