Again . . . and again . . . and again . . .
I didn’t turn when I heard footsteps behind me. Didn’t flinch when I felt the hand on my shoulder either. “What did I tell you about letting people have their privacy?” Sister Bernadette said.
“It’s not my problem his voice is echoing.” I turned on her. “What did you do?”
“Exactly what you wanted.”
“I asked you to intervene. You said you’d take care of it. Why isn’t he in the back of a police car?”
“Don’t talk like that—”
“Stop covering for him! What the hell did he do to Michael?”
“Shut up!” At the sound of Deacon Jameson’s voice, I spun toward the altar. Deacon Jameson was on his feet, voice echoing off the arched ceiling. “Shut up.”
“What did you do to him?” I demanded.
“You just had to interfere. You just had to mess things up,” Deacon Jameson said.
As he stepped forward, I took a step back. “Stay away from me, creep.” But he kept coming.
“First you drove Dima away.” Somehow, it felt more intimate and terrifying to hear Deacon Jameson use his nickname when I’d only heard him use Dmitry before.
I fought to keep my nerve, to keep a brave face. “He went to the camp because of you. Not me.” Whether that was completely true was irrelevant right now. Anything I’d said to Dima at the convention that might have influenced him paled in comparison to what Deacon Jameson had done. “What happened with Michael?”
Deacon Jameson’s voice hitched. “Why couldn’t you leave things alone?” Tears streaked down his cheeks.
“Oh, cut the bullshit! I heard your confession.”
Deacon Jameson stared at me blankly. “W-what?”
“I heard you. The special Communion. I heard everything.”
“Special Communion . . .” Deacon Jameson said, voice shaking. “Do you—do you actually know what happened?”
“I heard your confession. And you know what sucks? I thought I was just paranoid to suspect you. I thought I misjudged you, pervert.”
“I don’t have time for this,” Deacon Jameson said, getting back on his knees.
“Fortunately you’ll have plenty of time once you go to jail.”
“What is wrong with you?” Sister Bernadette hissed. “How dare you!”
“What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you?” I asked hoarsely as Sister Bernadette knelt down next to Deacon Jameson. “The police are right outside. If you cover for him, you’re just as culpable as him—”
“Cover for me?” Deacon Jameson’s voice raised in pitch. He half-laughed, half-sobbed, hysterically. “Michael is dead.”
My blood stopped pumping. He bowed forward, prayers broken up by sobs, Sister Bernadette by his side. “What?”
Silence.
This didn’t make sense. Michael was dead? Sister Bernadette told me she’d take care of it. She made a phone call. Everything was supposed to be fixed.
Did Michael kill himself? Rather than acknowledge what Deacon Jameson did, he took his life? I envisioned Michael’s eyes, already dead when I spoke to him.
My mind moved to the street, the reporters. I yanked my phone out of my capris and pulled up my news app. The headline glared at me:
LOCAL BOY FOUND MURDERED IN SWAMP
Michael . . .
Take care of it . . .
Did that mean . . .
Was it possible? Had Sister Bernadette and Deacon Jameson killed Michael?
“Oh my God . . .” I barely got the syllables out as my vision blurred. I thought I could faintly hear someone shouting my name but everything merged together. A symphony of chaos. Devastation. Guilt.
It’s your fault, it’s your fault, the voice in my head shouted seconds before my head crashed against the pew and the lights went out.
22 Alexis
Everything was blurry. Streaks of color through the corner of my eye—green, brown, blue—until I realized they were objects I could barely see. I sat upright slowly. I was in the backseat of a moving car, a crucifix swayed in the rearview mirror. Sister Bernadette was behind the wheel, but it wasn’t her car. Deacon Jameson sat in the passenger seat. Was this his car? My throat was dry. Oh and, twist, I was suddenly girl-me.
“Where are we going?” I got out hoarsely.
Sister Bernadette turned on the radio. A sermon was on. The crucifix around the rearview mirror bounced with each bump in the road.
I blinked a few times groggily, trying to make sense of everything. Michael was dead? Michael was murdered? And now I was in the backseat of a car? Was this a kidnapping?
No. A nun and a deacon would not kidnap the priest’s niece.
I thought about the previous day, Sister Bernadette reciting the Nicene Creed. How not long afterward she smiled and said it’d be taken care of. Now, neither of them were smiling.
Possibly because they’d just murdered someone. “You killed him,” I blurted out.
In the rearview mirror, I saw Sister Bernadette’s eyes widen. Deacon Jameson whipped around in his seat. His eyes were bloodshot, haunted. “Are you serious? You think we killed Michael?”
“What am I supposed to think?” I shouted. Or tried to shout. My throat felt raw.
“Jesus Christ,” said Sister Bernadette without looking away from the road. I wasn’t sure if a nun who took the Lord’s name in vain was more trustworthy or less so. “We tried to help him. We tried to protect him. We failed.”
Her words hit me like a blow to the face.
Lies? The lies of a murderer?
But if they did kill Michael, why would they have been so upset about his death? The tears, the anger they’d directed at me . . .
Think, stupid. Think.
I went over her words again. We tried to help him.
We.
“It was you on the phone yesterday,” I said to Deacon Jameson. “The person she talked to in code. It was you.”
“No shit,” Deacon Jameson said.
“Joey, stop,” Sister Bernadette said. She turned up the volume on the sermon.
I tried to process it. It would make sense—a twisted, sickening kind of sense, at least—that whoever was abusing Michael ended up killing him. If Deacon Jameson wasn’t Michael’s abuser, that probably meant he wasn’t Michael’s killer either. Instead, Deacon Jameson and Sister Bernadette had been trying to help Michael, but something had gone wrong. Horribly wrong.
“Why couldn’t you protect him, then?” I asked softly, on the verge of tears. “Why didn’t you turn in whoever did this to him?”
“You have no idea what we’re up against,” Deacon Jameson said, no rage left in his voice. So exhausted there was a little slur in his words.
“But you do know who the predator is.”
“I don’t want to talk about this in the car,” said Sister Bernadette firmly. “Can you just be quiet for another five minutes?”
Deacon Jameson reached over, plugging in his MP3 player. The sermon cut off. Instead there was a Gregorian cover of Metallica’s “The Unforgiven.” Hadn’t Dima said something about his passion for Gregorian chants? If it were any other time, I’d comment on how much I liked this song and ask if he listened to the originals or just Gregorian chant versions.