Authors: Ralph McInerny

Tags: #Mystery

Sham Rock (8 page)

BOOK: Sham Rock

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She had contacted Casey Winthrop on her own, invoking old times and telling him how much she enjoyed reading him. On a trip to Florida, she visited him and Peaches. She didn't mention David Williams. His name came up later when Peaches attached to an e-mail the notice that Dave's place on Longboat Key was on the market.

“If it drops another hundred thousand, I may make a bid.”

When Larry Briggs called, asking if she knew where in the world Dave Williams was, Mame was almost flattered that she should be expected to know.

“Get him on his cell phone.”

“I want to speak to him face-to-face.”

“I know the feeling. He could be in Florida. He has a condo on Longboat Key and a classmate on Siesta Key.”

“What's his name?”

“Casey Winthrop. Would you like his number?”

“How much did he lose for you?”

“The market will come back.”

Briggs tried to laugh, unsuccessfully. Mame had half a mind to call Flip and tell her to keep her husband away from windows in high buildings.

EMIL CHADWICK HAD A LITTLE houseâthey called it a villa for reasons into which he did not probeâin Holy Cross Village, across Highway 31 from the campus. He had joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1955, a fact that sometimes surprised even himself. Not that he had come here, but that it was so long ago.

Once he'd had a wife, but those married years were sandwiched between long pre and post stretches until he could almost believe that he had always been a bachelor. Almost. He still dreamt of Maude; he talked to her all the time, out loud, why not? He lived alone. The house in which he and Maude raised the kids had seemed haunted after she died. Not that he minded the ghosts. It was no place in which to live alone. Even so, he hung in there until five years ago when he had been offered his villa and took it almost without forethought, as if it were his destiny. He brought his ghosts along. “This is my final address,” he would say, sometimes in company. When he went gaga, they could just roll him down the road and put him in the special care unit.

It was called a retirement village. That meant they had all come here to die.

“Like Holy Cross House,” Father Carmody said cheerily.

“I never thought you would go there, Father.”

“I am in the place but not of it.”

It was the vanity of age to think that one was not like the rest of men. Chadwick felt the same way in the village. He seldom ate with the others, although there was a choice of restaurants. The food was fine, but the company â¦ Those who had come into the village after he did were required to take so many meals a month, but Chadwick was free of that, thank God. It was amazing what one could do with a microwave. He had been fending for himself since Maude died, so that wasn't much of a change.

“You've been grandfathered,” Carmody said.

“In every sense of the term.”

He had three grandchildren. One son was a seminary professor, a layman who had thought he had a vocation and, when that proved not to be the case, stayed on as a member of the faculty. Emil couldn't understand why Nick did not go on to ordination. Carmody had talked with Nick about it. “Scruples,” Carmody said to Emil. Maurice, his oldest, was a monk in Kentucky, a Trappist. He figured the kids had got religion from their mother, who had converted when they married and acquired the zeal of a convert. Maggie lived with her family in Portland. She called him once a week, but it was a long trip from Oregon, and he seldom saw her or her husband, Bill, or the children.

Roger Knight had seemed surprised when Emil first mentioned his children. Well, only old-timers like Carmody would remember Maude. Sometimes he strolled around Cedar Grove Cemetery, on Notre Dame Avenue, going from grave to grave, conducting a posthumous faculty meeting. He had not thought death had undone so many. All of his contemporaries lay there, as did Maude, with a place beside her reserved for him. His name was on the stone next to hers, with only his birth date. February 9, 1931. Colleagues who weren't buried in Cedar Grove, those who were members of the
Congregation of Holy Cross, were buried in the community cemetery, which was on the road that led to St. Mary's. Most of the priests lying there had died since Emil joined the faculty. He would pedal out there on his three-wheeled cycle, stand at the south end, where Father Sorin's grave was, and look out over the rows and rows of identical white crosses. Keats was hardly more than a boy when he fell half in love with easeful death. Chadwick knew the feeling.

An old man is a bundle of memories, and it was a pleasure to just sit still and let them come. No need to stir them up; they always seemed to be waiting for him. At night, he would often put down his book, turn off the lights, and sit on in the dark, remembering. In his Brownson office, a favorite book could induce long thoughts, and he would lay it open on his chest, close his eyes, and just think. When the first message came, he had been undisturbed by the whispering in the hall. When the sheet came under his door, he ignored it. Doubtless more administrative nonsense. He had turned in his chair to see the couple leave the building.

The second message had come at night when he was meditating in his unlit office. Napping actually, but that was all right. Had he been wakened by the sound in the hall? The light beneath the door was broken and a sheet slipped under. He had turned in his chair and looked out toward the parking lot, and then a young man came into the light before hurrying away.

He hadn't mentioned those kids when he and Roger and Sarah had talked about the messages.
Your days are numbered.
He might have sent the message to himself. Once he had read a novel in which a character composed fortune cookie messages for herself, allowing a sufficient gap between composition and reading to ensure surprise.

He sat on for half an hour before turning on his desk lamp and fetching the sheet of paper. Dear God, what a dreadful poem.

They discussed it the following day, he and Sarah and Roger. Sarah professed to be upset, but then she was an excitable young lady. One of his few informants left in her department had assured Chadwick that Sarah would be offered the tenured position. Chadwick had been sworn to secrecy, of course, but he knew all about academic secrecy. Sarah was convinced that the flat tires and Emil's bicycle pump were part of the campaign to drive her crazy.

“Why is one driven crazy? I always preferred walking.”

She was not to be diverted. Roger, to Emil's surprise, agreed with her that the flat tires were integral to the plot. “It's plain as a pikestaff.”

Emil threw up his hands and roared with delight. They were still discussing the ways in which a pikestaff was plain when Sarah left them in disgust.

“I saw the boy who left that poem, Roger.”

“I think I know who he is.”

“There was a girl with him the first time.”

“Not the second?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“I'M A FRIEND OF YOUR FATHER'S,” the voice on the phone said. It was midmorning; Jay had been sleeping in and resented the ringing of the phone. “Larry Briggs. Perhaps he's mentioned me.”

“Maybe. I'm not sure.”

“Is he still on campus?”

Jay sat up in bed and opened his eyes. Until he did that, he had been hoping he could just fall back and into sleep again. He told Larry Briggs that his father had flown out yesterday.

“Damn.”

“I can give you his cell phone number.”

“I have that!”

“Well â¦”

“I'd like to talk with you.”

“Okay.”

“I meant face-to-face. How about lunch?”

Geez. “Were you a classmate of Dad's?”

“Almost.”

They met in the student center, where there were four choices of cholesterol. Briggs stood out like a figure in one of the old pictures of Notre Dame. He was stoop-shouldered as if he had just put down the globe and hadn't straightened up yet. Funny-looking suit, wild
tie, a lean and hungry look. After shaking hands, they got into line and moved along until they ordered.

“What noise,” Briggs said as they waited for their orders to appear.

It was noisy. Jay had stopped noticing.

They found a table, and Briggs looked at the contents of his tray. He plucked a french fry from the little bag. “I'm a client of your father's.”

Jay nodded and took a bite of his burger.

“I've lost a lot of money.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I trusted him. We all trusted him.” Briggs picked up another french fry and flourished it as if he were directing the Ronald McDonald band.

Jay didn't know what to say. “You came out here to see him?”

“I think he's dodging me. Mame Childers is protecting him.”

“Who is Mame Childers?”

Briggs looked as if he were about to say something, then waved away the question.

Jay sat back. Briggs looked a little spacey to him. Large tragic eyes, his nose crooked, his mouth working as if he were eating, which he wasn't. Jay got out his phone. “I'll see if I can get hold of him.”

“No! Don't do that. I want to surprise him.”

Surprise him? Why should a client be a surprise? Jay punched the number anyway. His father answered after three rings.

“Dad, a man named Larry Briggs is here on campus. He came here hoping to see you. What's it all about?”

Briggs followed what Jay was saying, his hands opening and closing.

“He's there?”

“Sitting across the table from me.”

“Let me talk to him.”

Jay handed the phone across the table, but Briggs backed away from it, shaking his head. What a weirdo Briggs was. He reminded Jay of a lurking figure in a horror movie, the secret sharer, put off by everyone and everything.

“He doesn't want to talk on the phone, Dad.”

A longish silence. “Tell him I will expect to see him at my office.” “Is that where you are?”

“I will be by the time he gets back.”

Briggs got to his feet when Jay snapped his phone shut. Jay gave him the message.

“Did he say where he is?”

Jay was liking this less and less. “He said to meet him at his office.”

Briggs stared down at Jay. His long-fingered hands closed on the back of his chair. “Your father's son,” he said.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Briggs just shook his head, then picked up the little sack of french fries and took it with him as he wound his way among the tables to the door.

Jay put through another call to his father. “He's gone.”

“I'm sorry he bothered you, Jay. He's pretty upset by what the market has been doing.”

“He's a nut.”

A chuckle. “You may be right.”

“Who is Mame Childers?”

A pause. “Another client.”

“Dad, I'd watch out for that guy Briggs.”

“I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING about,” Jay Williams said when Roger told him he had received his poem.

“I won't say that I enjoyed it as poetry, but as a code, it is interesting.”

Jay sat forward with the beginning of a smile on his face.

“The initial letters,” Roger said.

Jay fell back, shaking his head. “Congratulations. You really are a detective.”

“Oh, anybody could have figured this out. Anyone who had the air let out of his tires, that is.”

The initial letters spelled Anaximenes, the pre-Socratic philosopher who thought he could reduce the variety of things to their elements and the other elements to air.

“So what was the point, Jay?”

“I was testing your detective skills.” The little smile was gone, replaced by an apparently sincere expression of concern. “You've met my father.”

“Yes.”

“He's in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“I don't know. This financial mess has hit him hard, I know that.
If he wasn't my father, I would think the recession was divine justice. I think there's something more, though.”

“Why don't you ask him?”

“Would you want to quiz your father?”

Roger wondered if David Williams would want to tell his son about the strange bequest from his old classmate, Brother Joachim. On the other hand, why should that be kept a secret from his son? The surprising bonanza would surely go a long way toward solving any financial difficulties David Williams was in, but his impulsive, almost horrified statement that he would have nothing to do with the money seemed connected with the confessional story Brother Joachim had sent to the archives. That didn't seem to be it, though.

“One of his clients was out here and wanted to see me. A man named Briggs. A spooky guy.”

“Spooky?”

“He all but threatened my father.”

“You should tell your father.”

“I did.” Jay inhaled. “What are your rates?”

“How do you mean?”

“I want to hire a detective.”

“You couldn't afford me.”

“Oh, but I could. I'm loaded, thanks to my mother.”

Roger Knight said nothing.

“The client who looked me up? Larry Briggs. I think he is stalking my father.”

Roger listened to the account of Briggs's visit. “Just french fries?”

“I ate his cheeseburger after he left.”

“I think I know what's bothering your father, Jay.”

“What?”

“He will tell you if he wants you to know.”

“What's the big secret?”

“Is it a secret just because he hasn't told you?”

“You ought to write poetry.”

“Oh, I do.”

Jay left, angry. All students have rough edgesâhow could they not, given their age?âbut Jay Williams was difficult to like. Amanda, of course, was another story.

“Jay told me about that stupid poem, Professor. And letting the air out of your tires. I had nothing to do with that.”

“I never thought you did.”

Emil Chadwick made a face when Roger tracked down the initial letters of the poem that had been slipped under their doors. “There's a name for that sort of thing.”

“Anaximenes.”

“Usually the initial letters give the name of the dedicatee, Roger. Maybe no one could write a decent poem under those constraints.”

“I've explained it to Sarah, so she will know that her receiving copies of the messages had no more to do with her than it did with you.”

Chadwick mumbled once again through Jay Williams's coded verse. “Do you know what Johnson said of Pope's
Essay on Man
?”

“Tell me.”

“I'll do better. I'll read it to you.” He rolled toward a bookshelf and ran his finger over his complete set of Samuel Johnson. Having found
The Lives of the Poets
, he opened it and, after a moment, read. “âThe subject is perhaps not very proper for poetry, and the poet was not sufficiently master of his subject; metaphysical morality was to him a new study, he was proud of his acquisitions, and, supposing himself master of great secrets, was in haste to teach what he had not learned.'”

He clapped the book shut and beamed at Roger.

“Wonderful,” Roger agreed.

“He goes on and on like that. Of course, he liked most of Pope.”

“And Dryden.”

“Yes. He places those two above all the others he treated. And both were Catholic.”

The thought of giving a seminar on Dryden and Pope drifted across Roger's mind, but another thought was more insistent. “Your son is a Trappist monk.”

“In Kentucky.”

“Do you ever visit him?”

Chadwick looked abject. “You have touched on a sore point. He is geographically closer than my other childrenâit is only a half day's drive to Gethsemani Abbeyâyet it has been three years since I was there.”

“We ought to pay him a visit sometime.”

“Are you serious?”

“Midsemester could be a possibility.”

Chadwick became almost excited. “We could stay in the guesthouse.”

“You're able to talk with your son?”

“Trappist silence? A thing of the past. One of Maurice's complaints.”

“There's another monk there I'd like to see.”

Jay Williams, who had acquired a stringent view on usury, thought the financial crisis was divine justice. He also thought his father was in danger from some of his clients. His father's reaction to the bequest from Brother Joachim suggested that there was another sort
of retribution troubling David Williams. Was Brother Joachim engaged in some sort of celestial blackmail? Roger was eager to talk to the monk, but there were weeks to go before he could set off with Emil Chadwick for Our Lady of Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky. Meanwhile Phil had grown impatient of all the mystery.

“Jimmy Stewart and I are going to move that rock and dig to see if there is anything there.”

“So you've told Jimmy.” Stewart was a detective on the South Bend police with whom they had struck up a friendship. “Have you told Father Carmody what you intend to do?”

“He'll be there.”

So early one morning a small band left the road beneath the Log Chapel and trudged across the lawn to the boulder. Father Carmody grunted beside Roger as they followed Phil and Jimmy Stewart, who were armed with a pickaxe and a shovel, respectively. In the first light, the campus had an odd allure, waiting for sun to bring it into its full beauty.

“I feel like a grave robber,” Roger said.

“Let's see what we find.”

Even a small boulder is a boulder, and this one had settled into the ground over the years since Patrick Pelligrino had placed it as the marker for the spot where he claimed to have buried the body of Timothy Quinn. Jimmy got one point of the pickaxe under the boulder, jiggling it down, until it served as a lever. He leaned on the handle, and the boulder moved. Phil shoved his spade under the opening. Jimmy's next effort got the boulder on end, and with his foot he toppled it free. Then Phil went to work, making a neat pile of the dirt he removed. The others stood around, watching expectantly.

The rotted box was three feet down. Jimmy and Phil crouched over the hole while Roger and Father Carmody kibitzed over their shoulders.

“I don't see any bones,” Father Carmody said. He sounded relieved.

With the shovel, Phil knocked away the rotted wood and reached into the hole. Then he stopped, put on his glove, and reached again. The morning sun had begun to slant through the trees when he brought forth what had been beside the box. They all stared at it.

A hatchet.

“Is that all?”

“He only buried the hatchet,” Father Carmody cried, relishing the phrase.

No, there was more. Roger lumbered forward and lowered himself to his knees. He lifted a side of the box that had crumbled. He let out an enormous sigh and gestured to Father Carmody.

“What is it?” the priest asked, bending down next to Roger.

“Bones, Father.”

“Dear God.” Father Carmody's hand went up, and he traced a blessing over the remains.

“Those aren't the bones of an adult,” Roger said.

Father Carmody said nothing.

BOOK: Sham Rock

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