Page 34 of Dead to Rites

She frowned. Today she was back in purple, with her favorite amethyst drops glittering at her ears. “This is important, Lorelei. I’ve been thinking about Frank, and I think there may be entries in my journal that matter now in a way they didn’t seem to matter before.”

That comment piqued my interest. “Matter how?”

“I’m not sure,” she replied. “That’s why I need you to take a look.”

“Okay.”

I scooped up the journal and took it back with me into the kitchen, then set it down on the table. Hazel followed and waited while I poured myself some coffee, doctored it with a little hazelnut creamer from the fridge, and finally sat down.

“What am I looking for?” I asked.

She was still standing near the table. It didn’t seem as easy for her to sit — or whatever it was that ghosts did that gave them the appearance of sitting — on one of the kitchen chairs the way she did in her beloved wingback.

“Try going about eight months back,” she instructed me. “There should be an entry where Father Frank came over to the house for tea.”

Dutifully, I thumbed through the pages until I found something dated February twenty-fifth.

Frank came to tea today, Hazel had written in her careful cursive, the kind of writing almost no one in my generation used anymore. He stayed for almost two hours, which was much longer than his usual visits. He’s wrestling with something he can’t bring to anyone else, something I won’t put on this page even in my own house. I’m his confidante in this, and I’ll keep his counsel, just as he’s so often kept mine.

I read this aloud, and then looked up at Hazel. “Do you know what any of this was about?”

As I’d halfway expected, she shook her head. “Not really. That is, I know something was weighing on Father Frank, but he didn’t go into any details — which was hardly a surprise. A priest hears things that he can’t share with anyone.”

Sort of like attorney-client privilege, I supposed, or like a doctor who couldn’t reveal details of a patient’s condition. Whatever it was, it sure sounded as if it had been gnawing at him.

“There should be another entry,” she went on. “Probably around three weeks before I died.”

She said it so matter-of-factly, as if her death wasn’t a big deal. Maybe it wasn’t for someone who’d lived as long as she had.

So I flipped through the journal, back toward the end of September, and found what I guessed she was looking for.

“Frank came again,” I read aloud. “He seemed closer to a decision. I told him — for whatever it’s worth — that I think he should do what his conscience tells him to do. Some confidences should be kept. But other things…if they hurt the living…must come into the light. He listened to me, but he also left without telling me what he’d decided.”

I sipped some coffee and sent my great-aunt an inquiring look. “Did he ever say anything?”

“No,” she replied. “Not a word. Whatever that secret was, it died with him.”

A little chill worked its way down my spine, even though the kitchen was warm enough and the coffee I’d just drunk was equally warm and comforting in my belly.

Was the secret Father Frank had been carrying all that time worth killing for?

For some reason, I flipped the journal’s pages over to the last entry, the one I’d seen during my first week here in Prescott.

Something is different. I don’t know what. I’m going to stop here for now and pick this up when I have more to say.

I looked up at Hazel, who was still standing near the table.

“You knew Father Frank was wrestling with someone’s confession.”

“He didn’t come out and say as much, but I knew it had to be that,” she said calmly. “If it had been anything else, I think he would have opened up to me. But he honored the seal of confession the entire time. Honestly, I think that’s part of why he came to visit. He knew he could sit with me and that I would understand without having to know all the details, or even any of them.”

I supposed I could see that. If I’d been burdened with something terrible that I knew I couldn’t divulge to another living soul, then it probably would have been comforting to sit with someone who would offer sympathy without asking for all the gory details.

The problem was, this understanding didn’t get me any closer to figuring out who’d attacked Father Frank in the men’s restroom at Copper State Cellars.

“This last entry,” I said. “The one where you said, ‘Something is different.’ What was different?”

Hazel didn’t answer me right away. Her mouth pursed, and I could see the fine lines around it, lines that would have been much more pronounced when she died, some thirty years past the appearance she wore now.