Read Online In the Still of the Night by Dorothy Salisbury Davis - Free Book Online Page A

he said. “He’s made up a story—a street story, common as dirt, as close as he could come to telling you what’s in his mind.”
    “About us?” Kate said, incredulous.
    “You asked me to tell you, and now you’ll listen to the whole thing. I can’t say what triggered his imagination, but he knew from the moment he saw our hands touch when I took the scissors from you that there was something going on between us.” Morrissey threw up his hands. “Maybe he’s warning you—danger ahead! I don’t know.”
    “Don’t be angry, Dan.”
    “I’m not angry. I’m ashamed, if you want to know.”
    Ashamed, Kate thought, another word for guilt.
    “I was a child just like him,” Morrissey went on. “In adolescence I grew in prurience. My father tried to beat it out of me. Instead he beat it in. I fled to the priesthood. I thought it was my penance. It was my salvation.”
    Kate slipped down from the table and offered her hands, caution be damned. He shook his head, smiled a little and left her. She heard the click of the tunnel door.
    She sat again for a few minutes, thinking.
    Had their affair been inevitable, a kind of Satanic justice to be satisfied after all these years? And if it was over, was he free now of the demon guilt forever? It was not in the nature of man. Or woman. She thought of the phantom face that had seemed to pursue her, to accuse her. No. That was not its mission. It followed, sometimes with a rhythmic beat, like the Hound of Heaven.
    She left the school and went into the church by the side door, the only one left open at that hour of the day. The high-intensity lights were focused on the Crucifixion mural, the artist himself straddling a plank in the scaffolding as he worked overtime. He was almost finished. With the Lord’s face and one of the women’s restored, Melodosi was studying his work on the other Mary. Even before he looked down at her, Kate knew his half-familiar face to be that of the phantom she had chosen to pursue her.
    She moved on to a pew in a darkened place. It had been a long time since she had prayed with her heart and mind, and on her knees. A simple prayer: Lord, I need help. She left the church determined to go to the police with José’s story, but when she reached the street, she saw two nuns waiting to be admitted at the St. Ambrose convent door. She got to them in time to enter the building with them, and very shortly Sister Josephine Reilly came to her in the parlor. As soon as the nun saw who it was, she said, “I know, it’s about José Mercado again.”
    “I just have a question,” Kate said. “Was he absent from school this morning?”
    “No,” the young nun said. “As soon as I saw him in first class, I sent him to the infirmary, but bad luck that it was, the nurse was out today. I cleaned him up a bit myself between classes.”
    “Did he tell you what happened to him?”
    The nun gave a great rolling shrug. “I think he said his brother beat him up—was it for talking back to their mother? Who knows with José?”
    Who knows indeed, Kate thought.
    A week passed before she heard from Morrissey. He called to say he was going upstate to the Trappist monastery on retreat. “Kate …” She could hear the deep intake of breath.
    “You don’t need to say anything, Dan.”
    “I’m grateful to you for understanding.”
    “And I to you, Father Morrissey.”

The Puppet
    O VER THE RING OF the doorbell came the cry, “Help me, Julie … Let me in!”
    Julie, out of bed before she was rightly awake, pulled on her robe and ran, barefoot, to the front of the shop. It was half-past one in the morning. She unbolted the door and opened it on the latch. Her upstairs neighbor, Rose Rodriguez, was shivering in a silvery dress that glowed in the stark Manhattan street light. Julie let her in, then bolted the door and lighted a lamp.
    “I don’t know where Juanita is. She’s not in her bed. I thought maybe she comes to you?”
    Julie shook her head. “Sit