murder on the block 2

My twin granddaughters, almost 5 are here with bern and I. Josh is at a wedding rehearsal . Cathy comes on the train tomorrow with Tegan, nearing 2. We'll have all three girls tomorrow night while Josh and Cathy are at a wedding and stay in a hotel in Hartford. Pray for us....

I have no time to write, but can send you chapter 2 of Murder on the Block (it's longer than the first chapter...endure....)

II.

Thursday, October 23, 2003—7:17 a.m.

Richard smelled bacon cooking and voices speaking softly. Someone was in the house with him. He willed his mind still. He tried, as he had been trying for nearly a year and a half, to pray. And nothing happened—not even a busy signal. Here he lay, a priest of God, unable to pray. As far as he knew, no one had figured that out yet—not the folk at St. Mark’s in Worthington or the precious few people of St. Anne’s on Block Island.

The last prayer he had prayed came sprawled out on the tile of the kitchen floor, his lips pressed against Susan’s mouth, blowing for all he was worth, trying to remember the training he’s received at the Worthington YMCA in first aid. He and Susan had both gone, imagining that parents of three children should know the basics of resuscitation. He had blown the breath of life into a remarkably life-like dummy, watching, out of the corner of his eye, at Susan laughing while he essentially kissed an obviously male torso.

But all he tasted on the floor of their kitchen was the taste of death. It was not unlike the taste of spring greens a day or two past the expiration date on the cellophane package. He could not for the life of himself describe it any differently or explain what that taste was like. But he knew it. It was the taste of death.

“Oh God, Jesus, please….” was the prayer he prayed in that moment. And, just as people who pray often tend to reduce their prayers to code, Richard’s prayer boiled down to one word…”Please, please, please….”

It did not please God to let Richard’s wife of almost 30 years live. In response, Richard, without ever “deciding” or “choosing” one way or the other, simply stopped praying at all. He simply stopped then and there.

To say he grew ‘angry’ with God would not be subtle enough to describe it. What he felt and experienced and lived out of was a sudden and complete ‘disinterest’ in whatever God was up to that kept the Almighty from noticing that this lovely, good, sometimes annoying woman was dead. Whatever else he knew or imagined that much was true: Susan was dead and God had been distracted by something else. In the beginning, for three months or so, even though he couldn’t pray, Richard had given God some wiggle room. There were a lot of things for the Creator of the Universe to be interested in, after all. There was the slaughter of innocent people in wars and on the streets of civilized countries. There was the insidious expansion of deadly diseases—AIDS, malaria, even new strains of flu—that silently removed thousands each day from this place and time. There was the wasting of the planet—global warming, damage to the ozone layer, deadly flumes, the ravages of pesticides in the air, ground, water table. God was busy with other things, Richard credited that for a few months, it was impossible to deny. But eventually, he realized that no matter what was deterring God from that kitchen floor in Worthington, Connecticut, it wasn’t as important as whether Susan lived or died. So, he stopped praying.

He had given it a great deal of thought to ‘not praying’ in the months since then. He had convinced himself that even though he didn’t pray any more, his role as a priest allowed him to be prayed through in the liturgies and rituals of the church. For almost six months after that morning, Richard did not celebrate the Eucharist or lead prayers. People gave him a wide berth. His assistant essentially took over St. Mark’s though Richard was still technically the Rector. And by the time he had gone through the almost Byzantine theological gymnastics that allowed him once more to stand at the altar—a man bereft of prayer himself, able to pray for others—the parish had given him a year’s leave of absence, with pay and benefits, and named Stephanie Poole, his Curate, as “Priest in charge”.

Richard wasn’t sure how many of the members of St. Mark’s in Worthington expected him to return, healed and restored, to take up his role in their life again. A scant few, he sometimes thought. He was, after all, a deeply wounded and broken man now. That might be an apt metaphor for a priest theologically, but practically, who would want to be comforted by someone who could not find comfort for their own soul? And who would want a priest who couldn’t really pray? So he had embraced the offer to come to Block Island—to “say prayers” rather than pray them for that tiny winter congregation while he sought to find the fruits of a year of counseling and introspection. What would he do next? He hadn’t even begun to plum the depths of that question when he and Cecelia happened upon two more dead people on a muddy dirt road in a place he was sent to be healing.

The woman whose name he couldn’t remember was in the doorway. She looked a little worse for a scotch filled night but was still almost beautiful. Her blond hair was spikey, like some punk rock singer Richard dimly remembered. She (“Mary?” “Martha?” “Marta?’: he ran through a litany of M names—“Mara”, that was it!) was dressed in faded jeans and a white Brown University T-shirt that almost reached to the top of her jeans. There was a sliver of flat, tanned stomach showing. Richard hadn’t noticed Mara or the other detective carrying in any luggage—but then, Richard hadn’t noticed much, high on pills and whisky and slurring his speech and not knowing if he could move or not.

Sgt. Mara (now he needed to dredge her last name from the left over stew of his memory) almost smiled at him, but not quite.

“Good morning, Father,” she said in what he would have described as a whisper except it was totally audible. “Cecelia needs to go out and you need to shave. Breakfast is almost ready and Dante wants to see the church.”

She lifted her hand and showed the rousing dog her leash. Cecelia tumbled from the bed and stumbled to Mara who bent down and embraced the dog’s head, holding it against her chest.

“Good morning, girl,” she said in that loud whispery voice that Richard remembered from the previous night as somehow sad. When Mara stood up, the leash was miraculously connected to Cecelia’s collar and the two of them left on six feet, leaving Richard alone, not a little confused and hung over and remarkably hungry.

Richard’s older maternal cousin, Marlin, had taught him what a man needs in the morning. “Three S’s,” Marlin said to ten year old Richard, “shave, shower and shit.” Many were the mornings, like this one as October began to die on Block Island, that Richard remembered that advice, and followed it.

Cecelia was eating boisterously and with much noise from her bowl in the small kitchen when Richard arrived, jeaned and t-shirted himself. Dante Caggiano (whose name bubbled up from the alphabet soup of Richard’s memory as soon as he saw him) was dressed in blue—navy blue pin-stripped suit, sky blue shirt, deep blue tie with navy blue accents, but the same black loafers—all of which was topped with an “HAVE YOU KISSED AN EPISCOPALIAN TODAY” apron, replete with a six inch square seal of the Episcopal Church in red and white and blue. Richard had noticed it on a hanger in the hall closet and secretly wondered who would ever wear such a garment.

Dante had one of the Rectory’s frying pans in one hand and a short, unfiltered cigarette in the other.

“You can’t smoke in here,” Richard said automatically. “There’s no smoking in the house.”

“I know,” said Dante, putting the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, expertly closing his eye and finding a spatula to shovel scrambled eggs onto a plate, which he quickly transferred to the table where Richard always sat. “But you can’t smoke outside because the fucking wind is always blowing on this piss-poor excuse for an island. So I will, from time to time, more often than you wish, I’m sure, Padre, be smoking in here.”

While he was holding his right eye almost shut and talking, the policeman was looking through the cabinets around the kitchen and presenting Richard with a bottle of Texas Pete Hot-Sauce. Richard thought he heard water running somewhere, but didn’t mention it.

Richard looked up at him. For just a moment Dante seemed to be still, but when that moment passed he was washing out the frying pan, dousing his cigarette butt in the water, dropping it in the trash can, changing Cecelia’s water bowl and putting two plates in the dishwasher.

“The dishwasher…”, Richard began.

“Was never fully anchored so I should be careful about pulling the top shelf out too far…”, Dante finished for him.

Richard covered his eggs with hot sauce and took a bite. They were fluffy, tasty and full of cheese.

“How did you know…,” he began.

Dante finished, “that you liked hot sauce? There are four bottles in various places around the kitchen. Elementary, my dear Padre.”

“He’s a detective, after all,” Mara said, entering the room, dressed now in black slacks, a huge, white fisherman’s sweater and expensive running shoes, her hair still wet from the shower.

Richard looked up at her between bites, thinking she was almost beautiful, wondering how long he had been noticing women again.

“My lovely Mara was taking a shower as we shared these moments together,” Lt. Caggiano said, removing the apron and lighting another cigarette with a delicate, monogrammed silver lighter. “That was why you heard water running, though you didn’t mention it.”

“Isn’t he amazing?” Mara said, teasingly, pouring two cups of coffee from the Mr. Coffee by the sink. “It gets annoying after a while, believe me.”

She carried the coffee to the table and sat one cup in front of Richard.

“A little cream,” Dante said, carrying a pint of half-and-half he grabbed gracefully from the refrigerator, “and one—no two—Splendas”. He handed Richard two yellow packets.

“How did you know that?” Richard asked.

“Don’t ask,” Mara spoke, whispered, “just be annoyed.”

Dante was standing with his back to the table, looking out the glass door to the back yard, watching the fluttering life of dozens of birds there.

“There are three pints of half-and-half in the fridge and an almost empty box of Splenda packets on the counter,” he said. “You’ve been here six weeks, in this house, and, unless you drink a lot of coffee—which I doubt—probably two or so a day, you’ve been using up about two packets a cup. Simple deduction.”

“Annoyed yet?” Mara said to Richard, nodding and winking again.

When his plate was empty and Dante had rinsed it thoroughly and put it in the dishwasher, Richard leaned back and felt like himself for the first time in over a day.

“Lt. Caggiano,” he said, “is it normal….”

“For the investigating officers to move in with a suspect?” Dante completed Richard’s question. “Not at all. But when our friend, Stevenson, suggested it, I couldn’t think of a reason why not.”

“Am I…”, Richard tried to say.

“But darling Mara and I aren’t two to abide by senseless regulations. You’ve noticed that, I presume?”

Mara laughed. “It’s real important to Dante that you realize he isn’t your normal detective. He has a reputation to uphold.”

“And you,” Dante said to her, though not unkindly, “have a reputation to live down….”

She laughed again.

Richard tired of the interchange between the two cops. “But am I…”, he started again.

“A suspect?” Mara and Dante said together, alto and tenor, though Mara’s voice was the lower pitch. They laughed, though Richard didn’t.

“Bread and butter,” Mara said.

“Guns and butter,” Dante replied.

They both laughed again, the comfortable laughter of people used to laughing together.

“Of course you are, Padre,” Dante began. “Of course and always.”

“One in three times,” Mara added quickly, “the person who reports the crime did the deed.”

“A remarkable and difficult reality,” Dante said. “Even we don’t understand it.”

“Why would a murderer turn themselves in?” Mara asked.

“Because they want to get caught?” Richard interjected, totally confused and searching for dry land in the swamp of his brain and the circumstances. He imagined the chemicals in his blood stream were still playing tricks with his logic.

“No!” Dante cried, suddenly in full movement, careening around the living room, waving his hands and wondrously lighting another cigarette in the midst of the fluttering of his arms. “No and a thousand times no. The killer calls in the crime thinking that act of civic duty will inoculate him or her—see how modern and politically correct I am, Padre—from being a suspect. And, in the meantime, we defenders of the faith—I mean our civilization’s, faith, Father, don’t be offended—know that our job has a third of a chance of being done when we discover the person who called 911. This really isn’t very hard, this solving of murders.”

Lt. Caggiano was flitting around the house so rapidly that Richard had to close his eyes to avoid the distraction of Dante picking up and putting back books, touching flat surfaces, swinging his arm around with a lit cigarette in his hand and dancing—that was the only word for it—dancing around the Rectory.

“So,” Richard said, calmly and slowly from behind closed eyes, “I AM a suspect?”

“Open your eyes, Father Lucas,” Mara whispered. Her whisper was just negligibly softer than her normal speaking voice. “He’s standing still now, you can handle it.”

Dante was perched on the end of the table where Mara and Richard were sitting. Even angled on the edge of a table, his suit’s lines fell sharply.

“Of course not,” he said. “You’re a respected, though damaged, 55 year old Episcopal priest with three children who live…correct me on this, Mara, if necessary…in Boston, New Haven and St. Louis, am I right?”

“Right as rain,” Mara answered.

“And though you have less than $3000 in your savings account, you have a remarkably good pension plan and almost no debt and a house that you’re not living in that is valued at just over three-quarters of a million dollars,” Dante continued. “You are in good health, though you might want to notice the next blood work about your liver—seems you’ve been drinking more than usual since your wife…Susan Marcia Browning Lucas…died….”

“Wait a minute!” Richard tried to say. He wanted to ask how he knew all this and especially if his house in Worthington was really worth that much.

“Lay back and enjoy it,” Mara whispered, really whispering this time, “he’s just showing off.”

“Your children are comfortable, law abiding and relatively debt free,” Dante went on, holding one extinguished cigarette in the palm of his hand and lighting another, “though Mary…no, Miriam…was arrested during a gay-rights demonstration in Boston when she was a student at B.C.—no Tufts, I forgot for a moment that you’re an Episcopalian. And your Episcopalian bishop thinks the world of you and there is nothing to indicate you are anything other than you seem to be. It’s astonishing, isn’t it, what the Rhode Island State Police can learn overnight? So why would you, reasonably, have anything to do with drugs, money or terrorism?”

Dante took a drag on his cigarette that would have pulled smoke and nicotine into the soles and toenails of his feet, if that were possible. He glided from the table to the sink in the kitchen, dropping one butt in the trash and extinguishing the second under a thin stream of water.

“Drugs, money or terrorism,” Richard finally interjected, “is that what this is about?”

“Isn’t it always?” Mara said.

“I’ve been in police work too long,” Lt. Caggiano said, now standing by the sliding door to the back deck, staring out at the marsh behind St. Anne’s. “There used to be other things to consider—passion and happenstance and the occasional ‘wrong place at the wrong time’ crime. But now it is all much simpler…and, if I might say, much duller. Drugs and money and terrorism are the whole thing, Father. The woof and warp of murder. And there is absolutely no reason to believe you have anything to do with any of that. So, as of now, let it be said, you are officially not a suspect so lovely Mara and I can domicile with you while we investigate and do other detective things here on this miserable rock.”

Mara actually giggled. Dante turned around and stared at Richard.

“Let’s see that church now,” he said.

***

Dante was curious about everything. He wanted the history of the large old stained glass window of St. Anne and her daughter, Mary.

“I think it must be from the old church,” Richard said, staring at the window he’d been staring at for a few weeks every year for two decades, realizing he’d never really thought to ask about a stained glass window leaning up against the wall.

“The one that burned?” Dante asked, already near the altar, examining fair linen and candlesticks. “And before you ask how I knew about the church burning, it’s because I took that coffee table history of Block Island with me to read in the helicopter.”

By the time he finished speaking, Lt. Caggiano was seated at the little electronic organ, figuring out how to turn it on and playing a few bars of something that sounded like Bach.

“Not a very good sound,” he said, switching to something sounding like the score for a silent movie. “But one wouldn’t expect it to be….”

Mara was sitting on one of the rattan chairs near the wall of glass that made up the north wall of the building. She was staring out down to the water and the ferry dock.

“How do you get people to listen to you?” she asked, still staring out. “Why don’t they just stare out at the view.”

“Some do,” Richard answered as Dante switched tunes again, this was something smoky, moody, a jazz tune familiar to Richard that he couldn’t place.

“Ellington,” Dante said, watching him watch Mara watch the view, “from the ‘Sacred Concerts’. Thought it appropriate.” Then he stood and moved around the little chapel again.

“You…,” Richard began.

“Play quite well,” Dante finished, “yes, I know.”

Mara turned back around, her gray eyes crinkled shut, “my God, Father, don’t encourage him!”

They all retreated to the part of the church near the front door. Dante was staring at a plaque with multiple small name plates by the door.

“Those are the people whose ashes are interred in the Memorial Garden out back,” Richard told him, moving to read over the detective’s shoulder.

“This one,” Dante said, pointing. He pointed with both his index and second finger, as if he were holding a cigarette between them. “This ‘Cynthia Jane Cuthbertson Matthews’, any relation to our friend Stevenson?”

Richard nodded. “His wife. She drowned in a boating accident. It wasn’t while I was up here—it was September, but Susan and I came over to the island for the funeral. She was a sweet and gentle woman. Stevenson was shattered. He had been in the boat with her and couldn’t save her.”

Dante sniffed, as if smelling a fine wine. “So the two of you are both in the widower’s club,” he said, “an exclusive club since women tend to outlive us by so long.”

“Only the good die young,” Mara said from behind them. Dante shot her a withering look and Richard flinched. Her hand flew to her mouth and her eyes widened. “Father Lucas,” she said, “that was thoughtless….”

He shook his head and smiled at her embarrassment. “It’s okay….And probably true….”

Nevertheless, she retreated to the deck just outside the door while Richard showed Dante what was in the kitchen. As he was taking out the silver from under the sink, he noticed it didn’t seem as crowded as usual. But the thought quickly floated away as Dante admired the communion sets.

And on it went until Richard had replaced all the silver altar pieces and shown Dante the few, dull vestments from the closet for him to examine and comment on.

“You know a lot about this stuff,” Richard told him finally.

“Two years in the seminary,” he said, “until I found my true calling—detective work and attractive men.”

“Oh, Lord,” Mara said from the doorway. She’d come back in but stood by the door staring out into the church parking lot to the houses beyond. “Dante thinks it important to share his sexual orientation as soon as possible. I don’t know why. Perhaps he thinks its disarming or will create some tension so people will say things they didn’t intend to say.”

“Or maybe Dante just wants to be open and honest,” Dante said, “and to let Fr. Lucas here know that I really appreciate the Episcopal Church, especially after this past summer.”

“This summer?” Richard asked, genuinely confused which, he decided he would be around the two detectives.

“The election of an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire and how the General Convention, I think that’s what it’s called, had the theological courage to approve it.” He looked at Richard, holding a white stole. “Isn’t that what happened, Father?”

Richard nodded, remembering now. “And high time,” he commented.

“Hear that, Mara dear,” Dante said, putting the stole around his neck after kissing the cross in the middle of the long white cloth. “That’s why the church I don’t go to is now the Episcopal Church.”

Mara laughed. “If that’s true for all homosexuals of your age, then when you find partners and adopt a child or when you start worrying about your mortality, the Episcopal church will be overflowing with well-to-do gay men and lesbians with lots of disposable income. Quite an evangical moment for Episcopalians.”

“You mean ‘evangelical’, I think, Richard said softly.

“Whatever,” Mara said, not miffed at all as he thought she would be. “Evangelical….”

Lt. Caggiano turned toward her, wearing the stole. “What do you think, Sergeant?” he asked, modeling it for her. “Maybe the church needs me back after all.”

“Fat chance these days, unless you do make the Episcopal church the church you don’t attend,” she said, walking out onto the deck that surrounded two sides of the house and connected chapel. Then she called back, “not much wind, Dante.”

“Come on, Father,” he said, handing the stole to Richard, “she knows if she doesn’t get me outside I’ll light up in a church.”

“You’ve done it before,” Mara called, though neither of them could see her anymore.

Richard followed in Dante’s wake, still carrying the stole, and when he stepped outside he saw the white, Rhode Island State Police helicopter sitting in the parking lot only a few feet from his battered, eight-year-old Volvo and a black sport’s car that was built incredibly low to the ground and looked terribly expensive.

“Ah,” Dante said, lighting a cigarette. “Brooks is back from breakfast.” The pilot waved from the cockpit of the helicopter and seemed to be playing with gages. “I let him take your car, Father, since your keys were on the counter and there’s no way he can drive the Ferrari.”

“No one but Dante can drive the Ferrari,” Marta said as she slipped around the detective, took Richard’s arm with a conspiratory smile and led him back into the church just as the rotaries of the huge machine jumped to life. A whoosh of air entered the door and Dante cursed outside, loud and creatively.

“The wind came up, Dante,” Mara said, laughing and moving quickly down the center aisle toward the door to the living room of the house.

Richard stood in the middle of the church, watching Dante—windblown and trying to pull the door closed as the helicopter began to ascend in a clamor of wind and noise that drowned out the detective’s curses.

***

“I don’t see how you slept through its landing and taking off last night,” Mara was saying as she and Richard sat at the table in the same places as the night before, drinking coffee, watching Dante flit around the room, examining everything over and again. “Three of your neighbors called the police.”

“They doubtless thought it was a terrorist attack,” Dante said from the kitchen, looking through drawers. “Or the feds coming to search for Osama bin Laden the way they did for Philip Berrigan.”

“You know that story too?” Richard said, “was that in the book?”

“No, Father,” he said, standing suddenly still next to him. The lack of motion was almost dizzying to Richard. “Our good friend and host, Stevenson Marten Matthews told me that tale. He was one of yours, wasn’t he?”

“Stevenson?” Richard asked, confused by the question.

“No,” Dante replied, still stone, “the fugitive harborer, the Berrigan hider. Stringfellow, wasn’t it?”

“One of mine?”

“An Anglican, of course.”

Richard nodded, understanding.

Dante took off his coat and hung it neatly on the chair to Richard’s left. He sat down, crossed his legs and leaned across the table toward the priest. “So naturally, given the history of Episcopalians giving sanctuary to criminals,” Dante said, slowly, frowning, “Mrs. Symons and Mr. Byrne, two of your neighbors, good citizens both, assumed that you were giving aid and comfort to drug dealers or suicide bombers and the helicopters were landing again. Déjà vu all over again.”

Richard glanced at Mara who was biting her lip and shaking her head.

“Drugs and terrorism again….” Richard said, looking back at Dante’s Al Pachio frown.

“And money, too, Father. Oodles of it most likely.”

“You seem sure.”

“Oh yes, since my little flight to Providence and a couple of hours with the Medical Examiner, Dr. Jay, and CSI folks—none to happy to be working through the night because the Italian asshole , as I am known in those circles, is breathing down their necks….”

“An unpleasant visual image at best,” Mara said softly.

Dante glanced at her, darkly and turned back to Fr. Lucas. “This whole double homicide—the technical term for two people being murdered at one time—has absolutely everything to do with terrorism, drugs and money. No doubt about it. Case closed.”

Richard must have looked shocked because Mara giggled. He looked back and forth between them, like someone watching tennis. “The case is closed! You’ve solved the murder?”

Dante laughed suddenly, like an explosion in a bottle. “No,” he said, leaning back in the chair, lifting the front legs off the floor and folding his hands behind his head, “quite the contrary. This will probably never be solved—at least not to the public’s knowledge. Unless of course my lovely assistant and I do that in the next eight hours or so, because before the day is out, the feds really will be crawling over this island like a hundred Berrigan brothers are running loose in the woods and Mara and I will be packed back to Providence on a special, high speed ferry. ‘The sooner, the better,’ our friends from Washington will say, ‘get them out of here so they don’t do something crazy and embarrassing like solve this crime.’ That’s what I mean, Father Lucas, by saying this case is closed.”

Richard shook his head, suddenly as confused as the drugs and scotch had made him. “The…the FBI is coming?”

Mara laughed and got up to get more coffee.

Dante lowered his chair and stood up. “No, no. Those federal employees would actually have a chance of solving this mess and are, more or less, bound by the government to let some of the truth be known to someone.”

“I’m confused,” Richard said. “Then who? The CIA?”

Mara was back at the table. She’d found some stale cookies in a cabinet and arranged them on a saucer. “The reason it isn’t the CIA is that, in spite of their bad press in the last few years and the fact that supposedly they stay out of domestic situations,” she explained, as to a small child about not running with scissors, “if they were coming they would have already been here. They would have beat us here.”

Dante was walking again. He circled the table slowly so that Richard had to turn his head to watch him talk. “No, good Padre, the really incompetent sons-a-bitches are going to know in just a few hours what’s going down up here on this inhabited vestige of the last Ice Age. They should know by now except our alphabet buddies in the FBI and CIA will take their time telling them since those guys are as pissed off as yours truly that real policemen aren’t going to be handling this one. This one is too big for actual professional law-enforcement types. This one is so big only the biggest assholes in the universe can handle it.”

“Stop walking!” Richard said suddenly as Dante passed behind him. Cecelia, sleeping peacefully on the couch through everything else, including the departure of the helicopter, heard the change in tenor in Richard’s voice. She growled lowly, rolled off the couch and stared at the three people across the room.

Dante smiled at Mara over Fr. Lucas’ head and she smiled back.

“Sit down…please….” Richard said, with a bit of hesitation. But the Lieutenant sat down in his chair and looked at him.

“Yes,” Dante said.

“Who are you talking about?” Richard said, near exasperation.

Dante took a deep breath. “Two dead people,” he said slowly.

Richard rolled his head and sighed. “I know there are two dead people,” he said, “but you were talking about some mysterious federal agency that is on its way here. That’s the Who I mean!”

Cecelia walked over and sat beside Richard, gazing as menacingly as a Lab can at Dante.

Dante watched the dog and spoke softly. “You know what’s really interesting here, Father Lucas?” he asked. When Richard didn’t move, he continued: “over 24 hours ago, you discovered two dead people in a wrecked SUV and you haven’t yet asked how they died.”

Richard frowned at him and made a hand motion, something like an invitation to move closer. “So?” he finally said.

“So, Father,” Dante said, narrowing his eyes and leaning forward, “you’re dealing with two accomplished detectives here….”

“Unconventional but accomplished,” Mara added.

“And accomplished detectives,” Dante continued, more rapidly, “even unconventional accomplished detectives always tend to postulate that if someone who reports a murder doesn’t soon ask something about how the murder happened…then that’s because they already know….”

Richard leaped up, furious, bumping Cecelia with his knee. The dog let out a rare, threatening bark and her hackles rose on the back of her neck.

“You arrogant, little jerk!” Richard said, louder than he had said anything since he cried out to God on the kitchen floor beside his dead wife. “I was in shock and then I was stoned and drunk and since then you haven’t stopped talking and flitting around and Mara is so lovely and distracting….” Realizing what he just said, he paused.

Mara smiled coquettishly at her boss. “I’m so lovely I don’t need to be charming….” She smirked.

Richard looked at the two of them and, expended, sat down and laid his hand on Cecelia’s head to calm her.

The three people and the dog sat in tableau for a long moment or two.

“When could I have asked,” Richard said, quietly, not a little embarrassed, “what happened to those two people? They were in a car wreck. They were dead. What was I supposed to ask?”

“I told you he had it in him!” Dante said, triumphant, to Mara.

“You were drunk, last night,” she replied, feigning anger. “I’m the one who told you Richard had it in him!”

He smiled slyly. “So it’s ‘Richard’ now, is it? No more ‘Father Lucas’ this and ‘Father Lucas’ that?”

The two police officers stared at each other like two bullies on a playground.

“I’m…I’m sorry,” Richard said. “About the….”

“Lovely and distracting thing?” Dante said, still staring at Mara.

“The flitting homophobic reference?” Mara quickly added.

And then they both broke into laughter. After a while, in spite of his resentment at having been so manipulated, Richard joined them. By then, Cecelia, confused by the emotional roller-coaster of the past few minutes, licked everyone’s face in turn and allowed Mara to take her out for a walk.

“Here’s the thing, Richard,” Dante said, “if I may call you Richard?” Accepting an affirmative nod, he went on: “actually, two things. What’s interesting is how those two folks died and who they aren’t.”

“You mean ‘who they are’?”

“No, my friend….I truly mean who they aren’t.” Dante grinned, stood up and rubbed his hands together like someone excited about what comes next. “I won’t walk, Richard,” he said, “but I need to stand up because this is just too good. All their ID’s said these two were Dr. Michael Johnson and Dr. Malinda Spencer—researchers for the Mystic Aquarium—Ph.D.’s doing jobs someone with a bachelor’s degree would be qualified for, getting paid B.S. salaries…both in the academic and the bull shit sense of the initials. Dr. Johnson even had his last pay stub in his pocket from the Aquarium, though our dear colleagues of the Connecticut State Police confirmed, somehow in the middle of the night—that neither that check nor Dr. Johnson come from Mystic.”

Dante was glowing, warming to his task.

“The Connecticut State Police,” Richard asked, “did that last night?”

Dante did one of his stone still moments. “Oh, my new friend,” he told Richard, “what you and so few folks know or could know—it’s actually a problem of epistemology—is that if it weren’t for the State Police of the fifty little nations we call ‘states’, the whole fabric of the society would be long ago torn asunder from top to bottom. We are,” he said, touching his chest almost reverently, like an altar boy crossing himself at the consecration, “WE of the states’ police—notice how I can accurately speak that plural form…and how, since I found out overnight that you were an English major in college, you can appreciate that—WE are all that is between Rhode Island and Connecticut and Virginia, where you were born, and utter chaos.”

Richard was caught up in the performance by then. He grinned and made his “go on” motion again.

“So, we paragons of crime detection—the State Police—ask ourselves, ‘who could manage a cover like that?’ Who, I ask you, Richard, and I always say ‘Richard’ since I learned overnight you’re never called ‘Rick’ or even ‘Rich’….”

Richard spread his hands and laughed. Then he bowed his head. “Homage to the states’ police,” he said.

“Well done, my new friend,” Dante said, beginning to move around in spite of his promise. “The names of the two deceased do exist. Addresses exist and phone numbers and next of kin. But they both live, not in Mystic, but Arlington, Virginia. So the mystery deepens.”

“So who do they work for?” Richard said, impatiently.

Dante returned, spun the chair beside Richard around and straddled it. “That’s not the deeper mystery,” he said, almost whispering in excitement. “The real mystery is how they died.”

“Not in the accident?”

“The accident, as you call it, was staged. The motor in the car didn’t die when it wrecked, it was turned off with the key.”

Richard frowned, trying to understand. “The key was turned off?”

“Exactly,” Dante said, “you are a worthy student of detection.”

“So someone wrecked it on purpose?” Richard said.

“Exactly! Precisely! It was wrecked, as you put it, by someone quite stupid but not totally so because there’s another thing…no fingerprints—besides yours, of course, anywhere on the door handle or window or steering wheel….Not even the fingerprints of the victims.”

“No finger prints?”

“None….So the car was wiped down carefully before it was dumped in the hole and the ‘dump-er’ must have worn gloves. Dr. Jay and his crime scene cronies thinks the wiping was done with Formula 409 or some similar cleaner. And not a print yet found but yours….” Dante smiled at Richard.

“But how…where….” Richard stammered, suddenly realizing the implication of what Dante kept saying.

Dante just smiled and watched Richard’s face.

“Mar…Mara….” Richard thought hard. “The drink she made me have….”

Lt. Caggiano laughed and clapped his hands together once, loudly, startling Richard even more. “Lovely Mara,” Dante said, “pouring spirits down the gullet of a man on serious tranquilizers. Hardly ‘by the book’, but we aren’t your mother’s detectives. It was her job and she did it well. Lovely Mara…and, by the way, take it from someone with a ‘queer eye’, she is as charming as she is lovely….”

Richard almost blushed.

Dante said, suddenly serious. “But more of that much later….What is for now is the P.M., which is detective-speak for….”

“Post mortem,” Richard added.

Dante stared at him. “A better student than even I predicted.”

“Detective novels.”

“Well enough,” the detective said. “Now, listen to this and search your memory of P.D. James and Ruth Rendall—both of which are on your bookshelf—and whoever else you read to see if you’ve ever heard a post mortem quite like this.” Dante paused dramatically. “They drowned.”

It was Richard’s time to stand up. He breathed in and out and stared at the picture on the wall behind where he’d been sitting. Women in long, pastel dresses on a beach beside of calm waters; he chuckled. “Drowned,” he said, almost to himself, “in a car….”

After a moment of confounded silence, Dante continued, “It’s still ‘preliminary’, Dr. Jay delves deeply into murdered folks, but it gets better. Listen: Dr. Johnson, whoever the hell he really is, drown in sea water, saline, salt water, like all around this island.”

“Yes?” Richard asked, thinking as furiously as he had in over a year.

“You know the rest? Prove yourself to me,” Dante said from the side.

“The other one…Dr….What’s her name?”

“Spencer. If either of them are, in fact, PhD’s.”

“Dr. Spencer,” Richard said, still thinking, pausing. “Did she drown in fresh water?”

Dante yelped like a seal. “My God, you’re as good as Mara said you’d be! She was right, you know, earlier? I was the one who didn’t believe in you, but she did.”

“So he drowns in the sea and she drowns in, what? One of the ponds?”

“Oh God,” Dante chanted, moving around the room rapidly, “it’s even better than that! She was drowned in bottled water—Poland Spring, the fake-tooth wearing ME thinks, but he’s not quite sure. Could be Avian—something like that. And there is absolutely no trace evidence to indicate that either of them were ever submerged in any kind of water other than a shower at the White House, then we’re left with imagining….”

“Stop!” Richard said. “They were staying at the White House? The B and B here on the Block?”

“The very one.”

“So you already know I know the owner?”

“Of course,” Dante said flatly, “she’s one of your flock here at St. Anne’s.”

“Margarite….”

“Larson….”

Richard shook his head and turned to look at the detective. “It’s a small world,” he said.

“No, my friend,” Dante replied, “It is a remarkably big world. But this is one bum-fuck small island….”

Dante smiled and continued his rounds of the room, looking at books, taking them from the shelves, flipping them open, putting them back, all the while smoking a cigarette and flicking the ashes into one of his hands.

“So they didn’t drown naturally?” Richard asked.

Dante stopped and looked at him. “What could ever be ‘natural’ about drowning?”

They both ended up on the couch, watching TV. Dante was about to go find the rest of the bottle of scotch when Mara and Cecelia came back from their long walk. The lab tried to leap the large coffee table to get to Richard but landed on top, kicking her legs wildly until he helped her across onto him like an 60 pound lap dog.

Mara was flushed from the walk and excitement. “Did he guess, Dante?” she asked. And, surprisingly, before her boss could answer, she said, “I figured out how they got away…they went fishing….”

“Guess what?” Richard asked her, wrestling with his dog, entranced by Mara’s energy, by her wind-blown hair, her smile, her loveliness.

Dante returned with three glasses and a totally different, equally good bottle of Scotch.

“She’s wondering if you figured out what feds are on their way to this far away place with its strange sounding name.”

Richard was shocked to realize that he had figured it out. “Terrorism, drugs and money”—it made perfect sense, the only sense in the world.

“Homeland Security,” he said.

Dante yelped and Mara laughed.

“Time for a drink,” all three said together.

Bread and Butter. Bread and Roses. Butter and Guns. Bread and Butter and Roses and Guns.

“You know what,” Richard said as Dante was examining the whisky bottle, “I saw something like this on TV one time.”

“Like what?” Mara asked.

“Someone drowning but not drowning—drowning in a weird way….”

“Sky diving,” Dante interjected, putting three glasses on the table. “It was on a Monk episode.”

“You watch TV mysteries?” Richard said. “I thought real cops hated TV cops.”

“Quite the contrary, Father,” Dante was pouring healthy dosages of scotch into glasses, “where do you think we get our ideas?”

“And where do the bad-guys get their ideas?” Mara added, lifting her glass.

“To murder most strange,” Dante toasted.

“Stranger than TV….” Said, Richard, touching his glass to theirs, wondering what he was doing drinking before lunch.

*****

They had a drink—just one this time—and then drove down into the little town in Richard’s Volvo (“not enough room in the Ferrari for three”, Dante said…”no one but Dante and I ever ride in his car,” Mara replied) for lunch at one of the little picnic tables outside a fish place. The weather had cleared and turned unexpectedly warm so Mara and Richard shed sweaters and let the autumn sun bake them. Dante kept his suit coat on and complained about the heat.

Half-way through their lobster rolls, Richard tried to take up the conversation they’d had in his car. “So let me get this straight…,” he began.

“Don’t you love the lobster roll?” Mara interrupted.

“If the sun doesn’t turn it rancid before we finish, we’ll be lucky,” Dante replied.

Richard looked at them. Both took bites, as if they were part of a synchronized eating team, and glared back at him from above their sunglasses.

He nodded and whispered, “Too public a place to ask?”

Dante nodded in return and Mara smiled in mid-chew, lobster meat stuck in her teeth.

Dante swallowed and whispered back, “we’ll make you a detective yet.”

Richard bit, chewed and thought, “that’s what I was afraid of….”

Dante insisted they drive around the island and “see the views”, which they did for nearly an hour, pulling over and stopping from time to time at Lt. Caggiano’s suggestion. As they approached the South East Lighthouse, Dante said, “pull in through the gate.”

Richard parked and they wandered out toward the Light and the cliffs. The wind was picking up and clouds rolled crazily over the mainland 13 miles away.

As they walked, Dante spoke. “The lab is rushing the toxicology screens, so we can know more about how the victims might have been killed. But even Homeland Security, as inept as they are, will figure out that they need jurisdiction before the sun sets.”

“That’s where you come in,” Mara interjected. Richard frowned at her and the three of them kept walking.

“Precisely,” Dante continued. “I’ll be scourged back to my dungeon in Providence but I want to keep my toes in the water.”

“You and I are Dante’s toes,” Mara said in her hoarse whisper of a voice.

“And this is going to work how…?” Richard asked.

“Lovely, charming Mara has accumulated nearly six weeks of leave,” Dante said, pausing at the fence before the cliff’s edge, staring out, trying to light a cigarette in the rising wind. “She’ll stay on the island with you.”

Richard reacted visibly and stammered, “wi…with…with me?”

The two detectives shared a knowing smile. “There are, given the recent unpleasantness…,” Dante began.

“…Some available rooms in the White House,” Mara concluded.

“And there is that inexplicable public phone at New Harbor, where the fast boats land,” Dante added. “We’ll keep in touch from there since cell phones and email will be too risky. We are, after all, dealing with the federal government, though a wounded part of that bureaucracy.”

The three of them were talking to each other but gazing down over the towering cliffs at the water pounding below. This part of the island had been falling into the sea for centuries. The lighthouse had been moved back once and would need to be moved again in twenty years or so, if not sooner.

“If we need to reach him,” Mara said, “We’ll use that phone to call a restaurant in Providence and order pizza. Of course it is too fancy a restaurant to serve something so pedestrian as pizza. Dante will call that phone back in 10 minutes from a secure place and one of us will answer.”

“Will there be a code word?” Richard asked.

“Italian asshole, might do,” Mara snickered.

“Or blonde slut,” said Dante.

“We could say ’10-4, good buddy’.” Mara added.

“Or ‘1^st Corinthians 13’, in honor of our priest,” said Dante. “Or we might do something as uncreative and mundane as rely on my good, musical ear to recognize your voices when you say ‘hello, Dante”.

“Okay, okay,” Richard replied, giving in to the ribbing, “so I’ve read too many crime novels.”

“Exactly right,” Dante added, quickly, “crime novels is what you’ve read. You’ve not read many Rhode Island State Police novels, because there aren’t any. And do you know why, my good priest?”

Richard shook his head but Dante was staring over the cliffs.

“I asked if you knew why you haven’t read any books about the Rhode Island State Police,” Dante said, louder, “about people like fetching Mara and yours truly?”

“No,” Richard said, realizing his error.

“Here is why, my dear Richard,” Dante said, echoing the baritone certainty of an aging college professor or brand new preacher, “Mara and I actually solve murders and do so without chase scenes or fist fights or dodging bullets. All very bland and boring. Not the stuff of pulp fiction.”

“But we do it unconventionally,” Mara piped in, reaching over to touch Richard’s arm.

“Which one might think would make good reading,” Dante went on in the same tone. “However, we are both so self-effacing and humble….”

“Not to mention lovely and well dressed….” Mara said, laughing out loud now, leaning into the fence.

“That no one would notice how heroic and brave we are,” Dante finished, just as Richard took a step back and then two quick steps forward to pull Mara away from the fence.

She shook her head and smiled at him. He held her shoulders a moment longer than he could have without blushing.

“I don’t like heights,” he said, sheepishly. “I never have.”

“Time to go,” Dante said.

On the way to the car, Richard asked about the phone number of the restaurant they would have to call and both detectives laughed. He was confused and said so.

“We won’t need to contact Dante,” Mara said, “just rely on that.”

Richard thought for a while. When they were in the car he paused before starting the engine: “so the whole ‘phone’ thing….”

“Just a little ruse,” Dante said, “a little joke on you….Things will be much simpler than that, just you wait and see.”

Richard passed through ‘confused’ to ‘angry’. He threw the car in gear and accelerated too fast back toward Spring Street.

****

“We have an appointment, Sgt. Coles and I,” Dante told Richard as the three of them stood in the parking lot of St. Anne’s and Cecelia barked and threw herself against the front door of the house, trying to get to them. Mara ran up and let out the dog, jumping and licking all in sight, including Dante who seemed not to notice. “We have thirteen minutes to get there, but thanks to our driving tour of the island after lunch, I know we can do it.”

Richard had absent-mindedly picked up one of the dozen or so tennis balls that littered the house and yard and parking lot and thrown it over one of the ubiquitous stacked stone walls that lined and relined Block Island. The Lab easily leaped over and chased the yellow ball down a long expanse of grass.

“Thirteen minutes, you say?” Richard quizzed Dante.

“See, I told you he’s a born detective,” Mara commented, passing by on the way to Dante’s Ferrari. “I suppose we’re taking the big car….”

“You’ve noticed I don’t wear a watch, have you, Father?”

Richard grinned. He had begun to enjoy the little games with Lt. Caggiano. “I didn’t know I noticed until you said the thing about thirteen minutes.” Richard felt a surge of pride in his unconscious observations. “But I suppose you’re going to tell me you have an internal clock.”

Dante gazed at him with unfocused eyes. He looked exactly like Al Pacino playing a blind man in Scent of a Woman to Richard. “Such things exist”, the detective said softly, turning to notice Mara was in the driver’s seat of his car. “Get out of that seat, you blonde hussy,” he yelled. “Then turning back to Richard, said, “it is now exactly 2:49 p.m. and we have only 11 minutes to get to Stevenson’s house.”

Cecelia came back, slobbering with her ball and dropped it at her master’s feet, then laid down in front of him. Richard watched Dante start the Ferrari—though the engine was so quiet he wasn’t sure he heard it turn over. The sleek car slipped out slowly into the dirt road. Dante wouldn’t want to damage the bottom of his pride. Only then did Richard think about what Dante had told him about internal clocks.

“Sixteen months, two weeks, five days, eight hours and 34 minutes,” Richard said to himself, as much to prove Dante right as anything. Then he tossed Cecelia’s ball across the wall again, watched her jump it gracefully, catch a scent and run off toward the ocean. Then he said out loud, “since Susan died.”

Ten minutes later, the panting dog found Richard down the dirt road toward Spring Street, examining the crushed bushes and weeds where the Lexus had turned over. He hadn’t ever noticed how steep the bank was just outside the track in the road. It dropped off four or five feet. Obviously, he thought, the marshy area between St. Anne’s and Spring Street had been filled with dirt at some point to make the narrow roadway. It must have all been marsh at some point in time, long ago. Gradually, over decades, as wetlands will do, the wet earth below the road bed had reclaimed the edges, just as the sea ate away at the south-east cliffs of the island, and created this drop-off the vegetation had disguised.

He thought about how many times he’d driven up that road late at night after dinner or a party where he’d had a bit too much to drink. Susan was always concerned about his post-drinking driving but gently so, especially on an island where you could seldom push your car above 40 and there was scant traffic. Back home in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, where he’d been a curate before coming to Worthington, she’d driven home at night. Had she known how being just a foot or so outside the track could turn over a car, she’d have not let him drive on Block Island either.

The matted and broken scrub brush held the outline of the white SUV. Richard was wondering how long it would take nature to spring back, renewed and fierce, and belie the fact that a car ever ran off the road there. Surely before he left in May to go—where would he go?...and would it, wherever it was, be “home”?—but probably long before that the bushes he could never remember names for, but Susan always knew, would again hide this hazard from the view of residents and fishermen and priests who thankfully served a few weeks at St. Anne’s.

Since Dante and Mara had christened him their “detective-in-training”, he lifted the yellow police tape around the area and tried to see something that others, more trained and alert that he, had missed. He imagined himself finding some remarkably important clue in the midst of the mess the SUV left behind that would prove Dante’s faith in him was well placed. But Cecelia was pestering him with her tennis ball and he knew, deep inside, that wanting to find a clue was meant to please Mara, not Lt. Caggiano. So the priest and his dog went back to the house and took a nap. As Richard slept, he dreamed, and though he wouldn’t quite remember the dream when the detectives came back and made so much noise fighting that it woke him up, he had the distinct feeling that his dream wasn’t about a woman with brown hair and brown eyes like Susan’s, but about blond hair and sad gray eyes instead.

***

Dante and Mara had returned feisty and conflicted but when Richard came down the hall, they stopped talking. Mara was slumped on the couch, with her sweater in her lap, looking up at the ceiling and Dante was examining the books on the shelves for what must have been the tenth time in less than 24 hours.

“Padre,” Dante said as if Richard hadn’t heard them arguing, “have a nap did we?”

“A little,” Richard answered, wiping his left eye, wondering where he’d put the Visine.

“Pleasant dreams, one would hope.”

“God, Dante,” Mara said crossly, still resting her head against the back of the couch, “why must we talk in that convoluted way, one might wonder….” She clearly wasn’t through fighting, but Dante smiled benevolently at her.

“Someone else could stand a nap,” he said through his smile.

She sighed and rose gracefully from the couch. Richard thought she moved like some lean animal and, since she was wearing a simple white blouse, he noticed for the first time how long her neck was—like the neck of the small island deer. He stared at her until she finished glaring at Dante and turned.

“Let’s go, Richard,” she said, “get a sweater. Some of us have detective work to do.” Before he could answer she banged out of the front door onto the deck.

Dante smirked at him. “A real pistol, our Mara,” he said. “Hurry, Father or she’ll go without you.”

Richard started to ask, “go where?” but instead grabbed a sweater off a chair and whistled for Cecelia. The Lab came bounding down the hall and beat him to the door.

They caught up with Mara who was walking with her hands stuffed down in her jeans and a scowl on her face. She stopped at the gate one of the neighbor’s had erected across the dirt road as it led away from St. Anne’s toward the ocean.

“What’s this about?” she asked, sensing Richard beside her.

“Freda Symons lives in the last house down there,” he was pointing to a distant building overlooking the water, “and she actually owns the road from here to there though a couple of other houses use it. She got tired of people who wanted to fish from the rocks leaving their cars down at the bend so she put up the gate and gave the other residents keys.”

“Good gates make good neighbors?”

Richard laughed. “I don’t think so. Everyone hates the gate and most everyone hates her. But it is effective. To fish, you have to walk from here. People park in the church’s lot to go fishing.”

There was room to walk around the gate, which stood on it’s own between the rock wall and some bushes. Cecelia was already two hundred yards down the road, anticipating a chance to swim in the surf. Richard and Mara followed her. At the end of a large open field was a half acre of dense vegetation with paths cut through it and maintained. Mara walked over to the path.

“A maze?” she asked.

“Not really,” Richard said, suddenly remembering how his kids would run in and out of the brush for hours when they were small, chased by whatever dog they owned at the time. Cecelia had been the dog of the empty nest. She was the companion of only Susan and Richard and now Richard alone. “There is a huge maze on the far end of the island, over there.” He pointed and Mara looked. Through the light fog of afternoon you could make out Mansion Beach across Old Harbor. “This is just a path.”

She smiled at him, her gray eyes not quite so sad. “Shall we?” she asked and they plunged into the brush, hearing pheasants clucking and the shuffle of rabbits.

“God, this place is a zoo,” Mara said half-way through, “listen to the critters.”

“I didn’t know people from Rhode Island said ‘critters’,” he said.

“I’m not always from here,” she answered. “Rural Ohio, actually, about 40 miles from Columbus. I came to Brown and fell in love with Providence and never left.”

“How’d you become a policeman?” Richard asked.

“Detective is better,” she answered lightly, “not so gender specific.”

He cringed a bit. “I’m usually more politically correct,” he said shyly and she laughed.

“One would hope so….” She began, imitating Dante’s voice quite well.

“One would, wouldn’t one…” he added. Then they both laughed.

They emerged from the path and came to the dirt road again. The way down to the rocks was steep. Cecelia was already wading in the water, sniffing and sneezing and shaking her head. Richard followed Mara down, noticing how surely and effortlessly she moved down an unfamiliar hill. When they got to the rocks—a rock beach 40 feet wide at low tide that stretched off in both directions and disappeared from view around the bends of the island—they did what people always seemed to do: they paused and stared at the ocean and the mainland in the far distance. The ocean was gentle with only scattered foot high white caps to the horizon. The sun was beginning to go down behind them, back to the west toward the church and the gray water was touched with gold and orange. The sky was almost perfectly clear and the slightest breeze came off the water.

“It gets calm this time of day,” Richard said, breaking the silence.

“Eight years,” Mara replied and smiled broadly when she noticed the confusion on his face. For the first time he realized that there was a tiny line down the exact middle of her upper lip. It looked like a ridge of skin just a half-shade darker than the rest of her mouth. As imperfections went, he found it startling and not unattractive. He also noticed the faintest down above her lip and then realized she knew he was staring at her mouth.

“In the State Police,” she said, looking away, sparing him obvious embarrassment. “Eight years. I studied Psychology at Brown and went to law school right after college at Rhode Island University. Criminal law fascinated me and I decided to get a little practical experience, so I applied to the State Police. I thought I’d be a lawyer for them, doing something in an office, handling complaints of misconduct, something like that. But Dante sat in on my last interview and followed me to my car.”

“Dante did, did he?” Richard said, working on his Dante imitation.

She smiled at him again. “It was weird. I don’t even know why he was in the room and the whole time he just smoked—even then you couldn’t smoke in the interview room, but he did—and looked bored. But then he follows me out of the interview and into the parking lot. He introduced himself and told me what I needed to do was work with him, be in the field, be a detective.”

“You thought he was hitting on you….” Richard guessed.

Mara cocked her head and looked at him. “You really are a detective at heart.”

“Just intuitive….”

“Of course that’s what I thought,” she said, turning to watch Cecelia trying to drag something out of the water with her teeth. “But he said, ‘let me assuage your fears, Ms. Coles’, I swear to God—‘assuage’—“I admire your obvious physical attributes as one might admire a fine porcelain…”

“Fine porcelain?” Richard blurted.

“Dante collects porcelains, as it turns out. He has a fortune worth of the stuff. But let me finish this…he then said, I swear he did, it’s etched in my memory, ‘but my proclivities lie in quite another arena. I happen to need a partner and my influence is such that my new partner could be you, if you would consent.’ Well, by then I just thought he was a nut case but I asked around and it turns out that Dante Caggiano could be working for the Justice Department or one of the alphabet agencies but he wants to stay near the restaurants.”

“The restaurants?” Richard was genuinely confused.

“Dante is a restaurateur,” she said, smiling at the word. “He owns the two finest Italian eateries in Rhode Island. ‘Maria’s’ in Providence, founded by his father and named for his mother—the restaurant we won’t need to call…sorry about that prank—and ‘Maria’s Also’ in Westerly—you’ve heard of them?”

“I’ve eaten at them!” Richard said. “Stevenson took Susan and I to the one in Providence and we happened across the other one. ‘Maria’s Also’—what a great name for a restaurant.”

“Pure Dante,” Mara said, “essential Dante….Well, look at this won’t you?”

Richard looked. Cecelia was staggering across the rocks with a nine foot long fishing rod in her mouth, just the kind to cast into the surf, except it had no reel or line. When she finally dragged it to them and dropped it at their feet she sat back on her haunches, soaking wet and proud to beat the band with her trophy.

“Richard, even your dog is a detective!” Mara said, excitedly, squatting down to pet Cecelia and look at the rod. “This is what we came here to find. Just exactly.”

She took a pair of rubber gloves from the back pocket of her jeans and slipped them on expertly. “Little chance of finger prints. Whoever threw this away was wearing gloves too. But this proves my theory. Mara, you are brilliant! Won’t Dante have to eat crow?”

Richard seemed to remember her saying that morning, “they went fishing!” or something like that. Mara explained while they looked around in the surf where Cecelia had found the rod, the dog shaking and splashing, thinking Mara and Richard had joined her game. Sgt. Coles had been trying to figure out how someone could wreck a car on a dirt road in the middle of the night and then leave. Going up or down Spring Street would risk being seen by some passing, late night driver. But no one would give a second thought to a fisherman walking down to the rocks with a flashlight. Mara had asked Stevenson that afternoon if people fished at night and he told her it was a favorite time for the serious and committed.

“So he, she, whoever,” Mara told Richard after they found a brand new plastic tackle box—empty—on the rocks twenty feet or so from where the dog had found the rod, “doubtless wore those long boots and a slicker with a hood, probably carrying some bucket of some kind along with the other gear. He dumped the stuff in the water, thinking it was wash away…or, not even caring if someone found it, and walked along the water back toward town or the other way to wherever he left a car, or maybe it’s close enough to walk back to wherever he came from. I bet if we get the Block Island cops to search down other dirt roads we’ll find the boots and slicker somewhere. Then maybe we’ll have something to go on. Maybe even some tire tracks.”

They were walking rapidly back toward the church and the setting sun was in their faces, casting an orange glow over everything. Mara was talking almost as fast as she was walking, going on and on about what a break this was and how Dante was going “to owe me big time for making fun of my theory!”

At some point Richard stopped listening to her words. He listened instead to the rhythm of her strange, whispering voice, to her excitement and joy in finding something to work with, something to go on in the case. He was simply glad to be walking with her into the sun, sharing the road with her. Something in him almost forgotten stirred briefly, like a shadow of a memory seeking the light.

***

Lt. Caggiano was on the deck, smoking one of his unfiltered cigarettes, talking on his cell phone as Mara and Richard and Cecelia returned triumphant. Richard had to credit Dante—the detective showed great interest in the fishing pole and tackle box and listened attentively to Mara’s theory about back roads. He immediately called to Block Island Police and told them what was needed. They confirmed that there was one spot north toward town from the rocks beyond St. Anne’s that someone could hide a car to find in the dark. Or else, they suggested, the “perpetrator” could have walked all the way down the rocky beach to the Ferry landing.

“They actually said ‘perpetrator’, just like that?” Mara asked as Dante recounted the other side of the conversation.

“Obviously the local cops read mysteries and watch Law and Order, reruns,” Dante told her. They laughed companionably together.

“Dante forbids saying ‘perpetrator’, Mara explained to Richard, “or ‘bust’ or ‘nab’ as simply too stereotypically cop-speak.”

Dante was staring down toward the rocks where the fishing gear had been found. He pointed to the right with his cell phone. “But young officer Alt is convinced the real treasure may be waiting on them to the south—out toward Mohegan Bluffs and the lighthouse. That way, he tells me, is a rabbit warren of little used roads and tracks.” He paused and stared at the sky. “So little light left, we should get Brooks and the helicopter back over here,” he added, almost to himself, punching in numbers on his phone with his index finger still gripping a butt.

“Brooks,” Dante said, “kick out the teenage girls out of your apartment and get the bird over to Block Island….Now, that’s when….and don’t land too near my car….What? Yes, of course bring it with you.”

He turned to Mara and Richard. “Brooks has some more reports from crazy Dr. Jay, the pathology genius. He’ll bring them.” After lighting another cigarette, he said, blowing smoke, “Good job, Sergeant. You made me a proper fool.”

Mara pursed her lips and mumbled, “Thanks Dante.” Then she turned and went into the house. Richard stood on the deck while Lt. Caggiano smoked. Dusk was gathering. Richard realized how profoundly Mara needed Dante’s approval and how inept she was in accepting it. Perhaps that, he thought, watching his dog circling in the dirt parking lot, sniffing the ground for scents, would somehow explain the odd relationship between the two. They were always joking and jabbing—putting each other down—and bragging about how “unconventional” they were. Dante was bound to be stingy with his praise and Mara, as graceful as she was, lacked the grace to revel in it when it came. Two people who knew each other better than perhaps anyone else knew either of them; but they couldn’t quite “let go” with each other. How hard it is, Richard thought, for the children of earth to be open and vulnerable in relationship. He was just about to analyze how he and Susan had been with each other in that long ago time before LWS began when Dante said something he didn’t hear.

“What did you say?” Richard asked, noticing that Dante was leaning against the railing, staring out at nothing much, standing uncharacteristically still.

“She adores me, of course,” he said, softly, tentatively.

“Obviously,” is all Richard could think to say.

***

While Dante and Richard were still outside, Mara sat on the couch and flicked through the 13 or so TV channels of Block Island’s cable. No news of the murders yet on CNN. It always helped to have the Feds involved. The alphabet boys could hold back any news longer than the humble Rhode Island State Police. And the Feds were really involved in this mess, she thought, imagining people yelling and throwing things in several suites of offices in Washington by now. The longer it stayed off the cable news, the longer Dante could stay on the case. As soon as he left, they’d agreed, she’d take vacation and play detective with Fr. Lucas. But she wasn’t sure exactly how to “detect” without Dante involved. For too long now she’d been Tonto to his Lone Ranger, Robin to his Batman, Ginger to his Fred. She still was lit from within from his grudging admission that he’d been wrong in the argument they had coming back from Stevenson’s about the “fishing” angle. Objectively, she was right about as much as he was when they disagreed, but it didn’t feel that way. She was still, in her mind, Mary Magdalene to his Jesus.

And the “going fishing” dispute about how the killer left the SUV wasn’t the only thing that went wrong on that trip to talk to Stevenson Matthews, not by a long shot. Mara played it back in her mind as she clicked through the channels on TV.

It started as soon as they got in Dante’s Ferrari and drove as carefully as a surgeon does heart surgery down the dirt road to Spring Street.

“Let’s talk about your priest,” Dante said, once his precious car was on real pavement.

“He’s not my priest!”

“Testy about it, are we?” Dante said, lighting a cigarette, grinning maniacally at her. “Proves my point doesn’t it, Sweetness?”

Mara sighed and watched the scenery to her right. They were swinging around a curve that revealed a tiny cove where the waves beat monotonously on the rocks.

“I detect some chemistry,” Dante said, emphasizing the last word entirely too much for Mara’s liking.

“He’s old enough to be my father.” She said, with a note of finality.

They drove uphill past the Spring House and then back down hill past a couple of smaller hotels toward the little town.

“Well, just barely,” he said, “but should we review your history—an affair with your married college advisor that ended badly and then that genuine relationship with a widowed law school professor that you broke off three weeks before the wedding….”

“You are a bastard,” she said, seething.

“And you, my lovely partner, are constitutionally attracted to older men. But this isn’t about that—it’s about Fr. Richard David Lucas, who knows something he doesn’t even know he knows that we—sleuths that we are—need to know.”

They drove in silence down the one long block facing the ferry dock. Hotels and restaurants and gift shops were on their left.

“What does he know?” Mara finally asked.

“I don’t know,” said Dante, lighting up again. “That’s why we need to find out what it is.”

“How do you know he knows something?”

“I’m a detective. It’s just a detective kind of knowing. But to figure it all out we have to talk about this priest who you aren’t ready to claim as your own or admit you feel drawn to.” Dante drove through the rest of town and then turned right, back down to the shore line, following the directions Stevenson had given him.

“So what do we need to talk about regarding my priest and what he knows but doesn’t know he knows?” Mara asked, almost smiling at the whole “knowing” conundrum.

“You’re the psychologist among us,” Dante replied, suddenly pulling into the parking area for the one public beach on Block Island. There were only two other cars there and neither of them was a Ferrari. “We’re can be at good Stevenson’s in a matter of three minutes from here,” he said, “and we don’t want to be on time. Give him ten minutes or so to stew and wonder what we want. So let’s stretch our legs and see the sea.”

Standing on the sand, staring out at Point Judith over the water with only two other people walking the mid-week, October beach, Dante smoked and talked. It was his belief that some key clue to the double murders was locked inside Fr. Lucas on an unconscious level. He had no idea why he imagined that was true but both he and Mara were familiar enough with his hunches to give credence to his belief.

“One thing that is absolutely blocking his ability to call that much needed piece of information from his mind,” Dante said, “is his grief.” He paused for a moment, as if considering something. “Grief is the arch-enemy of memory,” he continued, “and so I need some of your psychological insight into the nature of noble Father Lucas’ grief….Like this, did he really love his wife all that much?”

Mara’s laugh came out as a snort. “How should I know, Dante? How could anyone know?”

“We’re back to epistemology again,” he said calmly, gently. “None of us could possibly really know—I just want your insights and feelings, your fabled women’s intuition.”

A ferry was approaching the island, and beyond that two sailboats were tacking against the wind. One sail was white and the other deep red. Mara shifted into “psychologist mode” and tried to formulate a reply, seeking to drive from her mind how naively Richard Lucas had let her ply him with liquor just to get his fingerprints on a glass and how trustingly he had let her put him to bed.

“Oh, he loved her alright,” she said, speaking flatly, analytically. “He loved her as much…or more…than most women dream of being loved. But he is a good man, a decent man—unlike present company, I might add—a man who wants to ‘do right’ by his life. So, since she died so suddenly and unexpectedly, the tragedy threw Father Lucas into a psycho-drama of his own making. “Did I love her enough?” he must be asking himself daily, hourly. “Did she know without doubt that I loved her?” he agonizes, mostly subconsciously, I suspect. So he’s decided he failed her in some way—didn’t love her completely, fervently, totally…didn’t love her enough to keep her alive. He’ll wallow in that for a while—perhaps a long while, maybe the rest of his life. Or else he’ll decide, as he doubtless should, that his love was sufficient enough and true enough, in spite of whatever was missing in it, and move on.”

After a moment, Dante moved back toward the parking lot and Mara followed. He paused near the bathhouse. “Look, another public phone,” he observed, “a dying breed except on this island.”

“Two things,” Dante said as they walked, “first of all, damn you’re good at this, your psychological training serves us well.” He paused so Mara could appreciate his rare compliment. “And secondly, you, my lovely assistant, are already hoping you’ll be around when its time for the Reverend Mister Lucas to, as you so aptly put it, move on.”

“Damn you, Dante,” Mara said, opening the passenger side door of his car, “you are a genuine asshole.”

“Rhode Island’s finest,” he said, getting in. And when both doors were shut and he’d turned on the engine, he added: “but no man’s fool.”

Mara wasn’t sure at all about what the interview with Stevenson Matthews accomplished. He spent the first 20 minutes showing the two detectives remarkable items in the study of his sprawling house with a wrap-around porch situated on a knoll above New Harbor with a view of water in every direction. Mara admired his antique Block Island memorabilia, several almost priceless pieces of art, his collection of nautical instruments and the pictures of himself and his late wife—beloved Cynthia—with three, or was it four?—presidents. But when he asked if they’d like to see his porcelains, she excused herself and stood on the porch for a while, knowing he and Dante would be beside themselves and suggesting trades for some time.

She did learn that night fishing was a common tradition on Block Island and, yes, down from the church was a prime spot. Dante seemed to be asking about where and how the island’s hotels and businesses found summer help for most of the rest of the time they were there. Mara would later regret that she hadn’t been paying attention because she was lost in her theory about finding some evidence that the killer or killers had passed themselves off as going fishing to leave the scene of the crime. Besides that, she was thinking about what Dante had said about her and older men and realizing she’d never completely resolved that in her own mind. Here she was, almost 33, unmarried, childless and “lifeless” besides her job. All that took her deeper into self-examination than she liked to go, but she was spared dangerous introspection when Dante thanked Stevenson and said it was time to go home.

They were back in the car and on the road when she realized she had no “home” to speak of, nothing worthy of the name.

“My pretty,” Dante said, “we lost you there somewhere. Are you back with us yet?”

Mara was suddenly exhausted, peeved and depressed. “So what do you want from me about Fr. Lucas?” she asked, tired enough to go to sleep. “Besides whatever else I’ll be doing once you are shuffled off the case and the island, you want me to find out what he doesn’t know he doesn’t know, is that the deal?”

“Precisely the deal, darling.”

“And how do you propose I find that out? Do I need to sleep with him or something like that?” her voice was past tired to hard.

Dante glanced over at her, slumped back in the rich Corinthian leather seat, without her seat belt on, and he knew something was up with her. In addition, he was reminded of how deeply he cared for his younger partner.

“Something akin to that, emotionally at any rate,” he said, gently, “only in the line of duty, you understand. A little Father Lucas-knows-best pillow talk wouldn’t hurt. If you’d like to….”

She burned and breathed deeply, “You might like some pillow time with the good priest as well, I’d suspect.”

Dante flinched at the level of her unkindness, though he knew it was deserved. He had, after all, seen how Mara looked at Richard Lucas and how in looking at him the hard shell of her had momentarily dropped away and she was just a woman looking at a man. He’d felt a genuine hopefulness for his lovely colleague when he saw that look, a hope of a promise of something good for her. But business was business and murder was the most serious business of all—besides, time was running out and the boys from Washington would arrive sooner rather than later. Dante needed all he could get from Mara’s skills and wiles. So he took a cigarette from his case, flicked open his silver butane lighter and expertly lit up while driving back through the little town.

“He’s not quite my type,” he said, hating how he had to play this out and damage his connection to Mara, “almost…but not quite.”

“Why not?” she asked, almost with anger.

“Too old for me,” he said, fully realizing he was 52 and, himself, old enough to be his partner’s father.

She laughed, breaking the tension, and sat up. “Give me a cigarette, asshole.”

He feigned surprise. “You don’t smoke.”

“I do now,” she said, talking the unfiltered, French made cigarette, inhaling deeply as he held out his lighter without taking his eyes from the road.

As she exhaled smoke, he said, “how was it for you, darling?”

Mara choked and coughed and they both laughed. Then she brought up her theory about the “perp”—which she said on purpose just to annoy him—disguised as a fisherman, climbing out of the Lexus and walking calmly down the dirt road, through the gate, over the hill to the surf and away.

Dante didn’t buy it. He was convinced someone had followed the Lexus onto the little road, headlights off, waited for the driver of the wrecked SUV to come back and then calmly backed onto Spring Street and away.

“Away to where?” Mara was asking as they got out of the car in front of St. Anne’s. “It’s a fucking island, Dante….They have a place here they could either walk to our have a car waiting down the beach….”

He was already to the front door of the rectory, shaking his head. The argument came inside with them and only stopped because Richard emerged from his nap.

***

“Mara…,” Richard said, bursting through the door, jarring her from her memories, then, catching himself in familiarity, he began again: “…Sgt. Coles, we can already see the helicopter!”

She grinned at his enthusiasm. “Brooks is nothing if not prompt,” she said, smiling at him.

Dante came in as well, but rather than look at the two of them, he was gazing at the TV set. Mara had left it tuned to CNN.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Dante said, “will you look at this!”

On the screen was a live, aerial view of Block Island, coming closer. A graphic on the bottom of the screen said, in large, blue, almost gothic letters: MURDERS ON THE BLOCK.

The woman talking was superimposed on the bottom left as the camera panned over rocks, houses, a half-acre of brush, a field and then a small church with a house attached with an old Volvo and a shiny Ferrari parked in front of it. The sound of the helicopter almost above them was drowning out whatever the talking head was saying.

“I guess that wasn’t Brooks coming across the water,” Dante shouted, hoping to be heard.

Richard watched as a police car pulled into the scene on the TV and a young man got out, holding his hat and then having it blow away in the down draft from the helicopter’s rotors. He started to chase it but a large half Lab half Retriever, fur blowing in the swirling air, grabbed it up in her mouth and ran away, jumping a stone wall.

Mara was rocking on the couch, laughing at Cecelia and Officer Alt chasing her, then giving up the chase. The policeman walked, hatless, toward the house and knocked at the door. Mara and Dante and Richard watched him on TV and then opened the door to let him inside.

“Daw nook ni ht”, Officer Alt seemed to say. All three of them stared at him until they realized they simply couldn’t hear him from the roar of the helicopter.

On the TV screen, someone was promising an update from Iraq and then there was a woman worried about constipation. The deafening noise abated as the helicopter veered away to the north. Beyond Mara and Dante and Officer Alt, M., Richard watched Cecelia jump back over the wall and sprint to the house, a policeman’s hat firmly in her jaws. Then he realized what the policeman had been saying, beneath the roar, was simply this: “Dog took my hat”, and on live, national TV at that.

Malcolm Alt brought good news. The second dirt road off Spring Street to the south had paid off. A pair of fishing boots and a yellow slicker tossed hurriedly into the brush, not hid well at all. The Block Island Police had sealed the road and put up crime scene tape around the evidence. Unfortunately, in the near darkness, one of the officers had driven his patrol car over any possible tire tracks, but something, Officer Alt promised, vainly, might be saved.

Just as Dante started to ask a question, Brooks arrived in the Rhode Island State Police helicopter, landing in the grass beyond the parking lot and prohibiting conversation until he’d killed the motor and the rotors had swooshed slowly to a stop.

Brooks got out of the helicopter and wandered toward the house. Richard, who hadn’t gotten a good look at him before, thought he looked like Wayne Newton early in his career except dressed in a police flight suit. He was carrying a manila folder and wiping his broad face with his hand.

“The blessed report,” Dante said, pushing past Officer Alt and almost running to Brooks.

“I think we should go over to the scene,” Officer Alt yelled, not noticing the noise had stopped, “before it’s totally dark.”

Mara and Richard got into back seat of the police car while Dante sent Brooks to the house to stay with Cecelia. He joined them, pouring over the printouts in the folder. Malcolm Alt turned around and started down the dirt road to Spring Street with his siren and flashers on.

“Turn those fucking things off,” Dante said, annoyed. Then, turning to the two in the back seat he said, “Curiouser and curiouser, my pretties!” His eyes were shining with excitement. “According to Tony Jay and his toxology magic, our good federal employees did not, after all drown. Someone filled their lungs with water after they died.”

“So what killed them,” Mara asked.

Dante practically gleamed. “Sodium poisoning,” he said.

“Too much salt?” Richard asked, confused.

“From all the fish and chips they consumed? Not at all, good priest and friend,” Dante told them, “an overdose of sodium penathol,” he chortled. “This is just perfect….”

“Sodium what?” Officer Alt asked.

“Truth serum,” Richard answered. “At least I think that’s what it is.”

“Right as rain,” Mara said, reaching over to squeeze his arm, smiling.

“Just like us, my fine detectives,” Dante said, fishing for his cigarette case, “someone else wanted the truth and wanted it too badly….”

“What is truth?” Richard said, mostly to himself.

When Dante and Mara stared at him and Officer Alt said, “what?” he grinned and said, “It’s from the Bible….”

****

Richard stood beside the police car, not wanting to be in the way. Darkness had all but fallen and the darkness is very dark on Block Island. There is little ambient light besides the distant glow of Providence across the waters and the scattered houses are mostly dark in October. Dante and Mara moved with stealth, each carrying small but powerful flashlights they had secreted somehow in their clothing. They spoke in whispers to each other and moved very slowly around the area where the Block Island Police had found a pair of waders and a yellow slicker tossed into the brush. After about 20 minutes they came back to the car, each carrying a large, green trash bag Officer Alt took from his trunk when they arrived.

“A veritable treasure trove of evidence,” Dante told Richard when they’d carefully put the two bags back in the cruiser’s trunk, “and doubtless more when our stalwart Brooks returns at first light with the crime scene folks from Providence.”

The detective snapped off his rubber gloves, folded them carefully and slid them in the right pocket of his suit coat. “Officer Alt,” he said, turning to Malcolm, “one of your fine young policemen must spend the night here and wait for the crime scene workers. Try not to get anywhere near the area where we’ve been looking. It’s fouled up enough as it is.” Malcolm Alt was listening intently, not wanting to miss a single word. “Then,” Dante continued, ”you’ll take the good priest back to his Rectory before Sgt. Coles and I take these items to your office to we look over what we’ve found.”

Somehow Dante had managed to light a cigarette while talking rapidly and he waved the officer away with it.

“I think its best, Father,” Dante said softly, knowing voices carried much further on the Island than the mainland, “if you go home. When our federal friends get here we don’t want them to get the idea you’re anything other than a country parson.”

“What else am I going to be?” Richard asked, forgetting to whisper.

Mara brought her finger to her lips and giggled. “You’re our ace in the hole, our fellow traveler,” she whispered, though her whisper didn’t sound much different from her normal speaking voice, only softer. “You are going to play detective with me when Dante leaves.”

“Just make sure that’s all you play,” Lt. Caggiano added, smiling wickedly at them. Mara made a smacking motion toward him and smiled back. Richard was glad it was so dark because he could feel himself blushing worse than he could remember when.

***

The answering machine was blinking when Richard got back to the rectory. Brooks was sprawled on the couch watching CNN with Cecelia draped around him. The remains of one of the casseroles people had brought to Richard was on the coffee table along with two empty St. Pauli Girl bottles. The lab looked up at Richard and wagged her tail but didn’t bother getting up. Neither did Brooks.

“Great dog, Father,” he said, in a surprisingly high-pitched voice, “damn phone’s been ringing non-stop….Here it comes again,” he added, pointing to the TV.

Richard watched the scene again as the news-chopper flew toward St. Anne’s from the sea. There was the house and church and Officer Alt getting out of his patrol car. There was Cecelia dashing after the policeman’s hat and jumping the rock wall and Officer Alt chasing her in vain.

“That poor guy will never live this down,” Brooks was saying. “Every police department in the country will tape this and watch it during training about how to be professional and dignified.” Richard thought Brooks was being genuinely sympathetic until he laughed in a high-pitched cackle. “Hard to look professional chasing a dog with your hat! Maybe he should become a fisherman or drive the Ferry—hard to take him seriously as a cop.”

“I’m Richard Lucas,” the priest said, “we’ve not really met.”

“Glad to meet you, Father,” Brooks replied, starting to shift the dog’s weight off his legs.

“Don’t get up,” Richard said and Brooks sunk back into the couch.

Richard waited. “And you are…?” he began.

“Oh, I’m Brooks, I fly the bird.”

“I know, I’ve seen you….Is Brooks your first or last name.”

The pilot frowned. “Mostly it’s just ‘Brooks’….”

Richard nodded.

“You know,” Brooks said, “like Cher….”

“Like Cher….”

“Or Madonna even.”

Richard nodded some more. “Friends is coming on, Father. Wanna watch?”

Richard mumbled something like, “no, but go ahead….” Then he remembered the blinking light on the phone and went to play back the messages. There were 12 messages. The first six were from news papers or TV news affiliates wanting to interview “the priest who found the bodies”. Then a rambling message from Stevenson wanting to make sure everything was alright and letting Richard know he could call “any time you need.” The next three were from Richard’s children. He smiled as he listened to the worry in their voices and their distinctive styles of speech. Even without their voices, he would have known them from their words written on paper.

“Well, Pops,” it was Jeremy, the lawyer and father of Richard and Susan’s only grandchild, sweet Lila, almost two. Richard always rejoiced that he and Susan had gone to St. Louis for a week the month before she died and cooed with eight month old Lila and smothered her with love and affection. And, forever etched in his memory was Lila, crawling down the aisle at Susan’s memorial service, crawling toward the urn of Susan’s ashes on a small table at the bottom of the chancel steps. Lila’s mother, Melissa, caught up to her runaway baby just as Lila was pulling herself to her feet by holding onto the table. “I was so afraid she’d turn the table over and…” Melissa said afterwards, catching herself short, not wanting to offend her father-in-law.

“And spill Mom’s ashes all over the floor,” Jeremy finished for her. Richard and his children laughed for the first time since Susan died.

“Mom would have loved that,” Miriam added, wiping her eyes with one of the caterer’s napkins and leaning into Richard.

“Yes she would have,” Richard said, spreading his arms to embrace his children and Melissa as well, “she certainly would have….”

“Well, Pops,” Jeremy said on the tape, not announcing himself, just jumping into conversation, “You’ve made the news at last! And Cecelia, what a star she is! What’s the inside story out there on the Block? Will you be appearing on talk shows now? Is this an OJ kind of deal? Call us, I want the skinny. Love and kisses from the grandbaby and Melissa….Seriously, are you OK? Gotta go.”

Dr. Jonah Lucas, Richard’s oldest son, was completing his first year as a psychiatric intern at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Serious to a fault, Richard often thought, Jonah had always been the foil to Jeremy’s spontaneity. Jonah had been the student and Jeremy the athlete. Jonah was the debater and Jeremy the prankster—Jonah the pessimist and Jeremy the cockeyed optimist. Now Jonah tried to bring his patients from inner darkness to some new light while Jeremy, a junior member of the Prosecuting Attorney’s office in St. Louis, sought to put people in small, dark rooms for a long time.

“Dad, this is Jonah,” the second message began. “Miriam paged me and told me to turn on CNN. This must be terrible for you. I hope you’re talking to people and not repressing your feelings. I’ll call back but here’s my pager number if you don’t have it….”

“Always in role,” Richard thought, smiling at the professional tone of Jonah’s message. “I won’t repress my feelings”, he said out loud, remembering how that had been Jonah’s problem for much of his life. The oldest of three born each two years apart, Jonah had grown older too fast. He had always been Susan’s favorite—though parents are never supposed to admit such things—and Richard loved him profoundly but liked him less than the younger children.

Once, late at night, when all three children were in adolescence, Richard and Susan had talked well toward morning about Jonah over several glasses of wine. Richard, a glass or two past his normal air of impartiality, told her he didn’t like Jonah’s moods and seriousness and, truth be known, didn’t like Jonah himself all that much.

Susan’s Carolina drawl became more pronounced when she was tired or full of red wine. “Tell you what, Richard”, she said, pronouncing his name languidly as Rich-heard, “let’s divide and conquer. You expend all your worry on Jeremy and little princess Miriam and leave Jonah to me. He’s my boy….”

And so they had compartmentalized their worries. In the end, Richard now realized, Susan got the better of the deal. Moody and brooding as Jonah was from time to time, he never caused them any grief. Brilliant and single-minded, he was a full fledged adult from 16 on. They never spent a moment with Jonah in a principle’s office or emergency room or police station. Jeremy and Miriam, on the other hand, seemed to have special talents at breaking things—curfews, regulations, bones and laws.

Jonah was “the rock”. Lord knows, Richard often remembered, Jonah was the one who made most of the arrangements and handled the details when Susan died while his father and two siblings ran around like chickens with their heads cut off—spouting emotions and needs. Jonah wrote out all the necessary checks for Richard to sign to pay for funeral expenses. Jonah, Richard knew, took the cards about flowers and memorial gifts and answered them all, signing his father’s name to the thank-you’s.

Then Richard heard Miriam’s message. She was his baby, his girl-child, his princess, his special friend, his joy and wonder. For the years of their childhood, Jonah made amends for Miriam and Jeremy beat people up for her. Richard was simply mesmerized by her being. Only Susan was immune to the charms and wiles of that golden child. Susan knew Miriam through and through and cast a jaundiced eye toward her from time to time because Susan knew this child was the second coming of her very self. Familiarity did not breed contempt between the two women of the Lucas family, but it did make for some interesting and dangerous battles.

Miriam taught third grade in a public school in the North End of Boston. She had a Master’s degree in elementary education from Tufts and lived in the neighborhood where she taught and fought for her students. When she’d been an undergraduate she’d brought home a string of boyfriends…and girlfriends to visit her parents’ home. During her Junior year, Richard and Susan had met Brett at Thanksgiving—a member of the Tuft’s swim team from Vermont—tall and broad in the shoulders as only swimmers are. Then, at Christmas, Miriam had brought home Karin, a darkly beautiful poet, Jewish and sultry. If that had not been enough to confound Richard and test his well-know liberal ideals, Brett was back for Easter. Susan and Richard had agreed that once children lived out of the house and came home with “friends”, they would share a room. They both felt liberated and “modern” about that decision. “If they’re sleeping together in their real world,” Susan had put it, “then it’s crazy to make them lie when they’re with us.”

Richard had willingly agreed. But the junior year holidays had mystified him. Late Easter night when everyone but Miriam and Richard was already asleep, he found the courage to confront her.

“How’s Karin?” he began. They were sitting in the little room off the kitchen with a fireplace. The chairs all faced the fireplace, but, it being April, there was no fire. At least he could look at something besides his daughter.

“She’s great,” Miriam said, brightly—as she said almost everything. “She sends her thoughts and love on this celebration of the murder of her Messiah.”

Richard nodded to the fireplace. “And Brett,” he said, “he’s great as well?”

Miriam began to laugh. It started as a shaking of her head and then her whole body and then a cackling sound coming from her mouth and then the sound spread to the depths of her. It was so infectious that Richard was soon laughing too, though he didn’t know why. He simply couldn’t not laugh when his princess was laughing.

“You know, Daddy,” she said, kindly, instructively, when the laughter died a natural death, like a very good teacher tells a very important truth, “this sexual stuff is a lot more ambiguous than you believe or imagine.”

They sat in a long silence. The dog before Cecelia—there had always been a dog and often cats and other creatures—rested her snout on Richard’s leg until he let her out the kitchen door. When he came back to the fireplace, Miriam was standing, pursing her lips, looking at him, waiting for something.

“Alright then,” he said—and what else could he had said, loving her so enormously, “give us a hug and let’s get some sleep.”

She folded into him. Both his sons were several inches taller than he was, but Miriam was a slip of a girl, tiny, petite, fragile. As he embraced her, he lowered his face into her dark and curly hair. He breathed her in and knew, in the way only fathers of daughters can know that this was the essence of life. He never quite understood the ambiguity of Miriam’s sexuality. He knew she now lived with a lovely and generous Hispanic woman, a social worker at a Boston hospital. Milagros was one of his personal favorites of all Miriam’s lovers. She was almost the same size as his daughter—they could have been models for salt and pepper shakers of two beautiful women. And he had talked with both them about their dreams of adopting a child. Yet, they’d only been together for two years and Miriam’s last “friend” had been Chuck, an investment banker, for God’s sake! Richard would just wait and see.

Miriam’s message was the dearest of the three to him.

“Daddy, I just saw it on TV. Milagros was watching and made me watch. I called Jeremy and Jonah. Are you alright? Are you okay? I could be there tomorrow if you need me. I will be there if you don’t call me. Be brave, daddy. Don’t worry, I can come to you. Oh, I love you….Just know that, this must be horrible for you after…after Mom and all….I’m blathering, just blathering….Call me. Call me. Okay? Be well. I love you. Goodbye.”

The last messages were from more media outlets. Richard erased all the messages but the three from his children. Then he listened to those again and once more. He loved their voices, just hearing them speak, and knew he needed to call them and let them know he was fine, just fine, surrounded by police on every side. He even had the phone in his hand, about to dial Miriam’s number first, when Lt. Caggiano and Sgt. Coles burst into the house, startling Brooks and Cecelia off the couch at last and followed—or, perhaps, propelled into the house by a large, red-haired man who entered last and broke into a song: “There’s no business like show business, like no business I know….”

Not a bad tenor, Richard thought, hanging up the phone half-dialed and turning to see what the fuss was….

************

According to Dante and Marta, both talking at the same time to Richard, FBI Agent Owen Gordon was one of the good guys of law enforcement. By that, Richard would learn quickly, they meant Agent Gordon was more interested in catching the miscreants and villains (Dante’s terms) than in abiding by the “jots and tittles”, Dante put it, of institutional regulations. Agent Gordon’s presence on Block Island that early evening in October was proof enough of that.

“You never saw me here, Father,” Gordon told Richard after introductions were made and everyone had a neat glass of scotch. Brooks threw down his drink and went back to the kitchen for a refill. Richard wondered if, after beer and whiskey, Brooks planned to fly the helicopter back to the mainland that night.

Brooks stood in the kitchen with Cecelia lying at his feet. Richard felt a slight pang of jealousy that the lab could develop such loyalty to a stranger. The three policemen and Richard sat at the table holding their glasses like bridge hands while Owen Gordon talked.

Owen was as Scots-Irish as Dante was Italian and the two of them were polar opposites in size and demeanor. Agent Gordon was huge—6’5” at least, and must have weighed 250 pounds, Richard imagined, though he wasn’t flabby at all, just big and hard. He was dressed as casually as Dante was formally—an open necked, wrinkled white shirt, equally wrinkled khaki’s, a dark blue, zip-up jacket with a logo for a car dealer—O’Mally Ford—on the breast. He wore deck shoes without socks. His fair skinned face reminded Richard of some bartender’s face from his distant past and his hair was beyond carrot colored to day-glow orange.

“If I were on this island,” Agent Gordon began, smiling and winking, “which we all agree I’m not and never have been…right?”

The others nodded, except for Brooks who was searching through the refrigerator with Cecelia, paying scant attention.

“If I were here I could tell you some fascinating but confusing details,” Gordon paused, winked and waited.

“But you’re not here, for Christsake,” Dante said, anxious and annoyed. “Get on with it.”

Before Owen could answer, Richard asked, “why aren’t you here?”

Agent Gordon laughed and poured more scotch all around. Richard began to think law enforcement played hell with your liver.

“Flash is doing an end run around the other feds,” Mara explained patiently while Dante lit a cigarette and almost swooned. “He’s screwing over the Homeland Security boys by being here.”

“But I’m not here!” Owen laughed.

“Mary, Mother of God,” Dante almost shouted, standing up and knocking over his chair, momentarily distracting the Lab from the ham Brooks was feeding her. “this Mick takes forever to tell you something. Let him talk!”

“My mother was Irish,” Owen winked and explained calmly to Richard, “which explains the dagos’ reference. But my father was a Scotsman through and through.”

“Do you have your gun?” Dante asked Mara.

“In my room,” she answered.

“Go get it and put me out of this misery!”

After another minute of two of what Richard realized was meant to do exactly what it did—drive Dante nearly crazy—Owen settled into his story. Richard noticed the clock on the kitchen wall—7:45 p.m.

By 8 o’clock, Owen had told them that Spencer and Johnson, the two victims, were from Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence—people who spent their days worrying about terrorism, money laundering, drugs and illegal aliens as well as “whatever else has crossed Tom Ridge’s feeble mind since he woke up this morning”. At first, and even second, glance, they didn’t seem to be trained, professional investigators. “Glorified accountants assigned to the Boston office from all we can dig up,” is how Gordon put it, “monitoring banking records that might smell of some terrorist plot. But God knows,” he continued, “these people can do almost anything—no rules for them.” His biggest evidence of the overarching power of DHS was the car they were found in.

“Registered in Michigan with fake Connecticut plates,” he told them, “and when we ran it down it turns out that particular Lexus was seized in Miami from some drug lord. But why did they give it to bean counters?”

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” Richard said, interrupting, “but I’ve been wondering where the car is.”

“Providence,” Dante said, testily.

“No more,” Owen added, “on its way to Washington as we speak.”

“God-damn!” Dante said, lighting up again. He was putting his butts in his half-full scotch glass.

“It was a huge car,” Richard said, obsessing on the Lexus, “it must have weighed two tons.”

Owen smiled at him, winking. “Close guess, Father. 4037 pounds curb weight, but someone—the drug guy or Homeland Security had added bullet resistant everything to it along the way. They put another 800 pounds of reinforced steel in the doors.”

“That must have hurt the gas mileage,” Richard mused aloud. Dante almost starting tearing out his hair.

“So why were they here?” Mara asked.

Owen Gordon shook his head sadly. “Amore,” he said. “From their credit card records we’ve been able to find a pattern of week-ends away together—P-Town, New Hampshire, and now the Block.”

“They were just having an affair?” Richard asked, incredulous.

“Not ‘just’ an affair,” Dante said, flipping through some pages the FBI agent who wasn’t there hadn’t given him, “though one would think a priest would have a little less sympathy for adulterers—it was an affair that got them mistakenly murdered, most likely because they were driving the ‘company car’….”

“Wrong place at the wrong time,” Mara said, quietly.

“Star crossed lovers,” Richard added, barely audibly.

The truth was, Owen didn’t know much more than that. No other federal agency—all of which hated Homeland Security—had a clue why the two Mystic Aquarium slash Homeland Security agents slash couple on a romantic weekend were murdered. It all seemed to hinge on the Lexus.

“That’s all I’ve got for you,” Flash said, reaching for the bottle.

“And you’ve never been here,” Richard said.

“Right. And the HLS guys are going to want Dante to not be here either….” Owen laughed and winked. Richard suddenly realized that the agent’s winking—how his face was always contracting and expanding with one eye or another blinking—might be a twitch instead of a subtle message.

It was time for everyone to scatter. Owen had a boat to take Dante back to Providence.

“My car too?” the detective asked, suddenly anxious.

“Sure,” Agent Gordon said, “if you let me sit in the driver’s seat on the way across the water and pretend I’m driving….”

Brooks said a long, slobbering good-bye to Cecelia—he had to go get the Crime Scene people in the helicopter and bring them back before dawn and Homeland Security arrived. Mara went to get her luggage—one small bag, really—so she could move into the White House.

Owen “Flash” Gordon looked at Richard as Mara hurried out of the room. “Missed opportunities never return, Father,” he said, wickedly.

Mara would ride with Dante in the Ferrari and Richard would drive Owen to the dock in New Harbor where the FBI boat “really wasn’t”. Then Richard would drive Mara to the White House and himself home.

As they were all crowding out of the front door onto the deck, Mara turned to Richard, “is there anything open now?” she asked, “a place to eat.”

“One,” he said, “down by the water.”

“Can we eat after we get rid of this trash?” she said.

“Sure,” Richard answered, “no problem.”

Owen and Dante exchanged a glance.

***

The Ferrari crawled down the dirt road but exploded when Dante turned right. Richard and Owen watched the sports car’s tail-lights disappear around the first curve.

“Good cops, those two,” Owen offered.

“Unconventional, though they may be,” Richard responded.

Owen laughed a broad Scotch-Irish laugh. “They filled me in about their plans,” he said, suddenly serious. “Risky, I’d say, involving a civilian like you.”

“So I’m in danger?” Richard asked, taking the turn uphill by the Spring House. He was a little anxious, but, he realized, more excited than anxious.

Agent Gordon was winking overtime and smiling slyly, “you mean other than from Mara?”

They were gliding downhill toward the statue round-about. Richard was surprised at how he reacted to Owen’s question. Already he had dreamed about Sgt. Coles and he realized her fierce femininity had touched him. But a year was not enough time to mourn a 30 year marriage. His flicker of desire and hope was extinguished by a feeling of guilt. Just then he remembered he hadn’t returned any of his children’s calls.

“Do you know what Mara means?” Owen was asking him as Richard reminded himself he had to make those calls.

“Bitter,” he said, driving through the town and heading to New Harbor. “Mara means bitter.”

Ahead of them, coming up to the stop sign where they’d turn right and quickly left to arrive at New Harbor, Mara broke eight minutes of driving silence.

“I’m not sure I can do this, Dante,” she said.

Dante was lighting a cigarette while he drove and tried to find the Boston Hip-Hop station he loved on the radio. “Do what?” he asked, in the midst of all that.

“Fuck, Dante,” she said, painfully, “you know what….”

“Endure the psycho-drama with fair Father Lucas? Is that what you mean?” he asked, a bit harshly, pedantically. “Teasing out what he knows but doesn’t know he knows that we need to know to discover why two presumably decent people were given sodium penathol until they died and then had water poured down their gullets to confuse us and were left in an expensive SUV on a dirt road on an island—is that it?”

“I mean pretending to like him and being his shoulder to cry on. I mean spending this time with him making him remember what he doesn’t remember.” Mara felt suddenly drained, exhausted. “I mean….”

“Getting attached?” Dante said, softly.

He pulled the Ferrari up on the dock. They both saw a boat ahead with something that looked like a gangplank for an automobile between the boat and the dock. It was very dark, but there were lights in some of the yachts moored by the dock. And up to the right, on a hill, Stevenson’s house was lit up like a Christmas Tree, as if he were having a party.

“I’m already attached,” Mara whispered, really whispered, rather than saying it out loud in her whisper-sounding voice.

Dante was silent and uncharacteristically still. Then he offered Mara his cigarette case.

“I don’t smoke,” she said.

“You do now,” he answered as she laughed and took one of the thin, unfiltered cigarettes.

***

Mara and Richard watched the FBI boat pull away. Then they watched its lights until it cleared the harbor and turned toward the mainland. Before that, Mara, Owen and Dante had huddled briefly, all talking at once, Richard thought, though he couldn’t hear their conversation, before the Ferrari was driven onto the boat—with lots of directions and curses from Dante—by a young FBI agent—and Lt. Caggiano and Agent Gordon followed it on board.

There was a constant breeze with a hint of winter chill in it, but the two of them stood and stared out across the water for a long time after any sight of the boat’s lights was futile. Mara leaned back, almost against Richard, and he imagined he could feel her body heat and he briefly considered wrapping his arm around her shoulder. But he didn’t.

“Dinner?” he finally asked.

She smiled, wrapping her arms around herself. “That would be nice.”

In unnatural silence, they drove a mile or so in Richard’s old Volvo to the Captain’s Cove, the only restaurant open on the island that late on a weeknight in October. Richard was reminding himself to call his kids—especially Miriam—and Mara was making a list in her head about what she needed to do tomorrow. The gravel of the parking lot crunched beneath the tires before either spoke.

“We’re here,” Richard said.

“Good,” Mara answered, “I’m starving.”

She certainly ate like a starving woman, Richard thought to himself as Mara, unable to decide between Rhode Island style clam chowder and fried calamari for starters, ordered both. Richard picked at Mara’s squid while she quickly finished the chowder.

“Have as much as you want,” she told him, buttering bread to dip in the broth, “I always order too much.”

“I hope you like the food,” Richard said, smiling.

“Oh, I do like food….”

The waitress stopped by. She was an Islander in her mid-50’s, dyed blond hair tucked up under a baseball cap with “Captain’s Table” on the front. Her smile emphasized the sun-wrinkles on her face. She stood by Richard’s chair for a moment, watching Mara eat.

“Everything fine here?” she asked. Mara nodded and pulled the plate of calamari closer to her. “Another ale, Reverend Lucas?”

“Thanks, Millie,” Richard said, glad that waitresses and police officers both wore nametags, thinking everyone should.

“You too, M’am?” Millie asked Sgt. Coles. Mara’s mouth was full so she made a motion with her fork like keep ‘em coming.

After she swallowed, Mara asked, “do I look like a ‘M’am’ to you?”

“She’s wanting me to introduce you….There’s probably a bet in the bar that you’re the cop.”

Mara stopped her fork of squid half-way to her mouth, “or if the priest has a date….” She glanced at Richard, squinted her eyes and shoveled in the calamari. A dollop of thick tomato sauce dropped from the fork to her left breast. “God, I need a bib,” she said, “wiping it away with her napkin, leaving a dime sized red stain on the white sweater.

Richard averted his eyes, realizing he was staring at Mara’s chest, noticing how her breast moved as she dipped her napkin in water and tried to wash away the sauce. “Lord,” he thought, “that’s something I’ve not done for a while….”

Mara had noticed his gaze and his looking away. She felt a blush rising up her neck when Millie returned with more Otter’s Creek Ale.

“Want some seltzer for that?” the waitress asked, smiling at Mara, “better than plain water I’m told.”

“No, thanks. It’ll be fine,” she answered, self-consciously rubbing the spot with her fingers.

“Sure now? Won’t be any trouble….”

“No really…it’s….Don’t worry.” Mara forced herself to stop fussing with the stain, feeling fully embarrassed.

“Staying on the Block for a while?” Millie asked, picking up the empty chowder bowl.

“For a while….” Mara answered, picking up her mug and drinking a third of the glass.

“Hope you enjoy it. Let me get you some more bread….” Millie grinned obviously at Richard and hurried back toward the kitchen.

“Well, she’s certainly friendly.” Mara took another long drink of ale.

“Curious, more likely,” Richard said. “The real Islanders want to know about the tourists, especially detectives from the mainland.”

Mara rubbed her hand through her short, blond hair and Richard suddenly laughed. “What?” she said, a little sharply.

“Now you’ve got sauce in your hair.”

“Jesus,” she said, standing up just as Millie returned with another basket of bread and two more ales. She looked at the waitress, but before she could speak, Millie pointed the way through the bar to the bathrooms.

“Up the steps to your left, dear,” she said.

When Mara had gone, passing the few couples still eating and the half-dozen regulars at the bar, Millie asked Richard how he was doing.

“The calamari is very good,” he answered.

“No, Father Lucas,” she said, shaking her head and almost clucking like a mother to a young child. “I mean after your shock….Finding those bodies and all.”

Richard told her it had been a shock but that he was doing okay, that everyone had been kind and thanks for asking.

“Your…your friend….”

“Sgt. Coles.”

“Oh, Sgt. Coles,” Millie said, nodding knowingly, “is she…looking into all that? Mal…Officer Alt…told me earlier tonight there were two of them.”

Richard smiled. He was sure Malcolm Alt has said something like, an arrogant little Italian prick and a really hot blond. Mara wouldn’t have been unknown on the island after the first 10 minutes she’d been there.

“Some Federal officers will be taking over tomorrow,” Richard said, knowing he wasn’t revealing anything half the island didn’t already know. “Sgt. Coles is taking some time off.”

Millie was nodding again. Richard could see questions forming on her face. But before she could ask them, Mara was back. Her hair was damp and she was carrying her sweater. Underneath she wore a tight black crew neck pullover. It was patently obvious now, as Richard had subconsciously imagined, that she wasn’t wearing a bra. But before he had a chance to reflect on that he noticed what she was wearing—a small pistol in a dark brown leather holster and a pair of handcuffs, both on her belt. Never a gun-lover, Richard inhaled involuntarily. Since she never seemed to carry a bag and since she was a detective, he shouldn’t have been shocked to see the gun, but he was.

His reaction was mild compared to Millie’s. She was staring open mouthed at Mara’s waist. Mara sat down and pulled up close to the table, hiding the weapon from view.

“More ale,” she said brightly, “you must have known I’m on vacation.”

The waitress recovered quickly. “Yes M…yes, Sergeant…I’m sure you’ll love the White House. Margarite does a fabulous job up there….” Mara’s suddenly cold glance made her pause. “Your meals will be right out,” she finished and rushed away.

Mara turned the same gaze on Richard. He held his hands up, as if at gun point, “I told her your rank,” he explained, “but not where you’re staying. She knew that not long after you did….”

She rolled her eyes and softened. “God, island people….”

The meals came quickly, as promised. Mara had shrimp scampi and Richard mussels in wine and garlic. The extra bread came in handy for sopping up the rich sauce. They both saved their salads for last. For the first time Richard noticed Mara ate with either hand, switching the fork back and forth.

“You’re ambidextrous?”

“In most things,” she said. Then smiling, “but I shoot left handed.”

His eyes must have grown wide because she laughed. “I saw your reaction to my pistol.”

“I’m sorry, it’s just….”

“No problem,” she said, “I forget I have it on and take off my jacket. One of the pick-up lines I got once was, ‘what’s a nice girl like you doing with a gun?’ Then he found out I’m a cop and had a pressing engagement or a wife to get home to.”

Richard was busy separating the black shells and forking the meat out of the mussels. He looked up and noticed that Mara was staring at him. Her face was passive and expectant, like something was required of him. Her slate gray eyes did not glitter in the dim light of the restaurant. Those eyes had so distracted him before that he only now noticed how much darker, almost black, her caterpillar eye brows were than her hair. There were no wrinkles—not one, not any—on her face. Again his attention was drawn to the slight imperfection—scar?—on her top lip. He’d had three 20 ounce mugs of beer on an almost empty stomach, so time stretched out for him as the two of them looked at each other over seafood.

“I must admit,” he said, hesitantly, inspired by ale, “there is something remarkably exciting about a woman bearing arms….”

Mara took a deep breath and smiled at him. Richard thought for a moment she looked like Sharon Stone in some movie whose name eluded him. Sharon Stone was in a bathtub, he remembered that much, and was being watched via a camera by another character. Then he was seized by embarrassment on two fronts: how often he thought people looked like characters in movies and how he had begun to wonder what Mara would look like naked. Richard was truly a “straight arrow”, a Boy Scout, a square and a bore. And for over a year all that had been submerged in what was initially a tidal wave—a Bay of Fundy high tide—of grief and pain and loss. Now the water was, much to his surprise, retreating, and his normal thoughts and feelings were beginning to return. He was staring at a woman’s lips and breasts. He was suddenly aware again of how vital and wondrous it was to be across a table from a member of the opposite sex—and, in this case, an almost beautiful, almost Sharon Stone looking woman, only thinner and carrying a gun. And all that embarrassed him all over again. Richard was once more—after months and months of sitting Shiva in his own way—coming back to life, drinking ale and eating fish with a Sergeant in the Rhode Island State Police and enjoying it all, as embarrassing as it was.

“So you won’t leave me alone here because I’m a cop with a gun?” Mara said, looking at her plate. Her voice was now truly a whisper, and since her normal speaking voice was whisper-like, Richard couldn’t quite hear her.

When he asked what she had said, she repeated it verbatim, still not looking up, but a little louder. He was overcome with compassion for her in that moment. And in the next moment he reminded himself that he hadn’t heard her the first time because he was getting old and his hearing wasn’t what it used to be. A cold chill ran through him. What am I doing here? He asked himself, Mara’s only a few years older than my children….Why am I looking at her lips and noticing her breasts and worrying about how she’s feeling?

For her part, Mara was having second thoughts as well. Am I being so coy with him because Dante wants me to find out what Richard doesn’t know what he knows? Or am I truly wondering if who I am—a woman with a gun and a badge and God knows ‘a past’—is a problem with him? He’s too old, for Christ’s sake. And yet, there’s something here….

So there they sat, two human beings in 2003, in a restaurant on a rock of an island that was a gift of the last great Ice Age, each dealing with who they were and what they were doing there with each other and what it meant. There was more talk and more than enough beer and a minor dispute over who would pay—Mara on her State of Rhode Island credit card (because this had been “official” State Police business) or Richard on his pristine MasterCard (because Susan had always paid the bills and abhorred debt and he’d spend almost no money in the past year)—and then a slightly tipsy, almost silent ride in Richard’s Volvo back through the town and up the hill to the White House.

Richard cut the lights but not the motor. They sat in silence in the chill of October on an island. The front porch light was on and Mara had a key even if the door was locked. She’d put her sauce stained sweater on inside out before they left the Captain’s Table. It was at once—as it always was on Block Island when there were no clouds at night—both extremely dark and lit by starlight not available in Providence.

Mara was about to say something about what they needed to do tomorrow when Richard said, out of the starlit darkness, “I had a wonderful time.”

He regretted saying it as soon as it was out of his mouth and in the universe. He suddenly felt 17 and crazy as that. Embarrassed again. He began to think about how “embarrassment” was a significant part of being human and being alive.

She smiled to herself and remembered how awkward and awful adolescent “first dates” had been. She closed her eyes and bit her bottom lip so hard it almost bled.

“Me too,” she said, quickly, before either of them could say more and ruin the moment. Quickly as a night cat, she opened her door, leapt out and moved, slightly shaken from the ale and the moment and the starlit night toward the White House.

Richard watched her go, admired her grace as she ascended the steps to the porch and began to miss her as she closed the door behind her. Then, absent-mindedly he turned on the radio to a talk-station before backing out in that alcohol inspired carefulness onto Spring Street and drove the half-mile back to St. Anne’s.

Her room in Margarita Larson’s White House was dream-like to Mara. The double bed had high posts on each side. The mattress was soft—but not too soft—the pillows were feather-filled and the blanket was home-made and just heavy enough. After brushing her teeth—something she always did, no matter what…Dante had chided her because she carried a tooth brush and a travel sized tube of toothpaste plus floss and wooden picks everywhere they went—she fell into bed and, for the first time in months? Years? Decided it might be fun to touch herself. She touched her breasts, bringing her nipples to attention, then her stomach—flat and covered with feathery down—and then, if only but a moment, she explored her genitals with her fingers, carefully, gently, falling to sleep like a glass falls off a table. Suddenly. All at once.

Richard, for his part, opened the door to the Rectory with the intention of calling Miriam and his sons as soon as he was inside. Instead, he was greeted with 60 pounds of excited, loving dog and so he stood on the deck for 15 minutes while Cecelia did whatever was her business in the darkness, lit by a million stars.

As he stood in the windy chill, Richard could not help but think of dinner with Mara. Part of that thinking was some misplaced guilt about enjoying the company of an almost beautiful woman when his wife was dead and buried. Another part was replaying what he had said and done and wondering what the State Police Sergeant had “thought” of him. It hadn’t been a “date”, Richard reminded himself, trying to remember what it meant to “date” someone and why his dinner with Mara hadn’t been that. He felt foolish and vain standing on the deck, waiting for his dog to return. So when Cecelia came back, Richard filled her water bowl, gave her a new rawhide chew from the cabinets in the kitchen and followed her down the hall to bed.

As he was drifting off to sleep, he remembered he should have washed his face and taken a St. Joseph’s Aspirin and brushed his teeth—but he didn’t and that was okay too….When he woke from a troubling dream at 3:35 a.m. (he looked at his bedside digital clock) he realized his mouth was almost like a mouth full of cotton and he had forgotten to call his children and tell them he was alright. Falling back to sleep, he also noticed he had an erection, and, for the first time in over a year, he considered masturbating, but his mind was confused…he imagined both Susan and Mara, naked on a bed in some ethereal place—together or separately? he wasn’t sure—but sleep rose up and pulled him under before he could decide or touch himself.

Murder on the block

I wrote a murder mystery a couple of years ago just to see if I could. Only a few people have read it. I thought maybe I'd serialize it her under the castor oil tree.

So, if I can copy and paste, here is the prologue and the first chapter.

Murder on the Block

Block Island, Rhode Island

Wednesday, October 22, 2003

3:48 a.m.

Stupid….Stupid….Stupid….

It became his mantra as the power of his massive shoulders and muscular legs drove him through the surf and out deeper in the ocean.

Stupid….Stupid….Stupid….

He could have walked back to the house, all uphill, after throwing the empty tackle box and the pole without a reel and line off the rocks as far as he could. He could have walked back, still looking like a night fisherman, but he was frightened, more frightened than he’d ever been and more angry too. So he walked up the beach a ways and ditched the cheap slicker and boots he’d bought from the bald bigot in town. In the back of his frightened, angry mind, he had known from the beginning he would have to get rid of it all after driving the Lexus into the drop-off beside the familiar dirt road. The deep hole was hidden by brush, but that drunk idiot, Jonas, had slipped into it one of the nights they had walked down to the rocks to ‘fish’. Eli knew from pulling that stupid…stupid…stupid out that night in late September that the hole was deep enough to tip the SUV. He planned to ditch the newly bought disguise all along, but when the impact dragged him over on top of them, he was sure the props were a danger to keep. Still, he was a prudent man and hated to waste any money at all. But the box and pole and slicker and boots had to go.

Stupid….Stupid….Stupid….

He paused, treading the chill water, trying to see how far out he had gone. The stars and moon were his only lights and he couldn’t, at first, tell for sure where the land turned west and the bluffs began. If he kept swimming straight and didn’t head back toward the island, he would swim into oblivion. Eli considered it for a moment. Everything was going to unravel now. They would have to go home, back to warmer, bluer waters. He would leave now, if there was a way off the damn island in the middle of the night. He could steal a boat, he thought, staring east, and leave Jonas to deal with the fallout from his stupidity.

Then he saw the bluffs cutting off the night sky. He was 150 yards out, he reckoned. He could turn toward land now or swim into oblivion.

Stupid….Stupid….Stupid….

He dove down, knowing he was in very deep water. He did a breast stroke deeper and deeper, until his lungs were burning. Eli knew he wouldn’t drown himself, no matter what, not even now, so he stoked strongly back to the surface. Breathing deeply, treading water again, he realized he couldn’t ‘go home’—not now, not ever, not even after cleaning up Jonas’ stupid mess as best he could. No, Mon, he thought, feeling the cold numbing his muscles. I be runnin’ now. He had to swim again to burn out his fear and anger.

Stupid….Stupid….Stupid….Stupid….

He lay exhausted and freezing on the narrow spit of sand beside the endless stairs up to the top of the bluffs. As he rested, breathing raggedly, shivering, it all came clear to him. They had been set up. Whoever it was they worked for had made sure they would take all the blame. His instincts had told him to leave the syringes and the medicine in the tiny vials and not to follow orders. He even told Jonas that was what they should do. But Jonas (stupid, stupid Jonas) got excited about the orders on the note.

“Here’s some real action, Mon,” stupid Jonas had said, his eyes shining from rum though it was early morning the day before. “Now we be talkin’, Mon.”

Eli had gone along, against what passed as his ‘better judgment’—he bought the cheap gear, drove the SUV left stupid Jonas alone with them too long while he hid the Lexus down a dead end three roads away. He remembered, lying on the beach, wishing he had kept swimming toward oblivion, that walking back to the house after hiding the car he had been tingling with fear. When he finally got back and saw the mess that stupid drunk had made…Jonas was so god-damned stupid!

Stupid….Stupid….Stupid….

Eli repeated the word over and over, once on each of the over 100 steps up to the top of the bluffs. He repeated it over and over and he made his way down the road toward the house, still dripping, caked in salt, so cold.

He thought about simply killing Jonas and leaving the next morning—taking all the money and the stuff they’d been skimming. But then he realized how far he’d have to run. But there would be one more drop—he knew it in his heart, could see the note as surely as if he held it in his hand. The greedy bastards that had set him up so brilliantly would have one more shipment—probably already on the way—before shutting the whole thing down until Jonas’ stupidity blew over. So he and Jonas would take both packages, more than enough to ‘get lost’ somewhere. That was his plan. Maybe he’d kill that stupid drunk and take it all. That was beginning to sound like a better plan.

When he opened the door to the house, Eli saw Jonas sprawled on the floor, passed out, a spilled bottle of rum laying beside him.

“Stupid….Stupid….Stupid….” Eli said out loud.

I.

Wednesday, October 22, 2003—6:03 a.m.

Cecelia woke up and watched Richard sleeping.

She snuggled closer to him, her hip against his thigh, and felt his sleeping breath against her face. Nothing he could ever do would in any way diminish her love and devotion to him. He defined her life and was the source of her deepest joy. Just watching him sleep moved her deep within—touched her soul and thrilled her. Just that…Richard sleeping was almost enough to make her whole. He had worn her out last night, run her almost ragged. But morning had found her anxious for more.

Shifting slightly in the bed, she listened to the lonely calls of the red-winged blackbirds and the sweet, high songs of the finches feeding on the insects of dawn. And somewhere, at some distance, she could hear the irritable cry of Albert, the sea gull who spent the day complaining loudly from the roof of the house next door. Richard and all those bird sounds were nearly enough.

But not quite enough—she needed more and her need was greater than she could control. Quivering, her body against his, Cecelia’s mouth reached out for his. Tentatively at first, she tasted his breath, felt the warmth of him move through her body. More…she wanted more, she needed him so much she could hardly wait, so she licked his eyes and face and wagged her tail.

Richard smiled before he opened his eyes.

“Good morning, girl,” he said, sleepily. “Don’t want to sleep in?”

He scratched her ears and laughed out loud.

“OK, good dog,” he sang like a chant, “let’s get up and get out of here….”

Little did either of them know what was waiting a hundred yards away, down the dirt road toward Spring Street, nestled like a huge egg in a brush nest, white as an egg, but holding death, not potential life.

Father Lucas hoisted himself from bed and his half-Lab, half-Retriever dropped to the floor simultaneously. Both of them were ready for another day in the paradise that was Block Island. But time was running out. Within a quarter of an hour they would discover the trouble in paradise.

***

Richard wasn’t happy with his new running shoes. The left shoe tended to grab and irritate his heel, just to the left of center. Two pairs of socks helped, but not enough. Maybe there’s a rock, a twig, some sand, he thought, stopping a few strides down the dirt road that lead to Spring Street. He knelt in the mud left by the late October rains and fooled with his shoe. But his dog ran ahead and started barking inexplicably just around the turn.

Cecelia almost never barked—not at the deer or the turkeys or the tourists (most of them, God bless them, were mercifully gone now, leaving the island to the serious and the brave.) Just two weeks before, a couple of Jamaican who lived most of the year on the island—doing odd jobs, watching summer houses, helping at the docks—had gotten drunk and found their way into St. Anne’s always unlocked door to pass out. Cecelia had sniffed and whined at the door between the rectory’s dining room and the worship space while Richard boiled eggs and sliced melon. She’d run to him and back to the door time and again. She’d licked his bare knees and even nipped at his shorts, but she hadn’t barked, not once, not even with two unconscious, sweaty bodies splayed out only a few feet from the closed doors.

But now she was barking, barking like her dog-life depended on it, barking madly and running back and forth between the SUV turned over on the dirt road and Richard Lucas, newly widowed Episcopal priest, ready for his morning jog up Spring Street to Mohegan Drive and back across the hill to the little town for a coffee and a New York Times. Fr. Lucas was growing annoyed with Cecelia and her barking.

“Can’t you shut up?” he asked the dog as he fooled with his shoe. Cecelia responded with a low growl and a lick to Richard’s face that almost knocked him off balance.

“Jesus, Cel…” Richard muttered, then thinking, added “at least one of his friends….” And laughed to himself. Then the very worse thing that could have happen happened: Cecelia began her dance.

She had only done it once before, that morning sixteen months, two weeks and four days earlier when Cecelia, and then Richard, found Susan dead.

Sixteen months, two weeks and four days, Richard thought, stunned as the dog bounced back and forth unnaturally, almost like a cartoon dog, from her left legs to her right legs, then back again and then turning in a worried circle. The hours and minutes no longer came naturally to him. He had to think: just ten minutes or so. For over a year he had been able to compute automatically the time he had been alive without Susan. He had told only two people about it—his bishop and his psychiatrist—and both had been astonished and a little suspicious. Dr. Clarke had even kept notes and would ask him during a session—“How long now?”—and Richard could always tell her. He’d never been good with time or dates (“linear time confounds me,” was one of the little tag lines he’d developed over the years to explain how he didn’t remember what month, or sometimes even what year something had happened.) But since Susan died, some subconscious clock was constantly ticking, recording the passage of life without Susan. “LWS” he had started calling it to himself, but only once out loud because Laura Clarke had looked up quizzically when he said the initials. “Life without Susan”, Richard said, a bit embarrassed, and carefully avoided saying them after that. However, almost any time of any day, when something happened to make him think of her—the Saturday opera on the radio, a line of poetry, a sudden rainstorm…he never knew what it would be—Richard would “know” the months and weeks and days, not knowing how he knew them, and say them to himself, adding sadly and ironically, “LWS time.”

Now Cecelia was doing “the Dance of Death” again, spinning in the heavily pocked, muddy dirt road that ran from Spring Street past St. Anne’s to the four or five houses beyond, down on the beginnings of the cliffs that rose and soared a mile away at Mohegan Bluff. He had told dozens of people about Cecelia’s dance—never naming it as he did privately—as he, time and again, had to relive and tell of that awful morning. “She was like Lassie in the old TV show,” he would tell people who listened in rapt attentiveness since everyone secretly longs for all the details of death. “I laughed at her and said, ‘is something wrong with Timmy, girl?’ Then I followed her downstairs, still laughing, anxious to tell Susan what the dumb dog had done….” About then in his telling and retelling of the dog’s dancing antics, a shadow would pass over the face of whoever was listening. They realized that the next part would cause Richard great pain to tell—though they longed to hear it and, if the truth be known, he longed to tell it, as if telling it enough would make it ordinary, common and untrue. So they’d suddenly say something about how smart Cecelia was—which was a patent lie—or how animals have a “sixth sense” about such things and isn’t that amazing….Or else they’d realize they had an appointment or a call to make or someone coming to visit and find a way to escape. Those kindly, curious people thought they were sparing Richard remembered suffering. Little did they know he wanted to tell how he found his wife’s body enough to make it stop hurting so much.

“Cecelia, damn it!” Richard yelled into a moment in his mind of total silence. The birdsongs and the surf’s call and the screaming of the lone gull, Albert, had been drowned out by the emptiness of his memory. He tried to stand and stumbled, falling to his knees on the gravel and dirt. The pain of the fall brought him back. His dog bounced away, startled by an angry word from Richard. It only made her brain spin faster and she resumed her dance a yard further down the road.

It was a big white vehicle turned on its side in the ditch. That’s what the dog had seen, for Richard saw it as soon as he took the first turn and cleared the high brush that lined the one-lane road. He found himself laughing with relief. It’s only an SUV some half-drunk fisherman or half-high teenager had slid into the ditch, he thought. Enough to spook Cecelia, he thought, but nobody dead.

“It’s okay, girl,” he said, walking slowly toward his spinning dog. “Just a little island accident. Happens all the time. They’ll be coming for it soon.”

His soothing voice calmed Cecelia for a moment. But then she barked and ran toward the car, jumping up and putting her feet on the exposed undercarriage. Richard thought he’d have to bathe her if she got gunk from the bottom of a car all over her. Then she ran back and jumped up on him, leaving his legs and running shorts stained with grease and mud.

He could see the front of the SUV and noticed an insignia on the hood. He was never good about recognizing cars, but he thought it might be a Lexus. “Some parent is going to be pissed,” he thought to himself as he walked over to the left hand side of the road and noticed the objects he could see through the front window, leaning against the passenger side door. The sun was rising behind him and the windshield reflected orange and bright. He couldn’t quite make out what was in the car. His mind tried to place the shapes—two rolled up sleeping bags with soccer balls on them…soccer balls with something on top of them like the soccer ball in the Tom Hanks movie—what was it called? Of course, Castaway. That crazy ball that the Tom Hanks character made to look like a person—what did he call it? The name of the company…”Spalding”…no, “Wilson.”

Richard’s momentary pride in dredging that from his memory was canceled out by two rapid realizations: he and Susan had seen that movie together in the “pre-LWS time” and what he was looking at were two bodies, piled on each other by gravity when the SUV turned on its side.

Suddenly, he was running, bumping into sixty-five pounds of dog, almost falling, rushing to get to the car, hearing in a distance Cecelia’s bark and the cry of a seagull.

***

“Father Lucas,” someone was saying to him, “could you tell me what happened after that.”

Richard looked up at a young man in a uniform standing beside him. After Richard glanced around the room and realized he was sitting on the couch in St. Anne’s Rectory, he looked back at the police officer—that was the uniform, he was certain.

“What happened after what?” Richard said, so softly he had to repeat it again.

“After you realized there were people in the car and ran over to try to get them out,” the policeman said. He was in his late 20’s, Richard thought, with dark eyes, almost as black as his crew cut hair, an oval, deeply tanned face and a soft, understanding voice. He held a small, red spiral notebook and a white pen—a BIC, Richard thought, wondering how he knew that. The pin above his badge said “ALT, M”, which struck Richard as incomprehensible until he remembered the policeman had introduced himself as “Officer Malcolm Alt” about a half-an-hour ago.

Cecelia’s head was in Richard’s lap and there was grease and dirt on the dog and the couch.

“I’ll have to get this cleaned,” Richard said, to no one in particular.

“Mal,” someone said, stepping into Richard’s field of vision, “this obviously isn’t going to work. Maybe later.”

Officer Alt sighed and flipped his notebook closed. Stevenson Matthews insinuated his six and a half foot, bone thin frame between Richard and the arm of the couch. “Thanks, Mal,” Stevenson said in that patrician Boston accent Richard had come to know over the years. In his memory he saw Stevenson Matthews greeting him—him and Susan and their children, wild and not a little sea-sick—as they got off the ferry on Block Island for the first time.

(“You are, Father Lucas, I believe,” the tall man said, pronouncing Richard’s last name the way a Kennedy would—Lu-KAAS—and turning his hawk like face and gaze to Susan. “And you, I must say,” he went on without missing a beat, “are too lovely to have to be charming.”

“Keep that up,” Susan said, smiling mischievously, her children gathering around her, staring up at Stevenson, holding onto her legs, “and I’ll never leave this island.”

Stevenson laughed, throwing his head back, showing his perfect white teeth, his startlingly etched profile and shaking his salt and pepper, wind-blown, exquisitely cut hair.

“This is going to be more fun that I imagined,” Stevenson told Richard’s lovely and charming wife, smiling broadly at their three wild children running around just barely under control. The kids, as if knowing they were in the presence of an important adult, stood stock still and stared at him.

He made a sweeping motion with his long arms, as if embracing them and the island. “Welcome to the Block,” he said to the whole family.)

Stevenson wasn’t laughing as he squeezed onto the couch with Cecelia and Richard. His teeth were still perfect and his profile remarkable, but his hair was thinning and the white of mountain snow. And he was still, as he had been nearly 20 years before, the Senior Warden of St. Anne’s and one of the “powers that be” on the small island everyone called “The Block”.

“Not to worry about the couch,” he said, softly, to Richard. “Cecelia is guarding you well and needs to be here with you.”

Richard started brushing sand off the fabric, “I’m really sorry, Stevenson….”

“We know you are and not to worry,” he replied. “Dr. Weinstein is on his way though God knows he hasn’t practiced for a bit, but the best we can do on an island.”

“Dr. Weinstein owns the…the farm….” Richard managed.

“Precisely right, son,” Stevenson said, smiling enough to let the sun wrinkles deeply crease his long, thin face. “See, in spite of how you feel, your memory is fine. A bit of a shock though, I can only imagine, happening upon such a thing.”

“The people in the truck,” Richard began, “the man and woman, were they…are they….”

“Dead, I’m afraid,” Stevenson finished his sentence. “Won’t know why or how for sometime, I fear. But help is on the way. Are you hungry?”

Interestingly, Richard realized how very hungry he was. He and Cecelia were out of the Rectory at just after six, before he had anything to eat. And now, if his senses were normal and believable, it must be past noon. As at a great distance from the death less than a hundred yards away, Richard hungered—famished beyond words, longing to eat, wanting fat and protein and grains.

Surprisingly, because he didn’t notice that Stevenson had moved, Richard’s friend and Senior Warden was calling to him from the kitchen.

“Bacon and eggs and toast, how’s that sound?”

Richard thought he answered, but Stevenson asked again.

“Is that a breakfast you’d look forward to and enjoy?” he asked.

“Yes”, Richard thought and thought it again. Then he said it, twice, just to be safe…”Yes. Yes.” He heard and smelt the bacon in the pan before he wondered if he’s said, “thank you, Stevenson” or not.

***

At two in the afternoon, Richard was still sitting at the table in the Rectory. He’d eaten Stevenson’s bacon and eggs there and then an extra large fish and chips from the Captain’s Table that Stevenson’s middle-aged, Cuban-born housekeeper, Ofilia, had brought him for lunch. Somewhere in all of that he must have spoken with a third of the year-round members of Block Island’s community. People had been coming and going all day. Some of them had been willing to take Cecelia out for walks, though they all asked where her lead was since no one wanted to walk back down toward the Lexus SUV that was still in place, still the tomb of two bodies because the Rhode Island State Police had been contacted while Richard was still in some level of shock and requested—no, “demanded”—that nothing else be touched besides what the crazy Episcopal priest had already messed up, so that some semblance of a “crime scene” would be there for them and the Medical Examiner from Providence to survey. So Cecelia, whining and reluctant, had been walked a dozen times that day down toward the shore and away from the white van of death.

Other folks had brought him food, which he had dutifully covered with saran wrap or foil, and refrigerated. Others had brought strong drink—none of which he could have because Dr. Weinstein, 85 at the least and two decades retired on Block Island from his practice as an OBY-GYN in Boston, had prescribed and obtained some state of the medical arts sedatives that calmed Richard down without putting him to sleep. Most all the “islanders”, as the year-round folk called themselves, knew him in one way or another. He had been coming to Block Island for 20 years—since he was 35 and Susan was 32. A member of his parish in Worthington, Connecticut, was an “owner” on the island—as opposed to the “islanders” and the “tourists”—and knew that St. Anne’s was always looking for priests to come and minister to them. So William Crews had called Stevenson Matthews and those two good white men—both lawyers and bankers—had arranged for Richard and his family to spend three weeks on Block Island as a cheap vacation and the arrangement had lasted for 19 summers, until Susan died, dropping dead of an unexpected and finally explainable aneurysm in her kitchen one autumn morning. As Richard spent over a year in mourning and therapy seeking to deal with Life Without Susan, William Crews and Stevenson Matthews had been on the phone with each other and the Episcopal Bishops of both Connecticut and Rhode Island arranging for Fr. Lucas to spend and extended period—from September until May, at least, giving him time to regain his equilibrium and find himself again. After six weeks on the wind-blown island, it was working. Richard jogged/walked five miles every morning, ate well, went to the beach almost daily, had dinner with St. Anne’s parishioners and slept soundly. He could concentrate well enough to read for an hour at a stretch. The sojourn on Block Island had been just what Richard needed. No one could have known about the white Lexus SUV and the two dead bodies in it that would greet Richard one late October morning. No one could have predicted that—no one at all.

So, as no one could have predicted, Richard was sitting at the table in the Rectory—more food than he could ever eat in the refrigerator and more wine and whisky than he could have imagined sitting around the kitchen—when Sgt. Mara Coles of the Rhode Island State Police Special Crimes Unit came into his life.

“Father Lucas,” she said, “in an hour or so we need to talk.”

“You want to sit down?” Richard asked.

Mara smiled tightly and chose the chair across from him at the table. That was where Susan had always sat in the 20 years they’d been in that house for three weeks out of every year. Richard had sat with his back to the wall between the Rectory and the church—a wall with a framed print of some unknown painting of women and girls in long dresses on a beach somewhere, probably in the south of France. Susan had sat with her back to the kitchen of the small house. For years their children Jonah and Jeremy and Miriam had occupied the other chairs. As children would, they often chose to sit in different places. The first time the Lucas family sat at that table, the children were 10 and 8 and 6. The last seven years, in the last two weeks of June and the first week of July, Richard and Susan had begun the vacation alone. At some point during their annual stay at St. Anne’s, some collection of their brood, with significant others and, in the case of Jeremy, their middle child, a grandchild, would join them at that table.

Now it was just Richard—zoned out on Dr. Weinstein’s pills, freaked out by finding dead people in a van—with Mara Coles, a sergeant in the Rhode Island State Police.

“In an hour or so, I’ll be asleep,” Richard told her. “What’s the wait?”

Mara was tall, almost 5’10. She could have looked directly into Richard’s eyes if they’d been standing. Beneath her dark, well-cut suit and pale yellow silk blouse was the muscular, thin body of a distance runner—which she was—and her hair was shortly cropped and naturally blonde. She was wearing a slate gray suit so well cut that it must have been tailored. Fr. Lucas glanced down and noticed her black, leather flats—“sensible shoes” Susan would have called them—and her dark hose, containing well sculptured calves. His eyes drifted up from the floor and noticed her skirt stopped exactly at her knees—right in the middle of her knees, not above or below. Richard, woozy from his sedatives, wondered at her age—40, 35, 30—he had no idea. Finally focusing on Sgt. Coles’ face, her large eyes were, Richard thought, the gray of the North Atlantic in a storm. And they were as sad as gray, as unsettled as a storm, as ageless as the ocean. Her face was soft and round, with a straight, small nose, large, pouting lips and an unkind chin that kept her from being drop-dead beautiful.

“Dante isn’t here yet,” she said, almost whispering though Richard knew instinctively that was her natural voice. “Dante is the one you’ll have to talk to and he’s coming on the Ferry with his car. You won’t understand until you see it—the car, I mean. I flew over and did the crime scene. That I can do, what I can’t do is talk to you, ask you the questions we need to know about. I’m sure you understand.”

“You are too lovely,” Richard said, mellowed out by his drugs, “to have to be charming.”

Mara laughed. Her laugh was rich and lusty, full of fog and warmth and hope.

“I haven’t heard that line before,” she said, still giggling, “but it isn’t original.”

“No,” Richard said, more willing because of his trauma and drugs to speak the truth than normally. “That’s what Stevenson told Susan the first time he met her.”

Mara nodded. “Stevenson is the grand pooh-bah of this church and this island,” she said. “That much I know. But what I don’t know is who Susan is.”

Richard tried to focus on Mara’s face. The shock and drugs had taken their toll.

“Someone brought some good Scotch,” he said. “Look in the kitchen behind you if you’d like a drink.” He expected some conversation about “being on duty”, but instead she found two glasses and a bottle of Gynfylich. She’d finished one, as they sat and listened to the classical radio station Richard preferred when he wasn’t listening to AM “talk sports”. Then she winked one of her breathlessly gray eyes at him and nodded (“My Lord,” Richard would remember thinking, “a wink and a nod!”) and poured him some scotch, neat.

“It’ll help you sleep,” she said in her strange whisper of a voice.

“I’ll need it, I suspect,” he said, not yet slurring.

Just then someone knocked at the door. “Hello,” a distinctly fake English accent called, “may a humble physician enter?”

Mara smiled, “Dr. Jay,” she said, “come on in.”

A tall, stout man with thin brown hair combed straight back came in. He was looking around like he’d never been in a house before. “Mara, my love,” he said, now in an Hispanic accent, embracing her warmly as she stood up, “won’t you run away with me tonight? We can be in Mexico by morning.”

Richard noticed the man was wearing a motor cycle jacket and black leather chaps with boots garishly decorated with silver inlay. Mara introduced him to Richard.

“Dr. Anthony Jay,” the man said solemnly, no accent and shook Richard’s hand. “So sorry for your unpleasant day.”

“Thank you,” he replied, noticing that Dr. Jay had perhaps the worst set of teeth he had ever seen—crooked and broken and brown.

“Did you ride your motorcycle over, Tony?” Mara asked, smiling broadly.

“No, darlin’”, now it was a red-neck, mountain accent, “I was out ridin’ when I got the call to be flown over here in a State Police plane—cute littl’ thing—just big enough for a pilot, me and the two bodies to go home in….”

Dr. Jay shook Richard’s hand again, falling back into what must have been his normal voice and wishing the priest well. He then led Mara to the door and talked animatedly with her for a few minutes. Finally, she laughed so loud it startled Cecelia, asleep at Richard’s feet the whole time. The dog stood up and shook herself as the front door closed and Mara returned to the table, still laughing.

“Who is he?” Richard asked.

“The state Medical Examiner,” Mare replied, trying to compose herself. “He specializes in thorough autopsies and horribly bawdy jokes. I suspect he didn’t want to offend you with that one.”

“I couldn’t help noticing….” Richard began.

“The teeth,” Mara finished, giggling. “They’re fake. He has four different sets of them. Amuses him to shock people. Dante and I never mention it.”

“The Medical Examiner of the whole state…?”

“And a damn good one, if somewhat deranged…..”

Two drinks later, after talking and slurring non-stop to Mara about just about everything: the war against terrorism, the weather, the Red Sox and Yankees, the weather again, favorite TV shows and global warming, everything but Susan—Dante Caggiano arrived.

Richard couldn’t tell if all the chemicals and alcohol in his body were to blame, but his first view of Lt. Dante Caggiano was like a cartoon—he and Cecelia could have danced with Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. The man moved entirely too fast and looked entirely too strange to be quite real. Suddenly the combination of sedatives and scotch caught up with him. Richard wasn’t sure he could open his mouth again, ever. He felt paralyzed, totally rigid and this little man—who looked like a miniature Al Pacino, except his hair was extremely curly (almost “nappy”, as southern belle Susan, unaware of political correctness, would have said) but wet-looking—was dancing around the room in double time, examining the books on the shelves, bending down to check the carpet, flitting from painting to painting on the walls, pouring himself a healthy scotch and finishing it off in one drink, smiling and winking at Sgt. Coles, complaining about the Ferry trip and how the dirt road had almost ruined his car, doing almost everything anyone could do within the confines of a small house without ever looking at Richard at all.

The Lieutenant was dressed all in black. The darkness of his dress made him look minimally taller than his true 5’7”. Richard thought Dante Caggiano dressed more like a priest than he ever did. His suit was black, with tiny gray stripes, obviously exquisitely tailored and terribly expensive. His heavily starched shirt was black. His tie was black. His socks and what Richard imagined were hand-made Italian loafers were black. The neatly folded and fluffed handkerchief in his jacket pocket was black. Even the cuff links that showed a standard inch beneath the sleeves of his double breasted jacket were black—like black pearls, tiny and costly. Richard was enough out of it to almost say, had he been able to open his mouth, “I’ve never seen anyone dressed like you.” But he couldn’t open his mouth, so he didn’t say it.

Finally, after pouring himself another scotch, Lt. Caggiano sat down at the end of the table where Richard was petrified and Mara was gently laughing and said, “Fr. Lucas, you’ve obviously been inspired by my beautiful partner into mixing drugs and drink and aren’t at your best. But I’d really like to see the church.”

Mara helped Richard stand up and guided him toward the double doors between the Rectory and the Sanctuary of St. Anne’s. She was smiling at him as she supported his staggering walk, wrapping one arm around his waist and guiding him by his shoulder with her other hand.

“You may have noticed that brilliant Mara and I do not seem to avoid drinking on the job, something most detective novels would tell you was forbidden,” Lt. Caggiano was saying, as if through amber, as Richard commanded his legs to move. Cecelia had left her long nap on the couch and was sniffing the policeman’s crotch. Dante did not seem to notice and kept talking.

“But we are not your average police persons,” he was saying. “We are the finest team Rhode Island will ever know….And, as I think of it, Mara, dear, we should put the good Padre to bed and see the church tomorrow. You and I will stay here tonight, just as our new best friend Stevenson Matthews suggested. We’ll doubtless drink more of that good whisky and talk over our case, such as it is. So, pleasant dreams, dear priest….”

Mara was giggling as she guided Richard down the hall to the master bedroom. “He’s the case,” she whispered, laying him on the bed. “I’ll take the dog out, if she’ll go with me, and then let her back here with you. You need someone to sleep with tonight, I think.”

All of which, Richard later thought, he may have made up out of whole cloth. After all, he’d been through quite enough, hoisting himself up onto an overturned Lexus SUV, bloodying his hands prying the door up and open and plunging, like a scuba-diver into the car, carried by gravity into the strange embrace of a man and a woman, both of whom were obviously dead. Lying tangled in their limbs—that tall, thin man, probably in his sixties, though well-preserved in spite of being dead and that short, middle-aged woman with long brown hair and open, vacant, staring green eyes—Richard experienced a vertigo he had known only once before: the morning Susan died.

His adroit mind went suddenly blank. As a priest, he had seen many more dead people than most other folks would ever see, but he’d never been lying on top of two corpses, wondering how to find his way back up and out of an overturned car. That these two people were dead was obvious to him. That he was still alive was the harder question. The only thing that made that real was the insistent barking of his dog. Cecelia’s lament came to him through fog and fear. He heard it as at a great distance, but it kept him climbing out of that place of death though something powerful was willing him to stay.

What he didn’t remember was how he got out of the SUV. Later he would learn from Mara that he had left trace evidence from his troublesome running shoes all over the bodies of Dr. Michael Johnson and Dr. Malinda Spencer. Obviously, he had planted his feet on their shoulders, faces, hips to propel himself upward and out of the car so he could go back to St. Anne’s and phone 911. But none of that came back to him when he awoke—stunned and still a little stiff from drug and drink—late in the night. What he did remember was that he had talked for a long time to an almost beautiful woman. He had talked to her longer, and with more energy than he had talked to any woman since Susan died.

He only wished he could remember her name.

The other thing he noticed, waking up in darkness, besides Cecilia’s body against his side and the dog’s loud and raucous snoring, was that he was wearing only his boxer shorts and tee shirt. His running shorts were gone, along with his Block Dog sweat shirt, his ill-fitting running shoes and socks. Someone had undressed him in his sleep. He was both embarrassed and a bit—just a bit—stimulated knowing a beautiful woman had taken off most of his clothes.

If only he could remember her name. He tried, slipping away.

While Richard slept, fitfully as it was, Dante and Mara sat at the table and consumed, between them, half a bottle of 18 year old Scotch.

“So, is he a suspect?” Mara asked at some point before 2 a.m., when Dante was waiting for Brooks to come and pick him up so she could go to one of the guest rooms and get some sleep.

Dante sat totally, incredibly still. After eight years of working with him, Mara still marveled at both his kinetic, constant movement during the day and his almost catatonic late night posture.

He looked up at her, almost smiling. “Isn’t everyone?”

Then they both looked up because a surge of noise was descending on them from above.

“I need something to read,” Dante said, prancing around the living room and settling on a large book from a table. “Let us pray that Brooks, unlike us, hasn’t been in the Scotch tonight.”

“Brooks?” Mara replied. “Give me a break….Have a good trip.” She crossed the room and handed him a kitchen glass in a zip-lock bag.

“Doubtless,” Dante said, heading for the door in double time. Before he closed it he looked back at Mara with something bordering on affection, “and have a good night’s sleep. One of us should.”

The two detectives smiled at each other, much as they had for much of their eight years together. And Dante left.

Mara sat alone at the table for a while. She panned through the cable stations on the island with the sound too low to really hear, though she was relatively sure that if a helicopter didn’t wake Fr. Lucas, a TV set wouldn’t. She thought for a moment about him: he was not a big man, though she could tell from his face and his limbs when she undressed him that he was used to carrying more weight. His thinness was not quite natural—something was draining him away. His face was unremarkable but etched with memory and pain and creased with laugh marks. He was a man who had laughed a lot, smiled a lot, but was burdened now, struggling to find humor and joy. His longish hair was brown, turning gray. There was something substantial about him that was only in his eyes. When she was taking off his sweatshirt, his eyes opened and gazed into hers: they were brown, green, probably sometimes almost blue and, at least to her, had seen both wonder and suffering.

She walked down the hallway and looked into his room. In the shadows she could see he had turned onto his stomach and was snoring lightly. The dog was pressed against him. Mara liked men who liked dogs. It was in the early morning and he was stirring a bit. She left him there and went to bed to sleep for a few hours.

(Richard dreamed: Cecelia was dancing before him. He was in stocking feet and naked. He followed the dog down long, dark hallways to a bright place and found Susan on the floor. He pulled her into his arms and breathed into her mouth, willing her to life. But the more he breathed, the smaller she became, deflating like a balloon in spite of his breath blowing into her, until he was holding something light as silk and just as unsubstantial. In his dream, his eyes were burning and filled with fluid as he looked up and saw the dog, dancing, dancing, dancing….Like most of these dreams, even when he wasn’t saturated with drugs and alcohol, Richard would not remember it in the morning.

Mara dreamed, fitfully and for only a short while: She was flying in a plane across ice and frozen sea. Then the plane began to disintegrate and in a moment she was flying alone, just above the chill and ice. She flew and flew, almost skimming the ice. She was so afraid she could not speak, not even in her dream, and nothing else happened—just the ice and the flying and the chill enveloping her heart—until she dropped into a deep, profound blackness where dreams could not be remembered.

Cecelia dreamed, as only dogs do, clearly and absolutely: She was chasing something through a field, across a shallow stream, into a wooded area. She was running, running, running….Just that, running, closing in on her prey. At some point in the night, Richard bumped against her, getting out of bed and going to the bathroom. This behavior, she knew. When she felt his warmth near her again, she dropped back into sleep and dreams of running, running, running….Who could say whether she remembered those dream when she awoke or not?)

Heat lightening

That's what I've always called it--those explosions of light in the distance when the sky above you was absolutely clear and full of stars.

It was coming from the South tonight, from New Haven and the Sound. Puff after puff of light in the sky.

The temperature dropped between 10 and 15 degrees during the half hour or so I watched the heat lightening.

No rain yet. Not even clouds.

What it reminds me of is this: we live in a world we don't control or own.

That's how environmentalists are born: by realizing we live in a universe we did not create and do not own.

Don't mess with Mother Nature. The incredible string of natural issues: earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, floods, mudslides, heat wave of the last few months brings us face to face with that reality--we live in a universe and on a spinning ball that we neither created or own. Larger forces are in play than we can control or even predict.

Take a deep breath.

Seek to address the One who did create all this.

Just be present to that Holy One.

Don't ask for anything. Don't confess anything.

Just be present to the One who dwells within you and who owns all that is.

Take a deep breath. Don't do or say anything.

Just be there.

Really, just be there......

"doing Church"

What I do, as an Episcopal priest is 'do Church'.

I've always felt, over the 30 plus years I've been a priest, is that there are two radical disconnects about 'doing church'.

The first disconnect is that when someone asks you, "Where do you go to church?" the answer is a geographical location. Ekklesia, the Greek word we translate as 'church' doesn't refer to a location, it refers to a community. Yet most of us think of 'church' as a building, a location, somewhere in particular. The real meaning of 'church' is the people of the community. They have to gather and so they gather in a location and a building, but 'church' is the people, not a building.

The other disconnect is the role of the priest in the space and the community. A priest is a person of 'authority'. A priest is 'in charge' of the church. A priest is responsible and accountable for what 'doing church' and 'being church' means. The priest is the 'minster' of the church.

Yet in the catechism of my church, the answer to the question "Who are the 'ministers' of the Church" is "the laity, deacons, priests and bishops". The primary 'ministers' of the church are the un-ordained. The laos, the people of God are the ministers of the church.

I find myself, after retiring from 30+ years of the model of the priest being the 'authority' and 'in charge', in a situation that is based on Total Common Ministry. The four little churches where I am the Interim Missioner are based on a model that is not the 'traditional model' of a congregation gathered around an ordained person. Instead, their metaphor is 'a congregation devoted to mission and ministry that has a sacramental member who is a priest'.

That's what I've been looking for my whole life as a priest. That's how we should 'do church'. Every member a 'minister' with a priest who is the sacramentalist.

A metaphor for 'priesthood' that has always intrigued me is the priest as 'shaman' to the tribe. The 'shaman' has a niche role. The shaman walks sideways and utters nonsense and touches the holy things. The shaman is in the community for a specific purpose and that only. The rest of the tribe does everything else. They consult the shaman about tribal matters, but it is the tribe that determines the direction the tribe will take.

That's where I find myself now. I am the Shaman to the Tribe. But much of the Tribe has forgotten the myth and metaphor. They cling instead to the traditional model of the priest as the authority and the leader. In Total Common Ministry, the authority is with the laos, the people. The Shaman is not the "leader" but the servant of the community.

There is much to relearn in the place where I am.

I am the Shaman, part of my role is to teach the Tribe about the traditions and the myths.

That I must do. Pray for me as "we" (since in the metaphor of Total Common Ministry it is always "we", not "I") seek to relearn the chants and the dances and the stories and "do Church" in a powerful and significant way.

This is where I am meant to be right now. When the Tribe is ready, the Shaman will arrive....

"doing Church"

BEING a priest

I had a long conversation today with Ian, my bishop. And what showed up for me was what it means to 'be' a priest.

So I'm sharing something I wrote a while ago about just that. Hope you can find something in it that makes some sense.

Job Descriptions

A seminary classmate of mine who was also a priest in West Virginia when I was there was once riding an airplane from Los Angeles to Chicago. My friend, let’s call him Joe, was wearing, as he seemingly always did, a clerical collar and black shirt, black suit and black wing-tips. Joe is a very large man so his priest outfit always made him look like a black-out curtain from the London Blitz. He spent the flight talking amiably with salesman from the mid-west. They developed one of those airplane friendships and exchanged business cards as the descent began toward O’Hare. Just as the 747 was taxiing up to the gate, Joe’s new friend asked, “What do you do?”

Joe glanced down to make sure his uniform was in place—and hadn’t they talked about the church somewhere over Idaho?

“I’m an Episcopal priest,” Joe replied, confused.

The salesman smiled. “Oh, I know what you are,” he said, “I was just wondering what you do.”

It is an interesting observation and question. What on earth does an Episcopal priest do? How can we describe a role that I believe is more ontological than functional? What’s the job description?

Once, at a cocktail party in New Haven, surrounded by Yale ‘people’—the population of New Haven is divided between Yale ‘people’ and the masses of the unwashed—I had a long conversation with a physicist from India with one of those delightful post-Raj English accents that sound like a bird’s song. You hear that accent most every time you call customer services (aka “help!”) for your computer—they all seem to be in India. Since I didn’t have on a clerical uniform—and never once flew in an airplane with a collar on lest I be seated besides some psychologically disturbed stranger who wanted to confess at 40,000 feet—I had told him when we greeted each other what I ‘did’. And he told me what he ‘did’. It’s what people do.

(Here’s a fascinating thing: back in the Appalachian Mountains where I grew up, when people met for the first time, the question that came trippingly off each of their tongues was “where are you from?” not “what do you do?” I haven’t asked enough people who grew up in rural places if that was true back home to know if it is purely an urban/rural distinction. But I know and know fair well that back home you could tell a lot more about a stranger by knowing where they were from and “who their people were” than you could by finding out how they earned their money. I still have the tendency to ask people where they spent their formative years, believing as I do that there is a wealth of instant knowledge and intimacy in discovering someone’s roots. But, in the place I live now and amidst the people I know now, the first question is almost always, “What do you do?”)

So I told the Indian physicist that I was an Episcopal priest and he asked me with the guilelessness of someone who was ‘from’ a place half-a-world away and who was Hindu if he was anything religious at all, what my ‘work’ consisted of.

Even then, I had begun to believe that being a priest is an ontological rather than a functional thing, so I fished around in my brain for some way to describe succinctly what my “being” in the midst of a parish looked like. I came up with a thought that I’d stand by today. “I am a member of a community,” I told him, “and I function as the leader of that community in our ritual life. And I am very aware of what is going on in and around the community so that when I think I see God breaking in to the day-to-day, I can say ‘Stop! Look! There’s God’….”

He considered that in that lovely, calm and timeless way people from the Indian sub-continent have naturally, took a sip of wine and then said, smiling knowingly, “You’re a process observer.”

He, of course, had to explain to an English major that a ‘process observer’ was an indispensable role in the sciences. Much of what science is about is watching experiments and noting what happens. It is, he told me, rather tedious and painstaking work (not unlike the day-to-day ‘duties’ of a parish priest) but finally indispensable to the march of scientists to the day when they will have the String Theory down pat—the theory that explains just about everything.

“A process observer”, I said to myself, giving that little voice in my head a line to speak of my composition instead of just listening to it chatter on of its own volition. I rather liked it, yes I did.

The actuality is this: one of the things parish priests DO, it seems to me, is “point to God in the process.” We do it in the Eucharist—all the sacraments—in a most obvious way. “You may think this is just fish food and bad port, priests say in the Mass, but I’m going to ‘point out’ to you that this is ALSO the very Body and very Blood of Christ. How about them apples?” Or, like this: “You may imagine this is just a little baby and some water and some oil, but I’m going to reveal to you a different way of looking at all this…a way that brings to mind the Creation and the Exodus and John the Baptist and Jesus and the oil of anointing a royal child and the fact that this squirming little creature is actually the most loved Child of God.” Or this, for example: “I know everyone here believes you are simply a man and a woman anxious to get dinner over and shed these clothes and do what men and women do in the dark, wine-soaked night. But I tell you a Mystery—you are beloved of God and God approves, blesses and watches over you. Go after each other with passion and zeal, it is as the Almighty has arranged it!” Stuff like that is what priests “do”. Process observing—seeking to un-conceal the oldest String Theory of them all: that God is in control in some way we cannot recognize or even understand.

Once, a few years ago, the remarkable Organist/Choir Director of St. John’s—the finest musician I’ve ever known who doesn’t have a big, fat attitude—found a Spiritual he thought I would like, knowing I’m partial to Spirituals. It was called I Believe This Is Jesus and went like this: “I believe this is Jesus….Come and see, Come and see….” Bob’s idea was that I would, after the fracture of the host, sing the “I believe this is Jesus” part and the choir would respond, “Come and see. Come and see” and then do the rest of the song while I administered communion to those at the altar. Great idea—real ‘process observer’ stuff…I’d break the bread and then indicate the bread and wine and sing, “I believe this is Jesus.”

So, without telling anyone but the choir, that’s what we did. I broke the bread, took a deep breath since I’m rocky about my singing ability, then broke into song. When the choir responded, “Come and see. Come and see.” I did something like point to the bread and wine and sing along, shifting from foot to foot, remembering why I loved Spirituals—you can’t stand still and sing them. I turned to give communion to the others at the altar—including the assistant Rector and our Parish Administrator—and they were all staring at me as if I were a crazy person just escaped from the sanatorium with sharp, deadly weapons. After I force fed them the bread and wine—fattening up the Christmas goose—they nearly dissolved into that kind of laughter that there is simply no way, no way in heaven and earth, no act of will available to human beings to repress. The “I believe this is Jesus” Mass passed immediately into St. John’s lore. We still laugh about it—others laughing more than me since I was just ‘process observing’ and ‘reporting’—and I can still do it. I’ll do it for you if you ask me nicely.

I have this ongoing conversation with my bishop and others about ontology and function and what a priest “does”. I come down hard on the “being” side of the distinction. I actually think a priest’s job description is to ‘be’ in the midst of the community. The functional stuff is neither rocket science or brain surgery. In fact, most everything a priest does—since we are the last of the ‘generalists’—someone else could do much better. Say Mass, for example—I’d suggest training in theatre would make for a more dramatic Eucharist than studying Theology ever could. Visiting the sick, another example—couldn’t a nurse or social worker pull that off with great aplomb? Teaching adult classes—well, give me someone trained in education every day to someone who can recite the Nicene Creed by heart. Counseling the troubled—a seminary education makes you a ‘counselor’ as much as a class in auto mechanics makes you a jet pilot. Parish priests, if they took my advice, would avoid counseling like the plague and get a rolodex full of references. I can ‘listen’ to someone’s problems but I seldom, if ever, do I know an answer. I actually get ‘hung up’ in the problems, find them fascinating and probably wouldn’t want them to go away. Call a real professional, that’s my advice to a parish priest!

So, here I am, trying to describe “what I do” when the reality I deal with tells me that being a priest is much more about ‘being’ than ‘doing’. I have this argument with my bishop and lots of colleagues that will go on and on. I truly think that priesthood is about ontology, about ‘being’, much more than it is about ‘doing’ or the function we fulfill in the Church of God. This obviously is a result of my remarkably high view of the sacraments. I believe ‘being a priest’ is contained and fully lived out in the ‘being’ part. What I “do”—like talk to the leader of the Narcotics Anonymous group that uses St. John’s on Tuesday mornings about how most of the folks in that group—unlike the other 12 step groups that use the space—are ‘court ordered’ and there to score some dope and don’t give a good god-damn about the fact that there are other people in the building—the soup kitchen, the office staff, the clericus group, a meeting of a diocesan committee, just plain folks coming in and out to ask for help or tell us something or just check in with the staff. And never mind that there are sometimes funerals on Tuesday morning and receptions in the Library after the funeral and that we need some level of quiet and respect in the building. And then I have to deal with the email from the leader promising to ‘fix’ the problems if they can only, only, please, please, continue to use the meeting space. And I have to deal with the countless ‘drop-ins’ looking for a bus ticket or a meal or a motel room or something even beyond all that. I can refer most of them to the social worker in the soup kitchen but I have to talk with them and get enmeshed in their stories along the way, before sending them to someone who might actually be able to help them. And I attend endless meetings—in the parish and without—to deal with endless issues and come up not knowing our elbows from our assholes most of the time. And there are statistics to keep in a big red book about what we’ve done in terms of services. And there are budget matters to be addressed—can we buy this or pay for that…stuff I never got taught in Seminary. And there is the eternal ‘planning’ for things that are going to happen or not in the parish. And there are meetings…oh, I already mentioned that, but there are so many that it seems to require a second mention. And did I tell you about the parking lot and making sure the rented spaces are used by those who rented them and the dozens of people who come through the church each day aren’t in some lawyer’s space? I don’t do all of that, but I fret about it.

Most of the day-to-day stuff I do is fretting about something or another. And, in most cases, there are about three billion people who could fret about those things and be more effective than me. So, what do I DO? I’m not sure, not at all. My “doing” of stuff seems in many ways a bit crazy. And the source of great fretting and anxiety.

Here’s the quintessential Jewish joke, my friend, John, told it to me today. An e-mail arrives. “Start worrying,” it says, “letter to follow.”

I’m always ‘worrying’ about my ‘doing’…but I truly subscribe to the notion that ‘doing’ isn’t what being a priest is all about. What being a priest is all about is exactly that—“being” a priest.

You want to know the thing I hear most from parishioners of St. John’s? Here it is: “I didn’t want to bother you, I know how busy you are….”

My theory is that either we priests have created “busy-ness” out of nothing or else we are so deluded as to think that the nonsense we use to fill our days and make us feel like we’re ‘doing’ something has overcome the glaring reality that we are ordained to ‘be’, not to ‘do’. Back in 2000 when I visited 37 of my Virginia Seminary classmates, one of them—a guy who was only with us for a year and who had been a RC priest before he married a woman with five children—told me that he was pleased to have left VTS and gone to a parish where he had remained for 25 years. “I’ve been here long enough,” he told me, “so that people accept the fact that ‘being a priest’ is the only job in the world that is focused on ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’.”

What a thought—a whole career path focused on “being” rather than “doing”! And what a pity that people think I’m busy and shouldn’t be bothered by their petty concerns and wonderings and questions and longings. That is, in fact, precisely what my job entails, to be free and available and ready to “be” with people whenever they need that from me. I don’t suggest that my ‘being’ will “save them” or “heal them” or do anything much more than simply ‘being’ with them in their joy or confusion or pain or loss or wonderment. There is a wonderful term in psychology—the “non-anxious presence.” Therapists long to provide that service for their clients—just to ‘be’ with them, whatever is going on, without anxiety. A calming presence is what most of us need when ‘stuff’ is happening in our lives. We just need someone to “be” there—at our death bed, in labor hall, in the ER, when we’re troubled and confused, at the celebrations of the transforming moments of our lives. Just that—a shadow in the background who is simply “there” without attaching themselves to the emotions and feelings of the moment—that is what most of us need, most of the time. And that is, so far as I can see, how a priest can “be” in the midst of the community he/she serves.

I have done what used to be called “EST training”. Almost all ‘religious folks’ think EST was mind-control and a monstrous intrusion into the life of those who submitted themselves to it. I am still involved in a group—The Mastery Foundation—that continues the work EST began. The Mastery Foundation is the religious spin-off of EST and I have been a leader of the Making a Difference Workshop for almost 20 years now. I took that workshop when I was considering renouncing my vows as a priest and what I came out of the three days with was my priesthood all new and shiny. The Workshop is ‘ontological’—it is about ‘being’, not ‘doing’. And back over a quarter of a century ago, when I was in an EST workshop, I called to tell them I couldn’t come to the second weekend because a beloved parishioner of St. Paul’s (the parish I served at that time) was dying and I had to be with him. The workshop leaders gave me much shit—understandable shit but shit none the less—about my ‘commitment’ to the workshop and what if I’d gotten hit by a truck, who would be with Aaron, who would be his priest then? But I rejected all the bullshit they threw at me—some of it reasonable bullshit, but b.s. all the same—and went to visit Aaron when I should have been in my chair at the EST training.

Aaron was in a coma and I couldn’t “do” much of anything. I couldn’t give him communion or talk with him or reassure him as he was slipping into that good night. So, after 15 minutes or so, I left his room, having anointed him and given him final unction—I could “do” that, after all. I rode the elevator to the lobby and was unlocking my car when I remembered the first weekend of the EST training and the emphasis on “being” that I had learned there. So I went back to the elevator and rode back up to the 5^th floor and entered Aaron’s room again. I sat by his bed for over two hours. From time to time I would read a psalm from my Prayer Book aloud, but mostly for me, since he wasn’t in my time/space continuum. And after two hours I kissed his 88 year old face and headed for the door.

At that very moment, he awoke momentarily from the coma of his last sleep and said, with the basso voice I’d known from him before this illness, “Jim, thanks for BEING with me….”

It never occurred to me in that moment to “do” anything. I didn’t rush to his bedside and give him communion. I didn’t open my BCP and say a prayer. I only said, “You’re welcome, Aaron.” And I left. Three days later I was the celebrant and preacher at his funeral. I had done my job. I had “be-ed” with him. That was what he needed and all that I could do.

Actually, I do have a definition of the job description of a priest. I’ve used it in a couple of ordination sermons that did not get me in trouble and I think I would bet the farm on it being—if not RIGHT—at least in the county where RIGHT lives. Here’s how it goes: the ‘job’ of a priest is simply this: to tend the fire, tell the story and pass the wine.

A parish priest has an enormous amount of discretionary time—don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise. And that time should be spent being the Shaman of the Tribe. I really believe the metaphor of the Shaman is the one we priests should embrace. We walk backward and sideways, we speak words our mouths are unfit for, we do the holy acts and we dwell in the “being” of our being in the midst of the tribe. We are irrelevant except in moments when we are relevant. We wait with the expectant father, we sit by the sick bed, we pour water on the babies, we whisper nonsense syllables over bread and wine, we light the candles, we tell and re-tell the story of our tribe in old ways and ways made new, we anoint the sick and dying, we rejoice with the joyous, we are there when one of the tribe moves into that Good Night, we pour dirt on the casket, we unite the lovers, we sit and wait and are not anxious whatever is happening. Shamans are the role we can play in the Tribe who loves us and we love to death.

So, we tend the fire. Everyone else is too busy in the tides and times of living to pay attention. The priest must add the green branch to the dying fire and blow on it until it takes and burns. The priest must know the history of the Tribe and breathe it into the fire as the fire turns to embers. We are the fire-tenders, the wood gatherers, the ones who choose between the green wood and the seasoned. That is who we “are” and how we “be” in the midst on the Tribe.

We also “tell the story”. It is a story everyone in the Tribe knows, on some level, in some way. So the way we tell it must annoy and inspire and provoke. It is the story of our particular tribe and of the larger tribe we are a part of. It is the story of a God who created us in the very image of God and of a God who took on our flesh and a God who died, as we shall die, yet rose from death to prove to us that Life is the last word, the ultimate word, the only word that matters. So we tell this story with mouths full of pebbles and in halting, stuttering words and with an eloquence we neither deserve nor can rise to, except the Spirit leads us. We tell the story as the tribe sits by the fire we tend and we watch their eyes…heavy and full of sleep, confused and questioning, brimming with tears. It is always the eyes we much watch—those subtle pathways to the soul—as we tell the story in old ways, often heard, and in new ways to surprise and delight and confound. We have tended the fire and told the story.

What is left is this—to pass the wine.

Whenever I do baptismal classes, I bring out the symbols that will be a part of the service: bread, wine, water, oil, a candle and the scallop shell I use to pour the water. Sometimes I mix people up so they’re not with their baptismal group, and give them one of the symbols to talk about and report back to the whole group about after talking. I’m always interested in the report back about wine. We are a part of a remarkably Puritanical culture where wine is not openly valued. And of course, I know, church basements and parish halls are full each week with AA meetings—there is a downside to wine. But my thought has always been that the ‘value’ of something can be measured most accurately by how much it has been misused and abused. Oh, take Christianity for example: what crap we Christians have left on innocent yards! The Christian faith has been so misused and abused that it must be of great value—the value of pearls and gold and silver.

Most of the groups who report back on wine don’t fully emphasize the joy and gladness and goodness of alcohol. They seldom reflect on why it is we call alcohol “spirits”. They don’t have the courage to be politically incorrect in our day and say wine is a good and gracious thing. Never has any group reported back by saying, “In Vino, Veritas”. So I have to tell them how valued and important the wine is to the tribe and those gathered by the fire, listening to the story. Invaluable, I’d say—that’s what wine is to the life and metaphor and myth of the Tribe. There must be wine to make us mellow and accepting and to “inspire” us and to bring the story to full bloom and to make the dying fire look like a wondrous and warming blaze that enlightens the darkness all around us.

So, the priest passes the wine.

None of those ‘functions’, those ‘tasks’, those ‘acts’ require ordination—that I would tell you before you said it out loud. Just about anyone could tend the fire and tell the story and pass the wine. But in our Tribe, at any rate, we have decided that there must be someone ‘set apart’ for those acts, those rituals, those liturgies. So we ordain priests and entrust them with the work of “being” in our midst to ‘do’ these little, so significant tasks. The Shamans of the Tribe walk backwards, speak in nonsense syllables and touch the holy things.

A dear friend, the wife of a classmate of mine in seminary, told my wife that when her husband was ordained, “his hands changed.”

My wife, God bless her, said she hadn’t noticed that my hands had changed but she did like to feel them on her body.

Here is the conundrum about being a priest: nothing changes. It isn’t the ordination that matters, it is the willingness to simple “be” when all the world is “doing” that makes a priest different, set apart, unique. Her/his hands don’t change, not a chance, that’s just an illusion. What happens, so far as I can tell is simply this: some sap decides to “be” rather than “do”. And the church applauds.

Truth is, it’s a great job—process observing, tending the fire, telling the story over and over again, passing the wine. What’s the down-side of that? Just don’t take yourself too seriously or confuse yourself with Jesus or decide you can save the world or anyone in it—keep to the job description: observe the process, keep the fire burning, tell and retell the story, take a good sip of wine before passing it around, figure out how to “be” rather than “do”.

Well, it’s worked for the most part for me….

Flying over water

Coming back from Seattle, I changed planes in Midway, Chicago. I used to think Midway was 'midway' between something and something else. But going west I had to change from B Concourse to A Concourse to catch the next plane. I walked past a huge display on the way and discovered that Midway Airport was named after the WWII Pacific Battle for Midway Island. I didn't have time to read the whole display because I had to get something to eat, go to the bathroom and catch a plane. But I was shocked and amazed to know that. There was some big Chicago connection to the Battle of Midway but I really didn't get it walking by fast.

On the way back I changed planes again at Midway. And we flew back to Hartford over water.

I didn't have a book that obsessed me, as I did from Hartford to Midway, so I stared out my window seat window.

We circled and flew out off the lake front--big buildings I recognized--all the way across Lake Michigan. Since 1/5 of all the fresh water in the world is in the Great Lakes, they are big, bigger than you and I might imagine. It was like flying over a sea. It went on and on, that Lake. Then we flew over a slice of northernmost Ohio and hit Lake Erie. Again, lots of water. Not as big as it's cousin Michigan, but Erie takes a while.

Somewhere around Buffalo we turned a tad south and flew over the Finger Lakes in upstate New York. From the air you can see why they're called 'fingers'. They go south to north and are much longer than wide. There are 11 of them, you know, all with odd names. And one of them is the deepest lake in the US, almost 700 feet deep, the bottom of that lake is below sea level.

(I checked with my hand to make sure my flotation device was indeed under my seat. It was.)

I think we flew over every one of the Finger Lakes on the way to Hartford.

I've never been on an airplane that flew over so much water that wasn't going to Europe. And after being in Seattle, a place surrounded and overwhelmed by bodies of water, it was a fitting end to my trip.

(In Seattle, I ate dinner on Friday night at a restaurant on a huge fresh water lake in the middle of the city, which is surrounded on the West and North and South by salt water. That lake is where Tom Hank's houseboat was in "Sleepless in Seattle". The things you learn when you travel....)