“She was not at my Thursday night class when Tarlow was killed. And she hasn’t been back since. I texted her, no reply. I’ve sent you her number.”
Before leaving the mission, Gale sits in the back of the chapel, then kneels and lets his thoughts out. He hasn’t really believed in all this since he was eighteen. Left the home, left the faith. But Sally and Edward had staunchly brought him and his brother up in the Church. The brothers baptized by Father Ordonez right here in the mission baptistry. Never missing a Mass or a Confession.
Sangin shattered the last of his faith and blew away his future, but the voices inside him still murmur to be heard, and Lew Gale brings them here to let them speak.
From his Explorer, parked in the sun with the air conditioner on, Gale calls Geronima Mills, leaves a message about meeting her to talk about Wildcoast developer Bennet Tarlow.
Half an hour later, Gale is back in Laguna, a heavy plastic grocery bag in one hand, opening the gate to Bennet Tarlow’s backyard bird sanctuary and walking in.
No food means no birds.
He takes the pet store hummingbird nectar from the bag and fills the empty feeders with red sugar water.
In the small garage Gale finds the wild birdseed inside a galvanized aluminum trash can, fills the pet store bag, and takes it back to the yard.
When he’s done with the hanging seed feeders, he tops off the bright yellow birdbath with the hose, then sits in one of two aqua blue Adirondack chairs in the shade of the patio overhang.
And waits, picturing Tarlow doing all this every morning, because he had built up such an avian following here in his sanctuary.
You have to open the bird café or you’ll lose your customers.
He pictures those impatient hummingbirds dive-bombing Tarlow like they used to dive-bomb his mom when she opened her bird sanctuary in the morning, trying to get her back inside so they could drink.
And he sees in his mind’s eye Tarlow photographing the out-of-habitat great gray owl raising her brood in the sycamore tree near Wildcoast.
Hears the pistol pops.
Flinches in the blue chair.
Pictures Tarlow collapsing.
Tarlow’s backyard birds return rapidly.
Half a dozen hummers, their red throats flashing in the sun.
Doves landing clumsily on the seed feeders.
A sleek little phoebe splashing in the bath.
Gale sits an hour, reading his case file, then goes next door, where the friendly neighbor who had entertained Tarlow and possibly Norris something or other at a Fourth of July party is watering his roses.
“Detective,” he says, cutting off the hose water. “Have you made an arrest?”
“We’re working it hard,” says Gale.
“What’s in the bags?”
“Birdseed and hummingbird nectar. Can you fill up Bennet’s feeders once a day? The side gate is unlocked. There’s more seed in the trash can in the garage; keep the lid on tight for the mice. Refrigerate this nectar.”
The man gives Gale a yes-sir look and nods.
“You got it.”
“Thank you from Tarlow and his birds.”
15
Daniela Mendez drives her red Corvette past the gate and onto the driveway of Father Timothy Malone’s modest tract home in Orange. The house is fifties ranch style, stucco and rambling, surrounded by a high, dense hedge of white oleander trimmed flat on top. Three navel orange trees, large and potently fragrant, grace the lawn. This nearly hidden, very private property is Father Malone’s pride and joy, relief from the rectory of his earlier clerical life.
His voice on the intercom is deep and smooth as the whiskey he drinks.
They embrace, almost formally, then sit in the little dining room, where Father Malone serves Daniela a Bordeaux blend and himself the Quiet Man bourbon.
Daniela smells the fish and potatoes baking in the kitchen. Rosemary sprigs on the salmon.
“How is Jesse?”
“I’m so worried, Tim. The girl, the gaming. His silence. He carries it around with him. It’s where he hides.”
“Is Lulu a good influence, at times?”
“I suppose. She doesn’t drink or do drugs, apparently.”
“You’ve never really liked her. With him, I mean.”
“No. I hope I’m not a hypercritical mother.”
“I think your judgment is fundamentally sound. It always has been.”
A soft throb of doubt in her mind echoes back through Daniela’s thirty-eight years.
“I know I baby him too much,” she says. “Coddle and protect him. Maybe I turn into a fire-breathing dragon when I see them together.”
Daniela takes a sip of the wine. Good as always. Father Malone has always known his way around wine and liquor and fast cars. Sometimes they get in one of Tim’s cars, or sometimes they take Daniela’s Corvette, and take turns driving high into the local mountains, tearing up the hillsides and blasting through the turns. Adrenaline, fear, joy.
She looks into his eyes, blue and deep-set in a lean, ascetic face. An aquiline nose, a blast of gray-black hair, upright as if windblown. He’s thirty years her senior. Timothy Quinn Malone. She still likes looking at that face. It’s changed since she was seven. Still beautiful to her.
“And the guilt is so big, Tim,” she says. She feels it in her throat right now, a painful lump. “All the lies to give him a father. Leaving him with friends, then daycare when I was young and at work. Or here. Trying to Disneyland mom him on my free weekends. Which I’m going to get less of with this homicide work.”
Tim Malone sips from his glass. His bottle sits just off to his right side. Daniela has always thought the Quiet Man was an odd pick for him. Father Timothy Malone, with the piercing tenor in Mass. All that volume, coursing out from his slender body. Of course, privately, his voice is softer.
“Dani, you’re raising a strong-willed and intelligent young man. All of your sacrifice and hard work will pay off someday. I’m not an idealist about human nature. But I’m optimistic about what a human being can become. With the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And a mother like you.”
When Tim Malone talks like that to Daniela Mendez, she’s twelve again. Overflowing with God. Protected by the Spirit. All through Tim.
“I wish,” she says. “I wish it could be different.”
A long beat then, another sip of wine, another draw of the Quiet Man.
“There have been many years of wishing for both of us, Dani. This is what God has given us three.”
“Less wishing from you than me, Tim. Those years have worn on me. Because I can’t change them. And neither can you.”
“No,” he says.
“Back then, Tim, I thought you could do anything.”
“I? Not quite.”
“Have I apologized enough? Too much?”
“You don’t have to apologize again, Daniela. I won’t apologize to you, either. That is what we decided, a long time ago. I am half responsible for everything that happened. The good and the painful. I am very clear on my sin, far beyond the breaking of my vow. And how I failed you and Jesse.”
“Jesse needs you.”
“He would destroy me.”
Daniela nods but says nothing. This conversation has the same words and the same shape as the hundreds they’ve had over the last eighteen years. Many of them right here in this oleander-walled tract hideaway, which lies far from the Azusa Church of the Holy Martyr, where Daniela Mendez attended her first Mass at age seven, the age of reason, performed by Father Timothy Malone.
Father Tim excuses himself and comes back a few minutes later bearing plates of oven-poached salmon, baked potatoes, and steamed asparagus with butter.
The same first supper they enjoyed together here, nineteen years ago, her last day as a virgin.
As usual, this supper conversation now turns to news, cars, politics, sports, and parish gossip, in which Daniela still takes an interest, having attended her last Mass in Azusa nineteen years ago, before moving to Orange County, Jesse starting to show in her trim, nineteen-year-old body. She misses some of those people. A lot of those parishioners seemed so old then, but here they are, still ticking, as Tim accounts for them in the soft tenor he has when he’s not in the pulpit.