Title: Caryatid.
Author: lannamichaels
Fandom: Wake Up Dead Man (2025)
Series: Part 2 of Pillar Of The Community
Rating: G
Archives: Archive Of Our Own, SquidgeWorld

Summary: "How did you know?" Jud asks Blanc.



"How did you know?" Jud asks Blanc dully. The paramedics have gotten Martha on the stretcher, three of them busy around her. Deep down, he's not sure if he hopes she survives or not. Even still, he's texted a friend back in Albany to contact a lawyer to meet Martha at the hospital. She didn't make that confession, with the police and Blanc watching, assuming she would survive to see repercussions.

"It didn't make any sense! All this repetition, this motif, this Eve's apple," Blanc emphasizes, as if insulted. "Oh, yes, this pious Catholic woman would replace a diamond with a cheap Jesus figurine she probably got for free, but that's a jewelry box, and a jewelry box has a jewel! Where did it go, and who would know that other than the owner of the box? And the statuette, that was new. Last 30 years, tops. Oh, that tosh she told you in your story, that's very good, the sort of thing to hook a young priest. 'Your inheritance is now Christ', primed to make you swallow every word of it. I bet you took a vow of poverty, too. But the box, Jud! The box! That yarn she spun you, the inheritance is in the jewelry box. But Jesus does not come in a Faberge box!"

"Oh," Jud says, inadequate.

"And she kept it in her office, in pride of place. As a trophy! Who could she have triumphed over, I asked myself. But then I said, no, that's not the question. The question is how did she get it. In all those stories she said, how did she get it, and why did she keep it? All these years, why was she still lugging it around, if there was nothing in it of any value? Why? It didn't make any sense. And then I thought again, hang on, what did she triumph over? Obviously it's the source of the box, that's the only valuable part of it, that's the keepsake. And then you told me the rest of it."

"I did?"

"There's no Grace Wicks buried in this parish," Blanc says. "She lied to you. No Grace Wicks born here either but anyone can move. A woman who lies about something that easily checked is telling you a story, not giving you a history. And so I swung by the records office and asked if I could see a birth record. They hemmed and they hawwed until I said I just wanted confirmation on the names of the parents. And wouldn't you know it, but Jefferson Wicks's parents are there. Both of them! Martha Wicks and Simon Delacroix. After that, it was easy. What could make a mother conspire to kill her own son? When it was this son, you might as well start counting reasons. The only question is why she waited so long."

"He didn't threaten her in Cy's video," Jud says.

"He didn't have to! The threat is explicit. He threatened to tell everyone's secret. What was hers? That she was his mother! She'd even married the baby daddy to shut them up, but that wasn't enough for her son. Why else would he spend so much time preaching against his dead mother who no one in that church had ever met? You said yourself Wicks wanted walk-outs. A walk-out is a confession! It tells everyone in the church that this is your sin. So, ask yourself, why spend so much time talking about his dead mother? Of course it's because she was in the room. He wanted her to embarrass herself. He wanted her to ruin herself, nothing to do with him. Just stand up, admit that she was ashamed, and leave. And be ruined in the eyes of everyone in the church. Just like all those poor souls she'd watched him do it to before, so she knew he'd do it. She'd watched her father walk the same path, so she knew he would escalate. That's why she murdered the old man, too."

Jud blinks. That hadn't been in Martha's confession. She just said she'd watched him -- oh.

"Yes, oh," Blanc says, reading Jud's expression. "That's the trophy! The old man had done something, gone too far. What better way to kill him? Her first Holy Murder, I'm sorry, her first Holy Miracle. The family had plenty of money left over after buying the diamond, so she could let it sit and rot for fifty years. Almost like an investment. And she probably planned to leave it there forever, a final fuck you to dear ol' dad."

"Until I--"

"Oh, you did nothing," Blanc says. "This urge you have to take credit for everyone else's sins, you've got to stop that right now. Martha told Wicks and then found out that Wicks -- logically enough -- wanted to get the diamond out of his grandfather's corpse. But that's not what she told him for. She told him to ease her burden of guilt, not for him to get rich. Of course, she would have let him get away with it if she didn't hate him so much. Guess you shouldn't keep calling your mother horrible things from the literal high ground."

"I also sat there through those walk-outs," Jud says.

Blanc pats him on the shoulder. "That you did," he says.

Blanc seems happy to finally have his chance to make his grandstanding reveal, his checkmate. And for all his bluster, Blanc had showed real kindness in letting Martha have a chance to come forward herself, even taking the hit on his reputation. How many cases might not come Blanc's way because of Cy's video of Blanc admitting he couldn't solve this murder? This murder that Jud doesn't know when he solved, only that he knew Martha was behind it all when Jud hadn't even thought it could be her.

Of course it couldn't be Martha. She was Martha, always busy, always capable, always dependable. She hated him but everyone in this church hated him; Jud isn't taking it personally right now, not after the sense he's now developed of how Wicks had created this whole situation, had set up these people in this way, had used them and used them and used them, and then made it clear to them that they were expendable and disposable.

Jud is, shamefully, still happy Wicks is dead, but he's not glad that anyone did it. There were other ways this could have gone. It didn't have to be like this. There didn't have to be three people dead and Martha most certainly going to jail for the rest of her life. All because of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks and what everyone -- what Jud -- had allowed to happen here.

He aches.

The paramedics seem to be about to load Martha into the ambulance.

"I need to go with her," Jud tells Blanc.

Blanc waves him off. "Yes, yes, go."

Jud climbs into the ambulance and sits where the paramedics say he can sit. He takes Martha's hand in his and tries to pray, but Blanc's words are reverberating in his mind. A trophy. She triumphed over her father and kept a trophy. She arranged for someone to murder her son to keep him from the diamond or to keep him from ruining her life. It could be neither, it could be both.

What could be the triumph in watching her father commit suicide? What did her father say to her, do to her? How much of the story of Grace Wicks was true?

Jud's eyes stray to the bulge in Martha's pocket where the diamond is hidden.

She knew where the diamond was. She could have taken it and disappeared, either taking her son with her or leaving him behind. When Martha killed her father, it couldn't have been about the diamond. If Blanc was right that the jewelry display box was a trophy, then it wasn't a trophy of a greed-crazed victory. It was something else. Greed would have had Grace Wicks robbing her father and disappearing, not killing her father and leaving behind the greatest part of the fortune. She hadn't wanted the diamond at all.

In all the stories Martha had told Jud about Father Prentice Wicks and his daughter Grace, it had always been about greed: Father Prentice keeping his daughter from living her life in service of the material, by robbing her of the family fortune. Jud's no detective but it seems clear to him: this wasn't about greed at all. If that wasn't what happened, what did?

But is it necessary for anyone to know about it? Probably not. That's Benoit Blanc talking, not Father Jud, not the man he is now.

Martha opens her eyes blearily.

"Why did you do it?" Jud blurts out immediately, but thankfully Martha doesn't seem to hear. Her gaze sweeps over the ambulance and she closes her eyes again.

Jud swallows hard. He hopes she can hear him. "I called you a lawyer, she'll meet us at the hospital." What else is there to say? He's not even sure she can hear him.

Tears gather at the corners of Martha's eyes and she starts crying.

Jud bends down over her and prays.