The Wolves of Midwinter (50 page)

“But, Lorraine, this is the best time. Jim’s miserable right now over the death of this young priest in the Tenderloin.” How he wished he
could tell her more, but he could never tell her—or anyone else—more. “Look, these children are going to help bring him back to himself.”

She was not convinced. She looked at him searchingly, her soft eyes full of compassion and concern. What a gentle person she was. She was exactly as Jim had described her. She sighed and sat with her hands composed in her lap, working at the clasp of her purse much the way Christine’s hands had worked obsessively with her handkerchief.

“I don’t know what to do then,” she said. “I simply don’t know. It’s all so remarkable. They were resigned. They only asked to see their father from a distance. They wanted to know what he really looked like. And I didn’t think it would do the slightest harm. We came to the festival in the village and then on to the banquet here at the house. Jim looked right at us and didn’t recognize me, didn’t notice them. I had prepared the children for this. There were plenty of children at the party. There were children everywhere. I tried to stay out of Jim’s way entirely. The last thing I wanted was for Jim to see me—.”

“That’s why you didn’t wear a hat, why you took off your hat before the party.”

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind. It’s nothing. Go on. What happened?”

“Well, Christine was so upset. She is so easily upset! She’s always fantasized about her father, dreamed about him, written stories about him. She started drawing pictures of him as soon as she heard about him, though she hadn’t the faintest idea what he looked like. I should have known how actually seeing him in the flesh would affect her. She started to cry. I should have taken them home then. But I didn’t. And then towards the end of the party, this very small thing happened, such a small thing.” She shook her head. Her voice was filled with sadness. “Christine saw Jim walking out to the pavilion with a little girl. He had the little girl’s hand in his. He was talking with the little girl and with an older woman, a grandmother perhaps. And when Christine saw him with that little girl, you see, smiling at that little girl, and talking to that little girl—.”

Susie Blakely, of course
.

“Oh, yes, I can imagine,” said Reuben. “I know that little girl. Yes.
And I can see why this happened, what Christine felt. I understand everything. Lorraine, will you stay here tonight, please? Please stay here while I talk to Phil and Grace, my mom and dad, about this. Please. We have everything prepared upstairs, everything—pajamas, nightgowns, toothbrushes, everything you might need—three bedrooms have been prepared. Just stay here with us while we take this into consideration, please.”

She was clearly not persuaded. Her eyes were watering.

“You know, Reuben, you are very like your brother. You are kind the way he is kind. Your parents must be marvelous people. But I turned out to be poison for Jim.”

“No, that’s not how it was, not according to him, you were not poison!”

Reuben left the chair and sat beside her on the couch.

“I promise you this is going to work out! I give you my word,” he said. He slipped his arm around her. “Please stay with us tonight. And will you trust me to handle this with Jim? Please?”

After a long moment, she nodded.

“Very well,” she whispered. She opened her purse and withdrew a little packet of folded papers. “This is the DNA of the children,” she said. “Your mother’s a doctor. She’ll be able to check it against Jim’s DNA quietly.”

“Lorraine, may I ask you something?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Was the pregnancy ever in jeopardy? Did you have to go into the hospital—I mean after the last time you saw Jim?”

“No. Not really. There was a fight. It was ugly. Jamie … well, Jamie was drunk and he did slap me repeatedly. But he didn’t mean it. He would have never done it sober. He cut my face in a number of places. It bled something fierce. And I hit Jamie and things went from bad to worse. At one point I hit my head on something. I fell down. But no, the pregnancy was never really in danger. But it was a dreadful quarrel, that I confess.”

“Amazing,” Reuben whispered.

“My lips were cut. My right eye was cut.” Her hand fluttered over
her right eye for a moment. “I had a gash on my head. And I was bruised all over. I had terrible swelling afterwards, but no, the pregnancy was never in danger. Clearly Jamie thought later he had terminated it. I could read that plainly in his letters. I must confess I was still angry perhaps when I first received his letters. I never answered those first letters.…”

“Of course you were angry,” said Reuben.

“Jamie didn’t remember what any doctor knows. Cuts to the face and scalp bleed.”

Reuben sighed. “Amazing, simply amazing,” he whispered. “Thank you for confiding in me. Thank you for telling me that.”

“Reuben, I know what you’re thinking. Why did I let Jamie believe that he’d killed our child? But as I’ve tried to explain—to tell him that he hadn’t, well, it would have meant he couldn’t become a priest.”

“I do understand that.”

“And the children were happy. Keep that in mind when you judge me. And then there was Professor Maitland. He didn’t want me to tell Jamie about the children. The children saved me and Professor Maitland. They gave us our happiest years together. I couldn’t have remained with Professor Maitland if it hadn’t been for the children. And I couldn’t divorce him. I could never have divorced him. I would quite literally have taken my own life before doing that.”

G
RACE DID NOT DISAPPOINT
Reuben. As he poured out the story on the phone, his mother was quiet for far longer than he had ever known her to be in any conversation. He was on the landline when he told her, and with his iPhone he texted pictures of Christine, of Jamie, and of Lorraine that he’d only just taken in the breakfast room.

He could hear his mother crying, he could hear her struggling to say they were beautiful, he could hear her struggling to say, “Please, please, Jim, come home.”

There was no way Grace could come up to Nideck Point. She wanted to come with all her heart. “You tell my grandchildren that,” she said. But she was on call for the entire weekend, and she had two cases in ICU she couldn’t leave under any circumstances. But she insisted Reuben put Lorraine on the phone.

They talked for perhaps a half hour.

By that time young Jamie was in a fierce argument with Phil about “violent” varsity sports and whether it was fair to pressure children to play soccer or football. Jamie himself refused to engage in such sports, and while Phil thought they served a purpose and tried to explain the history of sports, Jamie was adamant that a boy his age had a right to sue the school authorities to remain out of sports in which he could break his neck or his back, or fracture his skull. Jamie had researched this question quite fully.

It was amazing, the rapid young British voice, so crisp, so unfailingly polite, firing back with such speed at Phil. And Phil was trying hard to keep a straight face as he punched the opposing view. “What is the school board to do with a young male population pumped with
testosterone at an early age and absolutely unable to work it off or—.” Phil was clearly crazy about Jamie.

“Well, certainly, they have no right to deplete our numbers through violent death and injury,” Jamie retorted. “Look, Mr. Golding, certainly you know as well as I do that the state and all its subordinate institutions face the same problem with the young males of any society. The armed services exist to siphon off the dangerous exuberance of young males.…”

“Well, it’s good to see you know the background of all this,” said Phil. “You have an astonishing grasp of the big picture.”

Christine dozed against the back of the breakfast room chair. Phil tried to bring her into the conversation, but she said sleepily, “Jamie gets all worked up about these things.”

“You have no idea,” said Jamie in a low confidential voice to Phil and Reuben, “what it is like to be the twin of a girl!”

The next morning, Lisa drove south to collect clothes and personal items for the Maitland family, and Phil took Lorraine and Christine and Jamie for a walk in the woods as soon as the sun came out from behind the clouds.

Reuben spent the morning calling guesthouses and hotels throughout the little city of Carmel with no luck in finding Jim. Grace found out Jim hadn’t used his credit cards or ATM cards since his disappearance.

Felix and Sergei asked Reuben if he wanted them to join in the search. They could easily fly down to the Monterey Peninsula and start looking for Jim. “If I was certain he was there, I’d say yes,” said Reuben. “But I’m not certain.” He had a hunch. He started looking for monasteries—isolated monastic communities that had guesthouses anywhere within a hundred miles of San Francisco. It was frustrating making the calls. Jim might not have checked in under his own name. And he was reaching out to remote rural places that obviously knew nothing of the San Francisco daily news or that Jim was missing. Sometimes he couldn’t understand the thick accent of the person who answered. Sometimes no one answered the phone at all.

By afternoon, Lorraine seemed to be completely in love with Phil,
laughing irresistibly at his little jokes and catching his most obscure witticisms and literary quotes.

Jamie was so drawn to Phil, so eager to argue a million questions, that Lorraine tried gently to separate them now and then, but it didn’t work, and Phil was clearly impressed with Jamie, and holding forth on everything from the superiority of baroque to the current state of San Francisco politics. Laura and Felix took Christine throughout the whole conservatory, explaining all the various tropical plants to her. Christine loved the orchid trees, and the exotic lobster claw palms. She asked what Father Jim Golding thought about these plants. Did he have a favorite? Did Father Jim Golding like music? She loved to play the piano. She was getting better at it, she hoped, all the time.

Jamie not only looked like Jim, he sounded like Jim. Reuben thought he could see Jim in Christine as well. She was the shy one, the quiet one, the sad one, and Reuben knew it was going to be that way until Jim appeared and took her in his arms. But she was a very clever little girl. Her favorite novel was
Les Misérables
.

“Because she’s seen the musical!” said Jamie scornfully.

Christine just smiled. Who was her father’s favorite author? she wondered. Did he read the poems of Edgar Allan Poe? What about Emily Dickinson?

Lisa cooked a huge dinner in the guesthouse, and Reuben tried to put on a brave face when he assured them they’d hear some good news from Jim soon. He went out into the night to call Grace, only to confirm there was nothing new. The police had confirmed Jim was on foot when he left the Fairmont Hotel. His apartment had been searched, and the little cashbox under the bed was empty.

“That means he probably has a couple of thousand with him,” said Grace over the phone, “and no need to touch his credit cards. Your brother always kept that much, just to be able to help people. If only he knew what was going on. The new rehab fund is up to two million! People are making donations in his name, Reuben! And this is Jim’s dream, this rehab shelter right by the church, where he can offer decent rooms to recovering addicts!”

“All right, Mom. I’m going back down to Carmel tomorrow morning, and I’m going to cover the entire area if I have to seek out every single little guesthouse or bed-and-breakfast in existence from Monterey to Carmel Valley.”

He texted the last four or five pictures he’d taken of Lorraine and the kids, being most careful not to include the robust and radiant Phil in any of them.

For a long time, he stood outside in the cold darkness looking through the multipaned windows of the guesthouse. Phil was sitting by the fire reading aloud to Jamie and Christine. Lorraine was lying, with a pillow under her head, on the carpet in front of the fire. He heard a footstep in the shadows behind him, and then he caught the scent of Laura, of Laura’s hair and Laura’s perfume.

“Whatever happens,” said Laura, “they’re going to be all right.”

“That part I know,” said Reuben in a thick voice. “They’re part of our family.” He turned and took her in his arms. “I wish we could be alone tonight in the forest,” he said. “I wish we could go off up there into the treetops, and just be us alone.”

“Soon,” she said. “Soon.”

Inside the warm cozy house, Lisa brought in steaming mugs on a tray. Reuben could smell the chocolate. He nuzzled his face into Laura’s warm neck.

“You’ve never told me,” she whispered.

“Told you what?”

“How did I do during the Twelfth Night Feast?”

He laughed. “Are you joking?” he said. “Your instincts were perfect.” He was thinking, remembering, and he could not bring his human attitudes now really to bear on what had happened. He could recall every second of it; but he could not feel what he’d felt when the Twelfth Night Feast had been in full swing.
These are the monsters, these are the reeking killers who slaughtered a boy and a priest, who poisoned children, who sought to maim and murder Jim
. “You were one of us,” he said to Laura. “And there was no male or female, really, or young or old, or lover and lover, or father and son—we were kindred. Just kindred. And you were part of it, as were we all.”

She nodded.

“And how was it for you?” he asked. “The first taste of human flesh.”

“Natural,” she said. “Completely natural. I think I thought too much about it beforehand. And it was simple. That’s the word. No conflict involved at all.”

It was his turn to nod. He smiled. But it was a slow and sober smile.

The little gathering broke up about eight.

“We turn in early in the country,” Phil explained. Lorraine was obviously exhausted. But Jamie wanted to know if he could stay up to watch the eleven o’clock news.

They climbed the hill to the house, and found Felix in his robe and pajamas in the library. He gave Reuben a knowing glance. Phil would change sometime close to midnight. That was the way with new Morphenkinder. And Felix would not let Phil go out into the woods alone.