Supernatural - Chapter 51: Money for Nothing (Patreon)

It was a little after nine on the evening of June 13, and a light was still burning in the basement of St. Agatha’s Church.

The annual summer festival was two days away. Upstairs, the parish hall was already crowded with folding tables, colorful bunting, and boxes of paper cups that nobody had opened yet.

Several tents had gone up on the back lawn that afternoon. Tomorrow, the volunteers would still have grills, cases of beer, and bingo supplies to haul outside. After a long day of preparations, nearly everyone had gone home. Only one person remained downstairs.

Tom Kelly was handling the festival accounts. He had volunteered at the church for more than ten years and had managed donations and expenses for the last several. Anyone asked would have called him trustworthy. Money placed in Tom’s care had never gone missing.

Not as far as anyone knew, anyway.

Tom finished counting the day’s cash, took two bills from the pile, folded them with practiced ease, and slipped them into his wallet. Then he lowered the total in the ledger.

He had been doing it for months. Ten dollars here, twenty there, sometimes a little more. The festival accounts were messy to begin with, full of small change, donations, and last-minute purchases. Spread the thefts out, and no one would notice a thing.

He closed the book, tucked the remaining money into an envelope, and reached to lock it away. A faint noise came from the far end of the basement.

Clink.

Something metallic had struck the floor.

Tom stopped and looked toward the sound. The basement wasn't large, but shelving occupied most of it, piled with old Christmas decorations, folding chairs, and the leftovers of festivals past. He had made sure he was alone when he came down.

He listened for a few seconds. Nothing else moved, so he returned to the cabinet. His fingers had barely reached its door when the noise came again.

Clink.

Much closer this time.

A coin emerged from beneath one of the shelves and rolled over the tiles toward him. It wobbled at his feet before falling flat.

Frowning, Tom bent to retrieve it.

Oxidation had darkened the coin almost to black, and its rim was badly worn. It looked older than he was. He was bringing it closer to check the date when the overhead light went out.

Darkness swallowed the basement.

Tom flinched so badly he nearly dropped the coin.

He straightened and began feeling his way toward the wall. Before he could reach it, a quiet noise came from behind the shelves at the very back.

A soft rustle.

Like somebody slowly turning pages.

“Who's there?”

His voice sounded unnaturally loud in the basement.

Nobody answered from behind the shelves. The rustling stopped, though.

Unease crept over him. Keeping a tight grip on his wallet, Tom felt his way toward the backup switch, relying on his memory of the room. He managed two steps before the fluorescent lights blinked back on.

He squinted against the sudden harsh glare.

When he could see again, he stopped dead.

A woman stood in front of the shelving.

She wore a pale dress in a style that belonged in a decades-old photograph. Her hair was arranged in neat curls, but her skin had the gray-white cast of a corpse.

She didn't move. Her gaze stayed on the wallet in his hand.

Tom's mind went utterly blank. He couldn't even remember to back away.

At last, the woman raised her eyes.

“That isn't yours.”

Frosty breath escaped Tom's mouth. He turned and ran.

He all but threw himself toward the basement exit. Just before he could touch the handle, the door slammed in his face with a crash that seemed to shake the entire room.

The following morning, the priest opening the church found Tom Kelly dead in the basement.

The police eventually called it an accident. There was no sign of forced entry and no evidence that anyone else had been there. A severe wound on the back of Tom's head suggested that he had fallen and struck the stone wall.

One detail, however, defied explanation.

Old coins were scattered all around his body.

-

By the middle of June, Murphy could manage the stairs almost normally again.

Her right shoulder still didn't have its full range of motion, and her ribs occasionally reminded her not to get too comfortable. Even so, the injuries barely interfered with everyday life anymore.

At her latest checkup, the doctor had said she could gradually become more active. There was one firm restriction: no strenuous exercise.

Murphy had accepted that readily enough. She had other ways to entertain herself these days.

404 had uploaded four gaming videos already. The views weren't impressive, but a handful of familiar usernames were beginning to show up repeatedly in the comments.

Some viewers complained that she talked too much trash while playing. Others came precisely to hear her commentary. Murphy was equally unbothered by both groups and uploaded whenever the mood struck.

On the morning of June 14, she had just finished reading a comment when Sam, sitting across the breakfast table, turned his laptop toward the others.

“Take a look at this.”

Dean, still eating, leaned forward to glance at the screen.

Someone had died the previous night in a little town in southwestern Minnesota. A volunteer responsible for the accounts at a Catholic church preparing for its summer festival had been found dead in the basement. The police's initial theory was that he'd fallen accidentally and hit a stone wall.

“Sounds normal enough,” Dean said.

Sam scrolled farther down.

The crime-scene photographs hadn't been released, but the article mentioned one peculiar detail. More than twenty old coins had been found around the body, and even the newest dated back to the 1950s.

The basement door had also been locked from the inside.

Dean's chewing slowed.

“Okay. That's a little less normal.”

The town was only a few hours away. The three of them checked the local records again and found no recent deaths resembling this one. St. Agatha's, on the other hand, had stood for over eighty years, plenty of time to collect the sort of history they might be interested in.

By the end of breakfast, they'd agreed to investigate. Murphy was coming too.

Nobody tried to stop her this time. She promised not to join a head-on fight, Dean checked that she had her pain medication, and Sam passed her some of the material on the church.

Murphy spent the drive reading through St. Agatha's records in the back seat and researching the dates of the old coins.

Dean drove while Sam occasionally turned from the passenger seat to compare notes with her. It was afternoon by the time they reached town.

They dropped their bags at a motel and changed into their disguises. When Murphy looked up from sorting her papers, Sam was standing nearby in a black shirt and a clerical collar.

She had to look twice.

The outfit really did suit him. His height made the dark shirt and collar look particularly crisp, and he'd even put gel in the long hair he normally left more or less alone. The longer she looked, the more convincing he seemed.

A joke that fit the occasion perfectly sprang into her head.

She cleared her throat and adopted a deliberately, absurdly sweet voice.

“I'm sorry, Daddy I've been a bad girl”

Sam froze with one hand at his cuff, staring at her in disbelief. Dean, who was checking their forged IDs nearby, jerked his head up as if he'd been startled too.

Silence held the room for two whole seconds.

Sam's expression became increasingly difficult to describe.

“Murphy...”

“Hmm?”

“You're supposed to say, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’”

Of course Murphy knew that.

She took in both their faces, tried to hold it together, and finally laughed. “I know.”

That only confused Sam more. “Then why would you say that?”

Explaining would require introducing internet culture from years in the future. Far too much trouble.

Murphy decided not to bother.

“Don't worry about it. You wouldn't get it.”

Sam plainly disliked that answer. He gathered his things and went to organize the paperwork on the other side of the room, looking distinctly irritated.

Dean, meanwhile, had understood a different implication. He didn't recognize the reference, but he was a perfectly ordinary adult American man. He knew what the words suggested.

And Murphy had been staring at Sam for several seconds before she said them.

Once Sam had his back turned, Dean edged closer and lowered his voice. “Didn't you spend a little too long looking at him?”

Murphy blinked. “Did I?”

“Yeah.”

“Because he looked good.” It was the simple truth, and it slipped out before she thought about it.

Dean went quiet.

Murphy studied his face. Two seconds later, understanding dawned, and she pressed her lips together to keep from laughing.

“Are you jealous?”

“No.”

His expression made an exceptionally poor case for that answer.

Murphy reached up to straighten the collar of his suit jacket and gave him a quick kiss. Dean was impersonating an investigator from the parish's insurance company today, not another priest.

“You look good too.”

That improved his mood somewhat.

“I know.”

Murphy stared at him in silence.

The man really had no shame about accepting a compliment.

-

St. Agatha's was even busier than the photographs had suggested.

When they arrived, preparations for the weekend festival were in full swing. Volunteers crowded the grounds, children ran in every direction, and the parish hall was full of people.

Passing through the back garden, Murphy noticed several men carrying cases of beer beneath a tent. She couldn't resist taking another look.

Dean followed her gaze. “What?”

“Church festivals can sell alcohol?”

“Why wouldn't they?”

Murphy considered that. Most of what she knew about American church events came from television, movies, and the internet. Apparently, she still had a lot to learn.

One look at her face told Dean she was discovering yet another unfamiliar aspect of America.

“Welcome to Minnesota.”

Their covers worked beautifully. With his hair tidied and his clerical outfit in place, Sam made a remarkably convincing priest.

Father Donnelly, the church's priest, was already in his sixties. Hearing that the diocese had sent them to look into the accident, he readily invited them into his office and had someone bring over the festival records Tom had recently managed.

Sam stayed to ask about the church's past and its basement. Dean went to examine the death scene, while Murphy remained in the office, discreetly going through the files.

Working separately was much quicker.

There was definitely something wrong with Tom's death. Blood marked the basement's stone wall where he'd struck it, but there was nothing nearby capable of sending a grown man flying that distance. The coins hadn't belonged to him either. According to the police, they'd been recovered from several different spots around the body.

More importantly, shortly before his death, Tom had taken an old batch of records out of the archive cabinet.

The festival committee had planned a small historical display this year, with photographs, programs, and ledgers from past decades. The oldest account book dated to 1958.

That date made Murphy pause over the papers in her hands.

That afternoon, the three headed to the town's public library.

Small-town news from fifty years earlier wasn't easy to find online, but the library had kept an extensive collection of old newspapers. They spent more than an hour searching separately before locating coverage of St. Agatha's festival in 1958.

Something had gone wrong that year as well.

When the festival ended, more than six hundred dollars couldn't be accounted for. Eleanor Walsh, the woman who kept the books, quickly became the prime suspect.

“Did they charge her?” Dean asked.

Sam turned another page. “They didn't have any evidence.”

In a town that small, though, a court didn't have to pass judgment for everyone else to do it.

Scattered stories in later editions filled in the rest. Eleanor had resigned from the church and moved out of town soon afterward. Three weeks later, she was involved in a car crash near another city.

She died at the scene.

Murphy laid the clippings side by side. The pattern was becoming obvious.

“If she believed the ledger ruined her life, it would make sense for her spirit to remain attached to it.”

Dean was still looking through the current year's accounts. “Then why start killing people fifty years later?”

Someone digging out the old ledger could explain Eleanor's sudden appearance, but not why she'd singled out Tom.

The answer turned out to be in Tom's own books.

Murphy compared the income against the deposits from the previous two months. Before long, she spotted several tiny discrepancies. Each was only a few dozen dollars, spread so widely that none looked suspicious on its own.

Tom had been stealing the festival money all along.

Sam studied the figures. “She was accused of stealing fifty years ago when she hadn't taken anything. Now she's finally found somebody who actually did.”

“Ghosts don't stay that reasonable forever.” Dean shut the file. “She's already killed once. She might not be so particular about her next victim.”

That evening, his warning came true.

Someone from the church called. Linda, the temporary volunteer who had taken over the accounts, had suddenly fainted in the parish hall. When she came around, she was terrified. She insisted a woman in an old-fashioned dress had been standing by the cash box.

The three of them hurried back.

Festival preparations had barely slowed. Most of the volunteers only knew that Linda had felt unwell. People continued moving supplies outside, and the long tables in the hall were already arranged with cakes and handmade goods for tomorrow's sale.

Murphy went to find Linda. Dean and Sam headed straight for the basement.

The 1958 ledger was now inside a glass case for the historical exhibition. Its cover was badly worn, and its pages were covered in Eleanor's handwriting. Since every appearance of the ghost seemed connected to the accounts, the book was almost certainly the object anchoring her spirit.

The instant Dean removed it, the lights upstairs began to flicker.

Murphy was walking Linda toward the exit when a sharp metallic sound rang out at the far end of the corridor.

A blackened coin rolled across the floor and stopped beside their feet.

Murphy grabbed Linda's arm. “Come on. Somewhere with people.”

Linda hadn't had time to understand when the glass along both sides of the corridor shattered in quick succession. A pale gray woman appeared ahead, staring fixedly at her.

Murphy snatched a handful of salt from her bag and flung it forward.

The ghost vanished as soon as the salt struck her.

Murphy had absolutely no intention of waiting around. She used those few seconds to pull Linda toward the parish hall. She'd promised not to fight the ghost directly, and she wasn't about to use her recovering ribs to find out how much force a fifty-year-old spirit could muster.

The noise upstairs soon reached the basement.

Dean glanced toward the ceiling. “Sam, hurry up!”

“I'm lighting it already!”

They salted the ledger, dropped it into a metal bucket, and set it alight. Flames raced over the yellowed paper.

When Eleanor appeared again, Dean was ready. He swung his iron bar straight at her. Her form dissolved, and in the bucket the fire had reached the last few pages.

As the final scrap curled into ash, the sound of coins rolling upstairs stopped completely.

The church fell silent once more.

The next day's festival went ahead as usual.

The people of St. Agatha's never learned what had truly happened the previous evening. All they knew was that an old ledger intended for the historical display had been destroyed in the confusion.

Fortunately, Sam had photographed several important pages before they burned it.

Before leaving town, he gave Father Donnelly the old articles about Eleanor, together with a correction published later that he had managed to find.

The missing six hundred dollars had, in fact, been accounted for in the end. The church had needed emergency boiler repairs that year, and the person responsible had taken the cash directly from the festival proceeds.

Unfortunately, the paperwork hadn't been filed until much later. By then, the whole town had already branded Eleanor a thief. Worse, the correction had appeared in a tiny corner of the newspaper, nowhere near as conspicuous as the original scandal.

Father Donnelly read everything and remained quiet for a long time.

Finally, he promised that the truth would be added to the parish records.

-

Murphy slept in the back seat on the drive home.

She'd barely been involved in a direct confrontation, yet her stamina was still well below what it had been before the injury. When she woke, they were nearing South Dakota and the brothers were arguing about music up front.

It was reassuringly familiar.

She listened for a little while, then closed her eyes again.

Go investigate a case, then come home. Lately, that rhythm had begun to feel perfectly natural.

A few days later, Dean went into Sam's study looking for some reference material he'd used before. On the desk, he noticed a book he didn't recognize.

Chinese for Beginners. A companion CD lay beside it.

“When did you start learning this?”

Sam glanced up from his notes. “Recently.”

Dean thumbed through a few pages. The book was already covered with annotations. Pinyin and tones were marked everywhere, and some pronunciations had clearly been practiced over and over. This was no passing whim.

He immediately thought of someone.

“Does Murphy know?”

“No.”

“Why haven't you told her?”

Sam looked back down and kept writing. “I'm not going to embarrass myself in front of her. I'll tell her once I can manage at least one decent sentence.”

Dean regarded him for a couple of seconds, returned the book to its place, and took the reference material he'd come for from the nearby shelf.

As Dean was about to leave, Sam called after him. “Dean.”

Dean turned around.

“Don't tell Murphy yet.”

Dean put on a show of considering the request. Just as Sam was starting to lose patience, he answered, “Of course. What kind of big brother do you take me for?”

After the door shut, Sam put his headphones on again and returned the CD recording to the beginning of the passage.

A woman's voice sounded again, slow and clear.

He repeated her pronunciation, frowned, and rewound the recording.

One more time.