Ghost Dance (8 page)

So Gallagher came up with an alternate plan. He would research both.

Gallagher drained his coffee cup, paid the waitress, then exited the diner onto Lawton’s Main Street. As he prepared to enter the crosswalk toward the village green, Chief Mike Kerris’ dark blue Chevy Suburban pulled up and blocked his path. Deputy Gavrilis sat in the passenger seat, his straight-cut bangs making it appear as if a bowl had been the template for his haircut. Kerris sucked his lollipop and pressed his sunglasses back up the bridge of his nose as the electric window rolled down.

‘Still around, Mr Gallagher?’ Kerris said in a mocking tone. ‘I figured finding a body in the Bluekill might have spoiled your taste for the local fishing holes.’

‘I’m not here just to fish,’ Gallagher said. ‘Like I said the other day, I’m researching a film on Father D’Angelo.’

‘That is what you said, isn’t it?’ Kerris replied. Then he folded his right hand into a gun shape and pointed the barrel at Gallagher. ‘I saw that note, Pat,’ Kerris said. ‘I’m watching you. Everyone who counts in Lawton is watching you.’

The tires screeched as he pulled away. Five years before, Gallagher spent a great deal of time in Tokyo putting together a film on the intertwining of the martial arts, religion and Japanese culture. Most of his time was spent in an aikido dojo. The sensei there taught a particularly vicious joint-lock technique called
kote gaeshi,
the purpose of which was to bend your attacker’s wrist until he either submitted or experienced the spiral snapping of three bones in the lower arm and hand.

Right then Gallagher had the overwhelming desire to perform the move on Chief Kerris.

It was nearly ten o’clock by the time Gallagher crossed the green and walked three blocks east to where Newton Street met Whelton Lane. St Edward’s Catholic Church was a white clapboard affair with a single steeple rising amid hundred-year-old maples whose branches were tinged with the first red buds of spring. The adjoining rectory was stone-faced and in desperate need of repointing. There was a high brick wall around a garden to the rear. Rising above the walls, like a constant shadow on the town, was Lawton Mountain. Up there the trees stood bare and pewter-colored, offering no hope yet that they might soon embrace spring.

He opened the iron gate, mounted the front porch and knocked. Being the pushy type, Gallagher did not wait for a response, but twisted the doorknob and entered immediately. The rectory’s interior was all dark wood and rich red Oriental carpets. The walls of the narrow hallway off the foyer were flush with paintings and photographs of the various priests who had served Lawton’s Catholic community.

One in particular cried out for attention—an oil portrait of a cranelike priest with a pained expression plastered across his lips. He was bald but for a fringe of white hair around his pate. He stood with his hands clasped around a Bible in a garden containing an ornate birdbath in the center of which were three small stone horses.

Just then a woman poked her head out of a room to his right.

‘I thought I heard a knock but I was chitchatting on the phone,’ bubbled Libby Curtin, the parish secretary. She was in her mid-twenties with a chestnut braid that reached her waist. A simple wooden cross dangled from her neck over a maroon tunic whose neckline was embroidered with daisies. She wore granny-style glasses, baggy, blue drawstring pants and Birkenstock sandals with rag wool socks.

‘You’re the moviemaker, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘You’re going to do a film on Father D’Angelo?’

‘Something like that.’

‘The Lord be praised!’ she cried, clapping her hands and bending over at the waist, all the while beaming. Then she glanced up at the painting and her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Isn’t it the pits about Father D’Angelo?’

‘The pits?’

She gestured at a hole in the painting the size of a tea bag on the priest’s left hip.

‘We had a burglar back a couple of months and he knocked the portrait off the hook,’ she explained in a low, conspiratorial voice that made Gallagher want to smile. ‘Monsignor McColl went totally ape, let me tell you. A burglar in the rectory! Monsignor McColl has his bouts of irritation, but I’ve never seen him so ticked.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘I’ll tell him you’re here.’

Libby Curtin hurried down the hall toward an imposing set of carved double doors, knocked, men disappeared inside. Gallagher looked up at the painting, half wondering whether D’Angelo’s story would be compelling enough to serve as one of the narrative vehicles of an hour-long documentary. The other part of him wondered whether D’Angelo’s story would be compelling enough to make him stop thinking about Potter, Nightingale and a killer who thought of himself as Charun. Gallagher took a notebook from the pocket of his oilskin jacket and grudgingly made a note that with the right lighting, the painting, even damaged, would make a dramatic image on film.

The carved doors opened. Libby Curtin poked her head out and waved him in.

Gallagher sidled through the door into the room and stopped short. Monsignor Timothy McColl dwarfed the heavy oak desk he stood behind. He was a grizzly bear of a man in his late forties, six feet six inches tall, with a broom of mahogany hair, a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard and a florid bull neck that threatened to pop his clerical collar. He wore his black sleeves rolled to the elbows to reveal the kind of forearms and hands you’d expect of an aging stonemason, not a priest.

Monsignor McColl’s massive paw literally swallowed Gallagher’s. He squeezed just enough to let Gallagher know that his physical power was real, then released and sank back into his tufted swivel chair. The priest grimaced as he gestured Gallagher toward a Gothic-style seat in front of the desk. He rubbed his belly sourly. ‘Excuse me a second, will you?’ he asked. ‘My stomach’s been acting up lately.’

Monsignor McColl went into a small bathroom and shut the door.

Gallagher took a quick inventory of the artifacts in the office for clues to the priest’s personality. Behind the desk were several wooden file cabinets and the obligatory crucifix. Off to the right hung three photographs. In one, the monsignor stood emotionless before a whitewashed church amid palm trees surrounded by somber children in white uniforms. In an older, black-and-white photograph, a much younger McColl stood in the snow with a group of equally solemn young boys in front of an aging brick building. One of the boys, a gangly towheaded kid with a remote expression on his face, strangely reminded Gallagher of himself as a child. In the third photograph, McColl sat atop a mountain peak wearing glacier sunglasses and a backpack laden down with ropes and climbing equipment. Beside the photographs, mounted on wooden pegs were several brightly painted baskets, a bolo knife in a sheath decorated with ornate and brightly colored beadwork and a necklace made of bleached shells. The office was bathed in soft light from a leaded-glass window overlooking the garden. A hermit thrush splashed in a birdbath at the center of which stood three tiny stone horses. The same birdbath depicted in the damaged painting in the hallway.

‘Sorry to make you wait,’ Monsignor McColl rumbled as he emerged from the bathroom. ‘So, Mr Gallagher, are you Catholic or lapsed?’

‘Neither,’ he replied. ‘I’m an atheist.’

The priest’s right eyebrow arched. ‘I thought Mrs. Curtin said you were interested in Father D’Angelo.’

‘I am.’

‘Why would an atheist be interested in a priest?’

Gallagher explained his background and gave McColl examples of his other film projects.

‘You make films about religion and yet you’re not a believer?’ Monsignor McColl said.

Gallagher dodged that question by telling him how Jerry Matthews and he had become interested in Father D’Angelo and the process of canonization during a trip to China two years ago, when they had learned about the recent elevation to sainthood of a priest who’d been a missionary there in the 1840s.

‘John Gabriel Perboyre,’ the priest grunted in recognition. ‘Tortured, hung off a beam and strangled by the emperor’s soldiers during a persecution. I spent eight years as a missionary myself. Yucatan Peninsula. All missionaries know about Father Perboyre.’

Gallagher nodded, then explained his wish to use Perboyre’s story and others to explain the Catholic tradition of sainthood to a lay audience. Jerry had found a brief mention of Father D’Angelo in a Catholic News Service story about canonization. Gallagher had decided to come to Lawton to fly-fish and do the basic research for the film.

Monsignor McColl came up alert when he mentioned he was in Lawton to fly-fish. ‘Are you the one who found Hank Potter?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll say his funeral mass Wednesday morning,’ the priest said. He toyed with his beard and watched Gallagher. ‘What are the police telling you?’

‘Not much,’ Gallagher lied. ‘I was just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

The monsignor drummed his fingers on the desktop and stared off at the birdbath in the garden for several moments. He cleared his throat. ‘As far as a film about Father D’Angelo is concerned, come back in twenty years. Takes a long time to make a saint.’

Gallagher shifted in his seat, realizing he was in for a fight. ‘I don’t have twenty years and, besides, we are interested in Father D’Angelo precisely because his cause is in the early stages of consideration.’

‘I’m sure there are others who would better fit your needs,’ McColl said.

‘I get the feeling you don’t hold much hope for his cause.’

Tiny blue lines popped out along the priest’s temples and he gave Gallagher a stiff look. ‘I’ve made it my life’s work to see that Father D’Angelo becomes a saint and I won’t have a damned atheist poking—’

‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ Gallagher interrupted. ‘My personal beliefs or lack of them is beside the point.’

‘Are they, now?’

‘I’m objective and fair when I portray a subject. I can give you references.’

McColl made a popping sound with his lips, then shook his head. ‘It’s too early for an outsider to be rooting around, damaging Father’s cause.’

‘Something you know that I shouldn’t?’

McColl’s already ruddy face turned beet-red. ‘Absolutely not! It’s just that promoting a case for sainthood is a delicate effort. I won’t botch it for the sake of yellow journalism.’

‘Yellow journalism!’ Gallagher yelled before realizing the interview was out of control. He took a moment to calm himself, then spoke lower and slower. ‘Look, Monsignor McColl, as I understand it, politics play a big part of the canonization process. If you’re so sure of Father D’Angelo’s worthiness, I only see an upside to making his case alongside established saints such as Father Perboyre.’

McColl did not reply. He was watching his monstrous hand flex and twist around some unseen object. Gallagher went for broke. ‘You know, I’m good at this kind of thing. I’ll get the story one way or another. I always do. But I’d much rather work with you. You know the man already. You can point me in the right direction.’

The priest swiveled in the chair, pressing the pads of his thick fingers together and looking out the garden window. He stayed that way for almost a minute, with his lips flapping, making those gentle popping noises. Gallagher was about to get up to leave when McColl rumbled, ‘If I get the sense you’re not serving Father D’Angelo’s cause, I’ll withdraw my help. Understand?’

A
T THE SAME TIME
, in an aging yellow farmhouse at the bottom of the south flank of Lawton Mountain, Olga Dawson’s little body heaved with sobs.

Nightingale held the old woman tight to her chest. She rubbed the back of her blue cardigan and hushed her as she might a child. Until at last Olga’s cries slowed and stopped. Nightingale gazed down at the frightened woman in her arms. Her throat constricted.

Olga Dawson had once been blessed with the ebony eyes, porcelain skin and ruby lips that haunt old black-and-white films. Nightingale’s late mother, Grace, always said Olga’s face was that of a star’s.

Now Olga was seventy-eight and still strong enough to feed a woodstove all winter. But lines like the filigreed branch of the red oak outside her kitchen window etched her mottled skin. Her cheeks twitched, a constant reminder of the strokes she’d suffered the past year and a half.

‘I’m sorry, dear,’ Olga said, sitting up on the couch and daubing at her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

A white Himalayan cat strode into the room. Olga reached absently for it. The cat hissed and arched its back. The old woman jerked backward and scolded. ‘Tess, you bad, bad girl!’

Nightingale made a clucking noise with her tongue. The cat curled on itself, leaped into her lap and purred contentedly. The onerous stray had shown up at Olga’s door two years ago. Tess barely tolerated Olga, but loved Nightingale.

Olga complained: ‘I wanted to get milk for the little fuss-budget this morning, but I kept coming out of the refrigerator with the juice. I knew what I was doing, but I couldn’t get my hands to follow what my brain wanted!’

Her eyes watered. ‘I’m becoming a burden to you, Andie! It’s not right for a young woman to be taking care of an old crone like me. You should be out with a handsome young man.’

Nightingale tensed for a moment, then said, ‘I’m ruined for handsome young men, I’m afraid.’

‘You can’t let the past influence the present,’ Olga told her.

‘It’s impossible not to,’ Nightingale said wistfully before putting the cat down and turning Olga around. She picked up a mother-of-pearl brush and began to work on Olga’s long silver hair. ‘And you’re no burden and you’re no crone. You’re the closest I have to family now. Think of where you were a year ago.’

‘I was in the hospital a year ago,’ the old woman said sullenly.

‘And look how far you’ve come. If you continue therapy, you’ll only get better.’

The old woman pounced on that thread of hope. ‘Will I?’

‘Of course,’ Nightingale said, finishing the braid.

Olga was silent, then jumped up. ‘I almost forgot. I baked you a pie.’

Over the years, Olga had won a half-dozen blue ribbons for her pies at the state fair. But Nightingale had a report to write on Hank Potter’s early-morning autopsy and the meeting afterward. ‘Honey, I don’t have time.’