by Lynne Hinton
Roger dropped his head, recalling that Malene had tried to comfort their grandson, that she was finally able to get him back to bed, and Roger himself had promised him that he wouldn’t let the things that people were saying influence him in his thoughts about or actions toward Trina. Alex had finally fallen asleep, but not before he shook his head and whispered, “They’re going to run her off.”
The sheriff was just about to turn around and go back to his house, choosing not to make the visit, to put off the conversation he knew he had to have, when Trina opened the front door and glanced down.
“Hey, Roger,” she said, smiling, not at all alarmed to see him there. “You coming up?”
Chapter Twenty-nine
I need to talk to Rob.” Katie stood outside the boys’ locker room just after school and just before football practice.
“He’s getting dressed,” the equipment manager explained and was about to shut the door in the girl’s face.
Katie caught the door before it closed. “No, you need to tell him that I have to talk to him.”
The manager, Billy Owens, a freshman, had just started his job with the football team, and he tended to waffle in his decision-making. He knew that the quarterback would not be pleased to have his girlfriend call him out of the locker room before practice, and that if the other players found out they would give him a hard time, but he also knew that Katie was best friends with Nichole Barrett, and Nichole Barrett’s younger sister was Iris, the girl he had had a crush on since fifth grade.
He knew he risked being reprimanded by Rob if he did what she asked, but he also knew this could be beneficial when it came to the girl of his dreams. Maybe, he thought, if I do this for Katie, she’ll remember and mention it to Iris. He paused, looking at the girl, then looking behind him in the locker room. He figured he could tell Rob and not let the other players know. He made up his mind.
“All right, wait right here,” Billy said.
Katie backed away from the door and leaned against the wall. She knew Rob wouldn’t be pleased to see her, would probably even yell at her for calling him out of practice, but she needed to tell him what she had just overheard. She needed reassurance that nothing had changed, that their stories were still reliable, and that no one knew what really happened the night of the fire. Katie felt her neck start to itch, and she knew it was turning red. She always broke out in hives when she got nervous. She glanced around to see if anyone was watching and took a deep breath.
Finally the door opened. “What do you want?” Rob asked, surprised to see her. Apparently, the manager had not told him who wanted to see him, only that someone had asked for him in the hallway. “I told you not to come here.” He looked up and down the hall, making sure they were alone.
“I know, I’m sorry,” she said. She reached up to scratch her neck and then reached out to take Rob’s hands.
He yanked his hands away. “I said, what do you want?” he asked again, sounding perturbed.
Katie stepped back. “I heard Debbie Crawford telling some girls that she knew your truck was at the church the night of the fire,” she said. She pulled her hair around to the front, trying to hide her neck.
“Everybody knows my truck was at the church that night,” he said, looking angry. “I told the police I took Trina there. They know that,” he said again. “Everybody knows that.”
“I know,” Katie said. “I’m just …” She shook her head. “I just think somebody’s going to find out,” she whispered, glancing around.
Rob stepped toward her and grabbed her by the arm. “I told you, nobody is going to find out as long as you keep your mouth shut,” he said. “Everybody thinks she did it, so just shut up about it.”
Katie looked down. “I’m, I’m just scared,” she said.
Rob sighed and grabbed her other arm, pulling her into him to reassure her. He whispered in her ear. “Nobody knows we were there,” he said, “and that’s the way it will stay. Nobody saw us there. Nobody can prove we were there. We’re the only ones who know. But,” and he pulled away and stared her straight in the eyes, placing both hands on her face, “if you keep whining like this, somebody is going to get suspicious. So stop it. It’s fine.”
“Everything all right out here?” Coach Simpson had rounded the corner and was making his way to the locker room. “Chavez, you planning to practice football or get a room?”
“Sorry, Coach,” Rob replied, dropping his hands and stepping back into the locker room. He didn’t even say good-bye, just left Katie standing right where she was while the coach watched.
“Young lady,” Coach Simpson said with a nod as he followed his star quarterback.
Katie stood at the door as it closed in front of her, feeling stupid for being there. She had expected that kind of reaction from Rob. He never wanted her around when he was practicing football or playing football, except in the stands with other fans. He didn’t even want her around when he was talking football with his friends. He claimed he cared about her more than anything, even sports, but once school started, it was obvious that she was not his first love.
She stood there, scratching her neck, and waited. She wanted to knock on the door again and call him back out and explain that people were still talking and that some of her friends had asked her about Rob and Trina and even though he had said nothing had happened between the two of them, even though he claimed he had only met her during the summer and had spoken to her a few times and that he had seen her walking and offered her a ride that night, she just needed a little more reassurance from him. She couldn’t seem to stop worrying about Rob and that girl and the night of the fire. She had thought she was fine, and she hadn’t felt nervous for weeks, but ever since school started she was anxious that someone would find out about what had really happened that night at Holy Family Church.
Weeks had passed and she regretted everything about that night. She regretted letting Rob in the house with his bloody lip and believing his pitiful story about getting hit at practice, she regretted sneaking out after her parents had gone to bed, and mostly she regretted agreeing with him to let him take her to the church. The entire night had been a mistake, and she wished she could take it all back, wished she had never answered the door, and wished most of all that she had never left the house.
Rob had been all hands when he stopped by, and she worried that her parents would come down to the basement and catch them. When she kept telling him to hush and to stop, that he was going to wake her mom and dad, he had pulled his keys out of his pocket and told her that he had a great place for them to go. Katie had not wanted to leave the house, but he was so persistent, and she had felt bad for him because of his lip, and deep down she worried that she had made him wait too long. He just seemed so needy. She worried that if she didn’t go with him and didn’t have sex with him, she would lose him. And Katie did not want to start school any other way than as Rob Chavez’s girlfriend.
Once they had parked his truck down the road from the church and walked through a field to the back door, she was feeling less anxious about it, even a bit excited. He had promised her this would be the most special night of her life, and it was in lots of ways. When they got there, Rob had been so tender with her. He lit candles and spread a blanket on the floor. He had told her that she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen and that having sex would make their love even more special. He had promised her that his last year in school would be their best and that she would be a part of his new life when he went to college, while she finished her senior year. He told her that he loved her and was sure he wanted to marry her. He said all the things she wanted to hear, and all the things he said were very special. That part, the part before he took off her clothes and slid her next to him, that part was everything that she had hoped it would be.
The last part, the act itself, was not so special for Katie and wasn’t nearly as good an experience as it apparently was for Rob. He was clumsy and too aggressive. He grabbed and pulled and bit
and pushed himself inside her before she was ready. It was painful and not as easy as he had promised. By the time school started they’d had sex five or six more times, and it didn’t hurt as much as it did that first time, but it was still not anything she enjoyed.
He did, at least, have condoms and used them every time, including that first night, so she didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant. But there were certainly other things to worry about. The biggest worry, of course, being the fact that when they left the church that night, sometime after midnight, Rob had folded up the blanket, blown out the candles he had put on the floor, and hurried them out the back door, hiding the key above the ledge where he had found it and forgetting about the candles left burning on the table.
When Katie later heard the news—the report that the fireman made to the sheriff and her brother, the one Danny shared with their parents a few nights after the incident, the report concluding that the fire had been started by burning candles on the altar—she had gotten up from the dinner table and run straight to the bathroom to vomit.
When Katie called and told Rob what she had heard, he convinced her that the story he had already told Danny and the sheriff was the perfect story. He explained it to her the same way he explained it to them. He had given Trina a ride to the church that night about an hour before he got to Katie’s house. He had dropped her off in the parking lot and left her there.
He promised Katie that everyone thought the new girl living in Roger’s apartment had been the last one at the church that night and that she was not denying she had been there. “It is,” he said convincingly, “a perfect story. No one thinks anything other than that.” He persuaded her that, for her own benefit, she needed to keep her mouth closed. And she had done what he asked. She hadn’t even told Nichole that she was no longer a virgin.
Once school started and people were still talking about how the Monsignor in Gallup had decided not to rebuild the church in Pie Town and the Catholic residents would have to attend Mass over in Omega or Quemado, how Trina had set the fire on purpose because she was angry at the priest, and how Father George was asking to be reassigned because the fire had taken everything from him and he didn’t want to be in a place that reminded him of such loss, Katie had begun to doubt Rob’s assurances that no one would find out about them being at the church and leaving the candles burning and that Trina would be held responsible for the fire but not charged with any crime.
She had begun to doubt not only what her boyfriend told her about the fire and about no one finding out, but also what he said about her being his one true love and how he could only love her. She had begun to wonder about all that he said about that night, about getting injured at football practice and giving that girl a ride and wanting to have sex only because he wanted to be as close to Katie as he could be. She had started to doubt everything about that night, about their relationship, and about Rob Chavez.
Katie knew she wouldn’t be able to talk to Rob again until he came to her house that night. She turned down the hall, walked outside, and watched as the football team headed out the back door of the locker room and onto the field. She thought she saw Rob look in her direction, and she smiled and lifted up her hand to wave. If he saw her, he never acknowledged her, and she dropped her hand, sliding her fingers, scratching, all the way down her neck.
Chapter Thirty
Father George Morris had not slept in weeks. In fact, if he counted back to the last time he’d had a full night’s rest, he would have to go all the way back to the night before the fire. That night he had slept deeply and soundly, waking even a little later than dawn, his usual hour for morning prayers.
Now every night was a struggle. He lay in bed. He tossed and turned. He prayed. He said the rosary. He got up and read scripture. He went back to bed. He tossed and turned some more. He figured he was getting a couple of hours of sleep sometime between the praying and the tossing, but in the mornings he felt as if he had been in some great, long, and losing battle.
He looked up at the calendar still hanging on the wall in front of his desk. The day was circled in red ink. Moving day. Leaving day. He was heading out later that afternoon for California, to a seminary in Berkeley to work in the administrative office as assistant to the president. It was a good job, and he was lucky to get it. And leaving parish ministry and taking an administrative position, getting out of the intimate work of being in the lives of people entrusted to his care just seemed a better fit. The Monsignor in New Mexico had made the arrangements, and Father George was thankful.
He had heard about the opening and made queries. In the end, they had all agreed that it would be a good match. He had great computer skills and excellent organizational qualities, liked order, and was task-oriented, everything the president needed in an assistant. It had been decided in only a matter of weeks, and even though everyone saw the new job as a chance for the poor parish priest who had lost everything in a fire to start over, no one spoke of it in that way. The diocese was being refigured in the western part of the state anyway, and a priest would no longer be serving the parish in Pie Town. It was a good placement at the seminary, a good move for the Gallup diocese and a good match for Father George Morris.
If anybody in Pie Town was upset about his leaving, no one said so. If any of the parishioners were sorry to see him go, it was never brought to his attention. The Altar Guild had planned a nice reception at the parish in Omega on his last Sunday. The members of the three churches had raised some money to help him buy replacement books, and the prayer shawl group had sewn a few new vestments. But no one stopped by the rectory to try to change his mind. No one hung around after Mass to try to understand his reasons for leaving. Accepting what the fire had left them and honoring the decision handed down to them from the diocese that no church would be built in its place, no one seemed concerned that the church would not be rebuilt and that Father George Morris was moving on.
He yanked the calendar off the wall and stuck it in a box sitting by the desk. “It’s for the best,” he told himself and opened the desk drawers to see what else he had left to pack. He shuffled through a few papers, pulled out some ink pens and a pair of scissors, dropped them into the box. He shut that drawer and pulled out the one beneath it, thinking about his short tenure in Pie Town, thinking about the few sermons he had preached in his time there, the few people he had actually gotten to know. His time in his first parish had been short and not very successful. He would mostly remember being the priest in place the night the church burned down, and that was how Pie Town would remember him as well. He sat down at the desk. He was tired from the packing.
After weeks of living next to ashes, next to the place where the church had been established over one hundred years before, next to the tiny chapel built by the townspeople, he had not spoken to anyone about the night of the fire. If Trina had used him as an alibi, if she had told anyone about the time she had been around the church, starting in the parking lot and concluding in the rectory, about what she was doing the entire time she was there and what time she left, he hadn’t heard it. The town had somehow gotten wind of the news and assumed that she set the fire, unintentionally of course, so no charges would be filed and no payment demanded from the young woman. There were rumors that she did it on purpose. A few said that she was in the sanctuary with a boy for reasons other than religion, some said that she did it out of meanness or spite, while only one or two suggested that she was there to pray. Everybody accepted that Trina was the cause of the fire, but they differed on her motives. As for Father George, he had not seen or talked to her since that night.
The sheriff had stopped by the rectory a few days after the cause of the fire had been determined, but he hadn’t asked about the priest’s interaction with Trina. He asked Father George only about the meetings or gatherings the priest had known to be going on at the church building, when he had left the sanctuary, whether he went back into the building after services, and if he had seen Rob Chavez’s truck i
n the parking lot. The only question Roger had asked about Trina was whether or not the priest had noticed her getting out of the truck.
When Roger had showed up at the front door, Father George had been prepared to tell the sheriff everything, even though he had not wanted to explain the details of that night. But when Roger never specifically asked him about his activities that evening and about what had occurred at the rectory, he had not volunteered the truth. And once everyone began to treat him as if he had been victimized because of the losses he suffered, staying clear of him, not pressuring him for information, he just didn’t see any sense in telling what he knew. Besides, he had told himself time and time again, he didn’t know what Trina had done when she left the rectory. She could have gone into the sanctuary, lit a candle, and left it burning. He didn’t know, and he didn’t see any reason to tell anyone about her visit and about their lengthy and intimate conversation, about how, before she left, she had covered him with a blanket and removed his shoes because he had fallen asleep on the sofa.
Besides, she had not called him for assistance. Apparently, she had not told anyone that she was with him that evening. No one had asked him to verify any story that she had given. So he had just decided not to hand over more information than was required. If she needed him, he convinced himself, she would have called and asked. He would assist only if she needed it. Because the truth of the matter was that it would not bode well for the priest if it was discovered that he had been alone in the rectory with a young woman, especially that young woman, well after appropriate meeting hours and late into the night. The two of them had talked a long time, and he had fallen asleep, and he didn’t know what time she left. That story would not be good for his reputation.
