Truth Beat

by Brenda Buchanan

  His wake, however, was held in a smaller downstairs chapel with an entirely different feel. The ceiling was low. The wood was dark. The windows were a uniform yellow pebbled glass, though I guessed they were intended to appear gold. Stella Rinaldi had called me to vent her outrage when it was announced that Patrick would be waked in the dim, cramped chapel.

  “If there were ever a priest who deserved to lie in state in the upstairs sanctuary, it’s Father Patrick Doherty,” Stella said. “The bishop is going to have to answer for this indignity.”

  I wondered if Kathleen felt insulted or relieved. The chapel meant a smaller stage for the role she was so reluctant to play, so perhaps it would be a relief. I pulled alongside the door that opened into the rear of the downstairs space.

  “I need to run home and change clothes,” I said. “Be back in a blink.”

  “That’s fine,” she said. “I can handle it on my own for a little while.”

  It turned out she couldn’t.

  * * *

  When I next stepped through the heavy oak and wrought iron door, it was 3:29 p.m. The visitation had been underway for less than a half hour, and while the line to pass Patrick’s casket wasn’t out the door yet, it was growing. Illuminated by the afternoon light, the yellow windows didn’t look half bad. A hundred candles were alight on the altar, a step above the wide area where Patrick’s body lay inside a polished wood casket. The vague smell of incense hung in the air, not as pungent as if it were actively being burned, but definitely there, a memory of every funeral that had ever been held in the old chapel.

  A half-dozen priests sat at the front, not a receiving line, more like a panel of observers. People approached the casket whenever there was room at the padded kneeler, blessed themselves, prayed silently. A pin dropping would have been a cacophony.

  It took me a few minutes to get close enough to recognize Father DiAngelo at the far end of the priestly line. I scanned the front of the church and both side aisles, but didn’t see Kathleen. Stella was there though, in the front pew, head bent, rosary beads twisted around her arthritic hands. She glanced over when I slid in at the end. Tears gleamed behind her glasses, but she blinked them away and inclined her head sideways, toward the door that faced her house.

  As soon as we were out in the courtyard, she gave me the skinny.

  “Father Patrick’s sister lasted about two minutes,” she said. “Walked in, knelt in front of his casket, let loose a big gasping sob and left without a saying a word to anybody.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Rufe couldn’t bring himself to climb out of his pickup. He’d parked his more or less anonymous black truck—not the baby blue plumber’s van with his name plastered on the side—on the far edge of the church lot on the west side of St. Jerome’s. He wasn’t the first to arrive, but he’d had his pick of spaces. He chose one with a good view of the lot’s entrance, thinking he’d wait till Joe showed up, so they could walk in together.

  Sam was in bed with the flu, or at least that’s what he’d said when he called that morning. He might have been faking it in order to avoid the pain of the calling hours, but that wasn’t Sam’s way. At least Rufe had never seen that side of his pharmacist friend, but then, he’d thought Pat was who he pretended to be, too.

  After a long debate with himself, Rufe decided not to call Doug. His stomach clenched every time he pictured the unofficial dean of Frig It in full lawyer mode. In the span of five days Rufe had gone from trusting the retired attorney’s wry wisdom to doubting everything he’d ever said. Rufe knew it was unfair, but hoped he’d get in and out of the wake without seeing Doug.

  He can handle this by himself, Rufe told himself. Dougie’s used to doing difficult things. His skin’s rhinoceros tough.

  For years they’d sat together in a circle of hurting, healing men, and Rufe had watched Doug grieve every miserable stage of his wife’s illness and finally, her death. He knew there was a tender person under the suit. Still, Rufe was unable to pick up the phone.

  He watched a tall ginger-haired woman pull a ten-year-old Corolla precisely into a parking space at the front of the lot, then walk past the church and on down the street. He slouched when a couple of men who Rufe considered second-degree Frig It brothers—not because they were any less dedicated than the rest but because they’d only been members for a year or two—drove up, parked on the other side of the lot and hustled into the church. They were in and out in five minutes, getting their duty over with as quickly as possible, like yanking a splinter out of a sore thumb.

  He sat up when a red BMW pulled up alongside the church. A woman wearing a black shawl over a black dress stepped out, and Rufe realized Joe was the driver of the fancy wheels. Has to be Pat’s sister, Kathleen, sprung from the hospital, Rufe thought. Had to be her Beemer. But why was Joe driving her car?

  The woman squared her shoulders, took two breaths so deep Rufe found himself doing the same, then walked with purpose toward the heavy chapel door. Joe left in the BMW, headed toward his house. Minutes later the woman emerged and pulled a cell phone from her purse. Rufe turned his key when a bright yellow taxi arrived, and fell in behind when the cab pulled away from the curb and headed toward Portland.

  He followed the cab past commercial strips, a succession of leafy neighborhoods and the university campus. Rufe played a guessing game with himself. Was she headed for a downtown hotel? An Old Port bar? When the cab approached the city’s West End he decided she must be on her way to a friend’s house or condo. But one quick right-hand turn later they were pulling up to the front door of the hospital. Was Kathleen feeling ill? Having a relapse of symptoms after her concussion?

  While the woman he assumed to be Pat’s sister settled up with the driver, Rufe slid his truck into a vacant thirty-minute parking space outside the Emergency Room. He hustled along the sidewalk and through a revolving entrance door. Kathleen had stopped to make an inquiry at the front desk, which allowed him to tail her with ease as she hurried down the polished main hallway, a woman on a mission. She appeared to be watching room numbers, even though they were in what seemed to be an administrative area, not a patient wing.

  The mystery was solved when she skidded to a stop in front of a wooden door labeled Large Conference Room #2 and pulled the door open. Before his feet approached the threshold Rufe heard a chorus of voices answering the woman standing in front of the room who’d just announced that her name was Carol, and that she was an alcoholic.

  He followed Kathleen into the room and sidled down the side aisle to an empty chair two rows behind the one she’d claimed. He wasn’t at all sure that it was appropriate for him to be incognito at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, but there had been no time to consider the ethics of the situation. Rufe knew three things about Kathleen. She was supposed to be at St. Jerome’s, shaking hands with those who came to pay their respects to her brother. She had a booze problem. And Joe, at the very least, must be looking for her.

  He slid his phone out of the inside chest pocket of his jacket, but the woman sitting next to him pointed at it and shook her head. Okay, so he wouldn’t be able to text Joe to let him know where Kathleen had fled. And it would be terribly disruptive for him to get up and leave. Rufe figured the meeting would last an hour, so he settled in and listened to Carol tell her story, and after she finished, to the comments of several other meeting goers who, in AA tradition, used only their first names.

  At four-twenty, Kathleen rose to speak.

  “Hello, my name is Kate, and I believe I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hello, Kate,” the others answered.

  “I’m here because something terrible has happened in my life, someone dear to me has died. I have been self-medicating with bourbon since it happened. I haven’t had a drink all day. I am right on the edge of hysterical. The funeral is tomorrow. I need to keep control of myself, and that means I can
not drink.”

  Rufe noticed some nodding heads, and a few frowns. Skeptical of a woman who openly acknowledges she came to a meeting only because she’s in an immediate crisis, he assumed, particularly because she hedged on the declaration of her alcoholism. I believe I’m an alcoholic. Leaving room to retract the words later. Oh, it wasn’t really that serious. I was a mess, and did some heavy drinking, but I’m not an alcoholic.

  “I can’t drink today, and I can’t drink tomorrow. I know this program has a slogan about sobriety being a one-day-at-a-time thing, and that is where I am at right now. Living one day at a time.”

  Rufe was impressed by Kathleen’s composure. Her voice wavered a little, but she didn’t cry until she sat down, when he could see her shoulders shaking with sobs.

  When the meeting adjourned he hotfooted it out into the hallway. Kathleen remained in the room talking with others who lingered, so he took the opportunity to tap out a message to Joe.

  r u liking 4 K?

  god yes

  in ptld at AA meet

  what?

  K headed here by cab. I foloed

  she sober?

  4 now

  can u bring her back?

  will try

  Kathleen was furious when Rufe approached her in the hallway outside the meeting room, hand out, and introduced himself as a friend of Joe Gale.

  “What’d he do, pay you to tail me? Under the nice-guy exterior your buddy Joe Gale is a fucking moralist, like everyone else in my life.” She was spitting mad but self-conscious enough not to blow up on the spot. She waved him up the hallway, where she wedged herself between a glass door and an enormous ficus plant and crossed her arms. “And on top of that, he’s an opportunist, with such an itch to break a story that he hires his friends to help him keep tabs on people.”

  “Joe did not put me up to this.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it.”

  “It’s not even slightly bullshit. I was sitting in the church parking lot, trying to pull myself together enough to go inside. I saw Joe pull up in a Beemer and let you out. I knew he planned to go to Bangor this morning to see you, and the way you’re dressed made it obvious who you are. I saw you go in, come out, jump into a taxi. I followed you because I knew you were running from something and might need help.”

  “To keep me from drowning myself in a bottle of liquor? Who made you my guardian angel, you judgmental asshole?”

  Rufe put up his hands.

  “You’ve got me wrong. God knows, I’m in no position to judge you or anybody else. But I’m not only Joe’s friend, I was your brother’s friend.” Rufe felt tears stinging his eyes, but he kept going. “I was Pat’s good friend. It was on his behalf that I was following you. He’d want to make sure someone was looking out for his little sister during this awful, awful time.”

  The tears were running then, down Rufe’s face and onto his shirtfront. He let them flow, knowing it would help his chances of bonding with Kathleen if he let her see his pain. Her body sagged against the wall, and she let out a sigh.

  “You sure you’re not Joe’s spy?”

  “He didn’t ask me to follow you and he didn’t know I was following you. But I won’t bullshit you. I texted him a moment ago to let him know you were safe, because I knew he expected you to be at St. Jerry’s tonight, knew he’d be worried when he found out you’d taken off.”

  Kathleen dug around in her purse, pulled out a package of tissues and handed them to Rufe. “Blow your nose,” she said. “I assume you’ll give me a lift back to Riverside?”

  * * *

  Everyone pretended not to notice that Patrick’s sister was hours late for the wake. Only a handful had witnessed her earlier appearance, so perhaps most of them assumed she’d simply been running late, especially because news outlets of every description had reported that she’d been hospitalized after being assaulted in her home the previous day.

  Rufe watched the priests approach her one by one, taking her hand like it was made of glass and murmuring brief words of sympathy. The only one who really engaged was Father Michael DiAngelo, who Joe had said was a personal friend of Kathleen’s in addition to being Pat’s colleague. DiAngelo took her hand in both of his and held her gaze while conversing with her in a quiet voice. The handsome priest was a life ring to a drowning swimmer, Rufe guessed, the one person with whom she did not have to hide behind a mask.

  Once she’d accepted condolences from the last priest, Kathleen set herself up as a one-person receiving line, head high, face composed, making determined eye contact with every mourner. After watching her for a few minutes, Rufe moved across the chapel to where Joe sat at the end of a pew, his gaze flitting from face to face.

  “Can we go outside?”

  Joe closed the narrow notebook on which he’d been jotting observations and followed Rufe into the churchyard.

  “I don’t know why I feel responsible for her, but I felt like an abject failure when Kathleen took off.” Joe rubbed his eyes, which were rimmed red with exhaustion. “I feared the worst, of course, that she was at a bar, pounding down drinks. I felt like a jerk when you said she took herself to an AA meeting.”

  “I’m not sure how serious she is about staying sober long-term, but she’s working hard to stay sober tonight.”

  “She told me she owed Patrick that.”

  “Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think that woman owes anybody anything,” Rufe said.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Kathleen handled it. For almost three hours she kept one look on her face—sad and dignified—interacting with the waves of people who showed up to honor her brother.

  Other than the brief conversation when she first arrived, I didn’t observe any other interaction between Kathleen and DiAngelo, who sat with the other priests on the altar, away from the mourners. They might have spoken when I was outside doing interviews, but whenever I stepped back inside the chapel it appeared neither had moved an inch, and I didn’t see any looks—supportive, angry or otherwise—pass between them. Studied disinterest, it seemed, as though they hadn’t been two of the two-and-a-half musketeers once upon a time.

  Peggy McGillicuddy’s fear about a small turnout turned out to be unfounded. The line was out the door until nearly seven, hundreds of patient mourners from all walks of life. Old and young. Male and female. Catholic and every other faith. Somehow they got past the rumors set a-swirl by Wrecker Rigoletti, and came to say goodbye to the warmhearted priest in whom they had faith.

  I heard a lot of personal stories when I talked with people in line.

  “He stayed with me through the night at the hospital when my son was in critical condition after a car knocked him off his bike,” a fortyish woman said. “In a straight-backed chair. I’m a single parent and my folks aren’t nearby, so he was my family that night. When the doctor came in he stood up like he was my boy’s father or uncle, and I trusted him to catch me if I fainted.”

  A spry man in his eighties told Joe that Patrick—a consistent advocate for low-income Riversiders—singlehandedly raised the money keep the nondenominational soup kitchen afloat when the need outstripped the pantry. “He had some chits in his pocket and he spent those chits on us. The donations have come in steadily since then. Money and food. There’s always enough now, like in the gospel about the loaves and fishes.”

  A woman with a deeply lined face and the voice of a heavy smoker kept her chin up when she spoke about her son’s suicide attempt. “Joey was one of them who was abused.” She spat out the name of a priest who’d served St. Jerome’s in the 1980s. “It’s a good thing they defrocked that bastard, or I would have de-balled him. I said that to Patrick—using those very words—after my son almost overdosed on sleeping pills. Patrick didn’t shush me, or tell me lies about all the things the Church was doing to make it right
. He let me talk. Let me scream and swear. And he told me I was right to be angry. That my anger was a proper expression of a mother’s love.”

  The woman’s ferocious eyes locked on to mine when she said that, daring me to challenge the dignity the dead priest had helped her to find within herself. “I hope whoever killed him burns in hell,” she said.

  When the crowd was thinning out, a half-dozen women flocked in, marched to the front and embraced Kathleen like they were her sisters. Her nurse colleagues, I thought. After kneeling and praying, they moved as a unit to a pew at the rear of the chapel. They were still there when the last mourners moved through the line at quarter past seven, but Kathleen didn’t go to her friends immediately. She sagged into the pew in front of the one where I was sitting and kicked off her heels, as though she were in her own living room rather than a public place, and a chapel at that. I slid along the bench till I was behind her.

  “You okay?”

  “Doing my best to be.” She swung around sideways but looked past me to her colleagues in the back row. “Did your friend Rufe tell you where he found me when I ran?”

  I nodded.

  Kathleen searched my face, looking for judgment. Despite the fact I’d known her less than a week and didn’t trust her farther than I could throw her, I felt compelled to reassure her that I was on her side.

  “You did a good job tonight, holding it together. I’m sure it was difficult.”

  “Yup, and tomorrow will be more of the same. But you can sleep without worry. The girls have booked a block of rooms at a hotel in Portland, and they’ll make sure I stay out of trouble.”