Page 20 of Dead to Rites

I decided to let it go.

Not too long after that, one of our regulars, Leah Shipley, came in with her husband. They weren’t there to drink, but to buy a few bottles of Mule’s Mistake from Page Springs Cellars, which they said they wanted for a dinner party the following evening. Bottle sales didn’t make up a huge portion of the bar’s business, but we were also licensed as a wine retailer and almost always sold a case or two of our various vintages over the course of a week.

Once they were gone, it was five minutes until nine, and I thought it should be okay to start closing out the register. I’d just transferred the receipts and the hundred bucks or so of cash into a pouch so I could put it in the safe when I realized that Father Frank had never come back from the restroom. His check was still sitting on the bar next to his empty glass.

Father Francis Brennan was not the kind of guy to drink and dash.

Frowning, I looked over at Marco, who was just finishing up with the last open bottle of white, a Miss Sandy Jones from Chateau Tumbleweed.

“I’m going to go check the restrooms,” I said, and he just nodded.

“Okay.”

For some reason, my heart was beating a little faster than it should have been. Maybe that was just because I felt kind of hinky about knocking on the door of a public restroom and asking if the priest inside was okay. For all I knew, he’d had a greasy pastrami sandwich for dinner and was now paying the price.

The bathrooms were located down a short hallway on the other side of the bar, a configuration that mirrored the hall that led to the kitchen and the office. The men’s bathroom was first.

I stood there for a second or two, then told myself to stop being such a coward and knock.

Two short raps, loud enough to be audible but not so loud that they sounded rude.

At least, I hoped they didn’t.

Nothing.

Should I knock again, or should I call his name?

The knocking hadn’t seemed to work, so….

“Father Frank?” I ventured. “Are you okay?”

No response.

Marco must have noticed where I’d gone, because in the next moment, he appeared at my shoulder.

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Father Frank went in there more than ten minutes ago, and he didn’t answer when I knocked or when I called his name.”

Marco was quiet for a few seconds. His dark eyes met mine, and I could see the reluctance in them. He didn’t want to go barging into the bathroom any more than I did, but enough time had passed that we both understood something awful might have happened. Father Frank was in his mid-sixties and appeared to be perfectly healthy, but heart attacks and strokes came out of nowhere all the time.

A single nod, and then Marco pushed the door open, with me following right behind.

The restroom wasn’t large. It had a single urinal, two stalls, and a sink, and a skinny little window was set high on one wall. Like the rest of the bar, it had a sort of cozy industrial feel, with more dark green paint on the walls and corrugated metal hiding the plumbing underneath.

But I wasn’t looking at the sink. I was looking at the stalls.

Father Frank was lying on the slate floor in front of one of them. Even from where I stood, I could see the dark blood that had pooled under his head. His face was slack and white, and he wasn’t breathing.

For one awful moment, the floor seemed to tilt under my feet. I saw Marco pulling out his phone and connecting to 911, but it felt as if he was standing very far away rather than just a foot in front of me.

But then my brain reconnected, and I was hurrying forward so I could kneel next to Father Frank’s limp form. I knew enough not to touch him, but I needed to confirm that he really was dead and not just badly injured.

His chest didn’t rise and fall, though, and his skin, usually ruddy, had already started to look pale and waxy. There had been plenty of death in my life over the past year — for one second, I had a vivid flashback to the moment when my phone rang and that detective from the Lake Havasu P.D. began to carefully explain what had happened to my parents — but this was the first time I’d ever seen it up close.

Movement at the edge of my vision made me look up. Father Frank was standing in a corner of the restroom, near the trash can.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “What happened?”