The Killing Room (Richard Montanari) - By Richard Montanari Page 0,90

had promised herself she would go through one of these days, weeding out the junk. The problem was that she was a sentimental fool. When they moved back to South Philly a year ago she had thrown out ten or so Hefty bags full of things she had collected over the years, including two full legal-sized boxes of Christmas and greeting cards. She had kept one small carton of cards, an old gift box from Strawbridge’s.

Jessica walked into the kitchen and sat down. She opened the white box. Inside was her first communion rosary, a white rosary in a small leather pouch. There were also a few dozen prayer cards, mostly from St Paul’s.

The two cards in the box that meant the most to her were for her mother and brother. There had been ten years or so between their deaths, but the wounds were still fresh, still open. She stared at the cards for a while, remembering the two services. She was five when her mother was buried. The church was filled with family and friends. Half the PPD showed up, it seemed.

Her brother’s service was different. He had been killed in Kuwait in 1991, and there were members of every branch of the military at St Paul’s that day, everyone in the neighborhood who had ever served their country showed up – men, women, young, old, from WWI through Desert Storm. Some of the old boys wore their uniforms.

Jessica held onto the two cards, made herself a cup of chamomile, took it into the living room. She curled up on the one big comfy chair they had, pulled a throw over her legs. Sometimes it was good to hurt, she thought. When you stop hurting, you start to forget. And she never wanted that.

THIRTY-SIX

Michelle Calvin tried to remember the last time she had been in a church. Was it her sister’s wedding? No, she had been in a church since then, hadn’t she? But when? She couldn’t recall.

As a child growing up in Savannah, Georgia she had been dragged to mass every Sunday, forced to sit in that sweltering, airless church on Margery Street. When she finally ran away at seventeen, never to return, Sunday became a day to do nothing but recover from Saturday night.

And there had been some serious Saturday nights.

She remembered. The last time she’d set foot in a church had been four years earlier, at her grandmother’s funeral. It was held at St Gregory’s, and the turnout was sparse to say the least. Her grandmother didn’t have many friends. Grandma Rita had been what people in her day called a loose woman – three husbands, more boyfriends than she could keep track of, a taste for Jack Daniel’s and a somewhat less than puritanical view when it came to backseat sex.

In many ways, Michelle had turned out the same.

But that was another life.

Now that she was in real estate, now that she had a career with a capital C, it had all changed. Three years earlier, at the ripe old age of twenty-six, she had turned her life around. It had taken one too many scrapes with the law – including a brief stint in jail and two years of AA – but she had finally gotten her act together. She had nearly lost her only daughter in the process, but somehow convinced the court that she had put her wicked ways behind her, and retained custody.

This job – its stability, its respectability, its ticket to better things – meant everything to her. Michelle Calvin was on the rise. And the sky, as they say, was the limit.

Michelle thumbed the combination on the lock box, removed the keys inside, unlocked the side door. Ahead was a short hallway with two doors on the right. The building was old, and had that musty smell of disuse. She walked into the central space which, she imagined, was once the main room of the church.

She hadn’t read up on the property, but she believed that this had one time been used as a chapel. When the old hospital next door was torn down they left this structure standing. Over the past few years it had been used for storage by the archdiocese, but no longer as a place of worship. The archdiocese sold the building to a company headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio who were now looking to unload it.

Michelle checked her watch. The buyer she was supposed to meet was ten minutes late. She’d give it another