It was a small silver key, and I squatted to pick it up. It seemed to have fallen off the top of the wardrobe, and I knew without asking that Jennie must have exerted as much energy as she could gather to move it.

“It opens the drawer,” Jennie told me as I held the key up to inspect it more closely. A drawer made sense; the key was too small for a door’s lock. “Top drawer on the larger desk.”

Of the two desks in the room, the one on the left was slightly larger than the one on the right. FATHER JAMES G. FAHEY was etched into a triangular glass nameplate on that desk, and I nodded in its direction. “Jennie says this key opens the top drawer.”

Trey stepped aside to allow me to pass, and the key fit into the lock on the top drawer perfectly. I pulled the drawer open to discover an orderly arrangement of office supplies: paper clips, a box of staples, a stack of business cards… and a small red spiral notebook.

“This,” I said, lifting the notebook for Trey and Violet to see. I didn’t need Jennie to tell me that the notebook was what we’d hoped to find. When I lifted the card-stock cover, I found each lined page to contain a name, a dollar amount, and a note about a request or issue. Some of the notes were more cryptic than others, but all were written in Father Fahey’s distinctive all-caps handwriting.

LINDSTROM, $50, MOTHER.

CORTESI, $100, MARRIAGE.

DEMILO, $75, CROP.

As I ran my finger over Father Fahey’s handwriting on each page, Jennie showed me a flash of an image detailing why each person had sought the priest’s help, kind of like little movies running behind my eyes. I saw an elderly woman lying in a hospital bed with a scarf wrapped around her head and knew that Marie Lindstrom had asked Father Fahey to cast a spell to allow her ailing mother to pass away peacefully after a long battle with cancer. When I turned to the next page, Jennie showed me a middle-aged woman holding up her husband’s cell phone and reading his text messages with a horrified expression on her face; Jody Cortesi had reason to believe her husband was cheating on her and asked Father Fahey to end the affair in an effort to save her marriage. And then I saw Stephani deMilo’s dad riding a tractor across a field of soybeans in the hot summer sun, and understood instantly that Stephani’s family had been in danger of losing their enormous farm because of dwindling crops each fall.

On page after page, Jennie showed me familiar faces from around town dealing with heartbreak, financial problems, grief, loneliness, and unrequited love.

“What does it say?” Trey asked me.

I turned to face him and Violet. “This seems to be like a record of requests for help and the amounts of money that Father Fahey charged,” I said. I handed the notebook to him so he could take a look for himself.