Gone (Michael Bennett)

morning, Michael. Are ye awake?” Seamus whispered.
    “I am now,” I said, sitting up in bed. “What is it? Let me guess. The kids are occupying the barn.”
    “No, it’s not that,” Seamus said, stepping in and closing the door behind him.
    “How are you this morning?” he said sheepishly. “Sleep well?”
    I noticed that he was showered and wide awake and wearing his formal black priest suit with his Roman collar.
    “I was, Father. I was sleeping as well as you please. I remember it quite fondly. What is it? Are you here to give me last rites? What in the Wild Wild West is going on?”
    “Well, I —” he started. “What I mean to say is that … I guess you could say I have a confession to make.”
    “A confession?” I said, sitting up. “That’s a switch. Wow, this almost sounds good enough for you to wake me in the middle of the night. Please, my son, confess away. Unload thy soul.”
    “Well, you know how you told us all repeatedly to keep a low profile?” Seamus said, wincing.
    I stared my grandfather solidly in his not-so-innocent blue eyes.
    “Yes. I believe we were all there for the conversation with the witness protection folks.”
    “Well, I haven’t been exactly following the rules. I was talking to Rosa, and she was telling me about the local priest in town. She kept telling me what a nice man he was, and I gave him a call. She was right. Father Walter is a very nice man. Actually, we’ve been talking back and forth for a couple of weeks now.”
    What a thoroughly nutty situation this all is , I thought. Seamus felt guilty about talking to another priest?
    “OK,” I said. “You and the local guy are talking shop. Did you tell him who we were?”
    “No, of course not,” Seamus said.
    “Why do I have the feeling that there’s another shoe about to drop?” I said.
    “Well, being the only priest in the parish, he’s swamped. I guess I let it be known that I might be available under extreme circumstances to help out. One of those situations just came up. His father had a heart attack, and he asked if I could fill in today for early-morning Mass.”
    “Holy cannoli, Father,” I said. “Why would you say that?”
    “Fine. I’ll admit it. I want to say Mass. Is that a sin? I haven’t said Mass in a while, and I want to.”
    “But you say Mass for us here at the house every Sunday morning.”
    “That’s not the same thing as saying Mass in a church, at an altar, Detective Bennett. I really miss it, Michael. I feel utterly, completely useless out here in the middle of nowhere.”
    I looked at him. I knew how that felt.
    “Listen, Father. I feel useless, too, but this guy who’s after us is not messing around. He’s spending a lot of money to find us. We can’t risk it.”
    “I know. You’re right,” Seamus said. “I’ll tell him I can’t do it. What do people’s souls really matter anyway, right?”
    I sighed.
    “Where’s the church?”
    “It’s Our Lady of Sorrows, in Westwood.”
    “When is Mass?”
    Seamus looked at his watch.
    “Starts in an hour.”
    “OK, Father Pain-in-My-Ankle,” I said as I finally stood. “Put on some coffee and let me hop in the shower. I wouldn’t want to be late for Mass.”

CHAPTER 18
     
    ABOUT TEN MILES TO the northwest, Westwood was a quiet, tiny mountain town that didn’t stand on too much ceremony. There was a farmer’s market, a post office, a couple of streets of small, neat houses with pickups in the driveways and grills on the front porches.
    “Hey, look, Dad,” my eldest daughter, Juliana, said from the backseat. “That’s a pizza place coming up.”
    Juliana had overheard Seamus and me in the kitchen and insisted on coming along to be Seamus’s altar server. She claimed that she wasn’t just trying to get out of her homeschool classes, but I had my doubts.
    “And oh, darn, there the pizza place goes,” I said, driving past it. “We’re in hiding, Juliana. No town pizza. If this weren’t a four-alarm Catholic emergency, we wouldn’t even be here.”
    There were more pickups in the parking lot of Our Lady of Sorrows, beat-up work vans with ladders on top. Seamus had explained that the congregation included a lot of farmworkers, many of them unemployed after environmentalists in the state legislature had head-scratchingly cut down the rural area’s water allowance for the year. Without the water, farmers had been forced to let fields lie fallow, and now there were a lot of unemployed people