Father Fisher brought his hands together before him. “Each of us has his cross to bear,” he said. Then his eyes got all dewy. “Jim, I hope, in the fullness of time — when you are ready — you’ll join us again at the Blessed T. We miss your shining face, my son.”
Jim looked down. “Thank you, sir.”
Father Fisher grinned and held up his hands, as if for a benediction.
“No pressure,” he said. “Just downright selfishness on my part. The ol’ ranch just ain’t the same without ya.” There was a real tear in the pastor’s eye almost as dazzling as the stones on his cross. He shook Jim’s hand warmly and headed back up Truelove to the Godmobile.
O, Saviour victim, opening wide the gates of life to man below. That was the passage on the passenger-side door.
Father Fisher waved at Jim as he drove by. It took Jim a moment to realize that the pastor had forgotten all about the book he had on hold.
In the library, Jim went right up to the counter and asked Mrs. Bhanerjee if they had a new Colin Dexter. She punched the name in on her terminal, waited, shook her head. “Nothing since Death Is Now My Neighbour,” she said.
“Is it on hold?” asked Jim.
Mrs. Bhanerjee checked and shook her head again. “I didn’t know you liked mysteries, Jim.”
A small smile lit up Jim’s face. “I’m beginning to,” he said.
8
There was construction on Highway 7. Jim and his mother had to sit in the truck and wait while earth-moving equipment lumbered across their path. The truck was idling funny. They both heard it — a clackety sound that could only mean repair bills some time soon.
“Did Father find you?” Iris Hawkins asked over the clacking.
“Find me?”
“I was talking to him earlier,” she said. “I told him where you would be.”
Jim was sitting knee-deep in groceries. He fidgeted. A carton of tea spilled out of a shopping bag. He tried to pick it up with his feet and put it back in the bag.
“That’s weird,” he said. “Father pretended he had been on his way to the library and it was a big surprise running into me.”
Jim glanced at his mother. This didn’t seem to strike her as relevant. Obviously she had something else on her mind.
“What did he want to talk about?” she asked.
Jim delved into a bag and found a box of Saltines. He opened it, helped himself to a couple.
“He just wanted to see how I was doing,” he said. “You know, see if I was ready to come back.”
His mother nodded. She looked as if she was going to say something but changed her mind. So Jim went on.
“Father said he was picking up this mystery they had reserved for him, but they didn’t. I asked. They didn’t even have the book at all.”
Iris peered at Jim under lowered eyebrows. “What made you ask?
“Pardon?”
“Were you checking up on him?”
Jim shrugged. “It was kind of… peculiar.” He was going to say suspicious but didn’t want to get into that. With relief, he watched her turn on the radio. It didn’t work so well with just a coat hanger for an aerial. She gave up after a minute and turned it off. The static had only deepened her frown.
“Why was it kind of peculiar?” she asked. There were little needles in her voice. Not anger, really, but something. Worry?
Jim kept his eyes on the earth mover, listened to its back-up beeping noise. “Well, it was sort of a white lie,” he said. “I mean, why didn’t he just say he’d been talking to you? Why did he make up anything at all?” Jim tried to keep his voice light.
His mother dismissed him with a little snort. “He’s a busy man, Jim,” she said. “I imagine his mind was on other things. He has parishioners to visit in hospital, folks who need his prayers.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Outside, a girl in a hard hat and fluorescent yellow jacket swirled her sign from STOP to SLOW.
“You know about his Kosovo Relief Fund?” Iris asked, as she put the truck in gear and edged ahead. “I know that’s taking up a huge part of his time right now.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Jim. He had seen notices his mother had brought home from church.
“Do you know what he’s done? He’s gotten all the churches in Ladybank to work together on this. When did you ever hear of such a thing? All working together. Not only that, he’s spoken to all the service clubs in town and even a couple of the factories.” Her voice had risen a notch, as if this was a point she needed to make. “What started out as a gesture of compassion from our little congregation has now brought in something like thirty-seven thousand dollars! All because of the effort of one man. Do you have any idea how amazing that is?” She paused. “And the thing is, Jim, he does this kind of thing all the time. He is a very committed man.”
Jim couldn’t believe his tattle-tale had provoked such a lecture. It was clear to him that Father Fisher’s character was not up for debate.
“You’re right,” he said as enthusiastically as he could. “It is pretty amazing, about the Kosovo fund. And the other stuff. I know it.”
His mother nodded. They were finally able to pull back onto the highway. Two of the cars following them immediately pulled out to pass. The truck didn’t accelerate all that fast.
“It’s a miracle, Jimbo,” said Iris Hawkins with a tremulousness in her voice that surprised him. He looked at her and she returned his glance with eyes full of fuss and worry, then quickly turned her attention back to the road. But Jim knew, suddenly, that Father Fisher had got to her. He must have told her about Jim’s run-in with Ruth Rose, how sick the girl was with her demented campaign against her stepfather. That’s why his mother was getting all hot under the collar.
He didn’t want that. Didn’t want her worrying about him.
Ruth Rose phoned him again that night. It was just after his mother had set off for work, as if she had been waiting. As if she had been watching.
“Can you talk?” she asked. Her voice was raised, almost shrill. There were street sounds behind her. It seemed she was phoning from a phone booth.
“What do you want?” he said guardedly. He looked out the window across the windy yard, half expecting to see a lit phone booth out on the Twelfth Line. Jim heard a car’s horn beeping in the receiver, otherwise silence. He was just about to ask if she was still there when, at last, she spoke.
“I’ve figured it out,” she said.
Jim pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. “Figured out what?”
“How he did it,” she said. “The day he killed Hub.”
Now it was Jim’s turn to go silent.
If Ruth Rose had expected some kind of response, she didn’t wait long for it. She hurried on. “The big thing was he had to make sure no one saw him. He couldn’t take any chances. So what did he do? He put on your dad’s clothes.”
“What?”
“Before he ever set foot in the Malibu, he put on your dad’s boots. Puts on your dad’s Dodds & Erwin Feed & Seed cap. Everything. That way there would be no ‘alien fibres’ for those forensic people to find, no threads or footprints or whatever that didn’t belong to your dad.”
Jim could hardly breathe. It was like an obscene phone call. And yet he couldn’t quite bring himself to hang up.
“Go on.”
There wasn’t much encouragement in his voice, but it was enough to launch Ruth Rose again. “The way I figure it, they met somewhere else — somewhere no one was likely to see them. Then, when Father had finished him off, he put on your dad’s stuff and drove the Malibu back to your place.”
Jim could feel the bile rising in his throat.
“They were about the same size, right? About the same weight. Both of them were big, anyway. Father drives the Malibu back to your place. He’s got gloves on so he doesn’t leave any fingerprints. If anyone passes him on the road, he could lower his head and they’d just think it was Hub — his hair’s covered by the ball cap. Your mother’s at the church and you’re at school — no one’s going to see him. He drives down the lane all the way to the cedar grove. He leaves the car there, then he walks south towards the train tracks, leaving nice juicy footprints. Then he crosses the tracks and leaves some more prints, some more clues. It looks like he’s heading for the quarry. Somebody drowned in that quarry a few years back. Right? He’s making it look like your dad just wandered off to kill himself. From there Father makes his way back to his own car, making sure this time he doesn’t leave any tracks. Takes off the boots, walks on rock — I don’t know. Then he dumps Hub’s clothes — burns them, probably — and drives home.”