"Tilden," she whispered.
"What?"
"Dr. Tilden." She cleared her throat and grabbed my arm, her fingers digging into my skin. "Shiloh was his student."
8
GRAVEL CRUNCHED UNDER the Saab Sister's bald tires. The sun crept over the mountains, shining now on the old brick church, the St. Ignatius Mission. I parked by a chain link fence that surrounded the church and stepped into the morning air. The road had calmed me again with its curative powers. I gulped the crispness of the mountain air and climbed the steep concrete steps to the door.
The mission looked like a Gothic miniature, straight and proud, rising high above the valley floor, struggling to compete with the proud peaks behind. The brick church was dedicated to Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits.
I pushed open the heavy wooden doors, stepping through a lobby into the chapel. Sun streamed through the solid squares of colored glass into the high, arched room painted a robin's egg blue. In the front of the chapel intricate carved wood frames embellished Gothic-arched paintings above a white marble altar. The straight wooden pews sat empty and solemn; I instinctively tiptoed to preserve the peace. The air smelled still but not unclean. This was a working church where people knelt and prayed and received guidance and blessings. Tall frescoed murals, painted directly into the plaster, lined the sidewalls and the front of the church. I walked a side aisle, staring at the murals of saints, Biblical characters, and miracles, until I reached a mural near the front corner that was covered with a drape.
I stood for a moment in front of the altar rail, a short white fence, The painting above the altar was pleasant to the eye but typical. Saints on puffy, billowing clouds, Mary and the infant Jesus on puffy, billowing clouds, Jesus with the cross on puffy, billowing clouds. God, it was tough being an art dealer. It was enough to make you billow.
The trim work curled, intensely ornate, with fancy cutout leaves and grapevines and doodads of all sorts, gilded of course, as only the Gothic style can muster. The effect was overpowering. But it worked in the sense that this type of art belonged in this kind of church. It fit. The way a frilly pinafore, lace anklets, ribbons, and ruffled organza only look right on a little girl.
Quiet descended. Too early for tourists; too late for the pious. I wondered where the priests hung out. I sank onto a pew, calmed by the place.
When I got up at six this morning Melina had already made coffee and was almost out the door. The sound of chirping birds in the backyard trees punctuated the early morning quiet. The circles under Melina's eyes deepened daily. She had a briefcase in one hand and a stack of files in the other. The same blue skirt now looked wrinkled and messy on her, especially with oxfords and anklets.
"Did you sleep?" I had asked, cradling a coffee mug in my hands.
"Yes," she sighed but I didn't believe her. "I have a class at nine and papers to grade before then. I haven't gotten anything done."
"I'm sure they understand."
Melina straightened defensively, her shoulders twitching into alignment. "I don't want them to understand."
We hadn't discussed her strange reaction to remembering Shiloh's connection with Dr. Tilden. Last night she told me Shiloh had studied anthropology as a graduate student a few years back. Melina wasn't sure when. Tilden had been her advisor. Melina told me this with trembling fingers squeezing my forearm, her lips pale and nervous. It unnerved me to see her so shook up, so different from the solid person I knew. She was my idol, the perfect sister. It had been that way for so long that I felt something slipping away from me, something important, something precious. I felt like crying when she went to bed.
Now in the church I tried to pray for Melina. She wanted me to help Wade but it was her I worried most about.
The heavy door behind me opened. Recognizing the black suit and Roman collar, I stood in the aisle. The priest took some holy water from a font, bowed his head, made the sign of the cross. His hair was slate gray turning to white. His face held the wrinkles of a man who has heard too much. I glanced at his ears as he strode up. Yes, his ears were small. They had shrunk in protest. Overuse, I thought wickedly.
"You're here for confession?" The priest stopped a few paces away and looked at me curiously. He had a kind face but his blue eyes were all business. He waved his hand toward the booths in the back in the church.
"No." I shook my head, smiling. "I'm a friend of Wade Fraser's. Alix Thorssen."
The priest changed his stance, facing me squarely; his hands behind his back. His eyes, graying now as he cooled toward me, bored through me. Only a priest could give you so much selfless eye contact. The rest of us have too much to hide.
"I heard about Wade's ... problems," he said. "What can I do?" He introduced himself to me as Father Percy. He had talked to Wade about the vandalism and appeared to have some affection for the old hippie. I was grateful. Such people seemed in small supply. We sat down on a long wooden pew.
"Did you and Wade come up with a possible motive for the slashing of the mural?" I asked, glancing at the draped wall.
"No. The police tell me vandalism is random hostility. It's not pointed toward anything really. But aimed away from the self, the bad-feeling self."
I nodded, impressed by his analysis. "Did Wade agree?"
Father Percy shook his head. "He thought someone held a grudge against the church. That they'd been let down or felt betrayed."
The priest followed my gaze to the drape. "Would you like to see it?" He pulled back the faded yellow cloth. The painting revealed a holy woman, Mary perhaps. I had been conscientiously forgetting my religious education ever since that first, only, horrible year at St. Olaf's. The mural was framed. Another ornate Gothic arch, stenciled and carved and trimmed ad nauseam as if the priest who painted it (he doubled as the mission's cook) hadn't known when to quit. It was his life's work. He kept at it until he died, finished or not.
Mary stood on puffy, billowing clouds, naturally, with her feet on a set of golden horns and a nasty-looking snake who was about to take a bite out of an apple. (Hmmm. Maybe it was Eve.) The vandals had done a number on the poor woman. With some pointed object they had scraped lines in the plaster. Slashes reached across the entire width of the mural, about six or eight feet. The cuts were high over my head. The culprits must have climbed onto the marble piece that stood against the wall under the mural.
The hostility of the vandal was palpable, sneering at the congregation and the priests. The painting could be repaired, restored. But it would never be the same.
"Such a pity," Father Percy said, letting the drape fall back across the mural. "Useless, really. A waste of energy. These are priceless treasures."
"This was the only thing damaged?"
"Oh, no. The Kateri statue was smashed to bits. And one of the newer paintings was badly damaged. I took it down and put it in my office."
Father Percy's office sat in a walled-off back comer of the chapel, opposite the confessionals. Flimsy plywood walls contrasted with the sturdiness of the old building's thick brick wall, which formed one side of the office. A small, high window shed a pale light into the space. An old wooden desk faced closets and three nicked school chairs. A small metal cross hung on the wall.
Father Percy flicked on a metal gooseneck lamp. "Here." He picked up a large stretched canvas with a too-small wooden frame. The oil painting portrayed an Indian man with strong features. A stereotypical Indian chief with a wise, beatific look and an ornate Plains Indian headdress. A bright glow in the dark sky gave him an ethereal air.
I stared at the rich new colors and the contemporary style, intrigued by the difference between this painting and the frescoes in the chapel.
"Who is he?"
"Shining Shirt," Father Percy said. "Before the white man came he had a vision that men in black skirts would come. And he had a cross." The priest pointed at a spot repeatedly smashed by the vandal. "See here?" He frowned. "Well, he was wearing it around his neck."
"A cross?"
"The legend goes that it came to him with the vision." He set the painting back on the floor against the wall. "His vision was the reason several delegations of Indians were sent to St. Louis to ask us--the Jesuit priests--to come."
"The black skirts."
"That's what they called the priests." We both gazed at the destroyed painting, still beautiful despite its wounds. Someone had a deep dislike of old Shining Shirt. The cuts crisscrossed the canvas to the point that several triangles of fabric hung tenuously by threads.
"It'll be hard to repair," I commented. "It may be easier to commission a new one."
Father Percy nodded. Sadness overcame his face. "We can do that. The artist is local. That won't be possible with Kateri, though."
I sat down in the chair opposite the desk. "Do you have a picture of that one?" The priest began opening drawers and leafing through brochures. He stopped, staring at an upper corner of the office, squinting his eyes in concentration. "I can't think of-- wait." He went out the door. While he was gone I picked up a glass figurine of Christ and dusted it on my shirttail.
Father Percy returned with a small photograph. "Kateri Tekakwitha," Father Percy said. "We celebrate her feast day in mid-June. Just a week ago."
The snapshot showed an Indian woman with braided hair in a buckskin dress, one fist clenched against her breast. A cape covered her shoulders. "And she was who?"
"Kateri? Well, if there had been monks among Indian women in the 1600s, Kateri would have been one. She converted to Catholicism and became greatly revered by her people. Some years back she was sainted. She represents the kind of pure, spiritual life that is possible within the church for a Native American." He leaned back in his chair, looking saddened by the vandalism but somewhat smug, I thought, as if he, too, led the pure, spiritual life. My prejudices were working overtime.
"Why can't another of these statues be made?"
"The sculptor passed away," he said. "He made a hundred and fifty of those statues for missions, then broke the mold."
I pulled a spiral notebook from my backpack and made a few notes about Shining Shirt and Kateri. Did it relate to Shiloh's murder? Had Wade found out too much?
"May I use your phone, Father?" He motioned to the ancient black telephone on his desk. I found Dr. Tilden's office number in the notebook. The secretary said he wasn't in so I left a message for him to call me at Melina's and hung up. We walked into the sunshine warming the front steps. The priest's forehead was knitted with worry. "So how is Fraser doing?"
"Not so good," I conceded. "Jail doesn't agree with him."
"I always liked Fraser. Some of the university people aren't so friendly, you know."
I watched his face. "Did you ever meet the woman, Shiloh Merkin?"
He jerked his bushy eyebrows up as if I'd interrupted his musings. "I don't think so." I began down the cement steps worn by a hundred years of footfalls. A group of elderly tourists poured from a huge motor home. As I reached the bottom something clicked.
"What people?" I called up the steps to the priest.
Father Percy stood staring at his shoes, "Pardon?"
"What university people weren't friendly?"
"Oh," The priest twisted his neck over the stiff collar and looked embarrassed. "No one in particular."
"No, Father," I said, reaching his side again. "You heard me ask for Dr. Tilden on the phone. Has he been here?"
Father Percy's blue eyes flicked away. So much for selfless eye contact. His mouth opened and closed again.
"When was he here, Father?"
"Several weeks ago."
"Just once?"
"Couple times."
"What did he do?"
The priest shuffled his feet. "Do? Just like anybody else. Look at the mission. Talk."
"What did he talk about?"
"I can't really say."
"Please, Father. This is important." I put my hand on his sleeve, tugging it slightly.
He looked at my fingers and sighed. "Dr. Tilden is a disagreeable man." He pulled away. His eyes were all business again. "That's all I can say."
The tourists, white-haired grandmothers and grandfathers in knit slack sets and baggy khakis, walked around us, The priest smiled at them, opening the door to the chapel and following them into the darkness.
9
ZENA HAD ALREADY called her friend, the holistic counselor, and gotten the information when I reached her at noon. The women's group was founded by Orianna Gold Flicker, in upstate New York. They have a conclave every summer. This year and last it had been held on the Flathead Indian Reservation because of its wealth of sacred sites and tribal willingness to admit whites to them. Tin-Tin Quamash's participation had also been a big plus.
According to the counselor, Shiloh Merkin had been the group's local contact. She had helped Orianna set up crystal workshops in Missoula in the spring, which spurred local interest in the conclave. Participants, Zena had heard, paid upward of $2,500 for the two-week session.
When Melina came home from teaching her classes in late afternoon I finally got around to asking her about something that had been on my mind since the hearing: Wade's "professional disagreement" that had ended in an assault charge. My sister was weary from her day. She remembered little of the event, she said, because it had happened eight or nine years ago. She did, however, remember who the fight was with. Her reaction was the same as last night. Pale, nervous, she spit out his name. A name that was coming up with regularity.
Marcus Tilden.
"What is it with Tilden, Mel?"
She was putting away her books and suddenly began cleaning up the living room, whose greasy popcorn bowl and beer bottles had become fixtures.
"What do you mean?" She pushed back her hair, stiff with hair spray, carrying an armload of dishes to the kitchen. "I can't believe what a mess this place is."
"Melina." I followed her into the kitchen. She ran hot water in the sink and squirted dish soap into the stream. Bubbles began to erupt from the water. "Why do you get so bent out of shape when you talk about Tilden?"
Her hazel eyes hid behind her glasses. She busied herself with dishwashing. "Do I? I suppose it's because I don't like him. That's all."
"That's all?"
She rubbed a wet cloth over the popcorn bowl. "He pressed charges against Wade back then. I've never forgiven him for that." I took the bowl from her, drying it. "I do remember what it was about, their fight. Wade wrote something that made Marcus look bad. I guess it really embarrassed Marcus so he came after Wade. It wasn't Wade's fault."
I watched my sister. Her memory was a funny thing. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. In my experience we don't forget things that make us want to tear hair out. She took the popcorn bowl from me. Before I could say anything, she had washed it all over again.
After dinner I decided the time had come to pay a call on Elaine Farrar, Shiloh's roommate. The evening light fell orange on the street, lighting up Lolo Peak south of town. Shiloh and Elaine lived six blocks away, down a tree-lined street with cracked sidewalks and petunias nodding in gardens. The sweet flower smells hung heavy in the air.
The house was a bungalow like Melina's, low and tidy, painted peach with white trim. The treeless front yard gave the house a neglected look echoed by sunburnt grass. An unpaved driveway filled with weeds led to a small one-car garage with old fashioned swinging doors.
The bowed screen door was all that covered the entrance. The inside door hung open, revealing a small living room, decorated with overstuffed chairs and lace doilies under glass-lantern lamps. Nine or ten women sat around the room, on the floor and in the chairs, as I knocked.
The woman who came to answer my knock had long brown hair past her waist and was painfully thin. Her skin looked blue in the harsh light from the single bulb under the porch roof. As I stood just inside the door, the conversation and laughter ground to a halt. The women stared at me. I smiled, unsure of which one was Elaine. I'd only seen her from the bac
k at the service. I turned to the thin woman. "You aren't Elaine, are you?"
Her eyebrows twitched together. "No. I don't believe we've met." Her voice had turned cold.
"No, we haven't," I replied, trying to be agreeable. The silence was penetrating. "Alix Thorssen. I'd like to talk to Elaine."
She looked at me hard. "Elaine's out here."
Under green fluorescent light a woman dressed in a purple sweat suit struggled with a large jug of wine. She grunted, stretching the tight fabric across her back, trying to loosen the cap, as we entered.
"Someone to see you." The thin woman evaporated.
"Good. You can help me open this." Elaine handed me the heavy bottle of wine. I jostled it in surprise, then set it on a counter, took a solid grip, and ripped through the perforated metal on the cap. She watched, her hands on her hips. "Great. Thanks."
As she poured the wine into glasses lined up on the old linoleum countertop I got my first good look at Elaine Farrar. Her hair was short and blond, permed into tight curls around her face. She projected an air of efficiency pouring the wine that belied her small, round stature.
"So, you must have been a friend of Shiloh's," Elaine said, flashing me a smile with pink-lipsticked lips. A ridge of freckles crossed her nose.
"Actually, I didn't know her."
Elaine put the jug down, replacing the cap. "Oh, I just assumed." A frown clouded her face. "What did you say your name was?"
On the way over I had wrestled with the nature of my visit. It would be easier to say I had been a friend of Shiloh's from long ago, here for the funeral. But I knew so little about her. And I hated to play games. Sucking in a breath, I faced the skeptical Elaine, repeating my name.
The Bluejay Shaman (Alix Thorssen Mystery Series) Page 6