“We have to be thorough,” she says and takes the bag from my hands.
Then she starts calmly and methodically placing the surveillance equipment. I just stand back and let her do it, checking the corridor outside on the off chance that someone will wander down here.
It doesn’t take her long at all. “Ok, let’s do the other rooms,” she says and brushes past me.
She bugs the corridor next, then the storage rooms and even the boiler room.
There’s still no one in the corridor on the ground floor and she puts some cameras and mics into the offices there too. And the corridor itself.
Our first setback is finding the doors of the first floor of the community center locked.
“I could break it down,” I say, checking out the lock more closely.
She shakes her head.
“We don’t want to leave any marks,” she says, turns around and heads back towards the auditorium. “I’ll do the church next. You go back to the play. Say I had to take a call or something, if anyone asks where we are.”
“I’d rather go with you to watch your back.”
“I’m fine,” she says. “You just make sure Gael is still in there and I’ll be fine. Call me if he leaves at any point.”
She doesn’t wait for a reply, just strides towards the door, giving me no chance to argue. I follow and grab her shoulder, giving it a comforting squeeze. Then I lean down and whisper, “Everything is gonna be all right,” into her ear.
She gives me a shocked look that’s also very grateful.
I think she understands that I’m not just saying that. I mean to make sure that priest pays for what he’s done to her, and to who knows how many other girls. Pays in pain and sufferingworse than the suffering he had caused. I’ll make sure of that whether Alice likes how I do it or not.
19
Alice
The front door of the church is unlocked and as I enter it, the pleasantly warm evening outside disappears, replaced by the dank cold and oppressive air inside. Even though this church is much newer, much smaller and much less ornately furnished, I feel like I just walked into St. Peter’s Church on Sycamore Road. The place where my life ended.
Inwardly, I’m still shaking from seeing Gael’s latest victim playing Dorothy on stage and from finding the candy room downstairs. The candy room. I’d forgotten I used to call the basement room where my nightmares started that. As I walk between the pews to the altar, I start outwardly shaking too.
I haven’t been inside a church since the last time my mother dragged me there the day before I turned eighteen. The smell of burning candles and the rich, spicy aroma of the incense is ingrained in the very walls and the wood of the pews here as well. I swear I can also smell the tangy, sweet scent of the candy he used to bring me too. It all makes bile rise in my throat.
But I’m here to do a job.
I’m not a scared, clueless, defenseless little girl anymore. No matter how much seeing Gael and being in his church again is threatening to turn me into one.
While taking deep, relaxing breaths, I place the microphones strategically in a few of the pews. Skye, our intel officer assured me that one of these mics is enough to cover a whole church, but I want to be sure.
I would dearly like to place a few bugs in the confessional booths, but that would be too big a sin, even in the pursuit of the higher good that I’m trying to achieve here. The confessional is sacred, the secrets revealed there are only between the confessor and God.
Gael spent a lot of time telling me that what he was doing to me was right and good inside the confession booth. But I still can’t violate the privacy of the others who come here to get absolution from their sins.
My phone stars ringing as I’m standing by the altar trying to decide if placing a camera there would violate anyone too gravely.
“He’s left the room,” Nico whispers as I pick up. “There’s at least twenty minutes left in the play.”
I turn back to the front door and stride towards it. But I’m only half way there when a side door opens and footsteps of leather against stone sound somewhere to my left. I recognize these footsteps.
“Were you looking for me?”
And there he is. Gael. In his black shirt and black pants, his eyes burning bright like they always did, even back then. The fiery eyes of the devil in a benevolent man’s clothing.
I want to run. I want to throw up. I want to fall to my knees and scream.
