Death Goes on Retreat

by Carol Anne O'Marie

  “I remember way back when you were the best turkey trotter in the Order,” Eileen said with a mischievous glint. Raising her toes and rocking on her heel, she hummed something between “If You Knew Susie” and “Don’t Bring Lulu.”

  Despite herself, Mary Helen laughed. Usually she hated Eileen’s “remember way back when” stories. “Living in the past is a sure sign of aging,” she contended time and time again. But at the moment, the past seemed comforting. Much easier surely than dealing with the present.

  Encouraged, Eileen sat down beside her. “Come on along, old dear,” she coaxed. “A walk will do us both good.”

  Mary Helen’s stomach pitched at the thought of her last walk around St. Colette’s: the angry insects buzzing, the dogs, stiff and staring. She closed her own eyes, trying to block out the memory. “You go on,” she said, forcing herself to picture only the ageless redwoods and the tranquil horizon. “I’ll just sit here and think.”

  “Suit yourself.” Eileen sighed. Without another word, she left Mary Helen alone on the sundeck.

  Sister Mary Helen felt the sun warming the tips of her walking shoes. Studying them, she noticed that they were covered with soft, fine dirt and small dried bits and pieces of needles and twigs, and crushed pinecones much like the cone stuck in Greg Johnson’s tennis shoe.

  She wiggled her toes, trying to blot the gruesome scene out of her mind. Before long the sun would creep across the entire porch, making it impossible to sit there without melting. She tucked in her feet and gazed out over the vista. There was such peace, such quiet, it seemed impossible that a brutal murder—actually three murders if you counted the animals—had taken place here.

  Who was responsible for them? And why? That was what she had better think about while she had time. With supreme effort, Mary Helen focused her mind on the situation and called up her mental list of those most unlikely to be guilty.

  Laura. She had talked with Laura and determined, once again, to her own satisfaction that the girl was telling the truth. Laura Purcell was dramatic surely, but the girl had no reason and no heart to murder Greg Johnson. Mary Helen supposed that she’d be hard-pressed to convince Sergeant Little of this since she had no positive proof whatsoever. But there was just something in the way the girl acted and reacted, in the way she spoke . . . Just a “gut feeling.”

  Sister Mary Helen knew well how poorly policemen— oops, policepersons—reacted to gut feelings as a reason to pronounce a suspect innocent—or guilty, for that matter. She strongly suspected, however, that they had gut feelings of their own.

  Her best bet was to uncover Greg’s murderer herself. That way she wouldn’t need to prove anyone’s innocence.

  Sister Felicita was in the clear too. Mary Helen had never considered her a serious suspect. Too nervous! And again, what motive? She barely knew Greg Johnson, or so it appeared.

  The next least likely on her list was the monsignor. Although she had fully intended to question him at breakfast, she never had the chance. She was about to go in search of him now when she smelled the faint, familiar vanilla fragrance of his pipe tobacco.

  Feeling lucky, she waited for Monsignor McHugh to round the corner of the porch, but nearly groaned aloud when she saw what he was doing. The good monsignor was reciting the Divine Office! Not at all the ideal time to launch into a casual conversation, or any other kind of conversation either. He seemed intent on pacing up and down the sundeck reading his breviary. Her questions would have to wait. “And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath,” she thought, watching him approach.

  Wasn’t there some canon law against smoking while you said the Office? she wondered peevishly. Or had he figured out a theological loophole, like saying the Office while you smoked? Whichever, this was clearly not the time to interrupt him to ask if he was innocent of murder.

  As he passed, the monsignor raised one long, thin finger in recognition and continued on his way, moving his lips around the pipe. Frustrated, Mary Helen watched him go. Who was next on her list?

  “Hi, Sister.” Mike Denski’s voice cut through the stillness. Why not? she thought, greeting him with a wide, welcoming smile.

  The young priest gave her a toothy grin that must have paid the orthodontist’s rent for several months.

  “Can I join you?” he asked.

  Mary Helen nodded. Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly. “You may if you can find a chair,” she said, unable even in these circumstances to resist a grammar lesson.

  Giving a slightly bewildered shrug, Mike pulled over another director’s chair and settled next to her. The pair sat side by side like two passengers on an ocean cruise. It took only a few seconds for the young priest to begin to fidget. First, he crossed and uncrossed his legs, then he wiggled his right foot. Finally, he curled the piece of hair at the end of his long sideburns.

  Well, it was less annoying than drumming his fingers on the chair’s arms would be, Mary Helen thought, watching him twist the hair.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” Mike said at last.

  Mary Helen glanced over with an abstracted calmness calculated to drive him crazy. I’ll bet you’d give a lot more than that, she thought, wondering what exactly was bothering him. She reckoned it wouldn’t take too long to find out.

  “My thoughts?” she repeated, as if she hadn’t quite heard. “You’re interested in my thoughts, are you? Well, to be perfectly honest, they aren’t really very profound. I was just sitting here thinking about how unpredictable life is. You never know from one moment to the next what God has in store for you.”

  She paused for effect. A small lizard sidled its way along the edge of the porch. She pointed to it. “Did you know that lizards remain motionless about ninety percent of their lives?” Then added with a whimsical smile, “Aren’t we lucky to see that one move?”

  Mike Denski stared at her openmouthed.

  Mary Helen congratulated herself. Keep him slightly off balance, wondering if her mind wandered or if she was just a font of little-known facts. It was a stroke of genius, affording her the perfect opportunity to ask him questions apropos of nothing.

  “How did you say you knew Greg Johnson?” she asked.

  It was clear from his puzzled expression that, as intended, the jump from lizard to murder victim took Mike by surprise. “We were in the same class at St. Patrick’s Seminary,” he blurted out.

  “Did you know him well?”

  “Too well.” There was an acidy edge to his voice.

  “Deep friendships do form when young people are thrown together in a small, intense community like a seminary,” Mary Helen said, knowing full well that deep animosities can fester as easily if not easier.

  Mike Denski stared straight ahead. The frozen lizard stared back. “I wouldn’t call him a friend, exactly,” Mike muttered.

  “What would you call him?” Mary Helen’s question sounded much more direct than she intended and too quick if she wanted to keep her slightly deaf act believable.

  The young priest’s foot began to wiggle again. “What I’d call him is a goddamn hair shirt!” Mike burst out.

  “A hair shirt?” His unexpected reference to the austere ascetic practice surprised her. She hadn’t thought of hair shirts for years. In the hagiographies of her youth, it seemed that almost every saint wore one as part of his or her road to sanctity. She had often wondered what they looked like. Fruit of the Loom T-shirts cut from one hundred percent horsehair?

  Today in our complex world, Mary Helen thought, just living and acting with love seemed to afford enough penance and self-denial to make trumped-up penances unnecessary.

  Mike Denski was waiting for her reaction. His eyes, like two topaz stones, dared her to contradict him.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” she said, and she did. “Believe me, after you’ve been in religion as long as I have you’ll run across not only hair shirts, but whole suits of underwear. ‘Hair long johns’ to coin a phrase!” She waited for an appreciative laugh.
What she got was more of a halfhearted grunt.

  That’s the trouble with some of the young ones today, Mary Helen thought, watching Mike’s serious face. Little to no sense of humor. Everything so deadly serious. You’d think God took a coffee break and left them in charge!

  “I guess I shouldn’t talk that way about him,” Mike said, no longer sounding defensive, just uncomfortable, “now that he’s dead and everything, but at St. Pat’s Greg Johnson really acted like he thought he was something. You know what I mean? Good at his studies, a big jock, and he didn’t mind telling you what hot stuff he was with the girls when he went home on vacation. That’s until they found out he was in the seminary. When we first went in, I thought he was great. Somebody I’d like to be like.”

  “The Bing Crosby model of priesthood,” Mary Helen said.

  Mike Denski gave her a blank stare.

  “Remember in Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s?”

  “What?” The light in his eyes merely grew dimmer.

  “Never mind,” Mary Helen said, somewhat ruffled. Almost as bad as no sense of humor, was no sense of history. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” she said. “He was someone you wanted to emulate. Then what happened?”

  “We got into it after dinner one Visitors’ Sunday. My mom had come.” Mike’s face flushed as if even the memory of what had happened angered him anew. “I love my mom. I even like her. She’s a good, unselfish woman who’s made all kinds of sacrifices for me. I guess I was talking about her too much. Anyway, whatever I said ticked Greg off. He acted like he hated his mother, although she’d seemed nice enough that day, and like he despised me for loving mine. Called me a ‘mama’s boy,’ or something like that. He kept it up and kept it up until I finally couldn’t stand it any longer. I took a swing at him.”

  Mary Helen cringed. The slight, sensitive seminarian would have been no match for the Johnson boy.

  “I got in one sucker punch.” Mike gave a crooked smile. “I guess he would have killed me if a couple of the other guys hadn’t pulled him off. I don’t know what the rector would have done if he’d found out, but nobody ever told him and things just went on, but they were never the same. From that day on, Johnson took every opportunity to make my life miserable. He made snide remarks about my mother and me and he rubbed my nose in the fact that I only got in one good punch.”

  “How long did the harassment last?”

  “Until he left St. Pat’s.” The color began at his jaw and grew until his face blazed. Only his eyes remained cold. “And I can’t say I was sorry to see him go. I came as close to hating him as I ever came to hating anyone.” He gave a caustic laugh.

  “Foolishly, I thought I’d be rid of him, but Greg was tenacious. Just weeks before my ordination he showed up at St. Pat’s again. Said something about asking the archbishop if he wasn’t afraid he’d have to ordain my mother, too, ’cause I couldn’t let go. I lost it, Sister.” Denski swallowed. “I don’t know where I got the strength, but I beat the sh—” He stopped. “—the you-know-what-I-mean out of him. I’m not proud of myself, but I did it.”

  “How did Greg react?” Mary Helen asked, trying to hide her surprise.

  “He swore he’d get even,” Denski said miserably. “And I’m afraid he would have, too.”

  So that was what had been bothering the young priest. He despised and feared the victim. Wished and maybe even prayed that he could rid his life of Greg Johnson. Had he run into Greg on the grounds of St. Colette’s? Was he so afraid of Greg’s revenge that he had seen his chance to rid himself of his tormentor once and for all? Did he actually hate his brother seminarian enough to murder him? Mary Helen doubted it, yet she must somehow broach the subject.

  “One thing puzzles me,” she said gently. “You seemed so upset when we discovered the body.”

  As suddenly as it had come, all the color left Mike Denski’s face. Mary Helen suspected he was reliving the gruesome scene.

  “I’d be upset about finding anyone murdered, Sister, even a perfect stranger. I guess I don’t hate anyone enough to want them killed.” Mike swallowed as if he were about to make a meal of every word. “Not even Greg Johnson,” he said deliberately. “Although, to tell you the truth, I didn’t realize that until I saw him lying there in his own blood.”

  By the time Mike Denski finally excused himself, the morning sun was quickly swallowing up all the shade on the wooden deck. Before long it would be too hot to sit there. Mary Helen mentally crossed the young priest off her suspect list.

  Although he had shown the first glimmer of a motive so far, she didn’t consider him mean enough to be a real dyed-in-the-wool murderer. He might have killed from passion on the spur of the moment as he threw that one punch so many years before, but this murder was clearly planned and coldly orchestrated.

  Mary Helen shielded her eyes and watched Mike cross the broad lawn surrounding the small, neat blue swimming pool. A figure—from this distance it looked like Ed Moreno—was furiously swimming laps. Back and forth, back and forth.

  Mike approached the pool, stopped, and stared down at the swimmer, but seemed to say nothing. Seconds later, he disappeared into a grove of sycamore trees abutting the lawn.

  No, the murderer was not Mike Denski. She was sure of that, although she was not quite as sure of what she thought about Ed Moreno.

  Mary Helen shifted in her chair. The canvas seat was beginning to feel like a slab of granite. Her back and shoulders were stiff. She turned to let the sun warm them. Undoubtedly tension. And no wonder! The last thirty hours had been filled with nothing else. Her conversation with Mike Denski was simply icing on the cake.

  Although she had eliminated three unlikely suspects, Felicita, Laura, and Mike, to her own satisfaction, the identity of the murderer was not coming at all clear. She checked her wristwatch. Perfect time for her coffee break. Whoever invented coffee breaks should be canonized! Mary Helen pushed herself up from her seat. Only a true saint could think of such a simple way to insert a few quiet minutes into our busy lives; a time when it is considered perfectly respectable to blow and sip and just daydream. Murder or no murder, she would have her coffee break!

  St. Jude’s dining room was empty. Or so Mary Helen thought when she stepped in from the sun’s glare. Only after she’d poured herself a large mug of coffee did she realize she was not alone.

  Father Andy Carr was seated in a remote corner of the large room, far away from the windows, almost as if he were deliberately trying to stay out of sight. Maybe he’s avoiding the glare, Mary Helen thought, smiling over at the priest.

  “Care to join me?” Father Carr invited.

  Although she would have preferred time with her own thoughts, Mary Helen hated to pass up the opportunity to pare down her list further. Outgoing Andy Carr would not be her pick for the murderer, but one never knew.

  “What are you up to?” Father Carr asked as soon as she sat down.

  His question took Mary Helen by surprise. Did he suspect? One look at his open, friendly face and she knew better.

  “Nothing much.” She fudged a little. No sense scaring him off by announcing, “I’m eliminating murder suspects from my least-likely list.” She wondered crazily what the expression in his candid hazel eyes would be if she were perfectly honest.

  “It’s going to be a hot one,” Carr remarked, taking another stab at being affable.

  Mary Helen nodded, realizing that she wasn’t being much help.

  “Where is everybody?” he asked.

  “Not very far away, that’s for sure,” Mary Helen said. Father Carr chuckled.

  “This retreat’s turned out to be one fine mess, hasn’t it?” He spread his broad hands on the tabletop. “Who would ever have imagined last Sunday that you—”

  “No one.” Mary Helen cut him off. She didn’t want to be reminded once again that she had stumbled onto the body. Something in his tone suggested guilt by discovery.

  Carr must have sensed her discomfort. He studied her.<
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  “My heart goes out to you,” he said. “I didn’t mean . . .”

  Unexpected tears flooded her eyes and she turned her head.

  “May I warm your bottom?” Carr asked.

  His question shocked her until she realized he was pointing to her coffee mug.

  “Dumb joke.” He lumbered up from his chair. “It always works at AA meetings.”

  And here, too, Mary Helen thought, no longer feeling like weeping. Instead she felt like grabbing the conversation by the horns and wrestling it right down to her satisfaction.

  “How did you say you knew Greg Johnson?” she asked when Father Carr had refilled their two cups.

  It was Carr’s turn to look surprised, but he recovered quickly. The man, obviously used to handling all types of crowds, simply rolled right into the answer.

  “The reason I made the young lad’s acquaintance”— Carr blew on his coffee—“is because while he was still in the seminary he managed to get himself arrested in a Gay Rights demonstration. Would have ended up in the pokey, too, if I hadn’t pulled in a couple of favors.”

  “You got him off, then?”

  Carr nodded grimly. “With just a few hours of community service.”

  “Why didn’t you let him go to jail? That was his purpose, wasn’t it?”

  Carr stared at her in unconcealed admiration. “My point exactly, Sister. But you have no idea what Absolute Norm, the archbishop, is like when there’s the hint of a scandal.”

  Mary Helen did not have to wait long to be told.

  “He’s like a crazy man, Sister. That kid hadn’t been cooling his heels five minutes before ‘himself’ is on the horn insisting that I talk to somebody, anybody, and get the little smart-ass out before he”—Carr dropped his voice in a perfect imitation of the prelate—“ ‘does irreparable harm to the image of the Church.’ As if the Church hasn’t weathered its share of scandals over the years.”

  “And did you? Get him out, that is?”