Vermilion Drift

TWENTY-ONE

It was nearing sunset when Cork pulled into Ashland, Wisconsin, an old port city on Chequamegon Bay, a deepwater inlet of Lake Superior.

He parked in the lot of the Hotel Chequamegon and headed to Molly Coopers, the hotel’s restaurant and bar. On the deck, which overlooked Lake Superior and was nearly empty, he spotted a man wearing a dark blue ball cap and a T-shirt that stretched tightly over twenty extra pounds of belly fat.

“Father Brede?”

The man looked up and smiled. “It’s been just plain Dan Brede for more than four decades. You O’Connor?”

“Yes.” Cork shook the man’s hand and sat down. “Father Green didn’t have any trouble locating you.”

“I haven’t tried to hide. From what Ted Green told me, you have some questions about the Vanishings. Nobody’s asked me about the Vanishings in over forty years.”

“But you haven’t forgotten.”

“A thing like that never leaves you.”

“Then you wouldn’t mind talking to me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Did Father Green tell you that the women who vanished have been found? Or what remains of them.”

“He told me.”

“And did he tell you that there’s been another, recent murder, and that the woman’s body was hidden with the others?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t want to talk about that?”

“I didn’t say that either.”

“What are you saying?”

“Have a beer,” Brede said, signaling the waitress, who was already coming their way. “And then you can tell me about who you are.”

Cork ordered a Leinie’s and watched a big motor launch back away from its slip in the marina behind the hotel, swing around, and head north up the deep blue bay.

When his beer was delivered, Cork said to Brede, “You knew my parents, Liam and Colleen O’Connor.”

“I remember them. And I remember you, too.”

For Cork, the memory of the priest was fuzzy. He recalled a young man with a great deal more hair, and it hadn’t been gray. Brede had been thin then, Cork remembered.

“In the year I knew you, you were a lot of trouble,” the ex-priest said.

“Trouble?”

“You have any idea how much your mother prayed for you? And your father?”

This caught Cork off guard. He didn’t remember being a problem to them at all. “Not really.”

Brede smiled and shrugged. “Doesn’t surprise me. Kids, teenagers especially, are clueless.”

“You work with kids a lot?”

“Over the years. And I have two of my own.”

“You said you haven’t been Father Brede for over forty years. You stopped being a priest not long after the Vanishings then.”

“A year after I was yanked from St. Agnes.”

“Yanked?”

“The Church reassigned me. To a little parish in southern Indiana where nobody cared or really even knew about the Vanishings. Two things about it bugged me. That I was found guilty without a trial and without any chance to defend myself. And that, finding me guilty, they simply reassigned me. I’m not sure which trespass of conscience I objected to more.”

“Will you tell me about the Vanishings, what you remember?”

“Why are you interested? I understand that you were a cop once, like your father, but you’re not anymore. Ted Green said that you’re a private investigator. Who are you working for?”

“The Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. As a consultant.”

“They know you’re here?”

“Is that important?”

He laughed. “People who have something to hide often respond to a question with a question. What is it that you’re hiding, O’Connor?”

“There are aspects of this case, old and new, that are very personal for me. Although I intend to share everything I find with the sheriff and her investigators, I need to put a few things in perspective for myself first. I think my father knew more about the Vanishings than he officially revealed.”

“I know he did. For one thing, he knew about me.”

“Why didn’t he say anything?”

“Most people who know about his silence believe it was out of loyalty or respect for the Church.”

“But it wasn’t?”

He shook his head. “He knew I was innocent.”

“How?”

“Your father was an astute judge of character.”

“That’s it?”

Brede laughed and took a swallow of beer. “You’re a cop all right. You require evidence.”

“My father was a cop, too. A good cop. I’m sure he asked for evidence.”

“He did. And I explained to him that I knew who’d planted the items that had incriminated me but that I couldn’t reveal the name.”

Cork said, “Because it was something you’d learned in confession?”

“The sanctity of which I firmly believed in then.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m a Methodist,” he said.

Cork drank from his own glass and waited. The ex-priest eyed the still water of the bay for a minute, then told his story.

At first the woman came to him in the normal way, confessing sins he’d heard before and for which he was fully prepared emotionally. An unclean thought. A coveting. A harmless lie to her husband. Hail Marys, he instructed her, and to pray for strength to resist these small temptations. He knew full well who she was. In a small parish, he knew the voices of all those who entered the confessional. As time went on, the sins she confessed began to change. They became darker, more disturbing. Sex with men other than her husband. Sex with women, too. Sometimes with both at once.

“Did you believe her?” Cork asked.

He didn’t know what to think. Surely there was no reason to lie about these things, especially for a woman in her particular position. He took her seriously and advised her to pray and to seek God’s guidance, and when that didn’t work, he urged her to seek professional help. She laughed at him, laughed seductively. And then she began the overtures. She often thought about them together, she said. She fantasized him forcing himself upon her in ways that disgusted him. He instructed her to banish such thoughts, but she swore she couldn’t. The images overwhelmed her and she masturbated thinking of them. This was beyond his ability to deal with, spiritually and emotionally.

The priest looked into the empty distance above the lake and shook his head. “The oddest part of it was that I saw her every Sunday in church, and she spoke to me cordially during our social hour afterward, and it was as if she’d never said any of those foul things to me in the confessional.”

Then she threatened him. She said if he didn’t have sex with her, she’d make him sorry. And very soon after that, the anonymous phone call had been made, and the incriminating items had been found. Although he couldn’t prove it was her, he knew that it was. Everything that had gone on, however, had been framed within the context of the confessional and her confessions, and he truly believed that he was bound to a sacred vow of silence. And the woman, if her name were made public, was so well thought of that he couldn’t be certain anyone would even believe him. So he’d said nothing. Yet Cork’s father had somehow divined his dilemma and had done his best to manipulate the public information so that the priest was never a part of the official investigation.

“How did he know?” Cork asked.

“Got me. He never said. But he saw to it that I was removed from the parish. Which,” Brede added philosophically, “was better for everyone in the long run.”

Cork said, “You’ve carefully avoided telling me the name of the woman.”

“I thought you might have guessed by now.”

Cork said, “A woman in, as you said, a particular position. Someone well thought of. Someone relatively new to the parish, I’m guessing. Young, intelligent, devious and deviant but able to hide it well, so probably sociopathic or maybe even psychopathic. Someone who, apparently, caused no problem for the priest who replaced you, Father Alwayne, who everyone said looked like Cary Grant. Which means that either Cary Grant wasn’t her type or she ended her behavior toward priests or, most likely, she herself was removed from the scene. Given all that, Monique Cavanaugh would be my guess.”

The former priest lifted his beer and said, “Cheers.”