The Confessors' Club

EIGHTEEN

I’d just stepped into the turret when a slow ripping creak sounded loud from upstairs. I ran up the wrought iron, knowing, and shot into the kitchen to see for sure.

The turret’s craggy, curved limestone walls make for interesting architecture, but they play hell with converting the place into a residence. Hanging anything onto them is a true nightmare. One of the kitchen cabinets I’d just hung was coming loose. I’d arrived home just in time to pull it safely from the wall before it crashed to the floor.

I changed into my rehabbing clothes, which look only marginally worse than my dress duds, and spent the next few hours re-anchoring the cabinet to the wall. By the time I got it to hang right, it was well past dusk, and Amanda had called three times. I’d dodged each call, knowing she must have spoken with her father, and now she wanted truths from me. I didn’t want to worry her by saying I suspected Jim Whitman had likely been murdered, and that Wendell didn’t want me to learn any more about it.

I walked across what one day might be a hall, and sat at the card table I use as a desk. My cheesy, giveaway black vinyl calendar was nothing like Jim Whitman’s leather-bound desk diaries. Though mine was dressed up in gold like Whitman’s, instead of monogrammed initials, mine sported an air-freight company’s logo of an emaciated bird. And where his provided an entire lined page for each day, mine offered a stingy small page for an entire month – space enough, the air freight company must have concluded, for people who don’t have much going on in their lives. Certainly they’d been right about me. Save for the leaf counts of the ash by the river, and the few hours I’d invoiced so far that spring, my pages were mostly empty.

I switched on my computer, typed in my billable hours for Wendell’s final invoice, wrote a check to refund the balance on his retainer, and printed out two copies of the invoice. One went with the check into an envelope addressed to Wendell. The other was for me. Opening the case folder, I saw again the photocopy of Benno Barberi’s obituary.

This time, though, the date of his death the previous autumn danced on the paper like it was lit by a strobe: October 11.

I grabbed the notes I’d made just that day. Jim Whitman had scrawled a ‘C’ in his calendar across the same Tuesday evening Benno Barberi had come home, furious, to die.

I spilled the rest of the file onto the card table, pawing for the newspaper article about Grant Carson’s hit-and-run. My hands shook as I read it. He’d been killed on February 15th. It had been a Wednesday, but very early in the morning.

My cell phone rang again. I glanced over. It was Amanda. I let it ring.

I read all the obituaries again, double-checking the dates with my vinyl calendar to be sure. There was no doubt. Benno Barberi, Jim Whitman and Grant Carson had all died on, or just an hour or two following, the second Tuesday of an even-numbered month.

I got out of the chair and went up the stairs to the third floor. I wanted a sweatshirt.

Suddenly, I was cold.