All The Pretty Dead Girls. John Manning

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      Maybe it was a mistake to come here. Maybe there’s no one who can help me.

      But if it hadn’t all happened to me, I don’t know if I would believe it either.

      Dr. Marshall walked back in, carrying two wineglasses and an open bottle of Shiraz. She poured herself a glass and placed the bottle and second glass on the table. She settled back into her chair. “Help yourself,” she told Sue.

      “No, thanks.”

      “Sue—” Dr. Marshall looked at her with stern eyes. “Surely you’re aware of how fantastic your story is.”

      “Yes. But that doesn’t make it untrue.” She doesn’t believe me, Sue thought, clenching and unclenching her fists.

      “But you don’t have any proof, do you?” Dr. Marshall asked gently. “That’s the problem, isn’t it?”

      “You don’t believe me.” Sue felt her eyes fill with tears of frustration. It had been a mistake to come here.

      “No, that’s not quite true.” Dr. Marshall cleared her throat. “I don’t want to believe you. But I conducted a few investigations of my own before I left the college, and so parts of your story ring true.”

      Sue moved forward in her seat. “Do you know then? Do you know what was going on there?”

      Dr. Marshall took her glasses off and set them on the coffee table. “No, Sue. Like yourself, I have no hard evidence.” She shook her head. “But if your story is true…Sue, it’s frightening. Absolutely frightening. And without proof, I don’t know what we can do. No one will believe this, no one.”

      “My grandparents lied to me. I can prove that.”

      “But that doesn’t prove your story,” Dr. Marshall went on. “Your grandparents could easily explain away why they didn’t tell you the truth. I can think of any number of reasons myself they wouldn’t have told you.”

      Sue stood up and walked over to one of the windows facing the front yard. A truck drove by as she watched. Show her, a voice within her whispered. That’s the only way to make her believe. You have to show her.

      She resisted the voice, as she had any number of times since that horrible day.

      “You really should call your grandparents and let them know you’re all right.” Dr. Marshall was talking behind her. “They’re worried sick about you.”

      “No.” Sue replied. “They aren’t worried about me. Didn’t you listen to anything I said?”

      She turned to face Dr. Marshall, who sat in silence now.

      “I explained why they want to find me.” She laughed bitterly, shaking her head. “It has nothing to do with concern about me.”

      “Sue…”

      She wiped her eyes. “I’ll go. But promise me you won’t call them. You won’t tell anyone I was here.”

      “Sue, you’re exhausted. I can’t just let you go—”

      “You can’t stop me.” Sue was hard, angry. “Promise me you won’t call my grandparents.”

      “All right. I won’t call them, if you don’t want me to. But I insist you not leave here until after you’ve rested a bit, gotten something more solid to eat than a peanut butter sandwich.” Dr. Marshall held up her hands. “And besides, I didn’t say I didn’t believe you, Sue. It’s just a lot—a lot to take in.”

      “Swear to me you won’t call them.” Sue was fierce. “I’ll lay down, take a nap, whatever you want, but swear to me you won’t call them!”

      “All right, I swear.” Dr. Marshall gave her a smile. “I won’t call them. But once you’ve gotten some rest…”

      I never want to see or speak to them again, Sue thought, and no amount of sleep is going to change my mind.

      3

      Sue fell asleep almost the moment her head hit the pillow.

      Dr. Marshall closed the bedroom door and walked back downstairs into the living room. She refilled her wineglass and sat watching the fire for a moment. Picking up the pile of papers from her coffee table, she thumbed through them again. She’d read all this material before. She had most of it in her files and had, in fact, accessed information the news media had never gotten their hands on. She’d even been to visit many of these sites—and some that weren’t included in Sue’s folder.

      She rubbed her forehead, remembering the terrible conversations she’d had with that police officer back in Lebanon, the college town where she’d spent several mostly unhappy years.

      Dr. Ginny Marshall had come back to Hammond to finish her book. She’d been working on Sightings of the Mother now for almost twenty years. All too frequently, she’d get distracted from it, getting stuck in mindless academia and forced onto other, more mundane projects that resulted in other books. But she always came back to this book. No matter how many times she’d given up on it, put it out of her head, boxed up her materials and hidden them away, somehow Sightings of the Mother always came back to her. She called it her personal Vietnam, the book she’d started without an exit plan. It was a joke she’d use when she was still married to Jim.

      Los Zapatos, Mexico—that was where she’d started. Twenty years ago, when she was fresh out of graduate school and looking to start her Ph.D. Her marriage to Jim was still new and fresh, still in the honeymoon phase. He’d passed the bar and was working insane hours at his new job with a firm in Boston. She was teaching a couple of theology courses for undergraduates at Harvard, determined to get her Ph.D., tenure, and a name for herself in her field.

      Research into the sightings of the Virgin Mary was an odd choice for a Ph.D. dissertation. Still, Jim was all for it—back then, her career was just as important to him as his own, even though the trip to Los Zapatos would strain their already strained finances. But it was also an adventure: flying to El Paso, renting a car and crossing the border, driving through the deserts of northern Mexico to that godforsaken little town. The roads were bad and there were times when Ginny feared she’d run out of gasoline in the middle of nowhere. The Mexican people of the region weren’t very friendly to her either; to them, she was the gringa with the bad accent. The Mexicans looked at her with suspicion in their dark eyes. They weren’t used to Americans, despite their proximity to the border. And Los Zapatos itself…

      Calling it a town was a misnomer. It was a village, dirty and poor, with dusty unpaved streets and poor sanitation. The faithful who flocked to the village were better prepared than she was; they’d brought their own food, their own tents and sleeping bags. None of the villagers would speak to Ginny. But the pilgrims, from all over Mexico, they were different. They were happy to tell her about the Virgin and their faith—even if none of them could see or hear the Virgin. They only came to watch as the three young girls had visions, and to pray, and to leave flowers at the Holy Site.

      The parish church was adobe and baked hard by the harsh sun. The priest, Fernando Ortiz, was only too happy to speak to Ginny in his own cultured Spanish. He was very proud of his origins in an upper-middle-class Mexico City family, and even more proud of the tough parish he had been sent СКАЧАТЬ