Sham Rock

by Ralph McInerny

  “That was the weapon?”

  “So Casey Winthrop tells me.”

  Father Carmody declined Phil’s invitation to stay on to watch a televised game. Notre Dame was playing a formidable Big East opponent.

  “I think I jinx them when I watch.”

  “Where did you park?”

  “Park? I walked.”

  No wonder he had arrived half frozen. Phil said he would drive the priest back to Holy Cross House. Father Carmody did not argue. Alone, Roger sat in the specially constructed desk chair in his study, moving now left, now right, a compromised compass, thinking. The most obvious suspect in any attack on David Williams would be Timothy Quinn, but what would he be doing in Kentucky?

  Amanda called to report that Jay’s roommate had said that he had left campus, anticipating the Thanksgiving break.

  “Where?”

  “He and his father plan to celebrate together.”

  PART THREE

  REQUIEM

  1

  AS SOON AS THE WHITE BUILDINGS of the monastery came into view, the Knight brothers felt enveloped in rural peacefulness. Phil had almost missed the turnoff to Bardstown, and for twenty minutes there had been silence in the van, as if both brothers were wondering if they were lost. Then the sight of the monastery dissolved their doubt.

  “I told you I’d find the place,” Phil said, but there was relief in his voice.

  “I never doubted you.”

  “I’ll report you to Descartes.”

  Worse than the doubt had been the discomfort of the unbroken trip from South Bend. Roger’s swivel chair in the back of the van gave him the appearance of a turret gunner, a very well fed turret gunner, but even this special seat seemed inadequate. He must have gained weight. “Or the chair has shrunk.” With Phil’s help, Roger had squeezed in. The safety belt didn’t have enough give to encircle Roger, so Phil had disengaged the signal that otherwise would have scolded them throughout the trip. Phil had suggested a rest stop several times, but Roger didn’t dare get out of the seat, so it was with some discomfort that he arrived.

  Getting out of the van was the first order of business, made even more difficult by the fact that the circulation in Roger’s legs had been cut off during the long cramped ride. After several unsuccessful efforts to free him, Phil sought and found help.

  “He only weighed one hundred twenty pounds when we set out,” Phil told the two monks who answered his summons. “I don’t know what happened to him.”

  “Puffed up with pride.” His feet on the ground, Roger rose slowly, then fell back against the van. “My legs are numb.”

  Walking was the proposed remedy, and soon Roger was being helped along the walk to the guesthouse, leaning on two thin monks, a wounded athlete being taken from the field.

  Chadwick had signed them up as retreatants, but they would be on their own unless they asked for spiritual direction. The task they had come on would be better performed without fanfare. The guest master, of indeterminate age, crew-cut hair, spare of body beneath the white habit, took one look at Roger and said he would give him a room on the first floor of the guesthouse.

  The single room was narrow, chalk white walls, unadorned except for a crucifix. On a bedside table was an alarm clock. One straight-back chair.

  “Wonderful,” Roger said. “As in causing wonder.”

  The serenity of the monk’s smile was reminder enough that he was not engaged in banter with Emil Chadwick. The monk gave him directions to the bathroom, and Roger immediately set off for it.

  They were on their own. No schedule other than what they devised for themselves, although of course they were welcome to come to chapel during the chanting of hours and the community Mass. Roger asked the guest master if he would let Brother Chrysologus know they were here. Emil had confided in his son that the brothers were coming down on behalf of the university.

  Now that he was on his feet again and his legs obeyed his commands, Roger wandered outside and marveled at the silence, of the house and of the world around the monastery. They were scarcely an hour from modern normalcy, and yet Roger felt that he had been dropped into an earlier time. The few signs that this was indeed the twenty-first century and not the fifth or twelfth were easily ignored, and this gave a powerful sense of the role monasticism had played in the formation of Europe and throughout the ages of faith until the apostles of reason had systematically shut down religious houses in the name of progress. Now, after bloody revolutions and bloodier wars following on the elegant naïveté of the Enlightenment, monasticism was making a comeback.

  In the United States, the revival had started after World War II when the gifted Thomas Merton, who had come to Gethsemani to take the vows of a Trappist, published his autobiography, Seven Storey Mountain. His further writings had acquainted his generation with the possibility of a monastic vocation, and Trappist abbeys had spread across the land. It is the fate of every male visitor to a monastery to imagine himself as a part of the community, living a scheduled day, work and prayer, work and prayer, a life of quiet and obedience seemingly without a worry in the world. Romantic, of course, yet Roger momentarily entered into the fantasy. But it was too self-regarding. Men did not become monks in order to please themselves, although if one were called to it such a life must have its profound satisfactions. The stripping away of distractions was meant to remove impediments to the acquisition of holiness. Monks saw their lives as a service to the Church, to the world, much as Benedict all those centuries ago had fled Rome and become first a hermit and then founded the community at Subiaco. Eventually that community ended at Monte Cassino, the great monastery that had been bombarded during World War II, becoming briefly a battleground as the Allies moved slowly up the Italian peninsula.

  The fantasy wore off as Roger walked and surveyed the fields and woods of the vast monastery grounds. He would have to settle for these few days, in which he could review the state of his soul. And talk with Brother Joachim.

  And find out who had killed Dave Williams.

  Brother Chrysologus and Phil were chatting in an open area of the guesthouse when Roger returned. The monk rose to his feet when Phil introduced his brother. For all his spiritual discipline, he could not disguise his reaction to Roger’s massive presence.

  “Are all the monks as thin as you, Brother?”

  “We have one or two chubby ones.”

  “Chubby wouldn’t do to describe me. I wonder if I could see Brother Joachim.”

  “I will get word to him.”

  “He doesn’t know me. Tell him I have come from Notre Dame.”

  Chrysologus nodded, and Roger left the two to their conversation, collapsing in a chair across the room.

  “Professor Knight?”

  A startled Roger swam out of the sleep into which he had sunk moments after sitting down.

  The monk standing beside his chair smiled apologetically. “I’m Brother Joachim. You wanted to see me?”

  “Yes, I do. Yes. Please sit down. That will be easier than my standing up.”

  Joachim was over six feet tall but looked taller because of his slenderness. His hands were in the sleeves of his white habit, crossed over the black scapular. His face was thin and his pouched eyes large and deep. He took a seat next to Roger’s. “You’re from Notre Dame.”

  “Yes, yes, I am.”

  “I went to Notre Dame.”

  “I know. Class of ’89. I have seen the materials you sent to the archives.”

  A nod. “Now you have come to investigate the death of David Williams.”

  “Brother Chrysologus has offered to show us the hermitage.”

  The abbey had a vehicle about the size of a golf cart for getting around the grounds, and it was put at their disposal. Chrysologus declined Phil’s offer of the passenger seat and walked beside them as they went out to the hermitage. The trees here were not as far along to winter as those in Indiana, but already the ground around them was carpeted with fallen leaves, their colors fading
.

  “This is the way you took with Casey Winthrop?” Roger asked Chrysologus.

  A nod of his crew-cut head. “Of course, we were both walking.”

  Not a criticism, apparently. With monks you had to fight the impulse to ask what had brought them to this secluded demanding life. Roger had read that clients often quizzed fallen women in much the same way.

  Emil Chadwick had been unable to explain it when Roger asked him about his son’s vocation to the Trappists. “He was as nutty as any other kid. Not much of a student, I’m afraid. Except for Latin. He loved Latin. Sometimes I had the idea that he was observing things and people in disbelief. ‘Is this all there is?’ Not criticizing, you understand. Just a little baffled. He translated Horace’s Ars Poetica for his senior essay. He loved Horace. So did Kant.” Emil added enigmatically. “The preface to the Kritik.”

  Emil was full of arcane lore, which was why Roger had been drawn to him from the time he first moved into the office in Brownson. Emil had surveyed Roger’s girth and said, “Welcome to Fat City.”

  Sarah, who was there at the time, took umbrage.

  “My dear, you are sylphlike.”

  “What’s a sylph?”

  “Look it up,” Emil said with a teacher’s reflex.

  “Is it naughty?”

  “Not always.”

  Roger had called Emil to tell him that he and Phil were going to Gethsemani.

  “How?”

  “Phil’s driving.”

  “Tell him not to get lost.”

  “He has a GPS.”

  “What in hell is that?”

  Emil had lived through the transition from mechanical typewriters to computers, from wired phones to cell phones, from reasonably educated entering students to the illiterate youth of his last years of teaching—his description—but then they knew all sorts of things that were mysteries to him.

  When the hermitage came in sight, Roger brought the vehicle to a stop and Phil hopped out.

  “Leave it here, Roger.”

  Phil and Chrysologus were halfway to the hermitage before Roger had his feet on the ground. He lumbered after them. Chrysologus had stopped to tell Phil that it was just about here that he had whistled to let Joachim know of their approach. Joachim had then appeared, coming out of the woods behind the little building. Onto the porch then. Chrysologus took Roger’s hand and helped him up the steps. Phil wanted a description of that earlier arrival. The monk had to think to get the sequence right. Had he tried to open the inner door before Joachim joined him and Casey? Roger was looking at the neatly stacked firewood on the porch of the hermitage, just beside the door. He picked up a piece as they went inside.

  There was a flagstone fireplace in the front room, the only heating in the place. Two more or less comfortable chairs angled toward the fireplace. A statue of Our Lady on the mantel, next to the crucifix. It was tempting to take one of those chairs, to just sit there and use the place for the purpose it was intended. Solitude. Silence. Meditation. On the wall was a framed photograph of Jacques Maritain and Thomas Merton seated before this very fireplace. Phil tried the door that separated this room from those beyond, moving it on its hinges.

  “He was lying there,” Chrysologus said, pointing.

  “Feet first, head first?”

  The monk closed his eyes, as if to evoke the scene. “He had fallen with his head toward the front of the hermitage.”

  “Facedown?”

  “Facedown.”

  The murder weapon, a piece of firewood, still lay where the assailant had dropped it.

  Phil was drawn to the back door at the end of the hallway separating the oratory from the bedroom and bathroom. He tried it. Unlocked.

  “Was this door open or shut?”

  Roger could see what Phil was getting at, but there was a difficulty. Someone—Joachim?—had come in through that back door and struck David Williams from behind, which was why he fell forward, toward the front of the building.

  “The firewood is on the front porch, Phil.”

  “There’s more out back,” Chrysologus said.

  More indeed. It was stacked four or five feet high along the back wall of the building. In the little clearing beyond was a huge stump surrounded with chips. An axe wrapped in plastic lay atop the stacked firewood.

  “Chopping wood for the fireplace is the main exercise you have here. That and walking.”

  “Have you ever stayed here?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you take turns using it?”

  “Only if you ask permission.”

  Phil went outside, to scout around, Chrysologus with him. Roger stood in the doorway of the bedroom, looking around. Bare as a cell, which is what it was. The bed was so narrow that he would have spilled over its sides, if indeed it could support his weight. Steel frame, no headboard, a thin-looking mattress with a comforter drawn over it. Did monks still sleep in their habits?

  Roger returned to the front room and eased himself into one of the chairs. Phil had wanted to inspect the hermitage before they talked with Joachim. The grate of the fireplace was clean, no ashes, no sign of a recent fire. The nights here must already be cold, but then that provided an occasion for asceticism. Roger closed his eyes, trying to imagine what had happened here.

  Joachim and Dave Williams would have sat in these very chairs, talking of their time at Notre Dame. It could hardly have been simply nostalgia. Over the years, Joachim had sent cards to Dave that could be regarded as menacing. Then had come the donation to the archives, an equivocal short story, and the huge bequest to Dave. And reference to a murder that had not been committed! Yes, theirs must have been an interesting conversation.

  The monk then had excused himself and gone out for a walk during which he said his rosary. Apparently he had heard nothing, had no inkling that they had been joined by an intruding third party. From the description of the body, David Williams could have been returning from the bathroom. Or using the oratory, of course, though that seemed less likely. Nature before grace. The assailant could have been waiting on the back porch, able to see inside through the little window in the door, and, when David emerged from the bathroom, rushed in and felled him. Roger could almost see the scene. But who had been holding that piece of firewood?

  Of course, the obvious suspect was Joachim, the monk who had been sending David Williams veiled, almost threatening, messages over the years, the classmate who had sent those materials to the Notre Dame archives with the absurd confessional letter and the bequest of all his worldly goods to David Williams. They must indeed have had an interesting conversation there before the fireplace. Surely Joachim would have dropped the oblique approach and told David of the stillborn infant he had helped Beth bury near the Log Chapel. How would Dave have reacted to that? In fact, what would have been the point of telling him after all these years? Had an old grudge been nursed all this time, despite the years in the monastery? It was clear to Roger that Phil leaned toward Joachim.

  “Phil, he’s a monk.”

  “Wasn’t Rasputin a monk?”

  2

  JOACHIM’S ACCOUNT OF THAT LONG-AGO burial near the Log Chapel on campus was undramatic. Terse. Trimmed of all incidentals. He and Roger had gone outside and sat in a courtyard in whose center a fountain sent up an endless spout of water.

  When the then Pat Pelligrino had been confronted by the tragic figure of Beth, clutching to her bosom something wrapped in a bath towel, and asked what was the matter, she had turned back a corner of the towel and showed him.

  “She was like the Pietà. She wanted to know what to do. It was I who suggested the burial.” He ran a finger down the long line of his nose. “It has plagued my conscience ever since.”

  “Surely you don’t think it was wrong.”

  A taste of Trappist silence. “I don’t think it was right.”

  More silence, and then he went on. “I wanted to kill Dave.”

  “Beth told you he was the father?”

  �
��She didn’t have to. It certainly wasn’t me, and Tim Quinn’s reaction told me it wasn’t him.”

  “Leaving Dave Williams?”

  “Tim wanted to kill him. So did I. I really did. It was jealousy we felt, of course.”

  “What was Dave’s reaction?”

  Joachim turned to Roger. “After Tim disappeared, my anger left me. I felt it was up to Beth to tell him if anyone did.”

  “And she didn’t.”

  “Apparently not. Terrible as all that was, it changed our lives. Beth with her homeless center. That stillborn child was a turning point in her life. Things could never be the same again for her. She didn’t want them to be. She was beyond all of us now. She had outlived us. How shallow and facetious we must have looked to her after what she had gone through. Eventually we were all affected, directly or indirectly. Tim’s disappearance was a first result, and now we find that he had become like one of those wandering holy men in Tolstoy.”

  “And you in a Trappist abbey?”

  “You can leave the world, but it never really leaves you.”

  “I suppose Dave wanted to thank you for giving him all that money.”

  “I was more concerned with the state of his soul. It seemed wrong that the father shouldn’t know.”

  ”What would be the point of that now?”

  “Imagine first encountering the soul of an unknown daughter in paradise.”

  “So you sent him annual cards.”

  “I hoped he would come see me.”

  “Finally he did.”

  “God rest his soul.”

  “Amen. Have you heard from Quinn since his reappearance?”

  “Oh, he was here.”

  “He was?”

  “Just the other day. He said he’d be back.”

  After he left Joachim, Roger talked to the guest master, who seemed surprised that Roger wanted to check his register of guests. When he understood the role the Knight brothers were playing, he was delighted. He leaned toward Roger and whispered, “I’ve read all of Agatha Christie. Twice.”