Chapter 1
Marlene Duclos slammed her palm on the potluck table so hard the Jell-O salads jumped, then pointed at Arlene Kasparek and said, "Get out of this church." Arlene had cleaned St. Casimir's kitchen for free for two years. No title, no paycheck, no council seat.…
Marlene Duclos slammed her palm flat on the folding table so hard the Jell-O salads jumped in their glass bowls.
The sound went through the parish hall like a gunshot. Sixty people at folding tables stopped chewing. A fork clattered onto a paper plate somewhere near the coffee urns. The coffee urn itself kept gurgling, indifferent, and that gurgle was suddenly the loudest thing in the room.
"Eight thousand dollars," Marlene said.
She had the microphone in her other hand. She lifted it slowly, the way a woman does when she wants everyone to lean forward, and she let the number hang there over the hot dishes and the tin foil and the cold gray light coming through the high basement windows.
"Eight thousand dollars is missing from the building fund."
Marlene stood behind the potluck table with her feet planted wide apart, like she owned the linoleum itself. Cream blazer with gold buttons. Navy blouse. Ash-blonde bob lacquered so hard a March wind couldn't move it. Large gold-tone earrings that caught the overhead fluorescents and threw little sparks of light around the room when she turned her head.
She turned her head now. Slowly. Deliberately.
She pointed at the end of the table, near the kitchen door, where a small woman in a faded rose cardigan stood with a canvas tote bag on her shoulder and her hands very still at her sides.
"Arlene Kasparek," Marlene said. "Get out of this church."
Nobody moved.
That was the part Arlene would remember. Not the words, exactly. Everybody in St. Casimir's had heard hard words before. But sixty people at folding tables, hot dishes going cold under the foil, Jell-O salads trembling in their bowls, and not one of them said a word. Not Deacon Paul, sitting at the council table with the parish binder open in front of him. Not Nadine from the ladies' guild, who had eaten Arlene's bars at every funeral for nine years. Not old Herb Sorenson, who had told Arlene at Christmas that her late husband Walter had been the best man at his wedding and that he'd never forgotten it.
Nobody stood up.
Arlene didn't argue. She never argued. She had learned a long time ago that arguing made it worse, that the women who argued in public got remembered for the arguing and not for the cause of it. She reached down, picked up the canvas tote from the edge of the table, and started to walk toward the kitchen door.
Her orthopedic shoes made soft sounds on the linoleum. Six steps and she'd be through the door and out into the little mudroom where the coats were hung, and out the back through the slush to her car.
Two steps. Three.
"Your Excellency—" Marlene said into the microphone, because the hall door had opened at the back of the room and Bishop Raymond Ostrowski had stepped in, tall and slow-moving in his black cassock with the purple piping, his pectoral cross catching the light.
The bishop stopped mid-step.
He didn't lift his hand to wave or nod or bless anyone. He just stood there, one black shoe forward and one back, one hand resting on the door frame, his kind gray eyes behind the wire glasses tracking across the room until they landed on Arlene Kasparek.
"Walter Kasparek's wife?" he said.
Quiet. Like a man placing a face from twenty-five years back.
The room went very still.
Arlene stopped walking. She didn't turn around all the way. She turned her head halfway, so the bishop could see her profile but not her face, and she kept her hand on the tote bag's strap.
"That's me," she said.
Marlene's hand came up with the microphone again, fast, too fast, the gold earrings swinging. "Your Excellency, we've just discovered a serious theft. I was explaining—"
The bishop was not looking at her.
He was looking past her. At the wall beside the kitchen door.
"What month?" he asked.
Marlene stopped talking.
"What month did you say the money went missing?"
"I—we only just—"
"Because I remember a letter," the bishop said, walking slowly into the room now, unhurried, past the potluck tables where farmers and retired electricians and church ladies were turning in their chairs to follow him with their eyes. "I remember a letter from a man named Walter Kasparek, in 1998."
Nobody said anything.
"The letter said the parish needed a kitchen and didn't have the money for one," the bishop said. "The letter came with a check. Twenty-two thousand dollars." He stopped at the end of the potluck table, maybe four feet from Arlene, and he looked at her with an expression that was hard to read. Something older than pity. "I was young then. I was on the hospital board with him, and he asked me to hold the check until the parish council agreed to take it, because he said he didn't want anyone to feel like they owed him."
Arlene's throat moved once. That was the only visible change in her.
Marlene stepped out from behind the table. "That may be a lovely memory, Your Excellency, but it has nothing to do—"
"It has everything to do with why this woman is standing by the door with her tote on her shoulder," the bishop said.
Still quiet. Still calm. He looked up, over Arlene's head, at the wall plaque mounted beside the kitchen door. It was a plain wooden frame that had been there as long as anyone in the room could remember. Gold-painted face. A few lines of text. Nobody had read it in years.
"The kitchen addition," the bishop said. "In 1998."
Arlene set the tote down on the end of the potluck table.
She walked back across the linoleum. Past Marlene. Past Nadine from the guild, who was looking at her plate. Past Herb Sorenson, who had gone very red in the face and was staring at the plaque as if he'd never seen it before. Arlene stopped in front of the wall, lifted her right hand, and rubbed her thumb against the bottom corner of the plaque's gold-painted face.
The paint flaked.
It came off in a curl, old paint over older paint, and underneath the curled gold there was brass. Bright brass letters, cut deep.
WALTER KASPAREK, 1998.
The bishop took his glasses off, because the light through the basement windows had turned them into two flat white circles, and he looked at the exposed letters with his bare eyes.
"I remember writing that check myself," he said.
The potluck went silent.
Not the kind of silence from a moment ago, with forks frozen above plates and the question of whether anyone would dare move. This was a different sound. It was the sound of the room being rearranged, the way a house settles when a weight comes off a beam. Sixty people looking at a small woman with her thumb pressed to a wall, and a tall woman behind them with a microphone hanging from her hand.
Into this silence, Marlene said, quickly, "That plaque is an old decoration. Someone donated it years ago. It has nothing to do with the kitchen or the fund or anything—"
"We've been using that kitchen for twenty-seven years," the bishop said. "I remember when we didn't have one." He put his glasses back on. "Deacon Paul."
Deacon Paul stood up so fast he nearly knocked over his chair. He was a thin young man with a pale face, and he looked like he'd been holding his breath for a year.
"Get me the building fund ledger," the bishop said. "And I believe the council keeps it in the cupboard under the sink."
"Yes, Your Excellency."
"And bring whatever else is in there with it."
Deacon Paul went through the kitchen door. Everyone in the hall heard him open the cupboard under the sink. Everyone heard the sound of a cardboard box being pulled across a shelf, the rustle of paper. It took him a long time, maybe forty seconds, and in those forty seconds Marlene Duclos stood behind the potluck table with a microphone in one hand and nothing to say. Her cheeks had gone from flushed to a strange flat gray-pink under the foundation. She changed her grip on the microphone twice. The second time, her hand was shaking so badly the microphone clicked against her rings.
Deacon Paul came back with the ledger under one arm and a shoebox in both hands.
He set them both on the council table.
The bishop opened the shoebox. Inside, neatly stacked, was a thick bundle of catering invoices. Every one of them had a glossy business card stapled to the top left corner. Every one of them was stamped PAID.
Marlene's voice came out of the microphone, thin: "Those are my invoices. I catered every one of those events. That's legitimate parish business—"
The bishop picked up the top invoice and turned it so the room could see the date.
"The Ladies' Guild spring brunch," he read. "March 9th."
Nadine from the guild said, out loud, in a voice that surprised even her: "We cooked that ourselves. Every dish."
The bishop laid the invoice flat on the table and picked up the next one. "The fall soup supper. October 14th."
"We did that too," Herb Sorenson said, standing up now, his chair scraping back. "Marlene wasn't even here. She was in Rochester that weekend, she told us so at Mass."
Marlene turned toward the council table. "Your Excellency, I have photographs, I have receipts, I—"
"You have neither," the bishop said. He set the invoice down. "This business card has no name on the back. No phone number. No menu. A real caterer prints a menu on the back of a business card. This one is blank because there is no caterer."
He opened the ledger.
The pages were ruled in Deacon Paul's careful hand. Every event in the parish hall for two years, every collection, every disbursement, every payment out and every dollar in. The bishop ran his finger down the columns, slow, methodical, past the confirmation retreat in September, past the Christmas bazaar in December, past a spring fish fry in Lent that had raised four hundred dollars more than the council had announced.
He stopped. He read the same line twice.
"Deacon Paul," he said. "Who keeps this ledger when the council president asks for it?"
"I do, Your Excellency. But Mrs. Duclos reviews it before it goes into the cupboard."
"And does Mrs. Duclos have a key to the cupboard?"
"She does."
Marlene's voice cut in, loud and quick and wrong. "This is a parish matter. The council should review this in private, in committee—"
"What month?" the bishop said, without looking up.
"Your Excellency—"
"You told the congregation eight thousand dollars went missing. You named a woman in front of her church. You ordered her out of the building where her husband's name is carved into the wall." The bishop finally looked up. "So we will do this in front of her church, not in committee, not in private, and not on any schedule you set."
He closed the ledger.
"I am suspending you from the parish council, Marlene Duclos, effective immediately, pending a diocesan audit of the building fund. Deacon Paul will take custody of this ledger, these invoices, and the council checkbook this afternoon. And I am asking the parish to vote today, at one o'clock, on naming the kitchen after Walter Kasparek."
The men and women at the folding tables made a low sound, not quite a cheer. Something underneath it.
Marlene laid the microphone on the potluck table. She picked up her coat from the back of the chair where she'd hung it. She walked out through the kitchen door, and nobody got up to help her.
Arlene was still standing by the wall with her thumb on the plaque, and the paint on her thumb was the color of old butter, and her eyes had gone wet and stayed wet without spilling over.
The parish had voted by one o'clock. It wasn't close.
But the part that came after, the part no one in the hall that Sunday could have predicted, started with three quiet words the bishop said to Arlene in the hallway by the coat rack, when most of the room had already gone home.
"Arlene," he said, and then stopped.
She turned.
"There are more entries in this ledger," he said. "Ones I haven't shown anyone yet."
Arlene's hand tightened on the tote bag.
"Did Walter ever mention other gifts to the church?"
She didn't answer.
And that, more than the pointing arm or the microphone or the painted plaque, was the thing that would keep her awake for the next three weeks.
Advertisement