Make them Cry (2 page)

On the closet floor, behind a shopping full of fabric scraps, Irene noticed a stack of books in the corner. There were six books in all, bound with burgundy-colored covers and gold-embossed. She reached for the volume on top of the stack. There was a fleur-de-lis design on the cover. Irene opened the book and stared at her daughter-in-law’s handwriting:

Irene stopped reading. She sat on the floor amid the spilled buttons, Dorothy’s diary in front of her. Rain lashed against the picture window. She could hear the boys downstairs, arguing about something. The TV was still on.

She wondered if Dorothy’s loneliness at the beginning of the year had led to the mysterious “business” dinners and overnights that preceded her disappearance. Who was she seeing?

Irene didn’t want to read about last Christmas. She needed to see Dorothy’s final entry in the journal. Where had her daughter-in-law been going that day she’d vanished? Irene flipped ahead in the book, then she stopped.

The last dozen or so pages with writing had been ripped out. The ragged edges—some with evident curls and strokes of a pen—still clung to the inner binding. There were a few words at the top of the next page after the gap, but they’d been scratched out. Irene could barely make out what it said beneath the obliterating scribble:

The rest of the page was blank.

Sighing, Irene fingered the jagged remnants of the missing pages. Were those passages so shocking that Dorothy didn’t dare keep them—even in her own private journal? Irene glanced at the last remaining entry before the pages were torn out. The date was almost three months prior to her disappearance:

There was nothing else. Just those words she must have written several weeks later, then scratched out:

The back was a little wrinkled, but he couldn’t touch it up with an iron. That would spoil it. The material from her rose silk blouse had to be preserved just as she’d last worn it.

He’d carefully measured the pattern of squares with a tailor’s soap chalk. The scissors had been sharpened to near-razor quality. He didn’t want any ragged edges or loose threads. He would cut a total of four square sections. He would keep the buttons, then burn the rest.

He had collected a couple of other souvenirs from Dorothy. But they were at another location.

The rose silk blouse still had faint traces of Dorothy’s perfume. He started cutting into it. Focused on his task, he barely noticed the bells ringing on the hour at Our Lady of Sorrows church.

Father Jack Murphy trotted around the asphalt track encircling the playfield by St. Bartholomew Hall at Our Lady of Sorrows seminary. On this cold April morning, he had the track all to himself.

The run was part of Jack’s daily ritual. He was spiritual advisor for the twenty-four seminarians residing on the fourth floor, north wing of the freshman dormitory. He lived with them in St. Bartholomew Hall: two dozen eighteen-year-old boys from all over the Pacific Northwest, Latin America, Vietnam, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, and China. Jack welcomed any excuse to get the hell out of there for an hour—even if the hour was an ungodly one.

So every weekday, Jack crawled out of bed at five o’clock in the morning while his freshman charges remained cozy under their covers. They still had another two hours of sleep before starting their day with a greasy breakfast in the cafeteria. But Jack was brushing his teeth and throwing on his jogging clothes.

The local TV News at Sunrise was usually just background noise. The only item that had caught Jack’s attention this morning was the latest on Judge Dorothy McShane. She’d been missing for over two months now. Apparently, last night the police had been led on a wild goose chase by a renowned clairvoyant. Her psychic powers had steered investigators to a ravine in Burlington, Washington, and the grave site of someone’s pet dog. They hadn’t said on the news, but by all indications, the police were giving up their search for Judge McShane.

They’d given up on Dorothy McShane at Our Lady of Sorrows, too. It had been weeks since they’d included her and her family in the Prayers of the Faithful at Mass.

Jack could see his breath as he jogged around the asphalt track. Because of his daily ritual, he was still in pretty good shape. In fact, he’d found out that he made quite an impression on the visiting mothers on Parents’ Day last October. He’d even acquired a nickname, “The Silver Fox,” because of his thick, wavy silver-gray hair. Jack had heard a couple of the mothers whispering, “Have you ever seen eyes so blue?” and “Oh, what a waste he’s a priest.”

It used to bother him when people went on and on about his looks. But now, Jack liked hearing that he was still attractive. His commitment to exercising was born out of that vanity—along with a healthy need for discipline and, yes, a flight from boredom and frustration.

As he rounded a curve in the track, Jack glanced up at St. Bartholomew Hall. The wall on this side of the five-story Gothic monstrosity was covered with dead ivy that still clung to the beige brick. All the windows were still dark.

St. Bart’s had been the first hall built on the Our Lady of Sorrows campus back in 1913. According to the story, they discovered it had been erected on soft ground. The building sunk nearly half an inch in the first six months. Everyone blamed the architect, an up-and-comer named Gavin McAllister, for setting the freshman facility so close to Lake Leroy. Better soil for construction was found across the lake near the town of Leroy, where they built the rest of the college and the graduate school—using another architect’s design.

Gavin McAllister’s career was destroyed. On Easter Sunday, 1914, when called to dinner by his wife, the thirty-one-year-old architect stepped into his dining room with a double-barrel shotgun. He’d opened fire on his wife and six-year-old daughter, then pursed his lips around the end of those twin barrels and pulled the trigger.

Jack wasn’t sure how much of the story was true, but a limerick had sprouted from the legend. Even after two world wars, most of the freshmen at Our Lady of Sorrows knew it:

The early statistics had said McAllister’s building, which encompassed the freshman classrooms and a two-hundred-bedroom dormitory, would sink a little lower each year until the foundation finally crumbled.

But those statistics were wrong. The basement flooded during some of the Pacific Northwest heavy rains, but after nearly a century, St. Bartholomew Hall’s foundation had settled only another inch into the earth.

Stretching the length of half a city block, St. Bart’s stood alone—like an outcast child—across the lake from the rest of the campus. The turreted roof pierced the sky, dwarfing treetops from the surrounding forest. Along the top floor, staggered every six windows, the weather-worn statue of a martyred saint stood on a pedestal. Above the front doors, a slightly decrepit, cement likeness of Our Lady of Sorrows welcomed all who entered with her resigned, forlorn look and her hands folded in prayer.

An old cemetery lay between the outskirts of the forest and the playfield, where Jack now ran. It was a small graveyard, for dearly departed priests who had taught at the freshman school during its first two decades. There were only a couple of dozen headstones, the most recent dated 1937.

Across the lake, the church bell rang six times. As he tallied another lap around the playfield, Jack felt the perspiration flying off his forehead. His gray jersey clung to his back. He noticed two students, Ernesto Rodriguez and Art Vargas, emerging from the side door of St. Bart’s Hall. They were among a dozen Hispanic freshman who came from the nearby city of Ferndale. The group hung out together, dubbing themselves the Spanish Mafia. Decked in sweatshirts and track shorts, Art and Ernesto waved at him, then started jogging toward a path that wound through the nearby forest.

The trail was known as Whopper Way, because after a half mile, it crossed over a tributary of Lake Leroy to the back lot of a Burger King. It was the quickest way by foot to town and the college campus. The seminarians would climb down to the creek, then tightrope-walk across a narrow, cracked slab of concrete that worked as a dam. Fall one way, and the St. Bart’s fugitive was up to his armpits in Lake Leroy; tumble in the other direction, and he had a five-foot drop to the rocky, shallow stream. The treacherous shortcut was dubbed Mendini’s Crossing, after Frank Mendini, a high-school junior in 1989 who’d fallen headfirst into the creek. According to the story, he spent several days in a coma, then woke up with such severe brain damage, his parents committed him to an insane asylum. Actually, Frank Mendini was unconscious for five minutes after the fall, and he took six stitches along his right temple. He stayed home that weekend, and managed to convince his parents that he didn’t want to be a priest. So they took him out of Our Lady of Sorrows. Yet somehow, word swept around the school that the fall had left Frank comatose, then deranged.

Jack had used Mendini’s Crossing himself—always on the sly, of course. He was supposed to set a good example for these students. But the other way to town—College Road, a two-lane drive that crossed over the creek—was a mile farther down and took twice as long. Another option was rowing across Lake Leroy in one of the boats available only to the faculty and students who had made special arrangements.

There wasn’t much in the way of entertainment at St. Bartholomew Hall and on that west side of the lake—unless one was delirious about forests. There was a “social room” in the basement, open from six to ten nightly—when the cellar wasn’t flooded. The room housed four archaic computers, where students—all deprived of telephone jacks in their rooms—had access to E-mail. There were two moldy pool tables, a TV with fickle reception bracketed to the wall, a couple of pinball machines which were usually out of order, four vending machines, and a bookshelf full of jigsaw puzzles and games ranging from chess to Monopoly. The torn corners of every faded box had been repeatedly taped up, and pieces were missing from each game and puzzle.

Small wonder the freshmen at St. Bart’s Hall were willing to brave Mendini’s Crossing for their escape. The other side of that lake offered all the splendor of a small college town: a minimall, a duplex movie theater, bowling alley, stores, pizza and burger joints—in other words, civilization and freedom.

It was no secret that some of the cooler freshmen ventured over Mendini’s Crossing to party with the upperclassmen. After a few drinks, the safest way back was College Road—or, if weather permitted, a quick swim across the narrow part of Lake Leroy. It was a nice way to sober up a bit before sneaking back into St. Bart’s Hall. But not too many freshmen tried it any more, because a boy had drowned a few years back while taking one of those midnight swims. Jack didn’t know the details.

He watched Ernesto and Art head down Whopper Way, then disappear into the forest. The two of them were best friends, and almost as dedicated as Jack with their morning runs.

Jack wished he had a friend here, someone he could confide in, another priest maybe. The closest person to him right now was a freshman named John Costello. At times, St. Bart’s seemed like a mental institution, and John the only other sane inmate there.

During his first week at the school, Jack had had some revelations about the other teachers and resident advisers at the freshman facility. “It’s sort of a proving ground for new guys like you,” a priest friend had warned him. “New priests and nutcases, that’s who they have running these freshman dorms, Jack. It’s SOP. They don’t want any of these guys managing a parish. So they stick them with these poor, vulnerable teenage boys. It’s sad, really.”

Of the eleven other priests at St. Bartholomew Hall, four were definitely alcoholics. Some even taught classes while drunk; and the kids weren’t dumb, they knew. Most of the clergy were gay, which didn’t matter to Jack. The ones who bothered him were the bullies; two priests in particular seemed to take pleasure in picking on the students. It was a weird sight, watching them hit or pinch these eighteen-and nineteen-year-old boys who probably could have taken them apart.

Jack guessed that just over half of the seminarians would actually become priests. For many students, this was a cheap college education with the archdiocese footing the bill. Still, a majority of the young men at St. Bart’s had a true calling. However, a handful of them took it a bit too far, practicing self-flagellation or fasting for days at a time as a way of becoming closer to God. One student on Jack’s floor woke up at dawn every morning to scrub out all the toilets and sinks in the bathroom on his floor. He said it made him happy. There were also several boys who took after those sadistic priests. They picked on their fellow students as a way of feeling powerful—or physically closer to them. All the unspoken crushes and furtive sexual activity among the boys caused one minidrama after another: fits of jealousy and contempt, friendships broken and rivalries started.

On their first day, all of Jack’s residents had reported to him in St. Bartholomew Hall’s basement “social room” for student orientation. It was a gorgeous, warm September day when the first of three groups were herded into that damp, musty cellar. The eight students were treated to a buffet lunch whipped up by the cafeteria staff: bologna sandwiches or peanut butter and jelly (bleeding through the bread), Fritos, Jell-O, and a choice of plain or chocolate milk. That was gourmet stuff compared to the usual fare in St. Bart’s cafeteria. Jack once saw a refrigerated delivery truck unloading boxes by St. Bartholomew Hall’s kitchen door. The boxes were labeled
GRADE D CHICKEN—EDIBLE
. The next day, he bought a minifridge and microwave oven. The cafeteria was run by a surly, chain-smoking Filipino woman named Valentina. Her staff consisted of two ancient nuns who belonged in a nursing home; Bob, a twentysomething mildly retarded man; and Valentina’s creepy ex-reform-school son, a skinny, tattooed weasel named Angel who probably wasn’t beyond spitting in the food when he had the chance.

None of them were in view for this desperately cheerful orientation luncheon. Jack found his first group waiting for him at their assigned table. Most of the students had arrived and unpacked the previous night. They wore their nametags, and among the eight were Peter Tobin and John Costello from Seattle. They were smart enough to forgo the cafeteria fare and split a pack of Hostess cupcakes from the vending machine.

It was hard not to single out John Costello. He was an extremely handsome kid, with straight black hair that occasionally fell over his blue eyes. Lean and tan, he looked very athletic in a white polo shirt and jeans. He didn’t say much, and barely cracked a smile. The boys were supposed to introduce themselves, and talk a little about their interests and hobbies. The other newcomers were cooperating, chatting nervously about their scholastic or athletic endeavors, and how they’d spent their summer vacations.

When his turn came, John took a sip of milk, then, without looking across the table at Jack, he muttered: “I’m John Costello. I’m from Seattle, and this is my best friend, Pete.”

Peter Tobin smiled and nodded at everyone around the table. Lanky and pale, with his brown hair in disarray, Pete came off as geeky beside his brooding, good-looking friend.

Jack had a list of questions he was supposed to ask—to “bring out” every freshman. It must have been drawn up in 1952, with real cornball queries such as
What’s your greatest accomplishment as a Christian?
and
Tell us about your last good deed
. He consulted the list for a moment. “Um, John, do you have any hobbies or interests?”

John Costello rolled his eyes. “Not really.”

“What did you do over the summer?” Jack pressed.

“I caddied at this cake-eater country club. It was pretty boring.”

“How long have you known Pete here?”

“A few years.”

Jack nodded. He decided to give up and turned to John’s pal. “Pete, maybe you can tell us something about yourself.”

“Yes, Father,” Peter Tobin announced, clearing his throat. “Well, when I was just a baby, my parents and I went down in a plane crash over the Andes. They died, and I was raised by wolves….”

It took a moment for the boys at the table to realize that Peter was joking. Peter quickly went into his repartee. His sulky friend cracked a smile occasionally. In all likelihood, he’d heard the routine before.