Annie told the rest in the wind behind First Lutheran, with her hands pressed into the pockets of her thin coat and her eyes on the gray water of the lake. “He had a gun, Sarah. Not his own. It was a service revolver, wrapped in a handkerchief, and there was blood on the knuckles of his right hand.” She drew in a sharp breath. “He sat down at my table, in the Spokane boarding house, three weeks later, and he told me. He told me that he had gone to see the pastor in the study of the church on a Tuesday night. He told me that the old man had begun to weep.”
I leaned against the cold stone wall of the church to keep from falling. She said that in the winter of 1988, a girl of nineteen named Mary Beth Olsen, a Sunday school teacher at First Lutheran, had gone missing on the way home from choir practice. The police never found her. Everyone assumed she had run off to the Cities. Annie had seen the tarp in the alley, and the collar, and the unmarked car, and she had understood. My father had gone to the pastor with a hunting knife in one pocket and the gun of his brother in the other.
“He did not hurt him,” said Annie. “That was the thing. Your father had meant to. But when he got there and saw the old man crying, he could not.” She gave a faint wondering smile. “Gunnar Holm told him everything. He said it was an accident, that the girl had fallen on the church stairs, that he had panicked. He begged your father to say nothing. And your father said, I will give you one chance. You will go to the police. And Pastor Holm said, Give me until the morning.” Her smile went away. “In the morning, he had called his cousin the chief of police.”
A light left burning for thirty eight years says what the man who lit it could never put in words: you are not forgotten, and I am still keeping watch.
I stared at her. The chief had been a Lutheran deacon, and a drinker, and a friend of the family of Holm. He had come to our house the next day, said Annie, in his uniform, with his hat in his hand, and sat at the kitchen table, and told my father, very kindly, that a man who accuses a pastor of a crime without proof is a man who loses his job, his church, and his daughter. He had mentioned me. I was then six years old. My father said nothing. He took the gun back, and he put it in a drawer, and the next day he hid the only witness on a bus.
“He told me he would keep the light on,” she said. “He said that as long as the pastor lived, and could do harm, he would keep it lit, so I would know to stay away. He said that when Gunnar Holm was dead or helpless, you would turn it off.” She turned her face into the wind. “I have waited thirty eight years. I read the paper every day. I saw the obituary of your father, and I knew. And I saw that the old man still preached the eulogy, and I thought, no. Not yet.”
I said, “What does he have to be afraid of now?” Annie said, “You.” She reached into her coat and took out a bundle wrapped in oilcloth. “Your father kept the gun. He kept the handkerchief, and a note written the night Mary Beth went missing, and a map. He gave them to me to hold in 1988, and I have kept them in a trunk in Spokane. I think he wanted me to give them to you, when the time came.” She laid the bundle in my hands. “The map shows where the pastor told him she is buried. Under the rose garden, beside the church hall.”
I went back inside. I did not know what else to do. I stood at the back of the sanctuary during the eulogy, with the oilcloth bundle under my coat, and I watched the old pastor mount the pulpit. His voice shook. He spoke of the faithfulness of my father. He said the words, A good man who kept watch through the long night. And in the second pew, a woman in a thin coat rose and walked down the aisle, and set a lightbulb on the flag a second time, and looked straight at him.
The pastor stopped in the middle of a sentence. He looked at the bulb, and at Annie, and at me, standing at the back. And the old man in the black robe, who had baptized me at that font, put both his hands on the pulpit and said, in a ruined voice, “I cannot do this anymore.” He sat down. The funeral was never completed. The ore dock men, the brothers of my father, stood up one by one in their good jackets, and they formed a quiet line, and they did not let him leave.
The police dug in the rose garden on Friday. They found Mary Beth Olsen in a plastic tarp, in a shallow grave, with a silver locket. Her mother, who was ninety, was brought from the nursing home in a wheelchair. Pastor Holm confessed the same day. He died in custody in February, before a trial could be held. The retired chief, who is eighty seven, was charged with obstruction, and the town council voted to strip him of his pension. I stood through all of it with Annie beside me, holding her thin hand.
That night I went home to the narrow blue house on Fourth Street. I climbed the steep icy steps with my coat buttoned to the chin. The light was on. It had been on for thirty eight years. I stood beneath it and looked at the moths, and at the yellow ring on the porch boards. Then I took the hand of Annie, and together we opened the door, and I reached out and turned off the switch. The porch went dark. It was the quietest, most beautiful dark I have ever known. And Annie, who was home at last, wept in the doorway until dawn.