by E. A. House
Detective Hermann squinted at the priest, but all he offered was, “Then the good thing is that we won’t be inconveniencing the parish if we have to cordon this area off for the crime scene investigators.”
“Oh no, that shouldn’t be a problem,” Father Michaels said. He gestured absently with the binder labeled “Saint Vincent de Paul notes, do not lose” Chris had noticed earlier. “Most people wouldn’t go into either of these rooms for longer than they absolutely had to even if you paid them. I think the youth group traditionally sneaks down here every year in the middle of the night when they have their spiritual retreat in the church hall, but they do it when the chaperones are asleep so I’ve never found a way to bring it up to Mrs. Woodley without giving her a nervous breakdown, and it’s so hard to find a good religious instructor that I can’t risk it; this will just give me a reason to keep them out. Now, if you don’t mind,” he added, “I’ve got a young woman with a sprained ankle and I’d like to take her out of the damp basement and maybe wrap it . . . ”
Detective Hermann looked at Carrie, who’d been shivering since she’d found the body, then at Maddison—who had been very quiet since seeing the ghost, then at the coroner in the process of stringing up caution tape, and said, “Of course.” Chris was left with no choice but to help his cousin up and follow the priest. What he really wanted to do was stay by the cistern; he didn’t like the idea of leaving the body in the hands of a bunch of police officers he didn’t know. He had the maybe-not-so-irrational fear that it would disappear if he did, in the same way he had a maybe-not-so-irrational fear that someone had paraded Cliff Dodson in front of him the other day in a purposeful attempt to scare him.
“So,” Father Michaels said to three distinctly bedraggled kids and an also bedraggled Dr. McRae once they were clustered awkwardly in the middle aisle of the church, clasping his hands. “I have one question, and it’s very important: would anyone like some of the monkey bread I made this morning?”
This offer resulted in nothing but stares. Father Michaels frowned. “Maybe some tea? I might even have some soda still in the fridge. And then we can discuss what you three were doing back here in the first place?”
“Oh,” Chris said, guilty.
“Tea sounds fine,” Maddison said weakly, and Carrie nodded.
The rectory, which turned out to be through one of the doors up by the altar that Chris hadn’t noticed, was exactly the kind of place Chris would have loved to explore if he hadn’t been stomping on that urge hard out of guilt. It was a small and very vertical house, with a long, spindly staircase and a bunch of smallish rooms with high ceilings, an ancient sea green refrigerator in the tiny kitchen and mismatched lace doilies on the mismatched living room furniture. Father Michaels put the binder in the exact center of his dining room table with the solemnity he would give to a Bible, and then put a tea kettle on to boil and microwaved a plate of monkey bread while everyone stood in an awkward cluster in the kitchen. Then he herded everyone back through the dining room and into the living room, explaining as he did that, “We’ve been looking for that binder for months, it’s at the center of a massive argument about the Christmas poinsettias.”
The living room seemed even smaller than it actually was, since Father Michaels had stuffed it with books, stained-glass pieces, and dinged-up musical instruments to such a point that it was difficult to sit down without knocking anything over.
“Oh,” Father Michaels said absently when Chris almost backed into a cymbal stand, “don’t mind those, I play a bit.”
A bit was possibly an understatement, considering the trumpet behind the couch, the electric keyboard balanced on a folding chair, and the triangle laid carelessly on a sofa cushion, but Chris restrained himself to just looking and sat down on his fingers. It was agony. The priest had an apothecary’s chest against one wall and a bookshelf full of geodes against another, and it was the sort of room you could explore for a day and not notice half of the contents, provided you weren’t feeling extraordinarily guilty and nervous or limping badly.
“The good thing,” Dr. McRae said, gently rewrapping the Ace bandage around Carrie’s ankle, “is that this is nothing more than a mild sprain. You could be walking in a couple of days, as long as you don’t do anything to redamage it.”
“You’re sure?” Maddison asked, and her father pretended to look offended.
“Mads,” he said, spreading his hands in a harmless “Who, me?” gesture. “You can trust me, I’m a doctor.”
“Of the arts,” Maddison pointed out, arms crossed.
“Well, true,” Dr. McRae said. “But I have all sorts of certifications and I do know my basic first aid, so you are going to be fine,” he told Carrie. “Provided you don’t fall down any more wells.”
“I’ll admit that I wasn’t looking forward to working on my Sunday sermon all evening,” Father Michaels said when he’d successfully settled a tray of mugs on the coffee table and passed around plates of cinnamon-sugar bread. “But I wasn’t really looking to replace that with a fun evening of dealing with the haunted cistern.”
Chris tried desperately not to fidget. To his surprise, Dr. McRae, who was sitting right next to Father Michaels, did fidget.
“And it is partly my fault for leaving a hole like that covered with flimsy boards that can’t hold the weight of a teenager without breaking,” Father Michaels continued with a sigh. “Would you be kind enough to tell me why you were there? At least so I can put up better warning signs?”
You could have heard a pin drop or a cricket chirp. Or the mrrrt of the gray long-haired cat who squeezed out from under the armchair Father Michaels was sitting in. The cat glared at everyone with bright yellow eyes, took a swipe at Father Michaels that he dodged with a skill that clearly came from practice, and climbed up the tablecloth draped over a side table. The cat settled directly next to Dr. McRae’s plate.
“You don’t get to comment. Where were you when this was going on?” Father Michaels said to the cat.
“Staring at me through the window,” Dr. McRae volunteered, eying the cat nervously and sniffling. “Because I spent a good five minutes sitting on the rectory steps worrying before Father Michaels got back from the hospital and could let me in, so, Maddison?”
“Uh,” Maddison said, putting her mug down hurriedly. The mugs all had a grinning cartoon image of Jesus on them, and according to Father Michaels had been sold by the youth group to raise money for the Mary Garden.
“They weren’t very popular,” the priest had admitted while pouring tea. “I think it was the fact that the eyes seem to follow you around the room, or maybe the strange greenish cast to Our Lord and Savior’s skin.”
He had, as a consequence, bought almost the entire stock for his own use, despite having decent china teacups from his grandmother stored in the side storage room. Chris was beginning to think there was something evil in that room, and that it got into and warped everything.
Maddison was still staring into space, obviously trying to come up with a reason for falling in the cistern. She was failing, and Chris decided that the awkward silence had gone on long enough.
“It’s a school project!” he blurted out, and got pinned with horrified looks from Carrie and Maddison, although Carrie’s was more of a you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me horrified look. Dr. McRae gave him an oddly amused look.
Belatedly, Chris remembered that Carrie had only recently told him that “it’s a school project” wouldn’t work in this case.
“I mean, not a school project, exactly,” he amended, and the murder in Carrie’s eyes went down to assault and battery. “But we did a section on local early Florida history at the end of the school year and some of it was really interesting and w-we were looking into it a little more.” There, that could actually work. And it was based in the truth; they had done a section on local history, in late April. “And we were . . . trying to find out more about this early Spanish mission that disappeared and the priest who recorded it, and it was supp
osed to have been part of this church. So we were, well, looking for some of the old parish registers to see if they mentioned him.”
That sounded studious enough, and if Carrie and Maddison backed him up they might even get Father Michaels to help them find the parish registers. They would at least have a reason to ask him.
“You were looking into the Santa Maria mission?” Father Michaels asked.
“Yes?” Carrie offered. Maddison was involved in some sort of staring contest with her father that she appeared to be winning.
“Well, that’s a new one,” Father Michaels said, getting to his feet and shifting the cat, who growled at him. Chris was just frantically trying to think of better excuses to use when Father Michaels went on and stopped him short. “Normally I only ever get graduate students in history programs asking about the mission,” he said, and removed the statue of Mary and the tablecloth from the side table the cat had been perched on, revealing that the side table was actually a freestanding safe.
“The thing about grad students,” Father Michaels added as he spun the lock open, “is that they’ve spent enough time doing research that they call me first, and only end up wandering around the church falling down stairs and into the holy water fount or sitting on rosebushes and putting their feet through the ceiling by mistake on the third or fourth visit.”
He swung the door of the safe open. “Technically,” he added, “the mission was named Santa Maria, Estrella de la Mar, in honor of”—his voice took on the sing-song quality of someone reciting—“Santa Maria, Nuestra Dama, Estrella de la Mar.”
“Saint Mary, our lady, star of the sea,” Dr. McRae said, breaking off his staring contest with Maddison. “One of the titles of the Virgin, patroness of sailors?”
The cat took an experimental swipe at Dr. McRae, who resumed his resigned glare but transferred it from Maddison to the cat. Then he sneezed. Father Michaels, meanwhile, shifted papers around in the safe for a bit and then came out with a crisp, blue-gray box, utterly unexpected in a church rectory but incredibly familiar to Chris. Next to him, Carrie gave a tiny gasp, so she had recognized it too.
The obvious explanation hit Chris only now, when it was too late to do any good. Duh. If you have a fragile, possibly damaged, historically interesting seventeenth-century parish register then you don’t actually hide it away like the lost treasure in some summer blockbuster. You take precautions against theft and against damage from the elements.
In short, you keep it in an acid-free box in a safe where the priest can keep an eye on it.
TO ADD TO CHRIS’S COMPLETE AND UTTER FEELING of mortification, when Father Michaels put the box down on the coffee table to unfold it and take the book out, the box proved to have a stamp on the lid marking it as the property of Edgewater Archives. This was less a coincidence than it was another moment of Duh, Chris, what else were you expecting? because the supplies you needed to preserve books in an archive weren’t cheap, especially for organizations that needed only a few things. Acid-free paper and boxes and stuff like stainless-steel paper clips were expensive and hard to buy in small quantities, and so the Edgewater Archive bought extra supplies with their bulk orders and sold them to local institutions for pennies. It was the community outreach program Aunt Elsie had been the most protective of. She would have donated things at no cost and in fact sometimes did, except then people took what they didn’t need or never used it. Still, the Edgewater Archives stamp on the box was painful to look at.
“We only have two or three of the old parish registers,” Father Michaels said. “This is the only one we have that mentions Father Dominic Gonzalez. He didn’t start keeping a parish register until 1722, when there were enough church members to make it worthwhile,” Father Michaels continued, paging delicately through the brittle paper. “And it isn’t very much information, so you might be disappointed.”
“What does it say?” Carrie asked.
“On this day of our Lord the fifteenth of September, 1729, were offered masses for these souls,” Father Michaels read haltingly. “Uh, my Latin isn’t the greatest,” he added, “but it goes on to name the men—Juan Calasanz, Antonio Arnau, Paul Sanchez, Gregorio Sanchez, Juan Simon Rodriguez—‘who were among many others lost in the terror of the deluge that sank the fleet of our majesty’s galleons in the year of our Lord 1717. Father Gonzales offered many prayers that we be spared ever more such a deluge and a wreckage, which he had seen with his own eyes from the threshold of this, our mission. May we face adversity with fortitude and trust in God’s will, Amen.’”
“Amen,” Maddison echoed, and then blushed. Father Michaels grinned. Then he put the parish register back in the box and passed it to Carrie, who was sitting closest to him, the clear intent being to let them pass the book around so everyone could look at it.
For something Chris had faced down a ghost to find, the parish register was surprisingly plain. It was a slim book bound in leather, with crumbling pages of intricate cursive in ink that had faded to a pale brown. The entries, although Chris could pick out the occasional name and a few words that he could guess, were all written in Latin and impossible to decipher. He flipped a few pages and then handed the register and its box carefully to Maddison.
“But that’s really all there is about Santa Maria, Estrella de la mar,” Father Michaels explained, “and about Father Gonzalez. Now there are other great sources of information about the early history of this church and the Catholic community in this area, some of them even in English, but if you want more firsthand stuff about Father Gonzalez you’d have to hike out to the ruins of the Mission and poke through the wreckage.”
“Because they left records at the old Mission church?” Carrie asked. Father Michaels nodded.
“Some of the more determined graduate students I’ve talked to actually went out and poked around the old Santa Maria mission, because we know from other sources that the priest who packed up that mission left a lot of stuff out there,” Father Michaels said. “But . . .”
“But it’s dangerous?” Chris offered.
The priest seemed to argue with himself for a second. “That course of action isn’t . . . one I’d recommend,” he said finally. “Not very many people who go looking for that mission manage to find it, and it scares a lot of the ones who do.”
“The mission scares them?” Maddison asked.
“Wait,” Carrie asked almost over the top of Maddison’s question. “How hard is it it to find this mission?”
“That part of the Florida wilderness is supposed to be haunted,” Father Michaels said sheepishly. “At least according to the six or so people who have come by to take pictures of the window for their paper and ended up giving me a blow-by-blow account of their accidental re-creation of a found-footage horror movie, complete with shaky camera footage and a lot of miscellaneous twigs bent into sinister shapes.”
“Oh,” said Maddison, perking up without seeming to realize it. “Really? What kind of haunted is it?”
Dr. McRae closed his eyes in resigned mortification.
“General Florida weirdness?” Father Michaels offered, packing the parish register back into its box. “The mission is in ruins now, and it isn’t marked on most maps of the park, but if you ask any of the rangers they can tell you which trail gets you close and what to look out for. It’s not as though it’s some secret lost temple or anything, I don’t know why people insist on thinking it’s haunted. I honestly think it isn’t anything but active imaginations and too many scary movies, since every single person has told me about something different happening to them, but I live next door to a ghost so I hardly have room to talk.”
“The ghost we just had a run-in with,” Maddison added, and Carrie mumbled, “Not supposed to talk about that sort of thing,” under her breath.
“Oh, probably,” Father Michaels sighed. He had, Chris remembered, been very careful not to turn his back to the cistern and tried to get them all out of there as fast as possible, and he had been more resigned tha
n surprised to find a skeleton in the cistern. Maybe he did believe in the ghost.
“Have you seen a ghost in the cistern?” Chris couldn’t help but ask. He got another shrug and hand wiggle in response.
“I’ve heard weird noises,” Father Michaels explained. “Strange smells, too, but that could just be small mammals getting in the church and then dying, and Grey here . . . ” He poked the cat, who attempted to bite him and then hopped off the couch to rub happily against Dr. McRae’s feet. “He hates that part of the church. Not that Grey doesn’t hate most things,” he added, “and he’s not even supposed to get into that part of the church after the incident with Mrs. Kennedy and the lit advent wreath—but there are also a couple of people in the parish who can’t even go in that side storage room at all, either because of the consequences or that camel, I’m not sure.”
There was a moment of silence as everyone shuddered at the thought of the camel.
“All that being said,” Father Michaels continued, “I’ve never actually seen a ghost, even when I went in there and blessed the place—but then I missed the skeleton, so make of that what you will—and I think there’s an overflow pipe buried under all the junk down there that sometimes lets the wind in. If there is anything in that cistern I don’t think it’s actively evil, or I’d have taken more drastic measures before now.” He grinned. “And you three are without a doubt the strangest thing I’ve ever found back there.”