gloves off

OK, so the most moderate and non-partisan Think Tank, which concentrates on issues regarding the budget and economy released a statement today calling what the Republicans in the House of Representatives are trying to do is 'tantamount to class warfare'.

My father was a life-long Republican. He was a Republican in a state that in his day was 75% Democratic. He had courage and dignity. I've often found myself feeling on the edge of things and marginalized in our society because I am too far to the Left. My father felt that way because he was too far to the Right. But the Right he was on included people like Sen. Everette Dirkson, President Dwight Eisenhower, Sen. Nelson Rockefeller, Sen. Robert Dole (the great compromiser) and President Richard Nixon.

Nixon, as much at the Left might revile him for his Watergate actions, was actually a screaming 'liberal' compared to the current Republican Party.

Nixon, we must remember, enforced civil rights, expanded Johnson's 'Great Society', opened the door to China and supported many of the ideals that are now 'liberal' agenda.

I'm really not sure which I wish: 1) The Tea Party would drive the Republicans so far to the Right and toward Libertarianism that Democrats would gain control for a generation or more, or 2) what's left of 'moderate Republicans' (an oxymoron in many ways recently) would rediscover that 'governing', unlike 'campaigning', requires compromise and reasonableness.

My favorite TV show, perhaps my favorite TV show ever, is "The Closer". It comes on at 9 p.m. tonight, a brand new episode. But I've told Bern she has to remember the dialog since I'll be watching the President address the nation at the same time.

The ideology of the Tea Party is in reality a 'theology', a 'dogma' and 'doctrine' than cannot be questioned or compromised. We live in a country that's government functions on compromise and 'not getting everything you want'. A country that seeks what is 'good' for the nation, not a particular ideology. That is no longer the norm in Washington.

I am so, so upset with the Tea Party playing 'chicken' with the economic future of our country and, indeed, the world that I had to take my gloves off for this post....

Generations

Bern and I had Morgan, Emma and Tegan overnight on Friday. They were great. At 3 the deck was in shade. Bern had all these containers of water--a big tub and smaller things--and the sand box in the top of an old Weber Grill, plus lots of containers and implements. Sand and water are magnets for kids that age. When the shade got to the back yard, we hooked up the sprinkler. While Emma and Morgan looked for bugs and worms, Tegan ran through the spray. It was 6 when we came in for a much needed bath, dinner, some TV and bed. Bern slept in the room with them and all was well. Tegan slept until 8 a.m.!

The girls got to sing happy birthday to their auntie Mimi when we called her. We didn't see enough of Cathy and Josh, but what we saw of them was wondrous.

There's about a 2 1/2 to 1 ration with the grandchildren. For every day with them we need 2 1/2 days to relax. That's why you have children when you're young instead of in your 60's!!!

next chapter of Murder on the Block follows....

IV.

Saturday, October 25—6:45 a.m.

Richard woke just past his normal time and lay still for a long moment, listening to the hundreds of birds outside for their morning feasting on the autumn-slowed insects and the seeds and berries on all the low scrub brush. He savored the time, trying to remember when he started loving waking up again. For month’s after Susan’s death, he would wake from sleep confused and with a dull ache in the back of his confusion. It would take a minute or two for him to ‘come to himself’ and remember why sleep was so blessed and to be coveted.

He could smell breakfast things from down the hall—coffee and bacon…no, sausage—and the sweet breeze through the opened window smelling of grass and ocean and morning and coming warmth. As he laid there, he thought of the term ‘come to himself’, dredging up from his memory of the study of scripture that those words were exactly the right English translation of the Greek verb at the dénouement of Luke’s gospel story of the Prodigal Son. The young Jewish boy, having squandered a fortune and fallen on the hardest of time, was sitting among the pigs, longing to be a servant in his father’s house. Then, according to Luke, at least, the boy ‘comes to himself’. The rest becomes clear. The path is obvious. The road home is straight.

Richard luxuriated in his musings and his senses. He pulled the pillow from the other side of the bed under his cheek and felt the night cool of the cotton still lingering. He breathed deeply, seeking every order he could inhale. Rolling on his stomach, above the sounds of the birds, he heard distant voices. Two people were talking on the front deck, laughing together. Mara and Miriam, he realized, since both voices, though low pitched, were female. And the sometimes vegetarian Miriam had a soft spot in her taste buds for sausage. That explained why he could smell it so distinctly.

Just about to fall back into that state of “almost sleep” that is so longed for by those who love to sleep, he realized that Cecelia wasn’t in the bed with him. She must be outside with the women, chasing the scents of morning, leaping stone walls, running wildly through the dew-wet grass. Lord, he thought to himself, I’m loving my senses this morning. He was about to think, thank God, when he remembered he no longer prayed.

Richard climbed out of bed, swearing to himself that he would take Cecelia on a long, long walk, up past the bluffs and overland down to the town as soon as Miriam and Mara left to be detectives. He knew the plans the two women had made the night before—trying to find out who might have bought the fishing gear Cecelia discovered on the rocks and Officer Alt found further north. As he had read and pondered about the gospel of Bartimaeus, he had worried about Miriam’s role in all this…and worried about Mara too.

He and the dog needed a long walk. In the pandemonium since Wednesday, the crowded rectory, the ‘investigation’ had kept him from his routine. And though Richard never noticed it before, thinking himself the champion of flexibility, there were certain routines in his life that he had relied on to keep him firmly in the ‘now’ in the time of life without Susan. But before that much needed walk, he would perform the three S’s, have eggs and sausage and several cups of coffee and meet the day with Miriam and Mara.

“Your parents,” Mara was asking as Richard turned on the shower, “from all I know, must have been wonderful for you.”

Miriam, holding one hand like a salute to keep the morning sun out of her face and holding a cup of coffee in the other, looked out of the corner of her eyes at Mara.

“Are you being a detective now?”

Mara smiled and glanced at her. Miriam had already seen the multitude of gays in the policewoman’s eyes. This morning they were the gray of mourning doves—soft and inviting.

“No, not really, just curious.”

“Curious like a cat,” Miriam asked, “or like a woman?”

“You’re still wondering about your father and me, aren’t you?”

Miriam sipped her coffee, growing cool, to give herself time to think. “A little,” she replied, “like ‘curious’…but not nearly so much as when I first saw you with him—you sitting where Mom sat for all those summers and you looking so god-damned beautiful.”

Mara turned to interrupt but Miriam waved her sun-blocking hand at her and continued. “It was a marriage,” she said, growing serious, “that I used to think my brothers and I had, in some way, interrupted. But who knows what they would have been like without us? I think my father actually tells people in pre-marriage counseling that having children with ruin their marriage.” She paused and winked at Mara, who had a look of horror on her face. “But he tells them to consider it anyway, at least I hope he does. But it was true for my parents. You have this relationship where you know most of the rules and then kids come along and it’s almost guaranteed that at many places during those endless years of raising children that you will come to hate the person you sleep with.”

They sat in silence for a few moments.

“Hate,” Mara asked at last, “isn’t that a little strong?”

Miriam turned to her and smiled, the hint of dimples forming on both her cheeks, “it’s obvious to me, Sergeant, that you’ve never had children.”

After a while, during which they both thought they should get more coffee, Miriam spoke again. “But nothing bad, nothing traumatic, no beatings or sexual assault, no screaming fights between them…just normal stuff from two reasonably good people who loved us fiercely. The only tragedy was my mother’s death and it did to daddy.”

Mara arched her eyebrows to indicate “what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. He went on a trip but forgot to leave. Nothing much has mattered to him since then. But, besides that, I guess you’re right—I was blessed to have such parents. I’m sure you’ve seen enough of the other options in your job.”

“More than enough,” Mara said, “for several lifetimes.”

Then Richard opened the door from the living room to the deck. He wished both Miriam and Mara ‘good morning’ and asked, “who’s fixing me some breakfast?”

The two women—dark and light, short and tall, daughter and…well, none of the three of them were sure about Mara’s ‘role’ in Richard’s life—looked at each other and said, as if one: “you!”

Humbled, Richard fried sausage and eggs, downing coffee as quickly as he could, toasting some raisin bread someone must have brought as comfort food and slathering it with butter. While he was eating ravenously, still indulging his senses, Miriam showered, Mara called Dante on his cell phone and the two of them eventually joined him at the kitchen table.

“We’ll be walking into town, Miriam and I,” Mara informed him, “in just a bit, so we can be there when the stores begin to open. We’re going to see if any of the owners remember selling the stuff from the beach and the brush to anyone in particular. We have pictures.”

Miriam added, “I’m taking Mara to Filbert Collins’ hardware store first, so she can interrogate him….”

“Interrogate Filbert…?”

Miriam rolled her eyes. “I’m getting into this, Daddy. It’s like being on Law and Order, except on Block Island, not New York…or like tagging along with V. I. Warshawski. You of all people know how great that would be. And what was found sounds like the hardware store to me….”

“Is she in any danger?” Richard said quickly to Mara.

She shrugged. “We’re all ‘in danger’, as you put it, all the time. Does nosing around about fishing gear mean she’ll be ‘knocked off’ by the mob? I don’t think so. Besides,” she added, repressing a smile, “as you know, I have a gun and am trained to kill anyone who would hurt your baby girl….”

“Plus, Daddy,” Miriam’s voice had a bit of adolescent pleading in it, like asking to borrow the car, “people on the island know me. I’ve been around here for years. I’ll make them feel at ease while Mara grills them.”

The two women looked at each other in a conspiratorial way.

“Besides all that,” Miriam said, suddenly looking to Richard like an eight year old who would jump off a bridge just because she was standing on it, “Mara’s got a really big gun!”

To the surprise of Richard’s left-wing, gun-hating heart, Mara having a Glock suddenly became something positive and comforting.

As Richard and Cecelia set off on their long walk while Mara and Miriam strolled down to town, planning to drink more coffee somewhere along the way, the eyes that had been watching St. Anne’s knew it was safe to come and look for the note. Finding none, much to his surprise, he went home and found ‘the note’ neatly folded and pushed under the kitchen door.

Rounding the bend and circling the small harbor where Dante had been fishing and the droves of black birds lived, Mara asked Miriam about the stone walls.

“One of the stories is that the slaves built them,” Miriam responded.

“The slaves?”

“It was either runaway slaves whose underground railroad ended on Block Island, heaven knows why, or slaves that the old families brought to the island.” They had started up the steep hill beside the Spring House but Mara’s pace didn’t slacken. Got to get to the gym more, Miriam thought, finding it difficult to keep talking. “So, which ever it was, they were suddenly slaves again. Only, instead of picking cotton or whatever, they were stacking rocks.”

When they reached the top of the hill, Miriam and Mara, with time to spare before businesses opened, went over to the ‘zoo’ that was part of the Spring House. Emus and peacocks and goats and llamas and a Braham bull and several other exotic creatures were wandering around in a large field. The two women watched the animals watching them for a while. For the most part the field was lined with more rock walls.

“You’re from the Midwest, right?” Miriam asked.

“How’d you know?”

“You have one of those ‘no accent’ accents. You could be a news anchor.” After a while she continued the stone wall conversation. “You don’t have rocks like these in the Midwest, not in the South either. The slaves were told, how I’ve heard it anyway, that when the rocks were all stacked they’d be given some land and a house and be truly free.”

“And they agreed?” Mara questioned, reaching out with a handful of animal food available in buckets attached to the fence, offering it to a goat with ridiculously long ears that had wandered near.

“South Carolina doesn’t have rocks like these. They didn’t understand that the whole island is essentially rocks. No matter how many they harvested and stacked into walls, there were always more and more. They could never finish.”

“So they stayed slaves?” Mara asked as they walked away from the farm. A peacock screamed good-bye to them.

“Something like that,” Miriam replied.

“And this is true?”

“The way I’ve heard it, it’s true. Of course, there are a couple of other tales about the rock walls.”

“Island people have lots of time to make shit up….”

“Precisely,” Miriam said, trying out her Dante imitation.

They had coffee at the first open shop they found and shared a newspaper as they sipped and waited for the Hardware Store to open. Neither of them read very carefully. They were both thinking about the other, mentally sizing each other up. As confused as Mara was about her feelings for Richard, she knew for certain that she liked his daughter. Miriam, still cautious about her father’s vulnerability, decided the detective could ‘wake up’ most any man.

On the last leg of their journey, knowing Filbert Collins would have opened his store, Miriam resumed the conversation. Mara knew she was still talking about the stone walls and the slaves.

“Reminds me of Daddy in a way.”

“How’s that?”

“He’s harvesting rocks—rocks of pain and grief and probably guilt and God knows what else. He imagines if he gets them stacked and organized, everything will be alright again.”

“And it won’t be?”

“Not so long as he keeps digging….”

“There are always more rocks?” Mara asked.

“Now you’ve got it.”

Mara wondered if she ‘got it’, even a little bit. But she realized she had fields of rocks of her own. Maybe at some point, she thought, you just have to leave some buried and walk away to something new.

“My job—the one my brothers have given me,” Miriam said, almost echoing Mara’s thoughts, “is to convince Daddy to agree to come the Jeremy’s in St. Louis for Christmas. That would get him away from his rocks for a while, be something new….I just hope all this won’t prevent that.”

“I don’t see how it could,” Mara said, “if we tripped over the killer and he confessed to us this minute, the wheels of justice never move fast. It’d be a year before anything came to a trial, if there was one. Nothing happens without lots of wrangling and hand wringing.”

“Sounds a lot like Daddy’s description of the Episcopal Church.”

By then, they’d come to Collins’ Hardware, just past the only real grocery store on the island, well beyond the cutesy shops and hotels and Block Island memorabilia stores, most of which had pared back or shut down by late October. Filbert’s store was a ‘year rounder’—always open. And Filbert himself was predictable.

“Mr. Collins is a real ‘letch’,” Miriam told the detective. “He’ll be staring at your breasts and your crotch non-stop. He’s been doing it to me since I was 13. But I’m used to it. Let me start the conversation and you can then…you know…be ‘bad cop’. OK?”

Mara stopped on the steps to the store. “You’re just like your father,” she said, “too many TV shows and murder mystery novels. All cops are good cops.”

“Not with Filbert, you’ll see….”

A bell above the door signaled their arrival and a man in his 60’s, dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans, needing a shave, with a deeply sun-tanned head where hair might once have grown, turned toward them from behind the counter. Just as Miriam had predicted, he feasted his eyes on Mara’s breasts.

“Miriam Lucas,” he said, obviously too happy to see her, “I haven’t seen you for two years. So sorry about your mother and about Fr. Lucas’ recent unpleasant experiences….” His eyes, both women noticed, had lingered on Mara as he spoke. Miriam had long experience with Filbert and could almost read his thoughts.

“Filbert,” Miriam said, moving her body subtly so when he hugged her, as she knew he would, he pressed her side and not her breasts against him. “This is Sgt. Coles of the Rhode Island State Police. She’s helping figure out what happened to those folks my Daddy found. She has some questions for you.”

Filbert turned toward Mara, as if he expected a hug from her as well, but she instinctively stepped back and subtly pulled her leather jacket open so he could see part of her shoulder holster. Filbert’s small eyes widened and he nodded.

“Sgt. Coles,” he said, “how can I help you?”

Nothing like a gun, Miriam thought, to discourage sexual harassment.

But she was wrong. Filbert resumed assaulting Mara with his eyes as she showed him photos of the fishing gear. He examined the pictures, glancing up as often as possible to look at the detective’s chest. But he did identify it as part of his stock.

“Cheap stuff—the cheapest I have,” he told Mara, licking his lips as he spoke. “I sell lots of cheap stuff this time of year. People who find themselves on the island and think they simply have to try fishing but don’t want any good equipment. They’re just ‘fooling around’, you know.”

Miriam knew Mara had heard the words ‘fooling around’ in the lascivious tone Filbert had used. But Mara gave not notice to it at all.

“Do you remember who you might have sold these items to this week?”

“Several people, like I said.” He paused, pretending to try to remember, though Miriam imagined what his true thoughts were. “But I do recall selling some to one of the Jamaican boys,” he said, “Monday or Tuesday, don’t remember which exactly.”

“A Jamaican?” Mara asked.

“One of those who come up to work the season in the hotels and restaurants.”

“That’s a common thing, help from Jamaica?”

“Too common for me,” he said, distastefully, “all their reggae and dope and Rastafarian hair. I don’t see why more American college kids don’t come over for the summer—make some money and ‘have some fun’. Always lots of ‘fun’ on the island.

Mara considered showing him what eight years of martial arts training could inflict on an aging white man. But she took a deep breath, feeling this was important, somehow vital to the case, and asked, calmly, “so how many Jamaicans are on the island?”

Filbert scratched his head, his eyes roving down Mara’s body and then over at Miriam’s. “Dozen or so, I suppose. Probably 50 during the season. But only a few stay around this late—staying to clean up and help shut things down for the winter…things like that.”

A large woman, her hair in curlers, wearing a bathrobe and pink slippers along with a yellow slicker, came through the door, causing the bell to tingle.

“Help you, Martha?” Filbert called.

“Don’t trouble yourself,” she replied, eyeing Mara and Miriam. “I think I can find light bulbs….Keep on talkin’ to the police and the pastor’s daughter.”

Martha moved toward the light bulbs, pretending to be searching for something in particular, but obviously wanting to listen in on the conversation.

Mara muttered to Miriam under her breath, “do they fucking know everything?”

“Pretty much,” Miriam whispered back, “but I’m betting they don’t know the names of the Jamaican ‘boys’.”

“What was the name of the Jamaican who bought this cheap fishing gear?” Mara asked sharply.

“Don’t remember…not personal friends with them,” he said, “Paid cash. Done deal.”

“Anything else you can tell me, Mr. Collins,” Mara continued, “about this particular Jamaican who paid cash?”

Filbert’s eyes were lingering on Mara’s chest again. She reached out with her finger and raised his chin so he had to look in her eyes—swirling and stormy gray, like what you see before your boat goes under in a north Atlantic gale.

Her action momentarily stunned him. “He…uh…the boy who brought these things, he might be one of the pair that live her most year round,” Filbert said in a monotone, transfixed by Mara’s gaze.

“You know where he lives?”

He shook his head.

“His description?”

“Hard to say,” he began, unable to disengage from Mara’s stare.

“Let me guess,” she said, “they tend to look alike….”

“Mostly,” Filbert said, finally able to drop his eyes back to the curves beneath Mara’s sweater, “though some are big and others are smaller….”

“Just like women’s breasts,” Miriam said quickly, smiling coldly at him. “Thank you, Filbert, for all your attention.”

As they turned to leave, Mara noticed the customer in hair-curlers had edged near them. She smiled and winked as they passed.

The bell was still vibrating above the door when Mara burst into laughter on the front porch.

“Jesus, Miriam,” she said, trying to compose herself, “you know how to end an interview with a bang!”

“Banging is all that asshole thinks about,” Miriam replied, renewing Mara’s laughter.

The two of them walked down to Corn Neck Road and the public beach. They walked the beach and watched the waves.

“So,” Mara said, kicking aside a bit of driftwood, “we might be looking for one of the summer help—someone from a very different island than this. We just need a name and an address.”

“Good luck to us,” Miriam answered, the expert on Island people.

Sure enough, though they talked to waiters and shop keepers and island taxi drivers and people down by the ferry landing, no one could give them any helpful information. The insatiable curiosity of Block Islanders did not seem to extend to the Jamaicans whose toil made the island work during the tourist season. Several of those they interviewed seemed genuinely surprised at the suggestion that there might be Jamaicans who stayed on the island after October. Like ‘good help’, black folks seemed to be invisible. No names, no descriptions, no addresses.

The two of them had a lunch of seafood salad at one of the open restaurants. The wait staff was all white and middle aged. They stopped for a cone of ice cream from one of the island’s landmarks—cherry for Miriam and rum raisin for Mara—to eat as they walked back toward St. Anne’s.

“We didn’t accomplish much,” Miriam said, licking her ice cream and walking fast to keep up with Mara.

“Don’t think that,” the detective answered, “we found out a key piece. We need to question some Jamaican and see if he still has his fishing gear. We just don’t know which one or if he went home in the past few days. But, on an island as ‘white’ as this, that really is something helpful.”

They finished their cones sitting on the barrier overlooking the cove where Dante had been fishing the day before. There were no seals to be seen on the rocks but there were lots of cormorants, holding their wings out to dry in the breeze.

“It is beautiful here,” Miriam said, watching the blackbirds circle above her head. “I forget how beautiful when I’m in Boston.”

“But the slaves are still here,” Mara said, “only now they’re from the Caribbean. They clean up, change the sheets, serve the food, bring the boats to dry dock. It’s still like stacking rocks. No matter how many beds you change and rooms you clean….”

“There’s always more,” Miriam finished.

“There’s always more,” Mara echoed.

They sat for a while in companionable silence. Then they started back to the church. When they got there Richard was making coffee and offered them some. Dante came by around 4 o’clock. Celia was sleeping in the sun on the deck where the humans were on their second cups of Richard’s strong brew. Mara and Miriam told the men about the Jamaican angle and asked Dante what to do.

“It could be something,” he said, “though I wasn’t thinking it could be summer help.”

“More coffee?” Richard asked, starting inside with his empty cup.

“I’m shaking from coffee,” Miriam answered, and the others shook their heads. While Richard was inside, she added, “some of them aren’t strictly ‘summer’ help. That’s what a couple of people said.”

“We could round up all the black people on the island,” Dante suggested in a mock serious voice. “Put them in a line up—shouldn’t be too hard.”

“Yeal,” Mara said, chuckling in her foggy tone, “I can see the Providence paper’s headline about that. Let the Homeland Security boys do that piece.”

Dante was lighting a cigarette, his sergeant turned toward him, “wonder what happened to Crosby and Nash anyway?”

“Ah, fair one,” Dante said, exhaling smoke and looking suspiciously up at the gull on the roof of the house next door that was squawking fitfully, “that’s where yours truly has been.”

“I thought you were ‘fishing’,” Miriam said. Both the police officers looked at her to see if she was being ironic. “No, really,” she said, reacting to their quizzical stares, “that’s what you said you were going to do.”

Mara and Dante had a laugh about Miriam’s innocence. Richard came back with more coffee and said, looking at the two laughers and his blushing daughter, “did I miss something?”

Dante waved his cigarette hand, making little streams of dancing smoke in the calm air of early afternoon. “Nothing, Padre, but you’re expertise is needed. Isn’t there something in the Good Book about fishing, about being a fisher of men…or at least of H.S. agents?”

They all laughed and the gull screamed back at them. “Albert doesn’t like good jovial fun,” Dante said, looking up at the bird.

“How’d you know his name was Albert?” Richard asked.

Mara and Miriam glanced at each other, smiled knowing, and said, in chorus: “he’s a detective!” This time the laughter drove the bird into flight and he soared down toward the ocean.

“Crosby and Nash don’t seem very interested in the murder at all,” Dante said. “I’ve been following them around and they aren’t interviewing people about that. They’re asking folks, mostly folks who work near the water if they’ve noticed any unusual boat traffic. I shamble along behind them and ask the good citizens they talk to what the suits wanted and they are almost beholden to me for asking.

“Plus, when I was having lunch at the bar near their table at that place across from the ferry landing,” he continued, lighting up without pausing, “I heard them mention needing to call their friends at the DEA….”

“So they think this is about drugs?” Richard asked.

“So does our esteemed friend, Flash Gordon,” Dante responded. “He and our not so well dressed Homeland Security colleagues both think our murder victims were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and most especially, in the wrong car.”

“So we’re ruling terrorism out?” Richard asked, remembering Dante’s earlier thinking.

“Well,” he said, “I seem to remember the U.S. of A. thought this rock might be the jumping off place for a German invasion of the mainland….” Richard smiled, wondering if Dante had a photographic memory of the book he scanned about the history of Block Island. “But I don’t see any sign of wild-eyed suicide bombers on the island, so it must be ‘drugs and money’, though I’m not sure how just yet.”

They sat in silence until Albert returned, fussing. “It doesn’t have the feel of any really ‘bad guys’—no self-respecting mobster would have botched those murders that way.”

Richard was wondering how ‘mobsters’ could be involved when Dante continued. “The name that has popped up several times when the two of them are talking together is a little surprising—Milo Miano.”

“Imagine that,” Mara said.

“Who’s that?” Miriam asked.

“Biggest mob family in Rhode Island,” Mara answered, “though connecting Milo to actual criminal activity has been impossible, not that Flash and the FBI haven’t been trying. He has a staff of high powered lawyers and keeps mostly to quite legitimate businesses, like competing with Dante and Leo.” She noticed Richard and Miriam seemed confused, though there was nothing new about that, so she explained. “Milo has two restaurants, just like the Caggiano brothers. Very respectable and up scale….”

“Their veal is cheap,” Dante interjected.

“Be that as it may, this is exactly the kind of messy and unprofessional thing that could cast a wider net, maybe even as wide as the Miano family.” Mara stood up as she spoke. “I just remembered, Richard, do you have a key to that box in the sacristy?”

He shook his head. “The hired help isn’t trusted with such a thing,” he responded, “why?”

“I thought Dante should see the porcelain, he’s such a fan.”

“What porcelain?” Dante said, eyes brightening.

“A cup and plate. I saw it when they were searching the church.” Looking at Richard, “so Stevenson has the only key?”

“Far as I know.”

Dante stood, “let’s have a look at the box, anyway.”

The four of them were crowded in the sacristy and Cecelia had come in to resume her nap in the middle of the church’s aisle. Dante toyed with picking or forcing the lock but decided against it. “Out of respect for holy objects,” he told Richard. “Funny though,” he continued, hefting the box, “seems a bit light.”

“I think Stevenson keeps them at home,” Richard offered, “I was surprised they were here when the search was done.”

Dante shrugged and carefully replaced the box under the sink.

“Time for more fishing,” he said, to no one in particular.

“Aren’t you afraid they’ll recognize you?” Miriam asked.

“They don’t know me. Besides I’m not really here, I’m in Mexico and I have Leo’s ID to prove it.” He stepped out on the deck and looked at the sky, “But I meant ‘real fishing’ this time, down on the rocks. Crosby and Nash were into their third pitcher when I left them. They won’t be doing much investigating this afternoon.”

He looked at Miriam, “want to join me?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” she replied. “Let me change clothes.”

While Dante and Mara went fishing, Cecelia following along after them, Mara and Richard sat on the deck, almost dozing in the sun, feeling the breeze picking up a bit. After a long silence, Richard finally said, “want to drive down to the North Light?”

Mara roused herself, wondering if he was nervous being alone with her at the house, if he needed activity to distract him—all of which was true.

They drove the familiar Spring Street route down into the little town. There were lots of people milling around and even more of the shops were open than that morning. Richard explained they were “day trippers” or people looking for one last weekend before the water became choppy and the ferry trips further apart. Some people waved at them as they passed and Mara smiled, imagining the tongue wagging of the year-rounders over the priest and the cop out on a joy ride.

“I’ve never been here in the winter,” Richard related. “I’m not sure I’m looking forward to it.”

“Couldn’t you go home?”

“I have no ‘home’,” he spoke softly, reflectively. “My leave from the church in Worthington isn’t up until April. I’d be in the way back at the parish—everything is designed to work without me until then. And the house isn’t anywhere I want to be either.”

“Ghosts?”

He smiled at her sadly. “Yeah,” he said after a moment, “one ghost.”

She wondered if he wanted to talk about his dead wife and wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it right then, so she asked, “So, why did you become a priest? I told you about why I’m a cop, it’s your turn.”

“It’s hard to say,” he answered after a quarter of a mile. They were on the stretch of Cornneck where Stevenson’s house dominated the view on the left. They both glanced over at it, but neither mentioned it.

She thought he wasn’t going to answer when he finally said, “I’m not very ‘religious’, you know.” It struck her as similar to Dante’s refusal to be a “conventional” police Lieutenant. Two men that were not quite comfortable or satisfied being what their jobs entailed.

As he talked, Mara watched the scenery. There was a huge housing development just beyond some fields full of cows. As she listened, she wondered, for no real reason, how much one of them would cost. Richard told her about his childhood in Roanoke, Virginia. His father had owned a small construction business—“really blue collar”, he observed—and his mother worked part-time in a bank. He’d grown up in the Episcopal church his parents joined because they wanted ‘more’ for their children and were secret social climbers. When she asked what they’d been before, he said “Presbyterian”. She thought it a lateral move at best, but with more pomp and circumstances. He’d been an acolyte and was washed out of the boy’s choir for being tone deaf.

“Brothers and sisters?” she asked.

“Just me.”

She thought for a moment. “But you said your parents wanted more for their ‘children’. I just thought….”

“Oh,” he said, something she’d never seen washing over his face—resignation? “I thought you meant now. I have…had…a sister, Caroline, who died before I was born. What we’d call SIDS today. But back then it was just a bottomless pit of despair. She was around a lot when I was going up. Sometimes dead children are more real than living ones. We didn’t actually ‘celebrate’ her birthday, but it was time of great emotion.”

Another ghost, Mara thought. Then she named the emotion she’d seen in his face. He was ‘haunted’.

He explained how he had been in college at the University of Virginia and called his mother on Caroline’s birthday, April 7. “We chatted about my classes and how everything was in Roanoke. The conversation was about to run out when I finally mentioned Caroline’s birthday.” He paused. They’d reached a dead end and he was pulling into a parking space in front of a large monument. “It was the first year she hadn’t spent the whole day in mourning. She’d actually forgotten. I brought all the pain back. She started crying and had to hang up.”

Not just ‘haunted’, Mara thought, so sensitive to pain that he can’t bear to inflict it. Her training in psychology made her wonder if Richard were damaged or enriched by how the pain of others became his own. She imagined she knew which he would say. She, herself, wasn’t sure.

They paused to read the monument at the north end of the island. It told part of the story of the wreck of the Princess Augusta in 1738. The half-starved survivors made it to shore and that group of Germans, looking for Philadelphia in their ocean voyage, added much to the life and future of Block Island.

As they walked away, heading down to a narrow beach with a light house at the far end, out where your eyes were drawn, Richard started talking.

“A ship wreck helped form this island. Something terrible and tragic turned out to make a contribution to the future.”

Mara walked over sand and rocks, avoiding his eyes until he continued to speak: “Something to reflect on. Something to remember. Out of tragedy comes new life.”

A dozen steps later, Mara asked, “Is that why you became a priest.”

He smiled. She didn’t see it because she was avoiding looking at him and gazing out, instead, at the ocean, its waves, its power, its depth. Never mind that she could see the mainland of Rhode Island—Charleston, most likely, and a coast line that covered the horizon—still, it was the ocean she was looking at, so broad and deep, so adept at burying secrets.

“No,” he said, not looking at her and not realizing she wasn’t looking at him. “I became a priest because my father died.”

He told her, neither of them looking at each other, how, when he was a junior in college her got a call from his mother on a chill February night. His father, just turned 56, had a massive heart attack while driving home from work. He’d pulled over, off the road so he wouldn’t endanger anyone else, and embraced death embracing him.

The EMT’s who had come to the scene had started life support in the ambulance that had been continued in the ER at Virginia Commonwealth’s hospital. His dad was technically ‘dead’, but his mother, because the machinery was in place, had the option about turning it off. She wanted Richard to come home and be with her. Now, that was what she needed and wanted—now.

Richard had lived his life with a dead sister, but a dead father was something he wasn’t ready for. Charlottesville wasn’t that far from Roanoke—two hours or so, more or less—but he wasn’t sure he could drive himself that distance, still dealing with what he didn’t know how to deal with—being half an orphan. He could see his mother’s drawn and bloodless face; he could even see her body, stooped and leaning over the bed of a man alive only academically, only because of machines that made it so.

“I called Father Roberts,” he said to Mara, neither of them looking at the other. “I didn’t know who to call. I told him I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t drive to Roanoke over slippery roads. An ice storm had hit the evening my father died.”

Father Roberts, the Episcopal chaplain to the university, a man who had ruined his career track by being open and outraged about the war in Viet Nam, had been sent like a refugee into college chaplainry by his bishop. But, being a man who knew lemonade came from lemons, he had thrown himself into the life of the campus and welcomed all into his field of love. Richard had been one of them—reluctant at first to admit his attachment to the church, but gradually, by Fr. Roberts’ calm hospitality, he had become a part of a worshipping community.

“He said to meet him at the church,” Richard said. “He said to come in the chapel door and he’d be there. When I got there I found him in full Eucharistic vestments behind the little rail in the chapel. He gave me communion from the reserved sacrament…somehow that meant something to me, bread and wine blessed for someone else that was now mine. And then he anointed me….”

Richard’s voice broke and he stopped talking. He and Mara kept walking. Finally she said, “he ‘anointed’ you?”

“Like a child at baptism,” he said, his voice unsteady. “He made sure I knew that the oil he was using was ‘chrisom’, the oil of baptism and not the oil for healing. Different prayers were said over them, he told me and he thought what I needed was the oil of ‘new life’, not the oil of healing,” Richard shook his head. By this time Mara was watching him. “So he smeared this oil on my head…I could smell it…I can smell it now…and told me I could drive those icy roads and be with my father when he died. And I did. I drove home and held my mother in my arms as they turned off the machines.”

They had walked another 20 yards or so, avoiding the flotsam and jetsam on the beach—plastic grocery bags, soda cans, seaweed and God knows what else—when Richard started speaking again.

“Isn’t it amazing,” he asked Mara, looking resolutely into her eyes, sparkling gray, sunlit and beautiful to him, “how a machine can keep us technically alive? How like machines we are?”

It was a question she had never considered, yet she agreed, longing for him to keep talking. They were almost to the two-story light house across the dunes. There was a sprinkling of other people close enough to them to hear what they said. But she wanted him to keep talking. She wanted to hear his voice.

“Let’s go back,” he said. “Miriam and Dante will be wanting dinner.”

They were half-way back to the parking lot, a ten minute walk, before Richard started talking again.

“It was the oil that got me, the oil Fr. Roberts smeared on my forehead. It was that oil that made me change my plans and apply to the Episcopal seminary in Cambridge instead of going to graduate school in something important.”

“Being a priest isn’t ‘important’?” Mara asked, looking out again at cows in a field and expensive housing overlooking the sea. “What about the God-thing?”

Richard almost laughed as he drove. “Quite honestly, that hasn’t been working for me lately. I haven’t told anyone this, my therapist maybe, though I don’t remember, but I don’t, can’t, don’t want to pray.

“It’s not a ‘big deal’. We Episcopalians have lots of ritual and sacraments to hang our hat on. I can read the prayers in the Book of Common Prayer. I can do that. And it seems to be enough.”

They were almost back to the town when Mara said, “is it enough? How’s that working out?”

“Better than anyone might imagine,” he said, sounding invigorated, watching the road. “I pretend to pray. And someone said, some writer I think, ‘be careful who you pretend to be because you might just become who you pretend to be.’ Something like that.”

They walked for a good while, half-way back up the beach toward Richard’s car, both of them lossed in their thoughts.

“Vonnegut,” Mara finally said, “Kurt Vonnegut said that.”

“I think you’re right,” Richard answered, a few steps later.

And after a few more steps, Mara responded: “do you think he’s right?” And when Richard didn’t answer, she continued: “It’s a lot like being a detective. As soon as a crime happens you ‘pretend’ to know the answer to the whole thing. Then you find out, several times over, that you’re original ‘pretend answer’ is totally wrong, so you invent a new ‘pretend answer’ and live out of that for a while until something else shows up and you have to pretend all over again.”

“It’s a lot like that,” Richard answered, “though the problem is that people want a ‘real answer’, like right away—something to hold onto and depend on and those answers don’t exist.”

“Tell me about it,” Mara said, smiling. They were back at the car and she climbed in. Richard pushed in a cassette since his car was too old to have a CD player. It was a Bob Dylan album.

“Blood on the tracks,” Mara observed.

They drove for a long time, listening to Tangled up in Blue and then Simple Twist of Fate, Dylan croaking as only he could.

“Lots of blood on the tracks,” Richard finally said, accelerating up hill out of town on Spring Street.

Mara couldn’t disagree.

As he was pulling off Spring Street onto the dirt road where the Lexus had been over turned, Mara asked, “What happens next for you? Where are you going after your time here?”

He said, “well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” His voice was so soft and sad that she wished she had on her shoulder holster so she could lift her shirt and show it to him again. And this time, she’d know why.

Unbeknownst to Mara, Richard was thinking about how taunt her stomach was when she showed it to him, about the perfect oval of her navel, about the fine down of blonde hair on the bottom of her stomach, about the hint of roundness of the bottom of her breast. He hated himself for wondering, but he wondered about that all the same.

While all that was happening, Dante and Miriam were on the rocks to the west of the rectory and church, fishing. Miriam was much more adroit at casting, but she let him struggle with it, knowing he wanted no advice. They would catch no fish; however, they would talk—the two of them were incapable of silence.

“So why don’t you go interview the Jamaicans?” she asked as they walked. Cecelia ran ahead rousting a rabbit and then a pheasant from the brush.

“What would we accuse them of? Buying stuff they then threw away? I’m not sure the fishing equipment has anything to do with the murders—that’s Mara’s theory.

She thought for a while. “You could charge them with littering a public beach and then sweat them.”

Dante chuckled. “Sweat them! You mean bright lights and rubber hoses?”

“Sure,” Miriam said. Dante didn’t yet know her well enough to tell if she was serious or just playing. “Or have Mara seduce them with her womanly wiles.”

Now he understood where she was going. By God, I am a detective, after all, he thought. Then he said, “I’m not going to be the one to suggest that. After a moment, just to check his theory, he added, “besides, Mara only works one ‘seduction’ at a time.”

Miriam’s head jerked toward him as he thought it would. “Do you think,” she said, like a whisper, a secret, “Sgt. Coles…Mara and Daddy….”

“When you call him ‘daddy’ it all seems too tawdry.”

“Is it tawdry?” she asked, reaching over to touch Dante’s arm. Her eyes were wide and shining green in the sun, “do you think something’s going on between them?”

Dante smiled at her excitement. “I have no idea, my dear. And I certainly have no intention of asking either of them such questions. They are, after all, consenting adults.”

“I never thought I’d say this,” she began, looking around for the dog, seeing her tail above the grass, “but daddy could actually do with some consenting….”

To get to the rocks they had to walk down a steep path through wild rosehips and bayberry bushes. Cecelia was waiting patiently at the bottom for permission to go into the water. Miriam rubbed the dog’s head and said, “go on girl.” Cecelia yelped with delight as she ran into the chill ocean.

The surf was light and the tide low. They stood on a rock about a foot above the water and Dante skewered a shrimp and began to cast. Miriam could tell he hadn’t fished much, but he had a natural grace that allowed him to master the rod quickly. She was much better at surf fishing than he, but she let him play with the rod without comment.

After a few minutes, keeping one eye on Cecelia’s whereabouts, Miriam spoke: “so, where’d you get your name? Were your parents literary sorts?” She thought he might have hooked something, but again she didn’t try to coach him. She knew most men hated help from women barely 5 feet tall.

“Shit, something just got away,” he said. He paused in reeling back the hook and sinker long enough to light a cigarette. The wind was picking up and Miriam thought he’d never get the cigarette to burn. However, he had an index finger sized lighter that put out a flame like a butane torch. Finally smoking and reeling, he responded.

“Mom was educated, but not my old man. He was a cook—not a ‘chef’, not at first, just a cook. He started with one of those silver carts selling sausage and pepper hoagies in front of the state house in Providence. He was barely 20 and just off the boat, probably stole the cart, couldn’t speak much English and was confused by making change for American money. But he had an eye for the ladies and the ‘Caggiano charm’,” Dante winked at her.

“My mother was a Smyth—with a ‘y’—imagine that, more WASPY than the queen and a looker. She was a freshman at Brown doing an internship with whatever crooked administration was in office at the time. She started eating lunch every day at my dad’s cart, helping him make change while he wooed her. The Smyth’s were from Long Island. They knew some ‘I-talians’—one cooked for them and one mowed their grass and took care of the roses.”

“A little culture shock when she brought your daddy home, I’d imagine.”

Dante grinned and then laughed out loud. He speared shrimp on all three hooks this time and handed the rod to Miriam. He watched her cast and was impressed that she hadn’t tried to school him.

“She was as blond and lovely as Mara,” he continued, “and on the field hockey team, for God’s sake. But she started taking Italian the next semester and taught my father passing English. Her Italian was always hysterical—a language made for poetry spoken with one of those tight-lipped, lock-jawed WASP mouths.”

“So the Italian genes won out,” she said, looking him up and down.”

“With a vengeance.”

“Their names?” she asked, maneuvering the line, waiting for the first tiny tug that might be a hungry fish.

“Margaret Anne, with an ‘e’ of course, and Benito,” he told her. “And you have to credit my Smyth grandparents—they rolled with the punch and welcomed my old man into the family. Mom convinced them to pay for Papa’s tuition at culinary school and then to buy the first restaurant for him. He paid them back and more. ‘Maria’s’ and ‘Maria’s Too” are cash cows—just got the fifth star last year.”

“Those are yours now?”

“Mine and Leo’s. He does all the work and I make half the money, a pretty sweet deal.”

Miriam made sure she could still see the dog, digging among the rocks down the beach, and reeled the line back in. “I thought the restaurants were named after your mother.”

“Oh, they are,” he said, chuckling and shaking his head. “Papa never learned to pronounce Margaret Anne without it sounding a bit risqué, so he called Mama ‘Maria’. She finally gave up and added it to her name, all very proper and legal….Besides,” he added, “how could you have an Italian restaurant named ‘Margaret Anne’s’?”

Having had no luck, Miriam handed the rod back to Dante. He added more shrimp. “Tell me what I’m doing wrong,” he said, before casting out beyond the breakers.

“A little more wrist,” she said, “and keep the rod more perpendicular, not so much to the side…but mostly, you’re doing fine.”

After he fished for a while, Cecelia came wandering over, panting and soaked.

“Speaking of names,” Dante said, “what about the dog’s?”

“Simon and Garfunkle”, she said, breaking into the first lines of the song: “you’re breakin’ my heart, you’re shakin’ my confidence daily….”

“Enough!” he said, above her song. “And here I thought your father was a sophisticated, reasonable man.”

“Not really,” she was smiling broadly, “the priest thing gives him that aura, but he loved Dylan and Joni Mitchell and the Stones.” She started an animated version of Beast of Burden, strutting like Mick Jaggar from rock to rock. Dante rolled his eyes and Cecelia began to bark and jump around.

“This is an amazing revelation—excuse the theological allusion—about the good Padre,” he was amused and captivated by the little woman’s energy.

“A good ‘Padre’ he is,” she said, still dancing a little. “The people at the church in Worthington just love him, absent minded and forgetful as he is.”

“And so do you….”

She laughed and punched his arm, hard enough that he almost dropped the fishing rod.

“That’s assault on an officer,” he said.

“Tough shit, Jose….”

“Ah,” Dante replied, barely containing his enjoyment of this woman, “that has ear-marks of an ethnic slur. You have the makings of a bigot, Ms. Lucas.”

Miriam hung her head and spoke softly. Dante could hear her because the tide was still out and the surf wasn’t noisy at all. “Daddy says we all are, bigots, I mean. He taught me that everybody ‘hates’—mostly out of fear of people who are different from themselves. People are afraid of what they don’t know and don’t understand. So, each in our own way—some subtle and some no so…--we’re all bigots.”

“What else did ‘daddy’ teach you, my dear,” Dante asked kindly, “about fear and hate and all?”

“You really want to know, don’t you?”

He nodded gravely.

“He says that it’s important to ‘pay attention’ whenever we hate someone or are afraid of something. He told me to ‘be aware’ of my fears and dislikes, to be on tiptoe with anticipation.”

“Why would he say that?” Dante asked, really not knowing.

She smiled, looking out at the ocean as if she could see the past there. “He’d say, ‘you’re about to learn something, Princess. Something you need to know.’ That’s why, Dante.

That ended the fishing. All thoughts of more casting without results were gone. Dante reeled in the line, then shouted with surprise and excitement at a tiny, less than six inch fish on the hook. Miriam gently removed it and threw it back out to sea. As they started up the steep bank, back through the rosehips and bayberries, the dog trailing behind them, he finally spoke again.

“Good advice, all in all,” he said, “but advice that, sadly, I’d never give. What I tend to learn from my fears and hatreds is to be cautious, be very cautious….”

“I know,” Miriam said, “me too.”

They sat on rocks at the top of the hill, Cecelia smelling of surf and dog, dozing beside them, exhausted. They stared out at the waters.

“What’s that buoy for?” He was pointing out about a hundred yards.

“Who knows,” she replied, “a lobster trap, a place to tie up a boat to fish or swim, a channel marker that’s drifted away. The water is lousy with buoys around this island. Haven’t you seen how many people just have piles and piles of them laying around?”

He had noticed that, but he still squinted through the smoke of a newly lit cigarette and the light haze of late afternoon. For reasons he couldn’t place, the buoy—blue and white—bobbing on the water interested him. He was about to ask her more about buoys when she raised the question people like the two of them eventually got to.

“So,” she said, inevitably, “what about the gay thing?”

Dante looked at her, taking a deep drag on his cigarette. “You’re one to talk, from what I understand.”

She twisted her mouth up at him and stuck out her tongue. “I love who I love. I’ve loved some men and I’ve loved some women. I think I like women better. Milagros, I think, is my ‘soul-mate’, if that isn’t too romantic to bear. We just happen to have the same plumbing—big deal. I love her. I hope this is forever….We want to have a baby, you know….”

“Good for you for loving women,” he said, “leaves more of the man for me.”

“But you’re a cop,” she observed, “and pretty outspoken about being gay. How do you deal with the assholes who fear and hate that? You must know lots of them.”

“They are legion,” he snuffed out his cigarette on the rock where they were sitting. “I don’t ‘deal with them’, as you put it. ‘Fuck them,’ I say, thought that thought would doubtless send them running to the hills.”

She smiled. “If I loved a man, Dante, he’d be a lot like you.”

“Gay?” he asked in a falsetto.

“Don’t joke.”

“Sorry, Kiddo,” he said in his natural voice, “same goes for me. If I loved a women—heaven forefend!—she’d have to be a lot like you.”

They both stared at the ocean until Miriam wondered, “want to give Milagros and me some sperm?”

He stared at her with a mixture of horror and curiosity. Then they both laughed.

“Guess we’ll just go to the bank and make a withdrawal,” she said.

“Interesting choice of metaphor….”

“Well, it wouldn’t be a ‘deposit’, would it?”

“Time to go, Kiddo,” he said. And they did.

Crossing the dirt road to the field they walked through, she said, “shouldn’t you be out detecting rather than fishing?”

He laughed. “There are times when not much is going on that looks like police work,” he told her. “That’s the one thing the TV shows and mystery novels leave out. There’s no such thing as constant action. Sometimes we just wait around for a clue to find us.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Au contraire,” he replied. It so happens that Flash Gordon is out doing some background, probably on a lap-top in a bar. I’m fishing. So I’m not kidding. You’d be surprised how much of detecting is waiting for someone to finish a report and then distracting yourself for a while. Otherwise you start thinking too much….But, if something doesn’t show up soon, maybe we will go round up Jamaicans.”

He wanted to walk through the weird little maze that had been created in the field out of brush. Cecelia plunged down a path without waiting for them. He was amazed by the maze—which must have taken some serious work each spring to keep the paths clear. He was about to ask Miriam if she knew who planted it when they were both distracted by the dog’s whining.

Cecelia was pulling at a blue tarp in the undergrowth beside the path. Miriam called her away with ‘leave it’ and she sat obediently a few feet from what she’d found.

Dante knelt down, pushing branches way and unrolled the tarp. He held up, in success for Miriam to see, two pairs of goggles, two wet suits and two pairs of flippers. She shook her head at him and he carefully replaced the swimming gear.

“What’s it mean?”

“Mara has been right as rain all along, though it pains me to admit it. Someone comes here and puts on this stuff and goes swimming. This is a big honking clue that just fell in our laps, or, more accurately, in the dog’s mouth.”

“What’s it a clue to?” she asked.

“That is yet to be seen, sweet Miriam. Yet to be seen.”

When they got back to the rectory, Dante praised Mara and told her and Richard about what Cecelia had unearthed. “The only real detective on this island has four legs,” Dante said. Somehow understanding he was talking about her, the dog came over and jumped up on him, trying to lick his face. “I don’t like dogs, dog,” Dante said, pushing her away.

“So you left them there?” Mara asked.

Dante grinned and nodded. “The best is yet to come, beloved,” he said to the other three. Cecelia leaped on him again and he rolled his eyes, giving in a bit to her affection.

It was just past 6 and darkness was beginning to wonder about gathering in a serious way. Dante declared the bar open and they picked through what was left of booze and wine people had brought to Richard on Wednesday. Two full bottles of scotch, a bottle of bourbon (“they remembered you were a southerner, Father,” Dante observed) and lots of wine. There was a mint plant that Miriam remembered from her summers on the island that was off on the south side of the house. It was dead, not even recognizable, but she grated ice in a blender and made them all mint juleps without mint to watch the stars with.

After a while, Dante and Miriam cooked, somehow creating a wondrous seafood Diablo from what was available to them and a salad of Boston lettuce, heart of palm and anchovies from a thin can they found in the back of a shelf. Dante and Miriam stayed with bourbon while Mara and Richard switched to wine and water respectively.

“I have to do church tomorrow,” he explained to the drinkers, who hooted and kidded him mercilessly.

Dante had a room at the Spring House under Leo’s name and Mara was still registered at the White House, but when dinner was over, no one made any move to leave. Mara took the third bedroom and Dante hunkered down on the couch, TV flipper in hand, running through the few channels. Miriam and Richard took Cecelia for a walk down Spring Street, though neither of them had much to say. Everyone was full and tired and a little high. When they came back, Dante was snoring lightly on the couch, the TV still on. Miriam found a blanket and covered him carefully. Richard and the dog went to the master bedroom. Somehow, having the police ‘sleeping over’ seemed natural and right to him now.

Within half an hour, everyone was asleep.

In a little three bedroom house on a rock of an island on a tiny planet lost in the wonderment of an already endless and still expanding universe, five sentient being slept. And they all dreamed.

Here is Dante’s dream, being the first of the night: he is holding a child, a baby that has curly hair and dark skin. He does not know who the child is or whose it, yet it seems familiar to him. He holds the child and rocks it in his arms, waiting, he knows but doesn’t know, that two lovely, small women are coming to join him. He is singing a lullaby in Italian, one his mother sang to him. He sings it though he doesn’t know the words, doesn’t remember them, but he sings them in perfect Italian and knows the words are all right. The child he holds smiles at him, gurgles and begins to sing along.

Mara’s dream is verging on a nightmare. She is alone in a strange and ill-defined landscape. She is alone and the edges of the horizon are closing in on her. She is alone and frightened, trying to scream as people often do in dreams, but having no ability to create noise. She is alone and she knows someone is near, even in the ever dwindling space. Someone is near and she is afraid. She is alone and she is afraid.

She wakes and shakes off that dream, which she will never remember, and falls back into sleep and a second dream. In this dream she is wrapped in some rubbery substance and swimming, swimming, swimming. She is not a good swimmer in life, but in her dream she swims effortlessly, with power, with and remarkable grace. She swims and swims and swims.

Miriam’s dreams that night are multitudinous and perplexing. She is walking a pleasant path with two women. She is standing on a rock, fishing. She is like an animal, picking her way through deep brush, sniffing. She is eating an ice-cream cone overlooking a pleasant bay. She is talking with her father and laughing and they talk and talk and laugh and laugh but she doesn’t hear any words—her dream is on ‘mute’. She is wrapped in someone’s arms, kissing them, touching them—first it is a Spanish woman and then a thin Italian man. And she is in love….

Richard dreams of a house he’s never seen, a house with many rooms. He wanders through the rooms, many of which have white cloths covering the furniture. He hears someone playing some reed instrument in the distance and tries to move toward it, but, as in dreams, he can hardly move.

And Cecelia dreams as well. While she dreams her legs move involuntarily back and forth. She is dreaming of running, chasing some creature she has no name for but can smell clearly. She runs, in her dream, tracking and chasing and running and running until she drops into a dark hole where there are no dreams, only sleep.

Richard has a second dream. In this dream he is blind and running toward something. He feels hands touch him and hold him up in his blindness. He is running toward that same sound—some reed instrument playing something beautiful and calm. And he is still blind and still running, supported by unseen hands.

Later Dante dreams of cutting onions, onion after onion with the sharpest knife he’s ever held. And weeping from the onions. Then someone comes and takes the knife from his hand and wipes away the tears from his face and holds him like a baby as he weeps.

Early in the morning, around 2:30 a.m., Richard wakes up and needs to pee. He staggers to the bathroom, noticing that Cecelia is whining and her legs are moving in her sleep. When he comes back to bed he falls immediately to sleep and dreams that Susan is responding to his fitful prayers and his attempts to revive her. She stirs and stands up, alive as alive can be and embraces him. He holds her near and weeps with joy. And at some point realizes his face is not buried in her hair but in some other hair, short and blonde almost to white.

Mara dreams she is standing on the precipice of the Mohegan Bluffs. The wind is tearing around her and the void beneath her is calling to her. She shuts her eyes and leaps, but someone’s arms pull her back.

Miriam dreams of Christmas, of being in St. Louis at her brother’s house. The tree is trimmed to perfection. She can smell food being cooked. She turns and sees her father and someone else she cannot recognize before her dream ends.

Just before he wakes, Dante dreams of holding a golden box in his hands, a box locked and sealed. But he opens it anyway and inside he finds….Then he wakes up.

Everyone and the dog in that house woke up within ten minutes of each other. Everyone and the dog, except for Richard, needed to pee. Time was spent doing that.

None of them, save Cecelia, remembered their dreams. Cecelia remembered running and running and running and running….

children/grandchildren

Yesterday was my daughter's birthday. Every year Bern tells the story of their birth to both Josh and Mimi on their birthday. It is a tender, sweet thing. I feel a little jealous that Bern lived with those two nine months longer than I have.

Our three grandchildren are here tonight. Josh and Cathy are at a wedding and will spend the night in Hartford. Pray for us! We've kept the twins overnight before, but not all three....

So, I don't have time to write more but will send the next chapter of Murder on the Block

III.

Friday, October 24, 2003—7:23 a.m.

Richard rolled over and over again, tangling himself in his sheet and blanket, trying to pull himself to consciousness to respond to the repeated pounding on the door and the calls of his name.

Then Cecelia dove off the bed and leaped up on the person standing in the bedroom door, licking her and wagging her tail like a flag at a 4^th of July parade. Richard rolled over, now entombed in his bed clothing, wrapped up like a mummy and saw a head so blond it was almost white nuzzling his dog. The head came into focus and he noticed how dark the eyebrows were and how wide the smile was.

“Wake up, sleepy head,” Mara said in a loud, whispery voice, full of smoke and fog and morning, “your dog is ready for morning. It’s time to wake up….” She smelled faintly of the garlic from her scampi the night before. Richard had long ago noticed how some people’s bodies processed garlic and seemed to have it ooze from their pours. Susan had been like that. His daughter, Miriam, as well. And now this police Sergeant. It was disconcerting since Richard was fond of women who smelled of garlic.

Richard stared at her in the dim light of early morning. She ruffled Cecelia’s head and pushed her aside. Then Mara put both knees on Richard’s king-sized bed (a gift to St. Anne’s from a grateful priest who spent two weeks each summer on the Block and wanted a comfortable place to sleep) and leaned over toward him. She was dressed in sweats—a loose fitting light gray top and equally loose pants. Her face was only a foot or so from Richard’s and she smelled of last night’s garlic and ale and of women’s sweat and of something different, something fruity…green apples, Richard thought, green apples that had just fallen from the tree. That fresh. That new.

“I’ll take your dog out,” she said, breathing on him, “while you wake your ass up and get dressed.”

Mara was on all fours, knees and hands on the bed with him, her lips—the flawless top one and the bottom one with the wondrous flaw of a scar almost in the middle—within easy reach of Richard’s mouth. He thought, for a fleeting moment, about rising up and kissing her. But it passed almost before it occurred to him.

“How…how did you get in?” he asked, instead of kissing her.

She stayed poised on his bed. “I knocked and yelled and then found out that the church is unlocked and the door to the house from the church is unlocked as well….Then I found you wrapped up in your cocoon with your dog slobbering all over me.”

“Some watch-dog,” Richard said.

Mara jumped off the bed, landing on her feet, growing suddenly grave. There was enough light for Richard to see the gray of her eyes. Storms gathering over the sea—and she was so lithe and graceful and under control.

“When Cecelia and I get back,” she said, turning toward the dog and the door, “I expect a butterfly from that cocoon.”

She moved so rapidly that Richard’s reply was stuck in his throat. So he got up, washed his face, brushed his teeth brutally to make up for his neglect the night before and found his dog and Mara in the kitchen.

She was pouring Uncle Sam Cereal into two bowls.

“I don’t cook like Dante,” she said, “but I’m making toast and slicing this God-awful cantaloupe I found in the fridge.”

Two teaspoons of Splenda and cold milk made the healthy cereal eatable. The melon was tasteless but the rye toast, smeared with butter and topped with damson jam from some previous priest’s stay on the Block, left in the refrigerator for those to come, was marvelous to Richard.

Half way through their silent breakfast, the Mr. Coffee was through with its work. Mara got up to pour and doctor the brew for them.

“The church door is always unlocked?” she asked, pouring half-and-half into the cups.

“Are you being a detective now?” Richard’s mouth was full of toast.

She carried their coffee to the table and handed him a cup.

“Where’s your gun today, detective?” Richard was being playful.

Still standing by the table, after taking a sip of coffee and sitting her cup there, Mara slowly lifted her baggy sweat shirt, showing him an expanse of flat, brown stomach and the hint of the swell of her breast so he could see the shoulder holster that held her weapon. Even as she was doing it, she was wondering why—she could as easily have told him she had a shoulder-holster or joked back with him: “that’s why they call it a concealed weapon, Father….” But before she could stop herself, she had lifted her shirt in an obviously seductive way.

He instinctively looked away. Mara lowered her shirt as slowly as she had raised it and then sat down opposite him at the table. She breathed in and out through her nose twice—very slowly and audibly.

“Richard….Father Lucas….” Mara spoke softly, almost tenderly, in her naturally breathless whisper, “I don’t think we should do this. I really don’t.”

Richard’s mind was racing wildly between the garlic/ale/green apple and sweat smell of her and the glimpse he’s just had of her belly and the wondrously round bottom of her breast…and a gun as well….He was still chewing on a bite of rye toast she had toasted and the butter and jam she’d smeared on it.

“Listen, God Damn it!” she said coarsely, jarring Richard back from his thoughts. “Dante wants you and me to be detectives for him. And here I am exposing myself to you at the breakfast table….I don’t know why I did that. I really don’t.”

Richard suddenly had lots of things to say, lots of rebuttal material about how it had been no big deal and she shouldn’t feel bad, but he was still thinking about the expanse of skin he’d seen and she raced on before he could speak.

She was terribly upset with herself, Richard knew at least that much. So she raved on: “I’m a good cop, but not if I’m out of control. I’m no good to myself and doubly no good to you. Dante and his hair-brained schemes about using you to help in whatever the fuck happens next…. But I can’t. I just can’t make you do this….”

Richard was confused. “Why not? Why can’t we do this…whatever this is?”

Mara bit her bottom lip and then released it. Richard was fascinated by how pale her lip seemed and how pink it soon became. He was on the verge of asking her about the little scar when she started talking again.

“The ‘why not?’ is like this,” she said, suddenly dreamy, disconnected, as if no one was listening, “I like you, Richard….Dante thinks it’s chemistry or hormones or the fact that we’re both lonely. Whatever…. You’re a gentle, tender man and I’m supposed to work with you, use you, find out what you don’t know you don’t know and solve all this nonsense and then walk away….but what the hell was I doing raising my shirt to you—I’m not sure why I did that and it’s not something I would ever do. I’m on thin ice here, I know, but I believe I’m starting to worry about you and worry makes me careless….so that’s the why not….That’s the truth.”

Richard stared at her. The “truth” that all his training and education had taught him would “set him free” seemed suddenly like a great burden on his heart. “Oh, God…” he thought, distracted by whether or not that qualified as a prayer, then returned to the jumble and stew of his feelings and thoughts. Here is this woman, he thought, confused and troubled, that I actually “think of” as a woman and not just another person I’ve met since Susan died….And there is this incredible down on her tight, tanned belly and she’s wearing a gun and she just told me she’s starting to “worry about” me and I want, more than anything, for her to go away so I can remember how mournful I am and yet, if she goes away now….

“Cat got your tongue?” Mara said, softly, slowly, just before taking a drink of her coffee. Her ocean-storm-gray eyes turned soft, moist. She was waiting for something from Richard that he wasn’t sure how to give but knew he didn’t want to withhold.

He took a deep breath and started to say something like, “I am beginning to care for you, though I don’t know why,” or “I’m old enough to be your father,” or “My wife just died—a year ago or so—and I’m still on LWS time….” He never knew which thing he would have said because he was saved by the front door flying open, Cecelia waking from her slumber under the table and a massive collision between his dog and his daughter.

Miriam Lucas’ hair was cut as short as Mara’s, but was so black it was almost navy blue in certain light and remarkably, incredibly curly. In high school she’d worn it as a soft Afro—towering on her head in a profusion of tangled curls. In college she’d grown it out and suffered gladly the jokes about her hair being like some vast, layered hat. As an adult, she had it cut as short as she could, but no matter how short it was, it kinked and twirled out of control.

Miriam is a tiny woman—barely 5’1’’ and weighing 98 pounds on a fat day. Though Richard was 5’10” and Susan 5’8” and both their sons an inch or two over 6 feet tall, Miriam was a miniature miracle with black hair to everyone else’s dull brown and inexplicable jade green eyes out of the soupy DNA mix of Susan’s bright brown and Richard’s darker brown. Richard had often thought she was a leprechaun, born of recessive Irish genes on both sides. “Munchkin” and “Hobbit” were the names her brothers gave her.

Her cheek bones were so high and prominent that her eyes looked almost Asian. Her skin was just a shade darker than a piece of typing paper. Her mouth was generous and her lips so unnaturally red she never wore lipstick. Susan had called her “Black Irish”. Richard always called her “Princess”.

Dressed in jeans, a purple sweater and the sandals she wore until the first snowfall, she was on the floor with Cecelia in the middle of the living room and anyone would have been hard pressed to decide who was happier to see the other. The dog was only a few pounds lighter than Miriam and Richard laughed to see them tangled so while Mara wondered if the Lab might hurt this tiny girl.

Finally, face covered with slobber, Miriam stood up and started talking non-stop, as always.

“You didn’t call, Daddy, so I came over on the first plane. Just a twenty minute flight—can you believe that—from Logan. I’ve been so worried about you I just couldn’t not come. How are you, anyway? Is this just awful? There were some guys on the plane in suits and skinny black ties who looked terribly grim and Republican and….”

“The Homeland Security agents have arrived,” Mara said calmly, looking at Richard, who was looking at his daughter, who suddenly—noticing her for the first time—was staring, with her generous mouth wide-open at Mara.

Things got awkward fast. Richard stood up in what passed as his pajamas—a pair of faded gym shorts and a UConn tee-shirt—Cecelia, still excited from her bout with Miriam, put her front paws on Mara’s lap and began licking her face, Miriam looked back and forth from her (she believed) still-mournful father to the lovely blond woman trying to push away the dog to stand up.

Richard moved toward Miriam and took her in his arms. “I should have called…I meant to call…last night, but when I got home….Well….”

Miriam returned her father’s hug, but stared around his arm at Mara, who had calmed the Lab enough to stand up.

“Where were you last night?” Miriam asked, narrowing her green, almost Asian eyes at Mara.

Richard stepped back. “Mara and I had dinner after Dante left….” He was suddenly seized with a confusion and embarrassment that would rival any adolescent’s worst nightmare.

“This is Mara…Sgt. Coles...,” he said to Miriam, who was standing absolutely still, staring at Mara. “Mar…Sgt. Coles,” Richard continued, falling back on time honored formulas to smooth the heavy seas of his predicament, “this is my daughter, Miriam.”

Mara offered her hand, but Miriam wasn’t through staring. After a couple of moments, the detective slowly lowered her offering.

“I’m glad to meet you, Miriam,” she said, as calmly as she could.

Miriam broke the exchanged gaze with Mara and turned to Richard.

“I think we should talk in private,” she said, her voice emphasizing her confusion and need.

Cecelia was still rubbing against Mara’s legs, adoring her in the way dogs do. She reached done to pet the Lab’s head.

“The dog and I will take a run now,” she said, obviously flustered. And, with Mara’s surpassing grace and Cecelia’s rambunctious clumsiness, they made their way through the living room and into the great outdoors.

“Want some coffee?” Richard weakly asked his daughter.

She stood stock still, a mighty mite, by the table, then slowly turned her eyes to Mara’s cup and cereal bowl and plate with a half-eaten piece of rye toast still on it.

“What’s up here, Daddy?” she finally asked, a bit too harshly for Richard’s liking.

He had the good sense (the Spirit moving, he later told himself) to take his cup and go to the kitchen where he found another cup and slowly, meticulously made them both fresh coffee. He carried the steaming brew back to the table and sat down, motioning to the chair at the end of the table for his daughter. She sat down, glumly.

“Is this sugar or Splenda?” she asked.

“Sugar for you, Splenda for me,” Richard answered.

“Cream or milk?” Miriam’s voice was harsh, judging.

“Cream for you—half-and-half, actually—and the same for me,” Richard said, softly.

The two of them sipped coffee for a few minutes.

“Miriam,” Richard finally said when he thought she was beginning to calm down, “until your reaction to Sgt. Coles—Mara—I had no more idea than you about what’s up here, as you put it.”

Miriam started to speak, but Richard calmly raised his hand and said, “not yet.”

She looked at him and he could see love and worry in her face. Miriam had been the worrier of the family—wild and untamed, but always concerned about the others. She swallowed her words with a sip of coffee.

“Two people died and I found them,” Richard began, “and I’ve spent the last two days with police of one ilk or another and there’s this one police officer, who you were, I must say, very rude too, who is here on the island to do something I only vaguely understand and….”

Miriam’s face was back to what Richard always saw—open, accepting, interested.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said.

He melted, as always with his daughter. “I know, Princess….And something is going on here just in the last two days—something besides the murders—something about me and how I am beginning, little by little to come back to life.”

Now she smiled her pixie smile, eyes almost shut. “And this woman—this police sergeant, this…what’s her name…Marty?”

“Mara.”

She smiled even more. “This Mara is part of your coming back to life?”

Richard rubbed his face. “I don’t know,” he said, sad, almost defeated. “I don’t know at all.” Brightening, he continued, “but I know I have to find out. Does that make any sense? Is it enough that I’m feeling stuff I haven’t felt—not Mara in particular—just in general…I’m feeling again, not just bad feelings, but good too….Is that alright with you?”

Miriam laughed out loud.

“Let’s go find her…her and your dog,” she said, rising.

Richard waved the thought away. “Forget it,” he said bluntly, “she’s a runner. She might run Cel to death. We could never fucking catch her.”

Opening her mouth, rolling her head, Miriam moved around the table and insinuated herself into Richard’s lap.

“Omygod,” she said, laughing, kissing his face, “you said ‘fucking’, Daddy! You must be getting better. You’ve been so…’non-profane’ since mother died!”

Richard wrapped his tiny daughter in his arms and, inexplicably, began to weep. “I must be,” he said, burying his face into her hair.

****

Father and daughter had cleared the table and put everything away before Mara came back. As they moved around the small kitchen, Richard suddenly remembered the first two weeks after Susan died—how Miriam had taken a leave from school, sent Milagros back to Boston, and stayed with him in the suddenly too large, too lonely house. The boys had left only a day or two after the funeral, but Miriam stayed on. The two of them had moved like wraiths for several days, neither able to sleep but both spending lots of time in their beds. After the first week, they began, tentatively and carefully, to talk late into each night. The flood of people who had been dropping by died out quickly enough to a trickle and then to almost nothing besides a few phone calls and cards each day. So he and Miriam would take long, almost silent walks with the dog, cook complicated meals they only picked at and, once fortified by a bottle of wine or several whiskeys, wrap themselves in blankets on the two couches in the family room and talk with the TV on and muted.

Richard would tell stories about Susan—most of which Miriam knew anyway—and about what they’d been like B.C. (“before children”). Miriam would relate her memories of childhood, of the mischief she and Jeremy would get into and how Jonah would cover for them and clean up their messes. Most of it was harmless childhood pranks, but there were things about drinking and drugs (“just pot, Daddy, and only pot—well, maybe a little something else, but only experimenting”) that Richard hadn’t known about. By then Jonah was away at school and the two younger children had to cover their own tracks. Richard wasn’t whether he was more relieved or embarrassed that he hadn’t known at the time.

Deep in the nights he began to wonder if he had been paying attention at all when he children were young. But Miriam reassured him he’d been there when they needed him—they just hadn’t needed him as much as he might have imagined. And he came to see Susan through Miriam’s eyes and through her interpretation of her brothers’ vastly different points of view. He was struck, in those late night talks, by how distinct and unique each child was—something he, as an only child, had always found confusing.

Their nightly conversations were initially tender and gentle, but after a week of staying up to the early hours and sleeping late, laughter began to slip into their talking. Both of them felt guilty to be laughing, half-drunk—as if gayety were a sin against Susan. But the two of them had so often laughed together, so often been so silly Jeremy hadn’t known how to keep up while Jonah and Susan—like the two adults—would merely shake their heads and smile lovingly. They would even tell jokes, though Miriam was terrible at it, because Richard—a natural storyteller and speaker—was so good.

(“Mom would have liked this one,” Miriam said one night, already giggling to herself—one of the reasons she was bad at joke telling. “Do you know the difference between southern zoos and northern zoos?” Richard didn’t, so she told him, laughing, “northern zoos only have the names of animals of the cages!”

Richard looked puzzled in the dim, flickering light of the silent TV show, so she asked, “don’t you get it?” When he shook his head, she added, “the southern zoos have ‘recipes’ on the cages….”

Richard almost chortled, “you left that out….”

“Left what out?”

“The recipe part. The punch line should have been, ‘southern zoos have recipes beside the names of the animals’. Something like that.”

Miriam grimaced, thinking, then laughed so hard she almost fell off her couch, so hard Cecelia woke up to come check on her. “That’s good, Daddy,” she said, breathless, almost as if he had told it to begin with.)

One night—the last night before Miriam went home to her classroom and Milagros—Richard asked her if she and her brothers had discussed what to do about him and decided she should stay with him for a while. She had laughed about that.

“What’s to discuss, Daddy?” she said. “I’m the only one who could have stayed. I’m a lowly school teacher, not a lawyer or a doctor! And I’m the ‘girl’, it’s my job to take care of you….” Richard was touched by her words, but then she added, “besides, Jonah or Jeremy would have driven you crazy. Can you imagine?”

He couldn’t imagine, of course. After a day or two, Jonah would have started rearranging Richard’s sock drawer and Jeremy would have gone to Blockbuster to rent the complex video games he loved to play. Neither would have sat in the flickering light of a soundless TV set, wrapped in blankets, talking the night away. Only Miriam could do that. Only Miriam could endure the silences of the day and the tears they shed at night. She had done the job only she could have done—smoothing the transition for her father from the shock and denial of Susan’s death to the long, painful, necessary months of his mourning. All that came to him at once and completely.

After they finished off the second bottle of wine of that night, he said to her, “it’s time for you to go, Princess.”

She unwrapped herself from her blanket and wrapped herself around him. “I know, Daddy,” she whispered after they had shared a long, tearful hug, “it’s time.”

The next day she left. And Richard began Life Without Susan alone.

Here they were, almost a year and a half later, sitting on the couch in St. Anne’s Rectory, watching CNN with the sound turned off, when Mara and Cecelia returned.

The dog ran by them into the kitchen where she noisily began lapping up a whole bowl of water. Mara stood in the door, drenched with sweat. Her hair was plastered to her head, a shade or two darker than normal and her sweat suit was so wet it clung to her and showed the outline of her shoulder holster clearly. Richard found himself thinking if it was uncomfortable running with a gun weighing her down and the holster rubbing against her skin.

“I brought Cecelia home,” she said, so out of breath that her voice was even more like a whisper, “and I’ll be going now….”

Miriam was rising from the couch, staring intently at Mara. “No, don’t go,” she was saying, moving slowly toward the detective. “I was so awful to you before. It’s just…just that I….Well, I was….”

“Worried about your father?” Mara finished for her.

Miriam sighed. “Yes,” she said, “exactly. But that doesn’t excuse how rude I was….I’m just so….Well, I’m….”

“A little crazy when it comes to him?”

“Do you know what I’m thinking?” Miriam laughed out the words.

“I am a detective, after all,” Mara answered, smiling, holding out her hand once more, and this time Miriam took it. Richard noticed Mara’s hand enveloped and contained his daughter’s. Mara’s hands were at least as large as his and Miriam’s were tiny. The two women grinned at each other and then at Richard.

“If I’m staying, I need a shower…and some clothes….”

Miriam threw back her head, exasperated. “Oh shit,” she said, “I left my bag in the taxi!” Then looking up into Mara’s face, “but you couldn’t wear my clothes….I mean….” Then she turned and sized up her father. “But you’re as tall as Daddy. He has something you could wear, I’m sure.”

Mara bit her lip to keep from laughing as Richard jumped off the couch and raced to his room. Glancing at the TV, she said to Miriam, “the sound is off, you know.”

Miriam waved a hand before her face, “it’s a family thing,” she said, smiling as Richard returned with a towel, a pair of jeans, some white athletic socks and a purple Block Dog tee shirt. Mara took them from him, turning her gray eyes on him with a smile.

“And a belt,” he said, “you’ll need a belt since the waist will be too big.” Then he paused and blushed.

“No underwear?” Miriam asked. And the two women looked at each other and burst into laughter at his expense.

While they listened to the water running in the shower and Richard flipped the channels, Miriam said, softly, “she’s a beautiful woman.”

Richard’s breath caught. Miriam’s words had shocked him from an subconscious vision of Mara in the shower, imagining her body under the spray. How much embarrassment must he endure? He was horrified by what he had been thinking but was spared from responding by the Block Island taxi that pulled into the parking lot.

Miriam ran to the door. “My bag is here,” she said, rushing out the door. But before she got to the taxi, another car arrived. A Block Island Police cruiser driven by Officer Alt pulled up beside the taxi bearing two large passengers in dark suits.

Richard stood, holding the door open, and Cecelia ran out to greet positively everybody. Malcolm Alt patted her genuinely, though she was the cause of untold humiliation for him. The taxi-driver, a middle aged, extremely fat woman, handed the Lab a bone from the box she kept beside her seat for all the Island Dogs she ferried about in her van. The two suits more or less ignored the dog’s attention, as well as Miriam’s who seemed to be trying to engage them in conversation about having shared a plane ride from Boston with them a few hours earlier.

One man was tall, perhaps 6’4’’, and so gaunt that his black suit and white shirt hung uncomfortably on his frame. He looked like a man in his early 30’s with a long, slender nose and ears that stood away from his head. His hair was that muddy brown Richard associated with people several generations removed from the British Isles. Beside him was a fire-plug of a man in a matching, though much differently cut, black suit. This one’s hair was red and as severely cut as his partner’s. But his face was round and ruddy, matching in roundness the body it rested on. The two of them reminded Richard of Abbot and Costello or Laurel and Hardy—some mismatched, almost comedic pair.

Ignoring both Richard’s dog and his daughter, the two of them mounted the steps to the deck of St. Anne’s house. Without prelude, the taller, thinner one—Abbot or Laurel—reached into his inside jacket pocket and produced a multi-folded document.

“Father Lucas,” he said, thrusting the papers out toward Richard, “I have a federal warrant to search this house and church.”

Richard was reaching out instinctively, a normal reflex, to take the papers when Mara shoved past him, still steaming from the heat of her shower, damp underneath Richard’s sweat shirt and too large jeans. Her feet were bare (Richard noticed with surprise that Mara’s toenails were polished a pale orange—‘tangerine’, he thought) and her head was wrapped in a towel.

“I’m Sgt. Coles, Rhode Island State Police,” she said, grabbing the papers and opening them up to read. Without looking at the two suits, she asked, harshly, “and you are?”

By then Miriam and Cecelia had arrived at the door as well. Things were getting crowded.

“Daddy, these are the guys from the plane,” Miriam said, moving past everyone and through the door with her recaptured overnight bag.

The dog followed her inside. Richard still stood, holding the door open like the doorkeeper for the House of the Lord.

The shorter man answered Mara’s question. “I’m Federal Agent Cosby and this,” motioning to the tall, brown haired man, “is Agent Nash.”

“What happened to Agent Stills?” Mara asked, absently, still reading the papers. Richard did all he could to keep from laughing.

Mara looked up from the warrant and said to Richard, “those aren’t their real names. We’ll never know their real names. I’m not sure they remember them….”

By then, Officer Alt was in the midst of them.

“Go on inside, Malcolm,” Mara said kindly, “find some coffee and something to eat.” The policeman nodded and passed Richard by.

Then she continued in a tone that was all business-like and formal, “Father Lucas, I’ll keep these gentlemen occupied out here long enough for you to go telephone Mr. Matthews and the Bishop of Rhode Island about why we shouldn’t let this warrant stand.”

The two men on the deck looked at each other before Agent Nash (Abbott/Laurel) tried to speak. “This warrant was issued by a Federal Judge in Providence,” is all he got out before Mara interrupted.

“This is a church, Graham, or whatever your name is,” she began, turning her troubled sea-gray eyes on him, “and there may be something in the law that you and your federal judge haven’t noticed—separation of church and state comes to mind—and you aren’t moving off this deck until Fr. Lucas makes some calls….” She turned to Richard and repeated, with serious inflection: “Until Father Lucas makes some calls….”

Richard let the screen door slam and rushed to the phone. After he explained the situation to Stevenson Matthews, Stevenson said, “I’ll be there in 10 minutes, don’t let them inside.”

Getting the Bishop of Rhode Island on the phone was more difficult. He was out of the office, but his executive assistant knew how to run him to ground. Richard stood by the phone for a return call long enough for Stevenson to arrive in a big-assed Jeep of some kind. He jumped out, took a few steps and then retreated to his truck to get a large L. L. Bean bag—the most common means of conveyance on the island.

He joined Mara and the Agents on the deck. Stevenson, luckily, was a lawyer as well as a banker and the Senior Warden of St. Anne’s. He knew what to ask Mara.

“What are the parameters of the search?” he asked her, ignoring the agents to the side.

She was still eyeing the papers the agents had brought with them. “They seem to be looking for anything Dante and I may have left here—files, information about our investigation.”

“Why might that be?” he asked, politely reaching out for the warrant. “If you don’t mind, Sgt. Coles,” he said.

“Certainly Mr. Matthews,” she replied, handing him the papers and turning a gaze on Cosby and Nash that would have frozen a rose to absolute zero.

Stevenson read the document, moving his lips slightly and then looked up at Mara, “this is preposterous”.

“I agree,” she said.

Richard was fascinated that a man nearing 80—well dressed in tan, wide-wale corduroy slacks and a deep purple turtle neck though he might be—and a still damp, lovely woman in men’s jeans and a tee-shirt and her head in a towel could be holding up the work of two federal agents. Cosby and Nash looked befuddled, still standing in the yard where Mara had chased them, whispering to each other.

“They’re assholes”, Officer Alt whispered to Richard from inside the door. “Half an hour with them taught me that. They’re not even real cops like Lt. Caggiano and Sgt. Coles or that FBI fellow who wasn’t really on the Block last night.”

Richard would have been shocked if the Islanders hadn’t known about Agent Gordon’s visit. When you live on an island you notice comings and goings acutely.

The phone was ringing, but before Richard could get inside, Miriam answered it by saying, “St. Anne’s Rectory.” A life time as a Priest’s Kid had taught her many things. “Yes, he’s right here…wait there’s another call….St. Anne’s Rectory….Yahoo, it’s me….Daddy, its Jonah….Yeal, he’s fine. House is full of cops of all sorts….I’ll put him on….Here, Daddy, its Jonah the doctor.”

Richard took the phone but Miriam pulled his head down so she could get her ear near the receiver. “Jonah,” he said, his neck suddenly aching, “so good to hear from you….”

From the door Stevenson called out, “is it Bishop Loring?”

“Wait a minute, Jonah,” he said, then to Miriam, “who’s the other call from?”

“Some bishop,” she said, pulling the phone from him.

“Richard,” Stevenson said harshly, “is it the bishop?”

Richard wrestled the phone back from his daughter and spoke into it, “we’ve got a situation here, Jonah, I’ll have to call you back….are you at home or work?”

Jonah’s tinny telephone voice was saying, “What kind of situation? Dad, what’s going on up there?”

Richard covered the mouth piece and said to Miriam, “show me how to get the bishop back….”

She gave him a rolling eye look and an exaggerated sigh. “Daddy, when will you figure out call waiting?” Then into the phone she said, “Jonah, where are you?….OK, I’ll call you on my cell….Hello, Bishop Loring, thanks for holding….”

She handed the phone to her father who handed it to Stevenson.

“Hey, Stevenson,” Miriam said, standing on tiptoe and pulling his face down with both hands to give him a kiss, “pretty exciting, huh?”

After Stevenson put down his bag and told Richard he’d brought some chicken soup his housekeeper made, he talked to the Bishop while Miriam and Richard talked to Jonah on her cell phone. Conversations ended, they all returned to the deck. Mara was sitting in a deck chair, drying her hair in the sun, talking to Officer Alt while the two Homeland Security agents were fuming in the grass. They both started to speak when they saw Stevenson and Richard, but the elderly man held up both hands and stared at them until they were silent.

“Agents,” he said, as if he were speaking to children or the simple minded, “I fear you will be able to exercise your warrant, but not before our bishop speaks to his chancellor and the chancellor speaks to Judge Martini about all this.”

Glancing at Mara, he said, “if it’s alright with you Sgt. Coles, perhaps we can invite these representatives of our federal government inside for some coffee while we wait to hear the chancellor’s opinion?”

Mara shot Cosby and Nash a nasty look then turned, smiling, to Stevenson, “as long as I don’t have to brew it,” she said, almost sweetly.

Miriam grabbed Richard’s arm and squeezed. “Isn’t she wonderful?” she asked in an energetic whisper. Richard was once again, as always, astonished at how quickly his daughter could change her mind and how much she loved an adventure! He began to wonder how long it would take to get her to go home to Boston and he realized he, too, thought Mara ‘wonderful’.

While Richard made more coffee, Stevenson put a plastic container in the refrigerator and took his bag to car. Richard noticed he went through the church to reach the deck, but thought little of it. Stevenson went whichever way Stevenson wanted to go….

The chancellor of the Diocese of Rhode Island, an Ivy League WASP with oodles of money, eventually called back when everyone—including the Homeland Security agents—was full to bursting with coffee and wondering about lunch. Judge Judi Martini was unyielding and told Robert Alan Aronson Morrison, the bishop’s chancellor, that he could appeal her ruling at his leisure, but agents Cosby and Nash could indeed search St. Anne’s church and rectory for any files, papers, notes Dante and Mara had possibly squirreled away and hidden there and any other evidence that seemed material to their case. This was, the good judge was reported saying, relayed to all by Stevenson, from R.A.A. Morrison, “a matter of national security”.

“The tide that swamps all boats,” Stevenson told Richard and Mara and Miriam, “that’s what national security has become since 9/11. Nothing much else matters if you say those magic words.”

“Poof, poof, piffle,” came to Richard’s mind from some long hidden and forgotten synapse in his brain, “make me just as small as Sniffle.” For the life of him he couldn’t remember the context or origin of those words, but he knew they were “magic”, just as much as “national security” was.

***

Mara and Stevenson stayed at the church to shadow the agents’ search and make sure nothing much got upset or displaced.

“This is holy space, after all,” Richard heard Stevenson saying to Cosby and Nash as he and his daughter and dog were leaving to take a walk into town. As faithful and committed as Stevenson was to St. Anne’s, there was nothing in Richard’s nearly 20 year relationship with Stevenson that would lead him to believe that the Sr. Warden had any concept of “holiness”. Stevenson was a banker and a lawyer. He had a keen sense of the value of space—but, so far as Richard knew, and he knew the older man quite well, “holy” was not a word that came easily or accurately to Stevenson’s lips. But Richard was smiling as he and Miriam and Cecelia left the parking lot and started down the dirt road, past the shrine to the dead in the Lexus—some bunches of autumn flowers well-meaning islanders had stopped by to put there—to Spring Street and town. For as long as he’d known Stevenson and for the intensity of his knowledge of Mara, Richard knew St. Anne’s was in good hands and that the federal agents would be haunted every step and movement of their search.

Cecelia, for all her wildness, knew the command “heel” and walked to Richard’s right and a few steps behind Miriam and him. One of the joys of the dog was that she would never venture onto the road and Richard could take her anywhere without a lead. Cecelia wasn’t brilliant, by any means, but “stay”, “heel”, “sit”, “leave” and “back” were the five absolute words of her vocabulary—they were as deeply ingrained in her as DNA. There was almost no situation that a single word wouldn’t control her. For all of the Lab’s life, Richard had walked her and controlled her with his voice.

The three of them turned down Spring Street, walking past St. Andrew’s parish house and chapel—the Roman Catholic Church on the Island that had another building in the town for packed summer masses and the weddings that contributed so mightily to Block Island’s economy. Then they passed a wondrous house called “Seal Rest”, above the rocks and the North Atlantic where seals were legendarily supposed to sun. In all his time on the Block, Richard had never seen a seal, not once, but the year round residents swore they were plentiful.

The road dipped down past St. Andrew’s and Seal Rest and the island curved slightly to take in a bay of ocean some 80 feet beneath Spring Street. There was a rock jetty in that bay where teens sometimes sought Rhode Island tans and fishers often stood. The jetty pushed out into the water for 25 yards. Richard had many times marked it off at low tide with long strides—25 of them—until he stood at the end, looking toward the mainland…Port Judith and beyond.

They’d walked in companionable silence—Miriam and her father and his dog—for ten minutes or so, until they were almost even with the jetty but high above it, separated from the rocky beach by even larger rocks that formed a formidable and steep decline from Spring Street to the water. One of the things both Richard and Susan had learned from living in New England was that there were always rocks.

Susan grew up outside of Greenville, North Carolina, where the land was red clay and damp, even in the height of summer. Roanoke, Virginia, where Richard had lived as a child and adolescent, had rich, black dirt beneath the grass—like Charlottesville, where he and Susan had met at, of all things, a dinner for Episcopal students given by Father Roberts when Richard was a senior and Susan a sophomore. But in Connecticut and all the other New England states—and especially Block Island—rocks were everywhere. Something to do with the last Ice Age, Richard vaguely knew, a frigid time where the glaciers and ice stopped short of southwestern Virginia and North Carolina, so long ago it numbed the mind to imagine it.

Rocks were not part of his childhood, but they had formed his children, New Englanders all. And a single fisher was on the jetty, casting awkwardly into the surf, standing on Ice Age rocks. Cecelia started barking and poked her head beneath the metal barrier to the rock ledge and the beach below. It was unlike her to bark, being, as some rare labs were, almost silent. But she was interested in the lone fisherman and seemed ready to roll down the hill to get to him.

“Funny hat,” Miriam said, the first words spoken since they left the house.

Richard knew she meant the fisherman’s hat. It was soft and wide brimmed, like something from New Zealand or the defunct Peterman catalog. Besides the misplaced hat, the fisherman wore a bright yellow jacket—not unlike the one the police had found that the murderer wore—and knee boots over what appeared to be dress pants. It was a most unlikely outfit for a fisherman.

Richard’s words did not work on Cecelia, so he finally had to wrap his hand around her collar and pull her away, up the hill in front of the Spring House, out of sight of the man fishing on the jetty.

Several red-winged black birds swirled around their heads as they climbed the grade and walked on the newly repaired sidewalk past bed and breakfast homes, the White House, and a hotel or two. The walk was down hill now, past the artists gallery and down into town.

They’d now walked for half-an-hour, and in the last five minutes or so, Richard had been telling his daughter the details of the past two day—Dante figured large in his story, that included “Flash” Gordon, FBI agent, two dead people and, of course, Mara.

Miriam looked up at her father. “I haven’t heard you so excited….” She began, suddenly stopping on a precipice they both knew well. Her face clouded over as she turned away and dropped into silence.

After a dozen steps or so, Richard completed her thought: “since Susan died….”

Head down, watching her feet, she echoed softly, “since mother died….”

After they crossed the side street and reached the long, unbroken block of storefronts, restaurants and hotels facing Old Harbor, she smiled at him, her eyes brimming. “Having that back in you is like having a little bit of her back too….”

“I know”, he said, wrapping her in his arm as he would wrap her in a blanket, “me too. My being dead inside so long has been like killing her all over again. The only way she can live in me is if I’m really alive.”

They walked like that past a scattering of day-trippers. It occurred to Richard to wonder if the people they passed could tell they were father and daughter or if they thought of them as a December-May couple. Miriam looked so little like him that he suspected the men they passed glanced with envy at this nearing 60 man and his not yet 30 girl-friend. That thought amused him and, just more, made him think how Mara was much closer to his daughter’s age than to his. He thought several different things about that all at once—how crazy he was to be attracted to Mara, how brittle he was about himself and his feeling, how lovely and graceful the detective appeared to him. Richard had always been a man who could look at something a dozen different ways. He was never know for being decisive, in fact, many of his friends and colleagues and parishioners had rolled their eyes over the years at how frustratingly circumspect he was—never quite sure or definite in his opinions. He got so lost in his rolling thoughts that Miriam, still wrapped in his arm, pulled on his sleeve.

“Slow down, Daddy,” she said. He hadn’t realized he was walking so fast.

“It’s going to still take some time, Princess,” he told her, lifting away the blanket of his arm, slowing his thoughts and stride, “but I’m coming back to you.”

“Maybe something bitter can make for sweetness,” she replied in a gentle tone, almost as if she didn’t expect him to hear or, if he heard, to respond.

“What?” he said, coming to a stop, thinking she couldn’t possibly mean what she said the way he heard it.

“You know, Daddy,” she smiled at him, “bitter, Mara….”

He shook his head. “How do you know that?”

She laughed her munchkin laugh, throaty and too low pitched for such a little woman. “Good Lord, Daddy, I grew up in church! I know all sorts of thing. I know about epistemology and ontology the doctrine of the atonement and what the epiclesis is….”

Right in front of the Block Dog Store, Richard embraced his daughter and they both shook with laughter. He didn’t wonder, not for a moment, what people passing thought. All he experienced was the feeling—almost forgotten but rising past the dark, odd shapes in his subconscious—of joy. Whether he realized it or not, he was “coming home” to joy.

The two of them, with Cecelia waiting patiently outside, had coffee and deli sandwiches in a coffee house squeezed between an overpriced J. Crew store and a small art gallery and divided up the New York Times—Richard the front page and sports, Miriam got the rest. The argued for a bit about some movie neither of them had seen and about an op-ed piece Richard read to her about the Middle East. No matter how left-wing Richard was, Miriam would outdo him. Arguing with Miriam was a pleasure he had almost forgotten.

The walk back was more uphill and took longer. Miriam used the time to say, “so here’s what Jonah and Jeremy want, Daddy…and me, too, though it was their idea…we’re all going to have Christmas in St. Louis.”

Richard was shocked. “Not at home?”

She walked on for a few moments then stopped and put herself in his way. Staring up into his face, she said, “Worthington isn’t home now. And even if we all came here, this isn’t home. You don’t have to answer now but that’s where we’ll be and we want you there too. New start. New traditions.”

“Princess…,” he began.

“Enough talk,” she said, turning and double-timing ahead of him.

Richard sighed. All the possible arguments that were lining up in his mind melted away. Christmas in the mid-west, he was horrified at the thought. He hurried to catch up.

The fisherman who had been on the jetty was gone, though the red-winged black birds weren’t. Cecelia whined and pushed her head under the barrier several times while they passed the little cove with the fishing jetty. Richard wasn’t used to his dog acting that way and spoke harshly to her. Miriam chastised him for his uncharacteristic mistreatment of the dog.

“She’s just doing what dog’s do, Daddy. And you’re mad at me, not her.”

He felt himself blushing. Of course she was right. One of the mantras that Richard and Susan had filled their children’s lives with was much like that. When one of the endless stream of cats Miriam had grown up with left an offering of a bird or mole or even a baby rabbit on the porch, one of her parents would say, “Sammie” (or Blackie or Abby—all the cats of the multitude of cats had names that ended in an e sound) “is just doing what cats do, darlin’.”

Richard even remembered the conversations he’d had with each of his children about what was “wired into” various creatures, like the way certain things were wired into cars and computers and washing machines to make them do what they do. Even human beings have such “wiring”, he had told them all, wiring about survival and safety and reproduction. “But the difference is,” he always told them, “dogs and cats and eagles and dolphins cannot disobey their wiring, but people can.”

Richard, in the last five minutes of his walk with his daughter back to St. Anne’s, considered how his reaction to Cecelia’s “being a dog” was, finally, more about the thoughts and feelings he’d been having about Sgt. Mara Coles for the last two days. His chastisement of his dog was, most likely, misplaced and should have been directed toward himself. He was, he thought, just “being a man”—experiencing feelings and thoughts on a basic human level and not disobeying his wiring. He made a mental note to be gentler with himself—and with his dog and everyone.

As they turned off Spring Street onto the dirt road where the SUV and the dead people had been, Richard asked, “so if I’m mad at Cecelia for being a dog, as if she could be anything else, what does that make me?”

Miriam grinned at him. “Fish sticks,” she said. It was then that Richard remembered how in his household, among his children, fish sticks were the worse thing ever for dinner, the worse thing in the world, the bottom of the barrel, the dregs in the cup, the lowest of the low. So he smiled back and understood.

In the midst of all that, Miriam and Richard and Cecelia arrived back at St. Anne’s to a house and church dutifully and conscientiously searched by Federal Agents. Stevenson had left and Mara was sitting on the deck with the fisherman they had seen. He was smoking a European cigarette.

“Dante!” Richard almost shouted, “what the hell….”

The detective took off his misplaced hat and took a drag on his smoke. Cecelia ran to him and began to sniff him and whine. As always, Dante ignored the dog.

“I’m like Flash Gordon,” he said, flicking his cigarette far out into the yard, sending Cecelia dashing after it in true retriever fashion, “I’m not here.”

“Dante’s in Cancun,” Mara said, smiling.

The detective stood, lighting another cigarette, “Among the bronzed and rich,” he said, “or at least my brother is….”

The story flowed quickly, effortlessly, from both Dante and Mara. Dante’s brother, Leo, was four years older but could pass in customs for his baby brother. With Dante’s passport and Dante’s credit card, Leo had left the country for Mexico and Dante had bought bad fisherman’s gear and come on the noon ferry.

“So much for Homeland Security,” Richard said.

“So much for Dante’s bank account,” Mara added, laughing.

“Leo knows how to spend money,” Dante contributed, just before Miriam, who’d been standing in the grass, watching and listening, came up the steps, crossed to Dante, took his cigarette from his mouth and had a long draw. Then she hugged him, driving him, for the first time since Richard had known him—two days, more or less—into stunned silence.

“A real detective,” Miriam said in mid-embrace.

Mara and Richard were smiling in disbelief.

“What does that make me?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Richard answered, almost giggling at Dante’s discomfort, “fish sticks?”

Mara glared at him. “Too hard to explain,” he told her. She shook her head and smiled a bit, so glad to have Dante back.

****

The four of them spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening plotting and planning and inventing schemes. They were a detective on vacation, a detective who wasn’t there—was in Cancun, in fact—a priest and a school teacher…not an impressive corps to take on a murder investigation. And yet they would.

It looked like this: “How long can you stay, Miriam, my love? Because you are a real god-send…an off-islander who people know and don’t fear because you’ve been coming here so long? How long can you stay?”

“Until Sunday?” Miriam said, shrugging.

Dante had obviously been thinking this out. “Exemplary!” he said. “You and the lovely Mara will scour the island, asking questions that people will only answer to a familiar face and two beautiful women….Execllent.”

He turned his gaze to Richard. “You, Father Lucas, will have this job, the one I’ve always known you had—you must pray and worship and whatever a man of the cloth does until you remember what you can’t remember that will break this case wide open.”

“I still don’t know what that means,” Richard began, looking first at Miriam who was entranced with Dante and did not look back and then to Mara who laughed and shook her head.

“This is Dante’s motis operandi,” she said. “he always decides someone on the edge of the case knows something they don’t remember knowing that will make every thing turn out right in the end—bad guys caught and punished, good guys happy and redeemed. Just the way he plays it and he most always plays it right….”

Dante nodded in agreement.

“And what are you going to do to aid this investigation?” Richard asked him, a little annoyed.

“Me,” Dante answered, innocently, “I’m going fishing….”

What he meant was that he was going to spend his days as Leo Caggiano (whose driver’s license and passport he held) amateur fisherman, asking anyone who would listen and even those who wouldn’t, things about fishing the sea around Block Island, gathering information, acting dumb, soaking up answers.

“And all the alphabet soup guys besides Homeland Security have been warned off this case,” he told them all, even the dog sitting attentively at his knee. “So the only people here besides us don’t know shit about all this and we will know it all—especially you, Padre, when you remember what you don’t even know you know….”

Dante was grinning like a crazy man, watching Richard intently, waiting for something.

“Ok,” Richard said, finally, “the bar at St. Ann’s is open.”

Dante laughed, “you are a detective,” is all he said, heading toward the door and the kitchen stash of alcohol.

***

The four of them—a motley crew at best—had a hardy meal from the casseroles and salads and sandwiches the Block Island folk had brought to Richard in his distress. And they drank a great deal of the wine folks had brought as well.

By the time dinner was over, it was growing dark and chilly. Miriam invited Dante to go for a ride down to Mansion Beach to look at the stars. The unlikely pair sat off in Richard’s car with the dog in the backseat and the priest and detective sergeant were left alone. They watched TV for a while, neither paying attention, then sat on the deck to watch the darkness.

Finally, as much to break the tension of their aloneness as to gather information, Richard asked, “what was the search of the church like? Did they find damning evidence?”

Mara smiled. “Hardly,” she said. “The only exciting moment was when they found this big silver box under the sink in the little room….”

“The sacristy,” Richard prompted.

“Right. The sacristy,” she repeated. Mutt and Jeff got all excited until Stevenson produced a key from somewhere and opened it.”

“The memorial porcelain communion set,” Richard suggested.

“Right again, Father Detective.” She said, smiling. Her smile made Richard’s knees weak. He was glad they were sitting at the kitchen table. “Your noble friend Stevenson launched into the story of why they were there. It was terribly moving. The Homeland Security guys and I were on the verge of tears.”

“It’s a memorial to his wife…his ‘beloved’ Cynthia…who died in a boating accident off of Old Harbor in 1994.” And before he knew it, Richard continued by saying, “the loss of a spouse is a terrible thing, a wound that doesn’t soon scar over….” He paused, realizing he was talking about himself, not Stevenson.

When he suddenly stopped, Mara said softly, “I know the history, Richard. I know….”

After a deep breath, Richard told her that shortly after Cynthia’s death Stevenson had donated a remarkably valuable plate and cup from his collection of porcelains to be used on Easter and Christmas at St. Anne’s Eucharists.

“They must be very valuable,” she said. “When I saw them I wished Dante had been there. He would have coveted them on the spot. He said Stevenson’s porcelains were museum quality. He would have loved seeing those two pieces.”

Richard crinkled his brow. “They were there—the cup and the plate were in the box?” he asked.

Mara nodded. “Why?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.” He pursed his lips. “I’ve never seen them, never been here at Easter or Christmas. I just imagined because they were so valuable that Stevenson brought them in a day or two before each service. The church is open….”

“All the time…,” Mara finished.

He nodded.

“I guess I was wrong.” Something nagged at him on the edge of his consciousness.

She smiled, “I guess you were,” she said stifling a yawn. “I need to get to the White House and sleep. You need rest too.”

“Too bad for me,” he replied. I’m preaching Sunday. I need to read the lessons.”

“I never thought of that.” She stood up. “Tomorrow, then?”

“Tomorrow,” he said, realizing in some important way that he was sorry to see her leave.

He was still studying the lessons for Sunday when he heard Miriam come in with the dog. She banged around in the kitchen for a while and then it was quiet. Cecelia found Richard in his room and leaped on the bed, exhausted and damp.

“Need anything, Princess?” he called out.

“Nothing, daddy. Good night.”

He knew without seeing that she was watching the TV in the living room with the volume on mute.