Yet he has an unsettling way of arriving and departing with a suddenness that sometimes reminds me of a ghost materializing and dematerializing. He is there, then isn’t. Isn’t, then is.
With Knuckles, I left the grand cloister and followed the stone passage to the guest cloister, from there through the oak door into the main parlor on the ground floor of the guesthouse.
We went to the fireplace at the north end of the room, though no fire was burning, and sat forward on armchairs, facing each other.
“After we talked last night,” Knuckles said, “I did a bed check. Don’t have no authority. Felt sneaky. But it seemed the right thing.”
“You made an executive decision.”
“That’s just what I done. Even back when I was dumb muscle and lost to God, I sometimes made executive decisions. Like, the boss sends me to break a guy’s legs, but the guy gets the point after I break one, so I don’t do the second. Things like that.”
“Sir, I’m just curious…. When you presented yourself as a postulant to the Brothers of St. Bartholomew, how long did your first confession last?”
“Father Reinhart says two hours ten minutes, but it felt like a month and a half.”
“I’ll bet it did.”
“Anyway, some brothers leave their doors part open, some don’t, but no room’s ever locked. I used a flashlight from each doorway to quick scope the bed. Nobody was missin’.”
“Anybody awake?”
“Brother Jeremiah suffers insomnia. Brother John Anthony had a gut full of acid from yesterday’s dinner.”
“The chile rellenos.”
“I told ’em I thought maybe I smelled somethin’ burnin’, I was just checkin’ around to be sure there weren’t no problem.”
“You lied, sir,” I said, just to tweak him.
“It ain’t a lie that’s gonna put me in the pit with Al Capone, but it’s one step on a slippery slope I been down before.”
His hand, so brutal-looking, invested the sign of the cross with a special poignancy, and called to mind the hymn “Amazing Grace.”
The brothers arise at five o’clock, wash, dress, and line up at 5:40 in the courtyard of the grand cloister, to proceed together into the church for Matins and Lauds. At two o’clock in the morning, therefore, they’re sacked out, not reading or playing a Game Boy.
“Did you go over to the novitiate wing, check on the novices?”
“No. You said the brother facedown in the yard was in black, you almost fell over him.”
In some orders, the novices wear habits similar to—or the same as—those worn by the brothers who have professed their final vows, but at St. Bartholomew’s, the novices wear gray, not black.
Knuckles said, “I figured the unconscious guy in the yard, he maybe came to, got up, went back to bed—or he was the abbot.”
“You checked on the abbot?”
“Son, I ain’t gonna try that smelled-somethin’-burnin’ routine on the abbot in his private quarters, him as smart as three of me. Besides, the guy in the yard was heavy, right? You said heavy. And Abbot Bernard, you gotta tie him down in a mild wind.”
“Fred Astaire.”
Knuckles winced. He pinched the lumpy bridge of his mushroom nose. “Wish you never told me that ‘Tea for Two’ thing. Can’t keep my mind on the abbot’s mornin’ address, just waitin’ for his soft-shoe.”
“When did they discover Brother Timothy was missing?”
“I seen he ain’t in line for Matins. By Lauds, he still don’t show, so I duck outta church to check his room. He’s just pillows.”
“Pillows?”
“The night before, what looked like Brother Timothy under the blanket, by flashlight from his doorway, was just extra pillows.”
“Why would he do that? There’s no rule about lights out. There’s no bed check.”
“Maybe Tim, he didn’t do it himself, somebody else faked it to buy time, keep us from realizin’ Tim was gone.”
“Time for what?”
“Don’t know. But if I’d seen he was gone last night, I would’ve known it was him you found in the yard, and I’d have woke the abbot.”
“He’s a little heavy, all right,” I said.
“Kit Kat belly. If a brother was missin’ when I did bed check, the cops would’ve been here hours ago, before the storm got so bad.”
“And now the search is harder,” I said. “He’s…dead, isn’t he?”
Knuckles looked into the fireplace, where no fire burned. “My professional opinion is, I kinda think so.”
I’d had too much of Death. I’d fled from Death to this haven, but of course in running from him, I had only run into his arms.
Life you can evade; death you cannot.
CHAPTER 11
THE LAMB OF DAWN BECAME A MORNING LION with a sudden roar of wind that raked the parlor windows with ticking teeth of snow. A mere snowstorm swelled into a biting blizzard.
“I liked Brother Timothy,” I said.
“He was a sweet guy,” Knuckles agreed. “That amazing blush.”
I remembered the outer light that revealed the inner brightness of the monk’s innocence. “Somebody put pillows under Tim’s blanket
s so he wouldn’t be missed till the storm could complicate things. The killer bought time to finish what he came here to do.”
“He who?” Knuckles asked.
“I told you, sir, I’m not psychic.”
“Ain’t askin’ for psychic. Thought you seen some clues.”
“I’m not Sherlock Holmes, either. I better talk to the police.”
“Maybe you should think on whether that’s smart.”
“But I should tell them what happened.”
“You gonna tell ’em about bodachs?”
In Pico Mundo, the chief of police, Wyatt Porter, was like a father to me. He had known about my gift since I was fifteen.
I didn’t relish sitting with the county sheriff and explaining that I saw dead people as well as demons, wolfish and swift.
“Chief Porter can call the sheriff here and vouch for me.”
Knuckles looked doubtful. “And how long might that take?”
“Maybe not long, if I can reach Wyatt quick.”
“I don’t mean how long for Chief Porter to tell the locals you’re real. I mean how long for the locals to believe it.”
He had a point. Even Wyatt Porter, an intelligent man, who knew my grandmother well and knew me, required convincing when I first took him information that solved a stalled murder investigation.
“Son, nobody but you sees bodachs. If the kids or all of us is gonna get slammed by somebody, by somethin’—you got the best chance of figurin’ out what-how-when, the best chance to stop it.”
On the mahogany floor lay a Persian-style carpet. In the figured world of wool between my feet, a dragon twisted, glaring.
“I don’t want that much responsibility. I can’t carry it.”
“God seems to think you can.”
“Nineteen dead,” I reminded him.
“When it might’ve been two hundred. Listen, son, don’t think the law is always like Wyatt Porter.”
“I know it’s not.”
“These days law thinks it’s about nothin’ but laws. Law don’t remember it was once handed down from somewhere, that it once meant not just no, but was a way to live and a reason to live that way. Law now thinks nobody but politicians made it or remake it, so maybe it ain’t a surprise some people don’t care anymore about law, and even some lawmen don’t understand the real reason for law. You pour your story out to a wrong kind of lawman, he’s never gonna see you’re on his side. Never gonna believe you’re gifted. A lawman like that, he thinks you’re what’s wrong with the world the way it used to be, the way he’s glad it ain’t anymore. He thinks you’re a psych case. He can’t trust you. He won’t. Suppose they take you in for observation, or even for suspicion if they find a body, what do we do then?”