The votive candles caught his attention. One of them guttered and died; the others flickered wildly in pools of melted wax. He lit a rolled paper spill and touched it to as many unlit wicks as he could before the spill burned his fingers, lit another one and moved methodically along the rows of crimson votive glasses until all the candles were lit. A gentle wave of heat and light rolled over him.
“We found where he left. There’s a cellar door at the end of the hall that probably opens onto an alley. It’s barred from the outside.” Geoffrey and Prudence stood in the doorway.
“What’s the matter, girl?” Kevin Carney’s voice could be heard just outside the crypt. “Do you want to go back in there again?”
Blossom pushed against Geoffrey’s legs, nudging him from the doorway.
“I had the devil of a time getting her out of here,” Kevin said. He’d figured out that the killer’s scent had to be mixed with Alice Nolan’s, but Blossom hadn’t seemed in any hurry to pick it up. Maybe she’d known it would end at a cellar door barred against them from the wrong side.
Now she went straight to one of the marble sarcophagi, a child’s resting place from the size of it, and lay down on the floor, head on her crossed paws.
“What’s she doing?” Hunter asked.
“Wait.”
Blossom raised her head, sat up, barked twice, then placed both front paws on the sarcophagus. Her nails scrabbled against the slick marble, throwing her back. Down to the floor, head on her paws, up again, this time flinging more of her body against the marble tomb, trying to wedge her nose under the overhanging lid, shoving with all of her might against it.
“Take the far side, Ned,” Geoffrey positioned his fingers under the marble slab. Kevin crowded in, wedging a thin shoulder under the covering stone. A dreadful urgency spread like cold fog from one man to another.
The slab moved with surprising ease, sliding across the top of the marble sarcophagus with a scraping sound that sent shivers up spines and set Blossom to whining loudly. While the men lifted the lid to the floor, the dog hooked her paws over the side of the marble box, and leaned her head as deeply inside as she could.
They all saw it at the same time, a slender white hand reaching up out of darkness to caress Blossom’s muzzle.
“I prayed someone would come,” a voice whispered. “I prayed to my guardian angel, and here you are.”
They lifted Alice Nolan out of the tomb where she had hidden herself, where she had crouched in blackness amid Baby Maude’s fragile bones until her would-be killer gave up the search. Prudence folded her into her arms, rocked her gently, shushed the raw sobs.
“I heard him leave,” she told them, drinking in the brightness of the lit candles, gulping air as though it were a welcome drink. “But I didn’t dare try to get out. I was afraid he was nearby, waiting for me to show myself. I heard the dog barking, then the noise of a lot of footsteps. Suddenly I knew he’d gone. I can’t explain how. Just that something evil had been here and wasn’t anymore.”
“The dog’s name is Blossom,” Kevin told her.
“Blossom. How beautiful.” Alice smiled at the dog.
Blossom smiled back. This human was like the weakest member of a pack, the one most likely to end up in the belly of a predator. She had the same look in her eyes, as if she saw her fate and was resigned to it. Blossom felt sorry for her. Sometimes, she knew, the weak pup held on against all odds and managed to survive.
She hoped Alice Nolan would be that fortunate.
*
“Old Seamus Reilly has died,” Father Brennan announced to Father Mahoney in the late evening of the day Alice Nolan was found hiding in Baby Maude’s tomb. He took his time removing hat and gloves, hanging his heavy winter coat on the rack that stood in the rectory’s front hallway. “I was able to get to him before the end, thank God.” It was what every good Catholic prayed for, the grace of a happy death. “What’s wrong, Father?”
“You’ve been gone a long time.”
“One of Mr. Reilly’s neighbors came to the rectory after confessions looking for a priest. I don’t know where Mrs. Healy was, but there wasn’t time to tell her where I was going. I hope she didn’t worry.”
“It doesn’t matter now you’re back. I told them they were wrong.”
“Who was wrong, Father? About what?” Father Brennan rubbed his sculptured white hands together vigorously. It was near freezing today, and he’d been out in the cold longer than he’d originally intended. He set down the leather satchel in which he carried the holy oils of Extreme Unction to souls on the brink of departing this life. It was larger and heavier than the bag most priests carried, but Father Brennan liked to be prepared for any eventuality. “I’ll put this away later. Right now I’m perishing for a cup of tea.”
“There was a bit of a mix-up this afternoon,” Father Mahoney remarked when Mrs. Healy had brought the tea tray and left them to it. “One of our parishioners managed to lock herself into the crypt. Quite a panic until they found her.”
“Who was it?”
“Alice Nolan. Joseph Nolan’s sister, poor thing. You must have met her when the Nolan maid was killed. She’s been pestering her father for years to let her go to the Visitations, and she’s finally gotten her wish. A bit weak in the head, if you ask me.”
“Why is that, Father?”
“She has an overactive imagination. Makes up stories about things that never happened.”
“What would these imaginary stories be about?”
Father Mahoney slurped his tea. “Women get hysterical, you know. It’s worse if they read novels.” He added another spoonful of sugar to his cup. He liked his tea sweet. “There are times in the confessional when I know a woman is making up tales that would curl your hair if you believed them. Right out of the pages of the kind of book that doesn’t belong in a decent home. I don’t argue or tell her I think she’s lying. I give absolution and a nice, stiff penance. That does more good than anything else.”
“I find it hard to believe someone would lie in confession. What’s the point?” If the pastor had somehow learned that he’d been gossiping about Alice Nolan with Jerry Brophy, there’d be hell to pay. Even though he thought he could argue and win a case against having broken the seal of the confessional. Father Brennan poured himself more calming tea. He drank it plain, no sugar, no milk.
“Wait until you have a few more years on you, Father.” Father Mahoney had to ask the next question directly, and he hated doing that, but Father Brennan wasn’t being cooperative. “Was Alice upset when she left the confessional?”
“I don’t know that she came to confession today. I can’t put a face to all the voices yet.”
It was the answer he expected, no real answer at all. “There was something else odd,” Father Mahoney said.
“What was that, Father?”
“Did you run into a monsignor this afternoon?”
“What would a monsignor be doing at Saint Anselm’s?”
“That’s what I said, but they insisted they’d seen a monsignor come down the street and go into the church. They described the red buttons and the piping on his cassock. He was wearing a biretta. They described that, too. And he had a scarf wrapped around his face against the cold. An unusually tall, slender man.”
“I don’t think I understand who saw what.” Father Brennan put down his tea cup.
“Do you remember that Geoffrey Hunter who came with Miss MacKenzie asking about the Nolans’ maid, Ellen Tierney, and the girl from Staten Island who was murdered?”
“I do.”
“The two of them and an ex-detective who was forced off the Metropolitan Police a few years back came up with the idea that whoever killed those girls was connected to Saint Anselm’s. They were hiding in an alley across from the church this afternoon, waiting for him to show up.”
“The killer?”
“They had a vagrant and a dog with them.” Father Mahoney sighed. It had been a trying day. “Apparently they also de
cided that Miss Nolan was the next intended victim, and when she didn’t come out of the church after the monsignor went in, they ran across the street to save her. The crypt door was locked, so Miss MacKenzie came here to get the key. Mrs. Healy took her into the church through the basement tunnel. I had a few words to say about that, I can assure you.”
“I’m certain you did.”
“All because an hysterical woman dozed off in her pew and had a nightmare. Can you imagine? She said she woke up in the crypt with no memory of how she’d gotten there, and then she became frightened, so she hid.”
“What about the monsignor?”
“No one seems to know who he was or where he went.” Father Mahoney wished he had something stronger than milk to put in what remained of his tea. “That’s why I asked if you’d seen him here in the rectory. I assume he was looking for me. If he exists at all.”
Father Brennan shook his head regretfully. “I didn’t come back to the rectory before going to Mr. Reilly’s,” he said, contradicting what he’d told the pastor earlier. “There was certainly no monsignor in the church.”
“Well, then.” Father Mahoney rested his elbows on his substantial belly and made a tent with his fingertips. “Reilly was still alive when you got there, was he?”
“By the grace of God. He was able to make a good death.”
“The body’s at Bellevue now, I suppose.”
“Nowhere else for the poor man to go. He hadn’t any family. Nothing put by for a burial. Or so the neighbor said.”
“He’s not the first and he won’t be the last.”
“May he rest in peace.”
“Amen.”
“Will the Visitations take her, do you think? This Alice Nolan?” asked Father Brennan. “After what happened today?”
“Oh, they’ll take her all right. They’re all a bit touched in the head, if you ask me. Soft. Alice wouldn’t last a week with the Charities, but she’ll do fine with the Visitations. Out of sight, out of mind, I say. That’s always for the best.”
Father Brennan nodded his head in agreement. Out of sight, out of mind.
Out of reach. Out of danger.
*
Father Mahoney had a visitor that night after Father Brennan and Father Kearns had gone to bed. He tossed and turned and fretted over what he was told, then made an unannounced and uninvited visit to the archbishop’s office the next morning. He impressed upon his superior’s assistant the urgency of his request and the importance of avoiding scandal at all costs. Father Brennan was one of those odd priests who didn’t fit in anywhere, who arrived at a parish with good recommendations, and left within a year or two under a cloud no one cared to penetrate too deeply. Sad, but too frequent an occurrence to cause much discussion. Fortunately, there were always empty slots needing to be filled, so no real damage was ever done.
The assistant agreed, and gave Father Mahoney ten minutes with the archbishop. It was all he needed.
“Priests lie to their pastors all the time about their whereabouts,” the archbishop reminded him when Father Mahoney had finished stating his case in as much detail as he thought prudent and strictly necessary.
“They do,” Father Mahoney concurred. Both men knew that it was usually about a woman, a love affair with the bottle, or the greed that comes from never having enough money. “But I think we have a more serious problem here than the usual.”
“Can you be more specific, Father?” The archbishop wasn’t asking for details, just confirmation that the situation, whatever it was, warranted swift removal and reassignment. He trusted that Father Mahoney, a priest for more than thirty-five years, understood that.
“He has to go, Your Eminence.” Father Mahoney hesitated, then decided to wade a bit further into the deep waters of chancery business. “The police might become involved if he stays. The newspapers, also.”
“We can’t have that, can we?”
“No, Your Eminence. The scandal.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” the archbishop said.
Father Mark Brennan’s career in New York City was over.
His transfer came through less than five days after Saint Anselm’s pastor requested it. Given that it was two weeks before Christmas, the speed with which the archbishop’s office moved was nothing short of a miracle.
*
Seamus Reilly was buried from Bellevue with no one but two city workers to shovel him into the ground.
“But wasn’t it a shame that the priest didn’t get there in time to give the poor man the last rites,” remarked the neighbor when he came to Saint Anselm’s to complain to Father Mahoney the night Reilly died. “There was plenty of time to receive the Last Sacrament if he’d only come right away. Seamus was cold by the time he got there.”
What was troubling the neighbor was that he’d been waiting outside the building to take the priest upstairs to where Reilly was breathing his last, but Father Brennan hadn’t come from the direction of Saint Anselm’s at all. When he reached the steps, he hadn’t met the neighbor’s eyes. And he’d smelled like he’d been with a woman. There was no mistaking that odor if a man was careless and spilled over on his pants. If Father Mahoney understood what he meant.
The other thing that was bothersome was that one of the women who lived in the neighborhood had sworn up and down that she’d seen a monsignor walking along the street like an ordinary person. At first she’d thought it was Father Brennan rushing along, the priest was that tall, but then she saw the scarlet piping on the cassock. She’d leaned farther out her window thinking how grand it would be if a monsignor could be the one to ease poor Seamus out of this world. A monsignor, fancy that! But then the monsignor passed by and it had been Father Brennan who turned up at Reilly’s apartment after all. Too late to do any good.
Did Father Mahoney know who the monsignor might have been? Who had sent him? And where he got off to?
CHAPTER 32
“There’s a key hidden above the ledge,” Davey said, trying to be helpful. The tall man who had asked about the maids who came to have their uniforms altered reached above the shop doorway. “No, it’s the ledge over the window. Mr. Neil said it was safe there because everybody thinks it has to be on top of the door.”
“That’s very smart, Davey.”
“Mr. Neil isn’t dumb. Like me.” Davey hung his head. He’d made another mistake. He knew it. Mr. Neil had told him to forget about the men who’d asked him questions, but he’d remembered the tall man as soon as he saw him peering through the window of the uniform shop. And he went right over to see what he could do to help. Davey liked it when people told him he’d done a good job.
“Have you seen Mr. Slattery this week?”
“No, Miss.” The lady’s voice was soft and gentle, not like the screeching sounds made by women calling out their windows for children to come home. Or the raw pleadings when Mrs. Slattery was still alive and Mr. Neil had to go into the back room to fix things, shooing Davey out of the shop and locking the door behind him. But not before he’d heard. He hoped the nice lady would ask him another question.
“Davey, did you ever see Mr. Slattery, you call him Mr. Neil, dressed up like a priest?”
“Wearing a long black dress, you mean, Miss? Except that my mother told me another name for it, but I don’t remember what it is.”
“A cassock, Davey.”
“Maybe I should write it down.” He always carried a small notebook and a pencil in his back pocket. His mother said that was the way to learn things, write them down. “He had red trimming on his dress. And a funny hat with red buttons on it.”
“When did you see him wearing the hat?”
“I wasn’t supposed to, but I came early when he said he’d be needing me to mind the counter. Mr. Neil doesn’t like loud noises, so I tiptoed in as quietly as I could and I didn’t shout hello. He was in the private place, but he’d left the door open, so I peeked in. He had his eyes closed and he was praying. You’re not supposed to interrupt people whe
n they pray, so I sneaked out and went home for a while. When I came back he wasn’t wearing the … cassock.”
“Was this a long time ago, Davey?”
“A long time.” He nodded his head solemnly. He wasn’t sure what the difference was between a long and a short time because people didn’t always count the same way. He hoped it didn’t matter.
“Let’s not stay out here any longer, Prudence. We don’t want to attract attention.”
The tall man thanked Davey for his help and gave him a dime.
*
The shop was silent, dim, and orderly. It smelled of the black and indigo dyes of the uniforms hanging in perfect symmetry along two walls.
“There’s a lamp on the counter over there,” Prudence said. “Shall I light it?”
“I’ll turn the lock and pull down the door and window shades,” Geoffrey answered. “If anyone knocks, we’ll ignore it.”
“What are we looking for?” A pale yellow light poured out from the gas lamp.
“Whatever he’s left behind. I think his departure was unplanned and quickly accomplished.”
“He left Alice drugged and unconscious in the crypt, then he panicked when he couldn’t find her again.”
“What we don’t know is whether he went back to Saint Anselm’s to collect incriminating evidence and just happened upon Alice or if he had already targeted her.”
“We’re not even sure he’s our man,” Prudence said. “You always tell me that circumstantial evidence is the least trustworthy.”
“Which is true. Unless it leads to something stronger, more certain.”
“Do you think he’s gone for good, Geoffrey?”
“I think it’s very likely.”
“He’s meticulous. There isn’t any dust on the counters and the floor looks like it’s recently been waxed. I haven’t found anything out here in the shop.”
“I didn’t expect we would, but it doesn’t pay to cut corners. Let’s move to the back rooms.” Holding high the lantern, Geoffrey led the way through the curtained doorway into the area where they expected to find a storeroom and perhaps some trace of where the late Mrs. Slattery had performed the illegal terminations sought by so many desperate young women. He set the lantern down on a scrubbed wooden table then took out his folding knife and began to scrape lightly along the crevice where the two halves of the table top met. “I’m looking for traces of old blood,” he explained to Prudence. “We won’t be able to prove that a stain was caused only by blood and not something else, but in my own mind it would go a long way toward certainty in identifying Slattery as a suspect.”
Lies That Comfort and Betray Page 34