The Priest's Graveyard Read online

  “Say it!” I said.

  “Settle down.” His hands were spread and that smug grin was gone for good. “What do you want me to say?”

  “Say you’re lying! Say you killed him!”

  He didn’t say anything right away. And that was good enough for me.

  I shot him.

  The sound of the gun firing was soft, like a pellet gun, but the smack of the bullet wasn’t so soft. It thudded into his shoulder and jerked him to his left.

  Bourque began to swear, but I cut him off.

  “Shut up! The next one goes in your head, you filthy pig!” My voice sounded distant, as if another part of me was speaking, the part that was chased by ghosts sometimes. I was hardly aware of what I was doing. My mind had skipped off its track and was on a surreal trip.

  His face twisted up into a blood-dark knot. “You shot—”

  He wasn’t listening, so I shot him again, this time in his belly. It sounded like a hard slap.

  He grasped his stomach, aghast, then pulled his hand away bloody.

  My mind cleared long enough for me to grasp what I’d just done. It hit me like a thunderclap. I’d actually shot the man! I’d shot him twice. Danny would kill me!

  “You shot me,” he said. “You stupid whore, you shot me!”

  My impulse to shoot again was overwhelming. I wanted to make him eat my gun for spreading those lies about Lamont.

  But my hands were trembling and I knew that something was wrong. I couldn’t piece it together, but something wasn’t right here. I should just shoot him. I’d waited three months, and I could finish everything with just one more piece of lead.

  So I did. I pulled that trigger one more time, and this time the bullet took him between the eyes.

  His head snapped back and he sagged on the chair.

  The smell of gun smoke hung in the air. Silence settled around me.

  I had to get out!

  I lurched forward and stumbled to the window. I fumbled with the latches, finally flipped both open, and yanked the window up. A screen blocked the way and I tried to punch it out, but the thin wire mesh only bent and then broke where my fist had hit it. So I stood back and kicked the frame. This time the whole screen popped out.

  I was halfway through the window, gun banging noisily on the metal framing, when I remembered my black bag.

  Never leave your kit. Never.

  Obeying Danny’s voice, I retrieved my kit, rushed back to the window, flung the bag outside, and rolled through the opening after it.

  If the cabdriver had turned tail and run out on his two-thousand-dollar fare, I would be on foot and caught within minutes.

  Someone yelled inside as I came to my feet, bag in one hand, gun in the other. I shoved the gun into the bag and ran, not knowing where to, praying for that cab to materialize.

  But I didn’t have to pray. Raymond had parked directly across from Bourque’s warehouse in the shade of another.

  I ran at the cab, flailing one arm over my head. The engine roared to life, but with it came a curse from the window behind me. So I zagged, thinking zigging and zagging targets were harder to hit than ones running as straight as a bullet flies.

  “Hurry!” I screamed.

  The car squealed through a tight turn and skidded to a stop in front of me. I plowed into the side, grasped for the door handle, missed, and was making a second grab when the car window exploded with the impact of a bullet.

  “Up front! Up front!” Raymond had thrown the front passenger door wide.

  I dived into the cab headfirst.

  Pop! A second bullet slapped into the car’s metal skin. It was all the encouragement Raymond needed. He swore, grabbed onto the back of my blouse to keep me from falling out, and floored the gas.

  “Hold on!”

  But he was the one who had to hold on, because my feet were still bouncing off the concrete drive. I grabbed for the thing that would give me the most leverage, which happened to be the steering wheel.

  Hauling my feet into the cab, I managed to get the door closed just before we squealed around the first corner, as close to being on two wheels as a car can get without rolling.

  Then we were out of the warehouses and flying past the gate, which was open on the exit side.

  Three corners later, Raymond was still mumbling curses. But my mind wasn’t on him. I was already up at the glass house. Something was wrong, I could feel it in my gut. Something didn’t add up.

  Bourque had said Danny was there, at the glass house by the sea. Now. I didn’t know why. I didn’t really care.

  I just had to get to Danny.

  And I had to get to him now.

  29

  IT TOOK DANNY five minutes to satisfy himself that the metal door at the back of the basement was the only other exit besides the staircase that led up to the rest of the house.

  Oddly, the door was locked, barred by both a dead bolt on the bedroom side and a keyed lock.

  It appeared as though it had been repaired recently. Someone, perhaps Bourque’s men, had chipped the metal framing trying to get in, and the Realtor had done a patch job and called it good. The bank selling this house had elected not to replace the entire door. Too many houses on the market to fuss over them all.

  The dead bolt was already open. He withdrew his picks, sprung the lock that was missing its key, slipped the pick set back into his pocket, and walked into the small room.

  A ring of mammal busts prepared by a skilled taxidermist stared at him from two of the walls. Of these, a water buffalo’s head took the prize for being the most disturbing, if only for its size. Lassos and whips hung from one of the other two walls. An old wood desk to his right, a closet at the back of the room.

  An office. On the surface.

  The frame on the desk’s bottom left drawer was busted where the lock had been forced. Renee’s account of finding Lamont’s money wandered through his mind. She’d called the room Lamont’s trophy room.

  Danny set his case on top of the desk. Nothing incriminating supported Bourque’s claims about the man. So then, perhaps Danny had been played. What he’d seen in the house thus far might be seen as incriminating—the pink room with its camera, the glass walls, the numerous locks, the welded windows. But any or all of these could also be merely the signs of a wealthy man driven by compulsive behaviors.

  Danny walked up to the slatted accordion door on the back wall, pulled it open, and surveyed the contents of the tiny closet. It was just large enough to step into and maybe turn around in with the door closed. Its shelves were lined with books, mostly legal in subject matter. A few white file boxes on the top shelf might produce some interesting information about Lamont’s private life, but nothing here exposed the kind of abuse that had haunted Danny’s mind over the past several hours.

  A copy of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species caught Danny’s attention. It sat on the shelf to his right, slightly away from the wall to allow for a light switch. Odd. The light had come on with a hinge switch when he’d opened the door.

  He reached in and flipped the switch. A hum sounded. There was grinding and scraping as the shelves at the back moved.

  Into the foundation wall.

  Danny stood back, stunned, watching as the wall formed a three-foot opening into a dark space beyond before clunking softly to a halt. Fingers of dread tickled the back of his neck.

  This was it. This was the place of secrets. This was where Lamont lived true to his basest self. Danny could not go inside.

  He could not, but of course he had to. He had to because his life had changed today. There was Bourque, and there was the priesthood, and there were monsters who preyed on others—the world had not changed. But there was Renee, and today Renee had become the centerpiece for all that was wrong with injustice.

  She’d stormed into his life and stolen his heart, and today his heart would break for her. He knew that already, staring at the hidden space beyond Lamont’s office.

  All Danny could think to d
o was snatch Renee away from her past and hide her somewhere safe. But he had to know what she’d suffered. He had to bear her burden, even if in complete silence.

  His breathing was thick. Easy, Danny. Easy. He was only staring at darkness, and darkness was often far more frightening than what it contained.

  He walked up to the opening, reached into the darkness, felt along the inside wall, found a switch, and flipped it on. An overhead incandescent bulb popped on. Low-wattage yellow light. Danny ducked his head and eased into a room slightly larger than the office behind him.

  There was a bed with pink sheets there.

  Shackles with padded wrist restraints hung from chains attached to padded walls.

  Rows of prescription bottles lined a medicine cabinet with glass-panel doors.

  A toilet squatted in the corner.

  The floor was linoleum. Black-and-white checkerboard.

  Danny saw it all in one sweeping glance, and in that space his muscles lost their rigidity. His legs began to tremble. The room spun.

  He’d found Lamont’s altar, and he knew that Renee had been the sacrificial lamb.

  Renee, I’m so sorry…oh, I’m sorry. His lungs had stopped working properly and he had to inhale deliberately for oxygen.

  There is a point one reaches when no amount of effort can fix a given situation. All that is left is to wait and endure the pain until it passes.

  But this…

  He wanted to turn and flee the house, and he might have done it, but he couldn’t seem to turn his muscles on.

  He wanted to shut down the part of his mind that yielded any imagination of what might have happened in this room, but his intellect had lost its bearings and didn’t seem to know how to turn that switch off.

  So he stood there on the black-and-white linoleum as terrible thoughts smothered him with a pain he hadn’t felt since finding his mother dead.

  Whatever had happened here, Renee’s drugged mind had found a way to protect itself by erasing the memories until no significant evidence of them remained.

  Here was the ultimate judgment for failing to follow Lamont’s law. Here was a living hell for the unwitting victim.

  I stayed in the front of the cab as Raymond drove west through heavy traffic to the address Danny had turned up two weeks ago after doing some research on Lamont. I didn’t care about the wind that howled through the shattered window, and I ignored the questions from the driver, who wanted to know just what the heck had happened back there.

  I couldn’t tell him, of course. I hardly knew myself. Well, yes, I knew what had happened, sure. I mean, I hadn’t been able to resist the temptation to look, just look, at Bourque’s den of iniquity. Then follow him, just follow, to his secret place. Then I’d flipped my lid and shot him. That’s what had happened back there.

  What I didn’t know was exactly why I’d flipped my lid. When I told Danny, which I would right away, he would say I’d made a dreadful mistake that proved I wasn’t ready. The most important weapon is the mind, and I’d made it as clear as humanly possible that I didn’t have control of mine.

  Worse, Bourque was dead. His men and the law both would come after me with both barrels blazing. This, more precisely, was what I couldn’t tell Raymond.

  But it would have been worse if I hadn’t killed Bourque, right? He would come after me himself. I’d rather have the FBI than Bourque after me.

  Danny would be upset. I’d been a complete fool. I couldn’t wait to beg his forgiveness.

  To keep Raymond quiet, I finally told him that I’d shot my husband in the arm for having an affair with a man. Then I told the driver not to ask any more questions. Two thousand dollars was a lot of money, I reminded him, and it should pay for my privacy as well.

  My foolishness wasn’t the only thing that kept me silent as we inched toward the coast. I couldn’t shake the things that Bourque had said about Lamont. Lies, all of them. Terrible, unconscionable fabrications concocted by a deceitful man. He was so accustomed to lying that he might even believe at least some of them himself.

  You can tell when a man is lying, Danny said. And I thought I could. Jonathan Bourque didn’t sound like the kind of person who knew he was lying.

  See, there was something wrong there, just under the surface of my mind. Like a déjà vu that I couldn’t quite grasp. And I don’t mind saying that it bothered me quite a lot.

  In one sentence, Bourque had thrown everything I knew about Lamont under the bus. It was like hearing for the first time that Santa Claus wasn’t real, or that the world wasn’t flat, or that your religion wasn’t quite as flawless as you thought it was.

  Absurd. Infuriating. I should have just shot that pig in the mouth before he finished. I told you to shut up.

  But even the most loyal believer is allowed to ask what if? now and then. It took me half the trip to shut down that nagging question and focus on how to deal with Danny’s disappointment when I told him what I’d done.

  I sat and stewed and stared ahead in silence.

  “What’s taking so long?” I asked.

  “Rush hour,” he said. “We’re almost there.”

  My palms were sweaty. This was the first time I’d gone back to the house by the sea. I had no desire to live through the tragedy of losing Lamont all over again.

  But now Danny was there. I wasn’t sure what he hoped to accomplish. He was probably just covering all his bases, learning more by visiting the scene of the crime so to speak. Gathering more incriminating evidence against Bourque. With what I’d learned, the case was closed, right? Danny would be thrilled. Sure, I’d broken our code, but…

  Stupid! You’re so stupid, Renee! I don’t know what I was thinking, going against Danny like that.

  How did Bourque know Danny was at the house? See, that was another nagging question, one I couldn’t get rid of. The whole thing about Danny being Bourque’s priest was a crock, I’d seen that in the man’s eyes. But had Danny talked to him today? If so why? He’d broken our agreement, too?

  What if Danny wasn’t at the house? Or what if it was a trap?

  “Excuse me, Raymond? Um…Do you mind parking down the street from the house? And waiting for me?”

  His brow went up in the rearview mirror. “Waiting for you is a dangerous occupation, honey.”

  “I need to get a few things from the house and a friend may meet me there, but if not, I want to get out before my husband gets home.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’ll make it worth your while. If I need a ride, that is.”

  He only had to think a couple of seconds. “Okay. But you pay me the two grand before you get out. I’ll wait for half an hour, and if you need a ride, it’ll cost you another five hundred. S’long as it’s local.”

  “That’s extortion.”

  “That’s what it’s gonna cost to fix the holes in my car. Heck, the two grand’ll barely cover that.”

  He had a point.

  “Then I’ll pay you an extra thousand.”

  “Now?”

  “If I need a ride. Or I could pay you an extra five hundred now for waiting and another five if I need a ride.”

  “Works for me.”

  “’Kay.”

  Ten minutes later Raymond pulled over and put the car in park.

  “This is it?” I stared out, trying to remember. I’d never seen my neighborhood except from the windows of the glass house. It was getting dark, and tall shrubs blocked my view. I couldn’t even see the sea.

  “You don’t recognize your own neighborhood?”

  “’Course I do. I meant, is this where you’re going to park?”

  I opened my bag, counted out twenty one-hundred-dollar bills, and handed them over the seat.

  “Thanks, Raymond. You’ll wait, right?”

  “Twenty-five hundred?”

  “Oh yeah.” I dug out another five hundred.

  He took the money. “That buys you half an hour.”

  “’Kay.”

  I climbed ou
t with my bag and walked up the street, straining to see the house numbers, so nervous that my legs were numb. But I could hear the ocean now. It’s okay, Renee, you’re safe. This is home. It doesn’t feel like home, but this is home. Nobody’s going to get—

  I saw Danny’s car parked in the next driveway and my heart jumped. I walked faster, then stumbled into a half run, I was so eager to get to safety.

  Then the house was there in front of me and I came to a dead stop at the top of the driveway.

  This was it. But Lamont was gone. It all seemed so surreal, having lived in Lamont’s glass house for over a year without leaving even once. Now I was outside the house, suddenly terrified to go back in.

  I stood there for ten or fifteen seconds, frozen by a horrible collision of emotions and ideas. Lamont, drinking wine on the back deck. Me, preparing him tofu, purging, taking my pills, polishing the floors, cleaning the walls. Danny.

  I was a different person now, but still the same. I was afraid to go back inside and remember. The pain of my loss would eat me up.

  But Danny was inside.

  I ran, afraid I would lose my nerve. Down the driveway to the front door. The knob twisted in my hand and I pushed the door in.

  The house was dark. And cold. As silent as a coffin.

  “Danny?”

  My voice sounded like it was in a box, and the first thing I thought of was that the glass-walled hallway had always sounded a bit boxy. I should clean those glass walls while I was here. Lamont would like that.

  Lamont’s dead.

  “Danny?” I cried his name, gingerly stepping in.

  Why was the house dark if Danny was here? Had he already gone? But then why was his car still in the driveway?

  The light switch was on the wall to my right; I set my bag on the floor, reached for the switch, and flipped it up. Fluorescent tubes popped to life on the ceiling above the hall. The door to my pink room, the only room upstairs without glass walls, was open, and a stab of anger sliced through my nerves.

  Who’d been in my room? I would kill him!

  But no, it wasn’t my room anymore. And Danny was here. I would love Danny to see my room!