The Haunted Season (23 page)

They had been standing before the vicarage fireplace and she had pulled out of his arms, tipping her head back to look up at him. “I don't know, Max,” she'd said. “I can watch the baby all day. It's no problem. This will be ever such a good baby, I'm sure of it.”

“Yes, but you've a business to run.”

“So have you, when you think about it. Really, Max, I'll figure out a way. The other women in the village will help me. And I won't like being away—I know myself; I won't want to miss a moment.”

And what she said had proven to be true. Unlike in most young families, where there was a permanent hullabaloo, life with Awena and Owen continued on a serene course, a fact he credited to both their tranquil natures, mother and son.

Awena had held some sort of purification ceremony after Owen's birth. Her sisters Unita, Xantha, and Zoe had all attended, making the journey from the west coast of Anglesey, full of good cheer and unasked-for but useful advice, prattling happily away, their faces wreathed in smiles. Every time Max saw them, one or another was holding aloft some tiny garment or toy, exclaiming over it in lilting Welsh. Max had known Awena spoke the language but had not realized how second nature it was to her. She was alight with happiness from the presence of Owen and her sisters. As she told Max, “It is like the gods are shining on us all.”

Max's heart had stilled for a moment when she said that. While he agreed, superstitiously he wondered if it weren't tempting fate to say it aloud. Looking into Awena's translucent eyes that day, eyes Owen looked set to inherit, Max had pondered the path that had led him there, to that very moment, to the only woman who had ever entirely owned his heart. Cocteau had said of Edith Piaf that she had “the eyes of a blind person struck by a miracle, the eyes of a clairvoyant.” That was as near a perfect description of Awena—her appearance and her essence—as Max could conjure.

And Max felt he could not live without her. Awena, with her dark hair marked by its distinctive streak of white, and her tea-rose complexion.

He was happy. Sublimely happy.

In early February, halfway between the winter solstice—Yule—and the spring equinox—Ostara—the three sisters had returned to celebrate the onset of spring. In Awena's tradition, this was Imbolc. Their traditions, his and hers, all blended together, making a perfect kind of sense.

One evening not long afterward, he heard himself asking Awena if there were any more of that baked tofu left over from the party, and he had laughed aloud at the “new” Max. He felt he had been thoroughly brainwashed. But if this was brainwashing, he was delighted, happy to succumb. Life, he thought, could not get any better than this, right here, right now, as they lived in this cheerful give-and-take, appreciating and honoring each other's traditions, bound together by their love for each other and of Owen.

Whether the bishop would share this happy appreciation was always open to question.

He might adapt. He had done so before. Max recalled the bishop's initial horrified reaction when Max had explained to him the more esoteric traditions of the hand-fasting ceremony.

“I don't see how you can participate in what is essentially a neopagan ceremony,” the bishop had said at last. “It's rather … preposterous for a man in your position.” He heaved a mighty sigh, and his face visibly softened, for he liked his scofflaw priest. “I'm sorry, Max. I truly am. But I don't see a way. The media…”

Oh, Lord, yes.
The media. “The media,” said Max, “will find a new dancing bear to keep them and the British public entertained, within a week or less. You know that, Bishop, as well as I do.”

When Max had later related this conversation, Awena had laughed.

“Perhaps I should wear an embroidered scarlet letter on my dress:
P
for
pagan.
”

He gathered she had heard about the rather unfunny Hester Prynne remarks. And typically, wisely, she had chosen to ignore them.

He realized now that the bishop had asked him a question. Fortunately, he had rushed on, not waiting for an answer.

“Before you say anything, Max, I have already composed a letter to the editor. I will run it by you, but I don't feel that anything as silly and scurrilous as what this reporter has written and this paper has published should go unchallenged.”

The wave of relief that swept through Max made the room practically shimmer before his eyes. He had had no idea how the bishop would react, but Max felt he should have known the man would react in exactly the proper way. For one thing, having met Awena, the bishop knew how ridiculous this portrayal of her was; the bishop and his wife had ended up attending the much-debated hand-fasting ceremony, demonstrating once again their open-mindedness. They had, in fact, ended up staying half the night, enjoying the festivities afterward. It had been a fabulous party, even by Nether Monkslip standards.

“Thank you, Bishop,” said Max in all sincerity.

“Now, we come to the difficult part.”

There was a more difficult part?
Then he remembered the “miraculous” face appearing on the wall of St. Edwold's, which, of course, the reporter had included in his report.

“This image on the wall of St. Edwold's. This face. How convinced are you there is nothing to it?”

“You mean nothing miraculous?” Max hesitated. It almost seemed like a trick question, like one of those tests from the early days of the church, when learned men had debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. “To be honest, Bishop, I don't know. I was completely thrown for a loop when Nether Monkslip came up in connection with the so-called miraculous Face at Monkbury Abbey. It's not that I became convinced there was anything to it, you understand. It is that the confirmation of all the long-simmering legends was just … weird.” He didn't add, “considering the source of many of those legends was a wildly unreliable narrator like Frank Cuthbert,” but he thought it.

“But more than that,” Max went on, “I can't ignore the fact that I have had that wall whitewashed and scrubbed and painted more times than I can recall, and the image returns, sometimes by the next day. There is no question whatsoever about that. I've had the roof and ceiling and outside walls checked for leaks. Nothing. And that roof, as you know, is practically brand-new anyway. There is no accounting for it, and yet…”

“And yet there it is.”

“That's right. By any scientific reasoning, it can't be there, and yet it is. You saw it when you visited Nether Monkslip for the hand-fasting. What did you think?”

The bishop didn't say anything, and when he spoke, he avoided answering the question.

“Why did you become a priest, Max?”

“Why did I—That's easy. I wanted my life to count for something, to mean something. To me, if to no one else.”

“And there was an element of turning swords into plowshares in your case, wasn't there? Given your MI5 background?”

This was true, Max realized. The murder of his friend and colleague Paul had done for him. He had grown sick of the carnage, of the tit-for-tat violence, of the stupid bloody-mindedness of it all, of the constant lying to everyone about who he was and what he did all day. He'd wanted out. It hadn't stopped his aching wish that the man who had killed Paul would be killed or captured, but it had changed his life completely, and put him on a wholly different path. A path that led to Awena and to Owen. A path toward—dare he say it?—peace and undiluted happiness.

All he had left to remember Paul by now was the shirt he, Max, had been wearing the day Paul died. It had a speck of blood on the collar, presumably Paul's, and it was tucked on the top shelf of his closet now, carefully preserved. For what, Max could not have said, but he could not be parted from it, and he had given Mrs. Hooser a very hard time when she attempted to use it as a dust rag.

Not long ago, Awena had found it in rearranging the bedroom closets. He'd told her what it was, and she'd asked, “What makes you certain it's Paul's blood?” Max had been too stunned to reply. Any other explanation had never occurred to him. He had so wanted it to be Paul's.

“I could say the same,” the bishop was saying now. “I wanted to make a difference in the world, and this was the avenue that appealed to me—there was so much of the planet in dire straits and I wanted to do something about it, not just spend my short time on earth taking care of me and mine, worrying only about what I could accumulate, and how many channels I could get on my satellite dish.”

Max waited, sensing there was more.

“But I also believed, Max. Despite the fact I consider myself to be a rational actor, I was and am a believer. Why, I asked myself, did Christianity succeed when hundreds of cults died off? It was the Twitter of its age, the underfunded start-up that changed the world. Did the early Christians believe in miracles? Of course they did. We know they did. And without joining the ranks of the credulous, the easily duped, the easily separated from their hard-earned money by charlatans, I think we have to believe, too.”

Max was taken aback. Never had the bishop spoken to him like this, of matters like this. Max felt he was being given for the first time a glimpse into the man's soul.

“That said,” continued the bishop, “this situation has to be handled very carefully. I suppose you could just keep painting the image over, pointless as it has become. Or have that portion of the wall removed, perhaps?”

But even as he spoke, the bishop seemed to recognize the futility of this approach. Any miracle worthy of the name would break through any attempts to stifle it.

“But we come to the real issue, Max. Between the murders and the face and the rampant speculation about you and your wife by the media—well, it may come to this: You may have to be reassigned to another parish.”

No.
Max's reaction was immediate and heartfelt. Nether Monkslip, like Awena, had come to be a part of his soul. The place not only where he resided but where his soul thrived.

NO.

“I am sorry, Max. We don't have to decide anything today. But the spotlight needs to be turned down a notch. The murders started when you arrived in Nether Monkslip. Perhaps they'll end when you leave.”

Or they'll trail along behind me, thought Max.

And from the look on the bishop's face, he was thinking the same thing.

 

Chapter 17

STRANGERS ON A TRAIN

Late that night, Max was watching Alfred Hitchcock's
Strangers on a Train
on DVD. The sound was turned low, as Owen dozed in his arms. Max had figured out that Owen loved old films as much as his father; the sounds seemed to calm him until he fell asleep. Chip off the old block.

The film, starring Farley Granger and Robert Walker, revolved around a professional tennis player and a wealthy psychotic, who suggests they solve each other's personal dilemmas by switching murders, thus providing on each other with an alibi. Farley's dilemma involved the fact that his wife was pregnant with another man's child, and he, Farley, was in any case, in love with another woman. Robert Walker had an inconvenient father standing in the way of his inheritance.

Max, caught up in the portrayal of the thoroughly evil Bruno character played by Walker, felt a little shiver of recognition, a sense of déjà vu. The theme of strangers chatting casually of death—certainly that had come up recently, and was the reason Max had dug out the old recording to watch. But it was more. What
was
it that nagged at him? Something about pregnancy? The rather doubtful pregnancy of Farley's wife. The top of Max's scalp began to tingle. He had been jiggling Owen to help him sleep, but now he froze, trying to summon whatever memory or idea had been called into play. He rewound the film in his mind: Bruno had been talking about a “crisscross,” suggesting the means to establish an alibi, since neither man knew the other and so collusion would not be suspected by the authorities.

But what did that have to do with the current case? Max couldn't fathom it, although he felt certain whatever was nibbling at the edges of his mind had to do with the death—and the life—of Lord Baaden-Boomethistle. And it wasn't just the obvious connection that the removal of Lord Baaden-Boomethistle had meant the estate could pass to his son. It was more than that. Something to do with a train, then?

Max, hitting the pause button, thought back over the facts as he knew them, wondering if two people could have colluded in the crime. That was always possible, even though it was the riskiest way to commit a murder: One had to trust absolutely one's partner's ability to keep quiet. Murder created a pact as “sacred” as marriage or kinship. But he had the idea this whatever it was he was alerting on predated Lord Baaden-Boomethistle's death.

He recalled that Lord Baaden-Boomethistle had mentioned a train. Something about a train … how convenient the Chunnel had made train travel but that the Chunnel had just opened one hot summer and he was always one to wait until they'd worked the kinks out of big new projects. The Chunnel opening had been around 1994, as Max recalled—he could look it up, but what did it matter? The lord had talked about how he and his first wife had taken a train out of Spain to catch a plane to England, and how they'd been delayed. How hot it had been that summer. How crowded. The sounds (and the smells) of crying children had added to the discomfort. There had been a litany of complaints about the journey: “I am one of those who firmly believe children should be seen and not heard.” And Lord Baaden-Boomethistle had gone on to request—foolish hope!—that the organizers make sure the noise from children at the duck race be kept to a minimum.

It was gone three before Max put Owen in his crib to be guarded by Thea, the living, breathing baby monitor. Max knew he would need Cotton's help to confirm his wild hypothesis, but there was not much Cotton could do at this hour. He might need a search warrant: That depended on how cooperative the people at Totleigh Hall might prove to be. Somehow, Max thought the odds were not good, but it wouldn't hurt to ask.