Enter by the Narrow Gate

by David Carlson

  “I assume you mean her life,” Father Fortis offered.

  “Yes, her journey of faith. Sister Anna was an amazing soul, Nicholas. Full of vim and vinegar, as my immigrant mother would have put it. Actually, that also described my mother. I don’t want to say too much and bias your reading, but the first part of the journal describes what brought her to St. Mary’s. The rest covers what she discovered while living among us.”

  Father Fortis flipped to the end of the journal. Sister Anna had written two hundred and forty-five pages.

  Father Bernard laughed softly. “Yes, you’re right. It’s pretty thick when you consider how short a time she was with us.”

  “And where is Brother Andrew mentioned?” Father Fortis asked.

  “It’s marked, but the raciest comment she makes about him is to call him a puppy dog. He helped her out in the print shop on most of her art projects. That comment was, and maybe still is, what interested the police the most. But one of our older monks, Brother Caspian, was always in the shop with them.”

  An old monk with bad hearing could miss a lot, Father Fortis thought. “If the journal exonerates Brother Andrew, why would he try to kill himself?”

  Father Bernard studied his hands. The joints of his fingers were massive, strong for someone who spent his days listening to the problems of others.

  “The poor kid probably felt like St. Sebastian after the police got through with him. Their questions would have been like arrows to a lad as sensitive as Andrew.”

  “But he was cleared, right?”

  Father Bernard smiled. “Oh, yes, and his alibi is so simple. The boy never learned to drive. Brother Bartholomew gave him his first lesson a week before the tragedy. They’d only driven around the parking lot, and from what Bartholomew told me, Andrew made a mess of that.”

  Father Fortis remembered the tortuous road to the murder site. “So it’s hardly likely that he drove out to the retreat house, the old morada.”

  Father Bernard ran his hand over his scalp. His hair sprang back rebelliously to its same disheveled shape. “Ah, you know where it is, then?”

  Father Fortis felt his face heat up at having so carelessly revealed his visit with Worthy to the scene of the murder. “I saw it on a map. It looked to be a curvy road.”

  Father Bernard paused and let the awkward silence speak for itself. “That it is. But again, I want to make it clear that Andrew isn’t the real reason we’d like you to read the journal. Even before Andrew took those pills, the abbot and I wanted you to take a look at it. As I said before, Anna was a remarkable person.”

  An amazing soul. A remarkable person. Did such elevated language say more about the spiritual director than it did the nun?

  Father Bernard looked down at the magazines on the table. “I take it that you’ve seen the photos of her body.”

  Father Fortis nodded.

  “The shredded paper all over the floor—those were her sketches. She went on retreat to pray for direction, but she also did a lot of drawing. Literally hundreds of sketches were found in the place, most of them torn to pieces.”

  “Perhaps her drawings were her prayers,” Father Fortis suggested.

  Father Bernard looked up and nodded in agreement. “Yes, good of you to see that. I think she would have liked you, Nicholas, and I think after you read her journal, you’re going to like her, too.”

  Ah, but will I fall under her spell as Brother Andrew did, and maybe you? Father Fortis rose from the chair. He offered a quick prayer for forgiveness if he’d judged this man harshly.

  “So once I finish reading this, we can talk again?”

  “I look forward to it,” Father Bernard said as he escorted his guest to the door.

  Father Fortis paused before leaving. “Thank you for trusting me with the journal. I keep expecting someone to tell me to mind my own business.”

  The spiritual director shook his head. “Someone probably will, but read it before you thank me, Nicholas. Her journal won’t necessarily make your life with us any easier.”

  Father Fortis stood in the doorway and pondered the comment. “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  Father Bernard looked out into the darkened corridor. “Has it ever occurred to you that St. Mary’s pain might just be beginning?”

  As they drove north from the airport, Sera Lacey glanced over at Worthy. “Was it hard to come back?”

  Worthy gazed out at the cliffs rising from the Rio Grande valley. Had it rained every day in Detroit or did it only seem that way? He looked toward a tiny cluster of homes set halfway up the mountainside. It wouldn’t be bad to live out here, he thought.

  “Was it hard to come back from Detroit? Are you kidding?” He’d slept well last night at St. Mary’s, the first good night’s sleep in days. This morning he’d felt euphoric, as if a day so beautiful promised something incredible. “Detroit’s a pressure cooker. Spend a few days there, and you’ll see why people move out here.”

  “Huh. Then I guess I misunderstood your message. I got the feeling that you were pleased with the trip.”

  “Oh, the trip was worth it. At least the interview with Ellie’s psychiatrist, and maybe even the one with that lame campus priest. But based on that damned letter, the VanBruskmans are sure I’m taking a vacation out here.”

  “The letter does make us look pretty stupid,” Sera said. “As soon as I got your message, I put the word out to all the maintenance crews at the post offices. Nothing out of the ordinary so far, but then a letter in a post office is a bit like a needle in a haystack.”

  “I wish I could have brought that letter back. You’d have thought from all the smudges that it was at least a month old.”

  “Except for the postmark,” Sera observed.

  “Right,” Worthy conceded, “except for the postmark. So what have you got?”

  “I wish I had more to tell you, but I did manage to speak with Victor’s uncle.”

  “The one out at Chimayó, right?” Worthy asked.

  Sera switched lanes to pass a cattle truck. “That’s the one. I wish I could report that he had a lot to say, but maybe it was because I’m a woman. About the only thing I got from him was the name of Alonzo Muniz, one of Victor’s close friends from high school up at Española. That’s only about an hour up the road. Unless you have a better plan, I thought we’d run up there now. The Muniz boy has a summer cleaning job at the school.”

  The beauty of the day and the fact that he was thousands of miles away from Detroit made it easy for Worthy to forget about the new deadline set by Arrol VanBruskman. Besides, maybe this Alonzo would have an idea where Victor could be hiding.

  As they drove north past the pueblo communities of Tesuque and Picuris, Worthy shared in more detail what he’d gleaned in Detroit. As he’d imagined she would be, Sera was most stunned by the news of Ellie’s adoption.

  “Those bastards. That’s a pretty big piece of the puzzle to keep from us,” she said.

  “Wait until you see the sketchpad I took from Ellie’s room. There’s a portrait of Victor, along with a lot of crosses and religious lingo. It makes his mother’s nickname for him sound right.”

  “Padrelito?” Sera asked. “And Ellie’s parents—or adoptive parents, I should say—they just let you take this sketchpad?”

  “Not exactly, but I can guarantee they’ll never know it’s gone.”

  “Ah, I see. Now you’re stealing evidence from the people paying your way. This case just keeps getting more interesting. I sure hope you brought back some brilliant theory to pull it all together.”

  Worthy laughed. “I think I have the beginning of one, but I wouldn’t call it brilliant.” He turned in the seat toward her. “I do have a new theory about why Ellie ran away.”

  “Oh? She isn’t trying to find Victor?”

  “Yes and no. It’s something I got from Ellie’s psychiatrist. I think Ellie ran away because she was worried about Victor, not because she was hoping he would rescue her.”

  “Rea
lly?”

  “All the signs point to him being pretty much of a nutcase by the time he got back here,” Worthy explained.

  Sera drove without speaking for a moment. “I didn’t get that idea from the uncle. Victor left Chimayó before Easter, but the uncle figured he just wanted to hang out with his friends. Like Alonzo, maybe. That sounds pretty normal for a kid that age.”

  Worthy shook his head. “No, no. Normal isn’t close to the way the psychiatrist or the priest remembers him.”

  “You keep mentioning Ellie’s psychiatrist. Are you saying this doctor met him?”

  Worthy was surprised by the challenge in Sera’s voice. “No, but you can imagine that Ellie talked a lot about his troubles in the fall. Look, once you take a look at the sketchpad, I think you’ll change your mind.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “Okay, I’ll give you an example,” Worthy said. “There is this odd language, and I’m pretty sure Victor wrote it, because it doesn’t look like Ellie’s handwriting. He writes about needing to enter by some narrow gate. But what gate? And there’s something else. Have you ever heard Chimayó called the center of the earth?”

  Sera looked puzzled. “No, not exactly.”

  “But you love the place, right? Can you think of a reason someone would call it that?”

  A slight smile broke out across Sera’s face. “Maybe I do. When I was younger, my family drove out there every year.” She patted the top of her head. “I always had a new mantilla for Mass, but every year it fell off. My sisters said my head was too pointed.”

  Worthy chuckled. “My sister always said my head was too big. Come to think of it, I bet she’d still say that. So about Chimayó. Why would Victor call it the center of the earth?”

  “Maybe because it’s a pilgrimage place. Did you see the milagros when you were there?

  “Those little … symbols?” Worthy asked, avoiding the word trinkets.

  “My sisters and I were given fifty cents every year to buy one to leave with the Holy Child of Atocha. You simply can’t understand the place if you go there as a tourist. Sure, tourists can buy milagros and they can take home some of the dirt, but pilgrims always leave something. If not a milagro, then at least a prayer.”

  Her fond memories of the place brought a pang of regret to Worthy.

  “What I said about the place must have sounded pretty rude,” he said.

  “Yes, it did.”

  “I should have stayed more objective.” He looked out toward the mountains ahead. “That’s my way of saying I’m sorry.”

  She nodded. “Apology accepted. Objectivity is pretty tough to muster with a place like El Sanctuario. I just figured you weren’t Catholic.”

  “No, not even religious. Although sometimes I think Father Nick still holds out hope for me.”

  “Does that mean you used to be religious?” she asked.

  “Brace yourself, Sera. My father was a minister.”

  Sera guffawed, a curiously raucous sound for such a poised woman. “Sorry, but I thought you were kidding.”

  “Not kidding, but that was all a long time ago.”

  Sera’s fingernails clicked rhythmically on the steering wheel. “Do you mind telling me what happened?”

  Why did he have the feeling that the question had been waiting in the wings for a long time? And how could he describe the sorry state of his soul to someone who loved a place like Chimayó?

  He looked up to the snowcapped peaks, so clear in the morning light. “I don’t want you to think I like … not believing in anything.”

  Now, that’s a stupid way to begin, he thought. “Let me put it this way. Some things happened to me, and about the only way I can describe those months is to say that a cloud came down over everything. Eventually the cloud started to lift, but the God I used to believe in was just … gone.”

  Sera drove in silence for a time. Finally she said, “I’ve always believed in Him, even when I wished there wasn’t a God. I’m not sure that makes any sense.” She’d spoken softly, as if confessing a painful truth of her own.

  “What I’ve decided is that losing faith makes no more sense than having it,” he said.

  “Those things that happened to you … they must have been pretty bad.”

  “I’m not so sure. Others have dealt with far worse and still believed in God, but yes, I’d say a big bunch of bad stuff hit me about the same time.” He looked down at his hands. “It’s not all that interesting, really.”

  “Try me.”

  He pondered the invitation and felt something pushing him to say what had been trapped in his mind for over a year. “I was lead guy on the most gruesome murder I’d ever seen—a black teenaged girl who’d been raped at least four times before she died. Within twenty-four hours, a bunch of gang members from another neighborhood—real tough kids—were arrested. That’s the way they like to do it in Detroit. Quick arrests. But the neighborhood leaders complained, said it was a cover-up, and about that time I began to wonder about a few things myself. I rearranged some of the pieces, and in the end, we arrested a white kid from a hundred miles north of Detroit. The murder had taken place up there, but he and a buddy dropped the body in a Dumpster in the city.”

  Worthy paused, caught up in the memory. Sera didn’t say anything.

  “The kid who did it was an Eagle Scout, headed for college,” he continued. “He even said he’d thought about becoming a cop. Anyway, the night of the verdict, the TV news flashed my picture and called me a hero for defusing mounting racial tension. You know how that works.”

  “No, I can’t say I’ve ever had that problem.”

  “It was a problem, because I knew I was no hero. The dead girl was Allyson’s age, but she was nothing like my daughter. She’d been in jail on drug charges, involved in prostitution for years, the whole thing. Do you know what kept running through my mind?”

  “No.”

  “It was like this huge truth. Maybe it’s the cloud I’m talking about. I knew that no one, including myself, would have cared one ounce for this girl if she hadn’t been murdered.”

  Sera groaned. “She was invisible, Chris. That’s what most of the runaways are out here. They’re invisible until they try to be just that—invisible.”

  Worthy knew he could end the story right there, but felt an urge to show his partner the rest of his ugly scar.

  “So that night, I turned off the TV and just sat there, feeling famous and hollow at the same time. Susan came into the room, sat down at the other end of the couch, and told me she wanted a divorce.”

  Sera stared over at him. “What?”

  Worthy cleared his throat. “I never saw it coming. I swear I didn’t. I still don’t see it clearly, but I’ve given up trying.”

  “And then your daughter ran away,” Sera said with a sigh. “I’m so sorry, Chris.”

  He shrugged. “Like I said, others have dealt with more, plenty more. You, for example. You lost your husband, and you have to raise a boy on your own.”

  “Losing Steve was awful, but my family was there, my sisters and especially my grandfather. Without them I’d have fallen apart. Who knows, maybe I’d have lost my faith, too.” She sounded almost wistful. “Wasn’t anyone there for you, Chris?”

  Worthy studied the starched cuffs of his shirt and the perfect creases of his khakis. He thought of his apartment, the never-ending stack of DVDs, a different one for each of the seven nights of the week. He thought of the awkward weekly visits to his old house, with only Amy happy to see him. He thought of the payback he’d received at work after his divorce, those who’d resented his meteoric rise now enjoying his stumbling ineptitude. He thought of his first meeting with Father Fortis and his panicky fear that the huge, talkative monk could smother him to death with a hug.

  “Until Father Fortis—I mean Nick—came along, I guess there was no one.”

  “Oh, Chris,” she replied. “You were invisible, just like the dead girl.”

  He turned away and st
udied his reflection in the window, as it floated like a ghost in front of the boulders and mountains beyond. And maybe that’s like Ellie VanBruskman, he thought, living in that mansion with people pretending to be her parents. She was invisible long before she ran away.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Worthy and Sera walked down the deserted hallway toward the high school’s art room. On the walls, murals portrayed historical scenes of the area. One was a river with native fishermen spearing fish from atop a primitive rocky dam. On the other wall, ancient adobe buildings like those at Acoma were depicted. The past, always the past, Worthy thought.

  In the car, he had decided to let Sera conduct this interview. After all, it was she who had uncovered Alonzo Muniz’s name. The boy was her lead to follow up. But also, Worthy felt he owed her something. No partner he’d ever worked with had understood him half as well or as rapidly. Usually, by this time in a case, his previous partners were complaining about his lack of cooperation. Perhaps I am changing, he thought.

  In the art room, they found Cesar Muniz, Alonzo’s father, leaning over a block of wood with carving tools. Rising from his work stool, Mr. Muniz removed his safety glasses and shook hands with the visitors. Worthy noted a faded tattoo of a bleeding crucifix on the man’s right forearm.

  “Victor? Yes, my son and Victor have been friends for years,” Mr. Muniz said, reaching for a broom. His English was more heavily tinged with Spanish than Sera’s. “In fact, they worked together here last summer on the grounds crew. Is Victor in some sort of trouble?”

  “We’re hoping he can help us find a missing girl from Detroit,” Sera replied.

  Mr. Muniz began to sweep wood shavings into neat piles on the floor. “Such a shame about Victor dropping out of college. Everyone had such high hopes for him.”

  Worthy strolled around the room as a means of letting Sera know that the interview was hers. Pots bearing intricate triangle designs sat in rows on a long wooden table, ready to be fired. A mosaic project next to them displayed a sky of stars and moon. He paused in front of another table at the far end of the room, where wooden blocks were pinned in vises. On each of the pillars, Worthy detected the faint outlines of a human form drawn in pencil.