Part 28 (1/2)

Chapter 101.

”And it's no nay never, no nay never no more!” Seamus sang as he played the accordion in the living room after the turkey was demolished. Turkeys, to be exact.

”How do you like Irish Thanksgiving?” I said to Mr. Peters as I was stacking cleaned plates from the dining room table. ”We also do an Irish Halloween, and even, impossibly, an Irish Fourth of July. Because nothing enhances a fireworks display like green beer and a hearty jig.”

”I like it just fine,” Mr. Peters said, laughing and looking like he was ready for a long tryptophan nap. ”That gravy Mary Catherine made was divine. And those biscuits”-the Southerner winked-”rivaled my own mama's.”

I smiled as I headed into the kitchen.

Mary Catherine had insisted we do Thanksgiving early, for Marvin and his uncle, who were just settling into their new place. I dropped off the china next to Mary Catherine, who was rinsing a platter in the sink.

I stood there looking at her for a second. She'd put her hair up, and she was smiling to herself about something-a memory, maybe a joke. She looked so incredibly beautiful and sweet as she stood there in her ap.r.o.n that I felt a physical pulse, an almost electric shock of happiness, pa.s.s through me.

It suddenly dawned on me then, like a name that's been on the tip of your tongue.

I knew that I loved her and only her, and that I would never want anyone else but her for the rest of my days.

”Yes, Michael?” she said, suddenly hitting me with her blue smiling eyes. ”You look like you want to say something.”

”I, eh, uh...” I said, smiling, stalling, blus.h.i.+ng.

”You eh, uh, what?” she said, turning, now face-to-face with me, pinning me with those eyes.

”I, um, brought you my plate,” I said, pointing at the counter.

”So you did. So you did. A fine plate it is, too.”

I hugged her then. Fell into the nape of her neck. Never wanted to stop falling.

”You had my plate at h.e.l.lo, my Irish beauty,” I whispered in her ear. ”Cross my plate and hope to die.”

St. Peter's Square, Rome.

White smoke signals that a new pope has been chosen.

Is it possible that the new pope...is a woman?.

For an excerpt, turn the page.

PROLOGUE.

Twenty Years From Now.

One.

Vatican City.

THE STORY had begun deep inside the Vatican, had leaked out into the city of Rome, and within days had whipped around the globe with the momentum of a biblical prophecy. If true, it would transform not only the Roman Catholic Church but all of Christianity, and possibly history.

Today was Easter Sunday. The sun was bright, almost blinding, as it glanced off the ancient and sacred buildings of Vatican City.

A tall, dark-haired man stood between towering statues on the colonnade, the overlook above St. Peter's Square. He wore Ray-Bans under the bill of his cap, a casual blue jacket, a denim s.h.i.+rt, workaday jeans, and combat boots. The press corps milled and chatted behind him, but writer Zachary Graham was transfixed by the hundreds of thousands of people packed together in the square below like one enormous single-cell organism.

The sight both moved him and made him sick with worry. Terrifying, unprecedented events were happening around the world: famines and floods and violent weather patterns, compounded by wars and other untethered forms of human destruction.

The New York Times had flown Graham to Rome to cover Easter in the Vatican and what might be the last days in the life of an aging Pope Gregory XVII. The pope was a kind and pious man, beloved everywhere, but since Graham's arrival in Rome four days ago, he had seen the sadness over the pope's imminent pa.s.sing and, not long after, his death eclipsed by a provocative rumor, which if true would be not just the turning point in one of the world's great religions and the explosion of a media bomb, but, to Zachary Graham, a deeply personal event.

Graham had been born in Minnesota forty-five years before. He was the eldest son of a middle school teacher and a Baptist minister. He was no fan of organized religion, but he was fair-minded. He was a brilliant writer, highly respected by his peers, and clearly the right person for this job-which was why the Times, still the preeminent news machine of the twenty-first century, had sent him.

Now, as he stood in the shadows of Bernini's ma.s.sive statuary, watching the crowd show signs of panic, Graham knew it was time to go to ground.

He walked twenty yards along the overlook, stopping at the small, cagelike lift. Other reporters followed him, cramming themselves into the rickety elevator. The doors screeched shut. Graham pressed the Down b.u.t.ton, and the car jiggled and lurched toward the plaza below.

From there, Graham walked north through the colonnade, the harsh light throwing contrasting blocks of sharp shadow onto the worn stones. Moving quickly, he exited through the s.h.i.+fting crowd in St. Peter's Square and headed toward an alley off Via della Conciliazione, where the mobile production trucks were behind barricades, tightly parked in a b.u.mper-to-b.u.mper scrum.

Graham flashed his credentials to get through security, then opened one of the rear doors of a white panel van.

He peered over a sound man's shoulder at the large monitor and read so many expressions on the faces in the crowd: fear, desperation, and fervent hope that the new pope would bring much-needed change.

From the election of the very first ”vicar of Christ” to the current Holy See, the pope had always been G.o.d's representative on earth-a man. Could it be true that Gregory's successor would be a woman? The provocative, unsettling story that had once been just a whisper was taking on more certainty by the moment: the next pope would be an American lay priest by the name of Brigid Fitzgerald.

The possibility of a woman pope was extraordinary, astounding, and if it happened, the consequences would be profound.

Zachary Graham had done his homework.

Legend has it that in the year AD 855, a woman who had disguised herself as a man was elected pope. Three years later, while in a processional through Rome, this pope had gone into labor and given birth. She was immediately tied to the tail of a horse, dragged through the streets to her death. Her baby was also murdered, and the two of them were buried beneath the street where they died.

Given the absence of physical artifacts, this story had been officially dismissed by the Catholic Church as a Protestant story concocted to embarra.s.s the Church and the Papacy. Yet there were etchings of Pope Joan and footnotes in a hundred ancient, illuminated ma.n.u.scripts. There was even a small, disfigured shrine to Pope Joan on a small street not far from St. Peter's Square.

This old story troubled Graham's soul. It was why he was afraid for Brigid when people spoke of her as ”miraculous,” and why for so long he had been unable to find satisfaction or love or even sleep.

Graham took a chair in front of the screen displaying those rapt, excited, tormented faces and carefully considered his options.

Should he wait, observe, and report the facts that were unfolding before him? Should he do his job? Or should he commit journalism's greatest sin by interfering in this true epic drama? If he did that, he might very well change the outcome.