Free Trespasser by Paul Doiron Page B

mouth. I brushed the hair out of her eyes. They were open, lifeless. On the woman’s cheek was a small
S.
Between her breasts was a larger
L.
The word continued down her torso, a bloody signature that ended above the dark triangle of pubic hair.
    “Don’t touch her!” said Charley.
    He yanked me away, but not before I had pushed the dead girl onto her back. By then, I knew the inscription the killer had carved into the body of Ashley Kim.
    SLUT,
it said.

10
    A s a child, I had a fierce and powerful faith. My mother instilled in me a deep connection to the Catholic Church, taking me to Mass each Sunday morning while my father lay hungover on the couch.
    I was baptized and received my First Communion at the Church of Saint Sebastian in the gritty papermaking town of Madison. I said my first penance there, too, whispering through a screen to a priest whose role in this arcane ritual I didn’t comprehend. I had known Father Landry all my young life, but I was now supposed to believe that he wasn’t actually present in the confessional. The heavyset man who seemed to glide down the aisle during Mass had been transformed into God’s earpiece. At age eight, I couldn’t figure out why the Lord needed a surrogate, especially since my previous conversations with Him in prayer had been so direct. But I surrendered myself to the sacrament, promising not to trespass again and saying the ten Hail Marys that Father Landry gave me as punishment for my childish sins.
    I emerged from the confessional, unsure of what had taken place. The unsatisfying ceremony made me feel
more
distant from Him, rather than less. Still, I continued in my Catholic faith, taking my father’s name, John, in confirmation.
    It was only many years later, when I had real sins to confess, that I began to wonder where God was hiding. One of us had gone missing, but I couldn’t have told you which.
    By the time of my father’s rampage, I had parted ways with the supernatural. In the weeks following my return from Rum Pond, when the Warden Service chaplain, Deborah Davies, first came to see me, I remembered feeling vaguely sorry for her. She seemed like a kindhearted person, and I was glad that she derived comfort from her beliefs. But when she asked me if I’d spoken to my parish priest recently, it was all I could do to keep from rolling on the floor.
    I did not believe in ESP. I did not believe in ghosts or crystal balls or future events foretold in tea leaves. If she had asked me, I would have told her that the prophets of the Old Testament were schizophrenics and that the voices that spoke to them out of the desert were electrochemical misfires in the brain. Human beings are not transmitters of their intentions, I would have said. Angels do not whisper in our ears. Predestination is a fairy tale, a bedtime story for adults scared of meaningless death. Those were the articles of my adult faith.
    So how could I explain the deep foreboding that preceded my discovery of Ashley Kim?
    When I arrived at Hans Westergaard’s house, I didn’t suspect the woman was dead or fear she was dead. I
knew
she was dead. The certainty had been with me for hours—like an animal lurking beyond the campfire light—but I hadn’t recognized the premonition for what it was. Maybe I didn’t want to admit to myself the meaning of the portent. I didn’t want to open the confessional door after so many years and find God present once again, but in a shape I no longer recognized.
    With a grip like eagle talons, Charley pulled me from the Westergaards’ bedroom. He guided me back down the stairs, his voice soft in my ears, encouraging me to retrace my original footprints, until we were once again standing beside my truck in the driveway.
    “It’s a crime scene now,” my friend said. “We don’t want to muck it up any more than we have.”
    In the sharp, cold air, my senses returned. I found my cell phone in my jacket pocket. I started to key in the direct number for the Knox