A Circumstance of Blood Read online

  A CIRCUMSTANCE OF BLOOD

  Jeannette Cooperman

  © Jeannette Cooperman 2015

  Jeannette Cooperman has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  To my husband, Andrew Cooperman, who makes what’s best in my life possible.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Acknowledgements

  “Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.” Paul Tournier

  “Love and a cough cannot be hid.” George Herbert

  CHAPTER ONE

  Out in the hall, Luke was crowing about his latest sexual conquest. “You’re still a virgin,” Philip yelled, spinning the desk chair to kick his dorm room door shut. He blasted Mahler’s Ninth and laced his fingers behind his head, letting the music wash over him until his classmates’ swagger dropped away and he could think again.

  Clearing space on his desk, he slanted his grandfather’s black and gold fountain pen across a yellowed symphony programme. Five bucks on eBay; a miracle. Playing with his gooseneck desk lamp until the programme was half lit, half in dramatic shadow, he photographed it from several different angles, always making sure the name of the guest artist was readable.

  Next he’d Photoshop the image, scorch it so the edges could dissolve into flames in the video. He already had fabulous, crackling audio from that bullshit New Year’s Eve bonfire, when they were supposed to ‘throw the year’s failures into the fire’. He’d wanted to zoom in on somebody’s secret, as it curled and turned to ash, but it was too dark to get a clear shot.

  Didn’t matter. He’d found plenty of secrets already.

  He pushed up the sleeves of his black cashmere turtleneck. Restraint today − black tight-legged jeans, a few black paint streaks in his white-blond hair. The colour would come from his art. Just three more people to go, then an opener. The old map maybe, if he could find a way to manipulate it that wasn’t too kitsch.

  Now for the next revelation. Dear Roland, he keyed, wondering if it was okay to use the old guy’s first name. What the hell − it wasn’t like he was going to answer. I know you’ve been bothered by the press your entire life, but I’m about the age you were when it happened, and I’m boarding at a prep school where one of the priests teaches. I’ve been thinking about this – ‘day and night’ was too melodramatic. He’d sound unstable − for months now, wondering what you finally decided. Was it true evil, living and breathing on its own? Or did they just lay their own beliefs on somebody else’s experience?

  *

  Edging close to the door’s frosted pane, Colin McAvoy stood to one side so the kids wouldn’t see his shadow. He heard a taut, breath-held silence, then a soft scuffle as the boys shifted in their seats.

  “I will repeat my question, Mr. Beckholdt,” Francis Charron’s voice boomed. “For a train, what would Aristotle’s final cause be?”

  Colin winced in sympathy. He’d suffered through Father Charron’s classes himself, back in seminary.

  Finally, a quavering answer came, “The caboose?”

  The boys snorted, and the old Jesuit launched into a rant about sloppy thinking. Colin grinned and eased away from the door. A little angst wouldn’t kill Beckholdt; it might even make the information stick. And Charron was as sharp and exacting as ever.

  Eavesdropping was a cowardly way to run a school, but it was damned efficient.

  Colin was debating a listen outside the new biology teacher’s classroom when he heard a clack of heels at the other end of the hall. His secretary hurried toward him through a haze of sunlit dust, waving a pink notepad aloft.

  Her curls glowed an improbable red; she must have coloured her hair over the weekend. Her tortoiseshell readers were askew, and the sun lit a sheen of perspiration on her creased forehead. Hot flush or anxiety? Surely Connie knew by now that he wasn’t going to sack her. The stroke had taken her speech, but she was as sharp as ever, and − this he’d admit only to himself − the silence was blessed. He spent most of his day swatting away excess words.

  “Ach, sorry, I was on my way back,” he said, skimming the note. “You’d no need to . . .” He broke off as the contents sank in. The auxiliary bishop who oversaw education had ‘dropped in’ (Connie’s exaggerated quotation marks) and was waiting in Colin’s office (three exclamation points).

  Muttering his mother’s safe curse, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he took the stairs two at a time. Ehrlich was probably here for a spot inspection, looking for some reason to close Matteo Academy before it had a real chance to get established.

  At the landing, Colin forced himself to stop, catch his breath and collect a little dignity. Sweat tingled in the creases of his palms. He swiped them against his khakis, glanced up, groaned.

  The student he least wanted Ehrlich to meet was slouched against the outside wall of his office, clad in a white pirate shirt and black velvet pants tucked into purple suede ankle boots. Not much makeup today, only eyeliner. Still, the bishop would never understand.

  Covering the distance in three strides, Colin jerked a thumb in the direction of the stairs. “Away wi’ ye,” he hissed, urgency thickening his Scots accent. Philip slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. Colin glared down at him. “I’m not playing.”

  In a single languid motion, Philip rose. “You really shouldn’t feed the hierarchy’s power lust you know.” He drifted away, fingers waving backward over his shoulder.

  Running a finger between his hot neck and Roman collar, Colin adjusted the stiff plastic tab and wished the entire shirt were made of the stuff. Better yet, Kevlar.

  He pushed open the door.

  Auxiliary Bishop Matthew Ehrlich was standing behind Colin’s desk, sliding books out of the bookcase one by one, glancing at the covers and replacing them like flea-market discards. Well over six feet, nearly as tall as Colin, he wore a perfectly cut jacket a shade darker than his wavy silver hair, and the eyes behind his silver half-rims were a cool, clear grey.

  Metallic inside and out, Colin thought, tugging at his rumpled herringbone jacket, pockets stretched out of shape years ago by small spiral notebooks and jabbing pens. “Bishop!” he said, trying for hearty and hating himself for it. “What brings you to Matteo?”

  Ehrlich’s smile took a second too long to widen. Diocesan priests hadn’t trusted Jesuits since the sixteenth century. “I had a few errands to do out west, and I thought I’d come see how the place is shaping up. I’ve heard good things, Father McAvoy.”

  The words were breezy and warm; the eyes could have laser-cut steel.

  “We’ve got our first fifty boys, forty-eight paying full tuition and two on private scholarships,” Colin
told him. “As soon as you’re able to release the funds, we’ll bring in the fifty whose parents can’t afford to pay at all.”

  “Excellent.” Ehrlich moved to the window, his attention caught by a red-tailed hawk gliding above the Missouri River. “And I have good news,” he said, turning back. “We’ve found you another full-tuition pupil.”

  “Well, we don’t really . . .”

  “He’s quite intelligent,” Ehrlich continued, raising his volume just a notch, “and his parents are fine people.”

  Major donors.

  “They’ve been through some very trying times recently,” Ehrlich said, settling himself in the leather guest chair and gesturing Colin toward his own desk chair. Colin remained standing. “Bryan Dennison’s just become a partner at Wittgens, Worthington & Schucard.” The syllables slid off the bishop’s tongue. “And his wife, Laurel, is a psychologist. She nearly died last year; she somehow contracted an isolated case of Legionnaire’s Disease, and her lungs collapsed. The boy’s had a few behaviour issues since. The stress of his mother’s illness, no doubt. I’ve assured the Dennisons that Graham will be most welcome here.”

  Inside his pocket, Colin’s left hand balled into a tight fist, snagging a loose thread and snapping it free. “We can’t guarantee that, Bishop. He’ll have to go through the interview process like every other student.”

  “Of course.” Ehrlich rose. “I’ll see that the scholarship fund takes priority.”

  Quid, pro quo.

  *

  Moving idly through her apartment, Sarah Markham filled the dog’s kibble bowl and swiped a layer of dust off her dresser with the side of her hand. The air smelled stale and lonely; it had hung there too long, undisturbed by life. She tugged up the Roman shades and the smoky lavender of a January sunset filled the huge bay windows.

  She should check email. No, she should start writing.

  Opening the refrigerator door, she scanned the shelves: beer, pickles, bitter-orange marmalade, a half-empty jar of garlic-stuffed olives coated in greyish-white foam. From the freezer she pulled a bag of York mints, unwrapped six and smeared peanut butter on them, then pried off a beer cap. In Haiti, they’d drunk a cheap lager called Prestige every night, all the doctors and nurses crowded into one hot room in the guarded compound, still in their sweat-soaked scrubs. You were lucky to get five minutes of tepid water for a shower; you didn’t waste it.

  Now she had to capture that month. The cholera tents, huge ragged holes cut in the nylon cots so patients too weak to move could empty their bowels. The vat of bleach and the row of absurdly bright galoshes, daisy and cowboy and polka-dot, lined up in the decontamination tent. The translator who’d balked at the entrance − “I am not going in there! I have seen this thing! It can kill you in one hour!”

  Her first time in the decontamination tent, she’d been so nervous she’d dropped her notepad into the bleach and had to fan the notes dry under a mosquito net. By the end of December, it took a single thoughtless minute to strip off gown, cap, gloves, and booties and dunk her boots in bleach.

  Now, safely home, with as much clean hot water as she wanted, uninterrupted internet and a radiator steaming away St. Louis’ familiar grey chill, she’d lost that urgent rhythm. And she had to get it back. Hole up in her apartment, think of nothing but Haiti, go out only to walk the dog. She had less than a month to craft the best piece of narrative journalism she’d ever written.

  Her future depended on it.

  *

  “Why not homeschool me?” Graham suggested, tipping backward in a Regency side chair. “Hot biology, cold calculus, a little Shakespearean tragedy . . .”

  “Matteo Ricci is a promising new academy, and you’ll have no trouble moving from there to the Ivy League,” his father said. “Stop doing that, you’ll break the chair legs.”

  “They’re like hearts. Stronger once you glue them together again.”

  His father had just opened his mouth to reply when a silver car slid past the French doors and they heard the motor cut. They stayed silent until Laurel Dennison came to find them, a flat grease-stained cardboard box in her hands. “I stopped for Papa Vito’s,” she said, looking from one to the other with a smile so eager Graham wanted to slap it away. “Meat Lovers, for you guys. I thought maybe we could watch something on Netflix.”

  “That sounds great, honey,” Bryan said. “You two get started, and save me at least three pieces. I’ve got to run back to the office for a file, but I’ll be back in time for the movie.”

  He always ruins it, Graham thought. Mom wove her little plans and Dad pulled the key thread loose. If you accused him of sabotage, he’d just widen his eyes and say, “But I came home as fast as I could!”

  He was great at defending people, and he was his own favourite client.

  *

  The dorm’s dining hall was deserted, its benches shoved crooked under old refectory tables. Half kneeling on top of an old wooden ladder, Jimmy leaned out to stretch a black and gold banner between two ceiling beams and heard the wood creak in protest.

  “For God’s sake, be careful,” Colin called from the doorway. “I don’t need a lawsuit right now.”

  “What are you doing out of your office?” Jimmy mumbled, nails in his mouth. “You’re supposed to be writing your report for the board.”

  “We’re getting a new student. You might want to hear this from the ground.”

  Jimmy made a quick chalk mark on the wood, dropped the banner on Colin’s head, and climbed down, agile as a teenager. He wore gym shorts and a grey Matteo Academy T-shirt, and his sandy hair was tousled, probably from a run. If I dressed like that, Colin thought, I’d lose all credibility. But somehow he pulls it off.

  “Let me guess,” Jimmy said. “It’s not fifty scholarships.”

  “Aye, that it’s not.” Colin dragged out a bench and sat, leaning against the table, while he described the bishop’s visit.

  “And what happens if the kid burns the school down?” Jimmy asked. “Will the good bishop be here to explain?”

  “Not likely. But we need those scholarships.” Reaching behind him for a battered leather messenger bag, Colin pulled out Graham Dennison’s file, which the bishop hadn’t produced until he’d put his coat on to leave. “It says here there was a ‘minor incident’ when he was seven. He pushed over a child in a wheelchair.”

  “Nice. Did he torture any puppies?”

  “Er . . . no. Not that it says. He’s bright, I’ll give him that. A 4.0 at Conway Day School and a 2280 on the SAT. He had some temper issues later in grade school, but he seems to have pulled it together in junior high.”

  “Something’s happened since then, or they wouldn’t be leaving him on our doorstep in the dark of night.”

  “Yeah. It’s right here. When his mother was in the ICU and it was touch and go, his father thinks he fiddled with the dials on her ventilator.”

  Jimmy gave a long, low whistle.

  “When the alarm went off, nurses rushed in and got the mother stabilized. The father panicked and banished Graham from the room. The hospital made a police report afterward, probably just to cover their arses. Ehrlich writes that the Dennisons are candid, concerned, responsible parents who want to do the right thing, and perhaps overreacted.”

  Jimmy leaned closer to read the notes. “Why don’t we overreact too, and refuse him admission?”

  “Because Ehrlich will block the scholarship money if we do. And what if the boy never meant to hurt his mother? Maybe it only looked that way because of that early episode. I thought you could do some spiritual direction, figure out where his head is.”

  “And become his next target? Colin, he shoved a child in a wheelchair and tried to kill his own mother! By most definitions, that’d make him a sociopath. Those kids are born cold. And they’re not curable − I’ve read the research.” Jimmy grabbed a hammer and climbed back up the ladder. “I can trot Graham through every spiritual exercise Ignatius Loyo
la ever invented, but it won’t change who he is.”

  “We don’t know who he is,” Colin said, surprised by a rising anger. “You can’t throw that label on him because of two reports in a file folder. We should at least give him a chance.”

  His voice had gone loud, and he glanced up nervously − the boys’ rooms were just above the beamed ceiling. “Ehrlich made it pretty clear,” he said, lower. “The scholarship money’s a reward for compliance.”

  “So you’re playing his game?” Jimmy squinted at his chalk mark. “You don’t have to you know. We don’t answer to the archdiocese.”

  “I want those scholarships. Besides, it’s not fair to judge the boy sight unseen.”

  “Colin, keeping an open mind is one thing. Taking a chance on a kid who might be violent . . .” Jimmy whacked a nail into the beam, “is another.” He gave the nail a final tap, then looked down at Colin and grinned. “If I’m doing spiritual direction for a sociopath, can I at least have a raise?”

  *

  Little brass plate, ‘Head of School’. How very British. Graham pushed through the door. A grandmotherly type with dyed red hair and a uniboob swivelled around and smiled at him.

  “Rough morning?” she asked, her voice going all marshmallow.

  “Not in the least. I’m here to see . . .”

  “Father McAvoy. And you’re nineteen minutes late.” She’d crisped up fast.

  He didn’t bother answering, just went through to the inner office without knocking. Tossing his backpack onto a chair, he held out his hand, then tightened his grip and waited for the Head of School to release first.

  “I’m Graham Dennison. You wanted to see me?” Without waiting for an answer, he folded his body into the leather guest chair, hooking an arm across the back and making it his own.

  “I’m told you’ve had a rough year,” McAvoy began. His accent matched the doorplate. Had to be fake. “Tell me why you want to be here.”

  “I don’t particularly.” Graham slid his phone from his pocket and glanced at the screen. “But I have to finish high school.”