Page 48

Thievery Corporations

On Thursday morning, I drove over to Sacred Heart. I didn’t need to be at the bar until noon, and that gave me a few hours that were utterly my own.

And I was going to use them.

I’d already learned through Marco that Nell Whitaker worked Tuesday through Friday from nine to two, so I made sure to show up a little after nine-thirty. That way, I figured I was giving her some time to settle in before I appeared.

The parish offices were in a small brick building behind the main church. When I went inside, I didn’t think “church” but rather school building, because the industrial carpet on the floor and the drop ceiling overhead reminded me a little too much of the office at my elementary school in Scottsdale, where I’d spent far more time than my parents would have preferred.

However, my school definitely didn’t have photos of pastors past hanging on the wall.

I spotted Nell right away. She sat at the reception desk, glasses perched on her nose, while she went through a stack of identical envelopes. As soon as I entered, she looked up, the smile she’d been summoning fading before it could quite form.

It seemed she wasn’t exactly thrilled to see me.

Interesting.

But I stepped forward anyway and put on a smile of my own.

“Hi, Nell,” I said. “I’m Lorelei Cosgrove. I don’t know if you remember me — we met briefly at the reception following the vigil on Sunday.”

“Right, right,” Nell replied. She’d gone downright pale.

Guilty conscience?

“Father Frank was very kind to me,” I went on. “I keep trying to make sense of his death, but I just can’t. I was wondering if we could talk for a few minutes?”

“Um, well — ” She paused there and glanced around the office, but no one appeared to rescue her with some urgent, last-minute task. “Sure, I guess. Do you want some coffee?”

The coffee was probably more of a delaying tactic than a true offer of hospitality, but I accepted anyway. She busied herself with pouring two cups from the machine on a counter on the far side of the room. After asking whether I wanted cream or sugar — I said yes to a little of both — she came back and handed me a cup.

“We have a meeting room just down the hall,” she said. “We can talk there.”

So I followed her into a room that was barely ten feet square and furnished with a small table and four chairs. I guessed it was used when people wanted to have a private conversation but didn’t want to have it in the pastor’s office, for whatever reason.

But even though the room was small and plain, there was a maple tree outside the window turning gorgeous shades of scarlet, and I could see a square of bright blue sky.

For some reason, the view gave me a boost of confidence.

“I wanted to talk about Father Frank’s last couple of weeks,” I said after Nell and I had seated ourselves at the table. “Did you notice anything different about him?”

Her fingers wrapped around the plain ceramic mug. I noticed that she wasn’t wearing any rings, and her nails looked as if she bit them.

But I wasn’t here about her manicure.

“He — I suppose he seemed kind of preoccupied,” she said, then lifted the mug and took a sip, as if she hoped some coffee might give her the courage she needed to answer my question. “I don’t know why, though. He didn’t seem as if he wanted to talk to anyone.”

“So, he was keeping to himself?” I asked.

“As much as he could.” She sipped again, then added, “It wasn’t as if he wasn’t performing all his duties — conducting Mass, counseling parishioners, and all that. In fact, he was working longer hours than usual. He had some extra meetings with parishioners that weren’t on the schedule.”

Was one of those parishioners the person who’d unburdened themselves to him — and put him in danger?

I knew I couldn’t ask that question outright, though. And honestly, I already could feel in my gut that Nell wasn’t the person responsible.

That didn’t mean she wasn’t bearing some burdens of her own.

Coffee sounded like a good idea right then, so I drank some and was relieved to find that it wasn’t as awful as I’d feared. Nell Whitaker obviously had her own issues, but making coffee wasn’t one of them.