Electra was looking expectantly at Temple.
"I didn't do it!" she swore.
No one came and got it. The audience stirred, bereft.
A camera operator from Hot Heads zeroed in on the podium. Nada. Savannah stood alone, like all cheesy things.
Then someone was walking forward. The audience stirred. Un-certain applause began as a slight figure in a pale suit joined Savannah at the podium.
"I'd like to thank the G.R.O.W.L. committee, and the esteemed judges, and all who recognize literary merit," Crawford Buchanan's deep baritone boomed over the mike. "I never could have done it without all of you published writers as an example. And to my mother . . . keep the tuna casseroles coming, Mom! They're brain food."
He flourished his trophy and strutted back to a distant table, the Hot Heads camera dogging his every step.
"Gross," said someone near Temple.
She turned. Quincey, with a Fontana brother, was sitting only a table away.
Electra was looking disappointed, and looking at Temple. "I thought for sure that you--"
"Not guilty," Temple pled with perfect confidence.
She would never write a romance novel until she had plotted out her own lovelife, and that might take a while.
"By the way, who won the Incredible Hunk title last night?" she asked as people began rising and filing out of the ballroom.
"Troy Tucker got the popular vote of the convention at large."
"No surprise there," commented Kit, collecting her entwined dolphins.
"A nice guy," Temple approved.
"And Kyle Warren got the big award," Electra said, picking up her plaque.
"Kyle Warren? Which one was he?"
"Tall. Long dark hair. Muscles. One earring, two wrist cuffs."
Temple shook her head. "I couldn't tell him from Adam. Would Cheyenne have won, do you think?"
"Maybe, hon." Electra's face fell. "Say, you're the only one of us three who didn't get an award."
Temple smiled. "Don't be too sure about that."
Chapter 37
Confess
The brass vigil light hung from the high ceiling, glowing faintly in the daylight, striking the face of the madonna with a fever blister of bright red.
God bless Our Lady of Guadalupe, Matt thought, with its old fashioned atmosphere of eternal Catholic verities: the vigil light and the Virgin.
He sat on the polished wooden pew, absorbing the peace and the piety. Statues of Mary and Joseph still kept guard on either side of the aisle. Stained-glass windows cast kaleidoscopic patterns on the stone floor varied enough to soothe the restless attention of the most fidgety child, at least for a few precious moments.
The pews were made from golden oak and waxed to piano polish, hard but supportive, as all sturdy things are. The kneelers were padded in brown vinyl, a thirty-year-old concession to weak-kneed modern worshipers and unnecessary now that the modernized mass avoided long, trying stretches of kneeling. Matt remembered the bony knees of boyhood protesting hours on vinyl tiled floors when special-occasion masses had been celebrated in the high school auditorium.
Now he sat. Now he thought rather than prayed. Now he worried about other issues, which were the same old issues in fresh form.
A door cracked somewhere in the church. Not the big thunderously echoing double doors at the front, but a smaller, discreet door beyond the altar. Perhaps the door to the sacristy, or a side door to the nearby school or rectory.
Was a janitor coming or going? The Ladies' Altar Society coming to dust? A church stood empty most of the time, a monument to scheduled sanctity. He liked this time of waiting best, the church itself as entity, the holy place in wait for a glimmer of random, unexpected spirituality, for a lost soul blundering in, snared by its ancient trap of shelter and sanctuary.
A man wearing a short-sleeved black shirt came around the communion rail, now also an outmoded symbol of a far more formal ritual. Communion was not taken kneeling on hard stone steps along an ornate guardrail anymore, with vulnerable closed lids and open mouth, but standing at center aisle with cupped hand and wide-open eyes. It was self-administered these days, like the sacrament of Penance, now called Reconciliation.
For all the softening of ancient habit, when it came to dogma, the church remained a hard mistress.
Father Rafael Hernandez recognized Matt, smiled and came forward.
"May I join you?"
"Certainly, Father."
The older man sat in the same pew and faced the same way, studying the elaborate carved plaster altarpiece, a rococo tribute as ornate as a Bach fugue.
"Even in the early sixties," he noted, "the parishioners wanted their florid folk art. I like it."
"Me too," Matt said with the ungrammatical ease of a schoolboy. "We Poles have our Black Madonna and our gilded Infant Jesus. Gilt doilies for the Lord, valentines for holy days."
"It is good to think of those Eastern European churches free of the shadow of the Kremlin these days, of people free to practice their faith with all the old traditions."
Father Hernandez's autocratic profile was tilted up toward the church's blue-painted nave, in the ancient pose of prophets and saints. Matt was surprised to see rays of good humor radiating from the corners of his eyes and mouth.
The priest sighed, his hands clasped simply on his lap. "My recent. . . difficulties have been the proverbial blessing in disguise. I had taken my priesthood for granted; I had too much pride of position and too little faith. It's a temptation. You've done parish work," he went on, assuming rightly. "Each parish is a little kingdom, and the priests are its princes. And the pastor, he is king. I took myself too seriously. I allowed myself to alienate an old woman from the church only days before her sudden death, and all over a matter of animals in heaven! No, that wasn't the issue. It was my authority. It was my being right, even about minutiae. And the blackmail, the notion of my being thought badly of, that was what unhinged me. Our Lord was falsely accused and made it into a means of redemption for all mankind, but I, Rafael Hernandez, could not survive a pointing finger. I had my pride. That is the root of all evil, not money. Pride."
"Money motivated Peter Burns to kill his great-aunt," Matt pointed out. "But pride did, too. He felt . .
. shamed from birth and was never given leave to feel anything else, for a sin that was not his. He compared himself to Jesus, do you know? Asked who had given him room in the inn when he was an infant in need of shelter."
"You've talked to him recently?"
Matt nodded. "In jail a couple of weeks ago."
"Why? The man is poison, and he cannot blame the world for all the wrongs he did."
"I wanted to understand his hatred."
"You are not a priest anymore. You don't have to listen to confessions."
"No." Matt found himself glancing at the set of confessional booths on the nearest side aisle. "They look like something from Alice in Wonderland, strange, decorative doors to exitless closets, where you feel shrunken or inflated, depending on your sins that day, or your penance."
"I still use them." Father Hernandez shrugged at Matt's surprised glance, for confessions nowadays were face to face in faceless rectories or churches or schoolrooms. "The old timers can't countenance--
excuse the expression--a cosy daylit conference with the parish priest. They must have their kneelers and their darkness, their pleated white linen curtain and the whispers in the dark, the slow slide of the priest's little door from side to side. I admit I enjoy the suspense, the anonymity, the drama, the guessing in the dark. So much about the church has changed. I wonder that anyone wishes to become priests anymore."
Matt smiled. "A lot of women do."
"Women! Don't start me on that, Matt. Next Miss Tyler's cats will find heaven not enough, and demand ordination. I'm too old for so much change."