by Joel Goldman
She took a seat in a pew near the front, wedged between two large, older women who sheltered her, their blue-white coiffed heads towering over Mary like sentries. Mason got the message. She didn't want his company while she communed.
Mason slid into a pew at the back of the church, an outsider looking in on a ritual that was foreign to him. Moments later, a priest led a procession into the sanctuary, making his way to the stage a hundred paces from the entrance. He was a couple of decades younger than Father Steve, his devotion to his faith evident in his sure steps and the certainty of his gaze as he made eye contact with the congregation, favoring everyone with a comforting, confident nod. They were all in the right place at the right time, he said without speaking a word. People beamed back at him, silently confirming their mutual bond.
Father Steve was a no show. Mason doubted that priests could take Sundays off without a note from God, but Father Steve had become almost as elusive as Whitney King. Though he'd managed to defy the long-standing practice of the diocese to rotate priests at least every five to ten years, holding on to his pulpit for more than thirty, Mason saw Father Steve's future even if the priest didn't. Father Steve was on his way out. There was a new priest on the block.
The priest ended his processional by taking his place behind the pulpit. There was a set of stairs at each end of the altar that allowed the priest and his parishioners to come together. Another stairway, nearly invisible descended from a back corner of the altar, providing a private passage for the clergy, though Mason couldn't tell where those stairs led.
He scanned the parishioners, looking for Whitney King, the only other person who would be as obviously out of place as Mason even though King belonged to St. Mark's. The sanctuary had three sections of seats divided by two aisles running from front to back, each section split in half by aisles running side to side. Though it was only about two-thirds full, the sanctuary easily held five hundred people. A sea of heads bowed in front of him, listening to readings from the Old and New Testaments, reciting prayers and singing hymns, rising for the Gospel and kneeling for prayers until, as if on cue, they rose and formed three lines to receive communion, one line on either side of the sanctuary and the third down the center aisle.
Mary's two protectors peeled away from her, taking up station in front of the altar at the head of the lines on the sides of the sanctuary, where the wafers that were supposed to represent the body of Christ were being passed out. The priest performed the same rite in the center aisle. People jostled for position, preferring the priest's line; stragglers grumpily gave way for the blue-haired ladies. Mary let the crowd sweep past her before slipping into the priest's line.
The low buzzing chatter of people waiting their turn burst into an astonished miniroar as Father Steve emerged from the stairs at the back of the altar and walked briskly toward Mary. He wrapped his meaty arm around her, leaning to her ear as he whispered and pulled her out of line. Mason stood, watching as Father Steve elbowed aside the stout blue-haired guardian blocking the steps to the altar, knocking the bowl of wafers from her hands, pressing his hand into the small of Mary's back, propelling her up to the altar.
Chaos broke out when the bowl of wafers hit the floor, congregants rushing to scoop them up. When Mary cast a backward glance searching for him, Mason began weaving through the crowd, picking up his pace as Father Steve reached the stairs at the back of the altar. Mason broke into open field running, catching falling worshipers as he brushed past them, cursing loudly enough for many to hear when Mary and the priest disappeared from view.
People yelled as he vaulted onto the altar, nearly tripping over an exposed microphone cord. Though their outraged voices mixed together making it difficult to understand them, he was certain that they weren't offering their blessings. The young priest tried to restore order, calling back two men who thought to chase Mason.
Mason stopped for an instant at the top of the back stairs to get his bearings, throwing a look at the men that told them to listen to their priest. The menace in his unshaven face and bullet-hole eyes persuaded them to retreat.
There was a short hall at the bottom and a door that was slowly closing as he took the stairs two at a time. That door led into another passageway that continued straight ahead a short distance before branching off at right angles in opposite directions.
Mason looked down both halls. He didn't hear voices or footsteps, but he saw a red-lighted exit sign at the end of the hallway to his right. He ran down that corridor, turning another corner, crashing through a door and into a concrete cavern at the bottom of yet another set of stairs, the morning sun casting a shadow at his feet. He had emerged from the church's basement on its back side after bolting up the stairs into the sunlight.
Clearing the top step, he stopped again. He was on the edge of an empty grassy quadrangle; the church was behind him, the high school to his right, and the street to his left on the far side of the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the grounds. Opposite him and set back a hundred yards was a small house buried in a stand of tall oaks, their broad leafy expanse serving as camouflage. Mason guessed it was the rectory, Father Steve's house.
He sprinted across the grass, barely slowing when he reached the front door of the house, not bothering to knock as he shouldered the door open. He skidded to a stop in the front hall, caught off guard by the unexpected scene in the living room to his left.
He found Mary and Father Steve staring at an aquarium sitting on a black metal stand, the price tag still visible on one leg, brightly striped fish happily oblivious to the humans who had invaded their space.
The morning was hot and the house was stuffy, a floor fan stirring up dust mites without cooling the clotted air. The living room was sparsely furnished, a wooden rocker with a flattened red pillow on the seat, a tired gray couch half-covered with a turquoise knitted afghan, and a low wooden table littered with magazines. The hardwood floor wheezed with each step Mason took. A fireplace dominated the outer wall, a black screen drawn across the grate, a brick hearth cut into the floor.
Mary and Father Steve whirled toward Mason, both clutching their hearts.
"You scared me!" Mary said.
"Makes us even," Mason answered. "You left in kind of a hurry and you didn't look too happy about it."
"I'm afraid that's my fault," Father Steve said.
"You won't get an argument from me," Mason told him. "But don't expect me to believe you hustled Mary out of the church just to show her some fish."
"They're my fish," Mary said. "Father Steve rescued them for me."
The missing fish and the abandoned deep sea diver in Mary's aquarium had convinced Mason that she was still alive, though she had denied knowing what had happened to them. That Father Steve had taken them, buying an aquarium for their foster home, was the latest paragraph in the indictment Mason planned for him.
He said to the priest, "Then you knew Mary wasn't coming back. Which is funny since you told me she'd gone to Omaha to see her husband."
Mary said, "That's what I told Father Steve. He had no reason to think otherwise."
"Sure he did if he went to the trouble of breaking into your house, stealing your fish and buying an aquarium for them. If he thought you were only going to be gone for a few days and he was worried about your fish, he would have offered to take care of them," Mason said. "Better yet, you would have asked him, but you didn't."
Mary stepped away from Father Steve, crossing her arms over her chest. "You knew what they'd done to me?" she asked.
Father Steve's round shoulders sagged, his arms at his sides, palms upturned in a supplicant's pose. "Not for certain, Mary. You must believe me. When Mr. Mason told me you were missing, I did think you were in Omaha until I called Vince and he told me that he hadn't heard from you."
"Then why didn't you tell me?" Mason demanded. "Or the police?"
He shrugged, tilting his head and dropping his palms to his sides. "I've been a priest for more than thirty years. I suppose I'
ve heard tens of thousands of confessions in that time. Many of them are small sins. I listen, absolve, and forget. A few are truly awful sins. I listen to them as well, even if I can't absolve the sinner and I can't forget the sin. Sometimes the sin gets inside of me and eats away at me like a disease."
"Is that supposed to be an excuse?" Mason said. "Knowing that Mary had been kidnapped made you too sick to do anything about it."
Father Steve permitted himself a thin smile. "I imagine you're quite a good lawyer, Mr. Mason, to be able to twist my failings to make them worse than even I make them to be. I'm not sick. I'm just afraid of the things I know. My weakness, my sin, is not doing anything about it. My sin is the sin of silence as you guessed that day when we talked in the school."
"Then what is this all about?" Mason asked. "Stealing Mary's fish and snatching her out of Sunday Mass."
"It's about someone who is sick of his own weaknesses and is trying to atone for his sins. I took Mary's fish to save them for her. I prayed for her safe return. I called the police to warn them about that young man Whitney shot, your client, Nick Byrnes."
"Nick says you weren't there when he was shot," Mason said.
"He's telling the truth," Father Steve said, looking at the floor, locking his hands together, twisting his fingers. "I was inside. Whitney and I had just finished meeting about another donation to the church. I came outside after the shooting. Whitney told me what had happened."
"Then why not tell that to the police instead of lying?" Mason asked.
"I'd compromised myself too many times to be that virtuous, Mr. Mason. Whitney King knew that. He knew which button of mine to push."
"So why the anonymous phone call to the cops?" Mason asked.
"I didn't know for certain if Whitney had taken Mary, but if he had, it was logical that he would want Nick as well. It's the way he is. He's often told me that he'll take any risk to avoid a risk, though he never cared about the contradiction. It was how he justified the things he did."
"What did Whitney have on you?" Mason asked.
The priest drew a deep breath. "Silence that made me an accomplice."
"An accomplice?" Mary asked. "An accomplice to what?"
"Murder," the priest confessed.
Chapter 51
Mary reached out her hand, steadying herself against the fireplace, turning away from Father Steve, the enormity of his confession beginning to sink in. She staggered to the rocking chair, collapsing into it as the chair bobbed back and forth.
"Whose murder?" Mason asked.
The priest looked at Mason as if the question demanded he extract a chamber from his heart to answer it. Then he looked at Mary who was holding herself as she rocked.
"Whitney called me this morning and asked if I knew where you were. I didn't know whether that was because he wasn't involved in your disappearance or whether you had somehow escaped. I told him I hadn't seen you since you left the church that Wednesday. He told me he thought you would come to church today and told me to call him and tell him if you did."
Mason stepped to the front window, looking out at the quadrangle, having learned that Whitney usually made his phone calls when he was close by, the call giving the false impression that he wasn't.
"So he knows that Mary is here," Mason said.
"When I saw you come in this morning, I came back to the rectory to call him because I didn't think I had a choice. But I didn't call him."
"Why? So you could wait until you got Mary back here and she couldn't get away?" Mason asked, squaring around at the priest.
"No, Mr. Mason," Father Steve said, hanging his head. "I realized that if I called him, I would be crossing a line between hiding behind my vows and giving up someone to evil. I couldn't do that even though I'd spent the last fifteen years pretending there was a difference. I was afraid Whitney would come looking for Mary no matter what I told him. That's why I was in such a hurry. I decided to give Mary something to protect her. To do that, I have to break my silence and my vow to protect the sanctity of confessions."
Father Steve took off his coat, laying it on the arm of the sofa. He knelt on the floor where he pulled up four bricks from the middle of the hearth, stacking them next to the fireplace screen. He reached down between the floorboards into the crawl space beneath the floor and retrieved a tightly wrapped oilskin bundle tied at both ends with knotted twine. He slipped the twine off the bundle and unrolled the oilskin, spilling a tire iron onto the hard floor.
Mason knelt alongside the priest. Using the tips of two fingers like a giant tweezers he raised the tire iron up by one end and laid it back on the oilskin. Cradling it in the protective cloth, he picked it up for a closer look. The oilskin had saved it from rusting too badly. Freckles of orange rust mixed with dark splotches that were burrowed into the imperfect surface. Holding it to the light, he caught the reflection of what could be a hair embossed in the open cup that was used to grasp lug nuts on a wheel.
"Where did you get this?" Mason asked him.
"Victoria King gave it to me," Father Steve said as he stood. "After the trial."
"Why didn't you turn it over to the police?" Mason asked. "There could have been fingerprints or blood or tissue that would have proven Ryan Kowalcyk was innocent. How could you bury a murder weapon under your fireplace for fifteen years?"
"Do you have children, Mr. Mason?" the priest asked.
"No."
"Imagine that you had two children and they were both drowning, but you could only save one. Which one would you choose? It's an old dilemma, the stuff of a college philosophy course, until you actually are faced with it. What would you do?"
Mary came out of her chair. "You had to choose between my Ryan and Whitney and you chose him because his family had money and we had nothing! May you rot in hell!"
Father Steve's wide round face blanched at Mary's bitter curse.
"That will be for God to decide, Mary," he said, his crushed voice resigned to his fate. "Though I expect you'll get your wish. But it wasn't just about that. I didn't know whether this tire iron would prove that either boy was guilty or innocent. I convinced myself the jury had made that decision. My decision was about choosing between my vows and Victoria King."
"Victoria King is the only child in that moral dilemma," Mason said.
"That's where you are wrong, Mr. Mason. My vows, my faith, my church. That was my other child. That was my life. That's what I thought I was choosing by keeping silent about Victoria."
"I don't understand," Mason said. "Victoria had nothing to do with the murders of Graham and Elizabeth Byrnes."
"You're correct. She didn't," Father Steve said. He wrapped his hand around the cross hanging from his neck, closing his eyes in a moment of silent prayer, Mason reading his lips as he mouthed God forgive me. "Victoria King killed her husband. With this," Father Steve said, taking the tire iron from Mason.
"You mean this isn't the tire iron used to kill the Byrneses?" Mason asked.
Father Steve wrapped the tire iron back in the oilskin, holding it at both ends. "She never said, but I've always assumed that it is."
"Then," Mason said, pacing the small room, "Whitney had to have given it to her. He got rid of his bloody clothes at Ryan's house but hung on to the murder weapon. He must have given it to his mother. She kept it so that the prosecutor couldn't use it to convict her son. But why did she kill her husband?"
"Because my father was going to ruin everything," Whitney King said as he walked into the room.
King was wearing a black suit jacket over a shirt and jeans. The jacket was cut too full and hung unevenly on him. Mason finally recognized it as identical to the one Father Steve was wearing. The butt of a gun poked out of a side pocket. King held another gun in one hand, waving it at the three of them.
"Over there," King said, pointing them toward the sofa.
The priest sat in the corner of the sofa, moist half-moons of sweat under the arms of his rumpled white shirt. His face continued to pale,
the pasty shade running through the fleshy folds of his neck, nearly matching the color of his collar. His eyes darted between King and Mason as he licked his dry lips, swallowing hard, his mouth involuntarily puckering for a smoke. Mary chafed at being so close to him, arching her back, setting her jaw with a stiff fury.
Mason didn't move, forcing King to divide his attention. It was a small advantage, but survival was often the sum of slim chances. He only had one card to play, but he waited, choosing the moment.
"Father Steve's clothes aren't a good look for you," Mason told King. "I'd stick to cross-dressing."
King laughed, his chuckle low and guttural. "The Catholic Church isn't known for its fashion sense. I'll give you that. And this rag," he said, sniffing the fabric, "smells like shit, but it was the best I could find in Father Steve's closet while I was waiting for you to get here. My luck, I had to pick a chain-smoking priest."
Mason put it together, shaking his head. "You were wearing Father Steve's jacket when you shot Sandra. Just to make me think it was him. What was the point? You were going to kill me too."
"I never plan on things going exactly like I planned. I just plan on winning no matter what happens," King said. "Turns out Sandra was right. You're a hard man to kill."
"Sandra figured out that your mother had killed your father. That's why she asked Dixon Smith to find out why your mother had been at Golden Years for so long. She was going to tell me and you couldn't let her do that."
"Sandra's firm has represented my family for years. One of the partners suspected that my father's death wasn't an accident. No one else at the firm would listen to him so he buried a confidential CYA memo in my father's files. Unfortunately, Sandra found the memo. Fortunately, when she told me about it, she also told me about the gun you kept in your desk."