Coldwater Revenge

by James A Ross

Gauss folded his hands as if in prayer and propped his chin on tee-peed fingers. “And what is our Sheriff going to do with his own crisis of conscience—if he believes this clever theory?”

  “Don’t bait me, Padre.”

  “Would that be unwise?”

  “Not even Billy was that reckless.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I see.”

  “No you don’t. So let me spell it out.” Joe put his hands on the conference table and locked eyes with the priest. “What I care about is keeping Coldwater safe. I do that by locking up the dangerous and letting God, or whoever, take care of the guilty. You’re an arrogant son of a bitch; but you’re not dangerous. So I could give a rat’s ass what you did, or didn’t do, out there on the lake that night. I also know that you don’t corrupt little boys.”

  “His Eminence would be happy to hear you say that.”

  “Maybe I’ll tell him. But I want something from you first.”

  Gauss shook the last cigarette from the pack, lit it and inhaled deeply. “What?”

  “I want you to use that priestly influence of yours to get my brother off that phony financial merry-go-round he’s got himself on. Susan Pearce isn’t around to get in your way anymore. Finish what you started.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Your silence. You don’t tell Tommy any of this. Not ever. You let slip one crumb and he’ll figure out the rest in a nanosecond.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  Gauss smiled. “You’re walking away from quite a coup, Sheriff, if your theories are correct. You must love your brother very much.”

  “I’m not here for love of the church.”

  “Are you afraid that one more fallen hero might be too much…?”

  “That’s right, Father. You and our old man put a clamp on my brother’s head so tight the poor bastard can’t feel without thinking first. Lay this on him and he’ll never throw it off.”

  “You don’t know your brother as well as you think.”

  Joe took another envelope from his jacket pocket and dropped it on the table just outside the priest’s reach. “Maybe. But I’m pretty sure I’ve got you figured out.”

  Gauss looked across the table at the envelope. “More phony letters?”

  “A lab report. Comparing fibers from the bag Billy was found in with some I took from the front of your rowboat. Want to guess what it says?” Gauss looked at Joe and took a long last drag on his cigarette. “Or do we have a deal, Padre?”

  CHAPTER 32

  Moe Silverstein called first. He’d gotten through to the New York State Attorney General. No charges would be brought against Tom or his firm in connection with the Eurocon matter. The AG’s office would officially drop the case in a few days. “They’re waiting for the right spot in the news cycle so it doesn’t get too much attention,” he explained.

  “Thanks, for getting through to the right people so fast.”

  “No problem, Tom. Every level of state government is looking good right now. They’re anxious for it to stay that way through the November election. But it’s a shame that you and your brother aren’t going to get a medal or something. That was a hell of a thing you did, and no one is ever going to hear about it.”

  “We got what we wanted, Moe.”

  Tanner called next to say that the London office was Tom’s if he wanted it. Moe Silverstein had been circumspect about what had happened. But he made it clear that it was Tom’s doing and that the firm would be nuts if it let a Houdini like Tom Morgan get away. “We’re all proud as hell of you,” said Tanner. “Whenever you’re ready to come back, you’ve got your pick of assignments. Any office, any continent. There’s a mega-project in Russia that’s got your name written all over it.”

  Tom knew he should feel flattered as well as relieved to know that he was no longer headed to jail or to the poor house. But he felt nothing. Susan was dead, and his capacity for feeling seemed to have died with her. Physically he was healing, but mentally and emotionally he was numb. Dr. Sayed said he could leave the hospital soon. But to do what? He no longer cared.

  A voice at the door interrupted his gloomy musings. “Sorry about not returning your messages,” said Gauss. “Bishop’s orders.”

  Tom sat up in bed and smiled at the priest. “I assumed as much. The Church’s defense fund must be scraping bottom these days. If you got stuck to the Billy Pearce murder, they’d be passing the plate for decades.”

  “That’s more or less the way the Bishop put it.”

  Tom waved a splinted finger at a plastic chair. “Pull that thing over. I have some questions.”

  The priest moved the chair beside the bed and sat.

  “You’re not so unkind as to pass along an eight hundred page tome on a whim. You had a message. I missed it.”

  “You were busy.”

  “I’m not now. And it’s bothering me.”

  The priest placed his hand on Tom’s forearm. “I’m sorry about Miss Pearce. That was a tragedy. She was misled by her heart, I imagine.”

  Tom shook his head. “By her genes, she would have said. I doubt that so-called terrorist told her what he had in mind.”

  “No, that doesn’t seem likely. In any event, the last time we spoke you were intrigued by her work on emotions and brain chemistry. I sent you that book because its author made the connection between emotion and feeling three hundred years before Miss Pearce stumbled onto it. I thought you might be interested.”

  Tom smiled through cracked lips. “I am. But I doubt precedence was your point.”

  “No. I wanted to remind you that the quest for knowledge has been led by philosophy, not science: Heraclitus dreaming up the atom, Plato the modern fascist state. I thought the reminder might help you get back on track, that’s all.”

  “What track is that?”

  “Don’t be obtuse, Tommy. You’re floundering again. Not as badly as when I first met you. But you took a wrong turn after I let you out of my sight. You know it and anybody who knows you can see it. It’s time you put that first class mind of yours to work on something more worthy than mergers and acquisitions.”

  Tom fidgeted as best he could, pressing his shoulders into the pillows. “My career is finished, Father. The firm is dangling goodies to get me back, but there’s no gas in the tank. I wouldn’t last a month in that scrum. As for what I’ll do once I get out of here…”

  “Have you tried reflection?”

  Ouch. “I haven’t been to church in a decade, Father.”

  Gauss’s response was patient, but pointed. “I’m not talking about the Church, Tommy. Organized religion is one of many paths. It happens to be mine. But I’m not surprised, and certainly not offended, that it hasn’t turned out to be yours.”

  Tom felt the telltale twitches of surprise and caution wrestle for control of his face.

  “Catechism and ritual help some people lead better lives than they otherwise might. Others seem compelled by nature to seek their own answers. Like anything we’re designed by nature to do, if we don’t do it, we’re not healthy or happy. And no celibacy jokes, please. Depending on what it is we’re not doing, we can be wasting our lives.”

  “Is that what you think I’m doing?”

  “I do. And what’s more, you know it.” The priest paused to let the sting raise a welt. “Do you remember your Socrates? The Apologia?”

  “An unexamined life is not worth living?”

  “That’s right. If Frankie Heller or that terrorist had succeeded in ending yours… what would your own judgment be on the last ten years of it—excluding what you did here recently?”

  “He wasn’t exactly a terrorist. But why exclude that?”

  “Don’t be stubborn. When I saw you last, you’d already sensed the need to begin looking for a new path. Should I ask what you’ve done about it? And I don’t mean lying here brooding.”

  Tom didn’t respond. He didn’t k
now how.

  “You already know the answer’s not on Wall Street.” The priest’s gaze pinned his former altar boy to the pillows. “But if you have the courage and stubbornness to keep looking, you could do worse than to start right here in Coldwater.”

  Tom’s eyes found the window and the speck of Pocket Island in the distance. Courage and stubbornness. Fortis et Obstinatus. It might as well be the Morgan coat of arms.

  “Something tells me you have something specific in mind,” Tom said.

  “I do.”

  “Go on. I can’t get away.” Might as well be in that rowboat of yours.

  “I’m thinking of building a school out on Pocket Island,” said Gauss. “Something along the lines of the old Greek academies…

  Tom lay back, closed his eyes and listened to Gauss expound his vision. At first, he couldn’t help thinking: do you have any idea of how much something like that would cost? The federal and state bureaucracies that would live in your pockets? The sheer regulatory and financial complexity of getting something like that off the ground? But as Gauss expounded, Tom felt his heart warmed by the beauty of the idea, even as he mentally tallied the enormous hurdles. He opened his eyes to see the priest watching.

  “I see two roles that need filling right away,” Gauss concluded.

  Tom laughed. “I’ll bite. What?”

  “Prayer and Finance. Pick whichever one you think you’re better at.”

  Before Tom could answer, another voice interrupted from the doorway. “Sorry,” said Joe. “He wouldn’t wait.”

  Luke ran to the bed and climbed in next to Tom.

  “We were out with your newspaper pal, Jack Thompson, trying to catch Moby Dick.”

  Tom smiled. “Season’s over, Sheriff.”

  “Yeah, well, I had to get gabby here out of the house. He’s been a bear since his fishing buddy’s been out of action. Driving his mom and grandma n-adic-uts.”

  “Jack Thompson endorses my idea, by the way,” Gauss added. “He says that if I can get you involved in one project, he knows a dozen more waiting for someone like you to take them on.”

  “What project?” asked Joe.

  Tom sighed. “Something about building a school on Pocket Island.”

  Joe looked sharply at Gauss, who smiled blandly in return. “It would be great to have you stay, Tommy.”

  Tom turned to Luke and poked him with a bandaged elbow. “So what do you think, buddy? If Uncle Tom helps Father Gauss build a school on Pocket Island, would you go?”

  “There’d be no girls,” Gauss apologized. “Just boys, boats and fish, I’m afraid.”

  Wide eyes above a gap-toothed grin moved up and to the right. “Y-adic-es!”

  Excerpt from COLDWATER CONFESSION

  (Book 2 of the Coldwater Mystery Series, due out April

  2022)

  “There was a little girl, who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead.

  When she was good, she was very, very good. But when she was bad, she was horrid.”

  Children’s nursery rhyme.

  Lightning blasted the top of a tall royal palm and dropped it through the windshield of the parked rental car. Cacophonies of thunder and colliding debris overwhelmed all other sound and thought. Andrew Ryan watched the swirling carnage from the window of the vacation cottage, heard his wife scream and did nothing.

  “Aaaann—Drew!”

  Peevish bleats, pitched to dramatize minor annoyance, no longer penetrated the young man’s consciousness, but the timbre of genuine terror is self-authenticating and his wife’s cries eventually broke through. The swollen bathroom door yielded to his shoulder. A screaming woman careened through the opening. Behind her, a pale reptilian tail slithered through a gap where the bathtub and wall did not quite meet. Waves of adrenaline surged through Andrew’s already overloaded system.

  “I’m out of here,” his wife shouted. But when she spotted the severed tree rising through their car’s windshield, she froze. “ANN - DREW!”

  “It’s okay,” he whispered.

  “There’s a HURRICANE out there! We have to get out.”

  “We’re not going anywhere until this is over.”

  “But there’s a SNAKE in here! I saw it.”

  “And stuff flying through the air out there at a hundred miles an hour.”

  “I CA….CAN’T STA… AY HERE!”

  Andrew pressed the phone to his ear, tilted his head and then tossed the mute piece of plastic to the chair. “It’s dead,” he said. His wife wilted to the floor, wrapped her arms around her knees and began to rock back and forth, moaning softly. The sound that seeped out of her then was more ominous to Andrew than anything howling outside or coiled in a corner of the bathroom. It started as a low-pitched wail, like a Muslim call to prayer. Only it wasn’t spiritual.

  “Eye-eeeee. MMmmmmm.”

  “Karen?” he demanded. “Did you take your medicine?”

  “Eye-eeeee. MMmmmmm.”

  “Karen? Did you take your Thorazine?”

  “Eye-eeeee.”

  Andrew lifted his moaning wife and laid her on the couch and then began to search her suitcase. “Where did you put your pills, Karen?”

  “Eye-eeeee. MMmmmmm.”

  “Karen, don’t do this.”

  “Eye-eeeee.”

  “Did you pack them?” His wife’s eyes were unblinking…scared and defiant at the same time.

  “I don’t like the way they make me feel,” she whispered.

  Her husband’s oath was a weary amalgam of despair, resignation and foreboding. “Then knock yourself out before this gets ugly. There’re some sleeping pills in my bag.”

  “Will you stay with me?”

  “Of course.”

  ***

  Andrew Ryan lay in bed, listening to the sounds of lethal nature and mulling an ordinary marriage turned by slow degree to tragedy. Or maybe it wasn’t so slow, but he was just slow to notice. A file of overlooked clues lay open against the back of his eyelids:

  Late for their first date, the tanned coed in a white halter-top boasted of getting caught in a speeding trap on her way there, peeling-out and losing the startled cop in a chase through the residential hills. Aroused by the exotic combination of recklessness and sexuality, Andrew Ryan assumed that she was making it up. She wasn’t.

  Later came the serial drama of post-graduation employment disasters, masked for a time by the carnal pleasures of twenty-something life in the big city. Months between jobs lengthened into seasons. The fade from lioness to recluse accelerated.

  The year the popular magazines were touting biological clocks on their final countdown ticking, Karen announced that it was time for her to have children. She could do it all, she promised. Andrew was tempted to note that she had yet to do anything, but he stalled at the possibility that this might be the missing piece, the thing that could fix whatever it was that had gone badly wrong.

  But he was mistaken about that too. The daily responsibilities of motherhood made no claim on Karen. Day-long trances behind her drawing table matured into night time hallucinations. The doctors said it was a hormone imbalance, easily remedied by medication. But Karen resisted being “balanced,” and she “forgot” to take her medication. The cops and the EMT drivers became frequent visitors at the Ryan house. They had their own professional diagnosis. Psycho and stoned have a lot in common, they told Andrew. Some of their charges simply liked how it made them feel.

  Karen stirred under the blanket and reached a hand to stroke her brooding husband. “Come here,” she whispered, her voice soft and come hither though the sounds of the storm had, if anything, gotten louder. Andrew slipped beneath the covers and snuggled close. Strange, he mused, that while everything else had fallen apart, this one thing still worked. No deception. No false promises. They came together like ice dancers to a music they heard instinctively. Or was he kidding himself about that, too?

  “You lost weight in there,” he said. “You look good.”


  “They should call it the Club Med for the Head diet,” she answered. “Institutional food and major drugs.”

  “How do you feel now?”

  “Scared shitless of that snake in there, thank you. I was hallucinating them so much in the bin that they had to strap me down. Most of the time it’s kind of interesting, you know? But I really thought I was going to lose my mind this time.”

  Andrew looked away.

  “You don’t like to hear this, do you?”

  “I don’t like to hear you call it ‘interesting,’” he said wearily.

  “I’m an artist, Andrew. How could I not?”

  “Because your doctors have warned you a zillion times, not to find it interesting. Quote: ‘Down that path lies madness.’ Quote: ‘One time too many and you don’t come back.’”

  “I can come back any time I want,” she snapped. Then, “You want to hear why they had to strap me down?” Andrew stared at her, but said nothing. “There was this long, pale slimy thing under my bed that kept trying to poke through the bottom of the mattress. It scared the living shit out of me. But you know what my doctor said it was? She said it was you, nagging at me to ‘get out of the wagon and start pulling.’I suppose she got that charming phrase from one of her chats with you. She says that you should quit acting so disappointed all the time. That you’re supposed to forgive me.”

  “I do,” said her husband automatically.

  Karen shook her head. “You don’t even know what you’re supposed to forgive me for.” Andrew closed his eyes and mentally perused a fat catalogue of forgivable misdeeds:

  Wandering the neighborhood at 3:00 a.m. in your Victoria’s Secret nightgown, ringing doorbells at the homes of neighbors with teenage boys. Maxing-out on a half dozen credit cards I didn’t know you had. Getting shit-faced at a dinner party with my boss and passing out on your plate. Leaving our two-year old daughter alone in the house all day while you’re out driving the interstate lost in the buzz of your latest medication—or refusal to take it. The jumble of images collaged a multi-year sabbatical from the responsibilities of adult life, but they did not explain it.