Page 95 of Bitter Burn
I don’t have anything to pick a lock with—at least, nothing I’m willing to use—and breaking an old woman’s window really is in bad taste, even if I want to rifle through her dead sister’s things. I’m about to walk around to check on a potential back door when I notice the path of worn grass leading from the rectory to the church itself, to a narrow door set into the back of the stone nave. It’s cracked, just slightly.
I keep the flowers in my hand as I stride through the graveyard to the door, planning on keeping my story simple enough to elaborate on if needed but specific enough that I can prompt Regina’s sister for some clues about why Regina might have been receiving money from a cardinal. I push the door open—it’s shockingly heavy—and step into a cavernous space of dark stone and stained glass.
The windows are intact in their pointed arches, and the heavy wooden pews remain, but the altar is gone and the air is damp and lonely. There is half-collapsed scaffolding in one corner, a pile of abandoned organ pipes in front of the dais, and amidst the rafters, I am almost certain I see an altocumulus of leathery shadows—bats. The massive hammer beams supporting the roof are carved into the shape of angels.
They stare down with sightless eyes, their mouths rounded as if in song.
I see her immediately, a silver-haired woman perhaps in her late sixties, sitting in the second pew and smoking a cigarette. She’s wearing an old leather coat and boots that show their age, and the cold has daubed her pale cheeks with red. She glances over at me with flat gray eyes, the wrinkles on her lips deepening as she brings her cigarette to her lips.
It’s a strange fact of being what we are that we killers can recognize each other in the wild. I have never met or seen this woman before in my life, but I know we are the same. It’s something in her eyes maybe—or maybe it’s what isn’t there. Kindness or humanity or remorse.
She blows out a wreath of smoke as I walk up to her pew and sit down. She ashes her cigarette onto the floor with an impatient tap and says, “Look me in the eye when you do it. That’s all I ask.”
Thirty-Two
Mark
I sit back in the pew, stretching my arm out along the back while I set the flowers to the side. We are far enough apart that either of us would have plenty of time to react if the other moves.
“I’m not here for you,” I reassure her. “I actually came for your sister, because I had some questions for her. I’m sorry about your loss, by the way.”
The woman watches me, the inborn wariness of a predator tempered by something else. Grief maybe. “Thank you. We only had each other, you know. It feels like an amputation.” She turns her eyes toward the magnificent array of stained glass behind the dais where the altar used to be. I notice a pile of beads in her lap—a rosary made of some dark, dull metal. “What questions did you have for her? Maybe I can answer them.”
I abandon my earlier plan and decide on the truth. “Your sister was getting money from a trust fund managed by a Catholic cardinal named Mortimer Cashel. I want to know why.”
She laughs, a thick, wheezing noise that sounds like forty years of tobacco smoke. “Oh, I know why.”
I wait patiently while she finishes laughing and then takes another drag on her cigarette.
“They were never payments to her,” the woman says after she exhales. “They were payments to me.”
“Ah,” I say. “For…services rendered? Did your sister help?”
“Yes, services of a sort,” she replies. She taps more ash onto the floor and then explains, “I’ve spent most of my life trying not to exist. No bank account, no work history, no taxes filed. So Regina collects the money for me.” Then she corrects herself with a frown. “Collected.”
“You’ve gotten paid recently,” I remark. “Does this mean you’re still active?”
She shakes her head. “I guess you could say that I get royalties on a few of my larger projects. Or more accurately that I’m paid to keep quiet. Murder for hire isn’t exactly the kind of thing that helps a new pope’s reputation.”
“Given the Church’s history, I’d say that’s a pretty recent development. How long did you work for him?”
She pulls in a drag. “Started when I was nineteen. Last body was three years ago now.”
“Nineteen,” I repeat. I think of Isolde, brought to Rome to poison coffee and pierce flesh, not even to her second year of college.
“I ran away when I was sixteen. It was the seventies, you’ve got to understand. It was so easy for the city to swallow me up, help me chew myself into a pulp. There was a bad girlfriend, then some dope, then a boy I fell in love with. That last part ended with two black eyes and me working a crew spot on a cargo ship to Spain. I ended up in Ireland a couple years later, sleeping rough, living rougher, and that’s when Father Cashel found me trying to sleep in the doorway of his parish church. He gave me dry clothes and something to eat and let me sleep in the office. Started giving me odd jobs. He never leered at me or put his hands on me or made me feel small. He listened and helped—the opposite of everyone I’d met since running away.”
She looks down at her cigarette, which is now smoldering at the filter. She tosses it to the stone floor with a sigh and pulls the pack from her pocket.
“Cigarette?” she offers.
“I don’t smoke.”
“You young ones never do. What are you, private? Freelance? That’s too nice a suit for government work.”
I accept the compliment with a gracious nod. “I’m freelance, I suppose, but I only freelance for myself. I started in the agency though.”
“Ah,” she says, now digging for her lighter. “You do have a bit of an agency vibe.”
