Page 54 of Dead to Rites

As I stood there and watched Bob’s face, watched the mixture of guilt and anger and worry that warred in his features, I believed him. Maybe he was just a really good liar, but I didn’t think so.

“And I’m going to tell her,” he added. “It won’t bring Father Frank back, but at least I can finally do what he asked.”

Abruptly, he rose from the barstool and went out the door, leaving his untouched glass of wine sitting on the counter.

I took a break a little before six — well, Roz shooed me out the door, reminding me that even business owners needed to get a breather every once in a while — and I decided to walk down to Marsh & Hollow. Yes, Jude and I were already meeting for dinner the next evening, but I’d just picked up another piece of information and wanted to share it with him to see what he thought.

He was just turning the sign in the front window around to CLOSED when I approached, but then he smiled and held the door open for me. Once I was inside, he shut it and made sure the lock was engaged.

Apparently, he was serious about his business hours.

“What’s up?” he asked as he led me to the back room so we could sit down.

Mercifully, both chairs had remained free of books during my absence. I pulled out the nearest one and sat, and Jude followed suit.

“Bob Anselmo was in the bar this afternoon,” I said. “He confessed to me that he was having an affair. But that’s not the important part.”

Jude’s brows lifted slightly. “Joanne Anselmo might have a slightly different view of the situation.”

True enough. “Point taken,” I replied. “But what seemed significant to me is that Father Frank was actively pressuring Bob to do the right thing and come clean. It sure sounds like it’s the same thing he was doing with Meg, and that means there was definitely a pattern developing.”

Rather than respond right away, Jude just sat there for a moment, expression considering. When he broke his silence, the words he spoke weren’t at all what I’d been expecting him to say.

“Lorelei, I need to tell you something you probably don’t want to hear.”

I stiffened. Something in his voice seemed both kind and formal at the same time, as if he was falling back into the tone he’d used when he was a priest offering counsel, even though those days were behind him now.

“What?” I said warily.

“You’re investigating a man’s murder because you don’t think the police are doing an adequate job, and I can understand that. You’re chasing names and looking for patterns. Every time I see you, you seem more focused, more certain of yourself. I realized after our last talk that this is the most alive you’ve been since I met you.”

I blinked at him. “And that’s supposed to be a bad thing?”

“Let me finish.” His tone was still even, almost mild, which made me even more wary. “The first year after I left the priesthood, I read everything I could about the experience that drove me out. I became an expert, and I told myself I was searching for the truth. But what I was actually doing was running from grief. The thing that had driven me away from the priesthood was too big for me to absorb, so I made it into a project. I made it into something I could solve. Except…I couldn’t.”

And what was that “thing” that had driven him away from the priesthood? I could tell he was still avoiding the subject, still dancing around it.

I could have pressed him on that. But instead, I just sat there, as if I was caught by the spell of those glimmering hazel eyes and couldn’t move.

“You lost your parents a year ago,” he continued. “You barely had time to mourn before you lost Hazel. As far as I can tell, you’ve been alone ever since your parents died. And now Father Frank is dead, too, and instead of grieving him — instead of grieving any of them — you’ve turned yourself into a detective. You’re making finding his killer a project. You’re treating his death like something you can solve.”

At last, I found my voice. “That’s not it at all.”

His head tilted slightly as he looked at me. “Maybe it isn’t. Maybe I’m wrong.” This whole time, he’d been speaking in that same calm, level tone, a tone I was sure he must have used on his parishioners back when he was a priest. “But I know what spiritual bypassing looks like, Lorelei, because I did it myself. Father Frank caught me at it six months in. He sat me down in the rectory and told me what I was doing. He said the work I was doing was real, and the question I was chasing was real, but I was also using both of them to avoid thinking about what I’d lost. He was right. I needed to hear it, and I’ve never forgotten what it felt like to hear the truth spoken plainly to me.”

The rage came boiling up out of nowhere. Normally, I would have said I was a person who needed a lot to lose my temper, but I supposed I’d finally hit critical mass.

“You know, if I wanted to be psychoanalyzed, I would have been paying a shrink three hundred bucks an hour to dig into my brain.”

Jude didn’t seem to take any offense at my remark. He only sat there in his hard-backed little chair, one that looked too frail to hold someone that tall. In fact, one corner of his mouth lifted slightly.

“I think the going rate here in Prescott is more like two hundred an hour.”

I waved a hand. “Whatever. You don’t get to do that. Don’t do the wise-priest thing on me. You don’t know what I’ve been doing for the past year. Hell, you barely know what I’ve been doing for the past couple of weeks.”

Of course, he didn’t lose his temper. Maybe that was something priests got trained to do, to quietly sit there while one of their parishioners lost it in front of them.

“I know what I see,” he said calmly.