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  “I think you will find Colleen Galaher extremely interesting. She has many of the same qualities you see in Kathleen,” Rosetti said. “Go and you will see. Please, go. They could be sisters.”

  Chapter 57

  LESS THAN TWELVE HOURS later, we were in Ireland, and I was trying my best to focus on a whole new set of problems.

  I had said good-bye to Kathleen and her parents, and I also spoke to Cardinal Rooney, who asked me to cooperate with Rome as much as I could. So here I was . . . about to meet the second virgin, wondering what it all could possibly mean. And I was carrying my gun.

  We scooted down a country lane in a tinny little car on the wrong side of the road. Justin seemed more at ease on his home ground and apparently was enjoying it to some extent.

  I took comfort in his joy, and also marveled at the solemn beauty of the countryside. But mostly, I couldn’t help feeling concerned and afraid. Too many bad things had happened already.

  After nearly two hours of driving through low, striking hills colored a hundred different shades of green, we came to a gray wooden road marker for the town. Next to the town’s name, GOD’S COUNTRY was printed in bold black letters. At another time, the irony of the words might have made me smile, but not now.

  Turning down a narrow paved lane, we passed a drove of villagers: twenty men all dressed in earthy brown suits, plaid caps, and black boots that were obviously the work of the same cobbler.

  Twenty pairs of eyes casting suspicious stares at our car as we drove by.

  “What an odd group of men,” I commented. “They make me think of the Druids.”

  “The last real peasantry in all of Western Europe,” Justin said with a thin smile that expressed either pride or moderate embarrassment. “We’ve officially entered Maam Cross.”

  “I feel like we’ve stepped into a medieval hamlet,” I told him.

  “We have,” he answered.

  There were a few one-room stores on the main street of the village. Soot-stained advertising posters were stuck up on the walls: Player’s Please, Guinness for Greatness. A livery stable and garage housed in one building. A row of stone cottages, freshly tiled and painted.

  Justin explained that inside each of the cottages there would be a ten-by-ten-foot family room filled with souvenirs, a television, and numerous religious pictures. The bedrooms would all be cramped and tiny. The interiors would be badly lit and perfumed with the heavy smell of a turf fire.

  I knew the real estate review was nervous chatter on Justin’s part. The chatter abruptly stopped when we saw the graffiti on the fast-food hamburger joint that looked so out of place in the center of town.

  The letters were angry, red brushstrokes high up against a freshly whitewashed wall: Colleen sucks fairie dicks!

  “Aahh, that explains everything,” Justin said and smirked as we zoomed on ahead.

  Chapter 58

  THE GALAHER HOUSE was about a mile and a half east of town. Justin and I went directly to it, almost as if we’d been there before.

  I kept getting the feeling that none of this was in our control, and it frightened me in ways I’d never experienced. That morning, the Herald Tribune had carried stories of a terrible famine in India, a plague in Mexico, the polio outbreak in the United States. The stories reminded me of a scary book I had read years before called The Hot Zone. Ebola had almost seemed the work of devils.

  As we pulled into the graveled car park, clouds snuffed out the sunshine, casting the tiny thatched and whitewashed cottage into gloom. There was nothing welcoming about the house, the yard, even the walkway.

  “That’s a peat fire you smell,” Justin said as we climbed out of our rented car. “The smoke can be stifling. You won’t forget that smell.”

  What I wouldn’t forget was how I felt as we started to walk toward the cottage. We were in Ireland, by God. We were about to meet the second virgin, and our opinion was important to solving a great mystery.

  “Colleen’s father died a year or so ago. A regular Finn McCool sort of man,” Justin said. “Her mother was felled by a stroke. She’s nearly senile as well — at forty. She’s in her bed most days. The doctors out here are not terribly sophisticated. It’s not the best situation for the girl. Not like life with the Beaviers.”

  “Kathleen’s life isn’t an easy one,” I said, feeling a little defensive for some reason. “Not anymore it isn’t.”

  “I know that, Anne,” Justin said. “I like Kathleen very much. Now we have to find out some things about Colleen.”

  “Like how the Church in Ireland has been able to keep this a secret?” I said.

  Justin shrugged. “That’s no surprise to me. But I know the Irish Church. If Jesus Christ had been born on this island, the word still might not be out.”

  There was a rusting iron gate in the stone wall surrounding the cottage and it creaked as it opened under Justin’s hand.

  At that exact moment, the blue-painted cottage door swung open as well. A nun, a large, severe-looking woman, her black habit blowing in the soft breeze, stood there before us.

  “I’m Sister Katherine Dominica,” she announced curtly. “Who might you be?”

  We introduced ourselves, and the nun nodded her head. She said she was expecting us. Dun-colored hairs peeked out from under her stiff white cap. She eyed us distrustfully but showed us inside.

  The sister looked as forbidding as a crow and that was a fact. But I forgot her as soon as my eyes adjusted to the low light in the cottage.

  There was a movement at the fireplace. A girl stood up from a low stool to greet us.

  She wore a printed housedress under a frayed lace apron and had a striking mass of dark red hair curling down her back.

  “Hello!” she said with obvious delight and surprise. “I’m so glad you’re here. It means the Church believes in me.”

  The sunshine that had been obliterated by the clouds overhead had materialized right here. The smile on that girl actually illuminated the dim and dreary interior of the cottage.

  I stared at her, not meaning to be rude. But she would have drawn stares anywhere she went.

  Colleen Galaher had that coloring we think of as stereotypically Irish: transparent white skin, apple cheeks, clear green eyes, and, of course, her marvelous titian hair. But her radiant features transcended the stereotype.

  I’ll call it as I saw it. She was an exceptionally lovely girl — an exceptionally lovely girl who was hugely pregnant.

  Fourteen years old, I couldn’t help thinking. The exact age of Mary of Nazareth when Jesus was born. Father Rosetti had impressed that point on both of us. Did he believe this girl was the true virgin?

  “Could I get tea for anyone?” the girl asked in a sweet, shy voice. “Some homemade soda bread after your long journey from America?”

  I found that I liked Colleen Galaher instantly. Who wouldn’t? And that made me feel as if I were betraying Kathleen.

  No wonder Father Rosetti needed help, I thought. This was an impossible problem.

  Both girls seemed perfect.

  Chapter 59

  COLLEEN IMMEDIATELY IMPRESSED on us that she wanted to cooperate in any way she could. She had been hoping and praying that the Church would send someone.

  We walked single file with her down a solitary mud path that twisted along behind the Galaher cottage. She said it was a good place to talk, and listen.

  “It’s very pretty out here,” I said to the girl.

  “Thank you,” she said and seemed proud of the land. “I think it is, too. People around here say that it’s God’s country.”

  Colleen was taking the lead. I followed, and Justin brought up the rear of our march along this dull, uneven seam sewn into the otherwise bright green countryside.

  I concentrated on Colleen, and what she was telling us. She definitely wanted us to hear her story.

  “What do you want to know?” she turned and asked in the softest, sweetest voice.

  Is she a little too good to be true? I w
ondered. But wasn’t that true of Kathleen as well?

  Two perfect girls — a perfect puzzle.

  “Why don’t you just start at the beginning,” I suggested. “What’s the very first thing that you remember pertaining to the pregnancy?”

  “I can tell you that one. It was probably too late to be out alone,” she said, “but I often come to Liffey Glade by myself. That’s what happened on the night it all began.”

  Fields became sparse woodland, then dense thicket. When the gloom was thick around us, we came suddenly to a clearing within the trees.

  Colleen pointed to a flat rock jutting out over the edge of a small stream. “I was right over there,” she said, “watching the moonlight glinting on the water, when I heard their voices.”

  “Who did you hear, Colleen?” Justin asked. “What voices?”

  A shadow crossed the young girl’s face, as if her peace of mind had been breached by an ugly memory.

  “It was two men and a boy around that bend,” she said. “I thought they were trapping rabbits. Or perhaps fishing in the stream. I called out — and startled them. They were doing something wrong,” said the young girl, her voice catching in her throat, coming out so ragged that it was hard to understand her. “They didn’t want me to see.”

  “What kind of wrong?” I asked. “Did you see? What were the men doing?”

  Colleen coughed, then cleared her throat. Her voice became a nervous whisper. “They had their pants down to the ground and one of them — a man as big as a bear — had his mouth on the boy . . . down there. The boy is in my school. The other man was someone I knew. A priest from another town. And he was touching himself.”

  Colleen suddenly started to cry. Big tears raced down her cheeks. She pushed them away with the back of her small hand. The tears seemed genuine.

  “The priest recognized me and began to come at me. So I started to run. They did too. I could hear them breathing. I could smell them. I ran as fast as I could.

  “The bigger man grabbed me by the waist and he pulled me down. I hurt myself. The priest covered my mouth and nose so that I couldn’t scream — there was no air to breathe! Then it seemed like there were so many of them, not just the two men and the boy. It seemed like there were twenty or thirty, more than I could count.

  “Then there was a loud cracking, louder than the loudest thunder. Big daggers of light turned the sky yellow and white!

  “The men vanished. However many there were. Just scrambled up the scree, leaving me lying alone, scraped up and bleeding in the rain that came up suddenly and fell in the glade.”

  Colleen pointed across the clearing. An enormous oak was split in two. The damage looked recent. Half of the tree still stood, while the other half lay on the ground. I could see the fire marks that had scorched the length of the trunk.

  “They didn’t get me,” said the young girl fervently. “The stories about me are all false, all lies. I got away from them untouched. I am a virgin, I swear it,” Colleen said, cupping her belly with both hands.

  “So how did this happen to me? How could it be?” she asked us.

  As we stood in the gloaming in this fairy glen, I noticed the same pinkish glow that I’d sometimes seen emanating from Kathleen now shining faintly around this child. Could Justin see it? Could it be a nimbus?

  I turned to him and saw to my shock that tears were flowing down his face. He could see the glow too. My God, what did it mean? What was the strange light?

  “If you don’t believe me, please ask my doctor,” Colleen said. “He’s right here in Maam Cross. He’ll tell you the truth.”

  I believed her. I believed every word. And so did Justin.

  And we didn’t need the testimony of Dr. Murphy.

  Early yesterday morning, Father Rosetti had pressed Colleen’s dossier into my hands. It included the medical report from Trinity Hospital in Cork. At the Vatican’s behest, they had sent a doctor to examine Colleen.

  I’d read the report myself. So had Justin.

  Colleen Galaher was eight and a half months pregnant.

  And she was definitely a virgin.

  “Please help me,” she whispered. “I’m a good girl.”

  Chapter 60

  Portsmouth, Rhode Island.

  IT WAS HALF PAST nine, and the three friends were having a round or two of cocktails at Neely’s infamous Lawn Bar. Jamie Jordan returned from the head, and he sauntered up to the crowded bar where Chris Raleigh and Peter Thompson were hunched over cold, foaming drafts of Samuel Adams, Boston’s finest brew, or so the ads proclaimed. On the color television overhead, the blue-and-red-clad Rangers were pulverizing the local-favorite Boston Bruins.

  Jamie knew from the slippery looks they gave him that his dear pals had been talking about the night at Sachuest Point. What else? That royally pissed him off. He pushed his hand back through his long blond hair.

  “I told you that we don’t talk about that night. That means we don’t talk about it. That means you two dickheads don’t talk about it while I’m in the head.”

  Chris Raleigh rolled his dark eyes. “Paranoid asshole. You’re loaded, too. You’re drunk. Do you believe him?” Raleigh turned to Peter Thompson.

  Jamie Jordan’s face turned bright red. “Thompson, were you talking about that night or what? If you weren’t I’ll buy the next round.”

  “Shots or beers?” Thompson said, trying to relieve the potentially bad scene the best way he could.

  The three of them had been inseparable since their grammar-school days in Newport. That’s why the friends were worried. They knew Jamie. Nothing had ever gotten to him like this. And now everything got to him.

  “Were you talking or not?” Jamie asked again. The veins in his forehead bulged out against bone and seemed to throb.

  “We need to talk about it, buddy. This whole thing has gotten out of hand. In case you haven’t fucking noticed,” Thompson said and pointed an index finger at his friend. “Do you know how out of hand this has gotten? We need to do something. We need a plan.”

  Without thought or warning, Jamie Jordan hit his friend hard in the chest with a closed fist. The dark-haired boy reeled off his chair and slipped down onto the puckered linoleum floor.

  Hizzoner Tom Neely, proprietor, grabbed an old hardwood walking stick and waved it high over his bar. “You petty hoodlums cut the crap here or I’ll brain the lot of ya!”

  Neely’s went dead quiet. The older workingmen glared down toward the corner where the ruckus had erupted. The three young friends were tall and muscular and looked to be in their early twenties. Each of them carried false IDs, which got them into most area bars.

  Jamie Jordan spun away from his friends and lunged toward the front door. He bumped into a few ossified regulars, who did nothing. Jordan was six foot two and close to two hundred pounds. His friends were just as big.

  Outside, with the sea breeze whipping across his face, Jamie Jordan thought about going right back in and wiping the floor with Thompson and Raleigh. Oh, Christ! He smacked his palm hard. Kathleen Beavier was the one he ought to wipe out.

  He remembered how he’d had to practically get down on his knees and beg the Ice Queen for a date. He’d driven over to Salve Regina to meet the Catholic schoolgirl getting out of class on four different afternoons. He’d even worn his best Nautica sweater and ironed his black cords.

  There was something different and special about Kathleen Beavier, he had to admit. Jamie had wanted her more than he’d ever wanted any girl. Not just for the sex, either, though the blond bitch was sexy. Jamie had just wanted to be around Kathleen. She had it. He had thought that he loved her.

  Until that night at Sachuest Point.

  Where something bad had happened.

  Chapter 61

  JAMIE JORDAN FIRED up the motor of his expensive Mercedes SLK. He twisted the radio to full volume and jerked the neat yellow sports car out of Neely’s half-full parking lot. He yelled out the words of a Smashing Pumpkins song. His friends were rig
ht about one thing — he was bombed out of his mind.

  As he motored up the steep cobblestoned hill behind Neely’s, he angrily thought back to the night of January 23, when he’d taken Kathleen to the Salve Regina dance. Jamie’s own parents were pretty wealthy, but he’d still felt intimidated as he drove up to the Beavier house that night. He’d worn a black tux and knew he looked great, but he was still unsure of himself. Charles Beavier had answered the front door and invited him in. He’d been preoccupied, rude actually, talking on his cell phone and barely giving Jamie a nod.

  Jamie had cooled his jets in the living room and tried not to take the slight personally. A few minutes later, Kathleen appeared. Not half an hour late, the way a lot of girls liked to make you wait around for them. He appreciated that and his mood softened.

  Actually, the sight of Kathleen had taken Jamie’s breath away. She wasn’t just another pretty schoolgirl — she was drop-dead gorgeous.

  She had on a sleek, pale-green dress instead of one of those puffy gowns that made girls look so ridiculous on prom night. She wore a silver headband in her long blond hair. She looked like some kind of royalty, Jamie thought.

  Unfortunately, the dance at Salve Regina was even worse than he had imagined it would be. The band was a stiff, middle-aged quartet that played at all of the pitiful Newport club and debutante teas. Besides that, there was an old-fashioned wooden running track that circled the gym one story above the dance floor. From there, flocks of Carmelite nuns watched over the dance like hawks from beginning to end. The nuns seemed to have a knack for laughing and tapping their feet at all the wrong times.

  He’d been desperate to leave the dance after the first five minutes. Still, maybe Kathleen was worth all this torture.

  There was supposed to be a fancy party after the dance — engraved invitations had been sent out: Come to a great bash at Elaine Scaparella’s house. Kathleen had been pressing against him all night, tantalizing him with her CK perfume and the delicious hint of cleavage showing below her neckline.