CHAPTER 13
It was almost dark by the time Thomas got back to the rectory, and the rain had turned to sleet. Finding no lights on in the house and no sign of life, he inched his way up the stairs to Ed’s room and sat on the bed. He was pretty sure he had sprained both knee and ankle in his fall, but he didn’t think he had broken anything. He’d be black and blue in the morning but, on the whole, he had been lucky.
Not often you end the day relieved not to have been eaten, is it?
He grinned to himself.
“Leave it alone,” his attacker had said.
His grin faded. There had been no attempt at robbery, no gleeful laughing at a lethal but well-executed prank. Leave it alone. Someone was trying to scare him away from poking into Ed’s death.
Well, they’d succeeded in scaring him. Just not enough to stop him.
Mule, said Kumi’s voice in his head. Ox.
The room was still untidy from the rifling of Parks, the thief who had taken what the beat cop had called the Jesus fish. Could the same man have subsequently tossed him to the lions? He had no way of knowing for sure, but he didn’t think so. The thief had seemed impetuous, reckless even, something that his odd weapons seemed to reinforce. The guy at the zoo had been a professional, all his movements economical, and his strength prodigious. The guy had picked him up and thrown him as if he were no more than a child. Men like that carried automatic pistols, not swords.
“Devlin?” he mused aloud.
He got to his feet, restless, suddenly anxious to get out of this room and its oppressive silence. He wanted to find Jim and tell him about his afternoon with the senator, the lion, and the man who had thrown him to her, but on descending saw no sign that he was home. The rest of the house was still dark, so he wandered down to the one part of the building he hadn’t seen, away from the front door and kitchen, past stained wooden cabinets through a musty-smelling corridor lit by a bare, low-wattage bulb. There was one door on the left, which was locked, and another at the end of the corridor. He tried it, and as it opened he stepped into his past.
It was a sacristy, where the priests dressed for mass, where they stored their vestments and the accoutrements of the liturgy. It smelled of incense and candle wax, and it was gloomy and wooden floored, like the sacristy where he had been an altar boy thirty years before. As a rule, Thomas didn’t like dark, enclosed places, but this was different: familiar. At the far end were a pair of double doors into the church, and through them came a faint murmuring: Jim, saying mass, doubtless to a huddle of lonely seniors who had nothing better to do on a cold March night.
For the first time Thomas felt the loss of his brother wholly without rancor. This could have been where they horsed around in their cassocks before mass, messing about with the candles, arguing over who got to be the cross bearer and who had to be the acolyte. Ed always got the cross. He was two years older than Thomas, which made him taller, so Thomas would be paired with one of the shorter boys and together they would carry the heavy brass candlesticks on either side of Ed, who walked slightly ahead of the procession. The smell brought it all back to him, as if it were yesterday: the dead matches, the exotic fragrance of the incense so alien to the rest of their working-class world, and for a moment he thought he could turn and see his brother, ten or twelve years old, pulling the white surplice over his head and mimicking Father Wells’s nasal singsong: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son . . .”
Tears started to his eyes, not because his brother was dead, but because Ed and this place announced so clearly how very much he had lost since those days, that so much had gone of life and left him with so little. It wasn’t just Ed that had gone, it was also his parents, several friends, and, of course, his ex-wife, and though she was very much alive, her absence from his life seemed to speak loudest of isolation and failure. Thomas stood still in the gathering darkness, only thinking to wipe the tears away when brought back to himself by the once-familiar rumble of the congregation saying in broken unison, “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen . . .”
The mass he had listened to through the closed doors had been over for two hours. He had shared a dinner of frozen chicken pot pies with oven fries and baked beans with Jim at the kitchen table and had watched the local news while Jim made a round of phone calls and tapped out e-mails on a droning, yellowed PC: “parish admin stuff,” he said. Jim had listened aghast to Thomas’s account of the incident at the zoo, speculating that Devlin had arranged the whole thing.
“Maybe,” said Thomas, pleased by the priest’s ambivalence about the senator, even by the way he seemed to be taking Thomas’s side. “But Devlin didn’t even try to warn me off.”
“He didn’t need to! He had some goon ready to kill you!”
“Not really,” Thomas admitted, sipping his Bushmills. “I think he came to warn me off. I, sort of, fought back, and he lost his temper. I could have been killed, but I don’t think he really intended . . .”
“That’s about the dumbest argument I’ve ever heard,” said Jim.
“So you think I should go to the police?”
Jim faltered.
“Well,” he said. “I don’t know. The police . . .”
“You don’t trust them?”
“Cops are too fond of rule books,” said the priest.
“Isn’t the Bible . . . ?”
“No,” said Jim, abruptly.
“Anyway,” Thomas said, “reporting it will achieve nothing beyond making me look like an idiot.”
“That’s what you’re afraid of?” said Jim, his good humor returning as quickly as it had gone. “Looking stupid?”
“Well,” said Thomas, “it is humiliating to have to talk about how . . .”
“Right,” said Jim dryly. “I can see that. If I had been thrown down a trench to be eaten by lions I know that what would really bother me was how embarrassing it all was. I mean, what does one wear for such an event . . . ?”
“I’m not kidding, Jim,” said Thomas. “The guy told me to leave things alone. If I’m going to keep poking into Ed’s death, I need to be discreet about it. Sitting in a squad car and chatting to some well-meaning cop who can do absolutely nothing to help will achieve nothing, and may give whoever is watching me a reason to put me out of the picture for good. It’s not worth the risk.”
“And I thought I was paranoid,” said Jim.
“When someone tries to make you into whatever lions have when they can’t get zebra, you’re allowed a little paranoia.”
“Point taken, Daniel,” said Jim, managing a smile.
In the lion’s den.
“Funny.”
“I thought so.”
“I keep coming back to what Ed was doing in Italy,” said Thomas.
“Research and a bit of downtime,” said Jim. “But I got the impression he spent a lot of time away from the retreat house. They called here once asking if he had left early.”
The phone rang in the kitchen. Thomas checked his watch and raised his eyebrows. It was after ten. Jim, used to being called—and called out—at all hours, just sighed and lumbered into the other room. Thomas closed his eyes and settled back. He was ready for bed. It had been a long, strange day, like the one before it, and he didn’t know what to do next. He wondered why he was still in the presbytery and if he was ready to go back to his empty house.
Better be. You’ll be spending a lot of time there for the next few months.
The prospect of no job, no income, nothing to do with his time depressed and wearied him still further. He turned and noticed that Jim had left the computer on, the screen showing the parish website. One of the thumbnail images of the community was the very picture of Thomas’s wedding that currently lay on the floor of Ed’s room. That Ed would have used that picture, particularly after they lost touch, surprised him, and he stared at it, wondering what had been going on in his brother’s life before he died.
“It’s for you.”
Jim was standing in the doorway holding the portable phone.
“Here,” said Jim. “I’ll see if I can turn up that contact address in Italy.”
Thomas took the phone from him frowning.
“This is Thomas Knight,” he said.
“Hello, Tom.”
It was probably only a couple of seconds, but he felt that he had been standing there for at least a minute in stunned silence.
“Tom, you there?”
No one else called him that. No one ever had.
“Kumi?”
He didn’t need to ask, hadn’t really meant to. It had just come out, hoarse, distant, like the echoes of the past he had heard in the sacristy. The hairs on his arms were bristling and his heart had started to race.
“Hi, Tom.”
“Hi. It’s been a while.”
“Five years, yes.”
She said it without resentment, perhaps a little sadly. It was he, after all, who had refused to talk to her anymore.
“I called you at home, but I guess you still don’t check your messages, so I thought I’d try to reach you here.”
“Right,” he said. He just couldn’t find words. Jim had just walked back in brandishing a slip of paper, but his smile died when he saw Thomas’s face, as if he thought he might be having a stroke. Maybe he was.
“Listen, I just wanted to say how sorry I was about Ed,” she said.
“Right,” he said again. “Thanks.”
“I know things hadn’t been good between you lately, but . . . well, it’s just terrible. I wish I could do something.”
“Thanks. I know. It’s okay.” Then, as an afterthought, “Wait. How did you know?”
She seemed to hesitate.
“I had a call from DHS,” she said.
“Oh,” said Thomas, unsure of what to do with this.
“So,” she said, moving things along. “You doing okay?”
“Not bad, you know.”
“Work okay?”
“Fine,” he lied. “You know, the usual.”
“Right.”
“You? Work, I mean.”
“Oh yes. All work and no play. I was thinking of you in the office the other day,” she said. Her voice was light now, almost frivolous. It sounded forced, ghostwritten.
“Yes?” he managed.
“Yes. I was thinking back to when we went to Arizona with Ed, and we went on that hike. That was great, wasn’t it? I think back about that a lot. Remember, when we came down that dried-up creek bed? And Ed was there, and we were all laughing . . .”
“Kumi,” he interjected, “you okay?”
She ignored him, her voice a little shrill now, high and fast as if she were auditioning for a sitcom.
“And the three of us were staying in that little hotel and it was just the best time and . . . And Ed kept talking about that time he went to Italy. Remember? I keep thinking about that hike up the creek bed. Remember that? Going back to the river source—and Ed said it was just like that place he went to and . . . Anyway. Listen, I’m sorry. I’m rambling. I’m calling from work so I shouldn’t stay on. I just wanted to wish you all the best and say how sorry I was. Okay?”
“Kumi,” he repeated, more carefully, more seriously, “are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Really. It’s you I’m concerned about, Tom.”
“Wait,” he said.
“I’m sorry, Tom. I really have to go. We’ll talk again, okay? Bye.”
“Kumi . . .”
“Bye, Tom.”
The line went dead.
Thomas stood there in the dimly lit room, staring at the phone.
“You all right, Thomas?” said Jim.
“I don’t think so,” said Thomas. The hairs on his arms were still bristling, and he felt very cold. “I think things are worse than I thought. Far worse.”