Page 74 of Dead to Rites

She had to stop there because she was crying openly now, her thin frame shaking with sobs. I wanted to reach out to her, but I didn’t know her well enough for that.

So I only sat there, waiting.

“Three days later,” she went on, “Father Frank was dead. And I knew. God help me, I knew within an hour of hearing the news.”

I pressed my lips together, wondering if I should speak.

The kettle began to whistle in the kitchen. Meg and I both startled a little…and then I realized that it was continuing to whistle because Diane wasn’t there to shut it off. She was somewhere else in the house, presumably on the phone.

The front door opened, and I stiffened.

“Grandma?” a man’s voice called from the foyer. “Mom said you needed me.”

And Wes Lindley walked into the living room. He must have come straight from a job, because he was in jeans and work boots and a flannel shirt, now with a canvas coat thrown over everything because it was chilly outside.

He saw me sitting in the chair opposite his grandmother and came to a dead stop. A series of emotions passed over his face — worry, guilt, anger, something that might have been all three at once —before his features went very still. In that moment, I could tell he’d been mentally preparing for this ever since the break-in.

No doubt he’d hoped it would never come…but now it had.

“Hi, Wes,” I said.

“Lorelei,” he responded.

A pause as he gazed at his grandmother’s tear-stained face, at the box of tissues sitting on the side table next to her untouched cup of tea.

Then he said, in a calm voice that didn’t sound very much like him, “I think we all need to sit down and talk.”

Diane came to the doorway to the living room then, hands twisted together. Her face was pale and resolute.

The words almost came to my lips.

I should be going.

Jude was listening to all this, and he’d hear me say that and know it was time to intervene. Everything was going sideways, just as Hazel had feared it would, and yet I knew if I said the phrase that would bring him to my rescue, all of this would change. It would become a real confrontation, because Wes would look at Jude and know he was there for only one reason.

To make sure I didn’t become a victim, just like Father Frank.

“Okay,” I said calmly.

“Let’s talk.”

Chapter 19

Arrested Development

Moving easily, Wes walked past Meg and me and sat down on the sofa opposite us. Diane stayed where she was, and I realized distantly that the kettle had stopped whistling at some point, that she’d probably turned it off once she knew Wes was here and could end her phone call.

“So,” he said simply, “what do you know?”

Here was where I needed to step carefully. I didn’t want to come right out and accuse him, but I needed to lay out what I’d pieced together so far as questions rather than accusations.

“I think Father Frank had been encouraging your grandmother to come forward about something that happened in 1968,” I said. “And I think you recently found out that she was about to. I also think you tried to talk to Father Frank about the situation. He wouldn’t budge, so you decided you had to stop him. Am I close?”

Through all of this, Wes had been watching me closely, his jaw set. He was the type of man who’d probably been lean his entire life, but now he looked almost haggard, as if he’d dropped five pounds since the last time I’d seen him, when he’d come in to fix the door at Copper State Cellars.

Guilt eating him alive?

I liked to think so.