Secrets of the Old Church

by E. A. House

  With that he more or less let the whole matter of them getting caught where they weren’t supposed to be drop, and instead asked Chris, Carrie, and Maddison a number of questions about the research they’d been doing into Father Gonzales and the history of the church. Luckily Carrie really had done her research and Chris had skimmed the church’s website so they didn’t seem too obviously to be faking it.

  “Yeah, Father Gonzalez is a bit of a local legend,” Father Michaels explained when Carrie asked if he was the brown-robed figure in the center of the church’s rose window. Which was another puzzle to Chris, because that window was blue, so shouldn’t it have been “the blue window”? “They used to say he carved a mission church out of rock and sheer determination, and he did so much for the sailors on this island that even the other congregations liked him. Mad George Lucian is supposed to have come up with the window designs for this church after he saw Father Gonzales in his dreams for seven nights in a row, standing in front of a different stained-glass window every night.” Father Michaels sighed. “But that story sounds too neat and tidy to be true,” he added. “It’s sad, because the reason Father Gonzales was such a friend of sailors is the 1717 Fleet disaster. A truer legend that a lot of people skip over is that he saw the whole thing and it devastated him. He spent—well, you heard that entry in the parish register—he spent the rest of his life praying for the souls of those who were lost in the wreck, and the priest who succeeded him followed his example. It’s why the name of this church has changed but the saint has always been a patron of sailors.”

  “Saint Erasmus is a patron saint of sailors?” Carrie asked.

  Chris looked at her in surprise. Saint Mary, our lady, star of the sea, Chris thought, isn’t it pretty obvious?

  “Yes,” Father Michaels said, “one of the major ones. He gets shortened to Saint Elmo sometimes, and San Telmo.”

  Chris very nearly jumped in surprise. Maddison looked intrigued again.

  “And before anyone asks, no, I haven’t ever had a run-in with ball lightning while I’ve been priest here,” Father Michaels added. He’d apparently figured out what Maddison’s area of interest was because he addressed the comment mostly to her. “Or Saint Elmo’s fire.” He looked fondly at the irritable gray mop that was curled comfortably on Dr. McRae’s feet. “Though he likes to poke me in the nose in the middle of the night and when he builds up enough static electricity he zaps me, but that doesn’t count.”

  “Saint Elmo’s fire is this weird bluish static electricity that builds up on ships,” Maddison explained to Carrie and Chris in an undertone. “It’s also called ball lightning, and it’s sometimes thought to be supernatural.”

  “Like a green flash?” Chris asked.

  “I don’t know if a green flash is considered supernatural,” Maddison said thoughtfully. “That’s when the sun suddenly looks green when it’s setting, right?”

  “Yeah. But I’ve never seen it,” Chris said.

  “Professor Griffin has once, remember?” Carrie reminded him. “Two years ago? He was so excited we got him a cake.”

  “Or, it could have a perfectly reasonable explanation, like the refraction of light,” Father Michaels said, bringing the side conversation to a halt.

  “Like the disappearance of Cesar Francisco?” Maddison asked. “You didn’t expect the body in the cistern to be him,” she added when the priest frowned.

  “I’ve never been entirely convinced he died there,” Father Michaels admitted. “There are some holes in the legend; for one thing, my predecessor’s predecessor was never that deaf.” He shrugged. “But then again, I’ve never seen the ghost, so I can’t say he is or isn’t Cesar Francisco.”

  “He didn’t look like anyone in particular,” Maddison offered, but Father Michaels was frowning at his cat, who was now genuinely snoring on Dr. McRae’s feet. Dr. McRae had been making increasingly strange faces over the course of the conversation, and his eyes, Chris now noticed, were red and watering.

  “I realize I should have asked this earlier,” Father Michaels said. “Are you by any chance allergic to cats?”

  Dr. McRae tried to offer a polite denial but he was interrupted halfway by a violent sneezing fit, and Maddison and Father Michaels jointly decided that it was time for everyone to head home before, as Maddison put it, “Dad starts having trouble breathing.”

  “Can I talk to you for a second, Father?” Dr. McRae asked as they gathered up a pile of mugs and dislodged Grey, who slunk under the armchair and hissed at the world. “In private,” he added, and sneezed again. Father Michaels looked puzzled but agreed, and Maddison must have picked up on something because she grabbed Carrie and made a beeline for the body of the church and then down the aisle and into the entryway. Carrie gave Chris a significant look and he hurried to follow them, so the only spying he managed was a glimpse of Dr. McRae and Father Michaels bending over the rack of prayer candles. Then Maddison was pushing the second set of church doors shut and studying the bulletin board.

  “I saw some prayer cards I want to look at somewhere on here,” she announced, and Chris and Carrie spent a confusing five minutes reading about pancake breakfasts on the bulletin board while trying not to wonder what Dr. McRae and Father Michaels were talking about. There wasn’t really room for all three of them in the tiny hallway, either, and eventually Carrie sat down on a set of steps that turned out to lead up to the choir loft and Chris found a visitors’ log. He thought about signing it, but then the memory of Sketchy Guy stalking them loomed up in his consciousness, and he flipped through it instead. It was a big, heavy book of good-quality paper, and it went back years. Some of the signatures in the book had been there since the late eighties. Early in the nineties Chris’s absent page flipping hit a snag and he was fingering the ripped edge when Carrie came up behind him.

  “Find anything interesting in there?” she asked him. Maddison was frowning in thought with two different prayer cards in each hand and another tucked under her chin.

  “There’s a page missing,” Chris said, but just then Dr. McRae and Father Michaels came through the doors and he let the matter, and the cover of the book, drop.

  Whatever Father Michaels and Dr. McRae had been talking about they didn’t feel inclined to share, because Dr. McRae went right for the doors outside while fishing a Kleenex out of his pocket, sneezing. Father Michaels paused just inside the doorway to the church.

  “I’ll keep you in my prayers,” he said to Chris, Carrie, and Maddison. “If that’s all right with you. And remember that the doors of this church are always open to you.” He paused. Then grinned ever so slightly. “Except maybe not the ones marked ‘Authorized Personnel Only.’”

  DETECTIVE HERMANN WATCHED THE BODY BAG GET wheeled out to an ambulance with a deep scowl on his face. “We’ll need statements from all of you at some point,” he said when the group neared him. “But for now”—his gaze fell on Carrie’s wrapped ankle and the way she was leaning heavily on Chris—“it’s fine if you just go home. Just don’t leave on vacation or anything without contacting us first.”

  Chris felt such a statement was moderately ominous. He was unexpectedly grateful for Carrie’s injury; he was pretty sure it was the main reason everyone was cutting them so much slack. Even so, Chris wasn’t looking forward to explaining what he’d been doing at the church to a police officer. Especially since he was a little—okay, kind of a lot—worried that there were people in the police department working against them. They still didn’t know if Dodson had been the only one behind Aunt Elsie’s murder . . .

  The trip home was tense.

  It wasn’t entirely Dr. McRae’s fault, either. Maddison’s father offered to drive them all home in a tone of voice that suggested he might run someone over if they didn’t accept. Maybe that’s more suspicious than helpful, Chris thought to himself, but he really does look like he wants to murder someone. Then he drove the few miles from Saint Erasmus to the street the Kingsolvers lived on in silence broken only by th
e occasional sneeze. Apparently he was really very allergic to cats.

  The only good thing was that Maddison had called shotgun as soon as they got to the parking lot, and so Chris did not have to sit next to Dr. McRae and try to make polite conversation, because all he could think of—So, you’re really allergic to cats and By the way, I’m still seventy-percent sure you tried to kill me—were conversational openings hand designed to get him glared at. At the least. Who knew what a sneezing, itching, already irritated Dr. McRae would do if bothered? In the end, it was Dr. McRae himself who broke the silence, by turning to Maddison and asking, in a tone low enough that Chris and Carrie could pretend not to hear, “Do we need to have a talk about the ‘telling someone’ rule?”

  “Can we pretend I realized that I forgot the rule when I was halfway down a cistern in the dark?” Maddison asked, sinking low in her seat despite wearing a seat belt. “Because that’s totally what happened, and I think falling down a cistern in the dark and then getting stuck there for hours is punishment enough for forgetting—oooohh, Mom is going to be—I don’t even know!”

  “Horrified? Smug? Tempted to never let you out of the house ever again?”

  “Yeah,” Maddison said. “So, I’m already very sorry and you don’t need to lecture me. Because I already lectured myself for an hour.”

  “Okay,” Maddison’s father said-sneezed. “That’s fair. It’s not getting you out of trouble—and I am telling your mom what happened—but it is fair. Your mom says you were in a foul mood when you left?” he added.

  “Yeah,” Maddison said in a small voice.

  “Did you hammer it out or do I need to beat somebody up?”

  There was a slight possibility, Chris thought, that if he threw himself from the moving car he’d survive the impact and subsequent fall into—he checked outside—a crocodile-infested canal. It might be preferable to sitting the conversation through to its logical conclusion.

  “Dad!” Maddison yelped.

  “Well, do I?”

  “No!” Maddison said firmly.

  “Please no,” Carrie added, not helping at all. “I’m too used to him.”

  “Ah, well,” Kevin McRae said. “It had to happen someday. Oh—and at least it wasn’t that Tyler fellow who used to follow you around making idiotic comments about your eyebrows.”

  “Daaaaaaaad!”

  “Although he was on the football team,” Dr. McRae pointed out.

  “What’s the ‘tell someone’ rule?” Chris asked, now even more afraid of the direction the conversation was going. Carrie, the traitor, was giggling hysterically into her fist and would probably start encouraging them when she caught her breath.

  “It’s simple, really,” Dr. McRae said, sobering. “Maddison has to tell someone where she’s going and how long she’s going to be gone whenever she goes out. Everyone in the family does.”

  “I forgot to do it this afternoon,” Maddison admitted. “I was angry when I left for the church and it completely slipped my mind—how did you know where I was, anyway?”

  “Luckily for me, when you’re angry you also stop being ‘tidy Maddison’ and turn into ‘leaves everything in a pile on the floor’ Maddison,” Dr. McRae said. “I got back from the police department needing to tell you something and you weren’t there, but you’d left me a decent transposition cypher with the translated message written in underneath telling me that you were going to the church at noon and that you were sorry. Very sorry, judging by the number of times the word was repeated.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you worry,” Maddison offered.

  “Normally it wouldn’t be a problem,” Dr. McRae sighed. “I would have waited for you to get home and given you a lecture when you did, but something happened today that all three of you deserve to know about, and I was . . . worried. Which is why I drove out to the church and pounded on the door for five minutes before I remembered there’s nobody in on Fridays.”

  “Sorry,” Maddison said.

  “We’re lucky Father Michaels is a calm sort of person, and doesn’t get upset if you scare his cat,” Dr. McRae said.

  “Aaand, again, sorry,” Maddison said.

  “Ah, but I didn’t fall down the cistern and sprain anything, so I got the better end of the deal.”

  Actually, Chris suspected Dr. McRae had gotten the worse end of the deal, because he’d been so worried. But he didn’t say anything.

  “So, what was the thing we deserve to know?” Carrie asked nervously.

  Dr. McRae looked at Maddison and then at Chris and Carrie in the rearview mirror, and pulled abruptly into the parking lot of the local grocery store.

  “It won’t be in the papers until tomorrow,” he said when he’d parked and turned around to face all three of them with only a slight crick in his neck. “So I’d appreciate it if you two don’t tell your parents where you found out about this until after the news breaks, because this isn’t the sort of thing that should be leaked, but I happen to have a friend on the force who tells me a lot more than he should.” He sighed. “Cliff Dodson—the man who admitted to killing Elsie Kingsolver—they found him dead this morning.”

  “Wait,” Maddison said. “Dodson? Like, threatened park rangers and tried to shoot Chris and Carrie, that Dodson?”

  “Dead? How?” Carrie asked.

  Dr. McRae sighed. “Yes, Maddison, that Dodson,” he said. “And well, I was down at the police department because they wanted to ask me questions about the time he tried to shoot at me and three park rangers . . . ” He started to trail off, because Carrie was giving him her best worried look.

  “Oh,” Maddison interrupted. She looked like she’d just made a connection and she couldn’t believe it. “Cliff Dodson was Sketchy Guy, wasn’t he?”

  “Sketchy Guy?” Dr. McRae mouthed, and then he shook himself. Carrie was still giving him huge worried and puzzled eyes, and he sighed.

  “How did he die?” Carrie asked.

  “They’re pretty sure it was suicide,” he admitted. Chris gaped at him; Carrie was frowning in puzzlement and Maddison looked shocked, and if Dr. McRae had been intending to avoid most of the details because of their tender years he crumbled in the fact of their combined confusion.

  “They found . . . they found him hanging,” he said grimly. “Not a lot else it could be. You don’t fake things like that very well in real life.” He cleared his throat. “Although anyone trying would have to realize how strange it would look. Out of character, I mean,” he clarified. “Dodson had a rap sheet the length of his arm and no sense to go with it. He was not the type to kill himself for getting caught.”

  “So he really wasn’t the type to commit suicide?” Maddison asked quietly.

  “He wasn’t the type to even come up with the idea,” her father told her. “Just—it’s probably nothing, I’m probably overreacting because you’re growing up and falling in—”

  “Don’t say it!”

  “Cisterns,” Dr. McRae finished innocently. Maddison actually growled at him. “But I still worry,” he continued, serious again. “About all of you,” he added, although he seemed to direct it especially at Carrie.

  Something about Carrie seemed to bother Dr. McRae, not that he was in any way rude to her. In fact, he seemed to be especially careful with her, but that might simply have been because she was injured; he looked at her as though she made him sad for some reason.

  “I thought this mess was over,” Dr. McRae said, and, wow, he was gripping the steering wheel tightly with that one hand. “I thought the threat was over, and now one more person is dead. I can’t deal with you going missing, you understand? And if you are going to run around researching the history of the mission you all need to do more careful research before diving in like that,” he finished. Chris didn’t entirely like the way he said “researching the history of the mission.” It sounded far too knowing, and if there was anyone who was going to guess what they were up to and become a gigantic stumbling block it was Dr. McRae.


  Well. That was the whole problem still, wasn’t it?

  “What were you talking to Father Michaels about?” Maddison asked suddenly, and Dr. McRae sneezed in surprise.

  “Oh, that? I was, just checking that, well . . . ” He looked at them in the rearview mirror and bit his lip. “You know that ominous moment in a movie where the main character goes to ask the librarian about the secret book of arcane spells, or what have you, and is just about to leave with the information he needs when the librarian mentions that it’s the oddest thing but they’re the second person to come in asking about that book?”

  “Yes,” Maddison said slowly.

  “Oh no,” Chris said.

  “Actually you got lucky this time, the last person who came in asking about the parish register and Father Gonzalez was a family historian from Idaho.”

  THE PROBLEM, CHRIS ADMITTED TO HIS COUSIN LATE that evening, after convincing two sets of parents that Carrie had tripped coming down the steps of the church they had visited to look at stained-glass windows, was that they hadn’t really accomplished anything.

  “What do you mean?” Carrie asked, chewing on a pen. She was sitting inside Chris’s room this time, mainly because her family had stayed over for dinner and then she and Chris had disappeared to copy out the instructions for their summer reading project. The adults were in the living room, hashing out the pros and cons of getting security systems installed in both houses. Chris actually had lost his summer reading project instructions within about a day of getting them. He felt guilty for losing his copy, and he and Carrie actually had talked over the assignment, for about fifteen minutes, but it didn’t take that long to decide that Billy Budd was a safer bet than Moby Dick, and then they’d turned to the more pressing matter of Aunt Elsie’s clues and the final resting place of the San Telmo.