The Prayer Waltz Read online

  “Try Petersen.”

  “He’s a rip-off.”

  “Have you looked in the paper?”

  “Not yet.”

  Evan swiveled his stool. I couldn’t help but notice how broad his shoulders and back were, how tight his waist. I already knew he had a superior ass. Now I wanted to run my hands over him. The bartender delivered me from temptation by bringing my beer. Gratefully, I downed a third of it.

  “If you’re in a bind,” Evan said to the wood buyer, “I could sell you a cord or two from my own stockpile. Aged oak, mostly. About eighteen-inch lengths.”

  The young man brightened. “You sure you want to give it up?”

  “I can always make more. Call me tomorrow.”

  Smiling, the young guy clapped Evan on the shoulder. “Thanks, man. I really appreciate it.”

  “No problem, Aaron.”

  As I listened to this exchange, I realized a number of discomfiting things. First, not only did I like the way Evan looked, I liked the way he smelled—faintly smoky and piney, with a hint of St. Jerome’s thrown in. Second, his left knee was just a breath away from my right knee, or at least so close I could feel its warmth. Third, he was almost a Village People stereotype come to life—not a bad thing, in his case. Fourth, I was strongly drawn to both him and Aaron, and I was already weaving a voyeuristic fantasy about watching the two of them get it on… just before, of course, they invited me to join in.

  My mind was becoming incorrigible. I really needed to get laid. For at least a week prior to my trip here, I couldn’t even think about dick. Not my own, not anybody else’s, not even phallic symbols. And that was after four months of celibacy following Frank’s death. All told, I’d had three hookups in the past eight months. They’d been come-and-go encounters that had lightened my balls but weighted my conscience. Not very satisfying.

  “So, what brought you to St. Jerry’s?” Evan asked, jarring me out of my daze. He laughed quietly. “Sorry. That was a bad question. It’s a church, for crying out loud.”

  I forced my gaze away from his broad mouth, framed by dark stubble and curved creases. He was handsome, ruggedly handsome. The realization made me want to smile. Never before had a ruggedly handsome man been one of my acquaintances, except maybe for Malcolm, a swaggering Dom. But calling him handsome was giving him an oversized benefit of the doubt.

  “No,” I said. “It’s a logical thing to ask, since I’m not a parishioner. I doubt many people wander into a church at night unless there’s something going on.”

  “You know, Peg kind of suggested I invite you over here for a drink.” Those flattering pink patches surfaced again on Evan’s cheekbones. He probably felt guilty for not following through. “But you’d just lit a candle, and I couldn’t tell if—”

  “I understand. It might’ve seemed inappropriate. You don’t know me from Adam.” I smiled to reassure him. It was a moment before I noticed he hadn’t averted his gaze. We were looking into each other’s eyes. I was more at ease with it than Evan was.

  Blinking as if that simple movement could break a spell, he grabbed his beer and took a long swallow. For whatever it was worth, he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Then I realized he never had addressed that “taken” issue.

  “Anyway, it’s nice to meet you,” I said, offering my hand. “My name’s Steven Brandwein. I’m visiting from Minneapolis.”

  “Evan McAllister. Homegrown.”

  His hand was large and callused. Although he’d relaxed a little, he still seemed easily flustered. I was tempted to tell him I didn’t need to be babysat. As a good Christian, Evan probably felt obligated to make me, a stranger in a strange land, feel welcomed. Peg had obviously thought so. I saw it as a hell of an onus for anybody.

  I decided not to reject his fellowship. It would’ve been rude. Besides, that fantasy of mine needed more fleshing out. “Are you a lumberjack or something?”

  Evan coughed out a laugh. “Lumberjack? Hardly. I own a small tree-harvesting business. It’s been in the family for three generations. But we don’t swing axes or do the old push ’n’ pull with two-man crosscut saws.” He laughed more softly, shook his head, and ordered another beer.

  I suddenly felt like the pluperfect metrosexual, although I was a few consonants and vowels away from that stereotype. Served me right for casting Evan as a lewd Paul Bunyan. Damn the Village People.

  “So why are you in Prism Falls?” he asked. “It’s none of my business why you came to St. Jerry’s. Of course, it’s none of my business why you’re in town, either.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Same reason for both.”

  Evan frowned slightly, pulling his straight black eyebrows closer together. They were just thick enough and perfectly complemented his long lashes. I imagined he had silky swaths of hair on his chest and a neat, dark path creeping down to his groin. Fuck, he had a nice body, a perfect body, lean and strong and tapered. His thighs looked granite-hard, as if I’d split a nail or two if I tried digging my fingers into them.

  Yup, I was definitely horny and definitely catching a buzz. Whenever I started cataloging the assets of hetero guys, those two factors were invariably the catalysts.

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean,” he said.

  I finished my beer and ordered another. The bed-and-breakfast was only three blocks away. “Frank Connor,” I said. “That’s what I mean.”

  Even the widening of Evan’s eyes couldn’t smooth out the crow’s feet at their corners. “Father Frank?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, that one.”

  “Is he in town too?”

  I circled the base of my beer glass with my thumbs and forefingers and stared at it. Finally, I managed to shake my head. “No.” My delicious horniness had already begun to dissipate like melted chocolate in water.

  “So… is he your pastor now?”

  “No.”

  “A relative of yours?”

  “No.”

  “Do I get one more guess? Are you friends?”

  “We used to be friends,” I said, forcing myself to acknowledge Evan with at least a fleeting glance. He still looked dumbfounded. I turned my attention back to my beer and emptied the glass.

  “Did something happen to him?”

  Shit, I didn’t want to go over it all again. Why hadn’t I anticipated this? Parading out the ugly details, inviting other people’s shock and sadness to reopen my wounds. I should’ve just kept my mouth shut and made something up.

  “He died eight months ago.”

  Evan audibly expelled a breath. When I ventured another look at him, his lips were still parted and his glazed eyes were trained on nothing in particular just below the backbar.

  “Accident, murder, or suicide?” he asked in a stunned voice.

  My first thought was, how strange he hadn’t mentioned natural causes. Then all the old, sickening questions regathered and rammed my gut like a cannonball.

  “I don’t know,” I murmured.

  Chapter Three

  I DIDN’T know a lot of things. Mourning had pushed the realization of my ignorance out of my mind, but my period of mourning had drawn to a close. I couldn’t keep pretending Frank and I had been oh-so-very close. I’d certainly loved him, but the old suspicion that I really didn’t know him was barreling at me again.

  Since the Harmony Bar wasn’t exactly conducive to discussing Frank Connor’s passing and Evan wasn’t finished asking questions, I invited him to my room at the Edelweiss Inn. And I damned myself for doing so.

  With a six-pack of Beck’s Dark on the seat beside me, I followed Evan’s pickup to the B&B. He was thoroughly familiar with Prism Falls—not much of a feat, probably, in a town of 26,000 people. The streets were deserted. Tire tracks from a lone vehicle marked our way, their rippled indentations already filling in. I felt as if I were heading toward a secret conclave.

  Why am I doing this? I kept asking myself. Why am I closing myself up in a hotel room with a straight guy I find attractive to discuss a
lover who’s dead? At the moment, I couldn’t imagine a situation more stressful. Already I’d begun to question my motives. Was I being predatory without realizing it?

  I couldn’t help questioning Evan’s motives, as well. He’d accepted my invitation with little more than a heartbeat of hesitation.

  Evan turned into the small, tree-shrouded parking lot beside the Edelweiss. I followed, since I’d left myself no choice.

  Why the fuck am I doing this?

  What I needed most on this sad and snowy night was to settle in and let the room’s coziness calm me. I really didn’t want to talk about Frank. And I sure didn’t need to deal with an internal wrestling match featuring Desire and Frustration, Grief and Guilt.

  Snow continued to fall as Evan and I got out of our vehicles. I wondered vaguely where he lived. I wondered more keenly why he was so interested in Frank Connor’s fate.

  The insectile buzz of distant snowmobiles cut through the white silence that enveloped us.

  “How long do you plan on being in town?” Evan asked as we shuffled through the inch or two of new powder.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  I hadn’t told him I’d been thinking of writing a book about Frank. I wasn’t even sure I could do it. Write, yeah—I’d been doing television scripts for docudramas as well as some historical and biographical programs for the past decade. But those were entirely different animals from a memoir about an enigmatic lover.

  “Don’t you have a job to get back to?” Evan asked.

  “I’m self-employed.”

  We entered the dimly lit lobby and quietly mounted the stairs to my room. Its door had to be opened with an actual key, not a card, and the rattle-rattle-click echoed throughout the short corridor. I didn’t know exactly how many other guests were staying at the inn, although there were three other vehicles in the lot and I’d earlier seen a young man and woman carrying cross-country skis through the lobby as I’d left for St. Jerome’s.

  The rooms were clean, spacious quarters decorated primarily in white with touches of blue or rose or green. Each had a gas fireplace. At least the owners had had enough good taste not to cheapen their hostelry with faux Alpine kitsch, although choice antiques and mementoes suggested an Austrian connection.

  I hung my coat in a small closet with bi-fold louvered doors, then took Evan’s hooded Carhartt jacket and hung that as well. It was saturated with his scent, but I didn’t respond to it the way I had earlier. Frank’s specter looming between us had quelled my churning hormones.

  “Shit,” I muttered. “I don’t have a bottle opener.”

  Evan dug in his jeans pocket and produced a fat Swiss Army knife. “Be prepared,” he said with a smile.

  I smiled back. “I admire guys like you.”

  The fireplace was about eight feet from the foot of the bed. Two Columbia-blue wingchairs were angled in front of it, with a small, bleached pine table in between. As soon as I set the six-pack on the table, Evan pried the caps off two bottles and handed me one. I thanked him and took a seat.

  “It must be kind of tough,” I said, “helping out at St. Jerome’s in the evening after cutting trees all day.”

  Evan settled in. “Not too. I’m mostly a desk jockey now. Besides….”

  Waiting for the rest of the sentence, I watched him. He was looking down at the bottle he cradled in both hands, running his forefingers over the mist of frost on the glass.

  “I do it for my son,” he said in a muted voice, “or in honor of my son. I do it for myself too, I guess.” He glanced at me, a self-conscious look accompanied by a subdued, self-conscious smile. “Working there has kind of become my thoughtful time. And maybe my way of praying. I don’t much like going to Mass.” He breathed out a laugh. “Hell, I’m not even a proper Catholic. I was raised Presbyterian.”

  “Your son,” I repeated, trying to cobble together some comprehensible explanation from these scraps.

  “Yeah, Scott. I called him Mogie. He was killed in a car crash just over a year ago.” Evan stared vacantly at the Beck’s bottle he held. “Seventeen. He was only seventeen.”

  A residue of grief had altered his expression. Not fresh, heavy grief but the ghost it had left behind. Now I felt like a heel for lusting after this man. “I’m so sorry, Evan.”

  “It’s all right. We had a pretty good relationship while it lasted. That’s what I hold to.” He took a long swallow of beer.

  “I didn’t know you were married.”

  “I’m not. I knocked up Scott’s mother when I was eighteen. He was born when I was nineteen. I got shared custody a year later, then full custody when Scott was five. Lisa couldn’t have cared less.”

  The mathematics of the timeline told me Evan was thirty-six when his son died, which now made him thirty-seven. That still left a whole lot of questions unanswered, but I didn’t think it was seemly for me to keep probing. We hardly knew each other, and I wasn’t qualified enough to discuss much less understand the domestic politics of hetero couples. It was already clear Evan’s former squeeze hadn’t been much of a mother.

  Evan rose from the chair, and I felt a nip of fear that he was going to leave. I don’t know why I didn’t want him to leave, but I didn’t.

  “Excuse me,” he said quietly. “I need to use the bathroom.”

  I watched him walk to the open door to the left of the sitting area and disappear behind it. Turning back to the fire, I poured some beer down my throat. This was becoming one very strange meeting. I didn’t know what to make of it—or of Evan McAllister.

  When he returned, I didn’t wait for him to resume the conversation. “What made you start going to St. Jerome’s if you’re not even Catholic?”

  Evan ran both hands through his thick black hair, grabbed his beer off the table, sat, and took a drink. I got the impression he was buying some time—either trying to determine how to answer my question or considering not answering at all.

  He slipped me a glance, then looked away. “Frank Connor.”

  “Oh.”

  Oh boy.

  Seconds ticked by. Five… ten…

  “What happened to him?” Evan’s voice had a fragile, distant quality that bespoke some feeling other than idle curiosity.

  The question didn’t exactly catch me off guard, but the sound of it did. A prickling spread between my shoulder blades. “He, uh… he’d gone to a cabin in the Boundary Waters—a mini-retreat, he called it—and was apparently cleaning some antique firearm.” My throat was getting tight. When I spoke, it felt like I was punching the words through a membrane. “It discharged. Into his heart.” Through peripheral vision, I could tell Evan was staring at me. I could almost feel his stare.

  “Was he alone?”

  “That’s the point of a retreat, isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” Evan shifted in the chair.

  I still couldn’t face him. Hoping to pull myself together, I drank more beer. The clog in my throat dissolved. My distress passed. Some months ago, I wouldn’t have recovered nearly as quickly. Time was doing its healing thing.

  “Who found him?” Evan asked softly.

  “The person who cleaned the cabins. At least Frank wasn’t… lying there for long. Coroner figured the incident happened right around dawn.”

  “Was there any kind of inquiry, any investigation?”

  I shook my head. “No, nothing formal. Not that I’m aware of. It was considered a freak accident.”

  That was the extent of my knowledge. I didn’t know with absolute certainty why Frank had gone to the Boundary Waters, only that he went off on these mini-retreats every few months or so. I didn’t know whether or not he’d been alone. How could I? Hell, I didn’t even know if he’d been seeing other people while we were together; we kept separate residences. And I didn’t think he was a collector—of anything—so I couldn’t explain the presence of a gun, antique or otherwise.

  In the eight months since Frank’s death, the only firm realizations I’d come to were that I
missed his presence in my life, and what I knew about him was far outweighed by what I didn’t know.

  “Pardon me for asking,” Evan said, “but how did you come by all this information?”

  I cleared my throat. Maybe I should tell him I got the story through a network of mutual friends or Frank’s relatives or the parish to which he’d been assigned. If I told Evan the truth, the jig would be up. But I just couldn’t bring myself to lie.

  “My name was on a card in his wallet, one of those ‘contact in case of an emergency’ things. Actually, the cops ended up sending me his wallet.”

  I remembered the look and feel of it—a slightly scuffed, black leather slab, curved to conform to the shape of Frank’s butt. I’d cried as I held it to my chest, to the side of my face. But I’d given its contents only a cursory look. Men’s wallets, like women’s purses, were sacrosanct. Poking through Frank’s would’ve seemed like a violation. All I’d glimpsed were his driver’s license, a credit card, and some folded pieces of paper. After keeping it for a couple of months, letting it rest beside his picture on my nightstand, I’d pulled out its contents, burned them, and put the wallet in the same box where I’d assembled all my other Frank mementoes.

  “What about his parents?” Evan asked.

  “Frank didn’t have much communication with them. When he died, I think they were in the process of buying property in Baja California. That’s where they were going to spend the rest of their retirement.” I didn’t tell Evan why there was little communication—that Frank’s relationship with his parents, tenuous at best, had all but disintegrated when he left the priesthood. I had no clue where exactly they now lived.

  “Well… who contacted them?” Evan asked. “Did they arrange his funeral?”

  I paused and took a drink. The nature of Evan’s questions had begun to pique my own curiosity. He’d asked nothing about the parish to which Frank had allegedly been assigned. A logical assumption would’ve been that the Church had handled everything: disposition of the body and of personal effects, notification of family, arrangement of funeral services and burial. Everything. A priest would’ve been taken care of by his diocese.