Empire Falls

old priest stealing a car and running off to Florida’s about the funniest thing I ever heard.”
    “I suppose it is,” he said morosely, “if they don’t kill themselves, or somebody else.”
    “So what happens now?”
    That was exactly what Miles would’ve liked to know. Father Tom had blown town in the parish station wagon, it was true, but it turned out the six-year-old Crown Victoria was registered in his name, purchased before he began to slide, at least noticeably, into senility. The last few years it had been understood that he wasn’t allowed to drive any more than he was permitted to hear confessions. The problem was that Father Tom dearly loved to do both, and whenever he located the keys Mrs. Walsh and Father Mark had hidden away, he’d take the Crown Vic for a spin, which in his case, was an apt description, because once he tired of his sport and wanted to return home, he was as thoroughly disoriented as a blindfolded five-year-old at a birthday party, which meant he had to be fetched from wherever he was. Sometimes that fetching took a while, inasmuch as he had the car.
    Just as Father Tom’s name was on the wagon’s registration, so was he, at least officially, still the pastor of St. Catherine’s. While Father Mark had taken over the administration of the parish, he was technically the assistant pastor, which meant that even if he wanted to make an issue of the missing money—no more than five hundred dollars, they’d estimated—it couldn’t really be treated as a theft. The money, after all, had been freely given to the church, and its pastor was the church’s duly appointed representative. There were virtually no legal strings attached to it.
    What Father Mark had been unable to figure out was how an old man who needed reminding that the vented side of his undershorts was designed to be worn in the front had managed to get into the parish safe. The only explanation he could come up with was that his fingers must’ve remembered the combination. The old man no longer recalled it, because for the last year he’d been asking Father Mark what it was and getting angry when he wouldn’t tell him. Father Mark could only assume he must’ve come into the den one day and let his fingers’ instinct take over while he sat in front of the safe, dismayed by his inability to remember three little numbers.
    At any rate, if Father Tom and his new best pal were presently southward bound in the Crown Victoria, there wasn’t much anybody could do about it.
    “What I worry about most,” Miles admitted to Bea, “is an accident.” His father wasn’t too bad a driver when he was sober, but of course he wouldn’t be sober until their money ran out. Father Tom hadn’t been too bad a driver when he still had his mind, but now he was easily confused and Miles doubted he had much experience of freeway driving—or any driving, really, outside rural mid-Maine. It was hard to imagine the two men would make it to Florida, but then again, they might. In the Keys, once the money ran out, Max would tire of the old priest’s company and probably call St. Cat’s and tell Father Mark where to come and pick him up. Miles just hoped Father Tom wouldn’t return with an ass full of obscene tattoos.
    “By the way,” Bea said, reaching under the bar for a folded newspaper and handing it to Miles, “I saved this for you. It’s an awful nice picture of your mother.”
    “That was good of you, Bea,” he said, but when he glanced down there were twice as many people in the photo as there had been this morning. There were two of his mother and two of Charlie Mayne, and when he looked back up there were two of Bea as well. “Is it cold in here?” he asked, suppressing a shiver.
    Both Beas studied him for a moment, then leaned forward and put a single cool, dry hand on his forehead. “My God, Miles,” she said. “You’re burning up.”
    “Never mind that,” he said, suddenly feeling the same strong sense of purpose that had come to him earlier on the ladder. “I have a proposal for you.”

CHAPTER 22
    M ILES WAS A high school sophomore when Empire Textile and its companion shirt factory closed and his mother lost her job. The Whiting family had sold the mill three years earlier to a subsidiary of a multinational company headquartered in Germany. The new owners had very different ideas about how to run the mill, and there were immediate rumors that Hjortsmann International had no real interest in Empire