by Neil Plakcy
“What a handsome name,” Esther said. I assumed she meant Rochester. She stood up. “I’m afraid what we have isn’t in any kind of order. But I can take you into the social hall and you can look through the boxes.”
I helped Esther carry two big boxes of pictures to a table in the warm, drafty social hall. Lili opened her messenger bag and pulled out her iPad and a portable scanner. She slid the iPad into the scanner’s dock, and then ran a photo through to test it. I was impressed at the quality of the picture that showed up on the iPad’s screen.
“Very cool gadget,” I said.
We each took a box and began looking through the photos, which had been haphazardly tossed together. “This is a big project,” I grumbled. “Most of these pictures aren’t even labeled.”
“We both know what Friar Lake looks like. Let’s just see if we can find anything that matches what we’ve seen.”
We spent nearly an hour before Lili found a picture that she thought looked like the abbey at Friar Lake. She pulled up a recent picture on her iPad and we compared it. “Yeah, that’s a match,” I said. “See the tracery around the stained glass window? It’s the same in both photos.”
I looked over to see Rochester nosing into one box. “Rochester! Come away from there!”
He didn’t respond, so I jumped up and crossed the room to the box he was sniffing. “Is there something in here, boy?” I asked.
I carried the box over to the table where Lili and I sat, and lifted out a frayed white robe embroidered with gold thread. Underneath was a small waxed-paper sleeve of round cookies. “False alarm,” I said. “He found some cookies.”
I shook my head at him. “These are so old they’re stale,” I said. “You can’t have one.”
“They aren’t cookies,” Lili said. “They must be communion wafers.”
“Oh. That makes sense.” Under another robe, though, we found a cache of black and white pictures of Our Lady of the Waters from the 1950s. “Good boy, Rochester,” I said, scratching beneath his chin. “You did find something after all. You’ll get a treat when we get home.”
Rochester recognized the word treat, and he lifted his big head up and nodded a couple of times. When he realized there was no treat coming, though, he lowered his head and slumped back to the floor.
Lili and I looked through the pictures. Monks in traditional robes stood outside the chapel, the dormitory and the kitchen. Someone had written the date and the monks’ names on the back of each photo, in a spidery, faded handwriting.
There were some indoor shots, too—a monk in his room, another in the kitchen. The last set were taken in the chapel. Maybe it was just the age of the photos, but the place looked pretty worn. Monks stood by the windows, next to the baptismal font, and at the foot of the altar. In one close-up shot of the altar various ceremonial objects had been laid out on an embroidered runner.
Lili went to get Esther while I ran the pictures through the scanner. “We’re hoping you can tell us what some of these things are,” Lili said as they walked back in. “Neither of us are that familiar with Catholic objects.”
“What a lovely picture,” Esther said, when we showed her the altar close-up. “Look at the detail on that altar cloth. You don’t see work like that anymore.”
She began moving down the line of objects. “That’s the paten,” she said, pointing at a flat plate with the letters IHS inscribed in the center. “You put the Eucharistic bread on it. And that’s the Christogram there—the first three letters of Christ’s name in Greek.” It was a simple round plate, and the goblet next to it was very plain as well. “The chalice, for the wine.”
There were several crucifixes laid out on the altar cloth, and the positioning of Jesus’s body was slightly different in each. One even had a skull and crossbones beneath his feet.
“That’s a symbol of Calvary, where Jesus was buried,” Esther said. “In Hebrew they call it Golgotha, which is supposed to mean the place of the skull. Some traditions say that Jesus was buried directly on top of Adam and Eve, and the skull and bones represents that.”
It was creepy—but then, the whole idea of displaying a dead or dying man creeped me out. I had been in a speech and debate club in high school, and our team often competed in meets at Catholic schools, where the crucifix was as ever-present as the American flag in our classes. I had become desensitized to them—but when I looked closely at these I was struck by the horror and the pain.
The last item on the altar cloth was a rectangular box about six inches long. “What’s that for?” I asked Esther, pointing.
She shook her head. “I don’t know.” We all looked more closely at the box. Unlike the plain paten and goblet, the box was inscribed with ornamental curlicues, and inlaid with stones. In the center there was a tiny etching, and Lili had to enlarge the photo several times before we could make it out.
“Why, it’s a man with a dog,” Esther said. “How sweet.”
“Oh, wow!” I said. “That’s Saint Roch, the patron saint of dogs.”
Lili and I shared a glance and I could tell she was as excited as I was. We’d finally found something that substantiated Brother Anselm’s story about the reliquary. We couldn’t tell from the picture, of course, if there was a saint’s thumb bone inside, or even if the jewels on the box were real. But the details matched.
Esther looked at me. “Now, how did you know that?”
“Because there are a lot of people looking for a box like this,” I said.
Lili finished scanning the last couple of pictures, and then we packed up our gear. “Thank you so much for your help,” Lili said. “Would you like me to send you copies of the pictures I scanned?”
“That would be lovely,” Esther said. She handed Lili a flyer about the church. “Our email address is right there on the bottom.”
Rochester stopped to pee on the same light post before he got back in the car, and then we headed back toward the suburbs. The sun had gone in and the skies were gray, and I was glad to be leaving the inner city behind.
“So it’s real,” Lili said, sitting back in her seat. “The reliquary.”
“You bet. When you zoomed in on that picture, my heart skipped a couple of beats. Now we know that the monks had it as late as the 1950s. The question is where it’s been since then, and who has it now.”
“Not to mention,” Lili said, staring out the windows as the grim urban landscape fled past, “who might have killed DeAndre to get it.”
26 – Runaways
Lili had work to do before her class the next morning, so I drove her up to her apartment in Leighville. “I’ll email you the pictures I scanned,” she said. “I’ll try and zoom in on the box and get as good a print as I can.”
As I drove back downriver toward Stewart’s Crossing, I realized it was already dinner time and I didn’t feel like cooking, so I called Rick. I kind of wanted to show off to him, about what we’d discovered about the reliquary. “You want to split a pizza?” I asked. “I’ll pick up from Giovanni’s?”
“Works for me,” he said. “Although I know you’re only offering so you can squirm your way farther into these investigations.”
“As long as we’re clear,” I said. I hung up and ordered the pizza. Giovanni’s was in a small strip shopping center in the middle of Stewart’s Crossing, perpendicular to Main Street. It was sandwiched between a Laundromat and a State Store, the government-run outlet for liquor, along with a greeting card store, a dry cleaner’s, and a karate donjon.
I left Rochester in the car with the windows down while I went into the pizza parlor. There was a line for takeout, and I had to force myself to be patient until it was my turn. By the time the cashier had pulled the large sausage-and-mushroom pie from its warming spot on top of the pizza oven my mouth was watering and my stomach was grumbling.
Carrying the hot-bottomed box by its edges, I shouldered open the restaurant door and walked to the trunk of the BMW. I was surprised that Rochester wasn’t hanging out the window salivating. I sl
id the box into the trunk and then opened the driver’s side door.
Rochester was gone.
I scanned the parking lot. “Rochester! Where are you, boy?”
I couldn’t see him anywhere. Had someone stolen my dog? Or had he run away? There were a dozen or more cars in the lot, but he was too big to hide under anything smaller than an SUV.
A father exited the donjon with two little boys in white robes, and a matronly woman was crossing the parking lot toward the State Store. There was no one else around to ask if they’d seen a big golden retriever.
When I was a kid, I explored every corner of Stewart’s Crossing on foot or on my bike, alone or with friends. I knew there was a creek behind the shopping center that fed into the mill pond down the street. Could Rochester have gone back there? Or had he run toward Main Street? He was a smart dog, but impulsive, and I worried that he’d run in front of a car.
I tried to shut down my fear and focus. Should I go toward the street, or the creek? If Rochester had jumped out the car window on his own, which way would he have gone?
I went with my gut instinct and took off at a run for the creek, calling his name. “Rochester! Rochester! Where are you, boy?”
The two boys in karate robes looked at me open-mouthed as I ran past them. I rounded the corner of the shopping center and skidded to a stop. Rochester was knee-deep in creek water, his front paws up on the trunk of a sloping weeping willow.
“Rochester! Come here right now!”
He looked over at the sound of my voice, but then turned back to the tree and barked once.
My heart was pumping and I was panting for breath. I guess I hadn’t sprinted like that since high school.
“I am going to kill you,” I said, stalking through the underbrush to the creek. Just before I reached him I banged my shin on something. “Ow!” I looked down and realized it was the handlebar of a bicycle. “This is not a dump! What kind of a jerk throws a bike back here?”
Maybe it was the two words, jerk and bike, together in one sentence, that made me think of Owen Keely. “Crap,” I said. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Rick’s number.
“You know what kind of bike Owen Keely rode?” I asked.
“I thought you were bringing pizza.”
“We had a bit of a diversion. The bike?”
“Hold on. Let me check. I don’t have all this information at the tip of my tongue, you know.”
“I know,” I grumbled. Rochester kept trying to climb the tree, and I saw a squirrel in a branch high above us, chittering down at him.
Rick came back on the line after a minute. “His mother doesn’t know the brand. But it has a blue body and cream-colored fenders.”
“I think Rochester found it,” I said.
“Where are you?”
I told him, and he said he’d meet me there. There was no guarantee it was Owen’s bicycle, though it looked pretty new, not the kind of bike you’d just throw in the trash.
Rochester was still sniffing around the tree, though the squirrel above had long since hopped away. I had forgotten to bring his leash with me so I had to grab him by his collar.
“You are a very bad dog. Don’t you ever run away from me again!”
He splashed in the creek and the water sprayed my pants legs. He tried to reach up and lick my hand but I pulled him forward. Holding the ring on the end of his choke-chain collar, I led him to the car and he jumped in the front seat. “Sit!” I said.
He plopped his butt down, but by the time I had gone around to the trunk he had jumped to the back seat and was sniffing toward me, leaving muddy paw prints everywhere.
I had to remind myself that even though he was two years old, he was still a puppy in many ways, and that it was my own fault for leaving the windows in the car open enough so that he could jump out. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.
My hands were still shaking as I opened the trunk and pulled out a slice of pizza. No reason to let the pie get cold while I waited for Rick, I thought. I fed some crust to Rochester through the back window and wished I had a beer with me.
I forced myself to take some deep, calming breaths, as Rochester sniffed and scratched at the back seat. I felt worn out—not just from the run, but from the fear that I might have lost my dog for good.
I was calmer by the time Rick pulled up in his truck. I closed the trunk and put Rochester’s leash on as Rick got out. “Where’s the bike?”
“I’ll show you.” With Rochester pulling forward, we went back to the creek, and I told him how Rochester had run away. “It freaked me out,” I said. “And it reminded me he’s still a big puppy. I need to be more careful about him. I just kept imagining him running in front of a car, or him galloping away and me never seeing him again.”
“I know how you feel. I had Rascal at the dog park a couple of weeks ago and when this ditzy blonde opened the gate, he ran right out and took off down the street. Had to chase him for three blocks until he got distracted by a squirrel.”
I led him a couple of feet into the thicket, and pointed at the bike, half-hidden under the brush. “I guess you need a crime scene tech here,” I said.
“What’s the crime?” Rick asked. “Illegal dumping?”
“But doesn’t this mean…” I began.
“All it means is that somebody dumped a bike back here that might be Owen Keely’s. Back the dog away so I can drag it out.”
It was hot and muggy back there by the creek, and Rick’s cargo shorts and T-shirt were sweaty and dirt-stained by the time he had the bike out of the muck and thrown into the back of his truck.
“You get the pizza?” he asked, wiping his hands on a rag.
“Yeah. Probably cold by now.”
“That’s what microwaves are for.”
I followed him back to his house. Before I got out of the car, I clipped Rochester’s leash onto his collar, and then I held it tightly as I navigated removing the pizza box from the trunk and opening the gate to Rick’s yard.
Rascal came tearing toward us. The combined force of the two big dogs nearly knocked me over, and Rick had to jump forward and grab the pizza box.
He put a couple of slices of pizza into the microwave as I opened his fridge and removed a bottle of beer. I sat at the table and he brought out plates and paper towels.
“Lili and I drove into Philly today,” I said. “And guess what we found?”
“It can’t be a bicycle,” he said dryly. “Already dealt with that.”
“How about a photograph of this reliquary Brother Anselm talked about,” I said. As we ate, I explained about calling the church on Germantown Avenue, and then going through all the pictures. “There was a lineup of stuff on the altar—probably all their valuable pieces. We saw this one box that looked like the reliquary.”
“How could you tell?” he asked, feeding a piece of crust to each dog.
“Let me see if Lili sent me the picture and I’ll show you.” I opened my phone and checked my email. I clicked on Lili’s latest message, and a close-up of the picture appeared. “We think this is it,” I said, showing the phone to Rick. “See that guy with the dog? That could be St. Roch, the patron saint of dogs. And even in black and white you can see that those look like jewels around the edges.”
“You send this to Tony?”
I checked the message, and saw that Lili had copied him. “Yup.”
I sat back in my chair. “Lili’s working on a pictorial history of the property. I’m supposed to be helping with the text.”
“And how’s that?” Rick asked. “Working with her?”
“So far it’s okay. I can remember times I had to help Mary with her projects, and we use to squabble about every little detail. Lili and I don’t seem to work that way.”
Mary was smart and tough and good at communication and convincing people. She had built a career in corporate marketing, and we had moved from New York to Silicon Valley so she could take a big job with one of the computer companies. Sh
e was often up til the early hours of the morning, reading, answering emails and working on presentations.
Sometimes, though, the technical aspects of what she was working on would overwhelm her, and she’d ask for my help. I had built up the ability to communicate technical information clearly, and I’d try to untangle her sentences to clarify and focus.
But that always led to arguments. “It needs to read that way,” she’d say.
“But it’s not clear.”
Our voices would climb, and we’d end up yelling at each other over some stupid point like the storage capacity of a jump drive, and then one of us would get fed up and stalk away, slamming doors and nursing hurt feelings.
It wasn’t like that with Lili—at least not yet. So far we’d been getting along just fine. I struggled to remember the first years with Mary, double-dating in New York with Tor and Sherry, but it was all a blur.
“When you were first married, did you get along with Vanessa?” I asked.
“What kind of a question is that? I wouldn’t have married her otherwise.”
“Yeah, but even when Mary and I were first going out, we used to argue about little things—like where we’d go to dinner, and what the best way was to get somewhere on the subway. I think that set a pattern for our whole relationship.”
“And it’s not like that with Lili?”
“No, so far we get along well.”
Rick sat back in his chair with his bottle of Sam Adams in his hand. “Vanessa and I were all about sex,” he said. “We were both so hot for each other we didn’t pay attention to anything else. Yeah, if I look back on it now, I see we liked totally different things. She was a girly girl, into her clothes and her makeup and her shoes.”
He leaned forward and put the beer bottle down on the table hard. “Shoes.”
“As in Paula Madden,” I said.
“Shit. What do I keep doing with these women?”
I had an idea but I wasn’t going to say. I thought I’d broken my pattern with Lili, but maybe it was too early to say.
“That’s it,” Rick said. “My new year’s resolution. No more dating women like Vanessa.”