“Later? Is there going to be a later? This isn’t just a onetime visit?”
“When Chris told me you were a detective and mentioned your illness, it occurred to me that you are going to need some time to convalesce when you get out of here. An opportunity, if you will, to kill two birds with one stone.”
“I’ve been in this bed for over a week now. I don’t think I much like that simile—or is it a metaphor?”
“Certainly just a figure of speech, and you’re right, not an apt one, all things considered. What I’ve come for is to offer you the perfect place to convalesce, just down the coast a bit, near Big Sur—sea air and mountain vistas and lots of quiet.”
“Sounds lovely. Does it have a name, or am I simply to refer to it as Eden?”
That laugh again. A deep, ringing baritone that suggested all kinds of manly things to Stanley, and none of them pertinent to a priest. Or a friar, he corrected himself. Something, at any rate, which ought to negate seductive thoughts.
“Saint Marywood,” Father Brighton said. “Though I’m not sure Eden would be so awfully remiss. It is a lovely place. Except there are no apple trees.”
“Is it a monastery, this lovely Saint Marywood?”
“Yes. Or friary, if you prefer, though I’ve always thought that a bit pretentious. Anyway, friary is ordinarily used to indicate the mendicant orders, and we don’t beg for alms. We are self-sufficient. More or less so, at any rate.”
“Then I’ll stick with calling it a monastery. Where, I take it, I will be surrounded by monks. Quiet monks, presumably, since you mentioned that especially.”
“Friars. And reasonably quiet, yes, but not entirely. Meals are silent, but otherwise some of the young men are quite vocal. And, I might mention, not all of them are as old as I, if that tempts you.”
Which it did, and Stanley thought the friar rather knew that without being told, but still, he wasn’t one to give up his secrets so easily. “I have a boyfriend.”
“So I am told. Tom Danzel, your partner in that detective agency, isn’t it? That’s what Chris told me, at any rate. But surely there’s no harm in looking. Which, I should probably say, is about all that could be expected to happen anyway, notwithstanding their predilections. They do take vows.”
“Celibacy?”
Father Brighton nodded somberly.
Stanley gave an exaggerated pout. “Well, that doesn’t sound very promising. All those girls in dresses and no one allowed to kick up their heels. Or raise them, so to speak.”
“I wouldn’t want to give you a false impression. But in another sense, you could be said to have your cake and eat it too. Or feast on it with your eyes, at least. I can promise you that, certainly—a feast for the eyes, one that I myself savor often, to be perfectly honest. I gave up certain of my activities pursuant to my vows, but the predilections remain, do they not?”
“Well, I’m not dead yet, so…. Wait, what are you suggesting? Predilections? Are these monks—”
“Friars.”
“Friars, then. Are they all gay?”
Father Brighton smiled somewhat impishly and nodded. “Someone once said that queers make the best monks.”
“And friars too, it would seem. And they are all young men?”
“Most of them. The past is more likely to be an encumbrance to the young.”
“Still, monks—excuse me, friars…. I can’t help thinking it seems such an unlikely choice for a young man to make.”
“Something about the passion, I should think. And the asceticism. Mind you, as I say, there is that vow of celibacy.”
“Which is never broken?” Stanley sighed. What was the point of young men with their passions flaming like a fire on the hearth if you had no hope of employing a poker?
Father Brighton shrugged. “Some things are left up to the individual conscience. I’d be less than honest if I didn’t say I think it sometimes happens. As Plutarch put it—”
“The wildest colts make the best horses,” Stanley finished for him.
Father Brighton beamed at him. “Exactly. You know your Romans.”
“Better than I know my friars, obviously. I’ve been intimately involved with one or two over the years—Romans, I mean, never a friar. So what you’re saying is that a few of the colts are still frisky?”
“Most of the brothers are still colts, certainly, young men in the prime of their lives. And while they do work in the local schools, as teachers—friars serve in their communities, you see—they are also much of the time somewhat isolated, so it’s not surprising if they sometimes stray from their vows. That’s to be expected, I should think. But I have to be honest, I also think such instances are rare.”
Stanley thought about that for a moment. “And this is why you didn’t really want to bring the police into this, whatever this problem is.”
“In part, yes. I think ideally we’d want someone of a certain sensibility. You can understand that, surely?”
“I can. But I may as well tell you, I’m done playing detective.” Stanley sighed.
Father Brighton raised one eyebrow slightly. “If you’ll pardon my saying so, you seem troubled.”
“Hmm. Not troubled so much as weary. Of… well, lots of things. It’s too long a list to go into here.”
“But not that partner you mentioned—Tom, as I recall.”
“Tom? No….” Stanley paused, thinking for a moment, and said, more emphatically, “No.”
“If you’ll forgive an old man for spouting advice, let me say, Stanley, from where you stand—”
“Lie,” Stanley corrected him. “I’ve been very much horizontal of late.”
“And it becomes you, if I might offer a comment. But what I started to say is, the road before you looks deceptively long, but it’s not. It’s far, far shorter than you could possibly imagine. If you’ve found love, cherish it. Squeeze all the happiness and love you can into every moment. They have a habit of fading away all too soon, those moments.”
“Were you saying that I look attractive horizontal? And you sound as if you’re troubled yourself.”
Father Brighton laughed again, his expression changing in an instant from somber to happy. “Yes, to the first part. As to the other—perhaps, as you put it, I am just a bit weary too.”
“And there is that problem you mentioned….”
“Which I shall not burden you with after all, I think. Since, as you say, you are no longer playing detective.”
“I don’t think it was ever really my cup of tea, and I’ve already informed Tom, my partner, that when I get out of here, I’m not going back into the business. We always seem to end up with murder on our hands, and in my experience, murder nearly always involves dead bodies. Just out of curiosity, by the way, is that the sort of problem you’re having at your friar place—a spot of murder?”
“No, no, nothing so dramatic as that.”
“And you don’t want to tell me about it while you’re here?” Stanley hated to be left in the dark, especially regarding other people’s business.
“Well, if you aren’t coming to Saint Marywood….” Father Brighton shrugged and said—perhaps a little too brightly, Stanley thought—“And really, it’s not all that pressing.”
Pressing enough to talk to Chris and, at his suggestion, drive from Big Sur—four or five hours, wasn’t it?—to make a visit here to the hospital. Despite his promises to himself that he was done with detective work, Stanley found himself mildly intrigued. He’d all but made up his mind he was through with all that. Still, he felt a slight quickening of his lately sluggish pulse.
He was about to pursue the matter a bit further, but the doctor, whose name Stanley never could remember, appeared at that moment in the doorway. He wheezed—as was his frequent habit—and looked past the friar, directly at Stanley.
“If it’s not a convenient time…,” the doctor said in a voice that indicated he thought it ought to be.
“I was just leaving.” Father Brighton got up qu
ickly from the wooden chair, but on his way to the door, he paused to look back.
“The offer of convalescence remains, regardless of that other matter,” he said. “It’s a lovely place, really.”
And there’s still that unexplained problem, Stanley thought, more tempted than he wanted to admit to himself. “I confess, it is attractive.”
“If you change your mind,” Father Brighton said, “you are certainly welcome, for as long as you wish. And Chris will know how to reach me.”
When he had gone, the doctor walked over to Stanley’s bed. He wheezed again, glancing down at some papers in his hand and back up to Stanley. “I’m happy to say the tests have confirmed our most recent diagnosis. Not leukemia at all, just a rather atypical mononucleosis. But you did have me worried for a time.”
“Hmm, strictly speaking, I think you were puzzled,” Stanley said. “I was the worried one.”
The doctor rewarded him with an unamused smile. “Yes, well, in any case, you’ll need a few days more—”
“I was hoping to go home.”
“You will need a few more days of rest,” the doctor said emphatically. “We’ll see how things stand in a day or two.”
“Or lie. Which I’ve been doing for days, and I must say, notwithstanding that some seem to find it attractive, it does get boring.”
“Your boredom won’t kill you.”
Stanley was not quite so sure. He remembered Chris, who was a nurse, saying, “If the disease doesn’t kill you, the doctors may do the job.”
This doctor, whose name Stanley still couldn’t recall, had scarcely wheezed his way out of the room when a young woman came in. They must be selling tickets, Stanley thought. He hadn’t had more than one visitor a day since he’d been here, not counting Doctor Wheeze, and now it seemed like he was on the Gray Line tour.
“If you’re Stan, these are for you,” his newest visitor said, holding out an arrangement of yellow and white daisies in an emerald green jar.
“Stanley.” He hated being called Stan. It sounded so… well, something he wasn’t, even if he couldn’t quite put a name to it. Macho, maybe.
“Stanley,” she corrected herself with a bright smile and a generous display of teeth. “I’m Delightful.”
“Yes, I should say you must be,” Stanley said, setting the flowers on the nightstand. Or if not delightful—and that took some knowing, didn’t it?—she was, without question, comely. Lustrous auburn hair framed a perfect oval of a face—a very pretty face it was too—and fullness of bosom and hip was accentuated by a wasp-sized waist. Stanley had a vision of male heads snapping about as she passed, of shops and homes emptying as surely as they had emptied of other occupants for that Pied Piper. His partner, Tom, had been a dedicated skirt chaser until he had embarked on the as-of-yet-not-clearly-labeled relationship with Stanley. Tom would surely be salivating. And running with the rats. Probably at the head of the pack.
The potential object of salivation beamed at him, once again flashing perfect teeth. “You’re wondering about my name. Everybody does. The answer is quite simple, though, really. My parents were hard-core hippies,” she said. “So they named us accordingly. My brother is Willing.”
“I think I may have met him,” Stanley said. “Charming creature, as I recall.”
His visitor laughed. “And I was christened Delightful. But everyone calls me Dee. Dee Collins. I’m your girl Friday.”
“Leaving Saturday through Thursday unaccounted for?”
She gave him a generous grin, tossing those auburn curls this time. More men were surely abandoning the shops, or at least their hospital rooms. An intern passing the open door happened to glance in and, seeing Dee Collins, paused briefly to give her what the French call an oeillade, which Stanley had always thought sounded more elegant than a leer. To her credit, Ms. Collins did not notice—or did not show she noticed, in any case. Stanley had the impression that she did not miss much, certainly not where men were concerned.
“Well, those too,” she replied. “Or Monday through Friday, in any case. Tom hired me.” When Stanley only looked blankly at her, she added, “Tom Danzel.”
“Yes,” Stanley said, his face carefully free of expression, “I know the name. And what exactly did Mr. Danzel hire you for?”
“I told you, I’m your girl Friday. He says you aren’t coming back to the office, and he needed someone to manage things there. So”—she spread her hands wide—“I’m it.”
“Like a game of tag,” Stanley said. “And odd man out.” He knew his partner. Tom was a faithful kind of guy, but temptation when it came to him probably wore a miniskirt that barely reached past the waterline and had black-encased legs that seemed never to end. All the sorts of things Tom would be sure to notice. Oeillade, indeed. He immediately thought of one or two things he did not care to have her manage—his partner foremost among them.
He tossed the covers aside and swung his own unencased legs to the floor. “Actually, that bit about my not coming back to the office is still up in the air. Doctor Huffenpuff says I can go home today, but I will need to convalesce for a bit. If you would be so kind, Delectable, my clothes are on a hanger in that closet just behind you.”
“Delightful.” She took a hanger from the little closet and handed Stanley his sweats.
“Exactly. As it turns out, I’ve got the perfect place for resting up. We are going to spend a couple of weeks down the coast. Sea air and mountain vistas and lots of long brown skirts.”
“We?” She looked appropriately puzzled.
“Oh, I haven’t informed him yet, but Tom will be going with me. It will be like a vacation.”
“But….” Her smiling expression became one of dismay. “But what about the office?”
“That, it seems, will be in your hands—your surely competent hands, I should think.” He raised an eyebrow and gave her a mocking smile. “I’m going to put my knickers on now. No peeking.”
VICTOR J. BANIS is the critically acclaimed (“the master’s touch in storytelling” ~Publishers Weekly) author of more than 200 books and numerous shorter works in a career spanning nearly a half century. A longtime Californian, he lives and writes now in West Virginia’s beautiful Blue Ridge.
Website: www.vjbanis.com
By Victor J. Banis
A Deadly Kind of Love
Published by DSP PUBLICATIONS
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Deadly Kind of Love
© 2018 Victor J. Banis.
Cover Art
© 2018 Adrian Nicholas.
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ISBN: 978-1-64080-251-3
Digital ISBN: 978-1-64080-252-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953660
Published
March 2018
v. 2.0
First Edition published by Dreamspinner Press, June 2011.
Printed in the United States of America
A Deadly Kind of Love Page 21