Grace

by Selena Kitt

  Leah tried to wrap her head around this new information, her brain spinning with it. She actually had to put her head in her hands to make it stop. Her mother had been in love with Susan Nolan?

  Was it possible? Could it be true?

  She lifted her head, looking at her future husband, trying to make sense of it.

  “It happens, Leah. Some women… they just have a stronger affinity for their own gender than they do for the opposite sex. The world we live in calls this sexual deviancy. They label all of this—” Rob waved his arm around the room, at the photographs, the movie reels, all depicting some sort of sex act that society, the church or the government would consider deviant. “Offensive. Sinful. Criminal. But do you know what I see?”

  She shook her head, not trusting her voice.

  “Beauty.” He smiled, looking down at the pictures fanned out on the bed between them. “Truth and beauty. That’s all I see when I look at these.”

  “Susan told you about this,” Leah nodded toward the photographs. “Her relationship with my mother…” She still was trying to process the fact. Saying it out loud made it more real somehow. It was slowly starting to make some kind of strange, surreal sense. “But they didn’t tell you about the Mary Magdalenes?”

  “No.” Rob looked away, shaking his head, and she saw his jaw working again like it did whenever he got mad. “Not until the end. Not until she had to.”

  “My mother said you made some kind of deal with Father Patrick, about keeping Erica out of it?”

  Rob had a faraway look in his eyes. “Susan made me promise that I’d raise her to be a Mary. But once she was gone, well… at least Patty and I saw eye to eye on one thing. It was the only thing Patty and Susan ever fought about. Me and Patty didn’t want either of you involved in the Mary Magdalenes. Of course, Father Patrick had other ideas.”

  Leah touched his cheek, feeling his jaw working, teeth grinding. He looked at her, his face softening, reaching over to tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear.

  “I would have done anything to keep you girls safe and out of this mess.” He shook his head, his mouth pressed into a thin line. “I failed you both. I’m so sorry.”

  “I don’t understand why didn’t you just take Erica and disappear?” Leah wondered out loud. “I mean, you could have gone anywhere. Somewhere Father Patrick couldn’t find you.”

  “I couldn’t do that to your mother.” He swallowed, taking Leah’s hand in his, looking at the ring on her finger. “I couldn’t take her daughter away from her. She’d already given up so much. It would have been like putting the final nail into her coffin.”

  He looked up, expectant, searching her face, and Leah didn’t understand at first what he was looking for. She replayed his words in her head, searching for a clue, and when she found it, her jaw dropped, the information hitting her like a lightning bolt, straightening her spine, the hair on the back of her neck standing up.

  “Her daughter…” Leah repeated the two words that had jolted her like an electrical current.

  “Erica is your sister, Leah.” Rob took a deep breath, letting it out in a long, slow sigh. “Patty gave birth to twins. She kept you. Susan and I adopted Erica.”

  “We look nothing alike…” Her voice shook, and she looked down at her hand, still resting in the cradle of Rob’s. It didn’t feel like hers anymore. She couldn’t feel her body at all, in fact. She was floating somewhere above it, hovering, the only barrier keeping her on earth the ceiling above their heads. “My birthday is in February, Rob. Erica’s is in January.”

  “Fraternal twins don’t look identical. And you were the smaller baby. That happens with twins sometimes. One gets a little more nutrition than the other in the womb.” Rob stroked her hand, turning it over and lifting her palm to his mouth, planting a soft kiss there. “So we just fudged things a little on the birth certificates.”

  “But how?” She felt like crying, but her eyes were dry as a bone. Her mouth too. She could barely get words out, like her tongue was trapped in spider webs.

  “Donald Highbrow,” Rob replied. “His father’s firm served as the executor of Susan’s will and trust. He helped us with the birth certificates. And Patty’s marriage license of course.”

  She looked at him, incredulous. His revelation had gone off like a nuclear bomb in her head. Leah had been reduced to dust in its wake. There was nothing left of her.

  “After Susan died, we talked about telling you.”

  Rob’s words were far, far away. Like an echo.

  “We talked about getting married, making a little family unit, and I considered it, for your sake and Erica’s. She may not always know how to show it, but Patty really does love you both in her own way. I think my wife was the only person she ever let her guard down with completely.”

  “I probably would have married your mother after Susan died if I hadn’t gotten involved in… this.” He nodded toward the cabinet filled with film reels. “But once I found out about the Mary Magdalenes, about what Father Patrick had done to my wife, to your mother, and then to my daughter…”

  “What, Rob?” Leah croaked, her anger surfacing like molten lava from a volcano. “What did you do? Nothing! You did nothing! Absolutely fucking nothing!”

  Rob caught her wrists as Leah flew at him, avoiding her intended blows, twisting her around while at the same time pulling her close, enfolding her so she couldn’t do anything but struggle against the circle of his arms. She couldn’t even bite him—he had turned her to the wall—although she tried, her teeth bared like a wounded animal at a perceived threat, snapping at the air.

  “You have every right to be angry.” Rob’s voice was calm, soothing, a fact that made Leah struggle even more in his arms. “And when I’m done telling you what I have to tell you, I promise, you can do whatever you like. You can hit me. You can walk out that door and never come back. I will write you a blank check. You can go anywhere in the world.”

  “Let me go!” she cried, but it was impossible to break the hold he had on her. She was folded up like a pretzel in them.

  “When I’m done.”

  “There’s more?” She looked over her shoulder at him, incredulous, like a child whose parents had informed them that no, the doctor wasn’t going to hurt you, while they stood there and watched the needle being prepped. It was always for your own good, wasn’t it, Leah thought. They always said it was for your own good.

  “The only think I will not allow you to do is throw away five years of my life. I’m so close to putting that bastard away for the rest of his life, I can almost taste it. Father Patrick is going to pay for what he’s done. I’m going to make sure of that, or die trying.”

  She relaxed in his arms, feeling his body trembling with emotion, tense with fury.

  “Tell me the rest.” She whispered the words, her throat hot and raw. “Just tell me.”

  “Father Patrick came to me,” he began. “He came to throw me a bone, like I was some milksop pantywaist groveling at his feet. He mistook me for one of his bootlicking parasites.”

  Leah felt Rob’s heart beating hard, his chest against her back.

  “That degenerate pervert had the audacity to come into my own home and brand me a cuckold. Here I thought my wife had been faithful to me, aside from her liaisons with Patty. And those, well… those were filling a need I couldn’t. But in the end, I discovered my wife had been unfaithful to me not one time but a hundred. And she’d been in love with another man all along.”

  Leah made a soft, wounded sound, feeling his pain. “Father Patrick?”

  “She’d told him everything.”

  She wiggled in his arms, his grip like a vise. “Owww, Rob, it hurts.”

  He let her go instantly and she turned to face him.

  “Susan had betrayed all of us. The way her will was structured, Erica was her sole heir, and Father Patrick the trustee. I was her father in name only. All Susan’s money was tied up in the church.”

  He pressed his lip
s together, looking at the wall.

  “But you make so much as a photographer!” Leah exclaimed. “You’d already photographed Eisenhower and Marilyn Monroe! Couldn’t you have made a living on that? You could have taken me and… my mother…”

  The realization that her mother was also Erica’s stopped her words, her train of thought. It was still too much of a shock to her system.

  “I didn’t stay for the money.” Rob smiled grimly. “I stayed for the revenge. I wanted to put that sick motherfucker away for the rest of his life. That’s why I stayed.”

  “How?”

  “He thought he had me dead to rights. After he gleefully informed me that he had ritually fucked my wife for the entire duration of our marriage, he then told me he not only held my purse strings, but he intended to ritually rape my daughter too.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “He then told me he had already laid the groundwork for this by having her sterilized at the tender age of seven.” Rob rubbed his eyes again with his palms, as if he still couldn’t quite believe the images his mind was showing him. “And if I didn’t agree to this, he would remove Erica from care, cut me off from Susan’s trust fund, and he would show the world this.”

  Rob reached into the box, producing a yellowed newspaper clipping, handing it to her. Leah took it with trepidation, unfolding it and staring at the photograph.

  “That’s you?”

  Leah could barely breathe. She had been young during WWII, but she was old enough to remember the oppressive feeling of the era, as if the entire world were being strangled by one madman, his boot on the throat of the very notion of freedom. She remembered kids at school calling each other “Nazis” and getting in trouble for even saying such things. And she was looking at a picture of her husband in full Nazi uniform, hand raised in Hitler’s salute, standing amidst a full line of similarly attired and at-attention soldiers.

  “My parents were German immigrants to this country.” Rob took the article from her trembling hands. “They came over in 1899. They were in their early twenties, newly married. They settled in with the Poles and other German immigrants in Detroit and my father opened a meat market. They thought they couldn’t have children until I came along in 1915. My mother was almost forty. They were both gone, Dad of a heart attack and Mom from complications of pneumonia, by the time I graduated from college.”

  “Oh Rob…”

  He held up his hand, shaking his head. “I was raised speaking German. When I was drafted—I wanted to enlist, but Susan wouldn’t let me—the U.S. Army found my ability to speak German immensely useful and they sent me over to this new little unit they had called the Office of Strategic Service. Their job was intelligence.”

  “You were a…spy?”

  “You could say that.” He nodded. “Unfortunately, Father Patrick had a Xerox of this article.”

  Leah shook her head. “How?”

  “Susan.” He grimaced, putting it back in the box. “She gave it to him before she died and told him if I didn’t agree to raise Erica in the Mary Magdalenes, he should come to me with that photograph. She knew, even if the truth came out, that it would ruin my professional reputation. I’d never work anywhere again.”

  “My god.” Leah glanced down at the pictures still spread out on the bed between them. “What kind of monster was she?”

  “She’d been raised in it. She didn’t know anything else. She looked at that charlatan like he was some sort of God walking around on earth.”

  “So what did you do?”

  He laughed, a sad, bitter thing. “I made a deal with the devil. I sold my soul for vengeance.”

  “But how did you end up in all… all this?” Leah asked, watching him gather the photos and put them back in the box.

  “I called the man who had been my commanding officer during the war, who now had a high ranking position in what used to be the Office of Strategic Services. He was now the head of the Special Activities Division of the Central Intelligence Bureau.”

  “The CIA?”

  “Yes. I told him about the photograph and the priest who was threatening to reveal it. I also told him about the rituals, the abuse of young girls, and told him the church was filming these events and selling them to very rich collectors.”

  “They were?” Leah gaped at him. “How did you know that?”

  “Susan and Patty showed one to me, about two weeks before my wife died. You see, I didn’t believe her, about the Mary Magdalenes. It sounded…”

  “Crazy?”

  He glanced over at her. “Doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.” She nodded. Of course it did. Who would believe such a thing?

  “He said he was very interested, and he believed his friend, J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I would most definitely take an interest in such activity. He told me to sit tight and he’d call me back.”

  “And then?” Leah prompted when Rob trailed off, staring into space.

  He shook his head to clear it. “He got back to me about a week later and said the F.B.I. and specifically J. Edgar Hoover himself was particularly interested in the filming of the rituals and the selling of pornography. They wanted me to continue to find out as much as I could. He asked if I thought I could gather intel, and I told him I was pretty sure I could arrange that.”

  “To what end?”

  Rob looked at her. “They wanted to gather enough evidence to close it down.”

  “Magdalene House?”

  “The church.”

  Leah gasped. “The entire Catholic Church?”

  “From the top down.”

  “What did you do?” she whispered.

  “I did what I was ordered to do. I gathered evidence. I shut up and took pictures. I filmed the rituals. I took still photographs of girls for the ‘art books’ you found under my developing table in there. The church sells them for a tidy profit on the black market. Many of those girls would go on to become Magdalenes in their rituals.”

  “Why did Father Patrick let you do that? He obviously didn’t trust you and had plenty of reason to resent you.”

  “I had far more reason to resent him,” Rob replied darkly. “It was like the Cold War between us. I knew too much about him and he knew too much about me—or he thought he did. The longer our relationship, the more he began to rely on me. That’s the way intel works. People trust the familiar, the things they see every day. I simply offered my services, and he accepted.”

  “Well… don’t you have enough evidence now?” Leah asked. “Can’t you tell him, your contact, whoever he is… can’t you tell him it’s time?”

  “It’s not time. Not quite.” He smiled sadly, taking her hand. “The ritual that Erica participated in—” He choked over those words, clearing his throat. “It’s a yearly event in each Mary Magdalene chapter, but once every ten years they do that same ritual in Rome. Father Patrick facilitates. They do it on years ending in eight, something about the eight beatitudes. They even hold the ritual in an octagon built under the city.”

  Leah remembered the tunnels under the church at St. Mary Magdalene’s leading to the circle in the center with all the cubbies on the sides where naked bodies writhed on red or white pillows. It wasn’t a circle after all—it was an octagon.

  “And, of course, the eight on its side is the symbol for infinity. These are their biggest rituals, the most well-attended, by the highest of church officials. Including, so I hear, the Pope himself. They had one in 1918, 1928, 1938—that’s the one Patty and Susan participated in—and then again in 1948. The next one will be…”

  “1958.”

  “Next year.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I think Father Patrick has his sights set on Erica for next year’s ten-year ritual.” Rob’s jaw tightened as he considered this. “I don’t intend to let that happen, but regardless, I do know that I have to film it. I need that evidence.”

  “But Rob, you can’t keep doing this!” Leah protested. “If someone finds out before then,
you’re going to get stuck holding all of this… and the picture of you in that Nazi uniform will just be the icing on the cake.”

  “It’s just a little longer, Leah.” He put his arms around her. “Hang on with me a little longer. I’ve been doing this for five years, gathering evidence for five years. If I reveal what I know now, yes there will be a scandal, but the church will have time to cover it up. Trust me, they are very, very powerful. It has to go all the way to the top in order to for us to bring it down.”

  “Oh my God.” She buried her face against his chest, unable to take it all in. She didn’t like it, any of it, but she understood what he was saying. “I feel trapped. Like there’s no way out.”

  “There is.” He rocked her, kissing the top of her head. “I promise you.”

  “So Erica really is my sister.” Leah tried this on for size. They’d always been like sisters. No wonder they’d never wanted to be apart. If Leah wasn’t at the Nolans then Erica was at Leah’s. They’d always been inseparable. They could never stay mad at each other for long. It made perfect sense, in hindsight.

  “Yes.” He stroked her hair. “You get tell her. Unless you want me to do it?”

  “No, I’ll do it. She’s too mad at you right now.” Leah pulled away, frowning at him. “So…my mother was never really in love with you?”

  “No. She was in love with my wife.” He smiled sadly. “I think some part of her died with Susan.”

  “But she always talked about you,” Leah said, shaking her head and putting her arms around him again. Had her mother really been in love with another woman? “Said you were such a catch.”

  “It was a cover, I guess,” he said, holding her close. “She’s never remarried. She doesn’t date. I think she’s had to pretend so long, maybe some part of her believes it. I don’t know.”

  A thought suddenly occurred to her and she asked, “Did my mother know what they were going to do to Erica?”