Sacred Trust

“Remember, Marti?” I say softly, my lips curving into a slight smile. “Remember the time you stuck hundreds of veil pins all over my bed?” The pins with their round black heads studded the white bedspread, and I had to remove each and every one before I could lie down and go to sleep that night. It was Marti’s revenge for my having short-sheeted her the night before.

Silly practical jokes, and even sillier because we were eighteen, supposedly grown. At twelve, they might have made sense, but…

“We were still so young at that age,” I whisper. “So naive. When did we stop having fun, Marti? And why?”

Children, some say, are pure spirits when they come in, full of joy. Emotions like fear, sadness and guilt are built into them as they grow. By the age of seven, children are determined, at least by the Catholic Church, to have reached the age of “reason.” That’s when, in effect, they take on the guilt and sins of the world. Each year from then on finds the child growing more serious, taking on more “burdens.”

Marti and I must have been late bloomers. We still had some fun left in us when we went off to Joseph and Mary. Both of us came from families that had loved and supported us, given us every chance to explore our lives and what we thought we wanted to give, as well as get. My mother was, and still is, a seemingly happy-go-lucky Irish woman, a bit plump and not more than five feet tall. My dad, a retired salesman, loves her to distraction. He calls her his little “butterball,” and he takes care of her and protects her as if she were made of glass. That’s because, he says, she’s really “laughing on the outside, crying on the inside,” like the old song. She carries old sorrows, he tells me, that she never shows anyone and won’t talk about, not even to him. My mother’s favorite expression is a cliché, but still true: “Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.”

Marti’s parents, both of them gone nearly twenty years now, were different from mine; a bit distant, though just as supportive. Her mother was a literary genius, hailed in the forties for her innovative style of writing and showered with awards. Her father was an artist, also said to be a genius. They died together, recently, in a plane crash in Central America, on their way to help children who had been orphaned there during a catastrophic storm. The entire world grieved when they died.

I can’t help thinking, now, that at least they weren’t here to see their daughter murdered. Life does have its small blessings.

Behind me, a door opens and closes. I feel a draft on the back of my neck. Big, familiar hands cover my shoulders, and I lean back to rest my head on Ben’s chest.

“I didn’t know if you’d come,” I say.

“I thought you would call me.”

When you had time to cool down, he means.

“I might have,” I say, “but something happened.”

He turns me around, and I see that he’s worried. Deep lines run from cheek to mouth, and his forehead is creased. Poor Ben. From photos I’ve seen he was handsome and carefree at eighteen. He’s still handsome now, at least to me, but it’s as if that snapshot of the eighteen-year-old has been sharpened by a unique new photo process called Life. His forehead is so creased from worry, it will be permanently so by the time he’s fifty, and his eyes have taken on an intense, cautious look.

“What happened?” he asks me. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. It’s Murphy.”

His eyes narrow. “What about Murphy?”

“He got out today. Somebody did something to him.”

“What?”

“They, uh…carved the letter A into his back.” My voice catches. “Into his skin.”

He puts his arms around me, holding me against his chest. “Holy shit. Abby, what the hell is going on?”

“I don’t know.” I push him away, afraid that if I start to lose control, I’ll never get it back. Turning to the autopsy table, I say, “I don’t want to talk about it now, okay? What have they found out about Marti?”

He shoves his hands into his pockets, as if not knowing, now, what to do with his arms.

“It’ll take a while to run certain lab tests,” he says. “But Ted says she didn’t die from the nails in her palms. Death by crucifixion can take days, and whoever killed her apparently didn’t want—”

He breaks off abruptly. “You sure you want to hear this? It can keep for now.”

“No, tell me. I want to know.”

“The ultimate cause of death, at least from what Ted can tell without toxicology results, was blood loss from an injury to the brain.”

“What kind of injury?”

He looks uneasy. “I think I should let Ted tell you about that. Okay?”

“I…okay.”

Again he hesitates. “Abby…those odd tiny wounds on her body. You saw them?”

“Yes, they were all over her front.”

“They’re on her back, too. I guess I told you. Anyway, the coroner says it looks like she was beaten with a whip of some kind. Something with small metal balls on it.”

“Dear God.” I look at Marti and my eyes tear, thinking how much she must have suffered. “Ben, what if she was alive, even with the nails in her palms? She must have been alive while she was being beaten. What if she saw and felt everything?”

I reach out to touch Marti’s cheek. It is cold as an ice floe, and I remind myself that this is only her shell. Marti isn’t here. She won’t be, not anymore.

The absolute finality of her death hits me then. Before this, I have been cushioned to some extent by shock. Now the fact that I will never talk to my friend again, never laugh with her again, that she won’t be at the other end of the phone when I call, or leaving messages on my machine, smacks me in the face like a rock.

Ben puts his hands on my shoulders once more and steadies me while I cry. My tears fall onto the white sheet like so many tiny veil pins, though there is no joke now, no responding laughter, no love.

Ted Wright, the coroner, enters the room. A pale, slight man with intelligent blue eyes, he gives me a careful look.

“I asked Ted to talk to you,” Ben says, “but only if you want him to.”

I dry my face with the back of my hand. “I want him to.”

Ted clears his throat, obviously uneasy. Though he deals with death and mangled bodies on a regular basis, he is a kind man, I know.

“Don’t worry, Ted. I won’t fall apart on you.”

His eyes behind the steel-rimmed glasses are filled with sympathy. “I’ll try to keep it simple,” he says, standing beside me to look down at Marti.

“The first thing, and one that struck me as odd right off, is that certain rituals seem to have been observed. Not only the crucifixion, but the scourging—”

He looks at Ben, who nods and says, “I told her.”

Ted begins again. “I’ve done some reading about this, and the killer seems to have deliberately mimicked the kinds of crucifixion deaths that existed in ancient times, including a scourging with a whip. A flagrum, if you will. Such flagrums were constructed of leather thongs with small lead balls at the end of each thong. It is said Jesus of Nazareth and others condemned to crucifixion were scourged in this manner until they were nearly dead. Only after this were they nailed to a cross.”

He sighs and removes his glasses, wiping them on his sleeve.

“Ted, what is it?” I say.

Putting the glasses back on, he shakes his head.

“I’ve never seen anything like this. I’m sorry, Abby. My guess would be that this is some sort of execution-style killing. Possibly to silence your friend, or to send a message to someone else. Perhaps even revenge for something she did. The words that were painted on her chest, in fact, would seem to confirm this.”

Ben tightens his arm around my shoulders, and Ted says, “Are you sure you want me to go on?”

“Yes,” I respond in what sounds amazingly like my ordinary, day-to-day voice. “Go on.”

I want to know everything, suddenly. I want every word burned into my brain so that when and if I ever meet up with the monster who did this to Marti, I will feel perfectly justified in killing him.

“Her back…the skin on her back,” Ted says, “is in strips. And the fact that her feet were nailed to the cross, that she wasn’t simply hung on the cross with strips of cloth, is significant. In reported cases of crucifixion, the very act of hanging—without the feet being affixed to the cross, that is—would cause death to occur rather quickly from suffocation. That is, provided the victim didn’t die first of cardiac failure, blood loss or dehydration. The weight of the body on the cross pulled the arms upward, causing the pectoral and intercostal muscles to be stretched. This led to hyperexpansion of the lungs and an inability to breathe. The victim would attempt to raise himself with his arms to relieve the pressure, which caused muscle spasms. Unable to hold himself in that lifted position, he would die very quickly.”

I close my eyes briefly, but to steady myself, not to ward off the picture. Ted’s recital is working. My anger is growing.

He shakes his head sadly, looking at me, then down at Marti. “In your friend’s case, as I’ve said, her feet were nailed to the cross. I find this significant. In ancient times, when the feet were nailed, it was done primarily to lengthen the victim’s suffering. It gave the victim something to press against—to raise himself against, rather than using his arm muscles. In that way, he was able to breathe momentarily. He would alternate between slumping to relieve pain on the feet and then pressing against his feet, in order to breathe again. The pain caused by pressure on the nailed feet, of course, would have been terrible. Eventually the victim, who in many cases began this terrible ordeal with loss of blood, became too exhausted to lift himself any longer. The respiratory muscles became, you might say, paralyzed. Which led to suffocation and death.”

He sighs. “This is a simplification, of course. There are other medical details…fluid buildup in the lungs and perhaps the pericardium, hypovolemic shock…I could go over these with you, but—”

Ben shakes his head, and this time I agree. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to forget this, even if Marti’s killer is one day caught and put to death. “Thank you, Ted. This is enough.”

Then I remember something Ben said earlier. “Just one thing, Ted. Ben told me you thought Marti had actually died from a brain injury. Not suffocation?”

He takes several long moments to answer. “Without having seen the results of her toxicology tests,” he says with obvious reluctance, “which will take a bit of time, that is my best guess.”

“Are you saying she died from a blow to the head?”

Ted looks at Ben, obviously miserable about having to do this with me. I would take pity on him, but I need to know everything.

“Please, tell me,” I say.

One of Ted’s hands goes to Marti’s forehead. He brushes it gently, as if brushing back her hair, though it’s hidden under the white sheeting. “As I said, I’ve done some reading about ritual murders, in particular religious ritual murders. What I found on your friend…Abby, have you ever heard of trepanning, or trephination?”

“I don’t think so. It doesn’t sound familiar.”

“Well, a trephine is a surgical instrument with sawlike edges. It’s used to cut disks of bone from the skull, in medical practice. The cult of trepanning, or trephination, however, is something else. It’s been around, off and on, for thousands of years, and seems to be making a comeback now, if you will. Followers of this cult believe that drilling a hole into the top of one’s head where the soft spot, or fontanel, was at birth brings a person a feeling of bliss—the greatest high one can experience.”

“Drilling a hole? You can’t mean they do this to themselves?”

“That’s precisely what they do, I’m afraid.”

“Ted, that’s…it’s sick.”

“I agree. However, there does seem to be historical evidence that this has been practiced by thousands of people over the centuries. Some believed it would help mental illness, headaches, epilepsy. Others claimed it gave them special mental powers. In your friend’s case…” He pauses.

“You don’t mean somebody did this to Marti,” I say, shocked.

“I’m afraid it looks that way, Abby. I found a hole the size of a quarter had been drilled into her skull, probably by a corkscrew-like object, such as a trephine.”

Seeing my expression of horror, he stops, waits a moment, then continues. “Unfortunately, the instrument used went too far—into her brain. There was massive bleeding, and I suspect this is what ultimately caused her death. As I’ve said, I can’t be sure, of course, without further tests and examination. But I suspect that whoever did this did it after nailing her to the cross.”

I look down at Marti again, imagining the scalp, then the skull, being drilled through, the horrible pain she must have experienced.

I try to swallow, but there is no saliva, only bile in my throat, and I am shaking. “God, Ted. Why would anyone do such a thing?”

“My best guess,” he says, “is that it fit with the religious aspect of this murder. According to reports I’ve read, priests once performed this act to release evil spirits from people who were thought to be possessed.”

I lean back against Ben, my legs too weak to support me much longer. The bile is in my mouth now, and I fear I’ll vomit. Reaching for a Kleenex in my bag, I hold it to my mouth.

Ted’s glance slides from me to Ben. “You should take her home, now,” he says. “Abby, again, I am very, very sorry. Try to get some rest. Put this out of your mind for a while.”

“Put it out of my mind? Ted, how can I? Who would have done this to Marti?”

“I can’t answer that, I’m afraid. Your friend was a well-known personality in her field. People like that sometimes make strange enemies.”

I can’t imagine Marti ever having made an enemy.

I turn to Ben, anger taking over. “How long, do you think, before you get this monster?”

“I don’t know, Ab. Carmel—the council, city administrator, angry residents—everyone wants this solved, and quickly. The task force is working on it already, including the sheriff’s department, the police departments of every city on the Peninsula, and of course—”

He breaks off. The Secret Service, he was going to say. But he didn’t, and I’m guessing that’s because Ted is here. Ben is supposed to keep the Secret Service’s involvement quiet, apparently.

“I can promise you one thing,” he says, his expression grim as he looks down at my friend. “I’ll do everything I can to find out who did this, Abby.”

I let him lead me to the door, but midway there I turn back.

“Ted, you didn’t say. Was Marti…was she raped?”

He shakes his head. “I’ve found no evidence of sexual attack, Abby. No, everything about this points, as I said, to an execution-style killing. It was the style that counted, I’d guess—perhaps the shock value of the terribleness of it, not the actual cause of death.”

4

I leave Ben outside in the parking lot, climbing into the Explorer and again promising to find Marti’s killer. It is a comforting promise, though I fear that’s all it is. I wonder how long it will be before they start questioning me again.

We haven’t talked further about the name “Abby” at the crime scene, or the letter A carved into Murphy’s back. If that seems odd, I attribute it to Ben’s haste to get back to the station and the case.

At home, I tend to Murphy first, cutting open a capsule of vitamin E and rubbing it gently into the wound on his back to hasten the healing. Still feeling numb, I double-check doors and windows, making sure they’re all locked. Taking a cup of hot chocolate upstairs, I undress for bed, putting on a pair of warm pajamas. Murphy plants himself outside my door, as usual, at the top of the steps. After a few minutes I call him in with me, patting the bed and urging him to lie beside me. Careful not to touch the sore spot beneath his fur, I position my arm around him, seeking to comfort us both while we fall asleep. He licks my hand and looks at me with eyes that seem full of questions for which I have no answers. Sighing, he lies back down.

First thing in the morning I call the vet and he tells me to bring Murphy in at one. I settle him down on a blanket by the fire, fix myself some breakfast, do the dishes, throw some clothes in the wash and sweep the side patio. Then I call Frannie to let her know Murphy’s been found, and tell her what was done to him. She is horrified, and we commiserate about that a few minutes. Finally I call Ben to find out if they’ve made any progress on the case and if there’s any word about Marti’s funeral. The one thing I forgot to ask Ted was how soon he’d be releasing her body. Ben isn’t in, and the woman at the desk assures me she’ll have him call me as soon as she hears from him.

After that I don’t know what to do with myself. All this activity has had only one purpose—to keep me from brooding about Marti. It can’t help things to sit and mourn. Yet, what’s the alternative? To head out on a white charger? I would give anything to be able to avenge my friend’s death. If I knew who killed her, I would probably, at this moment, do him in with my own bare hands. I just don’t know where to begin.

If only she had talked to me about her life more recently, if only I had made more of an effort to be with her, to find out what was going on with her. If only, if only, if only. Could I have done more?

I turn to writing to get my mind off things. It doesn’t seem to help. At the computer in my study, I try to come up with next week’s column, but my mind won’t work. I feel as if I’m sleepwalking, and finally give up struggling for the witticisms my readers have begun to expect, all the funny and sometimes caustic observations about life in Carmel that residents and tourists alike seem to enjoy. Instead, I toy with the keyboard, typing out Marti’s name and then the letter A, over and over, like some kid scrawling her boyfriend’s last name after hers in a geography workbook: Annie Smith. Annie Smith Jones. Mrs. David Jones. Everywoman’s dream…to get that ring, marry that man.

In this case, the occasion is not a wedding but a funeral. Though what the difference is, I swear I don’t know. For me, they both seem related to death or dying.

Well, then, write a piece about weddings.

I write that down and follow it by wondering if old memories still cling to the fabric of our wedding gowns. If I were to go up in the attic and put mine on, would I feel the happiness I felt on my wedding day?

I remember an old movie with someone who donned an antique wedding gown, which took her back to another time when she was someone young and in love.

I stare at the screen and wonder why Marti never married. Was it because of the baby? Did she feel it wouldn’t be fair to have a happy married life, having given up the child that could (or should) have been a part of it? The “should” would be Marti’s; she would think that way, not I.

And so I’m back to “Shining Bright” again. Finally I close this exercise in futility and open my journal file, which I keep under the word Dervish in a hidden document that only someone wise in the ways of computers could find. The path is so obscure as to be Chinese in nature, the point being to keep it from Jeffrey’s prying eyes.

Which can’t be as hard as I make it out to be. Jeffrey doesn’t understand much about computers; he has secretaries for that. Assistants, really, but he won’t call them assistants or even allow them to classify themselves as such on a résumé. To do so would dilute, he has said quite openly, his own position of power.

When the file comes up I see that my last journal entry was six months ago, just after I caught Jeffrey with the bimbo. Since then, I haven’t had the heart to put my life down in black and white. My feelings have been too embarrassing, even humiliating.

When I was a child, I used to pray, “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Later on, in my twenties, I fell hopelessly in love with someone for three years, and took to this writing of journals. Absolutely everything went into them, every foolish, futile longing. When it was over I had a corrugated Seagram’s carton three feet by three, bulging with spiral-bound notebooks from the drugstore that were filled with largely unreadable ramblings, scrawled in blue ink from a ballpoint pen. For years, I toted this damn box with me every time I moved, like a turtle unwilling to shed its shell. I’d go zooming down a freeway with this stupid thing in my trunk, scared to death I’d be killed by some idiot suffering road rage and my survivors would end up reading all that dross. I couldn’t let go of the dross, however, neither the journals nor the man. Thus my nightly prayer became, “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my journals to take.”

Now I know that there are more ways of dying than one can conceive. Further, there are days when there is no Lord, or at least he’s checked out for the day.

Jeffrey came along after that three-year journal-writing madness, on one of those Lordless days. My heart still had a hole in it, and my car still had that box in its trunk. I just didn’t think about it so much anymore, thoughtlessly shoving it aside to make room for groceries every Friday night. Then I met Jeffrey. And a whole new literary era began.

Because heaven was closed that day, I fell head over asinine heels in love with Jeffrey Northrup, right off the bat. And because I still believed in journals, I spread the craziness of our lives across the clean pages of a bright new book, as if making up the bed of my heart with fresh new sheets. In the beginning, I wrote down all the “I know he really loves me” stuff and the “I’ll die if he doesn’t remember my birthday” madness.

The irony is, Jeffrey is dead now, not I. Oh, he walks and talks. But for me the funeral took place six months ago.

I met my husband sixteen years ago at the Pebble Beach Golf Club. I was down from San Francisco having lunch with a couple of other women, all three of us in our early twenties. They were friends of mine and secretaries, as Jeffrey would say, though they did all but run Monterey for their employers. I was working as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and had a pretty good career going. I’d come down for lunch on a day off and to soak up some sun.

Jeffrey was at the club that day playing golf. At two hundred dollars a game, that set him far above us. But he came in all sweaty and smiling, especially when he saw us. Not that he knew us. Jeffery, I later learned, always smiled at good-looking women.

I counted myself among them, at that time, the good-looking women. I had dark hair that fell to my shoulders in shiny waves, and huge brown eyes. There was something exotic about me, I’d been told by some. Not that you could prove it by me. I still had those mental tapes from childhood, the ones that said I couldn’t do anything right, my hair looked like a rat’s nest, and I’d never amount to much.

How I got those tapes, where they came from, is a mystery to me still. Certainly not from my parents, who supported me in every way. Sometimes I think those beliefs, running over and over in my head, came with me from another life, that I carried them in when I was born.

Which presumes a belief in reincarnation—something I’d rather not think about. The very idea of having to do all this over again and again and again makes me cry, at least on those days when it doesn’t make me laugh.

Jeffrey made me laugh. At first, he said truly funny things, a born comic who never made it onstage but went, instead, into politics and business. Then, later, he made me laugh in another way. Oh, I know I shouldn’t have. But he’d come into the bedroom stark naked with that—that appendage sticking out ten inches if it was one, like some old-time romance writer’s “flaming sword,” and he’d look at me with those sultry eyes and rasp, “You really want it, don’t you?”

And I couldn’t help it. His hair would be wet from the shower, black curls clinging to his forehead, and my eyes would travel from that to the green eyes I had once loved, the aristocratic nose, the chest a thicket of graying black hair, and I’d laugh.