Chapter 27 #2
Cara returns from the sink, and I point the way to the stairs.
“Let me know if they ever find anything,” I tell the former Marine as I leave the kitchen—mostly out of polite interest but a little out of professional interest too.
Sometimes an amateur investigator is able to find things authorities would never even think to look for.
Cara and I climb the stairs to the loft, and then I invite her to sit in one of the armchairs facing the night-sparkling city.
“I’m sorry for the ambush at the bus stop,” I say as I take a seat myself. “I hope it wasn’t too frightening after what you’ve been through.”
She shakes her head. “I was scared at first, but Nat and Goran told me they knew Tristan, and I guess if there’s anyone I trust to be a knight in shining armor, it’s him.
And,” she says, glancing around the bookshelf-lined loft with its designer lamps and its multimillion-dollar view, “this is the first time I’ve ever lain low so high up in the air.
It can’t be all bad in a place this nice. ”
“Bad enough if you only have Goran to play cards with or Nat’s cooking to eat,” I say. “Now, can you tell me everything you know about Aaron’s involvement with Ys?”
Cara puts her vape pen to her lips, her eyes downcast when she inhales. When she exhales, the vapor curls around her like steam from one of Tristan’s wyverns. “Yes,” she says tiredly, and she tells me everything she can.
It is as Tristan had explained in Rome, although in greater detail, and when she’s finished, I ask her when she thinks her brother started working for Ys, how she thinks they might have communicated with him, and how much money he was able to send home and how frequently.
There are few specifics in her answers but enough to confirm my suspicions that Aaron had fallen prey to Ys sometime the year before last. When I ask if she remembers anything hinting at direct Church involvement—using Church buildings as storehouses or charity missions as cover for moving supplies—she shakes her head.
It’s a long shot, but I have to try. “Do the names Regina Springer or Brittany Hill sound familiar at all? Could Aaron have mentioned them to you before your final phone call?”
She takes a hit off her vape pen while she thinks. “I don’t think so. Aaron never talked about new girls. It was always the same four or five from the town we grew up in. He was kind of stuck in the past that way. I would remember if he’d mentioned anyone new.”
I’m about to thank her for talking to me when she adds, “He never talked about new girls, but there was a priest he talked quite a bit about around his third deployment, the one before his last.”
I don’t move, listening intently.
“You wanted to know if they were using churches and things for what Aaron was doing, and he never mentioned anything like that, but the deployment before this one, he was closer to the Polish border, and there was this priest there, like with them on base, God, what’s that called?—”
“A chaplain?”
“Right, right. A chaplain, Father Adam. Aaron talked about him kind of the way you’d talk about someone you had a crush on, you know?
We’re Catholic, but we’re pretty laid-back, and Aaron was the laziest of all of us about it.
He never wanted to go to church, and he hated dressing up.
Wriggled out of everything he could after his confirmation.
And then all of a sudden, he’s into rosaries and chaplets, and he’s wearing two different kinds of scapulars and telling me and Chloe to go to Mass and reconciliation and all this stuff?
And you’d think that if his conversion was about mortality or killing people or whatever, it would have happened during his first deployment, but it didn’t. It was after he met Father Adam.”
“Did he share that deployment with Tristan? Could Tristan have met or seen this Father Adam? Maybe could recognize him now?”
“Tristan wasn’t there—Aaron complained about that constantly. He was the kind of friend who needed his buddies around all the time”—a flickering smile—“but I think that’s part of why he latched on to Father Adam so hard.”
“Did he mention anything about Father Adam being younger…older…anything distinctive?”
Cara’s fingers tap idly on the pen. “He mentioned that Father Adam did PT with them, so he probably wasn’t older?
I guess? But Father Adam was gone by the end of the year.
Maybe his chaplain assignment ended, I don’t know, and then Aaron abruptly stopped talking about him.
Then the religious stuff kind of reversed itself too. He was very cynical at the end.”
Arms smuggling will do that. “Do you think there was any relationship between his newfound faith—or the flagging of it—and when he started working for Ys?”
She looks tired all over again. “It’s impossible to tell, isn’t it?
He never mentioned anything like that to me—that he felt compelled to send us extra money out of his newfound Christian duty or whatever—but maybe inside, he felt that way?
I don’t think it’s out of the question, but Aaron was always obsessed with being the man of the family, with providing for us, so it could have been something he did all on his own.
Organic Aaron,” she adds, a little wryly.
My questions exhausted and a new name cataloged—Father Adam—I get to my feet. “Thank you for talking to me. This has been immensely helpful, and you are safe here as long as you want to stay.”
“This is the most sleep I’ve gotten in months. Even with Nat’s cooking, this feels like paradise compared to some of the places I’ve been hiding in.”
“Then you’re welcome to it. I hope it won’t be required for long.”
She looks up at me. Dark lashes, sharp eyes.
There’s a certain beauty to the hardness of her face…
she reminds me a little of Andrea, actually.
Flawless marble that’s been used for crenelations and arrow slits instead of statues and fountains.
“You’re going after them, aren’t you?” she asks.
“Downstairs, they didn’t know anything about Ys when I asked, but you know things like you’ve been trying to know things. ”
I pause for a moment, my thumb toying with the inside of Tristan’s ring. “They killed my husband,” I finally say. “Eight years ago. I knew the day I watched them spread dirt over his grave that I was going to make them pay.”
Cara doesn’t ask anything else. She just sucks on her vape and nods. “Kill the bastards. Kill them twice if you can.”