Melia Ridge
MELIA RIDGE
A MAX BLAKE MYSTERY
WILLIAM FLORENCE
WildBluePress.com
“Melia Ridge” is a work of fiction. The names, characters, locales, and incidents that are depicted in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance of any character within this work to an actual person, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The exceptions are the Oregon, Ireland, and Italian settings.
MELIA RIDGE published by:
WILDBLUE PRESS
P.O. Box 102440
Denver, Colorado 80250
Publisher Disclaimer: Any opinions, statements of fact or fiction, descriptions, dialogue, and citations found in this book were provided by the author, and are solely those of the author. The publisher makes no claim as to their veracity or accuracy, and assumes no liability for the content.
Copyright 2017 by William Florence
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
WILDBLUE PRESS is registered at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Offices.
ISBN 978-1-947290-23-5 Trade Paperback
ISBN 978-1-947290-22-8 eBook
Interior Formatting/Book Cover Design by Elijah Toten
www.totencreative.com
Also by William Florence:
The Max Blake Mystery series:
Raptor’s Ridge
Misery Ridge
Faraway Ridge
Snowfall Ridge
Emerald Ridge
The Max Blake Western series:
The Killing Trail
Trail of Revenge
Trail to Redemption
Trail to Dead Man’s Gulch
Trail from Crooked River
Acknowledgments:
Special gratitude is extended to Jennifer Guyor Jowett and Lori Kronser, editors extraordinaire, for their detailed critique of the early manuscript; to Rowena Carenen of WildBlue Press, for her detail-oriented and meticulous eye; to Christian Maheux, for his cover design; Linda Lou, for finding the cruise of the century; Stu and Donna, for pulling the Mediterranean trip together so nicely; and to a variety of friends and relatives – from Bill Kohlmeyer and Doc Strand and Michael J. Parker to my cousins Vinny and Bob to – hey, you know who you are – who once again served up their names and expertise to the cause. Simply put, I couldn’t get there without you. Nor would I want to.
For Vincenzo, Roberto, Giovanni, and the entire New England clan, scattered now to time and distance and the four winds
Cast of Primary Characters
The port side of the Atlantic
Max Blake: Private detective; retired college professor and former investigative reporter
Caeli Brown: Max’s fiancée/business partner and a former newspaper reporter
Bill Kohlmeyer: Chief of police of Oregon’s capital city
Fredo Fierro: The new capo di tutti capi; Max’s and Caeli’s friend and sole client
Elmore and Leonard: Fierro Enterprises (USA) employees/bodyguards
Michael J. Parker: Max’s and Caeil’s friend and attorney
Dr. Floyd Strand: Max’s friend, golf buddy, and medical adviser
Mitts: Caeli’s 26-pound Maine Coon cat
Koko: Caeli’s midnight-black rescue cat
The starboard side of the Atlantic
The Rev. Sean “Jack” O’Lennox: Caeli’s uncle, the former Archbishop of Armagh
Roberto Fierro: The late Don Vincenzo’s lookalike brother; Fredo’s uncle
Guglielmo Morandini: Don Roberto’s gardener and occasional chauffer
Monsignor Luca LaGuardia: Papal wheeler-dealer
Father Antonio Rizzo: Resident Vatican good guy
Father Pietro Angelus: Resident Vatican bad guy
Penn and Teller: Fierro Enterprises (International) employees
Bruno Coretti: the Mayor of Nepi, Italy
Ruth Coretti: Kidnap victim and the mayor’s wife
Chiara Coretti: Bruno’s and Ruth’s daughter
‘Those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.’
‘Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.’
– John Fitzgerald Kennedy
35th U.S. president
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
A Niggling, Worrisome Past
The majesty, the spectacle, the trappings of power – all are difficult to ignore.
Admirers, and especially the true believers, continually remind you of the simple fact that the church endures. Witness the long lines at the Città del Vaticano, day after day.
But if you take the time to study the centuries-long abuses and shockingly sordid history of the church, you’ll discover all too quickly that its zealous minions will do damn near anything to further the excesses of the faith, or at least the faith as they see it and shape it. And if Shakespeare was correct and the past truly is prologue, this legion of underlings, many thousands strong through the millennia, will go to extraordinary lengths to protect those who represent the venerable institution and toil in its vineyards, for good or for evil … not only in the past but in the present day as well.
Consider this random listing of known transgressions:
Book-burnings and imprisonments and the incessant rewriting and reconstruction of history;
The mournful saga of the Crusades and the slaughter of untold hundreds of thousands of so-called non-believers;
The wanton destruction of churches, synagogues, temples, and varied places of worship of those faiths deemed unworthy;
Witch-hunts and religious wars resulting in the deaths of shocking numbers of innocents – millions of them through the ages;
The slaughter of native peoples around the globe – from Ireland to the Hawaiian Islands and throughout the African, European, and American continents, both North and South, including what eventually became the United States;
All-out, all-in wars against so-called heretics of all stripes and creeds across the far-flung reaches of the globe;
The historical exploitation of church indulgences, which constitutes a gut-wrenching retelling of vicious abuses and excesses;
The World War II concentration camps run by the Catholic Ustaše, which participated in the murders of people of all genders and ages, children included;
The indifference of the Pius XII, often called Hitler’s pope, while the Nazis ran roughshod across two continents;
The church’s involvement in the Rwanda massacres of the 1990s …
You get the idea.
It’s a litany not of the saints but rather of grave-faced, relentless, unrepentant sinners.
A selective recounting, you say?
Ah, but there’s so much material to select from, with long centuries of history to cull, despite the repeated efforts of those at the helm to make it all disappear.
Look up the sad tale of John Wycliffe, or the detailed history of the Knights Templar – never mind the myths and the accounts of revisionists or those trying to make a buck through hucksterism or movie deals or simple deceit. Take a moment to wrap your mind around the church’s dealing with Galileo Galilei, or Joan of Arc, or Jan Hus, or William Tyndale, or the true story behind the Inquisitions. These days, with a wireless connection and a ready-made internet library at your fingertips, getting to the heart of the matter is as easy as a few keystrokes and a click with a plastic mouse.
Raise these topics, of course, and the faithful, forever bleating like sheep trailing the wandering shepherd, protest vociferously that much of this recounting is culled from the distant past – the Dark Ages, which have long since been relegated to the dusty pages of a shameful if narrow slice of selective history. And while countless reports regarding the predatory practices of certain members of the clergy have come to light in shocking detail in more recent years, those missteps, too, also are just as easily dismissed by the faithful. These halo-blind followers repeatedly maintain that we should not condemn the entire institution because of the malevolent depravity of a few sick individuals … this despite the repeated attempted whitewashes from those in charge, at least some of whom have been tried and convicted for their efforts to thwart justice.
To save you some time:
In 1992, exactly 350 years after Galileo’s death, Pope John Paul II apologized on behalf of the church for its denouncing of the brilliant scientist and philosopher’s lifetime of achievements and for locking him up for the final nine years of his life.
This recent John Paul, you should know, was something of an apology machine. During his years as pope, he formally apologized not only for the Galileo debacle but also for the church’s roles in the murders of Muslims during the Crusades, for its involvement in the African slave trade, for its ongoing silence and blind eye during the Holocaust, to those who were convicted during the Inquisition, for the church’s role in the religious wars that took place after the Protestant Reformation, and for its historical treatment of Jews, women, and most everyone else who suffered at the heavy hand of the dogmatists through the centuries.
Case closed and the record set straight … right?
Not quite.
Upon John Paul’s death in 2005, his successor, Benedict XVI, decreed that the original “verdict against Galileo was rational and just, and the revision of this verdict can be justified only on the grounds of what is politically opportune.”
As the wise man said, you can look it up.
I recount this slice of a sordid past not because I want to disparage the institution (I do not) but merely to point out that when something is rotten, in Denmark or in Rome, you can’t sit idly by and pretend that the cogs and the pulleys and the wheels and the wires are still in place, humming nicely along, benefiting all of mankind.
They aren’t, I’m sad to report, and from recent first-hand experience. If you have some time, I’ll tell you about it – including the church’s tenuous connection to the shocking death of an American president more than five decades previous.
I can’t promise an easy journey in this telling. But I will promise that it’s the truth … or at least it’s as close to the truth as I could get, given the fractious circumstances.
Judge for yourself.
ONE
The Mills of God Grind Slowly
Ever stop to contemplate how your life can turn on a dime?
A shift of the winds, an unexpected diagnosis, a glance in the rearview mirror (or a failure to glance behind you) – even the arrival of a single postcard in the mailbox: Snap your fingers and everything you know, everything you trusted or once took for granted, vanishes.
Bang.
Just like that.
Caeli’s Uncle Jack, the former Archbishop of Armagh, was alive.
But who could tell in the initial rush of revelation whether this was good news or bad – a fact to celebrate or one to curse?
As I look back, contemplating the significance of the disclosure from the safety of time and physical distance and large bodies of water that even now help to separate the varied combatants who lined up to stake a claim, it was damned difficult to absorb and not much fun to speculate about when the news arrived.
I’ll admit that I suspected the worst when the postcard showed up in the mailbox with a Vatican stamp attached. That’s likely because I’d previously seen an identical postcard, one with a British stamp, and recognized its significance.
Of course, learning that Caeli’s uncle was alive was one thing – an inconvenient truth. Learning that he was under the protection of the Holy Roman Church, which historically has gone out of its way to shield legions of scoundrels and villains and other shady characters who’ve populated the hierarchy of the august institution for millennia, was another consideration entirely.
Jack a scoundrel?
You bet. That’s exactly what he was – and he remains so in my mind.
Until a few weeks ago, I never would have placed those two words – Jack, as in Caeli’s uncle, and scoundrel, as in miscreant and blackguard and scalawag – in the same sentence, paired with one another in the way that, say, Arm & Hammer or Simon & Garfunkel or Smith & Wesson are associated.
But that was before the events on Mutton Island, the 185-acre bird sanctuary off the western Irish coast, and Jack’s efforts to overthrow the British government’s rule in Ulster through force and violence and madcap adventure and misguided revolution. (You can read the fine details in Emerald Ridge, my accounting of the sordid tale, the background of which might help with what took place in its aftermath and even here, in this telling.)
The thing of it is, Caeli and I both were certain that Uncle Jack was dead, killed by steady, unrelenting machine gun fire on the island, along with his trusted right arm, Michael Corbin, and other like-minded revolutionaries who followed in the archbishop’s terrorist-inspired footsteps and decided that the best way to unite the two Irelands would be to restart the historical mayhem of The Troubles.
Yeah. Exactly. What the hell was he thinking?
What the hell were any of them thinking?
We were there, Caeli and I, along with our two bodyguards-on-loan, Elmore and Leonard, planted on the barren, windswept island in a pelting rain, trying to rescue Uncle Jack from himself.
It turned out that Jack didn’t want to be rescued.
Or at least, not then, he didn’t.
But the situation took an enormous roundabout turn, unexpected and sure as hell unappreciated, when unnamed church officials stepped up to institute a capture of their off-the-reservation red-robed warrior, slamming him with a tranquilizer dart instead of a bullet and whisking him off Mutton Island and into waiting hands in Rome before any of us – or at least before Caeli and I – were able to see through the subterfuge.
I found this out weeks later when Jack sent Caeli a postcard depicting William Butler Yeats’s tombstone in Drumcliff churchyard, County Sligo, with the final three lines of the great poet’s 1933 masterwork Under Ben Bulben engraved on the stone monolith:
Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death,
Horseman pass by.
It was the same message that started the eve
nts leading to our arrival in Ireland and eventually on Mutton Island – the same message, delivered on an identical postcard, that resulted in, among other things, our ownership of a large estate on the Irish coast, near Limerick.
I eventually was able to confirm that church bigwigs, hoping to avoid the scandal that would accompany a rogue archbishop spraying gunfire across the land he so fondly called home, brought the once honorable and most reverend Sean “Jack” O’Lennox, the archbishop of Armagh, back into the fold, rather than allowing the Irish authorities and global media wolves to wail and gnash their collective incisors, along with their cameras and keyboards and flash drives and internet connections, on his sorry carcass.
Among other heinous deeds, Caeli’s uncle was responsible for the murder of his longtime friend and church associate, the Rev. Monsignor Donald McBride. And yet, although church officials were cognizant of that horrendous crime and dozens more, they still took Uncle Jack in and placed him under their protective blanket in the notorious Secret Archives Building at the Vatican, where he was assigned to while away his days in peace and penance, doubtless told to account for his sins and misdeeds while sorting through mountains of paperwork that date back centuries.
Or so we initially were led to believe.
Somehow, at some point, all was not as it seemed and he slipped away just long enough to smuggle out the Yeats postcard, which he sent to Caeli. I retrieved it from the mailbox when it arrived days later and, rather than turning it immediately over to her, tried to determine whether Jack was, in fact, the miscreant of this latest endeavor, or whether it was all some sort of twisted joke, perpetrated on poor Caeli by a decidedly malevolent prankster … one other than her uncle, of course.