way that she could remove herself from it completely, but he brought her back in an instant and her mouth quivered when she told him, “I love you too, Clay.”
“Can I ask you one more thing?” Clay asked. Erica nodded. “Did that really happen? Was that fairy tale true?”
“Yes, it happened. And yes, it’s true.”
“Your father really has a hidden darkroom under his loft?”
Erica stood, pulling on her underwear and a pair of her dungarees. Clay got dressed too, taking his cue from her. She pulled on a t-shirts and went into the jewelry box on her dresser, retrieving a key.
“Come on.”
He followed her down the hall, around the corner, through the living room and under Mr. Nolan’s loft bed. Erica pulled aside the tapestry to reveal a bolted door and a padlock.
“My dad changed the padlock when he found out I’d been in the room.” She held up the key and fit it into the padlock, turning it and unlocking it. “I just borrowed his keys-told him I needed to use the car-and I took the key off his ring and got another key made. Then I put his back.”
“Remind me never to try to pull the wool over your eyes.” Clay’s jaw dropped when she turned on the overhead fluorescents in the darkroom, staring at the pictures of nude women strung up on the line with clothespins.
“This is nothing.” Erica opened the second door, remembering now where she’d seen a latch like that-in the inner sanctum, under the crosses, the access to the hole where Father Patrick had kept his daughter. She wondered if the same person had built them both. Erica took him through and turned on the light, showing Clay the reels of film stacked in the cabinet.
“There are others at the church like this,” she told him. “Behind that room I told you about with all the adoption records-the records of removal. I saw the cases, although they were all locked. But they were just like these.”
Clay held the film of one reel up to the light, giving out a low whistle at what he found there. “This is hardcore stuff. And you think the church is selling it to make a profit? Damn I hate being right so often about corruption and hypocrisy in the church.”
“I think my father’s making it and they’re selling it.” Erica nodded. “It’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
“And Father Michael wants you to give him all of this because…?”
“He’s going to confront Father Patrick,” Erica told him. “The reels from the Mary Magdalene rituals he wants so he can go to the Bishop with evidence. The others?” Erica shrugged. “Maybe just a little more incentive, to get Father Patrick to turn himself in.”
“To the police? If your father was ever found out… Erica, it would be over for him. He’d go to jail.”
“No,” she disagreed. “We thought of that. Once all of this is gone from here, there’s no way to prove it was my father. It would be his word against Father Patrick’s. And once word of the rituals gets out, once people know Father Patrick fathered a daughter by his own sister and that she gave birth to a baby with a birth defect-a child who was raised in secret until he took a fancy to her too and decided to keep her like his pet sex slave in a hole in the basement under the church… and then got her pregnant. Twice…”
“Jeez when you put it like that.” Clay cringed. “So who was Father Patrick’s sister? You didn’t say. Where is she now?”
“Father Michael told me she’s a nun at Magdalene House. Sister Benedict.”
“Does she know he’s still doing it? All the Mary Magdalene ritual stuff, I mean?”
Erica nodded. “She sends the Magdalene girls to him. She sends them to the rituals on a bus.”
“You know this is crazy.” Clay sat on the bed. “Like, really, super crazy.”
“I know.” She smiled thinly. “I told you we were a couple of bananas short of a bunch. I’d understand if you wanted to go. No hard feelings. Really.”
“Are you kidding me?” Clay scoffed, standing and grabbing the box next to him on the bed. “Let’s get the car loaded up and drive this stuff over to Father Michael.”
Erica heard the phone ring and swore. “Stay here, I’ll be right back.”
“Will do,” Clay replied, sifting through the photographs he found on the bed. “I’m not going anywhere. Just gonna look through these nice pictures of… yowza!”
Erica laughed, going back through the darkroom, coming out under the loft and running to grab the phone before it stopped ringing.
“Hello?” she gasped.
“Hello, Erica, it’s Donald Highbrow calling.”
She nodded, still panting. “Hi there, Mr. Highbrow.”
“I was wondering if you might know how to track down one of the girls from Magdalene House. You did such a good job of finding Leah’s roommates…”
“Sure,” Erica said, grabbing a pen. “Give me the info.”
She wrote it down, slipping the paper into her pocket and reminding herself to ask Father Michael about it. Given the extensive nature of Gertie’s card catalog, it was pretty likely they would be able to find the girl Donald Highbrow was looking for without too much of a problem.
Erica stopped short at the door under the loft, realizing that in all of her candor, there was one thing she had missed telling Clay. She hadn’t revealed that his mother, Gertrude Louise Webber nee Phillips, had participated in the Mary Magdalene rituals as a “Mary,” that Clay’s mother could never have given birth to him, because she was sterile. Clay, like Erica, had been adopted.
She considered telling him, but she remembered what her mother had said, up in the loft on the morning of Leah’s wedding when she had asked if Susan had ever told Rob about her feelings for Father Patrick, and her mother had said, “There are some secrets a woman keeps for a lifetime.”
Erica knew this one was one of those.
She crept back in through the darkroom, sure she would find Clay looking through dirty pictures or even watching one of the blue movies, but instead he was sitting in the same spot on the bed, holding an old, faded and yellow article in his hands.
“What’s that?” she asked, looking over his shoulder and gasping when she saw the image of her father- Robert Nolan-wearing a Nazi uniform and doing the Hitler salute. “Oh my God, where did you find that? What is it?”
“It’s in German.” Clay surrendered the article when she put her hand out for it. “Do you read German?”
“No.” Erica held it up to the light. “What does this mean?”
“I don’t know.” Clay shrugged. “But if Nazis are involved, it can’t be anything good.”
“I’ll just keep it.” Erica folded up the clipping, putting it into her pocket with the information she was supposed to find out for Donald Highbrow.
“Are you going to ask him about it?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Well while you’re chatting, you might want to ask him about these,” Clay said, holding up a stack of pictures.
Erica took them, flipping through, her mind doubling back on itself as she looked at the pictures of her mother-mothers, plural, her real mother, Patty, and her adopted mother, Susan, in various sexual positions together in the photographs.
“I’m guessing from the look on your face that you didn’t know about those?”
Erica tossed them into the box, shaking her head. She was so tired of the lies, the pretending and hiding and keeping up appearances. But she was keeping secrets too, not telling Clay about his mother, about the fact that he was adopted, so how could she possibly judge?
Clay stood, putting his arms around her, pulling her close. He didn’t say anything, he just held her, and when Erica lifted her head to look into his eyes, she realized the words she’d repeated to him were true. She did love him. She had come to love him very much in a short amount of time. She knew it sounded impossible, but it had happened and it was true. Just like everything she had told him today, the post-coital horror story hidden in a fairy tale, had also happened and was also true.
There were some secrets you kept for a lifetime, and some stories you wished had never happened, and
