Chapter 5
“Somebody’s been hard at work,” Keith Dunagin said, when he’d been seated on the sofa with a mug of coffee. He pointed at the boxes scattered around the living room.
“Saint Maeve has been on a mission,” Therese said.
Maeve shot her a look of pure poison. “I had a real estate agent come over and give me an idea of what we need to do to get the house ready to sell. First thing she told me was to get rid of the clutter. And the carpet. But she says whoever buys the house might just tear it down and build something new.”
Their uncle shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He wore gray dress pants and his starched white pharmacist smock with the Dunagin Drugs emblem stitched over the breast pocket, and he held a brown paper grocery sack in his lap.
“Whatever it takes,” Therese said. “We just need a quick sale. Frankly, I could use the money, and I’m sure Maeve agrees, at least on that point.”
Keith stared down at his polished crepe-soled shoes, then up again. His balding head, even his cheeks were flushed. He set the grocery sack on the floor.
“About the house,” he said. “The thing is, I’ve got some not-so-good news on that issue.”
Maeve sat forward. “Uncle Keith? What kind of news? I mean, Mom told me years ago that she’d paid off the house note. In fact, she showed me the payment book, all those clipped-off coupons. And we burned the mortgage papers in the grill out back.”
“It was paid off,” Keith agreed. “But then … well, it seems she took out a new mortgage.”
“What?” Therese shot out of her chair. “When? Why would she do something like that? She had Daddy’s union pension from the port. What happened? She wasn’t hurting that bad for money, was she?”
Keith spied the praying-hands sculpture his niece had earlier tossed aside.
“This is what happened,” he said bitterly, holding out the plaster statue.
“Goddamned Brother Jerome. I guess he’s what they call a televangelist. Your mom somehow started watching the guy’s YouTube channel—Showers of Blessings, I think it’s called.
The guy’s slick. He talks about saving souls and bringing blessings to the downtrodden.
But he needs money. So much money, to do the Lord’s work.
So your mom started sending him money. Just a little at first. Maybe twenty bucks a week or so.
And every time she sent a check, he’d send her one of these statues. ”
“That doesn’t sound like Mom at all,” Maeve said. “I mean, she never missed Mass, but she wasn’t some kind of Jesus freak. Is this Jerome guy even a priest?”
“Who knows? When Mary Helen first told me about him, I watched him on my computer at work. He’s wearing a priest’s cassock and vestments, and it looks like a Catholic altar, but for all I know he could be broadcasting from somebody’s basement in Timbuktu.”
The sisters stared at each other in stunned silence.
“How much did she give this guy?” Maeve asked. “And why didn’t you try to stop her?”
“I didn’t know about any of this until it was too late,” Keith said, clutching his head between both hands.
“Phil Garner, he’s a longtime customer, and a senior vice president over at Southern States Savings and Loan, which is where we banked, tipped me off.
Totally unethical and illegal, probably, but he’d known your mom since grade school, and he went to parochial school with your dad.
Phil came into the drugstore one day about six months ago, pulled me aside, and asked me what was going on with your mom.
That’s when he told me. She’d been coming into the bank, like on a weekly basis, withdrawing cash.
Like a thousand dollars at a time, which was totally unlike her.
Arletha, her favorite teller, tipped off her boss, because she was alarmed.
“The next time Mary Helen came into the bank, she asked to see him and told him she wanted to take out a new mortgage on the house. He said he tried to talk her out of it, but she was absolutely adamant. Your mom told him it was a matter of ‘spiritual life or death.’”
“Oh my God,” Therese whispered.
“Literally,” Keith said. “She told him if he wouldn’t write the loan, she’d go someplace else. But she wanted it done that day.”
“How much?” Maeve asked.
“Three hundred twenty-five thousand dollars,” Keith said. “That’s what this house appraised at. Frankly, I was shocked. I guess I haven’t kept up with the real estate market.”
“Are you telling us she gave all that money to some goddamn preacher?” Therese asked, her voice rising.
“It looks like it,” Keith said. “When your mom made me executor of her estate, she gave me power of attorney too. There’s less than a thousand bucks in her checking account, and not but a couple hundred dollars in her savings account.”
He let out a long, soft sigh. “I’m so sorry, girls, but the money’s gone.”
Therese locked eyes with her younger sister. “What are we gonna do? I was counting on the money from the house. My car’s dead, I need new headshots, I’ve got bills to pay…”
Maeve thought about her own bills, about the air conditioner in her carriage house that needed to be replaced; the high mileage on her own car, a fifteen-year-old Honda she’d been hoping to trade in for a new model; the student loans she’d run up while pursuing her master’s degree; and yes, she’d admit it only to herself, her fantasy of taking an unpaid sabbatical to work on the novel she’d been tinkering with for years.
All those secret plans had apparently just been torpedoed.
“Is there anything we can do?” She turned back to her uncle. “I mean, this Brother Jerome obviously bilked an old, sickly widow out of her house. Can we, like, get him arrested?”
“And get our money back?” Therese added.
“I honestly don’t know,” Keith admitted. “I don’t even know what state the guy lives in. I wouldn’t know where to begin to try to go after him. I suppose we’d need to hire a lawyer. Are you two prepared to do something like that?”
Therese snapped her fingers. “Maeve, you should call Scotty Childress. He’s the smartest lawyer in town.”
“No,” Maeve said, without hesitation. “We can’t afford to hire an attorney. And I’m not about to ask an old family friend for a favor like that.”
“Why not? You know he’s always had a thing for you.”
Instead of answering, Maeve reached for her phone and started typing in the search bar.
She easily found the YouTube channel for Brother Jerome and Showers of Blessings Cathedral.
The first video showed a tall, powerfully built man with a luxurious shock of shoulder-length silver hair.
He wore colorful priest’s vestments and stood at an elaborately carved lectern in front of a soaring stained-glass window.
“He looks like Charlton Heston,” she muttered.
“Who? Scotty?”
Maeve showed her the video on her phone screen. “No. Brother Jerome.”
“Sonofabitch, he really does,” Therese marveled. “And Mom always loooved Charlton Heston.”
She tapped the sound icon on the video. The priest’s voice boomed into the microphone.
“The Lord loves you, and he wants you to be completely covered in blessings. His passion is to see us, all of us, flourish. And the way we make that happen is to listen to the message he asked me to carry to you today.”
The priest held up an oversized, gilt-edged Bible. “It’s all right here.”
“Amen!” an unseen woman’s voice called out, and was echoed by a chorus of amens and hallelujahs.
Brother Jerome leaned into the podium and lowered his voice.
“Beloveds, Satan is hard at work, every day. He never rests, which is why we can never be complacent. He’s trying to undo our mission, trying to stop us from broadcasting the word, the good news to all of you out there.
Right now, we are facing a dark reality.
Our costs are skyrocketing. Production expenses are mounting, and our facility, this beautiful cathedral, which is a monument to God’s goodness, has had serious structural damage due to an unprecedented number of storms.”
“Nooooo,” the hallelujah chorus chanted.
“Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of construction must be undertaken immediately,” Brother Jerome said. “Sadly, we have nowhere else to turn. So I must turn to you, beloveds, with this humble request for funds.”
“I’ve seen enough,” Therese said, abruptly swiping a finger across the phone screen to close out the video.
“Me too,” Maeve said wearily. She closed her eyes. “Mom, what did you do?”