Silent as the Grave

by Zoe Aarsen

  But we never considered that Father Fahey had instructed her on how to do it.

  “What was happening in February, seventeen years ago?” Trey wondered aloud.

  “It was two months before I was born,” Violet informed us. “My mom had been diagnosed with preeclampsia and put on bed rest right around that time, at least that’s what she told me. If my grandmother was afraid that my mom was going to lose me, then it makes sense that she would have cast the spell then.”

  She shook her head slowly at the piece of paper and asked the question on all of our minds. “Why would a priest at St. Monica’s have written these directions down for her?”

  CHAPTER 14

  THE FRONT DOORS OF ST. MONICA’S were locked, which wasn’t surprising considering that it was after ten o’clock on a Sunday night.

  “Great,” I muttered, pulling on the handle of the front door despite already being aware of the futility. I was so tired I could barely see straight, I reeked of smoke, and now we were standing outside a locked church late at night in the freezing cold. A lump formed in my throat. Becoming emotional wasn’t going to improve my circumstances at all, but the idea of just going back to Florida and simply hoping I wouldn’t die in the next ten days was starting to hold an undeniable appeal.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Trey announced, and without waiting for either Violet or me to reply, he hopped down the cement stairs and followed the path that wrapped around the side of the church.

  Violet frowned at me. “I’m not breaking into a church on Easter Sunday.”

  I shared her sentiment. I’d done enough breaking in, snooping, and sneaking around for a lifetime. But we needed to get our hands on something in particular before we did anything else, and I was too exhausted to think of any other place in town where we might find an object that would meet the criteria. So I trudged down the stairs after Trey, and Violet begrudgingly followed me, huffing and puffing with each step.

  We found him holding open a side door, through which a wedge of pale light spilled onto the path. “I had a feeling this wouldn’t be locked,” he told us. As Violet and I entered, we realized that we had stepped into the small chapel off to the left side of the altar. Although Mom and I hadn’t made a regular habit of going to church for many years, I vaguely remembered this side chapel was where baptisms were usually held. Dim overhead lights had been left on inside the church, which was fortunate, since I had no energy for poking around in cold, dark places filled with objects of religious significance at that hour. A surprisingly sweet and floral scent tickled my senses, and I noticed Easter lilies lining the center aisle of the nave.

  “How did you know there was a side door?” Violet asked Trey.

  “Believe it or not, once upon a time, I was an altar boy.”

  With one earbud in my ear so that I could hear Jennie’s voice over the radio, I walked down the center aisle between the chapel’s pews toward the altar. “We need something that Father Fahey either owns or handles a lot,” I reminded Trey and Violet.

  “The sacristy,” Trey said, and gestured for us to follow him.

  Violet flashed a smirk at me, impressed and amused by Trey’s totally unexpected familiarity with St. Monica’s. Sure enough, when we passed through a doorway at the back of the sanctuary, we entered into a narrow carpeted hallway. Trey reached into the first open doorway along it and flipped on the light switch. He led us into a small, cramped room containing a mahogany wardrobe and two desks. There was a small crucifix hanging on the wall and a cork bulletin board over the desks, to which Easter greeting cards and palm crosses were held in place with pushpins.

  “This is where they keep the vestments,” Trey told us.

  He reached into the wardrobe and pulled out a vibrant purple tunic on a hanger. “He would have worn this one to say mass today. Purple, for Easter.”

  I ran my hand over the smooth fabric and asked Jennie, “Will this work?”

  Violet mumbled, “Do you think we’ll all go to hell for blackmailing a priest?”

  “We haven’t blackmailed anyone yet,” Trey reminded her.

  I shushed them so that I could hear Jennie better. “It’s good enough,” she told me. “Just keep your hand on it in one place long enough for me to get a sense of him.”

  I pressed my hand against the purple fabric. We were there because we had agreed that confronting Father Fahey at the rectory about his involvement in spell-casting probably wouldn’t get us anywhere. There was no reason for him to tell us the truth, and nothing to stop him from calling the police and telling them that Trey was back in town. We needed to better understand why he’d helped Violet’s grandmother, and we needed evidence of just how far his interest in the occult reached. Basically, we needed leverage to make him agree to help us conduct an exorcism on Mischa.

  So yes. As much as I preferred to think of it under different terms, we were essentially there, at the church, using Jennie’s help to gather information for the purpose of blackmailing a priest.

  “What’s she saying?” Violet asked.

  “It’s outside,” Jennie told me. “Something outside, on a brick? There’s writing.”

  I listened for more.

  “It has to do with Ann Simmons and the rosebushes.”

  “Okay,” I said, avoiding Trey and Violet’s eager eyes. “What about other people? Has Father Fahey ever cast spells for other people in town?”

  Behind us, something struck the carpeted floor with a muffled sound. All three of us flinched at the sudden, unexpected motion, and Violet clapped her hand over her heart. “Jesus!” she exclaimed.

  It was a small silver key, and I squatted to pick it up. It seemed to have fallen off the top of the wardrobe, and I knew without asking that Jennie must have exerted as much energy as she could gather to move it.

  “It opens the drawer,” Jennie told me as I held the key up to inspect it more closely. A drawer made sense; the key was too small for a door’s lock. “Top drawer on the larger desk.”

  Of the two desks in the room, the one on the left was slightly larger than the one on the right. FATHER JAMES G. FAHEY was etched into a triangular glass nameplate on that desk, and I nodded in its direction. “Jennie says this key opens the top drawer.”

  Trey stepped aside to allow me to pass, and the key fit into the lock on the top drawer perfectly. I pulled the drawer open to discover an orderly arrangement of office supplies: paper clips, a box of staples, a stack of business cards… and a small red spiral notebook.

  “This,” I said, lifting the notebook for Trey and Violet to see. I didn’t need Jennie to tell me that the notebook was what we’d hoped to find. When I lifted the card-stock cover, I found each lined page to contain a name, a dollar amount, and a note about a request or issue. Some of the notes were more cryptic than others, but all were written in Father Fahey’s distinctive all-caps handwriting.

  LINDSTROM, $50, MOTHER.

  CORTESI, $100, MARRIAGE.

  DEMILO, $75, CROP.

  As I ran my finger over Father Fahey’s handwriting on each page, Jennie showed me a flash of an image detailing why each person had sought the priest’s help, kind of like little movies running behind my eyes. I saw an elderly woman lying in a hospital bed with a scarf wrapped around her head and knew that Marie Lindstrom had asked Father Fahey to cast a spell to allow her ailing mother to pass away peacefully after a long battle with cancer. When I turned to the next page, Jennie showed me a middle-aged woman holding up her husband’s cell phone and reading his text messages with a horrified expression on her face; Jody Cortesi had reason to believe her husband was cheating on her and asked Father Fahey to end the affair in an effort to save her marriage. And then I saw Stephani deMilo’s dad riding a tractor across a field of soybeans in the hot summer sun, and understood instantly that Stephani’s family had been in danger of losing their enormous farm because of dwindling crops each fall.

  On page after page, Jennie showed me familiar faces from around town dealing with hea
rtbreak, financial problems, grief, loneliness, and unrequited love.

  “What does it say?” Trey asked me.

  I turned to face him and Violet. “This seems to be like a record of requests for help and the amounts of money that Father Fahey charged,” I said. I handed the notebook to him so he could take a look for himself.

  “That’s it! It’s perfect!” Violet whispered with a smile. “We can take pictures and back all of this up, and he’ll have no choice but to help us. People in town would freak out if they knew the pastor of their church was doing all this freelance witchcraft!”

  Trey frowned. “Yeah, except that half of the population of our town is in here, so they must already know.” He handed the notebook back to me. “Besides, this basically looks like a list of people who asked him to say a special mass for them. People do that, you know? My grandmother tells me all the time that she has her priest say mass in the hope of saving my soul.”

  “Secrets,” I heard Jennie’s voice say over the earbuds.

  Frustrated to have been wrong, Violet frowned at both of us. “Well, Father Fahey’s boss wouldn’t find it amusing that he’s casting all these spells. I can’t imagine the Vatican would think too highly of that. Even if it looks on paper like he’s taking requests for special mass offerings, he’s charging a lot of money for it. What’s he doing with the money?”

  “You’re right,” I told Violet. “We should take pictures of all of these entries as backup, because if he refuses to help us with the exorcism, we can do something with them. But Jennie seems to think he’ll help us because he won’t want everyone in town to know how often he’s doing this. He knows the secrets of everyone in Willow.”

  Violet set about taking a picture of each page in the notebook with her phone, and Trey slipped his fingers through mine and squeezed my hand. “Does Jennie really think we can convince him to help us?”

  “What do you think, Jennie?” I asked aloud.

  She reminded me that it was difficult for her to predict the future when someone’s free will was involved.

  “He’s got that room in the basement of the rectory,” I reminded Trey. “I mean, he’s definitely performed an exorcism before.” But even as I listened to myself speaking, I knew that we were getting ourselves deeper into a mess that was larger than all of us. If Father Fahey had given Violet’s grandmother directions on how to cast the original spell, then maybe he’d also advised Trey’s mother on how to cast her spell, the one that had caused all the trouble. It could be very dangerous for us to cross him, but I had nothing to lose anymore.

  When Violet was done, I tucked the notepad into the interior pocket of my coat, and we headed back outside into the cold night. Violet and Trey turned right to follow the path to the rectory, which was behind the church. But sensing that there was still part of the puzzle we needed to see, I blurted, “You guys, wait. Jennie said something about writing on a brick.”

  Trey waved in the direction of the enormous church. “There are a lot of bricks here, McKenna.”

  “Just hold on a second,” I urged him. “Which brick, Jennie? Which one ties Father Fahey back to Violet’s grandmother?”

  “Across,” Jennie told me.

  “Across where?” I asked. Straight across from the chapel door were tall hedges. “I’m going to need you to be more specific, because it’s cold out here, and it’s getting late.”

  “The other building.”

  Other building? The only other building besides the church and rectory in the St. Monica’s complex was the elementary school, which was past the hedges and across an enormous parking lot. I walked down the path to where the hedges ended so that I could take a better look at the school building, and my head rose as if invisible hands were repositioning it. The two-story school building in the distance had been built with limestone, and its windows were dark behind the paper Easter decorations that had been hung in them.

  Trey and Violet joined me and both gazed out across the parking lot at the school in wonderment. Without saying a word, the three of us walked past Violet’s parked car and over the dark expanse of the lot until we reached the grassy lawn surrounding the school. In the lead, feeling as if my feet were being guided by Jennie, I walked toward the front corner of the building. My eyes came to rest on a bronze plaque hung on the brick wall, level with my eyes.

  Violet read the words embossed on the plaque aloud. “ ‘St. Monica’s Elementary School, August 2003. Many thanks to the generosity of Harold and Ann Simmons… ?”

  “That doesn’t make sense. My mom went to St. Monica’s when she was a kid,” Trey said. “That was way before 2003.”

  I looked down the length of the building, past the double doors of the entrance and toward the back, where I knew the gymnasium was located. “They built onto it. Here, in the front, and the gym. See how the limestone’s a different color here than near the front doors? And look at the roof over the gym.”

  Unlike the roof over the rest of the building, the roof of the gym was peaked, with brown tiles covering it. I couldn’t recall ever having been inside, but it made sense—especially if it had been constructed decades after the original building—that the architects had sloped the roof because of the excessive snow our area of Wisconsin received every winter.

  “You didn’t know that your grandparents donated a ton of money to build onto the elementary school?” I asked Violet, doubting that she could possibly have been so ignorant. “I mean, they added onto the library, too.”

  “And the community center,” Trey chimed in. “Haven’t you ever noticed the sign by the pool? They closed it one spring when we were kids to renovate and build the toddler pool. I only remember because the pool didn’t open that year on Memorial Day weekend because the construction wasn’t done yet, and everyone was angry.”

  Violet shrank a step back from us as if we were attacking her. “I had no idea! God! Obviously my grandparents invested a lot around this town. But I didn’t grow up here, so how would I have known?”

  “Donating money to build an addition on a Catholic elementary school is kind of suspicious, especially if your own kids don’t attend that school,” I gently pointed out to her. “Did your dad and your uncle go here?”

  Violet looked uncomfortably at Trey and then at me. “They went to boarding school in Connecticut.”

  “Of course,” Trey mumbled.

  I checked the time on my phone and saw that it was a few minutes after eleven o’clock. Perhaps Father Fahey had written down a two-digit number in his red notebook to account for Ann Simmons, services rendered. But the plaque on the school was proof enough to convince me that the favor he’d done for her was a big one, one worth millions. I glanced up at the sky. The moon had waned down to a little more than a half—a waning gibbous, to be precise. A visual reminder of the clock running out.

  Even though I felt like I might fall asleep standing upright, I couldn’t risk getting killed in an accident on the way back to Violet’s house. It had never been more urgent to just keep pressing forward. “Let’s go,” I told Trey and Violet. “This can’t wait until tomorrow.”

  We walked past the creepy white statues of various blank-eyed saints out in front of the rectory. From the patchy lawn below, it looked like everyone inside the building had turned in for the night. But when I tilted my head up toward the rectory’s second floor, I saw the cyan glow of a TV screen through the horizontal blinds hung in the windows. Someone was still awake inside, although the only residents of the rectory I knew of were Father Fahey, elderly Father Nowicki, and a visiting priest from Africa.

  Ignoring the business hours for the church office posted near the front door, I pressed the doorbell three times in fast succession. The night was so quiet that all of us cringed as we heard the shrill ring ripple through the three-story rectory. Moments later, I held my breath as I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. Trey stepped up alongside me and gripped my hand so tightly it felt like he was trying to cut off circulation to my fing
ertips.

  The locks on the door twisted open, and we found ourselves face-to-face with Father Fahey, who wore a threadbare brown terry-cloth robe and held a mug of tea. While he hardly looked happy to see us, he took a long look at Trey, most likely recognizing him and assuming we were there for an unpleasant reason. Nonetheless, he greeted us through the screen door with a polite smile. “To what do I owe this late-night visit?”

  I tugged the earbuds out of my ear, jammed them into my coat pocket along with my phone, and flashed the red notebook at him with a frown. “We need to speak with you.”

  His smile faded when he saw the notebook in my hands. “I’ll let you in because it’s my duty,” he told me. “But I hope that the three of you come in the name of the Lord and don’t have any ill intentions.”

  The familiar smell of the rectory—alphabet soup mixed with Murphy Oil Soap—overwhelmed me as we stepped inside, along with the memory of having passed through here with Trey just six months earlier. In a low voice, the priest told us, “Father Nowicki is already asleep, so please keep your voices lowered.”

  We followed him to the kitchen, where he gestured toward the table indicating that we should sit down.

  “Don’t you want to go downstairs?” I asked. “Maybe you don’t recognize us from the fall.”

  “Oh, I recognize you,” Father Fahey told me, leaning against the back of the empty fourth chair at the table instead of sitting on it. “And you must be the Simmons girl. Ann’s granddaughter,” he said to Violet.

  She nodded. “How’d you know?”

  “You look so much like her—well, when she was young,” Father Fahey said.

  Having had enough of the pleasantries, Trey said, “We’re not here to chat. We need you to help us perform an exorcism, and don’t even waste our time by telling us you don’t know how to do it. You told us you did last time we were here.”