Chapter 25: The Vestry Door

We went to Saint Lucia at midnight, the three of us, in Luca's car with the lights off for the last block.

Carla sat in the back with her hands tucked under her arms.

She had asked to come.

I had said yes before Luca could say no.

The church stood dark behind its iron fence, with the steps swept clean and the festival banners already hung from the porch.

Carla still had her old key to the side gate.

It turned.

"Mother had the locks changed on the house," she said. "She forgot the church. It's not hers."

"Whose is it?"

"The priest's. He has gone to bed at nine for thirty years."

We went in through the sacristy and along the dark side aisle.

The candles by the altar had burned down to stubs.

Luca walked a step ahead of me, and he made no sound on the stone.

I noticed it, and I filed it away for later.

The vestry door stood behind the altar, a plain oak door in the panelling.

Luca tried the handle, and then he crouched and looked at the lock with his phone light cupped in his palm.

"New," he said. "The brass is still bright. Somebody fitted it this week."

"Cesare has the key."

"Yes."

"And the old key?"

Carla held it up, and Luca took it from her and tried it, and it did not fit.

"Then we don't go in that way," he said.

"We don't need to," Carla said.

She walked to the far end of the altar rail and lifted a loose board in the floor.

Under it lay a flat tin box of the kind that held communion wafers.

"Mother keeps the festival register here," she said. "She has since I was ten. She thinks nobody knows."

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