Declan Burke fled Ireland forty years ago and never looked back. Now settled in New York, he thinks he’s put the old country behind him, until he reads the obituary of one Cathal Murphy. The obituary, he sees at once, is not about Murphy at all. It is a coded indictment of Burke’s own life. And a...
So I popped in to the school two days later, on Thursday, when a client failed to show up for my last appointment of the afternoon. I headed down the hall and turned left, on my way to find Brennan or Michael, or perhaps the famous and now reclusive Schellenberg. Someone had set up a table and ch...
He was fast asleep in his stroller as if nothing had happened. He doesn’t know yet about bad people. Bad parents. I wish he could live his whole life and never know. Suddenly I got up and grabbed him out of the stroller and — I couldn’t help it, maybe I was in shock too — I kept clinging to him a...
But on the first Monday of November his secretary, Tina, gave him the rundown of the week ahead and reminded him that he had scheduled a discovery examination in Tate’s wrongful-dismissal suit against the church. Discovery was the opportunity for each party to question the other on oath before tr...
He turned on the television to see if he could find a weather forecast. Ah. An electrical storm. He’d be sure to carry an umbrella. He was about to switch off the TV when a news item came on about the missing American preacher, the Reverend Merle Odom. The man’s tearful wife, flanked by supporter...
Irreprehensibilis est. (This place was made by God, a priceless sacrament. It is beyond reproach.) — The Mass, Graduale I I made a pass by Tim Hortons the next Monday morning hoping to see Sergeant Moody Walker, but there was no sign of him. I had b...