Secrets of the Old Church Read online

  “But that really doesn’t mean anything,” Carrie explained from her perch in Chris’s open window. There was a storm blowing in and lightning was already flashing in the sky, so she needed to get back to her own house soon. Chris was hiding sulkily under his covers. “Some girls can be perfectly civil on the surface while privately wanting to stab you to death, and I’ve only known her for three weeks so I don’t know where she falls on that spectrum.”

  “Okay,” Chris sighed mournfully. It was uncomfortably hot under all his blankets, but one sheet just didn’t hide you from the world well enough. “I just thought I’d ask.”

  “You didn’t do a bad thing,” Carrie said. “You understand that, right? Telling Maddison the truth was the right thing to do—”

  “Even if it means she hates me?”

  “Honestly, probably especially if it means she hates you,” Carrie said. “Now, I need to get inside before I get electrocuted, but I’ll be over tomorrow morning and we can do something—”

  “About the church,” Chris suggested.

  “That’s a terrible idea,” Carrie said. Then she looked at Chris, and the piles of research he’d been doing to keep his mind off Maddison, and sighed. Partly, Chris suspected, because his room was filled with drifting piles of notes and resembled a trailer park after a tornado. “But yeah, we can go look into the church tomorrow.”

  Maddison managed a day and a half of clutching her anger tight to her chest and raging against the unfairness of it all before her dad intervened. It was almost a relief, because raging quietly against someone was exhausting. Maddison liked being with people and talking with people and just people in general. She tended to wilt if you left her by herself for too long. A whole day going through the file cabinet marked M, which actually held the student records for last names I and K, and watching everything she said because she was in an enclosed space with the cousin of someone she was furious at (and let’s be honest, she was furious with Carrie too) had left her twitchy and irritable and horribly lonely.

  Mrs. Hadler, meanwhile, had giant cat’s-eye glasses but perfect twenty-twenty vision when it came to high school students, and she’d given Maddison and Carrie concerned looks over her glasses all day before finally inviting them both to her book group’s summer tea on Saturday. Maddison had a micromanaging great-aunt on her mother’s side and suspected this was part of a plan to strand her and Carrie in a sea of fluttery old ladies so they had to reconcile or die, but there had been no polite way to refuse the offer. Maddison had accepted the invitation with as much grace as possible, managed by a minor miracle not to catch Carrie’s eye, and gone home to feel glum and watch movies until her eyes fell out.

  She was curled up in the living room eating chocolate crispies dry right out of the box, eyes glued to the climactic fight scene of her third movie of the evening, when her dad came in and sat down next to her with a thump and a weary sigh. Maddison tried very hard to pretend he wasn’t there. This was made nearly impossible when he stole the couch blanket out from under her nest of pillows.

  Together, they watched a large squid-like creature escape from its ancient enchanted prison and attack the scientists in their tiny, tiny boat. Dramatic music played. The camera wobbled. The secondary love interest was snagged by a tentacle.

  “Mads,” her dad said over the synthesized sea-monster noises. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter,” Maddison said, far too stubbornly for the comment to be true, and her father sighed and tugged the cereal box out of her hand.

  “You have watched five movies over the last two days,” he said gently. “And every single one has been the second movie out of a trilogy.”

  “So?” Maddison asked. On screen, the squid-like creature thrashed and the primary love interest lashed himself to a harpoon, speechifying dramatically.

  “So, the second movie of a trilogy is always the one with the darkest ending,” her dad said, tossing a handful of chocolate crispies into his mouth and grimacing. “Argh, why do I keep doing that to myself?”

  “This movie doesn’t have that dark of an ending,” Maddison protested.

  “The Colonel is about to be eaten by the tentacle monster,” her dad said flatly, and Maddison groaned. He was right, of course. The Colonel was about to get eaten by a tentacle monster, not knowing that his best friend had betrayed him to Poseidon for the map to Atlantis or that the duchess had decided to accept his marriage proposal. Maddison fished the remote out from amongst the sofa cushions and hit pause just before the sea nymph revealed her parentage.

  “Chris . . . admitted a couple of things to me yesterday,” she grumbled.

  “And he’s secretly a serial killer?”

  “No! He . . . he lied to me about why he and Carrie needed to go look through the office last Monday,” Maddison said. Her dad raised his eyebrows. “Now that I think about it, I bet Carrie didn’t even really lose her necklace,” Maddison added. And that, Maddison, she told herself guiltily, was petulant. Even if it was highly manipulative of Carrie.

  “Nah—well, I did see a necklace in a drawer,” her dad offered. Maddison was strangely grateful that he didn’t try to convince her Chris and Carrie weren’t lying. “So who knows if she did? But that isn’t enough to make you this angry, Mads.”

  “They needed to get into the office because their aunt left them a letter telling them to get a box from under the floorboards that apparently had some secret information about the San Telmo in it,” Maddison said, and was gratified to see her father go briefly blank faced, like he did sometimes when he didn’t want to give away anything by reacting. “Chris says his aunt thought she was likely to be murdered for that information,” Maddison added. On second thought, her dad might just be having a number of emotions she’d never seen before all show up on his face at once.

  “Fudge,” he finally said, with feeling. Then he sighed. “Well, that’s not entirely unexpected.”

  “What?”

  “Mads, I—I suspected someone murdered Elsie Kingsolver,” her father said reluctantly. “When it comes to the San Telmo, well, a lot of very shady people have been after it at one time or another.”

  “Including you?”

  “I . . . walked into that, didn’t I?” Maddison’s father sighed. “But yeah, I know a lot about the San Telmo. Stuff’s been adding up and I did notice that the office was ransacked the day before the Kingsolvers cleared it out—I’m the one who bugged the local police into re-opening the case. Hit-and-run,” he added, mostly to himself. “Right, sure. With her job?”

  “Why did you . . . care?” Maddison asked, even though care wasn’t quite the right word. But there was something here her father was dancing around and it was related to the question of why Kevin McRae would go to such great lengths to avenge the murder of someone he didn’t know.

  “Oh sweetheart, I couldn’t just—if you know something is wrong, and you don’t help stop it, you’re no better than the person doing whatever it is.”

  “That’s not something everyone actually believes,” Maddison pointed out.

  “No,” her dad admitted. “But I couldn’t just stand by and let this go.”

  And that, Maddison thought, staring at her father’s face and not caring that she was making him uncomfortable, is true, even if it isn’t the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

  “But as for Chris . . . ” her father added, trailing off significantly.

  “I just can’t stand the fact that he and Carrie lied to me,” Maddison admitted, and her father put an arm around her.

  “It must have been a huge risk, though,” he offered. “Letting you in on the same secret that got his aunt killed.”

  “Yeah, but he still kept the truth from me,” Maddison said. Her father winced; that was a sword that cut both Chris and him. “And I’m furious that he did, but it’s also not really fair to blame him for not immediately taking me into his confidence, is it?” she asked.

  “You are allowed
to be angry at someone while acknowledging that they really have done their best by you,” her father said with a very slight smile. Again, there were several levels to this conversation, and Maddison wasn’t sure how many they were currently operating on, and she was actually starting to get an honest-to-goodness headache. And she still didn’t know what to do about Chris.

  “What am I going to do?” Maddison ended up wailing into her dad’s shirt.

  “Well, easing up on the sad and conflicted endings might be a start,” her dad suggested, patting her on the back. “Watch something happy. And then maybe talk to your friends? Last time you talked with Chris did you tell him what was wrong or just run out on him?”

  “Uh,” Maddison said sheepishly.

  “Be as angry as you want,” her dad said gently, “but don’t kill a friendship over this. And can I just take this moment to remind you that the search for the San Telmo is a dangerous one, and to be careful?”

  SAINT ERASMUS’S CATHOLIC CHURCH IN ARCHER’S Grove was a cream-colored jumble of a building; it was a strange combination of stucco and stained glass and had been added to on three different occasions with slightly different colors of paint and a variety of shingling. The half-tended flower beds outside the front doors and the bees attending to those flowers gave it a cheerful, buzzing appearance, at least to two teenagers casing the building one Friday afternoon.

  “The oldest part,” Carrie said to Chris as they strolled around the church, up the block, across the street, and then back past the church on the other side in the hope of being inconspicuous about casing the building, “is the church itself.” She was consulting the church’s website on Chris’s phone. “They added the current rectory in the eighties and the parish hall in January of 2000—ooh, that’s supposed to have stirred up the ghost—”

  Chris winced.

  “Sorry,” Carrie said. Maddison was still not really talking to them, even though Chris had sent her a text letting her know they were exploring the church today. Figuring out when to visit a functioning Catholic church was tricky, especially when your general game plan was to sneak in, find an old parish register and read it for clues, and then sneak out before anyone noticed you. Chris and Carrie were banking on the lack of scheduled events on the church’s online calendar and the logical hope that the priest didn’t actually spend a lot of time in the church itself. Chris would have felt much more at ease if Maddison had come along, despite having known her only a week or so, but unfortunately she wasn’t returning any of his calls.

  And he had realized after the fact that the apology he’d sent her might only have made things worse. Carrie must never know.

  “It’s fine,” Chris said, even though it really wasn’t. “What do you think we’re looking for?”

  “The attic, or the basement, or the locked filing cabinets?” Carrie suggested. “I actually have no idea. Everything I know about this place I got off its website, and there wasn’t a link to ‘secret treasure maps’ on the visitor page.”

  “That’s rude.”

  “Yeah, so inconsiderate,” Carrie agreed, and hopped up off the park bench they’d been sitting on. “Come on, it’s hot out here and I’ll bet the church has air-conditioning.”

  It took them a minute to cross the street since the traffic light had to cycle back around, and during that moment Chris himself cycled through a series of second thoughts and remembered a few things and ended up frozen in front of the doors.

  “Are we sure this is a good idea?”

  “No,” Carrie said, halfway up the steps. “It was yours, remember?”

  But that wasn’t the worst part; the worst part was something Chris had just realized. “Carrie, I know where I heard the name of this church before.” Carrie paused with her hand on the door handle and rolled her eyes.

  “Now what’s the problem?” she demanded.

  “Cesar Francisco,” Chris replied, and Carrie opened her mouth to say something irritated but then the name registered and she froze. Then she turned around, slowly, and looked up at the suddenly menacing front of Saint Erasmus.

  “This is the church he was supposed to have died in? It looks—”

  “Really normal,” Chris offered. Cesar Francisco had been a Cuban revolutionary in the 1950s, one who had already been approaching folk-hero levels of popularity before his mysterious death and disappearance. All anyone knew was that he had been smuggled onto a small passenger plane bound for the United States and that the plane had never made it to its scheduled destination at a small airfield in Archer’s Grove. But Francisco had been a political hot potato; devoted to the rights of the poor and downtrodden. Above all else he had been a thorn in the side of both American and Cuban officials. He might have been a popular hero but he was a political horror.

  Of the six different tales of his death, by far the most popular was the one that maintained that Cesar Francisco had, in fact, made it to Archer’s Grove, where a waiting CIA agent diverted the plane, killed the pilot, and attempted to kill Francisco, managing instead to wound the man before losing him in a torrential downpour near the old Catholic church. Which had been haunted ever since by the desperate Francisco, searching forever for the sanctuary denied to him when the nearly deaf priest failed to hear him pounding on the doors.

  That the body had never been discovered only gave rise to a rumor that the revolutionary had managed to hole up in some forgotten corner of the church—the basement was a popular suggestion—before dying. Other ghost stories suggested that the parish priest had been in on the whole plot and that his murder of Francisco was the cause of all the weird ghostly activity. In fact, whichever way you sliced it, Saint Erasmus was haunted by a very vengeful Cesar Francisco.

  But that didn’t change the fact that Chris and Carrie had to go inside, when the church was deserted, if they wanted to get anywhere in their search. And anyway, people had church services in the building all Sunday, so there was no way Saint Erasmus was as haunted as the stories said. Right?

  “Shhhh,” Carrie said unnecessarily as they eased the church’s double doors closed. They entered a narrow corridor decorated with a well-papered bulletin board and a large statue of Mary, and then moved into the church proper. Carrie pushed the doors to the latter open carefully. If they had been in a movie, the doors would have groaned, but instead they gave nothing more than a very small squeak.

  It wouldn’t have mattered if they had dragged the door open on squealing hinges, anyway, because the church was completely empty. And compared to the hot, bright street outside, it felt cool, and it had that echoing hush that tended to settle over buildings with a lot of history and where people were often serious and solemn. It was also dark; the emergency exit sign and the jewel-toned glow of the sunlight filtering through the stained-glass windows were the only sources of light.

  After prowling around the whole church looking for possible papers, Chris and Carrie found nothing historical enough to be the church record. It did occur to Chris that there might be a church library or a parish office or something similar—he knew from the website there was a parish recreation hall, where the rummage sale would be held in early August—but the door to that side of the church was locked. And for a Catholic church that had existed in the area since 1720, Saint Erasmus was depressingly modern.

  “Huh,” Chris said, sitting down in a pew and flipping experimentally through one of the books in the rack in front of him. “Even the hymnals were published this year.”

  “Does this look like Jonah and the whale to you?” Carrie asked. She’d been studying the six large stained-glass windows, each with a detailed scene depicted in jewel-toned colors, and was now paused by the one farthest from the door they’d entered through. On the window a green and blue sea creature with lovingly depicted rows of teeth was frozen in the act of swallowing a tiny figure of a person. It was not the strangest of the windows; there were two depicting catastrophic shipwrecks (one showed a snake gleefully biting someone while a Roman centurion looked
on amid the wreckage of a ship; the other showed Jesus walking on water towards a ship still in the process of sinking), and another that looked like a literal depiction of the phrase “I will make you fishers of men.”

  “Oh, wow. Why does the whale have scales?” Chris wondered, wandering over. It was not only the most disturbing depiction of a whale Chris had ever seen, it was also in the darkest corner of the building, and now that he was in that corner he could see—

  “Hey, there’s a door over here,” Chris said. It was hiding behind a statue of a monk holding a book on which he was balancing the baby Jesus. The door was painted the same color as the surrounding walls, but the knob turned when Chris tried it and the door grudgingly opened. Unlike the front door, this one did groan a little, and then it opened into a cluttered storage room full of books, vases, statues, Christmas garland, and—

  “C-c-camel!” Chris gasped. Carrie, right behind him, stifled what was either a scream or a laugh or more likely both. The camel did nothing, as it was a plastic camel decorated with red ribbon and jingle bells, clearly intended to be part of a Christmas pageant. It was still terrifying when it loomed up out of the gloom right inside the doorway.

  “Christmas camel,” Carrie said slightly hoarsely. “This looks more promising.”

  “This looks like the start of a horror movie,” Chris said, heart still pounding. And Carrie didn’t get to comment—she was behind him and so had avoided the worst of the camel menace.

  “No, seriously,” Carrie said. “This looks like a room full of old stuff, if you can get past the camel we might be able to find something.”