“Maybe this is my penance, too.” She gave him a tired smile.
“I guess I ought to take you home.”
She sat up straight and looked at him again. “No, I want to go back to the house. Someone had to have seen someone near his car, right?”
“You sure about that?” Cyrus asked.
“What if the Butterfly needs our help?”
There they were, Cyrus thought, two fuck-ups with so many sins in their past, they’d need an army of priests and a five-gallon bucket of holy water to absolve them both. Since they didn’t have any priests or holy water, they would find the Butterfly and make sure she was safe. They couldn’t do a God damn thing about their pasts anyway tonight. But they could do this.
Chapter Forty-One
They didn’t talk on the way to the house. Cyrus’s mind ran with the possibilities. The Butterfly, whoever she was, had stuffed the pink envelope into the mailbox. Someone might have seen her. Cyrus pictured a beautiful young woman, probably in her twenties, someone with a shitty boyfriend or an abusive husband. The kind of troubled young woman who’d had a bad relationship with her father and would latch onto a kind older man, a kind older priest. She’d pour out her heart to him and he’d comfort her and tell her how beautiful she was and how she didn’t deserve to be treated the way she was…and all the time Father Ike was falling for her, falling hard, so hard he couldn’t stop thinking about her, how much he wanted her, how much she tempted him. But he was a good man and he refused to give into temptation.
Until he did.
Assume the worst, Cyrus thought again.
Was she pregnant? Possibly. A priest finding out he got a young woman pregnant would be a good motive for a suicide. Or a murder. Men killed their pregnant partners all the time. Or maybe she wanted an abortion, and he offered to take her to get one when really he was going to keep her captive until it was too late for that. The thought turned Cyrus’s stomach.
Assume the worst.
There was something worse than even that. Don’t be a kid. Don’t be a kid. Dear Lord Jesus in heaven, don’t let it be a kid, Cyrus prayed silently.
They parked in front of the house on Annunciation Street.
“Ready?” Cyrus asked.
“Ready.”
They headed in the general direction of the street where Father Ike had left his car the day of the suicide. When they saw someone was home, they knocked on the door. Nora flashed her smile. Cyrus flashed his P.I. credentials. Nobody had seen a priest around, but they hadn’t been paying attention either. Lots of Catholic schools in the area. Priests and nuns didn’t make a big impression.
“I’m glad you’re with me,” Nora said as they turned the corner onto Rose. “Knocking on stranger’s doors is a little dicey.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Cyrus said. “Glad you’re with me.”
She felt safer walking around at night with a man. He felt safer walking around at night with a white woman.
“What now?” she asked as they stopped at the place where Cyrus had found Father Ike’s car.
“I guess we come back tomorrow,” he said. “And do it again.”
Nora exhaled heavily, nodded. As they walked back to the car, back to Annunciation Street, Cyrus tried to meditate, to reach the river and the answers he hoped were waiting there for him. But he couldn’t find his way there. Instead, his mind kept taking him back to that morning he was called to the house and had seen Father Ike’s body on the floor.
Maybe that meant something.
“If you were planning to meet someone somewhere,” Cyrus said, “and they didn’t show up, what would you do?”
“Call them.”
“If they didn’t answer?”
“I’d call again. If they still didn’t answer…I’d get very scared.”
“So what would you do?”
“Probably try to find them,” she said. “Go to their house, knock on the door, make sure they’re okay.”
Cyrus spun on his heel.
“Cy?”
“Come on,” he said, waving his hand and Nora jogged after him.
They ran all the way back to the street where Father Ike had parked his car that morning.
“What are we doing?” Nora asked, panting, out of breath.
Cyrus wasn’t sure. He only had a hunch. A strong hunch, but still just a hunch.
“Remember that nosy lady who asked us about the car? Where’d she live?”
Nora pointed to a pink house. Cyrus went up to the door and knocked.
A woman answered. It was the same woman who’d given them the third degree about the car.
“Yes?” she asked. “Wait. You two were here before.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” Cyrus said. “I’m a detective, I think I told you. You said something about kids messing with the car that was left on the street. Did you recognize those kids?”
The woman wore an embarrassed expression.
“Well, it was only one kid,” she said. “And she was mostly just standing by the car.”
“She? A little girl?” Nora asked. “Do you know her?”
“She lives over there in that little gray brick house. That’s her.”
He and Nora turned at the same time toward the house. A girl was sitting on the concrete porch steps, drawing or coloring. Cyrus looked at Nora. As casually as they could, they crossed the street. They stopped on the sidewalk in front of her house.
“Hi there,” Nora said. Her voice was painfully bright and cheerful. “Is your mom or dad home?”
The girl shrugged. “Soon.”
“That’s the girl,” Cyrus said under his breath. “I saw her walking by the house the morning after.”
Nora gave him a worried look. “Are you coloring?” she asked the girl.
The girl held up her book. It was a coloring book but not one for kids. This was the sort of coloring book adults used for personal therapy, with intricate patterns that took hours to complete—all butterflies. Those books weren’t cheap. Had someone given it to her?
Cyrus felt something inside him shatter and the pieces cut into his gut. She couldn’t have been more than twelve years old.
“I know you,” Cyrus said, smiling at the girl, the fakest smile he’d ever smile. “Where’s your fairy wings at?”
“Fairy wings?” The girl looked at him, wide-eyed.
“I saw you on Saturday walking on Annunciation. You had on fairy wings.”
“Those aren’t fairy wings,” she said. “That’s my backpack. It’s a butterfly backpack.”
Assume the worst, Søren had said. This was the worst.
“I’m Cyrus,” he said. “This is Nora. We knew Father Ike. Did you know him?”
Cyrus walked slowly to the porch, Nora at his side, still smiling. They both were, smiling like it would kill them not to smile.
“He was chaplain at my school last year,” she said, closing her coloring book. “He died, right?”
Nora stepped up onto the front porch first. Cyrus kept a little more distance.
“Yes, sweetheart,” Nora said. “He died. I’m sorry.”