Chapter 1

Elizabeth had just gotten off the phone when a timid knock sounded on her office door. She’d hoped to have a little time to collect her thoughts but before she could answer, the door opened a crack and a slight, haggard-looking woman—more girl than woman—poked her head in. Her blackened eyes reminded Elizabeth of a raccoon.

“Perdone usted, señora Elizabeth,” the woman asked meekly. “Ese time now?”

“Un momento, por favor,” she said to the woman.

The woman withdrew and shut the door. Elizabeth sat there for a moment, trying to regulate her breathing, hoping to get herself together enough to deal with someone else’s problems. Sometimes she felt like an actor who had to put aside her own life to assume that of the character she was playing. She’d sensed a growing annoyance on the part of Sheriff Crowder, the man with whom she’d just gotten off the phone. “I told you ma’am, we already sent you all his personal effects.”

“But I’m sure he had it with him.”

“It’s not here.”

“Could you just humor me and look again?”

“We don’t have it, Mrs. Gerlacher,” the sheriff said flatly.

“Did you even—” but before she could finish he cut her off.

“I have to go, ma’am. Goodbye.”

“Fuck,” she cursed, slamming her palm so hard on the flimsy dinette table that it spilled some of the coffee from her cup. This made the fifth or sixth time she’d called the Marrizozo, New Mexico Sheriff’s Department in the past few months. Not only about the missing diary but to discuss other things in the police report. Things that didn’t make sense. That didn’t add up. Each time she called, the sheriff seemed to get more defensive, and each time, growing increasingly desperate for answers, Elizabeth had become more pugnacious, allowing her cross-examination behavior to leach into her normally civil demeanor.

Finally she got up and went to the door and opened it. Peering out into the hallway of the annex of the small chapel, Elizabeth saw the woman sitting on the floor, her feet curled up Buddha-style beneath her. She appeared as anxious-looking as an eighth-grader waiting to speak to a teacher about a bad grade. The last time Elizabeth had seen her, nearly a week before, the rawness of her bruised, swollen eyes had taken Elizabeth’s breath away. But the swelling had gone down considerably, and now the gaudy yellows and purples looked more like some teenager’s idea of a makeup statement.

“Please come in, Fabiana,” Elizabeth said.

The young woman entered and sat down opposite Elizabeth. She was wearing a Mets baseball cap, a flannel shirt that hadn’t been washed in a while, and torn, loose-fitting jeans. She kept both hands over her distended belly, holding it like a football player guarding against a fumble in the last minutes of a game.

“Cómo estás?” asked Elizabeth, opening her file on the desk.

“Bien. Good.”

“And your eyes? Ojos,” Elizabeth said, touching her own eyes.

Nodding, the woman replied, “Better. No hurt.”

“And how is . . .” Elizabeth asked, patting her own flat stomach, “the baby?”

“Sí. El bebé está bien. Kicking,” she said with a smile.

For the past several years, Elizabeth had been doing pro bono work at the Mystic Women’s Shelter, a couple of afternoons a week and sometimes on Saturdays. The shelter was part of a Catholic retreat on a small island off the coast of eastern Connecticut. The cramped space Father Paul, the director, provided Elizabeth as a part-time office was actually an all-purpose room, containing the copier, a coffee machine, an apartment-sized refrigerator, a tag-sale kitchen set with cracked vinyl seats. It was also where Father Paul—or simply Paul, as he preferred—hung his vestments in the corner. On one wall was a picture of John Lee Hooker, Father Paul’s favorite blues guitarist, while on the opposite wall was one of Jesus feeding the five thousand. Loaves of bread and fishes appeared to fall from the sky, a downpour of food. Elizabeth helped women with legal matters—began divorce proceedings, sued for child support or alimony, or sometimes defended them against crimes like theft or drug possession. Or like now, to guide them through the intricacies of filling out a restraining order. Unlike in her law firm where she worked mostly with affluent middle-class people, her clients at the shelter were mostly poor white or women of color, or, like Fabiana, recent immigrants. Fabiana journeyed from Honduras two years earlier and when she related the complex story of how she got to the US, Elizabeth could only shake her head and say, “Jesus.” There were no translators so Elizabeth had to rely on her rusty high school Spanish and hand gestures to communicate.

Elizabeth began helping the woman fill out the restraining order, which was intended to keep her boyfriend from beating her up again.

“What that mean?” Fabiana asked Elizabeth.

“Ex parte. That means we’re asking the court for immediate relief from the respondent.”

“Qué es . . . respondent?”

“That’s your boyfriend. Jorge.”

Fabiana stared down at her lap. Elizabeth felt that if not for the fading bruises around her eyes and a depleted look that belied her nineteen years, Fabiana would have been pretty. She had lucid, acorn-colored eyes, a generous mouth, lustrous skin the hue of burnished leather, and long, auburn hair she kept in a tight braid down her back. Her fingernails were chipped and dirty from the per-diem work Father Paul had arranged for her on a local farm sorting carrots and potatoes. Even from across the table Elizabeth could smell the sour sweat and farm odor on her body. The woman’s son, Esteban, two, was at that moment playing with the half dozen other kids in the shelter’s nursery, several doors down. Occasionally, Elizabeth could hear a gleeful cry or a wail of disappointment emanating from down the hall. Sometimes, when Elizabeth wasn’t busy, she’d go down to the nursery and get down on the floor and play with the kids. Fabiana’s Esteban was adorable.

“I no can see him?” the woman asked. Against the brown skin of her neck Elizabeth spotted a silver crucifix.

“He no can see you,” Elizabeth replied, almost harshly.

“Cuánto tiempo?”

“That will depend.”

“On what?”

“On a lot of things. Mostly what the court decides in his case.”

“Will he go to la cárcel?” Prison, Elizabeth knew.

“Yes. But only if you testify. Comprendes? Testificar.”

The woman shook her head vigorously.

“What do you mean? You have to testify. Look what he did to you.”

“I no want him go away to la cárcel.”

“Next time it might be worse. You have to think of your unborn child. Su bebé,” she said, patting her own stomach again.

“Jorge, ese good man. He just get un poco loco when he drink.”

“But you have to press charges and you have to take out this restraining order. We need to make sure he stays away from you. If you don’t want to do it for yourself, do it for Esteban. For your baby.”

“Jorge love Esteban. And he es padre del bebé,” the woman said, pointing at her stomach. “He no hurt them.”

Elizabeth stared at her. “But he’s capable of that. You must do this, Fabiana.”

“Lo siento.” I’m sorry. The woman waved her hand in front of her face as if she were brushing away a bad smell.

“I can’t help you if you don’t let me,” Elizabeth said, her anger and frustration slipping into her voice.

Elizabeth didn’t understand such women. Women who were abused, who were used as punching bags for their husbands’ or boyfriends’ frustrations and angers, and who still somehow loved them. But that wasn’t really love, she thought. That was need or fear or guilt or something else entirely, but not love. Love couldn’t grow in such unfertile soil.

“I know, I know,” Fabiana said, tears beginning to run down her bruised cheeks. “You so good to me, señora Elizabeth. Lo siento.”

Despite being annoyed with her, Elizabeth got up and went around the table. She squatted down and put her arms around the woman. Fabiana’s sobs convulsed her small body. She clutched onto Elizabeth like a frightened child.

“It’s all right, Fabiana,” Elizabeth said, rubbing the woman’s back in small circles. She was so skinny, Elizabeth could feel the vertebrae along the woman’s spine. As she stroked her, she recalled when Luke was small and crying about something or other, her holding him and quieting his fears. It’s all right, sweetie. Everything’s all right.

“At least promise me you’ll think about filling out the restraining order. You at least have to do that.”

“Sí, sí,” the woman said. “I think about it.”

Elizabeth stood, suggesting to the woman it was time to leave, that she had done all she could for her. The rest would be up to her. At the door she turned and said, “Señora Elizabeth, usted es una buena mujer.” You are a good woman.

“Gracias. You think about it, Fabiana. For both your children.”

She was sitting at the table, doing some paperwork and imagining how sweet that first scotch was going to taste, when Father Paul stuck his bald, narrow head in the door.

“How’s Perry Mason today? I guess I’m dating myself with that?” he said with a boyish grin.

“You’re not that much older than me. When I was a little girl I used to watch the reruns with my father.”

“The Irishman?”

“As Irish as Paddy’s Pig,” she said with a laugh. She’d told Paul about her father. Though she didn’t go to church herself any more, she’d had Paul say a Mass for the man. It was something her father would have appreciated.

“He loved how Raymond Burr always got the bad guys in the last two minutes,” she explained.

“Virtue always rewarded, sin punished. What a perfect world.”

Father Paul was thin, with a shaved head and the sharp, lupine face of a fox. His countenance was softened a bit by sad-looking Bassett hound eyes, eyes that were perpetually pink from his doing laps without goggles in the overly chlorinated YMCA pool in town. As usual he wasn’t wearing a collar, but rather cargo pants and a ratty old sweater he’d bought when he was in the Aran islands on an archaeological dig involving the ancient church Na Seacht Teampaill. Elizabeth and Paul would talk about Ireland, the places Elizabeth’s father had gone. A brilliant man, Father Paul possessed a bushel-full of advanced degrees and spoke a dozen languages.

“Unfortunately, we don’t always get the bad guys, Paul,” she said, rolling her eyes conspiratorially at the priest.

“You mean, Fabiana’s boyfriend?”

“Ah huh. She wouldn’t sign the restraining order and now she’s not sure she wants to testify against our boy Jorge. She doesn’t want him to go to la cárcel.”

“She’s a very feeling woman.”

“Or a very foolish one.”

“It’s not always a bad thing to turn the other cheek.”

“It is when you know the other cheek is going to get itself smacked.”

Father Paul came in and sat down across from her. He ran his hand over the top of his shiny, bald skull. His shaved head reminded Elizabeth of a newborn’s, soft and vulnerable.

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“I’m willing to bet on it.”

“All right, what?” he asked, extending his hand across the table.

“What do you mean, ‘what?’”

“I’m willing to bet he’s learned his lesson.”

“All right. How about a bottle of scotch?”

“I’m not much of a scotch man. How about if I lose, I buy you a bottle. But if you lose, you come to work here.”

Elizabeth let out with a chuckle. “Now that seems like a fair deal.”

“I can’t match your salary. But you’d get this nice plush office with an ocean view,” he said, grinning. When he grinned he looked even more like a fox. The first couple of times he’d asked her to come work here, his tone had been almost playful, and each time she treated it as the joke that she thought it was. But recently he’d told her the shelter had gotten a large federal grant and that he actually had the money to pay her, though far from what she was currently making. Of course she already had a job, a junior partner in a small law firm twenty miles away. She liked Father Paul. He was smart and worldly, well-educated, with a good sense of humor. And she liked that he wasn’t preachy. His faith wasn’t a Sunday-morning spiel, but rather a way of life. He talked like a regular guy, about jazz or sports, history or politics, but he let his actions speak for him. He’d set up this island retreat for battered woman and their children, raising money by the seat of his pants, twisting the arms of donors, cajoling or embarrassing them, and often spending his own money on food and toys for the kids. He was a good salesmen, too, getting people to donate their money or time or expertise to the cause. Like with Elizabeth.

“You’re so good with women like Fabiana,” Paul said.

“Now you’re giving me a snowjob. What’s next, you’re going to try to sell me some indulgences? Then again, I could probably use some.”

“No, you are. You obviously have a gift.”

“The only gift I have is that I’m a lawyer. And I don’t think some dirtbag ought be able to beat her around whenever he feels like it.”

“It’s more than that with you. You get satisfaction from working here.”

It was true, though. She did enjoy working with these women, seeing that they got at least a semblance of legal representation. Despite the annoyances and frustrations, like with Fabiana, she felt that her time and effort here made a difference. Sometimes a big one. It was, in fact, one of the few things which gave meaning to her life lately. She not only provided legal counsel but also helped women get social services, food stamps, day care. Sometimes she even sat with them and helped them learn to read and write. At the same time she’d begun to find the work at her law firm increasingly tedious: wills and divorces, pre-nups and LLCs, defending spoiled little rich kids against DUIs and possession charges. In fact, she’d been spending so much time at the shelter lately she’d let her regular job slide, so much so that Warren Fuller, the senior partner, had had to call her into his office on a couple of occasions to speak to her.

“And how are you, Elizabeth?” Father Paul asked, his expression what she could imagine it to be in the confessional: thoughtful, considerate, patient.

She looked across at him. “Fine.”

“That’s your default reply. How are you really?”

“What do you want me to say?”

Paul sat there for a moment, his fingertips forming a little tepee that he tapped against his nose. “It takes time,” he offered.

“As in, ‘time heals all wounds’?”

“Something like that.” He continued staring at her, his pink eyes slick and painful looking.

Elizabeth stood, started to pack her briefcase.

“Getting over something like this does take time, Elizabeth.”

“No offense, Father, but how the hell would you know about something like this?” she said more harshly than she had intended. She was obviously still annoyed by the phone call earlier. When she looked over at him she saw the effect it had. He looked snubbed. “Forgive me, Father. I had no right to say that.”

“No, no, it’s all right. Besides, I have the hide of a rhino,” he said with a smile. “With this job you have to be thick-skinned. And you’re right. I can’t possibly know what it is to lose a child. But I have suffered loss. You can’t be human without suffering loss, Elizabeth.”

She was going to say this was different, that there was no loss in the world like this, but decided not to say anything.

“If you’d ever like to pray with me, Elizabeth?”

“Thanks for the offer. But I don’t think so.”

“Well, I’ll pray for you and your son anyway. Is there anything new in your son’s case?”

“I guess nobody but me thinks it’s a ‘case,’” Elizabeth said, using her fingers to make quotation marks around the word. “I don’t know if I told you this before. But Luke had a diary.”

“Really?”

“I think it was with him. When he was killed.”

“And you believe that’s relevant?”

“It wasn’t among his things they sent us later. I’ve called the sheriff down in New Mexico several times asking for it but he says they never had it.”

“How would that be important?”

“Who knows?”

“You’re thinking it might give you some insight into what he was feeling then?”

“It couldn’t hurt.”

She finished packing her briefcase and snapped it shut. Then she grabbed her umbrella and started for the door.

“Well, keep my suggestion in mind.”

“Which one?” Elizabeth said with a smile.

“The job. We couldn’t pay nearly what you’re making, but what a view, huh?” he said, looking out at the ocean. The day was rainy and blustery, the sound full of angry whitecaps. Only a single lobster boat braved the rough waters. “Drive carefully. It’s pretty bad out there,” Father Paul said.

As she headed out she saw Fabiana at the back of the small chapel. Elizabeth paused unseen for a moment. The younger woman had lit a candle and was praying. Elizabeth hadn’t been to church since her college days. Yet as she watched Fabiana, her head bowed and her eyes tightly shut, Elizabeth found herself longing for such simplicity. She thought of Father Paul’s offer to pray with her. She thought, too, of how fervently her own father used to pray in church, his head bowed, his knuckles white from his tightly folded hands. As well she thought of that time in Wales, when they’d “lost” Luke, of the prayer she had offered to God. She had prayed that time and like some sort of magic trick her son had reappeared. If only it were that easy.