Good Graces - Lesley Kagen [95]
I gasp. “Did he . . . did Father catch you looking through his stuff?” The thought of him coming up on her from behind the way Bobby did last summer makes the whole backyard feel like it dived underwater. I can barely breathe.
Troo shakes her head and says, “By the time he came back from paying the paper boy, I was already back in the chair memorizing the parts of the missal he gave me to learn.”
“Didn’t you wonder what he was doin’ with Mr. Livingston’s buckle?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I figured Father found it in church or something and was goin’ to give it back, but then I heard that it’d been stolen and I . . . I didn’t know what to think.”
My sister has gone pale. I dab the sweat beads off her forehead with my fingertips. I don’t want to upset her more than she already is and she can get snooty if you push her, so I’m going to try and let her unravel what she’s got to tell me in her own time.
“After that first visit, Father and me never studied religion again.” Troo lets out the longest exhale. “We played hangman and tic-tac-toe and he made me cherry Kool-Aid, but mostly. . . we talked.”
“You talked? About what?” I ask, finding that a little hard to believe. Priests don’t usually have conversations with kids. They just tell them they’re going to hell if they aren’t good and obey their parents and stuff like that.
Troo says, “He seemed so interested in me, Sal. He wanted to know what I thought about this and that. Like the Braves. The neighborhood. We talked about everything. Even Daddy.” She takes an extra long drag off her L&M. “I told him how much I hated Dave and how mad I was at Helen and . . .” She probably cried, but she’d never tell me if she did. “He gave me a hug and promised that he’d make sure that Mother never got the annulment letter and . . . I believed him.”
The heart of the matter, that’s what this is.
Troo says, “That’s how come when Father asked me to keep my ears open around Dave and report back to him what was goin’ on in the cat burglar investigation, I told him I would.”
“Didn’t you think that was kinda weird?” I ask. I sure do. Usually when somebody asks her to do anything she tells them where to go.
“Kinda,” Troo says, puffing away. “Until he explained to me that the reason he was so interested in the burglaries was because he studies wrongdoing. He told me it’s important to know thy enemy.”
I would have to agree with him.
My sister says, “I . . .I swear. I didn’t know then that he had something to do with the stealing. I just wanted to return the favor, ya know, for him being so . . . oh, I don’t know.” I do. Father made her feel the same way Daddy used to. Number one on the hit parade. Not second fiddle like she sees herself now. “So after that, every time I went up to the rectory, I told him everything I heard Dave tell Helen about the burglaries and what I heard him talk about with Detective Riordan on the telephone. Father seemed so happy to hear that, but . . . but then he broke his promise and brought the annulment letter to Helen anyway.”
Because of mental telepathy, I know she was also thinking that if she fed Father tidbits about the cat burglar case it would make it harder for Dave to solve the case. He would have to spend more time on the job and less time with Mother and that might get her steamed enough to call the wedding off.
Oh, Troo.
After letting all that sink in, I say, because I’m itchin’ to know, “But what does any of this have to do with Mrs. Galecki’s necklace? How did you get a hold of it?”
“I’m gettin’ to that.” She taps off her ash. “On the Fourth, on my way up to Granny’s to get my Eiffel Tower costume, I stopped by the rectory and went through a window into Father Mickey’s office. I knew he wouldn’t be there, that he’d be over at the park helpin’ get everything ready for the parade. I was so mad, Sal. I . . . I was gonna take the belt buckle outta the drawer—I don’t know what I was gonna do with it, but when I looked for it in