Mortal Sin (4 page)

He wondered what it was about him that made all these women perceive him as needy. The ladies of his parish, young and old, fluttered around him as though he were a lost lamb in need of mothering. They fed him roast beef and Irish stew and coffee cake, knitted him socks and scarves and mittens, sent him gifts. A prayer book, a bottle of wine, a pair of tickets to the flower show. In spite of the clerical collar and the rosary, a few of them had been known to offer him more than that, and it totally bewildered him.

“Thank you, Tia,” he said. “Tell your mother I’m grateful.”

He saw them out, then stood in the doorway to his study, tickets in hand, wondering what the devil he was going to do with them. It wasn’t terribly practical to give two tickets to a priest. Who was he supposed to take with him? His mother was long dead, and he didn’t have any sisters. He briefly considered inviting his secretary, but immediately vetoed the idea. Melissa was too much like an adoring pup, running along full-tilt behind him, and he wasn’t about to open that particular can of worms.

He supposed he could give them away. Call his friend Conor, offer them to him and Carolyn. But he really couldn’t picture the Raffertys whiling away an afternoon sniffing posies. It didn’t seem their style. Old Alton Robbins, amazingly spry for a man of eighty-seven, would be delighted with the tickets, would probably call up the Widow Larson for a date. But Alton was in Florida, where flowers grew directly outside his door, while Clancy was stuck in Boston, with winter not only outside his door, but inside his heart. He desperately needed an infusion of spring, and an afternoon spent in a garden—even an indoor one—would suit him just fine. It seemed a shame not to share his serendipity with some other winter-weary soul.

Tapping the envelope impatiently against his palm, he glanced at the wall clock. His ten-thirty appointment was five minutes late. Outside the window, snow spiraled in a shimmering cloud, raised by the frigid March wind. “She’s late,” he said.

Melissa glanced up from her computer screen. “Who’s late?”

“My ten-thirty. Sarah Connelly. Do you have any idea what she wants?”

“Not a clue. She’s a friend of Josie Porter’s. Josie called yesterday and made the appointment for her.”

“Ah. I see.”

It was typical of Josie. Ever since they were kids, playing kickball on M Street in Southie, Josie had practiced what he euphemistically referred to as urban renewal. She loved to take in strays and try to improve their lives. Sarah Connelly must be one of her victims. If the woman was smart, she’d escape from Josie’s clutches while she still had the chance.

“I’ll be in my study,” he said. “Let me know when she gets here.” He glanced out at the swirling snow and added gloomily, “
If
she gets here.”

Melissa’s watchful gaze sharpened. “Are you all right?”

He supposed the answer to her question depended on whether exhaustion, frustration, and restlessness fell under the heading of all right. “Cabin fever,” he said. ‘ “That’s all.”

He closed the door between them, walked to the window, and stood gazing out over the parking lot. Backlit by the morning sun, the blowing snow nearly obliterated his view of the rectory opposite the church. While he watched, a powder-blue vintage Mustang pulled into the parking lot and came to a stop beside his Saturn sedan. The door opened and a woman climbed out. She struggled with the car door, wavy brown hair lashing wildly against her face, before she won the battle with the wind and slammed it shut.

With a sigh, Clancy turned away from the window, yanked open the drawer that held the letters, and pitched in the tickets.

A biting wind swirled in off Dorchester Bay as Sarah Connelly slammed shut the door of the Mustang and glanced at her watch. She was ten minutes late, thanks to some nitwit in a Jaguar who’d changed lanes without signaling, forcing her into an instantaneous choice between death and an I-93 off-ramp. She’d chosen the off-ramp, then she’d had to drive for several blocks until she found a place where she could pull an illegal U-turn and backtrack to where she’d started. If not for good instincts, she’d be driving around in circles right now, lost somewhere in the Roxbury slums.

Everything she’d ever heard about Boston drivers was true. They were the rudest, most aggressive and egocentric creatures on the planet. These people were impervious to such minor inconveniences as traffic lights, stop signs, pedestrians, and emergency vehicles. They double-parked wherever and whenever it suited them, would sooner die than yield the right-of-way, and traveled life’s highways with the supreme confidence of sole proprietorship.

Drawing her coat tighter around her in a vain attempt to keep the wind from slicing straight through it, she glanced up at Saint Bartholomew’s Catholic Church, towering above her in all its Gothic splendor, narrow spire reaching like a stark finger into the winter sky. As she stood studying the gray stone fortress with its stained glass windows and bright red wooden doors, another icy blast of wind slammed into her, nearly stealing her breath away. She’d never considered herself a hothouse flower, but back home in Louisiana, she couldn’t have imagined this kind of brutal cold. Buffeted by swirling gusts, she lowered her head and marched determinedly toward the door leading to the parish office.

Inside the church, warmth hit her with almost physical force, accompanied by the rich, heady aroma of fresh-brewed coffee. The young woman—barely more than a girl—who sat behind the reception desk glanced up and smiled. “Cold enough for you?” she said.

“Lord almighty.” Sarah struggled to catch her breath. “This is the craziest weather I’ve ever seen. A week ago, it was fifty degrees, and now this. If I had any brains at all, I would’ve settled in Phoenix.” She pulled off her gloves and tucked them into her pockets. “I’m Sarah Connelly. I have an appointment with Father Donovan. I’m a little late, thanks to some yahoo who tried to run me down on the Expressway.”

“We were wondering what happened to you. I’ll tell Father you’re here.” The woman swiveled in her chair, stood and moved fluidly toward a closed door behind her workstation. Sarah unbuttoned her coat and spent a moment smoothing the hair that the wind had restyled into something bearing more than a passing resemblance to a nest of adders. Beside the desk, a twenty-gallon fish tank bubbled merrily, tropical fish darting to and fro. Abandoning her hopeless attempt at salvaging her coiffure, she leaned to study the tiny flashes of vivid color racing through a jungle of greenery.

“‘Sarah?”

The rich baritone voice startled her, and she wheeled around to face its source. When Josie had described the priest as an old family friend, she had somehow translated that to mean grizzled and arthritic. But she’d been off track. Way off track. He was somewhere in his mid-thirties, tall and raw-boned and attractive. His hair was a rich, deep mahogany, too dark to be a true auburn, too awash with red highlights to be anything as prosaic as brown. There was something of the ascetic in his face, lean almost to the point of gauntness above the clerical collar, an austerity that was magnified by the stark black of his attire. The severity ended abruptly at his eyes, which were a peculiar shade of amber that reminded her of the bourbon Remy kept in sparkling crystal decanters behind the bar in his den.

“I’m Father Donovan,” he said. “I hear you ran into a little trouble on the Expressway.”

“I had a run-in with a Jaguar. Not the four-legged kind, although the sentiment’s pretty much the same. Kill or be killed. I think that must be stamped on every driver’s license issued by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”

She crossed the room and shook the hand he offered. His hand was warm, his grip solid, the grip of a man who knew his place in life and was comfortable with it. “Your hands are like ice,” he said. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

“I would dearly love a cup of coffee. Cream, please, and two sugars.”

“Help yourself to a chair in my study. I’ll be right in.”

An antique walnut desk, flanked by a pair of matching jade plants in terra-cotta pots, dominated the room. A faded Oriental carpet covered the floor. The twin casement windows wore curtains of a soft green, a hue that was picked up in the fabric of the two plush chairs facing the desk. Built-in bookshelves, heavy with books, lined two walls.

The overall effect was one of warmth and coziness. She took off her coat, perched on a soft chair, and scrutinized book spines while she waited. Most of them were bulky religious tomes. Heavy reading, in every sense of the word. He returned with the coffee in a ceramic mug, and she accepted it gratefully, wrapping her hands around it for warmth.

“Thank you,” she said. “That cold out there is nothing short of barbaric.”

He shut the door behind him and said, “You’re not from around here.”

“Tell me, Father, was it the frozen hands or the tirade about Boston drivers that gave me away?”

He settled his lanky frame into the chair behind the desk. Leaning back, he studied her with those oddly leonine eyes. “I can hear it in your voice. Just a hint of it, but it’s there. Deep South. Mississippi, maybe Alabama or northern Florida. It makes me think of moonlight and the scent of magnolias.”

“Louisiana,” she said. “Most recently, New Orleans. But I was raised in a bayou town so small, it doesn’t show up on any maps.” She took a sip of scalding coffee, used it as an excuse to study him further. His hair was a little too long, a little too shaggy, and he possessed the pale, almost ethereal coloring so common among the dark-haired Celts. He wasn’t quite handsome; his features lacked the polished refinement that marked classic handsomeness. But he was striking, with a wild, dark beauty all his own. Heathcliff, wandering the windswept moors.

“So,” he said, “you’re a friend of Josie’s.”

“Actually, I’m her boss.”

Warmth flooded those golden eyes. “Of course. You’re the lady who just bought the bookstore. Josie’s mentioned you.”

“Then you have a distinct advantage over me, Father, because she’s never mentioned you until now. And you’re not at all what I expected. You’re so—” She paused, searched desperately for the right word.
Dark. Intense. Intriguing. Sexy
.

He picked up his coffee cup and took a sip. “So… ?”

“Young,” she said, breaking eye contact and focusing on a single dark blue paperback sitting on a lower shelf, just at eye level.
Catechism of the Catholic Church
. She supposed if he ever suffered from insomnia, the cure was readily available, right here on his bookshelves.

“Ah,” he said. “You were expecting someone like my predecessor, Father O’Rourke. Some crotchety priest from the old school who believes in bringing people to God by beating religion into them with a stick.”

When she turned back to him, she noted the gleam in his eye. “Are you making fun of me, Father?”

“Maybe just a bit. You know, when I first meet people, they generally react to me in one of two ways. Some of them try very hard to convince me how devout they are. They’re looking for brownie points that’ll give them an in with the Big Guy upstairs.” He tapped a fingernail against his coffee mug. “The rest are terrified I’ll see right through them and send them directly to hell.”