The Judas Child by Carol O'Connell Read Free Book Online Page A

personality. Some people had thought him very handsome, she remembered that much, but there had been nothing else to distinguish him. He had been such an ordinary man, uninspired in his sermons and merely adequate as a choirmaster.
    But the children loved him.
    Ellen’s hands flew up to cover her burning face, as if this thought had been spoken aloud—as though she had just told an obscene joke in church.

three
    “I like it.” The appreciation seemed genuine as he admired her jagged scar and the twisted mouth of bright red.
    Ali Cray remembered this priest as a tall man, but slight, almost delicate. The aesthetic’s face had been paler then, ethereal, framed by dark hair and black vestment. When she was ten years old and Paul Marie was in his early twenties, his large, lustrous brown eyes had peered out from a portrait of Lord Byron on a dog-eared page of her poetry text.
    Fifteen years older now, the bound man on the other side of the table was well muscled; broad shoulders strained at the seams of his blue denim shirt; and there was a hardness to his face. The chains on his hands and feet did nothing to diminish him, but made him seem even more powerful, held in check only by his manacles. He filled the whole room with his presence.
    Ali Cray felt her own personality being crowded up against the wall when he looked at her. Gone were the poet’s eyes; Good night, Byron.
    Lowering her head, she stared at the pages on her clipboard, though she knew each line of print by heart. Her gaze drifted across the table to the jailhouse tattoos on his hands. It was a common trait of the convict, this mutilation of the flesh with pinpricks and ink to while away the days. But his were not typical markings. On the back of the right hand was an S , and on his left was an E; both were wrought in the style of ornate capitals from illuminated manuscripts.
    She looked up at his face, his faint smile.
    “The letters stand for sin eater, ” he said. “A euphemism for sucking on penises. I was forced to do a lot of that while I was in the general prison population.”
    “In this prison, all sex offenders are segregated,” she said, as though she had caught him in a lie.
    “A clerical error—according to the warden. My paperwork was fouled up.”
    Not likely. She knew that someone would have to use influence or quite a bit of money for a mistake of that magnitude; it was nearly a death sentence for a child molester. Susan’s father could have arranged it. When Bradly Kendall was alive, he had had the necessary political connections and wealth. “But your lawyer would have—”
    “He never believed I was innocent. That’s why the little bastard dragged his feet for two years.” Paul Marie shrugged, as though this gross betrayal really mattered very little to him. “The lawyer knew what was being done to me. I think it fit his own sense of rough justice.”
    “I gather the Church believed in you. You were never defrocked.”
    The prisoner leaned forward, and Ali leaned back.
    “The Church has a shortage of priests. I wouldn’t be released from my vows for murdering a little girl. It’s not as if I advocated birth control.”
    Ali looked down at her clipboard again and made a quick note at the bottom of one sheet. She didn’t look at him when she asked, “Did you go on functioning as a priest?”
    “Yes—those first two years. I heard confessions and meted out penance.”
    Paul Marie’s voice had lost all the gentle tones. She couldn’t take much more of this changeling phenomenon. It was like a little death.
    He went on in this voice of a stranger, “There was a man who made a point of saying, ‘Father, forgive me,’ each time I was raped. One day, I beat the crap out of him with a lead pipe. And then I forgave him. The pipe scrambled his brains, so he no longer remembers what I forgave him for. But I did keep the sacraments. Though I had to improvise on the penance. One Hail Mary equals a broken nose. Three Our