On Off by Colleen McCullough Page B

it a burning candle in a red glass bowl.
    The first thing Carmine did when he entered a house of grief was to imagine how the bereaved must have looked before tragedy struck. Nigh impossible here, but nothing could alter bone structure. Strikingly handsome, all of them, and all with that café au lait skin color. A little Negro, a little Caribbean Indian, a great deal of Spanish. The parents were probably in their late thirties, but looked a decade and more older than that, sitting like two rag dolls in their own ghastly world. Neither of them seemed to see him.
    “Luís, is it?” he asked the boy, whose eyes were swollen and reddened from tears.
    “Yes.”
    “How old are you?”
    “Fourteen.”
    “And your sisters? How old are they?”
    “Maria is twelve, Dolores is ten, and Teresa is eight.”
    “Your baby brother?”
    “Francisco is three.”
    By now the boy was weeping again, the dreary, hopeless tears that can only fall after too many have gone before them. His sisters lifted their faces from soaked handkerchiefs for a moment, their little bony knees clenched together under the margins of matching plaid pleated skirts like pairs of ivory skulls. Shaken by great hiccoughs, they sat and writhed from the pain of it, the terrible shock that was now wearing itself down to exhaustion after the days of worry and then the news that Mercedes was dead, cut into pieces. Of course no one had intended that they should find that out, but they had.
    “Luís, could you take your sisters into the kitchen, then come back for a minute?”
    The father, he saw, had finally focused on his face, viewing it with confused wonder.
    “Mr. Alvarez, would you rather we postponed this for a few more days?” Carmine asked softly.
    “No,” the father whispered, dry-eyed. “We will manage.”
    Yes, but can I?
    Luís returned, tears gone.
    “Just the same old questions, Luís. I know you’ve already been asked them a million times, but memories can bury themselves and then suddenly come back for no reason, which is why I’m asking them again. I understand that you and Mercedes went to different schools, but I’ve been told that you were great pals. Girls as pretty as Mercedes get noticed, that’s natural. Did she ever complain about being noticed? Followed? Watched from a car or by someone on the other side of the street?”
    “No, Lieutenant, honestly. Boys would wolf-whistle her, but she ignored them.”
    “What about when she worked as a candy striper last summer?”
    “She never said anything to me that wasn’t about the patients and how nice the sisters were to her. They only let her into the maternity hospital. She loved it.”
    He was beginning to weep again: time to stop. Carmine smiled and nodded toward the kitchen.
    “I apologize,” he said to Mr. Alvarez when the boy was gone.
    “We realize that you must ask and ask, Lieutenant.”
    “Was Mercedes a confiding child, sir? Did she discuss things with her mother or with you?”
    “She confided in both of us all the time. Her life pleased her, she loved to talk about it.” A great spasm went through him, he had to cling to the arms of his chair to suppress it. The eyes that stared into Carmine’s own were transfixed with pain, while the mother’s seemed to stare into the depths of Hell. “Lieutenant, we have been told what was done to her, but it is almost impossible to believe. We have been told that Mercedes is your case, that you know more about what happened to her than the Norwalk police do.” His voice went thin with urgency. “Please, I beg you, tell me! Did she — did my little girl suffer?”
    Carmine swallowed, impaled on those eyes. “Only God really knows the answer, but I don’t think God could be so cruel. A murder of this kind needn’t be done to watch the victim suffer. The man may well have given Mercedes drugs to make her sleep through it. Of one thing you can be sure: it was not God’s purpose to make her suffer. If you believe in God, then