Part 4 (2/2)

”We're almost through here. Ask him to wait.” She put down the phone and said to me, ”If you don't want to do it, I'll find someone else. Any other photographer would kill to be in your position. And I don't want Yasmin to know, either. Or Victor. This conversation needs to stay between us.”

Gloves off. Now I knew why she was so good at her job as her party's whip.

”I'll have to think about it,” I said.

”Fine. You have until five o'clock, when we're supposed to meet at the monastery. If you change your mind between now and then, let me know. I'll need to start looking for another photographer right away.” She paused and gave me a halfhearted smile. ”I certainly hope it won't come to that.”

I stood up. ”I'll let you know. And I can see myself out. Good afternoon, Senator.”

Before she could reply or buzz her secretary to escort me out and admit her waiting two o'clock, I walked over to her private door, which led directly to the outside corridor.

”You need to use the other door-” she said.

I had no intention of waiting to be escorted out by the secretary and I didn't hear the forbidden door click shut behind me until I pa.s.sed Ursula's state flag at the entrance to her suite of offices. This time I took the spiral staircase with its winding bronze bal.u.s.trade. When I reached the first floor, I was as breathless with anger as I'd been a few minutes ago in her office.

By the time I walked outside, it was ten past two. I had fewer than three hours to simmer down and decide what I was going to do.

I reached in my jacket pocket for my phone, ready to call Ursula and tell her she could find another photographer. But it was the wrong pocket and my fingers closed around the little key I'd found this morning by the j.a.panese lantern. I thought of Victor and the sweet letter he had written me, asking if I would do him and Yasmin the honor of photographing their wedding. Could I really face him and tell him I had changed my mind?

Whatever I decided to do about Ursula's ultimatum, I had to stop by the monastery anyway. I had promised Kevin I would take pictures of the community garden and I needed to ask him if he'd lost this key. It was too early to drive over there now. Kevin was probably still busy with the children from Brookland Elementary. Between the meetings with Olivia and Ursula I had forgotten about lunch, and right now I was famished.

I dropped the key in my pocket and walked down 1st Street past the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress on my left and the Capitol on my right until I got to Pennsylvania Avenue. A few blocks later, I slid into a booth at the Tune Inn, the scruffy, beloved bar that was one of the Avenue's oldest Hill hangouts, ordered a beer and a burger, and tried to forget about Ursula Gilberti. There was a sports program on the television over the bar, alternating between highlights of March Madness and ice hockey, while Willie Nelson, Brad Paisley, and the rest of them sang the old rip-your-heart-out country songs from the jukebox. I ate and drank and listened to them croon about lost love and women who were trouble and the tantalizing freedom of getting in your truck and leaving it all behind.

I thought about ordering another beer and just spending the rest of the afternoon at the Tune until whenever I felt like leaving, but I'm not that kind of girl. I paid the waitress and told her to keep the change, which was almost as much as the bill. Then I walked back to my car and drove to Brookland and the Franciscan Monastery.

It was time to face my own music.

The parking lot across the street from the monastery was deserted when I pulled in shortly before four, even though the gardens and the church were still open to the public. The Byzantine-style Church of Mount St. Sepulchre, built to resemble the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, always looked to me as if it had been plucked from the midst of the real Holy Land, where it had stood in the shadow of a sacred Catholic shrine, and set down in this working-cla.s.s neighborhood of Craftsman bungalows and wood-framed houses the way Dorothy's house had landed in Oz. The inlaid gold-and-red Jerusalem Cross, the symbol of the Franciscans since the Crusades, and the gold cupola on top of the dome gleamed in the dull late-afternoon light. I walked through the arched entrance to the Rosary Portico, the cloistered walkway that surrounded the monastery on three sides.

In a few weeks the formal garden beds on these grounds would be filled with hundreds of blooming roses and flowering annuals. Now they were mostly bare patches of earth except for bright yellow and orange pansies around the statues of St. Francis, St. Christopher, and the monastery's Franciscan founder, G.o.dfrey Schilling.

Kevin was either in his room in the friary or somewhere on the grounds. The quickest way to find out was to ask the guard who sat in the small anteroom connecting the residence and the church. But when I checked with him, he seemed surprised.

”I haven't seen Brother Kevin all afternoon,” he said. ”I don't believe he's here.”

”He was supposed to meet the children from Brookland Elementary at the community garden at two o'clock,” I said.

The man shook his head. ”That was canceled because it was raining.”

”I saw his car parked on the street just now. He has to be here.”

”Then try the Valley Shrines in the lower garden,” he said. ”I just came from the church and he wasn't there. He also might be praying at the outdoor Stations of the Cross since it's Lent.”

I thanked him and walked through the portico with its multicolored columns and small chapels with mosaics commemorating the mysteries of the rosary. A sign marked the entrance to the lower gardens halfway down the walkway, and a series of blacktop ramps zigzagged down to several flights of stairs that ended in what looked like a large park. From down here the monastery was nearly invisible, hidden by towering evergreens and ancient magnolias, a tangle of brush and vines and high stone walls.

The formal part of the garden was dominated by a replica of the grotto at Lourdes, a place where the faithful believed the Virgin Mary appeared to a young peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous, and that the waters of a spring located on that spot possessed special healing powers. I called Kevin's name, my voice echoing weirdly off the ivy-covered wall where a statue of Mary looked down from an alcove on the white marble figure of St. Bernadette kneeling with her arms outstretched in the middle of a garden of bare, green-tinged rosebushes.

I made a complete tour, checking all the tucked-away chapels and memorials. Maybe Kevin was still working in the community garden, which was in a clearing on the upper level near the end of the Stations of the Cross. I followed the winding path through the woods until I was at the top of the hill across from the monastery.

The small garden was enclosed by chicken wire nailed to posts, presumably to keep out rabbits, with a gate at one end. Not much was sprouting this early in the year, as Kevin had said, so it was mostly tilled earth. Someone had left a pitchfork with a weathered handle in a pile of mulch near the gate, and a garden hose was coiled on a large hook attached to one of the posts.

Kevin wasn't here, so I finished the path of the Stations until I reached the final one, the laying of Jesus in his tomb. If Kevin's car was at the monastery and he wasn't in his room or the church, where else would he be? Had he returned to the catacombs for something else he'd hidden?

Then I remembered the Grotto of Gethsemane, a replica of the garden where Jesus prayed the night before his crucifixion. The entrance was on the hill opposite where I was standing, halfway between the upper and lower gardens and so well hidden you couldn't see it from either the monastery or the lower garden. I ran back through the woods and sprinted up the stairs, slipping on a slick patch of moss and mud. I grabbed a vine as thick as a small tree trunk that ran along the wall, but I still landed hard on one knee. The momentum knocked my camera bag off my shoulder and it b.u.mped on the ground.

I found Kevin in the grotto, lying on his side at the bottom of a small staircase. The wrought-iron grillwork door to the underground chapel was padlocked and looked like it had been that way for a while. In the viscous gloomy light, the small room hewn out of rock like a cave seemed more like a prison than a place to pray. I knelt beside my dear, beloved friend and touched my finger to the pulse point on his neck.

But I already knew I was too late. Brother Kevin Boyle was dead.

5.

A gust of wind blew through the trees above my head, a low, keening sound almost like a child crying. Had Kevin fallen, or had he been pushed? I whipped around in case I'd missed seeing someone come up behind me, trapping me in this dead-end place. But no one was there, only Kevin and me.

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and got out my phone to call 911, turning away because I couldn't bear to look at him while I did this. A female dispatcher answered after three rings and thought I was calling to report the death of my brother.

”He's a Franciscan friar,” I said. ”He belongs to a Catholic religious order. Brother Kevin Boyle.”

”Okay, I'm with you now. Sorry about that, hon. Spell the name, please.”

I did.

”Address?”

I gave it to her and explained that Kevin was in the Gethsemane Grotto of the monastery garden, spelling Gethsemane before she asked. She took down my name and number, confirmed the monastery's address, and told me someone would be here shortly.

”Do you know how long?”

”As soon as possible. Please stay on the scene and meet the officer.” She disconnected.

As soon as possible. Fifteen minutes? Twenty? Longer? Kevin was dead, gone, so no police cruisers and ambulances with their flas.h.i.+ng lights and wailing sirens were going to come racing up 14th Street.

I turned back to him. He was lying on his right side in a contorted angle in the cramped s.p.a.ce. His left hand was thrown up over his face as though s.h.i.+elding himself from something or someone, and his outstretched right hand was clenched in a fist. His eyes were wide open, as though he'd been surprised, and judging by his position, he had fallen forward. Somehow he must have hit his head, maybe on the steps or the sharp corner of the stone wall or the padlocked wrought-iron gate, which had stopped his momentum, because a pool of blood underneath his right shoulder had oozed onto the stone floor and seeped into his habit. Both his feet rested on the last step, and dried mud embedded with bits of mulch was stuck to the bottom of his sandals.

Kevin was a good man, a holy man of grace and erudition and scholars.h.i.+p, fierce in his beliefs, loyal to his friends, devoted in his faith. I didn't want to remember him stripped of his dignity like this, blood spattered, his kind, intelligent blue eyes now staring blindly, his habit rucked up to reveal worn, threadbare trousers and pale flesh, a sense of death already permeating this place like a bad stink.

Fading daylight poured in through a fretted skylight inside the locked chapel. The wind rustled the trees, the s.h.i.+fting shadows rippling like the las.h.i.+ngs of a whip on the walls and floor. The spine-tingling feeling that something was crawling on my skin made me wonder if I was being watched. A replica of the tomb where Jesus had been laid after he was crucified was only a few steps from the grotto. I couldn't remember if that gate was locked as well. The air fizzed with a low-pitched vibrating whine. I scrambled up the stairs, needing to get away from this closed-in s.p.a.ce with its prisonlike entrance, to the open s.p.a.ce of the upper garden and the sanctuary of the church.

Halfway back to the main garden path I skidded on the muddy spot where I'd slipped before, and a branch from one of the vines brushed against me like fingers raking my skin. I whisked it away and ran, the crazy idea flitting through my mind that the spirits of the dead haunted this alcove and the vines and branches that ran along the walls had begun magically weaving together to form a barrier that would imprison me in the Gethsemane Grotto.

I raced up the ramp to the Rosary Portico, colliding with a friar who was striding toward me. He was tall and st.u.r.dy, with ruddy cheeks and a mop of dark brown hair, and wore a heavy dark plaid flannel s.h.i.+rt over his habit.

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