Enter by the Narrow Gate

by David Carlson

  Father Fortis gazed out the window and spotted a wooden cross high on a hill. Father Linus had explained that such markers were Penitente stopping places used on processions to a morada or graveyard. Inexplicably, a chill ran down his spine.

  “It’s perfectly normal to be afraid,” he offered, perhaps as much to himself as the policewoman. “I see nothing that you need to confess in that.”

  “It’s not my fear, Father, but what you priests call pride.”

  “Pride?”

  “Do you remember when I said a while back, about this trip being my idea? I hinted to Choi that Colorado might help us understand Victor better. I got that idea from something Chris told me on our way back from Acoma, something I hadn’t considered before. He said that most problems on a case are caused by the investigation devoting too little time to what brought the victim to the place where he died.”

  “And few people ask witnesses what the victim was worried about the day and week before,” Father Fortis added.

  “I see he’s told you his theory, too.”

  “Yes, and I’ve seen how accurate it can be in some cases. But how is that pride on your part?”

  Sera gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Because after Choi agreed to my plan, he encouraged me to invite Chris to come along. And I didn’t.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  Sera nodded. “When I told Chris about my coming, I had the perfect chance to invite him, but I wanted to do this on my own. It didn’t seem difficult or dangerous at the time.”

  Father Fortis could feel the transmission lag as the van started its ascent. Ahead, vast horizons of piñon forests ran up toward snowcapped mountains, forming a perfect photo for a brochure. But today, the mountains seemed more like a wall.

  He sat back in his seat and pondered Sera’s confession. The most logical way to see the trip was from Choi’s perspective. And wouldn’t Worthy, if he’d sensed any danger, have insisted on coming along? Father Fortis couldn’t deny that he wished for a fourth passenger in the van, one who had some experience when life suddenly left logic behind.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “How the hell did I miss that?” Worthy muttered as he looked up from the desk to the canyon wall outside his window. But he knew exactly how he’d missed it. He’d had the news clippings about the Pakistani boy’s death for almost a week, but in his certainty about Victor, he’d failed to even glance through them.

  Sera had been absolutely right about him. He hadn’t been completely wrong, but he’d wedded himself to a picture of Victor based on insufficient evidence. And that evidence had mainly come from two other outsiders, the college chaplain and Ellie’s psychiatrist. Dr. Cartwright had never even met the boy. And he knew that his own aversion to the Penitentes had made him jump at the idea that Victor had plummeted from religious psychosis into murder.

  Worthy realized that he’d neglected several basic questions. What had happened to make Victor and Ellie blame the college? What was it exactly that had sent Victor back home in desperate need of forgiveness and had brought him to die on a cross?

  He stared at the name, dead center in the newspaper account, the one that condemned him. He should have seen it—if he hadn’t been so quick to accuse Victor. Samir Romadji, the Pakistani fifteen-year-old, had fallen to his death while hiking at the Palisades. But he hadn’t been alone. He’d been hiking with two other high school students. One was James Bidwell and the other was Aaron Stott.

  Stott—the name of Victor’s professor, the one who’d confronted Victor about his academic decline. With the evidence staring up at him from his desk, Worthy realized the truth was probably just the opposite. Stott hadn’t confronted Victor about his studies. No, Victor had confronted Stott about what had happened out at the Palisades. That had to be the explanation for Ellie’s odd line in her last letter, about the college being at fault.

  Worthy remembered the chaplain’s analogy, that Victor was the type who’d feel guilty over a distant tornado. What if the chaplain were wrong? What if Victor suspected something about Romadji’s death, but no one would believe him? And could Stott or his son have been the “devil” Victor thought was tailing him?

  Stott. The name appeared at least twice in every story, but he’d missed it. There was only one person who knew why Victor had felt so responsible, and she was still missing. If by some miracle Ellie wasn’t dead, she could tell the entire story.

  Worthy drove the back roads to Chimayó as fast as his bum arm would let him and arrived just before noon. As was true the first time, the lot was nearly empty. He looked up at the two steeples and their crosses, one tilting precariously as if it could fall at any moment. He wished Sera were with him. He’d like to tell someone how sorry he was for misjudging Victor. But not the nosy nun, he thought as he walked through the wooden doors.

  In the dim light of the altar, he could see that he was alone. As he sat on the rough-hewn bench at the back, the famous church seemed smaller to him, as if it had sunk deeper into the ground since his last visit. When Father Fortis had been here with him, he’d felt his friend watching him, and he’d hated the place. But now the need to hate was gone. The busy altar, the milagros on the floor, and the saints looking down from the walls were as before, but now he knew how much the place was loved. The center of the world. That was how Victor had put it.

  But some things hadn’t changed. He still needed to understand Ellie VanBruskman’s view of the church. What happened to her the day of her visit, the day before she ran away?

  He thought again of the message she’d left. Someday, Victor, I will find you. As he glanced over to where the visitors’ books were kept, he felt a hitch in his thinking. What had she meant by that?

  Someday I will find you. The phrase had sounded perfectly straightforward just weeks before, but now it struck him as odd. Someday, someday, someday …. What did “someday” mean?

  He jumped involuntarily off the bench as the answer came, the tip of his shoe catching on the stone floor. Almost falling, he stumbled toward the table of books, the word exploding in his brain. “Someday” meant some day, not this day, not tomorrow necessarily, or even next week. Ellie hadn’t said, “Tomorrow, I will look for you,” or “I’m coming for you right away,” but “Someday I will find you.”

  Someday suddenly sounded like a hope postponed.

  No wonder he’d never understood Ellie. Two weeks ago, he’d come here looking for a frightened, chemically dependent child. He’d pictured her full of loneliness and anxiety, maybe even panic, and desperate to find Victor. That’s what the VanBruskmans trained me to see, he realized.

  He sat down by the books, resting his wounded arm on the table. He closed his eyes. The sanctuary was quiet as a tomb. The words of Dr. Cartwright came back to him. Ellie had been improving, and was healthy enough to be angry with the VanBruskmans for their lies. But just as quickly, he remembered the psychiatrist’s certainty that Ellie would regress without therapy.

  What if Ellie hadn’t regressed? What if she were like Allyson, able to live off the anger at her parents for weeks on end? But Ellie and Allyson were different. No, the psychiatrist’s dire prediction couldn’t be dismissed that easily.

  Behind him the door opened, and he turned, half expecting Ellie to walk into the room, half expecting the nun. It was just the wind. But what was it that the nosy nun had told them? Chimayó was a healing site, not just for leg problems, but also for depression.

  Depression. His mind drifted back to his kitchen in Detroit. Had that been the real reason he’d kept the dirt and given it to Allyson? Oh, Ally, he thought, I’m so sorry.

  He willed his thoughts back to Ellie while he scanned the books on the wall. As he reached for one, a new thought, like a barely visible beam coming at him from the far end of a tunnel, lit up his brain.

  No, no, it wasn’t possible, he insisted, even as he admitted that the crazy thought would explain everything, even the new hope rising in his heart. If Ellie were too sick to survive on h
er own for more than a few days, she was either dead or somehow no longer sick—not as sick as Dr. Cartwright had believed, in any case.

  What if Ellie had experienced something here? Was he saying a healing? No, but the nun herself had mentioned the phenomenon of temporary remission of symptoms. What if Ellie had heard of the church’s reputation for curing depression and believed she’d been healed?

  He pictured Ellie writing her promise to Victor from the very spot where he was sitting. Thinking herself cured, what would she have done next?

  His eyes followed the wall in the direction of the altar and fixed on the strange saint in the glass case, the one with the funny little top hat, riding like a dandy on a toy horse. The animal looked to be a larger version of the one he’d purchased for Amy. Add a horn, he mused, and it could be one of Ellie’s unicorns.

  Where did you go, Ellie? The meager clues she’d left were like train cars needing to be linked. She had written the vague word someday. She’d felt something happen to her here, something so powerful that she’d felt hopeful, perhaps more hopeful than she had in years. Not much to go on, he thought. He looked around the sanctuary, waiting for the next train car to couple itself to the others.

  His good hand tapped on the table, while his eyes scoured the books in the case. He glanced up at a cork bulletin board laden with business cards, notices, and small posters. A Catholic supply house in San Antonio advertised rose-petal rosaries from the Vatican, while a restaurant in Durango offered vegetarian dishes during Lent.

  “Come on, come on,” he whispered as he continued to scan the bulletin board. The eyes of an infant smiled down on him from a small, ragged poster pinned precariously to one corner. Squinting, Worthy read the tiny print of a pro-life poster, advertising Catholic hospices for pregnant girls willing to offer their babies for adoption. Below, the same message seemed to have been written in Spanish.

  Adoption. He pictured Ellie looking at this same poster and realized that the tension in his belly was easing. He read the request at the bottom of the flyer for prayers, for money, and lastly for volunteers.

  Worthy steadied himself with his good hand as the train cars of clues lined up, ready to move. Ellie had been adopted and was angry with the VanBruskmans for keeping that secret from her. She experienced some breakthrough in this church and left a message of hope that the future would bring Victor and her together. If in the next moment she’d seen the poster’s plea for help, what would she have done? He reached up and pulled down the poster, having the odd feeling that Ellie had done exactly the same thing. His eyes scanned the small print at the bottom. Addresses were listed, two in Albuquerque and Las Cruces, one in Deming, and a fourth in Douglas, Arizona. The last stated a preference for Spanish-speaking volunteers.

  For the first time on the case, he felt that he was beginning to understand Ellie VanBruskman. Hadn’t Dr. Cartwright said her real mother was Hispanic, a Cuban from South Florida? Wouldn’t Ellie have seen herself in the infant’s face on the poster? Maybe he’d been wrong about the sequence. Maybe Ellie had seen the poster first, then written in the book. Maybe the baby’s face on the poster had made finding Victor Martinez a someday goal.

  He walked toward the altar and studied the santos wedged in its niches. Albuquerque, Las Cruces, Deming, and a place called Douglas. If he could pray, he would offer a prayer of thanksgiving. If he could pray, he would go across the plaza and buy a milagro and come back to leave it here. He would buy a milagro of a human leg, for the leg of a journey. He had found a trail.

  Father Fortis could not remember a more beautiful day since he’d arrived in New Mexico. They passed Abiquiu Lake shimmering in the afternoon light as they traveled along Route 84. Near the Ghost Ranch of Georgia O’Keeffe, Sera stopped at a pullout. While Father Bernard headed behind the rocks to relieve himself, Father Fortis stretched his legs and admired the cliffs, striated like Neapolitan ice cream.

  He breathed in the cooler air of the higher elevation. In the car, Sera had explained that they’d just entered the high desert. As he stood admiring the tall ponderosa pines and groves of aspen, he nearly forgot his earlier dread.

  Father Bernard’s return from the makeshift toilet broke into his thoughts. The priest shielded his eyes, gazing out at the forested canyons. “Fifteen years ago I came down this very road to enter St. Mary’s. Seems like another lifetime,” he said wistfully.

  “Oh, I imagine we’ll run into some people who still remember you,” Sera offered.

  “Do you think so? People don’t really know their priests.” He stooped down and picked up some loose rocks. “We administer the sacraments, baptize their babies, marry them—sometimes in that order—but in the end we’re just the guy with the funny collar in the family photo. Old what’s-his-name.”

  “But the opposite is rarely true,” Father Fortis posited.

  Father Bernard gave him a sideways glance. “What do you mean?”

  “I bet you remember nearly everyone in your parish.”

  Father Bernard nodded. “You know, that’s true. Maybe not their first names, but I remember their problems, their struggles. I remember babies who died because the families couldn’t afford basic medical care. Same with some of the older ones. I remember the young people getting married much too young and without steady work starting families. Most of all I remember wanting to do more than I could.”

  “Whereabouts was your parish, Father?” Sera asked.

  “Just outside Alamosa.”

  “Not too far from where we’re headed,” she said. “Victor’s father and grandfather are buried near Platoro. Do you know it?”

  The monk looked at the stones in his hand. “Platoro? No, it doesn’t ring a bell. You said that the boy’s whole family was Penitente?”

  “Just on the father’s side,” Sera replied as she returned to the van. “The mother is an Acoma Indian.”

  “Really. I didn’t think Pueblo Indians married outsiders,” Bernard said.

  “They usually don’t,” Sera replied as she stepped into the van and restarted the engine.

  “The moradas I knew up this way were filled with old men,” Father Bernard said, taking the passenger seat again. “I don’t suspect many of them are still alive.”

  Old men dying out, Father Fortis thought, recalling what Brother Elias had told him.

  Two hours later, after Sera had turned onto Route 17 and crossed into Colorado, she pulled onto Fire Road 250 for Platoro. The town itself was higher in the mountains than those in New Mexico, but almost identical in poverty. Rusty trailers squatted on the valley side of the road, while a mountain chalet, complete with twin SUVs and hibernating snowmobiles, rose on the opposite side.

  As the van crept along the bumpy road, Father Fortis sat forward in the second seat, trying to peer out the windshield in search of tire marks. The ground in front of them seemed simply dry and dusty, devoid of any discernible tracks.

  Father Bernard sat silently as the van jostled its way down toward a creek and then up the other side. At one point, Father Fortis saw him gaze out at a line of trees on the right. Around the next pile of boulders, the road veered sharply in that direction as it climbed a rise. He wondered if Father Bernard knew this road after all.

  Six miles farther, around another stand of pines and aspens, the morada and cemetery appeared. Crosses marking the graves were tipped at odd angles; some lay flat on the ground. The morada itself, sporting a cupola covered with a tin roof, was in less decay than the one Father Fortis had visited with Father Linus. Only the entrance of the structure, with its door leaning crazily from one hinge, suggested that it too was abandoned.

  Father Fortis and Sera began in the graveyard, while Father Bernard walked toward the morada. A number of the names carved into the crosses were indecipherable, though it was clear that many of the Brotherhood had died during the flu epidemic of 1918. Father Fortis noticed also that Martinez was a common name.

  He stopped by one grave. “Sera, I didn’t know that women co
uld participate in the Penitentes.”

  “Oh, yes. They’re Carmelitas.”

  “What do they do?”

  She stood next to him by the grave. “I was one of them once. We’d bring food to the Brothers during Semana Santa, Holy Week. And our procession would meet the brothers’ procession on Good Friday.”

  “Meet them? Why?”

  “The men carried their bulto, the statue of Our Suffering Lord, while the women carried the bulto of His Suffering Mother. We’d meet before we came to Calvario, and His holy mother would embrace Him and weep.”

  “It sounds impressive.”

  “It was pretty dramatic for a young girl. After that, we’d follow the men, and the Christo, of course, to Calvario. After the Christo was taken down from the cross, we’d all go back to the morada for Las Tinieblas.”

  “A Tenebrae service,” Father Fortis said. “Yes, I know something about that.”

  “Talk about something scary for a child. All that banging and those rattles in the darkness. The hymns were about Christ kicking down the doors of Hades, and it seemed pretty real to my sisters and me.”

  “Has your son witnessed it?”

  “No, my husband didn’t approve. I haven’t seen it myself for a long time,” she said.

  Behind them, Father Bernard called out, “I found something in here.” He walked into the graveyard and handed Sera a crumpled, stamped envelope. “What do you think …? I’m sorry, I forgot your rank.”

  Father Fortis looked over Sera’s shoulder at the brief message written on it. “Room 16.” In the corner was a return address of Souls’ Harbor Mission, Alamosa, Colorado.

  “I’m a lieutenant, but please call me Sera. Where exactly did you find this?”

  “On one of the benches. The place is filled with trash.”

  “Let’s have a look,” Sera said, heading for the morada.

  The room was as Father Bernard had described it. In the light of the policewoman’s flashlight, it was indeed messy, though it clearly hadn’t been vandalized. The plywood altar was dust-covered but bare. Benches, some facing the altar, others fallen over, were scattered around the room while leaves piled in one corner suggested an animal had been the building’s most recent inhabitant. In the back, a collection of large crosses leaned on their sides against the wall.