(Normie)
I was right! I do have the sight, and everybody knows it now. So I thought it would only be fair to tell my psychiatrist that I wouldn’t be needing any more help. Until next time, maybe. Who knows what else I might see? But anyway, I called New York, and Dr. Burke came to the phone.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi, Normie. How are you doing, my love?”
“Great! You were right. I’m not crazy and I’m not sick, and I don’t have headaches anymore. All those things I saw were true. Daddy and Father Burke sat me down and told me that what I was seeing was Mr. Delaney, when he was a baby and when he was a little boy. There really was a St. Vincent’s Orphan Asylum. That’s the orphanage where Mr. Delaney was kept after he got rescued from the horrible people who were being mean and hurting him. That was his own father and his father’s friends who were making fun of Mr. Delaney and hitting him, way back in the years when those World War Two radio programs were on! He was just a little boy!” My voice had a crack in it, and I realized I was sad all over again, because I thought of Mr. Delaney being beaten up as a little kid, like that boy Cody in the church parking lot, when the man hit him and his mother didn’t care . . . But the reason for my call was to show Dr. Burke that my imagination wasn’t playing tricks on me when I had my visions, so I knew I’d better just tell him that. I didn’t want him to worry that there was something else wrong with me.
“Oh yeah, and my little brother Dominic isn’t going away anywhere. You figured out I was scared about that, right, Doctor?”
“Well, I did think that might be taking a toll on you. I’m glad, for everyone’s sake, that it’s been resolved.”
“And there was another baby, who died in the orphanage, and Mr. Delaney was there when it happened, but he didn’t do it. He was a little kid at the time. And the baby was just sick. So Daddy said I didn’t have to worry if I ever thought Mr. Delaney had done something to a child. And he, Mr. Delaney, phoned and apologized to me for getting upset about the Hells Angels.”
“Hells Angels?”
“Yeah, but that’s all over now.”
“Oh. Good. Well, then, do you feel better about Mr. Delaney?”
“The honest truth?”
“Yes, the honest truth.”
“I saw him the other day. And I saw a storm of darkness coming from him, or felt it. I don’t know how to say it. But . . . I think he did something. Not to Mrs. Delaney or to a little kid. But . . . something.”
(Monty)
Brennan was hearing confessions at St. Bernadette’s on Monday evening. I sat in the church and gazed at the stained-glass windows with the evening sun coming through them, creating beams of light in red and yellow and green and blue and amethyst. Beautiful. When Brennan emerged from the confessional in his clerical black and his purple stole, he sat beside me in the pew.
“What’s on your mind, Montague?”
“We each know something, or some things, about Beau Delaney.”
“If we do, we can’t discuss it, you being his lawyer, me being his confessor.”
“That’s right. By the way, I heard through the legal grapevine today that the Crown is not going to appeal Delaney’s acquittal in Peggy’s death.”
“Ah. Well, that’s that.”
We sat in the silence of the church for a while. Then Brennan said: “Now I’m wondering, Monty . . .”
“Yes?”
“Will you be telling herself what you know?”
“Maura?”
“Are you going to tell her? I can’t reveal anything from a confession. But lawyers don’t get excommunicated for whispering to their wives about something that happened at work.”
“I have no intention of telling her. The fewer people who know this, the better.”
“But . . .”
“It’s only the two of us who know. There’s an old saying, Brennan: Secret de deux, secret de Dieu. Secret de trois, secret de tous.”
“Meaning?”
“A secret between two is a secret of God. A secret among three is everybody’s secret. Sounds much better in French.”
“Maura’s not exactly the six o’clock news. But, I suppose, why burden her with it? It will be tough enough for us to live with.”
“Exactly.”
“But, are we leaving people in danger, Monty?”
“I honestly don’t think so.”
“Are we in danger ourselves?”
I looked at him. “Do you think we are?”
“I’m thinking no. You?”
“I’m like you, Brennan. I think not. We’re betting our lives on it, though, aren’t we?”