Page 74 of Coram House

Karen takes a long sip. “No. I don’t see it.”

There’s no waver in her voice, no hesitation. It wasn’t the answer I was expecting. Not by a long shot.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Look, at the House, Fred was Sister Cecile’s dog. She’d tell him what to do and he’d do it.Fetch that boy. Lock her in the attic. Take away his food. Tear up her book.”

“It’s been decades,” I say. “Things change. People change.”

Karen looks at me with sympathy, like I’ve said something very naive.

“No, honey. No they don’t.” Her expression darkens. “And definitely not in Fred’s case. You know, I used to drive by her house sometimes—Sister Cecile, Jeannette Leroy, whatever she was calling herself.” She smiles and shakes her head. “That’s a lie. I used to go all the time. I’d park on her street and just sit there. I didn’t care if she saw me. I wanted her to see me. To be scared. But she always acted like I wasn’t there. The last time I went was, oh, I don’t know, maybe fifteen years ago. Summer. I got there and parked as usual. And there was Fred, up on a ladder, fixing her roof. I thought I was hallucinating. He didn’t ignore me like her. He looked down at me in the car and got this big smile on his face. Then he waved at me. That asshole waved. I never went back.”

“He was fixing her roof?”

“What I’m saying is—he loved her. She saved him. He never would have hurt her.”

I absorb what she’s saying. It doesn’t fit. Rooney was so angry when he showed up at her funeral. The story seemed so clear. The boy who was abused. Revenge coming thirty years later. But maybe this is actually more plausible. Maybe they had a fight. Maybe he never intended to kill her.Then why did he take the canoe?Why go to all that trouble to hide his presence there if he didn’t plan to kill her? A headache is beginning to throb behind my eyes.

“He dug up Father Foster’s bones,” I say. “And took them to the dump.”

Karen tilts her head back and laughs until she’s gasping and has to use her sleeve to dry the tears streaming down her face. “Oh, that’s almost enough to make me like him,” she says.

I see no point in holding anything back now, so I tell her about Sister Cecile’s funeral—how Rooney showed up drunk, taunted Bill Campbell, and rubbed it in the face of the police. Karen nods along,looking thoughtful. “It’s interesting,” she says, “that he’d do it now, I mean. After so much time.”

She blinks a few times and then murmurs, “That creepy fucker.”

“What do you mean?”

“It makes sense,” she says. “Sister Cecile hated Father Foster—never stopped trying to get rid of him.”

I frown. “She hated him? Why?”

“Because he was raping little kids—not that anyone else seemed to have a problem with it. It was the only good thing about that psycho bitch. She put a stop to all that.”

So it’s true. It feels like someone’s turned the world on its axis, so that the sky is the ground and the ground is the sky. Sister Cecile, who used to strip children naked and make them stand in the snow for talking back, who dangled a girl out a window as punishment, who beat children and starved them and locked them in the attic. Who pushed a little boy out of a boat and watched him drown. She really was the one who stopped Father Foster from preying on the children.Plenty of us have good and bad in us.

“Spare the rod, spoil the child,” Karen says. “That part’s in the Bible, so it was just fine with her to knock us around. But the Bible has a few things to say about sodomy too.”

“Karen, did Father Foster abuse Fred Rooney?”

Karen looks surprised. “Oh, yes, definitely. I think Fred was one of his favorites.”

“So the fact that he dug up the bones—or the fact that he dug them up now, I guess—”

“It was a present for her, I think. One last present.”

Unease trickles down my spine—like someone cracked an egg on my head. All the evidence is there. Rooney had access, a history of violence, and what looked like motive too. It all fit together seamlessly like a puzzle. Or at least I thought it did. Now I’m not so sure.

But all of this is based on Karen’s memory, and I’m still not sure I can trust it.

“Karen,” I say, “in your deposition, you talk about a girl who was pushed out of a window. Do you remember that day?”

Karen gets a faraway expression. “I was washing the windows that morning with Eleven.”

Eleven. She means Sarah Dale.

“And the other girl. It kills me that I can’t remember her name. Sister Cecile came in, on the rampage about something. She yelled at us about how the windows were still filthy. The other girl was standing on the windowsill already. To reach the top panes.” Karen mimics reaching up.

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