few said hello. I stopped and talked whenever it seemed feasible, telling everyone the same story, that I was doing an essay on Chris Robin, and that I was trying to get a sense of what life had been like forty years ago on Virginia Island.
Of those who were old enough to have known Robin and Elizabeth, nobody had anything to add to the basic story. I heard no more about infidelity, even when I asked whether there might have been any problems with the marriage. Everybody remembered Elizabeth as being friendly and nice. Her husband was okay, nobody had any real complaints, but he was always tied up in his work. I got the usual range of opinions as to what had happened to him.
I was looking for a more efficient way to penetrate the social mix on the island when I heard that the local church, Holy Sacrament, would be holding its monthly St. Kaelen's Night in two days. “What,” I asked Ilena, “is St. Kaelen's Night?”
“St. Kaelen,” she said, “is the patron saint of friendship and good times.” He was the saint whose motif was: Be generous and loving and you will never be alone.
I went early. The event was being heid in a meeting hall, adjacent to the church. An engraved dove, its wings spread wide, adorned a sign carrying the maxim Heaven is a state of mind. I wondered if that was really what they meant to say.
Approximately two dozen people were already in the hall when I arrived. Others were still filing in. A priest stood at the doorway, greeting people as they passed. He saw me and smiled. “Hello,” he said. “Welcome to Holy Sacrament. I'm Father Everett.” He'd put on a lot of mileage, and was old enough to have known Robin. He had dark hair, dark skin, friendly eyes.
“I'm Chase Kolpath,” I said. “Glad to meet you, Father.”
“I don't suppose you're a permanent resident of the island, Chase?”
“No, I'm just a visitor.”
He looked pleased. “Well, we're glad you decided to join us. Are you visiting friends?”
“Just sightseeing. It's a beautiful island.”
“Yes,” he said, “it is.”
More people were coming in, so I started to move on. “While you're here with us this evening, Chase,” he said, “the tradition is that you make at least one friend.”
The event was utterly informal. People brought covered dishes and soft drinks, set them down, pulled up chairs, and sat down with one another. Despite the efforts of St. Kaelen, the usual social relations held. Some guys were anxious to meet me; others shied away. I joined one group arguing politics while tensions rose, and another that was enraged by the policies of a local storekeeper.
When I could, I asked about Elizabeth and Chris Robin. And I got contradictory information: Chris was hostile, he was friendly; he was a genius, God knew how he'd ever become a professor; he had a great sense of humor, he was a crank. Nobody could account for his disappearance though nobody thought he'd gone voluntarily. “He loved Elizabeth,” they said. I heard that over and over.
Elizabeth was a good wife to him, they told me, better than he deserved. She could be a shrew when she wanted, though. Unlike him, she had a good many friends.
“I think whatever happened to him,” one woman told me, “it had to have been an accident.” Her name was Mara. She was accompanied by her husband and a grandchild.
“What kind of accident do you think would account for it?”
She glanced at her husband, who was small, smaller than she was, compact, and heavy. “He was working on a pocket-size antigrav device,” she said, without batting an eye. “Isn't that right, Walt?”
Walt nodded. “Something like that.”
“It wouldn't surprise me,” she continued, “if he had one in his pocket and activated it accidentally.”
“How would he have done that?”
“He was hauling luggage. It was late. It would have been easy enough to push a button by mistake.”
I got an image of Robin drifting into the sky, suddenly too high to turn the thing off, maybe hanging on to his piece of luggage because it was the only thing he had to hang on to. “Thanks,” I said.
Of course, with an antigrav unit, he wouldn't go into orbit; he'd just keep going. Ridiculous idea. A pocket- size antigrav unit, I'm pretty sure, isn't possible. But it would be a story that Ramsay could use.
Toward the end of the evening, I looked around for Father Everett. He was speaking with an elderly couple near one of the tables. I watched for my chance and, when they started away, I stepped in beside him and asked if he was enjoying the evening.
“I always do, Chase,” he said. “It's my favorite time of the month.”
“I was wondering if you have a couple of minutes to talk to me, Father. I could use some help.”
“Of course, Chase. If I can. What sort of help?”
“Well, I'm actually here doing some research.”
“You're studying the sociology of parties.”
“That, too. Seriously, Father, did you by any chance know Christopher Robin?”
“Chris? Yes, I knew him. To say hello. He and Elizabeth weren't members of the parish, but she used to come to some of the events. We were sorry to lose her.”
“I'm sure.”
“Her husband-? That was, what, twenty years ago?”
“Forty,” I said.
His face clouded. “Time moves so quickly. But yes, I knew him to see him. Though I don't think we ever really talked.” He picked up a potato chip and bit into it. “They're good,” he said. “What kind of information are you looking for?”
“I'd like to figure out what happened to him.”
The smile broadened. “Of course you would. Well, good luck on that.”
“Can you tell me anything at all that might be helpful?”
“I just never knew him, Chase. He had a reputation for being self-centered; I can tell you that. I thought he looked down on the rest of us. I suspect he thought everybody else on the planet was his intellectual inferior.”
“You didn't like him much.”
“I had no dealings with him, to speak of. Hello, good-bye, and not much more than that. But there was something in his manner. A sense of his own preeminence. It was hard to miss.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, I don't know. He occasionally shocked some of our people.”
“In what way?”
“Some of his opinions-” He glanced around the hall, which was now almost empty, and lowered his voice. “He was an atheist, I believe.”
I see.
“But that sometimes happens to people. They don't believe that faith has a place. They don't see the evidence for God, so they dismiss Him.” He excused himself for a moment to speak with a couple of his parishioners. Then he came back. “Despite his atheism, he seemed to think there might be a spiritual dimension. That, without God, we-our souls-drift through eternity. That it was possible there really would be no rest. He used to laugh at the notion of Hell, but I can't imagine a worse one. I almost think I'd prefer the fire.”
“Odd,” I said.
“He had exquisite musical taste; I'll give him that. Sometimes, in the evenings, I enjoyed walking down past his place, out onto the overhang. I could almost always hear the music coming from his house. Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Rimsky-Korsakov, Goldstein, Harkin. He loved the Euro composers.”
“Anything else, Father? Did you ever hear anything about what might have happened to him?”
“I know the police suspected Elizabeth. I guess they had to. They didn't have anyone else.”
“You don't think she could have had anything to do with it?”
“No. Not a chance.”
“Thanks, Father.”
“One other thing. I understand he was careless with money. I don't know whether that might have had anything to do with his disappearance or not-”
“How do you mean?”
