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Precious Blood(96)

By:Jane Haddam


“You were at the altar during Holy Thursday Mass?”

“Not during, before.”

“Why?”

“It was just for a second. I just went up there and looked around.”

“But Barry, what for?”

“I don’t know,” Barry said. He sighed. “I’ve been back, you know. Not to St. Agnes’s. They still have the church sealed. I checked. But I was at the cathedral today for Stations. And I—I went to Mass again. To the Good Friday Mass.”

Scholastica found herself wondering if the service on Good Friday was technically a Mass. It was long and involved, and the priests distributed Communion  , but there was no consecration. The Hosts distributed on Good Friday were the extras consecrated deliberately on Holy Thursday evening. She thought she had to be very tired. None of this mattered. In the face of what had happened to Peg, Scholastica wondered if anything mattered. She looked at the clock on the wall above her head and saw that it was after nine.

“They wanted to know if I’d touched the chalice,” Barry said. “Both of them asked me that. Both of them asked me that twice.”

“Did you?”

“I might have.”

Was she imagining it, or was there a note of caution in his voice? She thought: He’s going to start lying to me now, maybe not outright, but shaving pieces off the truth.

“You must know what you did,” she told him. “Going up in front of all those people. You couldn’t have got to the church until it was practically full.”

“It was full.” More caution. More hesitation. “I was sitting in a pew on the center aisle, in the middle sort of, right behind a lot of children who weren’t in uniforms.”

“From the public schools, yes.”

“Well, I just kept looking at it. At the altar. At the things on the altar. I hadn’t seen any of it in years. I left the altar servers, you know, senior year. After—everything happened.”

“After the six of us made everything happen,” Scholastica said.

“No.” Barry’s stronger voice was back. No lies, this time. “You can’t blame yourself for that. You and Judy and Peg. You left. It wasn’t your idea.”

We didn’t do anything to stop it, either, Scholastica thought. But she didn’t want to go into all that. She and Peg had discussed it, eternally. She said, “Did you tell them all this? That you might have touched the chalice?”

“Yes.” Caution returned. “I even told them all about senior year. Leaving the altar boys. Leaving the Church. Leaving home, too. Did you know I’d done that? Run away from home for three months?”

“No. How could you have, Barry? You graduated with us.”

“O’Bannion let me make up the work weekends and holidays. I went back to school and I—I didn’t want any part of it. Mass. Being Catholic. O’Bannion always after me, wanting me to go to the seminary. I stuck it out for about two months and then I took off to my grandmother’s house in Cleveland.”

“What brought you back?”

“My grandparents were even more Catholic than my parents. They thought I was going through a struggle of vocation, getting all the indecision out of the way before I became a priest. I asked them not to tell my parents where I was, and I thought they’d listened to me—”

“How could you believe they would?”

“I told them if they didn’t, I’d run away again and sleep in garbage cans. I thought I’d frightened them. They’d called my parents anyway, of course. They went along with it. You know my Mom. Anything, anything, as long as they have a priest in the family.”

“It must have killed them when you left the Church.”

“It would have, but my brother Chris went into the Jesuits and my sister Bonnie is a Daughter of Saint Paul. It’s so strange having to tell you all this. All the things you would have known, if things had been different.”

“I did know them, Barry. The Archdiocesan newspaper always has little items about order priests and nuns who grew up in Colchester.”

“That’s right. I forgot about that. Kath, what am I going to do?”

“About what?”

“About the questions they’re asking. About everything. I’ve been sitting in my living room all night, thinking it through, thinking about this cable system deal I’ve got going, and we’re due to go on line in another week or two—”

“Anti-Catholicism coast to coast?”

“I didn’t kill Andy, Kath. I really didn’t. And you know how I feel about abortion. I’ve made it clear over the air often enough. I couldn’t have killed Peg.”