Two
FATHER LEONARD ADDS three teaspoons of sugar to his tea when I set it in front of him. He seems calmer, but his red hair is all over the place, like he had continued running his fingers through it while I was out.
“Feel better?” I ask.
“How would you feel if you were in my position?” he replies. “I feel attacked. Assaulted. Betrayed.”
“Okay, all understandable. But I’m here to figure all this out. Now just calm down, take a deep breath, and let’s talk this over.”
He does what I ask. “All right. What do you need to know?”
I pull out my phone to take notes. “Why don’t we start at the beginning. When did you meet Rachel . . .”
“Watson,” he says. “Rachel Watson. I met her back in April, for the first time. Well, I should say that’s when I officially met her. She started attending Saint Clare’s just after Christmas.”
“Okay.”
“I noticed her at 10:30 a.m. Mass, I think on Epiphany Sunday it was.” He stops then adds quickly, “I don’t mean I noticed her-noticed her, like I took any special notice of her, more like I saw her and thought, ‘oh, someone new,’ not that I really thought of her then or later, I mean—”
“Father McCoy,” I say, holding my hand up. “Leonard, please, I'm not here to trap you. Just go on. So Epiphany was the first day you saw her.”
He nods. “It’s the first time I saw her at Saint Clare’s. I had not seen her here before.”
“When did you meet her?”
“Well, you know we needed to get a new parish secretary, after everything that happened,” he says. “Ms. Luckgold was wonderful, a valuable person. I asked—practically on my hands and knees—if she’d take the position permanently. But she declined. So we advertised.” He sighed. “We got two applicants. One was an old widow, a long-time parishioner, a solid person. The other was Rachel.”
“Why did you choose Rachel? It seems like an unusual thing for someone her age to apply for the job of parish secretary and housekeeper.”
“I thought so too when I first saw her resume—she was the only one to send a resume. The other woman just left a note in the offering basket. College degree in business management, experience in retail and customer service, quite over-qualified. But I interviewed her, anyway.”
“What was that like?”
His eyes brighten, and a slight smile appears on his lips. “Wonder—” He obviously catches himself. “Quite good,” he replies. “She was very impressive in the interview. She explained that she wanted to work in the parish because she was discerning a vocation.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Really? That’s good.”
“I thought so too. I thought it was a great deal for everyone. She told me she thought working at the parish would give her the opportunity to be closer to our Lord—more time to pray and attend Mass daily. Her current job was at the office park outside town, so she couldn’t make daily Mass and she wanted to adopt that discipline.”
“So you hired her, but of course she didn’t live here in the Rectory.”
“Oh, no, Father, no, she rents a townhouse in one of the recent developments on the edge of Myerton.”
“Have you been to her home?”
“What—oh, no, certainly not. I just know where she lives because I drove her home when her car was in the shop and I thought it was too late for a single woman to take an Uber.”
“She would work late?”
“Occasionally.”
“You’d spend time alone with her, here in the Rectory?”
“Yes, of course, she worked here after all. But nothing inappropriate ever happened.”
I look at my notes. “I haven’t seen the complaint, so I don’t know exactly what the accusation is.”
“The Archbishop sent it to me by email,” Father Leonard says, getting out of the chair. “I’ll go get it for you.” He leaves the living room and Anna darts in from the kitchen with a plate of sandwiches.
“I thought some food might help,” she whispers. “I’m not sure he’s eaten today.”
“Could you hear anything?” I ask, taking a sandwich off the plate.
“Oh, Tom, I wouldn’t listen to a private conversation.”
“I didn’t ask if you listened. I asked if you could hear anything?”
She hesitates. “These walls are kind of thin, Tom.”
I nod. “Any thoughts?”
She leans closer and whispers to me, “There’s more here than he’s saying.”
“Here,” Father Leonard says, brandishing a piece of paper as he returns from the office. “This is—oh, Anna! I forgot you were here. Sandwiches. Thank you. They look delicious.”
“I’ll leave you two,” Anna says. “The . . . kitchen floor needs mopping. I’ll just go do that.” She hurries from the room as Father Leonard resumes his seat.
“This is the allegation?” I say, taking the paper from him. It’s the printed scan of a handwritten document. “It wasn’t sent by email?”
“Apparently not,” Father Leonard says. “It arrived at the Archdiocesan Office late last week by regular mail. No return address, a Myerton postmark. It wasn’t signed. It’s a tissue of lies and slander!” He’s getting agitated again.
“Father Leonard, I very much want to find out the truth in this situation, and if you are as innocent as you say you are, then to prove that. But to do that, I need to see for myself what’s in this letter and I cannot do that with you blathering over me,” I say as I try to read the letter.
Only when I’ve read it through twice do I ask, “Is any of this true?”
Father Leonard shakes his head vigorously. “No. Not a jott. Not a tittle.”
I roll my eyes slightly. Why he insists on speaking like a character out of a Dickens novel, I don’t know. “So nothing in this is factual? Nothing at all?”
“Not a word of it.”
“But you told me you’d work late with her here at the Rectory and,” I look at the letter, “it says right here, ‘Father McCoy and Ms. Watson are often at the Rectory late at night alone.’ So this is true, isn’t it?”
“Well,” he sputters, “well, yes, I suppose if you put it a certain way, that is strictly accurate. But it’s the implication that’s incorrect.”
“I’m not seeing the implication, Father.”
“The person who wrote that,” Father Leonard explodes, “is clearly implying that Rachel and I are engaged in some kind of inappropriate behavior here late at night. The whole letter is like that, one unfounded accusation after another. Preposterous.” He plops in an armchair and brings his clenched fist down on the arm.
“The letter also says, ‘Father McCoy engages Ms. Watson in intimate conversations.’”
“I’ve offered her spiritual direction,” he barks. “She’s discerning her vocation. We’d pray together. She’d ask for guidance. I’d offer it as best I could.”
I look at Father Leonard. Slowly, he’s changing from frantic and anxious to visibly angry. I continue reading, “‘They’ve been seen dining alone together.’”
“We’ve had dinner a few times at The Bistro, the restaurant up the street,” he says. “People have to eat.”
“‘Several people saw them together at the parish Memorial Day picnic.’” I look at him.
His face turns red and sweat beads on his forehead. A look of panic passes across his face. He swallows and clears his throat. He clenches and unclenches his fist, rubbing it with his other hand. “That—” he squeaks, then clears his throat. “There were a lot of people at the picnic.”
“‘Father and Ms. Watson disappeared for about half an hour, then someone saw them engaged in deep conversation apart from the rest of the group. Father at one point kissed her.’”
“She had gotten something in her eye,” he explodes, standing up and beginning to pace again. “Rachel wanted to discuss something with me, so we went off a short way—a very short way, I could still see the games the children were playing—and sat together to get away from the noise. You know how noisy it is here, all the time, with all the children. We sat together under a tree. She got something in her eye, so I was trying to get it out. I got close to her face, you know, to see her eye.”
I regret how lame this excuse sounds. One the one hand, most people know that it's the oldest excuse in the book. A sophisticated man would never use it. But Father Leonard is anything but sophisticated, so it's just possible that that’s what actually happened. “What did you and she talk about?” I ask.
Father Leonard shakes his head. “No, I can’t tell you that. It’s under the Seal.”
The Seal of Confession. The shield that can be a sword. “In general, then,” I continue. “What did you and she discuss?”
He exhales. “She wanted to discuss her call to religious life. She was having doubts, and she talked to me about them.”
“Why at the picnic? Seems an odd place for spiritual direction.”
“It was my idea,” he says. “I noticed her looking distracted, somewhat upset. I asked her if anything was bothering her. She said there wasn’t, but I insisted we go off together to talk.”
“What did she tell you?”
Leonard shakes his head. “You know I can’t tell you that, Father. You must ask her.”
There’s a soft knock behind us. “Excuse me,” Anna says. “Father Leonard, you have sick calls this afternoon.”
“Oh! Oh my, I completely forgot,” he says. “I suppose I can’t do that now, can I, Father?”
I shrug. “I don’t see why not, Leonard,” I say. “The Archbishop said nothing to me about your visits or hearing confessions, just saying Mass. I’ll be glad to go in your place if you don’t feel up to it.”
“No,” he says, squaring his shoulders and straightening his collar. “No, thank you, Father. These scurrilous accusations have deprived me of saying Mass. I will not let them keep me from my flock. No, my mother always told me, ‘When people speak ill of you, go out among them with your head held high.’ If you’ll excuse me.” He starts out of the living room, then pauses.
“I was just trying to help Rachel,” Father Leonard says. “We became friends. I’ve never had that many. It’s difficult for me to make friends. Rachel, well, she and I are a lot alike.” He sighs. “It’s just nice to have someone who understands.”
“That’s all you are. Friends,” I say.
Father Leonard looks me in the eye. “Yes. Friends.”
***