Six John Jordan Mysteries

by Michael Lister

  “We had our session yesterday afternoon,” she said. “I saw him a few times after that, but not really to speak, just from a distance.”

  “How did he seem during his lesson?”

  “Distracted, now that I think about it, but not enough to make me really notice it much at the time. You know how kids are.”

  “Limited attention span?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “And limited experiences. No frame of reference to process most things.”

  “Did he ever mention having any problems with anyone in particular or being depressed or—”

  “You think someone killed him?”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea,” I said. “I’m just asking.”

  “But did you see anything that would make you think he was murdered?”

  I shook my head.

  “That he killed himself?”

  “Most drownings are accidental,” I said. “And when they’re not it’s extremely difficult to prove. I’m just asking.”

  “Because you’re not just a prison chaplain, are you?”

  “None of us are just anything.”

  “Someone said you used to be a cop.”

  “Do you think he was depressed?” I asked.

  “Are you going to try to find out what happened to him?”

  “Sister told me not to,” I said.

  “And?”

  “Was he depressed?”

  She smiled. “No more than reason.”

  I smiled. “Literate, aren’t you?”

  “I am a professional,” she said. “What’s your excuse?”

  “Was he having conflict with anyone here—or anywhere else—that you know of?”

  “Sure, who doesn’t have conflict, but he never mentioned anything that would result in this.”

  “The smallest, most trivial things can result in this,” I said.

  “I guess you’re right,” she said. “The first one was over whose offering God liked the best, wasn’t it?”

  “I’m not saying this was murder. Just wondering if it might be.”

  She nodded. “I wasn’t jumping to conclusions as much as showing off my knowledge of the Bible for you.”

  I smiled. “Impressive. The thing is, murder by drowning is very rare—so is suicide for that matter. So it’s likely we’ll never know.”

  “But you’re gonna try to know,” she said.

  Sister Abigail appeared at my door and tapped on her watch, indicating it was time for our session.

  “No,” I said, “I’m not. I’m going to obey Sister and leave the investigating to those who are paid to do it.”

  6

  “Are you bent on self-destruction?” Sister Abigail asked me.

  “Are you given to overstatement?” I shot back.

  She smiled. “Perhaps that was a bit over the top, but not necessarily. Once you start sliding down certain slopes, you might not be able to claw your way back up again.”

  We were in her office, which was much cleaner if no less cluttered than Father Thomas’s. I was seated on a muted floral-print love seat, she, in a well-worn cloth recliner across from me. As usual, she was not reclining, but sitting with her feet pulled back together on the floor, her hands folded in her lap.

  “You think asking a few questions about Tommy is—”

  “The same as taking a few drinks?” she asked.

  My breath caught, my pulse quickened, and I suddenly felt very vulnerable.

  Averting my eyes, I glanced around her office, which gave the illusion of extravagance but had obviously been decorated on the cheap. Pristine books—psychology and religion texts mainly—were neatly arranged on homemade shelves that sagged slightly. Holy cards of the handout variety hung in wood frames of the dollar store variety. On her walls, atop her shelves, and on her desk were a lifetime of gathered objects—gifts, mementos, collectibles—and joining her many religious icons were the framed photographs of Freud and Jung.

  Seeing their pictures made me think of The Talking Cure, and it occurred to me that that’s exactly what I was here after.

  “Is it ever just a few drinks?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Is it ever just a few questions?”

  I thought back to the recent investigations I had conducted, wondering if all of them had become obsessions. Was I just a compulsive person? Merely trading one addiction for another? Maybe I lacked the objectivity and detachment needed to be an effective investigator.

  “You came here because trying to be a chaplain and an investigator wasn’t working for you,” she said. “You said it had cost you your family, your serenity, and on occasion your sobriety.”

  She shifted in her chair, and as she moved her hands, the sweet fragrance of rose-scented hand cream tinged the cool air of the drafty old office.

  “Were you serious about wanting to look at why?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Has that changed?”

  I told her it hadn’t, and she stared at me for a long moment, eyebrows arched, forehead furrowed, head cocked.

  Though kind, her eyes were intense and penetrating, seeming to continually be searching for denial and deception, and I wondered how often she had found it in me.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “Because it looks to me like what you really want to be doing is investigating Tommy Boy’s death.”

  Through the window to my left, I could see Father Thomas walking toward the chapel. Head down in what appeared to be avoidance of interaction more than the cold wind, he walked briskly, hands jammed into his pants pockets. Before he reached the chapel, Tammy appeared in his path, forcing him to stop and acknowledge her.

  “Don’t you want to know if he was—” I began.

  “Yes, but I also know that we may never know, and I can accept that. Can you?”

  I thought about it for a long moment before saying, “I don’t know. I’m not sure I can.”

  “Even if it costs you your sobriety—or at a minimum your serenity?”

  “I’m just not sure. I’d like to say I could, but I’m trying to be honest and I just don’t know.”

  After what appeared to be an intense exchange, Tammy pressed her body against Father Thomas and attempted to kiss him. Grabbing her arms, he shook her angrily and shoved her backward. As she began to laugh at and taunt him, he stepped around her and all but ran for the sanctuary of the chapel.

  “If it’s likely that you will drink if you continue to investigate and you continue to do it, would you agree you have a problem?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but not in the way you think. I’ve got to. I can’t stop. Investigating is as much a part of who I am as ministering—maybe more. May even be a form of it.”

  “But look what it’s cost you,” she said. “Was it worth losing your wife over?”

  “It wasn’t investigating that cost me my marriage.”

  “I thought it was.”

  Mixed in the books surrounding us on all sides were several titles—both popular and academic—about marriage, but even if she had memorized them all, what could this aging celibate know about that most difficult of human relationships?

  “It coincided with an investigation, but it can hardly be blamed on what I uncovered. If we had handled it differently...”

  “Why did you come here?” she asked.

  “To St. Ann’s?”

  She nodded.

  I thought about it. “In search of peace, perspective—I don’t know. I just wanted to slow down for a little while and give myself time to heal and to see if I could figure out why I keep repeating certain patterns.”

  “Not to investigate what will probably turn out to be an accidental drowning?” she asked.

  I laughed. “Point taken.”

  “Is it possible that you want to do the latter so as to be distracted from the former—from the real reason you came?”

  “Anything’s possible,” I said with a smile she did not return.

  “Do you
see yourself as a controlling person?”

  I shook my head. “Not at all.”

  “And yet you have to be the one to investigate?”

  “Not always.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “I mean a crime you’re aware of and in close proximity to.”

  “So I’m controlling? That’s my problem?”

  “I’m just asking questions,” she said. “You have to provide the answers.”

  “You’re doing far more than just asking questions. You’re leading me where you want me to go.”

  “Am I?”

  “I don’t think I’m controlling,” I said. “If I were, I probably wouldn’t follow your leading questions, would I?”

  “Well, at least you spent a lot of time thinking about it before you answered, and that’s what matters.”

  I laughed. “I have spent a lot of time thinking about it. This isn’t my first experience with self-examination, you know. I know I have problems. I just don’t think being controlling is one of them.”

  “Does it have to do with your ego?” she asked.

  “Obviously.”

  “Is it pride? The attention? The need to know—because there are some things we never will.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “Well?”

  “What about a gift and the need to use it? A desire for justice?”

  “Sounds good, but couldn’t that be a way of justifying what you want to do? Giving it a sense of the sacred? And do we ever really have justice down here?”

  “We approximate it sometimes.”

  She was silent, thinking a moment.

  Was I guilty of doing what I had criticized so many others for? Had I, like so many televangelists and terrorists, become an egocentric self-righteous idolater who had created God over in my image to justify my actions?

  Finally, she said, “Is Steve Taylor a capable cop?”

  I nodded.

  She stared at me for a long moment. “So why not just let him handle it?”

  7

  “Guess who was last seen with Tommy Boy?” Kathryn asked.

  It was evening, the temperature falling with the slow diminishment of the day. I was standing at the edge of the lake where I had been for much of the afternoon, weighing Sister Abigail’s words, searching myself for answers, finding few.

  Though the onset of winter had muted its colors, the small lake was no less beautiful. What the brittle brown grass, straw-colored underbrush, and gray trunks of cypress trees lacked in lushness, it made up for in subtlety, and it matched my subdued, contemplative mood.

  Sister was right. I had come here for healing and anything else would be a distraction—including pursuing Tommy’s death or the woman who had just walked up behind me.

  “Who?” I asked, turning to face her.

  “Tammy. They were seen leaving here together in her Mustang late last night.”

  Tell her to notify the police.

  “You should tell...”

  “Huh?”

  “I thought the program was for street kids?” I said. “What’s she doing with professionally manicured nails, an expensive dye job, and a new Mustang?”

  “How’d you know her Mustang’s new?”

  “There’s only one Mustang here,” I said.

  She nodded, then rolled her eyes at herself. “Of course.”

  My afternoon by the lake had done me good. I felt peaceful, connected, loved, and I wondered if it was the lake, the time spent in solitude and silence, or just being away from my life. Why couldn’t I ever maintain my serenity? Why was equilibrium so elusive? In the widening gyre of my life, why did things always have to fall apart? Why couldn’t the center hold?

  Something about the stillness of the scene was serene. It had felt so right to sit on the ground and watch a small burnt-orange butterfly flitter between tall blades of grass while hearing the splash of a fish jumping in the lake.

  What I had to do was figure out how to integrate this—time for stillness, quietness, and meditation—into my life away from St. Ann’s, even, or especially, when I was involved in a homicide investigation.

  “Most of them are street kids,” she said. “Poor. Alone. From abusive families.”

  “But not Tammy?”

  She shook her head. “Tammy’s actually the niece of the man who gave us this place.”

  “She’s a Gulf Paper Company Taylor?”

  She nodded.

  “And she’s here because...”

  “Her uncle gave us this place,” she said, a wry smile turning up the corners of her pretty pink lips.

  “Does she come here often?”

  She nodded. “When her family can no longer tolerate her, or she wants to disappear for a while.”

  “Which is it this time?”

  “Her family didn’t bring her. I’m not sure they know she’s here. Rumor has it—and that’s all it is—that she’s hiding from an abusive boyfriend and the drug dealer they owe part of her inheritance to.”

  I nodded as I thought about it, then turned away from her for one last look at the lake in the soft shadow of sunset.

  The reflection of the pine and cypress tress on the smooth surface of the water looked like an impressionist painting—though it was hard to imagine Monet, Renoir, or Cézanne using such a pale palette.

  Across the lake, a gentle breeze blew through the trees and onto the pond, rippling a narrow strip of the otherwise glass-like water.

  “Breathtaking, isn’t it?” Kathryn asked.

  I nodded, and watched as a small winter wren flew across the lake and came to rest on an old weathered board nailed between two cypress trees not far from the water’s edge.

  “How often do you come down here?” I asked.

  “Nearly every day,” she said. “This is my Walden.”

  “No wonder you write such inspired books.”

  “Thank you. There is something to be said for the impact our environment has on us.”

  “Like spending most of your waking hours with convicted felons,” I said.

  “I can imagine that would be extremely difficult—especially on a man as sensitive and compassionate as I hear you are.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear,” I said.

  “I don’t, but when it comes from a nun...”

  “So much for confidentiality.”

  “Oh, she would never violate that,” she said. “But it doesn’t cover her trying to set us up.”

  “She working you too?”

  “Since the moment you arrived. She lives certain things vicariously through me, which means lately she’s had a boring life.”

  “Lately?”

  She smiled. “Well, actually most of my life.”

  “No wonder she’s so persistent,” I said.

  “You have no idea.”

  “Every man with a heartbeat that comes through the front gates?”

  “Oh, no, I meant... She’s very particular. She’s just relentless about certain ex-cop, recovering alcoholic, wannabe detective prison chaplains.”

  “Wannabe?”

  A rustling in the branches above was followed by a squirrel as gray as the surroundings scampering down the cypress tree closest to us. As we watched, he bounced across the cypress knees between the trees like a Pentecostal preacher walking pews, and scurried up another tree farther down the bank.

  “And she told you all that without breaking my confidences?”

  “Actually, some of that I learned on my own. You’re not the only one here who can investigate. I have to hunt down information for every one of my books. Speaking of which, I want to help you investigate what happened to Tommy Boy. I’m curious, plus I might be able to use it in a story. I can be your Watson.”

  “As fun as that sounds,” I said, “I’m going to take Sister’s advice and stay out of this one.”

  Her deep brown eyes grew wide in surprise. “Really?”

  “Really,” I said.r />
  There would always be cases, always be distractions. I couldn’t keep allowing them to lure me from my path. They were becoming red herrings in my life, and like a young, untrained hound I kept losing the true scent—and my way. Since the only way to stop a destructive cycle was to stop, that’s what I had decided to do. I couldn’t continue to fail to live out my convictions and ideals and have any credibility as either a minister or investigator.

  “Wow, so I’ve lived to see the day when Sister was wrong about someone,” she said. “I don’t know if she’ll be happy you took her advice or sad she was wrong to predict you wouldn’t.”

  “You should turn over everything you have to the chief of police.”

  “Steve?”

  “You know him?”

  She nodded. “We went out a few times.”

  I felt myself pull back ever so slightly, and I wondered if she noticed.

  “Then you know where to find him,” I said, surprised not only at my tone, but how much what she said had bothered me. It was irrational and immature, but there it was.

  She nodded. “Shouldn’t be hard. He’ll be joining us for dinner tonight.”

  8

  The tension during dinner was palpable.

  For the first part of the meal everyone ate in awkward silence. At one end of the long main table, Sister Abigail sat with Ralph Reid, a trim, rigid, early graying representative of the Gulf Coast Company who had come to look over the property. She was finding it difficult to be civil to him and she didn’t conceal it well.

  He acted oblivious. He wasn’t much of an actor.

  At the opposite end, Tammy Taylor, dressed modestly in jeans and a white button-down, was seated between Brad Harrison, Keith Richie, and across from Sister Chris King. Avoiding each other’s eye line, the three watched Tammy intently, but she just kept her head down, moving her food around on her plate with her fork. In fact, she was so subdued, such a different person, I found myself trying to guess if she was medicated or merely bipolar.

  I was seated near the center of the table, Kathryn next to me, Steve next to her.

  “Sister Abigail, where’s Father Thomas?” Steve asked.