Page 30 of Devil

“For her sake or for mine? Since I am just an innocent student after all.” I flashed her a grin, wide as the Cheshire Cat’s.

I think I unsettled her because she blinked and looked away. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I just don’t think it would be a good idea for either of you.”

“Like it wasn’t a good idea for Birdie to keep living with you?”

Kaitlyn looked up with narrowed eyes.

“Reputational risk too high?” I asked. “Understandable, although I guess it does put a price tag on your friendship. What was the price, by the way? High five figures with bad health insurance and limited room for upward mobility? The least they could do is throw in a plenary indulgence or two for you.”

“I’m not telling you anything about herormyself,” she said tightly, and that was fine. I hadn’t thought I’d be able to get an exact address out of her anyway. But hopefully I had enough to go on now.

“Thank you for your time anyway.” I stood and walked to the door, pausing in the doorway. I didn’t feel charitable toward her, but she had given me more information than I’d had before.Tongie. Ozarks.So I’d give her something in return, which was my collected wisdom as a deeply amoral observer in the Catholic world. “Don’t wait things out at the diocese if you’re hoping to climb. Move to Kansas City–Saint Joseph next—I assume you’re admitted to the bar in Missouri too—and then come back to the Jesuits at the provincial level.”

That got her attention. “Back to the Jesuits? Why would I do that?”

I glanced over at the guidebook for conversational Italian. “You want the Vatican one day? Two of the five strong favorites for the spot are Jesuit. This pope might have another decade in him, but not much more. That’s enough time to work your way up to a higher-profile diocese before you ingratiate yourself with the order of the probable new pope.” I looked her up and down. “No more cardigans. Spend thirty more dollars on your blouses, and make sure you spray the collars with hair spray to keep your makeup from smudging on the inside, or use a decent setting powder.”

She sheepishly pressed her fingers to her neck.

“If you change your hair, go brunette, not blond. Brunettes are serious people to be taken seriously—or so the men around you will think.”

“But—”

“I don’t care what you see on TV. Brunette. And no more flavored vapes.” I flashed her another grin and then left her for good.

It turns out that I shouldn’t have wasted my breath on Kaitlyn becauseTongieandOzarksalso got me nowhere. The only Cooper I could find in Tonganoxie was anM.MerleCooper, who owned two houses of decent square footage on a chunk of land. There was indeed a Mary Geraldine Cooper who owned an old trailer at the Lake of Ozarks, but she’d sold it days before I’d found it, and the real estate agent and neighbors hadn’t seen her since the check cleared.

There were no new Birdie Cooper statues. No new trace of her at all.

My salary at the Kansas City branch of a well-known architecture firm was generous, so I had the money to match my fixation. Birdie was impossible to find, and strangely, so was her sister, although not in the same way. She left trails all over the country—police reports, short-lived social media accounts, hospital records—but by the time she hit the system, she was already gone. Bad addresses, bad phone numbers. The sorts of jobs that didn’t give you pay stubs every two weeks.

Years passed like this. Nothing changed. Birdie was my talent buried in the earth, and no one could tell me where to dig her out.

In my worst moments, my lowest ones, I worried that she’d done something stupid, something desperate. I’d seen the sadness in her eyes that semester—of course I had; it had cemented my obsession with her—but I knew what ripened on that tree. I knew what burst from that fruit when it fell to the ground.

I comforted myself with the fact that there would have been an obituary. A social media post by one of the churches that had one of her statues. A fresh flurry of police reports or hospital records involving a thrashing, grieving Busy. Something. I would have known.

I didn’t get along with God, so I didn’t pray, but I told him what was going to happen, how it was going to be: I would find her. I would. Iwould.

And now?

Now I have.

13

BELL

“You were looking for me?”Her nose scrunches the tiniest bit. She does it whenever she’s concentrating, and I think she has no idea that she’s doing it at all. It’s fucking adorable.

“Yes,” I say, smiling at her. I’m so happy. Lust and satisfaction and a little bit of anger even still—it’s all convecting and blistering inside me. I feel like a fucking sun. “And now I’ve found you. Can you guess how?”

“The statue,” she says quietly, looking back down at her feet.

I’m almost close enough to catch her chin and make her lift her eyes to mine.

“But I didn’t… No one knows it was me.”

“You must have known what I’d think if I saw it. It’s my hair, my face, even down to the beauty mark above my mouth. And the spot on the hand…”