by Paul Heald
By all accounts, the last popular priest in the parish had been Ernest Rodgers, who had served during all of the 1970s and 1980s and most of the 1990s. After he retired, he lurked around the parish for years, contrary to diocesan policy, and had only passed away six months earlier. A stack of his boxes still sat in the choir-room closet, guarded jealously by Woodall, whose loyalty to Rodgers’s memory bordered on fanatical. A bronze plaque bearing his name and profile graced a prominent position in the foyer of the church.
Thor checked his computer for his next appointment and put his feet up on his desk when he saw that he had another hour before the altar guild arrived and presented him with their yearly flower and linen budget. His office had been remodeled by Father Rodgers, and the massive cherry desk provided plenty of space for a footrest. Dark walnut bookcases towered behind him and lined the wall facing the window. An eighteenth-century print of Canterbury Cathedral took up most of the space on the wall next to the doorway. Through the door lay the vestibule where the church secretary had her desk and photocopy machine. Heavy velvet curtains hung next to the windows, but the young priest had tied them back to maximize the amount of sunlight in the dark office. He wished he were bold enough to put up a poster of his favorite English folk-rock band, James, but a parish that sometimes referred to him as Doogie Howser, MDiv, was not ready for any such unconventional move.
Were it not for the windows looking out onto the shady parking lot and playground beyond, he would have felt completely suffocated in the space. So, he spent a lot of time resting his eyes on the greenery and watching visitors approach the church. He had developed a sixth sense for trouble as it came up the sidewalk and had become adept at preparing for it by rehearsing a quick speech or darting into the bathroom down the hall.
Thirty minutes before the arrival of the altar guild, Thor saw a middle-aged man in a blue seersucker suit park his car and head toward the church. He looked vaguely familiar, and the priest hoped that he was not a parishioner whose name he really should remember.
The man introduced himself as a newspaper reporter and a Baptist deacon, and the young priest thought that he recognized the name on the business card he was handed. He seldom looked at bylines, but he remembered a very even-handed story by James Murphy about several Muslim families, mostly associated with Clarkeston College, who had established a tiny mosque in a storefront in a failed strip mall. The article emphasized the mosque’s charitable works in the community and was accompanied by a large photo of smiling children. The story had made the transplanted midwesterner less apprehensive about his new home and rather ashamed of his presumption that a story about Muslims in a small-town Georgia newspaper would have to be negative. He mentioned his appreciation of the article to his visitor and asked Murphy what he wanted.
“I’m doing a story on a murder that took place before you came to Clarkeston.” The reporter gave an outline of the disappearance of a community-minded student named Diana Cavendish. As the fifth anniversary of the murder approached, the newspaper was planning on running a retrospective, complete with pictures of the girl and appeals from the authorities for those with information to come forward. “St. James,” he added as he cleared his throat, “was sort of at the heart of the initial investigation.”
Thor was not surprised that he had heard nothing about the matter from his congregation. After all, it had taken the vestry three months to inform him that the absent junior warden had resigned and was not just on vacation.
“The prime suspect in the killing grew up in this church. His name is Jacob Granville.” The name meant nothing to the young priest. “His parents moved shortly after the investigation was concluded, but I believe the sheriff at the time is still a member here.”
Thor nodded. Sheriff Porter Johnson was a regular attendee, a large, bluff fellow who had told Thor on several occasions that he had been raised Baptist and suffered St. James because his wife was a cradle Episcopalian who could not forsake her favorite Anglican hymns and the “bells and smells” of feast days.
“The sheriff and Jacob Granville’s father worked closely together for years. The older Granville was the prosecuting attorney for the county at the time of the murder.” The reporter spoke cautiously and watched Thor closely, as if gauging his reaction to the news, with a peek over the top of his glasses. “He claimed that he stayed away from the investigation, but few people believed him.”
Thor wondered what all this had to do with him, but he continued nodding his head and encouraged Murphy to keep talking. The church was full of secrets that he was not deemed worthy of knowing. Sometimes he felt like the nerdy high school student who was never told the location of the big party until after it was over. The reporter was passionate about the death of Cavendish, and, without being too blatant, had successfully communicated that someone or something in the tight-knit southern community may have thwarted justice. He had experienced enough impediments in his own ministry to be sympathetic to the journalist’s mission.
“In the middle of all this mess was Ernest Rodgers, your predecessor here. No matter how much evidence stacked up against Jacob Granville, he’d tell anyone who would listen that the kid could not possibly be the murderer.” Murphy motioned to a small portrait of the priest hanging on the wall. “He must have written a dozen letters to the editor. Heck, he even preached it from the pulpit.”
The reporter explained how the Cavendish murder had marked the end of an era in Clarkeston. As in many southern towns, the power elite had long congregated at the downtown Episcopal church, but even before the death of Diana Cavendish, its influence had begun to dissipate. Politics at all levels had become dominated by evangelical Bible-thumpers, not adherents to the Book of Common Prayer. Despite the fact that Jefferson Davis and his vice president had both been good Episcopalians, the church was not nearly conservative enough anymore to attract the new breed of politicians and businessmen determined to bring their born-again theology into all walks of public life. The people who wielded the real power in Clarkeston were some flavor of Baptist or Pentecostal or attended one of the new nondenominational megachurches that kept springing up along the ring road circling Clarkeston. The murder and perceived cover-up were the final blow to St. James’s dominance. Power flowed elsewhere now.
“Thanks for the history lesson, Mr. Murphy,” Thor replied, with a genuine appreciation of a fresh perspective on his church and his flock. Much of Clarkeston, Georgia, was still a mystery. “But I’m not sure what any of this has to do with me.”
“Nothing, really,” the reporter said. He sat back in his chair and cast a glance out the window before he spoke further. “I just came here to ask you a favor.” He smiled and polished his spectacles while he continued. “I was hoping that you might let me have a look at Father Rodgers’s papers. I’ve been told that they’re still around here somewhere, and no one has ever poked through them to see if they might shed some light on the whole story.”
Despite the reporter’s inoffensive demeanor, alarm bells started going off in the young priest’s head. What good could come of letting an outsider poke through his predecessor’s boxes? Just because Thor didn’t like Father Rodgers’s decorating tastes did not mean that his privacy was forfeit. Although the congregation’s devotion to the departed priest grated at times, Rodgers himself had always been very civil. In fact, as he lay terminally ill in the hospital, he let it be known that he wanted Thor to conduct his funeral. This gesture generated some temporary goodwill, but not enough to prevent the vestry from inviting a bishop from North Carolina to lead the service.
“I’m not sure that I can let you see his private papers, Mr. Murphy.”
“Call me James.”
“The papers aren’t mine,” the priest reasoned aloud, “and they’re technically not the church’s either. They probably belong to Mrs. Rodgers.”
“Then,” the reporter said gravely and with evident sincerity, “I have an even bigger favor to ask you: could you ask her permission to share the
m?”
Thor tried to explain how difficult talking to her would be but quickly realized that the reporter already understood. Murphy had a baleful expression on his face and the posture of a knowing supplicant. The widow Rodgers was one of the thorniest people the transplanted midwesterner had ever met. She was a native of Clarkeston, and he had no doubt that her fierce reputation was as well known as it was well earned. On the other hand, he had not seen her since the funeral and had been putting off making a visit to inquire why she seemed to have abandoned St. James. And the vestry had pointed out in their last meeting that she was an elderly and wealthy woman who needed to be approached about leaving part of her estate to her husband’s parish. “Exactly what would you want me to do?”
“Well,” his visitor could not help but grin, “don’t tell her that I want to poke through his stuff. She can’t stand me.” He stood up and moved toward the desk. “Just ask her if she wants it. My guess is that she doesn’t care, or she’d have picked it up already. If she says no, then it’s abandoned and you can do whatever you want.” He reached out his right hand and laid the palm flat on the priest’s desk. “And you can count on me not to reveal my sources. If I find any useful information in there, no one will ever know where it came from.”
Thor nodded, his mind already contemplating what approach to take with the formidable old widow. The problem of the boxes actually gave him a nice excuse to pay her a visit. It would provide a neutral topic to justify their conversation and maybe even help him move deftly to the question of a bequest for the church. He thanked the reporter for stopping by and made a mental note to see Mrs. Rodgers the following day.
V.
EXITS
James Murphy shut the door to his car and decided to make a stop on the way home from St. James. He had a hunch that something was going to explode with the Cavendish story. A niggling itch behind his right ear told him that somehow, for better or for worse, all hell was going to break loose. The feds might trace the pictures back to a mountain cabin containing Jacob Granville, or Ernest Rodgers’s old boxes might yield a scrawled confession. Something was going to happen if he kept pushing, and when he finally broke through the last barrier, a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting stood sparkling within his grasp, and peace and closure would finally come to the family of Diana Cavendish.
The cause of the breakthrough, of course, would be clear to anyone reading his as-yet-unwritten award-winning story. Without the serendipitous discovery of the racy photos of the victim, the mystery would have remained unsolved, and that meant questions would be asked about the source of the discovery. And that meant lying to avoid embarrassment or confessing at some point that he sometimes surfed the net looking at photos of bikini-clad young women. He could dissemble and say that he received a tip from a confidential source. That might elicit some snickers at the Pulitzer press conference, but no one would be able to prove that the resolution of the mystery had begun with his own failings. Murphy saw the out that was available, but he hesitated to take it. He had the strong intuition that if he paid no personal price for the story, it would never materialize in the first place.
In the South, superstition and guilt get tangled in spectacular ways, and the middle-aged deacon was susceptible to seeing the fortunate and unfortunate events in his life as related to sins successfully resisted or those slavishly indulged. One never heard the word karma at the First Baptist Church of Clarkeston, Georgia, but the notion was alive and well in various doctrines associated with blessing and retribution. James was not merely chagrined by his inability to stay away from the sleazy side of the Internet, he felt guilty about his weakness. Lusting in one’s heart was a sin and there was no denying that his gazes were lustful. And the fact that he evoked those alluring images in his head on the increasingly rare occasions when his wife wanted to have sex affirmed the sinfulness of his surfing habits. So he had two reasons to visit Pastor Johnson at his home church, a genuine sense of shame and the superstition that he needed to come clean or the Diana Cavendish murder would never be solved. There was a price to be paid and he needed to pay it.
The middle-aged penitent pulled into the parking lot of the massive church and sat for a moment contemplating the white Doric columns supporting the roof of the old sanctuary. The nineteenth-century space that used to house the entire congregation had been relegated to children’s activities after a new addition was built in the early 1980s. The church now took up most of a city block, with its two thousand members struggling to find parking space downtown on Sunday mornings. He would have preferred to attend the small Methodist church near his home, but his wife had grown up at First Baptist and he stood no chance of moving her away from her power base.
He got out of the car and walked over to the side entrance to the church office. The church had six different ministers now, and he wondered who would be on pastoral duty on a Wednesday afternoon. As a member of the board of deacons, he rated private time with Curt Johnson, the senior minister, but James doubted that the head of the whole operation would be available. He had an empire to run and delegated all mundane matters, other than fund-raising, to his associate pastors. The journalist entered, took off his hat, and asked the church secretary if anyone was around.
He was sent down a plushly carpeted hallway to see Neville Armstrong, associate pastor and slugging first baseman for the church’s league-winning softball team.
“James,” the burly minister exclaimed as he greeted his former teammate, “what brings you by?” Murphy had played sparingly as a left fielder until a series of heel injuries ended a mediocre career. Whenever he looked at Armstrong, he imagined him screwing up his meaty face before taking a swipe at a looping pitch. The minister got up from the desk and pulled a chair around so that they could both be seated in the corner of his office.
“Not too much,” the reporter replied, “do you mind if I shut the door?” Even though he had not yet confessed, he was already feeling better. He remembered the relief he felt years ago when he finally told his mother that he was going to college in Clarkeston. She needed him to stay at home, to earn some money for the family and serve as buffer between herself and his drunk of a father, and yet she understood. Thinking about the rare hug she had given him and the simple good luck she had spoken still had power to bring tears to his eyes.
He sat down in the offered chair and realized that he had not thought through the connection between his Internet surfing habits and the renewed murder investigation. Omitting the context of his behavior might make his confession a little awkward, but dragging city politics and the memory of Diana Cavendish into the room seemed risky and pointless.
He cleared his throat and spoke haltingly for a while before getting to the point, “Uh, Nev, this is kind of an uncomfortable conversation to have, but something’s been bothering me and I just need to talk to someone.”
“That’s why I’m here, Brother James,” said Armstrong, beaming the same look he gave a sixteen-inch softball as it approached the plate. For his part, James hated being called brother. He considered it an affectation borrowed from the Pentecostalists. “What kind of a burden are you carrying today?”
“That’s the word for it … a burden.” He looked out the window and saw the church secretary leave the building and walk to her car. Although her skirt was conservatively long, there was no hiding the pleasant swish and sway of her derriere as she bent down to put a bag in the trunk. “It’s lust,” he said to himself.
“You’ve been cheating on Sondra?” A storm cloud passed the brow of the minister as he leaned forward to hear better.
“No!” The reporter exclaimed. “Not that!” The mere thought was appalling. His relationship with his wife was in a rut, but he loved her deeply. Her beauty still made him shake his head at his good fortune. “No, it’s the Internet. I haven’t done anything with anybody.”
“Ah,” the minister said knowingly, “we see Internet porn addiction all the time. Sometimes I wish the damn thing had
never been invented.” He shook his head and then said thoughtfully, “Or at least the porn part of it.”
James drew a deep breath. “I don’t know if you’d call it porn exactly.” But it was porn. When a man looks at porn, he has lustful thoughts in his head. That’s the whole point of pornography and that’s why it’s sinful. Why should his bikini website be preferable to hard-core porn just because the women are wearing swimsuits rather than nothing at all? If a man fantasizes about having sex with a woman in a picture, does it really matter what she’s wearing? “We’re talking about sexy swimsuit pictures.” He sighed. “Still, I’m not proud of myself.”
Armstrong seemed disappointed that the reporter’s revelation wasn’t more lurid. He shifted in his chair and took up the Bible that rested on the round table separating them. “No triple-X-rated orgy sites?”
“Not yet, at any rate.”
The pastor looked let down. He did not seem to understand that sin was in the heart and not on the page. Armstrong scratched his head and suddenly looked like he had an idea. “How old are the girls in the pictures?”