by Jane Haddam
“Personally,” Declan Boyd said, “I think Barry and Andy have some kind of deal. Barry gets what he wants—which is a great big audience every time Andy comes on. Some of the farmers out there are really addicted to Catholic conspiracy theories. Andy gets to build a big rep as a dissident priest. In his head, he probably compares himself to Sakharov.”
Gregor grunted. The priest on the screen did not look as if he envisioned himself as another Sakharov. He looked as if he envisioned himself as a ski bum. Roman collar or no Roman collar, all he needed to be a perfect type was a pair of poles and some goggles.
“Now, brothers and sisters,” Barry Field said, “Father Walsh is here today to talk about something that might not seem, right off the bat, to have anything to do with the Catholic Church at all. It might not seem, right off the bat, to have anything to do with us in Colchester. Colchester is by and large a priestly city, and we all know it. The forces of God have been working here for many years. Father Walsh is here to tell us that the forces of the Devil have been working here too.”
“Never use one word where ten will do,” Declan Boyd said. “I bet he finished his English essays in fifteen minutes flat.”
“Now, Father Walsh,” Barry Field said, “a lot of the good people out there think Devil worship is a new thing in our community, that it hasn’t been around very long. You know better, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” Andy Walsh said. His voice was dreamy. “I know much better.”
“Well, Father Walsh, how long ago was it, would you say, that devil worship came to this city?”
Andy Walsh smiled. In fact, he grinned. To Gregor, he looked like a man getting ready to play an enormous joke on somebody he didn’t like.
“Well, Barry,” he said, “anybody who’s been alive long enough, and has a good enough memory, must know it’s been around here for at least twenty years.”
“Twenty years? Are you saying there’ve been men and women worshiping the Prince of Darkness, offering up sacrifices to the evil one, right here in Colchester for—twenty years?”
“That’s what I said.”
“But why haven’t we heard about this? Why hasn’t it been on the front page of every newspaper? Why hasn’t it been proclaimed by the pundits of the television screen? Why hasn’t it—”
“I hate these,” Declan Boyd said abruptly. “It’s been rehearsed. Can’t you see it? Barry Field is a really terrible actor.”
“He’s a terrible something,” Gregor agreed.
“I don’t understand how people don’t see how phony he is,” Declan Boyd said. “He doesn’t make any effort to hide it.”
Back on the screen, Andy Walsh was playing games with his arms, mocking remonstrances. “But it has been in the newspapers,” he said. “It’s been on television, too. Every one old enough out there must have seen it.”
“Seen what, Father Walsh?”
“The reports about the animal sacrifices in Black Rock Park. From what I remember—we were both in high school at the time—it made every media outlet in the area.”
“Did you say animal sacrifices in Black Rock Park?” Barry Field said. “Well, Father, I remember some reports of something going on in Black Rock Park, but nothing about sacrifices. The way I heard it, what happened back there twenty years ago was some juvenile delinquents doing their evil work on some mangy dog.”
“Three mangy dogs,” Andy Walsh said. “And two cats.”
“Even so, Father Walsh, I don’t remember anything about worshiping the Devil in that case.”
“I don’t either,” Andy Walsh said. “That’s not the way the papers reported it. That doesn’t mean that wasn’t the way it was.”
“Do you have any reason to believe that that’s the way it was?”
“Of course,” Andy Walsh said. Gregor realized suddenly that the priest’s eyes were twinkling. He was having fun. “I have the best reasons in the world. I’ve made a thorough study of Devil worship, Mr. Field, and I can tell you here and now that that incident showed all the signs.”
Gregor felt a movement beside him, and turned to find Declan Boyd leaning so far forward he was nearly off the couch. The cherubic face was not so cherubic any more. It was shocked, confused and a little green.
“What is he doing?” Boyd demanded. “What in the name of God is he doing?”
Actually, Gregor wanted an answer to that question himself.
SIX
[1]
IT WAS 9:16 WHEN Judy Eagan ran up the walk to Peg Morrissey Monaghan’s front door, and 9:16:45 when she plowed into the foyer, slammed the front door behind her, and started chewing up Peg’s carpets on her way to the back of the house. Peg was in the kitchen, with a view of nothing more edifying than a television set still tuned to WNVB and the backyard, but she knew who it was. Judy’s heels were so high and so sharp, when she walked across carpet she always sounded like a sewing machine needle making progress through a thick length of cloth. Peg wished she’d make the same sound on her way out, right away. Either that, or that Joe would start remembering to lock the door. That was the problem with being married to a man who had grown up in a town too small to have crime. He never took the possibility of intrusion seriously.
Judy said a high, fluting, exasperated “hello” to the children as she came through the television room and then slammed into the kitchen. Her hair was wild, her coat was open, and she wasn’t carrying her pocketbook. Peg couldn’t imagine how she’d managed to leave it. Judy was as paranoid about her pocketbook as Richard Nixon had been about tapes.
Judy shrugged off her coat, threw it across the kitchen table, and said, “Did you see it? Did you hear about it? Have you any idea what—”
“Yes,” Peg said. “I did see it. I was flipping through the channels and I saw Andy, so I stopped to listen—”
“That goddamned two-faced son of a—”
“Judy.”
Judy shot a guilty look at the door to the television room, from which the sounds of the Sesame Street Learning about Letters videotape were coming clearly. “Sorry,” she said. “I keep forgetting the little brats are here.”
Peg picked up Judy’s coat—it had skidded into a basket of apples and overturned it—and folded it neatly over the back of a chair. “Believe it or not, I don’t think of my children as brats. In fact, I take a certain amount of pride in believing they’re well behaved.”
“How can you tell? God, the last good night’s sleep you had must have been in 1978.”
“I sleep fine.”
“For God’s sake. How can you live like this?”
“By choice,” Peg said. Then she mentally scolded herself for needling Judy—choice was one of Judy’s favorite words—and started putting apples back in the basket. The problem with Judy, Peg thought, was that she didn’t really believe in choice at all. She was absolutely sure she had found the one right way to live, and she was just as absolutely sure that any woman who didn’t want to live that way had been—well, brainwashed. To say the least. It was impossible for Judy Eagan to believe that Peg Morrissey Monaghan was actually happy.
Peg got the last of the apples into the basket and sat down. “How did you see it?” she asked. “I thought you were over at the church, dealing with the—”
“The goat,” Judy finished. “I was. I didn’t see it. Declan Boyd told me about it. He was absolutely hopping.”
“Declan Boyd?” Peg frowned. “Why would he be hopping? He didn’t have anything to do with it. He wasn’t even living in the state at the time.”
“He’s living in the state now,” Judy said, “and in O’Bannion’s jurisdiction. And you know how O’Bannion feels about what happened in Black Rock Park.” “Yes, I do. But Father Boyd wasn’t—”
“Oh, Peg,” Judy said. “When Andy causes trouble, Dec gets creamed. You know that. Andy’s so damn good at disappearing during firefights.”
Peg looked back at the television. It was a little black-and-white set Joe had bought so that she could watch s
oap operas while the children were in the other room watching Alice in Wonderland. It was still tuned to WNVB, now showing a choir of green-robed women singing “Rock of Ages.” Peg got out of her chair and turned it off.
“Maybe,” she said, “what we ought to do is go to the Cardinal and explain it all.”
“No,” Judy said.
“Why not? We weren’t even there for whatever it was that happened at the end.”
“What happened at the end was that a lot of animals got their throats cut.”
“But we weren’t there. Kath and you and me. We—”
“We were there long enough,” Judy said. “We were there for the beginning.”
“And then we left.”
“Yes, we did. But we didn’t tell anybody. We didn’t do anything to stop it. Even though we knew what was going on.”
Peg flushed and looked away. “We were afraid to tell anybody then. And we were—”
“Stoned?” Judy said. “Why do you think that constitutes a defense? Can you imagine telling Cardinal O’Bannion that his favorite parochial school principal swallowed two hits of windowpane acid and most of a case of beer and then proceeded to make herself an accessory to the butchering of a lot of stray dogs and the gang bang of the school tramp?”
“You make it sound so deliberate,” Peg said. “It wasn’t like that at all.”
“I know it wasn’t, Peg.” Judy sighed. “The problem isn’t what it was. The problem is what it’s going to appear to be. To have been. I don’t know how to say it. Remember the fuss the papers made at the time?”
Peg smiled faintly. “They made it sound like Hiroshima. At least.”
“Yes, they did. And they still do, every year or two, when they decide to dredge it up again. Every time some teenage crack addict knifes his dealer in the boys’ room of some tenth-rate public school, they bring it up again. They love that story. It’s the most exciting thing that’s happened in Colchester in two hundred years.”
Peg looked back at the television set, blank now. “I watched the whole thing,” she said. “He didn’t give anything away. He really didn’t. It was like he’d forgotten he’d been involved in it at all and he was using it for something else. Like an innocent bystander with an eye for the main chance.”
“The main chance of what?”
“I don’t know.” Peg looked around her kitchen. She was feeling vague and unsettled, maybe even a little feverish. She had been feeling that way, off and on, since Cheryl showed up at her door. Cheryl. Dear God, she felt guilty about Cheryl. She always had, even in the days when dumping on Cheryl was de rigueur. “What I should have done,” she told Judy, “was ask her to stay.”
“Who?”
“Cheryl Cass. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I saw her picture in the paper, after she died.”
“What you should have done is kept your mouth shut,” Judy said. “If you hadn’t come forward, they never would have connected her to us. They never would have connected her to anybody.”
“They still don’t ‘connect’ her to us, the way you’re putting it. If I’d asked her to stay, she might never have committed suicide.”
“Is that what you think? Cheryl Cass committed suicide?”
“Of course. What else could possibly have happened?”
Judy Eagan snorted. Then she got up, put on her coat, and began to button buttons. “Never mind,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to the church and deal with that goat. I left him tied up in the vestibule and he’s probably—defecated all over the floor by now. You are coming to the ten o’clock?”
“Of course I am. I’m bringing that lot in there,” Peg gestured toward the television room, where the tape was jogging along to its finale, “and the rest will come over with the school. I wonder what Andy wants with the goat.”
“I wonder what Andy wants with anything.” Judy looked around for her pocketbook, didn’t find it, and bit her lip. “I must have left my purse at St. Agnes’s. I’ve probably had my wallet stolen by now. Is Joe going to Mass by himself tonight?”
“Yes, he is.”
“I’ll come back then,” Judy said. “We’ve got to talk this thing out, Peg. I don’t know what Andy’s up to, but I don’t trust him. You may not care if it all comes out one way or the other, but I do.”
“I didn’t say I wanted it to come out. I said maybe we should tell the Cardinal about it.”
“What’s the difference?”
There was a great deal of difference, Peg thought, but saying so would only prolong this conversation. That, she definitely didn’t want. Having Judy in her house always made her feel washed up and frumpy, like one of Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters having come to her poetically justified end. She thought about showing Judy to the door and decided not to. Judy knew her way. She’d been in and out of this house since the day Peg and Joe bought it.
The heels punched across the carpets. The front door opened and shut again. The house was quiet, except for the sound of Charlie arguing with his sisters about how to put the VCR into rewind. Peg headed for the television room, wondering when it was she’d stopped knowing what she thought about anything.
I should have asked her to stay with us, Peg thought. Then at least she wouldn’t have been found dead in an alley.
[2]
Going around with the Cardinal like this—in full clerical dress, in one of Dee Packer’s “unpretentious” touring cars—always made Tom Dolan feel as if he were traveling incognito. The car was a small brown Buick, the very essence of nondescript. The Cardinal was a vision out of the age of the Borgias, draped in scarlet and punctuated with gold. A studied informality had come to the American Church with Vatican II—so studied and so cunning, Tom sometimes forgot it was a ruse. O’Bannion in battle gear put the lie to that favorite liberal pipe dream, the self-destructing hierarchy. He was the Cardinal Rome wanted Her Cardinals to be, and he could have sat down on the throne of Renaissance France without looking in the least out of place.
Except, of course, for the fact that he was so obviously Irish.
Tom put his hands up to his face and rubbed. He had been at work since five o’clock this morning, and he was about ready to self-destruct himself. The car was bouncing along from pothole to pothole. The motion was making him sick. Maybe, he thought, he ought to have let the Cardinal walk, which was what the Cardinal had really wanted to do. It was only a dozen blocks from the Cathedral to St. Agnes’s. Then again, it was a dozen of the wrong blocks: right down Carver Street through a series of heavily Catholic neighborhoods, right up to the door of St. Agnes’s Church. First they’d be mobbed by the faithful. Then they’d be mobbed by the media. Right now, they were merely stuck in traffic.
O’Bannion reached under his robes, brought out a cigar that looked too cheap to be bearable, and lit up. “Did you call Andy Walsh this morning?” he asked. “Did you get in touch with him?”
“I called him just before seven, Your Eminence. I definitely got in touch with him.”
“He knows we’re coming?”
“Yes, Your Eminence.”
“He knows how I feel about altar girls?”
“I don’t see how he could avoid it, Your Eminence.”
“I don’t see how he could avoid it, either,” O’Bannion said, “but he always does. Did I tell you I’ve asked Rome to make you an auxiliary Bishop?”
“No,” Tom said. He dropped his hands and looked at O’Bannion, surprised. “I thought you didn’t approve of all that. Loading the Chancery up with auxiliary bishops.”
“I don’t. Having one won’t exactly be loading the Chancery up.”
“That’s true,” Tom said. O’Bannion’s predecessor had had no fewer than six auxiliary Bishops on his staff. Nobody had ever been able to figure out how he’d done it. “This is very nice of you, Your Eminence. I’m grateful.”
“You shouldn’t be. You’d have been raised to the episcopate sooner or later, you know.”
“Thank you for saying so, You
r Eminence. Right now, I’m very young.”
“Yes, you are. I, on the other hand, am getting old. I’ve reached the point where I’d like to cover the Church’s ass as well as my own.”
“Excuse me, Your Eminence?”
John Cardinal O’Bannion sighed. The traffic jam they were stuck in was going strong. They were halfway between the Cathedral and St. Agnes’s and they might as well have been parked. Tom looked past the Cardinal’s head at a row of small white frame houses, each with a cross overlaid with a Eucharistic symbol on its door. The crosses had been given out by the Chancery at the start of Lent to anyone in the Archdiocese who wanted them. It was the Cardinal’s way of combating “secular hedonism.” There were going to be no fuzzy yellow chicks or pink plastic Easter bunnies where the Cardinal had to see them.
“Andy Walsh,” the Cardinal said, “is getting out of hand.”
“Just getting, Your Eminence?” Tom smiled. “Andy’s been out of hand since he was six.”
“No,” O’Bannion said. “Not the way I mean it. Do you have any idea what he did this morning?”
“No, Your Eminence. What did he do?”
“It wasn’t a rhetorical question,” the Cardinal said. “I don’t know what he did, either. I just know he did something. Sister told me.”
“He did something at the church?”
“No, no. He was on Barry Field’s talk show this morning. Whatever he said had the switchboard lit up—and I quote Sister—‘like a Christmas tree.’”