“Hello, Father.”
Deep in thought, struggling to recall the poet’s full quote—he had known it once, but that was so true of many things now lost—Father Gervase did not hear the greeting. He limped along, the hip again paining him, his breath short as it was so often now. A half a block later, as often happened when he stopped struggling to pull something up from the depths of memory, the entire line rose up. Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad. And wasn’t it the greatest misunderstandings, he thought, that came from our inability to see the grief hidden in the heart of another, to mistake it for anger or pride or coldness? He knew full well that each person carried a personal history of sorrow locked away in the chambers of the heart, burdens that bent one to their weight. Perhaps there was a homily that could come out of these musings. Something about the loss that was the human condition. Something about whatever our doubts or differences or inability to see into each other’s hearts, our job was to love. But even as he considered these thoughts, they drifted away. He had grown tired of preparing sermons. Of preaching words that changed nothing. He passed the hardware store and saw Harold Weaver come out with a pole to roll up the awning before closing for the day. He continued toward Will Light’s house.
He would not fail Will again. He had seen the danger the very first time he had gone to Will’s house with the bishop’s request and knew it was not too much to say the man’s soul was at risk.
As he turned onto Governors Street, he saw in the distance a girl walking from the Lights’ house to the one next door. It took him a moment to place her. The LaBrea girl. She was walking up the steps to the home of the man he had watched flouting the watering restrictions during the worst of the drought. Rain LaBrea, he thought. From the back, she looked so like his sister. Not the hair—cropped so short while Cecelia’s had been long—but the set of her shoulders, her gait, and the sight of her pulled the breath from his lungs. He remembered another day, a summer day much like this one when Cecelia had walked with another boy, climbed into a car while he watched. He hadn’t called to her even though the instinct to had been strong. And later, it didn’t matter how many people told him it wasn’t his fault, that accidents happen and he wasn’t to blame, he knew he should have stopped her from getting into the car. Why hadn’t he? What had held him back? The question that had haunted him to this moment. His job had been to watch out for his sister. And at that he had failed.
But the LaBrea girl was not his sister. He was overlaying one distant memory onto this instant. He stood on the sidewalk and stared at the house she had disappeared into, paralyzed with indecision. If he followed his instinct and knocked on the door, what would he possibly say? He would risk appearing foolish. A meddling old man. Better to mind his own business.
And yet. And yet.
“Do not decide,” Saint Ignatius had preached. “Discern. Discern what God is calling us to do. Follow the holy desire.”
A wave of dizziness took him, clouding his mind.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
“Our Father,” Rain said.
The man was talking to her, rambling on and on, and Rain tried not to listen. She forced herself to continue. “Who art in heaven . . .”
He took a step into the room.
“Hallowed be thy name.” She forced her voice to be calm, to go slow.
He took another step forward.
She moved to one side, her back still against the bureau. She raised a hand to brace herself and felt the stone, Lucy’s Lucky Strike stone. She closed her fingers around it.
“Thy kingdom come . . .”
“‘The Lord made of me a sharp-edged sword.’”
They both turned toward the door. “Father Gervase,” she whispered.
“‘And concealed me in the shadow of his arms,’” the priest intoned.
The man dropped his hands, confused.
“Let her go,” Father Gervase said.
For years after, Rain would remember this scene. Standing by the bureau, reciting a prayer she had known since childhood, Lucy’s stone clutched in her hand, the man, Payton Hayes, coming toward her. Father Gervase, so much shorter than the man was, yet standing tall in the door, his hand reaching toward the man, his voice so big. Let her go.
“Go on, Rain,” Father Gervase said in the voice not his. “Go on now. Leave the house.”
Hayes froze in indecision.
“Go,” the priest told her.
Rain slipped past the man, past Father Gervase, and ran down the hall, her shoulders braced for the hand that would surely grab her any second. She reached the kitchen—the clean and deceiving kitchen—and wrenched open the door.
She heard the echo of the priest’s voice as she escaped from the room, ran from the house.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
What stopped me?
His hands. I stared at his hands, needing them to hold the answer I had sought through the past months, wanting to wring the answer from them just as his hands had twisted Lucy’s sweet throat, bloodying her face. They lay, palms up, limp and defenseless in his lap, the skin chapped and reddened from scooping ice cream, wrists so delicate they might have belonged to a ten-year-old. I wanted to deny the truth so obvious before me, pressing down on me, but I couldn’t. He had not murdered our beautiful girl. Once again I was left impotent, helpless with the hard knowledge that I still didn’t know who had killed Lucy, might never know.
We both sat for a long, immeasurable moment in the silence of the car. I shifted in my seat and the gun pressed against my thigh. Outside, the wind stirred the leaves in the trees. Duane spoke first.
“I didn’t hurt Lucy,” he said. “I could never hurt her.”