by Chaz McGee
‘Why the hell is she here?’ Maggie muttered.
‘The mayor,’ Calvano guessed. ‘It’s just like Gonzales said. He’s called in the media to put pressure on us.’
Maggie pulled into a parking spot as far away from the cameras as she could get. ‘You know what, Adrian?’ she asked. ‘I’d give my eye teeth to find out that, in the end, Mayor Gallagher was involved in his daughter-in-law’s disappearance. Because he deserves payback for this, big time.’
‘Look out,’ Calvano said, pointing to a cluster of reporters who had rounded the corner and were heading for their car. Maggie’s ex-husband led the pack. ‘We’ve been spotted.’
‘I’m not doing this,’ Maggie decided. She put the key back in the ignition and revved the engine. ‘Where are the other teams right now?’
‘Tom and Terrence are at the elementary school, talking to the kids. Elton and Sandy are canvassing the neighbors.’
‘Then we’re going to the school,’ Maggie decided. ‘Better hold on.’
Calvano knew enough about Maggie’s driving to take the warning seriously. He braced himself as she accelerated toward the main exit of the parking lot, then took an abrupt U-turn and screeched out the side entrance, leaving the news crews standing in a cloud of exhaust. They stared after her dumbfounded.
‘Nice move, Gunn,’ Calvano said. ‘Way to make your ex eat your dust.’
‘He’s lucky that’s the only thing I’m making him eat,’ Maggie snapped back.
I was suddenly very glad that I had never been in a position to get on her bad side.
SEVEN
The school where Arcelia Gallagher taught was crowded with families waiting in the hallways to talk to the police. It seemed as if everyone wanted to find Seely. I was not the only one who had been captivated by her.
The children were still too young to understand what might have happened to their teacher. They raced up and down the hallways playing and their parents were too distracted to stop them. They had been forced to hurry past a gauntlet of television cameras as they entered the school with their children in tow and the experience had driven home the realization that Arcelia Gallagher’s disappearance was real.
Two of the classrooms had been converted into staging areas where the detectives could question the children in the hope that at least one had seen something that might prove useful in the investigation.
The two men questioning the kids seemed an unlikely choice at first glance, but if you knew them, like I did, it made sense. One was tall and gaunt with a cadaverous face, but he was the father of four children, the last I’d heard, and comfortable with their fanciful flights of imagination – all of which had to be sorted out from the truth to reveal useful leads.
The other officer was a bear of a man whose father owned the Polish restaurant in town. Terrence Palicki must have eaten at it five times a day growing up because he was well over six feet tall and as wide as a grizzly. He was also a gentle giant. I remembered him as one of the few people who had been unfailingly kind to me back when I was alive and bumbling through my cases. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body. At the moment, he was questioning a small boy with a remarkably round head and runny nose. Two of his classmates stood nearby, gazing at Terrence with awe.
‘What did he look like?’ Terrence was asking the little guy, who mostly seemed interested in the gold badge pinned to the detective’s jacket pocket. Maggie and Calvano were waiting against one wall for Terrence to finish before they checked in. Both were the subjects of unabashed staring by a line of five-year-olds. Maggie barely seemed to notice their presence, but Calvano winked at a few and flashed his gun at a row of little boys. He had a lot of nieces and nephews and was comfortable with humans that barely reached his waist, even though he had none of his own.
The little boy with the round head picked up a crayon and bashed it into the top of the desk, enjoying the opportunity to smash something. ‘I don’t know,’ he told Terrence, concerned solely with the destruction of his crayon. ‘He looked like my dad.’
Now if it had been me, I would’ve torn my hair out long ago and left the task to someone else, but Terrence had unlimited patience. ‘What does your dad look like?’ he asked the child. ‘What color hair does he have? Is he taller than me?’
The little boy stared at Terrence. ‘No one is taller than you.’
‘What about his hair? What color was it?’
‘Like mine. I look like my daddy so my daddy looks like me,’ the boy explained proudly.
Terrence sighed. He had limits after all. He shifted in the chair, which was way too small for him, and the whole room seemed to tremble. ‘You have blond hair,’ he pointed out. ‘Did the man you saw at the fence also have blond hair?’
The little boy nodded, but one of his classmates could no longer stand by and listen to his nonsense. ‘Liar!’ an Hispanic boy with a buzz cut interrupted. ‘The man had brown skin like mine and his hair looked like mine.’
The first boy looked at his classmate with scorn. ‘I think I can tell the difference between a Mexican and a ’Merican.’
Oh yes, it started young.
‘So you saw the man at the fence talking to Seely, too?’ Terrence asked the second boy.
The boy nodded. His skin was the color of dried autumn leaves. His eyes were huge and he stuck his thumb in his mouth for comfort as he contemplated Terrence’s size.
‘Was this a few days ago?’ Terrence said encouragingly, his voice gentle as he tried to wheedle more information out of the boy.
‘No,’ the little boy said stubbornly. ‘It was the day we had the birthday cake for Amy.’
Terrence sighed and wrote something down in his notebook, but the first little boy felt his honor had been maligned and was not going to let the matter stand.
‘Edgar’s lying,’ he said, glaring at his classmate. ‘I saw the man and he had blond hair like me.’
‘Did not!’ Edgar shouted back.
Terrence was starting to sweat. Two little alpha boys were about to go at it and he was trying to figure out what he could do about it, given that the stun gun and pepper spray were out of the question.
‘Boys are so dumb,’ a high-pitched voice interrupted. A little girl with curly red hair stood a few feet away, arms crossed as she shook her head at them like she was their mother.
The little girl looked from one boy to the other. Her voice dripped with scorn as she said to Terrence, ‘Did you ever think that maybe there were two men at the fence. Huh? Did any of you think of that?’ She was actually tapping her foot on the floor, a caricature of a movie mother. She was going to make someone miserable one day.
‘Good point,’ Terrence told the little girl. ‘Why don’t you come over here and talk to me some more?’
Like I said: infinite patience.
With Maggie and Calvano’s help, they finished questioning the children within an hour while I amused myself by making faces at the little squirts – to no avail, as they could not see me – and then wandered outside to haunt the media crowd for a while. Maggie’s ex-husband, Skip Bostwick, was there, being an even bigger jerk than he looked like. He was sucking up to the better-known newscasters with a zeal that only lifetime brown-nosers can achieve. I wandered back inside where the families were gradually trickling out, until just the detectives were left in the classroom discussing what they had learned. The only possible lead they had uncovered came back to the two little boys and their belief that the missing teacher had been talking to a man, or two men, depending on who you believed, through the back fence of the playground at various times the week before. One boy insisted the man had been blond and that Seely had been angry at him, shouting at him to go away and leave them all alone. The other little boy had stuck fast to his insistence that the man had been Mexican and that his teacher had seemed sad, not angry, after she had talked to the man. Neither boy, nor the red-haired girl, knew more and their classmates had not noticed anyone talking to their teacher at all.
‘It’s not a lot to go on,’ Maggie said with resignation.
‘Better than nothing,’ Calvano said. ‘And it might mean something.’
‘Did any of the parents know anything?’ Maggie asked.
Terrence shook his head. ‘We didn’t have time to talk with them one-on-one, but I asked anyone with information to come forward and I gave them plenty of opportunity to do so. I am sure they would have spoken up if they had anything. There is not a parent in the school who doesn’t love that woman. I don’t know what else she had going on in her life, but our missing girl must’ve been one hell of a teacher.’
Maggie’s frustration was obvious. She glanced out the window where the camera crews were starting to pack up in the distance.
‘What’s that all about?’ Terrence asked. ‘The camera crews got here soon after we did.’
‘Apparently, there is nothing else going on in America right now,’ Maggie said bitterly. ‘We’re the main show until some moron who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else kills his wife and hides her body.’
‘You sure that’s not what happened here?’ Terrence asked.
‘We’re not sure of anything,’ Maggie admitted, shaking her head in dismay.
EIGHT
Danny Gallagher was ready to go home, but home was out of the question. I had claimed the back seat of Father Sojak’s car when he arrived at the hospital to pick up Danny later that night. I thought I might learn something useful if I tagged along with them. Unfortunately, Danny sat silent, still in shock, throughout the entire ride and Father Sojak turned out to be the kind of person who doesn’t like to push someone into sharing. The silence had been heavy and depressing. Now, the three of us were staring at a gauntlet of media blocking the entrance to Danny’s farm.
‘Oh, God,’ Danny muttered.
‘I’ll take you to the rectory,’ Father Sojak decided. ‘You can stay in one of our guest bedrooms.’
Danny did not answer. Someone in the crowd had recognized him and a camera crew started sprinting toward the car. Danny shielded his face while the priest turned the car around in a cloud of dust and sped back toward town, leaving the cameraman covered in dirt. I peered out the back window and stuck my tongue out at the media pack, enjoying one of the perks of not being seen. I was certain we would be followed, but none of the news vans took chase. It did not take long for me to realize that we had another tail, however. Maybe they didn’t care whether or not they were spotted, or maybe they were just lousy at it, but it was pretty obvious that Maggie and Calvano intended to follow Danny Gallagher wherever he went. They picked us up on the highway and followed us all the way through town. But when we reached the parking lot of St Raphael’s, Maggie pulled their car behind a van where it would not be seen and stayed put. The priest was leading a still-silent Danny Gallagher inside the church, so I took the opportunity to see what Maggie and Calvano were up to.
They were arguing. I was astonished to find that Calvano wanted to go inside alone to talk to the priest. He usually depended on Maggie to take the lead in everything they did. But this time he was adamant. ‘Look, I don’t want to offend you, but the dude is clearly uncomfortable around women,’ he said. ‘You make him nervous.’
‘Gee,’ Maggie said sarcastically. ‘I wonder why that is?’
‘Look, you have to respect his religion. Isn’t it your religion, too?’
Maggie gave Calvano a look of disgust. ‘Fine. Go in and talk to the guy alone if you think it will get us anywhere. But steer away from Danny for now. I’ll stay out here and wait to see if he leaves, just in case.’
‘Don’t be mad at me. I just want to get another take on if he’s hiding something,’ Calvano said.
‘Oh, he’s hiding something,’ Maggie told him. She slumped back against the seat, pulled out her cellphone and began reading what I suspected was a string of e-mails from Gonzales. I had seldom seen her in such a bad mood and I knew the appearance of her ex-husband had everything to do with it. I was tempted to keep her company – after all, that’s what invisible friends are for – but I was curious to watch Calvano in action.
I had never been a very good Catholic, not even when I was young and the ultimate honor had been to be chosen by the priests to serve as an altar boy at Christmas and Easter mass. I had always argued with my parents, kicking and screaming, in fact, as I was dragged from the car and forced to report for duty. Needless to say, I had never been chosen for important masses. Then again, I had never had to spend time alone with a priest, either, and maybe that was good. Our town had become fiercely divided on the topic of priests in recent years, with half of them – the Catholic half – vigorously defending the local fathers from speculation even as scandal gripped the church worldwide. The other half pretty much just assumed they were all perverts and kept their children as far away from them as possible. It was a sad state of affairs.
Calvano clearly weighed in with the pro-Catholic half. It was as if he pulled himself together and solidified somehow before he entered the church, his steps slowing as he reached the front doors. I slipped in behind him, curious to know what it felt like to be in St Raphael’s again after so many years. I had been there a few times as a child and it was, by far, the most beautiful Catholic church in the county. A high dome soared above floor-to-ceiling stained-glass windows and the floors were polished marble. The lighting was muted and red votive candles caused shadows to dance across the paneled walls. The sanctuary smelled like melting wax. There were no electric votives at St Raphael’s. This was old-school Catholicism and most of the parishioners were pretty old-school themselves.
The church was empty except for one young Hispanic woman who sat in the front pew as her fingers flew over her rosary beads. If St Raphael was anything like the Catholic church my family attended on the other side of town, membership had soared in recent years, rising with the Mexican population.
Calvano dipped his fingers into the holy water that shimmered in a basin near the front door and automatically crossed himself, a gesture now found only among older church members. I figured he would head for the side door that led to a small courtyard and the rectory where the priests and nuns lived, but Calvano surprised me. He walked about halfway down the middle aisle, then knelt on one knee, crossed himself, rose, and entered one of the pews. He knelt again and began to pray.
I cannot actually read people’s minds. I have had more success with memories. But I can often share in what people are feeling and I found the fallout from Calvano’s prayers to be extraordinary. I was sitting in the row behind him when I felt a blanket of cool, comforting air settle in around me. I felt compelled to look up and, as I did so, the light from the votive candles seemed to dance across the jewel tones of the stained-glass windows, sending droplets of fiery red, golden yellow and sapphire blue spinning over the white marble floor. My whole being filled with a warm, comforting liquid, a feeling I had not experienced since I was a young child and my grandmother held me in her lap. I felt a glow somewhere deep inside me and my greatest fear – that I might never be able to leave this plane – disappeared under its power. It was as if infinite possibilities had been offered to me and all I had to do to obtain them was to believe. I was rocked by the sensation. I felt comforted and exalted and powerful all at the same time. I felt renewed and humbled and honored.
I do not think Calvano felt what I did. I think that only someone in my state of being could experience what I had. But I was deeply grateful to know that being the way I was, trapped between the living and the dead, in an existence which brought so much loneliness, also had its advantages.
Calvano finished his prayers and rose. Reluctantly I went with him. I’d felt a glimpse of something greater waiting for me one day. It made leaving behind what I had felt all that much harder, but what choice did I have? My afterlife is apparently among the living.
I knew the rectory at St Raphael’s would be much the same as the one so familiar to me from attending St Michael’s. I was right. Behind
the church, surrounded by a parking lot, sprawled a low, unremarkable building that housed the living quarters of the priests and a handful of nuns who served the church. There was nothing colorful or stylish about their rooms. Yet somehow, there was a relief in the sparseness of the outdated furniture and bare walls. This was not a place of material excess.
An old priest was fast asleep in a leather armchair by a window, his snores filling a tiny library next to the kitchen. I looked around to see where everyone else had gone.
Calvano had been met by an older nun who was leading him back to Father Sojak with a friendliness that was a little too effusive to be genuine. The priest was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea in front of him. The room was filled with melancholy. He did not look surprised to see Calvano. He merely shrugged and Calvano sat next to him with a poise I was not used to seeing in him.
‘Where’s Danny?’ Calvano asked.
The priest nodded toward the doorway. ‘He’s putting his things away in his room. Can’t you do something about the situation at his house? It’s not good for him to stay here. He’s afraid that his wife may try to come home and that he won’t be there. Or that someone may call and ask for money for her and he won’t be there to answer it.’
He wanted Calvano to control the media besieging Danny’s farm. Calvano knew the task was impossible. ‘His home and cellphones are already being routed to the department in case someone calls about his wife, and I’ll see if the commander will put a couple of patrol cars on the farm,’ he promised. ‘But Father, are you sure you want to get involved?’
The priest understood the real meaning behind Calvano’s words. He was warning him that Danny Gallagher could well be guilty. And if he was, that he could pull Father Sojak, or even all of St Raphael’s, down with him.
