Confession

  “Well, I can’t help that,” the neighbor said with injured dignity.

  “Come on, Geof,” I urged when I saw that we could only further antagonize our friendly witness. “Let’s let Mr. Montgomery get back to his work. And we need to find David before school lets out.”

  At the front door, Geof said for the first time, “Dennis Clemmons died last night.”

  “He did?” The other man looked astonished. “How?”

  “A handicap ramp came apart, and he fell two stories.”

  The surprised expression slowly changed into one of open, childlike glee. “Fm delighted to hear it, Lieutenant. That’s simply wonderful news. Do you think he would have been scared on the way down?”

  “Terrified, probably.”

  “Good, good! Do you think he died instantly?”

  “No. In fact, we know he didn’t, because the paramedics said he was nearly unconscious but still aware of being in a lot of pain before he died.”

  “That’s fine,” Damon Montgomery said slowly as if he were savoring it. “So there’s justice after all.” He was smiling to himself as he started to close the door behind us, but Geof stopped him with one more question.

  “Mr. Montgomery, did Judy ever mention me to you?”

  “You?” A smile flitted across the other man’s face before a formal, courteous expression settled back onto it. “No, I don’t think so.”

  This time, he did close the door.

  “The things people don’t ask!” I exclaimed as we went back down his front walk.

  “Such as what?”

  “Such as why isn’t David satisfied with the way the police handled his parents’ deaths!”

  “Not everybody is as naturally curious as you are.”

  I couldn’t tell whether that was a jibe or he was refuting my point.

  “Could you tell if he knows about me, Jenny?”

  “Curious, are we?”

  He smiled but didn’t give in.

  “Everybody’s naturally curious, Geof,” I said, still defending myself against what I had taken to be a jibe, “They just get it thumped out of them by adults who say, ‘You shouldn’t ask things like that.’” Then I answered his question. “I can’t tell He seemed kind of coy about it. So maybe, maybe not.”

  We stopped on the sidewalk in front and watched as a white van pulled up into the Montgomery driveway. It stopped, and a window on our side rolled down. From inside the van, Sheila Montgomery called out to us. “Everything all right over there?”

  “What?” Geof called back to her.

  “The house!” she yelled. “Next door!”

  “Oh, yes!” He waved at her. “Everything was fine.”

  She gave him a look that suggested he was an idiot and called back to him in a disgusted way, “Fine! That sounds like something my son would say. Two people die in there, and a boy is left to fend for himself, and some wicked person paints graffiti all over it, and it’s … fine! I could tell you what it really is, it’s tragic and frightening, but why ask me? Pm just the mother, and what do mothers ever know?” With which sarcastic jibe—no mistaking that one—she pulled her car on up the drive and out of our sight.

  “You’ve made a real hit with the neighbors,” I observed. “Expect an invitation to dinner,” he predicted.

  “That’s another question he didn’t ask.” I stared at Geof. “He didn’t ask us what we found when we went in there last night.”

  My husband nodded. “And he called me Lieutenant.”

  “You didn’t tell him that?”

  “I did not.”

  “Why does everybody but us seem to know everything?” Even with the new breeze, it was still hot, and I felt like whining. “Geof, I’m getting curiouser and curiouser to know more about this strange religion the Mayers practice. Would you care to go with me to find out?”

  He looked interested. “How are we going to do that?”

  “Know any good ministers ni town?”

  “Hardy,” he said immediately.

  Hardy Eberhardt, he meant, the pastor of the First Church of the Risen Christ and the husband of the mayor of Port Frederick and our good friend, as well.

  “Do we have time?” He raised his left arm to look at his watch. I felt a lovely and suddenly much cooler breeze flow over my own bare arms.

  “We have an eternity,” I said, “in the timeless Now.”

  “It’s an hour and fifteen minutes until school gets out,” Geof said, giving me a look. “At least that’s true in the time zone where I live, I don’t know about the strange space that you inhabit.”

  I thought he was a fine one to talk, this cop who had landed our marriage in a Twilight Zone of violence and death. I wanted this to be a case he kept in a file at his office, not one that came alive right under my nose.

  “I wish you wouldn’t bring your work home,” I muttered as I got into the Jeep beside him once again. It was a totally unfair thing to say, of course, coming from a woman who was ordinarily fascinated by his cases.

  He looked over at me. “What did you say?”

  “When can we go home?”

  “As soon as we can go together.”

  “You don’t think it’s safe alone at home?”

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Exactly.”

  I found myself humming “Stormy Weather” on the drive over to Hardy’s church. Considering the lyrics, it was hard to know if that was an optimistic or a pessimistic impulse on my part.

  20

  “I WOULDN’T EXACTLY CALL IT A RELIGION.”

  The Reverend Dr. Hardy Eberhardt and I were seated together in a back pew of the small, empty sanctuary of his First Church of the Risen Christ. I liked the look and smell of the place: dark wood, red pew cushions, sunshine filtering warmly through the stained-glass windows, and a faint, pleasant woody scent that might have been Hardy’s shaving lotion or even a hint of perfume left over from one of his Sunday parishioners. I like churches. I don’t like to attend them, I don’t enjoy their rituals, but I like them as buildings, especially when they’re nearly empty: their long, cool corridors; their vast auditoriums; their quiet rooms and silent pews.

  Hardy’s voice echoed a bit, though he was speaking in a low tone, one that was far removed from the vibrant bombast I’d heard him employ up in his pulpit at the front.

  Geof had left us alone while he used a phone in Hardy’s office to check in with his own office. God only knew what they thought he was up to that day; I hadn’t even asked him what he’d told them, because it didn’t matter. One way or another, for the good or ill of his job, he was here, not there.

  “Not a religion,” I repeated.

  “In fact, that’s a principle of it, I gather,” Hardy told me, sounding tired. “They don’t say much about it to anybody as far as I know—they’re almost, but not quite, secretive, in fact—but from what little they have said, I think they believe in Christ without being Christians per se.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Hardy’s smile looked a tad frayed around the edges to me; it wasn’t his customary wide grin that hinted at the formidable intelligence and wit behind it. He was a big, good-looking man with a charismatic personality that seemed lately to have lost some of its luster. He and his wife, the mayor, both worked hard enough for four people, and they had a family to raise, to boot.

  “Well, think about it, Jenny,” he said. “The Christian religion didn’t exist until Paul essentially created it, and that came long after Christ’s death. Paul, of course, didn’t even know Christ. But before the religion, there was the man himself—there was Christ wandering around Palestine doing what he did, healing people, offending people, saving people’s lives and sanity, breaking rules, saying what he said, with only a small coterie of followers at the time. He was the cause of many effects during his lifetime, but he was not the center of a religion. He was a practicing Jew, of course, but he was breaking their rules—of diet, for instance—ri
ght and left.”

  “So what are you saying, Hardy, that the Mayers try to live as Christ lived without the trappings of religion?”

  “I think that’s their idea, which God knows is an attractive one, but it’s probably absurd. They’ve probably got their rituals, just like the rest of us, and they’re probably stuck in the concrete of their own version of some sort of creed, just like the rest of us. They’re probably just as far away from the actual experience of Christ-consciousness as any of us in the mainstream churches are. From what little I can tell you about them, I’d say that all they’ve done is what everybody does: pick and choose the parts of a holy writ that personally appeal to them, the ones that cause them the least personal discomfort and the ones that appeal to their illuisions about themselves and the world, then pretend to form a sort of spiritual life around that.”

  I was startled at the disillusionment his words seemed to imply in regard to his own creed, his own church, and I wondered, Could this be why Hardy was looking so worried and unhappy?

  He sighed, leaned back against the pew, laid one arm along the top.

  “Take that business of wearing all white, for instance, because the New Testament talks about raiments of white. And consider how they seem to concentrate on the worldly family of Jesus, because He came from carpenters and they’re home builders.”

  “Sounds simplistic, Hardy.”

  “It is simplistic and more than a little silly, and I’m an unforgiving, judgmental son of a gun for saying so.”

  “Well, then you must have changed,” I said in a matter-of-fact way. Something was definitely up with Hardy, something more than mere weariness with his workload. ‘Where’s their church?”

  His tone turned wry. “Probably in their woodworking shop.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hardy, is there anything in the New Testament that might suggest that you’d want to videotape confessions of sins?”

  He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Are you serious? Do they do that? Sounds like they’re more influenced by the television talk shows than they are by Jesus. I don’t know, Jenny, it might derive from all of the many references to light that you find in the New Testament. I suppose a twentieth-century person could stretch that into a foretelling of the modern movie camera. Weirder things have been done in the name of God. And we all know you can interpret any holy text to mean anything you want it to. Why not videotapes?”

  “What did you mean when you said they were almost, but not quite, secretive about their … religion … or whatever it is.”

  “Well, let me think for a minute about what I mean by that.” And he proceeded to do just that: sitting and gazing off at the altar thirty rows in front of us. When he was ready, he stirred and said, “You have to understand that I hardly know these people. But now and then they have shown up at theological meetings that Mary and I have attended, meetings that tend to be generalist and nondenominational in character. They always come as a group, they all wear white, they are always polite and pleasant to everyone with whom they come in contact, but they keep absolutely to themselves. The first time I realized they were from Port Frederick, I went up to them, thinking that gave us something in common. Plus, I was curious about these people in white. They were killingly courteous to me, Jenny. I asked them what church they represented, and they said, ‘We hold our own services at home.’ Or something to that effect. I said, ‘Are you Baptists, Methodists, Catholics’ … and they said … no.” Hardy smiled a little. “They said ‘We’re just the Mayers, and we build houses.’ That’s it and that’s all there’s ever been. I see them, I smile, they smile. I say hello, they say hello. One time I invited them to attend my services, but they never showed up, and they never returned the invitation, not that I expected them to, but I kind of hoped … I was curious.” He eyed me. “And now I’m real curious.”

  “So are we.”

  “Mary told me about Geof and the boy.”

  “I expected she would. Would do you think?”

  “I think Geoffrey ought to get himself a paternity test.”

  “He did that yesterday.”

  “And … ?”

  A movement behind us made us both turn to look at the doorway.

  “Well,” said Hardy, turning around and smiling, “the man of the hour.”

  Geof looked at me with an odd expression on his face; seeing it, my heart turned over in my chest.

  “I called the clinic just now,” he told us.

  “And … ?” Hardy asked again.

  Geof joined us, sinking down beside me on the red cushion and reaching for my hands. I wanted to drop my head and cry as soon as he did that, but I kept my head held high, my face turned inquisitively toward my husband. He squeezed my hands, smiled nervously, and said, “And I guess it’s true.”

  I squeezed his hands in reply and leaned forward to kiss his cheek softly.

  “My goodness,” Hardy said and suddenly laughed. “My goodness!”

  Geof shrugged, fooling none of us. “So, Hardy, did you know a man named Dennis Clemmons?”

  “No, who is he?” A hint of the minister’s usual vigorous wit showed in his eyes. “Not another long-lost son, I trust?”

  “Who was he, is the proper question, Reverend Smart-ass. David’s former stepfather. He got killed this morning.”

  “What do you mean,” Hardy said, sharp as always, “by the phrase got killed?”

  “I mean he died.”

  “You pose a conundrum, Geoffrey.”

  I noticed that our friend’s tone was different with Geof than it was with me, more gentle and serious with me, more bantering with his male, poker-playing crony.

  “I do?” Geof retorted. “Sounded like a simple declarative sentence to me.”

  Hardy stared off at his altar again, but this time he slouched down in the pew to do it. “I’m having trouble with death these days.”

  “Aren’t we all,” agreed my husband wryly.

  When Hardy didn’t reply, Geof pressed him, kidding him.

  “Don’t tell me … Are you having a crisis of faith, Hardy? When Jenny had one of those, she bought a Miata.” He smiled at me; I stuck my tongue out at him. I would have mentioned the Jeep, but I wanted to hear where this odd digression between these two long-standing men friends was going. “It seemed to work wonders for her. But of course, she was having a crisis of faith over her hometown, I guess yours would be over your, uh, home god.”

  Hardy’s warm smile appeared momentarily. “Home god. That’s good. That’s really good. I like that. Like ‘homeboy.’ Maybe I’ll do a sermon on that, about how we try to turn God into a nice little domestic idol that we can cut down to size and carve into a statue and set above the fireplace where he won’t bother us.”

  Geof glanced at me, arching his eyebrows when the minister wasn’t looking. “Hardy, let me say it again: What’s going on here? It isn’t like you to inflict theology on us. No offense. But then you don’t much like what I represent as a cop either, so I don’t inflict my gun-toting views on you. Are you having a crisis of faith?”

  “No, I’d call it a crisis of creed. Do you believe hi eternal life?”

  He included both of us in his questioning glance, but I kept quiet, not wanting to break the rhythm of their communication.

  Geof pulled a face. “Hell, Hardy, I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, well, you heathens”—Hardy grinned at us briefly—“what do you know? We Christians say we do, of course, but I preside at funerals where you’d never suspect that was true, and I’m getting to the point where I don’t think I can commit that kind of hypocrisy anymore. Christ promised us eternal life, He said spirit can never die, and here we are two thousand years later acting as if we believe just the opposite.”

  Hardy looked at us, at our concerned, befuddled expressions, and he laughed at himself. “Do you think I’m doing myself out of a job?”

  “Then come to work for me, Hardy,” I sai
d.

  He looked over at me and said, along with Geof, “What?”

  “I’m not sure what I mean,” I admitted. “The words just came out of my mouth. But now I’m thinking … This foundation that your wife is helping me to get started … maybe we’ll need somebody exactly like you …” Full of passion, I meant; somebody who took nothing for granted, who questioned everything, most especially that which was either not “supposed” to be questioned or it didn’t occur to anyone else to question. “… and maybe that would give you something temporary to do while you figure out what you believe …” I trailed off, half wishing I’d never said anything. And yet, I knew it would be so wonderful to have Hardy Eberhardt involved with this nameless entity I was a’borning.

  “Somebody like me?” He smiled a little. “And what’s that like?”

  “Nuts,” I said frankly. “Like the rest of us.”

  “Ah, yes,” Hardy said, and he reached over to squeeze first my arm and then Geof’s. “Well, then, that’s easy. I’m getting better at that all the time, just ask Mary. No, Jenny, you’re a dear friend, but …”

  “Just think about it,” I found myself saying. “Besides, the only people I’ve got involved so far are women, and I’ve already got a couple of black women—your wife and Sabrina. So I’m going to need a token male, and a black one would be even better …”

  That made him laugh, a welcome sound.

  “Hey,” my husband protested, “don’t you also need a token white male Anglo-Saxon former Protestant?”

  Both men got a kick out of that. Neither of them seemed to notice that Geof’s question took me totally by surprise and that it cast me into a most thoughtful frame of mind, which I carried outdoors with me into an afternoon that had gone sultry again.

  “Damn, no change in the weather,” I observed after we’d left Hardy. “I was hoping it was going to rain some more. When’s this heat ever going to break?”

  But Geof wasn’t interested in my weather commentary. “Where did he take you on that motorcycle ride, Jen?”

  “What? A farmhouse, where he said he spent a lot of time as a kid.”

  “Could you find it again?”