The Summer Children (The Collector #3)(60)

“What?”

“Mass,” she repeats patiently. “What time?”

I blink at her, too tired to fully comprehend what she’s asking.

“You feel better when you go to Mass, Mercedes. It’s a Sunday. So what time?”

“She likes the nine-thirty best,” Eddison tells her around a mouthful of half-chewed apple tart.

“Hmm.” Priya checks her watch and pushes to her feet. “We should get dressed then.”

Priya rarely chooses to take charge of things, but when she wants to, she’s a lot like her mother: impossible to resist. Before I’m fully aware of moving, my clothes are changed and I’m sitting in the backseat with my makeup bag and Priya holding a mirror steady, Sterling in the front passenger seat as Eddison drives us to church.

It’s a bizarre mix. Priya isn’t a practicing Hindu, if that’s the right description, but she does wear a bindi on a daily basis, and Sterling is Jewish, despite her deep and abiding love for bacon. Eddison was raised Catholic, but his faith didn’t survive his sister’s kidnapping and so-far permanent disappearance. He occasionally sits with me, usually at Christmas or when I’m having a rough time, but the memories, so engrained in him through his childhood, make him uncomfortable in churches.

But there we all are, stretched out in a pew near the back, Priya and Sterling subtly watching others for their cues and Eddison blushing every time he’s standing or sitting or kneeling by rote. When everyone else starts moving, pew by pew, for Communion, Priya gives me a questioning look.

I shake my head. “You can’t take Communion without confession.”

“And you can’t do confession because of your job?”

“Job isn’t really a factor, as long as I don’t share confidential information,” I whisper. “It’s more that I can’t receive absolution for sins I don’t genuinely repent.” She still looks confused, and despite everything, it makes me smile. “I don’t think God hates queers, but the Church isn’t fond of us. What I am, how I feel, is a sin, and I can’t repent.”

“Oh.” She chews on that the rest of the service. Priya wasn’t raised in any religion, and she has an outsider’s fascination for them, not just the stories and imagery, but the rules and rituals, all the ways we try to structure what people are allowed to believe.

When the sanctuary is mostly clear after the service, Eddison nods toward the priest. “Go on. We’ll wait.”

Priya’s head tilts to one side. “I thought she couldn’t—”

“Confession isn’t the same as counsel,” he tells her.

Leaving him to explain the distinctions to Priya and Sterling, I ease out of the pew and up to the altar. Father Brendon is only a couple of years older than me, and he’s a good sort. Half the preteen and teen girls have crushes on him, because he’s safe, and because he’s respectful of their feelings without encouraging them. He’s a vast improvement over Father Michael, who used to scowl at me during homilies.

“Ah, Mercedes,” he greets me, smiling as he hands the last of his regalia to a waiting altar boy. “You’ve been busy these last few weeks.”

Which is a very nice way of pointing out that I haven’t been to Mass in almost a month.

“There’s been . . .” How the hell do I even put it?

Nodding, he sits down on the edge of the dais, clasping his hands between his knees. “Work? Or personal?”

“Yes,” I answer decisively, sitting beside him.

He laughs, warm and soft, and I need to remember to thank Eddison and Priya later for this. “Is everything okay with Siobhan?”

“She dumped me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I’m not sure I am. Sorry, I mean.”

He listens gravely as I carefully fill him in on what’s been happening, with the children and Siobhan, even with my father. I never told Father Michael, because being a priest doesn’t preclude the possibility of being an asshole, but Father Brendon is easy to confide in, and this is far from the first time a case has scraped up against the scars.

“That’s a lot,” he says eventually, and it makes me snicker. “Maybe it feels like you’re besieged on all sides? Lost in the woods?”

I flinch, but then, there’s a reason he used that phrase. “These kids . . . they’re being rescued from horrendous situations. It’s impossible not to acknowledge that, even as we have to and should abhor the methods.”

“And you wonder what you’d be feeling if someone had made you one of these children, way back when.”

“When we catch this person, the media coverage is going to be a zoo. A vigilante rescuing kids? The public will eat that up. It makes our job a lot harder to do. And it . . .” I swallow, trying to work my way through that. “She’s clearly pissed at a system that isn’t protecting these kids, but how is dumping them deeper into that same flawed system going to keep them safe?”

“Those who turn to violence don’t usually have solutions to offer. Or they tried, and lost, and think this is their only way forward.”

“Something’s driving them.”

“Something drives you,” he reminds me. “It’s probably not all that different.”