Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 50, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2005

She had the pizza, all right, covered with slices of chourico, the hot sausage I liked so much. And the raisin squares that I’d do almost anything for. Almost anything did not, however, include what she had in mind, a surprise for me and two of my cousins, Natalie and Norbina Oliveira. She had sewn costumes for us so we’d look like the three kids from Fatima. Now these were shepherd kids. From 1917. In the newspaper pictures taken of them, the two girls have these huge, dark scarves that fall halfway down their backs. The boy is wearing some kind of weird, overblown turban-like affair that hangs off the back of his head like a sack that he’s using to steal a watermelon. Besides the headwear, my grandmother had been historically accurate with the girls’ ballooning dresses and the boy’s dark little jacket. Slick maybe for shepherd kids in Portugal in 1917, but not the fashion statement for an eleven year old in the early ’80s who wanted to dye his black hair blond so he could pass for a midget version of Sting.

My mom, Vo’s daughter, gave me up like a Spartan mother sending her son off to the army, and she didn’t even flinch when I came out of Vo’s spare bedroom practically radioactive with embarrassment. My grandmother, followed by the obedient herd of everyone else in the family, marched me and my cousins out to her back yard and had the three of us kneel in front of the statue. Then my chubby, tech-crazy cousin, Victor Medeiros, seventeen and safely out of the running for shepherd boy, stood off to the side braying like a mule. Over and over he asked me to throw in a prayer for him while he took our pictures with his brand new Nikon F3 35 millimeter.

But my mortification didn’t end there. My vo decided one of Victor’s pictures was so nice that she sent it in to the local Portuguese weekly, where in what must have been a very slow news week it ended up on the front page.

For months after that it seemed to me that every kid in Our Lady of Fatima school came up with variations on Victor’s tired “Pray for me, Gilbert” line, and since they all knew that the Blessed Mother had supposedly told the three children of Fatima predictions about the course of events in the world, they kept asking me if Mary had told me anything worthwhile.

“Hey, Gilbert, any chances I’m gonna get a ColecoVision for Christmas?”

“How ’bout the Red Sox, Gilbert? Was one of her miracles the Sox finally winning the World Series?”

You get the picture. I got the picture, all right. I got the picture taped to my desk and my locker, taped to the back of my coat, taped to any schoolbook I happened to leave lying around.

It could’ve been worse, I suppose. If I’d been older, my classmates would probably have come up with more creative forms of torture. But this was bad enough, and though I knew most of the attacks were stupid, that still didn’t keep them from bothering me.

In fact, as I drove down to Fall River in the early morning darkness, I could still remember them clearly, still feel that sharp sense of unfairness that kids never let go of. As for worrying about my vo saying that someone was going to die — well, considering the source, I didn’t really take it too seriously.

On the other hand, almost every light in the third floor apartment of the triple-decker my grandmother owned seemed to be on. She insisted on staying on the third floor despite her age because she said she got extra heat coming up from the people below. And climbing the stairs was good exercise.

I could see her silhouette at the curtains of the front parlor, the only semidarkened room in the apartment, and she appeared to be cradling something that looked ominously familiar in her arms.

So I hustled up the two flights of stairs but was careful to stand off to the side as I rapped on the door.

“Who is it?”

“You know who it is, Vo. I saw you at the window.”

“You alone, Gilbert?”

“Yes, of course I am. So will you please carefully put down Vo’s shotgun and open the door?”

I heard the thunk as the stock of my late grandfather’s old Remington .32 over-and-under hit the floor, then the slow turning of her lock.

“Took you long enough,” she muttered, closing and locking the door behind me.

She was dressed in gray sweats, top and bottom. With her fly-away white hair and dark eyes, the only touch of color on my grandmother was the gold bracelet she always wore. It had cameos and the date of birth for each of her fourteen grandchildren, and we all jangled from her wrist with every move. Kind of like life. I was number eight.

“Sorry, I was slowed down by all that five A.M. traffic.”

“This is no joking matter, Gilbert. No joke at all.”

“Right. You said someone’s going to die, and it’s connected to the statue?”

“Did you see it?” she said, dark eyes blazing. “Did you see what they did to it? To the shrine of the Mother of God?”

“Uh, no, Vo. The statue’s in the back yard. It’s... well, it’s still pretty dark out.”

“They destroyed the boy, Gilbert! They knocked his head off, smashed him all to smithereens.”