Devious - Lisa Jackson [181]
All in the name of the Holy Father.
Heart heavy, worry propelling her, she slipped through the hallways of St. Elsinore’s, the ghosts of the past giving chase as she embarked on her mission.
And you, are you so much better? Silently reproaching the selling of vacations, but you, skulking through the hallways, intent on doing anything you can to ensure your secrets are safe. Who are you to judge, Charity Varisco? A fine reverend mother you are!
She shut her ears to the nagging voice in her head, pasted on a smile she hoped looked genuine, then nodded to a few straggling parishioners who were still hanging in the hallways. But she didn’t stop to speak to any of them and made her way straight to the restroom and into a stall. She waited a few seconds, and once she was certain no one was inside, drew a deep breath and slid into the hallway unnoticed.
She didn’t return to the gymnasium but hurried away, in the opposite direction, under the ropes that indicated that the rest of the building and the south hallways were off-limits and restricted. Nearly running, her skirts rustling, the beads of her rosary clicking, she found her way to the door of the basement in the south wing. She was concentrating on withdrawing her key ring, one she’d kept for decades, and silently praying that the locks of the ancient building hadn’t been changed when she thought she heard something.
A footstep?
A sharp intake of breath?
She paused, looking into the dark corridor, toward the end of the building, the darkened, silent end. Was that a movement, near the far window? Her heart clutched, but as she squinted, she saw nothing lurking in the shadows. And she didn’t have time to investigate. Fifteen minutes, she told herself. She could only be gone fifteen minutes, twenty on the outside, before someone would notice or start asking questions. She could cover for herself for that short span of time, but not much longer.
At the door, she paused only to make a quick sign of the cross. Then she inserted her key into the lock, twisted, and with a welcome click, disengaged the bolt. “Thank you,” she whispered, feeling that God was guiding her as she slipped through the doorway and snapped on the light switch as her footsteps clattered loudly down the stairs.
God? Or a demon straight from Satan’s legion?
She thought about the mistakes she’d made in her lifetime, the falsehoods she’d spun all in the name of vanity and pride. She’d atoned for years, slapping herself with that sharp riding crop in the mirrored room, sucking her breath as the leather straps bit into her flesh, mortified that Father Paul was watching, the old lech.
She’d had no choice but to allow his perversity, his ogling of her torture as he did God only knew what in his hiding place. But then he’d wanted more than just her nakedness to “admire,” as he’d called it, when she knew it was more that he was interested in watching the suffering that comes with self-flagellation—the mortification.
Oh, she’d been a fool.
And here she was still covering up. She snapped off the lights to the stairwell, thought she heard something above but told herself it was just the crowd in the gymnasium, the old timbers of the building creaking with the weight of hundreds of excited people moving around on the floor above.
Snapping on another switch, the one that allowed the dim, hanging single bulbs to illuminate this rabbit warren of corridors, she walked unerringly through two hundred years of stored junk—everything from chairs and bed frames to old pictures, artifacts, desks, and mattresses. No doubt the rats were nesting in the alcoves where boxes were disintegrating, and she didn’t want to think about the spiders . . . or the snakes. She heard the drip of rusting pipes, saw pools of condensation, and refused to consider the vermin that made the basement of St. Elsinore’s home.
Though it was a shame that the buildings were being sold, possibly for