2
I remember the priest at Father Szyszynsk’s funeral who had stared through my veil as he handed me the Host, as if my features were familiar. And I remember the sentences printed carefully on a banner beneath the coffee table on that last day, before Nathaniel stopped speaking. PEACE BE WITH YOU, FATHER O’TOOLE. PEACE BE WITH YOU, FATHER GWYNNE.
Tell me what he told you, I’d asked Patrick.
Father Glen.
Maybe that is what Patrick heard. But that isn’t how Nathaniel would have said it.
“He wasn’t saying Father Glen,” Nina murmurs to Patrick. “He was saying Father Gwynne.”
“Yeah, but you know how Nathaniel talks. His L’s always come out wrong.”
“Not this time,” Nina sighs. “This time he was saying it right. Gwen. Gwynne. They’re so close.”
“Who the hell is Gwynne?”
Nina rises, her hands splayed through her hair. “He’s the one, Patrick. He’s the one who hurt Nathaniel and he’s still, he could still be doing this to a hundred other boys, and—” She wilts, stumbling against the wall. Patrick steadies her with one hand, and he is startled to feel her shaking so hard. His first instinct is to reach for her. His second, smarter response is to let her take a step away.
She slides down the side of the refrigerator until she is sitting on the floor. “He’s the bone marrow donor. He has to be.”
“Does Fisher know about this yet?” She shakes her head. “Caleb?”
In that moment, he thinks of a story he read long ago in school, about the start of the Trojan War. Paris was given a choice to be the richest man in the world, the smartest man in the world, or the chance to love another man’s wife. Patrick, fool that he is, would make the same mistake. For with her hair in knots, her eyes red and swollen, her sorrow cracked open in her lap, Nina is every bit as beautiful to him now as Helen was back then.
She lifts her face to his. “Patrick … what am I going to do?”
It shocks him into a response. “You,” Patrick says clearly, “are not going to do anything. You are going to sit in this house because you’re on trial for a man’s murder.” When she opens her mouth to argue, Patrick holds up his hand. “You’ve already been locked up once, and look what happened to Nathaniel. What do you think’s going to happen to him if you walk out that door for more vigilante justice, Nina? The only way you can keep him safe is to stay with him. Let me …” He hesitates, knowing that on the edge of this cliff, the only way out is to retreat, or to jump. “Let me take care of it.”
She knows exactly what he has just vowed. It means going against his department, going against his own code of ethics. It means turning his back on the system, like Nina has. And it means facing the consequences. Like Nina. He sees the wonder in her face, and the spark that lets him know how tempted she is to take him up on his offer. “And risk losing your job? Going to jail?” she says. “I can’t let you do something that stupid.”
What makes you think I haven’t already? Patrick doesn’t say the words aloud, but he doesn’t have to. He crouches down and puts his hand on Nina’s knee. Her hand comes up to cover his. And he sees it in her eyes: She knows how he feel about her, she has always known. But this is the first time she has come close to admitting it.
“Patrick,” she says quietly, “I think I’ve already ruined the lives of enough people I love.”
When the door bursts open and Nathaniel tumbles into the kitchen on a whirl of cold air, Patrick comes to his feet. The boy smells of popcorn and is carrying a stuffed frog inside his winter coat. “Guess what,” he says. “Daddy took me to the arcade.”
“You’re a lucky guy,” Patrick answers, and even to his own ears, his voice sounds weak. Caleb comes in, then, and closes the door behind him. He looks from Patrick to Nina, and smiles uncomfortably. “I thought you were visiting with Marcella.”
“She had to go. She was meeting someone else. As she was leaving, Patrick stopped by.”
“Oh.” Caleb rubs the back of his neck. “So … what did she say?”
“Say?”
“About the DNA.”
Before Patrick’s very eyes, Nina changes. She flashes a polished smile at her husband. “It’s a match,” she lies. “A perfect match.”
From the moment I step outside, the world is magic. Air cold enough to make my nostrils stick together; a sun that trembles like a cold yolk; a sky so wide and blue that I cannot keep it all in my eyes. Inside smells different from outside, but you don’t notice until one of them is taken away from you.
I am on my way to Fisher’s office, so my electronic bracelet has been deactivated. Being outside is so glorious that it almost supersedes the secret I am hiding. As I slow for a stoplight I see the Salvation Army man swinging his bell, his bucket swaying gently. This is the season of charity; surely there will be some left for me.
Patrick’s offer swims through my mind like smoke, making it difficult to see clearly. He is the most moral, upstanding man I know—he would not have offered lightly to become my one-man posse. Of course, I cannot let him do this. But I also can’t stop hoping that maybe he will ignore me and do it anyway. And immediately, I hate myself for even thinking such a thing.
I tell myself, too, that I don’t want Patrick to go after Gwynne for another reason, although it is one I will admit only in the darkest corners of the night: Because I want to be the one. Because this was my son, my grievance, my justice to mete out.
When did I become this person—a woman who has the capacity to commit murder, to want to murder again, to get what she wants without caring who she destroys in the process? Was this always a part of me, buried, waiting? Maybe there is a seed of malfeasance even in the most honest of people—like Patrick—that requires a certain combination of circumstances to bloom. In most of us, then, it lies dormant forever. But for others, it blossoms. And once it does, it takes over like loosestrife, choking out rational thought, killing compassion.
So much for Christmas spirit.
Fisher’s office is decorated for the holidays too. Swaths of garland drape the fireplace; there is mistletoe hanging square over the secretary’s desk. Beside the coffee urn sits a jug of hot mulled cider. While I wait for my attorney to retrieve me, I run my hand over the leather cushion of the couch, simply for the novelty of touching something other than the old sage chenille sofa in my living room at home.
What Patrick said about labs making mistakes has stayed with me. I will not tell Fisher about the bone marrow transplant, not until I know for sure that Marcella’s explanation is right. There is no reason to believe that Quentin Brown will dig up this obscure glitch about DNA; so there is no reason to trouble Fisher yet with information he might never need to know.
“Nina.” Fisher strides toward me, frowning. “You’re losing weight.”
“It’s called prisoner-of-war chic.” I fall into step beside him, measuring the dimensions of this hall and that alcove, simply because they are unfamiliar to me. In his office, I stare out the window, where the fingers of bare branches rap a tattoo against the glass.
Fisher catches the direction of my gaze. “Would you like to go outside?” he asks quietly.
It is freezing, nearly zero. But I am not in the habit of handing back gifts. “I would love that.”
So we walk in the parking lot behind the law offices, the wind kicking up small tornadoes of brown leaves. Fisher holds a stack of papers in his gloved hands. “We’ve gotten the state’s psychiatric evaluation back. You didn’t quite answer his questions directly, did you?”
“Oh, come on. Do you know the role of a judge in the courtroom? For God’s sake.”
A small grin plays over Fisher’s mouth. “All the same, he found you competent and sane at the time of the offense.”
I stop walking. What about now? Is it crazy to want to finish the job once you’ve found out you didn’t succeed the first time? Or is that the sanest thing in the world?
“Don’t worry. I think we can chew this guy up and rip his report to shreds—but I also would like a forensic shrink to say you were insane then, and aren’t now. The last thing I want is a jury thinking you’re still a threat.”
But I am. I imagine shooting Father Gwynne, getting it right this time. Then I turn to Fisher, my face perfectly blank. “Who do you want to use?”
“How about Sidwell Mackay?”
“We joke about him in the office,” I say. “Any prosecutor can get through him in five minutes flat.”
“Peter Casanoff?”
I shake my head. “Pompous windbag.”
Together we turn our backs to the wind, trying to make a very logical decision about whom we can find to call me insane. Maybe this will not be so difficult after all. What rational woman still sees the wrong man’s blood on her hands every time she looks down, but spends an hour in the shower imagining how she might kill the right man?
“All right,” Fisher suggests. “How about O’Brien, from Portland?”
“I’ve called him a couple of times. He seems all right, maybe a little squirmy.”
Fisher nods in agreement. “He’s going to come off like an academic, and I think that’s what you need, Nina.”
I offer him my most complacent smile. “Well, Fisher. You’re the boss!”
He gives me a guarded look, then hands over the psychiatric report. “This is the one the state sent. You need to remember what you told him before you go see O’Brien.”
So defense attorneys do ask their clients to memorize what they said to the state psychiatrist.
“We’ve got Judge Neal coming down, by the way.”
I cringe. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding.”
“Why?”
“He’s supposed to be incredibly gullible.”
“How lucky for you, then, that you’re a defendant,” Fisher says dryly. “Speaking of which … I don’t believe we’re going to put you on the stand.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to, after two psychiatrists testify.” But I am thinking, I cannot take the stand now, not knowing what I know.
Fisher stops walking and faces me. “Before you start telling me how you think your defense ought to be handled, Nina, I want to remind you you’re looking at insanity from a prosecutor’s perspective, and I—”
“You know, Fisher,” I interrupt, glancing at my watch, “I can’t really talk about this today.”
“Is the coach turning into a pumpkin?”
“I’m sorry. I just can’t.” My eyes slide away from his.
“You can’t put it off forever. Your trial will start in January, and I’ll be gone over the holidays with my family.”
“Let me get examined first,” I bargain. “Then we can sit down.”
Fisher nods. I think of O’Brien, of whether I can convince him of my insanity. I wonder if, by then, it will be an act.
For the first time in a decade, Quentin takes a long lunch. No one will notice at the DA’s office; they barely tolerate his presence, and in his absence, probably dance on the top of his desk. He checks the directions he’s downloaded from the computer and swings his car into the parking lot of the high school. Teens sausaged into North Face jackets give him cursory glances as he passes. Quentin walks right through the middle of a hackeysack game without breaking stride, and continues around the back of the school.
There is a shoddy football stadium, an equally shoddy track, and a basketball court. Gideon is doing an admirable job of guarding some pansy-ass center six inches shorter than him. Quentin puts his hands into the pockets of his overcoat and watches his son steal the ball and shoot an effortless three-pointer.
The last time his son had picked up the phone to get in touch, he’d been calling from jail, busted for possession. And although it cost Quentin plenty of snide comments about nepotism, he’d gotten Gideon’s sentence transmuted to a rehab facility. That hadn’t been good enough for Gideon, though, who’d wanted to be released scot-free. “You’re no use as a father,” he’d told Quentin. “I should have known you’d be no use as a lawyer, either.”
Now, a year later, Gideon high-fives another player and then turns around to see Quentin watching. “Shit, man,” he mutters. “Time.” The other kids fall to the sidelines, sucking on water bottles and shrugging off layers of clothes. Gideon approaches, arms crossed. “You come here to make me piss in some cup?”
Shrugging, Quentin says, “No, I came to see you. To talk.”
“I got nothing to say to you.”
“That’s surprising,” Quentin responds, “since I have sixteen years’ worth.”
“Then what’s another day?” Gideon turns back toward the game. “I’m busy.”
“I’m sorry.”
The words make the boy pause. “Yeah, right,” he murmurs. He storms back to the basketball court, grabbing the ball and spinning it in the air—to impress Quentin, maybe? “Let’s go, let’s go!” he calls, and the others rally around him. Quentin walks off. “Who was that, man?” he hears one of the boys ask Gideon. And Gideon’s response, when he thinks Quentin is too far away to hear: “Some guy who needed directions.”
From the window of the doctor’s office at Dana-Farber, Patrick can see the ragtag edge of Boston. Olivia Bessette, the oncologist listed on Father Szyszynski’s medical reports, has turned out to be considerably younger than Patrick expected—not much older than Patrick himself. She sits with her hands folded, her curly hair pulled into a sensible bun, one rubber-soled white clog tapping lightly on the floor. “Leukemia only affects the blood cells,” she explains, “and chronic myeloid leukemia tends to have an onset in patients in their forties and fifties—although I’ve had some cases with patients in their twenties.”
Patrick wonders how you sit on the edge of a hospital bed and tell someone they are not going to live. It is not that different, he imagines, from knocking on a door in the middle of the night and informing a parent that his son has been killed in a drunk driving accident. “What happens to the blood cells?” he asks.
“Blood cells are all programmed to die, just like we are. They start out at a baby stage, then grow up to be a little more functional, and by the time they get spit out of the bone marrow they are adult cells. By then, white cells should be able to fight infection on your behalf, red blood cells should be able to carry oxygen, and platelets should be able to clot your blood. But if you have leukemia, your cells never mature … and they never die. So you wind up with a proliferation of white cells that don’t work, and that overrun all your other cells.”
Patrick is not really going against Nina’s wishes, being here. All he’s doing is clarifying what they know—not taking it a step farther. He secured this appointment on a ruse, pretending that he is working on behalf of the assistant attorney general. Mr. Brown, Patrick explained, has the burden of proof. Which means they need to be a hundred percent sure that Father Szyszynski didn’t drop dead of leukemia the moment that his assailant pulled out a gun. Could Dr. Bessette, his former oncologist, offer any opinions?
“What does a bone marrow transplant do?” Patrick asks.
“Wonders, if it works. There are six proteins on all of our cells, human leukocyte antigens, or HLA. They help our bodies recognize you as you, and me as me. When you’re looking for a bone marrow donor, you’re hoping for all six of these proteins to match yours. In most cases, this means siblings, half-siblings, maybe a cousin—relatives seem to have the lowest instance of rejection.”
“Rejection?” Patrick asks.
“Yes. In essence, you’re trying to convince your body that the donor cells are actually yours, because you have the same six proteins on them. If you can’t do that, your immune system will reject the bone marrow transplant, which leads to Graft Versus Host disease.”
“Like a heart transplant.”
“Exactly. Except this isn’t an organ. Bone marrow is harvested from the pelvis, because it’s the big bones in your body that make blood. Basically, we put the donor to sleep and then stick needles into his hips about 150 times on each side, suctioning out the early cells.”
He winces, and the doctor smiles a little. “It is painful. Being a bone marrow donor is a very selfless thing.”
Yeah, this guy was a fucking altruist, Patrick thinks.
“Meanwhile, the patient with leukemia has been taking immunosuppressants. The week before the transplant, he’s given enough chemotherapy to kill all the blood cells in his body. It’s timed this way, so that his bone marrow is empty.”
“You can live like that?”
“You’re at huge risk for infection. The patient still has his own living blood cells … he’s just not making any new ones. Then he gets the donor marrow, through a simple IV. It takes about two hours, and we don’t know how, but the cells manage to find their way to the bone marrow in his own body and start growing. After about a month, his bone marrow has been entirely replaced by his donor’s.”
“And his blood cells would have the donor’s six proteins, that HLA stuff?” Patrick asks.
“That’s right.”
“How about the donor’s DNA?”
Dr. Bessette nods. “Yes. In all respects, his blood is really someone else’s. He’s just fooling his body into believing it’s truly his.”
Patrick leans forward. “But if it takes—if the cancer goes into remission—does the patient’s body start making his own blood again?”
“No. If it did, we’d consider it a rejection of the graft, and the leukemia would return. We want the patient to keep producing his donor’s blood forever.” She taps the file on her desk. “In Glen Szyszynski’s case, five years after the transplant, he was given a clean bill of health. His new bone marrow was working quite well, and the chance of a recurrence of leukemia was less than ten percent.” Dr. Bessette nods. “I think the prosecution can safely say that however the priest died, it wasn’t of leukemia.”
Patrick smiles at her. “Guess it felt good to have a success story.”
“It always does. Father Szyszynski was lucky to have found a perfect match.”
“A perfect match?”
“That’s what we call it when a donor’s HLA corresponds to all six of the patient’s HLA.”
Patrick takes a quick breath. “Especially when they’re not related.”
“Oh,” Dr. Bessette says. “But that wasn’t the case here. Father Szyszynski and his donor were half-brothers.”
Francesca Martine came to the Maine State Lab by way of New Hampshire, where she’d been working as a DNA scientist until something better came along. That something turned out not to be the ballistics expert who broke her heart. She moved north, nursing her wounds, and discovered what she’d always known—safety came in gels and Petri dishes, and numbers never hurt you.
That said, numbers also couldn’t explain the visceral reaction she has the minute she first meets Quentin Brown. On the phone, she imagined him like all the other state drones—harried and underpaid, with skin a sickly shade of gray. But from the moment he walks into her lab, she cannot take her eyes off him. He is striking, certainly, with his excessive height and his mahogany complexion, but Frankie knows that isn’t the attraction. She feels a pull between them, magnetism honed by the common experience of being different. She is not black, but she’s often been the only woman in the room with an IQ of 220.
Unfortunately, if she wants Quentin Brown to study her closely, she’ll have to assume the shape of a forensic lab report. “What was it that made you look at this twice?” Frankie asks.
He narrows his eyes. “How come you’re asking?”
“Curiosity. It’s pretty esoteric stuff for the prosecution.”
Quentin hesitates, as if wondering whether to confide in her. Oh, come on, Frankie thinks. Loosen up. “The defense asked to take a look at it, specifically. Immediately. And it didn’t seem to merit that kind of request. I don’t see how the DNA results here make a difference for us or for them.”
Frankie crosses her arms. “The reason they were interested isn’t because of the lab report I issued. It’s because of what’s in the medical files.”
“I’m not following you.”
“You know the way the DNA report says that the chances of randomly selecting an unrelated individual who matches this genetic material are one in six billion?”
Quentin nods.
“Well,” Frankie explains, “you just found the one.”
· · ·
It costs approximately two thousand dollars of taxpayer money to exhume a body. “No,” Ted Poulin says flatly. As the attorney general of Maine, and Quentin’s boss, that ought to be that. But Quentin isn’t going to give up without a fight, not this time.
He grips the receiver of the phone. “The DNA scientist at the state lab says we can do the test on tooth pulp.”
“Quentin, it doesn’t matter for the prosecution. She killed him. Period.”
“She killed a guy who molested her son. I have to change him from a sexual predator into a victim, Ted, and this is the way to do it.”
There is a long silence on the other end. Quentin runs his fingertips along the grain of wood on Nina Frost’s desk. He does this over and over, as if he is rubbing an amulet.
“There’s no family to fight it?”
“The mother gave consent already.”
Ted sighs. “The publicity is going to be outrageous.”
Leaning back in his chair, Quentin grins. “Let me take care of it,” he offers.
Fisher storms into the district attorney’s office, uncharacteristically flustered. He has been there before, of course, but who knows where the hell they’ve ensconced Quentin Brown while he’s prosecuting Nina’s case. He has just opened up his mouth to ask the secretary when Brown himself walks out of the small kitchen area, carrying a cup of coffee. “Mr. Carrington,” he says pleasantly. “Looking for me?”
Fisher withdraws the paperwork he’s received that morning from his breast pocket. The Motion to Exhume. “What is this?”
Quentin shrugs. “You must know. You’re the one who asked for the DNA records to be rushed over, after all.”
Fisher has no idea why, in fact. The DNA records were rushed over at Nina’s behest, but he’ll be damned if he lets Brown know this. “What are you trying to do, counselor?”
“A simple test that proves the priest your client killed wasn’t the same guy who abused her kid.”
Fisher steels his gaze. “I’ll see you in court tomorrow morning,” he says, and by the time he gets into his car to drive to Nina’s home, he has begun to understand how an ordinary human might become frustrated enough to kill.
“Fisher!” I say, and I’m actually delighted to see the man. This amazes me—either I have truly bedded down with the Enemy, or I’ve been under house arrest too long. I throw open the door to let him in, and realize that he is furious. “You knew,” he says, his voice calm and that much more frightening for all its control. He hands me a motion filed by the assistant attorney general.
My insides begin to quiver; I feel absolutely sick. With tremendous effort I swallow and meet Fisher’s eye—better to come clean eventually, than to not come clean at all. “I didn’t know if I should tell you. I didn’t know if the information was going to be important to my case.”
“That’s my job!” Fisher explodes. “You are paying me for a reason, Nina, and it’s because you know on some level, although apparently not a conscious one, that I am qualified to get you acquitted. In fact, I’m more qualified to do that than any other attorney in Maine … including you.”
I look away. At heart, I am a prosecutor, and prosecutors don’t tell defense attorneys everything. They dance around each other, but the prosecutor is always the one who leads, leaving the other lawyer to find his footing.
Always.
“I don’t trust you,” I say finally.
Fisher fields this like a blow. “Well, then. We’re even.”
We stare at each other, two great dogs with their teeth bared. Fisher turns away, angry, and in that moment I see my face in the reflection of the window. The truth is, I’m not a prosecutor anymore. I’m not capable of defending myself. I’m not sure I even want to.
“Fisher,” I call out when he is halfway out the door. “How badly will this hurt me?”
“I don’t know, Nina. It doesn’t make you look any less crazy, but it’s also going to strip you of public sympathy. You’re not a hero anymore, killing a pedophile. You’re a hothead who knocked off an innocent man—a priest, no less.” He shakes his head. “You’re the prime example of why we have laws in the first place.”
In his eyes, I see what’s coming—the fact that I am no longer a mother doing what she had to for her child, but simply a reckless woman who thought she knew better than anyone else. I wonder if camera flashes feel different on your skin when they capture you as a criminal, instead of a victim. I wonder if parents who once fathomed my actions—even if they disagreed with them—will look at me now and cross the street, just in case faulty judgment is contagious.
Fisher exhales heavily. “I can’t keep them from exhuming the body.”
“I know.”
“And if you keep hiding information from me, it will hurt you, because I won’t know how to work with it.”
I duck my head. “I understand.”
He raises his hand in farewell. I stand on the porch and watch him go, hugging myself against the wind. When his car heads down the street, its exhaust freezes, a sigh caught in the cold. With a deep breath I turn to find Caleb standing not three feet behind me. “Nina,” he says, “what was that?”
Pushing past him, I shake my head, but he grabs my arm and will not let me go. “You lied to me. Lied to me!”
“Caleb, you don’t understand—”
He grasps my shoulders and shakes me once, hard. “What is it I don’t understand? That you killed an innocent man? Jesus, Nina, when is it going to hit you?”
Once, Nathaniel asked me how the snow disappears. It is like that in Maine—instead of melting over time, it takes one warm day for drifts that are thigh-high in the morning to evaporate by the time the sun goes down. Together we went to the library to learn the answer— sublimation , the process by which something solid vanishes into thin air.
With Caleb’s hands holding me up, I fall apart. I let out everything I have been afraid to set free for the past week. Father Szyszynski’s voice fills my head; his face swims in front of me. “I know,” I sob. “Oh, Caleb, I know. I thought I could do this. I thought I could take care of it. But I made a mistake.” I fold myself into the wall of his chest, waiting for his arms to come around me.
They don’t.
Caleb takes a step back, shoves his hands in his pockets. His eyes are red-rimmed, haunted. “What’s the mistake, Nina? That you killed a man?” he asks hoarsely. “Or that you didn’t?”
“It’s a shame, is what it is,” the church secretary says. Myra Lester shakes her head, then hands Patrick the cup of tea she’s made him. “Christmas Mass just around the corner, and us without a chaplain.”
Patrick knows that the best road to information is not always the one that’s paved and straightforward, but the one that cuts around back and is most often forgotten as an access route. He also knows, from his long-lapsed days of growing up Catholic, that the collective memory—and gossip mill—most often is the church secretary. So he offers his most concerned expression, the one that always got him a pinch on the cheek from his elderly aunts. “The congregation must be devastated.”
“Between the rumors flying around about Father Szyszynski, and the way he was killed—well, it’s most un-Christian, that’s all I have to say about it.” She sniffs, then settles her considerable bottom on a wing chair in the rectory office.
He would like to have assumed a different persona, now—a newcomer to Biddeford, for example, checking out the parish—but he has already been seen in his capacity as a detective, during the sexual abuse investigation. “Myra,” Patrick says, then looks up at her and smiles. “I’m sorry. I meant Mrs. Lester, of course.”
Her cheeks flame, and she titters. “Oh, no, you feel free to call me whatever you like, Detective.”
“Well, Myra, I’ve been trying to get in touch with the priests that were visiting St. Anne’s shortly before Father Szyszynski’s death.”
“Oh, yes, they were lovely. Just lovely! That Father O’Toole, he had the most scrumptious Southern accent. Like peach schnapps, that’s what I thought of every time he spoke …. Or was that Father Gwynne?”
“The prosecution’s hounding me. I don’t suppose you’d have any idea where I could find them?”
“They’ve gone back to their own congregations, of course.”
“Is there a record of that? A forwarding address, maybe?”
Myra frowns, and a small pattern of lines in the shape of a spider appears on her forehead. “I’m sure there must be. Nothing in this church goes on without me knowing the details.” She walks toward all the ledgers and logs stacked behind her desk. Flipping through the pages of a leather-bound book, she finds an entry and smacks it with the flat of her hand. “It’s right here. Fathers Brendan O’Toole, from St. Dennis’s, in Harwich, Massachusetts, and Arthur Gwynne, due to depart this afternoon as per the See of Portland.” Myra scratches her hair with the eraser of a pencil. “I suppose the other priest could have come from Harwich, too, but that wouldn’t explain the peach schnapps.”
“Maybe he moved as a child,” Patrick suggests. “What’s the Sea of Portland?”
“See, S-E-E. It’s the governing diocese hereabouts in Maine, of course.” She lifts her face to Patrick’s. “They’re the ones who sent the priests to us in the first place.”
Midnight, in a graveyard, with an unearthed casket—Patrick can think of a thousand places he’d rather be. But he stands beside the two sweating men who have hauled the coffin from the ground and set it beside Father Szyszynski’s resting place, like an altar in the moonlight. He has promised to be Nina’s eyes, Nina’s legs. And if necessary, Nina’s hands.
They are all wearing Hazmat suits—Patrick and Evan Chao, Fisher Carrington and Quentin Brown, Frankie Martine, and the medical examiner, Vern Potter. In the black circle beyond their flashlights, an owl screams.
Vern jumps a foot. “Holy sweet Jesus. Any minute now I keep expecting the zombies to get up from behind the tombstones. Couldn’t we have done this in broad daylight?”