Passionaries Page 16

  “Don’t you see, Captain? They are contagious. Every day their following grows. The weak-minded, the depressed, the lonely, the confused, the unstable, they flock to them.”

  “Are you saying they are bad for your business, Doctor?” Murphy said. “That they and their followers should be here instead?”

  “I’m saying they are charlatans. The latest in a very long line of them. And that the answer to your questions might more likely be found in their world, not mine.”

  “Maybe they offer something you can’t.”

  “Is there anything else, Captain?”

  “No. Not for now.”

  “Good night.” Frey watched the detective walk down the hall, wait for the elevator, and get in. He took the files of the two men Murphy had left, rolled his chair back, and dropped them in the trash can. He pulled himself closer to the desk and eyed the satchel sitting on the desktop. His initials had been stamped in gold leaf on the black calfskin casing. The bag was elegant and cool, but unassuming.

  He reached for the gold clasp and turned it. The frame snapped apart with an audible pop, the pressure released. The doctor reached into the bag and placed his fingers around the metal canister, lifting it out gently, holding it momentarily above his bag, tilting it to one side and then the other, inspecting it in the light as a jeweler might evaluate a gem about to be pawned. He could see the organ through the glass pane, somewhat surprised it had not been the least bit cracked or damaged in its acquisition process. Sebastian’s heart was intact, unusually so, given that few steps had been taken to properly prepare and preserve it. Incorrupt.

  “Welcome home, Sebastian,” Frey whispered. “You are finally back where you belong.”

  Jesse walked along the fetid waterside, waving away at flies and the stench that penetrated his nostrils. The still water was the most unusual shade of industrially tinted gray/green. For years, there had been talk of cleaning it up, turning it into some kind of Brownstone Riviera, but for the most part, it remained what it had always been—a polluted dumping ground. A place to drown secrets. He’d heard all the old Mafia jokes that had formed the Gowanus’s reputation; that it was 90 percent guns, that it was the best place to catch “gowanorrhea,” all of that. All of it back-to-back with some of the priciest real estate in the city.

  The canal was nestled between the family friendly neighborhoods of Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, tucked away but sticking out nevertheless. An appropriate place to put a halfway house, especially if you wanted to blend in, Jesse thought.

  For the city and the project’s supporters, turning a crack house into a halfway house was good politics, especially since it had been rebranded an outpatient facility. Money was invested, the streets around it were cleaned up, businesses and stores were encouraged to open up and police presence was increased. All good things designed to calm the nervous neighborhood Nellies who typically opposed these sorts of things. They signed off in exchange for the hope of increased real-estate values, which was the big picture in the end anyway and an assurance that the residents were guaranteed to be harmless. It was part of the same deal that allowed the conversion of Precious Blood, Jesse recalled. Frey’s deal. The connection was suddenly becoming clearer and clearer to him. There was nothing harmless about this place, especially if Mayfield was living there.

  As Jesse approached Born Again, he could see a spate of unusual police activity buzzing near the recently renovated four-story brownstone. The street was taped off and police stanchions dotted the canal side. Emergency vehicles choked off the street, and traffic in either direction had been brought to a halt.

  “Want to find a traffic jam, look for a traffic cop,” Jesse moaned.

  Curious, he walked as close to Born Again and the commotion as he could, just in time to see the police divers fishing a lifeless body from the water. The police radios crackled with details, all offered in code. “OD” and “suicide” were the signal codes he recognized.

  The body was bloated and gray. Eyes and tongue bulging, like a sick molly Jesse had once found at the bottom of his fish bowl. Jesse wanted to turn away but couldn’t. He recognized the corpse. And the bulge of money, his money, in the front pocket.

  “Mayfield.”

  3 The lights were burning brightly in the Fremont home long after midnight, passersby glued to the angry shadow play screening on the curtained windows. Fingers pointing, arms outstretched in frustration, feet stomping.

  “You will not put me through this again!” Martha bellowed.

  “You?”

  “I’m not sorry for you, Agnes. Not anymore.”

  “I’m not looking for your pity!” Agnes shouted.

  “Don’t you care about the future?”

  “Yes, the future is the thing I care most about.”

  “You could have fooled me,” Martha railed. “You are becoming an embarrassment.”

  “Not everybody feels that way, Mother,” Agnes said, pulling the curtain from the window and pointing to the candles, flowers, and the assortment of Park Slope pilgrims camped outside their door.

  “Something to really be proud of, dear, a motley crew of life’s winners gathered in your honor.”

  “They are people, Mother! And I don’t care what you think or what your friends think.”

  Martha took a step back and sat down. “I’m not trying to insult you, Agnes. I’m just worried sick about you,” Martha explained, nearly slumping, exasperated, into the cushions. “The police, the newspapers, those people out there. I don’t know what happened to our lives.”

  “Sebastian happened.”

  “All that boy brought to us is danger. Death.”

  “Speak for yourself, Mother.”

  “Not just him either. Those two girls, Cecilia and Lucy, I blame them, too! How you ever got mixed up with these people . . .”

  “Mixed up?”

  “They are beneath you, Agnes. Dropouts and drug addicts. Fame whores. I thought you would choose better than that.”

  “I didn’t choose.”

  “Now you are really scaring me,” Martha said. “I swear I should just have you—”

  “Have me what?” Agnes fumed. “Committed?”

  “You are behaving like a crazy person. I don’t even know you anymore.”

  “You never knew me.”

  Agnes bolted for her bedroom and slammed the door. Martha trailed after and stopped in the hallway.

  “One of these days it will be the morgue I’m picking you up from, Agnes!”

  Lucy and Cecilia left the police station and headed toward Lucy’s Vinegar Hill apartment. Heads turned, some walked by, laughing under their breath, others followed, praying silently under theirs. They continued to stroll along Court Street, the rebel rocker and the sometime socialite, past the baby strollers and the double-parked delivery vans, a mismatched pair that somehow fit perfectly together. They looked fierce. Fearless.

  They came across a local park with children playing and sat on a long bench.

  “What do you think he wants with it?” Cecilia asked.

  “To keep it hidden,” Lucy said. “Out of sight, away from those who would revere it.”

  “Why wouldn’t he just destroy it?”

  “Because it’s a trophy for him. It’s power,” Lucy offered. “It represents everything Sebastian was. Strength, courage, and truth.”

  “Everything Frey isn’t.”

  “Now that he has it, he doesn’t need us anymore, so life is about to get a lot more dangerous.”

  “I know.”

  “And he knows we will come for it,” Lucy added. “No matter what.”

  “He’s been goading us,” Cecilia said. “First it was the club fight, then Bill, then those subway jerk-offs.”

  “And now, Perpetua,” Lucy said sadly.

  “He has the cops and just about everyone else fooled,” Cecilia said.

  “Not everyone,” Lucy said reassuringly.

  “We need to get it back.”

  “We
will get it back.

  “Eight dollars,” the gypsy cabbie croaked, his scanner full blast, waiting to pounce on his next fare.

  “Here is fine,” Dr. Frey instructed, requesting to be let out a few door ahead of his final destination. “Put it on the hospital account.”

  The town car rolled to a stop. There was no mistaking he’d arrived at the right spot. Several rows of candles and bouquets of flowers bordered the wrought-iron fence and dotted the foot of the stoop leading up to the Fremont home.

  “You know her?”

  “Why do you ask?” Frey sniffed.

  The driver eyed his passenger in his rearview mirror, making him for another well-heeled cheapskate too distracted by his own life to dig into his pocket for a tip.

  “You don’t look like a lot of the people I drive over here.”

  “How do they look?” Dr. Frey asked, reaching into his pocket for a fifty-dollar bill.

  “Desperate,” the driver said.

  “Looks can be deceiving,” Frey said, handing the money over. “But then again, you didn’t drive me here.”

  “Whatever you say, boss,” the cabbie agreed, flicking the bill upright in his fingers and bringing it to his forehead in salute.

  The sidewalk in front of the house and across the street was empty, a sure sign that Agnes wasn’t home, as Martha had promised him. Frey studied the pop-up shrine, complete with votives, letters, cards, flowers, pictures, pleas, and other offerings. The glow from the candles lit the cuffs of his wool slacks, reflecting off the tops of his recently polished black Italian loafers. It was almost blinding. He looked away, rubbed at his eyes, and proceeded up the steps.

  He reached the top and turned to face the street, unable to shake the feeling of a familiar but unfriendly presence. He surveyed the block from left to right, one side of the street to the other. Instead, all he could recognize was a bell ringing. Not the ominous tolling of a church bell or the frenetic warning of a car alarm, but the thin ting-a-ling of bicycle.

  Frey strained to see the source of the sound through the twilight. Before long, it revealed itself. A boy, riding toward him as fast as his feet could pedal along the gray slate sidewalk. The boy stopped at the foot of the Fremont staircase and looked up at him.

  “Hello, Jude,” Frey greeted, showing none of the surprise he felt. “Sounding the alarm, I see.”

  The boy remained silent but stared directly up at him. Confronting him as best he could.

  “You are a long way from home at this hour.”

  Once again, Jude did not respond, but kept his eyes fixed uncomfortably on Frey’s.

  “Such good eye contact you’re making,” Frey observed. “I always knew you had it in you. Something for us to discuss during your next visit.”

  Jude shook his head no.

  “We’ll see about that, son,” Frey said. “Now you run along.”

  The boy mounted his bike, popped a wheelie over the curb into the street, and pedaled off into the darkness.

  “Be careful, Jude,” Frey called after him. “You could get hurt.”

  The doctor returned to his original business and knocked at the door. A vine of lush magenta roses crept up the side of the brownstone. Gorgeous, like nothing he’d ever seen. The scent of flowers filled his nose as he waited.

  “Oh, Dr. Frey. Thank God, ” Martha said welcomingly.

  “Your roses are quite something,” Frey said.

  “Yes, this is the first time they’ve actually flowered. The vine has been here since we have, but it never produced roses. Until now.”

  Frey was impressed, but didn’t want to show it. “It’s been a while since I’ve made a house call.”

  Martha held the door open wide and ushered him in. “I am so grateful, Doctor. I know your responsibilities at Perpetual Help keep you very busy.”

  “Yes, there is always a lot to do,” he agreed, “but Agnes is a very special case.”

  “I’m so relieved to hear you say that,” Martha offered. “Please come in.”

  Frey handed off his coat and studied the home admiringly as Martha hung it in the foyer closet. The decor was eclectic with a vintage feel. A crucifix hung near the entrance to the hallway, and several plaques with prayers of Saint Francis and other generic but beautiful hand-embroidered “when life gives you lemons make lemonade” type motivational sayings dotted the living room wall. He took a seat on the couch and waited, as he had been trained, for Mrs. Freemont to open up. She fidgeted for a moment or two and grabbed for a tissue from a decorative box that sat on the coffee table between them, dabbing at her eyes.

  “I don’t know what to do anymore,” she began, sobbing quietly. “I’m at the end of my rope with her.”

  “When I didn’t hear from you about a follow-up, I assumed things were improving. For Agnes, and between the two of you.”

  “Not at all,” Martha answered. “She was so resistant to see you because of everything that happened with the investigation, and I guess I was in denial too.”

  “Understandable. I know she blames me for Sebastian’s death.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Dr. Frey. You were the first one to bring her problems to my attention. If I had only listened.”

  “One spends a lifetime building a career, Mrs. Fremont,” Frey explained. “And to see it called into question, especially by those I sought to help, was disconcerting to say the least.”

  “I hope you won’t hold it against her, Doctor. She’s so headstrong.”

  “All is forgiven,” he said.

  “She is very sick; I see that now.”

  “Only now?”

  “I thought the attempt that brought her to the ER was impulsive, but now I’m worried that there is something much deeper going on.”

  “Yes, much deeper,” he agreed.

  “She barely speaks to me, and when she does, it’s only to argue,” Martha complained.

  “May I see her room?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Martha led him down the hallway to Agnes’s private space.

  “The inner sanctum,” Frey said with a smile as he entered.

  “Please don’t touch anything. She’s very sensitive about anyone being in here.”

  “Of course,” he agreed.

  The doctor walked straight to the foot of her bed and took in the homespun, bohemian environment Agnes had created for herself. In many ways, it was from another era, apart from the computer that hummed quietly on her desk. It looked idealistic and romantic, like Agnes. But it also painted a picture of a more complicated, more subtle, more independent girl.

  He stepped to her dresser, checking the rug for his footprints, and ran his fingers along the edge of the top, noting her pictures and perfumes and framed photos of her parents with her as a child. He stared out her window at the old dogwood tree beginning to flower in the yard. Her closet door was open and he pulled each hanging garment closer, studying them. Vintage lace dresses, long flowing skirts, her school uniform, dry-cleaned and ready to wear. All tasteful, all quality fabric and stitching, all—apart from the uniform that she had to wear—romantic. A handwritten note was pinned to the inside of her closet door. It read:

  All truth passes through three stages.

  First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed.

  Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

  Martha watched the doctor pore over it. He tipped his head back and pursed his lips.

  “It’s some sort of biblical saying, from Jesus or a prophet, isn’t it?”

  “No, actually, an atheist. Schopenhauer.”

  Frey was intrigued and alarmed. If he and Agnes agreed on nothing else, they could agree on this one philosophy. It demonstrated that she had a much more comprehensive understanding of her circumstances than he had given her credit for, and a much tighter hold on reality than Martha imagined. It was, he thought, a perfect mission statement.

  He turned to her desk. “Do you mind?” he asked, pointing to her drawer. />
  Martha shook her head, still dabbing at her eyes. “No, it’s okay.”

  Frey reached for the top drawer and pulled on the handle. It was locked.

  “Is there a key?”

  Mrs. Fremont reluctantly shuffled through Agnes’s jewelry box—past oversize turquoise and moonstone rings, vintage bracelets, chunky necklaces, and lockets—and finally produced the key. She handed it to Frey who fitted it into the slot and opened the drawer. He wondered what she was keeping so closely guarded, expecting a diary, press clippings of Sebastian’s murder and the investigation that followed. Perhaps even notes, special requests from those psychos who elevated her to sainthood.

  To his surprise, there were only three things in the wooden drawer: her patient wrist tag from Perpetual Help; an ornate gold vial; and a single vellum page illuminated by hand, the page of Saint Agnes, taken from the Legenda in the old chapel. The police had found a page like it with Sebastian. He’d been shown it during questioning.

  Frey lifted the artifact out carefully, removed his glasses from his shirt pocket, and put them on. In the dim light of Agnes bedroom, the paper became almost translucent, and the gold, green, and red ink seemed to glow, giving the appearance that the words were floating in air before him. As he held the page up closer, a shock ran from his fingertips down his arm and he dropped the vellum to the desk, shaking his hand to regain some feeling.

  “Static electricity,” Frey explained.

  Martha took the page and placed it back in the drawer.

  Frey then picked up the vial to examine it.

  “It’s exquisite, isn’t it?” Martha said of the gold vial. “I have no idea what it is, but she holds it sacred.”

  “It appears to be a Victorian tear catcher,” Frey explained.

  “Oh?” Martha asked.

  “In Victorian times, a woman, usually a widowed bride, would capture her tears for an entire year, the tears she cried over the loss of her husband, and on the anniversary of his death, she would pour the preserved tears onto his grave. It marked her mourning period.”