Coldwater Revenge by James Ross (e novels to read online TXT) 📗

be in bed, too. Then helping your brother, not waiting on me.”

“How about your leg?”

“I’m taking it to my apartment.”

Tom looked at the man behind the wheelchair.

“Herbert’s driving me,” she added.

The old man showed a pair of gleaming dentures and passed an index finger alongside his nose.

“Okay,” said Tom. “Looks like you’re in good hands.”

She pressed her lips and stifled a retort.

“I was going to stop and see Father Gauss this evening,” said Tom. “If you want, I can come by the Center and pick you up after that?”

“Well, there’s some news there, too.”

“What?”

“Father Gauss has left. Mrs. Lynch says that he wasn’t at Novena last night, and that when she called the rectory to find out why, the housekeeper said he’d been transferred.”

“To where?”

Mary shrugged. “She didn’t say. And then that Pearce girl phoned again. If you don’t mind my saying so, that girl is the ‘r’ in relentless.”

“Was she looking for me?”

Mary frowned. “For your brother.”

CHAPTER 17

Tom collected the Coldwater patrol car from the parking lot in front of Trudy’s Diner, where the Cashin kid and his sidekick had surprisingly left it undamaged. Punks must be scared of you, brother. He drove toward town, feeling the breeze through the open windows dry the stale film of sweat on his arms and face and ripple the front of the pungent shirt he’d had on since yesterday morning.

The last and only time Tom had driven the Coldwater Sheriff’s patrol car, was the summer he got his driver’s license, when Mary had twice sent him to collect her husband passed out behind the wheel across the street from a house where he had no business being. Tom had no idea what was going on in his parents’ lives that summer, though it was obvious in hindsight that something had been. The vicissitudes of his own rocky romance pulled his attention elsewhere. Then as now.

Memories clamored for daylight, but he forced the shutters tight. The distraction of ancient mysteries was just that. He had to get back to New York soon and rescue his career, or give it up. Pissed was fast replacing confused, and worry was gaining on them both.

Sayed’s file on Joe’s prior hospital visits was as fat as a phone book. The doctor had made light of the broken fingers, facial lacerations and other occupational hazards of small town law enforcement. He had even dismissed two prior herbicidal poisonings that he and Joe had concluded were due to ripping up treated marijuana plants. But this was different, beginning with the severity of the symptoms. Tom had asked the doctor point-blank if his brother could end up with some kind of permanent impairment.

“He could die,” said Sayed bluntly. “A weaker man might have already.”

Tom didn’t believe that Joe was going to die. Though admittedly, that was a non-expert opinion. But he also knew that short of death, Joe would have to function in at least some limited capacity soon, or all hell was going to break loose. Shit happens fast when the teacher is out sick and the class learns the substitute is clueless.

Tom parked the patrol car in front of Our Lady of The Lake rectory and sat for a while watching a soft northwest breeze ripple the blue black water across the street. Father Gauss had made it clear he wasn’t going to violate a confidence—even if it might help lead to Billy’s killer. But other than finding Gauss and having another go, what was there to do until Joe was coherent enough to direct next steps? Tackle Frankie Heller and his stock car alibi? Mike Sharp and his phony Yankee game?

Tom left the car and walked to the rectory, whose three stories of weathered clapboards were unlikely to see fresh paint any time soon. The single pane windows were as old as the structure itself, swollen shut in the summer heat and rattling and porous in winter when the winds from the north swept across the frozen lake. The paint-crusted button beside the door made a tinny hum when he pressed it. No one answered. He thumbed the bell again, tried the door handle and then pressed the unlocked door until it swung open.

“Mrs. Flynn! It’s Tom Morgan.”

A pear shaped figure, topped with braided white hair and scowl answered from the second floor landing. “Yes?”

“May I come in?”

“You’re already in.” said the housekeeper. “He’s not here; he’s gone away”

“Do you know where?”

“No,” she said, firmly. “But wait here; he left something for you.” She disappeared up the stairs and returned a few minutes later carrying a fat leather bound book, stamped along the spine in faded gold lettering with a single word: Ethics,. “He said you’d be around sooner or later, and to give it to you. At least I think he meant this one. He’s got a lot of books up there.”

“He didn’t take his books?”

“Only what fit in that old travel bag of his.”

Father Gauss had once remarked on the church’s abrupt and sometimes arbitrary personnel assignments. But this sudden disappearance felt more like a rent skip than a transfer.

Tom carried the book to the patrol car and propped it open on the steering wheel. A folded letter fell from its pages onto his lap.

‘Dear Tom,

I don’t know if you’ve read Spinoza’s Ethics. If not, it’s time you made the author’s acquaintance.

Despite what you may have been taught across the street, most modern thinkers don’t consider science, philosophy and theology to be fundamentally opposed. Plato claimed that man is a puppet pulled on strings by the gods, but that he has one string of his own that he can pull back on: Reason.

The ancient Greeks didn’t have what we would call a theology. But their philosophers understood that some things are not susceptible to knowledge through reason and that it was essential to understand the difference.

It seems to me that you’ve started down a very old path. Some who have gone before you have left useful markers for others