Read Bringing Adam Home for Free Online

away to the seminary, though, I wasn’t so sure. My mother knew I was upset and sat me down one day to tell me it was okay if I didn’t want to go. I didn’t have to be a priest just to please her, she told me.” He shrugs. “It was a big relief to me at the time. But sometimes I think being a cop is almost the same thing.”
    In any event, when his subject on the day of August 7, 1981, sat down in the examining room, Matthews started by asking, “Tell me a little about yourself, John.” When Walsh began by telling Matthews where he’d gone to college and what his major had been, Matthews held up a hand. “No, I mean, tell me about how you grew up. About your mother and father. Like if I asked you to rate them on a scale of one to ten, with ten being tops, and why. That kind of thing.”
    On that day, “that kind of thing” went on for almost seven hours. Prompted by Matthews, Walsh said that if ten were tops, then his father, a hardworking war hero he had idolized, was probably a twelve in his eyes. Walsh and his mother had what he considered a normal relationship. There were typical mother-son issues between them, but he loved her, and she had always been supportive of him. Give her an eight.
    Matthews and Walsh did get around to a discussion of college, though it took a while. He was an English major at the University of Buffalo in New York when he met Revé, though he’d been stunned to discover she was still in high school at the time. Even though she was five years younger than he was, he’d found her so poised, and so intelligent. From the moment they met there had been no one else for him, Walsh told Matthews. They’d been married for ten years, since July 1971.
    Walsh also told Matthews a story from his days as a pool manager and lifeguard at the Diplomat Hotel out on Hollywood Beach. He was keeping watch at the pool one afternoon when he saw a group of kids rushing toward him from the nearby jetty. Frantic, they told him that one of their friends was in trouble out by the jetty’s end, where a massive discharge pipe emptied runoff water into the ocean. They’d been playing near the mouth of the pipe when the tide shifted in and trapped their pal, lodging him in a crevice against the rocks. The boys had tried, but they couldn’t get him out. The force of the incoming tide was just too strong.
    John ran out to the end of the jetty and scrambled down the rocks to find matters just as the boys said. Indeed there was a kid lodged between the rocks and the mouth of the pipe, the waters rising inexorably toward his chin. And as if it could be worse, he realized that he knew this child. It was John Monahan Jr., son of the Diplomat’s chief executive, trapped there in the rising waters. He’d given the boy a series of scuba lessons earlier that summer.
    He managed to get young John calmed somewhat, then tried pulling him out of the crevice by the arms, but it wasn’t working. The water was close to the boy’s chin when John called to the kids watching from the top of the jetty for help, but they couldn’t understand what he wanted.
    “You’ve got to hang on,” he said, turning to young Monahan. “I’m coming right back.” Then he bounded up the rocks and back to the pool storage shack, where the diving equipment was stored. He kicked the door open, found a tank, mask, and regulator, and raced back along the jetty to Monahan. “We’re going to do it just like we did it in the pool a hundred times,” he assured the boy, helping him into the gear as the waters rose over his head.
    Once the boy had been reassured and was breathing in a passable way, Walsh slipped under the water and put his arms around Monahan’s chest. He pushed hard with his feet, levering against the rocks, and suddenly, as if a cork had popped from a bottle, the boy was free.
    Needless to say, the incident made John Walsh far more than a trusted employee at the Diplomat. When Walsh and Revé got married, Monahan’s father