Joel Goldman - Deadlocked

Mary said, "That's what I told Father Steve. He had no reason to think otherwise."

"Sure he did if he went to the trouble of breaking into your house, stealing your fish and buying an aquarium for them. If he thought you were only going to be gone for a few days and he was worried about your fish, he would have offered to take care of them," Mason said. "Better yet, you would have asked him, but you didn't."

Mary stepped away from Father Steve, crossing her arms over her chest. "You knew what they'd done to me?" she asked.

Father Steve's round shoulders sagged, his arms at his sides, palms upturned in a supplicant's pose. "Not for certain, Mary. You must believe me. When Mr. Mason told me you were missing, I did think you were in Omaha until I called Vince and he told me that he hadn't heard from you."

"Then why didn't you tell me?" Mason demanded. "Or the police?"

He shrugged, tilting his head and dropping his palms to his sides. "I've been a priest for more than thirty years. I suppose I've heard tens of thousands of confessions in that time. Many of them are small sins. I listen, absolve, and forget. A few are truly awful sins. I listen to them as well, even if I can't absolve the sinner and I can't forget the sin. Sometimes the sin gets inside of me and eats away at me like a disease."

"Is that supposed to be an excuse?" Mason said. "Knowing that Mary had been kidnapped made you too sick to do anything about it."

Father Steve permitted himself a thin smile. "I imagine you're quite a good lawyer, Mr. Mason, to be able to twist my failings to make them worse than even I make them to be. I'm not sick. I'm just afraid of the things I know. My weakness, my sin, is not doing anything about it. My sin is the sin of silence as you guessed that day when we talked in the school."

"Then what is this all about?" Mason asked. "Stealing Mary's fish and snatching her out of Sunday Mass."

"It's about someone who is sick of his own weaknesses and is trying to atone for his sins. I took Mary's fish to save them for her. I prayed for her safe return. I called the police to warn them about that young man Whitney shot, your client, Nick Byrnes."

"Nick says you weren't there when he was shot," Mason said.

"He's telling the truth," Father Steve said, looking at the floor, locking his hands together, twisting his fingers. "I was inside. Whitney and I had just finished meeting about another donation to the church. I came outside after the shooting. Whitney told me what had happened."

"Then why not tell that to the police instead of lying?" Mason asked.

"I'd compromised myself too many times to be that virtuous, Mr. Mason. Whitney King knew that. He knew which button of mine to push."

"So why the anonymous phone call to the cops?" Mason asked.

"I didn't know for certain if Whitney had taken Mary, but if he had, it was logical that he would want Nick as well. It's the way he is. He's often told me that he'll take any risk to avoid a risk, though he never cared about the contradiction. It was how he justified the things he did."

"What did Whitney have on you?" Mason asked.

The priest drew a deep breath. "Silence that made me an accomplice."

"An accomplice?" Mary asked. "An accomplice to what?"

"Murder," the priest confessed.

Mary reached out her hand, steadying herself against the fireplace, turning away from Father Steve, the enormity of his confession beginning to sink in. She staggered to the rocking chair, collapsing into it as the chair bobbed back and forth.

"Whose murder?" Mason asked.

The priest looked at Mason as if the question demanded he extract a chamber from his heart to answer it. Then he looked at Mary who was holding herself as she rocked.

"Whitney called me this morning and asked if I knew where you were. I didn't know whether that was because he wasn't involved in your disappearance or whether you had somehow escaped. I told him I hadn't seen you since you left the church that Wednesday. He told me he thought you would come to church today and told me to call him and tell him if you did."

Mason stepped to the front window, looking out at the quadrangle, having learned that Whitney usually made his phone calls when he was close by, the call giving the false impression that he wasn't.

"So he knows that Mary is here," Mason said.

"When I saw you come in this morning, I came back to the rectory to call him because I didn't think I had a choice. But I didn't call him."

"Why? So you could wait until you got Mary back here and she couldn't get away?" Mason asked, squaring around at the priest.

"No, Mr. Mason," Father Steve said, hanging his head. "I realized that if I called him, I would be crossing a line between hiding behind my vows and giving up someone to evil. I couldn't do that even though I'd spent the last fifteen years pretending there was a difference. I was afraid Whitney would come looking for Mary no matter what I told him. That's why I was in such a hurry. I decided to give Mary something to protect her. To do that, I have to break my silence and my vow to protect the sanctity of confessions."

Father Steve took off his coat, laying it on the arm of the sofa. He knelt on the floor where he pulled up four bricks from the middle of the hearth, stacking them next to the fireplace screen. He reached down between the floorboards into the crawl space beneath the floor and retrieved a tightly wrapped oilskin bundle tied at both ends with knotted twine. He slipped the twine off the bundle and unrolled the oilskin, spilling a tire iron onto the hard floor.

Mason knelt alongside the priest. Using the tips of two fingers like a giant tweezers he raised the tire iron up by one end and laid it back on the oilskin. Cradling it in the protective cloth, he picked it up for a closer look. The oilskin had saved it from rusting too badly. Freckles of orange rust mixed with dark splotches that were burrowed into the imperfect surface. Holding it to the light, he caught the reflection of what could be a hair embossed in the open cup that was used to grasp lug nuts on a wheel.

"Where did you get this?" Mason asked him.

"Victoria King gave it to me," Father Steve said as he stood. "After the trial."

"Why didn't you turn it over to the police?" Mason asked. "There could have been fingerprints or blood or tissue that would have proven Ryan Kowalcyk was innocent. How could you bury a murder weapon under your fireplace for fifteen years?"

"Do you have children, Mr. Mason?" the priest asked.

"No."

"Imagine that you had two children and they were both drowning, but you could only save one. Which one would you choose? It's an old dilemma, the stuff of a college philosophy course, until you actually are faced with it. What would you do?"

Mary came out of her chair. "You had to choose between my Ryan and Whitney and you chose him because his family had money and we had nothing! May you rot in hell!"

Father Steve's wide round face blanched at Mary's bitter curse.

"That will be for God to decide, Mary," he said, his crushed voice resigned to his fate. "Though I expect you'll get your wish. But it wasn't just about that. I didn't know whether this tire iron would prove that either boy was guilty or innocent. I convinced myself the jury had made that decision. My decision was about choosing between my vows and Victoria King."

"Victoria King is the only child in that moral dilemma," Mason said.

"That's where you are wrong, Mr. Mason. My vows, my faith, my church. That was my other child. That was my life. That's what I thought I was choosing by keeping silent about Victoria."

"I don't understand," Mason said. "Victoria had nothing to do with the murders of Graham and Elizabeth Byrnes."

"You're correct. She didn't," Father Steve said. He wrapped his hand around the cross hanging from his neck, closing his eyes in a moment of silent prayer, Mason reading his lips as he mouthed God forgive me. "Victoria King killed her husband. With this," Father Steve said, taking the tire iron from Mason.