by Paul Heald
“It’s all stuff from stories Jake was working on, I suppose.” Mrs. Granville shrugged. “I didn’t even notice it until I went through his room after he disappeared.”
Her husband looked as if he wanted to add something to her explanation, but instead reached into his pocket for his cell phone. He looked at it and took a step toward the door. “Sorry, but I need to take this.”
Murphy looked at Mrs. Granville, hoping that she would amplify her remarks, but Melanie spoke first.
“It must have been hard on you, too, Mrs. Granville, to be shut out from an investigation involving your own son.”
“Oh,” she clasped her hands together, “it was horrible! Porter—he’s the sheriff—and Phil were best friends, on the vestry together at St. James and all that, and suddenly Jake’s gone and the officers are asking all kinds of questions, and I didn’t know where Jake was or what had happened to him. Phil was gone all the time and not talking much when he was around.” She sighed and her shoulders slumped. “I still don’t understand any of it.”
At that moment, Granville returned to the screen porch and abruptly took the papers from the hands of James and Melanie. “I’m afraid that I’m going to have to ask you two to go.” He forced a smile and gestured at the door with his hand. “We have a prior commitment.”
“What commitment?” Jessica Granville asked.
“They need to leave now, sweetheart.” His eyes flashed the expectation that they make a prompt exit. Melanie cast a quick glance at her companion as they made their way to the front door. James blinked his noncomprehension, took out his business card, and handed it to Mrs. Granville as they exited.
“If you can think of anything more,” he said, as the door was shut in their faces, “please let me—”
He looked over at Melanie to see if she, too, was struck by the abrupt behavior of their hosts.
“Oh,” she beamed and nodded, “this is getting interesting.”
XIII.
DATES
Thorsten Carter decided to tell Miriam Rodgers about the theft of her father’s boxes during dinner, despite the risk that the news might ruin his first date of the year. Not surprisingly, the love life of the young priest had taken a nose dive after his move to Clarkeston. Dating someone in the congregation was out of the question, and his social life did not extend much further than to those he met at church or in committee meetings. The gym where he worked out was full of lovely young ladies, but they were mostly undergraduates at Clarkeston College and not interested in a thirty-year-old cleric. He attended a weekly Bible study/gripe session with a number of other ministers in town, but the only attractive woman in the group, the new head of the Unitarian church, had a partner and three children.
Dinner with Miriam presented a rare opportunity to spend time with a woman his own age who already knew the ins and outs of his profession. Of course, with opportunity came pressure, and his romantic moves, to the extent he ever had any, were seriously out of practice. His last relationship, commenced while he was still in seminary, had ended two years earlier, after months of post-graduation phone calls and emails finally petered into silence. In the end, neither of them cared enough to do much more than “like” the occasional Facebook posting. When his parents asked about her, he was at a loss to explain what had happened, but since his brief meeting with Miriam, he had a theory. Never during his entire time with Karen had he felt a jolt of electricity as when Miriam consented to dine with him. Never before had he spent a whole day meditating on a woman’s perfect nose or the way a shock of her lustrous hair framed the curve of her delicate throat. A single chance encounter with Miriam had already been worth a month of dinners and movies with Karen.
When he returned home on Tuesday afternoon, he shaved for the second time that day and spent five minutes with his trimmer tidying up his sideburns and beating back a tuft of ear hair. He found a checked shirt in his closet and slipped on a new pair of blue jeans. A glance in the mirror, however, produced nothing but disappointment. He looked like he had just walked out of a Soviet-era men’s fashion catalog. Styles from the seventies might be coming back, but not the Steve Martin “wild and crazy guys” vibe. He went back to his closet in search of something hipper, but realized with chagrin that he had not bought a new article of clothing for several years. Thirty years old, he thought to himself, and still relying on Christmas presents to provide his wardrobe.
He decided to keep the jeans, match them with one of the plain white shirts that he often wore to work, and complete the ensemble with a serviceable cream jacket and a skinny green tie. If he was going retro, the early eighties was the better move. He really didn’t look too bad. He still weighed the same as he had in college and a daily elliptical regime had kept him pretty fit. Although an unruly shock of ginger hair topped his head, his face was friendly, his jaw strong, and his brown eyes warm and understanding. There was a chance, he thought, that Miriam would not storm out when she heard the bad news about her father’s papers.
They had arranged to meet at a local dive called the Wild Boar. She had been a student at Clarkeston College and claimed that he could not call himself a true Clarkestonian until he had drunk at least one pint there. He arrived first and found the place was not nearly so low brow as she had described. The long bar, made from slats of maple reclaimed from a bowling alley, displayed a number of Thor’s favorite microbrews, and the windows that looked onto the street had been pushed open to let in the warm early-summer air. He took a seat by one of them and looked contentedly onto the southernmost part of the college campus.
A few minutes later, he saw Miriam park a new Prius across the street and walk toward the door of the bar. He was relieved to see that they would not be too mismatched at dinner. She wore a pair of tastefully cut designer jeans and a short-sleeved silk blouse that pressed against her as a breeze wisped down the road. He absolved himself of an impure thought and reminded himself that treating her with respect was more important than keeping on her clothes in his imagination.
She entered with a smile and waved him over as she walked to the bar. “No table service, I’m afraid,” she said as she got herself a gin and tonic. “Part of the charm.”
He ordered an IPA brewed in Atlanta. “It’s nice. You made the place sound like I should get a tetanus shot before coming in.” The bartender shot him a queer look but brightened when Thor pushed a couple of dollars into the stein that served as a tip jar. They went back to his window seat.
She took a sip and looked around. “When I was an undergraduate here, the Boar was a lot shabbier. You could go across the river on a nice date downtown with the frat boys or come here and hang out with the bad boys.”
She did not look like someone who had ever hung out with a crowd much racier than the St. James youth group, but her eyes flashed dangerously over her drink, and he wondered whether she might have been the typical clergyman’s child: rebellious, out of control, resentful of authority. He imagined a girl in a leather miniskirt and chain-laden boots, smoking a joint smeared with black lipstick. Then she smiled and suddenly looked more like Gwyneth Paltrow than La Femme Nikita.
“What did you study at the college?”
“History,” she said. “I thought that I wanted to go to law school.”
He realized that he had no idea what she did for a living. “I take it you’re not a lawyer now?”
“No,” she looked wistful. “I work in the state insurance commissioner’s office doing public-affairs stuff, planning the next Don’t Play with Matches campaign, that sort of thing. I still read history books though. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a history of Clarkeston. There hasn’t been a new one for almost fifty years, and that was mostly the story of a few leading families. I’d love to do the job right someday.”
He watched her closely. She had a lovely way of tucking her hair behind her ear before she reached for her drink, and the left corner of her mouth came up slightly higher than the right whenever she smiled. She had
a real passion for local history, and when he pushed her a little about her job, it became clear that she enjoyed running the media side of the commissioner’s office and relished pushing the state’s tolerance for humor in the commercials she made.
When she paused, he just wanted her to keep talking. “What’s the most interesting thing that you could tell me about the town?”
She gestured out the window to the lush campus. “Well, a hundred years ago the only trees you would have seen for miles around would be a few on the quad and some in the original antebellum settlement to the west of downtown.” She nodded over her shoulder. “Everyplace else was planted in cotton, all the way up into people’s front yards. The demand was so high that people would cut down their favorite shade tree in order to get in one more quarter acre. It’s hard to imagine how bare the land must have been or how bright it must have looked when the cotton popped white in the late summer. Now it’s all green again.”
“What happened?” As a Missouri native, Thor knew a little about corn and soybeans, but nothing about cotton.
“Boll weevil and tired land.” She waved at the bartender in the hope of getting another drink, and despite the purported lack of table service, he complied with a discreet bow. “The boll weevil was a menace for decades until the government got it under control, but cotton never came back because the soil had been destroyed. The alluvial sediment in a river delta is really the only sustainable place to grow cotton in the US, and even then you need an amazing amount of pesticide and fertilizer.” She twisted her plastic stirrer into a knot and flicked it onto the floor. “In my imaginary book I’d put old pictures side by side with new ones taken from exactly the same angle so that people could really get a sense of how much things have changed and how quickly.”
The young priest was ready for another beer, but the bartender was uninterested in his signaling. When Thor got back to the table, he tried to get his companion going once again. “I suppose St. James has a pretty interesting history too.”
She laughed. “It’s too bad you can’t talk to Daddy about that. He loved poking around in the church archives. He once told me that Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, worshipped there. I don’t know why. His family plantation was in Crawfordville, which is pretty far away. Anyway, as a native of Clarkeston, my father was both fascinated and appalled that so many of the rich planter class used to call St. James their home.” She leaned back in her chair. “It’s the dilemma of being an educated Georgian: you can’t help but love a gorgeous place like Clarkeston, but you never quite know how to deal with the baggage. You could say that cotton pretty much built St. James, but it sure wasn’t the plantation owners doing all that work.”
“So,” she took a sip of her drink and then grinned mischievously, “what do you think of the old pile of stone, anyway?”
“It’s fine.” He dared not say anything critical. He had her father’s old job, after all, and she probably knew more about St. James than he did, so he offered up some fluff. “It has its challenges.”
“Like dealing with the congregation from hell?” Her eyes challenged him to be truthful. “My mom doesn’t go anymore because she’s an atheist. I stopped because the people are just plain mean.”
“I’ve met some nice people there,” he said weakly.
“Of course there are some,” she leaned over the table closer to him and he caught a flash of tan cleavage, “but they don’t run the show. I’ve got a lot of great friends still at St. James, but they’ll never serve on the vestry or the nominating committee for the next priest.”
“So, I’m a lame duck already?” He expected her to laugh, but instead she raised her eyebrows and shook her head knowingly.
“They’ll figure out some way to drive you off.” She shrugged and, when a tire squealed in the street nearby, looked momentarily away.
“How come your father survived so long?”
“Because he was a fire-breathing son of a bitch, that’s why!” She laughed and launched into a series of stories, the moral of which was that only a ruthlessly efficient autocrat with a love of confrontation could hope to beat back the forces of venality at St. James Episcopal Church. “When he started getting crap from the congregation about switching from the old 1928 prayer book to the 1979 revision, we spent a month worshipping with the original 1549 Anglican Book of Common Prayer! He said that if the traditionalists wanted the ‘original’ language read in church, he’d give them the real thing. I don’t think anyone understood anything he said during those services. He even managed to find some old English Reformation sermons to read from the pulpit. After a week or two, the congregation was crying for mercy!”
Son of a bitch or not, he had her adoration, and she reveled in the tales of his blustery bulldozing of the congregation. It was hard not to be fascinated by her, and his admiration began edging toward infatuation. He pushed the black cloud of the disappearance of her father’s papers to the back of his mind.
“Now,” she said with a smile and look of genuine interest, “tell me what it’s really like to take on St. James.”
Thor confessed his frustrations, and she proved adept at keeping him rambling on about his job. The conversation flowed seamlessly through a third round of drinks and the walk to the restaurant. It was a balmy evening and the college was quiet as they made their way through campus and toward the bridge that led over the river to downtown. Final spring-semester exams had already been given, but summer school had not yet started, so only a single wandering professor prevented the leafy campus from being their private nature preserve. Since the college had been constructed first along the river and then southward in the direction of the former farmland where the Wild Boar now stood, each step took them deeper into history as they entered the original quadrangle, a series of red-brick buildings that all dated from before the Civil War.
As they stood in the middle of the space, a shaggy black dog raced toward them, skidding to a stop next to Miriam. When she stepped back and raised her hands out of reach of the dog’s tongue, the canine reversed course in the general direction of a middle-aged man calling “Abigail” in a commanding but ineffective voice. The dog ignored him, veered to a garbage can, and began rooting around in the grass next to it. Miriam and Thor talked about their childhood pets as they crossed over the pedestrian bridge that dropped them onto the north side of the river, just a block away from the Italian restaurant that Miriam had suggested.
The same forces that had emptied the campus resulted in a quiet dining space that Thor and Miriam shared with just a handful of other customers. To the priest’s delight, his date was as interested in the wine list as he was, and their conversation cascaded through a variety of topics common to those in their early thirties, who had seen the Berlin Wall fall as children, experienced 9/11 as college students, and watched the evolution of MTV from videos to reality television.
As Thor was washing his hands in the men’s room, he looked up to find a rather mentally challenged grin pasted on his face. He uttered an expletive and shook his head, but the sappy boy-crush expression was still there. He knew that alcohol was befuddling his brain, but he lacked the guile to hide his feelings. Forcing the corners of his smile downward, he pitched a paper towel forcefully into the garbage and tried to focus on the bad news about Miriam’s father’s papers that he was soon to deliver. But when he reappeared, Miriam responded with a wink and raised glass, and his face lit up like a jack-o’-lantern once again. He sat down and tried to dilute his feelings by concentrating on some unattractive feature of her face, but he only managed to convince himself in the end that the thin scar on the side of her throat and the mole just above it on her cheek were the most compelling beauty marks that he had ever seen.
“I have some bad news for you,” he blurted out as he picked up his wine glass, “your father’s papers have gone missing.”
“What do you mean, ‘gone missing’?” First confusion, then suspicion.
He flushed
and contemplated the baroque pattern on his silverware. “Well, they’ve sort of been stolen.” He felt a sinking feeling as he realized that the most damning part of the story was not the missingness of the boxes, but rather from where they had been taken. He had no good excuse for sharing them with a journalist like James Murphy without her permission.
“Who the hell would steal a bunch of cardboard boxes from a locked closet in a church? Are you sure somebody didn’t just move them or something?”
Thor briefly considered blaming the mishap on the church janitor, but a lie was not a good way to start a relationship, especially when his moral compass, as usual, was pointing straight to truthful. “They weren’t taken from the church.” He frowned and sighed. “I gave them to someone and his house was broken into.”
She crossed her arms, leaned back in her chair, and studied him for a long moment. “Why don’t you start this story from the beginning?”
He nodded and told her about Murphy’s initial visit to his office, his interest in the abduction of Diana Cavendish, and the seemingly benign request to have a look at her father’s papers. “In retrospect, I should have asked your permission, but technically they belong to your mother, and when she told me to throw them out, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to let Mr. Murphy have a look at them before I gave ’em to you.”
He watched her stiffen, and he began damage control. “Of course, I looked through them completely to make sure there was nothing embarrassing in there. It was just a bunch of programs and stuff from conferences and a collection of his sermons … no love letters to the church organist or anything like that.”
“What?!”
Now panicking, he quickly explained how Murphy had taken the papers home and how they had been stolen, along with the reporter’s computer and other documents from his den. He emphasized the journalist’s misfortune as a means to distract Miriam from her own sense of loss. Her face was a mask of conflicting emotions. Fortunately, anger did not seem too prominent, but he could read disappointment, sadness, and a disturbing touch of disdain.