Val had to stop this madness. She had to!
“What do you want from me?” Charity asked, glancing nervously at her captor.
“To atone for your sins—and none of that flogging you do for that old pervert Father Paul. No, I want you to admit that you’re a liar and a fraud,” the killer said, sneering, “that you’re unfit to be a bride of Christ. Just like the others.”
“Oh, Dear Father,” Charity whispered. “You know?”
“That you had a love child with Arthur Wembley?” the killer sneered.
Now, without the voice’s rasp, Valerie thought she recognized it; she’d heard it before. A soft voice . . .
I’m sorry, Reverend Mother,
the voice had said as Sister Charity’s lips pinched in silent rebuke.
Valerie’s heart froze.
It was the same voice she’d heard in the garden at St. Marguerite’s, the same, she now realized, as the snotty little girl with the cast thirty years earlier, who had barred Cammie from the slide and said slyly,
“You know what seven-seven-three-four is, don’t you? It’s hell.”
Sister Devota?
She was the killer?
A woman?
A nun?
No! That was nuts . . . too crazy . . .
As if the killer had read her mind, she sprang into action. Val, still gripping the gun, heard a frantic quick shuffling of feet, shoes sliding over the floor. A scuffle of sorts. A struggle.
No!
Val took a step forward as a woman, Sister Charity, mewled pitifully.
Then all became suddenly quiet.
Deathly quiet, the tomb feeling like death itself.
Goose bumps rose on the back of Valerie’s arms, fear wrapping cold talons over her soul.
Save her . . . you have to save her.
Slowly she crouched, glancing behind her into the inky folds of darkness, feeling as if she were about to be ambushed.
Someone coughed.
Val whipped her head toward the sound, toward the eerie wash of blue light just as a grating voice slithered from the murky dead air. “Come on out of the shadows, Valerie. Oh, yes, I know you’re there. I know you followed me. I waited for you. So come on out.”
Val’s stomach dropped. She didn’t move a muscle.
“You heard me,” Devota said, angry now. “Come out from your ridiculous hiding place. Don’t you know you can’t hide? You’re on my turf now, Val. Mine and God’s.”
Val still didn’t move. She could still get the drop on this psycho!
“Oh,” the raspy voice said, as if suddenly remembering some small detail. “And drop the gun, or I will, right here and now, in front of your eyes, slit your pathetic mother’s throat!”
Slade heard voices.
Not from the auction overhead but from the dark space in front of him, the words garbled and soft as they slid from deep in the tunnels that he’d found, a complicated series of tombs that smelled of death and decay. A place where rats scurried, pipes dripped, and he felt as if he were walking through the smoldering ashes of long-forgotten lives.
He was moving as quickly as he could, images of Val facing off with the killer filling his mind. He saw her struggling, a garrote at her neck, the strong hands of the killer twisting tighter and tighter, cutting off her air, the sharp noose cutting through her beautiful neck.
Don’t go there! Just keep moving! Save her, for Christ’s sake!
His lighter was little illumination, and he took another wrong turn, then doubled back. Breathing hard, fear sizzling through his body, he forced himself to stop and listen, his ears straining to hear over the fear pounding in his heart. The sounds of the auction had long disappeared, and here, several stories beneath the building, he moved forward.
He thought of Valerie, and his insides turned to water when he imagined losing her, that some maniac might wrap a flesh-slicing garrote around her throat and squeeze the life from her. He thought for a moment of what his life would be like without her, how empty the world would be.
No,
he thought, his jaw turning to granite. He’d do anything to save her.
Anything!
God help him that he still had enough time.
T
he crowd in the gymnasium was restless, but backup had arrived, the officers taking charge, EMTs on hand to help with those who were feeling ill.
Bentz, eyeing the restless throng, gave up his position to Zaroster and approached Montoya with the bad news. “There’s a door open to the basement in the north wing,” he said. “Zaroster discovered it and we’ve got a uniformed guy standing guard.”
“Why?”
“It was locked earlier. I checked with Sister Georgia, the reverend mother here.” He was fidgeting, his eyes searching the crowd, chewing gum like a fiend, feeling that something was going down. Something bad. “And we’ve got some people missing.”
“Valerie and Slade Houston?”
“And Sister Charity and Sister Devota, that I can come up with off the top of my head.” His gaze roved the crowd. “Who knows who else?”
Father John!
“Son of a bitch.”
Bentz nodded. “My thoughts exactly.”
“He’s here!” Montoya was certain of it. He had only to think of Sister Louise’s dead body stuffed into the piano . . . “Shit a brick! You think he’s got them?”
Bentz didn’t answer. But, yeah. He did. But he wasn’t going to voice it. Not yet. “I don’t know, but let’s find out.” Bentz was already heading out of the gym, cutting past people in their fancy clothes and worried expressions, hoping to get one more shot at Father Fucking John.
This time, the bastard wouldn’t survive.
Devota had lunged, grabbing Charity from behind, twisting one arm back so painfully that Charity heard her tendons popping. She’d cried out as the younger woman had drawn a knife to her throat, but she’d known her scream was useless.
Charity had tried to fight but had lost the battle before it had begun. She was sweating and scared, her heart beating so frantically she thought it might explode.
What could she do?
How could she save herself?
How could she save her daughter?
Oh, Sweet Mother Mary, why had she spent her life holding on to her lies, spinning more, compromising her soul?
Devota had barked out a threat: “And drop the gun, or I will, right here and now, in front of your eyes, slit your pathetic mother’s throat!” and Charity’s knees had buckled.
Valerie couldn’t be here! Oh, dear Father, no, not after all the years Charity had so rabidly tried to protect her only child.
“Did you hear me, whore?” Devota snarled, her breath hot against Charity’s ear, the thin blade at her throat, slicing into her skin, cold and wicked as it split her flesh.
Charity whimpered as she felt her warm blood begin to flow from a wound already stinging. How could this be happening? Why would Devota, the girl she’d met at St. Elsinore’s when Charity had worked there, the poor child who had broken her leg and had always walked with a limp thereafter, turn on her? How had she become this vile monster? Surely, as God would see to it, there was an ounce of reverence, of piety, of goodness still within her soul. “Devota, please . . . think of the Blessed Mother. Do not give into Satan’s calling.”
“Shut up, you old hypocrite!” Devota hissed. “What do you know? Always hiding your own sins and judging others for theirs. Your time is over,
Mother,
” she snarled. “You can take it up with God when you see him.” Then, to the surrounding darkness, “You! Valerie Renard! Sister of the whore! Step forward!” She wrenched Charity’s arm, and the older woman squealed in pain. She couldn’t fight—the knife blade was too sharp—and if she complied, perhaps Valerie would be saved....
But she knew better.
Weren’t Camille and Asteria proof enough of that, and probably Louise and Lucia as well? Her knees crumpled.
Devota yanked her to her feet. “I said, step forward!”
To Charity’s ultimate horror, Valerie complied.
Blessed Mother of God, please, stop this madness.
But she watched in terror as Valerie stepped into the cruel, frail light.
Tall and beautiful, as strong as her father had once been, Valerie leveled her gun directly at Devota’s head. “She is
not
my mother.”
“Of course she is! Don’t you know that this is what it’s all about? That you were the love child of this old lady and that wheezing skeleton who donated the piano?” Devota seemed amused at that. “That’s where they’ll find Louise, you know, in the piano, but no longer singing, I’m afraid. She’s sung her last solo.”
“Oh, for the love of the Holy Mother.” Charity’s worst nightmares were confirmed.
“And your dear old daddy, Wembley, used his money to pay off everyone, including Mike and Mary Brown, so that no one would know. Everyone kept the secret, just as long as the money kept flowing. Sinners, every last one of them!”
“Don’t listen to her,” Charity said, and was rewarded with another sharp tweak to her left arm. Her right was free; she could swing back and hit Devota in the face, but that would probably ensure that she would die as the knife blade found her jugular or carotid.
“But I’m not lying, am I?” Devota whispered with a kind of horrid, dark glee. “I found out the truth that you worked so hard to hide all these years . . . your secret love child.”
“Please,” Charity whispered, her head thundering, the truth hammering away at her brain, chipping at her pride and exposing her self-loathing as warm blood slid down her neck in this musty, dark tomb.
“Wasn’t too hard to do,” Devota bragged. “All I had to do was shadow the whore. She was on to something, found out about the adoption papers being altered when she worked at St. Elsinore’s. And then she came down here and verified everything she’d put together.”
“I don’t believe you! Let her go!” Valerie insisted, unflagging, her eyes directed on Devota.
“Then again, you always were dull. I remember you from the orphanage.”
Charity could feel Devota’s bitterness curdling through the dusty air. She, the unwanted one, the lame girl, the one always passed over.
Valerie took another step forward. Her voice was low. Threatening. “I said, let her go!”
“Not just yet.”
“Now.” Valerie didn’t drop the gun.
“You’re not in control,” Devota reminded her.
But Valerie, as tough as Charity had been in her own wasted youth, didn’t back down. “Why are you doing this?” she asked, verbalizing the questions that had formed in Charity’s mind.
“God’s work,” Devota said again, with that drip of satisfaction at finally explaining herself, her mission.
It scared Charity to death.
Devota tightened her grip. “Someone has to get rid of the harlots who shame the church, who defile the order. So you see, your ‘sister, ’ she really wasn’t any blood relation to you. Oh, yeah, she looked like you, but there was nothing between you. Nothing! It was a lie. Anything that said otherwise, about how you resembled each other, was pure coincidence . . . or fantasy. People see what they want to see, you know, but Camille, she found out.”
Charity felt her captor tense at the thought of Sister Camille, as if the prettier woman had been her rival. “Everyone bought into her act, but she was dark below the surface. Pure evil.”
Val’s face, in the weird light, remained impassive.
Devota went on, almost as if the words that had been bottled up in her for years were now bubbling upward, like froth from some ruined, bitter champagne finally uncorked. “She couldn’t wait to stick it to Old Man Wembley. I followed her, witnessed the old woman, the
wife,
paying the blood money to Camille, and you know what she did with part of it? She gave it to that witchy little Lucia. That twit! I saw it with my own eyes, and it didn’t take too long to put two and two together.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” But Valerie was wavering, her voice not as strong.
“Of course I do!” Devota snapped, suddenly angry all over again, spittle flying as she added, “True to her nature, that Jezebel was blackmailing the Wembleys, and the missus, she wasn’t too happy about it!”
Charity couldn’t stand to hear another word. “What do you want from me?” she demanded, reeling from the mortification of her life, her secrets, being exposed—to the very daughter she’d tried to save.
She realized that she was about to lose her life, now, when she had so many sins to atone for.
“What do I want from you?” Devota repeated, unafraid of the gun that was trained on her. She was breathing hard, furious, as she sneered into Charity’s ear, “I think you know,
Reverend Mother.
I want you to pay, of course. Like the others. They, too, were whores, all of them in love with Father O’Toole.”
“No!” Charity shook her head. She wouldn’t have the sisters vilified.
But Devota was convinced of their sins. “I know that probably only Camille had actually lain with him,” she said, and a shudder ripped through her body. Charity could feel it. As if the thought of Camille and Frank together was so vulgar Devota could hardly stand it, was nearly to the point of vomiting. Yet, she wasn’t finished.
“But the others, they wanted to. I saw it in their eyes, those pious little hypocrites. Every last one of them.” She was breathing hard, as if she’d walked up fifty flights of steps, her rage seeping through her blood. The fingers around Charity’s wrist gripped harder. “All of those pretty little girls who had all the advantages, who had been adopted to homes . . . with . . . with parents. And brothers and sisters.” She was nearly panting with her rage. “They shared Christmas Eves with the grandmothers who baked apple pies and filled their stockings with hand-knit caps and dollies and little tins of chocolate,” she said bitterly, the girl always left behind. “They believed in Santa Claus and had siblings to fight and play with, boyfriends in high school. They had crushes and friendship rings and . . . and some of them were cheerleaders or athletes before going to college with men meant to be their husbands.” She was spewing her anger, nearly choking on the unfairness of it all. Her fingers clenched so tightly Charity cried out, but Devota, in her rage, didn’t notice, didn’t care. She was reliving all the injustices thrust upon her. “They had first kisses and first loves, and they wrote in diaries. . . .” She glanced at Valerie. “Oh, yes, they wrote all their lurid thoughts in diaries. All their sinful acts recounted and detailed . . .”
Charity saw her daughter wince, and for the first time the gun wobbled, if only just a bit.
“You blame the girls who were adopted?” Valerie whispered, disbelieving.
Why didn’t Valerie leave? Charity thought desperately. Val could just run away, hide in the dark and save herself. But staying here, arguing with Devota, was of no use. She would only end up getting herself killed. “You should go,” Charity said, trying to hold her daughter’s eyes. “Quickly . . .”
Valerie glared at Devota, moved a little to the left but didn’t turn tail. “The others were innocent.”
“Innocent?” Devota repeated in revulsion. “Those idiots? They didn’t know the meaning of the word! Only when they’d had their fill of their normal lives, when their parents or a boyfriend or life didn’t give them what they wanted did they come running back, crying out that they wanted to be nuns. To be pure of spirit. To become brides of Christ!”
She squeezed Charity. “And you took them in, didn’t you, Reverend Mother? Every last pathetic one of them, especially your pets, those who came from St. Elsinore’s. You gave them a new life, instruction, and showed them the way, but all the while you were a scheming, lying fraud! A whore who slept with a married man, bore him a child and hid it all!”
“No,” Charity squeaked, feeling blood slide beneath her collar.
Please, Valerie, leave. Leave now!
She tried to stall. “I believe—”
“I don’t care what you believe. It’s all a lie anyway. And God knows!” Devota said. “He sees you for what you are and the rest of them, too, when their vows got too difficult. All of them were ready to jump into the first handsome priest’s bed.” She leaned closer, her spit touching the shell of Charity’s ear, her rancor oozing through the old tombs. “I saw them, Reverend Mother, and so did you, but you allowed it, didn’t you? You let them flirt. You let them dream. You let them fantasize and imagine sleeping with him. Because you knew of their hunger, their desire, their evil, vile desire.”
This was going so badly. And Valerie . . .
Holy Father, please make her leave
.
Don’t let her blood be spilled.
“They . . . they may have had fantasies, but—”
“But they were supposed to be devoted to Jesus, the son of the Holy Father!” Devota nearly screamed, her voice cracking, the depth of her fanaticism showing.
Charity remembered her as she was: Darlene, a half-crippled, unwanted, and never adopted child, and the girl had embraced the life of the convent with open arms. There had been a darkness to her, too, a cancer in her soul that Charity had hoped would shrivel with her faith. She’d renounced her given name of Darlene and taken Devota, but the cancer, that blackness planted by Satan, had taken over, and the woman before her, a monster bent on her own vision of righteousness, was no better than Lucifer himself.