Help for the Haunted(57)

“Inherited?”

“They’d been here with Father Vitale before me. Vitale shared their beliefs about the power of demons and souls banished to hell for eternity. Personally, I take a less extreme approach to faith. Even so, your father struck me as a decent man. And your mother, well, there was something so tranquil about her. To be in her presence, it just made you feel . . .” He trailed off, before adding, “In fact, Sylvie, you have a good deal of her in you. I don’t know if anyone has ever told you that.”

“I look like her. People have said that.”

“I’m not talking about looks. I mean whatever that thing was about her. You have it too.”

As he spoke, my mind filled with the memory of that hotel room, my mother lying close to me, her whispery voice telling me: It began when I was a girl not much older than you. . .

“After Father Vitale left,” Coffey said, pulling me away from that memory, “I made a decision that as long as the things your parents did weren’t happening in my church, I would put it out of my mind and embrace them, same as I would any other parishioners.”

“If you embraced them, why did they stop coming?”

Coffey looked away at the altar, running a few fingers beneath the collar of his turtleneck, before taking a breath and answering. “I want to make it clear that I came to like your parents, Sylvie. Genuinely. I understood their choice for privacy, given the nature of their work, but that also made them seem remote, secretive even. And as their notoriety grew, it became difficult for me not to think about who they were and what they did, especially when parishioners began to complain.”

“Complain?”

“Yes. Frankly, Sylvie, people found your parents’ presence in the church distracting. They didn’t much like the idea of people doing what your parents did all week long, coming so close to Satan I guess is how you could put it, then attending Mass on Sundays. Never mind serving as a Eucharist minister as your father did.”

“So you told them to stop coming?”

“No. Actually, I defended them, reminding those parishioners that gossip had no place in the church. It worked for a while. But once that photo of your mother and the doll appeared in the paper —not to mention the news of the hatchet and so many other things kept in your basement—and once Abigail came to live with you, well, after that, no amount of scripture put an end to their gossip and complaints. I don’t know how else to say it, Sylvie, but people were afraid of them.”

The light through the stained glass had shifted again. Father Coffey and I would be nothing more than shadows soon, but neither of us made a move to get up just yet. Seated so close to him, I could smell the sugary sweetness of those doughnuts on his warm breath. In a quiet voice, I said, “People misunderstood my mother and father. They took the things they did and twisted it around. All my parents wanted was to help people.”

“Maybe so. But I’m not sure that’s what ended up happening. I read the book by that reporter. It painted a very different picture of their motives. Your father’s anyway. Have you read it, Sylvie?”

“Yes,” I told him, though that wasn’t entirely true. I still hadn’t been able to brave the final section—“Should You Really Believe the Masons?” “You were saying that people were afraid of my parents, but they didn’t care what people thought. So that couldn’t have been their reason to stop coming to church.”

“Imagine, Sylvie, how awkward it was for your father to serve Communion when no one would go to his line except your family. And when I asked him to offer the wine instead, the handful of people who took that did not anymore. Finally, I had no choice but to tell your father his assistance was no longer needed.”

I remembered those Sundays at church, how awkward they had become, and how grateful I felt when we suddenly quit going. “So that’s why they stopped?”

“Yes, and at first, he grew angry and said he was going to complain about me to the bishop. He never did, though.”

“Why not?”

Father Coffey glanced behind us at the silhouettes of those wooden statues, as though he worried someone might be listening. In a whisper, he said, “I think we should finish here, Sylvie. I need to get to the school. The nuns arranged to have the floors of the gym waxed, and the smell is so noxious they don’t think people will make it through the service on Sunday without passing out. Someday, God willing, we’ll raise enough money to build a church where students don’t dribble balls all week long. Now do you need a ride somewhere? Or is that car outside for you?”

“I thought that car was yours?”

“The Buick belongs to me. But there’s another one out there—a Jeep with the engine running and someone behind the wheel. Do you know who it is?”

“I might,” I said, because I had a hunch.

Coffey stood and exited the pew, this time making a hasty sign of the cross. As we walked out of the church, I looked back at the altar, thinking of my parents entering that building, not knowing they would never leave, thinking of Rummel who asked if anyone in their circle had reason to do them harm. When Coffey pushed open the door, I saw the Jeep and gave a small wave. “Do you still keep a spare under the flower boxes?” I asked, as he jangled his keys, locking up. It was a detail I recalled from my father’s deacon days.