“If you’re comfortable working up there,” I said.
She smiled. “I love that room. It’s as close to a secret hideaway as we have in this place.”
She was right. And I thought it appropriate for them to examine materials from Langham’s secret room in our most secret room.
“If Louise agrees,” I said.
Susan smiled. “She will,” she said.
* * * *
They worked throughout the afternoon. I didn’t interrupt them. Instead, I sent the workers home, and stepped in for Susan at the phones. The evening shift arrived with pizza. I was about to go upstairs with some pieces for Susan and Louise when Susan surprised me in the kitchen.
“We found something,” she said quietly.
I knew that Kaplan would be in touch, so I told the two volunteers that if someone came or called for me, I was in the vestry. They seemed surprised. I wasn’t even sure these two new girls knew where the vestry was.
Then I followed Susan upstairs.
The smell of sawed wood was strong here as well. I was in the process of remodeling the former offices and choir room into a women-only gym. At the moment, I still taught my self defense classes at union South and my friend Nick’s gym, but I wanted a room of my own, as Virginia Wolff said.
The vestry was to the left of the construction zone, past the still closed-off sanctuary. Paneling hid the door on this side, apparently to prevent parishioners from walking in on the minister as he prepared.
Right now, though, the door was half open revealing a well lit little room. It wasn’t as big or as fancy as Langham’s hidden office, but it was beautiful, with lovely paneling that I planned to save, and a ceiling that went almost two stories up, ending in a point that mimicked the church’s closed-off spire.
Louise had lit some homemade scented candles, so the little room smelled like vanilla. The desk was covered with hand-written legal papers. The garbage cans were overflowing with wadded up sheets. The nearby table had all of the journals opened to various pages. A blank legal pad sat on one of the reading chairs I had placed toward the back.
“Where did you get this stuff?” Louise asked.
“I can’t tell you,” I said.
“You need to tell us,” Louise said.
My heart sank. After that step-, only-, half-daughter thing, I braced for the worst. “How bad is it?”
Susan went over to the table. She touched an open journal.
“This,” she said, then touched another, “this,” and another, “this,” and yet another, “and this, all tell the same story. Different days, different years.”
“And the handwriting is a little looser in all of them,” Louise said, as if that would mean something to me.
“What story?” I said, knowing they wanted me to ask.
“You’d recognize it if you could read it,” Louise said. “It’s the sob sister.”
* * * *
We’d been calling her the sob sister from the beginning of the hot line. She had called every Saturday night like clockwork, rarely missing, usually around eleven.