At Home in Mitford (30 page)

He looked at the calendar clock on his desk. If the boy didn’t turn up in the next few hours, he and Miss Sadie had agreed to drive to Holding, where they’d go over the town with a fine-tooth comb.

“I’ve got new tennis shoes,” she told him. “I’ll go up one side of the street and you go up the other!”

“Listen to this,” the rector said to Barnabas, who was sprawled at his feet. As he read the first draft of his sermon, Barnabas listened with sincere interest.

Actually, he found his dog more attentive than many of his congregation. On the other hand, none of the congregation ever openly engaged in vigorous scratching. So it was a wash.

He got up and walked to the tall spruce with its twinkling lights and looked at the array of gifts still lying beneath it. He had lost the heart to finish opening them, somehow, though he’d torn right into his cousin’s gift and discovered that it was, indeed, an electric train. As soon as Dooley comes back, he thought, we’ll set it up. Surely, Dooley would be coming back.

Suddenly, he remembered the present Dooley had made for him and found it lying near Winnie’s bulky gift.

He opened it eagerly.

A glasses case, made at school. Two pieces of leather, glued together on three sides, and monogrammed with the aid of a stencil.
FT
was printed on one side,
DB
on the other. “I put my initials on it,” Dooley had scrawled on a piece of notebook paper, “so you won’t firgit me.”

Forget Dooley Barlowe? Never!

Many boys who’d been raised like Dooley, he reasoned, would be good for nothing. Dooley, he was convinced, was extraordinarily good for something. It only remained to be seen what it was.

He wished he had someone in the house to talk to about this disturbing turn of events. Like Walter, with whom he’d shared nearly every confidence since he was a boy.

He put the glasses case in his shirt pocket and walked back to his desk. “Talk to Hoppy. Tell Rodney. Thank Cynthia” were scrawled across the top of his desk calendar.

He decided to work his list backward.

Cynthia, he thought, did not have much trouble making herself at home. When he’d called to thank her for the mole watercolor, she’d suggested tea, and he said he had just put the kettle on. In barely two minutes, she had “popped through the hedge,” as she liked to say, and curled up on his study sofa, helping herself to a piece of shortbread. He was intrigued to see that another of her pink curlers, obviously overlooked, adorned the back of her head.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, when told about Dooley. “I always thought runaway boys come straight home when they got hungry.”

“Yes, well, that is complicated by the fact that this is not his home.”

“Has anyone seen him?”

“Rodney says he was seen by three different people on his way down the mountain. They remembered the red bicycle.”

“Did they say anything else?”

“They said he was . . . ah, flying.”

“Flying! Oh, dear.”

There was a thoughtful silence.

“I’ve never raised a boy,” said Cynthia.

“That makes two of us.”

“But I do try to understand their feelings. I always pretend I’m a child when I write Violet books, and then I write exactly what I want to hear.”

Is that the way he should write his sermons? Saying exactly what he would like to hear?

“A publisher who looked at the first manuscript said, ‘Oh, we can’t print this, it’s far too silly.’ But the next publisher understood, and there have been eight since then. All silly!”

“And all successful, I believe.”

“Well, yes, and then the Davant Medal was announced, and we went into second and third printings of everything. But my point was, let’s try and put ourselves in his shoes, even if it seems silly. It might work! Let’s see . . . if I were a boy with a new bicycle, where would I go?” She stared intently at the fire, wrinkling her forehead.

“We think he’s gone to his mother, but we can’t trace her.”

“Where does she live?”

"She had a trailer down in Holding, but it’s been moved.”

“We could go and ask around the neighborhood where she lived. Somebody would know something.”

“The police are doing that. They haven’t turned up anything.”

“I hate this,” she said.

“I hate it more.”

How, he wondered, could he be sitting here by a warm fire, when a fatherless boy was out there somewhere, almost certainly cold and hungry?

There was a knock at the back door. His heart pounded as Barnabas leaped from his place in front of the fire and skidded into the kitchen. Rodney! Surely it would be Rodney with some news.

When he opened the door, Dooley Barlowe looked him straight in the eye. “My mama tol’ me to come back.”

“Come in,” the rector said, hoarsely.

There was an ugly welt on the boy’s face. Barnabas licked it while Dooley silently removed his gloves, the down jacket, and the yellow windbreaker. He dropped the gloves in the bin and hung the jackets on the peg.

“Come and say hello to Miss Coppersmith.”

Dooley met Cynthia’s gaze without wavering. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey, yourself.”

His face was red from pedaling in a chill wind, and he trembled slightly from the cold.

“It might be good if I made some hot chocolate to warm you up,” said the rector.

But Dooley was headed toward the stairs, Barnabas hard on his heels. “I cain’t stand here talkin’,” he said over his shoulder, “I got t’ take a dump.”

The rector looked at his neighbor, coloring furiously.

“Don’t look at me,” she said. “I never raised a boy!”

Before he called Rodney about the jewels, he called Walter.

“You’re in possession of stolen goods,” said Walter.

“Good Lord!”

“I doubt if Rodney will press any charges, but you ought to know where you stand by failing to report what you found.”

“I knew I should have reported it. It’s just that the choir was rehearsing three different performances, and I was busy with Lessons and Carols, and Rodney would have conducted a lengthy investigation, and . . .”

“Believe me, I understand. But it was still a damnfool thing to do,” Walter said.

He sat for a moment after talking with Walter, with his head in his hands. Then he called Rodney.

“I’ve got something I want to show you. How about this morning, at Lord’s Chapel?”

“Let me stop by the Grill and get a coffee to go, and I’ll be right over.”

He felt sick. In possession of stolen goods! A fine thing for a man of the cloth, for heaven’s sake. If there were any punishment, it was the nauseating humiliation he felt, which was surely punishment enough.

“You look like somethin’ the cat drug in,” said Emma, coming through the door.

“That’s a fine greeting.”

She sighed. “Dooley Barlowe is doin’ you about as much good as a case of diabetes, if you ask me.”

“He came back last night.”

“What a relief! I wish you’d called me!”

“I did. No answer.”

“Oh, yes, well . . . I was at Harold’s mama’s and we worked on my suit.”

“Your suit?”

“That I’m gettin’ married in. Red. Black buttons. Peplum. High neck.”

“I see.”

“Black patent shoes. Black hose. Pearl earrings. Where was he?”

“His mother’s, like we thought. She sent him back, told him she couldn’t care for him.”

“Breaks my heart,” said Emma.

That’s encouraging, he thought.

“But mostly, it makes me mad.”

Aha! Here it comes.

“You get house help, change your diet, get you a nice dog for company, start feelin’ better, and what happens?”

He was so astounded to hear Emma refer to Barnabas as a nice dog that he was speechless.

“What happens is, you get a boy who runs you down, wears you out, and worries you half to death, and you’re right back where you started. I declare, I’ve seen diabetes make you look better than you look this mornin’.” She caught her breath and plunged ahead. “Do you know how old you are?”

Remind me! he thought, enduring her assault. “Not twenty-five! Not thirty-two! Sixty! You’re too old to be takin’ on a boy, plus do your preachin’, and go to the hospital, and visit the elderly, and go to meetin’s, and read in that program with Olivia Davenport, not to mention the bells comin’ in, and the nursin’ home startin’ up, and that old mangy dog to wash . . .”

Now his nice dog was old and mangy.

As she continued her oratorical massacre, he came to a sober realization. He would certainly never tell her so, but he had to admit one thing:

She was right.

“Dark in here,” said Rodney. “But it smells good.”

“It’s the old wood, and years of incense and beeswax and flowers and lemon oil and dried hydrangeas. It’s a wonderful smell!” he agreed as he switched on the lights. “Come down this way. What I want to show you is where we keep the ashes of the departed.”

They walked down the hall and stopped at the closet, where he removed the key from above the door.

Rodney adjusted his holster. “Is somethin’ goin’ to jump out of there?”

“I fervently hope not.”

He opened the door and turned on the light, relieved to find that everything was as orderly as he’d left it. No one had tossed in any plastic flowers or worn hymnals.

“Now,” he said, carefully picking up the bronze urn that was sitting third from the left, “this is Parrish Guthrie. Remember him?”

“Ha! How could I forget th’ old so-and-so? I wasn’t th’ only one that got a deep breath when he went to his grave . . . or whatever that thing is.”

“This is an urn. After the body is cremated, the ashes—which are mostly bits of bone—are interred here.”

“Bits of bone!” Rodney said, shuddering. “I like th’ old-fashioned way—pushin’ up daisies.”

“Let’s take this urn and walk on back to the kitchen.” His heart was pounding. Oh, how he hated to tell the bitter truth about his wrong behavior.

He stood at the sink and unscrewed the cap of the bronze urn, which came off more readily than before. “I’m going to show you something very . . . what is the word? Something that grieves me.” With his other hand, he took the white tea towel from the rack and spread it on the drain board. Then he gently shook the urn, so that the contents would spill out.

Nothing tumbled to the mouth of the urn.

He shook it again and turned the urn nearly upside down. There was no rattle, as of seashells in a jar, and nothing came rolling onto the towel. He realized there was a good explanation for this:

The bronze urn was empty.

He felt strangely light-headed and confused. “I don’t understand,” he began.

“What’s the deal?”

The rector shook the urn. “I don’t know. I’m . . .”

“Somethin’ was supposed to be in that jar. Right?”

“Jewels,” he said weakly. “Jewels that I found in this very urn sometime before Christmas.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Let’s sit down.”

Rodney sat on the stool by the wall phone. Father Tim sat on the old pine table in the center of the room.

“Before Christmas,” he confessed, “I was cleaning up that closet, throwing things out. I picked up Parrish’s urn and it rattled strangely. I remembered I’d never seen the contents of an urn, so, out of curiosity, I brought it back here to the kitchen, and opened it. There were little cloth sacks full of jewels in there, cut jewels.”

“Maybe it was another jar you brought back here.”

“No. It was definitely Parrish.”

Rodney rested his hand on the butt of his pistol. “So, why didn’t you report it?”

There! There was the question he was dreading.

As he explained why, Rodney took off his hat and scratched his head.

“I don’t know,” said the chief, “I never run up against anything like this. When you found ’em th’ first time and didn’t report it, you were in possession of stolen goods, I know that.”

“So I’m told by my cousin, who’s an attorney.”

“But now that there’s nothin’ here, well, there’s nothin’ I can see to charge you with. Maybe we ought to look in th’ other jars.”

The rector shrugged. He didn’t think it would do any good.

“This is creepy,” said Rodney, peering into the urns and stirring their contents with a bread knife from the silverware drawer. “I wish to th’ Lord I’d brought me a chew of Red Man.”

When they finished an hour later, they’d found nothing amiss. “I’m just goin’ to write up a report, and then you sign it, and I’ll file it.”

“Where? Where will you file it?”

“In my right-hand drawer over at th’ station.”

“Aha! I thought you might file a report with J.C. Hogan.”

“Not, by dern, if I can help it,” said Rodney.

He felt faint with relief.

He had thanked his neighbor for her imaginative gift.

He had confessed his unfortunate discovery and equally unfortunate behavior to Rodney.

And now there was only one thing left to do on his list, and that was to talk with Hoppy Harper.

He felt like calling the airline immediately and flying nonstop to Shannon, then renting a car and driving to Sligo. There, he’d spend at least four weeks in a remote inn, riding a bicycle along narrow lanes, and tapping his foot to fiddle music played in thatched cottages.

Instead of calling the airline, he called Hoppy.

“Harper.”

“Your good rector here,” he said, not feeling very good at all. “How’s Russell?”

“It’s amazing the way the infection is reversing.

Not typical in cases like this. How’re you? Are you running?”

“Slacked off.”

“I’ve got three words to say to you, pal: Just do it.”

“OK. You’re right, and I will. Let me ask you something. I need to talk with you about . . . an important matter. Your place or mine?”