Suzanne’s blush deepened but she couldn’t deny the truth of Sutherlin’s words. Her attraction to Father Stearns was still too fresh a wound to bother denying.
“Yes,” Suzanne admitted. “I’ve seen him.”
Sutherlin raised her eyebrow, obviously hearing the deeper truth to the words. She smiled again, uncrossed her arms and sat on the arm of the pew.
“I said one question and that’s exactly what I mean, Ms. Kanter. You can ask me one question—” Sutherlin held up a single finger “—and I’ll answer it. Truthfully. Without subterfuge or disingenuousness. I will tell you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to whatever one question you ask me.”
Suzanne’s eyes went wide.
“Next you’re going to tell me I won the lottery,” she said, scarcely believing her ears.
“Only the truth lottery. But this prize comes with a price. I’ll answer your question, but the answer will be off the record. And you can use nothing I tell you to hurt him. And you can take nothing that I tell you to find out more. If a single word of mine appears in print, I will have Kingsley destroy your career so thoroughly you won’t even get a job as a weathergirl like your old professor suggested. Do you understand that?”
Swallowing hard, Suzanne nodded. She heard the threat in Sutherlin’s voice and knew she meant every word. That she even knew about her old prof suggesting she become a weathergirl was a sign this woman’s world was not one Suzanne needed to linger inside a moment longer than necessary.
“Also, once I give your answer,” Sutherlin continued, “you will leave me, Kingsley and Søren alone. We will cease to exist to you. You will banish us from your thoughts, your memory, your conversation and your vocabulary. Can you accept that?”
She couldn’t imagine completely banishing Father Stearns from her memory. Her body still tingled when she thought of his hands on her arms. But she would try. For the sake of the truth, the whole truth, she would try.
“Okay. I accept. I’ll be going to Iraq soon anyway. Time I moved on.”
“Yes,” Sutherlin said. “It is. Now ask your question, and we can all move on.”
Suzanne didn’t have to pause even one moment to think of her question.
“Are you and Father Stearns sleeping together?”
If she’d thought such an inquiry would faze Sutherlin, Suzanne was highly disappointed.
Sutherlin looked neither shocked nor scared at the question. She leveled her dark green eyes onto Suzanne’s face.
“You really want to waste your one question on something you already know the answer to?” Sutherlin asked.
Suzanne’s stomach fell a few inches. She’d hoped…believed…at least wanted to believe… But it didn’t matter. Sutherlin had been a virgin even at age nineteen. Whenever she and her priest had become lovers, she’d been at least a legal adult.
“No, I suppose not.” Suzanne sighed heavily. “How about this? The conflict of interest that’s on that anonymous tip someone sent me—what is it? Is it his sister Elizabeth? She practically confessed to killing their father.”
“She did kill their father, and she did confess to Søren. And Søren refused to reveal her confession. I overheard it at the funeral. And he’s been worried for seventeen years that Elizabeth would find out I heard. But no, that’s not the conflict of interest the church is worried about.”
“Then what is it?”
“Søren’s father was a very wealthy man when he died. He got half his wife’s fortune in the divorce and with his ruthless business acumen, he’d trebled it by the time he died. And when he died, he left every single penny to his only son. Nearly half a billion dollars.”
Suzanne gasped. “But…his father had sent him away after what happened with Elizabeth. Nearly killed him.”
“True. But when his father had no more sons and had no relationship with either daughter, he had a change of…whatever he had in his chest in place of a heart. But the money wasn’t a peace offering. It was a bribe. Priests take vows of poverty. To accept all that money, Søren would have had to leave the priesthood. For nothing and for no one will he ever leave the priesthood.”
“So what did he do?”
Sutherlin grinned.
“What any good priest would do. He tithed. He gave ten percent of the money to the church. Five percent to his old Catholic school in Maine. And five percent to this diocese. The rest he split in half and gave to each sister. He kept not a single cent for himself.”
Suzanne covered her mouth with her hand and turned away. In her head she quickly crunched the numbers. Five percent of five hundred million dollars was…
“Twenty-five million dollars,” Suzanne breathed. She turned back around. “He gave that to this diocese?”
“He did. You know how it works. Parish priests get transferred all the time. Yet Søren’s been here for almost twenty years. How does he get such an exemption? He bought it.”
“I wondered why they hadn’t moved him around, moved him up the ladder.”
“He likes it here.”
He likes his privacy, Suzanne realized.
“What would you call giving a promotion to a man who’d donated twenty-five million dollars to your corporation?” Sutherlin asked.
“A conflict of interest,” Suzanne whispered. “I’d thought…I thought he might be a predator. Or, you know, because…with you he had…”