The Lost Years

18

Richard Callahan taught biblical history at the Rose Hill campus of Fordham University in the Bronx. After college, he had entered the Jesuit community but stayed only a year before realizing that he was not ready to make the commitment to the priestly life. At age thirty-four, he still had not come to a final decision.

He lived in an apartment near the campus. Raised on Park Avenue by his parents, two prominent cardiologists, it was convenient to be able to walk to work, but there was also something else. The beautiful campus with its Gothic buildings and tree-lined paths could have been set in the English countryside. When he walked outside the gates, he enjoyed stepping into the diversity of the crowded neighborhood and the abundance of splendid Italian restaurants on nearby Arthur Avenue.

He had intended to meet friends for dinner at one of those restaurants, but on his way home from the funeral, he canceled the date. The sadness of the loss of his good friend and mentor Jonathan Lyons would be a constant for a long time. But the question of who had taken his life was paramount in Richard’s mind. If it was proved that Kathleen in her dementia had committed the crime, he knew it would mean she would be confined to a psychiatric hospital, probably for the rest of her life.

But if she was found to be innocent, who else would the detectives start looking at as someone who had a reason to kill Jonathan?

The first thing Richard did when he stepped into his cheerful three-room apartment was take off his jacket, tie, and long-sleeved shirt and put on a sport shirt. Next he went into the kitchen and got out a beer. I’ll be glad when the cool weather comes, he thought as he stretched his long legs out and leaned back in the aging fake-leather reclining chair that he refused to allow his mother to replace. “Richard, you haven’t taken the vow of poverty yet,” she said, “and you may never take it. You certainly don’t have to live it now.” Richard smiled affectionately, remembering the exchange, then turned his mind back to Jonathan Lyons.

He knew that Jonathan had been translating ancient parchments that had been discovered in the safe of a long-closed church.

Had Jonathan found the Joseph of Arimathea parchment among them? If only I hadn’t been away, Richard thought. If only he had told me exactly what he found. It was possible that by accident he had stumbled across it. Richard remembered that a Beethoven symphony had been discovered on the shelf in a library in Pennsylvania not that many years ago.

There was a nagging thought in the back of his mind that refused to surface as he later fixed pasta and a salad for himself. It was still there when he selected a movie on demand on his television set and watched it.

It was also there when he went to bed, and it slipped in and out of his dreams during the night.

It was midmorning on Saturday when it finally surfaced. Lily had been lying when she said she didn’t know anything about the parchment. Richard was sure of it. Of course Jonathan would have shared that discovery with her. Maybe he might even have left it with her.

And, if so, now that he was dead, would she quietly find a buyer for it and pocket what could be an enormous sum of money?

It was a scenario he wanted to discuss with Mariah. Maybe it would do her good if I asked her out for dinner tonight, he thought.

But when he phoned her, it was to learn that Greg had already called and she was having dinner with him. Richard realized how deeply disappointed he was to hear that.

Had the decision he had finally made come too late?