Sham Rock (3 page)

Authors: Ralph McInerny

Tags: #Mystery

BOOK: Sham Rock

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JUST AS BOOK DEALERS ARE REGULARLY approached by owners of old but worthless books, thinking they have a treasure, so the archivist's professional appraisal of gifts will often differ from the donor's assumptions. Greg Walsh, associate archivist at Notre Dame, had come to regard donations from old grads with skepticism. Memorabilia of old sports events were a constant item, but how many accounts ofÂ the famous 10â10 tie between Notre Dame and Michigan State do you need? Letters were another thing, and diaries even better. Greg had been puzzled when the neatly wrapped package arrived from Our Lady of Gethsemani, a Trappist abbey in Kentucky. Cheese? No, it contained items that Patrick Pelligrino, now Brother Joachim, Notre Dame '89, hoped the archives would find of interest. Greg put them away for a duller day, when he could pore over the contents, hopeful that the box contained good things.

It was on a rainy Saturday afternoon, in an empty archives, that Greg again opened the box. Among the things it contained was a sealed manila envelope, bulky, and a slimmer addressed envelope. He set them aside and sorted through the playbills and course notes, a dozen newspaper clippings about a missing student, and aÂ diary that disappointed since the entries were sparse, scattered
through the little book with a padded cover on which “1988” was embossed in faded gold. Finally he opened the larger sealed envelope. The sheaf of elegantly handwritten pages bore the printed title
De mortuis nil nisi bonum.
Speak well of the dead. It proved to be a story, and it was dedicated “To Timothy Quinn,
requiescat in pace
.” The newspaper clippings had concerned the disappearance of Quinn. Arranged chronologically, they moved from first notices of the missing Notre Dame student through the attempts to discover where he was to the announcement some months later that the search had been ended. Timothy Quinn was presumed dead, although his remains had never been found. Greg settled back and, without great anticipation, began to read the story.

The setting was the Notre Dame campus, the time some decades ago, and the story told of the rivalry of several young men for the attentions of the same girl. The narrator was Patrick, who was enamored of Beth, and his rivals were Dave and Timothy. The plot seemed to turn on which of them would win the girl, and the narrator developed nicely the way a common love had led to a falling-out among the three friends, the turning point being when Patrick became the distraught girl's unwilling confidante. Her trouble was not stated explicitly, but it seemed clear that she had become pregnant. By whom? Not the narrator, who is crushed by what the girl tells him. Having consoled her as best he can, he hurries off to confront Timothy and tell him that he must do the honorable thing. A vivid word picture of Timothy's enraged reaction makes it clear that he is not the villain. If neither of them, then who? David. The shared knowledge makes allies of the two until Patrick realizes that Timothy has violence in mind. He takes from the wall on which it hangs a hatchet, an award he had won as a Boy Scout. Seeing that Timothy's rage has become homicidal, Patrick struggles with him, trying
to wrest the hatchet from him. An enraged Timothy strikes Patrick, knocking him out. When the narrator comes to, he dashes to Dave's room. Dave is sitting on his bed, holding the hatchet.

“Where is he?”

“Gone.”

The denouement was disappointing. Having brought his story to this pitch, Patrick all but abandoned it. “I never saw Timothy alive again after our struggle.” The end? That seemed to be it. Not quite. A line was drawn across the page and then: “I buried him and his hatchet.” Beneath were instructions on where the hatchet and body could be found buried near the Log Chapel.

The names of the characters in the story were the names of two of Pelligrino's classmates. Why would a monk write such a story? It seemed to be a fictionalized account of a real happening. The manuscript was one he must show Roger Knight. Meanwhile, he gathered all he could find in the archives about Quinn, most of it duplicates of what Brother Joachim had sent.

“Something interesting has come in,” he said to Roger over the phone.

“Ah.”

“Are you busy now?”

“You have piqued my interest.”

To bring Roger across campus to the library on such a day as this was out of the question. If Mohammed could not come to the mountain, the mountain must go to him. In this case Roger was the mountain. Only for the Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies would Greg have removed something from the archives. Of course, the Joachim donation had not yet been officially registered. That was the small moral loophole through which Greg Walsh wriggled when he set off
for the Knights' apartment with a carton on the passenger seat beside him.

Philip Knight was sprawled in a beanbag chair in front of the television, watching a game that seemed to give him pain. In far-off California, Southern Cal was inflicting yet another humiliation on the Fighting Irish. Roger took Greg into his study, and it was there that the Joachim donation was examined.

Greg presented the materials in order of increasing importance, first the newspaper clippings. The tale of Timothy Quinn prompted memories of more recent student disappearances, each of which had ended in the discovery of the body, both apparent suicides. The case of Timothy Quinn was different, very different.

After the newspaper clippings, Greg showed Roger the diary. The enormous Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies leafed through the little book, reading the scattered entries. Pelligrino had made constant use of initials. BH appeared to be a St. Mary's student, an object of interest to the three classmates, PP, TQ, and DW. She had appeared in several plays with the three young men. There was also a CW and an MS. Roger looked quizzically at Greg, who handed his friend the envelope.

“Have you read the story?” Roger asked as he took it.

“Yes.”

It was difficult to tell if Roger, as he read, found it interesting. When the narrative collapsed without resolving its apparent point, he frowned.

Greg handed him the final typed page. It read, “The above is an account of the disappearance of Timothy Quinn. This weighs upon
my soul.” The writer went on to say that he had resolved to spend his life doing penance for the foul deed.

“Why?” Greg asked.

“I suppose many monks regard their lives as a form of penance for past sins.”

“I meant penance for what.”

It was inescapable that Brother Joachim counted on the contents of the box being read, most notably the abruptly ended story.

“No other manuscript?

“No.”

“There is no mention of Quinn's death in the story.”

“The hatchet and the body?”

“That seems to be what is weighing on his soul.”

What was the point of all the obfuscation? A twenty-year-old disappearance, the writer apparently considering himself responsible, for that and even for the death of Timothy Quinn. Did the Trappist monk expect to be taken from the monastery, tried, and confined in another sort of cell? He was clearly pointing an accusing finger at David Williams.

Timothy Quinn's hatchet could be located by means of the large boulder that Patrick Pelligrino had carried to it. To mark the spot, to conceal it?

The following afternoon, Roger and Greg went in Roger's golf cart to the Log Chapel and then wandered west of it. They came upon the large rock described by Pelligrino. Was he directing them to a murder weapon?

The sealed letter in the box was addressed to David Williams.

What to do? Roger's suggestion was that they put that question to Father Carmody on the telephone.

The old priest listened to Roger's account, saying nothing, and even allowed the story to be read to him over the phone.

“I suppose you knew these boys, Father.”

“In those days I knew everybody.”

“Is that yes?”

Father Carmody grunted. “What do you intend to do?”

“Ask your advice.”

The old priest took a moment. “Put it back in the archives. Bury it.”

“Just that?”

“Patrick Pelligrino was the author of two plays that were put on.”

“The plays in which he and DW and TQ appeared, along with BH?”

“Beth Hanrahan,” the old priest said softly. “What you've read me sounds like an undergraduate effort that for some reason he wanted preserved in the archives.”

“You think it is twenty years old?”

“The story reminds me of one of Pelligrino's plays, inspired by Poe. A man named Primo bricks his rival into a wall and then is haunted by what he thinks are moans from behind the bricks. This goes on for weeks. Finally he tears open the wall, goes into the chamber looking frantically for a body. All this is recounted in a note, read years later. The wall is once more opened, and there is the body of Primo. It was a powerful play. Melodramatic, of course, and incredible, but good acting can do much for a weak story.”

One of the playbills in the carton was for
Behind the Bricks
. The author, Pelligrino, had played the role of Primo. The rival was David Williams.

Roger told the priest that there was another letter, addressed to David Williams, the name typed.

“You didn't open that one?”

“It was addressed to David Williams. I wonder where he is now?”

“David Williams? I see him from time to time. I could pass it on to him.”

“Will you tell him about the story?”

“That depends.”

It was a few days later that Father Carmody called to say he was stopping by with an old student, David Williams.

JAY WILLIAMS AND AMANDA ZIKOWSKI were in the Computer Cluster in DeBartolo, sharing a computer, or pretending to. It was here that Jay had come up with the idea of a note to be slipped under the door of Roger Knight's office.

“Jay, that's stupid.”

“Of course it's stupid. I'm a philosophy major.”

“I wish you'd never signed up for his class.”

“Amanda, it was your idea.”

“A stupid idea.”

“You've become a philosopher.”

It was Amanda's wide face with its luminous eyes and the blond hair arranged in some complicated way on her head that had first drawn Jay to her. Now minutes could go by before he noticed her exterior. It was the inner Amanda who fascinated him. And all her breathless talk about Roger Knight had made him jealous, nor had his first sight of the blimplike Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies driven away his jealousy. He knew how susceptible women are to the helpless male, and Roger Knight looked as if he needed twenty-four-hour assistance.

The class was interesting in a way, Aquinas's assimilation of Aristotle, but it was largely an hour and a half of tangents. Jay would have thought that the overweight professor was showing off, but that
didn't seem to be it. In fact, he rejected the idea that his numerous excursions off the subject of the course were tangents. He attributed Jay's question about them to the fact that he was a philosophy major.

“What philosophy courses have you taken?”

“Before I became a major? A survey and then epistemology.”

“Ah. And since?”

“I'm taking Philosophy of Science this semester.”

“Isn't philosophy a science?”

“You're kidding.”

“Do you think philosophy is a specialty?”

“Well, it's a major.”

“You've put your finger on the problem with higher education.”

Luckily Amanda had not been in on this conversation. Roger Knight had asked Jay to define science, and he had answered, “Physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy.”

“But what makes them sciences? You will say the application of mathematics to the natural world. A good answer. Of course, you probably think this is a fifteenth-century innovation.”

“You don't?”

“Only up to a point. Well, at last you will be reading Aristotle's
Physics
. Does the name Arthur Eddington mean anything to you?”

This was hard. Jay's grade point average was as close to a 4.0 as a B in biology permitted. With Roger Knight he felt like an illiterate idiot. He didn't like it.

“You remind me of myself at your age, Jay.”

“My weight?”

Roger Knight had roared. “Actually I was a wraith of a lad. The avoirdupois came later. Hop in.” Jay got onto the seat of the professor's golf cart, and it started off silently. “Where to?”

Jay shrugged. “Where are you going?”

“Home. Care to come along?”

That was how Jay met Roger's brother, Philip, the more or less retired private investigator.

“I worked with him,” Roger said proudly.

“You were a private detective?”

“I still have a license. We both do.”

This was too good to be true. He could hardly wait to tarnish Amanda's image of her favorite professor with this information. The great professor, great in every sense so far as Amanda was concerned, a onetime private eye.

“What were some of your cases?”

“One of my favorites involved our aunt Lucerne.”

Jay listened with fascination, as if he were gathering evidence. The case they had been put on by their aunt involved a riddle, and then there was the case of a dog named Fetch.

“You should write them up,” Jay urged.

“Not everyone would be as interested as you.”

“Oh, I know all about that,” Amanda said when he hurried to tell her about Roger Knight's past.

“You do?”

“He likes to talk about it. Sometimes I think he misses being a detective.”

That was when Jay conceived the idea of testing Roger Knight's prowess. It would begin with a note with a mysterious message pushed under his office door.

“Jay, that's stupid.”

“It's just the teaser. We complicate things by pushing an identical note under the doors of offices near his.”

“What is the object?”

He looked at her. Oh, those luminous eyes. He couldn't say that he hoped to make a fool of Roger Knight. He didn't like the frown that was forming on Amanda's brow. “Just to let him show his stuff.”

“I'll tell him.”

“Amanda, he's been a detective. This will be child's play for him.”

“Well, it's child's play, all right.”

She didn't like it. She would like it even less if Jay's campaign showed that Roger Knight was mortal, fallible, not the paragon of wisdom she thought he was. It occurred to him that then she would despise Jay Williams, not Roger Knight.

Amanda reluctantly came with him when he slipped the notes under the office doors. At the next class he asked Roger Knight toÂ explain again the difference between numbering and numbered number. Roger was delighted and went on and on until even Amanda looked bored, but Jay intended to play fair, more or less. Afterward he expected Amanda to be mollified.

“I as much as told him who had written the notes.”

“Jay, do you seriously think he is losing sleep over that silly message?”

“You may be right.”

No need to involve Amanda in step two of the plan. What he needed was a riddle, like the riddle in the case Aunt Lucerne had her nephews investigate. Her estranged husband had left her a Green Bay Packers fan cheesehead and a piggy bank on one side of which was taped
Your name
and on the other
MacLivid
.

“What was the solution?”

Roger smiled. “There was a Swiss bank account, in Lucerne, and the number was given in Roman numerals. MLIVID.”

“Pretty obvious?”

“Pretty unintelligible. It's not a Roman number.”

“Of course not. That's the point.”

“If you say so.”