The Lost Bird (26 page)

Father John rose from the chair, crossed the study, and stood at the window. His own reflection moved in front of him, agitated, searching. And then he knew. It wasn’t a document. Gianelli would have found a document in Joseph’s things or in his computer files. Joseph’s killer had taken the opera tapes in the Toyota. When he found out they were opera tapes, he had come to the mission, ransacked the office, and gone to Joseph’s bedroom to search for a tape. Whatever proof Joseph had was on a tape.

He glimpsed his own reflection, the look of comprehension crossing his face. He knew what was on the tape. Joseph had gone to see the one person still in the area who knew about the stolen infants: Joanne Garrow. And somehow he had taped the conversation. What did he say to the woman? That the truth about the stolen babies had to be told? That he would break the seal of the confessional? What did she say that had incriminated the clinic, that had made Markham so determined to find the tape?

Father John strode across the study and sat down in his chair. There was the possibility—a slim thread of hope—that Vicky was right and Joanne Garrow might be ready to let go of her burden. As he reached
for the phone to try her number again, a jangling noise broke through the quiet. It startled him. He stared at the ringing phone. Another emergency? Another dying woman? He did not want to go out tonight. Reluctantly he reached for the receiver.

“John.” A woman’s voice, low, little more than a whisper, with a throatier quality than he remembered from phone conversations twenty-five years ago. “Mike said you called.”

He felt his breath sharp in his lungs. “How are you, Eileen?”

She ignored his question. “What has Megan told you?”

Father John waited a moment, searching for the right words. “Your daughter is searching for the truth about her parents,” he said.

“Megan knows the truth.” The voice rose, harsh and edged with impatience. “She refuses to believe me. She’ll believe you, John. Just tell her.”

“Tell her what?”

“That Mike is her father, of course. Tell her that, and she’ll believe you.”

“Megan believes she was a full-term baby,” he said.

The voice came over the line like a cry. “Why is she doing this? Why is she causing all this confusion and pain? What is the point?”

“The point is the truth,” he said. “Was she full-term?”

He heard her emit a long sigh. There was a loud knock, as if she had set a glass onto a hard surface. “I’ve explained all this to her. She was almost full-term.”

Almost.
The word hung before him, as if it had taken a physical shape. “Eileen.” He spoke slowly.
“Megan deserves to know the whole truth. I have the right to know.”

The line went silent—the hollowness of eternity. Then the sobs came, long and shuddering, barely muffled, and over the sobs, the sound of his own heart beating. After a while she said, “What do you want from me, John? What do you expect me to tell my daughter? That the day after you left me, I fell into bed with your brother, a man I hardly knew? Is that what you want me to tell her? That is not how she was brought up. That is not the way we have taught her to live. What will she think of us, her own parents?”

Father John exhaled the long breath that had been caught in his chest. His whole being seemed to gather together, reform itself in familiar ways, his sense of himself coming again into focus. The line was quiet again. He said, “Eileen, your daughter will think you’re human.” Vicky had said the same thing to him a few hours ago, he realized. “Is that so bad, Eileen? To be human?”

The sobbing started again, softer. After a moment she said, “I’ll call her tomorrow.” Another silence, then: “Mike is a good husband and father. I love him.”

“I know,” he said.

After he hung up, Father John sat at the desk, trying to sort through the emotions flowing through him, a tide of relief and emptiness, joy for Mike and Megan and sadness for himself. Megan was not his own. That was the truth, and the truth was hard, with sharp edges that cut and scraped at his heart. A drink would smooth the edges, he knew, and he wondered for an
instant if that was why he would always want a drink, to make the truth easier to take.

He picked up the phone and punched in the number for Joanne Garrow. Still no answer. In forty minutes he could be in Lander. Surely the woman would be home by then.

•   •   •

Outside the breeze was cool, a warning of winter coming from the north. Next to the Escort stood a dark pickup. Two young men sat in the cab, black cowboy hats pushed up on their heads: Arnold Bizzel and one of his cousins. The door snapped open as Father John approached. “I have to go out for a while,” he said. “Megan’s alone at the guest house.”

“Don’t worry, Father,” Arnold said. “Me and Tom’ll stay right here. Nobody’s gonna get close to the mission tonight.”

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T
hirty minutes later Father John parked in front of a two-story red-brick house a couple of blocks west of Main Street in Lander. The house was dark except for the faint gray light glowing in the front window. A sedan sat in the driveway. Joanne Garrow was home.

He hurried up the sidewalk and mounted the stairs to the porch that jutted from the front of the house. There was the muffled sound of chimes inside as he pressed the doorbell. He waited for the shush of footsteps, the crack of the door opening, but there was only the soft rustle of the wind and, in the distance, the hum of tires on asphalt and the sound of a baby crying. He tried the doorbell again and waited several moments.

He was about to turn away, wondering whether to wait awhile in the Escort when something drew his attention: the gray light flickering across the porch floor—the light of a television. He stepped toward the window and glanced past the edge of the drapes. Light spilled from a television against the far wall of the living room, but there were no images on the screen. Only a smudge of light that cast silver shadows over
the sofa and chairs and sparkled in the crystal figurines on the small tables. A woman sat in one of the chairs, head tilted back, arms flopped over the sides, legs sprung out. The heels of her black shoes dug into the Oriental carpet. A dark mass spread over the front of her white blouse.

Father John darted back to the door and tried the knob. Locked. Then he ran down the porch steps and around the side of the house. The backyard lay in quiet shadow, a thousand stars blinking overhead. The back door was also locked. Retracing his steps, he hurried across the lawn to the house next door. As he came up the porch steps, he heard the muffled television voices inside. He leaned into the doorbell.

There were sounds of movement inside, and the door swung open. A large, burly man in blue jeans and T-shirt stood in the opening, backlit by the shimmering lights of the television. “Yeah?” he said.

Father John introduced himself and said the woman next door had been hurt. He asked the man to call 911.

“That crazy old lady,” the man said. “What she do, fall down the stairs?”

“I think she’s been shot.”

“Shot!” The door snapped back. “Come on in, Father. Phone’s over there, you wanna call the police.” He motioned past the woman sunk in one of the two recliners in front of the television. She held a remote in one hand; the television had gone mute, leaving a fullness of quiet.

Father John stepped over to the phone that sat on a small counter. Beyond the counter was the shadowed space of the kitchen. He punched in the numbers and waited, pressing the phone hard against his ear,
counting the number of rings. “Come on, come on,” he said, mostly to himself.

“I told you, Walter.” The woman’s voice cut over the ringing noise. “That wasn’t any engine backfiring. That was a gunshot. I should’ve called the police right then, only you said—”

“Be quiet,” the man barked as the 911 operator came on the line.

Father John gave his name and told the operator what he’d found. Then he said he’d wait for the police.

•   •   •

He leaned against the side of the Escort, jacket zippered against the cold snap of the breeze. From the distance came the wail of sirens that gradually grew into a wall of sound rushing toward him. Then the sound abruptly cut off, leaving a ringing in his ears. Two police cars and an ambulance swung into the curb, blue and red lights on the cars flashing over the sidewalk and lawn. Father John walked over as doors flung open and officers and attendants spilled out. A man in a dark sport jacket approached. “You Father O’Malley?”

Father John nodded.

“Give us a couple minutes.” It was an order. Then the officers started up the sidewalk toward the house, the attendants following. A flashlight beam played across the front door as one of the officers bent over the lock. In an instant the door opened, and the men filed inside.

People began spilling out of the houses across the street and down the block, gathering in shadowy clusters, heads craned toward the two-story house. A couple of men sidled up and asked what happened. Father John said he wasn’t sure, and they moved away. The
buzz of voices filtered around him and mixed with the sounds of the breeze.

After several minutes the plainclothes officer emerged from the house and came down the sidewalk, through the blue and red lights. “You know the victim, Father?”

Father John shook his head. He wasn’t even sure the woman was Joanne Garrow. “Who is she?” he asked.

“One of the ambulance attendants knows her. Name is Joanne Garrow.”

Father John told the officer he’d come here to talk with the woman, that he’d tried to telephone her earlier and hadn’t gotten an answer.

The officer withdrew a small notebook from his jacket pocket. Then he produced a ballpoint. “So you don’t know the lady, and you drove over here tonight for a visit?” Thin dark eyebrows came together. “Now why is that, Father?”

Father John started to explain. A priest, his assistant at St. Francis Mission, had been murdered a few days ago on the reservation.

“FBI case.” The officer interrupted. He was jotting something in the notebook.

Father John went on: it was possible Joanne Garrow had known the priest when he was at the mission thirty-five years ago. He’d wanted to ask her about him.

The officer stopped writing and looked up. He blinked into the flashing lights. “You saying there might be some connection to the priest’s murder?”

Father John glanced away a moment. The sidewalk was crowded with groups of people. Still other groups formed in the street and, in the shadows, he could see
more people hurrying down the block. “I have no idea,” he said. He and Vicky had a theory, that was all. They’d hoped that Jeremiah Markham’s business manager would confirm the theory, but now the business manager was dead.

“Chances are it’s a big coincidence,” the officer said. “Priest shot on the res. Old woman shot at home. My bet is there’s not gonna be a piece of jewelry or stick of silver or camera in that house. Whoever surprised her probably threw it into a pillowcase and ran out the door after he shot her.” He snapped the notebook shut. “We’ll call you if we need anything else.”

He was dismissed, he realized. He started toward the pickup, then turned back. Nodding toward the house next door, he said, “The neighbors may have heard the shot.”

The officer had already started up the sidewalk. “We’ll tend to our business, Father,” he called over his shoulder.

Father John slid onto the seat of the Escort and turned the ignition switch. The engine flickered to life, and he pulled into the street, guiding the car past the knots of bystanders. Two people from the Markham Clinic were dead. The nurse who had confided in Father Joseph thirty-five years ago, and now the business manager. He decided it was time that he and Vicky took their theory to Gianelli.

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