by John Saul
As the church bell tolled the hour, Father MacNeill smoothed the chasuble one last time, picked up his breviary, opened the vestry door, and stepped into the sanctuary. For a moment the murmuring went on uninterrupted, but as first one person and then another realized their priest now stood before them, the tenor of the buzzing changed, and finally died away.
Father MacNeill scanned the congregation. The church was crowded this morning, though he suspected that had more to do with the news of the desecration in the cemetery than it did with his own powers to preach.
Even Corinne Beckwith, whom he was certain accompanied her husband to church only to keep Ray happy, was paying attention this morning. Father MacNeill wondered if she had her tape recorder going, or would be content taking notes with a pen and paper. But like nearly everyone else in the sanctuary, she obviously was expecting him to say something, to explain to them what had happened last night. How, though, could he point an accusing finger until he was certain he knew the culprit's identity?
As he was still trying to decide what, if anything, to say, the door at the back of the church opened and he saw three figures silhouetted against the brilliant morning light. They stepped forward, the door closed, and for a moment they were lost in the shadows of the vestibule.
Then Janet Conway, holding the hand of her little daughter, Molly, stepped forward, dipped her fingers in the font, and dropped into a quick genuflection. Straightening, she searched the church for an empty pew.
A moment later Kim repeated the ritual her mother had just performed.
Then Ted Conway stepped forward, slipping his arms almost protectively around his wife and older daughter.
Father MacNeill found himself holding his breath as he waited to see if Jared Conway would also appear in the church. The seconds crept by, as heads turned to see at whom their priest was staring. When Jared didn't appear, Father MacNeill finally let out his breath and waited to see what the Conways would do.
Phil Engstrom rose from his seat in the first pew, as if to leave. His wife was beside him, though Father MacNeill didn't see Sandy. The mayor's gaze locked on Father MacNeill's, and the priest saw that even the mayor had finally rejoined the ranks of the righteous, abandoning his support of the Conways. Then Phil turned and looked directly at Ted Conway, and as the two men's eyes met, the priest saw something change. Phil Engstrom appeared uncertain for a moment, and then his face cleared and he smiled at Conway. "There's plenty of room here, Ted," he declared. "Come and sit with us."
Stunned by the change in the town's mayor, Father MacNeill watched as the Conways made their way down the aisle, every eye in the church tracking them. Only as they edged into the Engstroms' pew did anyone speak.
"If there's room in this church for them, then there isn't for me," Ellie Roberts declared. Rising from her seat, her right arm in a sling, she stepped out into the aisle and, limping heavily, left the church.
Father MacNeill waited. No one else left.
Then he turned his back to the congregation and began celebrating the mass in the old tradition: facing the altar and intoning the words in the ancient language of the Church. The Latin phrases rolled from his tongue in fulsome cadences, and when he finally turned to face the congregation, every one of them had closed their eyes as he recited the final benediction.
Every one of them, except for one.
Ted Conway's eyes were wide open.
And they were blazing with undisguised hatred.
Janet glanced at the clock on the wall of the big reception room in the parish hall. Its hands seemed not to have moved since the last time she'd looked. The mass had ended an hour ago, but Ted insisted they stay for the hospitality hour. Every minute had seemed like an hour as she stood with Marge Engstrom, pretending she didn't notice how few people approached them, or see the hostile clutches of parishioners whispering to each other while pretending not to glance her way. Worst of all were those who spoke to Marge but ignored Janet and her family completely, acting as if they simply weren't there. And everywhere she looked, Ellie Roberts was there, whispering to one group after another. All the goodwill Janet had felt after the town meeting had evaporated; if the meeting were to be held again tonight, she was sure there wouldn't be a single person in the room who would vote with them. "It's like they think we had something to do with what happened last night," she said as Ted and Phil finally came over to join them.
Shortly after mass was over, the Conways heard about the desecration of their uncle's tomb, and the grisly object pinned to the tree. Though Kim refused even to look at the cat's hide, Janet and Ted identified it as Muffin's. Tears had streaked Kim's face when she learned the fate of her pet, but she wiped them away, refusing to expose her pain to a town that had suddenly turned so hostile.
Ted shook his head. "It's not that so much as Ellie Roberts—she's telling everyone that Jared made her walk in front of that car."
"But that's stupid!" Kim burst out, breaking out of her grief over her pet to defend her brother. "I saw Jared, and he wasn't anywhere near Mrs. Roberts!" As almost everyone in the room turned to stare at her, she flushed with embarrassment. "Can't we go home, Daddy?" she begged. "Please?"
For a moment Janet thought Ted was going to argue with Kim, but instead he nodded. "Sure. I don't think we're going to be able to bring any of these people around right now, anyway." Saying goodbye to Phil and Marge Engstrom, they stepped out into the bright sunlight.
Just being outside of the parish hall—and away from the hostility she'd felt radiating from nearly everyone in it—Janet began to relax. But when Ray Beckwith stopped them before they'd even reached the sidewalk, her anxiety came rolling back.
"Do you know where your son was last night, Mr. Conway?" Beckwith asked.
Ted's eyes fixed angrily on the officer. "He was at home. Why?"
"Now, don't get all het up," Beckwith said quickly. "I have a job to do here, and all I'm trying to do is—"
"All you're trying to do is blame my son for vandalizing my uncle's mausoleum?" Ted demanded. "Why shouldn't I get 'het up,' as you so picturesquely put it?"
"I'm not saying he did it—" Beckwith began again, but once more Ted didn't let him finish.
"You're damned right you're not! And if you do, I'll slap a lawsuit on your ass so fast it will make your head spin!"
Ray Beckwith's face reddened. "Now you just hold your horses, here, Conway—"
"Hold your own damned horses," Ted shot back. His voice dropped to a menacing growl. "I'm fed up with what's going on in this town. Since the moment we arrived, it seems like a lot of people have been trying to get us to go away. For starters, there's Jake Cumberland, right? Where was he last night? The last time I saw him was at the town meeting, where he was pointing at me and ranting about the Devil! So before you go accusing my son, why don't you check out Cumberland?" His gaze shifted toward the church. "And speaking of the Devil, why don't we talk about the church, too! It was Father MacNeill who was talking against me at that meeting, wasn't it? In fact, the last few weeks he's talked to practically everyone in town, trying to get them to vote against letting me open a business. And now there's been vandalism in the cemetery next to his church, but it was my uncle's crypt that was vandalized. So if I were you, Sheriff, I wouldn't be talking to me about this. I'd get my ass in there and start asking Father MacNeill and everyone else who's been whispering about us all morning what they know about this!"
Ray Beckwith, his ruddy face paling in the wake of Ted's torrent of words, stepped back. "Yes, sir, Mr. Conway," he said, his voice suddenly drained of the anger he'd shown a moment before. "I can certainly understand your feelings. And I'll certainly look into every possibility."
Again Ted fixed his gaze on the policeman. "You see that you do." He turned to Janet. "Let's go home."
Father MacNeill fairly trembled with rage. "He actually suggested you investigate me? And you took him seriously?"
Ray Beckwith quailed before the priest's anger, wondering what he'd d
one to deserve the bad luck to catch the call that morning when the vandalism had been discovered. They were seated in the priest's small office, where Father Bernard had joined them as Beckwith attempted to piece together the sequence of events. It had been discovered that the cross used to pin the cat's hide to the tree came from the side chapel in St. Ignatius. But the church had been locked last night—Father MacNeill had unlocked it himself before mass that morning. A few other people had keys, but none of them would have given a key to Jared Conway, or Jake Cumberland, for that matter.
Jared Conway, Beckwith ascertained, had in fact been inside the church, unsupervised. Hadn't Father Bernard checked on the work the boys had done? And if he had, how had he failed to notice that missing cross right away?
A vein in Father Bernard's forehead throbbed as he admitted he hadn't actually examined the boys' work that afternoon. Beckwith turned to Father MacNeill. "Seems to me at least one of you might've noticed if that cross had been missing since the boys cleaned the church."
That was when Father MacNeill started getting angry. "I'm in and out of the church a hundred times a week. I can't possibly notice everything that's wrong."
"But you noticed the crypt in the Conway mausoleum was open," Ray reminded him. "It wasn't open more than an inch. But you noticed."
That tore it. Father MacNeill's face hardened into an angry mask. "Are you suggesting I might have vandalized the cemetery myself?" he said in a tone calculated to make Ray back down.
But Ray stuck to his guns. "I'm just doing my job. I talked to Mr. Conway, just like you wanted me to, and now I'm talking to you just like he—" He caught himself too late. The priest leaped on it immediately.
"Well?" Father MacNeill demanded when Ray didn't answer his question right away. "Did Ted Conway tell you to investigate me or not? It's a simple enough question."
"I told you, Father MacNeill. I'm doing my job, and my job is to investigate what happened last night. It's not to decide who did it, then go about making everything fit."
Father MacNeill glared furiously at the policeman. What on earth could make Ray Beckwith, who until this very afternoon had never failed to treat him with the respect his position deserved, suddenly speak to him as if he were a common criminal?
Then he remembered glancing out the window of the parish hall just after Ted Conway led his family out. He'd seen Ray talking to Conway, but mostly he'd seen Conway talking to Ray. Talking to him the same way he'd addressed the whole town at the meeting? Of course. And Ray, obviously, had fallen victim to the man's charm as easily as everyone at the meeting had.
It's time for me to talk to that man myself, Father MacNeill decided.
"Very well," the priest said aloud. "I wouldn't want to interfere with you performing your job, Raymond. And I'm sure when you're done, you'll have discovered the truth. But I'm telling you right now—if you think anyone here had anything to do with this terrible criminal act, you're wrong. Perhaps mortally wrong."
Leaving the threat to the future of Ray Beckwith's soul hanging in the air, Father MacNeill turned his back on the policeman and left the room.
Perhaps we ought to wait until tomorrow morning," Father Bernard fretted. The afternoon had turned warm, but not nearly warm enough to warrant the perspiration dripping down his arms and back. No, his sweating wasn't caused by the heat, but by his nerves. And to what purpose? Tomorrow morning he could call Jared Conway and Luke Roberts into his office at school and get the truth out of them very quickly, indeed. In his office, Father Bernard was in charge. Outside his office, it was another matter entirely. From the time he'd first arrived at St. Ignatius, he'd been the leader in the school; in the rectory, however, it was the force of Father MacNeill's personality that held sway. Which was how it happened that he was now walking along Pontchartrain Street toward the Conway house, with sweat trickling down his back, staining the sleeves of his cassock.
"There's no reason to wait until tomorrow," Father MacNeill shot back. "If Ray Beckwith won't do his job, we shall simply do it for him." He paused a moment, gazing down the street at the Conway house. This afternoon, with the sun shining on its new coat of paint, the house had finally lost its look of a crumbling derelict. The missing slate on its roof had been replaced; somehow Ted Conway had even managed to find new trim to replace the fancywork that had rotted and broken over the years the house sat empty and untended. The last of the overgrowth crowding the grounds had been stripped away, and only a few strands of dying kudzu still clung to the great spreading magnolia from which George Conway had hanged himself so many years ago. Indeed, the disrepair that had given the house its darkly foreboding look was gone, so much so that for a moment Father MacNeill wondered if it was possible that everything he'd ever heard about the house—everything Monsignor Devlin had shown him in the Conway Bible—had been untrue.
But an instant later, as he started across the street, he felt it. It was as if an evil force was emanating from the house itself. He tried to ignore it, but even as he neared the door, he felt it.
A chill.
And something else.
It was as if something unseen—unseeable—was waiting for him.
Preparing to attack him.
As he drew closer, every nerve in his body began tingling, and a wave of panic rose inside him. He forced it down, though, and with Father Bernard trailing after him, made himself stride up the walk, mount the steps, and ring the bell. From somewhere deep inside the house a chime sounded, and then a dog began barking.
The priest was about to press the bell a second time when Janet Conway opened the door. She was bent down, clutching at the collar of a large golden retriever. The dog was still barking, but its tail was wagging furiously as it attempted to scramble out. "I'm sorry," Janet blurted, "I'm afraid—" Her words died on her lips as she recognized Father MacNeill. An uncertain frown appeared as she straightened up. "I'm afraid Scout isn't much of a watchdog," she finished. Tightening her grip on the dog's collar, she pulled the door open farther.
A wave of cold rolled through the gap. Father MacNeill took an involuntary step back.
"Is there something I can do for you?" Janet asked, keeping her tone neutral, but with difficulty.
"I wanted to have a few words with you," Father MacNeill began. "And your son, too." As he uttered the words, the priest felt a wave of pure emotion break over him, an emotion he recognized at once.
Hatred.
Something—or someone—in this house hated him with an intensity he'd never felt before. A hatred so strong that once again he lurched back a step. Under his cassock, his body was suddenly slick with sweat, and the panic he'd only barely managed to control a few moments ago was again threatening to overwhelm him.
Janet's frown deepened as the priest staggered backward. "Are you all right?" she asked anxiously, opening the door still farther. "Would you like to come in for a moment?"
Father MacNeill struggled to control the panic that had seized him. He tried to take a step forward, but could not. It was as if a wall—a physical wall—blocked him. When he tried to speak, his voice was constricted, as though a rope was tightening around his throat. "I—wanted a word with—" His breath caught for a moment, then he managed to finish his sentence: "—with Jared," he stammered.
Once again he tried to take a step toward the open front door, but it was no use.
He couldn't enter the house, couldn't so much as set foot across the threshold.
"Jared?" Janet repeated. Her eyes flicked from Father MacNeill to Father Bernard. Both priests were sweating, and their faces were ashen. Before she could say anything else, Ted appeared behind her.
"Is there something we can do for you?" he asked coldly, his eyes fixed on Father MacNeill.
Once again the priest took an involuntary step backward. "If we could just have a few words with Jared," he repeated.
Ted Conway's eyes bored into the priest's. "About?" he demanded.
"Is he here?" the priest countered, his voice trembling
despite his efforts to control it.
Janet, still struggling with Scout, looked uncertainly to her husband. "Should I call him?"
Molly peeped around the edge of the door. She gazed out at the two priests, then suddenly began crying and reached for her father. Ted swung the little girl up into his arms. "We might do better to call the police," Ted said as he jiggled Molly and she calmed down.
Janet glanced from her husband to the priest, then back to her husband. "I—I'll just call Jared," she stammered. If she didn't do something to break the tension between Ted and the priest, one of them very well might call the police. "He didn't have anything to do with what happened last night, so what can it possibly hurt?"
Without waiting for a reply from Ted, she hurried through the dining room and opened the door to the basement. "Jared?" she called. "Jared!" When there was no response, she went down the steep flight of stairs and rapped on the closed door to his room. A moment later the door opened a crack, and she could smell the musty odor of the fumes that constantly drifted up from the sump in the middle of the room. "Father MacNeill and Father Bernard are here. They want to talk to you."
Jared's expression clouded. "What about?"
"Something happened at the cemetery last night, and for some reason Father MacNeill thinks you might have something to do with it. All you have to do is tell him you didn't, and that will be the end of it."
When Jared said nothing, Janet felt her stomach tighten. If Jared refused to talk to the priest, MacNeill would assume the worst. But then Jared shrugged. "Sure," he said. "I'll be up in a minute."
By the time Janet got back to the front door, Kim was standing at the bottom of the stairs. "What do they want?" she asked, anxiously eyeing the two priests who waited on the porch.
"It's all right," Janet assured her. "They just want to talk to Jared. They'll be gone in a minute."
