Six John Jordan Mysteries

by Michael Lister

  That night I went to bed early.

  The only light came from the bathroom down the hall, and the dim room was a chalky gray like moonlight defused through thick clouds. I lay on my bed staring up at the gray, thinking about all that had happened. Concluding a murder investigation—no matter how seemingly successful—is always incomplete and bittersweet, and, as usual, I was depressed. I had found the murderer, solved the mystery, but that did nothing for Nicole. It couldn’t bring her back, couldn’t undo what had been done to her, couldn’t wake her from the nightmare she had lived through, had died in. It couldn’t absolve me from failing her in the first place, from failing Dexter. Only God could do that, and, as I lay there looking up at nothing, I prayed for forgiveness.

  Later, when I answered the phone, my mouth was dry, my voice sleepy, though I was still wide awake.

  “Hey.”

  It was Susan.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “How’d it go?” she asked.

  I told her. And as I did, the three hundred miles between us shrank to nothing, our connection seeming to bypass circuits and lines and everything mechanical to become direct and intense and intimate.

  “My God,” she said.

  “That’ll teach you to ask.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m glad you told me. I want you to tell me everything.” She was silent a beat before asking, “Do you think he’ll confess?”

  “Already has,” I said. “Went with me right then and did it.”

  “How do you feel about the inmate—what was his name?”

  “Dexter,” I said. “Guilty.”

  “I figured you did,” she said.

  “If I hadn’t staged the whole memorial service in the first place,” I said, “or confronted him in such an uncontrolled environment or dove for the gun...”

  “Have you talked to anyone?”

  “You mean besides you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No,” I said. “Not about how I feel.”

  “Oh,” she said, a little startled. “Thank you.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Sounds like you need to get away for a while,” she said. “That’s the reason I was calling—to invite you up for the weekend. I’d really love to see you and—”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just can’t. I—”

  “I told myself I wasn’t going to do this. I let you know how I felt, and I was going to just wait on your response, not push it. I’m sorry.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not it at all. I’d love for us to get together. Really. I’m just not ready to come back to Atlanta yet. It’s too soon, wounds too fresh. Could we go somewhere else?”

  “Yeah, sure,” she said.

  “What about that bed and breakfast we stayed at near Charleston?” I asked.

  “Oh, John,” she exclaimed. “That sounds wonderful.”

  After we made the plans, she said, “I feel so hopeful about us,” she said. “But I want you to know that even if we don’t wind up together, I’m glad we’re doing this... getting to know the real us.”

  “Me too.”

  We were quiet for a while and I could hear her breathing. It reminded me of making love in sweet silence, caught up in passion beyond words, and it made me want her even more.

  “I don’t need you, John,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t need you,” she said. “For over a year now, it’s been just me. And I’m comfortable with that. I’m learning who I really am and I like me very much. I don’t have to have someone in my life—that’s why I haven’t been looking. I’m not looking for someone to rescue or complete me.”

  “Good,” I said. “That’s really good.”

  “I’m not finished,” she said. “I don’t need you... but I do want you. I want you very badly. I want you in my life, in my body, in my soul.”

  Images of being in all three filled my mind, and I lost myself in the sound of her breathing.

  “I don’t want to hang up,” she said after a long, comfortable silence.

  Lying in the dark, listening to her words, her silences, reminded me of when we were first dating, the hours we spent tethered together by phone cords, unseen radios playing the same songs in the background, the darkness keeping the rest of the world at bay. Like everything about her, this felt familiar, comfortable, like a home I had only briefly known.

  “So, don’t,” I said.

  “I don’t really have anything else to say,” she said.

  “Just breathe,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I like listening to you breathe,” I said.

  “But I’m about to fall asleep,” she said.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I like listening to you sleep.”

  Flesh and Blood

  John Jordan Mysteries Book 3

  By Michael Lister

  Introduction

  by Margaret Coel

  There is a distinct pleasure in reading an anthology of short stories featuring the same character. Each story explores a different aspect of the character’s life and shines the spotlight on different parts of his or her personality. In the best of such anthologies, the stories build upon one another, adding layer after layer of complexity and contradiction until the character’s inner life—the most guarded thoughts and feelings—are exposed, and in the process, we, the fortunate readers, are able to gain a deeper insight into our own guarded thoughts and feelings. And isn’t that the true value of stories? We open an anthology and begin reading, anticipating both the pleasure to come from the reading itself and the way in which the stories will take us outside of ourselves for a brief time and provide a new perspective that can help us to make sense of our own lives.

  Flesh and Blood and Other Stories by Michael Lister is that kind of enriching experience. The character whose life opens up for us is John Jordan, a man of irony and contradictions that make him real, like an old friend we thought we knew who continues to surprise us. He’s an ex-cop and an alcoholic struggling to hold on to sobriety and sometimes failing. An ex-cop in recovery, he says of himself, and now a chaplain at a tough prison in the northern Gulf region of Florida. He wears a clerical suit and collar, yet finds he has little in common with other men in clerical suits and collars. He navigates the rocky shoals of racial tensions in a place where old prejudices still run beneath the surface of things—“a white man at home among blacks, underprivileged and oppressed.” He’s in love with Anna. “The one,” he says,” and the one who got away.”

  He’s also a superb detective, this John Jordan, often called upon to investigate the inexplicable and sometimes unsolvable cases. Ex-cop and chaplain, he is part Sherlock Holmes and part Father Brown. What he brings to the investigations is the combination of Sherlock’s powers of observation—the ability to see details others overlook—and Father Brown’s openness to the fundamental mysteries at the heart of life. Those are the mysteries that infuse these stories. Even after Jordan has solved the crime, wrapped up all the facts, provided the answers, the fundamental mysteries linger, reminding us that not everything in life is knowable or solvable.

  Four of the stories might seem like typical mysteries with ingenious and suspenseful plots that challenge Jordan’s powers of deduction. Yet, by the endings, we’ve glimpsed the larger mysteries at the center of the stories—mysteries that recede from our grasp like clouds drifting overhead. In “Bad Blood,” an elementary school teacher is found bludgeoned to death on the prison grounds. Jordan uncovers the facts and apprehends the killer, but the mystery of the infectious nature of evil and its power to spread into the most unlikely human hearts remains just that—a mystery.

  “Blood Bought” and “Blood-Red Rec Yard Ruse” bring Jordan face-to-face with the mystery of love and the way it exerts control over the human heart and will. And in the brilliantly plotted “A Taint in the Blood,” Jordan struggles with the darkness in his own heart and with the possibility that his theory about “the
great disconnect of prison”—the vast difference between how someone appears and what he may be capable of doing—may also apply to him.

  Running through all of the stories is the mystery of divine grace and the way it can penetrate even the darkest places. The stories are religious in the best sense of the term—open to possibilities. Jordan is a chaplain with more questions than answers, yet he recognizes that grace—the sign of God’s presence in the world—is capable of manifesting itself through the most unlikely people and in the most surprising situations. “Flesh and Blood” begins with the mystery of a pregnant nun who happens to be a virgin and concludes with the mystery of forgiveness and the way in which it can heal the human heart. In “A Fountain Filled with Blood,” Jordan confronts the fundamental mystery that the truth may be something other than what is apparent, when he is drawn into the case of a ten-year-old black girl who says she is Jesus returned to earth—and gives every indication that she just might be.

  The remarkable story, “Image of Blood,” weaves together the various strands that run through the anthology—mysteries of the human heart, of relationships and of God’s presence in the world. At the request of his dying mother, Jordan sets out to determine whether the Shroud of Turin might be the actual cloth that had wrapped the body of Jesus following the crucifixion. His search through the scientific studies for what is real and authentic about the shroud becomes a metaphor for his relationship with his alcoholic mother. The facts he uncovers—the certainties—only lead to deeper questions. What is more important, fact or faith? Can something be at once real and unreal? Ironically, it is the mystery of the shroud rather than the facts that begins to heal the broken relationship. As Jordan says, the shroud “works its magic.”

  Indeed, mystery and magic fill these stories. They are in the richness of the language, such as the descriptions of the North Florida landscape with Spanish moss hanging from oak branches, forests so thick they block out the light, and the dark, greenish-black water of a slough filled with cypress trees. They are in the remarkable insights into men who are imprisoned—into what makes them want to live and want to die. They are in the deft details that reveal Jordan and the characters with whom he interacts. He can spot a murderer by instinct, he says, “by the pale green teardrop tattoos at the corners of his vacant eyes.”

  And mystery and magic are in the journey that we take with John Jordan into the unseen wonders permeating all of life, beyond the facts and the data and what we might imagine is the extent of reality. The idea that God’s grace might illuminate even the darkest, most violent and disjointed places may be startling, even unsettling, but it is also comforting. That is what the best stories do: they startle and unsettle us and, in the process, expand our view of reality. Most of all, they touch us, perhaps with God’s grace.

  Margaret Coel

  Boulder, Colorado

  July 2006

  Flesh and Blood

  I was leaving Potter Correctional Institution following an unusual day when the call came. The day was unusual because it was good, and good days at PCI were about as rare as innocent men.

  Anna Rodden, the one, and the one that got away, was next to me as we headed toward the parking lot on the other side of the chain-link fence and razor wire, and though we would part ways when we reached our vehicles, I had no reason to believe that I wouldn’t have as good a night as day.

  “Chaplain Jordan,” someone yelled.

  I turned around.

  It was a young female officer with toffee-colored skin, leaning over and yelling through the document tray on the back side of the control room.

  I turned around.

  I had been a chaplain at PCI, the meanest prison in the Panhandle, since returning to North Florida from Atlanta following the breakup of my marriage and the general disintegration of my life. That had been a few years ago now, and I was beginning to settle into prison chaplaincy and the little life I was living among the least and the lowly.

  Beside me, Anna stopped walking, as well.

  We were inside the pedestrian sally port, having been buzzed through one gate into the holding area and now waiting to be buzzed through the next.

  I walked over to the document tray, which was next to the entrance door of the security building, as other employees continued toward the front gate. Anna followed.

  It was a clear day in spring. The sun was still high in the western sky. The time had changed recently, and I was looking forward to enjoying the extra light of the lengthening day after leaving the institution.

  “There’s a call for you,” the officer said. “I told her you were leaving for the day, but she said it was urgent.”

  She was striking in spite of the correctional officer uniform she wore, her dark, tumescent lips so full they looked nearly engorged.

  “Catch her name?” I asked.

  “A, ah, Sister Abigail from St. Ann’s.”

  St. Ann’s Abbey was a retreat center near the coast, and Sister Abigail was a middle-aged psychologist, Catholic nun, and my sometime counselor.

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  She fed the telephone and its extra-long cord through the document tray. The once white receiver was yellowish with grime and held traces of makeup.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “John,” Sister Abigail said, “I’m so glad I caught you.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve got a situation I need your help with,” she said. “It’s extremely important and quite delicate and requires immediate attention.”

  “Name it,” I said.

  “How soon can you get here?”

  “Less than an hour.”

  “Come as fast as you can,” she said. “I’ve got a pregnant nun who claims to be a virgin, medical evidence that confirms it, and some hysterical zealots about to turn my retreat into a circus.”

  “I’m on my way,” I said.

  The serene, scenic drive to St. Ann’s was made more so because, having nothing more interesting to do, Anna had decided to join me.

  “Whatta you think she wants you to do?” Anna asked.

  “Prove we’re not about to have a virgin birth.”

  “Really? A nun?”

  I nodded.

  We were on a long, straight, empty stretch of rural highway in the midst of hundreds of thousands of acres of pine tree forests, my small truck the only vehicle as far as I could see in either direction.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t think she believes in such things,” I said.

  “Does she believe in God?”

  I shrugged. “I can’t really speak for her, but if I had to guess I’d say she doesn’t believe in a supernatural deity that breaks into nature to perform miracles. I think she sees God as more imminent—more a part of than from everything. But even if she didn’t, and even if she believed that this nun was a pregnant virgin, she’d want me to disprove it if I could. It’s like exorcism, exhausting everything else—all mental disorders and other explanations before even considering that it might be possession.”

  “But she’s not exhausting all other explanations because she believes it really could be a miracle, is she?”

  “She’s a person of science as much as faith,” I said.

  “Not easy being a person of faith these days, is it?” she asked.

  “Way too easy for some,” I said.

  She nodded. “True. I should have said it’s not easy being a modern person fully engaged in the world of suffering, fully aware of science and existentialism, and still be a person of faith.”

  “But that would have taken too long,” I said.

  She smiled. “How do you do it?”

  “Not well,” I said. “Obviously.”

  “That’s not true,” she said.

  “What about you?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I guess I really don’t consider myself a person of faith—not like you, or a nun.”

  “But you are,” I said.

  Just ahead of
us, a new bridge rose high into the air above the intercoastal waterway, its peak reaching the tops of the tall pines that spread out from it in all directions.

  “I believe in you,” she said. “And in what you believe in.”

  “Then you’re in far worse shape than I thought,” I said.

  “Seriously,” she said.

  Why did all our conversations lead here, to an intense intimacy we couldn’t move beyond—at least not without her husband’s strenuous objections?

  “How do I respond seriously to that?” I asked. “By saying ‘thank you’? Thank you.”

  “Thank you is fine, but you don’t have to do anything with it. It just is. It’s true and it needed to be said.”

  We rode along in silence a few moments.

  “Do you even believe in the virgin birth?” she asked.

  “I did as a kid,” I said. “Now, it just doesn’t matter. It could have literally happened, or it could be a misunderstanding of an obscure verse in the Hebrew Bible, or it could have become part of the tradition because of competition with Greek and Roman sons of God who were said to have been born of virgins, or it could merely signify there was something extraordinary about the simple Jewish peasant of whom it was said.”

  As the highway ended abruptly at the edge of the Gulf, we took a left and drove along the beach for a few miles, each of us mesmerized by the bright orange afternoon sun pooling on the smooth blue-green surface of the Gulf waters.

  “Tell me again why we don’t live down here,” she said.

  I thought about all the recent development, all that was on the way now that Florida’s largest landowner had closed down its paper mill and had begun building resorts and golf courses, and all the For Sale signs of people who had lived here their entire lives now cashing in as the beginning of the end had begun. Florida’s final patch of pristine, unspoiled beauty was being sold to the highest bidder, and the only thing we locals who loved this area so much could do was stand by in our powerlessness and watch. In doing so, I felt like the Native American man in the commercial from the 1970s, standing on the side of the road, a single tear rolling down his creased face as he watched ugly European-Americans toss litter out of their large, gas-sucking cars.