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“You knew the Father well?”Kate asked.
“We’re not exactly church folks,” Annie replied.“Heathens, Tom called us.He was…” She took a breath.Kate could see a tear forming in the woman’s right eye.She took a napkin from the dispenser on the table and handed it to her.“Thank you, sweetie.Oh, you’re a pretty thing, aren’t you?”she said.
Kate hadn’t expected that.She didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing, and smiled.
“Father Tom was one of the best.”
“We’re sorry for your loss,” Kate said.“What was he like?”
“You want to know about Tom? A decent guy.Stood up for what was right, you know?”
“We heard that from other quarters, too,” Kate said.“But what sort of things are we talking about?”
“Well, let me tell you a story about one thing he did, because it’s something I actually saw and heard, so I know it’s not just talk, or what-have-you.”
Kate smiled, and shifted in her seat, thinking Annie would sit down and join them.But she didn’t.She stood right where she was, twisting the napkin in her fingers.
“Every Christmas, we have a big social, up at the marina, and you know how it is, some folks drink more than they should….And after the party, one year, I think it was his second Christmas with us… We were up in the clubhouse clearing up and Father Tom was helping.He’d always be the one to help, you know, he was the –”
She lost her thread momentarily and blew her nose loudly.Kate noticed that even though Annie called herself a “heathen,” she still referred to the priest as “Father.”Perhaps everyone saw him like that, she thought.As a kind of father.
“We were all clearing up and we heard a noise from the parking lot,” Annie continued.“This big old brute of a man was out there whaling on his wife.And she’s a tiny thing, the wife, Mary, a slip of a girl.And suddenly, the Father’s out there.We didn’t notice he’d gone out.He’s right in between them and we heard him, because we had the windows open, airing the place after the party.And he says, ‘You want to hit someone, Joe, try me.’Now Joe Kerrigan was as drunk as a skunk that night, and he took a swing at Father Tom.And you know what Father Tom says?He says, ‘I’m glad you did that, Joe.’And he laid him out flat with one punch!”
“Nice,” said Marcus.
“And when Joe’s down on the floor, the Father kneels down and says something to Joe.Nobody knows what he said in his ear.Mary had run up to us in the clubhouse.So whatever he said, that was between Tom and Joe and maybe God, if you believe He was there, too.Whatever it was, Joe Kerrigan left town.Mary moved back in with her mom, and nobody heard from Joe again.So…”
A hatch opened on the other side of the counter.A thick and hairy pair of arms deposited two slices of apple pie on the ledge, and the hatch closed.Annie went to fetch them, returning with the coffee pot.
“He wasn’t what I expected a priest to be like,” she continued, as she filled up their cups.“He was happiest sitting out on the pier with a fishing rod.Liked a drink or two at Rourke’s.Loved to tinker round under cars and trucks.I don’t know if he believed all that God and sin and resurrection stuff, I guess he musta.But wouldn’t a guy like that have been happier with a loving wife and a big ol’ houseful of kids and dogs? Then he wouldn’t have had to…gothat awful way…”
Annie’s voice cracked for good this time and she fled into the kitchen.
“Sounds like he might have made an enemy or two,” Marcus observed quietly.
“A priest who wasn’t like a priest,” said Kate.
“And do we think Joe Kerrigan really left town?”
She hated how their minds worked sometimes.A much-loved man had died a horrible death, a close-knit community was in shock.And here they were, digging for secrets, handing out guilt and blame and suspicion.Assuming the worst, because it was their job to do so.
And who knew, in any case, if Father Tom’s awful death had anything to do with Father Tom or the community he ministered to?The message on the hymn book page – the letters of her name spelled out, and perhaps other signs and warnings, too – took this brutal killing away from the place where it had happened, and landed it right at her own feet.It was impossible to ignore that one, simple, chilling thought.
The killing of Father Tom was a message to her.But why? What did they want with her?
CHAPTER FOUR
Cracking codes reminded her of trips to the cabin.
Kate’s parents owned a little place, three hours north of Chicago, at a spot called Sugar Meadow Forest.According to a family legend no one really believed, Kate’s mother’s great-grandfather had won it, playing poker with a Prohibition-era mob boss.It sat on the shores of a lake which froze solid in the winter.Kate remembered winters and skating, long, hazy summers, swimming, hiking, den-building in the forest.Cook-outs on the shore, the grown-ups getting tipsy and the kids flitting in and out of them like a cloud of gnats.
The spot was idyllic, the journeys to it much less so.Kate’s mother would be packing up the car, her father, without fail, delayed by work.There was always a surgery that took longer than predicted, a nervous junior who needed a second opinion, a snap meeting of the hospital board.In the run-up to each trip, Kate’s mother would plead with her husband to keep his schedule free, to do some forward planning and ensure that this time, just this once, they made it out of the city before night fell.
And Kate’s father would smile that easy, twinkly, Irish smile of his, put an arm around his wife’s slender waist and kiss her, saying, “It’ll work out fine, Cath, just fine.”
But it didn’t.He’d be late, Kate’s mother would get a headache, there’d be an argument as they crawled out of Chicago in the Friday night exodus of exhaust fumes and impatient horns.An argument, or a tight silence with Kate in the back, soaking up all their tensions and converting them into carsickness.
Eventually, she would fall asleep, and until she was quite big – eleven or twelve – she’d never witnessed the moment they arrived at the cabin.She’d wake up in the stuffy little attic room and, no matter how many times it happened, she’d panic initially, not knowing where she was.
