On the Third Day (18 page)

            “You watch over Father Thomas for me, Lord.  He’s one of Your good ones; make no mistake about that.  Give him strength, and keep him safe...”

            She knelt and prayed for another ten minutes, until her knees shook and she was afraid that if she didn’t stand right at that moment, she would be kneeling there still when the doors opened in the morning and the church began to fill.  It was going to be a long, slow trek to her car, and by the time she got home, made her way inside, explained her absence to Norman, and got into bed it would be nearly dawn – time to make the entire journey again.  It didn’t matter.  She would have made that journey every day of every week for Father Thomas.

            Gladys walked slowly back toward the front of the cathedral and the parking lot beyond.  Behind her, the huge dangling Christ watched with sad, pain-soaked eyes.  She felt the weight of it as the huge old wooden doors snapped closed behind her, leaving the carving to its silent vigil.

~ Eighteen ~

            Hector was in a quandary.  It was perhaps the first time in his career that the word fit so neatly, and so completely.  He sat alone in his office, staring at his computer screen.  There were several files open on his desk, the papers strewn about in a state of disarray that would normally have sent him into a frenzy of filing.

            Hector’s world was ordered.  There was a file for anything and everything that influenced his life.  In particular, he kept other peoples lives in his files.  He kept their stories in neat rows in deep metal drawers.  He cross-indexed the files, linking one to another in cascades of scandal and entertainment.  It was what he did, what he’d always done.  Hector’s ability and propensity for finding the darker, seedier side of every story was what had kept him out of a regular news anchorman’s seat, and launched him on the career that won him his own show.

            One aspect of his talent was the uncanny ability to see through the fluff to the cutting edge of a matter.  He always knew when to bring someone on the show.  He always knew the point of sharpest impact for the blade that would eviscerate a local politician, or expose the long-term affair of some hot-shot business executive.  The most important aspect of work like his was to catch the story at the proper moment.

            What was spread out before him was something he couldn’t quite grasp.  He’d managed to get a lot of it into folders, which was a start, but glancing down at the jumbled mess those folders had become, he realized that what he was seeing exemplified the entire situation.  He just didn’t know how to proceed.

            He’d had the video clips from Norman Multinerry for months.  It had taken some time, but he’d managed both to uncover Norman’s name without the guy knowing it, but he’d also, for a ridiculously small sum, all things considered, bought all of the video clips.  A little time in the photo lab – longer than it would have taken one of his techs, but he didn’t want to share just yet – and he had the entire movie.  His copy was sort of jerky, and the images had been a little grainy to start with, not having come from a professional camera, but this had never stopped him before.

            What he had seemed to be incontrovertible proof of something; but there was the rub.  Was it the stigmata? Did Father Thomas experience some strange religious phenomena that brought him, and those who followed him, closer to God?  Why had the bishop filmed this? How had Norman gotten his hands on it, and what would be the repercussions, if any, were Hector to put it on the air?  More importantly, what was the hook?

            It all hinged on what exactly it was that he’d seen in the videos.  The fact that the Vatican had sent the investigator, Father Prescott, to check the situation out was significant.  It meant that they were taking it seriously, though from what angle Hector could only imagine.

            There were only a few ways to go about this, but all of them were dangerous.  If he attacked Father Thomas openly, he risked the ire of the parish, the church, and exposing his lack of actual knowledge on the event.  The video was solid evidence, but without someone associated with the event to comment on it, it would remain suspect.  The church could even come along later and say Hector had doctored the files – that no such event had occurred, and that he was fabricating sensational stories to further his career, at the expense of a beloved local priest.

            That much Hector had ascertained – Father Thomas was well liked, even loved, by his parish.  Talks with Norman Multinerry had filled in the blanks that Hector’s staff hadn’t been able to.  Norman’s mother, Gladys, had been present for the Easter Mass.  She wouldn’t even talk to Norman about it, despite several attempts to draw her onto the topic.

            It would have been perfect if Norman himself had attended mass.  He didn’t care one way or the other about Father Thomas, and he could have been led, or directed, in any direction that Hector was willing to pay for.  One good witness, one person willing to be interviewed, one priest disgruntled with the situation, and Hector was in business.  He didn’t want to run such a potentially powerful story in an abbreviated manor, doing the commentary himself and filling in the blanks with speculation.  While that would make a good story – hell, even a tiny portion of the video he’d watched a thousand times on the screen of his computer would make killer copy – it wouldn’t be the strongest story it could be.  Not only that, but it would leave Hector himself liable to repercussions if he missed something, or interpreted it wrongly and got caught.

            His files were filled with such stories, though few with as much potential.  Hector believed in patience as a fundamental virtue.  Once he was in gear and had a story in his sights, he would plow straight through it to the end, but if there was more to it when he reached that end, if he could find some thread that indicated his was only tugging the loose material off a much larger tapestry, he would wait.

            Now he’d waited so long that Easter Mass loomed once more, and he had decisions to make.  All of the requests had been made for access to the Cathedral.  They had been denied.  The very polite response from Bishop Michaels’ office had explained that, while they were sympathetic to the desire of the press to record such an important spiritual event as the celebration of the Mass on the day the savior rose from his grave, they could not allow such an intrusion into the intimate, private worship of their parish.  He, Hector, was welcome, as on any Sunday, to attend and to join in their worship, but there would be no cameras, no interviews, and no news crews within the walls of San Marcos.

            Nothing the church could do would prevent Hector from coming as close as possible without entering.  Probably they wouldn’t try too hard to keep him out of the parking lot, or even off the front steps of the Cathedral.

            He had to follow through.  He would be there with all the equipment the station could muster, and when they chased him off the steps of the church, as they inevitably would, he would enter with Shirley and see what happened next.  He had a very small video camera, one he’d bought from a site on the Internet geared toward equipment used to record movies in movie theatres and make them available in bootleg formats.  He didn’t intend to steal any movies, but Hector had seen the potential in the tiny hand-held camera immediately.  He owned two.

            He would give one to Shirley, and he would take the other.  Between the two of them they would find a way to record whatever happened, and based on what they found, he would finally air his show.  The thought of this made the palms of his hands slick, and though he smiled, the expression was weak and devoid of its usual confidence. Hector Clearwater was a local legend.  He’d exposed crooked politicians, changed the face of local business, made, and broken careers, but never on this scale.

            This type of story would get national press.  He had no idea how The Church had managed to keep this one so quiet – could only imagine that whatever experience had moved Gladys Multinerry to such adamant silence had the same effect on all those who witnessed it.  Once Hector exposed it, the dam would burst.  Anyone who knew the truth would suddenly want to talk, and to be part of the exposure.  The Church would certainly retaliate, and Hector had to be ready for them.  They paid armies of top-notch lawyers to prevent the type of story Hector was most likely to air, and he had only his own limited resources, and those of KROK, assuming they chose to back him, with which to fend off The Vatican.  It wasn’t a pleasant prospect, but the end result would be well worth the pain. 

            Hector wanted to be known.  He didn’t want to be “local talk show host Hector Clearwater,” he wanted much more.  He wanted every man, woman and child who watched television in the United States, possibly in the world, to recognize his face, his voice, and his name.  He wanted to expand his files to include scandals in other cities and other states.  He wanted what so many, in his opinion, lesser entities already possessed.  Hector Clearwater wanted to be famous.

            It had been a long time since he’d attended mass.  It had been even longer since his days as an altar boy – not at San Marcos, but in the city.  He remembered the eerie presence of the dark robed priest in the confessional as if it hadn’t been decades since he last participated.

            “Forgive me Father,” he whispered.  “It has been twenty-seven years since my last confession.  I have ruined lives, put people out of business, broken up marriages and put myself before all others.  Oh, and by the way, Father?  I’m about spread your face and voice from coast to coast and show them the little circus you held here last year.  What do you think…half a million or so Our Fathers and A Hail Mary, full of shit?”

            He didn’t laugh at his own crude humor. Hector seldom laughed.  He reached out, instead, and pressed down on his left computer mouse button, starting the video once again.  Within moments he was lost in the deep, resonant voice of Father Quentin Thomas, and the “miracle” he intended to expose.

* * *

            Norman knew he needed to get to sleep.  He was going to have to get up and drive his mother to the church in only a few hours.  In fact, for the first time in more years than he cared to count, he was considering whether he might not put on the one suit he owned and join her.  He hadn’t been sleeping well since he’d sent the first short video clip to Hector Clearwater, and as the money had poured in, and the rest of the video had been e-mailed out, his mind had eroded steadily along with it.

            He didn’t believe there was any redemption for what he’d done to be found in a single trip to mass, but there was always room for a new start.  The only thing that kept him hopeful was that Clearwater hadn’t gone public with the video.  Norman didn’t know why, but he was grateful.  The more he thought about the situation, the easier it became to picture Hector Clearwater pointing a long, thin finger straight at Norman and saying, “Who, me?  No, it was that guy.  All
I
did was put it on the air.  Ask
him
where it came from.”

            Norman had woken from several nightmares, crying out loud as thousands of leering, questioning, accusing eyes focused on him and held him in their glare.  He didn’t know if confession could help, but he was willing to give it a try.  He’d wanted to tell his mother for weeks, but feared the consequences.  He might as well tell the priest first – confess the sin and get his absolution.  His mother would tell anyway, and any confession he made after the fact would look like just what it was – something done out of fear after being caught.  Better to get it off his chest and to be able to tell his mother that he had already taken steps to correct his error.

            If there was any way to correct it, that was.  It was possible he’d already done all the damage that could be done, and that Hector Clearwater, looking and sounding as much like the Devil as any man Norman had ever encountered, would plaster the whole thing across the news as close to Easter as possible for effect.  Every night Norman sat in front of the television, just long enough to find out what the stories on that show would be, and then, when he saw that they had nothing to do with Father Thomas, or with San Marcos, or with himself, he stood, walked to his room, and locked himself inside.

            He was sure his mother believed he was masturbating, or sneaking out the window to visit wild parties.  She knocked, sometimes; to be sure he was really there.  He knew she worried about him, but there was something more in her gaze now, something darker and more troubling.  Norman had stayed up many nights trying to figure out just what it was, and in the end, he was fairly certain that he knew.

            His mother loved him, and she always would, but in her new gaze he saw that she no longer knew him.  She had always believed he was her good boy, that the skinny eight-year-old boy who’d once hung off her skirts as she baked and chattered at her endlessly of growing up to be a fireman, or a baseball player was the real Norman, and one day he’d snap back to ‘normal’ and realize it.  Now she looked at him as she might look at a stranger.  She mistrusted his words, and his actions, and when she spoke to him, not as often as she once had, she did so in a careful, measured tone that Norman knew she’d once reserved for casual acquaintances.

            She wasn’t ignoring him; she just didn’t want to know.  For some reason that one night, walking in and seeing the least of what he had live on his computer screen had been the proverbial straw on the camel’s back.   She had looked at him, tried to find that eight-year-old boy, and realized suddenly he wasn’t there, and was likely never coming back.  Now she dealt with him as if he were a different person – a different Norman than the one she’d raised, and he didn’t know how to breach the walls she’d erected to show her he was still there.

            Norman rose and walked to his closet.  He searched the hangars closest to the back and found the plastic dry-cleaner cover that protected his suit.  With a grunt, he pulled it off the hangar and dragged it free of the blue jeans and t-shirts surrounding it.  Shoes might be more of a problem, but he thought he could shine up his Doc Martens, if nothing else.  No one was going to be staring at his shoes, and if they did, so what?  Was he thinking about going down to the Church to pick up women, or start a career in fashion, or was he going to try and straighten out his life?