Funeral Hotdish (22 page)

She almost choked on the last one.

“They’re so honest they’re ready to swallow a lie to get back to their tidy lives. It’s like Johnny is the scab over their wound and they’re pleased as punch. I’d never have believed that. I’d have bet that this town would demand justice. But hey, it’s just a druggie that got murdered in a most gruesome way. It’s just a disturbed high school kid who offed himself. How inappropriate that this tragedy should visit here!”

She grabbed the steering wheel with both hands and rocked back and forth, trying to dislodge her demons.

It took another hour, but before she allowed herself to get too high and mighty, Joya Bonner found her own scab.

“You have to protect your family, no matter what. I’m not here to solve a murder case. I’m here to save my dad. Let sleeping dogs lie.”

Chapter Twenty-two

Friday, January 21, 2000

Dolan Lowe impressed the three musketeers of Northville as he sat at the Bonners’ dining room table and laid out all the things the sheriff didn’t have. Joya had already told her father these points, but he listened more carefully to the attorney, since it was a man telling him that made him believe they were safe.

Joya swallowed her anger at this slight, but she should have expected it.

“As long as you three keep your mouths shut, you’re okay,” Lowe declared.

“Now, do we have any problem with that shotgun shell?”

He looked at each of them. One by one they swore it couldn’t have come from their weapons.

“So what if they find it was packed in a special way? Any of you guys pack your own shells?”

All the heads turned toward Ralph. “Yeah, I do.”

“And who do you pack shells for?”

“Anybody in town. Probably a dozen guys have my shells.”

“Great, that’s great.”

“What’s great about that?” Bernard asked.

“Because if it was one of the shells Mr. Bonner packed, there are a dozen suspects. And if you’re certain your guns didn’t shoot that shell, it means nothing that he packed it. At least, that’s what I’ll argue if we have to go there.”

For men who normally saw things in black or white, this gray area was a new sensation. But they had to admit, it looked pretty damn good right now.

“Okay, so what’s this statement that the sheriff claims he heard you three threaten the kid’s life?”

“That’s bullshit!” Earl yelled.

“Yeah, he’s lying. We never said that. We did tell him to do his job, but he didn’t.” Ralph couldn’t believe anybody in town would believe that sheriff over him.

“We are not lawbreakers,” Bernard said, ignoring that kidnapping was against the law. “We are upstanding citizens in this town. Ask anybody. If you need—what do you call those people who speak up for you?”

“Character witnesses.”

“Yes, if you need character witnesses, we’ve got a whole town that will speak up for us.”

Joya felt the need to interject. “I think you should ask the Bishop to say something, too.”

The men looked at her and then remembered the church roof payback and started smiling. Lowe didn’t get the joke, but the idea of a Catholic Bishop as a character witness was farther up the food chain than he’d ever been.

“And you might want to stop at Alice’s Bakery—she knows everything about this town and she knows all about these men. Her bakery is like party central—everyone hangs out there. She’s my cousin.”

“Good suggestion,” Lowe said. “How about we go there after this meeting? I hear she makes a killer donut!”

Everyone laughed. He was in for a treat.

“So nobody in town knows for certain that you three were the kidnappers,” Lowe asked, to be sure this wouldn’t come back to bite him.

“The only ones who know are our wives, and they will not tell,” Ralph said with certainty. “They know if they do, we’ll go to prison. Because who’s going to believe we kidnapped him but we didn’t kill him? We wouldn’t want anyone in town wondering if…No, nobody in town knows and they aren’t going to know.”

“Good,” the lawyer said. “Keep it that way. You’ve already won the first round. Earl, you’re sitting here, rather than in a jail cell, because there wasn’t anything to hold you on. The courts clearly saw that. I believe I can get them to see the sheriff is off on a fishing expedition with you guys when the real killer is obvious. I’m going to argue that Johnny Roth is the killer here and there’s physical evidence to tie him to the Harding kid. He was disturbed and depressed over the death of his girlfriend. I want to talk to the prosecutor this week and lay this out for him to see, and maybe this harassment can be over real soon.”

Joya didn’t say a word.

It sounded so completely logical and honest—Lowe sounded so confident and competent—that all three men bobbed their heads in ready agreement.

Joya was always grateful that Bernard looked over at her. “And thank you, Joya. You saved us. Thank you.”

Earl also grumbled, “Thank you.” Ralph looked away because he’d already said it once and that was enough.

“Yes, you have quite an investigator here, Mr. Bonner. You should be real proud that she knows so much about evidence. She kept you from handing over your gun and she got the reports and she found me. We all owe her our thanks.”

Joya knew she’d never hear words like that from her own father, but she knew he’d heard them. She decided to believe he would have said them if his German stubbornness had let him.

Joya and Lowe went to the bakery and Alice vouched for each man with certainty and passion. “I’ll testify if you need me,” she said. “I’ll tell how these men are pillars in our community and would never do something reckless and illegal.”

Lowe guessed she knew the truth, but was a good liar. He liked that in a woman.

“Should I tell how that sheriff came in here and tried to browbeat me into saying those men killed Crabapple?” Alice added, and Lowe looked at her like she was the biggest prize in Crackerjacks.

“What?”

“Yes, he was in here the day after they arrested Earl. Wasn’t that ridiculous? He didn’t even spend the night. And the sheriff told me he had evidence those men kidnapped Crabapple and then murdered him and he knew for a fact that I had knowledge of these crimes and if I didn’t come clean, I’d end up being charged as an accessory to murder.”

“You never told me that.” Joya looked at her cousin with new eyes.

“I knew he was bluffing, so I just blew him off.”

“You know what one of his deputies did to me?” Joya was anxious to share. “He ran me off the road—but don’t you dare tell my folks. I made up an excuse.”

“Oh, my God,” Alice shrieked. “Both you and me? That’s harassment, isn’t it?”

“It certainly is, my dears,” the attorney said with a self-satisfied sigh. “I’ll need an affidavit from each of you to present to the court, and we’ll put an end to this right now!”

Alice treated everyone to donuts, then excused herself to get back to her chores.

“I don’t want Mom and Dad to know about this affidavit, but it will help Dad, won’t it?” Lowe reached across the table to squeeze her hand as he bobbed his head and filled up his face with a smile.

***

A week later—Friday, January 28, 2000—the district attorney of Richland County announced his investigation had concluded Darryl “Crabapple” Harding had been murdered by Johnny Roth in retaliation for the death of Amber Schlener. Northville’s 104-day nightmare was over.

Lowe was laughing when he called Joya to say the entire courthouse could hear the district attorney ripping the sheriff a new asshole. And he demanded Badge 329 be fired. “I’m betting somebody’s going to run against that sheriff in the next election, if the DA has anything to do with it.”

It seemed amazing that it was finally over. Ralph Bonner didn’t even make a fuss when he wrote out the check to pay Lowe’s fee.

Throughout Northville, there was a giant sigh of relief. People felt bad for poor Johnny, so bad that many went to his funeral at St. Vincent’s and ate funeral hotdish afterwards. Cissy German was there, of course, leaving her dime.

Johnny was buried on the backside of the Catholic Cemetery, where the suicides are relegated.

The town mourned for his folks and his friends and that the Class of 2000 had lost yet another member. Even Kenny Franken understood that his best friend had become a killer and then hung himself in guilt.

Darryl Harding didn’t belong to any church in Northville, but a country church held a simple funeral for him. There was no meal afterwards. Huntsie paid for the funeral and the burial plot at the back of the Protestant cemetery.

To be honest, some people thought that three town leaders had
something
to do with all this, but whatever they’d done was nowhere near as bad as what Johnny did, so “let sleeping dogs lie.” The first time Joya heard someone use that phrase, she feared they knew the secret, but then realized it was simply the phrase that fit the moment.

At Alice’s Bakery, the gossip died down quickly because it was such an ugly thing, and ugly gossip didn’t go well with sweet donuts.

Maggie, Angie, and Norma kept their secret pact. Each of their men had cried in their arms at night in bed, sorry the boy had died, sorry Johnny was gone. “We just wanted justice,” each one had said, and each wife believed her man.

Joya flew home to Phoenix, deciding that someday she’d write a book about the time she saved her dad. She had a lot of work to catch up on. The Sammy trial was gearing up and, of course, she’d cover that. She ran into Rob now and then and they were polite, but neither wanted to try again. She started dating a lawyer, but he was a Republican, which didn’t work.

From her Sunday calls home, she heard Northville was grateful it was all over.

Sadly, it wasn’t.

Chapter Twenty-three

Wednesday, February 2, 2000

Father Singer knew Ralph Bonner hadn’t killed Crabapple.

He knew Earl Krump and Bernard Stine were innocent, too.

He knew the three had kidnapped the boy.

All three men had come today to confess their sins.

All spoke with dismay and remorse at what they had done.

All declared what they hadn’t done.

Catholics know they can confess murder and be safe—their secret will never leave the priest’s lips. And a Catholic who has killed knows the only way to erase that horrible sin is to confess and do penance.

So Father Singer was certain that the men who swore they were not murderers were telling the truth. Because they believed, as the church teaches, that their confession wasn’t to the mortal man standing in, but was to Jesus Christ himself.

Knowing the three town leaders weren’t killers was a great relief. Father had a harder time with knowing that Johnny Roth didn’t kill Crabapple, either. Most of all, the priest mourned that he couldn’t stop Johnny from killing himself.

Father Singer would spend months on his knees, saying one Rosary after another, trying to reconcile the rules of his faith with the holes in his heart.

“If only I could have done something. If only I could have gotten help for Johnny—called his mom, he loved his mom She could have talked him down. She could have made him see there was still a life for him.”

But he couldn’t call Lois Roth. The sanctity of the confessional forbade him from doing anything but listening to the boy’s sins.

He could only plead with the boy, trying to slice through his fog of depression and shroud of hate. He had tried. God knows, he tried. But nothing in his training had prepared Father John Singer for a moment like that.

He was a simple man, a disciple of the rituals and rules of his church. He studied the Bible with an intensity most don’t expect from Catholics. He lived in the parsonage next door. He refused a housekeeper so he made his own meals, washed his own clothes and cleaned his own house. He wasn’t the best cook, so he ate mainly soup—cereal was supper some nights. He ate little meat, didn’t drink or smoke—all due to his pledge of humbleness.

He was a man educated in the ways of the church, the ritual of mass, the management of a parish. He had never had a single second of training in what to do when a parishioner comes to confess and almost screams that he’s going to commit suicide.

If Father Singer thought his simple, humble life would impress God enough to help out at a time like that, he was sorely disappointed.

“Please son. Please. Call your mother. You don’t want to hurt her like this. You know she loves you. Please don’t make her grieve. She sat at your bedside every day when you were in the coma. She prayed every day for you to come back. I was there many times at her side and we prayed the Rosary over you. Please don’t hurt her. Please, son, Please.”

But his begging did no good. As he gave Johnny the absolution he was due, Father Singer prayed with all his heart.

“Lord, watch over your son who is troubled and in great pain. Help him see that his loving mother and father and friends would mourn forever if he were not here with them. Help him find his way to you and your grace and forgiveness. And help him face another day with the knowledge that You are by his side and You will never abandon him.

“For your penance, say six Our Fathers and six Hail Marys.”

Father Singer heard Johnny weeping as he said his prayers. He heard the boy’s footsteps echoing off the marble floor of St. Vincent’s Catholic Church. He prayed to hear God’s whisper that he had done what he could. But he heard nothing more than his heart breaking.

He was shocked when he walked into the sacristy and found Gertie Bach, holding a polishing rag full of Brasso. He’d forgotten she was there. Their eyes met.

“I tried to stop him,” Father blurted out before realizing he was breaking an oath.

“I know, Father. I know.” They cried together.

Later that day when his fears were confirmed, Father Singer needed an hour to compose himself before he drove out to the Roth farm to comfort Lois and Paul.

Now today, he again was reminded of that awful day as he heard more confessions.

It vexed him that there was still a killer in town that nobody suspected, because they believed Johnny was the guilty one.

There is a burden in carrying around knowledge that can never be shared, but is carried on your shoulders alone, just as Jesus carried that cross. It didn’t help Father Singer to think of the Passion of Christ to ease his burden. He lost weight, suffered through sleepless nights, and he wondered if he could live the rest of his life with such horrible knowledge.

In the fourteen years he’d been a priest, he’d heard thousands of confessions. He’d heard a little girl at her first confession screaming out her sins as her classmates tittered and he whispered, “Whisper, Janney, whisper.” He’d heard grandmothers admit they were being abused at home by grandfathers who were ushers on Sunday morning. He’d heard boys admit they masturbated and stole apples, and men admit they cheated on their wives. He’d heard a woman admit she didn’t love her children.

As he was trained, he said a Rosary after every session of confession and then parked what he’d heard in a closed vault in the far corner of his mind. He knew confession was there, not to punish, but to forgive. It was a sacrament that allowed Catholics a do-over.
Any
sin could be forgiven.
Any
sin was forgiven.

But the words he’d heard in the wake of Northville’s tragedy refused to be parked. The vault refused to close. It plagued Father Singer that he kept hearing the words again and again.

He thought that was the greatest burden he’d ever carry.

Until the day the killer confessed to murdering Crabapple.