by Paul Heald
After a silent rehearsal of his speech, Thor got out of his battered Corolla and walked up to the house. He did not enjoy asking parishioners for donations, nor did he relish the task of approaching a notoriously difficult lady for any kind of favor, but her absence from the congregation provided him with a good excuse to drop by, and her husband’s death gave him a reason to talk about her estate planning. He took a deep breath and pushed the yellowed button to the right of the door. A large bicycle bell seemed to jangle within the house and a few moments later Caroline Rodgers appeared at the door in a dark blue dress, reading glasses pushed up into her steely gray hair, piercing green eyes registering both recognition and disdain.
“What are you doing here?” she asked in a clear, high voice that could have belonged to a much younger woman. He shifted his weight forward but she made no move to let him in.
“Just a courtesy call, Ms. Rodgers.” He adjusted his dog collar with a nervous tug. “We haven’t seen you over at St. James for a while, so I thought I’d stop by and see how you’re doing.”
“I’m doing just fine,” she replied impatiently. She opened her mouth as if to say something more, but instead she stepped back to shut the door and end the brief interview. Just as it began to close, a young woman in a bright sundress appeared and blocked its movement with her hand.
The attractive woman, who looked to be in her early thirties, outmuscled the taciturn widow and smiled brightly at Thor. “You must be Father Carter! Please come in and we’ll get you some tea.” She stared at her mother until the septuagenarian grudgingly moved aside to let the young priest in.
“I’m sorry,” he replied to the blond angel, “have we met?” Certainly, he would have remembered such a face.
“No, no,” she laughed brightly.
“Then how—?”
“Black suit, white collar, and a little deduction. I’m Miriam.” She took the priest’s hand and guided him to a sitting room crowded with overstuffed furniture covered in a faded floral brocade.
“Goddamn blackbirds,” the older woman scowled and shook her head as they passed by her in the hallway.
“Momma! Be polite!” Thor took a quick look back through the screen door.
“No, Father,” Miriam continued, “not real blackbirds.” She cast a sour look at her surviving parent. “She means priests. Since Papa died, my mother has revealed quite a horrifying attitude toward all clergy. She doesn’t mean anything personal.”
To this, the older woman offered an audible “harumph” and stalked into the kitchen. “She’ll bring us some tea,” the daughter continued.
“But will it be safe to drink?” Thor managed a smile at Miriam, intending a joke, but not entirely sure that the sniping senior was completely harmless. He was rewarded with a laugh and he extended his hand to her. “Call me Thor. I haven’t gotten used to Father Carter yet.”
She pressed it warmly in return and smiled, “I used to call my dad ‘Father Father’ when I was a kid. He was pretty terrifying from the pulpit, but at home he was a sweetheart.” She pointed to a family picture on the mantle, displaying the familiar face of Ernest Rodgers in the midst of three beaming children and a stony-faced wife. “Those are my brothers Eli and Joseph. I’m the youngest … we all still miss Papa horribly.”
“I didn’t get to know him well.” Thor searched for the right word to describe the imperious old cleric. “But he certainly was an impressive guy.” At this point, the widow emerged from the kitchen with a platter that contained three glasses of iced tea and a tiny plate of peppermints. She set the items down on the round table that separated Thor’s chair from Miriam’s and sat herself down on the sofa facing them. Thor thanked her and took a glass.
By way of misdirection, he spoke once again to the daughter, hoping to prompt a more civil response from the mother. “I just stopped by to check on your mom and ask what she wanted done with your father’s papers. We haven’t seen her at church for a while and everyone is wondering if she’s okay.”
“And you’re not going to be seeing me,” the widow responded authoritatively and then paused, waiting until the priest turned to her. “The only reason I ever went was to support Miriam’s father,” she explained. “With him gone, there’s no reason for me to spend any more of my time with that pack of hypocrites at St. James.” She picked up a peppermint and popped it in her mouth. “Besides, I’m an atheist.”
“Momma!”
“Always have been, darlin’.” She sucked on the candy and brought it briefly to her lips. “You know that. I just never let the congregation catch on.”
“Momma,” Miriam stated firmly, accustomed to her mother’s irreverent outbursts, “I don’t think that we need to discuss theology with Father Thor.”
“Well,” she snorted, “who else should I discuss theology with if not a priest?” Thor watched Miriam roll her sparkling blue eyes. “And as far as your father’s papers go, this young man can burn them if he wants. The church secretary told me that they’re just a bunch of old sermons and Anglican Monthly magazines.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” replied Thor, thrilled to make a positive response to anything the woman was saying. “I’ll go through the boxes carefully and save anything that you might want to keep.”
The widow shrugged her shoulders and popped another peppermint. For a moment, Thor could see where Miriam got her distinctive and pleasing looks. She shared intelligent eyes and an aristocratic nose with her mother, and they both had the same slender neck and full lips. Miriam was taller and curvier. Her mother’s rigorously slim figure must have been the envy of the stolid matrons at St. James.
“That leaves just one more thing …” Thor almost abandoned his plan to broach the subject of money, but he had sworn that he would not chicken out. Fund-raising was the most painful part of his job, but it was important to the parish, and if he did not carry through with his duty, then he might lose his nerve permanently. Of course, he had never had to schmooze a clergy-baiting atheist before. “Ms. Rodgers, your husband’s passing might have gotten you thinking about your own mortality. His ministry left a lasting legacy at St. James, and I was just wondering whether you might want to leave your own mark with a testamentary gift of some sort.”
“My God,” the widow said, grinning broadly and turning to her daughter, “I do believe he’s asking me for money!” She was positively gleeful at the audacity of her guest.
“Given … uh … what you’ve said,” stammered the priest, “you may not want to maintain a monthly pledge.” He knew for a fact that she had not kept up her husband’s tithe nor any part of it. “But you might want to look to the future and make some sort of commitment.”
He prepared for a blast of vitriol, but instead of cursing him or laughing him out of the house, the old woman uttered a single word in a decisive voice.
“Bells.”
“Bells?”
“Bells! Mr. Carter,” she explained impatiently. “The only thing that I ever enjoyed at St. James was playing in the handbell choir, and I would be happy to make a bequest large enough to buy a new set of bells and to endow a permanent director just for a bell choir.” Her voice began to raise in pitch, “The current music director, that—
“Mother!”
“—trollop,” she compromised reluctantly, “hates handbell music and convinced the vestry to sell the bells. It would please me tremendously to think of them ringing again at St. James.”
“That’s very generous, ma’am.” Thor did the math quickly in his head and determined that such a bequest, if she really meant to endow a salary, would have to be in the neighborhood of $250,000. “That’s very generous indeed!” He stood up and took her hand. She remained seated, but nodded her head slightly.
“Good luck over there, young man,” she dismissed him with a wave. “You’re going to need it.”
He thanked her again and walked to the door with Miriam, who could barely stifle her amusement at the negotiation she had just witnessed. She followed
him down the concrete steps onto the lawn and took his arm before he reached his car.
“I know my mother said that you could burn my father’s papers, but I’d like to have a look at them before you get rid of them.” She shrugged her shoulders and smiled. “I’m curious.”
“No problem.” He felt a sudden impulse to ask her out to dinner. While he gathered himself for the effort, she made a quick survey of her mother’s yard and plucked a couple of dandelions that were growing in the crack between the lawn and the driveway. “Momma’s got plenty of money to keep this place up.” She shook her head and gestured to her childhood home. “But she’s got this old-fashioned shabby-chic attitude about the house. You see how smartly she dresses. She’d never let her personal appearance slide like this.”
Instead of agreeing that her former residence could use an update, Thor returned to the subject of the papers, “Would you like to come over to the church next week and look in your father’s boxes? Maybe you’d let me take you out to eat beforehand?” He was aiming for nonchalant but was not sure that he had hit the mark until she accepted his proposal without batting an eye. They agreed to meet on the following Tuesday and parted with an awkward handshake initiated by Thor that seemed to amuse the young woman.
As he pulled away, he decided to let James Murphy look at Ernest Rodgers’s papers over the weekend before he turned the boxes over to Miriam. Rodgers’s widow clearly had no interest in them so there seemed no reason not to help the journalist out. Nonetheless, vague concerns troubled him while he drove back to St. James. What if the reporter did find something that implicated Rodgers in the cover-up of Diana Cavendish’s murder? The thought was ludicrous, but neither Miriam nor her mother would appreciate his ruining the priest’s reputation. He pulled into his parking space in front of the church and decided to go through the papers himself before showing them to anyone else, just to see if there was anything as extraordinary as a signed confession from Jacob Granville among the sermons or a pile of gay porn slipped inside an Anglican Monthly.
* * *
He greeted Shelly Woodall, the church music director, as he entered the building and asked her for the key to the closet in the choir rehearsal room.
“But that’s where Father Rodgers stores his papers.” Her expression dared him to question her use of the present tense. “I’m not supposed to let anyone in there.”
Woodall had been Rodgers’s organist and choir director for years before his retirement, and she still revered his memory. Several parishioners had recommended that Thor hire a replacement, as was his prerogative as the new priest, but he kept her on. When she was not reminiscing about her former boss, she was an excellent keyboardist and managed to coax a nice full sound out of the small parish choir. He was used to her defending Rodgers’s turf, so he patiently explained that permission had been granted by the widow and emphasized the need to finally make space for the boxes of old hymnals currently stacked in one of the Christian Education rooms.
She reluctantly handed over the keys but could not resist taking a shot at the woman who had authorized the trespass. “Caroline Rodgers doesn’t care a bit about what’s in those boxes,” she sniffed. “And I don’t think she cared about him either! I used to make him coffee whenever he came in. Bitter, he said it was, always too bitter back at home.”
She hovered over him disapprovingly as he opened the door, and a pleasant piney smell seeped into the air. Thor stuck his head in the closet and saw that it was lined in cedar, a common means of coping with mildew in the days before air conditioning transformed the South. Three boxes were stacked in the far corner of the space, almost covered by a pair of musty surplices and several choir robes in a style that the church no longer used.
“Ah,” remarked the priest with a wicked grin back at Woodall, “so that’s where we keep the surplus surplices!” His wit earned him only a puzzled look, so he reached back into the closet with a sigh, pulled out a box and carried it to the desk in his office. Woodall carried in the others, and soon he was ready to plunge into the dusty remains of his predecessor’s presence at St. James. She stood close by as he opened the first box. It took a long stare and a request for a cup of coffee to get her to leave him alone with the jumbled papers.
As he had been told, the boxes were primarily filled with typed sermons, many of them bearing extensive notes in the margin, along with various church-related publications and printed programs from conferences Rodgers had attended. He had been a delegate to the national Episcopal convention several times, and one whole box was devoted to agenda items and position papers drafted on issues such as the ordination of women and church policies toward confirmation.
After an hour of sorting through the papers, he felt certain that the boxes contained nothing unusual, so he called Murphy and left a message. He looked out the window and saw that it had started to rain, a slow drizzle that promised to last the rest of the day. A glance at his watch and calendar revealed that he had an afternoon in front of him with no meetings or commitments of any kind. He sighed. Unable to think of an excuse not to write the sermon for the following Sunday, he flipped on his computer and scrolled through his email before finally opening up his word processor.
Normally, sermon writing was a pleasant task, but the readings assigned by the lectionary all related to the observance of Trinity Sunday, and wading into the theological quagmire of the triune God was a notoriously daunting clerical task. Thor sat for fifteen minutes, drafting and redrafting a single sentence before finally deleting it and then getting up to go to the bathroom. As he reentered his office, he remembered that the box of sermons had been ordered according to the rhythm of the church year, and it took only a couple of minutes to locate three sermons on the subject of Trinitarianism. The paltry number of pages suggested that his predecessor had preached off topic on most years or conveniently gone on vacation, as many clergy did on the first Sunday after Pentecost, in order to cast the preaching burden onto a visiting priest.
Thor skimmed the sermons and saw that they were essentially regurgitations of each other. Although they showed some sophistication and erudition in tackling the notion that one God manifested himself in three ways, the quotations from Aquinas and St. Augustine did little to make Trinitarian doctrine seem anything more than a holy mishmash of theological truisms. The young priest longed to tell the truth to parishioners and expose his whole flock as the rampant polytheists they undoubtedly were. He fantasized about telling the congregation that if they envisioned two beings in heaven, a father and son, sitting side by side as two distinct rulers, they should not call themselves monotheists. Had they noticed anything amiss at the Academy Awards several weeks earlier when an evangelical winner thanked both God and Jesus for helping him become a better actor? To make matters even more confrontational, he could troll through Paul’s letters and identify the source of the heresy, and then accuse Christians of being polytheists from the very beginning. He would finish by admitting that he only mouthed the words in the Nicene Creed that proclaimed Jesus was “seated at the right hand of the father,” because he considered the phrase to be absolute blasphemy.
Although he lacked the boldness to rail so directly at his congregation, he saw the potential for a toned-down version of his fantasy and sat down to write the sermon. The words quickly tumbled out and he was proofreading the first draft when the phone rang and James Murphy announced he was coming over to pick up the boxes.
VIII.
SUMMONS
Stanley Hopkins was chewing on a candy bar and staring at a stack of exams in his office at Belle Meade College in Los Angeles when the phone rang and a sweetly lilting southern voice brought him back to full consciousness. The woman’s request was of a sort that had been coming with greater frequency in recent months. After helping the LAPD track down the location of a gonzo pornographer shooting a series of Girls Gone Wild–style videos with high school sophomores in the San Fernando Valley, his name had been passed along to the FBI as a possible res
ource for an ongoing investigation of interactive websites featuring the coerced performances of Eastern European women. His academic expertise in the labor and economics of the sex trade, not to mention his willingness to work for little more than the reimbursement of his expenses, had led to a series of calls from law-enforcement officials seeking his advice. To many of them, he had nothing to offer, as when a police chief in Oklahoma asked what he knew (absolutely nothing) about organized gangs of porn-for-meth dealers, but sometimes a query fit nicely, and he was happy to tell the well-spoken US attorney from Georgia that he might be able to help her.
“What’s the name of the company again?” he asked, after she introduced herself and explained how exhaustive Google searches had produced nothing but dead ends in her search for the real owner of a soft-core website named Mygirlfriendsbikini.com.
“Sweaty Palm Productions,” she repeated. “I’ll send you the URL of the pictures that we’re trying to track down and a brief reference we found to the company online.”
“And what do you need, exactly?”
“Well,” her tongue lingered on the liquid consonant and Stanley decided that she had a second career as a narrator of romance novels if the Justice Department ever let her go. Her accent was light and subtle, a flick of golden-brown hair in a summer breeze. “In order to figure out who posted the photos of our victim—a student named Diana Cavendish—we need to find the owner of the website where they were posted. The website owner may have contact information for the photographer. The Whois database lists Sweaty Palm—with a false address—as the owner, but Google suggests that a firm by that name did exist in the Los Angeles area. Maybe it still does.”