The Book of Kills
Authors: Ralph McInerny
THE
BOOK
OF KILLS
ALSO BY RALPH MCINERNY
MYSTERIES SET AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
On This Rockne
Lack of the Irish
Irish Tenure
FATHER DOWLING MYSTERY SERIES
Her Death of Cold
The Seventh Station
Bishop as Pawn
Lying Three
Second Vespers
Thicker Than Water
A Loss of Patients
The Grass Widow
Getting a Way with Murder
Rest in Pieces
The Basket Case
Abracadaver
Four on the Floor
Judas Priest
Desert Sinner
Seed of Doubt
A Cardinal Offense
The Tears of Things
Grave Undertakings
ANDREW BROOM MYSTERY SERIES
Cause and Effect
Body and Soul
Savings and Loam
Mom and Dead
Law and Ardor
Heirs and Parents
BOOK
OF KILLS
A Mystery Set at the
University of Notre Dame
RALPH MCINERNY
THE BOOK OF KILLS
. Copyright © 2000 by Ralph McInerny. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McInerny, Ralph M.
The book of kills : a mystery set at the University of Notre Dame / Ralph
McInerny.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-20346-2 ISBN 978-0-312-20346-7
1. University of Notre Dame—Fiction. 2. Indian land transfers—Fiction.
3. South Bend (Ind.)—Fiction. 4. Brothers—Fiction. I. Title
PS3563.A31166 B66 2000
813’.54—dc21
00-040257
First Edition: September 2000
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Father Jim Riehle
THE
BOOK
OF KILLS
THERE IS A WILLOW GROWS
aslant Saint Mary’s lake on its northwestern shore where the path passes beneath Fatima Retreat House. An elderly figure sat on a bench beside the path surrounded by ducks, to whom he was doling out bits of bread. The ducks were always indiscriminate in waddling toward dispensers of food but this morning, after a first unseasonable snowfall, they would willingly have been fed by a butcher. But the old priest ignored that, preferring to think of himself as Saint Francis, who could charm the birds from the trees and talk to animals in their own language.
“Venite ad me omnes,”
he murmured, on the chance these ducks spoke Latin.
There was a lesson to be learned from the mindless greed with which the ducks responded to sense appetite. Only man must subsume his natural desire for food and drink under the governance of reason. It was a lesson Father James had taught in a lesser college of the Congregation for years, but of late he had been assigned to Fatima Retreat House as a preacher of retreats.
Mid-October was a slack time for retreats, and the snow brought thoughts of Christmas and the weeks when the house would be empty and he need think only of his own soul. The creche would remain in chapel long after Epiphany and the
smell of pine would perfume his prayers. And, of course, the students would be gone on vacation and the campus, too, all but empty. But this morning’s snow was already beginning to melt and soon autumn would be back in full force.
When the bread was gone, the ducks continued to crowd around. He showed them that the bag was empty but they remained. He had neglected to say grace on their behalf before feeding them and said it now.
“Benedic nos, domine, et haec tua dona . . .”
The ducks began to go quacking off to the lake. Perhaps they spoke French or Italian. The priest flattened and folded the empty bag and put it into the pocket of his coat. He rose from the bench. It was time for exercise. He started along the path in a westerly direction, moving slowly. He did not really believe in exercise. Exercise was a poor substitute for genuine labor in a generation gone soft with luxury. He smiled away the thought. He was Francis not Jeremiah.
This thought was reenforced when half a dozen ducks accompanied him along the path. Clearly they were not land animals, only imperfectly amphibian. But their pace suited his. He was in no hurry. From time to time he stopped and looked back the way he had come, at the spire of Sacred Heart, at the great golden dome of the Main Building. Once, Father Sorin’s eyes had rested on them. He felt a profound solidarity with the founder of the Congregation in which he had labored for some forty years.
When he turned he found that his escort of ducks had continued up the path. One had wandered from it and was seeking to conceal what it had found. But the other ducks were not deceived. They waddled across the snow and soon there was a quacking contest for the prize. Father James wondered vaguely
what it could be? What foodstuff could they have come upon?
When he reached the point on the path from which they had set off to the quarrel, he stopped again to look benignly at his feathered friends. What they were fighting over seemed feathered, too. His curiosity, usually dormant, was piqued. He went across the snow and found that they were playing tug of war with what looked like an Indian headdress. And then he saw the body.
The man was all but covered with snow and there were now many duck tracks around the body. Father James hurried forward and knelt before saying the formula of absolution over the man. Who knew how long the soul would take to leave a frozen body? The back of the head was exposed now that the headdress had been removed. Masses of blood had blackened and frozen in the matted hair. Father James struggled to his feet and as he returned to the path he shooed the ducks before him. Stupid beasts.
And then he went on, in what an undemanding observer might have described as a jog, back to the house to spread the alarm.
THE TROUBLE BEGAN ON AN
October Saturday at the log chapel.
Two stretch limos came up the road behind Bond Hall, which housed the architecture department, and parked. Out of them poured a wedding party. The bride wore a traditional white gown, the bridesmaids were in blue, the men in formal attire. The groom was an alumnus, the bride his childhood sweetheart, and he was fulfilling an undergraduate dream of being married in the log chapel on the Notre Dame campus, a venue in even more demand than Sacred Heart Basilica, the university church. Father Burnside, who had been rector of the groom’s undergraduate dorm, was to meet them at the chapel door.
But there was no sign of the priest.
The chapel door was guarded by two men done up in traditional Indian garb.
“Have you seen a priest?”
“He’s inside.”
They did not get out of the way. The best man, another alumnus, had made the football team as a student, a tight end who had played a total of eight minutes in a game that had been won already in the first half. He stepped forward, expanded his chest, and explained that a wedding was scheduled.
“The priest is our prisoner,” one of the Native Americans said. “We are reclaiming our property.”
In Cedar Grove Cemetery, the sexton was appalled, the more so because he had not noticed the outrage when he came to work that morning, though he must have driven right past the toppled grave markers. One had stood six feet tall and when it fell had done damage to a number of neighboring graves. The sexton called for his crew to make a thorough reconnaissance to see if there were other instances of vandalism.
He assumed that it
was
vandalism, kids from town in the momentary grip of adolescent madness who had thought pushing over gravestones made some profound statement to the universe. There were three desecrated graves, if that was not too heightened a way of putting it. The sexton did not think so. He used the term five times in speaking to campus security. To the provost he spoke of sacrilege.
Cedar Grove Cemetery was as old as the university itself. It was located on Notre Dame Avenue, as good as on the campus, just south of the bookstore and Eck Alumni Center. For some years there had not been a single unspoken-for grave site in Cedar Grove, but more land had been acquired to the west when the golf course was relocated and now a fortunate few more could look forward to awaiting the last trump in the company of the earliest generation of South Bend.
It was Roger Knight, the Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies, who later noticed a pattern in the vandalism.
Coquillard, Pokagon, Pokagon’s son.
Old Father Carmody nodded. “Contemporaries of Father Sorin.” Edward Sorin was the founder of the University of Notre Dame, a visionary French priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross who had found a small trading community on a bend in
the Saint Joseph River when he came to claim the property he had bought for what he grandly called his university. “Frenchmen like himself,” Carmody added.
“Not entirely, Father. Some of them had Indian blood as well. And Pokagon was a chief.”
Meanwhile, Father Burnside had been released from custody and the wedding in the log chapel went on as planned. But when the happy couple and their party returned to their rented vehicles to be driven away to the Morris Inn for the reception they had to pass between ragged rows of half a dozen surly men all dressed up as Indians.
“What’s going on?”
“Keno sabe?”
“Be careful.”
On the following day, Wednesday, the university chancellor did not return as scheduled from a trip to Hong Kong. A call to the Michiana Airport revealed that he had arrived in South Bend on the appropriate flight.