“Yellow metal. You mean gold?” said the Chief.
“I didn’t know about them,” said Father Phillip. “What were they doing in the altar?”
John shrugged. “They aren’t worth much even if they are gold. Anyway, you could compare them to what you found in the car. It would be hard to scrape little things like that on a car lid. I think they are probably a gift from someone. I have five more of them that Father Tom had in his safe deposit box.”
“I’m still checking the scrapings out. I’m sending them off to the State Police lab to be examined. I’ll get the altar pieces from Steve. If I need the ones from the bank, I’ll let you know.”
“Anything else in the trunk?” asked John.
“A couple of shovels and some grocery bags.”
John looked at the chief intently. “What kind of grocery bags?”
“They were unused. He had them stacked. They were the ones you get at the little store on Strand Street, what is it, Strand Street Grocery.” He saw the look on John’s face. “You know something?”
“I saw some of those same bags in the trash can at the monastery. Someone had tossed them all over the back porch.”
The Chief smiled. “That’s helpful. I’ll check it out. If the bags are still there, they might tell us something.” Then he turned to the priest and said, “Father, the whole town knows something happened. You can’t have a fire in an adjoining town with two men dead and not have questions, especially in a small town like River Sunday where everyone knows everyone’s business. People suspect a lot of money was involved and they know it is missing, buried somewhere, or whatever. They also know that Father Tom was involved and that makes the church suspect. You’re going to have to live with that.”
“I do worry and pray about our parish,” Father Phillip said.
“I’d worry about the fellow who burned that monastery.” He paused then asked, “When’s the funeral?”
“Tomorrow.”
The Chief said, “We’ll keep our eyes out for strangers, someone who might be more interested in the money than in the death of the priest.”
“The diocese has planned to send someone to conduct the Mass,” said Father Phillip. “That’s to honor the priest’s memory as God’s servant.”
“As for you, Neale, don’t forget I got my eyes on you too,” said the Chief.
“Are you watching me or watching out for me?” John said, with a grin.
“Both.”
An hour later, as John drove on the high spans of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge over the blue water far below, he thought of the old priest, what he must be doing in the heaven he sought all his earthly life. A song came to mind, a Johnny Cash ballad, which played over and over, seizing his brain.
I was a sailor, I was born upon the tide
And with the sea I did abide.
I sailed a schooner round the Horn to Mexico
I went aloft and furled the mainsail in a blow
And when the yards broke off they said that I got killed
But I am living still.
John arrived in Baltimore two hours later, his truck overheating with burned oil smoke streaming out the tailpipe. He had bought the vehicle from one of Ricker’s friends after arriving in River Sunday. At that time it had more than two hundred thousand miles on it. While the engine would still push the vehicle up to highway speed limits, it worked very hard to do so. The suspension left much to be desired as it bounced along and when he went around sharp turns, the driver’s seat tended to slide to the side because its supports were rusted out.
He drove by the Cathedral, a multi acre walled church property replete with extensive gardens and trees that was surrounded with expensive city dwellings and equally well planted private yards. On the cathedral building itself, he could see signs that new construction had recently begun. The last time he came by this area, at least a year ago, all that was in view were the bleak walls of the former cathedral standing almost untouched, part of the roof and the base of the missing steeple where the explosion had torn off the tower end. At one time this had been an architectural tourist sight for visitors to Baltimore. From what John could see the new construction was at the foundation level and had not reached the stage of putting back the once magnificent cathedral spire.
The explosion, which demolished the building, was spectacular to say the least. The Baltimore Sun had quoted an onlooker as saying that the spire that had been very high and very pointed, shot up into the air several hundred feet before falling back to the ground to destroy itself in a tumbled mass of broken concrete and twisted steel.
“Like a rocket to the heavens,” the headline had read. John remembered it well. He had been in law school. Many students and professors attributed the explosion to a bombing by a radical terrorist group. Unfortunately, if a group had been responsible, it never came forth with any claims.
Even after extensive police investigations, no one had ever been implicated. Even the Federal Bureau of Investigations came to study the event in case it might be classified as a hate crime. The explosion occurred in the middle of the night when no one was in the building so most experts thought terrorists who looked to harm large crowds were not likely suspects. Over the months since the disaster, the police had released little to confirm any suspicion of terrorist activity. What they did surmise was that whoever did it was not interested in killing so much as making a point through property destruction. What that point was no one could say. However, after all the police work was completed, the general consensus was that the explosion was due to a ruptured gas pipeline deep in the bowels of the church although this could not be firmly documented either.
Since the cathedral had been destroyed, the Archbishop had declared an emergency fundraising program and gone out to all the churches in the Maryland diocese to raise money for the rebuilding. However, since the money raising began, an activist group for the homeless had been protesting church expenditures for the cathedral rather than welfare housing and from time to time had been interviewed on the Baltimore television stations. The group, with all its fervor, seemed to have little political power to stop the fund raising. After all, Baltimore had been an important player in the early Catholic Church in the United States and this heritage as well as the architectural excellence of the former cathedral building was one that most Catholics wanted to acknowledge.
In River Sunday, John knew that nothing had more pressing in Father Tom’s outlook, in his Sunday homilies, than following the lead of his Archbishop and gathering funds to rebuild the famous church. Prior to Father Tom’s death a huge plywood symbolic thermometer had been set up in front of Saint Gilpin’s parish to show the gain in funds raised for the Cathedral. Several weeks before his unfortunate heart attack the parish council had demanded that he take the thermometer down and in addition that he begin to think about raising money for the repair of his own church building. Since then, he had been at odds with his parish council, including Steve and Father Phillip.
Far past the Cathedral neighborhood and into a poorer section of Baltimore, John came to the address of the priest’s elderly sister. She had retired to a small apartment in a multi-story brick tenement which, although very old, was still in good repair. The building was next to a playground filled with small children and their mothers and John noted that the walls of nearby apartment houses were not spray painted with obscenities like others in nearby neighborhoods he had driven through.
He parked and walked toward the entrance. A police cruiser went by him slowly, the officers looking him over. The sister’s name, Rebecca Sweeney, was written neatly on the door of one of the twenty or so mailboxes. He pressed her room call button and heard a buzzer far off in the depths of the building. A few moments later the sister asked his name and then opened the door.
“Come on up,” she said, this time in a rasping elderly voice. “We’ll have a look at you.”
The hallway and the staircases smelled like overcooked food mixed with strong soap. Th
e plaster on the walls showed age and cracks but was clean and recently scrubbed. At her door, he knocked. She opened the door a crack and looked at him.
“You’re Mister Neale, my brother’s lawyer?” she asked and he nodded, holding out his driver’s license through the chain. She looked at it, holding it closely to her eyes, then took off the door chain and waved him in.
She was a large woman, similar in body build to the old priest with a full cheeked pleasant face that except for the stringy white hair surrounding it duplicated the kind appearance of Father Tom. She was wearing a green housedress and slippers and sat in a wheelchair that had seen much use. The arm pads were worn and across the back he noticed rips in the vinyl backrest material.
She smiled. “Come in, Mister Neale. Come in. I’m sorry you had to come all this distance.”
“It’s no trouble. I’m glad to finally meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you from your brother.” This was a lie as the old priest never talked about his sister.
“He was a good man, he was. I’m going to miss his monthly visits.”
“He came to see you once a month from River Sunday?” asked John.
“Sure did. Always count on him towards the end of the week. It was good to see him, talk about family and the church. We both spent our lives in the faith you know.”
“You were a nun?” asked John.
“Yes. We were both religious, of course, but we never worked together at the same church. He liked Baltimore and I wanted to serve in New York. When I retired, I came back here. You might find it strange after my public life, but I guess I wanted to be alone after all those years of being with other women.”
“I can understand that,” said John.
“I had a little money saved up and I make do.”
The apartment was small and cluttered, with well-traveled paths among the furniture for her wheelchair route. Every bit of the living room space was occupied with books and magazines stacked on and around a long sofa. A television set and a computer station had cleared spaces in front of them. At the computer a table held stacks of computer disks. Standing out among the religious paintings scattered around the walls of the room, was a large American flag, about three by three feet pinned to an open section of wall above the computer.
“My brother told me about you,” she said.
“I liked him.”
She was nervous, her head moving from side to side and her white hair bobbing like a bunch of white flowers. “Sit down, Mister Neale,” she said.
When he complied, moving a few books from the edge of the sofa, she asked, “Why did you settle in River Sunday? Most of the young men stay in the city.”
“I had the idea I could find a career in a farming area, helping the farmers.”
“That was pretty generous of you, seeing as how I expect most of them don’t have any money for lawyers.”
“Pretty foolish,” John said, with a grin. “I had promised my foster father that I would help family farms fight the corporations. He had to sell our farm when it went bankrupt. He died soon after. My mom did too.”
“I bet my brother didn’t think you were foolish.”
“He said that I’d made a good step towards being a Christian because I did choose beliefs over money. He and I talked both had faith in the innovations of small farms and believed that they should be preserved.”
“Why did you choose law?”
“I wanted to do something for the decent farm people I met growing up.”
“I think my brother was telling you that you have the makings of being a good man.”
“Yes Ma’am, but what’s a good man?”
“You’ll know when the time comes,” she said with a smile.
John grinned. “I think he was just trying to get me to come to church.”
“More than that I think.”
John looked at her for a moment and said, “I came to ask about your brother’s estate and selling the land he owned.”
“Sell it and give the proceeds to the cathedral fund. He worked so hard to raise money for that cause. That’s what he would want.”
“He didn’t say that in the will. He left it to me to decide.”
“I know he wanted to help me. He saved his little bit of money that the church gave him and he thought that it might be used to help me with hospital bills. He worried that I would end up in some poor hospital where he had seen so many nuns left to die in pain.”
“Give it to the Cathedral instead. That’s what you want me to do?”
“Of course.”
She paused, then said, “I read about the monastery and the death of those two monks.”
He said, “I was there just after they were killed.”
“Do you think it was an accident?”
“Why do you ask?” said John, bending forward.
“My brother went up there a lot. He said he was worried about the safety of Brother Tim but he didn’t know what to do about it.”
“Did your brother ever tell you about a rich donor he had met, someone who was providing him with large sums of money?”
“No,” she said, with a laugh. “That would certainly be rare for him to get a lot of money from a donor. From what I remember his parish was a very poor one. He had no money himself. Many people seek money. To you or at least to most of you, maybe not you yourself, success is making a fortune, saving up a million dollars, investing in the stock market or gold. To a priest, money is worthless except as a means to assist others in the fulfillment of God’s mission. My brother would seek money only to glorify God.”
She closed her eyes. “The construction of a temple to God. Yes, the higher the better.”
“We found some small rectangles about a gram each of what looks like gold with Father Tom’s name engraved on them. Remember them?”
“No. People were always giving him trinkets.”
“Do you know about his swampland?”
“He rarely spoke of it. He liked to fish, I know,” she said, opening her eyes.
She wheeled to the computer and said, “Let me show you something.” She pressed a few keys and a website came up. It showed a white Christian crucifix in a field of blue.
“What does it signify?” asked John, looking over her shoulder.
“The site for the largest of the homeless organizations in Baltimore.”
“What does that have to do with your brother?” John asked.
She leaned intently over the computer and said, “I’ll tell you something you might not realize about the young priest, Phillip, there in River Sunday. My brother told me about his activities.”
“Father Phillip Spare?”
“Yes. My brother and he had many discussions over the use of the Lord’s money. Phillip was not an evil man but he did not understand my brother’s concern. These homeless people disparage all church charities that give to buildings for worship and do not provide funds for housing the poor. Father Phillip often writes for this site. He is misguided.”
She said, “I’ve been a sister for most of my adult life. Got into the religious life after high school and never looked back. I’m retired now but I still keep up.” She breathed deeply. “These people are violent. It’s not competition. They don’t want to reason. They want what they want and they want it now.”
“What is the group called?”
“Easter Sunlight. The leader is a fellow named Guthrie Smith.”
“Smith.”
She pulled up a picture of a tall man and muted the sound. “Can’t stand listening to him.” She chuckled. “See how he wears golden robes like he is the sunlight himself. The people treat him like a god. That in itself is heresy. You’ll find you can’t talk to him. You just have to listen to his babble about how terrible and unfeeling the church is.”
“Violent, you say?” asked John.
“Some say they were responsible for the explosion at the cathedral but no one, not these police anyway, could ever prove it. Besides, who do you arrest when th
ere are a thousand possible street people who could have sneaked in there and set off something? Can’t get a word out of any of them and when you try to talk to them, they just act crazy.”
She continued, “My brother often said, ‘Cathedrals are an aspiration to heaven, not earthly success. We can feed food to the poor but they will always be hungry, but if we build the cathedral we will feed them hope.’”
“I’ve heard that in his sermons in River Sunday,” said John.
“You see, my brother realized early on that all the money in the world would not have helped those who would always need more earthly things. He believed that all that would really benefit them was a miracle and that if he could put his life into the support of the only source of miracles, then it would be a far more worthwhile life.” She took out a handkerchief from her lap and wiped at her eyes.
“So the cathedral was to memorialize the miracles?”
“Yes. My brother carried out what the two of us always dreamed. Constructing the finest temple to God. We’d talk of it constantly. That’s why he tried to raise money to rebuild.”
The site came through with a banner proclaiming that an opportunity had come to bring the homeless to the attention of the media in a new and deliberate way. It said, “Stand by for instructions. Guthrie.”
She typed in a quick email “Pray to God and get a job. God takes care of those who take care of themselves.” She said, “That will teach them.”
He thought of the fancy stone that had been dedicated to the founding monk in the monastery cemetery. Those men had believed. Yet, Ricker and his companions would probably buy the land, plow over the building and put up a shopping center in place of the monastery.
Her faced looked suddenly blank. “I don’t know about any donors. He kept that from me. Perhaps he wanted to protect me.”
“Why would he want to protect you?”
“You’ve seen the computer. Those people would search me down and try to get at the money if they knew he had some.” She was talking fast and her face was flushed.
“Let me ask about something else. We found scrapings of what looked like gold on the metal edge of his car trunk. I know this sounds far fetched but did he ever speak of pawning church property to raise money?”
Gold (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 4) Page 6