Mrs. Jones met him at the door.
His face flushed with annoyance; he had a thought that he wanted to pursue and Mrs. Jones was a perpetual distraction with her flat Southern accent and pinched widow’s face and dry manner.
“What is it?”
“A fella,” she said. “Says he come down from Rome.”
“Rome? Rome what, Mrs. Jones? Georgia?”
“Rome.” Mrs. Jones was a Baptist and her assumption of the housekeeper post had been accompanied by suspicion on both sides.
Yes, McGillicuddy thought. Perhaps he had been expecting this as well. The Agency, even Rome. But perhaps he could outsmart them all, even that old priest praying in the chapel.
When he opened the door of the middle parlor where Mrs. Jones had shown the visitor, McGillicuddy was not surprised by his youth or by his lack of clerical garb.
The young man turned from the window that opened on a garden beyond the walls of the rectory. He was tall and lean and muscular, with a flat expression on his face.
“I’m the Father Superior,” began McGillicuddy, extending his hand.
The young man only stood and stared at him for a moment and McGillicuddy let the hand fall to his side.
“Yes,” the young man said. “I know. I’ve come to see Leo Tunney.”
“Well, who might you be?” McGillicuddy said with a note of joviality that was all the more false for its faint tinge of annoyance.
“Martin Foley.”
“And you’re from Rome?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m being protective just now of our Father Tunney, he’s not been well, he’s—”
“This is not a request.”
“It isn’t? It isn’t?” He knew his voice was rising but he couldn’t seem to help it. “And just who the hell are you then?”
“From the Congregation, McGillicuddy. I think you’re aware of us.”
And the priest stood perfectly still then, the anger fading from his face with the draining color. “Yes,” he said at last, the voice suddenly old. “Yes. He’s in the chapel now, praying.”
“We’ll wait for him then,” Martin Foley said, smiling thinly.
“Yes,” McGillicuddy agreed. His voice was limp. “Yes. I suppose I should have expected someone… someone from—”
“From Rome? But that was inevitable, wasn’t it?”
“But what does the Congregation—”
“In time, Father. Everything will be revealed.”
But the old priest knew that revelation was the last thing on Foley’s mind.
11
Dawn came but there was still no real morning light, only the thin line of red color in the east defining the blackness of the rest of the sky. A smell of rain came on the wind blowing steadily from the Gulf side of the island.
Rita Macklin pounded along down Gulf View Boulevard, the main road of the island that formed Clearwater Beach. Her yellow running shoes pushed her relentlessly forward through the gauntlet of sleeping, shuttered hotels along the beach and past a solitary car near the causeway. When she reached the bridge at the south end of Clearwater Beach island, she decided to keep on, despite the threat of rain in the air. Her head still was not clear, she still did not know what to do. The two days she had been in Florida had been wasted.
As she ran, her red hair fell free on her shoulders and her long arms fell into an easy rhythm across her belly. She wore white tennis shorts and an old blue sweatshirt from the University of Wisconsin. A line of sweat glistened on her pale forehead and her cheeks were flushed. Her green eyes were as clear and bright as a deep pool found in sunlight, in a woods.
Two days ago.
She had driven south all that night after the confrontation with Kaiser. It had been so unexpected and so angry that it lingered in her like a poison that would not be flushed away.
There really had been no point in driving all night but rage had demanded it; she had pushed herself because she felt the need to punish herself after the angry words with Kaiser, to push beyond physical and mental limits. The argument had made her feel guilty and angry by turns; first it was Kaiser’s fault and then it was hers. It was a quarrel she had never thought she would have with the middle-aged man who had been her boss for nearly three years and had been more than that: a friend, unexpectedly, and a confidant, finally, and someone she had come to care for very much. All of it had been blown away with the angry words of that afternoon.
She had needed money and cashed a large check on her small account at the grocery on the corner and then went home, put together a few clothes in an old bag, threw the bag in the back seat of the car, and just took off, south on Interstate 81 through the gently rolling valley of the Shenandoah. All night she had driven, through the Tennessee mountains, down and down the map toward Florida. In the mountains, the rage and guilt had been replaced by a numbing fear as she drove through rain and fog, the blackness of the mountains looming against the blackness of the moonless sky. For long hours, she had driven in silence, a silence more profound for the steady humming of the tires on the pavements and the whoosh of a passing semitrailer, its rig of lights winking like the lights of a ship. She played back the quarrel in her mind and then, for long periods, thought of nothing at all; and then, just as the silence seemed to keep her company, she would need the sound of voices again to wake her to the rest of the world. Turning on the car radio, she punched buttons back and forth, the red needle of the dial flying across the numbers, searching a thousand miles of country for night sounds. Country music came clearly from a powerful station in Chicago; another turn of the dial and a rat-a-tat diet of news and non-news came from another clear channel station in New York. At last, in the hills of eastern Tennessee, she settled on a mail-order preacher coming from somewhere in east Texas, the voice cracker-rough, selling God and crucifixes that glowed in the dark and dashboard-mounted Jesuses “for those long nights on the road for you truckers when you want to be thinking on Him who rides along in the seat next to you.”
Gospel music, hymns, a cowboy’s lament, and the sound of urban disco and then, as the car followed the elegant serpentine highway around the sleeping city of Chattanooga at the Georgia-Tennessee line, a small radio station bravely puffed out the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Tiredness seeped into her back muscles, burning across her shoulders. She sat up straight, slumped down, leaned against the door, rested her arm across the back of the front seat; she took off her shoes and then her socks, pushing the accelerator barefoot to keep her awake. In all the dark, empty night’s drive, she was never afraid except at dawn, in north Georgia, when a truck driver at a gas station suggested they share his cab for a while. Then she thought of it as it really was: Her quarrel with Kaiser had cut her adrift from the world of Washington journalism toward which she had directed her whole life. She was just someone on the road in Georgia now, pursuing an idea.
But she had to follow Tunney.
Kaiser could not understand that and as the quarrel began and built, she could not explain it to him.
“Little Rita,” he had said. “This is a story for the Times, for reporters who have the leisure of weeks and months to beat an assignment to death. We’re a wire service, my dear; the old in-and-out.” And he had grinned in what he thought was a lascivious way but she had been too enmeshed in the quarrel by that time to let him deflect her.