Sacred Trust. Meg O'Brien

seat, his hand and knee pressing her down so hard she thought she would smother.

      He took her keys, and she heard him lock the back door then slide into the driver’s seat. He drove forever, it seemed, and she wondered if they were on Highway 1. Along the way she tried desperately to remember every detail, counting three stoplights, three red then greenish hues making their way through the blindfold. If I can remember light and sounds, she thought, I might be able to tell the police where he took me.

      At that point she still believed she might live to tell the police. He might rape her, then let her go. Rape would be terrible, but it was something she could find a way to live with, just as the women she’d been interviewing tonight had found a way.

      It wouldn’t be easy, she knew. But if God were with her, if all her old saints were with her, she could do it.

      Silently, she began to pray the words of the Memorare, words from the early days that took no effort but tumbled over and over from her mind like a mantra: Remember, oh most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection or sought thy intercession was left unaided. Remember, oh most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled…

      When the car came to a stop, the prayer did as well. And when he dragged her from the car and shoved her to the ground, tearing her clothes off piece by piece till she was naked, she tried to scream and plead through the gag, “Please don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me.” But then he began to beat her, and she knew the flogging for what it was—an old familiar ritual when gently done, but now powered by the seeming hatred of a demented soul. The leather thongs had small metal balls attached to their ends, and he brought the flagrum down full force, first on her breasts, then, as she tried to squirm away, on her back. She felt the blows cut into the outer tissues, felt the capillaries break, then the veins. She knew when the blows reached into the muscles, when arterial blood began to spurt and her skin to hang in strips.

      Smothering would have been a blessing, was her only coherent thought. If only she had smothered and had it done with.

      Marti Bright never got to tell the police the many details she stored away that night. Not the way his hands felt on her mouth, the musty paper smell, nor the scuffling sounds he made after the flogging as he dragged her to the place on the hill.

      She didn’t get to tell the police the way he wheezed and coughed with the effort it took to kill her, high, piercing sounds that were almost like that of a woman. Or the way she knew, finally, why this was being done to her. The why, if not the who.

      There was time for only one thing in those final moments. Marti, still bound, was able to roll herself onto her side. From that position she used the fingers of one hand to write in the dirt. She prayed the darkness would cover the word, that it wouldn’t be seen until the police arrived.

      She prayed for other things, too. For the souls of her dead mother and father, for her own soul, for those of her friends. She prayed for the child she had given up so many years before. And when her killer dragged her to the makeshift cross and lashed her to it with rags so tight they cut into her skin, when it dawned on her what he planned to do, she even found it in the long-lost depths of her soul to pray for the person who was doing this hideous deed.

      Finally, as the nails punctured her palms, the prayer she screamed silently into the gag became, Mary, mother of God, save me. Please, oh, please, Mary, save me.

      But even as Marti prayed, she knew it was far too late for that. The mother of God didn’t come around much anymore.

      2

      ABBY

      Nobody believes me now when I tell them that I, Abby Northrup, of all people, used to be a nun. They look at my Better Homes and Gardens house, the “perfect” marriage I had before Jeffrey screwed me over—or, more precisely, screwed that bimbo over—and they laugh.

      But it’s true. I used to be a nun. Oh, I was only seventeen when I entered, and I never took vows. When I left the order at eighteen, people asked me why. Trying to be funny, I said, “I decided I liked boys more than girls.” That was true, too. But only half the truth. Because at Joseph and Mary Mother-house, at eighteen, I loved Marti Bright more than anything in life.

      Marti was one of those eighteen-year-old women who seemed ageless. She might have lived a lifetime before she was five. She was kind and funny, generous and giving. She spent hours in the motherhouse chapel, praying till her knees were scarred. Her face was peachy, like the cliché, and her eyes huge and dark. She had a musky scent that I loved and later identified as Pacquin’s hand lotion, and there was such an aura about Marti Bright, we gave her the nickname “Shining Bright.” In later years, after we both left the convent— “leapt over the wall,” as they said in those days—Marti became a photojournalist, and the nickname stuck: Shining Bright.

      They called her that on the news this morning, when the best friend I ever had was found crucified on a hill in Carmel. The newsperson droned unthinkable words over the car radio as I drove recklessly to get to Marti, shock and horror vying for room in my heart. “A world-renowned photojournalist, Marti Bright would forget, in third-world countries, that she was there on assignment. Several times her cameras disappeared while she fed rice and water to starving children. Dave Arnott, you knew her. Tell us something about this woman they called Shining Bright.”

      A male voice had taken over, heavy with sadness. “Marti was more than beautiful. She had a beautiful soul. More than once she was found crouching in the dirt, her khakis covered with mud. ‘Cameras can be replaced,’ she once told this reporter, ‘but not the grasp of a child’s fingers on yours as you siphon the tiniest drops of water or food into a starving mouth. Not that particular moment, or that particular child…’” Arnott’s voice had trailed off, and the first newsperson had finished simply, “Marti Bright will be sorely missed.”

      I stand looking at my old friend now, her naked torso swinging slightly in a brisk wind, exposed for half the town to see. Her wrists have been bound to the makeshift cross with some kind of cloth, and there are large, thick nails through her palms. Her beautiful dark hair has been cut as if with a blunt knife; its ragged edges are plastered to her skull by the rain. Blood is pouring down. There are bruises everywhere, and odd, peppery cuts all over her abdomen and breasts. From this angle I cannot see how her back has been stripped of flesh, though I’ve been told this is the case.

      The worst of it, however—the absolute worst—are the words “I LIED” painted garishly in red across her chest.

      Soon the national media will be here, but for now the stringers push forward for close-ups—not for the local television stations or papers, which might have the taste not to show them, but for Hard Copy, the Inquirer, and that ilk. Even an old Cesarean scar is hot news, the faint, smooth line from belly to pubic hair glistening beneath pelting rain and the storm-darkened sky. Till now, no one in the press has known that Marti had a child, nor has her family, or most of her friends. She never married, never seemed interested in a family, only her work.

      I knew, however. I was there by Marti’s side fifteen years ago, I saw the child lifted from her womb. I stood holding her hand, tears streaming down my cheeks along with hers. There was a time when Marti kept no secrets from me.

      That has changed of late. It must have, I think, staring numbly at my friend before the sheriff’s investigators cut her down. With the incessant click click click of cameras all about me, I think that something major must have changed. Because of all the secrets Marti told me over the years, she never once told me who in the name of God might have hated her so much, they could have done such a God-less thing.

      The cross upon which Marti’s thin, battered body was nailed and strung is planted deep into rain-softened ground above the Carmelite monastery, not five minutes from my house. This side of the hill is bare of trees, and on a good day I might have been ambling along Highway 1, on my way to breakfast at Rocky Point, and seen her here. Until the rain began, however, the fog was heavy in Carmel, visibility less than a block or so either way.

      I struggle to keep my composure