Free The Assassini by Thomas Gifford

cracked into a quick grin. He took his hat off, revealing a bald pink scalp with a fringe of gray hair curling over the tops of his ears and scarf.
    “At his age he can only take so much sex, violence,and confession.” I shook his hand. “Maybe I’ll present him with your collected works at Christmas.”
    I had seen Father Dunn on television once, being interviewed about one of his novels, and he somehow worked the subject around to one of his passions, baseball. Phil Donahue had asked him if, like so many ballplayers, he had any superstitions. “Just the Catholic Church,” he’d said, and the audience was in his pocket.
    “Don’t settle for paperbacks,” he said. “My hardcover jackets are every bit as shameful.”
    Peaches chuckled. “The priest who looks like Tom Selleck is being ravished by a Joan Collins clone in half a dress.”
    Dunn said: “Why don’t you join us, Mr. Driskill?”
    “How about a raincheck? I’ve got to meet my sister—”
    “Ah, a
respectable
writer. A true scholar and an activist. A unique combination.”
    “I’ll tell her you said so.”
    I left them and walked back to the car. It was fully in character for Peaches, a bit of a free spirit, to know Father Dunn, the iconoclastic priest/novelist whose books were always best-sellers that drove the Church hierarchy quietly nuts. He had devised a manner of somehow producing moral object lessons within the context of stories devoted almost exclusively to sex, power, and money. My father doubtless felt that Dunn had made himself a rich man desecrating the Church. Desecration aside, since Dunn was a diocesan priest free to keep any money he earned, he certainly was well-heeled. Like my sister, he was so well-known that the Church had to exercise considerable restraint in dealing with him. In practice they found it advisable to look the other way.
    It was still spitting sleet and the sidewalks were treacherous. From the shop windows all of the paraphernalia of Halloween stared into the night. Witches rode on broomsticks and bowls overflowed with black and orange candy. Jack-o’-lanterns grinned, gap-toothed. I headed home, eager to sit down in front of the fire in the Long Room with my sister Val and help her get things straightened out.
    * * *
    The house was still dark and empty, the rain still blowing in sheets and turning to snow in the headlights, dusting the rutted and freezing mud in the driveway. I pointed the car at the garage and walked ahead in the lights, looked through the windows. There was a car inside. I pulled the doors open. The car was wet. But it had been raining for hours and the engine was cold. I went back to my car, pulled it up by the house, and got back out. It was ten-thirty and I was beginning to worry about her.
    I’m not altogether sure why I walked back out toward the orchard. Maybe I went for a walk because the rain had turned to snow, the first of the year, and the quiet seemed surreal after the chatter of the Nassau Inn. I stopped, called her name just in case she’d had the same impulse, but all I succeeded in doing was start a dog to barking in the black distance.
    I was standing in the orchard before I’d given it any thought, and when I looked around I saw I was under the tree where the priest-we never talked about had hanged himself a long time ago. It seemed like my entire life had been spent living with the stories attached to the house and the orchard—priests from the rubble of World War II and priests working in the garden and saying mass for Mother and priests drinking scotch with Father and the one poor devil who’d hanged himself, all of them stories with the power of myth, stories reflecting this family of mine, its history and concerns and, inevitably, its religion.
    The orchard was always cropping up in family stories, but I’d never been particularly fond of the place. The only reason I’d ever spent any time out there was because Val had liked it. When she was four I taught her to