Devious - Lisa Jackson [190]
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.
Fear pounded through Charity’s brain as the blood trickled from her neck. Despite her pain, she stared straight at her only daughter and silently prayed that Valerie would have the good sense to run into the darkness, to never look back at this monster Charity had helped create. “Leave,” she ordered desperately. “Leave now!”
Val only took another step to that same side, as if to get a better angle for her shot, as if she hadn’t heard a word Charity said. With incredible calm, she stood in the wavering light. “I said, let her go.” Valerie was firm, her eyes trained on the sick woman holding the knife.
“No.”
“I’ll shoot.”
“Of course you won’t! You can’t shoot that in here,” Devota said in disgust, as if Val were a complete moron. “You’ll miss and hit your mother, or the bullet will ricochet and kill you both.” She paused a moment, taking in little short breaths, as if a finger of excitement had slid down her spine, a new, thrilling energy passing from her body to Charity’s. “I think there’s someone you both might want to meet.”
Oh, dear God! Charity, the blood from her neck spilling onto her shoulder, felt a new dread. The tone in Devota’s voice was triumphant.
Smug.
Devota shifted then and, letting the knife slip a little, yanked open one of the coffin doors, the one that had never really been sealed.
To Charity’s absolute horror, a corpse, rotting and desiccated, tumbled out of the coffin.
“Son of a—!” Val gasped, and jumped back.
Charity let out a bloodcurdling scream. Her knees gave way as she stared at the dead body of a woman who was little more than bones, pieces of dried flesh, and scraps of hair. The woman’s skin had shriveled, her eye sockets were empty and black, and she was wearing the remains of a stained and threadbare wedding gown, its faded ribbons and tattered lace fluttering in the dim, eerie light.
“Recognize her?” Devota demanded.
Oh, yes. Of course she did. With sickening clarity, Charity knew she was looking at the body of Sister Lea De Luca, the nun who was supposed to have left for San Francisco years ago, the one who had sent her cards.
Devota gloated, “It’s amazing how easy it is to find someone to send mail from another city. And all the while you”—she wrenched Charity’s arm and she nearly cried out—“thought you knew what happened to her. You thought that you’d dealt with ‘the problem.’ ”
“You’re insane,” Val whispered, the gun no longer steady. “You killed this woman.”
“Punished her,” Devota corrected. “Sent her soul to hell. Just like the others. It was so easy. I just told her that Father Frank was waiting. For her. Down here. And she fell for it. Put on her pretty little dress.”
“Because you drugged her!” Val accused.
“I helped her.”
“By luring her down here and killing her?”
“She was a slut. A whore! She