The Widow's Mate

by Ralph McInerny

  “He was best man at our wedding. Much to my father’s displeasure.”

  “You have done a lot of research.”

  “In the smithy of my soul.”

  “Where have you come from?”

  “Gethsemani. A Trappist monastery in Kentucky.”

  “You’re a monk?”

  “A penitent. They let me stay on, no questions asked. I had decided to remain dead, dead to all those I had betrayed, and spend my days trying to get right with God.”

  This was disarming, as it was no doubt intended to be. “What is it you really want?”

  He looked beyond Amos. He spoke softly. “Forgiveness.”

  “You should see a priest.”

  “I have been living with monks. Confession is surprisingly easy, but it is hard to believe that one can be forgiven.”

  Amos wanted to tell the man that forgiveness for what he was attempting would be difficult to achieve.

  “I have often prayed for my godmother.”

  Amos sat upright. “Did you?”

  “Mrs. Cadbury. Aunt Helen.”

  Amos had wavered when the man described the inscriptions on the wedding band, and he had been unsettled by all the man seemed to know, but this mention of his departed wife undid him. He put his hands on the desk and leaned toward his visitor and, against his will, saw that he was Wally Flanagan.

  From that point on, the conversation was very different from what it had been. Amos felt the layers of his skepticism melt away, but with the realization that, incredible as it was, he was talking to Wallace Flanagan, a host of other emotions came. The man had deserted his wife; he had been a womanizer, even betraying his mistresses; he had lived in seclusion and allowed his loved ones to imagine what they would of his whereabouts. Had he arranged for a body to be identified as his own?

  “I have been weak and deceptive, but that would have been ghoulish. Sacrilegious.”

  “So how do you explain it?”

  “I can’t. I told you I left my ring behind in Garrison. Not by design. I hadn’t worn it for years. It would have been in a dresser drawer. She must have found it.”

  “She?”

  “Sylvia. We had gone off together and settled in a lake place in northern Minnesota. She came to hate the solitude. I urged her to go, but she refused. She was determined to make life such a hell for me there that we would leave together. When I left, I left alone.”

  It was some time later that he heard the startling news that his dead body had been discovered in Fox River.

  “It is a strange experience to hear that one is dead. My first thought was that I was finally free of the past. Eventually, I realized that I could never be free of it. I ended up in that monastery in Kentucky.”

  Greta buzzed and asked if there was anything he wanted her to do before she left for the day. He realized he had spent the better part of two hours with his client, for that was the status Wally Flanagan once more had. However long the list of his wrongdoings, though, there seemed no indictable offense among them.

  “So what shall I do?”

  “There is a priest I want you to see. Father Dowling, the pastor at St. Hilary’s.”

  “Will you tell him my story?”

  “No. You are going to have to convince him who you are.”

  “Have I convinced you?”

  For answer, Amos went to the wall safe, moving aside the portrait of his wife to get to it, and brought forth an envelope. He handed it to Wally Flanagan.

  He read the inscription on the envelope; he opened it; he took out the ring and held it before his face. There were tears in his eyes when, with an effort, he put it on his finger. It was a ceremonial deed. At least in the eyes of Amos Cadbury, Wally Flanagan had returned.

  23

  It was odd how current events seemed always to point back to the disappearance of Wallace Flanagan. Now that who he had gone off with was known, and where, the plight of Sandra Bochenski seemed even more pathetic. Mervel put the main burden of young Flanagan’s infidelity on her, but she had reaped none of the benefits, if that was the right word. It was Sylvia Beach who had fled with the faithless husband, improbably into the North Woods of Minnesota.

  “Not all that improbable, Roger,” Phil Keegan said. “The Flanagans always vacationed up in Wisconsin, near the Dells, Lake Delton, renting a cottage for the summer. It was young Flanagan’s favorite place.”

  Roger Dowling knew the area and had been part of the traffic on I-90 and I-94, the two routes one traveled when going through the Dells, branching off at Tomah, one going west to La Crosse, the other continuing north to Eau Claire, both ending in Minnesota. It was the area in which he had been restored to health before being assigned to St. Hilary’s in Fox River, the end of his presumed destiny for ecclesiastical advancement but, as it turned out, the true beginning of his priesthood. One man’s exile is another’s home, and Fox River had become home to him.

  “Luke told me that when Wally said he didn’t want to succeed his father in the cement business, one reason was that it seemed a life sentence. He wanted only enough security so that he could live the way they had at Lake Delton for the rest of his life.”

  “Yet he deserted Sylvia Beach, too, in the end.”

  “And ended his life in the cement business.” Phil sipped his beer. He was not as complacent as he seemed. He had little more confidence in the case against Sandra Bochenski than he had in that against Luke Flanagan. “Cy went up to Garrison, Minnesota, and checked out Wally Flanagan’s time there. He was considered a character locally. He went native, quit shaving, was a frequent visitor to the town library, carting home books to read in a lawn chair in front of his lake place. Or in front of the fireplace in winter.”

  “Sounds idyllic.”

  “If you’re a monk. Of course, he had Sylvia, too.”

  “When did he leave there?”

  Phil smiled. “Before Sylvia did.”

  * * *

  Maud Lynn’s son was a genuine monk, not that she showed the usual parental pride in a religious vocation in the family. Jimmy had visited Gethsemani to make a retreat when he was trying to decide what to do with his life. He never left the monastery, having found there what he was looking for.

  “Life on the farm,” Maud said. “Woods, silence, cattle. He looks after the bees. They make cheese, too.”

  Father Dowling knew. He had made a retreat there himself, during his troubled days on the Archdiocesan Marriage Court when he had been undone by all the insoluble cases, people seeking release from their promises when release could not be given.

  For all Maud’s alleged lack of sympathy with her son the monk, she loved to give detailed accounts of her stays in the guesthouse at Gethsemani, memories refreshed by her recent visit.

  “Maybe that’s where I belong,” Luke said.

  “They have a Flanagan already.”

  Father Dowling asked what she meant, and she explained.

  “There are lots of Flanagans,” Luke said.

  “One too many.”

  “Maybe one too few.”

  Were they serious? They were constantly kidding each other, particularly about their impending nuptials, but that seemed to be all it was, kidding.

  Marie Murkin wasn’t too sure. “It would spring both of them from that retirement home. They could move back into the house.”

  “Or into the garage apartment.”

  Marie made a face. Her eyes lifted, and then she went to the window. “There he is.”

  Father Dowling looked out. On one of the benches, the vagrant Marie had fed the other day was comfortably settled, his arm on the back of the bench, looking toward the school.

  “It’s the risk you run when you feed them,” Marie grumbled.

  “Has he come back?”

  “There he is.”

  “I mean for food.”

  It turned out that he hadn’t asked for food the first time, Marie had just assumed he had come to the door for a handout. “I wonder if he came
to see you.”

  “That would be a novelty. When they come to the back door, I assume they’re your suitors.”

  She went off in a huff. Father Dowling continued to look out at the bearded man on the bench. When he decided to go out to him, he left by the front door.

  “Welcome,” he said, taking a seat beside the fellow.

  He had startled the man, causing him to look directly at Father Dowling.

  “We use the school as a center for retired folk now.”

  “Good idea.”

  “You might want to look into it.”

  “Am I eligible?”

  “There are people your age there. Has it changed much?”

  “Changed?”

  “Introibo ad altare Dei.”

  Again the man looked directly at him, his expression difficult to read because of the beard. When he spoke, it was slowly, summoning the words from a distant past. “Ad Deum qui laetificat iuventutem meam.”

  Father Dowling nodded. “There are things one never forgets.”

  “Do you say Mass in Latin still?”

  “Once a week. But without an altar boy.”

  He nodded, waiting for what Father Dowling might say next.

  “Gregory Packer was an altar boy here in your time, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you heard what happened to him?”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Risen from the dead.”

  “What shall I do?”

  Part Three

  1

  The return of Wally Flanagan, apparently from the dead, could not simply be announced. Its effect on Melissa, on his father, and in various degrees on others had to be taken into account before it could be treated as an item of news for the general public. More immediately, Father Dowling would have to make known to Mrs. Murkin the identity of the man he had invited to occupy the guest room in the rectory.

  “The guest room!”

  “Isn’t it ready?”

  “Of course it’s ready.” Marie was finding it difficult to express her amazement in a whisper. Not even the Franciscans had gone this far. She looked beyond Father Dowling and said, still whispering, “Where is he?”

  “In the study.”

  As if on cue, Wally Flanagan emerged. “Father, if it’s any trouble, I can just go back to my motel.”

  “Marie, why don’t you show our guest upstairs to his room.”

  “You’re the boss. Come on.” Marie began to mount the front stairway, then turned. “Do you have any luggage?”

  “We’ll pick that up later, Marie,” Father Dowling said.

  She turned and again started up much like the penitents who mount the Scala Sancta in Rome. Marie might not be going upstairs on her knees, but it was clear that she found the pastor’s orders just slightly this side of the line of duty. In eloquent body language, she informed an indifferent world that if the pastor of St. Hilary’s chose to lodge vagrants in the rectory, bearded nobodies from off the road, then she was resigned to being slain in her bed.

  When she came down, she breezed past the open study door and into her kitchen. Father Dowling followed her. “Sit down, Marie.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “You’re probably wondering why I’ve asked Wally to stay here.”

  “It has crossed my mind.” A double take. “Who?”

  “You can’t be any more surprised than I am.”

  “Did you say Wally?”

  “You must have noticed the family resemblance.”

  “Wally Flanagan?” She mouthed the words, but no sound emerged.

  “Exactly.”

  “Dear God in heaven! But he’s dead.”

  “So we all thought.”

  A look of suspicion crept across Marie’s face. “This is some kind of joke, isn’t it?”

  “Ah, then you did notice.”

  “Notice what?”

  “His wedding ring. That, of course, was the basis of identifying a body as his.”

  “He’s an impostor?”

  “Not at all. Marie, I was sure you would recognize one of the old altar boys of the parish.”

  “They said a funeral Mass for him,” Marie said.

  “So they thought.”

  “But…” Words would not come; she looked at him suspiciously, then pleadingly, finally in total confusion. He sat across from her.

  “You’ve taken this very well, Marie. Not that I’m surprised. I was counting on that. Imagine how this turn of events will strike Melissa Flanagan, Luke Flanagan, others. We are going to have to proceed with great caution and consideration.”

  It helped some, not much, when he likened the situation to the return of the prodigal son. That turned Marie’s thoughts to the preparation of dinner. “I do have some lamb chops.”

  “Good. Good.” He insisted that Marie join them at table.

  But Wally Flanagan had become a vegetarian, and the lamb chops were left to Marie and Father Dowling. “I didn’t make any big promise or anything, Father, but staying at the monastery, I got out of the habit of eating meat. It’s surprising how little you miss it.”

  “Brother Peter’s mother mentioned having seen you when she was visiting her son.”

  “She recognized me?”

  “In logic classes, a distinction would be made. I see a stranger coming, the stranger is Wally, can I say I see Wally coming? She saw a bearded man named Flanagan.”

  “But it was you who made the connection?”

  “If you hadn’t remembered the Latin responses for the prayers at the foot of the altar, I don’t know what I would have done next.”

  “That took me by surprise.”

  “Took you by surprise,” Marie said. Her expression suggested that she was remembering the sins of his past life. “So why did you decide to rise from the dead?”

  He had come upon a newspaper, an old one, one that Maud had left after her visit. The news had ceased to interest him, but he glanced at the paper, and that was how he became aware of events in Fox River. Reading of what had happened in the old family home, and that his father was suspected of murder, made it clear that remaining in monastic seclusion was self-indulgence.

  “I had not been a good son to him.” He said this slowly, then shook his head. “How inadequate that sounds. And then Melissa…”

  Marie melted before this contrition, obviously heartfelt. “Imagine how delighted they will be,” she cried.

  “Once I got here, I began to doubt that. How many I’ve betrayed. So I have been vacillating. I have a habit of disappearing, and I thought maybe I should disappear again. I came here, intending to speak to Father Dowling, but you gave me something to eat, and I lost courage. When I was sitting on one of the benches, I heard a group of older folks from the school mention Melissa. Could it possibly be my Melissa? I wanted to catch at least a glimpse of her.”

  “And did you?”

  “How unchanged she seems.”

  * * *

  So the first hurdle, Marie Murkin, was cleared, and the question arose as to how to proceed. Father Dowling suggested having Phil Keegan over, introducing their guest, and then playing it by ear.

  Marie vetoed this.

  “No, no. Cy Horvath. Nothing could surprise him.”

  “Cy Horvath?” Wally seemed doubtful.

  “You were altar boys together,” Marie said.

  “I can imagine what he thinks of me.”

  “That is the least of your troubles.” Marie was entering into the spirit of the thing. If she could play a role in orchestrating the return of Wally Flanagan, she was more than ready. “Father Dowling likened your return to that of the prodigal son. I doubt that you can expect universal rejoicing.”

  Marie had taken exactly the right tack. It was as a remorseful penitent that Wally Flanagan had returned, and he had few illusions as to the reception he could expect.

  “Are you going to call Cy?” Marie asked.

  Father Dowling rose. “I want to spe
ak to Amos first.”

  Wally said, “I was going to suggest that. I’ve already seen him.”

  In the doorway, Father Dowling turned. “You did?”

  Marie said, “I’ll get these dishes off the table.”

  Wally offered to help.

  “Just be careful. These are the good dishes.”

  2

  Phil Keegan figured that if Amos Cadbury and Roger Dowling thought the man was Wally Flanagan, that was good enough for him. It wasn’t good enough for Cy Horvath, and he didn’t want to talk to the fellow at St. Hilary’s, where he had been accepted as Wally Flanagan.

  “Do you want him to come downtown, Cy?” Father Dowling asked.

  “I’ll pick him up.” Cy paused. “In front of the church.”

  Driving out to St. Hilary’s, Cy wondered if he was the only one who saw the real implications of this supposed return. Say it really was Wally, they might finally have the solution to the killing of Greg Packer. If nothing else, the man who had convinced Amos Cadbury and Roger Dowling had apparently made himself knowledgeable about the life of Wally Flanagan. So why wouldn’t he know about the garage apartment, the alternative entry? Of course, anyone who read the papers knew of that trapdoor and ladder now, but who had known of it at the time Greg was killed? Sandra Bochenski, and that was only because Wally had shown it to her. Whoever this guy was, Cy had personal as well as professional reasons to want to talk to him.

  The man had been sitting on the steps of the church and looked curiously at Cy’s car as he pulled to the curb. Cy waited. The bearded man rose, looking like any other bum, and shuffled toward the car. He bent and looked in. Cy rolled down the window.

  “Hello, Cyril. I expected the Batmobile.” He opened the door and got in. “So you’re still fighting crime.”

  Cy pulled away from the curb. His expression did not show the surprise he had felt at the guy’s mention of his boyhood enthusiasm for Batman comics. “You like Chinese food?”

  “I prefer Italian.”

  So they went to a Papa Vino’s, Cy driving in silence, his passenger seemingly at ease.

  “What do you make of the use they’ve put our old school to?”