I banged a couple pots together, heard a couple yells. Dara jumped up, tried running, fell over cause she was still in her bag. Once she sat up, I was about to give her an earful when Father Julien put his hand on my shoulder, told me to calm down.
I had to leave the room and punch the wall outside. Hadn't been that angry in a while. It wasn't a sleepover, it was her job. All she had to do was stay up all night. Eventually, I calmed down. She was just a kid, still had a lot to learn.
When I came back in, Dara and Father Julien were sitting at the table looking at her laptop. There was some green and black video of the kitchen. I apologized, but told her she shoulda told me what was going on. Around three, someone tiptoed in. It was him, dressed in mismatched clothing. He grabbed a couple sandwiches from the counter and a bottle of water.
Rest of the video was pretty blank, until we got to me coming in and banging the pots. We watched it and laughed, but something seemed off. I asked Dara to rewind it. Me getting the pots, me banging them, a couple yells. Dara screamed, sure. Problem was, all I saw was a slight smile on Father Julien's face. His lips never opened.
I fired a blank at the ceiling. Dara went screaming out of the room. Father Julien curled in a ball, yelling. And a third scream from somewhere else came at the top of their lungs, out in the hallway.
I started going through the hall, tapping at the walls, listening for hollow points. Dara came back, yelling I lost my mind. I told her to stop screaming and to start tapping, there was someone hiding nearby.
We moved a cabinet out of the way to tap behind it. Took both of us to shove, and there was a dirty outline of plaster bits where it sat. No one moved it in a while. I looked up, there was a square shape and border, where it looked like a loose panel.
Father Julien came out twitching like a cat's whisker. I pointed up. We got the cabinet back in place. I pulled myself up, pulled out the panel, looked inside. Some sort of duct or hidden passage or something. I screamed down it, near blew my ears out. Told whoever it was he could come out now, or we'd smoke him out with the exterminators. He had five minutes.
After a while, I hear some banging, and he near fell over himself trying to get out of the duct. Same slob we saw on the video, dark hair, pale face, mismatched clothing. I guessed wrong, he couldn'ta been over 16. Turned out, Duke ran away from home a while back, but didn't have anywhere to go. He found the access door in the storeroom by accident. He was hiding out, popping out for food, living in the walls cause he couldn't go home.
Father Julien told Duke he'd stolen from the poor, ran away from home, defiled church property. I tried to get him to calm down, but he shrugged me off. Put the fear of God almighty in the kid, told him after he took him home, they were gonna go down to juvie, or Duke could spend the next year helping with outreach.
Kid wasn't a complete fool. He's still there right now, three times a week. One night I was down that way, paid him a visit. Me, him and Father Julien shared a couple laughs over some stew.
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