John Saul - The Right Hand of Evil

Ted's eyes fixed angrily on the officer. "He was at home. Why?"

"Now, don't get all het up," Beckwith said quickly. "I have a job to do here, and all I'm trying to do is-"

"All you're trying to do is blame my son for vandalizing my uncle's mausoleum?" Ted demanded. "Why shouldn't I get 'het up,' as you so picturesquely put it?"

"I'm not saying he did it-" Beckwith began again, but once more Ted didn't let him finish.

"You're damned right you're not! And if you do, I'll slap a lawsuit on your ass so fast it will make your head spin!"

Ray Beckwith's face reddened. "Now you just hold your horses, here, Conway-"

"Hold your own damned horses," Ted shot back. His voice dropped to a menacing growl. "I'm fed up with what's going on in this town. Since the moment we arrived, it seems like a lot of people have been trying to get us to go away. For starters, there's Jake Cumberland, right? Where was he last night? The last time I saw him was at the town meeting, where he was pointing at me and ranting about the Devil! So before you go accusing my son, why don't you check out Cumberland?" His gaze shifted toward the church. "And speaking of the Devil, why don't we talk about the church, too! It was Father MacNeill who was talking against me at that meeting, wasn't it? In fact, the last few weeks he's talked to practically everyone in town, trying to get them to vote against letting me open a business. And now there's been vandalism in the cemetery next to his church, but it was my uncle's crypt that was vandalized. So if I were you, Sheriff, I wouldn't be talking to me about this. I'd get my ass in there and start asking Father MacNeill and everyone else who's been whispering about us all morning what they know about this!"

Ray Beckwith, his ruddy face paling in the wake of Ted's torrent of words, stepped back. "Yes, sir, Mr. Conway," he said, his voice suddenly drained of the anger he'd shown a moment before. "I can certainly understand your feelings. And I'll certainly look into every possibility."

Again Ted fixed his gaze on the policeman. "You see that you do." He turned to Janet. "Let's go home."

Father MacNeill fairly trembled with rage. "He actually suggested you investigate me? And you took him seriously?"

Ray Beckwith quailed before the priest's anger, wondering what he'd done to deserve the bad luck to catch the call that morning when the vandalism had been discovered. They were seated in the priest's small office, where Father Bernard had joined them as Beckwith attempted to piece together the sequence of events. It had been discovered that the cross used to pin the cat's hide to the tree came from the side chapel in St. Ignatius. But the church had been locked last night-Father MacNeill had unlocked it himself before mass that morning. A few other people had keys, but none of them would have given a key to Jared Conway, or Jake Cumberland, for that matter.

Jared Conway, Beckwith ascertained, had in fact been inside the church, unsupervised. Hadn't Father Bernard checked on the work the boys had done? And if he had, how had he failed to notice that missing cross right away?

A vein in Father Bernard's forehead throbbed as he admitted he hadn't actually examined the boys' work that afternoon. Beckwith turned to Father MacNeill. "Seems to me at least one of you might've noticed if that cross had been missing since the boys cleaned the church."

That was when Father MacNeill started getting angry. "I'm in and out of the church a hundred times a week. I can't possibly notice everything that's wrong."

"But you noticed the crypt in the Conway mausoleum was open," Ray reminded him. "It wasn't open more than an inch. But you noticed."

That tore it. Father MacNeill's face hardened into an angry mask. "Are you suggesting I might have vandalized the cemetery myself?" he said in a tone calculated to make Ray back down.

But Ray stuck to his guns. "I'm just doing my job. I talked to Mr. Conway, just like you wanted me to, and now I'm talking to you just like he-" He caught himself too late. The priest leaped on it immediately.

"Well?" Father MacNeill demanded when Ray didn't answer his question right away. "Did Ted Conway tell you to investigate me or not? It's a simple enough question."

"I told you, Father MacNeill. I'm doing my job, and my job is to investigate what happened last night. It's not to decide who did it, then go about making everything fit."

Father MacNeill glared furiously at the policeman. What on earth could make Ray Beckwith, who until this very afternoon had never failed to treat him with the respect his position deserved, suddenly speak to him as if he were a common criminal?

Then he remembered glancing out the window of the parish hall just after Ted Conway led his family out. He'd seen Ray talking to Conway, but mostly he'd seen Conway talking to Ray. Talking to him the same way he'd addressed the whole town at the meeting? Of course. And Ray, obviously, had fallen victim to the man's charm as easily as everyone at the meeting had.

It's time for me to talk to that man myself, Father MacNeill decided.

"Very well," the priest said aloud. "I wouldn't want to interfere with you performing your job, Raymond. And I'm sure when you're done, you'll have discovered the truth. But I'm telling you right now-if you think anyone here had anything to do with this terrible criminal act, you're wrong. Perhaps mortally wrong."

Leaving the threat to the future of Ray Beckwith's soul hanging in the air, Father MacNeill turned his back on the policeman and left the room.

Perhaps we ought to wait until tomorrow morning," Father Bernard fretted. The afternoon had turned warm, but not nearly warm enough to warrant the perspiration dripping down his arms and back. No, his sweating wasn't caused by the heat, but by his nerves. And to what purpose? Tomorrow morning he could call Jared Conway and Luke Roberts into his office at school and get the truth out of them very quickly, indeed. In his office, Father Bernard was in charge. Outside his office, it was another matter entirely. From the time he'd first arrived at St. Ignatius, he'd been the leader in the school; in the rectory, however, it was the force of Father MacNeill's personality that held sway. Which was how it happened that he was now walking along Pontchartrain Street toward the Conway house, with sweat trickling down his back, staining the sleeves of his cassock.

"There's no reason to wait until tomorrow," Father MacNeill shot back. "If Ray Beckwith won't do his job, we shall simply do it for him." He paused a moment, gazing down the street at the Conway house. This afternoon, with the sun shining on its new coat of paint, the house had finally lost its look of a crumbling derelict. The missing slate on its roof had been replaced; somehow Ted Conway had even managed to find new trim to replace the fancywork that had rotted and broken over the years the house sat empty and untended. The last of the overgrowth crowding the grounds had been stripped away, and only a few strands of dying kudzu still clung to the great spreading magnolia from which George Conway had hanged himself so many years ago. Indeed, the disrepair that had given the house its darkly foreboding look was gone, so much so that for a moment Father MacNeill wondered if it was possible that everything he'd ever heard about the house-everything Monsignor Devlin had shown him in the Conway Bible-had been untrue.

But an instant later, as he started across the street, he felt it. It was as if an evil force was emanating from the house itself. He tried to ignore it, but even as he neared the door, he felt it.

A chill.

And something else.

It was as if something unseen-unseeable-was waiting for him.

Preparing to attack him.

As he drew closer, every nerve in his body began tingling, and a wave of panic rose inside him. He forced it down, though, and with Father Bernard trailing after him, made himself stride up the walk, mount the steps, and ring the bell. From somewhere deep inside the house a chime sounded, and then a dog began barking.