“I know who that is.” I choked, eyes wide and hands trembling. The angle of his jaw, the cool icy eyes, it was the person I’d seen Lucy talking to that night. I was almost sure of it.
Cruz groaned, releasing the cross from his grip then, tension draining from his body.
“There.” Bastien rose, hands clutching gently at his nephew’s shoulders.
Cruz finally uttered, eyes glazed with shock.“Is he dead?”
“Oh, Cruz.” I descended on his shaking form, arms wrapping around his shoulders as tears leaked from his eyes. Shock blanketed me as blood darkened the worn carpet at my feet. Cruz dropped to his knees, hands holding his head as fresh tears pushed down his cheeks. I sat frozen.
Bastien pressed his palms to my neck then, thumbs sliding down my jaw and throat, willing me to look up at him.
“Sweet dove, please come back. I need you.”
His forehead brushed mine, tears beading at his eyelids as he placed soft kisses along my lips.
Sirens vibrated in my eardrums, closer and closer with every passing beat.
“Can you take care of Luce for me? And check on Ms. Watson? I have to stay here with Cruz, but can you check on them for me, my dove?”
His words solidified in my consciousness.
I nodded, hollow but present. “Yes.”
“Good.” His smile, pained but relieved, lit my desperate soul. “Thank you, Tressa.”
* * *
I picked my way around the wreckage. Shrapnel in the form of hundreds of tiny objects littering the churchyard. Objects meant to destroy, ravage, maim the flesh of God’s most obedient flock. Gunpowder and shrapnel had settled on the last rows of pews, only those with heavier trajectories flying farther up the nave.
Ronnie John picked up a wrench and a jagged shard of steel sitting under the final Station of the Cross, Jesus’s death, hanging just outside the sacristy door. The very objects responsible for battering Lucy and Ms. Watson almost fatally.
When I’d found Ronnie John huddled in a bathtub upstairs, his frail teen boy arms shook with fear as he covered his head and cried.
I cried with him when we walked down the stairs and he told me how he’d come in early before Mass to set up the catechism room and help Father Bastien distribute this week’s leaflets to the missiles in each pew. He described feeling the first boom shake the foundations under his feet. By the time he’d exited the tiny catechism room and snuck up the back stairs, a dark figure was pulling another weighted backpack into the main hall of the church. With the bomber’s back turned, Ronnie John had crab-crawled across the front pews and ducked inside the sacristy, his only focus finding Father Bastien to warn him.
What I hadn’t realized, and what Ronnie John had confessed as we walked back to the chaos, was that Bastien had apparently, and very recently, had a security system installed. A discreet button hidden in a corner of the sacristy rang the security company and local emergency services. Ronnie John had helped him install it before Bastien explained to him and the rest of the kids in catechism class how it worked, urging that if they ever felt threatened, they were to use this without hesitation. He’d also explained to them the importance of keeping it a secret, especially from church officials who wouldn’t approve of its installation without their knowledge.
Bastien’s dogged determination to help the helpless had always impressed me, but the idea that he’d installed an alarm without even the cardinal’s knowledge was something else entirely. I couldn’t help but wonder if something he’d found in the attic upstairs had driven him to seek out enhanced security for St. Mike’s.
My rebel saint, the man with the plan to save us all.
Ronnie John cleared his throat as he swung open the door of the sacristy to reveal a now-bustling crime scene.
Armed officers, detectives, and medics swarmed.
I wrapped my arms around my body, sliding my palms up and down the long sleeves of my shirt before crossing the threshold of the door and letting it close softly behind me.
Cruz caught my eye and nodded as he was being questioned by detectives. I’d already explained to them the sequence of events from my point-of-view, but Cruz was the only one that’d seen him as he entered the church. I wondered if he’d tell them the part about me, freshly showered and still in sleep clothes with Bastien’s marks on my body? What would I say if they asked? What could I say? I didn’t think there was a likely explanation other than the truth. Anything else seemed laughable in comparison.
Anxiety threaded my muscles, making it hard to walk, hard to think, my only focus the fear of what might happen if we were caught.
One night.
One indiscretion.
Two lives changed forever.
I walked the length of the church wall, fingertips drawing on the smooth stone to steady me as I descended each of the Stations of the Cross, a dark representation of Jesus’s last moments before death. The calm look on his hollow face haunted me then, and it did even more so now.
