Walter Stachiew has powerful arms, matinee-idol looks, and an easy charm that he uses to distract his neighbors in the Bronx from his bad habits, which include a love of liquor and a fondness for teenage boys. When he is found one night, beaten to death with a shovel, the natural suspect is his drinking buddy, Stanley Paycek, who is tried, convicted, and sentenced to die in the electric chair. He is just a few minutes from death when his son Willie whispers the truth about who killed Walter Stachiew.
Willie is a hateful boy, rat-faced and ostracized, but he and a few of his schoolmates know more about Stachiew’s death than they will ever tell. As they grow into men, finding success all over the globe, the secret of that night binds them together forever. As the hate festers in Willie’s heart, it threatens to one day destroy them all.
Walter Stachiew has powerful arms, matinee-idol looks, and an easy charm that he uses to distract his neighbors in the Bronx from his bad habits, which include a love of liquor and a fondness for teenage boys. When he is found one night, beaten to death with a shovel, the natural suspect is his drinking buddy, Stanley Paycek, who is tried, convicted, and sentenced to die in the electric chair. He is just a few minutes from death when his son Willie whispers the truth about who killed Walter Stachiew.
Willie is a hateful boy, rat-faced and ostracized, but he and a few of his schoolmates know more about Stachiew’s death than they will ever tell. As they grow into men, finding success all over the globe, the secret of that night binds them together forever. As the hate festers in Willie’s heart, it threatens to one day destroy them all.
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Overview
Walter Stachiew has powerful arms, matinee-idol looks, and an easy charm that he uses to distract his neighbors in the Bronx from his bad habits, which include a love of liquor and a fondness for teenage boys. When he is found one night, beaten to death with a shovel, the natural suspect is his drinking buddy, Stanley Paycek, who is tried, convicted, and sentenced to die in the electric chair. He is just a few minutes from death when his son Willie whispers the truth about who killed Walter Stachiew.
Willie is a hateful boy, rat-faced and ostracized, but he and a few of his schoolmates know more about Stachiew’s death than they will ever tell. As they grow into men, finding success all over the globe, the secret of that night binds them together forever. As the hate festers in Willie’s heart, it threatens to one day destroy them all.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480460973 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 12/31/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 474 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Dorothy Uhnak (1930–2006) was the bestselling, award-winning author of nine novels and one work of nonfiction. Policewoman, a memoir about her life as a New York City transit police detective, was written while Uhnak was still in uniform. The Bait (1968), her first novel, won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel. She went on to hit the bestseller lists with novels including Law and Order (1973) and The Investigation (1977). Uhnak has been credited with paving the way for authors such as Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, Patricia Cornwell, and many others who write crime novels and police procedurals with strong heroines. Her books have been translated into fifteen languages.
Read an Excerpt
The Ryer Avenue Story
A Novel
By Dorothy Uhnak
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1993 Dorothy UhnakAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-6097-3
CHAPTER 1
SISTER MARY FRANCES WAS HAVING A BAD day. The class knew it the minute they entered the room. All the signals they had come to recognize were evident: the squinting, the constant shoving of the rimless eyeglasses up to the ridge of her small nose with a rough knuckle, the sudden stopping in the middle of a sentence, looking around for a culprit, for someone to blame for her pounding headache and obvious agitation.
She was a short, heavy woman who moved in a whirl of flying, floating black, the high stiff white wimple rising from invisible eyebrows high over her head, the starchy surplice advancing before her. Her target could be anyone. In Sister Mary Frances's class, good behavior was suspect. It was merely bad behavior hiding behind subterfuge. Oh, she knew these eighth-graders so well.
Teaching the eighth grade was just one of the many crosses Sister Mary Frances had to bear. Many years ago she had taught the third grade. It was her best time. The third-graders were the ideal students. They were over the first-grade tears and jitters and attacks of babyhood. They were ready to settle down and listen and learn, and she had reveled in teaching them. The reading and writing and arithmetic were all secondary to the real purpose of the education of these young souls. It had been her responsibility to initiate them into the mysteries of their true Mother, the Church, and from time to time, when some bolder parent complained that a child was nervous, sleepless, crying out in fear and terror of the pains of hell, Sister Mary Frances spoke with righteous authority.
"Would you rather they not know," she would ask the mother, "and be unaware of what eternity holds for the unrepentant sinner?"
The earlier you got them, the younger they understood. Let them be frightened and nervous and sleepless. Let them remember stories of the holy saints and their tortured martyrdom. The piercings and roastings and hackings were true historical events, suffered for and offered to Our Lord in perfect love. Let the little ones hear these true things now, let the history of the Holy Mother Church be impressed on them at this young age, when their minds were relatively pure and they had yet to be corrupted.
Twice in her tenure with the third grade, students were withdrawn and sent to public school. One little girl was a mess of tics and shrugs and movements and should have spent life in a straitjacket, as far as Sister Mary Frances was concerned. She felt she had acted properly, bundling the child into her coat and suspending her from a hook in the clothing closet. She only put the mittens in the girl's mouth when she began screaming. She was well out of the class. There was no room for one of those children who craved attention constantly. There had been more than forty other third-graders to deal with, and this bundle of nerves demanded too much time.
The other child would end up in the electric chair, no doubt about it. He had been more than an eight-year-old rogue. He was clearly and surely on the road to damnation with his cruel mischief, his laughter, and, above all, his filthy mouth. Sister Mary Frances did no more than was called for in the situation. She shoved half a cake of brown laundry soap into the vile mouth, forced the dirty words back down his throat, fought off his surprisingly strong hands (he actually struck out at her!). When she finally released him and headed him toward the door and the principal's office for more drastic punishment, the boy fell facedown on the floor. When she rolled him over, he was foaming at the mouth, which after all was natural, given the amount of soap he had bitten off. She grabbed him by his small shoulders and stood him up, but the minute she let go, the boy deliberately let himself fall backwards. He hit his head against the edge of a desk, knocked himself unconscious, and caused a terrible commotion in the class.
St. Simon Stock parish school was well rid of these two. There were plenty of others who were lost causes, and it seemed to Sister Mary Frances that a large number of them now present in this room should have been more harshly dealt with earlier on. Through the years, she had watched former third-graders enter her eighth-grade room. They knew her and she knew them and the class ran more smoothly for this mutual knowledge.
She set the class an assignment in reading, a geography lesson they had not expected. They would be tested on their reading within a half hour, and Sister Mary Frances sat at her desk, head tilted to one side, listening, watching, wary and suspicious. Did they think for one moment today was to be a special day? Last day before Christmas vacation, a day for acting up, for defying her. She had heard the low groan when she told them there would be no class party. The small boxes of hard candy provided for each of them would be distributed at the end of the day. Today was a workday, like any other. The soft moan that drifted toward her reverberated inside her head. She had her suspicions but she wasn't sure. Before the day was out, she would find which of these terrible thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds persisted in defying her.
She moved around the room, floating down the aisles, cracking a knuckle down on an unprepared head: a boy with his face practically making contact with his book. If he needed glasses, let him tell his mother or father, but do not sit like an old blind man, nose touching the printed word. She stood at the back of the room and surveyed her students.
It was in the very air around them. It permeated and spoiled and poisoned the atmosphere, this dangerous age of awakened physical changes. Some of the boys were still slender and smooth-cheeked, involved in childish mischief, but others ... ah, the others, with their darkening voices, broadened shoulders, hair beginning to gleam over upper lips, and the girls, as restless now as the boys, perfectly aware of the physical changes taking over their bodies. Small breasts swelling, waists narrowing, hips widening, and she knew—knew—some of them sneaked lipstick when they were out of the class. She could see the evidence; lips that had been pale were mysteriously pinker, touched by cosmetic.
There was a nervous sexual energy surrounding all of them, and it was her job, her vocation, her determination to save them from the evil into which they were slipping. She did this with vigor and dedication. There was no flirting, no whispering, no brushing of hands in her classroom. She filled them with enough stories of children gone wrong, struck by lightning or by mysterious disease: a childhood heart attack, the victim dead before arriving back in the state of grace that baptism had bestowed.
She glanced around the room, then focused on William Paycek. He was a thoroughly repulsive boy, with his greasy hair, his narrow, small, and bony body. He never looked clean because he never was clean and God alone knew the source of the terrible pimples and sores and bruises on his thin ferret face. He had little pebble eyes of no particular color that Sister Mary Frances could determine. No one liked him. The boys bullied him and the girls avoided him completely. He was devious and sly and a liar and a cheat. He came from a family of pigs, and the boy smelled of garbage. Polacks.
Dante D'Angelo was the biggest boy in the room: tall and heavyset, a dark complexion and nearly black eyes. He was turned out clean and fresh every day, which was a wonder to Sister Mary Frances, what with his mother having been so sick for so long before dying and his oldest sister going crazy and being carted off to an insane asylum somewhere. Probably one of the boy's aunts—the Italians seemed to have more aunts than other people—moved in and helped out. Well, that was good, Sister Mary Frances supposed. At least it was one thing in their favor: they took care of their own. She knew the boy helped out in his father's shoe-repair shop after school, and she checked his hands and nails carefully each day, but could find no evidence of the oil and black polish that had stained his father's hands permanently. He was not a particularly friendly boy, but the others seemed to look to him for leadership out in the schoolyard. Probably because he was bigger than the rest of them. Why else would they include the only Italian in all their games. He hadn't given her any particular trouble and, thought Sister, he'd better not.
Her eye kept going back to Megan Magee, the brightest girl ever in St. Simon Stock. She was a year younger than the rest. The child in Megan was still very much in evidence. She had the openness and innocence of a much younger girl, and Sister Mary Frances loved Megan in many ways. She realized that her first attraction to Megan was because of her startling resemblance to a girl named Margaret Forbes. The same dark red hair and orangey eyes, the same pale skin with collections of freckles over the small, slightly uptilted nose. The same dark red lips, turning up in the corners. The same dimples. The same competence as the girl approached any assignment, never freezing at the blackboard, ready to answer any question or complete any assignment.
The snow was beginning, just as it had been forecast.
Margaret Forbes was dead. This was a different girl altogether. As if anyone else could ever be Margaret Forbes. If only she could stop remembering the hurt, the pain, the awful sinfulness of loving that long-ago friend. She had to be very careful to remember that Megan was not Margaret. There was a different situation here. Not that Sister Mary Frances ever showed favoritism in any way. What she did with a child who moved her in some mysterious way—as did this girl—was to be twice as hard on that student. Demand much, expect little, but do not let her own weakness be evident, ever. She stood for another moment, turned and surveyed the class, deliberately avoiding even the slightest glimpse at Megan. She would ignore her completely for the rest of the afternoon. She would not think of Megan or Margaret again for the next twenty-four hours. With the help of the Lord she would banish all such thoughts, or at least keep them locked up so deep inside her brain that she would be free of memory and of remembered temptation.
Sister Mary Frances clenched her hands together tightly and turned for a quick moment to look out the window at the darkening day.
She was about to hand out the test papers when the door burst open and there stood Father Thomas Kelly. Sister Mary Frances would never, in her entire life, be able to accept with grace the presence of Thomas Kelly as assistant pastor at St. Simon Stock. She had been his teacher twice, first in third grade, then in eighth. To Sister Mary Frances, he would always be the overactive, smirking little boy who answered her back in third grade and mocked her in eighth. He stood there, as all heads turned, as her children grinned and answered his greeting in unison: Good afternoon, Father. Pushed aside their reading assignment, forgot about the importance of the impending test, played up to him and his boyish, smiling presence.
With his movie-star good looks, his calculated charm, he won them over as always. The girls beamed and blushed, more aware than ever of their own changing bodies. He joked with the boys as though he were one of them, an older brother, filled with their own excitement and turbulence.
The discipline in the room collapsed, as he knew it would. He strode to the front of the room, smiled, greeted her with that false, friendly, insinuating voice.
"Good afternoon, Sister." His voice went low and dangerous. "Any of these rogues giving you any trouble? If they are, just send them along to me."
"There is nothing in my classroom I can't handle, Father."
He reached over without warning and took the familiar sheets of test paper from her hands. The same boy, the same tormenting boy he'd always been.
"Aw, Sister, not a test today! It's Christmas vacation time." And then to the class, "Sister's present to all of you wonderful, good students is that there'll be no test."
They clapped and grinned back at him, observing only him, his wink to them, his conspiracy against her. They were on his side, he would always save them.
He turned to the table at the front of the room, spotted the candy boxes.
"Any leftovers?"
He approached the table and scooped up some boxes that he handed out to several girls, who immediately ripped open the boxes, extracted candy, and offered him some.
"Oh, boy, feed Father's sweet tooth. What do you girls care if I get a toothache?"
She stood, silent and tense, the headache pounding harder, and watched as he distributed the candy.
Finally, as though he had just remembered why he had come here in the first place, he told her, "Father Murphy is having me go around to tell all you teachers. School is over early today." He consulted his wristwatch. "In fifteen minutes, to be exact. The cleaning people are going to leave early, and Father wanted them to have enough time to straighten things out." And then to the class, "You be good now, do not give Sister any trouble, or I'll hear about it. Sister, you have any complaints about anyone, you let me know. Well, Merry Christmas, eighth-graders."
They called out to him in loud and boisterous voices and then he was gone and they were hers once more. She ordered them to close the candy boxes immediately. There was no eating in her classroom. They fell silent quickly, sat motionless, with folded hands as she demanded.
"I will wish you all a sacred Christmas. I hope you will be able to put aside your greed for games and new clothes and whatever else your parents see fit to gift you with, and take time to think about what the day means. Whose birthday it is. And how the mother was turned back into the cold. And where Our Lord was born and what his life was. And particularly, after you attend the joyous mass celebrating our Savior's birth, I want you to think ahead to the end of Our Lord's sojourn on earth. His Crucifixion. As you celebrate the Holy Child's birth, never, ever forget his death at the hands of his enemies, the Jews."
Her cold, hard eyes blinked rapidly through her smudged glasses and lingered helplessly on the face of Megan Magee. She turned abruptly and, without facing them, stood rigid as the school bell rang, announcing dismissal. No one in her room moved or made a sound. No one dared. Finally, when she decided, she turned back to her class and dismissed them for the two-week Christmas holiday. They gathered their coats quietly from the closet, marched out of the room silently.
Sister Mary Frances stood by the window and watched as they exploded noisily out onto the street, faces turned up to taste the heavily falling snow. She closed her eyes tightly and began to recite the rosary.
CHAPTER 2WILLIE PAYCEK HATED MORE PEOPLE THAN anyone else, anywhere in the world. His hatreds were cold, clinical, and for cause. He kept accounts deep within his brain and could, within a split second, bring a person to the front of his mind and run through the catalog relentlessly, without omitting a single injury. He made little distinction between damage done to him physically and damage done emotionally. It was all the same; he noted, he remembered, he would never relent in his determination to pay back.
And it was important that each one who did him damage knew that someday, without question, little Willie Paycek would finally take his revenge.
With one exception, he hated all of his teachers. They melded together into one large, indistinct form inside a tangle of black floating veils, foreheads obscured by hard white linen, pinched mean faces, pale eyes batting behind rimless glasses, mouths tight and dry. All spoke in the same accusatory voice, as though their very purpose in life was to catch out some child right smack in the middle of a sinful thought. They knew, these women, they could tell, they had been gifted with second sight that could pierce into the evil heart and brain of some luckless child. Usually the luckless child was Willie Paycek.
His very physical appearance caught their immediate disapproval. He was a narrow child with a gray complexion and thin hair that was always badly cut and always seemed unclean. His clothes never fit properly; they were either too-large hand-me-downs or his own, worn until his knobby wrists showed from the frayed cuffs of his shirts and his falling socks, sliding into his scuffed shoes, revealed the fish-white skin of his ankles.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Ryer Avenue Story by Dorothy Uhnak. Copyright © 1993 Dorothy Uhnak. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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