The 24th Letter

SEVENTY-FIVE

Max was the first to see him coming down the dock. She darted around the cockpit of Dave Collin’s boat, whimpering, tail going a mile a second, pink tongue sticking out of her panting mouth. She barked. O’Brien said, “How’s my little girl?”

Dave stuck his head out of the salon, grinned, and said. “I haven’t seen Max this excited since I cooked shrimp over an oak grill last night.”

“It’s one of her favorites,” said O’Brien, picking up Max. She licked his face, huffed and puffed with excitement and looked at O’Brien with adoring brown eyes.

Dave said, “I’d surmise that she missed you.”

“Surprised she doesn’t run away. My face has looked better.”

“I started to ask you-who in Miami Beach did you fight, the whole damn cocaine cartel?”

“Felt like it.” O’Brien stepped onto Gibraltar. “Thanks for watching Max.”

“She’s a great companion. Bounced between my boat and Nick’s. I’m not sure if she was being social, or simply wanted to see who had the best food at the moment.”

“I think she gained a little weight. Okay, show me what you found.”

“Enter into my window to the world of renaissance art-my computer.”

O’Brien carried his laptop in one hand and Max in the other.

Dave’s computer was set up at his small office work desk. He typed in a few words and said, “I’m going to use the split-screen function to help illustrate this. For a moment, I’ll leave the left side of the screen black. On the right side is the image you had Detective Grant send me of the drawing Father Callahan left. In a minute, I’ll fill in the other side of the screen with an enhanced image that you snapped of the moon the other night and emailed to me.” He looked up at O’Brien, over the top of his glasses. “You happened to be at the right place at the right time, have the right atmospheric conditions-”

“You mean clouds?”

“Much more than that. It’s quite remarkable that you saw it and managed to capture it. A passage of seasons, planets, and time.”

“What?”

“The equinox-the unique moment in the year when day and night, or black and white, if you will-are equal on earth. The moon rises at a point exactly opposite the sun. When the moon rises, coming up from the east, like it did over the ocean, you see an optical illusion. It will appear the moon is much larger at the horizon than it is at other positions in the sky. The ground effect, or in this case, the ocean relative to the moon, gives the moon an illusion, a false perspective, of being larger than it will be later that night in any other spot in the sky.”

“What I saw, what I caught on the camera phone, is real.”

“So here we have a nice artist’s canvas, a big harvest moon, and then along comes a moving image in black-a cloud-that sort of does a freeze-frame long enough for you to capture it. It’s no Mona Lisa, but the image is striking. You hear people say when ‘planets align,’ well you had the atmospheric conditions, the time of the year, and the moon at the right place above the ocean to give you a perfect opportunity for this…”

Dave tapped the keyboard. On the left side of the screen appeared the image of the moon O’Brien had captured. Dave said. “Take a look at that. Your equinox moon and cloud, as you thought, have an uncanny resemblance to what Father Callahan drew.”

O’Brien sat next to Dave and studied the two images without saying anything. Max trotted over and sat beside him. O’Brien said, “When I saw that cloud rise in front of the moon, it triggered something I’d seen at some point in my life. I didn’t make the connection earlier when I found Father Callahan’s body and saw the drawing he’d left. But when I saw that image in the moon, I felt the two were somehow related. In a dream I saw an image of…the Virgin Mary. She was coming out of the moon. It was overlooking a bay, ships, maybe one ship on fire in the harbor. A hawk flew in and out of an old cathedral. There was an elfish figure there and an angel. Then the angel was pointing toward the Virgin Mary. I saw a man in a flowing robe reading a book, maybe the Bible. I remember reaching out to touch Mary, and I touched a wet painting.”

Dave nodded. “I combed the halls of every museum that has its art online, and most do. If not, the work of the masters can be found hanging on plenty of cyber walls.”

“Masters?”

“Indeed, Sean. You’re not dreaming schlock nightmares, my friend. You’re picking pieces of memory paint up from one of the best, perhaps most overanalyzed painters in the history of renaissance art.”

“Who?”

“Today, he is just as misunderstood as he was in his day, around the late fourteen hundreds. When Columbus was discovering the New World, this artist was painting a tortured world. A place revealing a garden of earthly delights, seven deadly sins, the last judgment…and I present to you, Sean O’Brien, the painting done by Hieronymus Bosch that brings together the puzzle pieces.”

Dave typed in few keystrokes. Both images on the screen faded to black and then a painting appeared. It was an old painting-one depicting a man sitting on a hillside overlooking a harbor. In the harbor, a ship was burning. A hawk was sitting in the left side of the frame. The right side showed a gnome-like little man tiptoeing. An angel was descending down a hill in the background pointing to an image of the sun or moon with the Virgin Mary in the center of it sitting on a crescent moon and holding an infant.

O’Brien leaned in closer to the image. “This is it! I remember seeing this as a child in a museum in Spain.”

“Bosch’s painting is called St. John on Patmos.”

O’Brien looked at Dave and said, “Patmos. Now I know what Father Callahan was referring to with the letters P-A-T.”