An Unholy Mission Read online

  When the two men finished their breakfast, Jim suggested they drive out to the shore and go for a walk along the beach. It was a cold, clear day with no wind to speak of, and the tide was far enough out that walking on the hard-packed sand at the water’s edge was invigorating without being exhausting.

  Frederick was blowing into his cupped hands. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the cold here. Oh, we have snow in England, but it never really lasts very long. Here it seems to settle in, and once it does, there’s no escaping it. I’ll never forget my first winter here.”

  “If I remember correctly, my friend, that was only one year ago,” said Jim.

  “My, how time flies when ...”

  “… when we’re saving our dear Olympia from one more disaster of her own making,” said Jim, finishing the sentence.

  “What is it with her?”

  “Well, she’s always been one to fight for the underdog. It probably has a lot to do with her history, and by that I mean her daughter.”

  “Very likely, but now that they’ve reconnected, do you think she might be a little less inclined to go dashing toward the windmills of her own undoing?”

  “Not a chance,” said Jim, shaking his head. “It’s bred in the bone. She’s not going to change, and that’s why we both love her.”

  “I wish she’d marry me,” said Frederick, pushing his hands deep into his pockets and carefully matching his pace to Jim’s.

  “She may one day, but if I were you, I wouldn’t push it. She’s got a lot of baggage in that department. Accepting your ring is huge. I never thought I’d see her agree to even that much of a commitment.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’m not sure I know the whole of it. There was the daughter, followed by an unfortunate marriage. I don’t know what else. She doesn’t talk about it. Oh, look, here’s a bit of red sea glass. You don’t find much of that.” Jim held out the softly rounded triangular shape for Frederick’s inspection and then pocketed it.

  The two men stopped and looked out over the slate blue water. Slow waves were breaking a few feet off shore and then sliding and bubbling almost to where they were standing. The tide was coming in. Frederick turned to the man standing beside him.

  “Jim, a couple of days ago you made reference to some disquiet in your own life. It’s very un-English of me to ask, but if you want to say more, then in my own awkward way, I suppose I’m saying I’m here to help if there is any way I can. Is it about your health?”

  Jim looked at Frederick and held out his two hands in a gesture of futility and then dropped them down to his side.

  “Maybe more like a result of my health. Medically, it’s manageable. I’m adapting well to the medications and other than the fact that I tire more easily, I should be okay for some good time to come. It’s my soul’s well-being that’s the real issue. I’m a gay priest in a church which turns away from what I am and everyone like me. I was a gay priest before I was diagnosed, and that isn’t going to change. I made a vow of celibacy at my ordination, and that’s not going to change either, but the fact that I am HIV positive will eventually come out. In some ways that terrifies me, and in another way I almost wish it would happen.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I’m tired of living a lie. I’m tired of hearing people say that HIV-AIDS is God’s curse for being what I am. What’s even worse is that I’m both disgusted and terrified when another gay priest comes on to me. That could be the stuff of blackmail. Either I go along with it or run the risk of him outing me. So far I’ve been able to sidestep it, but I know it’s only a matter of time.”

  “Bloody hell,” said Frederick.

  “We need to get back to the car. I’m starting to feel the cold. I came down to Brookfield so I could take some time to consider my options. I don’t want to leave the priesthood. I’m afraid that if the word gets out, I’ll be sent off to a mission in Timbuktu where I won’t be an embarrassment to anyone.”

  “Is that a real possibility?”

  “Anything is a possibility, Frederick. That’s the problem. I love teaching at the college, and I really like working in the parish. Other than Olympia and her kids, and now you, this is the closest thing I have to a family. I like the community aspect of parish ministry; but in the end, when everyone else goes home, the priesthood is a lonely profession.”

  “I’m glad you think of me as family,” said Frederick.

  Jim turned and smiled. “I don’t suppose our girl has told you this, but last year, when you’d returned to the UK, herself was having second thoughts about having you come back. I made the case for giving it a trial run. If I’m ever going to have a brother-in-law, it might as well be you.”

  “I’m honored and grateful,” said Frederick, “but how can I, or we, help you?”

  “I’m not sure. Things really are changing in the church, but it’s never going to change its stand on homosexuality, at least not in my lifetime. That’s the real question, I guess. Can I be a part of something that not only denies the sanctity of what I am as a human being but actually curses it?”

  Frederick shook his head. “It’s no life, is it?”

  “It’s no life at all,” said Jim.

  Olympia left a message on Sister Patrick’s answering machine, saying only that she needed to speak with her at once and to please call her on her cell phone as soon as she got this message. She had learned a long time ago never to leave anything on a voice mail that someone other than the intended receiver might hear.

  But that had been hours ago, and Patrick still hadn’t called her back. She thought when the charge nurse called her to the telephone that it might have been her, but when she picked up the phone, there was no one there. Well, what was that about? She was running her legs off this morning. It was a full house with mothers and babies in every available room. The place was literally jumping. The nurse at the desk said it was because it was the full moon. Either way, when it was finally lunch time and then some, Olympia was only too glad to smile and wave her goodbyes and take the elevator to the lowest level. She was a little later than usual and was looking forward to something hot and a few minutes of visiting and winding down with Timothea before they both headed back up the stairs to the conference room.

  At eleven o’clock Luther slipped into a men’s room and struggled into the blue operating room scrubs he’d ordered on line. He rested against one of the sinks for a couple of minutes to catch his breath before pulling a gauze surgical cap low on his forehead completely covering his hair and his eyebrows. He completed the disguise by hanging a surgical mask around his neck and putting on a pair of lightly tinted sunglasses. After that he folded his street clothes into his black leather briefcase and began the slow and painful way to where he’d left the gurney.

  Olympia was hungry, tired and distracted. She had not slept well because she kept seeing Luther’s gaunt face and his burning eyes and hearing his plea not to tell the others. She was so distracted that she missed her turn and ended up outside the radiology lab before she realized what she’d done. Now she was really aggravated. She had lost five precious minutes of her already diminished lunch hour, and she needed the mental break every bit as much as she needed food.

  To compensate, she turned back into the main tunnel and picked up her pace, then cursed to see an orderly ahead of her slowly pushing a gurney down the empty walkway directly in front of her. She recognized it as being one of the drop-down ones from the morgue and set aside her aggravation to whisper a silent prayer for the departed soul.

  The blue-clad attendant must have heard her coming up behind him, because he pushed his transport over to the left and, without looking up, motioned for her to pass. Something about him looked familiar, but a blue scrub suit is a pretty common sight in a hospital, so she dismissed it and quickened her step. Death and dead bodies no longer frightened her. She’d been a minister too long for that. However, the loneliness and permanence of the final journey always made her pause and refle
ct on the fragile brevity of this gift of life.

  She was adrift in her own thoughts when someone, the attendant—good God, it was Luther—slipped his arm through hers and stepped in front of her. In one swift movement he jabbed her other arm with a hypodermic syringe and pushed the plunger to the bottom.

  “Luther, what are you …?” Olympia tried to push him away, but the walls were spinning around her, and she felt herself falling.

  “Making sure you don’t interfere with God’s plan,” he whispered, but Olympia never heard him finish the sentence.

  In one practiced motion Luther pulled back the sheet and shoved the collapsing Olympia in such a way that she fell forward into the gurney. With her upper body half in place, it wasn’t hard to lift her legs and feet and yank the shrouding sheet back into place. Now he had to get her out of the building and finish the job. There was an exit at the end of the passageway just past the door to the morgue. He’d worked it all out. The one thing that could have gone wrong, somebody coming along and disrupting his plan, hadn’t happened. But then it wouldn’t, would it?

  Luther stood, hanging onto the back of the gurney, waiting for a spasm of pain to pass The exit door to the back alley, the one where the hearses picked up their silent passengers, looked like it was a thousand miles away; but every journey, even this one, begins with a single step. He’d made it this far. Luther took a deep breath and started forward. He was almost there.

  Twenty-Four

  Sister Patrick looked at her watch and then at the three chaplains sitting at the table in the conference room. “Has anyone seen or heard from Olympia? It’s not like her to be late.”

  All three shook their heads.

  “She wasn’t at lunch today,” said Timothea, “at least not in the cafeteria. We usually sit together.”

  “Did you check your voice mail, Sister? Maybe she left you a message. I mean, like, knowing Olympia, she woulda told somebody. It’s not like her just not to show.” By the lift of her eyebrows, it was clear that Jenny Abelard was also concerned.

  “I never got back to my office this morning, so I don’t know. Maybe she’s stuck in traffic.”

  Jenny held her hand up to her ear with her thumb and pinky extended, the universal telephone symbol, and said, “I don’t mean to tell you what to do, Sister, but maybe you should check. You can pick up your voice messages on your cell phone, can’t you?”

  Sister Patrick nodded and reached into her pocket. After a few taps she cocked her head to one side and listened as a worried frown gathered strength across her forehead.

  “She left a message early this morning, telling me to call her at once. She didn’t say about what, but I’ll do it right now. I wish I’d thought to check my messages before this, but I’ve been in meetings all morning.” Sister Patrick pushed the call back code and waited, then shook her head. “She’s not picking up.”

  “Should we be doing something?” asked Joel.

  Sister Patrick pursed her lips in thought. “Ordinarily, I’d say no. She’s a grown woman, and she can take care of herself, but she didn’t sound like herself on my voice mail. Her voice sounded strained, like something wasn’t right, and I’m well enough acquainted with her to know that she would never tell me to call her without saying please or why. Maybe I should call her house. Do any of you have her home number?”

  “I do,” said Timothea, pulling a little blue address book out of her handbag.

  Patrick took the number and dialed it. She identified herself to the person who answered and asked if Olympia was there, then looked at the others and shook her head. She spoke again into the receiver.

  “Jim, Jim Sawicki, is that you? I thought I recognized the voice. Look, Olympia hasn’t shown up this afternoon, and you say she left for the hospital early this morning. I wouldn’t ordinarily be concerned, but she left a rather strange message on my voice mail, and the other chaplains and I are a little worried.”

  Patrick’s face darkened as she listened. She thanked Jim and said she would start checking right away and get back to him the minute she knew anything. She set the phone on the table in front of her and began to speak to her chaplains.

  “Olympia bumped into Luther Stuart in the cafeteria last night. He told her not to tell any of us, me in particular, that she’d seen him. All I can say is, I know some things about him you don’t know, and I’m afraid this could be serious.”

  They all began to speak, but Patrick held up her hand and claimed an authority even they had never seen before.

  “Jenny, I want you to go over to Women and Infants and see if she showed up there. If she did, find out when she left. Joel, I know this is going to sound strange, but I want you to go down to the underground garage and see if her car is there. You can get her parking space number from the HR office. You’ve got your badge on, so they’ll give it to you. Then call and let me know, okay?”

  In response to Timothea’s worried look, she said, “I know this might be hard for you, but someone has to stay here in case she shows up. She expects us to be here.”

  “But …”

  “I want you to pray for her, Timothea. We may need that more than anything.”

  As they all began to gather up their things, the code blue alarm came over the speaker system. Patrick paused and looked at Timothea. “You might as well pray for that one, too.”

  Jim Sawicki hung up the phone and turned to Frederick. “Olympia’s missing. They’re checking now to see if she ever made it to the hospital.”

  Frederick turned pale. “Oh, God.”

  Jim held up his hand. “She has identification with her. God forbid, if she had been in an accident, we’d have been called by now. We can be concerned, but there’s no need to panic until we have something concrete to panic about.”

  “I don’t believe a word you’re saying, Jim.”

  “Neither do I.”

  Their helpless frustration was interrupted by the simultaneous ring of the telephone and the furious clanging of the mantle clock. Frederick grabbed the phone out of Jim’s hand.

  “Watkins, here. Frederick Watkins, you bloody fool. I’m Olympia Brown’s fiancé. Oh, God. We’ll be there within the hour.”

  Frederick hung up the phone with a crash and turned to Jim.

  “That was Mercy Hospital, Olympia’s in intensive care.”

  Sister Patrick, Timothea, Jenny and Joel were hovering around the bed, not unlike Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s lost saints, when Olympia opened her eyes. Her mouth felt and tasted like it had been glued shut. Coherent speech and any kind of coordinated movement were impossible. Patrick saw the eye-blink over the green oxygen tube and ran for the nurse while Timothea reached for Joel’s and Jenny’s hands and began to praise the Lord. Olympia thought she could hear a man screaming, but that, like everything else in her emerging consciousness, seemed to be coming and going as she did her best to pull her way out of the fog that immobilized her. As her vision cleared more rapidly now, she looked into the faces of her friends, then at the amazing array of wires and tubes that were connected to her body.

  “Wha …?” Olympia shifted her eyes from side to side. It was the only movement she could control.

  “We don’t know yet, is the answer to your question, but we’ve got a pretty good idea.” Sister Patrick had come back into the room with the floor supervisor right behind her.

  The nurse went through the ritual of checking Olympia’s vital signs and gave her and the assembled cohorts a big smile and a thumbs-up. “We just got the blood back. She was hit with a tranquilizer, the kind they use to stun animals in the wild. It easily could have killed her, but because her assailant shot through her clothing, he must have missed by a little bit. Good thing he did.”

  “How do you know it was a man?” said Patrick.

  “That’s him screaming,” said the nurse. “He’s at the other end of the hall. They brought them up together. He was unconscious on the ground beside her and still had the needle in his pocket. One of the local
funeral directors had come for a pickup and found them both in the alleyway outside the door by the morgue. She was under the sheet on the gurney, and he was lying in the snow. Good thing the guy had the presence of mind to act as fast as he did.”

  “What guy? What presence?”

  “ Timothea, Wanda, where is she?”

  Frederick and Jim burst through the door in a dead heat to get to Olympia, who licked her gluey lips and smiled up at them all. “Phrederiph? Jmmm?”

  The assembled chaplains made room for the two men at the bedside, and Timothea made the introductions. In the excitement no one saw Sister Patrick and the nursing supervisor slip out of the room and into one of the private conference rooms just as another scream shattered the air. In fact, no one around the bed seemed to take any notice.

  When Patrick and the floor supervisor were out of earshot, the nun turned to her colleague. “So what’s with Luther Stuart? I’m going to go and talk with him, but I want the word from you before I do.”

  “In a word, he’s dying of end-stage, untreated pancreatic cancer. He’s in agony and won’t let us give him anything for the pain. He keeps screaming that God won’t let him die. Legally, we can’t do anything. Even if we could medicate him, he likely wouldn’t last more than a week. We’ve got to get him into a private room. All that howling is agitating the other patients.”