Page 36 of Sin With Me

Chapter9

Cameron

I climbed the oval staircase,turning left and up. The ominous echo of old brick underneath my soles made the hairs on my nape stand tall. The lightbulb on the next level flickered, and I focused on the shifting shadow of the steps ahead of me. I wasn’t one to get scared easily, but even I was having trouble keeping my cool. I wondered how many people had passed this way before me. I touched the railing at the side and felt old dust transfer to my palms.

When I finally reached the top, I felt like I was in another world, and behind the wooden door I’d find Sleeping Beauty. I twisted the metal key in its lock and pushed the door open. The smell of age-old wood and paper, moss and musk overpowered the room. Across the attic, daylight shone through a single window, casting its perfect hologram in the disturbeddust.

I didn’t have to venture far to realize the task ahead of me. As I stared at the lines of cabinets, stacks of boxes, and stray papers everywhere, I was afraid that I’d need more than two lifetimes to find this… grain of sand in the middle of the universe.

The sound of footsteps shook the living ghost out of me, and for a moment I thought I was seeing a ghost, but then the shadow of a familiarly beautiful silhouette pushed up into the attic. It looked like my sleeping beauty was coming upstairs.

“Father Cameron?” Her voice stirred something inside of me, and my mind immediately flew to this morning when I’d seen her standing in that kitchen, completely soaked.

“Up here,” I called out, and then blew a breath of air over my face. The heat in this attic was squeezing the sweat out of myback.

A moment later, she stepped through the door. Dressed in tight jeans and a similar white t-shirt to the one she’d lent me, Kate took my breathaway.

“You didn’t bring a flashlight?” I asked.

“No, but it looks like I should have. Did you find what you were lookingfor?”

“I’m just about to start, but I’m not really sure where the hell to start.”

She gasped.

“I’m sorry. It’s a joke. I didn’t mean real hell.” By the time I realized my choice of words, it was already too late. Kate was looking at me like she didn’t recognize me. She was looking at me as if I were a man, not a priest – and that was dangerous.

“Oh, I’m not that good at church jokes,” shesaid.

“Unless you have a tequila, right?”

“Now that one was funny.” She laughed and then crossed her arms over her chest, rubbing them. “I wish I could say I was here with no ulterior motive, but that would be alie.”

Ulterior motive?That sounded more like a temptation.

“There’s a lot of dust here. You’re going to get dirty,” I said. “What’s the ulterior motive?”

“I’ve never been afraid of a little dirt.” She pulled her hand across her cheek, drawing a long smudge as she did so. Kate must have touched the dusty railing on her way up. She couldn’t have realized how cute she looked at the moment. I put my hands on my hips and once more scanned the long rows of cupboards.

“I just found out that my mother used to live in Pace,” she said, surprising me by the comment.

“And you didn’t know this before?”

“My mother never talked about her past. She never talked about my childhood, either, and there’s no record of her in the office files.”

“Wait – so you’re not originally fromPace?”

“No, of coursenot.”

“Where are you from, then?” I already knew the answer from my brother, but I wanted to hear it from her. “And if you didn’t know this was your mother’s home town, why are you here? Sorry. That soundedrude.”

“It’s all right. When my mother fell ill she also lost 99.999 percent of her speech capabilities. The only thing she said was ‘Jack Pace.’ You wouldn’t happen to know a Jack in this town, would you? Because I’ve looked everywhere.”

I shook my head. In a matter of five minutes, Kate had managed to derail my mission to find a clue about where the Cortez family could have movedto.

“I just want to make her happy, you know. It must be important if she keeps repeating his name. Well, at first I thought it was a man by the name of Jack Pace, but I’ve pretty much covered all of the country searching for him, and I couldn’t find him. Thinking that maybe she was talking about a man by the name of Jack, from the town of Pace, that’s how I gothere.”

“That’s a pretty long shot.” I knew exactly what searching for someone felt like, but even I had a bigger lead on the woman we needed to find than Kate had on someone by the name ofJack.

---