Sham Rock

by Ralph McInerny

  “Ah, the private detective.”

  Roger was looking around, fascinated. From the outside, it was simply a storefront with OUR LADY OF THE ROAD lettered on it, and beneath it WELCOME. In one corner of the large room was a rack on which old clothes hung, with beneath it a box of shoes. The furniture would have been used when she acquired it, and it had borne the weight of who knew how many wandering souls that had found their way here for a meal and some respite from their loneliness and defeat. On every face that stared at Roger he could read a different story of a life gone wrong, a will weakened to passivity.

  Beth showed them around, glowingly proud of a center that for most would have seemed a desolate place, some level of ante-purgatory from which release was distant. The kitchen, with its massive stove on which a kettle simmered, giving off the aroma of stew, was in the charge of a tall, bearded fellow in a Cubs hat who kept backing away as if seeking invisibility.

  Finally they settled in what she called her office, a box of a room with a dusty window, a table on which Roger noticed a little red book from which a golden ribbon peeked. There were chairs, but looking at them and then at Roger, Beth laughed. She went to the door. “Q, bring in one of the large chairs, would you?”

  A minute later the man in the Cubs hat pushed in a more or less adequate chair, and Roger settled into it. The Cubs hat closed the door of the office when he left.

  “So,” Beth said when they were all seated.

  “You say David Williams called you?”

  “Isn’t that amazing? After nearly twenty years. To think he once professed to be undyingly in love with me.”

  “I suppose he told you about the things Brother Joachim sent to the Notre Dame archives.”

  “He said he would leave that to you. At least Pat, Brother Joachim, sends me a Christmas card each year.” She sighed. “Sometimes I’m tempted to escape to a convent.”

  “Escape?”

  “Elsewhere always seems easier, doesn’t it?”

  Phil picked up a magazine from the table, looked at it, put it back. Beth thought he must be wishing he had stayed at the motel. She said to him, “So what are you detecting?”

  “Roger tells a better story than I do.”

  Roger told her then of Joachim’s donation to the archives. “It was all about the disappearance of his classmate Timothy Quinn. He claimed to have killed him.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Well, it’s false. He wrote a story about it,” Phil said.

  “That’s why I brought it along.” Roger handed her the story, and she hunched in her chair as she read it. Then she read it again.

  “Just a story,” she said, giving it back to Roger.

  “He described where he had buried the body, but all that was found there was a hatchet and what looked like human bones.”

  “Where did he say he buried the body?” Her manner had changed, and she leaned anxiously toward Roger as she asked.

  “Do you remember the Log Chapel?”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I’ve told you all that was found. Joachim also left David Williams a considerable amount of money.”

  “Where would a monk get money?”

  “He had made the bequest before entering Gethsemani. He had inherited it from an uncle.”

  “And he gave it to David Williams?”

  “That surprises you?”

  She thought for a moment. “I don’t know why it should, but it does.”

  “Perhaps because he was a rival.”

  “Oh, he was never that.”

  “No.”

  “Sometimes I think that the only one of the three I really loved was David. Of course, that’s hindsight. Water long since over the dam.”

  “Where on earth do you think Quinn went when he disappeared?”

  The chair she sat in was a swivel chair, relic of some long-ago office. She turned in it slowly as if in search of true north. Then she rose. “Excuse me for a moment.”

  When they were alone, Phil said, “Well, it was a nice drive anyway.”

  “What do you think of her?”

  “Is she a nun?”

  “Not quite.”

  The door opened and Beth came back, alone, a frown on her face. “He’s gone.”

  “Who?”

  “Q. Timothy. Timothy Quinn.”

  8

  AFTER BETH HANRAHAN’S AMAZING statement that Timothy Quinn was alive and well and working with her at Our Lady of the Road, Phil rushed off to try to locate the man who had a habit of disappearing.

  Beth dismissed any suggestion that there was something amiss in her keeping Timothy Quinn’s secret. “Who could be hurt by his absence? He has no relatives to speak of. Besides, it was all so long ago.”

  “Unfortunately, interest in the matter has been stirred up by Brother Joachim’s contribution to the Notre Dame archives.”

  She considered that. “What on earth did he expect to accomplish?”

  “He seemed convinced that Timothy had come to a violent end.”

  “That’s nonsense.”

  “Surely you didn’t think at the time Quinn had just evaporated.”

  She was silent for a moment. “No. His disappearance had a devastating effect on all of us.”

  The conversation could have gone on, in circles, but Roger returned to the fascinating topic of Beth’s refuge for the hungry and homeless. “Do you live here?”

  “Oh, no. I kept the studio upstairs after I opened the center.”

  “Studio.”

  “I was an aspiring artist.”

  “Is that yours?”

  On the wall was a picture in the form of a stained glass window featuring Dorothy Day. It was Beth’s.

  “So you haven’t given it up?”

  “I don’t have much time for it now, but it is a blessed relief when things get hectic here.”

  “Could I see the studio?”

  “You’ll have to climb some steep stairs.”

  Roger heaved himself to his feet and threw back his shoulders, an alpine climber about to brave the Matterhorn. “No problem,” he said. “No problem at all.”

  She was right about the stairs. There was a railing set rather insecurely in the wall on which it would have been unwise to rely. At the top of the stairs, Beth opened the door, and a breathless Roger walked in to face the man in a Cubs cap. Timothy Quinn. He looked accusingly at Beth. Had she advised him to take refuge in her studio?

  “Q,” she said, “you’ve done nothing wrong. Please relax.” Timothy Quinn looked like one of Beth’s guests rather than a co-worker—spare and rangy, a tousled beard, wild hair escaping from the edges of his cap. He wore bib overalls and a flannel shirt. He had kicked off his cowboy boots and was in socks that exhibited his big toes to the world.

  “Take those off, Q, and I’ll darn them.”

  Obediently Timothy Quinn sat and began to pull off his woolen socks.

  Roger had gone to the easel and was studying the half-finished portrait there. “David Williams?” he asked.

  “His telephone call prompted that. I’m working from photographs, newspaper photographs. Go ahead and say it, it’s not very good.”

  Quinn joined Roger at the easel and glared at the canvas. “That sonofabitch.”

  Not a propitious note on which to tell him of what Brother Joachim had sent to the Notre Dame archives. “He thought you had been killed by Dave Williams.”

  “He’s the one who should have been killed. That’s why I took off.”

  “You were afraid?”

  “Afraid that I would kill him if I didn’t.”

  “They found your hatchet, Q,” Beth said.

  “Where?”

  Roger described digging beneath the boulder that Brother Joachim had said marked the remains of Timothy Quinn. Beth listened nervously.

  “What is Pat up to, Beth?” Quinn asked.

  “I think I know,” Beth said.

  Roger and Q waited, but she did not go on. “It’s n
othing important.”

  “Tell me,” Roger urged.

  “It’s personal.”

  It was half an hour later that Phil came up the stairway to the studio. He looked at Quinn with disgust, the reaction of a man who had just returned from a wild goose chase. He asked Beth for the use of her phone and called the police, telling them to call off the search for Timothy Quinn.

  Prompted by Beth, Timothy Quinn told the story of his long-ago disappearance. He had gone out to the toll road entrance booth and managed to get a ride to Chicago. From there he took the train to California. San Diego. The manual jobs he took paid better than he would have thought and all the beaches made it seem he was on vacation. After several years of that, he enlisted in the army and ended up getting shot at in Baghdad. Eventually, he received a serious wound and was flown off to a hospital ship. His enlistment ended while he was recovering, and he reenlisted. It seemed the line of least resistance. Finally, he ended up back in San Diego, with another chance to renew his life. Nurses had brought him back editions of the South Bend paper and he read about his disappearance and presumed death. After discharge, he drifted back to Indiana with the vague idea that he would tell someone what had happened. Back on campus, he found that the hidden life still had him in its grips.

  “You went back to Notre Dame?”

  “I got a job on the grounds crew at the golf course, mowing fairways, watering greens. After work, I would wander around the campus, remembering.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Just the one summer. It was all changed.”

  Then he came upon a write-up of the work Beth was doing in Minneapolis. His tone altered as he spoke of Beth and it was clear that his long-ago love had survived his wanderings.

  “It was weeks before he told me who he was,” Beth said. “I thought he was kidding, but all he had to do was recall those days and I knew he was who he said he was. So I let him stay.”

  Quinn’s brown eyes rolled to her as a dog’s might roll to its mistress. One of his feet began to thump upon the floor.

  “He’s not much help,” she said cheerily, “but like the others, he has no place to go.”

  At the far end of the studio was a bed, the area marked off by a planter luxuriant with forty shades of green. A suspicious mind might have wondered how far the reunion of Beth and Quinn had taken them. Roger dismissed the thought as unworthy. Whatever Quinn’s interpretation of her willingness to let him stay, it clearly differed from hers.

  As was his habit, Roger was now wandering around inspecting whatever books were in the studio. “The Woman Who Was Poor,” he cried. “Léon Bloy.”

  “Is that how you pronounce it?”

  Roger opened the book and read. “‘There is only one tragedy, not to be a saint.’”

  “Isn’t that lovely?” Beth said.

  Quinn looked despondent.

  “You and Dave Williams ought to get together,” Roger suggested.

  “It’s a little late for that.” There was a wistful tone in her voice. Quinn got up and kicked one of his boots across the room.

  “What now?” Phil said.

  “We have accomplished our mission,” Roger said. “Timothy, would you mind coming back to Notre Dame with us, to help clear things up?”

  “Not on your life.”

  “I’ll come with you and explain everything,” Beth said suddenly. “Q can look after things while I’m gone.”

  9

  A STIPULATION OF BETH HANRAHAN’S returning to Notre Dame was that absolutely no fuss was to be made. She would explain what had happened, remove any lingering sense of fault on the part of the university, and then return to her work in Minneapolis. For all that, the trip was so much a departure from what had become the even tenor of her ways that she begged to be taken to the new shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe at La Crosse, Wisconsin, a stop that did not take them far out of their way. They stayed overnight in La Crosse since Beth did not want simply to pop in and out of the shrine but to attend Mass as well.

  Her second suggestion, an Orthodox church in Chicago where an icon of Mary was said to weep, was more difficult. It took Phil hours to find the place, relying on questioning several startled pastors at whose rectories they stopped. When Phil pulled into a mall and noticed there was a church on the opposite side of the street, he said he would make one last effort.

  A bearded priest listened to him with cocked head and narrowed eyes. “You are joking, yes?”

  “I am only telling you what I’ve heard. A weeping icon.”

  “But this is the place!”

  Beth knelt for half an hour before the icon, kissed the priest’s hand, and whispered to Roger, “Give him something.”

  Roger handed the bearded priest a twenty-dollar bill. He was holding it up to the light as they left.

  Chattering on the road, Beth had asked if Father Carmody was still alive.

  “That’s his story,” Phil said.

  “He must be ancient.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “He was my spiritual adviser. What I’ll do is just explain everything to him and go on back to the center.”

  “There is a direct flight to Minneapolis from South Bend.”

  She looked at Phil. “I’ll go by bus. Did you ever hear the story of Dorothy Day coming to Notre Dame by bus when she received the Laetare Medal?”

  “Have you ridden a bus lately?”

  She ignored him. “I had forgotten about Gary,” she said, as they slipped through the gritty town on the Indiana toll road. Even with the windows up the smell was unmistakable. An hour later, they left the toll road and stopped at the booth, with Beth’s alma mater, St. Mary’s College, looking like a picture.

  “How I hated that place.” Just an observation; there was no bitterness in her voice. “A women’s college. I only went there because I was turned down by Notre Dame. I spent most of my time on the Notre Dame campus.”

  Soon they were coming down Notre Dame Avenue with the golden dome visible before them, Mary on its top, looking in their direction. Beth gave a little cry.

  “This is the first time I’ve been here in I don’t know how many years. I am so glad I’ve come.”

  The question now was where she was to stay. There was no extra bedroom in the Knights’ apartment, which was their first stop. Beth got out the phone book while the brothers fidgeted. In a moment she was dialing the number of a South Bend homeless center with the catchy name of Our Lady of the Road. Whoever answered told her she wanted Baxter.

  “Is he there?”

  “Hold on.”

  Within minutes, she had been offered a room in the center’s women’s residence.

  “Staying in motels could spoil me,” she said to Roger.

  Off she went with Phil, leaving it to Roger to set up an appointment with Father Carmody so she could tell him all about it. Phil had wanted to call Carmody after the discovery of Quinn in Minneapolis, but Roger urged the delay.

  “Beth Hanrahan?” Father Carmody asked.

  “She said you used to be her spiritual director.”

  “I don’t give refunds.”

  Meanwhile, Roger put through a call to David Williams, thinking that he should know how things had developed. Brother Joachim? That could wait.

  10

  THERE IS A BLACK BOX INTO WHICH a priest places the sins he is told and the confidences he receives, not only in the confessional but in any conversation in which a person clearly regards what he or she is saying as between him or herself and God, the priest there merely as the viceroy of the latter. Now that penitents could choose to confess face-to-face, something that in the past had occurred only rarely and outside the confessional box, the confessor could not help but connect the sin and the sinner. Father Carmody continued to hear student confessions in Sacred Heart, and as often as not the penitent would come around the grille and sit facing him as he told the anguished tale. Carmody had opposed this, as he had most innovations, but had come grudgingl
y to think it had its points. It certainly did not make keeping the seal of the confessional any more difficult. For Carmody it had never been difficult at all. Spiritual direction was another matter. Face-to-face then, all right, but he would be damned if he would call confession reconciliation. It made sin seem a quarrel between equals.

  From the very first time that the long-ago disappearance of Timothy Quinn had been raised by Brother Joachim’s contribution to the Notre Dame archives and the names of the young men began being tossed about, the name of the girl, Beth Hanrahan, had put Father Carmody on the alert. He had known the young men, but he had been privy to the secrets of Beth Hanrahan’s soul. Had he known her before she had come to him in his role as priest? Not well, if at all. Her nervousness, her expression, told him how seriously she regarded what she had come to tell.

  “Father, I don’t know how to begin.”

  “Is it a boy?” With penitents the age Beth was then, sexual faults were usually the burden borne.

  “Yes!” She seemed to think he had made an uncanny guess.

  In those days, Father Carmody had a suite of rooms on the ground floor of Sorin Hall from the windows of which he could look out at the entrance of Sacred Heart. It was a men’s dorm, so it was something of a surprise when he found that it was a girl who had come to his door.

  “Tell me about it,” he said. “No details!”

  “We made love.”

  Well, he hardly expected her to confess to fornication. Often boys claimed to have committed adultery though neither they nor their partner was married. It seemed pedantic to correct them.

  “Have you confessed this?”

  She seemed surprised. “That’s what I’m doing.”

  He opened a drawer, took out a stole, and draped it purple side out over his shoulders. No need to ask her to say again what she considered already confessed.

  “There must be no repetition.”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Will you see him again?”

  Her hesitation was the answer to that.

  “Tell him you have confessed. Tell him to do the same.”

  For her penance he told her to say five decades of the rosary. He gave her absolution while she was making an act of contrition, the familiar Latin words rolling off his tongue. Ego te absolvo, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.