UnCatholic Conduct Page 6

  “What do you think?”

  “I think I should have been more aware.” Jess exhaled loudly. “Should have made sure I saw her before she left.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Not well.” Jess leaned back and tucked one leg up. “She came here from St. Matt’s, beginning of grade nine like most of the other kids. Stayed out of trouble. Shy, mostly. Not really a social kind of kid. I don’t even know if she had any friends. But good God, Julia. What a way to go!”

  “Was it drugs?”

  “Yep. Lethal cocktail of Xanax and Ativan. Both of which she found in her mother’s medicine cabinet.”

  Jil nodded. It seemed important, for the moment, just to let Jess speak.

  “Her parents were in here Tuesday morning, wanting to talk to me, take her things home. Funeral’s tomorrow.”

  “Are we all going?”

  Jess shook her head tiredly. “I can’t shut down the school. But I can give permission for the teachers to go, and try to find coverage for their classes. Mark Genovese can act for me while I get down to the church. Anyway, I thought you should know first, since you were there.”

  “How are you doing?”

  Jess smiled, her face closed. Finally, she relented a little. “Not great,” she admitted. “This is the last thing we need. Given the school’s history, we’re going to take a lot of flack.”

  “What history?”

  Jess let out a long breath. Creases of fatigue lined her forehead, and her eyes were smudged with dark circles. Her voice, when she spoke, sounded heavy. “We’ve had a few problems over the years. There was a double suicide in the late seventies—two male students.”

  Jil frowned. “A double suicide? Like Romeo and Juliet style?”

  Jess met her eyes, but didn’t say anything more.

  “A relationship issue?” she pressed.

  Was that a blush on Jess Blake’s face?

  “Nothing was ever proven.” She looked down at her desk “But it looked that way. Society wasn’t exactly very accepting back then.”

  Jil raised her eyebrows. Back then? What about now?

  “Anyway, apparently, things ended badly. They hanged themselves from the rafters in the old gymnasium. So awful. The building wasn’t released for nearly a month. After that, no one wanted to use it, so the school council agreed to build a newer, better facility, and we use the old gym for storage now. Of course, that happened well before my time. I remember my older brothers talking about it, and when I became principal here, they gave me a big fat folder on St. Marguerite’s history.” She stopped for a moment, caught.

  “It’s okay,” Jil said. “I’ll forget I heard that.”

  “I’m usually a little more discreet,” Jess muttered. “I don’t know what I was thinking saying that. It’s meant to be…”

  “A secret?”

  Jess smiled wryly. “Confidential.”

  “Consider it in the vault.”

  “Thanks. Anyway, in the late nineties, a senior girl named Regina Francis slit her wrists in the bathroom on the third floor.”

  “You guys have a lot of disturbed people here.”

  Jess shrugged. “This school has been around for almost sixty years. Some unpleasant things are bound to happen.”

  “Yeah, but don’t you think it’s a little odd to have people killing themselves on school grounds? Unless they’re trying to make a statement.”

  Jess regarded her steadily, and Jil felt that peculiar tingle up and down her arms. Jess only shrugged. “I just hope Alyssa’s the last one. But it does seem strange to me…”

  “What does?”

  Jess was holding something back.

  “You’ve already told me half of it, so you might as well finish and get it off your mind,” Jil said.

  Jess leaned back in her chair but remained silent.

  “Do you want a shot of something?”

  Jess cracked a small grin.

  “C’mon, spill it. I’ll even sign a confidentiality agreement if you want.”

  Jess cocked an eyebrow. “Might not be a bad idea.” She sighed, then relented. “High school is a rough time. I get it. Every few years, we lose a student—usually to accidents or illness. I’ve known about several students who’ve committed suicide too. It just seems strange to me that they do it here, and not at home. I don’t like to think of all the ghosts that haunt this school.” She breathed out, hesitating again.

  “How many are we talking about?” Jil prompted.

  Jess shook her head. “At least five suicides. One accident. At least I think it was an accident…that seems strange too.” She stopped again. “I’m sorry. I must be in shock. You shouldn’t hear all this.”

  Jil wanted to reach out and squeeze her hand, but she was afraid of what Jess might do.

  She met her eyes instead, and held them. “Jess, you don’t have to worry about what you say to me.”

  Jess bit her lip. “Thank you.”

  “Lay it all out. It might make you feel better.”

  She exhaled slowly. “A few years ago, maybe eight or nine, another boy died in the woods off campus.”

  “In the woods?”

  “Behind the track and field pitch, we have an outdoor education facility. That’s where the Pathways kids go on the weekend.”

  “I was living in Rockland at the time. I never heard about that.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have. They kept it very much under wraps.”

  “What happened?”

  Jess blew air into her cheeks, and frowned, like she was struggling to remember the details. “It was February. Subzero temperatures, and he went for a walk by himself, which was against the rules. A blizzard came up and he was caught outdoors, lost. By the time he found the outdoor ed. cabin, he was half frozen.”

  “So he died there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was this in your secret folder?”

  Jess looked up sharply.

  “Relax, Jess, I’m kidding.”

  Jess shook her head, allowing a tiny smile. “No. I remember it because I was a student teacher at St. Jo’s, around the corner, when it happened. That one, I couldn’t do anything about, but this one…”

  “There’s probably nothing you could have done to stop her, once she’d made up her mind,” Jil said, getting back to Alyssa.

  Jess smiled ruefully. “Isn’t that what principals are supposed to do? Shepherd their herd?”

  “You have thirteen hundred students and almost a hundred staff. You can’t know us all.”

  Jess held her gaze for a moment, as if she wanted to say something more. And Jil wondered, once again, how much she saw and never spoke about.

  Word about Alyssa spread quickly through the staff, and then through the student body.

  “Suicide,” kids whispered to each other as they passed in the halls. In less than an hour, every teacher and student at St. Marguerite’s knew that Alyssa Marco had overdosed on drugs, lain down outside the doors of the school, and waited for her heart to stop.

  What they didn’t know was why.

  Why was Jil’s top priority, most of the time. And this was no exception. She hadn’t been assuaged by the official report on Alyssa’s death. In fact, her suspicions had only grown stronger. In her gut, she knew there was something strange about the St. Marguerite’s ghosts.

  *

  When Jil walked in the doors of her industrial loft condo on Friday night, having trailed two math teachers to the movies before giving up on any salacious activity, she caught sight of the milk she’d left on the counter that morning.

  Great. No cereal tomorrow for breakfast.

  She sighed, then grabbed her stuff and headed back out the door. If she had to go to the grocery store, she might as well stop at the library too. So far, an Internet search had proved fruitless for the 1974 double-hanging incident, so she hoped to find something in print.

  She walked into a nearly empty library. A large woman stared at her computer screen and didn�
�t look up as Jil approached the desk.

  “Excuse me,” she said pointedly.

  The woman’s gaze flicked upward. The faded remnants of the name Debbie were left on her nametag.

  “I’d like to view information from nineteen seventy-four.”

  “What kind of information?” Debbie’s voice seemed too high for her large frame, and the faintest trace of a Scottish accent surrounded her vowels.

  “Newspapers, specifically.”

  “You’ll want Periodicals then. That’s downtown at Central.”

  “Downtown? You mean there’s nothing here at all?”

  Debbie sighed and pointed to the back corner of the library. “You could try the Periodicals section, but really, most of the information from that long ago is at Central.”

  “Is there any way to have it brought here?”

  “No. I’m sorry,” Debbie said, her gaze returning to her screen.

  Jil gritted her teeth impatiently. “Well then, may I look at the collection here as a start?”

  “Please do.”

  She glanced back down again without so much as a “Let me know if you need any help.”

  Jil shook her head, and took herself to the Periodicals section. She noticed the microfilm machine and remembered the headache she’d had learning how to use it while in university. Luckily, the headache had forced her to retain the information.

  She scanned the shelves for the docket of drawers holding microfilms and spotted it in the far right corner. Rockford Citizen lined the top. She scanned and noted that 1974 appeared to be the cutoff for retention of the newspapers. Jil opened the drawer holding January-March and fished out the first few reels.

  With minimal cursing, she loaded the microfilm into the machine and sat down, adjusting the lenses. Blurry.

  “Christ,” she muttered to herself. This was going to take awhile. Particularly if it wasn’t front-page news.

  She went through seven reels of microfilm before deciding to pack it in for the day. And then, she saw it.

  Tragedy at St. Marguerite’s Catholic School:

  March 27, 1974

  It was a grim morning for staff and students at St. Marguerite’s Catholic School in Rockford yesterday as the bodies of Tommy Deloitte and Edward Cartwright were found hanging from the rafters. Cartwright was taken to hospital and later pronounced dead. Deloitte was pronounced dead when paramedics arrived. An investigation into the apparent attempted double suicide is underway.

  “It’s too bad they didn’t have anywhere to go for help,” says Rocco DiTullio, a senior student. “They should have said something to someone.”

  Principal Robert Bourne declined to comment, except to report that St. Marguerite’s is a Catholic school and upholds Catholic standards of conduct. A funeral mass will take place for Tommy next Monday at 1:00 p.m. at St. Marguerite’s Church. Well-wishers can pay their respects at that time.

  Jil sat back in her chair. Rocco DiTullio. Interesting.

  She flipped through the last remaining slides from that year, but found nothing more. For a newsworthy story, there seemed to be very little actually recorded.

  Fatigue overcame her, and she pulled herself away from the questions elbowing for space inside her already preoccupied brain. Time for home.

  *

  She walked slowly up the stairs, peeling off her clothes. In the bathroom, she closed the door to keep the heat in, turned on the heat lamp above the bathtub, and ran herself a hot, deep bubble bath. Before climbing in, she turned on the classical station and lit some candles, then turned off the lights and sank into the bubbly hot depths.

  For a moment, she just lay there, letting the hot water permeate her sore muscles, especially her back and shoulders. She imagined fingers working into the knots, squeezing the tension out of her neck.

  Whose fingers?

  She shook her head. Not going there.

  Not surprisingly, the fantasy massage had stimulated more than her neck muscles. She let her mind wander, imagining a mouth on her nipples, fingers trailing down her stomach and between her legs. What did surprise her was how quickly she was aroused, an orgasm building almost the moment her own fingers made contact. She breathed hard, fast, until a wave crashed over her, and she moaned quietly.

  As she came down, back into the hot bath water lapping against her breasts, the little corner of her mind that she’d been silencing for weeks now began to whisper softly to her subconscious. The part of her she usually kept well hidden, bringing out only when it would advance her assignments—not sabotage her personal life. But it drifted in now, prodding her conscience.

  When she was touching herself, she knew exactly who she’d been fantasizing about. And that would make this investigation a hell of a lot more complicated.

  Chapter Six

  September moved into October with all the frost and fire of Northern Ontario. On the Québec border, Rockford could be beautiful and bitter at once, and this year brought early snow as well as frost that settled on the flaming maple leaves around the campus. The first week of the tenth month, eight centimeters of snow stuck to the pavement, wreaking havoc on the roads as drivers re-acclimated to the slip-and-slide conditions.

  Jil eased her truck out of the parking lot and onto the unplowed street. She cursed the frost on her window, the air where she could see her breath. She hated winter, and it had come way too early this year. Muttering obscenities, she searched around in the backseat for her steering wheel cover and slipped it on, grateful for this one small comfort. Still waiting, she blew into her hands, wondering why the red light at the top of the hill got slower every goddamned morning.

  Julia Kinness’s purse lay on the seat beside her.

  Lanyard—check

  Notebook—check

  Phone—check

  Personal life—left at home, as usual.

  Her phone began to vibrate. She answered on the vehicle’s speakers. “Kidd.”

  “How go the Catechisms?” Padraig asked, his low rumbling voice still coated with sleep.

  “Oh, you know all about the Good Catholics. I’m a little busy teaching, to tell you the truth. That and investigating a dead student. Not to mention the whole don’t ask, don’t tell thing. It gets a little tricky to actually get work done when you’re in a mosh pit like a high school.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re only a month in,” Padraig said. “Don’t worry too much, and don’t rush things. The last thing you want is to blow your cover over this.”

  “I’m getting sucked in,” Jil said, only half-joking. “The other day, I was driving home and almost collided with another car. When I pulled away, I found myself wanting to make the sign of the cross!”

  Padraig chuckled again. “Well, maybe it’s a subconscious desire. You were probably fed Catholic guilt in your breast milk.”

  Jil held her breath, wondering if Padraig would go on. She lived for this kind of information—tidbits about her mother. She hardly remembered her at all. Chestnut hair, arched eyebrows, red lips. The faint scent of apple and vanilla. Laughter like church bells, and a warm white sweater that tickled her nose when she snuggled into her lap. Classical music. The piano. Art. Books. A fierce intelligence behind an even fiercer love. That’s all she remembered about her mother.

  Except watching her die.

  “Just keep doing what you’re doing, Kidd. Preliminary report’s due by Christmas break, so try not to stay too long after mid-December.”

  “Believe me, I’m dying to get out of there,” Jil said. “It’s not like we’re getting paid by the hour. I have made some interesting discoveries, though.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Apparently, the two students who killed themselves in nineteen seventy-four were gay.”

  “Really?”

  “I came across a report in the newspaper, and Jess Blake confirmed it.”

  “Jess Blake knows you’re looking into this?”

  “No, not exactly,” Jil backpedalled. “It kind of came up in conversa
tion.”

  “Must have been a helluva conversation,” Padraig returned darkly. “Watch yourself, Kidd.”

  If only he knew…“Don’t worry. I’m as anxious to solve this problem and get out of there as you are to get me back in the line of fire. Oh wait…I mean, back behind a desk where you can keep a good eye on me.”

  “All right. Okay. Point taken! What’s your next step?”

  “Well, I’ve got a list of about twenty staff members for the preliminary report. I have a few more I want to check out today, but then I’m going to investigate the death of that student from the nineties. The one who slit her wrists.”

  “Of course you want to stick your nose into that.”

  “C’mon, Padraig.”

  “Yes, fine. I’m resigned to you by now. Good luck.”

  “Thanks.”

  The light had finally turned green, and she sped toward the highway for another day of teaching. She tossed her phone onto the seat beside her and wondered what glorious surprises St. Marguerite’s would have for her this frosty Monday morning. Bombings? A science experiment gone wrong? Buck Weekly with an actual smile on his face?

  She wasn’t sure she really wanted to know.

  The last thing she expected was a shiftless group of students. Again. This time, inside the school. Jil’s heart leapt into her mouth, and she found herself almost running toward the doors. The students were hushed—eerily so. They let her through without a problem.

  Was that blood over the doorway?

  “Excuse me, ladies,” Jil muttered, and two junior girls moved over quickly to let her through. No, not blood. Red paint. Graffiti. Over the doorway to the chapel, somebody had taken blood-red paint and written AN EYE FOR AN EYE. An involuntary chill shivered through Jil’s core. She had never pretended to be a religious person (until now), but that particular passage always gave her the creeps.

  Jessica and the custodians huddled in conference in front of the mess, which effectively blocked the students from going through the atrium to the R and B buildings. The students looked around, seeming not to know which way to go. Behind them, Mark Genovese blocked off the student entrance in an effort to stop the flow of traffic through the atrium; in front of them stood Jess, whose path they didn’t want to cross.