Chapter 4
The signature on the carbon copy was Marlene Duclos's.
The bishop brought the photocopy back the following Sunday, in an envelope, after Mass. He handed it to Arlene in the church vestibule, in front of fifteen people who pretended not to notice, and he said only: "Meet me in the sacristy after the coffee hour."
Arlene sat in the last pew during the coffee hour instead of going to the hall. She opened the envelope with her thumbnail and looked at the photocopied signature.
M. Duclos, in blue ballpoint, the same looping D she'd been writing on the parish potluck sign-up sheets for twenty years.
Arlene folded the paper and put it back in the envelope and sat with her hands folded in her lap until the sacristy door opened and Deacon Paul came out to get her.
The sacristy smelled like incense and starched linen and wool. The bishop was sitting on a stiff wooden chair with his chasuble folded on the table beside him.
He was not alone.
Herb Sorenson was there, sitting on the other chair with his hat in his hands, looking like a man who'd been asked a question he'd been dreading for two decades. His face was red and his hands were shaking.
"Arlene," the bishop said. "Sit down."
She sat.
"Herb has something he wants to tell you."
Herb looked at the floor. "In 1999, after Walter passed, there was a council meeting about the school annex. The annex had already been delayed. We were trying to figure out whether to build or fold the money into the building fund and I was on the finance committee that year." He stopped.
"Go on," the bishop said.
"Marlene was the secretary. She brought the file from the previous year. She told us the annex bequest had been returned to the estate because the donor had died and the gift hadn't cleared probate." Herb's voice got very small. "She said there was no money. She said it had all been a pledge, not a real gift."
"Was that true?"
"No. It wasn't true. I knew it wasn't true. Walter had shown me the check stub once, in his garage, when we were rebuilding his snowblower engine. He hadn't told me the amount, but he'd told me it was a gift, and it had gone through, and he'd asked me not to say anything." Herb finally looked up. "I was twenty-nine years old. Marlene was the council secretary and she'd been at the parish since before I was born and I was a farm kid from Badger Creek who got married at St. Casimir's because my wife's family went here. So I didn't say anything."
Arlene did not move.
"I've been carrying that for twenty-five years," Herb said. "I should have said something. I should have said something on Sunday. I should have said something right then, in front of her, when she was standing there with her palm on the table and Walter's name was still under the paint."
The bishop leaned forward. "The archive record for the bequest is dated 1998. It was made out to the parish council in trust for the School Annex Fund. Between 1999 and 2001, the amount that had been held in that restricted account was gradually transferred out and booked against general repair expenses, which would have been legitimate if the restriction had been lifted. There is no record of the restriction ever being lifted."
"Because she lied," Arlene said.
"Because she said the money had never arrived," the bishop said. "That's different from lying in a ledger. That's lying in a meeting room with no minutes kept, in front of a man who was too young to contradict her and a bookkeeper who was her brother-in-law."
"Corinne's husband," Arlene said.
"Corinne's husband kept the parish books from 1997 until he got sick in 2014," the bishop said. "We have his old ledgers in the archive. They don't reconcile with the ones he kept for the council. The same years repeat in different columns."
Herb looked at his hat. "So she took it."
"We don't know how much of it was the second gift and how much was the general fund. The auditor is going through everything from 1998 forward." The bishop looked at Arlene. "Nobody has told the parish yet. I want to do this once, and I want to do it right. But I need to ask you something."
"Ask."
"May I look at your husband's tool belt? It's in the back of your car, I believe."
Arlene's throat closed for a second. She hadn't told anyone that. Deacon Paul must have seen it in the parking lot and mentioned it to him.
"Why would you want his tool belt?"
"Because Walter was the person who installed the copper pipe run in the cupboard under the sink, in 1998," the bishop said. "The parish council had already voted not to spend money on it. He paid for the parts and did the work himself on his own weekends, because the kitchen couldn't be used without a second sink. He was careful with his work. He dated and initialed every joint he soldered. If he did the pipe in the cupboard, there will be a date and his initials on the copper."
Arlene understood where this was going. She stood up without a word and went out through the sacristy's side door and across the parking lot in the cold and unlocked her car trunk.
Walter's tool belt was folded on top of an old blanket. She carried it back into the sacristy and laid it on the table.
The bishop untied the belt carefully and spread it open. A leather belt cracked and darkened with thirty years of sweat and hand oil. A worn hammer loop, a tape pouch, a pair of pliers, a finishing nail box, a twenty-five-foot tape measure with a broken clip.
And in the side loop, an old flat-head screwdriver, its handle wrapped with red electrical tape because the original handle had cracked in 1995 and Walter had wrapped it and refused to replace it.
The bishop picked up the screwdriver.
"Deacon Paul," he said. "Go open the cupboard under the kitchen sink and look at the copper pipe run above the utility shut-off. Tell me what you find."
Deacon Paul left. The sacristy was quiet except for the tick of a clock on the wall and the distant low murmur from the coffee hour in the hall.
He came back four minutes later with a small, yellow legal pad and a pencil.
"There are three joints visible," he said. "Each one is dated in pencil, in tiny handwriting. Two are dated August 1998. One is dated September 1998. Each one has the initials W.K. next to it."
The bishop looked at Arlene.
"Every piece of that kitchen was Walter," he said. "The copper pipe, the addition, the plaque, the check that I held in my own hand. And somebody has been spending money meant for a school that a farming community needed, for twenty-five years, and the man who gave it up never told his own wife because he wanted her to be able to sit in church."
Arlene closed her eyes.
"Where's the money now?" she said, without opening them.
"Where's the money now," the bishop repeated. "That's the question. And this week, Mrs. Kasparek, that's the question I'm going to bring into the open in front of every person in this parish, in the hall, where your husband's plaque is still on the wall and where the paint on the corner is still in your thumbnail. But I need to ask one more thing first."
She opened her eyes.
"What."
"Between 1999 and today, has anyone in this parish ever offered to pay you for the work you've done in that kitchen?"
Arlene thought about it.
"Marlene put me on the guild roster once," she said. "For the Christmas bazaar in 2021. I was supposed to get fifty dollars as a volunteer stipend. It was in the parish bulletin and everything."
"And did you receive it?"
"No."
"Was it ever recorded as paid?"
"I don't know."
The bishop looked at Herb Sorenson without saying anything, and Herb looked back at him, and then Herb stood up and put his hat on his head and said, in a voice that was not the voice of a man in his early fifties but the voice of the boy who had sat in that same room twenty-five years earlier and said nothing:
"I'll go get the bulletin."
He went out. The bishop watched him go.
"Sunday after next," he said to Arlene. "The auditor will have come and gone. We will have what we need. I want you to think about who you want in that room when I say it out loud."
"Whoever is in the room," Arlene said, "is who is in the room. I don't get to pick who's in the room. That's how it's always been."
The bishop looked at her for a long moment.
"Then this time," he said, "you pick."
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