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Phil Knight came outside with him and pointed him up Notre Dame Avenue. Swithins had little choice but to set off. When he got to his car he looked back. Knight was nowhere in evidence, so Swithins headed west along a campus walk in the direction of what remained of the old golf course.

When he came to the road that ran along the golf course fence, he continued toward Rockne Memorial. There was an old guy on the practice putting green and Swithins stopped to watch him. Hunched over his ball, the man seemed aware of his presence. He turned and glared at Swithins.

“What can I do for you?”

“Teach me how to golf, I'll bet.”

Unexpectedly, the man smiled. “What class were you in?”

“Nineteen eighty-two.” This was the year Swithins had graduated from high school in Syracuse.

“I'm not good at names.”

“Swithins. Cal Swithins.”

“I'm Dennis Grantley, of course.” He held out his hand.

“Of course.”

“What brings you back?”

For answer, Swithins opened his arms and looked around. Grantley nodded as if he understood.

“This the first time you've seen what they've done to this golf course?”

“When did it happen?”

Grantley led him to a bench and sat down with a grunt. He had used his putter as a cane and now began hitting his right shoe with the club head. “It's a sad story.”

But one he seemed happy enough to tell. Swithins listened patiently to this tale of woe. Finally, Grantley was done.

“Terrible what happened to Mortimer Sadler.”

“Did you know him?”

Swithins shrugged.

“You said '82. He was before your time.”

“The name is familiar.”

“I'll tell you why. See that ugly building over there? That is the Mortimer Sadler Residence Hall.”

“He must have done well.”

“A helluva lot of difference it makes now. What do you do?”

“I write. I'm a reporter.” He looked thoughtful. “I would like to write up what you've told me about the golf course.”

“Who would print it?”

“
The Notre Dame Magazine
?”

“Ha.”

“I heard that Sadler was poisoned.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“At the Morris Inn.”

“So that's where you're staying. You ought to write up Sadler's death.”

“That is a very good idea. Did you know him well?”

“I suppose not much better than I knew you. But he came back often. And, of course, he donated that building. But you will probably want to concentrate on what happened this morning.”

Swithins got out a notebook and brought the tip of his pencil to his tongue. Over the next hour, he scribbled down everything Grantley told him and then they went across the road to the maintenance shed, where a man named Swannie added his two cents. Grantley left him there in Swannie's office, but nothing Swithins heard added much to what he already had. By now he was anxious to get downtown.

Half an hour later, he was in the city room. The sight of it brought an unexpected lump to his throat. Raskow was not there but Mendax, the city editor, was in his glassed-in office, mixing something milky in a glass. He looked out at Swithins and his expression was not welcoming. Swithins opened the door and went in.

“Shut that damned door.”

Swithins shut the damned door. “I want your go-ahead on a story.”

“You were fired.”

“Mistakes are made.”

“What was yours?”

“That isn't what I meant. Look, Lyman, I'm on to something big. There has been a murder on the Notre Dame campus—”

But Mendax held up his hand. “Stop right there. You ought to know that this paper is not going to put the university in a bad light.”

“The university didn't murder him.”

“Stop using that word.”

“It's the only word that fits.”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Raskow has already written a story on Sadler's falling dead on the golf course.”

“Raskow hasn't been on campus. I have. I've interviewed people, I have all the facts.”

But Mendax just kept shaking his head. “Stick with obits, Swithins.”

So he knew about that. But Mendax had become the editorial equivalent of a stone wall. Swithins felt beaten.

“I'll write the death notice,” he said.

“Good. But don't use incendiary language.”

Swithins went into the city room and sat at a computer. He felt like crying. But by God, this was his big chance. He would write this story if he had to place it in
The Shopper.
He got up and stormed out of the city room. No one noticed him leave.

13

In his room at Holy Cross House, Father Carmody put down his breviary and asked Dennis Grantley if he would like something.

“Like what?”

“A beer?”

“If that is the best you can do.”

Thus induced, Father Carmody got out a bottle of Powers and poured a niggardly ounce for his less-than-welcome guest.

“So you have been wandering about the world like the devil in Job.”

Grantley sipped his whiskey and ignored the remark. Once Carmody had been a golfer, but he had quit the game when he despaired of eventually shooting his age. Once on the course, nothing was more pleasant, but it became increasingly difficult to waste from three to five hours or more establishing the fact that his game was not what it had been. Grantley was an old friend, of sorts, a man who had been about the campus almost as long as the old priest, but he was an uncomfortable reminder of the passage of time. Father Carmody had moved to Holy Cross House from Corby, the clerical residence on campus, without complaint, refusing to see it for what it was, the last station on the journey of life. Others in the house were in various stages of their final illness. Once a week there was a melancholy row of wheelchairs filled with those awaiting a haircut, once-mighty figures reduced by strokes or worse to drooling oldsters submissive to whatever they were wheeled to endure.

Carmody himself remained hale and hearty. He might have stayed on campus, but even the seniors there had seemed young whelps to him, and he preferred the autonomy of Holy Cross. He could get around by golf cart or drive when he chose to leave the campus. His room here was much as his room had been wherever he had lived on campus, and he had dwelt in a succession of buildings—first in the Main Building, when residence there was not unusual, then moving on to a hall where he had been rector before he would have been ignominiously removed from under the Golden Dome in the Main Building. In his mind's eye, his present quarters were simply his present quarters; such intimations of mortality as came to him were applicable to others rather than himself. His grandfather had lived to a hundred and both his parents were gaga in their nineties when God called them to Himself. His own mind was clear, his energy somewhat diminished but, with judicious napping, adequate, his physical examinations productive of unwelcome praise from physicians, as if his health were some accomplishment, a product of his will. Father Carmody recognized a grace when he received one.

The most difficult task of all is growing old. This was a truth he had come to see as much in the breach as in the observance. Grantley had not grown old gracefully. He repined. He groused. He resented. And he lapped up Powers as if it were water. Carmody replenished his glass, his own scarcely touched. Temperance was an easy virtue.

“You heard about Sadler?”

“Which one?”

“Mortimer. They found him dead on the sixth green of Burke this morning.”

Of course Carmody had heard it all, but there was a mordant pleasure in allowing Grantley to tell the story as if it were news.

“Poison,” Grantley said, smacking his lips. “The poor wretch must have taken his own life.”

“Never presume that, Dennis. The police do not.”

“How do you know?”

Father Carmody made an impatient wave of his hand. “The question is, who would have wanted to kill the man?”

“I could make a list.”

“Come now.”

“You remember him as an undergraduate, I am sure. In the early seventies. Mad as a hornet about the fact that women had been admitted to Notre Dame.”

“That was long ago.”

“Barley is my favorite suspect.”

“Barley!”

“They shared a quad in St. Edward's.”

“Two in a quad?”

“Oh, there were four of them. But Barley had the strongest motive.”

“What an odd fellow you are, Grantley.”

“He is here for the reunion Sadler defiantly initiated as a thumb in the eye of the alumni association. They were to be a foursome at Warren, the four old roommates. They whooped it up in the Morris Inn last night and early this morning Sadler crept out on Burke for some practice holes. That is why he was found there.”

“He was playing alone?”

“What killed him was in his water bottle.”

Philip Knight had already reported this to Carmody by telephone. “What does belladonna suggest to you, Father?” he'd asked.

“I am a celibate.”

“She is a poison.”

“What a chauvinist you are.”

“Roger tells me that chauvinist has something to do with baldness. My hair is still thick.”

“You mean that Mortimer Sadler was poisoned?”

“That was the first result of the police investigation.”

This was dire news. High on Father Carmody's list of priorities was that only good should be spoken of Notre Dame, and if evil occurred it was to be discreetly muffled if not entirely silenced.

“Have the media been told?”

“It's hardly a secret.”

The media! The plural of
medium,
a medium being one who conducted séances and invoked the powers of evil to wreak havoc in the world. Only such a profession would have accepted such a designation. Father Carmody, of course, exempted the alumni who had done well in journalism.

“What are you going to do?” Grantley asked now, studying his empty glass. Father Carmody had capped the Powers after pouring Grantley a second tot and was indisposed to open it anew.

“What do you mean?”

“We can't have a scandal.”

Grantley's remark reminded him of his feeling of impotence when Phil Knight had passed on the news. He had asked Roger Knight's brother to represent the university in the matter, the better to prevent public attention. But it would have been delinquent of the local constabulary to treat a murder on campus as if it were a secret.

“This would have been unthinkable once,” Grantley said.

Carmody said nothing. A local woman had compiled an unpublished manuscript on the strange and unsolved deaths on the Notre Dame campus. Any acreage in the world chosen at random might deliver up similar mysteries. Was Grantley really unaware of the precedents? More likely his remark was simply another instance of his resolve to treat the present as a betrayal of the past.

“The more quickly it is solved the better.”

“The murderer found?”

“I thought you suspected suicide.”

“It was my first thought. But that is so horrible to contemplate.”

Grantley's tone indicated that he would have welcomed an exchange on the inscrutable ways of Providence, the folly of men, the mercy of God, and allied subjects. The fact was that the man annoyed Father Carmody, all the more because of his manifest assumption that they were in the same boat. Grantley considered his own years at Notre Dame to be a record of unjust treatment and feeble loyalty to one who had given his life to the university. He had a case of sorts, but what was the point of making it again and again? If it came from another it might elicit more sympathy, but no one can plead his own case without weakening it. Besides, Carmody did not see his own life as one of failure. There are seasons in human life and he accepted the one in which he now found himself.

“You must pray for him, Dennis.”

“That is difficult. I knew him.”

“All the more meritorious.”

Grantley held his glass to the light as if to verify its emptiness. Carmody did not take the hint. He stood.

“You better get to your bed, Dennis.”

“It isn't nine o'clock.”

“That is the witching hour here.”

“I don't know how you can stand this place.”

“There were no empty rooms in the firehouse.”

That was mean, and in repayment Father Carmody accompanied Grantley to the front entrance and through the sliding doors into the summer night.

“Don't tell me you walked.”

“They make me park my car off campus now.”

“You should get a bicycle.”

Another mean remark. Grantley's artifical knees would have made biking painful. Father Carmody patted his visitor on the back and sent him shuffling into the night. Back in his room he offered up a prayer in reparation for his lack of sympathy with Dennis Grantley. And for the repose of the soul of Mortimer Sadler.

14

The archives of the university of Notre Dame are located on the sixth floor of the Hesburgh Library. When the library was opened in 1963 it was vaguely called the Memorial Library, and donors of various degrees and dimensions were commemorated on plaques throughout the building. The first archivist, Father McEvoy, a distinguished if curmudgeonly historian, died at his post and was found one Monday morning at his desk. Eventually, the name of the library was changed to honor Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, the legendary president of the university who had retired, after decades in office, into an aerie on the thirteenth floor along with his long-time associate, Edmund Joyce, ostensibly to enjoy such years of leisure as might be left them. In any event, Hesburgh's career had accelerated in his supposed retirement, and while he studiously attempted to keep in the background his successors were faced with the formidably eclipsing fact of his presence.