With half an hour remaining before sunset on this Tuesday in August, the western sky blazed orange, steadily deepening toward red, as though the sun were wounded and bleeding in its retreat. The white walls of the church took color from the heavens, and appeared to be full of holy fire.
Stormy waited for me in front of St. Bart’s. She sat on the top step, beside a picnic hamper.
She had traded her pink-and-white Burke Bailey’s uniform for sandals, white slacks, and a turquoise blouse. She had been cute then; she was ravishing now.
With her raven hair and jet-black eyes, she might have been the bride of a pharaoh, swept forward in time from ancient Egypt. In her eyes are mysteries to rival those of the Sphinx and those of all the pyramids that ever were or ever will be excavated from the sands of the Sahara.
As if reading my mind, she said, “You left your hormone spigot running. Crank it shut, griddle boy. This is a church.”
I snatched up the picnic hamper and, as she rose to her feet, I kissed her on the cheek.
“On the other hand, that was a little too chaste,” she said.
“Because that was a kiss from Little Ozzie.”
“He’s sweet. I heard they blew up his cow.”
“It’s a slaughterhouse, plastic Holstein splattered everywhere you look.”
“What’s next—hit squads shooting lawn gnomes to pieces?”
“The world is mad,” I agreed.
We entered St. Bart’s through the main door. The narthex is a softly lighted and welcoming space, paneled in cherry wood stained dark with ruby highlights.
Instead of proceeding into the nave, we turned immediately to the right and stepped up to a locked door. Stormy produced a key and let us into the bottom of the bell tower.
Father Sean Llewellyn, rector of St. Bart’s, is Stormy’s uncle. He knows she loves the tower, and he indulges her with a key.
When the door fell quietly shut behind us, the sweet fragrance of incense faded, and a faint musty smell arose.
The tower stairs were dark. Unerringly, I found her lips for a quick but sweeter kiss than the first, before she switched on the light.
“Bad boy.”
“Good lips.”
“Somehow it’s too strange…getting tongue in church.”
“Technically, we’re not in the church,” I said.
“And I suppose technically that wasn’t tongue.”
“I’m sure there’s a more correct medical term for it.”
“There’s a medical term for you,” she said.
“What’s that?” I wondered as, carrying the hamper, I followed her up the spiral staircase.
“Priapic.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Perpetually horny.”
“You wouldn’t want a doctor to cure that, would you?”
“Don’t need a doctor. Folk medicine offers a reliable cure.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“A swift, hard blow to the source of the problem.”
I winced and said, “You are no Florence Nightingale. I’m going to start wearing a cup.”
At the top of the spiral stairs, a door opened to the belfry.
A carillon of three bronze bells, all large but of different sizes, hung from the ceiling in the center of this lofty space. A six-foot-wide catwalk encircled them.
The bells had rung for vespers at seven and would not ring again until morning Mass.
Three sides of the belfry were open above a waist-high wall, presenting splendid views of Pico Mundo, the Maravilla Valley, and the hills beyond. We stationed ourselves at the west side, the better to enjoy the sunset.
From the hamper, Stormy produced a Tupperware container filled with shelled walnuts that she had deep-fried and seasoned lightly with both salt and sugar. She fed me one. Delicious—both the walnut and being fed by Stormy.
I opened a bottle of good Merlot and poured while she held the wineglasses.
This was why earlier I had not finished the glass of Cabernet: As much as I love Little Ozzie, I would rather drink with Stormy.
We don’t eat in this perch every evening, only two or three times a month, when Stormy needs to be high above the world. And closer to Heaven.
“To Ozzie,” Stormy said, raising her glass in a toast. “With the hope that one day there’ll be an end to all his losses.”
I didn’t ask what she meant by that because I thought perhaps I knew. By the affliction of his weight, there is much in life that Ozzie has been denied and may never experience.
Citrus-orange near the western horizon, blood-orange across the ascending vault, the sky darkened to purple directly overhead. In the east, the first stars of the night would soon begin to appear.
“The sky’s so clear,” Stormy said. “We’ll be able to see Cassiopeia tonight.”
She referred to a northern constellation named after a figure of classic mythology, but Cassiopeia was also the name of Stormy’s mother, who had died when Stormy was seven years old. Her father had perished in the same plane crash.
With no family but her uncle, the priest, she had been placed for adoption. When in three months the adoption failed for good reason, she made it explicitly clear that she didn’t want new parents, only the return of those whom she had loved and lost.
Until the age of seventeen, when she graduated from high school, she was raised in an orphanage. Thereafter, until she was eighteen, she had lived under the legal guardianship of her uncle.
For the niece of a priest, Stormy has a strange relationship with God. There is anger in it—always a little, sometimes a lot.
“What about Fungus Man?” she asked.
“Terrible Chester doesn’t like him.”
“Terrible Chester doesn’t like anyone.”
“I think Chester’s even afraid of him.”
“Now that is news.”
“He’s a hand grenade with the pin already pulled.”
“Terrible Chester?”
“No. Fungus Man. Real name’s Bob Robertson. The hair on his back was standing straight up like I’ve never seen it.”
“Bob Robertson has a lot of hair on his back?”
“No. Terrible Chester. Even when he scared off that huge German shepherd, he didn’t raise his hackles like he did today.”
“Loop me in, odd one. How did Bob Robertson and Terrible Chester happen to be in the same place?”
“Since I broke into his house, I think maybe he’s been following me around.”
Even as I spoke the word following, my attention was drawn to movement in the graveyard.
Immediately west of St. Bart’s is a cemetery very much in the old style: not bronze plaques set in granite flush with the grass, as in most modern graveyards, but vertical headstones and monuments. An iron fence with spear-point pickets surrounds those three acres. Although a few California live oaks, more than a century old, shade portions of the burial ground, most of the green aisles are open to the sun.
In the fiery glow of that Tuesday twilight, the grass appeared to have a bronze undertone, the shadows were as black as char, the polished surfaces of the granite markers mirrored the scarlet sky—and Robertson stood as still as any headstone in the churchyard, not under the cover of a tree but out where he could be easily seen.
Having set her wineglass on the parapet, Stormy crouched at the hamper. “I’ve got some cheese that’s perfect with this wine.”
If Robertson had been standing with his head bowed, studying the engraving on a memorial, I would still have been disturbed to see him here. But this was worse. He had not come to pay his respects to the dead, not for any reason as innocent as that.
With his head tipped back, with his eyes fixed on me where I stood at the belfry parapet, the singular intensity of his interest all but crackled from him like arcing electricity.
Past the oaks and beyond the iron fence, I could see parts of two streets that intersected at the northwest corner of the cemetery. As far as I could tell, no marked or un
marked police vehicle was parked along either avenue.
Chief Porter had promised to assign a man at once to watch the house in Camp’s End. If Robertson hadn’t been home yet, however, that officer could not have established surveillance.
“You want crackers with the cheese?” Stormy asked.
Crimson had seeped down the summer sky, closer to the horizon, staining the western swathe of bright orange until it narrowed to a swatch. The air itself seemed to be stained red, and the shadows of trees and tombstones, already soot-black, grew even blacker.