The Color of Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  Chapter 16

  The passageway outside the Oakland church basement door was packed with shopping carts, every one of them heaped with someone’s worldly goods: bedding, clothes, green trash bags full of cans and bottles redeemable for cash. A marmalade cat groomed herself in the sun atop the pile in one cart while a tired old mutt slept in the shade under another. A rich, human effluence filled the air as we made our way through the jumble.

  The church ladies were just finishing with lunch service in the big fellowship hall. A few stragglers among their customers lingered over coffee, some in conversational groups, others off by themselves except for maybe the voices in their heads. A ragged man with a long, tangled beard played Rhapsody in Blue on the old upright piano at the far end of the room. The piano needed tuning, but he played with such expression, such beautiful phrasing that Max and I paused to listen before we went in search of Father John.

  “He said he needed to sit down for a minute,” a woman clearing a table told us. “You might go up and check in the sanctuary. He enjoys the solitude there after the worst of the noise down here is over for the day.”

  We found the sanctuary easily enough, but not Father John. The vast chamber was lit only by sunlight streaming through the stained glass windows on the east side of the chancel, very pretty, but not very useful. It took a moment for our eyes to adjust, but when they did we still saw no John; I had expected to find him on his knees before the chancel rail. I was about to suggest that we look elsewhere when I heard a little snore. We walked down the center aisle looking into the pews on either side until we found him, stretched out, his apron wadded under his head for a pillow. I sat down next to his feet and gave the toe of his sneaker a shake.

  He awoke with a snort, seemed disoriented for a moment after he opened his eyes wide. Still lying on his back, he said, “Tell me I didn’t die in my sleep and here’s an angel come to take me away.”

  Max laughed. “No such luck, Padre.”

  John raised his head to look around me for the source of that voice. When he saw it was Max, he sat up and swung his feet to the floor.

  “Well if it isn’t that old sinner, Max Duchamps.” He offered his hand to my uncle. “Good to see you, friend.”

  “Been a while,” Max said. He nodded toward the altar. “You do realize this is a Presbyterian church, John.”

  Father John, smiling, shrugged, good-naturedly dismissive. “Last I heard, the Presbyterians were Christians in good standing. They also made their commercial-grade kitchen available to feed the hungry, so who am I to quibble?”

  “Are you all right?” I asked him.

  “Oh, sure.” He rubbed his cheeks. “The chemo knocks me out sometimes. I have found that a house of worship on Monday mornings is just about the quietest place in town to catch a few Zs.

  “So?” He turned an accusatory eye on me. “You told me you were too busy to help with lunch, but here you are. What brings you, child?”

  I felt tongue-tied. I had delivered the sort of bad news I had come to give him before, but it does not get easier. Ever. I managed to say, “It’s about Larry Nordquist.”

  “Not good news, I fear, about my AWOL cook.”

  “Father John.” I put my arm around his shoulder. “Larry’s body was found this morning. He probably passed away sometime Saturday night.”

  “Ah.” A shaft of blue light crossed his face as he looked up, crossed himself. A set of rosary beads appeared out of his pocket, wrapped around his hand. After a moment, as if speaking to no one in particular, he said, “I knew when I didn’t see him for a while that something had happened to him, but I didn’t expect that. No, not that. Not that.”

  We sat in the sepulchral quiet of the sanctuary for a bit before Father John let out a long breath.

  “An accident?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t look that way,” I said. “And not by his own hand.”

  “Thank you for telling me.”

  Max asked, “Do you know how to get in touch with his family?”

  “I do.” After another contemplative breath or two, he rose to his feet. “Can you give me a lift back to the rectory? There are calls to make.”

  For the trip back to Berkeley, I conceded the passenger seat of Beto’s delivery van to Father John and climbed into the back. I upended a plastic milk crate, folded a shop rug to use as a cushion, and made a seat of sorts in the pass-through space between the two front seats. It was a familiar enough arrangement. From time to time, on weekends when I was in high school, if Bart needed servers for an event he was catering, Beto would press a few of his friends into service and we would ride to the event in the back of the van with the food. Bart worked us hard but he paid us well; I remembered it being fun.

  The service pans and trays that had been used to deliver Hungry Ghosts party leftovers to the soup kitchen, now empty and carefully washed, were stowed on a shelf near the back door, ready for return to Beto’s deli. The pans and trays rattled around a bit, but overall, the short trip wasn’t unduly uncomfortable or unpleasant.

  Max broke the silence that had settled over the cab. “John, how do you handle the weight of all the secrets you have to keep?”

  Father John thought for a moment. “The confidences of the confessional don’t belong to me. I pass messages on to the boss upstairs and counsel the sinner to repent. And to fix his mess.”

  “Can you really do that, just hand it off?”

  Father John shook his head. “Not always. Sometimes what I hear makes my heart feel heavy. Hell, sometimes what I hear curls my toes. Why do you ask, counselor? Is something weighing on you?”

  “At any given moment? You bet,” Max said with a sardonic little chortle. “Lordy, the crap I hear from my clients. But my job isn’t fixing them or saving their immortal souls. All I have to do is represent their issues before the law. Sometimes, though, it’s damn hard to sit by and do nothing when I’m told something that could really help someone out, but I can’t say a damn word.”

  Father John reached across the space between their seats and clamped a hand on Max’s shoulder. Smiling, he said, “Have you tried going to confession, my son, to unburden your soul?”

  Max laughed. “I gave that up a long time ago, Padre.”

  “If I put a couple of easy chairs and a bottle of good scotch in the confessional, counselor, would you give it a try?”

  “I might.” Max reached back and tapped my knee. “What are your plans tonight?”

  “Jean-Paul is flying in,” I said. “So you’re relieved of duty.”

  “So, John,” Max said. “You up for a steak dinner?”

  “I know just the place,” Father John said. “Pick me up at seven.”

  We dropped off Father John at the rectory and headed down Shattuck. As soon as we pulled the van into its parking space in the alley behind the deli, Beto started making lunch for Max and me. Kevin was already gone, and the lunch-hour crowd was beginning to thin. Max and I found a table near the front windows and sat down.

  “How was it riding in back, Maggie?” Beto asked as he set pastrami on rye in front of us. He uncorked a frosted bottle of prosecco and poured it into three tall flutes; it had been that kind of a day.

  “It was nostalgic,” I said, clinking my glass to his as he pulled out the chair next to Max. “Like the old days, when we went on jobs with your dad. Do you still do catering?”

  “Oh, sure. More, actually. We cater a lot of lunch and breakfast meetings at Cal and Rotary, that sort of thing. When Dad still had the place alone, because those gigs always come at slam time here in the store, all he could ever do was drop off food platters and run back to work the counter. By the time I came aboard, he was already slowing down, so catering pretty much stayed status quo. But once our kids were in school, Zaida took over that end of the business, and she’s done a fantastic job, really grown it. She brought in Auntie Quynh to make desserts and help serve. If it’s a really big event, she hires her friends to do the serving, just like in t
he old days when Dad hired us on weekends. Now they have all the business they can handle.” Beto grinned. “I’m so proud of her.”

  “That’s just great,” Max said. “Really great.”

  “It is,” I said. I remembered that his mom used to work in the store during the lunch-hour rush. She’d see Beto off to school, and then she’d walk over; Mrs. B never drove a car.

  “Any new word on your dad?” I asked Beto.

  He shook his head.

  “I’ll go over and see him this afternoon sometime.”

  “He’d like that,” he said. “Look, if you’re going to the hospital, could you do me a big favor? Dad asked for a couple of things, but Zaida and Auntie are busy getting ready for a dinner gig and I can’t get away until closing. If you’d go by the house and get a bag for him, it would be a big help. Auntie will be at the house frosting cakes until four.”

  “I’m happy to help,” I said.

  My phone buzzed; it was Kevin, so I stayed where I was and took the call.

  He asked, “You get Father John squared away?”

  “We did. He’s going to call Larry’s family.”

  “I’ll tell the chief.”

  “You’re really off the case, then?”

  “Yeah.” There was a pause. “Hey, Maggie, the D.A. is filing charges against Lacy for the shooting. Arraignment is scheduled for Wednesday.”

  “That’s rough,” I said. “Max is here. Do you need him?”

  “No, but thanks. He put me on to a good local guy. On the advice of Max, we’ve started the process of getting Lacy formally committed to a long-term program. Her seventy-two-hour hold runs out tomorrow. We want her to be inside when the papers are served.”

  “Makes sense,” I said.

  “You’ll be called to make a statement.”

  “I don’t have much to tell, Kev. I didn’t see who shot at us.”

  “They might ask you about some other things, too.”

  “We’ll worry about that if it happens.”

  “Yeah. Hey, maybe I should have a word with Max.”

  “Hold on.” I handed the phone to Max and he walked outside with it.

  Beto picked up his empty plate and stood. “Let’s hope they can keep Lacy in the hospital long enough this time to do her some good.”

  With that, he walked away to tend to customers.

  I finished my sandwich, visited the ladies’ room, and came back to find Max waiting for me.

  “The cops are sending a car to drive us back to the house,” Max said.

  “Where’s Larry?” I asked.

  “He’s at the morgue. The crime analyst took the Dumpster somewhere they can comb through everything in it, so the police are finished at the house.”

  “Bless their hearts,” I said, fighting to keep the pastrami down as I envisioned the forensic technicians going through everything in that putrescent iron box. I hoped they had good face masks and gloves.

  A police cruiser pulled up outside and we said our good-byes to Beto. When we drove up to the front of the house, I looked at the mess left behind by police, gawkers, and media folks with dismay. The flower borders I had been so careful to protect from truck wheels all morning had been churned underfoot. I said a silent apology to my dad, and called Tosh Sato for advice. Right off, Mr. Sato asked about the Chrysler roses that formed the outer red band of Dad’s rainbows of flowers.

  “Ground to confetti,” I said.

  When he finished swearing, he gave me instructions for gathering the remains and putting them in water; maybe he could salvage cuttings. He’d be over in the morning with some new plants. We could not restore the borders to their former glory, but we could make them presentable.

  While Max headed inside the house to make sure all was secure, I pulled on Dad’s heavy leather rose-trimming gauntlets and did as instructed, gathered the broken, thorny remains of the roses and set them in buckets with water. I thought of my dad, digging in the dirt, his mind light-years away as he worked through some thorny physics conundrum or another, searching for patterns, always searching for patterns.

  I got out the big shop broom and began sweeping up the plant mess. No longer lined up in tidy color tiers, their petals were all in a jumble, the way bands of visible light might look if they were disassembled by a shattered prism.

  It occurred to me that no one except my family would understand the significance of Dad’s planting pattern. Sure, they made a pretty rainbow, but why they made a rainbow had meaning only for us, the targets of Dad’s lessons about the optical spectrum. Any sort of plant would do to replace them, because the house’s tenants would likely not care about the terahertz waves in the color blue. Or red, or yellow, or...

  “Dammit, Dad,” I muttered. Still carrying the broom, I ran through the garage and stood in the middle of the backyard, looking at the intact rainbow flower borders, the rose beds, the climbing vines on trellises, the vegetables, and I swore again.

  I called out, “Max!”

  He came out the back door with a phone to his ear. As he walked toward me, he held up a finger for me to wait while he finished his call.

  “I’m afraid to ask,” he said, pocketing his phone. “But what now?”

  “Tell me what you see?”

  He shrugged, surveyed the yard. “Grass, flowers, green beans and tomatoes.”

  “I should have asked, what don’t you see?”

  Looking around again, he said, “I need a hint.”

  “White,” I said. “You don’t see white.”

  I pointed to the closest flower border, raging with midsummer color, and said, “R, O, Y, G, B, I, V.”

  He threw back his head and laughed. “Okay, I get it. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet—the colors of the visible spectrum. And no, of course you don’t see white. White has no hue, it is the sunlight itself.”

  “Dad put you through the color drill, too, did he?”

  “Yep, first year physics in high school. You can’t have thought I’d be spared the Al Duchamps lesson on optics can you? Who do you think he practiced that stuff on before he subjected you to it? Me, his baby brother, that’s who. Did he make you read Newton, too?”

  “Of course he did. I left Dad’s copy of Opticks on a shelf in the den for the edification of the tenants and their children.”

  “Fat chance anyone will pick it up.” He looked around, puzzled. “What brought that up?”

  “Dad didn’t plant white roses, or white anything else.”

  “I see that.”

  “But every year he took white roses to the Bartolinis’ Hungry Ghosts party as an offering to Mrs. B’s spirit.”

  “A good Catholic boy like your father taking offerings to a ghost?”

  “Aha!” I whapped him on the back a little harder than I intended to and rubbed the place to make any sting go away. “The flowers came from someone else. But Bart always thought they were from Mom and Dad. This year Beto and I told Bart that Khanh Duc sent the flowers. And they got tossed out.”

  “By Bart?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Jean-Paul and I saw the bouquet, still in its vase, on the trashcan when we left the party. It was around that time that, according to Beto, Bart had a meltdown and got sent to bed. Later in the night he had a sort of mini-stroke.”

  “Where are you going with this?”

  “I have no clue.”

  “Don’t tell me that.” Max wrapped his hand around my upper arm the way he had when I was little and was intent on launching into some stupid daredevil stunt that Max was equally intent on stopping. “You have something in mind, and no matter what it is, I know and you know that I’ll get dragged into it.”

  “That would be up to you, though, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, my beloved. Yes. So, what’s up?”

  I looked into his bright blue eyes, Dad’s eyes. “Max, what I know is, you all—you, Mom, Dad, Gracie, Dr. Ben, Mr. Sato, Father John, and I don’t know who else—have a great capacity for ke
eping secrets.”

  “Are we talking about Isabelle now?”

  “In part,” I said. “My friend Beto’s mother was murdered in a terrible way. A very terrible way. Dad and Ben, I believe, knew something. Mom is protecting someone or something. And Gracie, I think, is protecting Mom. Larry may have died because he owned some part of that secret. And you? You told Father John that you are weighted down by all the crap you have to keep to yourself.”

  “I said that?”

  “All but,” I said. “Help me, Max. What do you know?”

  He shook his head. “When Tina died, I was practicing law in Los Angeles. I was out of that loop entirely.”

  “Entirely?” I said, very skeptical.

  He thought for a moment. “Mostly. I knew Tina, of course. Your mom had me volunteer for a couple of Legal Aid shifts at the refugee camp in the Presidio and Tina was my translator. I don’t remember seeing much of her after that.”

  “Did you do any legal work for Mrs. B?”

  “Yeah, some,” he said. “I don’t remember all of it, but the big issue was her sister, Quynh. A lot of people were worried about relatives that stayed behind in Vietnam, lots of rumors that the relatives were being punished because of them. I helped them go through the International Red Cross—la Croix-Rouge—and the Swiss Embassy to get information. She needed help finding Quynh.”

  “And you found Quynh?”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “We traced her to a re-education camp up near Hue, but then she disappeared. There was a kind of information underground among the refugee community that could sometimes get news out of Vietnam, or into Vietnam. But Tina didn’t trust them. She said they were spies for the communists, so we kept searching through official channels, but she died before Quynh was located.”

  “How did Quynh get out?”

  He held up his empty palms. “One day she called Bart from a refugee camp in Hong Kong. I have no idea how she got there.”

  I said, “I think it’s time to go see Bart at the hospital.”

  “Just to pay your respects, I hope. He’s a sick man.”

  “Of course, just to pay my respects. Beto asked me to stop by the house and get some things Bart wants.”