This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2017 C. S. Farrelly
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Cavan Bridge Press, New York, NY
Edited and designed by Girl Friday Productions
www.girlfridayproductions.com
Editorial: Emilie Sandoz-Voyer, Laura Whittemore
Interior design: Paul Barrett
Cover design: Scott Barrie, Cyanotype Book Architects
Cover images © beboy/Shutterstock; © Orhan Cam/Shutterstock
ISBN: 978-0-9987493-0-3
e-ISBN: 978-0-9987493-1-0
First Edition
For MJR & EVF
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Acknowledgments
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
When Peter Merrick’s cell phone rang around ten on a Monday morning, his first instinct was to ignore it. Anyone who knew him well enough to call that number would know he had a deadline for the last of a three-part series he was working on for the Economist. It was his first foray into magazine writing in some time, and he’d made it clear to his wife, his editors, and even the family dog that he wasn’t to be disturbed until after the last piece was done and delivered.
Several months had passed since his return from an extended and harrowing assignment tracking UN peacekeeping operations on the Kashmiri border with Pakistan, where violent protests had erupted following the death of a local Hizbul Mujahideen military commander. The assignment had left him with what his wife, Emma, solemnly declared to be post-traumatic stress disorder. It was, in his opinion, a dubious diagnosis she’d made based on nothing more than an Internet search, and he felt those covering the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan deserved greater sympathy. He’d been a bystander to tragedy, he told anyone who asked, not a victim.
One morning as he’d stood drinking strong Turkish coffee on the terrace of his apartment in Jammu, he watched as a car bomb detonated in front of the school across the road. No children were killed. It was a Saturday, and teachers had gathered there to meet with members of a French NGO dedicated to training staff at schools in developing nations.
The arm landed on his terrace with a loud thud before Peter realized what it was. Pinned to the shoulder of what remained of its shirt was a name tag identifying Sheeraza Akhtar, presumably one of the teachers. At the time, he marveled at his complete lack of reaction to the torn limb, at the way his response was to read the letters on the tag, grab a pen, and start writing down details of the event—a description of jewelry on the woman’s hand, the streak of half-cauterized flesh running from where it tore from the arm socket to the bottom of her palm, the way smoke curled from the remains of the school’s front entrance, and the pitiful two-ambulance response that limped its way to the scene nearly twenty minutes after the explosion.
Even now as he recalled the moment, he wouldn’t describe what he felt as horror or disgust, just a complete separation from everything around him, an encompassing numbness. His wife kept telling him he needed to talk to someone about what he was feeling. But that was just the point, he thought, even if he couldn’t say it to her. He couldn’t quite articulate what he was feeling, beyond paralysis. Making the most rudimentary decisions had been excruciating since his return. It required shaking off the dull fog he’d come to prefer, the one that rescued him from having to connect to anything. The pangs of anxiety constricting his chest as he glanced from the screen of the laptop to his jangling cell phone were the most palpable emotional response he’d had in recent memory. The interruption required a decision of some kind. He wasn’t certain he could comply.
But in keeping with the career he had chosen, curiosity got the better of him. He looked at the incoming number. The area code matched that of his hometown in central Connecticut, less than an hour from where he and Emma now lived in Tarrytown, but his parents had long since retired to South Carolina. He made his decision to answer just as the call went to voice mail, which infuriated him even more than the interruption. For Peter, missing something by mere minutes or seconds was the sign of a journalist who didn’t do his job, who failed to act in time. Worse, he’d allowed a good number of calls to go to voice mail while under his deadline, and the thought of having to sift through them all made him weary. The phone buzzed to announce a new message. He looked again from his screen to the phone, paralyzed by the uncertainty and all-consuming indecision he’d begun exhibiting upon his return from Kashmir. After several minutes of failed progress on his article, the right words refusing to come to him, he committed to the message.
He grabbed the phone and dialed, browsing online news sites as inconsequential voices droned on. His editor. His sister. His roommate from college asking if he’d heard the news and to call him back. Finally, a message from Patricia Roedlin in the Office of Public Affairs at his alma mater, Ignatius University in Greenwich, Connecticut. Father Ingram, the president of the university, had passed away unexpectedly, and the university would be delighted if one of their most successful graduates would be willing to write a piece celebrating his life for the Hartford Courant.
The news failed to register. Again, a somewhat common experience since his return. He tapped his fingers on the desk and spotted the newspaper on the floor where Emma had slipped it under the door. In the course of their ten-year marriage, Peter had almost never closed his office door. “If I can write an article with mortar shells falling around me, I think I can handle the sound of a food processor,” he had joked. But lately that had changed, and Emma had responded without comment, politely leaving him alone when the door was shut and sliding pieces of the outside world in to him with silent cooperation.
He picked up the newspaper, scanned the front page, and moved on to the local news. There it was, in a small blurb on page three. “Pedestrian Killed in Aftermath of Ice Storm.” The aging president of a local university was the victim of an accident after leaving a diner in Bronxville. His body was found near the car he’d parked on a side street. Wounds to the back of his head were consistent with a fall on the ice, and hypothermia was believed to be the cause of death.
To Peter’s eye the name of the victim, James Ingram, stuck out in bold print. An optical illusion, he knew, but it felt real. He reached for the second drawer on the right side of his desk and opened it. A pile of envelopes rested within. He rooted around and grasped one. The stamp was American but the destination was Peter’s address in Jammu. The script was at once shaky and assured, flourishes on the ending consonants with trembling hesitation in the middle. Folded linen paper fell from the opened envelope with little prompting. He scanned the contents of the letter, front and back, until his eyes landed on the closing lines.
Well, Peter my boy, it’s time for me to close this missive. You may well be on your way to Kabul or Beirut by the time this reaches you, but I have no small belief that the comfort it is meant to bring
will find its way to you regardless of borders.
You do God’s work, Peter. Remember, the point of faith isn’t to explain away all the evil in this world. It’s meant to help you live here in spite of it.
Benedictum Nomen Iesu,
Ingram, SJ
Peter dialed Patricia Roedlin’s number. She was so happy to hear from him it made him uncomfortable.
“I’d be honored to write a piece,” he spoke into the phone.
“He talked about you to anyone who would listen, you know,” she said. “I think he would be pleased. Really proud.” He heard her breath catch in her throat, the stifled sobs that had likely stricken her since she’d heard the news.
“It’s okay,” he found himself saying to this complete stranger, an effort to head off her tears. “I can’t imagine what I’d be doing now if it weren’t for him.” He hoped it would give her time to recover. “He was an extraordinary man and an outstanding teacher.”
Patricia’s breathing slowed as she regained control.
“I hope to do him justice,” Peter finished.
It was only when he hung up the phone that he noticed them, the drops of liquid that had accumulated on the desk where he’d been leaning forward as he talked. He lifted a hand to his face and felt the moisture line from his eye to his chin. After several long months at home, the tears had finally come.
CHAPTER 2
While life on the Ignatius University campus was a flurry of mayhem and mourning, the world outside continued along its path, with priorities ranging from Hollywood starlets to political power struggles. Father Ingram’s death had occurred nine months before the presidential election. His passing warranted only a brief mention in most of the tristate-area papers, while the efforts of the incumbent president to secure a second term dominated airwaves and newspapers worldwide.
Milton Casey, the reelection campaign’s chief strategist, sat in his office in Washington, DC, poring over the latest poll numbers for President Arthur Wyncott, a Tea Party candidate who’d ridden a wave of postrecession anger to the White House, and his running mate, Philip Eldridge. The report, showing flagging results for Wyncott in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Connecticut, and Arizona, confounded him. He was well aware of the liberal bent in other states like New York, California, and Massachusetts. But according to his research, large numbers of fiscally and religiously conservative voters should have neutralized, if not surpassed, the liberal vote in the states he was currently reviewing. Connecticut voters, with many of their jobs dependent on Wall Street or big insurance, could be swayed to reelect Wyncott by his promise of generous corporate tax rates. Voters in Pennsylvania and Ohio were religious, largely Christian even if not Evangelical, so Wyncott’s focus on social values and religious liberties should be helping to secure their votes, too. The campaign had been targeting social conservatives, making President Wyncott’s belief that marriage was only between a man and a woman clear and guaranteeing that no federal funds under his tenure would go to support abortion at a time when family values were vital to a strong future for the nation.
This messaging and his incumbent status had so far handed him an early lead over the Democratic nominee, Jennings Osgood, a genial and benign opponent considered to be a Hail Mary choice. Political infighting in the DNC had created a leadership void, with various factions squaring off about their preferred choices. The party’s few up-and-coming stars, namely a governor from Rhode Island and a senator from Oregon, were reluctant to squander their chances in a year when the party’s upheaval was the bigger story. With just a few months to go before the convention, both had politely declined to put themselves forward, citing commitments to their home constituencies as their priority for the foreseeable future. Left scrambling, the Democrats settled on Osgood, whose primary contribution to the American political process had been his DNA: he was related through his mother’s side to Cordell Hull, the secretary of state under FDR. Despite this tenuous connection to contemporary governing ability, the Roosevelt angle was a focal point in most of his campaign appearances and rhetoric. “America needs someone with vision to steer us through these turbulent times, just as FDR did,” his candidate website proclaimed. And Osgood, with his anachronistic waistcoats and sweater-vests, was apparently the best the Democrats could muster to do so.
The American people, according to Casey’s research, weren’t buying it. Older voters had selective memories when it came to the public good achieved by the New Deal, and were hesitant to change direction midstream with a new president, while younger voters openly mocked Osgood for being antiquated and out of touch. One late-night talk show host developed a running hand-puppet gag in which Osgood appeared as a Beatrix Potteresque rabbit, prancing across the screen and replying to audience questions with exuberant cries of “By Jove!” The Wyncott campaign seized on this skepticism and pointed to Jennings’s years of study at Hotchkiss, Princeton, and Yale as evidence he couldn’t comprehend the challenges real Americans faced. It worked. With several months left to go before he could even be officially named the Democratic candidate, Jennings was no longer considered a viable threat in most circles of influence.
But now, reviewing the latest poll results, Casey was nervous. While he and his team had been focused on establishing dominance over Jennings, a new threat had unexpectedly emerged. Just days before, they watched as the networks flocked to cover independent candidate Thomas Archer addressing a crowd in New Mexico. When Archer first burst on the scene, pundits and politicians alike had treated him as little more than an amusing distraction. Now, with less than a year to go before election day, Archer’s popularity had begun to surge. At a rally in Albuquerque, hundreds had gathered holding signs of support, vying alongside over thirty television and print reporters for Archer’s attention. The previous week, a Wyncott-Eldridge rally in the same location attracted only a small crowd and a handful of local media reporters. Archer opened his speech by thanking God and blessing the attendees, and when he followed his introductory remarks with a second speech entirely in fluent Spanish, the crowd went wild. Hours later, various television programs were still talking about it as though Archer had somehow invented both religion and the concept of foreign languages.
In interviews, Archer enthusiasts commented on his faith when describing his charisma. Part of Wyncott’s image branding was around his own strong Lutheran upbringing and how it guided his decisions; Archer’s gains on his religious territory were an unwelcome encroachment.
“We need to rethink how we approach these challenges,” Casey said as his staff trickled in for the morning meeting. “Where are we losing votes?” he asked his dedicated team. “We’ve got strong messages. Ones we know resonate with these voters. What are we missing?”
That morning’s edition of the Washington Post featured a photo of Archer on the steps of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, taken as he left Sunday morning Mass. Casey waved the paper with irritation.
“What the hell is this?” he snapped, shoving the paper down the table. Casey was a tall, broad man born and raised in Tennessee. His accent seemed to increase in direct proportion to his blood pressure and agitated mood. “We’ve already pointed out how often he changes his mind on policy, let alone his religion. Why do they care where he goes on Sundays?”
An uncomfortable silence greeted him. “Nothing?” he bellowed. “Twenty brains in this room and not a one of you has something to say?”
“Sir?” A hesitant voice came to the rescue. “I think maybe . . . ,” the voice trailed off. Casey glared down the table at the speaker, a milquetoast young woman, Ally Larkin, a graduate of Marquette University in Wisconsin. He hadn’t been inclined to hire her. She didn’t have the right credentials as far as he was concerned. But as the son of a Shell Oil executive, and a Duke University graduate, President Wyncott needed to demonstrate his everyman sensibilities and shift attention from his own affluent background. Having someone like Ally on board was consistent with his message about American democracy serving ev
eryone, not just upper-crust graduates of Ivy League colleges. And, as strategists for the party mentioned, it was important to be able to say the team had some Catholics, a few Jews, and definitely a Mormon (or preferably two) on staff. So when a professional colleague asked him to consider hiring one of his former interns, Casey agreed. His friend assured him Ally was very obedient, very informed, and very Catholic. She would offer an interesting and possibly useful perspective. Thus far, however, she hadn’t provided much beyond a nervous disposition.
“Yes? You think what?” Casey couldn’t disguise the irritation in his voice. He hated it when people didn’t finish what they started, whether it was a sentence or a campaign.
“The curiosity about Archer at church,” she ventured. “I think it’s tied up with the story behind why he goes to Saint Patrick’s instead of Saint Thomas.” She took in his confused reaction. “Saint Thomas—the pinnacle of WASP establishment, also on Fifth Avenue,” she clarified. Her bluntness elicited a few chuckles from around the table.
“Archer is from a privileged background,” she continued. “He’s the son of a governor of Virginia, attended boarding school in Massachusetts, interned with the secretaries of state and commerce when most of his classmates were on spring break.”
“I’m not hearing anything I don’t already know, Ms. Larkin,” he said, his patience swiftly running out.
“His ancestors helped found the Jamestown Colony. His great-great-grandmother was, like, the original Daughter of the American Revolution. They’ve been Church of England since they landed here, and Republicans for almost as long. And now he’s Catholic? And an independent?”
Milton wasn’t following. The minutiae of America’s religious history bored him. America was founded on biblical principles, that’s what he knew. Wyncott’s ability to quote scripture at the podium alongside the most popular evangelists in the nation was far more important than whether King James knew his family or not. And he said so.
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