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True Believers(3)

By:Jane Haddam


The truth of it, of course, was that he was in no danger of keeling over at the funeral, or anyplace else. He had never been so awake in his life. He had been drinking coffee for ten hours straight, and even if he hadn’t been, he would have been wired to the gills. Now he was pacing back and forth along the long choir gallery that overlooked the body of the church, his vision cut off at intervals by the thick granite columns that framed the gallery’s archways. It was a beautiful church, St. Stephen’s Episcopal. If he had been able to imagine the church he wanted when he first entered the Yale Divinity School, this would have been it. Catholic without being Catholic, Gothic even though it was in the middle of Philadelphia, bells and smells, chants and rituals, stained glass and tapestries—it hadn’t been this beautiful when he’d first come here, twenty years ago. He could still remember himself sitting in the high-ceilinged office of the then-bishop of Philadelphia, and being told, without qualification, that it was a lost cause.

“The future of the Episcopalian Church is in the suburbs,” the bishop had said, his fat little head bobbing back and forth on a neck so thin it made him look like a Tootsie Pop. “That’s what we’ve got to accept. That Catholics have a lock on the city of Philadelphia.”

The Catholics were across the street, at St. Anselm’s. Daniel couldn’t see them from here, but he could from his office upstairs. Sometimes, when Father Healy was in the middle of doing something totally outrageous, Daniel would watch them for hours, trying to figure out whether they were dangerous or just annoying. He always came to the conclusion that they were just annoying. Every once in a while, one of the papers or one of the television stations came out to interview both the priests in the “next-door-neighbor churches,” as if merely being next to each other ought to make them as loving and squabbling as brothers. Then, too, the papers liked the contrast. Dan was tall and spare. Robert Healy was small and wiry. It was always Dan’s figure that was easiest to see in the photographs that inevitably appeared in the Inquirer and the Star, although the quotes always seemed to come from Robert Healy. No reporter on earth ever wanted to talk to him long enough to get any real news. No reporter on earth ever wanted to get too clear on what was going on in St. Stephen’s, either, but Daniel was used to that. It was the unspoken agreement among everybody who had anything to do with this church. St. Stephen’s would be left alone to be what it had become, as long as St. Stephen’s left them all alone as well—as long as St. Stephen’s did not force the issue.

Daniel stopped in the very last archway and looked down on the pews and the altar. Scott Boardman’s casket was laid out in front of the Communion   rail, draped with flowers. The first three rows of pews were dotted with the figures of men who had come to sit vigil. Under ordinary circumstances, of course, there would have been a wake instead of a vigil, and it would have been held in a funeral home. In Scott’s case, they had all wanted to have the body here, and to stay with it, a little while longer than they would have been allowed to in a secular place. The one woman down there was Scott’s mother. Scott’s father had not come, and would not come, to see his son in death. Daniel rubbed his face and closed his eyes and wished suddenly that he had an answer to it all, to people, to what they were, to what they wanted and what they wanted to do without. He wished he had an answer to himself.

The door to the gallery stairway swung open, creaking. Daniel made a mental note to have the hinge oiled—and then felt stupid for having done it, as if a creaking hinge could rival in importance the fact that someone was dead. He wondered suddenly what it would be like to be someone like Chickie George, someone who could not hide who and what he was.

The gallery door creaked shut. Daniel put his head up and turned. Aaron Wardrop was standing at the back of the gallery, looking down on him for once, because of the graduated tiers of steps.

“Well?” he said.

“Well, what?” Daniel asked him.

They were whispering. They had to whisper. The church was a gigantic man-made cavern. Everything echoed off the granite of the arches and the columns.

Aaron came down the steps to sit beside him.

“You can’t have had any sleep. Any at all. You’re going to give yourself a heart attack. You’re fifty-six.”

“I was thinking about Chickie George,” Daniel said.

“Chickie’s behaving like a saint.” Aaron leaned over the archway rail. Chickie was kneeling in the second pew from the front on the right of the center aisle, his hands folded on the back of the pew in front of him, his eyes closed, his body still. “We’re all incredibly proud of Chickie at the moment. He’s been here since midnight.”