Mortal Sin by Laurie Breton Page A

thoughts as he climbed into the car and popped out the Springsteen CD, replacing it with something less raucous, one of Dave Grusin’s mellow jazz albums. Sarah picked up the stack of flyers he’d left on the passenger seat and studied the top sheet.
    “Melissa did a good job with them,” he said.
    She glanced up, and her blue eyes softened. “I’m so sorry, Father,” she said. “Dragging you out this late at night. It’s not right for me to disrupt your life this way.”
    He backed out of her driveway and shifted the car into gear. “It’s all right. I don’t have much of a life, anyway.”
    As he drove down the darkened street, he was aware of her lengthy appraisal. “You look different in your civvies,” she said. “Less… “
    She trailed off, and he glanced down at the burgundy cable-knit sweater and jeans he’d worn instead of basic black. “Less what?”
    “I don’t know. Austere.”
    Austere
. That was the last word he would have used to describe himself. Father O’Rourke had been austere. Bishop Halloran was austere. They’d been cut from the same mold, the two of them, dour of face and bleak of spirit. Clancy

Donovan was anything but dour. “It’s not me,” he protested. “It’s the clothes.”
    “Yes,” she said. “I know.”
    How could she possibly know? He’d only just met her this morning. He glanced suspiciously at her, wondering what else she could see, but he knew better than to ask. Women were odd creatures, intuitive in ways men couldn’t begin to understand. Better he should simply accept her words at face value, and not question what lay beneath.
    Route 1A was calm at this time of night, and they were both silent, soft jazz flowing around and between them as they passed parking lots and oil tank farms, weathered hangars and fuel trucks and jets lined up twelve deep, waiting for permission to take off. “Lovely scenery,” she said dryly.
    “Isn’t it? Logan just keeps expanding, hacking away at East Boston a piece at a time.”
    He left the airport behind, stopped at the mouth of Sumner Tunnel to pay the toll, and then the tunnel swallowed them up. At this time of night, inbound traffic was light. He accelerated to cruising speed, heedless of the speed limit signs posted every quarter-mile. Like most natives, he considered them little more than a suggestion.
    They emerged from the tunnel into the turmoil that was the Big Dig. “Lord in heaven,” she said. “What a mess.”
    “I believe we’re now in year eleven of a five-year project, with a budget that ran into the red several billion dollars ago. You have to admire the people of Boston. We’re audacious, if nothing else. We leveled hills and filled swamps to hold up skyscrapers and boulevards and a high-speed highway. Now that we’ve recognized the monster we created, we’re excavating to bury the ugliness and the exhaust fumes underground.”
    “Now I know why I stay in Revere.”
    He paused for a red light. Beside him, a bright red BMW raced its engine. The light turned green and the BMW shot forward. He followed at a more sedate pace, maneuvering through the maze of crooked streets and centuries-old buildings that was downtown Boston. “The city’s not so bad,” he said. “It has its moments.”
    “I daresay this isn’t one of them.”
    He held back a smile. “Are you always this straightforward?”
    “Only since my last divorce. I made a pact with myself.”
    She leaned over the dashboard and raised her face to gaze up at the silver monolith that was Exchange Place, the slender column of her neck turned alabaster by the moonlight. She had the most exquisitely flawless skin he’d ever seen.
    “What kind of a pact?” he said, turning right onto State.
    “The day I divorced Remy, I told myself that for the rest of my life, I’d be brutally honest in all my relationships. Most especially my relationship with myself.”
    “You were dishonest with yourself?”
    “For six years, I lived with a man