My Very Best Friend (3 page)

After lunch, he retreated to his small home, nestled in the trees on the far edge of campus, after upbraiding two of the nuns who had questioned him about how harshly he disciplined the girls, of which they strongly disapproved.

“I did not ask for your approval or your commentary,” he said to former Sister Mary Teresa Doyle, who spoke with me at length for this article. “Please pray that God will hold your tongue.”

“You are not to interfere with my discipline,” he said to Sister Angeline Aiken, who also talked with me at length. “Submit to my authority.”

The nuns went back to their classrooms, furious.

“Father Cruickshank had been with us for five years,” Sister Mary Teresa said. “How we missed Father Stephen, a kind and gentle spirit. Father Cruickshank was too punitive. Domineering. And secretive. He always wanted to be alone when speaking with the girls who had committed infractions.”

Father Cruickshank did not show up the next morning, and his secretary, a pious, seventy-year-old woman, named Rorie Helene Cantor, was quietly delighted. Mrs. Cantor handled the parents, the students, and the teachers who came in with this or that question or comment. At the end of the day, Father Cruickshank had still not appeared.

“My day was always blessed when Father Cruickshank was not around to spoil it,” she said.

The next day Father Cruickshank did not show up, either. Mrs. Cantor did not bother to find out where he was, nor did any of the nuns or teachers. When he didn’t turn up for the fifth day, Mrs. Cantor assumed that he was on vacation. Sister Mary Teresa suggested this scenario, too. They decided to believe it.

This was a wishful assumption to make, as Father Cruickshank took vacations only in the summer, when he visited his brother in various Scottish locations—at least that was what he said.

Mrs. Cantor simply took over running the school, which is what she did anyhow. She was so much more competent at it than he was, in her opinion, and in the opinion of others with whom I spoke.

It took ten days before anyone thought to go to Father Cruickshank’s home and check on him. To be completely accurate, Sister Angeline was checking on his cat. She was a cat lover.

Father Cruickshank’s cat had silver fur and was especially affectionate. The most peculiar thing was, the cat didn’t like Angus Cruickshank. In fact, Father Cruickshank had complained that the silver cat kept biting him and he was going to give her away as she was a “devil cat.”

It was then they discovered that Father Cruickshank was gone. Sadly, no one could find the cat.

The police were called, an investigation ensued, and the Vatican was notified.

The rumors started quickly, according to people in town.

Had Father Cruickshank simply left, taking his wallet, keys, and eyeglasses with him? Perhaps he was tired of working at a Catholic girls school? Perhaps it was a midlife crisis? He was forty, after all. Perhaps he had a girlfriend? A mental collapse? Was any money missing from the school? No.

Had Father Cruickshank been murdered for money, his body hidden? That would account for the wallet being taken. But who would do that? And why would a murderer take Father Cruickshank’s eyeglasses?

Finally, there was the question of what Sister Margaret O’Diehl had said to the other nuns. Were her accusations true?

As I have researched Father Cruickshank’s disappearance I tried to answer these questions, as he has never shown up again, anywhere.

Was he murdered?

Where is the proof?

Who would kill him?

Unfortunately, as I delved deeper into this mystery, the list of people who might have wanted to kill the priest is quite long.

This is the first of a four-part series on Father Angus Cruickshank.

I put down my fork. I had heard of Father Angus Cruickshank. Bridget had mentioned him in her letters when she was sixteen and went off to St. Cecilia’s on scholarship, as her fanatically religious father was so involved in the church and had befriended the priest. She hadn’t liked him, at all. Said he was creepy. Scary. I shivered as I folded the newspaper.

I wondered if someone had killed the priest. Maybe. Maybe not.

I thought of Bridget and felt my stomach lurch again.

Something was wrong.

Later, after three cups of coffee and Scottish macaroon snowballs with coconut and chocolate, and when I felt like a human again instead of a lab specimen, I climbed back in my car and drove through St. Ambrose.

I slowed at the ruins of the castle with its drawbridge, then the ruins of the nine-hundred-year-old crumbling cathedral and graveyard, where Bridget and I had often played as children. We had active imaginations, and those two ruins were perfect places for princesses and knights, ghosts and goblins.

I drove by the renowned golf course, stone homes built hundreds of years ago with double wood doors for carriages, the fountain in the middle of an intersection, university housing, and the village stores, including Laddy’s Café, Molly Cockles Scottish Dancing Pub, Sandra’s Scones and Treats Bakery, Estelle’s Chocolate Room, and antique and furniture shops.

I drove out of town when the road ended at the blue gray ocean, then turned a corner and headed down the winding street our family cottage was on, built by my great-grandfather, and passed on to my granddad to my father, then to my mother and me, and now we were going to sell it.

I felt an ache in my gut. As if someone had taken bagpipes and slugged me with them in the face.

Sell it?
Sell my family’s home? I drove past one farm, then the next, cottages and red barns, cattle and sheep, lambs and horses, rows of orchards, and fields that would soon be flourishing with fruits and vegetables.

I stopped when I came to a fork in the road.

I had gone too far. I hadn’t seen our house. I turned around, drove back, and when I hit the main road going toward the village again, I realized I had driven too far, once again.

What in the world? How could I have missed my own home? I was only fifteen when I left, but surely I should know how to do this.

I drove slowly this time, then braked.

It couldn’t be.

I gaped at our cottage.

Our home was now a sloping, slipping, bungled, overgrown disaster. I climbed out of the car, then leaned against it, shocked, my knees weak.

The roof of the cottage had partially cratered on one side. The white shutters, downstairs and on the dormer windows upstairs, were filthy and askew. The door was hanging on its hinges, the stone walls weathered and dirty. There was an old green car missing a door where my mother used to have an herb garden and another car, without an engine, parked sideways where there used to be a fountain of a little girl in galoshes holding an umbrella.

The purple clematis was blooming, a purple wave, as Ben Harris said. It sprawled over the tilting white arch over the pathway into our property, and all along the white picket fence, which now looked more gray than white.

I gritted my teeth when I saw the trumpet vine with the orange flowers near our red barn. That vine had to go as soon as possible.
Immediately
. I would get the ax and cut it to pieces, then dig out the root and trash the whole thing. It was the time of the bees when all that happened, and I didn’t need the reminder.

I ran a shaking hand over my hair. It became caught in a tangle, and I yanked it out, hurting my head. I turned my back on that terrible orange trumpet vine and focused my attention on the willow, oak, and birch trees, which seemed to have grown three times in size.

I didn’t understand. Mr. Greer wrote a check each month, which was deposited into an account here at a local bank. My mother withdrew the money from there.

Once a year I wrote to Mr. Greer and asked him if he needed anything repaired or replaced. He always wrote back that he didn’t, that he had handled the minor repairs that came up. This was positively wrong. He had not handled minor or major repairs.

“Charlotte,” I told myself. “You’re a fool.” Of course the roof would need replacing. It had been twenty years. Of course the walkway would need to be fixed, the bricks all tumbled about and uneven. Of course it would need to be repainted.

Why hadn’t I thought of those things?

But I knew why. I tried not to think of this house, and my father, and his death, ever, for several jagged-edge reasons. I was assailed by memories, as if they were charging in on the Scottish wind, over the highlands, across the North Sea, and back to me.

I took a deep, cleansing breath and thought of a complicated math problem to regain my sense of calm.

Something furry ran by my leg and I flinched, my mind still in the dilapidated mess of my childhood home. A silver cat with light green eyes peered up at me and meowed. I automatically meowed back, then settled down on my haunches and petted her. “How are you, Silver Cat? My home is falling down.”

She meowed again.

“Meow back at you.” I briefly thought about the silver cat that bit the priest in the newspaper article. “Do you have a home?”

I had hoped that I could stay the night here. I don’t know why I thought that was realistic. Perhaps my fear of flying blotted out all rational thought.

The two-story stone cottage I remembered had been clean and well tended, my mother’s garden flowing, creative, a picture of landscape art.

My dad was a farmer and grew lettuce: Lolla Rossa, Red Salad Bowl, Little Gem, and the Marvel of Four Seasons. The Lolla Rossa was purple and pink, the Red Salad Bowl lettuce burgundy and crimson, Little Gem was green and tight, and the Marvel of Four Seasons was red to green and gold.

He grew strawberries, too: Rosie, Judibell, and Symphony, which he said he grew to be “fancy.”

It was like looking at an organic rainbow.

All of that was gone.

I saw my father’s face, smiling, red hair, red beard, twirling me around in his arms. I heard him say, “You’re my Scottish butterfly, Charlotte. Eyes like emeralds, hair like a mermaid’s.” I heard his bagpipes, blaring, melodious, as he played “Scotland the Brave,” our red, blue, and green Clan Mackintosh tartan over his shoulder.

Then I saw my mother’s face, as she is today, her straight, brown bobbed hair, her exquisite clothing and high heels, her lips, painted with red lipstick. I heard her voice in my head.

I groaned.

“Charlotte, must you wear a clip on top of your head to keep your hair back? Why don’t you let me take you to a beauty parlor? It’s been what, two years, since you’ve had it cut? Do you want to resemble a human shepherd? Is that tape on your glasses? They tilt. I feel like I have to tilt my head to see you. Oh God. Don’t tell me you’re wearing all brown again. Brown is the color of blah. Boring. And is that . . . you are
still
wearing the brown monstrosities on your feet, aren’t you? A feminist can be stylish.”

Finally she told me that I was “wasting your life living alone on an island buying sweaters for your cats and you need to get laid. A feminist can get laid. She can fall in love. You have to say hello to a man without aggression before either of those things can happen. Say hello. Attempt to be polite.”

My eyes misted. Sometimes I missed my mother.

If she were with me, she would cry or, more likely, throw broken pieces of brick at one of the cars, stuck in her garden like a curse.

The silver cat meowed again and I meowed back. I lifted her under one arm, put my shoulders back, told myself to buck up, and walked down the crooked brick pathway. I was glad I wore my sturdy brown shoes with the thick heels. I fiddled with my glasses, on the taped part, and gingerly opened the door to our cottage.

I almost dropped the cat. She struggled and screeched.

The stench hit like an invisible wall, thrown at me by a giant, stinky hand. I could not be seeing what I was seeing. I was having an illusion. Or delusion. I had drunk too much on the plane. Surely I was having a Scotch Whiskey–I Hate Flying breakdown.

Our pretty Scottish cottage, the cottage my father had grown up in, that his grandfather had built, all under the proud Clan Mackintosh name, smelled like a dead corpse, which would be Mr. Greer. It also smelled like animal defecation. Dust. Years of decay, as if a graveyard had moved in, followed by a gang of pigs, and farts. A mouse sprinted on by.

Not only did the house smell like rotting dung, it was jammed. Jammed with junk.

I sat in that loaded emotional mess for a minute, then pulled on my underwear, as it had crept up over my right bottom cheek. I tried to open the windows. Two wouldn’t open, as they were broken, but I managed to open the rest of them on the ground floor before the stench killed me, then I turned and surveyed the damage.

The couch was clearly a mice home. I heard them scurrying, having a busy day. Two cushioned lounge chairs had dark brown spots in the middle. I didn’t want to know what the spots were from. There were two broken wood chairs, three kennels for dogs, but no dogs, fortunately. Inside the kennels were torn blankets and Styrofoam.

An algae-filled aquarium, half filled with water, held three dead fish, floating. There were broken lamps and three ice chests, empty beer cans inside. Boxes of junk, including old clothes that smelled like hell had rotted. There was another couch, gray this time, and spotted like chicken pox. Two beds had old mattresses I did not wish to touch. They looked diseased, same with the blankets and bedspreads on them.

I glanced down at what looked like years of porn magazines. “How does a woman walk with boobs like that, Silver Cat? It’s as if she’s got watermelons with nipples attached to her chest.”

I turned a page, disgustingly fascinated. The magazines appeared to be the only thing that didn’t have dust on them. “For the love of biology and physics!” I said. “That is perverted!” I shut the cover. I had never seen a porn magazine. That would be my last one. Another mouse sprinted on by.