"No," Temple said, too amazed by the byplay to consume anything at the moment.
She analyzed the situation. Pilar treated Matt like a favorite pupil, but Temple like some unwanted playmate dragged home from school unannounced.
And Matt Devine just sat there, soaking up this female consideration like he was born to it. Maybe Pilar could smell a priest; certainly Matt knew exactly how to handle a devout woman who lived to cater to the clergy, particularly the male clergy.
Temple sipped the last bitter drop of coffee in her cup. She had pictured priests as totally isolated from women, but in a parish setting, she saw, they were surrounded by them, utterly off-bounds, of course, but interacting daily, and even in the most intimate domestic setting with a housekeeper.
She had assumed that celibacy went hand in hand with innocence, with perhaps a secret and noble struggle underneath. She would expect a priest's ignorance to render him slightly gauche and awkward, despite the education of the confessional. Matt Devine was neither gauche nor awkward in this setting. He knew his way around these women like a master thief knows the layout of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He knew how to handle them without seeming to, without their noticing it any more than they should. He was forever "Father"; they relied upon him and deferred to him and considered him their own.
Pilar didn't think about all this, of course; she just reacted from instinct, as did Matt.
Temple's own instincts grew uneasy at this insight. Matt's background made him a smoother customer than she had thought, smoother than maybe he realized himself. He was a performer of sorts- after all. A spiritual prestidigitator.
He was beginning to remind her a lot of a missing magician named Max Kinsella.
Chapter 22
Hissturbing Questionsss
The door to the kitchen snapped open and a wizened face peered around the dark walnut doorjamb.
"Psst!" Sister St. Rose of Lima hailed Matt and Temple loudly enough to pass for a screaming steam kettle.
Pilar's stolid back remained turned to the room as water ran and her elbows cranked in and out over the sink. Apparently no dirty dishes lasted longer than an angelus bell in a Catholic kitchen. Temple mourned the last sweet licks of syrup on her plate that were disappearing under a baptism of sudsy water, leaving a plate that would now be squeaky-clean and innocent, unlike the rest of them, except maybe for Sister St. Rose of Lima, whose ancient, baby-doll face was wrinkled with unconcealed conspiracy . . .
Temple and Matt rose quietly and went to the door, where a whispered conference revealed that Sister Seraphina wished to meet them in the rectory while the lady lieutenant--that is the way Sister Rose put it with an awed precision--was interviewing Miss Wilhelm in the convent.
Temple and Matt exchanged one mystified glance and went out, not speaking until the warm light of day was bestowing hot haloes of amber sunlight on their heads.
"Sister Seraphina is showing signs of giving Lieutenant Molina as much trouble as I do." Temple mused. "I thought nuns were sworn to respect authority."
"Authority isn't as obvious as it once was," Matt said, "neither religious nor civil. I'm sorry to learn that Lieutenant Molina is a member of this parish. It could prejudice her."
"In pursuing the case?"
"In pursuing my past."
"Why do you think she'll bother to do that?"
"In her own way, she's as curious as you are and she has all the official means of prying at her fingertips. I suppose the crucified cat points to a religiously troubled killer, Why not me?"
"Listen, Devine, you are trouble, you are not troubled."
"I thought I was the self-defense teacher."
"In matters of physical prowess, in criminal matters, I'm the expert. Why do I feel that 'prowess' is something that has to do with 'lady lions' on the African savannahs and not me?"
"You've got plenty of prowess," he assured her, "in unexpected areas."
Matt paused at the rectory door, then pulled the wrought-iron hinges open with a mighty tug, as if he expected the door's weight and was ready for it.
They submerged themselves in another passage through cool interior shade, in a peace perfumed with lemon oil and candle wax and a faint odor of old incense.
Voices drifted into the silence like swimmers floating onto a deserted shoal, striving voices, one male, and one female.
Matt's pace quickened as he made for Father Hernandez's office door. Once there, he paused and turned to Temple with an expression of firm regret.
"I'd better go in alone."
"She summoned both of us."
"Yes, but--"
Beyond the door, Father Hernandez's voice rose to an angry rail, reminding Temple of the keening associated with an Irish wake. There was nothing Irish about this place, this time, this cast of characters, although the wake notion was all too apt with Blandina Tyler soon to become the centerpiece of her own.
Matt slipped through the door without seeming to open it.
Magician! Temple's resentful thoughts hissed after him. Subtle and self-concealing, discreet. The bitter words surged back and forth in her mind like angry surf. Max had confided nothing, revealed nothing unnecessarily, had shut and locked doors behind him that he never came again to open, and too many of them bordered Temple's emotional premises.
She waited outside this new closed door, unable to keep from overheating snatches of dialogue; unable to avoid dissecting and interpreting it.
Father Hernandez's voice came louder, deep and uncontrolled, a berserk organ rambling in a minor key. It ebbed and flowed in time to her softer mental surf. Temple could picture him pacing, his dramatic cassock skirt straining against his long, lean strides, his figure erect despite its distress. He did not look like a bendable man in any respect. Yet the voice was unkempt and slurred, touched with the tequila's thick, tart tongue.
Seraphina's mission was obvious to Temple whether she was invited in or not: to restore reason, if not sobriety, to Father Hernandez before Lieutenant Molina sat him down and peeled his mind like a Muscat grape fat with foreign intoxicants.
"I have failed," he raged in a three-penny-opera voice, rich and sonorous for sermons and now directed at himself like an accusing Greek chorus that would be heard through closed doors no matter what. "A serpent is loose in our little Garden of Eden, of Gethsemane."
Sssserpent loossse, As in Eden. But a serpent sounded more at home in Gethsssemane, the garden of purely human betrayal, Temple thought.
Matt's calm murmur--so damned priestly--was harder to decipher. Maybe Temple was irreverent to put it that way in her mind; maybe it was immaterial and irrelevant to care how she put it to herself. She paused before the sealed door, guilty but determined. Matt was the core of her concern. What would this crash course in troubled Catholicism do to him?
"Falsely accused!" Father Hernandez's best pulpit tones cried. "There is a Judas among us."
How he hissed the incriminating words! Falsssely accusssed. A Judassss among usss.
"Scandal!" the drunken voice raved.
Sssscandal, Temple heard.
"This is the Man!"
Thisss isss the Man.
Could Father Hernandezsss be the hissing caller? Certainly his rich, Hispanic voice, blurred by liquor and desperation, broadcast a susurration that an old woman on a phone might mistake for hissing.
"Snakes!" he ranted.
Ssssnakesss. On the phone. In the parish. In the pastor's raving words.
Matt's voice suddenly came clear and strong, urging control and sanity, banishing the bad dreams, or the memories?
Did Father Hernandez harbor bad memories of driving an elderly parishioner to distraction and ultimate death before she could change her will and cut the church from it like a plump plum doomed to wither on the apostolic vine?
A priest who killed? How? How, when he was drowning himself in tequila and paranoia?
Temple couldn't stand it. Eavesdropping was not her long suit--in hearts, clubs. Or even when it came to aces up her sleeve in spades. She needed to confront her suspicions in person, which is no doubt why Max's disappearance had so thoroughly confounded her. Her hand reached for the dark iron doorknob, then turned it.