Inside, he stared somberly at the crumbling, decrepit building. The bell tower was one of the few sections still intact. Most of the windows had been boarded over and tall weeds choked what had once been a lush yard and manicured grounds. Some of the roof tiles had slid off and splintered on the overgrown pathways and gardens. A fountain in the heart of the circular drive had gone dry; the statue of an angel poised to pour water from a vessel into a large pool, now decapitated and missing one wing.
This was the location of their trysts?
Their romantic rendezvous?
Narrowing his eyes as he stared at the run-down buildings, Bentz had a hard time turning back the clock, thinking about the old mission as it once had been with manicured lawns and gardens, stained-glass windows, and flowing fountains.
He stepped over a pile of debris and worked his way through rubble and brush to the ornately carved front doors. A rusting chain snaked through the handles, its lock securely in place.
To keep out the curious, the homeless, or looters.
Or a cop with too much time on his hands who might be obsessed with his dead ex-wife.
Ignoring the voice in his brain, he picked the lock and found his way through an archway into what had once been a courtyard, a square surrounded on all sides by the two-storied inn. Each long side was divided into individual units, complete with doorways on the ground level and balconies with boarded over French doors on the second. The courtyard was already in shadow, the gloom of evening seeping around the chipped and broken statue of St. Miguel as the sun sank low behind the bell tower.
So far, so good, Bentz thought.
The place seemed empty.
Lonely.
Walking along the portico, peering through a few dirty panes of the remaining windows, he nearly stepped on a rat that scurried quickly through a crack in the mortar.
Not Bentz’s idea of a romantic getaway.
At least not now, not in the inn’s current condition. The place was downright creepy, a great setting for a horror film. Testing each of the doors along the covered walkway, he felt the prickle of apprehension on the back of his neck.
All rooms were locked firmly.
Number seven, a corner suite, was no different. The number dangled precariously from the frame and looked ready to drop into the debris collecting on the porch.
Using his set of picks, he sweated as he worked the lock and it finally sprang open, the old hinges creaking eerily.
Now or never, he told himself, but he felt as if he were walking upon Jennifer’s grave as he stepped into the stuffy, stale suite. In an instant he was thrown back to a time he’d tried hard to forget.
A table was broken and cracked. A television stand was overturned, the floor scraped and filthy. Cobwebs collected in the corners and the dried corpses of dead insects littered the windowsills.
The entire place was near being condemned, Bentz guessed, his skin crawling. Stairs wound upward and creaked with each of his steps as he painfully climbed to the second floor, where a landing opened to a bedroom. There were two other doors. One led to a filthy bathroom, where dingy, cracked sinks had been pulled from the wall and a toilet was missing. The second door was closed, its latch broken, but when Bentz pushed on the old panels, he discovered it opened to an inside hallway. In one direction was the emergency exit stairs. In the other a long corridor stretched along the back wall of the building. He walked it and found the hall eventually funneled into a staircase that dropped into the area that had once been the lobby and office of the inn.
Handy, he thought. A secret entrance for a priest who didn’t want to be seen going through the front door of unit seven to meet his mistress.
Bentz returned to the bedroom, dark and gloomy.
Their bedroom. Where the memories and despair and guilt still lingered.
The place Kristi may have been conceived, if Shana McIntyre could be believed. There was a chance Shana was lying, of course, that she knew of this place from her own romantic trysts. Shana had never made any bones about the fact that she didn’t like him. She would thoroughly enjoy playing a sick joke on him, just to watch him squirm.
Almost smelling the odor of forgotten sex, he eyed a dusty bookcase that lined one wall. A few forgotten books were scattered on the shelf, their pages and covers yellowed. Other books had fallen to the floor, and from their mottled edges it appeared that something had been nibbling on them. He picked one up, a legal thriller from the nineties. A novel Jennifer had read. He remembered discussing it with her.
Her copy?
His throat went dry as he flipped through a few pages, then tossed the book aside, the ever-darkening room creeping into his soul.
Coincidence, nothing more.
And yet…
He felt as if she’d been here. Almost.
“Fool,” he muttered as his gaze landed on a desk. It had been pushed in front of the closet and was missing a few drawers. On the scarred top was the base of an old telephone, the receiver dangling over one side.
Had Jennifer really spent hours here? Nights? With James? He crossed to the French doors, the glass boarded over on the outside, many of the panes cracked. The doors had once opened onto a small, private balcony overlooking the courtyard. Thinking they might open inward, he tried the levers.
Neither door budged.
It was getting darker by the second, the room musty, dragging the breath from his lungs. He ran the beam of his flashlight over a worn chaise. Foam stuffing bloomed crazily from the frayed velvet that had once been ice blue and now was a dingy, dirty gray.
Bentz’s muscles tensed as he trained his small light on the bed, nothing more than a stained mattress on a rotting frame. It had been shoved into a corner beneath a broken stained-glass window, then forgotten.
Staring at the mess, cleaning it up in his brain, Bentz imagined what the room would have looked like nearly thirty years earlier. A time when Jennifer and James had first started their affair.
Don’t even go there, he warned, but couldn’t help imagining how the area would have looked. Surely a carpet would have covered the plank floors. The chaise, in a soft blue, would have been new and plump, the desk, a shiny rosewood antique. The bed would have been turned down and inviting, with smooth sheets and a cozy coverlet.
He thought there had been a desk chair, perhaps upholstered in the same blue as the chaise. He imagined a black cassock and clerical collar recklessly discarded over the chair’s back.
One fist clenched.
He considered his half brother. Father James McClaren had been a handsome man with an altar-boy smile, strong jaw, and intense blue eyes that many women, not just Jennifer, had found seductive. There had been those, like his ex-wife, who loved the challenge of it all, the act of bringing a priest to his knees. Then there had been the frail or weak-willed who had turned to their priest in times of need only to be seduced by the unscrupulous James.
Self-righteous sinner.
Bentz could almost hear his half brother’s deep laugh, imagined the whisper of his footsteps on the bare floor. In this room, alone with Jennifer, James had probably stripped naked, then with her giggling and backing away, had followed her, kissed her, and begun undressing her.
Or had it been the other way around?
Had she, dressed in scanty lingerie, waited in the bed for him, listening for his footsteps, eyeing the door until he stepped into the room?
It didn’t matter. Either way, they’d ended up in bed, making love over and over again.
So much for the vow of chastity.
Odd, Bentz thought now as he played out the scene in his mind. Much of his anger and outrage had dissipated over time. That burning sense of betrayal had been reduced to dying embers.
It had been so many years.