The Murders of a Saint

An assisted living facility, somewhere up north, maybe Connecticut, maybe Maine. It is Valentine’s Day of 2014. The moon can’t be seen for the buckets of snow, but it is full. The gray clouds continue to roll as it waxes clandestinely toward peak illumination at exactly 6:53:14 p.m. EST. That is ten minutes from now.

Amber light oozes like egg yolk from the facility windows making fat, warm-looking tear drops on the snowy drifts. A solitary figure in a fleece hat, two coats, and big rubber boots stomps awkwardly toward the arrival area. An attendant opens and holds the door for the visitor. This attendant pulls her collar up close to her neck. She bristles and buries herself within herself, head down, bracing against the chill of 19°F. It has been nineteen years since a blizzard happened on February 14th. It has been nineteen years since the moon was last full on Valentine’s Day. Nineteen years since the murders.

The visitor unwraps and already seems to know exactly which room to go to.

Carl Keeler is dying. It’s something that happens about once a month in a facility like this. It’s to be expected. They’ve come here to do so. And they settle right in. For a time, they have a playfulness, a spryness, a relief, it seems, where they know all their day-to-day adult responsibilities have lapsed. They are left with themselves and a ghoulish cast of characters with which to whittle out their end times. There’s always a sniveller and a snoop and a thief. A screamer. A lecher. A man who won’t hang up his hat. One resident cleans while some others make messes. Another one tells guests which chair or which sofa is most recently sanitized for stain-free sitting.

Another sits quietly, hearing aids off, in a corner working out the bits of an enormous jigsaw puzzle. She’s older and smarter and saner than all of them combined, but she’ll never tell. She blames dementia for shyness and lack of concern. She turns up a squinty eye when the snow visitor breezes by. The visitor, an elderly lady herself, is an ashen soul not much younger than most of them trapped in this building. She moves nimbly without cane or walker. She smiles at the puzzle solver, says, “Not today, hon. Not your time.” She winks. Finger goes up to the side of her nose.

The door to Carl’s room only creaks in cold weather. It opens to lamp light and deep, gasping breaths. The air has gone stale with the evaporation and mugginess of a dying body shutting down on itself. Blood shunts through his veins in a slick, syrupy laziness. Cell walls break down in a soft, languid slush. The visitor, the guest, knows this by instinct. She’s felt similar things during similar visits to other bedsides before.

She sits in a high-back chair, scoots it up to the bed, places her hand in the purpling withered fingers of an unconscious Carl Keeler. He hasn’t spoken or eaten in over eight days. The eyes have been closed for longer than that. Still, he won’t go. Hangs on. Waiting for nothing.

She begins.

“Now, friend, you don’t know me. And I don’t know you. We’ve never crossed paths in our long-aged times scooting around in this big ol’ city. At least not to my knowledge. And my knowledge is pretty good, you see. I got it from my momma and her momma before. It runs a long line. There’s a broken alarm clock by my bed that started ticking again about seven days ago.” She glances at the faded gold watch on her wrist. “I expect it to start clanging and clamoring right off the nightstand in, oh, about two minutes. And that, dear Carl, means it’s time for me to do my thing. Once in a blue moon.” She looks out the window. Sees nothing but her own reflection in the glass. “Once in a full moon. A special full moon on a special cold night. For a special man, you, who did some pretty nasty shit to some really nice people. And you did it methodically, by the call of a calendar, much darker, much older than the one on the wall.”

She pinches into one of his fingers just to see if he’ll flinch. Any semblance of recognition or protest would make everything much easier. Unfortunately, she has to rely on the research she’s done. She pictures his bloody crime scene photos in a quicksilver monochrome behind her eyes. She recalls newspaper clippings of this man, off scot-free, with a rock-hard alibi placing him in Rochester, NY at the time of each murder.

But higher courts had ruled guilty and left her with a hereditary, phantom intuition to guide her to this target. As with anything unearthly or celestial, a strong vein of faith is required of its adherents. Things beyond sight, sound, or touch must be assumed and unquestioned. She steels her unsettled nerves. Bows her head in a prayer.

“I take what you’ve taken in life and in love. I clean you, forgive you, and send you to punishment for a time, for a while, more than enough, where you’ll feel what they felt and be smothered in its sickness.”

She stands. She produces a kitchen knife from her purse.

“You go down on this day of love and light. During this Hunger Moon when you claimed you had powers, and maybe you did…maybe you did. But it ends here and now, Carl Keeler, the ‘Saint,’ the ‘Creeping Cupid.’ I dispatch you below, and I extract what you loved most, your own filthy black and barely beating heart.”

The jigsaw puzzle lady in the lobby sits up in her seat. Without hearing aid or bearing, without seeing or touching, she still senses something important has happened. She places the last puzzle piece. It’s a pink bear biting into a dark chocolate heart. Across town an heirloom alarm clock is ringing.

©2024 J. Brian Reed