Solomon's Grave

their feelings for each other and broke away both from their celibacy and the church.

They left home, sneaking away in the night, and found a tiny, roach-infested apartment thirty miles north, just outside of Hollywood. While she looked for a modeling job, Vinnie worked the grill of a diner two blocks from the Strip. He would have taken any job, as long as it paid the rent. They married. Not in the church, but in a small chapel in Las Vegas following a grueling day-long drive. A Justice of the Peace performed the ceremony. Melissa’s modeling career ended before it ever began, when she learned they were going to have a baby.

Vinnie took a second job. They found a place slightly bigger and with smaller cockroaches. Even now, Vincent wondered what his son would have been like had he been born. He wondered what kind of a mother Melissa would have been—a fantastic one, he was certain—had a man named Simon Ellison not taken one drink too many before trying to drive home.

Vinnie had been home from work only twenty minutes when the police came to his door and told him his wife was dead. The officer, sent to inform the next of kin, had not been at the scene. He simply took the report he was given and told Vincent Tarretti that his wife and son had been killed in an automobile accident.

In the strongbox hidden under two loose floorboards beside Vincent’s bed, sandwiched between his notebooks and the short stack of other yellowed clippings, was the single newspaper report of the accident. A small number “1” was written in the corner, but with no corresponding notation in any book. It was the only thing he kept from those long-ago days, aside from his cheap, gold-plated wedding ring which he also kept in the box.

His memory of life after the funeral, held in the town in which they’d both grown up, was a blur of alcohol. He had died in every sense of the word in that accident with his wife and son. Afterward, he was simply waiting for the van to arrive, as the song went. He was certain, thinking about it in retrospect years later, that death was waiting for him one particular night as he washed his third shot of Jack Daniels down with his ninth beer. If not that night, then soon. He’d sensed his personal limit had been reached, a signal to return upstairs and pass out on whichever piece of furniture was easiest to reach. That night, he’d hesitated, ordered another shot and beer. Once crossed, it was a line that would continue far into some desperate darkness waiting only for him.

While he slouched in a booth, twirling the now-empty beer bottle on the table top and considering without much resolve about going back upstairs, an old—no, ancient was the word that came to him that night—woman slowly slid into the bench across the booth from him. She had garnered a lot of looks from the brooding regulars at the bar. As soon as they saw with whom she sat, people kept their comments to themselves. They’d watched Vinnie’s deterioration and short temper long enough to know not to make any comments about someone who was most likely his grandmother.

She wasn’t his grandmother.

“Is your name Vincent Tarretti?”

“Yea…” he’d said, trying to focus on her face, but not succeeding very well.

“My name is Ruth Lieberman,” she said. “I’m dying.”

Vinnie rolled his eyes. “Well, too bad for you,” he said, and raised the empty beer bottle, trying to catch the attention of the bar’s only waitresses, a thin girl with tired eyes. She seemed to be looking everywhere but in his direction. He lowered his arm and said, “Everyone is dying. I’m dying; you’re dying.”

“In a way,” she said, never breaking eye contact, “you’re already dead. You’ve made up your mind to choose oblivion. Now,” she said, laying her aged hands flat on the table, “forgetting the obvious repercussions of such an act, God has need of you. You will have to stop drinking, forever, and come with me.”

In his state, the fact that this woman was echoing the thoughts blurring through his mind only a moment before did not carry any surprise. He simply smiled and said, “Yeah? Where to?”

“Massachusetts.”

The answer was spoken so assuredly that Vinnie sat up straighter in his chair. Hollywood was full of more kooks and weirdoes than he could ever count, but they never failed to entertain him.

“Mass-a-what?” He chuckled, a gesture that felt alien in those days. “And why would I do that?”

“I told you—because I’m dying, and God has sent me here to find you.” She looked around then, and for the first time Vinnie saw the calm certainty in her expression waver for a moment. “Everything I see, including you, is exactly as in the dream. There’s no question.” Saying that, her determination returned.

“Yeah, and what exactly am I going to be doing in Massachusetts? Selling flowers at the airport?”

She smiled. “No, sir. You’re going to be the new caretaker of the cemetery in town. Hillcrest, Massachusetts to be exact. It’s a pleasant little place a few miles north of a city called Worcester. It’s very nice.”

He leaned over the table. The wrinkled hands remained flat on the surface. He whispered, “Go away now or I swear to God I’ll—”

And then her hands came up and touched his cheeks.

And the bar disappeared.

Vinnie Tarretti saw the face of God as flames, burning His commandments into the stone tablets... a terrified old man carrying them down the mountain and in anger shattering them on a stone at the sight of the idolatry before him; returning from the mountain a second time with new tablets, placing them in a tabernacle adorned with the gold from destroyed idols, carried across the desert for forty years; then King Solomon, tall with a knitted beard and flowing robes and riches beyond match, building the temple of God, and the placing of the golden Ark of the Covenant beneath angelic wings of gold and….

He vomited across the table. In the days that followed, he never found out—and dared not ask—if he’d also thrown up all over the old woman. But as Vinnie fell into unconsciousness, he felt his life and whatever remained of his soul burn away. The world he thought he knew blew apart like ash in the light of God’s vision.

When he awoke, he was in the hospital. “Alcohol poisoning” was how the medical report read. He was released as soon as he could stand under his own power, being without insurance. Vinnie walked outside, into painful sunlight and thick, dirty air. An Asian man waved to him from a cab waiting at the curb, running to open the rear door without waiting for a response. Reflexively, Vinnie climbed into the back seat. Before he could get back out, the cab pulled into traffic.

The old woman from Massachusetts patted his hand and said, “It’s time to go, Vincent.”

Twenty-six years later, Vincent pulled his Blazer to a stop at the back of his small caretaker’s house, still relishing the joy from this morning’s service. Johnson barked from inside, as he did every time his master arrived home after going somewhere without him. Johnson’s bark sounded different this morning. An angry, warning tone.

He understood why when he walked around to the front of the house, fiddling with his key ring. A short man stood on the porch, hands folded calmly in front of him as if in prayer. He wore a dark suit with a black shirt and white tie. The neat apparel, his Sunday Best, Vincent assumed, fit in well with his clipped moustache and short white hair.

As Vincent mounted the single step, the man extended his hand.

“Mister Tarretti, I presume? So glad to finally meet you.” Vincent took his hand in a perfunctory shake. “My name is Peter Quinn. I was hoping we could talk.”

Chapter Eleven

The basement of Hillcrest Baptist Church once housed the Dreyfus family’s workroom and wine cellar, but had slowly been converted to a hall for church functions. It was wider than the church itself, running under the full length of the house, with a two-foot high stage for the occasional children’s play and group meetings. This room was as familiar to Nathan as his parents’ home. Every other Sunday for eighteen years, the Dinnecks joined other families of the parish in this hall for fellowship dinner, a community breaking bread together and discussing everything from the morning’s sermon to the Patriots’ chances that afternoon. The tables usually filled quickly, though today many people chose to stand and mingle among the larger-than-normal crowd. According to Hayden, the last time Sunday service had been this crowded was Easter.

The room filled with the scent of brewing coffee, orange juice, meatballs, pasta and pies. Children wandered toward the dessert tables, only to be pulled away by a parent who forced them to fill their plates with “good food” first.

As promised, both of his parents came, though his father had fidgeted more than usual during the service. Nathan had also spied his friend Josh Everson smiling at him from the last row of folding chairs. Like Elizabeth, Josh was never a diligent churchgoer. Nathan had always been more forward about inviting him, but had also known