“I guess we should get started,” he said, glancing around the room. “But I only have one pair of gloves with me, so I better do the digging. You can tell me if I—”

“I got this.” Nora rummaged through her handbag. She snapped on a pair of disposable, powder-free latex gloves. “I have my own.”

“Do I want to—”

“No, you don’t want to know.”

“All right then. What room do you want? Sitting room or bedroom?”

“Bedroom,” she said.

“Thank God,” Cyrus said.

He thought Nora would smile or laugh. She didn’t.

Cyrus started in on the sitting room, while Nora worked silently in the bedroom. He found nothing in the sofa but loose change and a pair of fingernail clippers. He had better luck with the coat closet. There was a shoebox on the top shelf full of old credit card bills.

He went through a few of them. The charges appeared benign. Gas, restaurants, Amazon. But Cyrus knew better—he’d seen it in the river in his mind. Father Ike had a secret, and keeping secrets costs money.

He carried the shoebox into the bedroom. Nora was sitting on the floor, her back to the bed, a Bible in her hands.

“Nora?”

She looked up at him, tears on her face. “Sorry,” she said, hastily wiping them away.

Although he was wearing a suit, Cyrus sat down on the dusty floor across from her. “What’s wrong?”

She closed her eyes, then took a breath before looking at him. “It just hit me what we’re doing. A priest died, and these are all his private things. We’re going through them like…like we can. Because he doesn’t have any family here.”

“This is the job.”

“Father Ike keeps private notes in his Bible.” She opened the Bible. It filled with scraps of paper. “Søren does, too. That’s why I got Father Ike’s Bible out when I saw it. Because I’ve found all kinds of secret stuff in Søren’s Bible.”

Cyrus waited. He could tell she had something to say to him. He’d been with enough women in his life to see that look in her eyes. He waited.

“I need to tell you something about Søren,” she said. “If I can trust you. Can I?”

“I want you to,” he said. “But I can’t make you. All I can say is keeping secrets is part of my job. There’s a whole lot that happens in this town, and I’m the only person who knows it or is ever gonna know it.”

“You won’t tell Paulina?”

“She understands I have to keep secrets in my line of work.”

“Like a priest,” Nora said.

“Right. Like a priest.”

He waited. She waited. He looked at her. She looked away. Finally, she looked at him again.

“Søren…he’s a priest.”

Cyrus let that sink in. “You know what’s crazy? I’m not surprised.”

“You aren’t?”

“Jesuit?”

She nodded.

“I went to Jesuit school,” he said. “They’re some scary motherfuckers, Jesuits. Scary smart. Scary-scary.”

“They don’t scare me.”