James Patterson - Gone

“No, it’s not that,” Seamus said, stepping in and closing the door behind him.

“How are you this morning?” he said sheepishly. “Sleep well?”

I noticed that he was showered and wide awake and wearing his formal black priest suit with his Roman collar.

“I was, Father. I was sleeping as well as you please. I remember it quite fondly. What is it? Are you here to give me last rites? What in the Wild Wild West is going on?”

“Well, I — ” he started. “What I mean to say is that … I guess you could say I have a confession to make.”

“A confession?” I said, sitting up. “That’s a switch. Wow, this almost sounds good enough for you to wake me in the middle of the night. Please, my son, confess away. Unload thy soul.”

“Well, you know how you told us all repeatedly to keep a low profile?” Seamus said, wincing.

I stared my grandfather solidly in his not-so-innocent blue eyes.

“Yes. I believe we were all there for the conversation with the witness protection folks.”

“Well, I haven’t been exactly following the rules. I was talking to Rosa, and she was telling me about the local priest in town. She kept telling me what a nice man he was, and I gave him a call. She was right. Father Walter is a very nice man. Actually, we’ve been talking back and forth for a couple of weeks now.”

What a thoroughly nutty situation this all is , I thought. Seamus felt guilty about talking to another priest?

“OK,” I said. “You and the local guy are talking shop. Did you tell him who we were?”

“No, of course not,” Seamus said.

“Why do I have the feeling that there’s another shoe about to drop?” I said.

“Well, being the only priest in the parish, he’s swamped. I guess I let it be known that I might be available under extreme circumstances to help out. One of those situations just came up. His father had a heart attack, and he asked if I could fill in today for early-morning Mass.”

“Holy cannoli, Father,” I said. “Why would you say that?”

“Fine. I’ll admit it. I want to say Mass. Is that a sin? I haven’t said Mass in a while, and I want to.”

“But you say Mass for us here at the house every Sunday morning.”

“That’s not the same thing as saying Mass in a church, at an altar, Detective Bennett. I really miss it, Michael. I feel utterly, completely useless out here in the middle of nowhere.”

I looked at him. I knew how that felt.

“Listen, Father. I feel useless, too, but this guy who’s after us is not messing around. He’s spending a lot of money to find us. We can’t risk it.”

“I know. You’re right,” Seamus said. “I’ll tell him I can’t do it. What do people’s souls really matter anyway, right?”

I sighed.

“Where’s the church?”

“It’s Our Lady of Sorrows, in Westwood.”

“When is Mass?”

Seamus looked at his watch.

“Starts in an hour.”

“OK, Father Pain-in-My-Ankle,” I said as I finally stood. “Put on some coffee and let me hop in the shower. I wouldn’t want to be late for Mass.”

About ten miles to the northwest, Westwood was a quiet, tiny mountain town that didn’t stand on too much ceremony. There was a farmer’s market, a post office, a couple of streets of small, neat houses with pickups in the driveways and grills on the front porches.

“Hey, look, Dad,” my eldest daughter, Juliana, said from the backseat. “That’s a pizza place coming up.”

Juliana had overheard Seamus and me in the kitchen and insisted on coming along to be Seamus’s altar server. She claimed that she wasn’t just trying to get out of her homeschool classes, but I had my doubts.

“And oh, darn, there the pizza place goes,” I said, driving past it. “We’re in hiding, Juliana. No town pizza. If this weren’t a four-alarm Catholic emergency, we wouldn’t even be here.”

There were more pickups in the parking lot of Our Lady of Sorrows, beat-up work vans with ladders on top. Seamus had explained that the congregation included a lot of farmworkers, many of them unemployed after environmentalists in the state legislature had head-scratchingly cut down the rural area’s water allowance for the year. Without the water, farmers had been forced to let fields lie fallow, and now there were a lot of unemployed people hurting.

Thanks, government , I thought, parking Aaron Cody’s seventies muscle wagon in the corner of the lot. Take a bow. Another job well done.

“Our Lady of Sorrows, indeed,” I mumbled when I saw the food-bank notice on the bulletin board beside the door of the tiny white church.

The inside of the church was very plain. Definitely not St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but there was something nice about it, something serene. Instead of an organ, there was an old piano beside the altar, currently being played beautifully by a thin, red-haired middle-aged woman.

“That’s Abigail, the parish secretary,” Seamus said. “Juliana and I better get going. She’s supposed to show us where everything is.”

“I guess it’s OK,” I grumbled as I looked around at the blue-haired congregation. “Not too many gangbangers around.”

“Exactly, Dad,” Juliana said, rolling her eyes. “Everyone knows the gangbangers just go to Sunday Mass.”

I knelt at a pew at the back of the church after they left. I hadn’t been to early-morning Mass during the week in ages.

I used to go all the time in the months after my wife, Maeve, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Before or after my shift at work, every chance I got, I would head to Holy Name Church, a couple of blocks from our building. The youngest person there by decades, I would sit in the front and pray with everything in me for my wife to somehow be OK, for God to grant me a miracle.

Because, while people talk about their wife being their better half, Maeve was more like my better three-quarters, my better seven-eighths. She was the saint who’d put our crazy, wonderful family together. Mike, we need to adopt another one , she’d say. And I’d look over at her, at the holy look in her eyes, and I was suddenly the farm boy from The Princess Bride , and it was “As you wish” time.

But, prayers or no prayers, God wasn’t having any of it. Maeve died almost six months to the day of her cancer diagnosis. It had been years now since she’d passed away, but her spirit was very much alive, and she was still such a source of strength for me.

“Hey, babe,” I whispered up at the rafters. “What do I do now?”

The church filled up more than I’d thought it would. In addition to the requisite white-haired old-timers, there were quite a few able-bodied young white and Hispanic men who looked like they worked outside. Praying for work, no doubt. For some hope, I thought, feeling bad for them. I checked my wallet and fished out a twenty to slip into the poor box on the way out.

It was just before the gospel when a strange guy with a gray ponytail and a scraggly white beard came into the church behind me.

“Well, what do you know? It’s actually true,” the guy whispered as he climbed into the pew beside me. “Open the door, and here’s the people.”

I looked him over. With his camouflage hunting anorak over his greasy jeans, and with suspiciously glassy eyes, the old hippie had a very strong resemblance to a homeless person. Or maybe to Nick Nolte about to get a mug shot taken.

“Welcome to the Hotel California,” I thought, rolling my eyes.

My cop radar thought Nick Gra-Nolte might pass out or cause some trouble, but as the Mass went on, he knelt when he was supposed to and knew all the prayers. He even knew all the annoying changes in the prayers that the church had just dropped on everyone out of the blue.