“Yes. My father taught me a lot about pirates. When I was little he told all kinds of stories about them. Every time we were near a beach, we walked up and down the shoreline looking for doubloons.”
“That’s an old Spanish coin, right?” asked John.
“Yes.”
“Did you ever find any?”
“No, but I think for him studying pirates was like a break from his other work. He didn’t care about the doubloons as much as the excitement of stretching his mind. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” John said. “Did he know a lot about local pirates? I mean, there’s a couple of bullet holes in my office said to be from old pirates.”
She smiled, and said, “They were here all right. The Nanticoke River was free of wood boring sea worms so in the old days sailors and pirates would come up here to careen their ships and clean the bottoms. Not this far up river but about three or four miles further down closer to the Chesapeake Bay.”
She went on, “Anyway, I couldn’t find any pirates with the name of fancy. I did find the word “fancy” used as a ship’s name in the late Seventeenth Century. The ship was considered a pirate vessel and was sailing in the area of the Carolinas in 1695. Interestingly, it could have come here.”
“What was the captain’s name?”
“Henry Every,” she said. “He was supposed to be worth millions in today’s money. He just disappeared with all his treasure. I can’t tell you whether that carving dates back to 1695 though. It may be something put on that rock as a joke.”
“It’s a lot of work to cut stone like that just for a joke and then hide it in a swamp,” John said, thoughtfully.
She looked out the window.
“There’s something I wanted to tell you,” he said, following her look.
She looked at him, expectantly. “What?”
“This thing about Father Tom. It might involve a killer who is trying to find where he got the money. He might think I know something. Anyway, last night someone trashed my office in River Sunday.”
Her eyes grew big.
He went on, “Stiles and I are worried that the guy who went after the monastery might come after you, I mean, because you know me. He might think you have information.”
She went over to the desk and opened a drawer. From it she took a large revolver, and tossed it carelessly back and forth in her hands.
“My father was given this by a Native American group when he was researching heirlooms in the West. It was supposed to be owned by a famous Apache chief. Me and my mother were taught to hit bull’s eyes with it. I wouldn’t worry about us, John.”
She put the gun back and picked up a paperback book, a large one that measured twelve inches on a side. She said, with a smile, “Come on outside on the deck. I have to check one of my asteroids.”
On the deck John could see many small lights in the field beyond the old priest’s property. “Steve has visitors,” he said.
“Those are people who have come looking for the money. I’ve noticed crowds of them gathering. Steve Knott and some of the people at that church are arranging to feed them, let them set up tents on his grassland. I don’t know much more about it,” she said.
They looked toward the north. The Nanticoke River came towards them from the south and went to the north after the hairpin turn. Ahead was the west, where the glimmer of a final sunset was still in the sky. To the east behind him, the horizon was dark over the roofline of Andy’s house, the sky speckled with starlight. Directly in front of them was a large telescope, larger than the one in the Andy’s truck.
“How powerful is that?” he asked.
“Twelve inch Celestron. It does the job,” she said. She opened the book and in the dim light traced across a page showing star locations.
“You see if one is going to hit the earth?”
She smiled. “Something like that.”
Mosquitoes slapped at his face. They did not appear to be bothering her although she, like him, had on only the waist skirt. Their arms and legs were bare.
She noticed his discomfort and said, “Here, try some of this.” She put down the book and handed him a small pot of fluid that had been sitting on the porch railing.
He dipped his fingers in the fluid. The liquid was warm, heated by the sun during the day. He spread some on his face. It smelled like dead fish.
“Put it on your arms too,” she said.
After a few moments the mosquitoes stopped coming near.
“What is this stuff?”
“Nanticoke River water,” she said, smiling.
“I didn’t know that would work.”
“Something in the muddy nature of the water near here I guess. We found out about it from the notes of tone of a French trapper who came up this way in the Sixteenth Century. I only find it right off this land. The other river water doesn’t work.”
“You should bottle and sell it. Make some money.”
She looked at him slowly with worry in her eyes. “You shouldn’t think about the water that way. If I ever did anything with it, I’d give it to people. It’s not something to make money from. Unfortunately there’s so little of it, I barely can find enough for my own use.”
“You and I look at things differently.”
“You’ll come around to my way one of these days. Pretty soon you’ll find out that money doesn’t mean as much as you think.”
He paused, thinking about what she had just said. He had thought about money just like her. Yet, he kept coming back to the debts he owed and how to pay them. He decided to change the subject. He said, “So, you and your buddies compare notes on what asteroid is going to hit the earth?”
She laughed, “Yes, only we talk more about where to hide from it.”
“I guess I asked for that. Long ago, hits from those things caused the death of the dinosaurs, right?”
“Some say.”
She opened the book again and left it spread apart on the wooden floor of the deck. Then she looked through the scope and after a moment, she bent down and made some notes in the margins of the open pages.
“Would you like to look?”
He nodded and squinted through the viewer. “What am I seeing?”
“We’re looking north. Actually, my asteroid is in the center of the view.”
“How about Cygnus?”
She said, “It’s in the background, very hard to see this early in the summer. The Incas believed that was the location of heaven.”
“Doesn’t look like much,” he said.
“Yes, that is true. It’s in a dark area of the universe along what we call the Milky Way, a band of stars across the evening sky. So it had a lot of meaning to the old observers. Some of my blog friends think that aliens visited our planet from there. My father did too.” She touched his arm, “I should warn you just in case. My father also thought that having red hair meant we carried the genes of the aliens.”
“He did, did he?” John grinned.
Standing this close to her he sensed her, an additional warmth radiating through the summer air. He thought about the Manito wisdom, about the balances in life between good and evil. He thought about her, about her toughness and independence. Even so, he knew he had to make sure that the killer did not come after her and test her strength. Anger at himself rushed through his mind as he realized the danger he was causing her. However, she would be the first person to complain if he treated her as weak. He knew he’d have to protect her anyway, just without her knowledge.
Chapter 8
Thursday, July 11, 10AM
The creek in back of John’s mobile home was already alive with noisy wildlife when he woke up. The sun was bright on the water and in the middle of the channel past the mudflats, several male and female Mallard ducks quacked and enjoyed the early heat. Because the trailer tires had sunk into mud on the creek side, the metal home was tilted and brush came up to scrape against the window. The view was composed, idyllic, the blue green framed with brown t
ipped green cattails.
He began to make something to eat. Naked, he turned on the portable television that he kept to the side of the trailer. He heard a familiar voice as lines covering the screen became the head of Father Phillip speaking earnestly to a television reporter. John was so surprised that he almost dropped the bowl of cereal he was fixing. He turned around and sat astride the single chair that he had at the fold down table and watched as the priest spoke. He was being interviewed in front of St. Gilpin’s.
Peterson, the sharp faced writer from the Baltimore Sun, dressed in a wrinkled seersucker suit and white shirt, asked questions in his brassy outspoken manner, the style that had made him famous writing about Maryland crime.
The priest said, “I didn’t know about any treasure. I suppose what you are talking about is a possibility but I don’t know how. Father Sweeney was a very religious man. He did not have time to look for lost pirate treasure like you suggest, much less find it and dig it up.”
“There’s a rumor that the money came from the old Indian mounds scattered around River Sunday. There are folks who are interested in digging at all the mounds. Did you know about that?”
“I know that one mound is on an old piece of land owned by Father Sweeney. What that means, I don’t have any idea.”
“Where else do you think he got all that money?” persisted Peterson.
“You know, I’ve thought about that. Perhaps, through God’s Grace, it was given to him by a kind hearted person but he never told me about it.”
“Whom was he giving the money to?”
“I don’t know that either. As I said, he was a holy man and I’m sure it was a good cause.”
“Some of your parishioners have told me that often you and the father disagreed about causes, things to put charity money into.”
“Yes, like many of us here at St. Gilpin’s we wish now that he had seen fit to give some of the money to repair our church building. As you can see it is in poor condition.”
“Has that made people angry? Why do you think he did not give it to the parish?” John could see that Peterson had the priest where he wanted him, on the defensive.
“No one is angry. We are a church, a congregation. I don’t know why he did not give us money. None of us do. We hope that his cause was a greater one.”
“You don’t know what his involvement with the monastery was, Father?”
“I told you. He wasn’t an evil man. He could not have had anything to do with those murders. Those men were his friends.”
“Do you think he caused the murders by sending the money there?” Peterson is sinking the lance, John thought. He’s making up his next headline.
“Yes, I’m afraid that was the consequence that I am sure he never expected.”
The reporter looked into the camera and said, “We’ve been talking with the pastor of the small parish of Saint Gilpin’s in River Sunday Maryland, the town that is the site of a modern gold rush as hundreds seek to dig in nearby fields. They are trying to find the source of millions of dollars apparently found by the former pastor of this small church.”
As John drove into town, he realized that like all news in small towns, obviously the story of the priest’s money was not something that could be hidden for long. Someone from the State Police or the State Attorney General’s office must have leaked the fact that the monks had phoned Father Sweeney in the hours before the fire was set by their murderer. That brought this reporter to town asking these questions. To add to the mystery in the public mind, Father Phillip’s honest appearance on the television didn’t provide answers. When the public was left with mystery and no answers, common sense told John that the frenzy would grow and that more and more people would try to solve the riddle, try to find the money.
This idea of the mounds being the source of money was intriguing. Whether it was true or not, it would get tongues wagging and would bring out the prospectors. He had no idea what shape the old priest’s marsh was in with all these visitors. Probably the mound there had been overrun already. He’d have to get busy on that fence to keep out trespassers until he and Andy finished examining the grounds there. He remembered that Tolson had already built a fence around his mound. Now he could understand why. Tolson was smart, sneaky but smart.
A television crew from Baltimore covered the funeral Mass of Father Tom Sweeney. As a matter of fact, John noticed when he got to the church that two crews were there, one from each of the larger stations. He smiled. It wasn’t that the editors cared about the death of a small town priest. No, the cameras panned the crowds standing outside the church and the many out of town cars going by on the street. The coverage was of the many people now coming to River Sunday to look for the money.
On the other hand, John had expected that the death would bring out a lot of mourners anyway. If a man is a priest, a good priest, for as long as Father Tom Sweeney, he develops a long list of friends both in the church membership and outside. Almost as reward for all the years of sacrifice and the long lonely evenings spent in his little bedroom at the parish hall, many showed up. Also, he saw the chief and his men, looking at faces, trying to spot a killer come here to gloat.
Several black cars were lined up at the church behind the hearse, and they contained the Bishop and his staff. The diocese had appointed a vicar forane in response to the priest’s death. He would attend to any church details that came up as response to the priest’s death. He was a rather small man named Monsignor Carter who wore gold-rimmed small lens glasses and who followed closely behind the Bishop. The Bishop himself, a skinny businesslike man, was to officiate at the Mass, say a few words and bless the proceedings as per the custom of the death of a priest. Father Phillip being the local acting pastor was actually giving the Mass.
As John entered the church, he was met with a smell of unwashed bodies, an odor that was not usual in the simple perfume of the country church. He could see the immediate source. The whole back section of the building was crowded with poorly dressed families, most of them with filthy faces and hands, the children with ragged hair and many with bare feet. These were the homeless who had been coming into town, the ones whose campfires he had seen from Andy’s house.
In the front of the church a stranger sat among the parishioners. He was a large man clad in a blue robe with a white cross stitched into its expanse. John recognized him from the computer pictures Rebecca Sweeney had shown him in Baltimore. This was Guthrie Smith and now he knew that the ragged people in the back of the church belong to the group called Easter Sunlight.
He sat with Andy. The altar had been repaired since Father Sweeney had fallen against it and John could hardly spot the cracks in the marble. Partway through the service, Father Phillip stopped and beckoned to Andy to come forward and say her words. She looked at John, stood up slowly and stepped up to the lectern. She adjusted the microphone as she was taller than Father Phillip, glanced around the parishioners smiling at some she knew, and then began to speak.
“I wanted to come here today as a thankful Catholic. I have been a member of Father Tom’s church for several years since I came home to River Sunday to live with my mother. I wanted to thank this holy man publicly for what he did to help me in get my life started again.”
As he listened to her homily, John knew even more clearly why Father Tom liked her so much. She had a voice that was filled with sympathy and with unselfishness, as if her life was dedicated to all the other people around her, the same kind of character that the old priest himself had possessed, yet she had it without the robes. From what John knew about her laid back attitude, she also had it without any priestly expectation of heavenly reward.
“I met Father Tom more than two years ago. Like perhaps many of you I had reached a point in my life where I was wondering what my life’s purpose was. I knew that I had something to do, something important but I did not know what it was. I also knew that my recent years of living, working only for success, whatever that is, were not making me happy. I ha
d come to realize that the man I was living with was not the kind of man I wanted to live the rest of my life with. I left my former life and came home to my family in River Sunday. I was confused and asking myself what next. Father Tom helped me reestablish my love of my father and mother and my home and aided me in following astronomy, something that I had known since childhood but had discarded in the way that we all discard what we think is too far away from success and making lots of money.”
She looked down at the audience and paused. Then she went on in her soft voice, so soft that John could barely hear her words, “I found that the meanings of God and the knowledge of the best ideas of all the religions of the world were right here for me to find and I did this with the help of this holy man by listening to his simple words and realizing he was a friend.”
“Father Tom gave his homily that first day I went to his church and it seemed meant for me. I want to tell you what he said as I remember some of the words very well and always will.”
“He said ‘Friends in Christ, we must look upwards and downwards as God is all around us. His love and the energy of that love are constantly spreading out through the endless space of the universe. What we have to do in this life is to find our path towards that love, so that when we die we can reunite with it, not be cast aside as evil and faulted, not worthy of being taken home.”
She stopped, wiping back tears, and concluded, “I hope you will find as much from these words as I did.”
Andy crossed herself and stepped back to her seat as the priest returned to the proceedings.
Later, moving slowly out of the church with Andy and the others, John saw Wink Ricker on the street talking with the farmer, James Tolman, and the same stranger, the tall man in a long brimmed black hat that he had seen before with Tolman at his farm. The man leaned forward on his left leg as though the leg was shorter than his right leg. He had a sharp-featured face, one that reminded John of a hawk and his eyes glanced from side to side as the crowd of attendees moved by, as if he were looking for someone. He had the same stare in his eyes as John had seen in the eyes of a thief he had once defended, a nervous look as if John might know the real truth behind his lies.
Gold (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 4) Page 9