The car stopped. Returning to the present, Lacey wiped her eyes and looked around. They were at the beach. A boardwalk lay straight ahead. She'd been here a few days ago.
They'd arrived at the edge of the continent... to do the unthinkable . . . in order to prevent the unspeakable.
"I don't know if I can go through with this," Lacey said.
Carole was already out of the car. "Stop thinking of yourself and help me carry him."
Thinking of yourself. . . That angered Lacey. "I'm thinking about him, and what he's meant to me, what he'll always mean to me."
"Do you hear yourself? Me-me-me. This isn't about you or me. It's about Father Joe's legacy. And if we're going to preserve that, we have to do what has to be done."
She was right. Damn her, this weird nun was right. Lacey got out of the car as Carole popped the trunk.
"Where are we taking him?"
"Up to the beach."
"Why the beach?"
"Because we can dig a deep hole quickly, and because very few people come here anymore."
"How do you know?"
"Because I watch. I watch everything. No one will find him. Now help me lift him."
Lacey glanced around. The area looked deserted but who knew what was hiding in the shadows. Her guns ... after taking the dead Vichy woman's clothes, she'd crept back into the Post Office and lifted the pistols off a couple of the undead corpses. She wished she'd thought to bring them, but her mind had been numbed with loss.
Carole opened the trunk to reveal the sheet-wrapped form. Steeling herself, Lacey took the shoulders, Carole the feet, and they carried Joe's body up a ramp, across the boardwalk, then down the steps to the sand. Carole directed them toward a spot under the boards with about five feet of headroom, maybe a little less.
Lacey stayed with the body while Carole ran back to the car. She returned moments later with a pair of shovels and a beat-up purple vinyl book bag. The sky had grown light enough for Lacey to see ST. ANTHONY'S SCHOOL emblazoned along the side in yellow.
"What's in there?" Lacey asked, although she had a good idea what the answer would be.
Carole said nothing. She responded by pulling out a heavy, iron-headed maul and a wickedly sharpened length of one-inch doweling. She drew the sheet back from Uncle Joe's head and upper torso.
Lacey's stomach heaved as she caught sight of his torn-open throat. She'd seen only his face back in the rectory. Good thing she hadn't eaten since yesterday, otherwise she'd be spewing across the sand.
"Look what they did to him!" she screeched. "Look what they did!"
Carole didn't respond. Her face seemed set in stone as she raised the stake and placed the point over the left side of his chest.
"Can't it wait?" Lacey cried.
"Till when?" Carole's expression had became fierce, her voice tight, thin, stretched to the breaking point. "Tell me a good time for this and I'll gladly wait. When, Lacey? When will be a good time?"
Lacey had no answer. When she saw Carole place the point of the stake over her uncle's heart, she turned away.
"I can't watch this."
"Then I guess I'm on my own."
Sobbing openly, Lacey resisted the urge to run screaming down the beach. She kept her back to Carole and jammed her fingers into her ears while she began a tuneless hum to block out the sounds—of iron striking wood, of wood crunching through bone and cartilage. She knew she should be helping, but after what she'd already been through in the last dozen hours, pounding a stake into her uncle's chest was more than she could handle right now. She couldn't. She. Just. Couldn't.
So she stared through her tears at the ocean, at the pink glow growing on the horizon.
Finally she pulled her fingers from her ears and tried to turn, but her brain refused to send the necessary signals to make her body move. The mere thought of seeing her uncle lying there with a shaft of wood protruding from his chest. . .
She heard a noise ... sobbing .. . Carole.
"Is... is it over?"
Carole moaned. "Nooooo! I couldn't do it!"
Lacey whirled, took one look at the nun's tear-stained face, and she knew.
"You loved him, didn't you."
Another bubbling sob from Carole as she nodded. "In my fashion, yes. We all did. A good, goo d man ..."
"I don't mean loving him like that, like a brother. I mean as a man."
Carole said nothing, just stared down at the sheet-wrapped body before her.
"It's okay, Carole. It's not just idle interest. He was my uncle. I'd like to know how you felt about him, especially now that he's . . . gone. Did you love him as a man?"
"Yes." It sounded like a gasp of relief, as if a long pent-up pressure had been released. "Not that we ever did anything," she added quickly. "Not that he ever even knew."
"But you" ... she needed the right word here . . . "longed for him?"
"God forgive me, yes. Not lust, nothing carnal. I just wanted to be near him. Can you understand that?"
Lacey shrugged, unsure of what she could understand. This was so unreal.
"I'm not sure how to say this," Carole said, "because I've never expressed it, even to myself."
"Why not?"
"Because it wasn't right. I took vows. He took vows. I shouldn't have been thinking of a man like that, especially a priest. God was supposed to be enough. But sometimes..."
"Sometimes God just isn't enough."
"It must be a sin to say so, but no, sometimes He isn't. Father Joe had something about him that made me ... made me want, long to be near him. His very presence just seemed to make the world seem right. I'd see him touch some of the other sisters, the older ones—nothing but a hand on the arm or, rarely, an arm across the shoulders as they'd laugh about something. But never me. And I never knew why. Not that I wanted more, not that I'd ever lead him astray, but a simple touch, just to let me know he knew I existed, that would have made me so happy."
Lacey felt as if she were talking to some lonely preteen, and sexually, maybe that was where Carole was. She'd probably joined the convent right out of high school—maybe during high school—and she'd never progressed past that stage in her relationships with the opposite sex.
"Do you think my uncle was avoiding you?"
"Sometimes it seemed like it."
"Well, I can think of only one reason for that."
Carole looked up. "What?"
"Maybe he felt the same about you."
"Oh, no." Carole shook her head vehemently, almost violently. "He didn't. He couldn't have."
"I'm sure of it."
She wasn't sure at all, but the sweet light flaring in Carole's eyes now touched Lacey more deeply than she could have imagined a few moments ago when this seemingly icebound woman had crouched there with a stake poised over Uncle Joe's heart.
"Carole, you should have seen his face the other night after you stopped by the church. He was worried about you, wished you'd come into the church with us, but he was beaming too ..."
Wait a sec. That was no exaggeration. Joe had been beaming. Maybe there'd been more going on between those two than anyone knew, least of all themselves.
"Beaming?" Carole said.
Lacey knew a prompt when she heard one. "Yeah. Beaming. He seemed really, really happy to see you and know you were still alive. He kept talking about you."
How sad, Lacey thought. The two of them could have made each other's lives so much brighter, but they'd been kept apart.
Carole sobbed again. "Now he's gone!"
"Not quite," Lacey said. "Not yet. And that's where we come in, I guess."
"How can I do this?" She wiped her eyes and sniffed. "I could do it, I know I could if he were one of them, if I could see that cold evil hunger in his eyes, I could save him from that. But look at him. Except for his throat he looks so normal, so . .. peaceful. I can't."