The big man’s jowls shook and his ruddy complexion darkened further. “Listen here, you little prick. This isn’t even your jurisdiction. I saw your ID. There’s nothing you can—”
“One,” Kindzierski interrupted, his back still toward them. “Two. Three. Four ...”
Enraged, the one with the jowls caved. He stood up, muttering obscenities under his breath, and Bony followed him as they made their way to an available table, drinks in hand.
“They’re gone,” David said quietly.
“Good,” Kindzierski said.
Janine and Larry exchanged an anxious glance, but David smiled. He liked the cop a hell of a lot more, all of a sudden. There were secrets to be kept, and that had created within him a kind of adversarial attitude toward Kindzierski. Now that disappeared. He was almost tempted to let the man in on the truth. But Kindzierski wasn’t his friend and he wasn’t a theologian like Father Charles. There was nothing David could tell him that the detective would find even remotely believable.
Or is there?
Before David could speak, Kindzierski cleared his throat and sat up a little straighter.
“One last thing,” the detective said. “Mr. Vale tells me that the two of you spent the night at a hotel. That’s why you, Mr. Bairstow, weren’t home when your place was trashed. Not to pry into your personal lives, but you both live alone. If you wanted some time to yourselves, why would that require a hotel room?”
David blinked, speechless a moment. The question threw him off. At the bar, Larry Vale blushed deeply and studiously avoided looking at his stepdaughter. Janine was flustered, completely caught off guard. Her reaction was sure to raise Kindzierski’s suspicions, take up more time, and David felt it was far more important that they get to their meeting with Father Charles.
“Tell him, Janine,” he said.
Kindzierski raised a curious eyebrow. Larry stared at Janine. Her mouth was open in an almost comical expression as she gazed at David in confusion.
“Tell him about the stalker.”
“You have a stalker?” Kindzierski asked. “And you didn’t think to mention this to me before? Why am I not buying that?”
Janine shrugged slowly, at a loss.
David fumbled to cover for them. “He’s not a stalker, necessarily. Just this creepy guy who’s been hanging around near her place lately. Probably nothing. Certainly not the guy who ran me off the road, and he doesn’t match your description of the man who ... who killed Spencer. Could just be some homeless guy, but she saw him in the yard last night and just wanted to stay somewhere other than home.”
Kindzierski frowned, suspicious. “Why not your place, then?”
Janine jumped in then, and David was glad. It seemed awkward for him to speak for her.
“If he really is stalking me, I was afraid he might already know where David was. I just wanted one night in a place where no one could find me,” she said.
“That’s why you called me so late about going to the hotel,” Larry Vale put in. “Why didn’t you say something?”
The slick ad executive’s voice was usually commanding, arrogant. Today he just seemed lost in his fear for his wife.
“You had enough on your mind, Larry,” Janine said gently. She laid a hand on his arm to comfort him.
“But this ‘stalker,’ he hasn’t done anything to threaten you in any way?”
Janine hesitated. Then she shook her head. “No. He’s just ... creepy.”
Kindzierski seemed even more frustrated now. “I’m still getting the feeling there’s something you two aren’t saying. I mean ... I just can’t believe with all these ‘coincidences,’ it didn’t occur to you that you should mention this guy to me right off. Whatever you may think, he could be the source of all your problems. You’re upset enough to spend the night in a hotel, but you say nothing to me about it. What am I missing?”
“I’m sorry, Detective Kindzierski,” Janine said, her voice shaking. “I guess we’re just not thinking very clearly.”
Kindzierski sighed and shook his head. He studied them both for a few moments as if waiting for one of them to say more. Then he shrugged.
“All right, look, there isn’t a lot I can do about him right now. If he doesn’t match the description of either suspect and he hasn’t actually done anything, the best I can say is that I can have a patrol car swing by Miss Hartschorn’s apartment hourly. If you see the guy again, call me immediately. Even if he hasn’t directly threatened you, I can bring him in for questioning about all of this. If I could catch him on your property, that would be even better. At least that would give me enough to hold him on.
“I just need a description.”
As they rode the T back to Medford, Janine sat silently beside David, her hand gripping his, and they both stared straight ahead at some curious bit of nothing in the distance. There were not very many people on the train at that time, mostly college students, but Janine did not want even to whisper to David with others so close. She was reminded of the two men who had been listening to Detective Kindzierski in the restaurant and she held David’s hand more tightly and waited as though she were holding her breath.
They got off the train at Davis Square Station and went up the escalator, still in silence. A guy with a boyish face and innocent blue eyes played acoustic guitar and sang high-pitched folk blues like he really meant it. Janine watched him recede as the escalator drew her up and away, and she wished she had stopped to throw a dollar in his guitar case, just to let him know that someone heard him.
There was a bank of phones upstairs in the station. A couple of kids who probably shouldn’t have been out of school just yet skateboarded past the glass-and-steel doors. Janine and David went to the phones. He picked one up and began to dial, then hung up and glanced at her.
“We blew that, didn’t we?” he asked.
Janine stared at him a moment, then nodded. “Big-time. There’s no way that he doesn’t think we’re hiding something. But what else were we supposed to say?”
“I should’ve just kept lying, but he already knew there were holes in what we were telling him,” David said.
“There’s nothing we can do about it now,” Janine told him. “And it isn’t like the cops can help us.”
David took a long breath, then picked up the phone again. He fished in his pocket for some coins, slid them in, and dialed Father Charles at his office at St. Matt’s. Janine listened as he spoke to the priest. Since David had not gone in to teach that day—though the vandalism to his house was a solid excuse—he did not want to be seen in the halls of St. Matthew’s.
Just a few moments later, David hung up.
“He wants us to meet him at the rectory.”
“Now?” Janine asked.
“I think now would be good, don’t you?”
It took them only a few minutes to drive from Davis Square to St. Matthew’s. When they rang the bell at the rectory, the door opened quickly, as though the priest had been waiting just inside for them. Father Charles greeted them with a tumbler of Crown Royal in one hand and a cigar in the other. Black pants and a black sweater were Hugh Charles’s idea of dressing down, but he still looked like a priest.
The woman who worked in the rectory office was on the phone as they walked by, and did not even glance up. Father Charles led them to a study on the second floor with a quartet of old leather chairs around a small round table. An enormous masonry fireplace took up one side of the room, but it was dark and dormant that day.
The priest offered them both a drink, but they declined. Thereafter, he did not touch his own drink, and even put out his cigar.
At first, Janine was hesitant to relate the events of the previous night. David, however, had already broken the ice with Father Charles about the bizarre nature of their recent experiences, and he was quick to describe what had happened at his house. She had been caught up in her own fear, in the numbing chill that went through her when she thought about Charon, or about her mother’s dis
appearance. Now, though, Janine truly saw David’s fear for the first time.
When he spoke, she reached out to hold his hand.
Listening to him broke down her own reluctance, and she finally opened up to the priest. She left out much of the sexual context of her dreams, but aside from that, she was even more open with him than she had been with David.
Like a confessional, she thought.
Yet she did not feel the sense of judgment with Father Charles that she would have felt in confession. It amazed her how open he was.The words insane and lunatic had been swirling around in her mind for a while, but with Father Charles, a man she respected as both intelligent and logical, she was able to push doubts about her mental condition aside for the first time.
She told him about her dreams, about the things she had seen and heard that she had at first thought she had imagined. She told him about seeing Charon that day on the riverbank, at the spot where David had been forced off the road. Together, Janine and David told him about her mother’s disappearance and their meeting with Detective Kindzierski. Father Charles listened with very little comment save a gentle prodding for further detail, until they both had sort of run out of steam.
“And you gave him a description?” Father Charles asked, aghast, when she revealed the end of their conversation with the detective.
Janine shrugged. “Not an exact description. Not the way I just described him to you.”
At length, when Janine was all talked out and she sat back in the leather chair, the priest reached for his whiskey and took a slow, contemplative sip, watching her over the rim of the glass.
Then he sat forward, his eyes upon her as though David were not even in the room. Janine shifted a bit, suddenly uncomfortable under that intense gaze. His eyes were kind, set in a wide, friendly face. Yet they sparkled with a kind of exhilaration. He took another small sip of his drink, then set it aside.
“I think we should take a ride,” Father Charles said lightly, as though nothing they had told him was at all out of the ordinary. “There’s someone I want you both to meet. I’m sorry to say that you may have to tell those stories all over again.”
“Who are we going to see?” Janine asked, mystified.
“An old teacher of mine, actually,” Father Charles replied.
“The one you told me about,” David said quickly. “From the seminary.”
“Indeed,” the priest said.“Father Cornelius Jessup. Since David first talked to me about the things that were happening to him, I’ve had several conversations with Father Jessup. He’ll be very interested to meet you.”
Once again, a kind of impatient silence descended upon them. Father Charles attempted to distract them both with talk of the day-to-day goings-on at both St. Matt’s and Medford High, but to Janine that entire part of her life, the real world, seemed to exist in some far-off land now.
The tires thrummed on the road, bumped through potholes as they drove out to Route 16 and followed it all the way into Everett. David was behind the wheel and he kept the window open to give them fresh air, but it could not wash away that feeling of unreality.
It was Father Charles’s fault, actually. She had expected him to require more convincing, if he were able to be convinced at all. At the very least, she had thought he would interrogate them a little more, try to find holes in their stories. But he had not done that.
He had not done that, and the only thing Janine could think was that perhaps that was because he believed them. Somehow, that made the fugue she was in so much worse. For if he believed them, it might all be true, and if it were, what did that say about everything she had believed about the world her entire life?
“Here,” Father Charles told David. “Turn in here.You can park in back.”
Janine glanced up as they pulled into a long drive that led into the rear lot of a large, faded brick building. It was a retirement home for priests in the archdiocese of Boston, and the first thing she saw when she caught sight of it was that it wasn’t worthy. With all that priests did to serve their communities, it seemed unfair to her that they should be tucked away in a crumbling neighborhood with graffiti on the walls, in a building that might have been a jail once upon a time.
Inside, the receptionist told them that Father Jessup was expecting them. Janine hated the sterility of the place, the antiseptic smell that reminded her of a hospital. Of the hospital, the one that had been both retreat and prison to her after her baby had died. As though he sensed her discomfort, Father Charles laid a comforting hand on her shoulder and they followed a disheveled orderly whom the receptionist had instructed to take them to see Father Jessup. David walked quietly behind them.
“You must be important visitors,” the orderly said. “Father Jessup was holding court with some of the other residents before he got your call. He’s been in the library ever since.”
“I’ve asked him for his opinion on a matter of theology,” Father Charles explained.
Janine snickered, a bit madly. It sounded so innocent, and also so hollow.
“Yeah, well, prepare for a lecture,” the orderly said with a laugh. “Cornelius has no problem offering his opinion when he hasn’t been asked. I don’t want to think about what he’s like when people want to know what he thinks.”
Father Charles stiffened.
“Young man,” he snapped at the orderly, though the heavyset man with his untucked shirt and unruly hair hardly seemed of an age to warrant the description.
The orderly turned quickly, but did not raise his eyes. Father Charles’s tone had been enough to tell him he had crossed a line. Enough for him, at least, but not for Father Charles.
“Cornelius Jessup, whom you so casually dismiss, is a brilliant man. He was my teacher.To this day, he is still my teacher.There are untold volumes of knowledge that you might attain simply by standing by to catch the pearls of wisdom that fall from his most august lips, and yet I daresay you would hardly recognize them. You know what they say about pearls and swine.”
The orderly knew he had been chastised, but seemed to have only the vaguest notion that he had also been insulted. “Sorry,” he said halfheartedly, “just kinda the impression you get, the way some of the other priests act around Father Jessup.They treat him like he’s a crank, you know?”
Father Charles sighed. “I’m sure they do. Perhaps, however, one day you’ll realize that it is possible to make up your own mind about your charges here, rather than relying upon the prejudices of others.”
“Sorry, Father,” the orderly said again.
“Let’s move along,” Father Charles replied, giving the man not an inch.
After a moment, the orderly shuffled along the corridor again and they all followed.
The library turned out to be much larger than Janine would have expected, and much more richly furnished given the rest of the facility, particularly its exterior.There were high-backed leather chairs, and some softer ones as well, and at least two sofas that she could see. One entire wall was made up of high windows so the daylight shone in, but the other walls were lined with books, mostly hardback volumes.
The place was empty save for an attendant who sat behind a desk near the door.
“Father Jessup here?” the orderly asked.
“In back,” the attendant replied.
“We’re all right from here,” Father Charles said, in a tone that would brook no argument.
Not that the orderly had any interest in giving him one. He glanced once at Father Charles and then fled the room, likely more than happy to return to changing bedpans or mopping floors if it meant not having to bear up under Hugh Charles’s admonishing gaze.
A number of tall shelves on the far side of the enormous room created the illusion that the place was far closer to an actual library. Beyond those shelves, they found a long oak study table surrounded by plain wooden chairs quite different from the plush, comfortable furniture near the door.This was an area for study, Janine thought immediately. Not enjoyment.
>
The books also seemed different. The spines of a great many were leather, and some appeared to be quite old. Even newer-looking books shared one element, however. As Janine scanned the titles she realized that all of them were volumes on mythology and comparative theology.
At the far end of the long table sat a lone figure, a tall, thin man in dark pants and a green cardigan sweater. He had wispy white hair, pale skin, and a thin mustache, and he reminded Janine quite a bit of the late British actor David Niven, though he wore glasses with square, wire rims. This had to be Cornelius Jessup, and though he seemed quite spry, she gauged his age to be in the mid-seventies.
“Father Jessup?” Father Charles ventured.
The old man glanced up quickly, his eyes bright and alive behind his glasses. When he stood, however, it was with great difficulty. Pain flickered across his features before he pushed it away.
“Hugh, my boy,” Father Jessup said, his voice the rasp of a lifelong smoker. “You’re looking well.”
“And you’re still as dashingly handsome as ever. Still breaking the ladies’ hearts, I’ll wager,” Father Charles said.
Janine blushed, a bit taken aback by this exchange between the priests. As if he sensed her discomfort, Father Jessup glanced at her, then held out an age-mottled hand in her direction.
“Don’t listen to him, my dear. I’m quite dedicated to my vows.”
“That’s what breaks their hearts,” Father Charles retorted.
But the moment for humor had passed. Once Father Jessup had looked at Janine, he had not looked away. He studied her now with an intensity that made her squirm uncomfortably. All trace of amusement had gone from his face, to be replaced by a gravity that seemed dreadful to her.
“Seen something you can’t explain, haven’t you?” the old priest asked. Then he glanced at David. “Both of you.”
Father Charles gestured toward them. “This is David Bairstow, Father. A colleague of mine at St. Matthew’s. And the young lady is Janine Hartschorn, formerly at St. Matt’s and now at Medford High.”
The Ferryman Page 22
