Spiked (10 page)

Chapter 13

St. Francis de Sales Church at the edge of the Acre neighborhood was completed about 1850 in gothic revival style. It's a wedge-shaped behemoth of gray Chelmsford granite, fat on the bottom and stepping up to a sharp blade at the top, decorated by a spine of jagged spires. Stone buttresses, guarded by gargoyles that spit in the rain, jut out into overgrown shrubs along the long sides of the building. The huge stained glass windows between the buttresses are dark and meaningless from the outside.

Twenty stone steps lead to a main church entrance of three oaken double-doors, recessed within gothic archways. Twin spire towers are the building's most imposing feature. Soaring a hundred fifty feet, the towers are festooned from the ground to their needle-like tips with ornamental arches and columns, mini-spires and spikes.

The church had been closed about seventeen years. Momentum had been building among Lowell's inner circle of politicians to take the land for redevelopment. Grass-roots opposition, organized under the name
SAVIOR
, had hastily assembled to save the church, with Congressman Vaughn's blessing.

The opposition had yet to get any ink in the paper. Franklin Keyes had low regard for political amateurs, especially neighborhood groups, and had ruled that the issue lacked the critical mass to make a full-blown story. He had not bothered to assign a reporter to the save-the-church rally.

The Empire was missing a good story. Volunteers from
SAVIOR
passed out candles to a crowd of about a hundred people, most of them old enough to have baptized their children in St. Francis de Sales before it closed.
SAVIOR
was an acronym for Save All Valuable Interests for Our Re-use. The neighborhood group was a little
GOOFY
(Gone Overboard On Finding an acronYm), but their motives seemed pure.

Congressman Hippo Vaughn's aide, Tabby, was toward the back of the crowd, cradling a stack of white folders. Tabby commuted from Boston to run Vaughn's district office in Lowell. Her smooth, dark skin came from her Lebanese parents. Her smoldering beauty, unspoiled with not a dab of makeup, came straight from Allah.

Whenever Eddie and Tabby spoke in person, she would tilt her head a little, curve her lips into a tiny smile, and touch Eddie's arm. Was she flirting with him? Or was he just wishful? She maintained an interminable, live-in relationship with a boyfriend who taught oboe in Central Square in Cambridge. That was all Eddie cared to know about him.

Tabby handed a radio reporter a press folder from the top of the stack. She handed Eddie the one on the bottom. “It's some history on the church and a copy of the congressman's remarks to open the rally,” she explained.

“Is Hippo around?” Eddie asked.

The whites of her eyes were big and flawless behind the dark pupils. She said, “He made his comments and excused himself for another appointment.”

Eddie flipped through the paperwork. “So, does Hippo really support these
SAVIOR
people?”

She put her hand on his and closed his folder. “The congressman's remarks are clear. You won't need his staff around to explain them.” She smiled and walked off.

Eddie watched the rally for twenty minutes. Speakers addressed the crowd with a bullhorn from the front steps. The speeches were all the same. How many ways can you say “save our heritage”? Boring.

Seated on the church steps, Eddie looked through the folder. There was Vaughn's two-page speech, which called for the church to “stay as safe as a two-run lead with The Monster on the mound,” a reference to 1960s Red Sox reliever Dick Radatz. There was an old church photograph from the Historical Society, a timeline of church history, a list of well-known church members, and a copy of a twenty-year-old letter from the last pastor of St. Francis de Sales, imploring the Diocese to keep the church open to serve the Acre and its new wave of immigrants from Southeast Asia.

Eddie scanned the list of prominent church members, recognizing a handful of former mayors, a former U.S. senator and others who seemed familiar only because of the streets named after them.

One name stuck out: Sawouth “Samuel” Sok, the reclusive philanthropist whom Eddie had spent the afternoon researching.

The folder also contained a sealed white envelope. Eddie tore it open and dumped a stubby silver key into his hand. It was shiny and sharp, apparently just cut.

That was it? No instructions? Hippo Vaughn occasionally tested Eddie's patience with his bizarre sense of humor.

Eddie gathered his paperwork and looked for a conspicuous lock. He walked both blocks next to the church, spying every door and delivery truck for a padlock. No luck. The church itself, maybe? The giant double doors were shut with chains and locks, but Eddie couldn't test them with all these people around.

He walked around the church. If there were any other doors, they were hidden by thickets. Eddie checked the black and white photograph in his packet. It was taken in the 1930s, when they used to trim the shrubs. The picture showed a small door on the west side of the church, one of the long sides with the buttresses and stained glass.

He hustled around the building and battled through an overgrowth of ornamental bushes. Panting, and with fresh scratches on his hands, he reached the stone foundation. There he found a wooden door, gray and needing paint, shut by a silver padlock.

The key popped the lock. The door resisted at first. Eddie put a foot against the wall for leverage and yanked it open with one violent jerk. A steep wooden staircase, practically a ladder, rose out of sight.

“Hippo?” he called out.

Nothing.

Eddie climbed the steps. They led to the church vestibule, behind the three great oaken double-doors.

“Hippo?” he called again.

He started into the main church sanctuary, unconsciously reaching his right hand to dip a finger in the holy water at the door. The dish held naught but dust. He blessed himself anyway with the sign of the cross, and felt sheepish doing so in the long-abandoned house of worship.

The impressive outside architecture of St. Francis de Sales could not compare to the inside, which seemed even more immense than Eddie had imagined. He gaped at its beauty. Two rows of white columns, linked by sharp gothic arches, divided the main body of the church into three sections, each filled with rows of cherry wood pews separated by narrow aisles. The ceiling chamber above the center aisle, rising higher than on the sides, peaked in a web of arches and vaults adorned with scenes from the Old Testament. Moses on the mountain. An angel staying the hand of Abraham. The serpent coiled in the tree. These characters played their parts on a background painting of a starry night sky.

The setting sun lit the stained glass into the Stations of the Cross, in a pale blend of blue and red light. The figures seemed to leap from the glass. The talent of the artist—of all the artists who had made this place—was plain to Eddie.

So was seventeen years of neglect. Hunks of plaster had plunged like meteors from the ceiling and exploded into fragments on the floor. The church smelled like mildew and wet cement.

No splendor or decay could stop his eyes from lingering upon the eight-foot church crucifix, like none he'd ever seen. It dangled two stories above the church altar on wires running from the tips of the crossbeam to a black chain, which disappeared into a hole in the ceiling.

The Christ figure on the cross wore dust like snowflakes, and seemed too real for art. The head slumped forward, the eyes bulged and pleaded for help, the lips parted in a gasp. This Jesus would have spoken, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” Only its hugeness showed any artist's license. Real iron spikes through the wrists and feet pinned the plaster Christ to a cross of round timbers lashed together with rope. The lean body tensed against the nails, stretching its plaster muscles. The nude figure was positioned in a twist on the traditional crucifixion pose; the statue's legs were bent at the knees and swung to the figure's left side. A single spike piercing both feet entered through the right ankle. The twist made the figure seem even more pained and real, though it may have been designed that way just to hide its private parts.

Eddie shook off a shiver and called again for Vaughn. “Hippo? Are you here?”

The church's granite walls dampened the city noise outside. The bullhorn at the rally sounded far off. This was no place to trespass. Eddie turned to leave, but the thought of finally getting some answers about Nowlin rooted him. He had already trespassed. Might as well see it through.

The building's vastness swallowed his footsteps up the center aisle. Eddie imagined the empty pews full of nineteenth-century working-class folks on their knees, hands clasped and knuckles white. Mill workers, most of them—the carders who combed out the rough cotton fibers, the spinners who twisted the fibers into yarn, and the weavers who interwove yarn into cloth on the looms. They would have been thankful for the blessing of a job in the mills. Yet they begged for a better life. A teenaged girl who left the family farm to spin yarn made fourteen dollars a month, minus a fiver for a bunk in the company boardinghouse. Bells controlled their lives. The mill bells told them when to start work in the morning, and when to quit fourteen hours later. The bells told them when to eat and when to stop eating. The church bell called them here on Sunday.

The church's main aisle finally ended at a low wooden railing. The altar table beyond the railing was a square marble slab on granite pillars.

Eddie turned left, walking along the front row of pews, and under a high arch between two stone columns. Ahead, three confessional booths stood, along the west wall of the church. Their oaken doors had a patchwork design, and looked heavy. Tarnish blackened the brass doorknobs. The largest booth, in the middle, was where the priest would sit to hear confessions. A decorative iron bracket on the door held a glass lantern. Back when the church was active, the priest would light a candle under the lantern as a sign he was inside, ready to hear sins and dispense absolution.

The lantern was lit.

Dusk seemed to fall suddenly, robbing light from the windows and dulling the colors of the church. The candle put Eddie's shadow in a pew. And Fear nibbled his ear.

He walked in silence to the door. Hot white wax rolled down the candle. The brass doorknob was almost too big to grip. It would not turn, wouldn't even click. Could a priest be working here now?

The door on the right, where parishioners entered to confess, was unlocked. A light tug swung it open without a sound on three massive hinges. At first, there looked to be nothing in the darkness inside. Then, as Eddie's eyes adjusted, fabric drapery appeared on the walls, and a padded kneeler came into view beneath the screen that separated the parishioner from the priest. The booth smelled like a top-rate consignment shop. He stepped in. The door clicked shut behind him and the place was black.
See it through
. His heart hammered against his ribcage, wanting out through the bars of bone. Fear draped herself over him.

Eddie dropped to his knees, wincing at the pain in his hip. His right hand traced the sign of the cross. And then, in the confessional whisper he had learned in catechism, Eddie said, “Bless me father, for I have sinned.”

The barrier behind the screen slid open with a bang. Fear raked her nails across his back.

“Oh, do tell, Edward, and make it juicy.”

Vaughn! “You old bastard!” Eddie said, still whispering. “You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

The congressman giggled. “Come now, unburden your soul, young man. And just the action, don't bore me with tales of coveting—I do plenty of that myself.” Vaughn continued to giggle until Eddie couldn't help himself, and laughed along with him.

“You have always had the weirdest sense of humor,” Eddie said. “When the Red Sox win the Series, I will piss on your tombstone, you crazy S.O.B.”

Vaughn laughed even louder and applauded himself. “When the Sox win the Series, I'll be sitting behind home plate in a seat worth five figures. But I'll raise my cup to my old friend Eddie, who'll be watching at home on a portable TV, with a coat hanger for an antenna.”

They both laughed. There's a little truth in every joke.

“I thought it important we meet this way for several reasons,” Vaughn said. “The first is obvious—it was funny.” He giggled some more. “Also, I want to stress to you the importance of keeping the secrets I intend to share today. Nothing is more secret than the sanctity of the confessional. Even a second-string Catholic such as yourself knows that.”

“I may have lapsed, but I still know the church rules,” Eddie said. “I'll protect you.” He'd go to jail to protect a source. So would most of the people he knew in the business. It almost never happened, but reporters ached for the opportunity to prove their gallantry to a judge, and to each other.

Vaughn continued, “Finally, this odd arrangement offers me a wee bit of protection, should someone deduce from your future inquiries that you have inside information.”

“How so?”

“I never lie, but in sensitive times I may not offer the whole truth. Should someone ask me if I proffered inside information to you, I would take umbrage, and swear, my right hand to God, that I have not seen Eddie Bourque for weeks. That is true. I did not see you come in, and we cannot see each other through the screen.
Capiscono?
”

“Yeah, I understand.”

“The autopsy report is done,” he said. “I was able to get the executive summary. The facts are scant, but they'll have to do.” He sucked a deep breath and eased it out. “The medical examiner concluded that Daniel was viciously beaten. He was murdered.”

Of that, Eddie was already sure, despite what that lying Frank Keyes had said. Still, it stung to hear the news confirmed, like when a relative on a deathbed finally passes; it was a shock, though not a surprise.