Authors: Linda Barlow
And you certainly wouldn’t waste your valuable time and energy on this obsession.
She glanced again at the tiny clock on the dashboard. It was now 4:13.
Dammit.
Barbara Rae always rose a few minutes before the dawn. This was a legacy from the days when she had worked in the fields,
mindlessly picking whatever fruits and vegetables were ripe and ready for market, and grateful for the work, backbreaking
though it was. There in the fields amongst the ripening fruit, she would raise her face to the brightening sky and seek answers
to the questions that had tormented her from childhood: Why is life so full of suffering? Is there anything to hope for? Why,
oh why, do I feel such pain? How can I relieve the sufferings of others?
It had been many years before she had received any answers, and more still before she had dared to believe them.
At night, before sleep, she had no questions. Her nighttime prayer was silent, meditative. In the darkness she was receptive—she
kept very still and listened in case God had something to say to her.
But in the mornings she questioned God. Interrogated Him sometimes.
On Friday morning, she rose slightly later than usual. Her limbs felt stiff and heavy as she got out of bed, and there was
a faint humming in her ears like the echo of a distant wind. She dressed quickly and simply, as was her habit. She would shower
later.
The morning was chilly, so she slipped into a jacket before she walked down the sidewalk to the cathedral. She hurried because
she knew that a few of the workers arrived very early in the morning, to catch the first light.
Although the sky was still dark, there were signs of a brightening in the east. Barbara Rae treasured each dawn, and thanked
God each morning that she had lived to see another. The world was surely a marvelous place! Despite all the sorrow of life—and
all the evil that lurked in the human heart—the endless richness and variety of the world never ceased to delight her. It
was so very
exciting
to be alive!
As she quietly entered the construction site through the south transept entrance, the humming in her ears grew louder. She
shook her head, wondering if she was getting a cold.
As soon as she was within the walls of the cathedral, however, Barbara Rae began to have the eerie feeling that, despite the
early hour, she was not the first one to arrive this morning. She stood silently, letting her eyes adjust to the pervasive
darkness. Although nearly blind in the unlit structure, she felt her other senses grow more acute. “Hello?” she said softly.
“Is someone there?”
A great hollow silence engulfed her.
* * *
Annie was awakened by the
trilling
of the phone. She groped for it. “Hello?” she said groggily.
“It’s me, Sam.”
She squinted at the clock. No, she hadn’t overslept—it was just a couple of minutes after seven. Her alarm didn’t ring until
seven-fifteen.
“Hi, Sam. It’s a little early.”
“Yes, I know, I’m sorry,” he said in a clipped voice that was very unlike him. “I’ve just had a call from the police. There’s
been an accident at the construction site. One of the workmen has been killed.”
“Oh no!”
“Apparently he fell from the scaffolding to the cathedral floor, some eighty feet below. The cops are there now, and they
want to talk to the people in charge. Since you’re one of them—”
“Sam, for God’s sake, who was it?”
“I’m afraid it’s the foreman of the crew of craftsmen we brought over from Italy to install the stained glass.”
“Not Giuseppe?”
“Yes.” There was a slight pause. “Annie, I’m so sorry. I hate to wake you with such awful news.”
“Dear God,” she whispered. She leaned forward, clutching the phone in one hand and wrapping her free arm around her suddenly
aching middle. “When did it happen? How?”
“No details yet. But you’d better get over there. The police will want to talk to you—well, to all of us.” Again he paused.
“When someone dies suddenly… you know how they are.”
“I’ll go immediately,” she said. “Has his family been
notified? He has a sister here, and Ludovico, the nephew, who used to work for us—”
“I believe the cops are taking care of that now. They have some questions. I’m on my way down there too—to the site, I mean.”
They have some questions,
“Sam, it
was
an accident, right?”
“What else could it be?”
Right,
Annie thought in confusion.
What else could it be?
She dressed rapidly feeling numb. Giuseppe dead? That talented, vital, friendly man? God. What a waste!
Had Sam called Darcy? she wondered. She didn’t hear any sounds from next door. She went out onto the front porch and rapped
on her friend’s door, but Darcy didn’t answer. She hadn’t been home last night, either. Annie had stopped by after getting
home from Matt’s to assure her that she hadn’t been raped or murdered after all.
She shivered. No,
she
hadn’t been murdered.
But a wonderful man was dead.
Annie arrived at the construction site just before eight o’clock and found an ambulance and several police cars parked with
the construction trailers. Several workers in hard hats were standing around, talking nervously to one another and smoking
cigarettes. Yellow crime-scene tape had been used to cordon off the entire site, and a policewoman prevented her from entering
the cathedral.
“Sam?” she said shakily. “What’s going on?”
He was talking to a police detective outside the south transept entrance. As soon as he saw her, he held out his arms. She
went into them and he hugged her convulsively. Then he stepped back, shaking his head sadly. He looked exhausted. His golden
hair looked dull, almost gray.
“I’m so sorry, Annie. I know how important all these workmen have been to you, and Giuseppe in particular.”
She moved back into his arms and for a moment clung to him. “Do they know how it happened?”
“I’m not sure, but it looks like they’re treating it as a crime scene, at least until they have evidence to the contrary.
I guess they have to make sure that Giuseppe wasn’t pushed off the scaffolding or something. The medical examiner is in there
now,” he added, nodding at a coroner’s van parked at the curb. “The cops have been in there making perimeter searches for
physical evidence.”
“Who would
push
somebody off the scaffolding?”
“Shit, Annie, I don’t know. I assume they’re just being cautious, doing their jobs, all that sort of thing.”
He looked so distraught that Annie laid a gentle hand on his arm to comfort him.
“Does anybody know exactly what happened?” she asked. “Were any of the rest of the crew working with Giuseppe?”
Sam shook his head. “It was too early. Apparently he was here alone.”
Annie nodded. Giuseppe typically arrived earlier than the rest of the crew.
“I think Barbara Rae was here, though,” said Sam. “Praying or something. Or maybe she’s the one who found him. She’s in there.”
He pointed to one of the trailers. “They’re interviewing her now.”
As he spoke, the trailer door opened and Barbara Rae emerged looking grim and tired. The police detective, a tall, expressionless
woman, pointed to Sam. “You next, Mr. Brody, please.”
Annie rushed to Barbara Rae Acker’s side. The older woman embraced her. “The poor man,” she said in her deep contralto. “He
was a master craftsman and a good family man. It is a heavy loss.”
“Barbara Rae, what happened? Did you witness the accident? What time did it happen?”
“I didn’t see him fall, but I did discover his body,” she said. “I came here to pray. I thought I was alone.”
“You were praying in a construction site? I know it’s going to be a church—your church—but still…”
“I know it sounds a little strange, but I come here often to pray. I think of it as, well, nurturing the sacredness of the
place right from the start. Asking God to come here and feel at home, as it were. Making it a comfortable place not only for
humanity but also for the divine.”
Well, maybe God hadn’t shown up yet, Annie thought. Letting somebody die in the construction process didn’t seem a particularly
wise or generous gesture on the part of God.
Don’t even think such things,
she ordered herself. Her faith had been sorely challenged when Charlie died.
“The worst thing is, I had a premonition about this,” Barbara Rae said. She was looking off into the distance, and her voice
was low, barely audible.
“A premonition?”
Barbara Rae shook her head slowly, back and forth, back and forth. “I get them. It’s the Sight. My mother had it too. She
called it a gift, but it’s always been hard for me to see it that way. The premonitions, when I have them, are always bad,
and no matter how much I pray, I don’t seem able to avert what’s going to happen.”
“You mean you see, in advance, when some tragedy is about to occur?”
“Not always, no. It’s very rare—for which I’m thankful. And I don’t see the actual event. I get just a hint of it.”
Annie nodded, not really understanding or believing in
premonitions or visions. That sort of thing was more in Darcy’s line. “What sort of hint did you get about this?”
Barbara Rae folded her arms around her middle. “It came on one evening when I was in there praying. Darkness. A sense of something
falling from a great height. The scent of blood.”
Annie found herself shivering. There was a commotion near the door as two men began rolling out a metal stretcher, the body
hidden from sight in a black zippered bag. Annie turned away as it was loaded into the back of the ambulance.
Poor Giuseppe!
Barbara Rae turned toward her and they moved into a hug. Annie could hear Barbara Rae murmuring something, and little by little
her voice got louder until Annie recognized the words:” ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will
fear no evil, for Thou art with me…’ “
Sam came out of the trailer the police had commandeered and joined Annie and Barbara Rae. He looked dispirited and sad. “I
think they want to talk to you now,” he told Annie. He gave her hand a squeeze as she went in.
There were two detectives, Catherine Sullivan, the businesslike one, a tough, no-nonsense woman with graying brown hair and
glasses, and John Foster, a middle-aged man with a paunch and a thick smell of cigarettes. Sullivan asked most of the questions,
while Foster tapped his fingers on the edge of his laptop computer.
How well had she known the deceased?
What, exactly, was his job?
Did she have any idea why he had come to work so early in the morning?
Did he have any enemies?
What did she know of his family?
Who had access to the construction site during the night?
Who had access to the scaffolding and how many people understood how construction scaffolding was put together?
At some point as she struggled to give satisfactory answers to their questions, Annie asked, “You sound as if you’re considering
this a suspicious death. You surely don’t believe that this was anything other than an accident?”
“We’re not excluding any possibilities at present, Ms. Jefferson,” Sullivan said.
“But do you know what happened? I mean, no one seems to be able to give me any clear information. Did part of the scaffolding
collapse? Is that why he fell?”
“That’s what we’re trying to ascertain, Ms. Jefferson.”
“You see, as the project manager and the interior designer, I’m in charge of the interior as well as the entire construction
site. If there’s a safety issue here—”
“Yes, I’m sure you’re concerned about your liability. Mr. Brody expressed a similar concern,” Sullivan said in a somewhat
sour tone.
Annie flushed. The possible legal ramifications had not yet occurred to her. What she was thinking was that if there were
dangers, she didn’t want any of the other workers to take any risks.
Projects like the cathedral did have inherent dangers, no matter how much planning and effort went into trying to reduce them.
Construction workers suffered one of the highest
rates of occupational hazard of any profession. People did occasionally die on such massive projects.
But until this morning she had been satisfied that everything possible had been done to reduce the risks associated with this
job. And it was important, both for Brody Associates and for McEnerney Construction, to affirm that they had done their best
to provide a safe working environment.
Therefore, the cause of Giuseppe’s death was vitally important. If he’d fallen because the scaffolding was faulty in some
way, somebody would likely be hit with a lawsuit.
“It has come to our attention,” said Detective Foster, “that the deceased, Mr. Brindesi, had a nephew who used to work with
him on this project.”
“Yes. Vico. I think his full name is Ludovico Genese.”
“And is it also true that this young man—this Vico—was fired recently from his job?”
“I’m sorry to say that he was.”
“For what reason?”
“He didn’t show up for work, and it was our understanding that he had been accused of a crime and was a fugitive.”
“And do you know the whereabouts of this fugitive, Ms. Jefferson?”
She shook her head and said, “No.” She wondered if she should mention that she had seen Vico at the youth center with Paolina,
then decided to wait and see what else they asked her. She wouldn’t lie to the police, but she didn’t feel inclined to get
Vico and Paolina into worse trouble than they were already in.
“Did Vico have any problems with his uncle?” Detective Sullivan asked.
“Well…” She hesitated. “They argued a lot. Giuseppe
was trying to straighten the boy out, but Vico is proud and very stubborn.”
“So there was conflict between them?”
Annie stared at the two detectives. Her head was beginning to ache. “What are you suggesting?”