Dog Bless You (19 page)

He woofed in agreement.

We met Lili by my car in the parking lot. Seeing her,
Rochester immediately clambered into the back seat. I lowered all the windows
and we headed south.

As we drove down River Road I told her about the
break-in at the abbey chapel.

“You think it was Owen Keely?” she asked.

“He’s the logical suspect. I’m sure that Brother Anselm
told him about the reliquary, too. Maybe he found it after he left Mark’s, and
that’s why he took off—to sell it somewhere.”

“Do you think he killed DeAndre, too?”

“I don’t know. Hell, I don’t even know if I believe
this reliquary thing is real. We only have Brother Anselm’s word that it ever
existed. There could be some other explanation for DeAndre’s death and Owen’s
disappearance.”

“Maybe there will be something more about it in these
archives,” she said. The church’s address was on Germantown Avenue in North
Philly, and she used her cell phone to pull up driving directions. “It says we
should go down US 1,” Lili said. “Isn’t that a long way?”

I shrugged. “When I was a kid that used to be the way
we went into Philly. It’s a lot of traffic lights, but I think it puts us
closer to North Philly than taking 95.” We hopped onto I-95 at the Scudder
Falls Bridge, just north of Yardley, and then took it a few miles south to
where it met up with US1 – or “useless 1,” as my dad used to call it.

“Sometimes I forget how lucky we are to live out in the
country,” Lili said, as we drove through Bristol, the original terminus for the
Delaware Canal. The divided highway was lined with warehouses, motels, used car
lots and superstores with huge parking lots. “You can hardly see a piece of
grass around here except for that cemetery over there.”

“The city keeps spreading,” I said. “I remember coming
down this way to visit friends of my dad’s, or to go to some special store. It
was pretty built up even then.”

As we continued into the heart of the city, the
suburban sprawl was replaced by rows of brick apartment buildings and strip
shopping centers that had long ago lost their parking lots to road expansion. In
Germantown, the street was lined with two-story row houses with street-level
storefronts—hair salons and dry cleaners and consignment stores, cheap-looking
Chinese, Mexican and burger restaurants.

A group of teenage boys played a pickup game of
basketball in a park across from an Acme grocery. On the side streets we saw
more row houses, these a bit more modern, with jutting second-floor
projecting bays.

 There were trees here and there, but the sidewalks
were damaged and some of the windows on Germantown Avenue were broken. We began
to see exterior bars on windows and roll-up gates on storefronts.

“The College Connection kids come from places like
this,” Lili said.

“So did DeAndre. I can see why he fell in love with
Leighville and encouraged his half-brother to go into the program.”

The church of St. Mary Martyr was a vaguely gothic
stone building, with a couple of arched windows and a square tower over the
entrance to the sanctuary. A long sloping concrete walkway, built to meet ADA
requirements, I was sure, snaked along one side of the old building. I could
see traces of old graffiti on the stone, and the grass outside was parched from
lack of water or care.

An electric trolley car rattled past as we pulled into
the parking lot behind the church. When I got out of the car, Rochester hopped
out behind me, and immediately peed against a lamppost. “They probably won’t
let you bring him inside,” Lili said.

“I’m not leaving him in the car in this neighborhood.
If we have to, he and I will wait in the lobby while you look through the
pictures.”

Esther Washington was a black woman in her late sixties
who worked in the church office. “My goodness, what a beautiful dog!” she said
when we walked in.

Rochester went right up to her and sat down on his
haunches. She reached over and petted him. “My, my. I had a dog just like you,
sweetheart. A long time ago.”

She looked up. “You must be the gentleman who called
earlier.”

“I’m Steve, and this is Lili,” I said. “And that’s
Rochester.”

“What a handsome name,” Esther said. I assumed she
meant Rochester. She stood up. “I’m afraid what we have isn’t in any kind of
order. But I can take you into the social hall and you can look through the
boxes.”

I helped Esther carry two big boxes of pictures to a
table in the warm, drafty social hall. Lili opened her messenger bag and pulled
out her iPad and a portable scanner. She slid the iPad into the scanner’s dock,
and then ran a photo through to test it. I was impressed at the quality of the
picture that showed up on the iPad’s screen.

“Very cool gadget,” I said.

 We each took a box and began looking through the
photos, which had been haphazardly tossed together. “This is a big project,” I
grumbled. “Most of these pictures aren’t even labeled.”

“We both know what Friar Lake looks like. Let’s just see
if we can find anything that matches what we’ve seen.”

We spent nearly an hour before Lili found a picture
that she thought looked like the abbey at Friar Lake. She pulled up a recent
picture on her iPad and we compared it. “Yeah, that’s a match,” I said. “See
the tracery around the stained glass window? It’s the same in both photos.”

I looked over to see Rochester nosing into one box.
“Rochester! Come away from there!”

He didn’t respond, so I jumped up and crossed the room
to the box he was sniffing. “Is there something in here, boy?” I asked.

I carried the box over to the table where Lili and I
sat, and lifted out a frayed white robe embroidered with gold thread. Underneath
was a small waxed-paper sleeve of round cookies. “False alarm,” I said. “He found
some cookies.”

I shook my head at him. “These are so old they’re
stale,” I said. “You can’t have one.”

“They aren’t cookies,” Lili said. “They must be
communion wafers.”

“Oh. That makes sense.” Under another robe, though, we
found a cache of black and white pictures of Our Lady of the Waters from the
1950s. “Good boy, Rochester,” I said, scratching beneath his chin. “You did
find something after all. You’ll get a treat when we get home.”

Rochester recognized the word treat, and he lifted his
big head up and nodded a couple of times. When he realized there was no treat
coming, though, he lowered his head and slumped back to the floor.

Lili and I looked through the pictures. Monks in
traditional robes stood outside the chapel, the dormitory and the kitchen. Someone
had written the date and the monks’ names on the back of each photo, in a
spidery, faded handwriting.

There were some indoor shots, too—a monk in his room,
another in the kitchen. The last set were taken in the chapel. Maybe it was just
the age of the photos, but the place looked pretty worn. Monks stood by the windows,
next to the baptismal font, and at the foot of the altar. In one close-up shot
of the altar various ceremonial objects had been laid out on an embroidered
runner.

Lili went to get Esther while I ran the pictures
through the scanner. “We’re hoping you can tell us what some of these things
are,” Lili said as they walked back in. “Neither of us are that familiar with
Catholic objects.”

“What a lovely picture,” Esther said, when we showed
her the altar close-up. “Look at the detail on that altar cloth. You don’t see
work like that anymore.”

She began moving down the line of objects. “That’s the
paten,” she said, pointing at a flat plate with the letters IHS inscribed in
the center. “You put the Eucharistic bread on it. And that’s the Christogram
there—the first three letters of Christ’s name in Greek.” It was a simple round
plate, and the goblet next to it was very plain as well. “The chalice, for the
wine.”

There were several crucifixes laid out on the altar
cloth, and the positioning of Jesus’s body was slightly different in each. One
even had a skull and crossbones beneath his feet.

“That’s a symbol of Calvary, where Jesus was buried,”
Esther said. “In Hebrew they call it Golgotha, which is supposed to mean the
place of the skull. Some traditions say that Jesus was buried directly on top
of Adam and Eve, and the skull and bones represents that.”

It was creepy—but then, the whole idea of displaying a
dead or dying man creeped me out. I had been in a speech and debate club in
high school, and our team often competed in meets at Catholic schools, where
the crucifix was as ever-present as the American flag in our classes. I had
become desensitized to them—but when I looked closely at these I was struck by
the horror and the pain.

The last item on the altar cloth was a rectangular box
about six inches long. “What’s that for?” I asked Esther, pointing.

She shook her head. “I don’t know.” We all looked more
closely at the box. Unlike the plain paten and goblet, the box was inscribed
with ornamental curlicues, and inlaid with stones. In the center there was a
tiny etching, and Lili had to enlarge the photo several times before we could
make it out.

“Why, it’s a man with a dog,” Esther said. “How sweet.”

“Oh, wow!” I said. “That’s Saint Roch, the patron saint
of dogs.”

Lili and I shared a glance and I could tell she was as
excited as I was. We’d finally found something that substantiated Brother
Anselm’s story about the reliquary. We couldn’t tell from the picture, of
course, if there was a saint’s thumb bone inside, or even if the jewels on the
box were real. But the details matched.

Esther looked at me. “Now, how did you know that?”

“Because there are a lot of people looking for a box
like this,” I said.

Lili finished scanning the last couple of pictures, and
then we packed up our gear. “Thank you so much for your help,” Lili said.
“Would you like me to send you copies of the pictures I scanned?”

“That would be lovely,” Esther said. She handed Lili a flyer
about the church. “Our email address is right there on the bottom.”

Rochester stopped to pee on the same light post before
he got back in the car, and then we headed back toward the suburbs. The sun had
gone in and the skies were gray, and I was glad to be leaving the inner city
behind.

“So it’s real,” Lili said, sitting back in her seat.
“The reliquary.”

“You bet. When you zoomed in on that picture, my heart
skipped a couple of beats. Now we know that the monks had it as late as the
1950s. The question is where it’s been since then, and who has it now.”

“Not to mention,” Lili said, staring out the windows as
the grim urban landscape fled past, “who might have killed DeAndre to get it.”

Lili had work to do before her class the next morning,
so I drove her up to her apartment in Leighville. “I’ll email you the pictures
I scanned,” she said. “I’ll try and zoom in on the box and get as good a print
as I can.”

As I drove back downriver toward Stewart’s Crossing, I
realized it was already dinner time and I didn’t feel like cooking, so I called
Rick. I kind of wanted to show off to him, about what we’d discovered about the
reliquary. “You want to split a pizza?” I asked. “I’ll pick up from
Giovanni’s?”

“Works for me,” he said. “Although I know you’re only
offering so you can squirm your way farther into these investigations.”

“As long as we’re clear,” I said. I hung up and ordered
the pizza. Giovanni’s was in a small strip shopping center in the middle of
Stewart’s Crossing, perpendicular to Main Street. It was sandwiched between a Laundromat
and a State Store, the government-run outlet for liquor, along with a greeting
card store, a dry cleaner’s, and a karate donjon.

I left Rochester in the car with the windows down while
I went into the pizza parlor. There was a line for takeout, and I had to force
myself to be patient until it was my turn. By the time the cashier had pulled
the large sausage-and-mushroom pie from its warming spot on top of the pizza
oven my mouth was watering and my stomach was grumbling.

Carrying the hot-bottomed box by its edges, I
shouldered open the restaurant door and walked to the trunk of the BMW. I was
surprised that Rochester wasn’t hanging out the window salivating. I slid the
box into the trunk and then opened the driver’s side door.

Rochester was gone.

I scanned the parking lot. “Rochester! Where are you,
boy?”

I couldn’t see him anywhere. Had someone stolen my dog?
Or had he run away? There were a dozen or more cars in the lot, but he was too
big to hide under anything smaller than an SUV.

A father exited the donjon with two little boys in
white robes, and a matronly woman was crossing the parking lot toward the State
Store. There was no one else around to ask if they’d seen a big golden
retriever.

When I was a kid, I explored every corner of Stewart’s
Crossing on foot or on my bike, alone or with friends. I knew there was a creek
behind the shopping center that fed into the mill pond down the street. Could
Rochester have gone back there? Or had he run toward Main Street? He was a
smart dog, but impulsive, and I worried that he’d run in front of a car.

I tried to shut down my fear and focus. Should I go
toward the street, or the creek? If Rochester had jumped out the car window on
his own, which way would he have gone?

I went with my gut instinct and took off at a run for
the creek, calling his name. “Rochester! Rochester! Where are you, boy?”

The two boys in karate robes looked at me open-mouthed
as I ran past them. I rounded the corner of the shopping center and skidded to
a stop. Rochester was knee-deep in creek water, his front paws up on the trunk
of a sloping weeping willow.

“Rochester! Come here right now!”

He looked over at the sound of my voice, but then
turned back to the tree and barked once.

My heart was pumping and I was panting for breath. I
guess I hadn’t sprinted like that since high school.

“I am going to kill you,” I said, stalking through the
underbrush to the creek. Just before I reached him I banged my shin on
something. “Ow!” I looked down and realized it was the handlebar of a bicycle.
“This is not a dump! What kind of a jerk throws a bike back here?”

Maybe it was the two words, jerk and bike, together in
one sentence, that made me think of Owen Keely. “Crap,” I said. I pulled my
cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Rick’s number.

“You know what kind of bike Owen Keely rode?” I asked.

“I thought you were bringing pizza.”

“We had a bit of a diversion. The bike?”

“Hold on. Let me check. I don’t have all this
information at the tip of my tongue, you know.”

“I know,” I grumbled. Rochester kept trying to climb
the tree, and I saw a squirrel in a branch high above us, chittering down at
him.

Rick came back on the line after a minute. “His mother doesn’t
know the brand. But it has a blue body and cream-colored fenders.”

“I think Rochester found it,” I said.

“Where are you?”

I told him, and he said he’d meet me there. There was
no guarantee it was Owen’s bicycle, though it looked pretty new, not the kind
of bike you’d just throw in the trash.

Rochester was still sniffing around the tree, though
the squirrel above had long since hopped away. I had forgotten to bring his
leash with me so I had to grab him by his collar.

“You are a very bad dog. Don’t you ever run away from
me again!”

He splashed in the creek and the water sprayed my pants
legs. He tried to reach up and lick my hand but I pulled him forward. Holding
the ring on the end of his choke-chain collar, I led him to the car and he
jumped in the front seat. “Sit!” I said.

He plopped his butt down, but by the time I had gone
around to the trunk he had jumped to the back seat and was sniffing toward me,
leaving muddy paw prints everywhere.

I had to remind myself that even though he was two
years old, he was still a puppy in many ways, and that it was my own fault for
leaving the windows in the car open enough so that he could jump out. I
wouldn’t make that mistake again.

My hands were still shaking as I opened the trunk and
pulled out a slice of pizza. No reason to let the pie get cold while I waited
for Rick, I thought. I fed some crust to Rochester through the back window and
wished I had a beer with me.

I forced myself to take some deep, calming breaths, as
Rochester sniffed and scratched at the back seat. I felt worn out—not just from
the run, but from the fear that I might have lost my dog for good.

I was calmer by the time Rick pulled up in his truck. I
closed the trunk and put Rochester’s leash on as Rick got out. “Where’s the
bike?”

“I’ll show you.” With Rochester pulling forward, we
went back to the creek, and I told him how Rochester had run away. “It freaked
me out,” I said. “And it reminded me he’s still a big puppy. I need to be more
careful about him. I just kept imagining him running in front of a car, or him
galloping away and me never seeing him again.”

“I know how you feel. I had Rascal at the dog park a
couple of weeks ago and when this ditzy blonde opened the gate, he ran right
out and took off down the street. Had to chase him for three blocks until he
got distracted by a squirrel.”

I led him a couple of feet into the thicket, and
pointed at the bike, half-hidden under the brush. “I guess you need a crime
scene tech here,” I said.

“What’s the crime?” Rick asked. “Illegal dumping?”

“But doesn’t this mean…” I began.

“All it means is that somebody dumped a bike back here
that might be Owen Keely’s. Back the dog away so I can drag it out.”

It was hot and muggy back there by the creek, and
Rick’s cargo shorts and T-shirt were sweaty and dirt-stained by the time he had
the bike out of the muck and thrown into the back of his truck.

“You get the pizza?” he asked, wiping his hands on a
rag.

“Yeah. Probably cold by now.”

“That’s what microwaves are for.”

I followed him back to his house. Before I got out of
the car, I clipped Rochester’s leash onto his collar, and then I held it
tightly as I navigated removing the pizza box from the trunk and opening the
gate to Rick’s yard.

Rascal came tearing toward us. The combined force of
the two big dogs nearly knocked me over, and Rick had to jump forward and grab
the pizza box.

He put a couple of slices of pizza into the microwave
as I opened his fridge and removed a bottle of beer. I sat at the table and he brought
out plates and paper towels.

“Lili and I drove into Philly today,” I said. “And
guess what we found?”

“It can’t be a bicycle,” he said dryly. “Already dealt
with that.”

“How about a photograph of this reliquary Brother
Anselm talked about,” I said. As we ate, I explained about calling the church
on Germantown Avenue, and then going through all the pictures. “There was a
lineup of stuff on the altar—probably all their valuable pieces. We saw this
one box that looked like the reliquary.”

“How could you tell?” he asked, feeding a piece of
crust to each dog.

“Let me see if Lili sent me the picture and I’ll show
you.” I opened my phone and checked my email. I clicked on Lili’s latest
message, and a close-up of the picture appeared. “We think this is it,” I said,
showing the phone to Rick. “See that guy with the dog? That could be St. Roch,
the patron saint of dogs. And even in black and white you can see that those
look like jewels around the edges.”

“You send this to Tony?”

I checked the message, and saw that Lili had copied
him. “Yup.”

I sat back in my chair. “Lili’s working on a pictorial
history of the property. I’m supposed to be helping with the text.”

“And how’s that?” Rick asked. “Working with her?”

“So far it’s okay. I can remember times I had to help
Mary with her projects, and we use to squabble about every little detail. Lili
and I don’t seem to work that way.”

Mary was smart and tough and good at communication and
convincing people. She had built a career in corporate marketing, and we had
moved from New York to Silicon Valley so she could take a big job with one of
the computer companies. She was often up til the early hours of the morning,
reading, answering emails and working on presentations.

Sometimes, though, the technical aspects of what she
was working on would overwhelm her, and she’d ask for my help. I had built up
the ability to communicate technical information clearly, and I’d try to
untangle her sentences to clarify and focus.

But that always led to arguments. “It needs to read
that way,” she’d say.

“But it’s not clear.”

Our voices would climb, and we’d end up yelling at each
other over some stupid point like the storage capacity of a jump drive, and
then one of us would get fed up and stalk away, slamming doors and nursing hurt
feelings.

It wasn’t like that with Lili—at least not yet. So far
we’d been getting along just fine. I struggled to remember the first years with
Mary, double-dating in New York with Tor and Sherry, but it was all a blur.

“When you were first married, did you get along with Vanessa?”
I asked.

“What kind of a question is that? I wouldn’t have
married her otherwise.”

“Yeah, but even when Mary and I were first going out,
we used to argue about little things—like where we’d go to dinner, and what the
best way was to get somewhere on the subway. I think that set a pattern for our
whole relationship.”

“And it’s not like that with Lili?”

“No, so far we get along well.”

Rick sat back in his chair with his bottle of Sam Adams
in his hand. “Vanessa and I were all about sex,” he said. “We were both so hot
for each other we didn’t pay attention to anything else. Yeah, if I look back
on it now, I see we liked totally different things. She was a girly girl, into
her clothes and her makeup and her shoes.”

He leaned forward and put the beer bottle down on the
table hard. “Shoes.”

“As in Paula Madden,” I said.

“Shit. What do I keep doing with these women?”

I had an idea but I wasn’t going to say. I thought I’d
broken my pattern with Lili, but maybe it was too early to say.

“That’s it,” Rick said. “My new year’s resolution. No
more dating women like Vanessa.”

“It’s July,” I said. “Kind of late for a New Year's
resolutions.”

“Better late than never, right? But I thought you came
over here because you wanted information.”

“Well, yeah. You have any to share?”

“Went back out to Crossing Estates this afternoon.
Paula’s friend identified the earring that Mark found in his van. One of a pair
her husband gave her for their twentieth anniversary.”

“So that connects Owen to the robberies,” I said.

“Circumstantially. Couldn’t lift any fingerprints from
the earring—it was too tiny. Because we only have Mark’s word that Owen had the
van, an attorney could certainly raise reasonable doubt. I’d need a lot more
evidence to connect Owen to those burglaries. The only thing I can connect him
to right now is the theft from Mark’s place—and even for that, we only have
Mark’s word.”

“Assuming that’s Owen’s bike, what do you think it was
doing back by the creek?” I asked.

“No idea. I looked around in the woods around the
Yardley railroad station and couldn’t find any sign that the bike had been
ditched,” he said. “Checked with drivers on the bus route through town, too,
and none of them remember him getting on with the bike.”