She smelled something burning. Panic gave her strength. She crawled toward a pillar, forced her hands and shoulders to drag her upwards until she was resting her back against it.
There. There it was. The source of the burning smell.
A single candle flamed and flickered in a bank of red glass votive lights. When it went out, she’d be in darkness. But awake. Awake and knowing that something terrible was hidden in those shadows, an unnamable horror coming for her with eyes that could see where she could not.
She had to have light. Mary, Mother of God, help me, she prayed.
Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here, ever this day be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen. It was the first prayer she’d learned as a child, before religion had become so confusing. She’d imagined her guardian angel floating just above and behind her, protective wings outspread, a loving smile on its beautiful face. Or perhaps that was the picture on the first holy card she’d been given. She couldn’t remember, but it didn’t matter now. She babbled the prayer over and over as she inched her way up the stone pillar, her back and legs strengthening, holding her up, her resolution growing firmer with each successful movement. To light and guard, to rule and guide.
Light was what she needed. By the time she reached the slanted iron stand with its banks of votive candles she was walking normally. The stabbing pain in her head had eased, and the sickening smell on the skin around her nose and mouth had evaporated. Alice lit five more candles with one of the long tapers from the holder next to the coin box attached to the front of the stand. She needed to conserve those candles until she could find more. She remembered that the sacristan often stored boxes of votive candles under the stands that displayed them. Yes, there they were, pushed back nearly out of sight. Dozens and dozens of them. She chirped a birdlike laugh and heard it echo off the stone walls.
I’m in the crypt, she decided, and immediately felt comforted. The rich dead of the parish lay all around her in marble tombs surmounted by carved figures of cherubs and small animals. The crypt had been one of her favorite hideaways when her mother brought her to Saint Anselm’s as a child. Lillian had been a member of the Altar Society, arranging flowers and laying out linens for Mass. She had been a gentle mother then, fond and indulgent. She’d smiled when Alice skipped away from her side and down the stairs into the crypt. There was only one way in and out of the underground vault.
Lillian knew her child would be perfectly safe down there.
*
“She has to be here somewhere. We saw her go in.” Ned Hayes stood in the middle of Saint Anselm’s central aisle, his Remington revolver cocked and ready.
“The monsignor, too. He never came out, either.” Hunter climbed the altar steps, tried the locked door of the sacristy.
Kevin and Blossom walked slowly down one of the side aisles, stopping at each pew. “She’ll smell like a nun,” Kevin told Blossom. “No perfume. Maybe talcum powder. Plain soap and water.” Pew after pew and scent after scent they searched, dismissing woman after woman. Blossom wondered why human females splashed cologne on themselves; it didn’t smell like anything good to eat and it made her want to sneeze.
It was Prudence who found the glove, crumpled on the floor under a pew opposite the Fourth Station of the Cross, Jesus Meets His Sorrowful Mother. She waved it triumphantly overhead, and when Blossom bounded across the church, held it to her nose.
“How can we be sure it’s hers?” Ned put the safety on his gun and holstered it.
“Her initials are stitched inside the cuff. A.N. Alice Nolan.” Prudence turned the bottom of the glove inside out.
“Kevin, can you tell Blossom to find Miss Nolan’s trail?”
“She knows. Best if we get out of her scent field.”
The men stood motionless, aware of the smells of hair tonic, tobacco, bay rum shaving lotion, shoe polish, and recently cleaned firearms, trying not to swirl those odors any more deeply into the air above Blossom’s head than they already had.
“She’s got something,” Kevin breathed. “Let her go on her own for a bit, then stay back a few feet. Sometimes what she’s following stops or turns around. She needs room.”
Blossom didn’t seem to be in a hurry. When Kevin held the glove to her nose again, she shook her head and gave a short explanatory bark. The scent she was following along the floor of the church wasn’t the scent on the piece of leather he kept shoving at her. The scent trails were definitely mixed, though the woman smell was fainter. The woman smell had been strong along the seat of the pew, then nearly obliterated by the kind of scent Blossom had smelled only once before, as a young pup. She’d awakened in a heap of dead dogs, all of them smelling of that sickly sweet odor. She’d crawled out and away in time to avoid the shovels and the pit, but only just. The rest of her litter hadn’t made it to the safety of the streets.
Now the man scent cut through the other smell, enveloping the woman scent. Blossom wanted to tell Kevin that the woman had been carried someplace, but that was too complicated to communicate. Better to concentrate on finding the trail to where the man had taken her. Down the aisle, across the front of the church below the main altar, around a corner and past another, smaller altar. Blossom stopped and sat down in front of a narrow door set into an alcove. She didn’t make a sound.
Remington once again in his right hand, Ned Hayes closed his left fist around the door latch, turned it, and pulled. Nothing. “Can you force the lock, Geoff?”
“Stand back.” He pulled the set of locksmith’s tools from his pocket, probed the keyhole, and cursed softly under his breath. “The tumblers are rusted; my picks aren’t moving them.” He straightened from the keyhole, tiny flakes of rust clinging to his pick.
“Do you think he’s still in there?” Ned pointed to the word Crypt in flowing Gothic script above the door.
“Unless there’s another way out.” Geoffrey pulled out a thicker pick.
“Stay here and keep trying,” Prudence said. “I’m going to the rectory to get a key that’ll be strong enough to break through the rust.”
“Ask one of the priests or the housekeeper about the monsignor we saw. We need to know who he is. And hurry,” Ned urged.
*
Whoever had carried her down to the crypt would soon be back, Alice reasoned. She tried to remember what she might have heard or seen in those last few moments before she fell asleep, but could recall nothing but the overwhelming fatigue that had made her crawl onto the pew like a sleepy child.
The door was locked and she had no weapon with which to defend herself, nothing in the pockets of her coat but the Stations of the Cross booklet, her rosary, and one glove. Why would he have taken her glove? It didn’t make sense. But nothing that had happened to her this afternoon was logical. She searched under the stand of votive lights for something she could swing at the man when he came to get her. Nothing, not even dust. The ladies of the Altar Society or Jerry Brophy must have added the crypt to their cleaning list. Brophy. Maybe he stored a broom down here. Maybe she’d find it leaning in a corner or against one of the marble coffins. Five minutes later she knew there was nothing. Jerry must carry all of his cleaning supplies with him. He probably never forgot anything.
Think, Alice, think! She said the Guardian Angel prayer again, the lilting rhyme pattern of it fighting off a growing sense of panic. Nothing bad could happen to you if you remembered to ask your guardian angel for protection. And if it did—well, that was God taking over because he had something else in mind for you to do. Or be. Like dead.
If she could hide, she might gain a few precious moments while he searched for her, might even be able to dash past him and out the door before he realized what she’d done. Would he leave the door ajar when he came to get her? Joseph had left his bedroom door open because he’d been so angry and distracted that for once in his life he hadn’t remembered to close and lock it. There might be the slimmest of chances.
They’d pl
ayed hide and seek down there, she and other children whose mothers belonged to the Altar Society. Around and around the catafalques they’d raced, stooping to hide, leaping up to chortle and run again, barely evading each other’s outstretched arms until somebody collapsed from shrieking laughter and was it.
There was something teasing the very edge of her memory, some bit of information acquired long ago that was trying to push its way through into the present.
Alice turned slowly in a circle, her eyes darting from light to shadow, seeking whatever it was her brain was telling her was important to remember. When her glance fell on the rectangular marble coffin of Baby Maude, she knew she’d found it. Like a sleepwalker, she extended her hands to the child’s final resting place, pushing gently so as to make as little noise as possible. The marble slab that had never been plastered down over the little girl’s wooden coffin slid aside. Baby Maude’s tiny skull smiled up at her amid a shower of splinters. One of the children playing down there had discovered the hiding place and smashed the rotten coffin as she climbed in. One of the other girls. It hadn’t been Alice. She would never have dared such a thing.
“Is there enough room for me inside with you, Baby Maude?” Alice asked. Like most other families, Baby Maude’s parents expected to lose more than one child. They’d left room for Baby Maude to be kept eternal company by a brother or a sister. Perhaps several.
Before she climbed inside and pulled the marble slab back into place, Alice took several votive candles and a box of safety matches out of the carton where they’d been stored.
When she emerged, safe and sound, she didn’t want to have to face only darkness.
Please God, she and Baby Maude wouldn’t have to keep company for too many long hours.
CHAPTER 31
“Father Brennan is hearing confessions this afternoon,” Saint Anselm’s pastor said.
“The church is empty, Father. There’s no one in any of the confessional boxes.”
“I’m sure you’re wrong about that. Father Brennan is punctilious about his duties.”
“We need to get into the crypt.” Prudence had already explained her suspicions. The only things she’d left out were Blossom and the guns Geoffrey and Ned had carried into the church.
“I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my life.”
“Father Mahoney, if you can’t give us a key or show us another way into the crypt, Alice Nolan’s death will be on your head.”
“What seems to be the trouble, Father?” The assistant pastor, Father Kearns, and Mrs. Healy, the rectory housekeeper, crowded into the hallway, drawn by Father Mahoney’s increasingly agitated voice.
“She claims there’s a murder about to be committed in the crypt.” Father Mahoney’s face flushed red with anger and bewilderment.
“Let’s not stand here in the open doorway giving scandal to the neighborhood,” Father Kearns said. “I suggest we send for the police to prove or disprove Miss MacKenzie’s allegation.”
“There’s a tunnel from the basement of the rectory into the storage rooms beneath the church,” Mrs. Healy blurted out. “You can reach the crypt that way.”
“A tunnel?” Prudence wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly.
“For bad weather,” the housekeeper explained. “Some of our priests have been older men. One of the pastors lived well into his eighties. The tunnel’s been there for years.”
“Show me,” Prudence snapped. She turned to Father Kearns. “Explain to Mr. Hunter what Mrs. Healy just told me and give him the extra key. He’s on this side of the crypt door, in the church. Hurry.”
They left Father Mahoney standing in the front hallway, mouth agape. Father Kearns, not used to being given orders by a lay person, especially a woman, decided nonetheless to comply. He grabbed the key to the crypt from a hook on the coat rack and took off at a trot.
Mrs. Healy led Prudence along the central hallway of the rectory, through the kitchen, and down a stairway off the pantry.
“This goes into the basement of the rectory,” she explained. “I store the canned goods down here and hang the laundry to dry.” She paused for a moment. “You can’t have the whole neighborhood staring at a priest’s underdrawers, now can you?”
“Why did you decide to tell me about the tunnel, Mrs. Healy? I don’t think Father Mahoney was at all pleased.”
“They’re all holy men, to be sure, but not a one of the three of them would help a poor girl who’s been sweet-talked out of her virtue and gotten in the family way. They’ve got their minds so fixed on sin they can’t see that being lonely and wanting a little love is what makes them do it. The girls get caught and the men walk away with their hands in their pockets and their pants unbuttoned.”
“You’re talking about Ellen Tierney, aren’t you?”
“I’ve heard a word or two, enough to guess that she might have been in the family way. Too early to tell Mick McGuire, they say, but caught tight nonetheless.”
Prudence decided that if women ran detective agencies there would be no more secrets in the world. Anywhere.
“And there’s something about that Father Brennan I don’t like. I’ve caught him coming up these stairs more than once. He always has a good explanation, but nothing you wouldn’t wonder about afterwards. Sneaky, if you ask me. Doesn’t want anyone to know when he’s coming and going. Hiding something.”
Mrs. Healy walked through the lines of drying wash, skirted the bulk of the furnace and the coal chute, smiled fondly at the shelves of glistening jellies, jewel-toned fruits, and deeply dark vegetables. More than enough to get them through the winter. All of them canned by her own skilled hands. No one ever got sick or died from eating what she put in her Mason jars.
“Jerry Brophy found a drop of blood on one of the kneelers in front of the altar rail. I saw him scrubbing away at it to beat the band, and I asked him why.” Mrs. Healy handed Prudence a key. “I’ve thought about that drop of blood at night when I couldn’t sleep. That’s why I told you about the tunnel. That’s why I’m giving you the key.
“I’ve been housekeeper in this rectory ever since my husband died, God rest his soul, and that’s more than twenty years ago now. Did you know you have to be a widow to get hired on as housekeeper to priests? It’s true. Something is wrong here, Miss MacKenzie. I can feel it in my bones. And it didn’t start until after Father Brennan arrived. Nothing you can put your finger on, but it’s there. Like the banshee no one sees. You can’t mistake the cry, but it comes out of nowhere. And then someone is dead. It never fails.” She turned on her sensible heels, black widow’s skirts stirring up the dust of the cellar floor. “I’ll say a prayer,” she promised.
The tunnel led as straight as an arrow from the rectory to Saint Anselm’s. Prudence unlocked the door at the far end with the same key Mrs. Healy had used at the entrance. She stepped into a storage room filled with broken cane-bottomed prie-dieux, banks of iron votive candle holders, racks of moth-eaten choir robes, and stacks of damaged missals and hymnals. There was a clear path threaded through the debris into a narrow passageway that branched in two directions. One had to lead to the church, the other to the crypt.
The almost certainly useless derringer in hand, Prudence crossed an alcove toward the crypt. It was too far back under the nave of the church to be anything else. She used the key Mrs. Healy had given her, then laid a tentative hand on the door latch, took a deep breath, and swung the door open so hard it bounced off the wall.
She saw a small undercroft with a row of pillars holding up an arched roof, marble and polished granite sarcophagi marching in orderly rows down its length, six votive candles burning steadily before the small altar where special Masses could be said for those who lay there. The air smelled of old dust and older bodies. She thought it must be at least as cold down here as it was outside in the street.
The crypt, like the church above it, was empty.
*
“Nothing,” Prudence said when she had rejoined the others in th
e church. “Someone has been in the crypt because votive candles are burning and it was locked, but whoever it was is long gone.”
Blossom bounded down the stairs, Kevin following closely behind. Father Kearns cast one scandalized look at the huge red dog who bared her teeth at him, then spun on his heel, and stormed indignantly off to report this latest intrusion to Saint Anselm’s pastor.
Ned Hayes was bitterly disappointed. He’d been so certain they would be able to step in before Sally Lynn’s killer claimed another victim. He trailed disconsolately down the stairs to the crypt, following the noise of Geoffrey’s and Prudence’s footsteps, fumbling the Remington back into its holster under his arm. He had an unopened bottle of fine Tennessee bourbon at home, and cash money in his pocket. He’d stop by the Turk’s, smooth away the rough edges of disappointment with the most expensive cocaine he could buy. Tyrus would hover disapprovingly, but he’d read his master’s mind and know better than to try to stop him entirely.
Tomorrow, when Alice Nolan’s eviscerated corpse turned up somewhere, he wouldn’t care as much as he did right now. Or at least the caring wouldn’t be as painful.
He stood at the bottom of the staircase, sorting out the sounds echoing around him. Listening to Blossom barking, then Prudence’s voice asking a question, Geoffrey’s voice answering. He could head in their direction or he could go into the candlelit vault directly opposite. Maybe what he needed was a few moments alone to begin to accept another in what he thought of as a string of failures that defined his life.
The crypt was dim and shadowy, fluted pillars reaching like unnaturally straight trees for the arched ceiling. Every available niche crowded with the marble tombs of the affluent dead. What was the word? Necropolis, that was it. City of the dead. Quiet, cold, smelling faintly of dry decay.
Lies That Comfort and Betray Page 33