The Priest: An Original Sinners Novel Read online

  “He’s an adult man, and I’m gonna assume she was an adult woman if she’s handing out business cards. This shouldn’t be something for the press. This is between that man and God, and he’s in God’s hands now.”

  “I wish it worked like that. Look, if you don’t want me digging, I won’t take the case. But if you think I should—”

  Paulina faced him. “If he was seeing somebody like that and somebody knew and told him they knew…”

  “Blackmail, you mean?” Cyrus asked.

  She shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. But if there’s any chance something else was going on, somebody making him do it, I’d hope somebody was investigating, that’s all.” Paulina checked the oven, all business. He knew the tears were coming, but not yet. She was still in shock.

  “How long until breakfast is ready?” he asked.

  “About ten minutes? Biscuits need to cool.”

  “You mind if I go out back for a minute?”

  “Gotta think your thinks?”

  “Gotta think my thinks.”

  She smiled sadly at him, and he kissed her forehead. She closed her eyes and leaned against him. He wrapped his arms around her and let her lean. He’d let her lean forever if she wanted to.

  “Ten minutes,” she said softly. Cyrus kissed her again and started to leave. He watched from the backdoor as she packed her grief away, her sense of betrayal, saving it up for later when she could be alone to talk it out with God.

  He went out into the backyard and took a seat on the wooden bench between Paulina’s bright orange zinnias and pink and yellow begonia bushes.

  Cyrus always found it easier to meditate when he was outside and alone, close to trees, close to water. The morning sunlight trickled through the trees and over the grass like ripples on the surface of a living river.

  He closed his eyes and went to his river.

  In the beginning, when he first learned how to meditate, Cyrus would have to wait nearly an hour to get even a distant glimpse of that cosmic river in the deepest, oldest, wisest part of his mind. Now he could find it in seconds. He’d close his eyes and open his inner eyes and there was the pine forest and there was the winding dirt path, and just over the hill flowed the river.

  He heard the water rising.

  Cyrus focused on the coolness of the soft dirt under his feet as he walked and nothing but the cool soft dirt. The path was short and the river came into view quickly. Today it flowed slowly and the sun on it was gentle. On the opposite bank, a man stood, waiting. If they were to meet, they would meet in the river.

  And if they were to meet in the river, Cyrus had to wade in first.

  He reached the muddy bank and didn’t stop to roll up his pants. No need. This river was a river of truth and dreams and meaning. It ran only through his mind. Without fear—that had taken months to learn as well—Cyrus stepped into the water and found it warm and welcoming. The bottom was sandy but sturdy and shallow, though there were parts of this river that went over his head. Sometimes truth was like that.

  The man on the opposite bank saw him and smiled. He, too, entered the river. And at the mid-point, halfway from bank to bank, they met.

  Father Ike Murran.

  He wasn’t wearing his usual clerical garb. He had on a light gray suit—a bit loose like he’d lost weight he didn’t need to lose—and a white shirt. No tie. His brown-gray hair was neatly combed. Cyrus could see the ghost of the handsome man Father Ike had been twenty years, thirty years ago. Even at sixty, he was a dignified-looking man.

  Never too dignified for a smile, though.

  “Cyrus Tremont,” Father Ike said with a wide grin. “You broke my heart.”

  Cyrus laughed, couldn’t help it. Father Ike was the tenth man to say that to him today.

  Today? What was today?

  “I’m not gonna say I’m sorry,” Cyrus said.

  “When’s the wedding again?” Father Ike asked.

  “Not soon enough.”

  “The way you keep looking at her, I’d say yesterday wouldn’t be soon enough.”

  “That’s the damn truth,” Cyrus said. Father Ike held a beer bottle in his hand, a Miller Lite. They had it at the engagement party back in June. That was it…that’s where they were. The river had brought them to Cyrus and Paulina’s engagement party, held in her backyard.

  The last time Cyrus had seen Father Ike alive.

  “I know you heard it from everyone in this city,” Father Ike continued, “but you are one lucky man. She’s one of the great ones.”

  “Truer words, man. Look, feel free to say ‘no,’” Cyrus said, “but we’re doing the full wedding Mass. Would you be willing to help out? Paulina loves you, you know.”

  Nothing unusual about having more than one priest at a wedding Mass.

  “It’s November seventh,” Cyrus pressed on.

  Ike winced and the crow’s feet around his eyes went deep. “I don’t think I’ll be around then,” he said. “I think I’m getting transferred. New school. Not in Nola. I’d hate to say ‘yes,’ then have to back out. But if I’m around, I’ll be there as a guest.”

  “It’s fine,” Cyrus said, because it was.

  “But I will pray for you and Paulina. Every day.”

  “I appreciate that, Father.”

  “And you’ll pray for me, too?” Ike asked, smile gone.

  Cyrus didn’t do much praying. That was Paulina’s thing, not his. But he was too polite to say that to a priest.

  “Yeah, definitely. I better get back to my lady.”

  “Give her a kiss for me. Or two.” Ike winked at him. Cyrus patted Father Ike on the shoulder and waded back to the riverbank, leaving the memory behind.

  When he turned around, Father Ike was in the middle of the river. He wasn’t holding a beer in his hand anymore, but a rifle.

  “Ike!”

  Cyrus sat up with a start, eyes open to the real world. He drank it all in—the begonias, the neatly-mown grass, the picnic table on the patio. He texted Katherine.

  Father Ike told me he was getting transferred. Ask the archbishop’s secretary what that was about, Cyrus wrote. Don’t ask Archbishop Dunn—ask the secretary. Call her at home, right now before Dunn gets to her.

  Cyrus didn’t know much about Archbishop Thomas Dunn, but he knew bishops liked keeping things quiet.

  Katherine wrote back almost immediately. Got it. You on the case?

  I don’t know yet.

  Know soon, Katherine wrote back. Cyrus rolled his eyes and stuffed his phone back into his jacket pocket. He got up and went back into the house, back into the kitchen.

  Paulina smiled at him as she brought two plates over to the table. “Ready to eat?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He sat down at his plate. Today’s feast was scrambled eggs, bacon, biscuits, and yogurt with an assortment of toppings (raspberries, walnuts, chocolate chips). The woman was a health nut every day but Saturday morning, God bless her.

  “Grace,” she said.

  He began, “Bless us, O Lord, and these your gifts which we are about to receive from your bounty. Through Christ Our Lord. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Paulina said, crossing herself as he did.

  He reached for his fork but felt his phone vibrating in his pocket. He grabbed it to silence it.

  He groaned at the sight of the number. Katherine again.

  “You can answer it,” Paulina said.

  “It can wait.” Everything could wait when he was with her.

  “A priest is dead, a priest I cared about. Table manners can take the day off.”

  “I love you.”

  She winked at him as he rose from the table. He went outside to the sidewalk, where he called Katherine back. He wasn’t about to talk to a woman he’d slept with while standing in his own fiancée’s house.

  “Secretary swears up and down Father Murran never put in for a transfer anywhere,” Katherine said without preamble.

  “And she would know,” he said.

  “Sh
e handles all the paperwork. Did you hear different?”

  “He came to our engagement party in June,” he told her. “When I asked him if he’d help perform our wedding Mass, he said he wouldn’t be around for the wedding because he was being transferred.”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He lied to you.”

  “He did.”

  “Maybe he was already planning on killing himself?”

  “Maybe,” Cyrus said. “He also asked me to pray for him.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “No.”

  “Did you pray for him?”

  “Kind of forgot to,” he confessed.

  “Take the case, Tremont,” Katherine said. “Please? You already have a lead.”

  Cyrus remembered the river, the gut-churning feeling of seeing Ike with the rifle in his hand. He would have tried to stop it if he’d been there. He wasn’t there then, but he was here now.

  “I’ll look into it. Just in case there’s more going on here.”

  Katherine exhaled so hard the phone rattled in Cyrus’s ear. “Thank you,” she said with obvious relief. “I’ll sleep better tonight knowing somebody’s looking into this. The Church has way too much power in this town.”

  Cyrus agreed, but he didn’t say that aloud. Not with his Catholic saint of a fiancée inside the house waiting on him to come finish breakfast.

  “What about those digits on the red card?” Cyrus asked. He dug his reporter’s notebook out of his pocket.

  “The previous address associated with the number is just a P.O. box, no longer Sutherlin’s. But our dominatrix friend has a file. A big one.”

  “Criminal record?”

  “Nothing in Nola. All in New York, mostly Manhattan. Plus a sealed juvenile record.”

  “What’s in the file?” Cyrus asked, scribbling everything down she told him.

  “Arrests. Lots of arrests. Now, the last arrest was years ago, but there was a period from about 2004 to 2008 she was arrested over ten times.”

  “Prostitution?”

  “Two arrests, yes. But mostly assault,” Katherine said. “But hey, that’s kind of what dominatrixes do, right? How’s a cop to know you’re slapping Joe Blow around by request?”

  Cyrus could picture that scene playing out, a nosy neighbor calling the cops on suspicious noises from next door. He’d seen stranger things back in his days on the force.

  “Jail time?”

  “The woman is Teflon. I’ll email you the basics, but no convictions. Nothing went to court. Not even a plea. Everything dropped every single time.”

  “What about blackmail? Any arrests?” Cyrus could easily imagine a sex worker blackmailing a priest-client. He knew quite a few priests with money tooling around town in big black Caddies, rushing to get morning Mass over with so they could make their ten o’clock tee-times at the golf course.

  “No, but she does have a known associate who was investigated for blackmail. And he’s local, too. I couldn’t find an address for her, but I found one for him.”

  “Name?”

  “Kingsley Boissonneault.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “AKA Kingsley Edge. Owns The Marquis Club. Jazz club, supposedly.”

  Cyrus winced. “Him I’ve heard of.” A husband he was tailing last year had spent a lot of money at The Marquis Club, a lot of money that should have been going to his ex-wife and kid.

  “What’s Edge’s address?”

  Katherine gave him an address in the Garden District. “You think Sutherlin’s there?” he asked.

  “They’ll know where she is if she isn’t. Better hurry. She might skip town when she finds out Murran’s dead. Plus, you know you want to meet this lady.”

  “Believe it or not, I’m not looking forward to getting slapped around by a big lady with a whip today. That is not my type.”

  Katherine laughed. “You’re forgetting I know you, Cyrus. Every woman is your type.”

  He looked back at the house, the little brick cottage painted white. His heart was in that house.

  “Not anymore.”

  Chapter Three

  Nora Sutherlin set her paintbrush down onto the tray and stepped back. She stood in the center of the nursery, which had been emptied of all furnishings. Everything was in storage, waiting for the mother-to-be to pick a paint color and for the aunt-to-be to do the painting.

  “Okay, take your time. But not too much time. You’re about to pop,” Nora said. “The green one is Sounds of Nature. The pink one is Cotton Candy. The yellow one is Enchanted. Which one do you like best?”

  Juliette Toussaint, thirty-five weeks pregnant with the child of the notorious Kingsley Edge, narrowed her eyes at the wall where Nora had painted three large sections in baby-friendly hues. With her right hand on her protruding pregnant belly and her left hand toying at a string of pearls around her long graceful neck, Juliette gave each swatch a long look before finally turning to Nora.

  “No blues?” Juliette asked.

  Nora dropped her chin to her chest and counted to three.

  “You told me no blues,” Nora said.

  “No, he told you no blues,” Juliette reminded her.

  “He’s buying. Therefore, no blues.”

  Juliette only sighed.

  “If there is any white woman on the planet who shouldn’t have a Pinterest account, it’s me,” Nora said. “But I opened a Pinterest account in my quest to get you the perfect nursery wall color, because your baby deserves the best. These three are the best. These are the colors Martha Stewart dreams in. If the Virgin Mary had a ten-thousand-dollar nursery budget, baby Jesus would have had one of these colors painted on His walls. Any one of these colors in a nursery will give the most diehard childless free spirit—me, for example—aching ovaries because she wants to have a baby for the sole reason she can have a room one of these colors in her house.”

  “I like blue,” Juliette said.

  “What are ovaries?” Céleste asked.

  Nora looked over her shoulder at Juliette and Kingsley’s three-year-old daughter Céleste, who was currently applying gold star stickers to the back of a large black German Shepherd.

  “Nothing but trouble, kid. Nothing but trouble.”

  Juliette looked at her. Nora laughed.

  “You want blue, you can have blue,” Nora said. “I’ll do stripes, squares, polka dots of blue. But…you have to promise Kingsley won’t kill me. I have just gotten off his shit list. Please don’t put me back on it.”

  “You said a bad word, Tata Elle.”

  “I say a lot of them,” Nora said. “Especially where your Papa is concerned. And what are you doing to my dog?”

  “Making him pretty.”

  “Gmork, are you getting a makeover?” Nora asked her dog. Gmork made a happy rumbling sound and licked Céleste’s face before settling down again.

  “I think I want blue,” Juliette said. “He’ll have to live with it.”

  “What does he have against blue anyway?” Nora said.

  “He doesn’t want a boy.”

  “That die’s been cast. And I think that’s the first time I’ve ever compared sperm to dice.”

  “What’s sperm?” Céleste asked.

  Nora rolled her eyes. “Kid’s got ears like a bat, I swear. Why did we teach her English?”

  “I’ll explain later, princess,” Juliette told her daughter. Céleste seemed satisfied with that, although knowing Juliette, “later” meant “in ten to twenty years.”

  “What’s wrong with boys? Other than the whole pissing-in-the-face thing they do.”

  “He says we should have just cloned her.” Juliette nodded at Céleste. Nora couldn’t blame Kingsley there. Céleste was about as easy and endearing a child anyone could ask for, even if she was in that incessant question-asking phase.

  “You think it’s a boy, don’t you?” Nora asked.

  “That one,” she said, pointing at Céleste, “was a lamb. T
his one.” She patted her stomach. “This one’s a lion. She felt like part of me. This one feels like someone’s in there planning a prison break. She’s me. This one is all him.”

  “What do you think it is, baby?” Nora asked Céleste. “A boy or a girl.”

  “I don’t care,” Céleste said. “I want a kitten.”

  “Talk to your Oncle Søren about that,” Nora said. “He’s the cat person in the family.”

  “Speaking of,” Juliette said and lowered her voice. “Any news?”

  Nora raised her hands, both empty. “I got a postcard from Idaho last week,” she said. “Idaho.”

  “Any idea when he’ll come home?” Juliette said, her voice hopeful.

  Nora’s stomach clenched. Her heart, too. She shook her head. “He just took off,” she said, mostly to herself. “Without a word. I still can’t believe he did that.”

  “You can’t complain,” Juliette said in her most motherly chiding tone. “You run away all the time without telling us where you are. You didn’t even send a postcard a few of those times.”

  “I wasn’t complaining. I’m just worried about him. Don’t tell him I said that.”

  She knew she shouldn’t worry. Søren was an adult. He had a big cushion of family money and brains to spare. There was absolutely no reason for her to worry. But she did anyway.

  “‘He whom one waits is, because he is expected, already present, already master,’” Juliette said, quoting a famous line from Kingsley’s favorite novel, Histoire d’O.

  “Fine. He can be the master. As long as he gets his ass home and fucks me. I haven’t gotten laid in a month. My pussy has cobwebs.”

  Juliette started to laugh but then stopped and pulled a white lace handkerchief out of her blouse, pressing it over her mouth and nose.

  “Paint fumes?” Nora asked. Juliette nodded behind her handkerchief. “Go outside and get some fresh air. I’ll figure out the paint.”

  Juliette waved her hand dismissively. She hated being fussed over just because she was pregnant. Since Kingsley couldn’t stop fussing over her, he’d been banished from the house between the hours of ten a.m. and five p.m. Juliette said the banishment had saved both their minds and, quite possibly, his life.