Brothers and Bones (23 page)

He concentrated so hard it look like he was wincing in pain. Seconds passed. The wait was killing me. I wanted to tell him to hurry up, to think harder, but I was afraid he’d lose his grip on the slender thread he was holding in his mind. Finally, he turned to me.

“I think he wanted you to find religion.”

I just stared at him for a moment. “That’s not going to help us find the tape Jake had, or his notes.”

“I didn’t say it would. I said Jake told me to tell you something. I never said it was about the tape.”

Now I was the one frowning. “Find religion? But that makes no sense.”

He looked a little offended, a little annoyed. “Yes, it does. People find religion all the time.”

“No, I mean, Jake wasn’t a religious person, not as an adult, anyway, and neither am I. Our parents took us to church when we were kids, and Jake was even an altar boy for a couple of years when I was really little, but I don’t think either one of us set foot in a church after my parents died.” I shook my head. “It doesn’t make any sense, Bonz. Why would he say that?”

“I don’t know, Charlie, I’m just telling you what he said.”

“What you
remember
he said.”

Bonz nodded. “That’s right.”

It wasn’t lost on me that Bonz’s mind, which had been battered to pieces shortly after hearing Jake’s dying words, could have remembered them inaccurately. But I said, “If Jake really said that, he must have been delirious.”

“He could have been,” Bonz said, “but I don’t think I thought so at the time.”

“I just don’t get it.”

“Look, your brother had been through a hell of a lot. Maybe he found God in the final weeks of his life. Wouldn’t be that unusual. Hell, toward the end of what I went through, I almost started praying, and I’d never prayed a fucking day in my life.”

It was possible, of course. Perhaps Jake had finally found God inside the cold walls of his prison. People facing far less had found comfort in religion, solace in prayer. But Jake? It was possible, but it didn’t feel right to me.

“I just don’t see it, Bonz.”

Bonz’s gruff voice grew even gruffer as he said, “Look, you asked, so I’m telling you. I remember—as clearly as it is possible for me to remember—I remember him saying something like that, right at the very end.”

“Wait a minute. Something
like
that? He didn’t say exactly that?”

“I don’t remember his exact words,” Bonz said. He was getting testy. I didn’t care. We were making progress now.

“Bonz, think very, very hard. What were his exact words?”

He grunted, then said, “I don’t know. Forget it.” He stared straight ahead again. “Turn right up there.”

“Where are we going?”

“I know a place we’ll be safe for a while.”

I wanted to know where he was taking me, but I didn’t want to derail his thought train. “Fine, but stay with me here. We’re onto something now, I think. Just tell me
exactly
what Jake said right before he died. Please.”

He huffed once, then said, “I think—and that’s the best I can do, Charlie, is tell you what I think—I
think
he said, ‘Find Charlie and tell him to find religion.’ ” He frowned again. “No, that isn’t it. ‘Find Charlie and tell him if he wants the answers, he should find religion.’ Yeah, that might have been it.” He was still concentrating, so I didn’t say anything. I hoped for more. Clarification, an additional clause or phrase, something, anything. And then Bonz said, “Wait. I think I have it.”

My heart did another somersault, then launched right into a cartwheel. “Well?”

“I’m pretty sure he said, ‘Find Charlie and tell him if he wants the answers, to turn to prayer.’ ” Bonz unscrewed his face, which had been screwed up in intense concentration, and turned to me. “I really think that’s it. I think those were his exact words. Turn left at the corner.”

I did, then I turned the phrase he’d said over in my mind, examining it from all angles. It still didn’t make much sense to me, but I began to believe that this message wasn’t merely the hope of a desperate, dying man that his beloved brother would start to walk on the right path to heaven. Rather, I thought, maybe it was, after all, a clue to the tape’s whereabouts. The part about “finding the answers” certainly seemed to be. Maybe Jake had, in fact, hoped Bonz would get his message to me and Jake had been, in fact, trying to direct me to his tape. I just had to figure out the part about prayer.

“What do you think?” Bonz asked.

“I don’t know. Give me a minute.” I looked at Bonz. “Good job remembering, though.”

He made a noncommittal little sound deep in his throat and looked out at the highway in front of us. I stared out the passenger window, thinking.

Then it hit me. I headed for Storrow Drive as fast as I dared in a car the cops were certainly looking for.

“Where are we going?” Bonz asked.

“To get the tape. I know where Jake hid it.”

If I was right, Carmen Siracuse would wake up tomorrow morning to a knock on his door and find a bunch of cops standing there with a nice pair of shiny silver bracelets, just his size, attached by a very short length of shiny chain. And if I
was
right, I might, just might, be able to clear my name.

TWENTY-FIVE

Saint John the Baptist Catholic Church, known by its parishioners as Saint John’s, is located in the affluent town of Belmont, nine miles or so west of Boston. Saint John’s is the church my parents took us to when we were kids. Jake had served as an altar boy there. My family lived just a few blocks away.

Bonz and I had left my Corolla a street over, parked behind a pizza joint that billed itself on the sign over the front door as a family-owned Italian restaurant. It was closed, of course. Not many people want a pizza with everything, or a dish of spicy sausage and peppers, at three in the morning. At least not in Belmont. From the pizza place we cut through a cross street and down several blocks to Saint John’s. We stuck to the shadows as much as possible, but only when we could do so without looking suspicious. We didn’t want to be seen, of course, but it would have been worse to be seen darting from dark patch to dark patch, scurrying across the well-lit areas. The streets of Belmont were quiet, though, and we made it to the church without incident.

Saint John’s sat nestled among tall oaks dating back to colonial times. Their branches were glutted with leaves that would fall in a month or so, laying a thick but brittle carpet of red and gold across the church lot. Parishioner volunteers, pressed into service by a strong sense of religious duty, or perhaps by good old Catholic guilt, would spend countless hours raking up those leaves, shoving them into bags, and hauling the bags to the town leaf dump.

The church itself was red brick. A wooden spire, painted brilliant white and topped with a gold cross, reached up through the oak branches and into the night sky. Far beneath the spire were two formidable oak doors, built strong enough to keep out the heathens.

We stood in the shadow of a fat tree trunk and looked at the church.

“You don’t want to wait until morning?” Bonz asked.

“If the tape’s in there, and I think it is, I’d rather look for it without anyone around asking us why we’re opening closets and looking under pews, wouldn’t you?”

Bonz was silent.

“Besides, the longer that tape’s not in our hands, the longer we’re in danger without the leverage to get us out of it.”

Bonz was studying the church. “Anybody in there now?”

“Shouldn’t be. The rectory’s over there.” I pointed to a small Victorian house on the adjacent lot. “Pastor lives there.”

Bonz nodded and looked back at the church. “Probably locked.”

“Didn’t stop you at Aunt Fannie’s.”

“We may have to break one of those windows.”

I looked at the windows running the length of the church, each at least ten feet in height. Though they weren’t illuminated from within at the moment, I could see the lead crisscrossing them seemingly at random. I remembered being struck as a kid by the beauty of those stained-glass windows.

“I’d rather not,” I said.

“You want in, I make no promises. We’ll try the doors first, though.”

I followed Bonz up the brick steps at the front of the church. Bonz grabbed a big, well-worn bronze door handle and tugged. Locked.

We went around to the side of the building. While a large portion of each window was fixed in place, the bottom foot or so could tilt in, allowing air into the stuffy nave during masses on hot summer days. We walked the length of the church, pushing on the bottom of each window. No luck.

In the back of the church we found a locked door with a window on either side of it. They were regular windows, double hung, like the kind you’d find in a house.

“What’s back here?” Bonz asked, nodding at the window.

I thought about the times I’d been in the back of the church with Jake before he assisted at a Mass. “If I remember correctly, there’s a small office and a sacristy.” I saw Bonz’s blank expression and added, “It’s a changing room, where the priests keep their vestments, where they get dressed for Mass.”

Bonz was looking through one of the windows, his face close to the glass.

“I don’t see an alarm sensor.”

He put his elbow against one of the panes and pushed sharply with it, breaking the glass, which fell into the room and broke fairly quietly into smaller pieces on the floor inside. Bonz reached in through the empty pane and turned the lock. He slid the window up and climbed through. I followed him. My second act of breaking and entering of the night—my third if you counted the car.

The room we stood in was dark, lit only by pale moonlight drifting in through the windows. Even in the dim light, though, I could see we were standing in the sacristy.

“You think anyone heard that?” I asked in a hushed voice.

“The glass? No.” Bonz spoke quietly, too.

“We can’t turn on a light, I guess.”

“No.”

“I’m sure there are candles out in the nave,” I said.

“What’s a nave?”

“The main part of the church, where the people worship.”

“Oh. Lead the way.”

I made my way tentatively across the room, farther into darkness, stumbling once on a footstool or something. I found a door on the far wall and pulled it open and stepped out onto the altar.

Though I wasn’t a practicing Catholic, and hadn’t been since I was six, I felt a twinge of guilt standing there on that holy stage. I shrugged it off and looked around, getting my bearings. The inside of the church was dark, but enough moonlight touched the stained-glass windows on one side of the building that I could see saints and martyrs, glowing very faintly in purple, scarlet, royal blue, green, and gold. As a little boy, the scenes in those windows held my attention far more securely than did the words of the priests. I could barely see them now.

The church smelled as I remembered it, as all old churches seem to smell. Old wood, old carpet, incense of some kind, dead flowers somewhere.

Two sections of pews ran the length of the nave, bisected by a central aisle. Aisles also ran along the side walls. I stepped down to the floor in front of the altar and walked along one of the outer aisles until I reached a rack of offering candles. I pulled a dollar bill from my pocket and stuffed it into a small tin box attached to the side of the rack—shrugging at Bonz as I did—and took a match from a glass jar by the candles. I struck the match. The tiny flame seemed very bright in the dark church. I lowered the match to the offering candle inside a votive and the wick caught, flame flickering to life. The ruby-red votive glowed. I handed it to Bonz and lit a second for myself.

“Out of dollar bills?” Bonz asked in a voice that was quiet, though still somehow gruff.

I ignored him. The votive grew hot. I had to hold it close to the bottom. Bonz’s fingers curled around the glass of his as if they didn’t even register the heat. “These going to give us enough light?” I asked.

“Have to, unless we find a flashlight. Now what?”

“Search the church. If Jake told me to find religion, or turn to prayer, he must have meant for me to come here. It’s the only connection we have to such things. Jake was an altar boy here when he was a kid. Maybe he came back, gave the tape to a priest with instructions to turn it over to the authorities if something happened to me.”

Bonz’s nod told me that he agreed this was a possibility.

“Or,” I continued, “even if he didn’t give it to anyone to hold for him, maybe he remembered a great hiding place for it. He’d have known his way around the church.”

“Okay. So where do we start?”

I had no idea. Jake could have hidden the tape anywhere. We had to be thorough and look everywhere, so we might as well start our search at the front doors—the back of the church—and work our way up to the altar.

“Let’s start in the narthex. We’ll look for any place that could serve as a secret hiding place for a tape.”

Bonz sighed. “What’s a narthex?”

“It’s that little foyer you cross after coming in the front doors, before passing into the nave.”

We walked the rest of the way down the outer aisle, candles held out before us, the votives flickering blood-red in our hands. We reached the back of the church—though it would be the front from the outside—and passed through an archway, into the narthex. The big oak doors stood at the front of the church. The narthex was empty. A staircase led down from one corner. Bonz walked over and held his candle at arm’s length into the stairwell.

“Where’s this lead?” Bonz asked.

“The basement. It was just storage when we used to come here. We’ll search it last.”

I walked back through the archway and stopped just inside the nave, beside a little metal bowl bolted to the wall. Out of Catholic habit, ingrained in me even as a very young boy, I dipped my fingers into the holy water in the bowl and touched my wet fingers to my forehead, chest, and each shoulder, first left, then right, in the sign of the cross. Nearly three decades of agnosticism bordering on atheism hadn’t been able to rid me of this vestigial Catholic instinct. I stepped farther into the nave. I noticed that Bonz didn’t cross himself. Either he wasn’t Catholic or he didn’t fear God. Neither would have surprised me.