The Shepherd's Calculus

by C. S. Farrelly

  He climbed the stairs and turned down the hallway to the bedroom. A suitcase was on the bed. The sight of it stopped him cold, as though a force field had popped up to block him. He knew something like this would happen. Ever since that night drinking hot chocolate with Emma’s father, he had suspected this moment would come. The suitcase was small, compact, and just the way he always imagined Emma would leave him—with nothing more or less than she’d had when they married.

  Resigned, he took a deep breath and walked in. The duffel bag he used to go to the gym sat empty near his nightstand. He tossed it on the bed and started taking socks and underwear out of his drawer. As he stuffed the clothes into the bag, his eyes kept straying to the suitcase.

  When he couldn’t help himself any longer, he reached over and flipped it open. A few of his shirts and pants lay folded within. Three pairs of socks bulged from the mesh pocket lining the top of the case. And in the center of the case, on top of the clothes and next to a travel-size umbrella, was a folded piece of paper. He opened it. The message was short and to the point.

  I’m sorry. I get it now. I love you, Peter Merrick. Come home soon.

  E

  He realized he’d been holding his breath when it came out in one solid burst. Back downstairs, he stopped in the kitchen to grab his cell-phone headset but got distracted when he knocked the wall calendar to the floor with his shoulder. He flipped it open to the right month and tacked it onto the corkboard. That very day was circled in red: Grady Vet: 11:30. He rushed out the door with his suitcase, completely forgetting the headset and feeling better than he had in a while.

  The trip to Wisconsin had been a successful one. With so much to do in a limited time, he hadn’t called her once. About fifteen miles from the airport he dialed her phone number. She picked up, the lightness in her greeting perking him up immediately. “Hi!” she chirped.

  “It was a mistake, Ems. The whole thing. It’s not what I thought it was.”

  He heard her sigh. “Oh, Peter. I’m so relieved.”

  “Me, too. I’m on my way to the airport now. I’ll see you in a few hours.”

  “Okay. Talk to you soon.”

  “Emma?” He caught her just before he hung up.

  “Yeah, babe?”

  “Thanks.”

  A couple of hours turned into half a day, thanks to a tornado in southern Illinois that affected air traffic and connections all the way up to Milwaukee. By the time he got home, Emma had long since gone to bed. Packaged leftovers sat on the top shelf of the refrigerator. He grabbed the container and wandered down the hallway to his office. As he was waiting for the computer to start up, Grady shuffled into the room and plopped down right on top of Peter’s feet. Soft fur tickled his ankles and Grady’s warm belly acted as the perfect slippers, chasing off a chill that had settled on Peter. He was too focused on finding out what he could about Father William Hartnett to notice it until the warmth rushed up his leg.

  So far, he’d managed to track down at least six civil suits filed against Hartnett, by three different attorneys representing more than fifteen clients across several states. Less satisfying, however, was his attempt to identify a clear trend or connection among the other cases and James Ingram. Why had Ingram reached out specifically to Kevin Garrity, and what connection did William Hartnett have to him? His calls to the parishes he had numbers for didn’t yield results. When he identified himself and described what he was looking for, he was informed that they could not comment on pending litigation and referred him to Ted Mercier, an attorney in Philadelphia representing some of the claimants. The next day, Peter dialed his office. Mercier was delighted to get his call.

  “You going to write an article about this dirtbag?” he asked, after Peter explained who he was. “’Cause if you are, you need to include all the dirtbags who kept fobbing him off on everyone else.”

  This was a man after Peter’s own heart. “Believe me, I have no problem doing that if I find the information,” he said.

  He was trying to find out more about Hartnett’s movements. Mercier was the right place to start. “Eighteen parishes in less than twenty-five years,” Mercier told him. “And that’s just the ones I’ve been able to track down so far. Every time I turn around, the church lawyers are filing another injunction to prevent me from getting access to their records.” In the background, Peter could hear the clatter of a filing cabinet drawer sliding open.

  “At the start, he was able to stay there for two years or more before rumors started. That was back in the late seventies. I mean, I look at it now and the evidence was all there. But I’m looking at it today, you know, with modern eyes that know how widespread this shit is, right? Guess they didn’t really pay attention to kids accusing priests back then.”

  He was right. Peter was about the same age as some of Hartnett’s victims. He could recall very clearly when public-service messages about sexual molestation started appearing, and schools started teaching kids about what to do if someone touched their private parts (“The parts covered by a bathing suit,” his sixth-grade teacher had said) and to tell someone (“An adult, a teacher, or someone else you trust”) immediately. He thought about the emphasis they placed on abusers being strangers and the idea that teachers, priests, and coaches were the kind of adult you should tell. It was an irony of epic proportions. By the mid-1980s, sexual-abuse information campaigns had reached the mainstream, but were still focused on stranger danger. Given that it had practically taken the start of a new millennium for people to speak out about priests committing abuse, he had no trouble believing, as Mercier did, that the uncensored annals of the American Church probably had thousands of cases never reported by Catholics too pious to conceive of priests being culpable.

  “Toward the end, though, he got sloppy. Or maybe the kids just got a little braver. Whatever it was, he was transferred more quickly in those last couple of years. He’d get busted in under a year. In some case, just a matter of months.”

  Mercier agreed to fax a list of the eighteen known parishes as soon as he got off the phone. Peter found what he was looking for the minute he received it. At the bottom of the page, just a few rows up from the end of the list, was the answer: Retreat Coordinator, Good Shepherd Church, Claremont, Pennsylvania.

  Hartnett had been there for just under two years. Peter took out the research he’d done on Erik Bader months before. Bader had settled out of court and, as part of the settlement, signed a nondisclosure agreement that prevented him from publicly naming his abuser. The court records were sealed, but based on the age he admitted he was when the abuse had taken place, Peter determined that it fell within the period William Hartnett was there.

  He flipped through his notes for the Hartford Courant article and found the list of Ingram’s clerical career locations given to him by Jane Kemp. A cross-check of the dates revealed that Hartnett arrived at Claremont to act as a full-time retreat coordinator around the time James Ingram gave up his part-time work there upon completion of his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.

  Ingram’s letters suddenly made so much more sense. He had to have known about Hartnett, but maybe he didn’t find out until long after he’d left Claremont. The letters to Bader, Terzulli, and Garrity all started less than two years before his death, many years after those particular victims had been abused. But once he found out, the guilt—the agony—of having created the opening filled by a predator would have crushed him. According to Mercier’s records, Hartnett arrived at Claremont from a stint in Illinois. His time in Claremont ended sooner than expected, and he moved on to a small parish in upstate New York, where he was caught behaving inappropriately in under a year. From there he was reassigned to the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, which placed him at Our Lady of Sorrows church in Olmsted. He arrived there just a few months before Kevin Garrity’s father walked out on his family.

  A phone call to Claremont informed him that the current monsignor had only been there for eight years. The office secretary, a brash woman
named Dorothy, gave him information with little prodding. Not only did she offer the names of all the monsignors dating back to the Battle of Brandywine practically, she gave him the dates of their tenures.

  Monsignor Tom Sexton had left parish administration in the late 1990s to finish his PhD in theology and was now on staff at the University of Scranton. Peter decided an in-person interview might yield better results. He played the Jesuit college grad card when he called to arrange a meeting. Friendly Monsignor Sexton was eager to help a graduate of Ignatius who had written articles for the National Catholic Reporter and America magazine. So happy, in fact, that he didn’t really press Peter for details on the scope of the article he claimed to be writing.

  Sexton’s office at Scranton was typically academic. Bland with limited character beyond that which Sexton gave it by hanging framed copies of illuminated manuscripts on the walls. The conversation was easygoing at first. An explanation of when and how Sexton decided he wanted to become a priest, where he studied. Peter used this to deftly turn the subject to a listing of where Sexton had worked and a summary of his work as a minister at each location.

  When he began outlining his time at Claremont, Peter seized the opportunity. Sexton was completely unprepared, that much was clear. “And what about the presence of William Hartnett at Claremont during your time there?” The old man’s face fell, a look of anguish more than shock crossing his face.

  “I’m—well—” he sputtered. “William Hartnett was a—” He tried to offer an explanation, but the words weren’t coming.

  Peter softened the interrogation a little, allowing the man to catch his breath before he pressed on. “How did he end up in your parish?”

  Sexton recovered suddenly, finding his voice and standing. “Mr. Merrick,” he said curtly. “I think this conversation should end before it even starts. I can tell you I took care of the Hartnett situation as soon as it came to my attention.”

  Peter smiled, tried to calm him down. “I know you did. Look, Monsignor, I’m not here to pick a fight with you about this or blame you for what happened. I’m trying to figure out what happened. How William Hartnett ended up in Claremont.”

  Sexton sat back down, his body sagging in the chair. When he looked up, his face burned bright red and he blinked repeatedly. “I ask myself how I could have let that happen every day. Whether I shouldn’t have looked more closely at his background before agreeing to assign him to Claremont.”

  He reached into the lower right-hand drawer of his desk and pulled out a bottle of scotch and two glasses. He set a glass down in front of Peter and poured a healthy amount of the amber liquid for them both.

  “I should have. I know that now. I know that if I’d called around to a few of his other parishes, I probably would have found someone willing to tell me what happened there. Why he left. But he came with such impeccable references from people with impeccable reputations. There didn’t seem to be a need to do more digging. I’m not sure that I could have asked any questions without causing an uproar and offending everyone involved.”

  “Wait. Let’s start with the references. How did you hear about William Hartnett?”

  Sexton had only recently been promoted to monsignor when he was assigned to the diocese governing Claremont. He was sorry to see James Ingram go, of course. He was certain that Peter, as a graduate of Ignatius, must understand why. Ingram assured him he would request permission to stay on until his replacement was identified and help with the transition any way he could. It was typical Ingram.

  Hartnett, he explained, was assigned to Claremont by the archbishop of Philadelphia on the recommendation of Owen Feeney. Sexton remembered Feeney from his days at Villanova and knew that he had just returned to America after spending two years in Rome at the office of the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. At the mention of Feeney’s name, Peter sat up straight, locked on every word. Hartnett was being transferred from the Chicago archdiocese, which also governed Parkchester, Illinois, by Cardinal Mulcahy. “Like I said,” Sexton said with a shrug, “the man had impeccable references. Feeney sent a letter of personal introduction on Hartnett’s behalf. Father Ingram liked Hartnett just fine and recommended him as well. It seemed like a perfect fit.”

  Peter nodded. It was completely understandable. “So what did you do when you found out what he was doing?”

  Managing his removal had been slightly more complicated for the young monsignor. “I was shocked. When the first report trickled in, I did some investigating. I couldn’t be sure what had happened. The boy who complained had a history of problematic behavior that predated Hartnett. Still, I thought it was better to play it safe. I contacted Feeney and asked him for advice on how best to proceed. I didn’t want to ignore the child’s complaint, but I didn’t want to cause a problem for Hartnett on flimsy evidence. Feeney said I’d done the right thing by handling it discreetly, and he would look into it.”

  “Out of curiosity,” Peter said, “what do you consider flimsy evidence?”

  “In the first case, the child said Hartnett had made him uncomfortable by asking questions about how many girls he’d kissed. Did he like girls. That sort of thing.”

  “Any physical interaction?”

  “No sexual contact. The boy said Hartnett put his arm around him.”

  “And that didn’t seem unusual?”

  “Not that unusual. Which made it difficult to determine how true it was. Part of it was that the boy had been caught masturbating in the back of the school bus. He was disciplined for that, and a few months later disciplined again for standing under the bleachers and staring up girls’ skirts. The simple fact is that he had already displayed hypersexualized tendencies. And each time we disciplined him, he expressed confusion as to why. Hartnett denied it and with no one to corroborate the boy’s story, I couldn’t tell how much of it was truth and how much was fantasy.”

  The explanation didn’t make Peter feel any better, but he had to admit it made a certain amount of sense. He told himself that if he’d been in the same position, he would have acted immediately. But the truth was he couldn’t know that. He wasn’t in that situation, and the calculation each person made in each situation was just that: a decision made based on a set of factors unique to the circumstances. “What about the second incident?”

  Sexton nodded. “That was a lot more clear-cut. A clerk working the drive-through window at the local Dairy Queen spotted Hartnett with his hand in a boy’s lap when she leaned out farther than usual to hand them a milkshake. She saw enough to mention it to her mom. When I was notified, I called Hartnett in to ask about it. He didn’t deny it, but wouldn’t admit it either. This time, Feeney didn’t even need to hear the whole story. He told me to file the formal transfer request with my archbishop and that I could rest assured it would be handled.”

  “So who had him moved? Feeney or the archbishop?”

  Sexton leaned forward. “That’s the thing. Feeney handled so many things for the archbishop, it was hard to tell.”

  Peter didn’t tell him as much, but in his experience, that had always been the case with Owen Feeney.

  “Do you know where he was transferred?”

  Sexton nodded. “A small town outside Rochester.”

  Peter wrote some notes. When he finished, he rose, held his hand out to Sexton, and thanked him for his time.

  He was almost to the door when he turned once more to the priest.

  “One last question—did you inform the monsignor at his new parish about his behavior?”

  “No,” he said humbly. “Feeney said he would take care of notifying them on behalf of the archdiocese.” The monsignor dropped his head in shame. “But I should have followed up myself. Just to make sure.”

  Peter didn’t respond. There was no use telling someone something he already knew. He slipped quietly out of the office and headed back to his car.

  By the time he got to the New York State Thruway, he’d already contacted the parish near Roc
hester where Hartnett was transferred after Claremont and spoken with a Monsignor Behrend, who was assigned to the diocese at the time. The story was remarkably similar. Hartnett came with personal letters of introduction and impressive credentials. He became a staple of the community, helping to build a shelter for battered women, and helping an out-of-work father whose car had broken down. Only this time, the first child to come forward wasn’t a behavioral problem. He was the son of a member of the city council, who immediately involved the police. Hartnett’s transfer was arranged immediately, and in exchange, the father agreed not to press charges. Hartnett had been placed with a parish somewhere in Wisconsin. As he listened to Behrend, Peter realized why the story sounded so familiar. He’d read parts of an article about it out loud to Ingram that day a few years ago when they’d had their most frank discussion about the scandal.

  “So, no one from the Philadelphia archdiocese informed you that Hartnett had been removed for inappropriate conduct?”

  The monsignor scoffed on the other end of the phone. “Not a peep. If they had, I damn well would have refused to accept him.”

  But the biggest similarity of all was the one Peter already saw coming. “Who wrote the letter of introduction?”

  “Big player in the church now,” the monsignor said, not without a trace of jealousy. “Bishop Owen Feeney.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Peter stared at the phone for several minutes before he picked it up to dial. He had to admit that a small part of him was going to enjoy grilling Feeney. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t intimidated by the prospect of confronting the good bishop via telephone. In person would have been preferable, but Peter knew how much Feeney cherished his status and that he probably had a gatekeeper to protect him from the riffraff. Without Ingram around to arrange it, an in-person meeting, was next to impossible. In fact, without Ingram so many things now felt impossible. Trying to catch Feeney for a meeting seemed like a waste of time. He settled instead for the telephone.