THREE HOURS LATER, I’m in the large conference room at the police station, having flashbacks to my very first assignment as a budding young archivist.
Father Xavier’s papers cover every available surface, organized into stacks by whatever common identifier I could determine. Most are by date, but others are by name or initial. I haven’t taken the time to read any of them yet. I just needed to get some kind of order out of, as best I can tell, twenty years of correspondence.
“This can’t be all of it,” I mutter. Father Xavier is in his mid-seventies, and his career in the Church goes all the way back to the Second Vatican Council that he attended as a young seminarian, one of the assistants to a predecessor of Archbishop Knowland. But everything here dates from the early-2000s.
I can pond
