Rabid (8 page)

“Don’t curse during confession. Has the Holy Spirit enlightened your mind?”

Sloan flicked his hands apart, nearly an obscene gesture. “I know what to confess.”

Dante watched Sloan’s blank, blue eyes. “Are you contrite?”

Sloan’s stare flinched away, but he caught himself and looked right back. “Yes.”

Dante’s cynicism won out. He leaned back in his chair. “This is not a true confession. This conversation is not covered by the seal of confession.”

“A priest can’t refuse to hear a confession!” Sloan’s anger dragged his rangy body up to his feet, and he paced.

“Sit down, Mr. Sloan.”

“It’s
Doctor
Sloan.
Doctor
.”

Dante held his steepled fingers motionless though the rigidity strained his arms. “Sit.”

Sloan paced in front of the two chairs. “You’re supposed to help us. You’re twisting everything I say. You’re making it worse.”

Stillness was key to retaining control. Dante’s fingertips mashed flat against each other. His fingerpads and nailbeds reddened. Strain drained into his wrists. “You cannot repair injury with platitudes.”

Sloan slashed the air with one hand. “You don’t know anything about being married.”

This objection, priests prepare for in the seminary. “One need not have cancer to be a good oncologist. You treat patients with neurodegenerative diseases. Do you have Alzheimer’s?”

“Of course not.”

“Marriage is a sacrament. As a priest, God and the sacraments are my domain.” Dante added his own twist. “And I am a psychiatrist. I am not psychotic, but I treat the mentally ill.”

Sloan’s head bobbled, begrudging the analogy.

Dante continued, “And I have never been possessed, but I perform exorcisms.”

Sloan stopped pacing. One sandy eyebrow dipped, incredulous. “You believe in possession and demons and all that superstitious crap?”

Believe?
Mere belief could not endure in a world rife with frailty and evil and sin and damnation: Chairs that flew across the room, elderly priests breaking chains, young girls’ faces transformed into hideous caricatures. “There are things I have seen that I do not understand.”

“You’re a medical doctor, a scientist.” Sloan gaped at him.

Dante’s stillness fought his agitation. “I am a priest.”

Sloan waved one hand in the air as if clearing irrational incense fumes. “I’ll believe in demons when you show me the molecular mechanism for them.”

Dante sighed. “This is not the subject at hand. The subject is your marriage and adultery, Mr. Sloan.”

“It’s
Doctor
.”

At the tips of his steepled fingers, Dante’s fingernails dug underneath each other. “You have forgotten your urge to confess the sins that so trouble your soul.”

Being caught in his lies deflated Sloan’s anger. He stared at the blue carpet as if the swirls of color might open under his feet. Dante glanced at the carpet, in case he had missed a flap in the carpeting concealing a subterranean dungeon.

Sloan pressed one hand to his weathered face.

Dante waited. He could wait for days if necessary.

“I don’t know why Beverly wants counseling.”

“You had sex with another woman.”  

“I’ll break it off.” Sloan rubbed his face. “I don’t know why that idiot woman hid her underwear in my luggage.”

Dante adjusted his cassock over his thighs. “Because she wants you to leave your wife.”

Sloan nodded. His silver hair swayed. “She’s hinted, but I wouldn’t.”

Dante asked, “But why would you have an affair?”

Sloan caught himself after a chuckle. “Oh, right. You priests are celibate.”

Derision would poison all the progress he had made, so Dante ignored it. “Tell this woman that the affair is over. Do not see her again. If you do this, after counseling Saturday, I will hear your confession, and you can take communion on Sunday.”

Sloan nodded. “And no one will know anything.”

“Yes,” said Dante, negotiating when he should have commanded Sloan. This must be a command. “If you lay a hand on your wife, if you so much as pinch her, this deal is off. I’ll grant her an annulment, I’ll excommunicate you, and I’ll call the police.” 

Both Sloan’s shaggy eyebrows rose. “What?”

Dante did not feel the need to observe more denial. He glanced at his watch. “I need to speak to your wife.”

Sloan strode out of the library. He didn’t say goodbye or even glance back.

But, if Sloan did cease his affair, there might be hope.

At his desk, Dante stacked boxes and waited for Mrs. Sloan.

~~~~~

Bev knelt before the Virgin Mary and prayed to her and God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit for peace. She strained with praying because, even though she had said the Rosary and was participating in counseling, she wasn’t forgiven because she couldn’t forgive. The situation was impossible: unforgiveness begat unforgiveness begat unforgiven sin.

A spotlight raked the Blessed Virgin’s left cheek and blue-robed shoulder. The Virgin’s inert, white porcelain face gazed down on Bev.

The statues crowded into niches ringing the church walls personified stories about God’s Love that she had heard as a child. Some saints were crazy or debauchers or drunks, but God loved them.

Even though Bev was a stupid doormat, God had loved her.

Probably.

Probably not anymore.

Conroy’s voice whispered, “Beverly!”

She turned, and dust grated under her knees, bruised from kneeling and praying every day. Conroy wove from side to side like a gray cobra hypnotizing prey as he scanned the lines of pews looking for her.

She whispered, “Amen,” and stood. “Over here, Conroy.”

Conroy whipped his head sideways and saw her. His voice echoed in the shifting dark of the cathedral. He wasn’t smiling, but he wasn’t scowling, either. He was grave, serious, busy. “That priest wants to see you.”

She slipped into Father Dante’s library.

Father Dante sat at his desk, sorting papers.

“Father?”

His shoulders jerked and he turned. “There is one more thing we need to discuss. You would sit?”

She sat in her chair.

“Mrs. Sloan,” he looked at her over his knuckles. “If you feel threatened, you should call me or the police.”

Bev crossed her ankles and arms. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

In his black cassock, brooding in this library fraught with shadows, Father Dante looked like a medieval Inquisitor. Anxiety rose in her lungs as if he was asking which of her neighbors weren’t good Catholics.

He said, “The Church offers you protection.”

She tucked her arms and legs in tighter. “I’m fine.”

Father Dante came over and sat in Conroy’ chair next to hers. He took her hand—his hand was warm like a leather glove in a sunny car—and he slipped a card into her palm. Black ink curled across the back of the business card, phone numbers.

He said, “The top number is the rectory. The lower one, it is my cellular phone.” 

Bev turned the card over. “I didn’t know priests had business cards.” The keys and tiara of St. Peter embellished the upper left corner, and Father Dante’s name ran through the center. Italian words surrounded his name. Bev tucked it in her purse.

Father Dante nodded. “There is one more other thing to talk about, but,” he looked at his watch, “it may take some time. Will you be in the church tomorrow?”

“I’m substituting for the music teacher. I have a free period at two o’clock.”

Father Dante nodded. “I’ll be here. Tomorrow, then?”

Bev left the priest sitting at his desk, sorting papers.

In the church, Conroy was in the third pew, reading the hymnal.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Conroy snapped the book shut and stood. “I’ll drop you at home. I’ve got to get back to the lab.”

Bev nodded. He probably had something very important waiting for him.

~~~~~

The next morning at nine, Leila slammed open the door to the mouse facility and found Conroy injecting a small syringe of liquid into a mouse’s belly.

Her breath puffed. She had sprinted to the lab with her arms full of printouts. She said, “Tony translated the Italian webpage.”

Conroy looked up from the mouse, startled. Behind the clear visor, his eyes, so oddly blue, were wide, and he glanced past her and then back to her face.

She said, “You will not believe this. The bottom links lead straight into the Vatican.”

Conroy frowned. “Of course he has Vatican links. He’s a priest.”

Conroy wasn’t getting it, and Leila was nearly hopping with wanting to tell him. “He’s not just a priest.”

“So he says.” Conroy resumed injecting the mouse then released it into its cage. He wrote a note in his lab notebook and turned the page.

Maybe shaking Conroy would wake his ass up. “First of all, it’s not
Father
Petrocchi-Bianchi. It’s
Monsignor
.”

Conroy cocked his head. “He said to call him ‘Father.’”

“Then he was being modest. And everyone in his lab has moved on. He doesn’t have a lab anymore.” Leila shoved papers into Conroy’s latex-gloved hands.

~~~~~

Conroy looked over Leila’s sloppy stack of papers. They sat in wheeled lab chairs in the mouse room of the animal facility to examine the translation of the priest’s web pages.

Her slim, tanned finger pointed to a link for
The
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
. Leila’s fingernail polish was the color of champagne.

He reached for her thigh.

She pushed him away and her chair rolled out of his reach. “Conroy,” she whispered. “The door is open. And God only knows what’s on your gloves.”

“No one could see.” And it didn’t matter if he was caught with her, too. He rolled toward her and reached for her leg again.

“Conroy! Yuck! You smell like mice.” 

He stripped off his gloves. “Can I see you tonight?”

Leila’s almond eyes, shaped by her Egyptian father’s genes, slid sideways. “I have lab work.”

“Me, too.” Both his hands clamped around her thighs just above her knees.

Leila’s eyebrows twitched. “More labwork? More than these mice?”

Conroy’s neck stiffened as if the suggestion of mice induced encephalitis. “Tonight?”