“She’s tired.” He sounded like he was talking to a little kid.
“I got that, Avery. I just want to check on her myself.”
He moved past his son, unconsciously skirting any contact with his own flesh and blood. Something wasn’t right here and it was driving him crazy.
He entered the master bedroom and flicked on the light, his eyes aching in the sudden illumination. Meghan was on the bed, dressed in the same nightgown she’d worn to sleep the previous night. She didn’t look like she’d moved much at all since he’d left for work almost ten hours earlier.
“Meghan?” He moved closer, feeling that cold spot in the pit of his stomach grow a few degrees colder still as he looked down on his wife’s prone body.
She opened her eyes and took a few seconds to focus on him. “Hey.” Her voice was raspy and dry.
“Hi, angel.” He leaned down and ran a hand over her forehead. Her skin was cool to the touch, but felt a little sweaty. “Are you feeling all right? Avery said you looked a little green, and I have to agree, honey.”
“Jus’ tired.” She smiled, her eyes focusing on him with the same clarity that she always seemed to have, and he felt relief thaw the ice in his stomach. “Feel like I haven’t slept all week.”
Alan leaned over and kissed her forehead, the taste of her running over his lips. “That’s because you
haven’t
slept all week.” He leaned back away and pushed a few errant hairs from her brow. “You’ve been worrying too much about Avery and other things.”
She nodded and closed her eyes. “I’m gonna sleep now, baby, okay?”
“Of course it is. Don’t worry. I’ll get something set up for dinner. Do you want anything?”
“No. Just sleep.” Seconds after the words were out of her mouth she closed her eyes and drifted into slumber. He sat with her for a while and watched her, amazed by her as he always was.
Downstairs, in the darkness, his son was waiting for him. Alan stood and stretched and then got into more comfortable clothes. His little boy would want company, and he’d already promised Meghan that Avery wouldn’t be left alone.
IV
There was a tension in the air that none of them would willingly acknowledge. There had been for several days and it wasn’t likely that the tension was going away anytime soon.
They were all independent men, the priests of the Sacred Hearts congregation. As a rule they worked together and then went their separate ways. But every Saturday night they got together and had a proper dinner. It was tradition and they never even discussed the matter anymore. It was simply a part of their regular routine and there was no reason for it to suddenly change.
Patrick was doing the cooking that particular Saturday and, as was often the case, he decided on pasta. The man should have been Italian with the way he went for pasta. Tonight it was lasagna and it very likely tasted as wonderful as it smelled. But all three men sat in silence as they ate, lost in their own thoughts.
And each and every one of them was remembering the girl they had seen in the church every Sunday for over a decade now, the girl who would be in the pews tomorrow and likely praying as fervently as she always did.
Each of them dreaded seeing Margaret Preston, the sweet-faced youth who had come to them and brought them pleasures of the flesh the likes of which they had never experienced before. She did so, as far as they knew, without provocation. She had surely never given any indication in the past that she found them attractive, and most assuredly she had never made advances before the week that had just come around. That she had been knowledgeable was a given. Maggie was talented and eager to teach things they had never willingly admitted to dreaming about, let alone ever expected to experience in their lives.
She had brought each of the men pleasure, deep abiding pleasure, and memories that would linger and haunt them for a long time to come. She had also brought each of them doubt. They doubted their own strengths and the strength of their faith in the Lord, if they were weak enough to give themselves over to a beautiful woman.
Each of the priests had thought of little else in their free time. The guilt was powerful and burned at them, as surely as her kisses had seared their flesh, as surely as their bodies burned for her, to be with her again, to experience the sensual gratification she had given to them once before.
They would see her at Mass and each of the men would remember what had happened. They would feel the guilt they shared more profoundly than ever and the desires as well. Each of the priests knew that this would happen but only knew it would happen for one individual. The men had often shared tales of their pasts during their Saturday night meals, and Donald Wilson had heard the confessions of his subordinates on many occasions.
There had been no confessions of their secret shared sins. Not a one of them ever seriously considered confessing. It was a secret, and it was a sin, but in each case, it was a sin that was still being savored.
And each of them had one more secret that they did not desire to share: despite the guilt involved, each and every one of them wanted to be with her again.
It was a silent meal that Saturday night. It was the last meal that all three men would share together. One of them would be dead before the week was over.
They ate in silence, lost in their sins and their urges. None of them even noticed. They were far too distracted to pay any attention to the men they ate with.
And that, of course, was exactly what Jason Soulis had been counting on when he hired Maggie: a secret shared is no longer a secret, and a sin held close to the heart is more often treasured than reviled.
Can you say Amen?
V
The night was starting to get long in the tooth and Boyd was beginning to feel married to Holdstedter, which wouldn’t have been that bad if the man looked as good as his sister did. Sadly, his partner was the wrong gender for him to even consider looking to get lucky.
“Are you thinking about my sister again?” Danny looked at him as he raised his mug of Sam Adams and smiled.
“Why would I be thinking about your sister?”
“You’ve got that look on your face that says you’re thinking about getting into the sack with a well-built blonde.”
“Only in your dreams, you loser.” That was another thing that annoyed him about his partner: the bastard could read him like a book and he didn’t like to be read.
“I can give you her number. She’ll probably chew you up and spit out the bones, but you’d have a good time.”
“Do you have any idea how wrong it is to hear you talk about your own sister that way?”
“Do you have any idea how wrong it is to know your partner is checking you out while you’re trying to drink yourself into a stupor?”
“You’re a sick man, Danny.”
“Yes, yes I am. Remind me never to change.”
“So how many are we up to for the day?”
“Seven. Seven more people who didn’t show up where they were supposed to or anywhere else. That’s seventeen to date, but who’s counting?”
“That prick we have to call sir.”
“O’Neill can eat my shorts.”
“He probably would. I hear he swings both ways.”
“That’s more than I need to know, Boyd.”
“Serves you right, talking about your sister that way.”
“You saying you don’t want to bang my sister?”
“What? You crazy? I’d fuck her through a wall. But that isn’t why we’re here.”
“No,” Holdstedter agreed. “We’re here to get drunk and bitch about the disappearing populace.”
“You think Freemont did in his wife?”
Holdstedter looked around to make sure none of the people in the bar was paying them any attention. No one was, except there was a brunette looking him over like he was a fine cut of meat. “I think he either did something to his wife, or he did something to someone else. He looked like he was ready to shit his pants when we pulled up.”
“Maybe. I don’t think he has the balls.”
“Listen here, Boyd, and listen well. Brian Freemont is a dangerous man. He gets into power.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He thinks too much like me, and I get into power.”
“Yeah? What do you do about it?”
“I have a beer and then hope I can get lucky. Nice game of hide-the-salami and I feel plenty powerful again.”
“You’re gonna have a kid that way, you know. You should wait until you’re married.”
“Yeah, that’s not happening.”
“So we put him down as a suspect?”
“Yeah, we do. I looked over dispatch’s records. There’s a while last night when he didn’t call in to report his location and he didn’t write a single ticket. He had time to get home and do something to her if he really wanted to.”
“You think it was that bad between them?”
Holdstedter shrugged his broad shoulders and got a sour look on his pretty-boy face. “I think anyone married to him would be miserable. I also think he looks at other women too much to be a good husband.”
“Nothing wrong with looking, Danny.”
“There’s looking and then there’s looking. If that boy had x-ray vision, every woman in this town would have reason to slap his face off.”
“Okay. We keep him as a suspect.” Boyd picked at the fries surrounding his burger and then decided to have a sip of beer instead. “So what the hell is going on in this town, Danny? How come we have so many missing people and not a body anywhere?”
“Maybe they’re all leaving town.”
“Some of them, sure. I can see that with the college girl and all, but ten-year-old corpses don’t walk away. And whatever the hell happened with the Falcones, I can bet they didn’t climb out of that car and skip their asses out of town for a little fun.”
“Yeah,” he grinned and took another sip of beer. “So a few maybe stayed here, but other than the corpses and car-crash victims, maybe they just left town.”
“That’s what I like about you, Danny. You’re an optimist.”
VI
Maggie was feeling a little tender when she got back to her apartment. The Baptist minister apparently liked his women submissive and he liked to fuck like a bunny on Spanish fly. Maggie visited him right after the Presbyterian. She was almost done with the list. Part of her was happy about that, because it was a lot of work with men who apparently weren’t getting any regularly. She was also a little saddened because she was having a good time with the whole lot of them.
Ben was outside, sitting on the ground near his front door. His head was hanging low and his knees were up so high they almost reached his shoulders.
“Ben? What are you doing out here?”
He looked up slowly, and she saw that he’d been drinking. He was ripped.
Ben shrugged his shoulders and waved his hands around aimlessly. “Thinking I maybe fucked up.”
He didn’t normally curse, and he wasn’t exactly a legend around school for his drinking habits. She walked over to where he was sitting and looked down at him. “What’s wrong?”
“That damned cop.”
“Oh, shit, Ben. He didn’t find out it was you, did he?”
“No. His wife is missing.” He looked miserable.
She shook her head. “What’s that got to do with you?”
“He said it was my fault. Accused me of doing something to her.” He shook his head with the slow, deliberate actions of a drunk who didn’t want to lose everything in his stomach.
“Did you do anything to his wife?”
“What?” He looked up sharply and immediately regretted it. Ben leaned back against the wall, his eyes moving fast behind closed lids and his face an unpleasant shade of green in the darkness. “No, Maggie. I don’t even know what she looks like.”
Maggie squatted down on her haunches next to Ben and tried to look into his eyes. His face was tear-streaked and he was sweating alcohol in the cool night air. She reached out her hand and touched his cheek, making him look at her.
“Then you didn’t do anything and he’s just a dick, Ben.”
“But maybe she left him because of me.”
“What? Because you hid his money and put it back?”
He nodded his head and simultaneously leaned his face against her palm. “Yeah. ’Cause I’m a bastard and hid his money.”
“Ben, he was blackmailing girls and raping them; they didn’t want it, but he made them do it. The only bastard here is him. If she left him because of anything, it’s because she finally saw what you saw.”
He shook his head and blinked his eyes several times. His bottom lip jutted out and pulled toward his chin. He was on the verge of tears over something he had no control over, because he’d been doing something genuinely nice for a girl he barely even knew.
“Still my fault. Maybe he deserved what I did, but what did she ever do?”
“Honey, for all you know she’d been hearing about everything he did and never reported him. Some people are like that.”
Ben shook his head again and rolled his eyes around until he could look in her face. “Why are you so nice to me?”
“Because you’re a nice guy, Ben.”
“No I’m not.”
“You just stop being a nutcase, okay?” She sighed. He really was a nice guy, but he was also a very drunk nice guy who was depressed as all hell.
“Tom is lucky. He knows that, right?”
“Let’s not talk about him, okay?” The last thing she wanted to think about was Monkey Boy. “Let’s get you back inside your place.”
Ben nodded and managed to stand on the first try. She’d expected him to fall on his ass. It still took almost five minutes to navigate into his apartment and move him toward his bedroom.
She helped him get his shoes and socks off. After that he was on his own. He didn’t try to get undressed.
As she was leaving he called out to her. “Maggie?”
“Yeah, Ben?”
“Thanks. Sorry to be a pain.”
“You’re not. Get some sleep. Feel better tomorrow, okay?”