An Affair to Dismember (21 page)

“What do you do again?” I asked, suddenly.

“What?”

“Your profession.”

Holden stopped walking. “This and that.”

“Your profession is this and that?”

“Does this matter to you, Gladie?”

Did it? He was more or less a stranger to me, although he had sort of saved my life, and we did kiss a couple of times, and the kisses nearly made my head explode. But strangers we were, and perhaps I didn’t have the right to ask personal questions. On the other hand, why was he being secretive? Was he hiding something or being private?

“Anyway,” he said with a smile, “here we are.”

“Where?”

“Here.” He pointed to the tombstone at our feet. It
was a small tombstone, set flush with the ground. C
HUCK
C
OSTAS
, 1925–1979.

“Oh, no.” It was literally a dead end. Chuck Costas couldn’t be the killer because he had died more than thirty years before. My gang theory was completely wrong. I felt like a fool.

“Here comes the man I wanted you to meet,” said Holden.

A priest walked up the hill toward us. He wore a collar and short sleeves. He was around Lucy’s age, with salt-and-pepper hair.

“So pleased to meet you,” he said, shaking first Holden’s hand and then mine.

“Father Lawrence kindly agreed to meet with us to discuss Chuck Costas,” Holden explained.

“Nice to meet you, Father. Did you know Mr. Costas?” I asked.

“No, I never had that pleasure. But I knew about him through his priest, Father Patrick. Mr. Costas returned to the fold through Father Patrick. He’d mended his ways, you could say.”

“He went on the up-and-up?” I asked.

“Yes. It’s no secret he had been a criminal at one time, but he turned to the church and a more sedate and honest life.”

I guess I’m a suspicious person by nature because all I could think about was the missing bank robbery money and how a criminal could lead a sedate and honest life with that money in his back pocket.

“Was he well-to-do?” I asked.

“Mr. Costas? No, a very humble man. He was active in charity works in his later life.” Father Lawrence removed his glasses and cleaned them with the hem of his shirt. “Are you a friend of the family?”

“A friend of a former colleague who recently passed away,” said Holden.

“Is that right? Anyone I know?”

“Randy Terns,” I said. “They used to work together.”

“Did they? And how did you come to know him?”

Holden and I exchanged glances.

“He was my neighbor,” I said.

“And why did you wish to reach Mr. Costas?” he asked.

“Randy Terns left something for him.” It just slipped from my mouth. I had no idea why I decided to lie to a man of the cloth. Once I started, though, it was easy to keep going. “It’s a shame, really. Randy wanted him to have it,” I said.

Father Lawrence shifted on his feet. “Perhaps I can help with that, get it to his family. It’s the least I can do, since you’ve gone to so much trouble trying to find Mr. Costas. Is this something he left large? Sentimental? Valuable?”

“I feel uncomfortable talking about it,” I said. Of course I was uncomfortable talking about it. I was so going to hell.

“How about we call you later and make arrangements?” Holden asked.

“I have time today,” Father Lawrence said. “I can come pick it up. Or maybe you have it here.” The priest looked over at Holden’s parked truck and took a couple of steps toward it.

Holden touched the priest’s shoulder. “We don’t have it here,” he said softly. “But I’ll arrange it with you later. Okay?”

“Yes. Yes. That would be fine.”

“Thank you for meeting with us. It was nice of you to take time from your day,” I said.

“No trouble at all.” He shook our hands and gave Holden his card.

We stood a moment and watched Father Lawrence’s back as he scattered down the hill. He got to the bottom,
looked both ways, and crossed the street toward the cemetery’s greeting hall.

“That was interesting,” Holden said.

“I don’t have a lot of experience with priests,” I said.

“He was more eager to help than I expected. And inquisitive.”

“He did ask a lot of questions. Do you think he knew about the bank robbery money?”

“It doesn’t matter now. It appears, Sherlock, that we have run into a dead end.”

“The deadest.”

“Taco time?”

A woman and her daughter placed flowers on a grave near us. The mother wrapped her arm around the little girl, and they spoke quietly to each other.

“Would you mind if I wandered off and met you back at the truck in fifteen minutes?” I asked.

“Take your time. I’ll wait at the truck.”

It didn’t take long to find my father’s grave. The memory of his funeral rushed back at me with the scent of sagebrush on the wind. His grave was one hill over from Chuck Costas, and his tombstone was bigger than most around him. Grandma had made sure it was bigger. My father was her only child, cut down in the prime of his life, with so much promise cut down, as well. My grandmother had told me about the injustice of it all more times than I could count.

He was a poet. He owned words, Grandma liked to say. He transformed words into magic. Although Grandma was eager to point out to me as a five-year-old that the Tooth Fairy was not real and Santa Claus was for less intelligent children, she was insistent that magic was real when it flowed from my father’s pen.

He died on a “blind day,” according to Grandma, when her third eye was sleeping. But years later Ruth Fletcher told me the truth, about how Grandma had
warned my father about the motorcycle, how she’d told him never to drive it, how she’d refused to let him park it near the house, about how she couldn’t look at it without crying.

But he drove it on a Wednesday while I was in ballet class with my mother when we were visiting Grandma for the summer. Either the bike malfunctioned in some way or he got distracted and swerved. We couldn’t see the body after. His injuries were too great.

He left three small published works of poetry and no life insurance.

Grandma didn’t allow friends or extended family at the funeral. It was just us three—my grandma, my mom, and me. There was no ceremony. Grandma read Dad’s poetry instead. I recalled one poem about a curly-haired girl. I hadn’t opened his books since.

Today the tombstone was dirty but otherwise the same.

J
ONATHAN
B
URGER
1964–1992
Beloved son, father, and husband
“And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

“I never went back to the ballet class,” I said to the stone. “I think Mom forgot about it.”

Then I started crying. The tears came as a great shock, and when I couldn’t find a Kleenex in my purse, I ran down the hill to the greeting hall to search out a bathroom. The back door was wedged open with an orange cone, most likely by a staff member out on a smoking break. A sign on the door said “Absolutely No Entrance” but I went in anyway and was rewarded with
a bathroom a few steps into a hallway with cinder-block walls.

I blew my nose and wiped my eyes. “What’s wrong with you?” I asked myself in the bathroom mirror. “He died a long time ago. You barely knew him.”

That made me feel worse. I started blubbering again. I was terrible at cheering myself up. Finally my tears dried and my snot was under control. I hoped Holden hadn’t seen my episode. I hardly wanted to talk to him about my dead father before our first real date.

I had run into the greeting hall through the back door, but Holden was parked closer to the front. This part of the building was obviously off-limits to visitors, but if I exited from the back door, I would have to wind all the way around the building to get to Holden’s truck. It would be much faster to cut through the building and exit from the front door, I reasoned.

I left the bathroom and found myself back in the long hallway. At one end was the door I had walked through, but now the door was closed. In the other direction, the hallway snaked around to an unknown destination.

I followed it until I got to two doors. One was marked “Personnel” and the other “Embalming.”
Blech
. I envisioned tubes and foul fluids. I saw stars, and the world spun around me.
Keep it together
, I told myself. If I passed out, it would take days to find me, or worse, they might mistake me for a wayward embalming victim and finish the job. I sobered up immediately and opened the Personnel door.

The door led to a little alcove with lockers, most likely for the cemetery staff. In the crook of the alcove was a small flight of stairs with an Exit sign above. Perfect. I had just taken a step down when I heard voices. At first I panicked, but then I realized I only had to explain that I had gotten lost, which was more or less true. Then I heard a familiar voice.

“I don’t know if they believed me. I heard that woman is too nosy for her own good, but Chuck wanted me to play it this way, and that’s what I did.”

The voices got closer. I spun around, looking for a hiding place. Two of the lockers had no locks on their doors. I opened one and stepped in sideways, but my butt got caught. I pushed, pulled, and sucked in my stomach. I cursed my weakness where junk food was concerned. “Why didn’t I spit?” I muttered. Finally I squeezed in and closed the door just as two men entered the alcove. As I suspected, one of them was Father Lawrence.

“What did Randy Terns leave for Chuck?” asked the other man.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t get it out of her. But Holden is going to arrange it with me later.”

“Did you talk to Chuck?”

“I’m going there now. He’ll be at confession late this afternoon before dinner,” Father Lawrence said.

“This is not a joke. If Holden doesn’t come through for you, you’re going to need to take more serious, permanent action. Chuck is not going to be happy. There are big things at stake here.”

“No one knows that better than I.”

The other man unlocked the locker next to mine. By the sound of it, he changed his clothes. After about fifteen minutes, they both left. I waited another five minutes to make sure they were really gone and then I opened the locker. It was harder to get out than it was to get in. I wasn’t sure why; perhaps my butt had swelled. One thing I knew: Chuck Costas—the third gang member—was alive. I didn’t want to think about who was buried in his grave.

I STOOD in the alcove, unsure which direction to go. In one direction was the lying, suspicious Father Lawrence and his mysterious friend. In the other direction was Holden. Holden, who was supposed to come through for them. I felt sick at the thought that Holden was in cahoots with them, and possibly worse. I wasn’t an idiot. I realized Holden was blond, too, like the knish thrower.

I walked down the stairs toward the exit at the front
of the building. I stood outside for a moment, searching for Holden’s truck, but it wasn’t parked where he’d left it. I was about to call Bridget to pick me up when Holden drove by.

“I put some gas in the truck,” he explained. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

“Not long,” I said.

I stared at the truck for a while, weighing my options, and then allowed my eyes to travel to Holden’s face. I studied him for a hint of liar, criminal, or worse. There was nothing there. Just Holden. Calm, compassionate, protective Holden. I got in. Holden made a U-turn and drove out of the cemetery.

“You okay?” he asked. “You’re awfully quiet. Did everything go all right back there?”

“Yes. Maybe we should get my grandmother her tacos.”

I hated suspecting Holden. I liked him. He had saved me. He was sensitive to my needs. He was hotter than Krakatoa.

“How did you find Chuck Costas?” I asked.

“Huh? I know a guy who finds people.”

“And Father Lawrence? How did you find him?”

“When I called the cemetery about Costas, they took my contact information. The next thing I knew, Father Lawrence was calling me and setting up the appointment.”

“Oh. So he set up the appointment.”

Holden shot me a look, making me blush. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I heard something back at the cemetery.”