Death of the Black-Haired Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

in nearby Connecticut, the family-planning movement had been all but founded and funded because a hundred years ago the Bush family had felt there were too many Italians in Bridgeport.
    There were a few men among the marchers, mainly older, wearing imperfects discounted at the mall, looking as though they had just come from the slot machines at the nearest low-rent casino. People smoked.
    Some of the women protesters had a few pale hardscrabble children with them and carried signs that read STOP THE MURDERS, GOD IS LOVE and SAVE GOD’S ANGELS . Others carried more aggressive placards: DEATH TO THE HATERS OF LIFE; ROME FELL THROUGH FOUL ABORTION, OUR COUNTRY WILL TOO; WHORES WILL DIE OF THEIR SIN . They somehow drew onlookers’ attention to the crazies in the crowd, who seemed as if they’d grown close to Jesus the hard way.
    Maud, newly an editor of the college’s
Gazette,
wanted to strike against the harassment at Whelan. What infuriated her most were the pictures of terminated fetuses a few of the demonstrators carried. Maud had a plan to deal with their piety, make them eat their miraculous chain letters to Saint Jude and the pictures their potbellied epicene prelates and blow-dried chiseling preachers had assembled. She would write an article for the
Gazette,
and she too would collect pictures to include with it. These pictures were as genuinely moving and heartbreaking as the others, though they bespoke a different point of view. Maud thought them an answer to the murdered cute kids’ photos.
    Maud was still outside the hospital entrance when she ran into Jo Carr, an ex-nun who worked in the college counseling office. They had been friendly two years before but rarely saw each other now.
    “Hey, Maud,” Jo called to her. “Come help us out! We can use some candy stripers on the wards.”
    “If I ever have time, Jo. Maybe.”
    “Time,” Jo said. “They don’t give you much, I know.” She looked at the grim procession of pro-lifers. She would not have included life on their list of things to cheer for. “Gonna write about these demonstrators?”
    “Wait and see,” Maud told her.
    Jo shook her head. “Don’t be cruel!”
    “Cruel!” Maud half shouted. Jo hurried to disengage as she walked down the hill.
    “The wrong side has feelings too, kid.”
    What Maud really wanted to do was see Brookman, but she elected to go swimming instead. When she got back to Cross to get her pool gear, the place was empty. Shell had gone out for fencing practice, which, along with the gymnastics and the enunciation lessons, was part of the highly regarded theater course at the college. Maud grabbed a change of lingerie and a clean denim shirt for after-swim, her own clothes this time.
    It had started to snow lightly again by the time she got to the gym. It was called the Biedler Athletic Center, after the grain millionaire who paid for it, a brick modernist building showing lots of glass and built into a low hillside. Through the dark winter evening, in the exciting whirl of snowflakes, its lighted windows were welcoming, promising warmth and invigoration beyond them. The gym had a huge lobby with overhead and floor lights. At the entrance, a blond basketball giant with a bony Slavic face checked her college ID.
    She could hear shouts, grunts, stomps, the smash of rubber balls against hardwood floors, the sounds echoing down tiled hallways but muted by the resilient walls. Somewhere in this building Shell was practicing her swordswomanship, and Maud, who had never seen her at it, wanted a look. She went down corridors peering through the small windows in the doors until, on the second floor, she found Shell in her mask and whites, engaging a shorter, chunky girl with close-cropped hair. Maud watched through the rectangular window. Shell’s opponent was standing her ground in what apparently was the classic position, parrying Shell’s thrusts. Shell looked skittery and a lot less expert but Maud could hear her little yelps