Hallowed (28 page)

“You ever regret becoming celibate?”

I stared at Claudia with a frozen expression of shock, eventually coming to my senses enough to attempt an awkward apology.  “Claudia,” I snapped.

“It’s fine, Paul,” he assured me.  “I get asked that one more often than you’d think, and the answer is ‘no,’ though…”  His expression turned serious for a moment.  “I have always had one regret.”  He gave Claudia a gentle smile and tagged me on the leg.  “That I never had the experience of being a father.  I think I would have liked that.”

Then before either of us could ask any other questions, he moved off in a different direction.  “Y’know, this was originally your grandfather’s place, and it’ll be yours after we’re gone to leave to your sons and daughters.  Don’t make the mistake of letting it go.  A place of retreat is good for the soul.”

“Dad said that you weren’t coming,” I said.

“That’s not what I told him,” Hank replied, his gentle smile hardening around the edges.  “I just wasn’t coming in the time he wanted me to come.  For a detective, your father can be very impatient.”

Claudia gazed at Uncle Hank with curiosity.  “Did he tell you?  About the letter?”

“Oh that.  Yeah, he told me.”

“But you decided to stay an extra day?” she said with a bit of wonder.

“There’s nothing that another human being can do to me that will make me forget my responsibilities,” he responded with a patient smile that he reserved for the children he taught in catechism class and for those he accepted as non-believers.  There was a sort of sadness in that smile that seemed to convey the disappointment he felt at not being able to share the knowledge, the wisdom that filled him.  “Claudia, there is only one thing I truly fear in this world: Separation from my Lord and Savior.”

From everyone’s reaction as we pulled up, his arrival wasn’t as complete a surprise as it had been to us.  Dad rushed out with a genuine smile.

“They just called us from the highway,” he told Uncle Hank.

“Yeah, quite the welcoming party you’ve got back there.  They looked ready to shoot me until I showed them ID.  Guess the collar wasn’t enough for them.”

Uncle Hank took my father’s hand with his right and with his left gripped his shoulder.  His body language sought an embrace but my father simply looked embarrassed.  Instead, Uncle Hank shared a few whispered words with him and went inside to give Mom and Mrs. Wicke hugs.

A few moments later, he stood out on the steps of the porch, gazing out at the lake longingly.  Inconspicuously, I took a seat at the table and watched as Dad handed him his copy of the letter.  Uncle Hank read through it only once in silence before handing it back to Dad.

“Did you catch the caps on Graves and Wicke?”

Hank didn’t answer right away.  Standing there, his head cocked to one side and staring out at the lake, he looked eerily like Claudia listening to the music of the spheres.

“You think this is about your investigation of the murders?”

“Well, of course I do, Hank,” he said contemptuously.  Dad stepped around him in the attempt to face him, but Uncle Hank was at the far end of porch and Dad teetered at the edge of the steps, deciding on whether he should go down or not.  Finally, he just stood there beside him, pretending to be patient out of sheer spite.

“There’s another possibility, y’know.”

Though I sat there at the table behind them, I had some trouble hearing them as they were facing the wrong direction.  I rose and stepped around to the side, out of their line of sight.

“Maybe the reference is to a different Wicke than Claudia.”

“Pat?”

“Ronnie.”

Dad reacted as if he had just been given to a kick to the shin, with pained surprise and something akin to revulsion at a sudden unprovoked attack.

“Pardon?”

“Graves could be a reference to either of us, Jack?”

“What are you playing at, Hank?”

“Do you think the sudden resurrection of the Tatum girl is coincidental?”

“Her name is Courtney Noble,” Dad stated, making sure to add extra emphasis to the woman’s given name. “There’s no proof that she’s the person she claims to be.  You seem to think there’s a connection between this woman and the killings.”

“Don’t you?”

“Oh yeah. Her own delusions.  There’s that,” Dad quipped.  “There’s no tangible string of causation connecting the two events across a thirty-five year gap of time.”

“Tangible string?”  Hank looked at Dad and sighed.  “You always had that problem seeing the intangible.”

“What?  Is this a faith thing, Hank?  Is that what this is?”

“She told us that Paul knows how the killer will be caught.”

My uncle turned and made eye contact with me simply to acknowledge that he knew I had been there all along, then turned back to Dad.

“She also told us that our family is in danger,” Uncle Hank said.  She had told me the exact same thing.  If she was crazy, at least she was a consistent kook.

“We have a highly technical term for that at the department,” Dad grunted. “Psychobabble.”

“Until I read the letter, I would have said the exact same thing.”  He handed the letter back to my father.  “Now I see, whether by dumb luck or divine will, that she was right about that part.  I think we owe it to ourselves and to the souls of every innocent life that was taken by this madman to investigate every possibility.”

“Well Hank, you sound just like my goddamn son.”

Shock was my first instinct at the words of profanity between the two men, one a law-man and the other a priest.

But then I saw my uncle smirk and slap my father on the back, and I realized that beyond their public roles, they were, first and foremost, brothers, whose expressions of love and respect took on a different flavor than the love shared between sisters or even between parent and child.

“Sounds like a pretty straight-thinking, well-raised kid to me.”

They shared a laugh.  It was one of the few times I’d ever saw evidence of the boys they once were.

Dad finally turned and did a double-take when he spotted me eavesdropping.  “Obviously, you heard this whole conversation.  Now do you understand why I didn’t want her talking to you?”

Uncle Hank looked at me, staring steadily into my eyes.  Suddenly, a look so clearly uncomfortable came over my uncle’s face.  In that moment, I knew he knew my secret.  Somehow he knew.

“I talked to her at mass on Sunday.”

My father seared me with a white hot glare, his jaw hardening.

“We were surrounded by the entire congregation.”

He shook his head and planted his foot on the top step.  I shudder to think what he might have done had Uncle Hank not been there.  “Paul,” he moaned.

“I was sure I’d get something that might help the investigation.”

“Did you?” he asked sarcastically.

“No,” I answered.  “Just this thing about the house.”

Like twins from the same womb, my father and my uncle lifted their heads with identical wide-eyed expressions of dismay.

“Which house?” my uncle snapped.  I’d not heard that edge to his voice before.

My voice emerged wispily, like my breath had been knocked out of me in a long fall: “The house she was held in.  The house where you and Dad found her.  She thinks it still exists.”

My uncle glanced at my father, but Dad was staring off into the space above my right shoulder with a look of dread, the kind that can only incubate in the hearts of the very young at a time when monsters under the bed were still very real possibilities.  The look was so focused that I came very close to glancing over my shoulder to see what it was that had frightened him so much.  Of course, whatever he saw was now thirty-five years gone, albeit still very fresh in his memory.

“That house was destroyed,” he said in an unnaturally loud voice.

I looked at my uncle and I could see the seed of doubt in his expression.  For if a girl you thought was long dead rises from her grave, why not a house?  Then I recalled what Tracy Tatum had said to me in the confessional.

If something existed once, can you ever really say when it’s gone that it leaves nothing behind?

“It was destroyed in a fire,” Dad repeated, like a mantra.

Before I could stop myself the words spilled out: “Mom told me that the house was torn down to make room for a housing development.”

A look passed between the two men.  Finally, my uncle spoke up: “The truth is, we don’t really know.”

“It was a gas leak from somewhere, started the fire,” Dad offered.  “It was carbon monoxide poisoning that made us see…”  Dad’s voice trailed off.  He gave a wave of dismissal and turned away from us to look at the lake.  It seemed like a non-sequitur, but it showed the momentum of his mind.

Uncle Hank gave a single shake of his head, and he cast a look over my left shoulder that chilled my blood.  Whatever was so interesting behind my back was making me a little nervous.

“So what’s there now?  Is it an empty lot?” I asked, attempting to bring the conversation back to specifics.

Neither of them answered.  They really didn’t even seem to hear me.  They seemed to be listening to other voices—voices from thirty-five years ago.

“I… don’t know,” Uncle Hank answered.

“I understand that you’re a little suspicious that Claudia and I might try and go there, but I just want you to know that…”

“No, Paul, you misunderstand me,” he continued, casting a glance back at Dad, who averted his eyes with something akin to shame, something I wasn’t used to seeing from my father.  “We don’t remember where that house had been.”

I stared at my uncle, considering only briefly if he were lying, then the reality of the situation sunk in.  I was questioning the honesty of a clergyman.  Perhaps, my father would have tried to pull an “I’m doing this for your own good” type white lie, but not my uncle.  He was completely on the level.

Then I remember the words the Tatum woman had said to me when I asked her about the location: “I don’t know anymore.”

Time… had a funny way of slipping past in the darkness.

A shiver went through me then, and I gave an unconscious jerk in response.

My eyes found my father’s, and after a moment, he gave me a nod of agreement.

“Can I please see the letter again?”

Dad passed me the note with a suspicious look.

I pointed to the last word of the text before the signature.  “Graves.”  It had been clipped from a periodical, that much was for certain, as the size and type of font didn’t match the surrounding text.  “I think I might know where this is from.”

I told him about the news article Mom kept in her Bible, the one from the Austin American Statesmen that told about the rescue of Tracy Tatum.  Obviously, he hadn’t known that she had kept it, because he was visibly upset at first, but quickly disappeared with his cell phone, leaving me and Uncle Hank by ourselves.

I turned and sunk back into the chair.  Uncle Hank studied me a moment before saying, “She told me that she spoke to you, y’know?”

Looking up into the face of my uncle, I knew then that I had to say something even at the risk of sounding crazy and making my case even weaker.  “I’ve been having these nightmares… about that house.”

He frowned at me then and turned eerily into my father for one fleeting moment.  “Why do you think that is?”

“Maybe it’s my mind’s way of filling in missing gaps the only way I know how.”

“What are you doing in the dreams?”

“Trying to save someone.” 
Claudia
, I thought to myself. 
I’m trying to save Claudia.

“Like your father and I,” he murmured.

“Uncle Hank, why did you go there in the first place?  How did you know Tracy Tatum was there?”

He got this look on his face, the sort of look I recall him getting just before he told the punch line of one of his jokes, but his eyes told a different story.  “You may not believe this, but I was chasing a girl.”  I must have given him a look of dismay because he pretended to take offense.  “Yes, as I explained earlier, the same Graves hormones that makes you do crazy, stupid things used to affect me as well, and I went looking for a girl I met at one of the varsity football games.”

It occurred to me then that I was talking to a man who wasn’t born with a collar around his neck.  For the first time, I was considering all the things he must have given up, all the sacrifices he must have made.

“I remember following this dirt road back into the deep woods and....”  He stopped and just sat staring out at the lake for a time, his eyes squinting as if almost catching a glimpse of something but then losing it again.  “I think I must have gotten lost, though I’m not completely sure.  I recall hearing a child’s voice, and since I already knew about the Tatum girl’s disappearance, I’m guessing that’s what drew me inside the house.”

“You just went inside this strange house?”

“I’m sure I must have knocked and when I didn’t get an answer, I must have walked inside, but I’m only working from an assumption.  I don’t know why I would have gone any further than that, unless I truly perceived that someone was in danger.  I might be brave, but I’m no idiot.  I wouldn’t risk life and limb on a whim without some strong reason.  Something drove me to enter and search the house for the source of that voice.  My faith tells me that it was the Holy Spirit that coaxed me forward.”